Scientists, Not Doing Science | Hacker News Reader

Scientists, Not Doing Science

noahcarl.substack.com

42 pointsBostonian29 comments

> This is not doing science. It is “publishing articles written by scientists that you happen to find emotionally appealing”.

Have scientific journals ever _not_ worked this way? They're generally curated by an editor who curates the articles the journal peer-reviews and publishes.

> Have scientific journals ever _not_ worked this way?

It has never supposed to have worked this way and we have supposedly made progress in making the process as Scientific as possible. The bias that exists has never really been expressed this blatantly before (at least in modern history).

What is essentially said here is that irrespective of how good the Science is, it will not be published if it upsets people. There are many, many, excellent and necessary Scientific studies that may be blocked by this.

I have actively watched studies about an ethnic group being blocked because the ethnic group would react badly (in this case it was insanely high domestic violence and factors that may cause it). Some truths may hurt at the time, but ultimately we become better by publishing them.

> They're generally curated by an editor who curates the articles the journal peer-reviews and publishes.

The editor is arguably the worst part of the process. Some of this can be negated with double-blind peer review for example, where the editor is limited in their ability to override the opinions of multiple reviewers.

One can only hope that with more online publishing we can move towards a better, decentralized journal system.

A lot of these large population datasets are not obtained with consent for this sort of research and part of the ethical oversight is to ensure that harm to the subjects is minimized.

Now, you might ask yourself whether anyone or what sort of people are going to consent to participating in a research study that is designed to discover racial or other superiority/inferiority.

But it really doesn't matter when you skip over informed consent to build genetic databases.

Just because the genetic database exists it doesn't follow that any uses are ethical or were consented to by the "participants".

"On the other hand, if “superiority” is taken to encompass things like scoring higher than others on an IQ test, then every submission to Intelligence would flout the guidelines."

Or one better. IQ is pseudoscience. "Biological group differences" is pseudoscience. All of these journals peddle pseudoscience.

The bulk of what passes for statistical analysis by the so-called "scientists" in fields such as human behaviour and demography is an affront to the actual mathematics and philosophy of statistics. These are not scientific disciplines, they are speculative fields that wrap pseudoscience in a sophomoric garb of statistical vocabulary to gain a false sense of authority and objectivity.

I really don't get it. Just look at history and linguistics, or even archeology if you want a more fact based science. We are lightyears ahead of what we were doing in the 50s. And even this hyperbole is not enough to explain how thing changed. We evolved from Maxwell to Planck in 20 years, and every decade new methods arrive to help figuring out what we previously missed.

Yes some journals are political (or in the case of Intelligence, want to avoid controversy as their subject is already controversial). This doesn't have any impact on the science. Editors are not scientists, and are not doing science. Obviously.

I'd like to point out that the history of social science is about as ugly as the history of medicine. It's been entirely a process of going from less to more scientific, and that is clearly still a work in progress.

I don't think liberalism is to blame, and I'd be perfectly willing. Liability is a more likely culprit.

the author seems to have a flawed understanding what science is about ...

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-03067-w

"There are now a large number of people out there called scientists who are doing something other than science. This is not due to lack of scientific training, or low intelligence (some of them are highly intelligent.) Rather, it is due to the corruption of science by left-wing ideology. And until enough senior researchers stand up, we’re going to see more editorials like the one in Nature Human Behaviour."

I suppose you are being downvoted because people disagree with this sentiment. You quoted the thesis of the article, which seems worthwhile for those who hope to meter their attention.

Don't peddle white-shoe-racist pseudoscience, and you'll be fine.

Sure a totally unbiased source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noah_Carl

"Rather, it is due to the corruption of science by left-wing ideology"

Science is not an organization, business, political party, or group of any kind.

The definition of science: "Science is a systematic enterprise that builds and organizes knowledge in the form of testable explanations and predictions about the universe"

How are you going to generalize whatever grievances to everyone in the world who might work in a field that is scientific somehow. What a right wing nonsense article whose sole purpose is to make people fear one source of factual information.

Of course it's a group. As seen recently by the alzheimer's research debacle it's a group that is subject to intense social pressure.

Really? Are Iranian scientists studying plants subject to liberal social preasure?

> Science is not an organization, business, political party, or group of any kind.

> The def "Science is a systematic enterprise that builds and organizes knowledge in the form of testable explanations and predictions about the universe"

> Talking about it like the article does is completely wrong

I don't think it's that clear cut. Science, according to your definition, is almost exclusively pursued in the context of scientific organizations. I think it's fair to also refer to those organizations, collectively, as "science."

The problem I see with the collective sense of "science" is that it's very frequently used to invoke unearned credibility by associating the accomplished fields of scientific inquiry with the others. Inelegantly phrased for effect, it can work something like this: Science is great, it gave us iphones, penicillin, and put men on the Moon! Social science is a science, and science gave us those wonderful things, therefore you should respect social science.

Speaking of science collectively can be a method of collectivizing credibility. The problem is that the scientific method is not equally effective in all fields of inquiry. For practical, ethical, or purely philosophical reasons, the scientific method yields great results in some fields and not in others. For instance, it is probably the case that the scientific method has limited usefulness when examining social matters concerning race, because it isn't practical to study large groups with scientific rigor, nor would it be ethical to do so even if they could. Another example might be a medical journal that refuses to publish any study that involves vivisection of humans, because that's impossible to do ethically.

Reading Nature's statement charitably, I think this is what they're getting at. If they're saying they won't touch race stuff because it's not practical or ethical to study that subject with scientific rigor, then I agree with them. If on the other hand they don't have a blanket moratorium on that line of questioning but have committed to only publishing results that are ideologically correct, that seems like a problem. Presupposing the answer and only publishing results that agree with it is not scientific.

This article is about Nature, one of the oldest and most prestigious science journals in the field.

tense social times override even capital-S science at the public podium.. dark days indeed

But what happens to the 2030 plan if people are allowed to think for themselves? We have to do as the WEF says.

I seem to remember that "doing science" was once a very odd phrase, a meme used when you were actually fucking around doing something stupid. This article seems to be using the phrase without a hint of irony.

I tend to associate it with GLaDOS. I think the Portal series may have raised the profile of that particular turn of phrase.

From the article:

> A far more sensible approach, which many scientists and philosophers have taken over the years, is to emphasise that claims about biological group differences have no necessary implications.

Really? emphasize? Then what? You can emphasize all you want, but cultural forces will do whatever they please.

If cultural forces (racism) exist that permit (encourage!) mis-intepretation of research results to disenfranchise entire swaths of humanity, then it will. It doesn't matter what a Substack blogger says.

Shouldn't the insitutions responsible for creating this knowledge in the first place have a responsibility to ensure its ethical employment?

Wouldn't (perhaps) one methodology here be to agree that certain types of scientific inquiry, due to the potential for widespread harm, are to be treated differently than the rest?

No. There is no way for them determine ethical employment. Just because someone racist wants to use some research for a racist claim doesn't mean all researchers should abandon pursuits. Don't fear racists. Fear people making policy from their views.

> Don't fear racists. Fear people making policy from their views.

And when they're the same?

They are always the same? Obviously not so you're wrong

Then work against the policy. If you can't defend against a racist policy in this day and age, maybe the "science" is right. That would be some "science".

> "emphasise?"

If you're objecting to the way he spelled this word, note that the author is British: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noah_Carl

No, the spelling is not relevant. I removed the quotes.

In the same way that censoring data to make the Pope happy is bad for science, censoring data for fear it treads on any ideology is bad for science. The inoculation against stupid policy is education, not censorship.

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