When do we have a scientific fact?
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I adore SJG but this is one essay where I disagreed. Actually started the first day of a research design course in a pretty heated debate with the dead wood professor where this essay was the topic of discussion, he couldn't wrap his head around taking epistemological or practical issue with the label of scientific fact and accused me of being a creationist. But I digress:
I don't see what use the word fact is except in a contextual sense. We have scientific observations, which are pretty close to facts, but they can still change when we later discover measurement error or similar. Everything beyond those observations is a matter of inference and I can't see how calling them a fact is useful beyond a term of convenience in the context of a dialogue where all parties are informed on the subject and can agree on something akin to the Gould definition:
> In science, "fact" can only mean "confirmed to such a degree that it would be perverse to withhold provisional assent."
Because you won't be convincing the unconvinced by calling something a fact, especially not in the post-truth era, so it's not going to turn creationists and will have limited use for public health messaging or similar.
[1] https://wise.fau.edu/~tunick/courses/knowing/gould_fact-and-...
The scientific world is primarily oriented towards finding stable consensus truths that are independent of individual bias.
The political world is primarily oriented towards persuasion and behaviour modification - either for personal gain, or (more rarely) to promote fairness, equality, and perhaps even opportunity.
To politicians, scientific facts are only one of many available tools for persuasion, and they're not particularly good at it.
These worlds are incompatible to such an extent that people operating in one world are fundamentally unable to understand the other.
So the question is really "How do you create a political consensus?" The answer is well-known - you set up numerous apparently independent think tanks and PR operations to promote your message across multiple media, you put journalists-for-hire in positions of notability and influence, you design soundbite concepts and memes that spread the message virally. You use psychological techniques learned from the ad industries and corporate psychology to dramatise and frame your message to make it more personally relatable.
For bonus points you set up an enemy who opposes your message and you demonise, belittle, and humiliate them.
Ideally you frame the "debate" to make disagreement literally unthinkable, while also making all supporters feel as if their beliefs are entirely their own, arrived at rationally and objectively.
Scientific consensus on its own will do none of this. And a scientific "fact" is powerless against this process.
The important prerequisite, and what I think is one of the major differentiator between your "scientific world" and "political world": promoting the idea of the debate itself, as an activity that's meaningful and useful in discovering the right solutions and objective facts about reality. The thing is, a debate is actually the exact opposite of that - it's entirely orthogonal to objective reality. But it sure does work well to build and reinforce "us vs. them" divisions and group people into conflicting sides.
In the "scientific world", you don't do debates. It's obvious they're a stupid waste of time. In this world, you collate what you know, share the connections you see and the reasoning you use, and try to tease out some underlying structure from all of it, that's mapping reality better than the one you had before.
There are things that are merely probable, and there are things that are beyond doubt. Not using the word fact for the latter is useless pageantry if the "well, technically..." kind.
The existence of atoms is not merely probable, after millenia of debate the question is settled. Everyone can perform an experiment to verify it. This ability is very interesting from a bayesian perspective. It means we have a statement for which we can generate additional evidence at will. No matter what your threshold for evidence needed is, it can be met.
Before the scientific revolution, facts like this used to be fairly trivial: The ground and the sky exist. That kind of stuff. The enormous explosion of facts like this is a unique thing to our historical period. To forgot the obvious natural word for this serves one purpose: It makes communicating scientific insight harder.
Except atoms aren't atomic: they can be further subdivided. In the original sense of the word, we still don't know whether there are atoms.
> It means we have a statement for which we can generate additional evidence at will. No matter what your threshold for evidence needed is, it can be met.
Reading the same book over and over again only gives you evidence about what the book says, not whether the words in the book are true. Likewise, performing an experiment over and over again only gives you evidence about what the experiment does, not any models that generalise its results (beyond the marginal, diminishing-returns "we're pretty sure this experiment's results match up").
Nothing is ever beyond doubt; only beyond reasonable doubt.
Those are two different facts:
1. Atoms exist
2. Atoms can be divided
>> > It means we have a statement for which we can generate additional evidence at will.
> Reading the same book over and over again only gives you evidence about what the book says
"Generate additional evidence at will" is packing a lot of stuff, but in my read it means "Generate a hypothesis", "Model a new experiment that can disprove it to the desired or available precision", "Review the experimental setup for any defects", etc etc.
"Generate additional evidence at will" when applied to the "scientific fact that atoms exist" means that any new experiment that you design and perform will be compatible to that fact. There is no evidence whatsoever that atoms (at their "level of abstraction") do not exist.
The only way I see out of that is if you're _so_ reductionist to the point where you accept that the _only_ thing that exists is whatever is at the lowest level of reality (quantum fields, quantum foam, whatever), but then I guess neither you nor I exist to be discussing this.
You're describing certainty. This is a prediction, not reality. A new experiment you design and perform might not be compatible with the existence of atoms; that's the whole point of running experiments! (Of course, I have the same prediction; the proton-neutron-electron theory of atoms seems like a pretty solid one, at this point.)
Certainty does have interesting properties, from a Bayesian perspective: if you are certain of something, there is no finite amount of evidence that'll convince you otherwise. (Of course, humans aren't ideal Bayesian reasoners; you can usually provide enough evidence to convince a certain person otherwise, if they are actually wrong.)
I was being concrete about atoms, in particular, not about what gets named as a "scientific fact" in general.
Yes, in general you don't reach that threshold of being able to produce a stream of evidence that is always compatible to a theory, and you should not call that theory a fact (I also pointed that out on a different message). However for the existence of atoms, specifically, I do believe we have reached this level.
> Certainty does have interesting properties, from a Bayesian perspective: if you are certain of something
I don't literally believe with 100% certainty that atoms exist (because I may as well be a Boltzmann Brain hallucinating my entire universe). I say there will never come a time when we'll disprove the existence of atoms (at their level of abstraction).
There's a word for this, as I think it's fair to say any evidence of atoms still takes some inference and isn't a direct observation. The word is theory [1]. That is why we refer to the idea that matter is made of atoms as 'atomic theory',
Gould: "facts and theories are different things, not rungs in a hierarchy of increasing certainty. Facts are the world's data. Theories are structures of ideas that explain and interpret facts."
Replacing the meaning of words isn't a minor point, it's the whole thing, and scientific definitions aim to be as strict as possible. If we decided to retire the word "atom" after the discovery of subatomic particles, nothing in reality would be stop existing, except this argument.
If we decided to call the electromagnetic field "the luminiferous ether" - defensible imo - we would be in a similar position. The concepts are incommensurate in similar ways, the word choice is to a degree a historical accident.
Not everyone can perform an experiment to verify it. Hell, even those that can, can't perform an experiment to verify it. Maybe you just imagined that you performed the experiment.
> No matter what your threshold for evidence needed is, it can be met.
I'm fearful of mentioning any specific current scientific controversy, but it seems to me that many of the current politically charged topics fail to meet this very strong threshold.
I guess I'm thanking you because while I had an intuitive sense for this, I didn't know this specific wording of "you can meet any threshold for evidence".
It would still be silly to call that statement a fact, because it only requires a single swan sighting in Australia to falsify it.
Once we agree on whatever definition of "swan" we care about (an animal belonging to a specific phylogenetic branch, with such and such qualities) we can agree on a more reasonable threshold, one that should include a visit to Australia to be crossed.
We can't always know what we don't know, so falsifiability must remain on the table.
Early 18th century work on the aberration of light evidenced some of the theoretical problems in Newtonian gravitation (and relatedly interference and diffraction exposed problems in corpuscular theories of light), but almost no practical ones. The practically-measurable non-Newtonian nature of the perihelion precession of Mercury wasn't discovered until at least a couple of decades after Newtonian gravitation exposed the existence of Neptune. For all practical purposes light as a source of gravitational potential (much less the self-gravitation of light) still isn't something we can demonstrate in an Earthbound laboratory (there is ample astrophysical and cosmological support for the active gravitational mass of light, though).
Tl;dr Newtonian gravitation was unphysical at its inception, and Newton understood this in correspondence exploring mechanical explanations for the inverse square law.
Penultimately, a direct laboratory test of Newtonian gravitation wasn't made until Cavendish's experiment in 1798. Was it "fact" or "effective theory" prior to that test? Did it become "fact" at the time of the test, or did it remain an effective theory? I'm not sure the distinction matters in any practical sense.
Finally,
> demonstrate [Newtonian gravitation] by watching an apple fall from a tree.
Try that in a strong wind!
Those are directly observable. "Fact" stands in for an "observation", or maybe a repeated/repeatable, perhaps standardized, observation. (The sky is really just the way the atmosphere appears from a certain vantage point, so if you really drill down I'm not sure what saying sky itself exists actually entails, but I digress).
> Everyone can perform an experiment to verify it.
Sure! But in the modern scientific paradigm the purpose of that experiment would be an attempt at falsification. This is absolutely critical to the underpinnings of science — anything that is inferred from observations could be falsified at any time, so it doesn't really make sense to allow a secondary inference — a hypothesis or theory — to be linguistically elevated to fact, which most people would take to mean something that is concretely true. I can understand using fact to refer to a primary observation, which is where fact seems a natural word. I'd still argue that observation is a more apt word, especially as they often involve instrumentation or cognitive bias and are rather subject to change.
I'm not expecting atomic theory to be falsified anytime soon, don't get me wrong. But in only slightly less edge cases, like round vs flat earth or evolution vs creationism, terming the beyond-a-reasonable-doubt consensus a fact isn't doing any work. Either we agree, at which point it isn't really necessary anyway, or we don't agree, because someone in that collective we is a flat earther or creationist or similar, at which point just using the word fact isn't going to convince them anyway.
> It makes communicating scientific insight harder.
On less epistemological grounds and more pragmatically... I do a bit of sci comm of my primary research, some public facing research and outreach and have also spent plenty of time arguing scientific consensus topics on the internet with people who may or may not see them as such. Anecdotally, most of the time I see the word fact being bandied in the context we are discussing here it is used as a cheap stand-in for where some actual evidence or at least evidence of scientific consensus should have been. (Quite often it is invoked in an attempt to shore up something on shakier foundation or for which the invoker just isn't that well versed in and may not be correct about.) Just not doing much work.
Take the atomic theory example — to teach it the first time, depending on the age group you would just describe atoms, without ever needing to stop to call them factual, or you would provide historical experimental and other evidence of the existence of atoms and why they are a useful model for physics and chemistry. The word fact isn't necessary. If atom truthers emerge and you are trying to convince an undecided or torn public that they really do exist despite what the YouTube videos say, the word fact isn't going to help.
The latter could be the empty set, and no argument I've seen has conclusively proven that it's inhabited. Solipsism is the ultimate refuge from the claim that there are things beyond doubt.
All you can do is make the contingency of facts explicit, like, "given the assumption of an external world to our minds, atoms exist".
I think this is all a bit of a red herring. The question is how do policymakers deal with politically charged topics. And I personally haven't seen cases where more research or "science" is the answer, it's just crutch that people use to try and make their political point.
The article mentions climate change, which is a great example of something that's been scienced to death. The future is unknowable, there will always be some "we can never know" component to it, but that doesn't necessitate more research to find a smoking gun that will shut down all sceptics, not does it require that since we can't prove it, we ignore it. Some mix of balance of probabilities plus public will easily passes the threshold for doing something. So do something. Sequester CO2, build dikes, if the whole thing comes to naught, it won't be the most wasteful thing government did.
A pragmatic approach is what's needed, not some philosophical search for how we define truth, which just offsets the problem one layer and doesn't change the politics at all
Climate change is a perfect example because oil companies and armed forces worldwide have been operating under the assumption that it's real and its coming, largely because they're the ones who have to deal with, for example, the immediate effects of storm size on ship builders, ports, and deep sea mining equipment. We've got a Jekyll and Hyde government with a Navy that has been preparing for climate change since the 90s while half the country fights tooth and nail against the very concept.
I think the pragmatic approach is to let the experts at the CDC, FDA, EPA, etc do the work they're qualified to do while working on checks and balances to prevent regulatory capture, politicization, and corruption.
Obviously we have warmed the planet a great deal but I don't think that is going to stop the next ice age.
Global regulation of fundamental economic development represents a shift to authoritarianism. That's not a positive move if you believe in individual liberty.
It also represents a significant loss of wealth. We pay more for the same services.
They bring their professional and political judgment to a competitive information environment and use the fractional share of power vested in them to inform the consensus to make or not make a particular policy. That or they beat the snot out of each other, but either way what gets done in a given legislative session is the product of whatever consensus they were able to make, however they were able to make it, with whatever information was in the room with them at the time.
The author Peter Vickers appears to have written this blog post motivated by a recent line of work that resulted in a book that came out entitled "Identifying Future-Proof Science": https://academic.oup.com/book/44533?login=false (2022, Oxford University Press); putting it in my shopping basket/on my 2023 reading list & curious to hear from anyone who has read it already.
Crazy idea: I propose someone collect a list of facts - e.g. a wiki - that actual scientists can sign individually (e.g. owners of academic email addresses that do not contain a .stud. sub-string). My contribution of a fact: "On earth, any fruit of _malus domestica_ (commonly called "apple") that is dropped will fall down" (which means from the height of any person towards the centre of earth) as long as (small print to establish the boundary conditions of Newtonian physics).
While it is technically true that a theory cannot be "proved", that view ignores the huge range of predictive power in our various scientific theories. General relativity and quantum mechanics have extraordinary predictive power: we can make quantitative predictions that match experimental results to ten or more decimal places. But predictive power gets worse by many orders of magnitude as you go down the scale from "harder" to "softer" sciences, to the point where we don't have any real predictive power at all in many areas of social science.
> a Kuhn-style change of paradigm a la Einstein's theory of relativity
Actually, no, this wasn't a Kuhnian change of paradigm. Why? Because a Kuhnian paradigm shift requires that the two paradigms are incommensurable. And that's not true for relativity vs. Newtonian mechanics. Relativity contains Newtonian mechanics as a particular approximation (low speeds and weak gravitational fields). So Newtonian mechanics is not incommensurable with relativity.
By contrast, the shift from Aristotelian physics to Galilean physics (I say "Galilean" since Galileo was actually the one that started the shift, before Newton was even born) was a Kuhnian paradigm shift, because Aristotelian physics and Galilean physics are incommensurable. Aristotelian physics contains teleological concepts that don't have any counterparts whatever in Galilean physics, not even as approximations.
> older theories (e.g. Newtonian physics) remain valid and often useful for some restricted scope.
With a true Kuhnian paradigm shift, this is not true: the old theory just gets thrown away. Aristotelian physics wasn't used by anyone after Galilean physics became the dominant paradigm, not even in a restricted scope. This is why Kuhn claimed that there is no such thing as scientific progress. He was wrong, of course: once a particular discipline actually becomes an experimental science (which Aristotelian physics was not), your statement about older theories does hold--Newtonian physics, as you say, being a prime example. But that is not what Kuhn was claiming happened in paradigm shifts.
It doesn't though. Acknowledging one thing does not mean that all other things are ignored.
That's true in the abstract, but in the particular case we are discussing, the view that a theory cannot be proved goes along with the view that what is important in science is falsification: we rule out competing theories until only one is left standing. But that is not what actually happens. What actually happens is that, as we get more and more data in a particular domain, we refine our models to have better and better predictive power. The more efficiently we can do that (because we are able to conduct controlled experiments with very accurate measurements involved), the "harder" the science is (the "hardest" by this criterion being physics). Nothing ever gets falsified and thrown away.
The other problem with the emphasis on falsification is that scientists still use theories that, by Popper's criterion, were falsified long ago. The obvious example is Newtonian physics. By Popper's argument, we should have abandoned it as soon as we had experimental and observational data, in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, that contradicted it. But what actually happened was that one branch of physics developed new theories, relativity and quantum mechanics, while other branches of physics kept right on using Newtonian physics, because, even though it was "wrong", it gave answers that were accurate enough for the purpose. In other words, its predictive power, while less than that of relativity and QM, was good enough for what it was being used for.
I don't think that's an adequate analysis. Newtonian mechanics to General Relativity was indeed a Kuhnian paradigm shift because it required giving up simultaneity, messed with causality, and did away with the notion that space and time were simply an immutable Euclidean background on which particle interactions took place. Instead, spacetime was itself malleable by the entities that inhabited it, and was described by hyperbolic geometry. All of these were tough pills to swallow and required significant revisions to how people thought about reality.
That Newtonian mechanics is embedded within GR is one data point to consider when deciding whether something is a paradigm shift, but it's not the only point that matters.
By your argument, quantum mechanics was also not a paradigm shift because it reduces to classical mechanics in some limit due to decoherence. I think any interpretation of Kuhnian paradigm shifts that excludes arguably the two biggest revolutions in science, ever, cannot be correct.
Tell that to Kuhn himself. The requirement of incommensurability for paradigm shifts is his, not mine.
I agree that there is a different concept of "paradigm shift" in science, which does describe what happened when relativity and QM were adopted. But that concept is not Kuhn's concept. In both of those changes (as I've already said with regard to the change to relativity), the old theory was contained in the new one as a special case or approximation. And that is precisely why they are not Kuhnian paradigm shifts--because the theories aren't incommensurable. That doesn't mean they weren't radical changes: it just means that Kuhn's ideas about how radical changes actually happen in science were not very accurate.
Didn't Cyc have a whole bunch of those?
Nature really doesn't care what humans want. Read every Superman comics ever written, dress up like him, jump off the cliff - and you'll go "splat" at the bottom.
Nature also never shows anyone the magic stone, which has all the rules written on it. Babies figure out pretty early that dropped objects fall to the ground. After a lot of bloody "splat"s, clever grown-ups figured out how to run off cliffs with parachutes & hang gliders and stuff, and live to brag about it. Usually. Things still go wrong sometimes.
Pretty much everything I've seen about on subjects like seems to boil down to humans wanting Nature to have rules that work their way, Nature not caring what humans want, and humans arguing about it anyway.
The focus on "95%" gives away that the focus of the article is on a preliminary stage of scientific inquiry, where uncertainties around the measurement (observation) process are dominant and the explanatory framework of what is happening is sketchy (statistical) in nature. This is typically the case when the system we want to establish scientific facts about is very complex (e.g. biological or much worse, human social).
Inceased scientific confidence obtains only when we can control that complexity and zoom-in into more fundamental behavior that can be both quantified and explained in more detail. That deepening of understanding leads to a cycle of prediction/measurement/experiment/confirmation that keeps adding "confidence" in a way that has nothing to do with statistical "95%" confidence. E.g., Netwonian laws were "proven" to very high certainty and yet they got eventually replaced by even more accurate scientific models.
Scientific facts are a journey, not a destination. For a sane discussion we need to clarify what phase of the journey we are talking about.
I think of it as "what data type(s) would I need to store this information", and the epistemic status(es) (maybe with reasoning, etc) would be a part of that.
Seems like nothing he said really contradicts Kuhn. Kuhn agreed that normal science operates within a particular paradigm; and in that paradigm there are accepted facts. What we can't know is whether a new paradigm might emerge that rearranges sensory phenomena into a different set of facts that "makes more sense" in some way, or allows certain puzzles to be solved that cannot otherwise be solved. If enough of those puzzles can be resolved in the new paradigm compared the old, the stage is set for scientific revolution.
There must be a stable reality of some kind, because when we operate as if there is, we are perpetually rewarded. But how we think about that reality is not necessarily stable. Oxygen definitely exists. But remember that the guy who discovered oxygen never called it by that name. The original term was "dephlogisticated air" which is a reference to the completely discredited phlogiston theory.
The article shows that the West has not really come to terms with rejecting divine revelation and the end of absolute certainty. Some personalities seem more drawn to "facts" than others, probably the same ones that are drawn to authoritarianism (of whatever flavor). I doubt people with high openness (in the OCEAN / Big Five sense) really clamor for FACTS.
Newtonian physics stood for hundreds of years, and we now understand it to be an approximation of quantum mechanics. It's still useful, but merely useful. Do not mistake "useful" for "true."
It could easily be misconstrued as a counter example to the quote in the article, which it is only in the strictest, most pedantic sense. In any reasonable interpretation, Newtonian Physics is still true.
I agree with your point, reality is certainly not statistical, and e.g. there would have been circles in which heliocentricity or a flat earth or some pre-germ theory of disease would have been agreed upon fact. Arguing that those aren't science is hindsight, at the time they would have been learned consensus.
Yeah, that's just not true. It's an absurd claim. Medical science is loaded with examples of things that had wide consensus (but...95%? Probably? Feels like this is a loophole in the argument...) which were subsequently found to be false. Consider just a few examples:
* hormone replacement therapy
* aspirin for heart attacks
* mammograms for younger women (< 50)
Just this year, a huge RCT called into doubt the usefulness of mass colonoscopy [1], which was absolutely "scientific consensus" until now (you can see this, because the study was met with rather vicious backlash).
For a more basic science example, consider "The Central Dogma of Molecular Biology" [2] which, of course, was so "consensus" that they named it "The Central Dogma": genetic information goes from DNA to RNA to proteins.
This was fact...until they discovered retroviruses. Then prions. Oops.
This stuff happens all the time. The authors are either not scientists, or they're so blinkered by ideology that they're unreliable.
This reference seems to be saying that mass colonoscopy reduces the 10 year risk of colorectal cancer by a statistically significant amount. How is this calling into doubt its usefulness?
Part of the backlash points out that cancer can affect quality of life in other ways and no one measured that. But either way, it throws the consensus into doubt.
> The risk of death from colorectal cancer was 0.28% in the invited group and 0.31% in the usual-care group (risk ratio, 0.90; 95% CI, 0.64 to 1.16). The number needed to invite to undergo screening to prevent one case of colorectal cancer was 455 (95% CI, 270 to 1429). The risk of death from any cause was 11.03% in the invited group and 11.04% in the usual-care group (risk ratio, 0.99; 95% CI, 0.96 to 1.04).
This isn't the final word on the subject, but it overturns the conventional wisdom that colonoscopy is an obvious win and worth all of the money, time, effort and pain we spend on it.
I'd posit that the one in 455 people who would die without a colonoscopy would disagree that colonoscopy isn't worth "all the money, time, effort and pain we spend on it."
I would suggest that you ask my uncle about it, as he didn't have a colonoscopy and was eventually diagnosed with stage IV colorectal cancer.
But I won't make that suggestion, as it wouldn't be worthwhile -- because he's dead. From colorectal cancer.
I guess that what one person considers a waste of money, time, effort and pain, another might consider a worthy investment.
Currently, colonoscopy is the only way to confirm whether or not colorectal cancer (and/or pre-malignant polyps) is present.
I expect that eventually, we'll have a test for colon cancer, similar to the (PSA[0]) blood test that helps diagnose prostate cancer. But until then, colonoscopy is the only way to identify colorectal cancers.
For your part, I hope you never get cancer and live a long, healthy, happy life. But if you do end up with colorectal cancer, I hope you've disabused yourself of the ideas you've expressed and get yourself tested.
Good luck!
Your post is a fantastic illustration of how and why we can't rely on "consensus" to determine fact. People routinely fall in love with narratives based on what they "know", and refuse to accept new data that challenges their narratives.
For literally anything we do, some people will die afterward. You could set up a study where you punch people in the shoulder at random, and follow them to see if getting punched implies a survival benefit. Eventually, everyone in both groups will die -- we'd expect about the same number in each group at any given time, because punching people in the shoulder probably doesn't affect lifespan. But still, people will die after getting punched!
Here we have a large, randomized study where approximately the same number of people died with colon cancer after getting colonoscopy as did without the screening. The screening had ~no effect on outcome.
Also, you've misunderstood: the 455 people is not the number of people who would die with colon cancer -- it's the number of perfectly healthy people you'd need to screen to prevent one case.
> I would suggest that you ask my uncle about it, as he didn't have a colonoscopy and was eventually diagnosed with stage IV colorectal cancer.
While I'm sorry for your loss, the data from this RCT suggests that colonoscopy on perfectly healthy people confers little to no survival benefit, and trumps any anecdote.
No. I haven't. If we don't do any colonoscopies, that 1 in 455 who develops colorectal cancer will die (as my uncle did) if the cancer isn't diagnosed early enough.
Don't want to go through the "trouble" of a colonoscopy after 50 years of age? Then don't. If so, I hope that you or anyone you love isn't that 456th person.
Yes, Anecdotes aren't data. However, that 1 in 455 is a statistic and what are statistics? Data based on aggregations of anecdotes.
I mentioned my uncle not because I want to pull your heartstrings. Rather, it's because while it's a simple thing to look at data and statistics, it's easy to forget that such data (at least in this case) breaks down in to anecdotes just like that one -- e.g., dead and/or very sick people -- who wouldn't be sick or dead with appropriate screenings.
If you don't care that some people will die without colonoscopies, that's your prerogative. I hope that attitude doesn't keep you or those you love from identifying potential colorectal cancer before it's too late.
That you don't care about others getting sick and dying[0] from the fourth leading cause of cancer deaths in the US, says something. Not sure what though and I won't speculate.
I'm sure that the your full-throated support for not doing colonoscopies is cold comfort to the (~36-56/100,000 Americans) ~118,000-185,000 actual, real people who develop colorectal cancer per year.
I'll say it one more time -- there are real people represented in that data. People who suffer and die every day. And if we did fewer colonoscopies, more of those people would, in fact, die, because their cancer wasn't diagnosed at all/soon enough. And so I have to put on my Quincy, M.E.[1] mask and ask: People are dying, doesn't anyone care? Is it correct to say that you don't care, or am I missing something?
It would be easy for me to just wish colorectal cancer on you and then ignore you, but I don't want you to get colorectal cancer (or cancer of any kind for that matter). Dying of cancer is a slow, agonizing, incredibly painful way to die and should be avoided as much as possible.
If you have a family history of colorectal cancer, please, please start having colonoscopies every two-five years starting at age 45.
If you don't, please do so every five years or so starting at age 50.
Or not. It's your life and (eventually) your funeral. That's up to you.
[0] https://gis.cdc.gov/Cancer/USCS/#/Trends/
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quincy,_M.E.
Edit: Fixed references and closed emphasis asterisk.
I'm sure there are theories in history, political science or sociology which once met the criteria, but are wrong. One of the things that (IMO!) is extremely important for something to be accepted as a fact is whether we can explain it through a causal model. The assumptions of such a model should at least meet the same criteria, but probably even stricter ones. A simple hand-waving explanation, no matter how widely accepted, should ever be accepted as fact.
Scientific racism and the various eugenics movements say hello.
Bruno was burned because he was a hermetic mystic and didn't really prove anything significant about the planets.
As far as theories are concerned, "useful" means "makes valid predictions", so true, but within a limited scope (Newtonian physics: macroscopic events, from a human perspective).
[0]: Under the Everett interpretation, which is no more or less scientific than the Copenhagen interpretation, this happens all the time and is witnessed by many humans.
I find it repulsive to even entertain the idea of "future proof facts". To me that is hubris to the extreme, especially when it is based upon a consensus of those whose knowledge and instrumentation are grounded in the present.
Finally, as others have noted, science revolves around theories and observations, and what we can currently ascertain from said observations - not facts. Often times "facts" are nothing more than bullshit that has yet to be called out.
Imo, if someone is more interested in carving "facts" into stone than continually engaging with what we think we know - they aren't the right person for the job.
The reason why scientific facts don’t exist is because the truly great scientists before this author knew that facts are only as good until the next data point that disproves it.
On the other hand, trying to establish scientific fact as consensus will result in political fights to try to force the scientific community and policy makers into decisions that further their own agendas. The sex/gender political fight right now is a great example of how consensus can be forced to further agendas. It’s evil and should never be pursued. Leave science as it is.
But the real problem is not the distinction between "fact" and "very high confidence". The real problem is that is the misuse of dubious correlations to justify agendas. Politics, economics, personal decisions etc.
We don't have a crisis of scientific facts. We have a replication crisis. And because of that, a lot of bogus science goes unnoticed and makes way WAY larger impact than it should.
Then to summarize the "there are no facts" position as "the idea that many philosophers of science muse that such ice ages probably didn’t exist and are just “nice ideas” that are currently popular amongst scientists who have been indoctrinated into a particular paradigm." is in parts wrong and on top of that incredibly misleading. I challenge you to find a single philosopher of sciemce who would assert that "ice ages probably didn’t exist". This imaginary philosopher does not exist, doubly so as this strawman would assert a fact about the world (specifically that the probability that ice ages have existed is low), in blatant contradiction to the "there are no facts" idea.
How we can act judiciously under uncertainty ?
related:
Medical Science: "The science-policy relationship in times of crisis: An urgent call for a pragmatist turn" ( August 2022 )
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S027795362...
Keywords:
Crisis, Public health policymaking, Uncertainty, Knowledge, Pragmatism, Covid-19
Abstract:
"In this conceptual paper, we argue that at times of crisis, what is sometimes called “evidence-based” or “science-driven” policymaking—establishing scientific truths and then implementing them—must be tempered by a more agile, deliberative and inclusive approach which acknowledges and embraces uncertainty. We offer pragmatism as one potential option, using examples from the UK to illustrate how such an approach might have changed particular crisis decisions and led to better outcomes. We propose that to better prepare for the next public health crisis, five pragmatism-informed shifts are needed in the science-policy relationship: from scientism to science-informed narrative rationality that emerges from practice; from knowledge-then-action to acting judiciously under uncertainty; from hierarchies of evidence to pluralist inquiry; from polarized camps to frame-reflective dialogue; and from an “inside-track” science-policy dialogue to greater participatory democracy. We suggest an agenda for a pragmatist-informed program of applied research on crisis public health policymaking."
That is, unless we escape the simulation and evaluate the mechanism’s implementation.
I think anything else is just semantics.
> I think anything else is just semantics.
Semantics is the science of meaning. So what do people really mean when they say that something is "just semantics"? Do they really mean sophistry?
There are 10,000 things wrong with this whole approach. The point, I assume, is that we do have some vitally important things that need doing sometimes, and wasting enormous finite resources trying to achieve even consensus, nevermind unanimity, has been rendered impossible or senseless or horrifically dangerous. Yep. That's a real problem (one might call it a fact).
This avenue is a dead end, though.
Seems to fly in the face of the philosophy of science, which typically has science as a process of ruling out things that are incorrect and incrementally approximating the truth.
I think relabeling some theories as facts is potentially dangerous and may prevent future progress.
No, I haven't read the book and I shan't for this passage gives me little confidence that the book would do them justice.
This is a flat out lie. Metascientists have grappled with this question for a long time, including Kuhn and Popper (who are mentioned). The truth of the matter is that you can't identify a scientific fact, that's not really how science works. We rule things out, not in. But we also hone in on answers but never have an exact one. There will always be a lot of trust in the system. We trust that scientists won't lie. The truth is that there is very little lying. Because if you do, you are completely ruined. We're even seeing people distrust science not because scientists are wrong but because science reporting is wrong and people will blame scientists but not the reporting. Though the thing is, how is a layman supposed to know the difference? I wouldn't expect them to and I don't know how to. I can only really judge a "fact" that's in my niche in my field and everything else is an educated guess. I have training and experience, but there's still a lot of trust in the system. The world runs on trust and people are extremely trustworthy and good, even in this time where many people don't think this is true the evidence is right there that people are honest.
But the article is talking about two different things. It opens with
> Scientists, policymakers, and laypersons could all use an answer to [knowing what is a fact]
but then starts discussing how we know the earth's core's composition. I'm surprised they didn't talk about the electron (or particles) as this is something Popper and Kuhn both talked about. Are they real or are they forces or just a mathematical construct? This is a far more philosophical question than discussing how public can understand if someone is teaching science or telling lies while sounding scientific. This is really missing the point if you're conflating these two philosophical ideas.
I do think we should teach more metascience in the sciences but I'm not sure this will do anything to build peoples' trust in science, and more importantly, scientific communication.
But how should policy makers deal with these questions? The same way news sources should. You communicate with the scientists and you have scientists (or former) on your team. People that can speak the language and communicate with you. This has to be a team effort because we live in a world of specialization. There is too much information for any singular person to even have a glimpse of reality. But you'll find that many politicians don't have members like these on their teams and I'm not sure how you could expect them to make accurate decisions (or how they can even trust themselves, but that's a different issue).
"established scientific facts can be identified via a solid (>95%) international scientific consensus"
All statements are false. Some are useful.
I'm not sure what it is people want ( Context maybe or capital T Truth.) but I know you can lie all day long with facts that are undisputed.
⇐ Francis Crick
The reason is, of course, that there are no scientific facts. There are hypotheses, theories, and observations. There is a scientific method, which attempts to connect them together.
This is a deeply unsettling perspective to a lot of people who demand something science can't deliver but which religion can, and I'd count the author among them.
Whenever an author starts tooting about "scientific facts" I sense an agenda. And it's often followed by demands that I submit to it.
Elsewhere, the author pitches the book like so:
> My new book Identifying Future-Proof Science argues that we can confidently identify many scientific claims that are future-proof: they will last forever (so long as science continues). Examples include the evolution of human beings from fish, and the fact that the Milky Way is a spiral galaxy. ...
https://petervickersphilosophy.com/publications/
The first claim is laughable. Without a path for abiogenesis (there is none yet), claims this specific about evolution are anything but "fact." And the tautology of classifying the Milky Way galaxy as a galaxy makes me wonder if the author has problems with basic logic.
This doesn't solve the problem of "future-proofing" or universalizing facts, because THAT is not a solvable problem. But it does solve the local problem of making a community decision about who deserves respect and what topics are worth debating.
It doesn't have to be. We can use predictive power to judge how strong our evidence is.
For example, if you want to judge the predictions of astronomers about close approaches of asteroids to Earth, the standard is not what the community thinks is ok, but whether their predictions are accurate enough to say for sure whether an asteroid will hit or miss. That standard is imposed by the universe, the laws of physics, and our desire to not get killed by an asteroid impact.