Intermediate sci knowledge associated with overconfidence and negative attitudes
nature.com
nature.com
For example, 23andMe thought they would revolutionize drug development with a huge genetics dataset. In practice, genetic information alone is not sufficient to treat the majority of diseases that affect individuals and society. There is too much environmental variation affecting human biology for purely genetic approaches.
Understanding the real limits of knowledge is vital to pushing knowledge forward where we can. As a biologist, one of the things I most appreciate about Sabine Hossenfelder (a physicist) is that she highlights the limits of knowledge in her (and adjacent) fields. She gets a lot of push back (and is sometimes wrong), but having the discussion is vital to science.
Acknowledging the limits of science is not a negative attitude about science, but a positive one. A clear idea of the current limits of science (both theoretically and practically) is instrumental to pushing through them. For example, the scholarly papers highlighting the replication crisis (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Replication_crisis) are actually very useful to maintaining the health of science as a human endeavor, not a critique of science. Scientists need a clear understanding of the scientific foundations that they are building on.
1. Science as the body of knowledge
2. Science as a method / approach
I also find that mixing the meanings/perspectives/intent up in a single conversation is common, sometimes accidentally sometimes intentionally.
In my ignorance (ComSci major, so not a real science :), I would describe myself as extremely positive / confident to "Science, the approach/method" and, through that approach, pragmatic about the "Science the current body of knowledge".
In other words:
Yes, there are very much limits to what we currently know, and some of what we think we know will turn out to be wrong, subtly or catastrophically. There are definitely huge limits and uncertainties to Science the body of knowledge!
But, acknowledging it is kinda the point, and the best way to figure it out that we are currently aware of is through scientific approach. (I've just realized I might even have become a zealot that you describe, because I can't even figure out what a plausible & feasible alternative method is, if your goals are to actually figure things out. To that point, I find humility and skepticism about your current science body of knowledge a crucial part of science the method, something which most other methods lack).
I find distinction is crucial especially in political and religious discussion frameworks. Otherwise, I never know if I agree or disagree with statements regarding "limits of science" etc.
(This is all further mixed up by zillion of daily popular articles where "Science says that [...]!!!" or "[...], scientists find", which... ugh, oversimplify at best and deceive more likely)
What are your thoughts?
The way we learn and study topics is divorced from the original method of discovering those topics. The way people learn Computer Science is generally by absorbing the information, not by doing the experiments. So it is difficult for people to understand that the way we have this knowledge is through hypothesis forming and experimentation i.e. Science.
3. What is actually happening in academia
I think most people exposed to science#3 from the inside can agree that science#2 works – and indeed works surprisingly well – despite science#3, not because of it.
My adjacent refrain is "Science is not the same as people trying to do science".
But I don't think as academia as the only, or even necessarily the most important place that science is happening in the world today.
> 3. What is actually happening in academia
While we're enumerating, I think there's a fourth definition:
4. "Science" as a belief system rather than as a tool/technology. I think in this respect, there's often an unacknowledged (or denied) blurring between science and science fiction (the more traditional "spaceship books" kind, as well as overconfident speculation). There's also a tendency to claim the prestige and authority of science for one's own personal opinions and preferences.
1. The belief that the scientific method and the assumptions and research methods of the physical sciences are applicable to all other disciplines (such as the humanities and social sciences), or that those other disciplines are not as valuable.
2. The belief that all truth is exclusively discovered through science.
Maybe the second definition kind of fits if you stretch it. I think 'futurism', not in the sense of the artistic movement, is a closer fit; '2. The study and prediction of possible futures.'
Meanwhile, these people mock the religious [in their imagination] for "being" insular/fundamentalist.
A key feature of scientism is that science itself is never well defined or understood by its adherents, so science is a floating signifier that can mean whatever its proponents want it to mean. Typically, these are not people with firsthand experience doing science, but consumers of second and thirdhand science media and science culture (TED Talks, "I fucking love science", NASA t-shirt, "I believe in science" bumper sticker, etc.). Lack of scientific literacy results in science taking on a ritual status, where following the ritual (scientific method, peer review, etc.) produces truth, and failure to find truth is always the fault of the mislead individual scientist. Because science is the ultimate source of truth, it is also the organizing principle for society, and those "anti-science" people who would question science are dangerous and stand in the way of progress--basically a religion.
I agree.
> A key feature of scientism is that science itself is never well defined or understood by its adherents, so science is a floating signifier that can mean whatever its proponents want it to mean. Typically, these are not people with firsthand experience doing science, but consumers of second and thirdhand science media and science culture...
I don't think that completely true. I think you have different levels of adherents of scientism, and what you say is definitely true of most of the lower levels ("consumers of second and thirdhand science media and science culture").
However the top tier consists of the creators of a decent chunk of that "science media and science culture." Many of those people are actual scientists, but ones who have sought out the public eye as "science popularizers" and are best known for their works for general audiences.
That’s too many hyphens.
The scientific method works best in fields such as physics and chemistry, where you have an established model of reality. The model has been extensively tested and validated, and you can use it to design experiments that will likely test what they are supposed to, taking all relevant factors into account.
Other fields, particularly those that are most affected by the replication crisis, study phenomena that are too complex for such comprehensive models. Instead of testing established mechanisms, such fields often use the scientific method to investigate black boxes. Designing experiments is harder, because it's not clear if you are measuring the right things in the right way, or which factors could plausibly affect the results. You may not even be sure if the mechanisms the experiments rely on actually exist and if they are properly understood.
I like to think that the replication crisis is the social process trying to deal with the issues resulting from overreliance on the scientific method. When you can't rely on an established body of knowledge, a focus on the method takes your attention away from questioning your assumptions and understanding them.
Which particular research are you thinking of?
Younger people are more at risk of getting this wrong because their scope of knowledge and experience are shallower. Introspection grows with age, but when introspection is not deliberate older people are more catastrophically at risk of getting this wrong.
Along these lines, I think the role of consensus in science has been overly dramatized by those with various policies to push. Max Planck's principle is famous in the short form "Science progresses one funeral at a time". One of the professors I worked with as a graduate student had a sign on his desk, "First They Ignore You, Then They Laugh at You, Then They Attack You, Then You Win".
These two quotes captures an important tension in the practice of science: consensus both retards the progress of science and captures it for others to build on.
Many people regard Einstein's later career as fruitless, but by attacking quantum mechanics, he improved its foundations as well as making it much more acceptable.
3. Science the institution.
As in "What Science says about X" as if there was a single authoritative, coherent entity we could call Science.
But what does that actually mean? How do you manifest this in your daily life and in your decisions?
My grandmother told me God told me I heard on the news
Well, that does not seem scientific nor following the tenants of science. But how can you evaluate information you receive that is called science and in so far as you know from a source of a scientist. Esp. these days in the US everything is incredibly politicized.
There is no way to dig deep enough into every tidbit of knowledge we are exposed to. A lot of scientific fields these days are so complicated that you need a degree to start understanding what is going on or to evaluate data.
If we are lucky we know a few people in different fields whom we trust. We trust the people to we trust what the say, since they are scientists. We all walk around and -believe- in various things we hear and elect not to believe in others. Then we claim that we believe in this or that "because of science". and because of the scientific method. But we dont know that for a fact because we dont know and probably could not understand all the steps from beginning to end needed to ensure that the scientific model had been applied appropriately at all stages.
I dont think real science should state "THIS IS TRUTH BECAUSE THIS IS SCIENCE" it should be "This is our best understanding right now, and there are some other theories out there that may also be valid."
3. Science, the mass psychological phenomenenon.
Like many ideologies it behaves a lot like a religion, and online discussions are chock full of artifacts.
In my case, I have a negative view of "science" because of this phenomenological aspect of it, which I consider dangerous because it results in irrational, tribal thinking (see: covid, climate change, etc)...and it ain't only the "deniers" who are guilty.
> Yes, there are very much limits to what we currently know, and some of what we think we know will turn out to be wrong, subtly or catastrophically. There are definitely huge limits and uncertainties to Science the body of knowledge!
> But, acknowledging it is kinda the point, and the best way to figure it out that we are currently aware of is through scientific approach.
Pro-science people absolutely love this meme, I encounter it several times a day in the online spaces I frequent.
> when a research paper is peer reviewed by its author .. that's clearly not science
Peer review is something academia evolved only relatively recently. Science long pre-dates peer review, and you can do science without peer review (or with useless peer review) just like you can write programs without code review. As recently as Einstein, peer review was being seen as some offensive newfangled thing which he had no time for.
The goal of peer review is to try and ensure that claims that are presented as being scientific actually are. It frequently fails at that task but even when it works it's still just a safety check, not an actual required component of true science.
> when the heads of multiple top university epidemiology departments come together to speak out about it, that should be regarded as science
A bunch of academics making an announcement is definitely not science. The whole point of science is that it doesn't rely on People With Titles deciding by fiat what's true. That's what religion is!
> What happened with COVID is that ... most scientists were pushed aside
We have very different memories of these events.
Oh? In what field are you working?
>A bunch of academics making an announcement is definitely not science.
A bunch of heads of Ivy League Universities who are the foremost experts on debunking junk epidemiology and who have all contributed significantly to the field are more wortg listening to than the media who has current joint ownership and board control of Pfizer. Even if only from a Bayesian logical perspective. Conflicts of such interests don't make for good science. But of course, as the general public doesn't know the difference, you can tell anyone whatever you want. Well, anyone except actual scientists.
I feel that I've never had the first problem, but have definitely had the second.
On one hand, there is the natural limitation of Science itself in terms of the type of questions (that are amenable to the scientific method) it can answer. On the other hand, it is still the best way of generating knowledge that we have.
My overconfidence was that scientists, as individuals and as a community, would always do the right thing, driven by, and honestly following, the scientific method. But in the past few years I've had to revisit this assumption several times and be reminded to always retain some healthy skepticism.
Most recent example is this climate scientist who just published in Nature, and then went ahead afterwards and penned an op-ed [0] saying he actually misrepresented the actual factors in order to get published.
[0] https://www.thefp.com/p/i-overhyped-climate-change-to-get-pu...
This is a great point. I'm shocked by how often I end up working on a project with a colleague who is taking the path of least resistance. In my field, this usually results in using decades old statistical methods than have been proven time and time again to be unsatisfactory. They just don't want to learn new methods or their technical expertise aren't good enough to learn how to implement the new approaches. So they just coast. I'm not sure what to do in these situations other than just try and set a positive example.
Environment is important but we could still have huge improvements in medical care using genomics. It's easy to obtain and still has a very strong relationship to disease, and is a problem best solved by deep learning. I've watched people tilt against this windmill for 25+ years and it's kind of funny just how bad our labelling of diseases is.
First we did not "fail" in drug development, our collaboration with GSK yielded substantially more programs than we had anticipated when we started. The verdict on whether the strategy is successful or not will not be clear for another 5-10 years because being better at picking targets doesn't shorten the timeline for bringing a drug to market, it mostly means that you should have a modestly higher proportion of programs that end up being successful.
Second we did not start with a premise that we could or needed to do a great job of predicting disease from genetics alone, that is not required to identify good targets. You're correct we don't have huge genomics datasets, we largely use the same genomics datasets others use. Identifying targets with genetics in the simplest sense requires using genetics to identify an association at a genomic location, and then using genomics for functional interpretation of that association. And having the largest database of genetic associations enables the first step of that.
I'm not sure what you mean by "the underlying relationship between the genome and phenotypes... is a highly nonlinear function". Simple additive models account for most of the heritability of complex phenotypes.
I was a team from Google that evaluated 23&Me's data and technology many years ago for a business deal. We already talked about this with Anne and she confirmed what I said above. It might have been before you were hired- but I'm pretty sure we talked about building a variant store and a transpose service? I stand by my statements (note: I work at a competitor of GSK and I know all about these deals). It's not correct that being better at picking targets doesn't shorten the timeline, either- at least in the opinion of the scientists at my company.
Additive models don't really account for most of the heritability of complex phenotypes. They're what have worked best and been published so far. Complex phenotypes are nonlinear because the generative processes in biology have feedback, homeostasis, enormous numbers of individual elements... etc...
By the way, does 23&Me still put tongue-twisting as a heritable trait on its reports? https://blog.23andme.com/articles/tackling-tongue-curling-th... It's not.
You may be correct that better targets may be faster to market. We would also hope so: better targets might be more straightforward to validate in the lab and may enable smaller trial sizes, for instance. Timelines are still long and this doesn't alter my statement that the success or failure of our target selection strategy won't be known for some years.
Do you have any evidence for additivity not accounting for most heritability? I'll give one cite (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2265475/). The fact that biology is very complex and non-linear is not inconsistent with most genetic effects being small and approximately additive.
We have never had a trait report on tongue curl, the 15-year-old blog post you linked to says it isn't a Mendelian trait, so I'm not sure where you were going with that. I can tell you that it is somewhat heritable but complex.
"The gods did not reveal, from the beginning, all things to us, but in the course of time through seeking we may learn and know things better. But as for certain truth, no man has known it, nor shall he know it, neither of the gods Nor yet of all the things of which I speak. For even if by chance he were to utter the final truth, he would himself not know it: for all is but a woven web of guesses"
Xenophanes via Karl Popper
I suppose you missed her recent video about economics? Her content is getting more and more clickbaitey by the day. Some really half-baked data creeping into her videos.
Celebrating someone's achievements in a specific domain is not giving them carte blanche across the board. Personally, I think it more productive to celebrate someone's successes while lamenting their failures. If one thinks that mediocrity is the norm (which it is, by definition), then transcending it, even briefly, it something to celebrate and use as inspiration, even while acknowledging that all individuals have flaws (to some degree).
I only heard her arguing others are wrong because she's right. That's not a demonstration of the limits of knowledge.
> We propose and use in the paper, an indirect measure of confidence in knowledge, defined as the ratio of incorrect to ‘don’t know’ answers in any knowledge questionnaire, as long as it had the format true/false/don’t know (or similar). The rationale is that an incorrect answer corresponds to an overestimation of one’s knowledge (more details in the main text).
On face value it seems like a good way to avoid the pitfalls of self-report surveys, perhaps also useful in affective modeling.
I might be motivated to be more conservative because I have a reputation to protect, but not actually be less confident. This may have an effect just as much as because I am more experienced.
I may also have just learned not to express my overconfidence interpersonally, while still exhibiting it in practice. Expressing appropriate levels of confidence is a skill, not just the absence of overconfidence.
I can’t access the paper currently.
> Expressing appropriate levels of confidence is a skill,
That's interesting, confidence can be gamed, just like other traits in personality tests
What does that mean? If you're overconfident in the forest and nobody hears it, it doesn't really matter, right?
In this case, additional knowledge wouldn’t actually represent a diminishment of your confidence in a functional sense, but a learned compensation to social feedback.
Edit: I'd share the article but have no idea where to host it.
The number of science fans I've met who sincerely proclaim they possess knowledge of the unknowable is scary.
There's different levels:
1. The guy who reads the title of the journal article.
2. The guy who reads the abstract of the journal article.
3. The guy who reads the text of the article.
4. The guy who's read all the other significant research in the field and can put it in context alongside their own personal experience as a practitioner.
I'm #2, and I strive to be #3. It's really hard to be #4, especially for more than one domain.
Is that a thing or did you make it up?
There's a reason abstracts exist, and they usually provide enough information as to whether the paper discovered any significant findings, so whether it's worth reading at all.
If you are #1, #2 and in #2 you include reading not just the paper but the meta-analysis papers of the field, that already puts you ahead of 95% of the general public.
Not even scientists themselves are full #3 people. It's just impossible, considering the amount of work that exists in the field, and considering that most studies just confirm existing findings from 10-20-50 years ago.
You should probably add a "5. don't know" option and check that one...
This is an incredibly common guy
(0.2. The guy who reads the title of the news article for the journal article on HN and proceeds straight to the comment section...)
I never realized how wrong papers could be until I read some from my industry and dug into their methodology of which I'm sufficiently knowledgeable to spot issues. I don't recall specifics as it was a while ago but I do recall the district impression I was left with which amounted to "holy crap, I wouldn't let this person pull reports on my ad account let alone run campaigns" due to the buy side 101 mistakes they made.
Since then I read all scientific papers with a huge heaping of salt.
Basically they think they know everything, to the point of educating the doctors about medicines when they are in the hospital (as patients). I don't know what got them into this but I found the arrogance distasteful.
Maybe it's in the culture though. Back in the day teachers were respected and the relationship between teachers and students are somewhat closer to father-children than customer-merchant. Now time changes but old habits stay hard.
now with chatGPT there will be more people like that
This often puts me in a position where I feel pretty confident that I have more fresh knowledge about it than the doctor before me. Someone who in all likely hood has a mild familiarity with it, and is filling in the blanks with rote medical intuition.
What I really wish is that I could get doctors to drop the veil, and just openly admit what there depth of knowledge on the illness is. I would love it if they googled stuff right in front of me. I absolutely do not expect them to have a full medical encyclopedia in their head, and I am smart enough to be able to not be put off by "I don't know/I'm not sure".
(Yes that level of understanding is often quite poor in absolute terms.)
I may not understand the minutia of the study, but if the conclusions are "60% of people with X showed the underlying cause Y", and my doctor is saying "I have never heard of any possible association with Y, and Y has no possible connection anyway" then I feel pretty confident that the doctor is out of touch.
Rather the doctors take should be "Please send me the studies and I will review them with my actual medical knowledge" or really "I need to review the literature on this patients illness so I can be up to date while treating them for it"
https://towardsdatascience.com/ai-diagnoses-disease-better-t...
They're used to being the smartest person in the room and telling the people around them what's what. This can sometimes rub off on interactions outside work. Same kind of thing can happen with other professions, of course.
It looks like they used multiple choice quizzes to determine both knowledge in science and a propensity to respond "don't know" indicating confidence. Any "don't know" response was counted as an incorrect response, while a correct guess increased the participants "science knowledge".
Thus, a willingness to guess something at random in the multiple choice test would both increase "science knowledge" as well as make the participant appear overconfident.
If I'm looking at the right document, one question was about which city out of Chicago, New York, and LA have the greatest annual temperature range (accompanied with a plot). Almost all respondents said New York or Chicago, rather than LA or "All equal".
However, the reward structure of overconfidence can be used to maintain the momentum and once you hit the hard wall of insurmountable incompetence congratulate yourself that you actually walked the path of knowing practically nothing.
It's the hardest thing to fully admit one's own ignorance and easy to see all around you, it's only when the giant rationalization machine buzzing inside is finally fully exhausted; for a brief moment the crushing vastness of the unknown pours in.
So in a way overconfidence is just unused fuel. Use it wisely.
It's really hard to by sure of anything these days
And having met many of these types of people they all seem to share one trait: definitiveness.
Everything is black/white and there is always a "right" answer or approach where as people with little knowledge and those who are experts tend to be nuanced and flexible.
That's not overconfident, I'm lead to conclude that you have advanced science knowledge.
I'm thinking of times where I went to the library to dig deeper on a topic and discovered a huge and complex topic just laying in wait.
What I am getting at is that if you have just intermediate knowledge in a bunch of places, I think it lends itself to sensing that you're just a paramecium stuck to the side of some N-dimensional construct. There's so much. I had a professor who was the expert in the second excited state of Helium-3. That was his thing. Just a single needle in the whale-sized blowfish of physics.
I do to and unquestionably I am beginner level.
Each scientific field has specialised and become so dense with knowledge that even new graduates in that field would barely be classed as intermediate.
* Surveys EB, Pew and GSS are publicly available and data and details can be found in refs. [27],[28],[29], respectively.
\* take the interactive Pew survey (11 questions) here: https://www.pewresearch.org/science/quiz/science-knowledge-quiz/
* Lackner survey data are available at: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.7920776
[27]: Bauer, M. W., Shukla, R. & Kakkar, P. Public Understanding of Science in Europe 1989–2005—A Eurobarometer Trend File (GESIS, 2012); https://www.gesis.org/en/eurobarometer-data-service/search-d...
[28]: Smith, T. W., Davern, M., Freese, J. & Morgan, S. L. General Social Surveys, 1972–2018 (NORC, 2019); https://gss.norc.org/get-the-data
[29]: Funk, C., Kennedy, B., Johnson, C., Hefferon, M. & Thigpen, C. L. American Trends Panel Wave 42 (Pew Research Center, 2019); https://www.pewresearch.org/science/dataset/american-trends-...
[9]: Fernbach, P. M., Light, N., Scott, S. E., Inbar, Y. & Rozin, P. Extreme opponents of genetically modified foods know the least but think they know the most. Nat. Hum. Behav. 3, 251–256 (2019). https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-018-0520-3
Even then, the 2019 Pew article is depressing reading: https://www.pewresearch.org/science/2019/08/02/partisanship-...
If you test high school concepts then if you are shaky about high school concepts that applies to you. People who have no clue about high school and people who understand high school well will be less overconfident on that test.
Or if you talk about college algorithms, then that is the basis for intermediate knowledge. An average comp sci grad will be the most overconfident, a person who never studied algorithms and a person who teaches algorithms for years will be less overconfident on that test.
My theory is that in primary and high schools, science is taught as a series of immutable "facts". You get tested on remembering them, and when you do an "experiment" you get marked down if your reading of the litmus paper isn't 4. No sense of doubt, and no exposure to the epistemic boundaries to controleld trials, measurements, etc.
If your takeaway is that scientists uncover and explain immutable facts, hearing them say one thing in January and another in June can in fact shake your beliefs in these scientists.
I was tasked with measuring the water resistance of a proposed environmentally friendly paper coating.
I asked my supervising scientist what numbers I should expect to get back from the experiment. I distinctly remember my surprise and thrill when he looked at me and said "I have no idea, that's why you're running the experiment".
It was such a new concept to me! A scientific experiment where the correct answer wasn't written in a teacher's lesson guide, or even known to anyone!
The Science didn't change that much (viz: masks in healthcare since forever), but the flip-flopping with messages ("don't horde masks; they won't save you!", "wait, no - everyone needs a mask!"), which was really less about The Science than about different concerns (mask effectiveness, availability) were just the "I told you so" they were looking for.
"Changing advice" is to be expected, but it was the outright lying, as proven by FOIA'd emails, which understandably shook faith.
The science mouthpieces (aka media and government speaking on behalf of scientists) were insisting they knew the immutable facts and any questions or doubt in those immutable facts were heretical. Anyone who has an appreciation of the evolving nature of scientific research should immediately see the red flags in that.
"Antivax" is not a position of anti-science, it's a slanderous label for an alternative theory with its own compelling evidence.
It's so I don't get intermediate knowledge and become skeptical to my own dismay.
And aren't there humble optimists with intermediate sci knowledge?
Maybe there just aren't enough humble optimists?
The article has some very different findings. The crucial paragraph from the abstract is:
>We find a nonlinear relationship between knowledge and confidence, with overconfidence (the confidence gap) peaking at intermediate levels of actual scientific knowledge. These high-confidence/intermediate-knowledge groups also display the least positive attitudes towards science.
It seems to that it is essentially a refinement of the Dunning-Kruger effect. It also matches some previous study I remember which found that science sceptisim and many conspiracy theories around science are most prevalent with certain engineering disciplines (I can't find the study right now, but will update with a link once I do).
It is interesting that someone mentioned Sabine Hossenfelder as a positive example, because I find much of her recent content peddles to exactly the crowd who has intermediate knowledge of and very negative attitude toward science. In particular she often comments on topics where she herself has very little understanding (I know because I have seen it for topics where I am an expert) and just pushes a scepticism opinion without much understanding, but acting like she is an authority.
It's kinda funny how only the abstract is referred to when trying to paraphrase the findings of the paper. I would say that the abstract by itself is more like an opinion. The real hard data backing up the abstract, should be in the article. But, it can't even be faulted because this "science" is behind a pretty hefty paywall with 40$ for the full PDF and 10$ for a 48h rent. It's basically the same price as a full movie.
Now if we wanted to investigate the methods and results in detail, we certainly would have to read the full paper, however the main findings will not differ from what is in the abstract. You might find that the methods (and hence results) are not valid, and can come up with a detailed rebuttal, for that you certainly would need to read the full paper. However, I assumed here that the findings are valid, because even though I have access to the paper, this is well outside my area of expertise so I am not well placed to investigate the claims in detail and rather refrain from that.
Certainly, overconfidence and negative attitudes cloud public debate and popularization of conclusions. I've unfortunately come across narcissistic CEO/VC types who believe they have "all" of the answers, when instead they may have a corner of the Rosetta stone or a piece of lint.
STEM knowledge must be tempered with data and supported conclusions over non-experimental biases. The larger issues are behavioral pathologies when people appear to believe they have a superior special monopoly on knowledge, experience, or being. Another pathology is anti-intellectualism, which runs deep in America.
https://arxiv.org/pdf/1903.11193.pdf
It's a survey-based study but the obvious thing to consider is, what do they mean by 'negative attitudes towards science'? Are they talking about the scientific process itself, i.e. experiment and observation coupled to theoretical modeling as the basis of discovering how our universe functions? Or are they talking about negative attitudes towards the 'science-based' pronouncements of governmental and academic institutions?
Certainly the modern scientific process takes place at such a level of specialization that even working scientists in one field are usually unable to judge the quality of results obtained in another field without doing a lot of time-consuming research, but if a long record of failure of peer review exists (and it does) then it shouldn't be surprising when people lose faith in academic and governmental institutions - but I'd guess they still believe that the scientific process itself is valid, it's just that the received wisdom of the white-robed annoited priesthood is no longer taken at face value.
There are many reasons for this - e.g. while science may have been viewed by all as wonderful in the 1950s, many discoveries (environmental carcinogens, fossil fueled global warming, etc.) have upset major economic and institutional powers leading to coordinated attacks on the reliability of science in major media outlets. Then there's the long record of pharmaceutical skullduggery (the push to prescribe opiates for just about any condition, leading to an addiction epidemic, the failure of a wide variety of science-approved medications to live up to claims and/or the production of negative side effects (Vioxx etc.)) - and as far as the vaccine controversy, yes it was a terrible idea to put organometallic preservatives in multi-use bottles of vaccines, and yes it was done to cut costs, but the claim it led to an epidemic of autism isn't well-supported, there are many more plausible industrial sources of heavy metals to blame for high childhood exposures, but that's not as convenient for class-action lawsuits due to vaccination records, etc.
This doesn't mean that most science isn't fairly reliable, but the glaring failures are what make the headlines, and there have been quite a few of them.
If we really want to regain public trust in academic institutions, divorce proceedings aimed at kicking the corporate interests out of the academic sphere will have to be initiated, meaning for example no more exclusive private rights to NIH-financed inventions and no more revolving doors between academic institutions and pharmaceutical executive boards. Don't hold your breath, we live in an era of systematic insitutional corruption that Trofim Lysenko would have fit right into.
Topics: Science, Sports, Cooking, Driving, Programming… literally anything.
I didn’t need a study to know this.
But I do know that a lot of people across a lot of topics over estimate their ability because they don’t know what they don’t know. Science as a topic isn’t special in this regard.
Jr devs are great examples. Your code is garbage and I am brilliant, just let me change this thing here and OH MY THE SYSTEM IS BROKE PLEASE HELP ME! Intermediate knowledge and negative attitudes.
B lane swimmers are less friendly than A,C, and D at least anecdotally
Dunning-Kruger isn't real.
Dunning-Kruger isn't real.
Dunning-Kruger isn't real.
hard to find a good example that is funny while also not crass/political, but they generally go something like this: https://i.imgflip.com/5dh26p.jpg
- Related to the post at hand and some of its comments: https://images.hive.blog/0x0/https://files.peakd.com/file/pe...
- Meta 1: https://programmerhumor.io/wp-content/uploads/2023/07/progra...
- Meta 2: https://assets.website-files.com/611cc49abc685aa7e3817103/64...
- The one I hope most people would follow in Data Science/Engineering: https://i.redd.it/s7olw2f01ra81.jpg
Actually who the hell knows when the paper is essentially behind a paywall. The Abstract gives nothing away about what they have found.
But just as the Reformation led to faith-healing and megachurch preachers, Sagan's teachings made it seem as if anyone could be a scientist. As long as a chain of reasoning made sense to you, then it was true!
Take something like whether the earth goes around the sun. Sagan showed how Mars sometimes moves backwards in the sky, and he implies that this can only happen in a heliocentric model. In reality, of course, you need much more evidence to come up with the correct model. It wasn't until Newton could predict orbits from simple equations that there was no longer any doubt.
But watching Sagan you get the idea that if you can just come up with ONE piece of evidence for whatever you believe, then that's enough to prove it! This is why flat-earthers rely on meme-like "evidence" that takes effort to refute.
In the end, it's a trade-off. Do you want people to just trust authority or do you want people to think for themselves? If we want the latter (which I think we do) then we have to put up with those who are wrong.
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[1] I love Carl Sagan. He was a huge influence on me, and I think he benefited society, even if I think his teachings also (ironically) stoked some pseudoscience.
Personally, I have always been irked by phrases like “Science say” as if science itself is a centralized institution rather than a collection of people applying the scientific method.
In a similar vein, I sometimes see posts of some natural phenomena (like ants changing colors after drinking dyed water) with captions like “Isnt science cool?” Im still trying to figure out why this irks me but its weird to imply science somehow caused this.
https://journals.aps.org/pre/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevE.102.0...
And she remarked, "isn't evolution amazing! It figured out so many things"
When someone says "Isn't science cool?", they are saying lots of things
* I appreciate facts/truth
* Knowing things is fun
* Figuring things out is fun
* There is so much we don't know about the universe
I think you are putting to much semantic meaning into the grammar they are using to express their sentiments. Same goes for, "science says". It isn't enjoyable to discuss things and at the same time qualify every single statement.
Its like looking at a painting and saying “vision is so cool.” Except worse because at least in that example you are actually using the lens (vision) to look at the phenomena.
Your comment is damn rude.
Whereas with religions, the shortcomings of it's delusional followers are attributed to it.
Science has got to have the shrewdest marketing department in the history of religion.
Quite a leap. Break that one down...
> Sagan's teachings made it seem as if anyone could be a scientist. As long as a chain of reasoning made sense to you, then it was true!
How does Sagan give this impression? Namely that "as long as it makes sense to you, then it must be true."
And why is this analogous to the Reformation? Seems like a non-sequiter.
> Quite a leap. Break that one down...
Prior to the Reformation, you needed not just Truth but Authority as well. There was an actual hierarchy, and you respected that hierarchy.
Luther said that any man could connect to God, be a spiritual leader, assemble a congregation. And so the number of religious sects increased from 1 to much more than 1, including for example faith healers and megachurches.
The Reformation certainly lead to a splintering of Christian sects, but did not introduce faith healing and megachurches. These were already ancient, arguably originating characteristics of Christianity.
Violate those, and it's not what it claims to be.
A bad haircut doesn't claim to be something that it's not, and its goodness is subjective.
It seems I would just remove just, and make the question great again
Coupled with an asocial, greed-driven and essentially anti-humanist agenda its just the worst possible moment (severe environmental stresses across the planet) to hijack whatever potential digital tech offers...
Sigh.
But Western reductionism/Laplacian determinism is still taught even at the PHD level as cannon and not as a target for practical models.
Perhaps the rise of research into indecomposable continua and the discovery of Strange non-chaotic attractors in nature may help.
Obviously math and computer science as taught today is insufficient.
I particularly blame the way we teach things as absolute truth and then pull the rug out from under those previous supposed hard facts.
But I am showing my own ignorance here because we do learn about the computable set etc...
It doesn't seem to help with people making claims about universal quantifiers being a few quarters away.
Economics is generally regarded as a social science, although some critics of the field argue that economics falls short of the definition of a science for a number of reasons, including a lack of testable hypotheses, lack of consensus, and inherent political overtones. Despite these arguments, economics shares the combination of qualitative and quantitative elements common to all social sciences [0]
[0] https://www.investopedia.com/ask/answers/030315/economics-sc...
Relevant : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d0nERTFo-Sk
Economics is not about predicting the stock market or economy as a whole, nor is it about coming up with excuses for free market capitalism and neoliberal agendas. It's about studying things like market failures, tax incidence, deadweight losses etc etc etc and coming up with solutions.
Uh, no. Read up on what economists did to empirically study and fix the kidney market and how many lives that has saved. (before you start typing, no, it wasn't to sell kidneys to the highest bidder)
> rational agent axiom
If you knew anything about economics, you'd know that no economist subscribes to any "rational agent axiom". But you have made up a strawman in your head so enjoy poking sticks at it.
Doctors get a good shout as well.
Aka "Engineer's disease." There's an overestimation of one's personal competence and the effectiveness of the tools and mental models you're most familiar with. Basically think asshole software engineer who tells everyone they're dumb and should just solve the problem like they're writing software.
The other very very disturbing trend are the "makers" who denigrate medical devices as overly complex. One thread I'll never get over was on old pacemakers. The prevailing sentiment was they're designed for failure because "evil medical industry profit", not that, you know, they wear out.
The other part felt like watching the theory of memetics demonstrate itself in real-time. One person commented that the single small mechanical component is rated to actuate 5,000,000 times or something like that. Someone dismissively said "Well yeah but Adafruit keyboard switches are rated at 2-3 million presses, they mass-produce them, thus it can't be that hard" (adafruit's data sheet says 1,000,000 btw). Very quickly, people picked up that line and repeated that the actuator in a pacemaker isn't "actually that complicated", citing the 2-3 million keycap example. I still see that keycap "argument" pop up all the time.
BTW: Pacemakers are actually rated for about 100,000,000 stimuli cycles.
What field doesn't they have insane disdain for? Software engineers even have insane disdain for software engineers!
I suspect the high-confidence/narcissist combination is especially high here due to this being an industry/entrepreneurial forum where being confidently wrong is a positive trait.
The astro-turfers appealing to the confidently wrong go by unnoticed to the majority.
The abstract of the study states the metric for over-confidence they developed is "the tendency to give incorrect answers rather than ‘don’t know’ responses to questions on scientific facts". I think that's true. I maintain that being confidently skeptical of confident claims and research is not the same thing.
You can click on "Read Full Text"
Also here: https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.abo0038