Comment by ProjectArcturis | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ProjectArcturis | Hacker News Reader

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ProjectArcturis

There are reasons science tends to work this way. First, there are cranks out there. The Society for Neuroscience used to continually receive abstracts from a guy who claimed black people's brains are more like monkeys' than white people's. Is that a topic that they need to be open-minded about, or can they just dismiss him as a racist crank?

More seriously, there are organized efforts by well-funded groups whose purpose is to sow doubt about science that could hurt their profits. The fossil fuels lobby is the best example, but the alcohol, sugar, and various polluter lobbies are out there too. They fund scientists who will do research designed from the outset to be favorable to the funders.

Faced with an organized bad-faith effort to corrupt the scientific endeavor, journal editors and grant reviewers naturally start applying more scrutiny to anything on the "wrong" side. Then the lobbyists complain about "preapproved narratives" in the Wall Street Journal.

There are highly placed researchers, people who've climbed the ladder over the years and have lots of authority in their field. They have their preferences about the direction the field should go in, and who should be doing the work, as well as protecting their own legacy.

Whether their reasons are benevolent or not, the existence of these people is the rule in science. If the knowledge moves too far forward, or away from their expertise they lose their relevance, and so they have incentive to protect it. This leads to biases in scientific research that are politically difficult to overcome.

Science advances one funeral at a time. -Max Planck

Cranks, almost by definition, are pretty much instantly recognizable to an expert: no one needs to apply extra scrutiny to catch them.

Suspect industry funding is a problem in some fields, but the powers that be couldn't care less about the charge of the electron, and yet it took twenty years to correct a fairly trivial error in Millikan's original measurement.

> Cranks, almost by definition, are pretty much instantly recognizable to an expert: no one needs to apply extra scrutiny to catch them.

Correct, but you are missing a wrinkle. What if I disingeniously call people cranks? What if a lot of actual experts in one camp call actual experts of the other camp cranks?

In the hard sciences we can deal with it. If one camp can build working satellites and the other cannot we know who the real deal is. But in softer sciences? It's an unsolved problem as far as I can tell.

In some scientific fields like human nutrition there are way more cranks than experts. Some of the cranks have even managed to earn PhDs and publish multiple papers. The fact that there is a lot of industry funding for this field doesn't help the situation.

> Is that a topic that they need to be open-minded about, or can they just dismiss him as a racist crank?

Well, this is kind of the point of peer review, isn't it? You review the work, you reject it if it doesn't pass muster.

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