The growing pains of science
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
> When I attended my first scientific conference at the tender age of 20, one of my mentors surprised me with the following bit of advice. Transcribed directly from memory:
> "You should be sure to attend the talk by so-and-so. You can always trust his results."
Perhaps around the same time, a professor said something similar to me, pointedly.
I paid attention to what I thought I heard, and I think I still remember the exact words, but in hindsight, I realize that they were probably implying something more than what I thought they were.
The bit of wisdom, which was actually a warning, whooshed over my head, so wasn't followed.
Though, if they could've known fully the fiasco that I was walking into, and had warned me directly of that in advance, I don't know that I could've believed them. :)
And I can understand why they'd speak indirectly or hesitate to say anything. Even having had this experience, and not wanting others to go through it, I still don't give advice as directly or strongly as I might, about some things. For a variety of reasons: they might be fine and not need the warning/advice, they might put too much weight on my advice, they certainly won't fully understand it, they might repeat something indiscreetly or misconstrued, there could be suppressing action against them and/or me, etc.
Some people think science has a proper lane, and that it (and those who speak on its behalf, cheerlead for it, etc) should stick to it in a more disciplined manner.
Also, I think that the wider public now has a greater appreciation that vigourous debate and disagreement is to be expected amongst the scientific community and that it's a good thing too.
> Americans’ confidence in higher education has fallen to 36%, sharply lower than in two prior readings in 2015 (57%) and 2018 (48%).
Not surprising when all academic institutions are politically captured by one side which suppresses and promotes ideas to further its agenda.
Recently, student support for Hamas after October 7 was a spectacular flower that could only grow in an ideological hothouse like what academia's become, and I don't think that's helped.
They seem to be getting the idea a little with Ivies now doing away with their creepy diversity statement requirements.
In the traditional Western culture, classical education was basically required for being part of the elite. If you could not participate in a refined discussion on topics elites were expected to know, other elites would not take you seriously.
But over time, the society became more meritocratic and education became more narrowly focused on employment. Today you can be a CEO without knowing classical Greek and Latin. You can call yourself a conservative without having liberal arts education. When social sciences and humanities are no longer something inherently appealing to conservatives, those fields are left to people with other motivations for studying them.
Because information was difficult to obtain, what was actually useful wasn't easy to identify and students relied on authority figures to tell them what was and what wasn't. Those authority figures themselves often had unsystematic and biased viewpoints which they then passed on to the next generation.
Years ago, Latin grammar was the gold standard by which all other languages were judged (perhaps as a legacy of the Roman empire). English grammar, along with that of most other world languages, is somewhat structurally different to Latin and difficult to shoehorn into the Latin model. In my opinion this has had a detrimental effect on multinational relations. Linguistics as a whole has only in the last few decades escaped from the missteps caused by classical education, with the rise of computer science and computer assisted comparative linguistic models. Google switched to other methods than those of traditional grammar for Google Translate and saw greater utility for end users as a result. Perhaps the results aren't especially idiomatic to the target language, but they have been very useful.
Maybe classical education was never that useful relative to what's available now and those who prize it have stockholm syndrome, perhaps with some rationale like "I had to go through it in my day, so students of today should too".
I think any attempt to maintain a scarcity of knowledge artificially now would be counter productive.
I've also heard, "Trust in the science." (emphasis mine).
I find this second form even more troubling. IMHO, it implies that there's only one conclusion that (real) science can reach, and the audience has been shown that conclusion.
To doubt that particular conclusion (no matter how badly researched) is to doubt the scientific method itself. It's implicitly a conversation stopper.
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That said, I'm making a lot of guesses about the intentions of whoever says that stuff. So maybe I'm being unfair.
"basic fields must progress in the absence of any prospect of empirical testing (string theory)" What does string theory have to do with cholesterol, or sugar, or Elsevier, or non-replicability, or fake data?
Perhaps "the naïve realism of previous generations becomes quite Medieval" is just some clods of mud being slung, and string theory's lack of testability is one more clod. His real agenda is "scientists must admit they're no better than liberal arts majors."