Hacker News Reader

> From my outsider's perspective, it seems the scientific community has adopted a series of guardrails that generally prevent "bad" research from getting published.

> But to return to my initial idea: I do think that we can arm ourselves with certain principles that, if applied, will move us away from biased thinking.

Run the proposition that science has cast its net of expertise and authority a bit too broadly by the science crowd and see how that goes over.

Or, pay attention going forward to what that crowd has to say about philosophy and other non-hard-science disciplines while reading your various socials.

I think the mechanism in the scientific community that allows progress are just multiple perspectives.

The version where there is one scientific authority that sets these guardrails is prone to fail and does that quite reliably. Different faculties have different requirements for their scientific work, but even here the established players often become a problem. The power of journals and their reputation can be detrimental, but as long as there is competition, it should work.

I think some field are less vulnerable here than others. You cannot just deliver scientific work in sociology/political science. You will have to fight a lot of people who will disagree for ideological reasons. These are by nature distinct from discussion about what color some gluon needs to have in some theoretical particle, although you have entirely "people focused conflicts" here as well.

But overall you should never put your belief in guardrails. They will be wrong and the next ostracized scientist was right in the end. The only relevant content is indeed the one in the scientific work itself. Whom you delegate them to evaluate them for you is a personal matter and no institution alone can take up this task.

> But to return to my initial idea: I do think that we can arm ourselves with certain principles that, if applied, will move us away from biased thinking. Simply being aware of "confirmation bias" and other psychological pitfalls might make us more capable of figuring out where we're going wrong. As the article notes, people are famously blind to their own errors, but quite good at pointing out others'. So it's not like it's impossible for us to become better and stronger thinkers.

This is why it's so important we teach our children things like critical thinking and reasoning, educate them on the various biases we're all prone to, and teach them how to recognize propaganda that works on those biases.