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Comment by KurSix | Hacker News Reader

Always worth asking how much these reconstructions reflect reality vs the assumptions built into the models

If a thought like this has occurred to you, a dilettante, after reading a headline and/or cursorily glancing over the article, then you should assume that a study conducted by people with substantial academic training and deep expertise in the field have also had this thought and incorporated it into how they perform their analysis.

Drive-by anti-intellectualism like this is the death of interesting conversation, truly.

Since the "people with substantial academic training and deep expertise in the field" can be bad at statistics or experts at academic fraud, doubting statements with obvious political motives is a prudent policy.

Distrust is science, deferring to authority without a good reason is anti-intellectualism.

It's not that simple. It's true that a willingness to criticize and falsify established assumptions and skepticism toward arguments based on authority are part of the scientific ethos. It's also true that many scientists simply do what they've been taught to do, without questioning methods or taking an interest in the philosophy of science. But your last sentence is so sweeping that it would allow flat-earthers to be considered scientists and intellectuals.

What is being criticized here is an attitude that believes one is the only one capable of critical thinking and that everyone else is just an idiot who is already overwhelmed by the task of tying their shoelaces in the morning. This is simply arrogance and has little to do with constructiveness, let alone scientific ethos. You treat yourself to that little dopamine rush of saying “ackchyually” and then just carry on playing Bubble Shooter on your phone.

This is very common here on HN. And when this ultimately hardens into blanket skepticism toward institutions, you are closer to the flat-earthers than to the scientists.

In an ideal world, you would be right. In this world, I just read a study (that passed peer review), where they took per-capita data from a district with 100 people, data from a district with 50.000 people, averaged them without weighing by number of people, then presented the result as the per-capita average for all districts.

That is when they're not outright fabricating data, and having their colleagues cover for them (at Harvard):

In or before 2020, graduate student Zoé Ziani developed concerns about the validity of results from a highly publicized paper by Gino about personal networking. According to Ziani, she was strongly warned by her academic advisers not to criticize Gino, and two members of her dissertation committee refused to approve her thesis unless she deleted criticism of Gino's paper from it. - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Francesca_Gino

I reviewed a paper recently that gave an incorrect definition for one of Maxwell’s equations and then proceeded to use it incorrectly. It got moved to a lower ranked journal rather than rejected outright. That wasn’t the only problem either, half the text was clearly AI generated.

Have you not observed that science is very often politicized, filled with fraud or just plain mistaken? The anti-intellectual position is anti-skepticism.

Then come with proof or some shred of evidence, rather than asking an unsubstantiated question that undermines the scientific process unnecessarily by trying to insert doubt from a place of zero expertise in the field.

I think they call this the appeal to authority fallacy, it’s the people without expertise in a field that often see the holes in something first, then the holes start glowing after they get hand waved away by smug narrow-minded experts.

> it’s the people without expertise in a field that often see the holes in something first

While it's obvious that everybody makes mistakes and has blind spots, I'd wager that, in general, being more knowledgeable gives you better tools to spot actual holes.

And sure, experts too can be narrow-minded and smug. Just like everybody else.

> And sure, experts too can be narrow-minded and smug. Just like everybody else.

Being an expert always adds a big weakness: You get paid to do this so you are biased.

So no, they are not "just like everybody else", they have spent more time on it so they know some things better, but you can't get away from biases that comes from being paid to do something and that makes experts worse at some other things.

> the people without expertise in a field that often see the holes in something first

No they don't. That never happens. Would you expect someone who knows nothing about programming to identify flaws in a computer language?

Of course not. You expect it will be people who actually understand the field that can identify issues.

it can even happen in software engineering but takes different forms, someone outside sees the problem first because they are looking from a different perspective or due to familiarity with some external factor or edge case of their environment

Example?

and what are you engaged in, appeal to nothingness? appeal to authority isn't a fallacy outside of formal logic, it is just everyday knowledgemaking.

Everyday knowledgemaking is filled with fallacies.

And we make myriad daily mistakes because of them. Most have no real negative consequences, so we don't correct.

> then you should assume that a study conducted by people with substantial academic training and deep expertise in the field have also had this thought and incorporated it into how they perform their analysis.

You should sit in some academic meetings and paper drafting e-mail chains! There’s a degree of believing the best in people but in my experience that can unfortunately be misplaced in science.

welcome to hacker news :)

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