Science =/= Politics
Dec. 18th, 2021 11:31 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
ysabetwordsmithHere's another article on science and politics.
When science mixes with politics, all we get is politics.
I say this a lot, so I'm happy to see it here. I also say it about money.
Who decides if science is right or wrong? Scientists, obviously.
Well, no, anyone can tell that. That's what makes it science. Its results are replicable and objective. While some experiments are too expensive to replicate easily, and some measurements are obscure, a lot of what goes on is stuff that people can observe for themselves. You want to know about climate change, look out the window. A whole lot of gardeners and farmers noticed the shifts waaayyy before the government or even the Arbor Day Foundation changed their maps. Restricting science to scientists fosters a gap that causes problems.
However, attacks from a variety of interest groups have undermined scientific credibility, with catastrophic results that cost lives and compromised our collective future.
You know what else undermines credibility? When scientists fudge their details for financial or political reasons, which is rampant. When a metastudy has to throw out a majority of the studies it is collating, because their scientific process is flawed. When scientists ignore or abuse large swaths of population, like women or black people. When some fields, like nutrition, are so horribly unreliable that we wind up with phrases like "Eggs: good or bad this decade?" and "I don't argue with people who think the Earth is flat, and I don't argue with people who think that dieting makes you thinner."
Scientific method is a useful tool, and reliable for things it is good at doing. Scientists, as a group of people, are reliable only so far as their output proves to be accurate and useful. And that's taken a beating for a whole bunch of reasons.
"To be ignorant of causes is to be frustrated in action."
Prevailingly true. You can't solve the problem if you don't know what it is and why it's going wrong. But people, often including scientists, aren't nearly as interested in finding root causes as they are in finding "something to do about this." It leads to a lot of ineffective solutions.
Bacon proposed that careful observation of natural phenomena, combined with experimentation and data collection and analysis, could be used to obtain knowledge of the mechanisms of nature. His method, known as the inductive method, looked at particulars (e.g., observations) to achieve the general (e.g., laws).
We'd get better results if people were more thorough in observation, because they have a strong tendency to jump to a hypothesis and well, what the Thinker thinks, the Prover proves. A leading form of flaw in studies is plain old data-cropping.
The only reason you step into an airplane with confidence is because, knowing it or not, you trust science.
No, the reason people step into an airplane is because they need to get somewhere in a hurry. If you ask them what they feel about it, you'll find that most of them are anxious about flying, but they try not to think about that; they figure the benefit is worth taking the risk. But it's not just about science of how well a properly made airplane stays up. It's also about whether the airline is careful about maintenance, the pilot is sober, the ticket they paid for will actually get them a seat instead of a beating, and the "security" will decide to rape someone other than them that day.
The paradox of our age is that although we live in a world that depends in essential ways on science and its technological applications, the credibility of science and of scientists is being questioned by people with no expertise whatsoever in science or how it works.
Anyone can question science. Again, that's what makes it science. It doesn't run on credentials, although people routinely behave as if it does. It runs on facts. What matters in a challenge is not whether the person has "expertise" but whether they have evidence. A particularly vexing point for scientists is that, while the plural of anecdote is not data, the later data often start out as anecdotes. Like say, noticing that people who smoke tobacco seem to cough a lot, or hearing repeated cases of lung cancer in smokers, and maybe this is something we should worry about since breathing is sort of important. The moment someone resorts to logical fallacies like appeal to authority or ad hominem attacks, you're out of science.
Specialization has a dual role: It strengthens its own subfield but weakens the global understanding of a question. Specialization makes it harder for scientists to be a public voice for their fields in ways that are engaging to the general public.
That silo effect also causes experts to make mistakes and fail to see connections or implications. This leads to solution-caused problems. We desperately need generalists to avoid this, and we're not training those, so the problems are getting worse.
So, scientists, the darlings of the 1950s, became the harbingers of annoying news, threatening people’s way of life and the profitability of large sectors of the economy. They had to be stopped!
When you stop paying attention to science, and worry about politics or economics, the results are consistently bad. But don't blame the scientists. Blame the politicians and the rich executives. If people had listened to scientists at that time then we wouldn't have the atmosphere cooking off now.
Scientific knowledge became a matter of opinion, something that Francis Bacon fought against almost 400 years ago.
*snort* No matter how you try to fiddle the paperwork, facts are facts. Lying about the environment will not stop a souped-up hurricane or wildfire from killing you dead. Reality is whatever persists despite your disbelief.
Science needs more popular voices, people that have a gift to explain to the general public how and why science works.
That's true.
Scientists need to visit more schools and talk to the children about what they do. Educators need to reenergize the science curriculum to reflect the realities of our world, inviting more scientists to visit classes and telling more stories about scientists that are engaging to students. This humanizes science in the process.
I don't expect this to happen, because there's no room for it in the increasingly centralized education system; teachers are just book-readers now. And if people really understood science, they'd have enough foothold on logic in general to make politicians very uncomfortable, which is precisely why a lot of content got stripped out in the first place.
Historians often say that history swings back and forth like a pendulum. Let’s make sure that we do not allow the pendulum of scientific knowledge to swing back to the obscurantism of centuries past, when the few with power and means controlled the vast majority of the population by keeping them in ignorance and manipulating them with fear.
Which is exactly where we are, and the people in power like it that way.
On the bright side, it's not particularly hard to learn how to spot the bullshit just from looking at lots of it. People can learn from experience -- if they care to.
When science mixes with politics, all we get is politics.
I say this a lot, so I'm happy to see it here. I also say it about money.
Who decides if science is right or wrong? Scientists, obviously.
Well, no, anyone can tell that. That's what makes it science. Its results are replicable and objective. While some experiments are too expensive to replicate easily, and some measurements are obscure, a lot of what goes on is stuff that people can observe for themselves. You want to know about climate change, look out the window. A whole lot of gardeners and farmers noticed the shifts waaayyy before the government or even the Arbor Day Foundation changed their maps. Restricting science to scientists fosters a gap that causes problems.
However, attacks from a variety of interest groups have undermined scientific credibility, with catastrophic results that cost lives and compromised our collective future.
You know what else undermines credibility? When scientists fudge their details for financial or political reasons, which is rampant. When a metastudy has to throw out a majority of the studies it is collating, because their scientific process is flawed. When scientists ignore or abuse large swaths of population, like women or black people. When some fields, like nutrition, are so horribly unreliable that we wind up with phrases like "Eggs: good or bad this decade?" and "I don't argue with people who think the Earth is flat, and I don't argue with people who think that dieting makes you thinner."
Scientific method is a useful tool, and reliable for things it is good at doing. Scientists, as a group of people, are reliable only so far as their output proves to be accurate and useful. And that's taken a beating for a whole bunch of reasons.
"To be ignorant of causes is to be frustrated in action."
Prevailingly true. You can't solve the problem if you don't know what it is and why it's going wrong. But people, often including scientists, aren't nearly as interested in finding root causes as they are in finding "something to do about this." It leads to a lot of ineffective solutions.
Bacon proposed that careful observation of natural phenomena, combined with experimentation and data collection and analysis, could be used to obtain knowledge of the mechanisms of nature. His method, known as the inductive method, looked at particulars (e.g., observations) to achieve the general (e.g., laws).
We'd get better results if people were more thorough in observation, because they have a strong tendency to jump to a hypothesis and well, what the Thinker thinks, the Prover proves. A leading form of flaw in studies is plain old data-cropping.
The only reason you step into an airplane with confidence is because, knowing it or not, you trust science.
No, the reason people step into an airplane is because they need to get somewhere in a hurry. If you ask them what they feel about it, you'll find that most of them are anxious about flying, but they try not to think about that; they figure the benefit is worth taking the risk. But it's not just about science of how well a properly made airplane stays up. It's also about whether the airline is careful about maintenance, the pilot is sober, the ticket they paid for will actually get them a seat instead of a beating, and the "security" will decide to rape someone other than them that day.
The paradox of our age is that although we live in a world that depends in essential ways on science and its technological applications, the credibility of science and of scientists is being questioned by people with no expertise whatsoever in science or how it works.
Anyone can question science. Again, that's what makes it science. It doesn't run on credentials, although people routinely behave as if it does. It runs on facts. What matters in a challenge is not whether the person has "expertise" but whether they have evidence. A particularly vexing point for scientists is that, while the plural of anecdote is not data, the later data often start out as anecdotes. Like say, noticing that people who smoke tobacco seem to cough a lot, or hearing repeated cases of lung cancer in smokers, and maybe this is something we should worry about since breathing is sort of important. The moment someone resorts to logical fallacies like appeal to authority or ad hominem attacks, you're out of science.
Specialization has a dual role: It strengthens its own subfield but weakens the global understanding of a question. Specialization makes it harder for scientists to be a public voice for their fields in ways that are engaging to the general public.
That silo effect also causes experts to make mistakes and fail to see connections or implications. This leads to solution-caused problems. We desperately need generalists to avoid this, and we're not training those, so the problems are getting worse.
So, scientists, the darlings of the 1950s, became the harbingers of annoying news, threatening people’s way of life and the profitability of large sectors of the economy. They had to be stopped!
When you stop paying attention to science, and worry about politics or economics, the results are consistently bad. But don't blame the scientists. Blame the politicians and the rich executives. If people had listened to scientists at that time then we wouldn't have the atmosphere cooking off now.
Scientific knowledge became a matter of opinion, something that Francis Bacon fought against almost 400 years ago.
*snort* No matter how you try to fiddle the paperwork, facts are facts. Lying about the environment will not stop a souped-up hurricane or wildfire from killing you dead. Reality is whatever persists despite your disbelief.
Science needs more popular voices, people that have a gift to explain to the general public how and why science works.
That's true.
Scientists need to visit more schools and talk to the children about what they do. Educators need to reenergize the science curriculum to reflect the realities of our world, inviting more scientists to visit classes and telling more stories about scientists that are engaging to students. This humanizes science in the process.
I don't expect this to happen, because there's no room for it in the increasingly centralized education system; teachers are just book-readers now. And if people really understood science, they'd have enough foothold on logic in general to make politicians very uncomfortable, which is precisely why a lot of content got stripped out in the first place.
Historians often say that history swings back and forth like a pendulum. Let’s make sure that we do not allow the pendulum of scientific knowledge to swing back to the obscurantism of centuries past, when the few with power and means controlled the vast majority of the population by keeping them in ignorance and manipulating them with fear.
Which is exactly where we are, and the people in power like it that way.
On the bright side, it's not particularly hard to learn how to spot the bullshit just from looking at lots of it. People can learn from experience -- if they care to.
(no subject)
Date: 2021-12-19 07:33 pm (UTC)But too many people don't "get" that a physicist's statements about, say, vaccines may not be accurate.
The overuse of "people in lab coats" in ads from the 50s on just magnified the problem.
(no subject)
Date: 2021-12-20 12:42 am (UTC)Thoughts
Date: 2021-12-20 03:24 am (UTC)Thank you.
>> I have a scientific background (Ph.D. and published papers), although these days, I’m a bureaucrat with a quasi-judicial position rather than a working scientist.<<
Go you!
Honestly, I'm a generalist. My degree is in Rhetoric/Women's Studies. But I study everything around me -- history, archaeology, botany, zoology, ecology, meteorology, astronomy, quantum physics, magic, sociology, psychology, linguistics, alternative building, comparative religions, cosmology, the manifold universe. There are some topics that interest me less than others, like sports, high fashion, pop culture, and who's fucking whom. But I love looking at the parts and how they all fit together.
I happened to spot, in very close succession, an article about the insect apocalypse and the bird apocalypse. It was instantly clear to me that a collapse in insects would necessarily cause a collapse in birds -- independent of other threats like habitat loss or migration disruption -- because birds eat insects. It was months before I saw anyone else connecting those dots, and they're still not commonly connected. I expect it's because most people who study insects do not also study birds and vice versa.
We really need scientists who are scanning the breadth of science for things like that, because a lot of issues have a cause in one field and an effect in another, which if you don't know the other field you aren't going to figure out let alone fix. And that's the easy stuff like birds and insects. The hard stuff is "why is this ecosystem collapsing?" and it's got roots in geology, meteorology, hydrology, and human action. You're not going to solve that from a silo.
We need generalists who are looking at ecology, economics, sociology, politics, psychology, and chaos theory too. They don't need to be top experts in any one field. They need to know the basics of the main fields in science and liberal arts, and as many favorites as they care to study in depth, and then they need to browse current events to see what sticks together. And then we need people to LISTEN to them.
The world is fractal. The same patterns repeat over and over. So if you study diverse fields, you notice things like how tree leaves and river deltas have the same branch pattern, or how the stock market moves like a predator-prey wave pattern, which can be used to predict similar actions in very different systems.
Science is a useful tool. Generalists really need it in the box. But they need other stuff too, because science is a lot better at concrete than abstract stuff, and especially at things which repeat than flukes which don't.
I've actually written down the General Science and Generalist degree requirements from Terramagne, in case anyone cares to replicate the study pattern here.
Re: Thoughts
Date: 2021-12-20 04:43 am (UTC)This.