11 ms·
The Unbearable Asymmetry of Bullshit
- trav4225 11y ago"There is a veritable truckload of bullshit in science." Amen to that. :) I'm a bit tired of seeing critics of various hypotheses being dismissed out of hand simply "Because Science".
- hellofunk 11y agoYes but in fairness there is a fair amount of BS in any area of human endeavor. There are BS movies, BS politicians, BS music, BS programming languages; it's certainly not unique to science.
- bcook 11y agoBut isn't science supposed to be, by definition, the anti-bullshit?
- rimantas 11y agoscience is supposed to be self-correcting.
- ArkyBeagle 11y agoIt is. This is just a very slow process.
- calibraxis 11y agoScience is a movement that's about simplifying reality to discover principles. (Examples: Galileo ignored friction and air resistance to get at principles of motion. And if something's too complicated, the physicist hands it to the chemist, who hands it to the biologist...) There's a link between that and critical thinking; one of the first theoretical physicists wrote: "The duty of the person who investigates the writings of ancients [scientists?], if learning the truth is their goal, is to make themself an enemy of all that they read, and ... attack it from every side. They should also suspect themself as they perform their critical examination of it, so that they may avoid falling into either prejudice or leniency." — Alhazen, ~1000, Cairo However, since science is a social enterprise, it's vulnerable to institutional bullshit. Certainly, Alhazen had to pretend madness to avoid angering the local Powers That Be. Nowadays, scientists must contend with all sorts of brokenness at universities; managerialism/bureaucracy, class/sexism/racism, etc.
- JackFr 11y agoOut of the crooked timber of humanity, no straight thing was ever made. https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Immanuel_Kant https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Immanuel_Kant
- hellofunk 11y agoWell, science is still human.
- arethuza 11y agoIsn't that Sturgeon's law: "ninety percent of everything is crap." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sturgeon's_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sturgeon's_law
- rimantas 11y agoMany hypotheses can be dismissed because they violate some fundamental principals.
- BatFastard 11y agoAren't history's greatest breakthroughs idea's that break what was thought of as a fundamental principle?
- mda 11y agoSure, but maybe parent meant fundamental principles like laws of thermodynamics.
- vog 11y ago> I'm a bit tired of seeing critics of various hypotheses being dismissed out of hand simply "Because Science". While this is certainly an issue, more often than not I see "critics" claiming broad statements without even trying to verify/falsify their claims scientifically. And if I have to choose between two sides, where one tries hard to fulfill scientific requirements while the other doesn't care, I'm certainly on the scientific side - even though our current academic landscape is far from perfect.
- vlehto 11y agoI'd like to point out that there are three possible stances on a phenomena. True, false and we don't know. People are bad at maintaining the "I don't know" stance. But it's sometimes the only objective.
- arca_vorago 11y agoI would like to point out that you are missing one of the most important stances: one of probability. Sometimes you dont know, but factors indicate a percentage probability, that should be updated as the data changes.
- Practicality 11y agoSo few understand that most "real life" things involve inductive logic (IE, probability) because real life is simply too complex and variable to give absolute deductive proofs of most things. You can still come to solid conclusions, but those conclusions are still "most probably true" rather than "absolutely true."
- vlehto 11y agoThat's kinda weird thing really. In science the probability for a given theory to be true is usually not very important. Usually you operate with the best guess that you have, or best guesses that you have. Until shit gets proven. You could argue that "probability" is name for this best guess, but scientific probability is mathematical term, that requires you are able to calculate some sort of numerical value for your probability. You usually can't do that to "most viable alternative". For science this is not a problem, because science only cares about "truth" and there are no time dead lines for finding it or necessary decisions that you have to make before 2030. Allocating probabilities would serve no purpose other than bias researchers. In politics "probable" is fuzzier concept and often just a cop out. You can justify anything with that idea, but you have no responsibility afterwards (damn, we went to the 5% range after all, sorry!). And you don't need any kind of real sources, just authority or lack of imagination suits just fine. When we wander into personal world views or some casual conversations, assigning probabilities become really good idea. But then it's often about who's authority you trust most, than what data you can actually consider. And end of the day most people still gravitate towards either "extremely likely" or "incredibly unlikely" most of the time. You just use likelihood as a way to show that you actually considered that your statement might be false, but you don't actually consider it to be. This psychological tendency for people to make up their minds, and then not change their minds is actually at the heart of the problem. These "critics" could not have mass following to their bullshit ideas without it. But currently lots of people fail to understand that just providing half decent criticism against an idea does not prove the opposing idea true. Because human beings are naturally bad at not making their minds.
- acqq 11y agoActually the critics should be dismissed as soon as they criticize scientific findings without demonstrating their knowledge and valid and effective use of the scientific method. Somebody's ignorance of the background of some scientific claims is absolutely not an excuse to accept to even spend the energy considering his claims of "wrongness." The only thing we should consider is how we can educate as much people as we can, but we certainly should not treat them as having any contribution to the understanding of the topic. An example for a case study: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8athT6tfRIg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8athT6tfRIg "Horizon Zoom Boom Earth Flat" The modern concept of "journalistic balance" (in reality, trying to win the eyeballs by creating "conflict") by representing 99% percent of all world scientists with one person and some group with silly claims with another person and giving these two then the same air time or coverage space is exactly one of the things that produce this effect: "The amount of energy necessary to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude bigger than to produce it." Also never ignore the "accidental" fact when the "silly" group represents the interests of the people with immense amount of wealth and/or power, or potential financial or power gain in maintaining the "controversy." That's where the events really get nasty.
- ska 11y agoFor all of its flaws, the scientific method is clearly the correct way to perform such criticism. It isn't perfect (it isn't close), but it is orders of magnitude more effective than any other approach humans have ever tried - assuming applicable area of study. So that leaves us with the critics. If you can't be bothered to do the work and are taking potshots from the sidelines there really isn't likely to be much value in your criticism. It's not impossible that there is value there, but the odds aren't very good at all, so you can't really blame people for not engaging with it easily. I agree it is unfortunate when people are quickly dismissive of an idea with "Because Science". But it remains true that by far the best answer to "Because Science" is, "Not, so fast, what about Science". Picking at potential flaws in a study rarely adds much signal. Suggesting improvements and helping make those happen has potentially immense value. Arguing about it on the internet usually has negative value.
- nsns 11y agoInstead of a sisyphean refutation of every attack, wouldn't a better strategy be to research and prove the attacker's conflict of interests (and thus discredit them)?
- s_m_t 11y agoIf your desired outcome is to merely discredit your opponent and win the argument, maybe. If you are in pursuit of truth, no.
- tempestn 11y agoOnce it has become clear that someone is a "Lord Voldemort", it seems to me there's little value in continued careful consideration of their positions. At that point, if it's possible, why not discredit them and allow the rest of the world to start ignoring them and spend time on more promising endeavours?
- pjc50 11y ago"Discrediting" only works on some people. If it was universally applicable then Donald Trump wouldn't be the leading Republican candidate.
- AlgorithmicTime 11y agoI'm convinced Trump could kill Marco Rubio on live TV in Times Square and receive a bump in the polls.
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- douche 11y agoI'm not convinced Rubio wouldn't look like this if he got ripped in half[1] [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Z5sX4qC5HE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Z5sX4qC5HE
- superpope99 11y ago/offtopic That 2.8mb .jpg is Bullshit
- brownbat 11y agoThe job market right now in the US forces grad students to attempt innovative research with remarkable conclusions. As a consequence, everyone's trying to prove more outlandish things while few are bothering with replications. If the field were sane, you would train all the apprentices on replication studies. Once they demonstrated dispassionate expertise with the tools, only then would they be allowed to try to use those tools to test their own ideas, where they will have a strong emotional preference for how the study will come out. If universities hired grad students based on their replication work, not on their eye-popping original research, we'd have better science and better scientists.
- x5n1 11y agoIf the field was sane we would not expect breakthrough results or any results all of the time. We would happily say to scientists, thanks for your continued efforts... and allow them the money and time to do real science. But this is not how the crazy Capitalist world works. You have sociopaths which run these institutions always barking orders and demanding results. So the poor employee gives you what you ask, and you say good boy, and give them a treat.
- themartorana 11y agoA lot of the time those same students are doing the bulk of the legwork for those findings then attributed to a professor, who is under greater pressure to advance (not confirm) science, who may or may not have even participated heavily in the grunt work of that research. The professor then punishes the work under his/her name, with no credit to the work of the students.
- LeifCarrotson 11y agoPublishes. I assume that was a typo?
- eplanit 11y agoNo doubt a typo. Punishment is the consequence of not publishing. :)
- Eupolemos 11y agoWell, it is still a variation "On Bullshit" (Harry Frankfurt's excellent article). If someone in science is more interested in a position than whether the presented arguments individually holds up or not, that person is unscientifically invested and we should have some kind of mental allergic reaction to that. The "Publish or Perish" has made Gish Gallops much harder to catch and almost impossible to punish.
- n4r9 11y agoThere's also the entertaining "On the phenomenon of bullshit jobs" by David Graeber, although it has less to say specifically about science: http://strikemag.org/bullshit-jobs/ http://strikemag.org/bullshit-jobs/
- a77jk153 11y agoAlan Sokal's 'Beyond The Hoax' and 'Intellectual Impostures' are good reads about the subject.
- bshimmin 11y agoFor anyone thinking, "The words in the title sound sort of familiar, but I'm not sure why", it's a reference to "The Unbearable Lightness of Being", a great book by Milan Kundera which translated into Daniel Day-Lewis' worst film.
- studentrob 11y agoBullshit is a byproduct of a highly incentivized research market. This is what respected journals are supposed to help curate. There are opportunities to create better forms of curation with less bullshit and I would bet people will pay for it.
- bazine 11y agohi
- mrcactu5 11y agothis is a great time to bring up Bullshit as a topic of study in and of its self. http://press.princeton.edu/titles/7929.html http://press.princeton.edu/titles/7929.html We routinely say things that aren't quite true -- sometimes with the best intentions or out of necessity. The truth can be a very complicated thing. What we are calling "bullshit" may go under more serious names (and serious discussions) if we look at specific cases - e.g. finance, medicine, game theory, biology, etc... My back-of-the-envlope definition is that of an "approximation to the truth".
- thallukrish 11y agoThat's the reason why theory should be backed by hard evidence or a product that can be experienced. Without this, a theory of any sort whether it turns out to be right or if it is pure bullshit should not be given undue credit.
- thallukrish 11y agoThat's the reason why theory should be backed by hard evidence or a product that can be experienced. Without this, a theory of any sort whether it turns out to be right or if it is pure bullshit should not be given undue credit.
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- leroy_masochist 11y agoI read this as a thinly-veiled attack on prominent climate-change activists. I thought the author ended a bit abruptly; was expecting a comparison of the tactics used by the fictitious "Voldemort" to the real-life actions of Bill McKibben, Michael Mann, etc.
- stillsut 11y agoSo meta... Notice how a couple Voldermorts have gone through the comments and down-voted anyone who questioned catastrophic global warming predictions. As Voldermorts are wont to do.
- gavanwoolery 11y ago' Instead, “It’s about a methodology for investigation, which includes, at its core, a relentless drive towards questioning that which came before.” You can both “love science,” he concludes, “and question it.” ' I've noticed that questioning some scientific finding often makes people think I am either anti-science, anti-intellectual, conservative, religious, or any combination thereof (I am none of these). To state quite the opposite, I think not questioning science makes you religious - you are putting faith in the findings, rather than disputing them or scrutinizing them with the scientific method (not that I think there is anything wrong with faith or religion, within their own realm).
- Chris2048 11y agoIf the science has "social" before it, it always needs to be questioned - too much political interference. The entire field is low in actual results, high in political tooling..
- fapjacks 11y agoIt seems that's the case with more than just science, but possibly a good rule to follow with anything.
- Chris2048 11y agoTrue. But social science is where the uncertain standards, and political gains are. No one can, or cares to, taint research into fundamental particles. Studies into any kind of demographic is a different case...
- moonchrome 11y agoI consider pseudo intelectual leftist dogmatic equvalent to religious right - but it doesn't mean i treat every questioning/skepticism as equal/valid/productive. When you're discussing anything nontrivial it takes a lot of effort/knowledge to dispute a flawed argument (disproportionately harder than making one IMO) - disregarding someone on biases/agenda is a decent heuristic.
- daveguy 11y agoAuthor mentions difficulty of reproducing research as one of the issues in passing. There was a recent Nature special edition on the subject: http://www.nature.com/news/reproducibility-1.17552 http://www.nature.com/news/reproducibility-1.17552 I believe this is the primary issue and the cause is from one of two causes: 1) secret sauce in research -- details are lacking because there is a push to commercialize things that come out of academia 2) insufficient experimental design -- small sample size, poor controls, etc. I would like to see an open publication that as a part of publication the result must be reproduced in a separate independent lab or two. This would almost double the required funding (maybe less because you eliminate false starts). Maybe just a few institutions could handle many reproductions. There is a bit of a self-healing aspect in that the non-reproducible and non-interesting/advancing studies just get dropped on the floor. However, it would lend a lot of credibility to a journal that required an independent research confirmation.
- pitt1980 11y agobm
- basicplus2 11y agoso true! and when you you reward the bullshit artists with money and grants.. it multiplies the bullshit a thousand fold
- agentgt 11y agoIn other professional disciplines particularly ones that require some sort of certification there are ethics tests and ethics committees. For example if your trying to get a CFA half of the test is ethics. Likewise for becoming and being a lawyer. Given the importance of academia and its impact on policy in general perhaps something similar should exist? I'm not sure if ethical tests and committees curb bad behavior but it could be a start or at least improve awareness. Maybe there is even something like the above already in place for academia that I'm unaware of?
- philh 11y agoI find it vaguely amusing and ironic that he cites rationalwiki on the gish gallop, given that my impression is they do this themselves a bunch. (Note that running a gish gallop doesn't mean you're wrong, it just means you're intellectually dishonest.) (I try not to pay too much attention to them, and I'm not super interested in refuting their bullshit, so this comment is going to be pretty unsatisfying. Sorry.)
- jenius 11y agoYou can't make a comment like this with absolutely zero explanation other than that it was 'your impression'. I understand the whole refuting bullshit is a lot of work thing, but it's equally as irresponsible, if not more, to make a comment like this with no evidence for a claim. At least give us something!
- philh 11y agoSee my other reply, also for why (apart from time commitment) I was reluctant to give evidence.
- knowaveragejoe 11y agoI haven't read much on rationalwiki, but nothing I did struck me as gish gallop. They might have a lot of angles on attack on some bunk concept, but they expand upon all of them.
- rudolf0 11y agoI haven't found them guilty of gish gallop, but some of their articles are very biased and one-sided. They seem to be a reliable source on most issues of philosophy, science, and "woo", but anything political, societal, or remotely controversial usually isn't given a balanced view.
- philh 11y agoIt's worth asking how much you already know about the subject? It's easy to make an article that looks convincing and devastating to someone with no prior knowledge, but laughably incomplete to to someone in the field. For example, a cited claim could be contradicted by the citation, or missing valuable context provided by the citation, and you'd need to look up the citation to discover this. Or the citation could be bogus, and you'd need to do further research. Or the claim could be a really trivial objection and its reply omitted, and again you'd need to do further research. I'll accept that not all of these things necessarily make for a Gish gallop as such. But they do all seem to be in the broad category of "intellectual dishonesty through weak argumentation which is easier to perpetuate than refute". I'm not going to quibble about how to subcategorise that. I'm reluctant to give specific examples, because that risks starting an argument about those examples. Hopefully this thread is now old enough to avoid that. --- So for example, we can look at http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Cryonics http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Cryonics (permalink in case of edits: http://rationalwiki.org/w/index.php?title=Cryonics&oldid=1593670 http://rationalwiki.org/w/index.php?title=Cryonics&oldid=159...). Just skimming it, the "engineering problems" section keeps referring to "freezing". Trivial objection: "freezing damages the cells!" Omitted reply: "yes, so we moved on from freezing". It does also talk about vitrification, but it makes no particular effort to distinguish between the two or to tell the reader that freezing is no longer current practice. Elsewhere, "Alcor Corporation calls cryonics "a scientific approach to extending human life" and compares it to heart surgery.[8] This is a gross misrepresentation of the state of both the science and technology and verges on both pseudoscience and quackery." What the citation actually says is: "Cryonics, like heart surgery, is a scientific approach to extending human life that does not violate any religious beliefs or their principles." They aren't making the comparison that RW wants to paint them as. They're sort of hinting in that direction, but they're not making any actual scientific claims here. (They do make scientific claims elsewhere. If they ever say that cryonics has the same chance of success as heart surgery, RW should feel free to call them on it. I'm pretty sure they never say that.) Their citation for "Some advocates literally propose a magic-equivalent future artificial superintelligence that will make everything better" is not someone proposing that (later in the thread, he says nanobots would be sufficient but not necessary). You might want to read the citation for more replies to RW-level objections to cryonics. I can tell you that "Belief in cryonics is pretty much required on LessWrong to be accepted as "rational."" is simply false, and probably wasn't true when it was written. The citation leads not to a survey of LWers opinions on cryonics, but to the opinion of the founder of LW. Note that these objections are true, and reflect badly on RW, even if cryonics is complete bunk. And also note that I didn't follow a single citation on that article and then decide "no, this seems fair". I picked things to follow according to what I expected to see, but I was never pleasantly surprised. (In the interests of fairness, I'll say that I am pleasantly surprised they don't call cryonics a scam. RationalWiki: not quite as bad as it could be.) And I've spent over an hour on this now, when I should have gone to bed. So I'm done.
- bikamonki 11y agoAnd then there is the bullshit that permeates from science research into bullshit blogs that later folk people use to guide their decisions (and editors/writers use to drive ad prints): what to eat or not according to recent research, how to raise children or not acording to recent research, how long a workout, how to be happy, how to this and how not to that. The bullshit then jumps from blogs into everyday conversations and daily live, into arguments over coffee (how much coffee is good by the way? According to quotable recent research that is). The most recent bulshit that really makes me lose hope is the don't vaccinate children bullshit. I see an entire civilization confused by a ubiquous mass communication tool which they invented to do exactly the opposite: enlight them.
- jedrek 11y agoExcept there's no science research against vaccination, there's just hucksters publishing "work" on sites like PRWeb ($99/article).
- bitwize 11y agoThere was Andrew Wakefield, who managed to get his fraud published in a legit journal.
- jerf 11y ago"I see an entire civilization confused by a ubiquous mass communication tool which they invented to do exactly the opposite: enlight them." There was never a stream of pure, refined truth available, that just somehow lacked a distribution method. All there ever was was a confusing mixture of an uncountable varieties of different possibilities, theories, and facts of varying veracity. Now you can have more direct access to that confusing mixture, with all the attendant privileges and responsibilities. There were things that claimed to be streams of pure, refined truth. Those claims didn't become false. They always were false. Now you can tell that better. It may not feel like progress, but it is.
- nmrm2 11y ago> There was never a stream of pure, refined truth availablem, that just somehow lacked a distribution method Academic educational programs have exactly been the source-without-a-scalable-distribution-method for at least the past century. You're unlikely to find a treatment of mathematics or physics or even Computer Science that is as well-curated, free of coercive bias, and well-presented as it often is in the undergraduate programs at universities that care deeply about their educational programs. (Such universities and colleges do exist; they unfortunately also tend to be expensive, selective, and not always well-represented in top N lists -- especially in the US.) The reason the distribution method of university education is lacking has more to do with economics than anything else. Hiring truly high-quality people to teach small groups of people difficult content in a rigorous way is expensive. If you skimp on any of those features, the quality of the end result goes way down (c.f. typical MOOCs and the university courses to which they are purportedly equivalent, in pretty much any dimension.) > There were things that claimed to be streams of pure, refined truth. Those claims didn't become false. They always were false. Again, I fail to see how this critique applies in any meaningful way to high-quality undergraduate education programs in hard sciences. Nothing is perfect -- and in fact I doubt any of those programs ever claimed to be "streams of pure, refined truth". But they come far closer than your comment seems to suggest. Now, going back to the contents of the article, universites certainly aren't "streams of pure, refined, and new truth". Such streams very likely don't exist.
- dahart 11y agoThere is indeed a lot of bullshit in the practice of science. But that doesn't mean science is flawed, it means people are flawed. Remember Sturgeons Law: 90% of everything is bullshit. [1] It would be great if we could fund science purely for science' sake, and if scientists didn't have egos or careers or reputations or children, but despite the objections, I will expect a certain amount of bullshit to continue unabated. In the mean time, the author's most important point, IMO is "if you love science, you had better question it, and question it well, so it can live up to its potential." This is true, and always will be, regardless of how much bullshit is involved! [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sturgeon%27s_law https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sturgeon%27s_law
- apo 11y ago>... He Who Shall Not Be Named predictably rejects all of the studies that do not support his position as being “fatally flawed,” or as having been “refuted by experts”—namely, by himself and his close collaborators ... This speaks to part of the problem - the undue weight that non-scientists place on expert opinion. Trained scientists see appeal to authority arguments for what they are: bullshit. I see this most frequently in areas for which few controlled studies are available to light the way. Human nutrition and toxicology come to mind. Oddly enough, these are the areas that are most likely to be of interest to non-scientists, setting up a vicious cycle of guru-ism complete with economic incentive to continue spouting nonsense.
- breischl 11y ago>>the undue weight that non-scientists place on expert opinion Speaking as a non-scientist, I can recognize an appeal to authority probably just as well as a scientist. But having recognized one, what do I do? I lack the training, knowledge, and time necessary to evaluate the research directly. I can choose to only trust studies that are peer reviewed, or in major journals, or backed by whatever relevant government body there might be, or that my friend who knows about this thinks are right. And maybe that's a good idea, but it's still just appealing to different kinds of authority. Most of the time laypeople have no realistic alternative to expert opinion.
- noelsusman 11y agoThe alternative is consensus. As part of my research I found that a particular method of estimating disease prevalence in small geographic areas performed better than this other method when tested on real data from schools. The tendency of the general public would be to look at that study and say the first method is better than the second method (assuming the general public would care at all, which they don't). That's incorrect. I would only conclude that method is actually better if several other people found similar results for similar methods in separate studies. People tend to place far too much importance on one paper or one study. In theoretical research this can be okay sometimes, but in applied research this is almost always the wrong way to go.
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- RyanMcGreal 11y agoThis phenomenon may help to explain the two solitudes in the research on whether salt is harmful: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2016/02/17/scientists-cant-agree-whether-salt-is-killing-us-heres-why/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2016/02/17/scien...
- astazangasta 11y agoI take issue with Brandolini's maxim: "The amount of energy necessary to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude bigger than to produce it." This assumes that we know, a priori, what is bullshit and what is not. Sometimes bullshitters know they are bullshitting, but most often they do not. What I think is really going on here is that the scientific method is crap for this sort of thing, there is no such thing as "empirical truth" that exists in the real world, and subjective debate, reasoning, and so on, is hard and requires enormous effort on all parts. Let's consider another hypothetical work of bullshit by one Maleficent. I, an oblivious third party, come across her published work. How am I to know that this work is bullshit? The traditional response is that we use the scientific method, verifiability and empiricism, to test the bounds of a proposed model against observation. "You said Planet X should be at y, but it is actually at z, therefore bullshit." To quote Laurence Laurentz: 'Would that it were so simple.' The problem here is that observation is fraught, and is usually based on its own assumptions. For example, let's say Maleficent is studying treatments for depression; to do so she must observe whether an individual is "depressed" or "not depressed". How the fuck should she do this? Frequently people use questionnaire measures like the Beck Depression Inventory (BDI). Is this a valid tool? I have been heavily depressed when I scored low on the BDI, so I would say not. But what IS a valid tool? Is there any objective criterion we can bring to bear, here? What is it? Does "depression" even exist as a thing? This problem, that observations are themselves laden with assumptions and based on pre-existing models, is a mire that all science is forced to wade through. Before we make decisions about anything, we must have a lens with which to view the world - but that, itself, is a decision! More broadly speaking this is a problem with deductive reasoning, and because empiricism claims to be based on deductive reasoning it falls into error as a result. Because it is impossible to begin with truth, any scientific observation must be riddled through with approximations. And usually, we are unaware of the approximations that are blinding us when we build flawed models on top of them. This is the main reason we get bullshit: there is no good way to do science.
- davidw 11y agoBrandolini's quote is brilliant. Going through evidence and conducting studies and doing research and looking through it with a critical eye is orders of magnitude more difficult than spouting some BS like "vaccines cause autism!!11!!111".
- awl130 11y agothis belongs on medium.com
- haberman 11y agoScience is an organism that needs an immune system. At a systemic level, it needs to be hard to get away with this kind of thing.
- entwife 11y agoThe immune system of science is the peer review system and other mechanisms to reduce faulty science. This author points out published papers that made it past that immune system, and it some cases became part of it (e.g. as peer reviewers). What analogous structure in the immune system could repair problems with the system itself?
- haberman 11y agoYes, the article describes how certain "viruses" have learned how to beat the current immune system. That just means the immune system needs to evolve to address the new threats. In nature, immune systems evolve based on natural selection. We need to keep trying new things and see what works. Maybe "peer review" needs to extend not only to individual papers, but to scientists and institutions themselves. Maybe their reputation needs to be evaluated over time so that a scientist who has been "infected" then has a standing presumption against their work until they can overwhelmingly demonstrate they are "healed." This idea might be good or might be terrible, but I believe that we should be trying things like this to see if any of them stick and cause more good than harm.
- ArkyBeagle 11y agoBut there is a cost problem with that, and behind the cost problem is a funding problem. "The servant is the one who takes the money" - Lawrence of Arabia.
- ArkyBeagle 11y ago"Science advances one funeral at a time." - Max Planck
- jimbokun 11y ago"In the case of Lord Voldemort, the trick is to unleash so many fallacies, misrepresentations of evidence, and other misleading or erroneous statements — at such a pace, and with such little regard for the norms of careful scholarship and/or charitable academic discourse — that your opponents, who do, perhaps, feel bound by such norms, and who have better things to do with their time than to write rebuttals to each of your papers, face a dilemma. Either they can ignore you, or they can put their own research priorities on hold to try to combat the worst of your offenses." So the scientific debate equivalent of the Trump campaign.
- atomic_cheese 11y agoIf you can't blind them with brilliance, baffle them with bullshit.
- newman314 11y agoI was just coming here to cite the Trumo campaign as an example. The unfortunate thing is that the amount of effort to counter this bullshit is significantly higher than the initial utterance and most likely will not reach the same audience. For instance, Trump utters something completely off the wall. Retweets galore. Everybody gets spun up. Let's say it reaches 1million people which some portion now repeats the soundbite. Someone like Politifacts comes along after the fact and points out the discrepancy after fact checking. Reaches a much smaller follow up audience. This is the sort of informational asymmetry that I find infuriating...
- sevensor 11y agoAnother tactic I've seen from the Lord Voldemorts I know is to cite loads of references that aren't readily available online. Such a citation can be used to prop up _any_ argument, whether or not the citation actually supports the argument, or even has any bearing on it at all. It's the same trap, though. To disupte the citation, you have to wait months for an inter-library loan, read the cited work in detail, and then decide what it really has to say about the argument. I personally fell into this trap, not because I was trying to refute something, but because I was trying to back up one of my own assumptions and I found that Lord Voldemort was citing Obscure Reference X to back up the same assumption. The joke was on me when I actually tracked down Obscure Reference X in the 30-years-out-of-print proceedings of a symposium on Y. Obscure Reference X had nothing at all to say about my assumption! Needless to say, I no longer trust Lord Voldemort or anyone who publishes with him.
- simplemath 11y agoWhy can't we name these people? Libel? Pastebin? Fuck these frauds.
- sevensor 11y agoThe problem is that saying "Professor Lord Voldemort is a liar and a fraud" puts an end to scientific discussion and forces people to assume nakedly partisan positions. Publicly at least, we have to assume good faith in our counterparts, even if we know in our hearts that they're self-inflated gasbags. The tactics I and the original article were describing allow Lord Voldemort to clothe any assertion he likes in the robes of science. The root of this problem is a broken incentive system for publication. We're required to publish a lot to show productivity, and we're trained to put in lots of citations to back up our work. This creates an unmanageable avalanche of worthless papers and makes it easy to build a false trail of scammy citations. Compare this to the situation 50 years ago, before publication inflation had set in. John Nash wrote a 30 page dissertation, and cited two works at the end of it. Simon's classic "Behavioral Model of Rational Choice" cited 5 works. The entire Cowles commission report on Activity Analysis devoted only 4.5 of its 418 pages to citations, and that included a detailed lit review in its introduction. Nothing makes it to press these days without five to ten times as many citations.
- return0 11y agoI heard a well known neuroscientist suggest that studies should be required to be replicated by at least another lab before being published/ established. That may sound impractical for some fields, but especially in biology/neuroscience most projects are small enough to make this feasible. Is it worth the money? I would say absolutely, not only for the validation of the science, but for the shift in culture, to finally stop designing studies chasing minute (but statistically significant) effects just to make another publication. I think its also about time we have post-publication peer review and about time scientists get off their high horses and start responding to it.
- argonaut 11y agoBut why would that other lab care enough to replicate? I suspect this would only exacerbate the "rich getting richer" effect whereby well-known labs/professors would have an easier time getting replicated (and thus published).
- SFjulie1 11y agoBS asymmetry works only when people believe in expert/authority and that the majority especially the one in charge is gullible. For the mass, it could be okay. For the people that pretends to be respected for their authority at discerning (the experts) it is quite a proof the expert model is not working.