6 ms·

Summary: Imperfect system is imperfect. 'Ya gotta love a tautology adorned as journalism. Are there any reasonable alternatives for privately funded research?

• jerf 16y ago
  I fail to see your point. The core claim that there are people who put far too much stock in the words-treated-as-magic "peer review" is definitely true; I encounter them all the time, to the point that I've also come to recognize it as a pattern. The fact that this is not true is, as you say, tautological. But some people need this fact brought to their attention, as it is clearly not generally understood. I've come to classify attitudes about science now into three broad categories. Hostilty: "I don't care what science says, Homeopathy worked for me." Religious: "Peer review is never wrong, and therefore the consensus is also always correct in every particular and those who disagree are heretics of science!" Realistic: "Science is the best way we have to find truth, but it isn't perfect either. The history of science should be learned and carefully examined, and it should not be forgotten that everything we see in the past is still around today, the only question is where." Rather a lot of people fit into that second one, and think it is the best understanding of science there is, and tend to label people with the third level of understanding as heretics on par with homeopaths, too. Trying to prod people out of religion-of-science into realistic-understanding-of-science is a noble goal, worthy of a blog post. Science has been wrong before, for decades at a time in every discipline I've ever studied enough to learn about its history (in addition to the current consensus), and the question is not whether there are disciplines every bit as wrong right now, but which ones they are. If you don't understand that or haven't internalized it, you don't understand the process of science, even if you can recite its tenants at will. When we say that science is a process, not an end-result, that isn't just words, it is the reality, and what it means in practice is that the consensus is very frequently wrong. There's nothing to "correct" in consensus if it's presumed always correct. The religious idea of science makes no sense; consensus must be wrong at some points in time, it is a necessary step. (This is all discipline-neutral, by the way. I do have my opinions about which disciplines are most likely to be wrong right now, but I freely acknowledge those are opinions. Certainly in the past entire disciplines have made glaringly-obvious-in-hindsight-and-common-sense mistakes before and it is no great insight to think that there might still be such errors around. But again, I freely admit that only time will really tell, and there are certainly other wrong-consensus-views I agree with.)
  • dantheman 16y ago
    I also think a big part is how forthright a scientist is. Most scientists claim way more than can be supported by their evidence, and it's not always clear what assumptions are being made. There's a great talk, I can try to find it if there is interest, that discuss the hubris that most climate scientists have. Observing a system for a tiny portion of a cycle can in no way tell you the entire cycle. If you then admit that "hey we don't know, but here's our best guess, and here's why we think it" then you've got something. Once something is established like like copper conducts electricity or the speed of light then you can say "hey we're pretty sure about this". It has a lot to do with the maturity of the science and the tools and techniques available to the scientists. Complex systems that cannot be decomposed and upon which experiments can not be made have should have a much lower confidence value than repeatable tried and true experiments. To conflate them is to cause confusion and to weaken the trust in more established science. Peer review is more about how to position your work in relation to others for ease of understanding than to verify the results independently.
    • thaumaturgy 16y ago
      > Most scientists claim way more than can be supported by their evidence... Ironically, you've made a claim here which is unsupported by any evidence at all. ;-) Seriously though, the thing about this is that research and experimental scientists are working in environments that you and I know very little about. Their claims are an extension of their experience in that environment; they spend a great deal of time for example designing experiments or attempting to reconcile large volumes of data, and when they've spent months -- or, more likely, years -- doing that, they might publish a paper. Then the public occasionally gets ahold of this brief summary of the scientist's work over that period, and they object that the claims are specious or sparse or incomplete. This is not to say that a scientist's claims should be trusted just because they're a scientist, but rather that the only acceptable challenge to a shortcoming in a scientific presentation is ... more science, not argument or conjecture. To put it another way: it is extremely unlikely that a layman will find a consequential error in a peer-reviewed scientific paper published in a reasonable journal, especially without any domain knowledge in that particular field.
• deleted 16y ago
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• InclinedPlane 16y ago
  That's not the point. It's known that the system is imperfect. The problem is that some people, especially those outside academia/research, have a different idea of what "passed peer review" means and a different idea of how the machinery of science works. Passing peer review doesn't mean that something has been proven as fact, it merely means (one hopes) that the authors did their due dilligence and put together research that seems solid. Put another way, it means that the reviewers don't think that the paper is obviously BS. Peer review is just a spam filter. The danger comes when people elevate passing through the spam filter with scientific proof. Peer review is the start of the debate, not the end of it.