Comments here are still talking about defending facts. This is a losing argument.
This is bread and circuses.
Let scientists do science - comics and comedians are the weapon to reach for.
America has lead the way for the past 4 decades in bringing the public into areas they don't have the prior knowledge to navigate.
Anyone old enough to remember the climate change debates will remember a time when scientists didn't debate climate deniers because it gave climate deniers too much credibility!
But what scientists didn't realize is that vested interests were setting them up.
Cranks and fakers were nurtured and given air time by a certain news channel till they eventually the "public interest" invaded the scientific.
At which point "science" lost. Science expected a debate, but walked into Spectacle.
Trump showed that with Twitter and crap you can cross the very low threshold required to beat the current crop of presidential candidates.
This is entertainment. If you don't treat it as such you lose space to the person who generates better TRPs.
Comedians were almost completely united against Trump and a lot of good that did. (I recall John Oliver pointing out, self-deprecatingly, how effective his repeated eviscerations of Trump had been).
Before I moved here, I remember thinking that Americans must be too stupid to understand "The Simpsons" because it takes apart and laughs at all the obvious flaws in American society, but discovered instead that Americans can cheerfully laugh at Homer, understand why they're laughing at Homer, and be Homer all at once.
Bear in mind that a Christian Conservative is already managing epic levels of cognitive dissonance "the love of money is the root of all evil.... mmmmm tax cuts" so a bunch more is barely going to have an impact.
> but discovered instead that Americans can cheerfully laugh at Homer, understand why they're laughing at Homer, and be Homer all at once.
This is not unique to Americans.
You can generalize your assertions to humanity as a whole. America is not unique in believing wildly irrational, logically inconsistent ideas and compartmentalizing cognitive dissonance. This is the story of human politics since the beginning of history...
You underestimate how deep this goes with the actual public.
My father has been in the GOP base his whole life. The refrain when I challenged his views on science was: "those scientists are all liberals. Why should I believe anything they have to say?"
He encouraged me to study sciences anyway because it offered a better life than his. Now, of course, he explicitly regrets providing me that education, because he sees me as "brainwashed."
As it often goes, both extreme political views (liberal pro-science vs. conservative, ignore-science) have some good points to make, and some unjustified beliefs that harm mutual understanding. May I suggest that you do not try to challenge your father's views on scientists directly head-on. Give him an example of a scientist and a contribution that may be interesting on their own. It's much less likely that the refrain will be used to discard your effort. Perhaps tell him about a scientist who wasn't a liberal, perhaps had some similar views as your father has - but still believed in science. Tell him about Teller, who was as far from being a liberal as it goes, pushing for hardline foreign policy and bigger and better nuclear weapons. Still he was a brilliant scientist and he perceived the potential danger of climate change due to fossil fuels already in 50's. Tell him about Fleming, an army doctor who investigated sepsis, discovered pennicilin and helped bring the humanity a cure to many bacterial diseases.
It's not about discarding what every scientist says. It's discarding the scientists that say things incompatible with his political opinions.
If a scientist pursues a line of work that might end up contradicting the GOP party line, they're immediately disqualified as a scientist. To him, that proves the scientist is motivated purely by political or financial gain.
We know that bullshit is asymmetric: it takes long to clear up than to cast. The way to take it down is to rip on the caster until they stop (or look ridiculous in voters' eyes) - this requires facts yes, but more importantly presentation.
That can backfire pretty hard as it did in the last election. Ripping on the caster rarely stops with the one person. Going after whole swaths of people eventually just drives them not to talk except in a voting booth.
I said it in another thread, if you keep demonizing people, they will eventually send demons.
I'm always surprised by variants of your argument because it presupposes there is some sort of dialogue being held. I'm an outsider and it's very clear that the right doesn't see it as a dialogue, they see it as a no holds barred fight.
Your right wing has been caricaturing and demonizing your left wing for a long time.
I've learnt a lot watching the Republican Party follow its discipline. The day Obama won, they rallied and fought for a one term president. At their nadir, they turned themselves around. That's something.
Today they have won most of the seats of power and have stymied the president for 8 years. They even have the chance to decide the next SC judge, something Obama should have had the right to (as I understand American politics)
A few of the things that come to mind - the complete shutdown of your government, the creation and agitation of the tea party, birthers, gun boats (or something), the refusal to increase the federal debt ceiling, their positions on medical insurance.
Not to mention Manufactured issues on evolution and climate change.
My rebuttal is that this fear of demons is redundant, the right is long past believing that demons have (literally) been sent. Their tools and tactics are specifically designed to stall and steal power from old liberal strongholds - science and learning.
You no longer have the luxury of deciding the terrain on which to fight. Tactics are all that's left.
For the record I used to be a bridge builder. A few months ago I would have given similar advice. But building bridges in the networked era is unlikely because of the echo chamber effect.
Until that problem is solved, other tools are needed to deal with current issues. And these tools also serve a bridge building purpose - negotiating with a party who has no leverage is redundant.
I don't recall where I saw it, but someone put it this way:
The Republicans and Democrats were playing a board game. Not liking how the game was progressing, the Republicans set the house on fire. The Democrats are still sitting at the board, surrounded by flames, weighing the tactical implications of moving various pieces in response.
Except that it didn't, because it wasn't attempted. Michelle Obama said, when they go low, you go high. Clinton was pretty respectful in the debates. I'm not saying nobody mocked Trump, I'm saying opposing candidate and their close associates didn't. There's a big difference because things that get said in the debates etc. get seen by the opposing camp in a way tribal-affiliated shows and magazines don't.
There's also a difference between taking the piss effectively and just calling people names. E.g. calling Trump a misogynistic idiot isn't funny or persuasive. There was a lot of righteous name calling, but not much satire - from the right people.
> Going after whole swaths of people eventually just drives them not to talk except in a voting booth.
Pft. I wish I lived in a world where Trump supporters lived in silence before the election. I don't buy this, at all. They were the loudest, most self-entitled, and they always represented themselves as victims.
Anyone looking at the numbers knew the election would be within 5% either way, so it's not like those 45M republicans were hidden, it was only a question of if the last 5M would get up on polling day. If they would, the conclusion was foregone because country-voters cast larger votes than city voters so they win all ties.
> if you keep demonizing people
You see - perpetual victims. Even though they won they're still going on about being hurt. If saying someone voted for a liar because they didn't bother to look up the facts is demonizing, then I don't know what you ever could say that they wouldn't complain about.
I agree in that people who still appreciate truth and facts must combat lies on all fronts, and that includes on the cultural front of entertainment. If a joke can reveal that the emperor has no clothes, I suppose that's a net gain. But this is a double-edged sword because it has the danger of dimming perceptions of what's really at stake. Yes we should laugh at the naked fool in charge, but if all we do is laugh, that just makes him a powerful naked fool.
You don't have a choice. double edged swords are already being wielded. At this point it's just a fight. Draw it to a stalemate and then decide what to do.
At least you don't lose more ground or have to rebuild more institutions.
Bringing dry facts to a Comedy Central roast isn't good strategy.
We do have a choice, and while Comedy Central may be the most popular arena at the moment, it will never be the only arena. Comedy is good for keeping things relevant, but I've never seen it actually convince anyone. For that, you have to have real conversations with people you disagree with, not just mock them.
"This comedian thinks I'm a stupid cretin and mocks all of my deeply held values, but he makes a good point about facts and the science of climate change! That settles it; I'm going to vote against all my other interests from now on."
I think "data science" has really let science down. 99% win predictions for Clinton, media darling Nate Silver getting the primaries completely wrong and saving face a little bit in the election, etc.
As a scientist, I instinctively trusted other data scientists to be as rigorous as I was when I did research. It turned out they were using extremely wonky simplistic models for complex human behavior, and it left me cold and clueless.
If poll-based divination is a better descriptor than political data science, then scientists should decry their stealing of the term.
I think it's important not to overlearn the lessons of this election wrt data and predictions. Most national polls were off by only a point or so. The polls in WI, MI and PA were off by a few more. As Nate said on a recent podcast "If you give me a national opinion poll, I'm inclined to believe it. If the poll is specifically from Wisconsin, I may be more skeptical."
Of course, some people built bad models and predicted 90+% chance of winning for Hillary, and those people need to rethink their approach. But this election was not a refutation of polling and modeling as a whole.
>Trump showed that with Twitter and crap you can cross the very low threshold required to beat the current crop of presidential candidates.
At a visceral level Americans are beginning to revolt against a system that continues to grow in its power to pick winners and losers through a systematic war on education, media, and democracy.
Obama promised change; Trump didn't have to.
The American oligarchs became complacent. A shrewd sexist, racist shark capitalized on the structures they have built to perpetuate their power.
> Science as a process is virtually infallible, but science as practiced by humans in human-run institutions is very very far from infallible.
Hyper group-think is one of the more unfortunate aspects of our modern technological dilemma. Places like HN breed it. I find it utterly despicable...it's as if most of the people here are willfully incapable of considering any point of view except their own.
If you disagree with the local group-think in the slightest, you just get censored and your words start fading away into nothingness. It's such crap.
I have designs for a new, better commenting and comment voting system could solve this problem. The up/down vote is so childish and overly simplistic. I look forward to a time when people get sick of it and finally change to something better.
Meh. Some people act like anybody who has ever called themselves a "Scientist" has never been wrong or that mainstream science has never been wrong. It has. Many, many times.
Unless you're taking the time to do the science yourself and verify the results - you could be getting lied to or otherwise misinformed. Do you ever actually do that or do you generally just trust people who call themselves a scientist and who are trusted by other so-called scientists?
This article is also a bullshit piece of propaganda that is going on attack because somebody in the White House wrote a 7 paragraph energy plan summary that didn't include their favorite word. The plan clearly states that "Lastly, our need for energy must go hand-in-hand with responsible stewardship of the environment." and last time I checked the "climate" is part of our environment.
Do you really think that Science as an institution is incorruptible?
No, that was my point. You were trying to say that it's OK because it correct itself over time. However, that fact does not really help us in the present time.
You seem to imply that science causes people to make mistakes. The opposite is true: people make mistakes and generate stupid ideas with reckless abandon. Science is the process of putting those ideas to objective scrutiny, and validating or refuting them with evidence. Stupid doctors came up with the idea of a lobotomy, science refuted it as a bad idea. You blame science for the origin of the idea, which is missing the point.
Oh I see your problem. Your perception is way off. Please allow me to correct your misunderstanding once again and hopefully for the last time.
You seem to imply that there is this perfect thing called science, which is wholly separate from people... This is a huge blunder because, in fact, there is no science at all without people. Therefore, science can't possible be responsible for anything by itself.
So, as you can see (hopefully...and finally), it follows that I couldn't possibly be blaming this inanimate thing called Science for anything. Nope. Not possible. I blame people.
People make errors. There is no science without people. You're trying to separate the two. Stop doing that.
Repeatedly responding to me with the same point and misrepresenting my position is equally rude. This person keeps saying that I'm "making a mistake" and that's all I'm saying back to them. Nobody is calling names or anything like that, so why don't you just butt out?
Furthermore, this person seems to just have a deep burning desire to have the last word, no matter how meaningless and trite that is. So, why don't you try reprimanding them instead?
I reviewed the thread before commenting, and yeah, neither of you is really making any progress with the other. Up until this point, however stubborn either of you have been, neither of you has been overtly snarky or condescending.
As for a "burning desire to have the last word", I see no less desire on your part than on theirs.
Oh I see your problem. Your perception is way off. Please allow me to correct your misunderstanding once again and hopefully for the last time.
This goes well past the line of civil discourse. Communication is a two-way street, and requires active participation of both parties. Once you decide that it's all their fault, rejecting the possibility that you're not communicating your ideas effectively, you're no longer participating in good faith. At this point it's better just to back off. (As I'm about to do.)
> Within two days of Trump assuming power, White House
> officials have found themselves embroiled in a
> scandal over “alternative facts”.
Those weren't alternative facts, those were lies.
Actual alternative facts do exist because we often select the facts we represent based on our tribal affiliations.
I won't be able to reclaim the term now that is smeared. But I wish people could point out when somebody is lying (or misleading) without trying to smear the existence of counterzeitgeist truth.
Aside: why didn't anybody in the Trump administration respond by pointing out that Washington, D.C. is majority democrat, and that Bush's inauguration might have been a better comparison? Quite embarrassing that they would lie when deflating the authority of the comparison would have probably been more effective...
I blame the media for a lot of this, honestly. If someone tells a lie, say "why did you lie about _____?" That's about 90% of why the media exists in the elevated status it has/had.
But when a reporter on CNN says "Why did the Donald Trump tell the Press Secretary to come out and tell falsehoods?" that diminishes what actually happened. The PS lied on national television. Call him out on it. Use the word "lied" or "liar" and stop dressing it up by using terms like "telling falsehoods."
When a liar is said to be "telling falsehoods" it's only one small step for them to reply with "alternative facts."
Agreed. And this has been Trump's strategy the whole time -- just keep bludgeoning and bludgeoning until whatever bullshit he says is accepted as real, or until the associations are tied where he wants them to be, e.g., whatever your political affiliation, "Crooked Hillary" is resonant now.
This has been a tried and true strategy of con men and salesmen and marketers throughout history. (It was also a tried and true strategy of various NBA teams -- foul so much that that level of fouling seems normal and the refs stop calling it. Highly, highly successful strategy; you basically force the game to unfold the way you want.)
I wonder if the lawyers have a hand in this. Words like "liar" paint a person in a negative light and could lead to a defamation lawsuit. Whereas pointing out that something is a "falsehood" is inviting a comparison of facts - i.e. inviting Trump to prove he wasn't lying.
That is what I understand; lie implies intent, which is impossibly hard to do. IMO the media is trying to being courteous, even delicate, when it is and should be an all out brawl, when the truth and fact are at stake.
I kind of like the vocabulary they're using. Everybody knows politicians lie, and I don't think that word would have much of an impact. Repeating the term "alternative fact" and using terms like "believes... won't provide any proof" draws attention to just how absurd these particular lies are.
It only draws attention for paying who willing to think critically. Lots of Trump supporters are perfectly content with the notion of "alternative facts."
There were what, 63 million of them? They're not all closeted racists with barely a HS education. Most of them aren't.
I don't understand the pervasive notion that anyone who voted Trump can't be reasoned with and isn't upset with how his administration has operated in the last week.
Maybe you have trouble understanding that pervasive notion because you misunderstand what people are saying?
Neither I nor the person I replied to said or implied that all Trump supporters are, well, anything. The other fellow talked about "lots of Trump supporters" (which could easily refer to just a few percent of the total) and that's the group I referred to in my reply.
I don't understand the pervasive notion that if you talk bad about any set of Trump supporters, you're somehow painting 63 million people with the same brush.
Trump's campaign was based entirely on persuasion (populism for want of a better term). That "alternative facts" exists as a thing is just another play in the persuasion handbook to discredit the idea that there any real facts at all - only opinions seem to matter now. As a result any attempt to counteract "Trumpism" with facts and data is dead in the water already.
Trump doesn't strike me as the sort of boss who enjoys hearing contrary views from his minions. I imagine he told his press secretary to get out there and tell the media off for lying about his record-breaking inauguration numbers, and Mr. Spicer went and did it.
The man is remarkably insecure. Everything he does has to be the "best ever" or it's just not good enough. Having someone like that in charge scares me.
Technically if you were pressing an alternative theory than you would be using 'alternative facts.' Facts are tools or pieces to build something, such as a theory.
We all experience alternative realities and use our 'alternative facts' to justify our beliefs. We all literally do this every single day.
As a libertarian or a marxist one has 'alternative facts' about the nature of humans, society and the environment, from there they build up their world.
'Facts' don't have an independent objective existence, unfortunately. 'Things that occurred' ( the literal etymology of 'facts' ) always require some form of interpretation in order to bring them into our domain of comprehension, and that's where the fuzziness enters.
In epistimology one discusses 'justified belief'; an apparently valid belief obtained in a repeatable and seemingly rigorous manner. But still subject to interpretation through our lens of 'knowledge'.
Think about the current cosmological debates about Dark Energy. Something like 5,000 papers have been published; it seems to be a 'fact' that Dark Energy exists and exerts an influence, but in 200 years from now we might have a justified belief that it does not as some aspects of relativity were incorrect.
> 'Facts' don't have an independent objective existence,
> unfortunately. 'Things that occurred' ( the literal
> etymology of 'facts' ) always require some form
> of interpretation in order to bring them into our
> domain of comprehension, and that's where the
> fuzziness enters.
That etymology is exactly how I understand facts, too. But I think many people don't use the term in that way.
For example, "It's 3:56 pm in the UK" is a fact in my mind.
(It won't be the case in a minute of course.)
The way I see it: facts are like memoized predicates. They are statements of truth within a particular context. Often they need to be re-executed to be kept fresh.
"Actual alternative facts do exist because we often select the facts we represent based on our tribal affiliations"
I wrote about this recently:
"When we are interested in a topic and have time, we read about it and contrast different points of views. But when we don’t have time or are not interested in something, we believe what our culture, friends and influencers say. And we are so bombarded with information nowadays that we can’t get informed about everything all the time" [1]
Do you think that a site tracking expert's opinions on important topics might help?
That's what we are doing on AgreeList.com / Wikiopinion.org We haven't decided yet if it should be a for-profit startup or a nonprofit organisation.
I'm not super excited about "expert" opinion. An expert, to quote Niels Bohr, "Is a man who has made all the mistakes which can be made, in a narrow field." A jet engine mechanic is an expert if none of the planes she works on experiences engine failure. A scientist is, almost by definition, not an expert. This is especially the case when experiments cannot be carried out. For instance, we cannot instantiate 1000 earths, vary their CO2 content, and then observe what happens. We can only model, and modeling is based on assumptions, or "alternative facts." Almost everything controversial today (e.g., drug policy, economic interventions, climate change, etc.) falls into this quasi-scientific realm. I'm not sure that there is a quick way to reach a consensus on such issues other than by having all of the interested parties slug it out in public over an extended period. I also believe we must be careful about overzealously applying the precautionary principle to the point that policies that are objectively not working become sacred cows (e.g., the War on Drugs).
Whenever I see 'expert status' debated at universities, where it is debated and criticized a lot, my alarm sirens go up. You can split hairs about what really constitutes an expert for many hours, I've even been to conferences about this topic. But funny Niels Bohr paraphrases aside, it's in reality very simple and not problematic at all who constitutes as an expert:
- Experts have 20-40 years of experience in a particular field within their discipline. Young scholars or those belonging to the academic middle field need not be counted as experts. (They may still be experts, but that doesn't mean you should resort to them for providing expertise.)
- Experts have 20-40 years of continuous publications in peer-reviewed international academic journals about the subject matter, or have been working in the field for that time in a senior role in non-academic fields (e.g. race driving, casino security, etc.).
- Experts are recognized as eminent scholars by the majority of fellow scientists who also work in the field, whether they agree with them or not. Not just scholars or average scholars, eminent scholars.
- The expert's discipline is an actual science and their field of expertise is in fact a subfield of that discipline. Fields are much narrower areas of specialization than disciplines. (Hence, priests are not experts about 'what's good', astrologers are not experts in astronomy and mechanical engineers who muse about special relativity are not experts about special relativity.)
- The expert is given the intellectual independence and has sufficient access to the evidence needed to provide his expertise.
These criteria really suffice to weed out all the pseudo-experts of the world. That's because most if not all pseudo-experts are either laymen or crackpots from related disciplines, and in any case are not recognized as eminent scholars from people of their field. Someone can be an expert without satisfying these criteria, Richard Feynman on the Challenger catastrophe, for instance, but if you want to make sure, the above criteria suffice.
Last but not least, nobody is forced to believe genuine experts, but he should also be prepared to defend his points of view as well as a genuine expert or be regarded a stupid assclown if he doesn't.
If a racing driver loses too many races, she'll eventually have to leave the field. If a casino security person presides over too many unexpected losses, he'll eventually have to exit his area of endeavor. Their expertise is under constant pressure. A scientist isn't exposed to this same pressure, nor should she be, because failure is part of the experimental process. Thus, I think "scientific expert" is a contrast in terms unless it specifically refers to one's ability to conduct the scientific method (i.e., controlled experiments) within a given domain.
For instance, consider James Hansen. There is no doubt that most climatologists consider him an expert in climatology. He ticks off many of the boxes on your list. That's fine, but the climate models he presented to Congress in 1988 don't match observations since that time [1]. That's not to say climate change (née global warming) isn't happening, but that it is happening differently than originally predicted. This nuance is lost when "expertise" is accorded to the modeler. It is lost even more when we start talking about a 97% "expert" consensus that humans are causing climate change.
Perhaps treating "experts" like predictors and somehow attaching a coefficient of determination to each one would ease my concerns.
An expert with a 50% error rate is a coin. A scientist with a 50% error rate is still a scientist, and perhaps an eminent one at that.
When tens of "expert" climatologists with an error rate of say 5% in their field testify in support of a policy that eliminates thousands of expert miners, geologist, etc. with error rates of say 0.01% in their fields, you're going to have resistance. That's a huge perceived inequality in terms of ramifications and consequences.
I definitely think so, this sounds like what I think might be a big, big part of the solution to this problem.
I would really hope that there's a threaded discussion component, and I would hope that differing opinions/theories are allowed (and critiqued, obviously).
Of course, there's going to be the typical reddit-like absolute nonsense bickering, deceit, lying, disingenuousness, half-truths, etc. But within this mess there is frequently some extremely good information.
And then there's the academic/professional opinion, which would tend to be less verbose and higher quality, but then we know from experience that now and then these people are a little casual with the truth.
I would like to see a site where people can go to (as much as is practically possible) solve disagreements on popular topics. Take climate change: I would like to see the problem clearly described in (as much as is practically possible) layman's terms, so the average voter can understand it. For those interested in more detail or technical depth, drill down hierarchically into deeper levels of documentation.
Also, I would like to see any issues or loose ends raised by those who are not completely on board (aka "deniers", because only certain thoughts are allowed these days) debunked thoroughly, or left with a status of "we don't know how this fits into our theory".
To me it would be tremendously more efficient if rather than bickering on the internet, we could simply link to the objective (reviewed by both "sides") facts. Wouldn't having a resource like this been a good idea for the Clinto campaign, rather than hiring people to infiltrate internet forums? It makes me wonder why this approach wasn't taken.
The administration itself named their blatant lies "alternative facts", though I guess the media could be blamed for not reminding us strongly enough that we are discussing obvious lies.
Yes, that is my point. Lies are lies. Facts are facts.
The indiscriminate usage of the term by the mainstream media is a strategic mistake since they are giving ground to the frame of all facts being subjective and equally applicable. Remember that 'fake news' was quickly and effectively used by the alt-right to tarnish mainstream media. I expect 'alternative facts' will eventually be used against them, too.
Also 'alternative facts' might be a position that the mainstream media needs to defend, if the current administration upped their game and began to mislead through selective usage of facts rather than more overt lying.
"... of all facts being subjective and equally applicable"
I guess you meant to write "objective" there instead of "subjective", at least otherwise I can't make sense from what you write...
The thing is: Facts are, by definition, obective: "a thing that is known or proved to be true". However, their interpretation is not, and it may well be influenced by additional facts being revealed -- thus, whenver somebody says "given the facts, it is clear that XYZ holds", what they really mean (whether they are aware of it or not is another question) is "given the facts I am aware of, XYZ holds".
But again: these are additional facts, not alternative facts.
So all in all, I don't think your suggestion about an eventual legitimate need for the term "alternative facts" holds gound.
Subjective facts as-in those with different sources or ways of measuring information. For example, people can choose the scientific studies that they draw attention to, and find an expert that agrees with them. (Also, the way in which people use the term 'fact' often relates to empirical observation and this can be miscalibrated: what was considered objective fact sometimes gets disproved or constrained.)
Alternative facts as-in alternative selections of facts. Not merely a case of adding facts, but also in not acknowledging the facts that you don't like.
> The indiscriminate usage of the term by the mainstream media is a strategic mistake since they are giving ground to the frame of all facts being subjective and equally applicable
They're saying that the media using the term "alternative facts" is giving ground to the very people who initially began spreading the lies, and in doing so is giving them an opening to exploit. Those people want to portray facts as subjective and all equally applicable. They aren't, and we should expect the the same people who started spouting "alternative facts" (read: lies) to begin branding actual facts as "alternative facts".
That's possible, but the premise of these three points is how they deal with facts that they -- ok, almost certainly "he" -- does not like.
That they are willing to outright lie to the world about simple facts that are plainly obvious even to a child (e.g. crowd size in photographs) does not bode well for their representation of complex, nuanced, and consequential information.
I suppose there is a fourth possibility: this is a dominance game for the President, forcing staffers to lie about his hobbyhorses, knowing millions will accept the pronouncements as truth, and winking at his infuriated opponents. If he'll say his crowd was the largest in history when it's plain to all that it was not, what will he say about some new "Presidential voter fraud investigation" whose conclusions will be used to further suppress the vote and "make him correct"?
This isn't about facts. Science is rarely about facts. Empirical science is and cannot be about proofs. Proofs and facts are for the abstract, the ideal, left to philosophers, logicians, and occasionally mathematicians and computer scientists. No, this is about something much more sinister: denying the ability to reason about and disseminate observations. All empirical science can do is look at things, do experiments and come up with logically consistent and plausible theories or hypotheses that explain them. The value is rarely in the data: the value is in the reasoning around it. Observing, for example, that beaks in birds change depending on the environment is rarely interesting. The interesting bit is reasoning that traits get passed down to offspring in a survival of the fittest scheme. Similarly, observing that combustion engines release CO2, and there is more of it than before we had them … not particularly interesting. The interesting bit is that it acts as insulation to sunlight and that a lot of ecological and climate systems act as non-linear under the influence of temperature and CO2.
Do I say this to downplay empirical science? On the contrary. However, the focus on facts is I think more harmful than it might appear in trying to protect our scientific legacy. Dump every table ever recorded on the internet as a torrent, and very little useful things will come from it. It's protecting the institutions and freedom to reason about, and talk about, those findings that is important; to be able to openly challenge them, and rigorously come up with "best explanations" (a human intellectual construct, not fact, not truth).
Gag orders to silence academic findings, that is problematic. More so than trying to "protect" facts-of-the-matter as if they are somehow the pinnacle of human intellect.
Corollary this is also why I always find "humanities are not science" or "this is not Nature worthy"-statements rather annoying. It's a no-true Scotchman fallacy. Science is more than stamp collection, it's more than peer-review, it's more than running elaborate statistical tests on randomized experiments: it's the collective human endeavor to understand the universe and ourselves, it's a mindset. A mindset that can, and should be, in constant flux as our understanding progresses (and sometimes regresses).
No, it's more than that. Without the rigor to come up with testable hypothesis and reproducible results, you might as well be practicing religion. You can have a very inquisitive mindset but without applying scientific rigor, you're right in line with numerologists and whatever else.
That's why people are so hard on shaky humanities studies that have poor experimental design, poor analysis, or terrible biases in the data. You can't derive meaningful conclusions from bad science. Garbage in => garbage out.
I think a lot about the tension inherent in science; we do science because we have a desire for the truth, which for many scientists is a deeply emotional and visceral hunger, a need for knowledge and a joy of discovery... but we do science by acknowledging that this goal is impossible, that we can never have a moment of celebration where we're absolutely certain we've discovered something. Trust your methods too much, and you'll end up believing in phrenology or whatever other misplaced scientism even the establishment can come to believe. Trust your methods not enough, and you'll never be able to come to a conclusion, and never be able to convince others of the importance of your findings (even if the fate of the planet depends on it.)
And in the end... it's a tension that can't be resolved. All there is is the tension. That's what science is, despite our hopes in it as a rational, dry methodology; at some point, the methodology has to come to a conclusion, the controlled experiments and p-values end up affecting the way we think and act, and we all just keep trying our best to make sense of the world.
Well yeah, but rigor is part-of the scientific mindset. One that we now try to enforce with statistics, peer-review, and reproducibility. But those are rather new ideas. Proper based evidence medicine, for example, is something we only came up with in the 60s or so. Rigorous experimental science might produce better insights in some way, because the data is better. But there is still value in other methods. An interesting example here is the advent in genetics for personalized medicine: did it deliver on the promises? No, it's still utter hype and vaporware. Part of the reason, I believe, is that it was merely stamp collecting. Sequence enough, go fishing for correlations, and hope that something useful comes of it. The current hype around CRISPR and related technology? Not because of rigorous scientific testing on large peer-reviewed data sets. Someone, was "merely" curios about bacterial immunological defense mechanisms. Curious enough to try and understand it. It was the explanation that made it worth it. Ideally they go hand in hand, but anyone who has ever been in a scientific institute will agree that this "idealized" view is rarely, if ever, true.
An interesting paper about the subject is "you can't play 20 questions with nature and win" by Alan Newell
A little off-topic, but part of the problem with personalized medicine I think is that the target market for any drug developed for a particular personalization is necessarily small. In other words, right now it is a bad business decision. Perhaps it can be used as a delta- to a mass-market drug in the future, like seasonings to a basic recipe, but that's a bit off.
I think the focus on data-driven pipelines for discovery, rather than focus on fundamental understanding of the biology and chemistry of organisms might also play a role. But I have no "proof" to back that up, other than my anecdotal experience as a researcher in a genetics institute :p
Scientists might as well be practicing religion for all that it matters to non-scientists.
So, it comes down to trust. Unless you're going to do the science yourself, you have to trust somebody.
Also, despite mainstream scientific consensus being based on "testable hypothesis and reproducible results", it's still managed to get things terribly wrong. That's what they call a paradigm shift but most people would just call it being proven wrong.
> No, this is about something much more sinister: denying the ability to reason about and disseminate observations.
Let's face it: Joe H. Average does not "reason". He just takes it on faith that there are various authorities on different matters, and just subscribes to the points of view of those authorities.
So then, the really sinister thing is this massive push to denigrate some authorities, while setting up "alternatives" in their place.
The vast, vast majority of people are puppets with very limited mental autonomy. If you think otherwise then you have no chance of understanding what's really going on now - because that's how the manipulators are thinking about the world, and they are succeeding.
I think of late one of the problems is that there is a certain dogma within political circles and the media that the body of facts produced by scientists is absolute and irrefutable, when the truth is somewhat the opposite: the body of knowledge produced by science is constantly changing, individual results are continually reevaluated, and theories are compared against each other until there is a preponderance of evidence in favor of one over the others.
I don't want to get too political, but one can't help but wonder if the way science has been talked about in the media has led to a skepticism of academia to an unhealthy degree.
I think a tangential issue is the assumption that science can decide one particular course of action to be the correct one, often expressed in a form such as that the science of climate change tells us that we must build solar farms and wind turbines. Science doesn't, in fact, tell us that, directly at least -- but it can tell us that if we want to combat the root cause of climate change, we need to decrease CO2 emissions, and major component of CO2 emissions is electricity generation, and solar and wind are reasonably practical, comparably low CO2 options, compared to most other option. But they are also expensive, and science can't tell us if it's 'worth it' (specifically if its more 'worth it' than other competing expenses), for an example.
Scientists understand this, headline writing journalists less so, and agenda-pushing activists and politicians definitely don't.
Do scientists understand this? I've tried to have this sort of conversation with scientists and most don't see things that way. I don't know if contemporary scientists see themselves as activists or if they are too hooked on grant money to give up the notion of scientific hyperauthority (reminded of Upton Sinclair's lament about getting people to understand things)
Yes, in great numbers they do. The spur to activism is in response to political foot-dragging, and the party bias is simply because the Republicans resist the whole issue en masse.
"Hooked on grant money" is a smear trope that is used by political opponents. If there was a credible scientific opposition to GW, they'd get all the grant money they could handle. It just ain't so.
no the spur to activism existed long before trump was elected president. I haven't been an active mainstream scientist for about 4 years or so.
> If there was a credible scientific opposition to GW, they'd get all the grant money they could handle.
Really? Without claiming that GW is not real (I think it likely is). What journals would they be published in? Who would review their papers? Who would review their grants? Where would this hypothetical credible GW scientist be getting their PhD from? Which advisor and committee members signed off on their degree? The overall process for getting money for science (and getting to the point where you're even in contention for getting money) is not different between chemistry and biology and climate science, and there is so much pettiness in the process in chem and bio, it's disgusting (and a large part of why I left). In the end whether or not you get money pretty much boils down to who you know and what your pedigree is.
I guess my overall point is that at this juncture in history, our scientific edifice is on very shaky foundations across the board. As much as I disagree with Trump, the fealty to which "anti-Trump" writ large gives over to "science", or really "scientific authority" is unfortunate. Moreover it's not 'being hooked on grant money' per se, but in order for scientists to keep being paid like they are, they must accept the validity of the system as a whole.
Generally it's my experience that if you catch a scientist whose work has been through the media, they're quite humble "well, actually" about it. But yeah, certain areas does appear to have become very politicised. I'll try to keep my faith, and suspect that it's worst in fairly small (very loud) circle, and that the rank and file is more modest.
It would all be so much more convincing if scientists fought for the facts from the start. Having been there, I have seen lots of scientists fight for publications, status, grant money, etc (and the 'winners' coming from that ilk - and not the honest type). It felt like facts at best were a second class citizen in the career of a scientist. I suppose that's just human, but then we shouldn't be making scientific results to such an apotheosis.
I think the apotheosis is not the result of science, but the method by which those results are arrived at or observed. Do you have a hypothesis, and do you reject/alter that hypothesis based on what you observe in reality? (Or, more literally, based on the manipulations of reality that you perform in the course of experiments?)
Being willing to believe things based on what reality says is the thing we should value. And it should be very highly-valued indeed.
That theory doesn't really align with the number of climate change denialists that appear on media channels and say that scientists are a) wrong, b) biased, c) not in consensus, d) unsure in their predictions, e) paid shills.
I think it depends on context. As you point out, a lot of coverage is given to climate change denialists - out of proportion to the number of scientists who are sceptical of the consensus. Other examples of that include vaccine safety, evolution, GMO safety and cancer therapy.
However, in other contexts it seems like the prevailing consensus is reported without any controversy. For example; many popular psychology books have been written and findings reported as truth, which is now being thrown into question by the recent reproducibility crisis in that field. I've not seen any coverage of "big bang denialists" or "inflation denialists", despite how esoteric some of these theories are.
I'm tempted to see a link between those issues which negatively affect people's lives and the rise in belief in alternatives which are less negative (but potentially falsifiable). However, this is by no means a thorough review of the issues, and perhaps reflects my bias in recalling examples.
> I'm tempted to see a link between those issues which negatively affect people's lives and the rise in belief in alternatives which are less negative (but potentially falsifiable).
I recall reading about an effect who's name I forget, but it goes something like this:
The larger and more distant a phenomenon is from the day-to-day of an individual, the less likely that individual is to accept it.
The mistake is to believe that people should care about an issue just because of proven risk. That is actually the domain of politics, ethics, and philosophy. Turning it into a scientific debate does not actually pursuade people of a particular world view.
I think you're on the right track - and the discourse from both sides is clearly wrong - but it goes deeper than that.
1. Facts may exist in the abstract, but in the real world, most facts aren't knowable as such. Every experiment makes decisions about how to set up its apparatus, what to do about measurement error. As such, everything that we choose to use the convenience of calling "observed facts" is really filtered through those factors of human judgment. And thus, all of our knowledge is tentative, depending on the quality of our experimental judgments. We really don't know with certainty as much as we tell ourselves that we do. In general, it's not an unpardonable sin for someone to claim your observations are not valid. (although in doing so, one, would expect more of an argument about why the method of observation was faulty, rather than just a "he said, she said" argument.)
2. As mentioned elsewhere in this thread, science even at its best can only tell us raw information. This does not lead inexorably to decisions about policy. This process necessarily passes through our values, at an individual and at a societal level. In a universe of finite resources and finite opportunities, we must always make the value judgments of which course of action is best, by analyzing expected benefits versus opportunity costs (not just monetary, but also in our moral and aesthetic senses), to see which course gives the greatest net benefit.
(sorry for not giving concrete examples to explain. I'm afraid that if I were to do so, it would distract by causing debate about the examples themselves rather than my actual point)
Facts are weird beasts. We are terrible at recognising facts, for a number of reasons. For a start people tend to confuse them with truth.
A fact is generally considered to be a proposition that is true. The problem is, science doesn't deal in what's true. Science deals in what's falsifiable.
Most things that are believed to be true aren't falsifiable, and therefore fall into the epistemologically nebulous category of "things which are not yet false". I'd suggest that trying to build a positivist bastion of truth on such shifting epistemological sands is doomed to fail.
>A fact is generally considered to be a proposition that is true. The problem is, science doesn't deal in what's true. Science deals in what's falsifiable.
That's the epistemology of Popper. Not necessarily how science works. See e.g. Fayerabends arguments in "Against Method".
> A fact is generally considered to be a proposition that is true.
Where do you get that idea? A fact has to be "established." As in the trial, in front of a jury.
Now in science, the jury are qualified scientists. Others simply aren't qualified. Even unqualified people can invalidate something that is believed to be a fact. But they can't do by just being loud. The jury has to acknowledge that that unqualified guy is not speaking nonsense.
Read about the testing of EmDrive as an example. The guy who made it and can't explain it will still be accepted to be the discoverer, if his claimed effect gets to be really proved. The jury was skeptical, but they will still accept the results, if the measurements demonstrate it "beyond any doubt." At the moment, what was measured is far from that.
Another example: global warming is a scientific fact. There are some loud persons claiming that it isn't so, but what they bring to support their claims is truly and utterly worthless. Who says that: the climate scientists, all in the world. How do we know it's true? Because that's how science works, the specialists are trained the whole life to recognize the valid claims. The valid claims would become a new facts. The deniers don't have them.
I don't think it is as easy to identify "facts" as this article implies. For example, which of the following statements are factual:
1) The effective radiating temperature of the earth, T_e, is determined by the need for infrared emission from the planet to balance absorbed solar radiation:
pi*R^2(1-A)*S_0 = 4*pi*R^2*sigma*T_e^4
where R is the radius of the earth, A the albedo of the earth, S_0 the flux of solar radiation, and sigma the Stefan-Boltzmann constant.
2) Rearranged, this equation gives:
T_e = [S_0*(1-A)/(4*sigma)]^0.25
3) For A - 0.3 and So = 1367 watts per square meter, this yields T_e ~ 255 K.
4) The mean surface temperature is T_s ~ 288 K.
5) The excess, T_s - T_e, is the greenhouse effect of gases and clouds
1) Conclusion from a well supported theory (not a fact, but pretty darn close). It's only an approximation, though: what's the albedo of a heterogenous body and doesn't it depend on temperature?
2, 3) Simple conclusions from (1).
4) Fact... sort of. It needs a precise defintion of "mean surface temperature" that makes sense in the face of the equation in (1). Shouldn't you take the fourth root of the mean of the fourth power of temperature? For practical purposes, this is called a "ball park number".
5) Plain wrong. The correct coclusion is that either (a) the theory presented in (1) is wrong or (b) one of your inputs (R, A, sigma, S_0) is wrong. Turns out the value of A is wrong, and the simplistic idea of albedo is not good enough for the theory in (1).
* Prominent scientists criticizing those who find math errors in their works http://www.vox.com/science-and-health/2016/9/30/13077658/sta... (There are few facts more basic than math, and one of the scientists actually used the words "methodologic terrorism" to describe this effort)
People communicating scientific knowledge to the general public need to become more responsible in talking about uncertainty. Scientists in certain fields need to as well. When people hear a bunch of scientific facts that later turn out to be false, they will stop believing the experts. This happens all the time with nutrition and health "facts." Today drinking red wine is good for you and next decade it's bad for you. Hear that enough and you stop trusting nutrition studies. Same with anything coming out of the fields with reproducibility crises. You stop trusting them. If we properly communicated the limits of and uncertainty around these ideas, people wouldn't say we're crying wolf. If we had different layman's language to denote a theory of bunk and the theory of evolution, people wouldn't say "but it's just a theory," and experts might regain trust. If people stop presenting "X affects Y in certain conditions for mice, maybe" as "X affects Y for all humans, definitely" then lay people might stop associating that level of trust to things like climate change. At the very least, it becomes more defensible.
The problem isn't people holding these anti-science beliefs.
It's people holding these beliefs receiving human connection in the context of these beliefs primarily from people who share the same beliefs! We use differing beliefs as a reason to disconnect & disassociate, which is EXACTLY what got us Trump in the first place.
Science knows this! We have to temporarily affirm their worldview before challenging specific pieces of it. The more foundational the belief, the deeper the connection needs to be.
My hypothesis: we need to collectively learn nonviolent communication in order to hear the right on an emotional level. By connecting with them over all their deep-seated fears & beliefs, we can then more easily stay changing them.
Has anyone else noticed the disturbing parallel between Trump's "Alternative facts" and the famous Nixon-era press office claim that "Previous statements are inoperative"?
It's nothing at all like that. Rumsfeld (much as it pains me to support anything he said) was categorizing knowledge in a way that's actually quite useful.
Example: In education it's important for students to learn a wide range of things about a subject, even things they didn't know that they needed. This is why self-taught students often have large but important holes in their knowledge; they simply didn't know what they had to study, so they didn't look for it.
If you know that you don't know something, that's a "known unknown", and you can plan to research it. If you don't know that you don't know something, then that's an unknown unknown, and that's a much harder problem to fix without external help or accidental discovery.
Sounds rather more like Karl Rove's "reality-based communities" — which was not praise:
> The aide said that guys like me were "in what we call the reality-based community," which he defined as people who "believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality." ... "That's not the way the world really works anymore," he continued. "We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality—judiciously, as you will—we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors…and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do."
Without defending the misleading way this was used, there are such things as 1. Known knowns, 2. known unknowns, and 2. unknown unknowns. AKA stuff you know, stuff you know that you don't know, and stuff that you do not know that you don't know.
This kind of article does not belong to Nature. It talks about what the media said as evidence , undefined alternative facts, how "Rejecting mainstream science has become a theme for Trump", yet the only fact presented is that tillerson acknowledged climate change. Other than the fair criticism of pushing fossil fuels, it's a purely political fluff article. Even editorials should be based on facts in Nature.
Not true: freezing EPA funds, censoring EPA twitter, replacing web pages on climate change with fossile fuel propaganda, and disputing truth on live television
We need to act, and we need to act now. Science is what got this man elected (twitter, television), now it needs to fight for the very basic principles.
> Science is what got this man elected (twitter, television), now it needs to fight for the very basic principles.
The word "science" seems to mean almost everything nowadays.
Twitter and television are not science. They are social constructs built around the works of engineering, which itself was based on some established scientific knowledge.
>Twitter and television are not science. They are social constructs built around the works of engineering, which itself was based on some established scientific knowledge.
I admit it's a long causality chain, but without the scientific methods, those things would not exist. Thus, those methods are what we need to preserve in order to advance, and this is very openly threatened by the current administration.
I agree that scientific method needs to be preserved, but honestly, I don't think the current US administration even enters top 10 of dangers to science itself. Science as both the methods and the established culture around it has been in serious trouble for years now, and a lot of that has to do with mass media reporting and with the way incentives for scientists are structured.
As for Trump's administration creating creating a danger for the climate-change mitigation efforts, that's another topic.
He targeted his ads using social media in a very scientific matter (the article on the front page yesterday??). Ads selected on beliefs associated with responses to social media behavior.
But you're right that using Twitter by itself is not science.
Do you really rely on only one source for your information? Maybe the article is not top notch investigative journalism, that doesn't dispute that this administration is openly aggressive to science that doesn't fit their agenda.
Thanks for saying that. I wonder why nature feels that scientists around the world need to read pure fluff which presents speculation as fact. Maybe because they want to bias scientists for or against someone? Science still needs to be blind.
Science must be political when it comes to self-preservation. It must not bias or censor research due to politics, which is where we're currently headed.
I don't think so. So scientists should fight to keep their jobs even if their science is bad? Some of the best science came from the most unlikely places, and was not funded.
So, you're saying 'some science is bad' and 'some science doesn't need public funding'... and that's your justification for a blanket ban on research grants?
You say there are "too many to list" but if you want this argument to sound even vaguely informed you're going to have to be a lot more specific about which science is bad and why.
From your comments it's not clear whether you know anything about science or public policy or have just read an article that says "science is bad, mmkay"
> freezing EPA funds, censoring EPA twitter, replacing web pages on climate change with fossile fuel propaganda
That's not science, that's politics. You might very reasonably disagree with it, but there's no branch of scientific inquiry that says that the EPA should be funded to a specific amount or be communicating in a certain way.
Obama expanded the EPA to care about climate change, Trump is reining it back in. C'est la political vie, and it should be dealt with like any other politics one might disagree with, but it's nothing to do with science.
That his energy plan does not mention the threat of climate change is another fact, that the energy plan does not mention nuclear power, that of two scientists he has met after the election one is well known for his active denial of the central discovery of climate science: these are more facts the article relays.
This is bread and circuses.
Let scientists do science - comics and comedians are the weapon to reach for.
America has lead the way for the past 4 decades in bringing the public into areas they don't have the prior knowledge to navigate.
Anyone old enough to remember the climate change debates will remember a time when scientists didn't debate climate deniers because it gave climate deniers too much credibility!
But what scientists didn't realize is that vested interests were setting them up.
Cranks and fakers were nurtured and given air time by a certain news channel till they eventually the "public interest" invaded the scientific.
At which point "science" lost. Science expected a debate, but walked into Spectacle.
Trump showed that with Twitter and crap you can cross the very low threshold required to beat the current crop of presidential candidates.
This is entertainment. If you don't treat it as such you lose space to the person who generates better TRPs.