Some time ago corruption was direct. Now a lot of corruption and business is done trough "science".
If any science is related to politics or there is some business/financial incentive I just assume it's skewed.
Take for example the harvard study that is responsible for the US obesity. The study found that sugar does not make you fat, because of food conpanies.
Or the guy that discovered the ulcer cause and cure. It was ignored because the fake ulcer treatment industry was a multi billion dollar one.
The "I F***g LOVE science" guys that will beleive anything, because SCIENCE are the worst
The “Fuck yeah SOYENCE” crowd doesn’t realize that science (as a process) can only hope to get to the truth in the asymptotic (infinite) future. The path to getting there is incredibly messy, especially because it is carried out by sacks of meat and emotions (cue: Planck’s observation that science progresses one funeral at a time).
At any finite time, it is difficult to guarantee that science has the correct answer — especially in ”complex systems” where many factors interact, including through feedback loops. The very idea of repeatable controlled experiments (at the heart of the scientific method) is fundamentally limited in its ability to address such systems. So for all practical purposes, decisions (be it individual, or policy) need to often accommodate uncertainty/incompleteness in knowledge and try to “convexify exposure” — rather than trying to bank on having the correct & complete knowledge.
I think you are being downvoted for your overloading of the word science exactly the way politics has corrupted it. Are we supposed to just start using another word?
How about we start calling it rationality? A bit more self-descriptive, and perhaps a harder to word to weigh down with political gibberish and marketing speak. Scientific Method -> Rational Method, For Science! -> For Rationality!
Science traditionally demanded speaking in clear terms, now it is all about obscuring incentives and methods in order to P-hack a conclusion.
The math and physics are exact sciences, I am assuming there is no way to fool that.
For the "non-exact" ones there is always possibility of corruption.
I think the current establishment for some areas in science is politicised, and there is a system in place - you have to be published in certain prestigious publications to receive money, but if you do not follow the political status quo, everybody will cut ties with you.
I guess more transparency about data collected and videos of experiments would help, but I don't think that's a solution. This is a problem only few worry about, the system is perfectly happy the way it is.
This whole incentive - corruption relation reminds me about greek democracy: You want to chose the leader that doesn't want to be chosen, so that he would not have incentives. The athenians also chose people at random instead of elections, to minimize the chance of picking someone with special interests.
Brave soul posting this kind of truth to HN comments. But you are right, there is corruption, arrogance and ego in the science fields just the same as any things else.
Not disagreeing with you on your latter point. I think the frustration lies in part with an awareness that these problems exist, and that the system proceeds as if they don't, and the way the problems manifest in public policy-type discussions is distorted (for instance, in the US, it tends to manifest in these anti-science versus pro-science positions, as if science is nobel and pure all the way down, or fraudulent and flawed all the way down).
Maybe it's like that in every field, but it's frustrating to see documentation of the problems, know that everyone knows about them at some level, but nothing is done about them, and everyone goes on as if the problems don't exist. It's going to take a lot of massive change, like at the level of congressional intervention or something, and once it does, there won't be any restitution or anything. Everyone who benefited still benefits, there's no correction, nothing.
I have not read the book Science Fictions, but will comment that the core problem in academic science is the intense structural reward of telling “stories” rather than focusing on high quality data generation and robust causal models. A snappy story gets you a paper in Cell, Science, or Nature, a grant award, and promotion. That is the pressure driving many of the distortions.
In contrast, a decade-long effort to generate foundational data sets gets you a footnote or acknowledgement. Think Tycho Brahe versus Copernicus.
The imperative of generating snappy, and preferably simple series of stories is that scientists focus intensely on reductionist systems and neat little “mechanisms”. To get to mechanism, the modus operandi is to trim away fundamental system complexity. Complex state-dependent feedback systems get converted into sad but comprehensible cartoons. And we are surprised that findings do not replicate? The one phrase that makes me cringe in the biomedical literature is “necessary and sufficient”. In your dreams!
Yuri Lazebnik’s wonderful “Can a Biologist Fix a Radio” is a classic commentary published in 2002, well worth reading in this context. “Could a Neuroscientist Understand a Microprocessor” by Eric Jonas and Konrad Kording (2017, PLoS Comp Biology) is the update for all of you on Hacker News.
The current structure of science usually does not reward high quality persistent data and metadata. This seems antithetical to what we are usual taught about the scientific method. The reality is that doing data justice has been getting lip service from day 1. I still see little evidence of serious efforts in this regard (genomics being a welcome exception) since the true cost of data preservation and sharing is staggering.
A salutary final note from Richard Hamming, that I do not mean in any way as an excuse: “In science, if you know what you are doing, you should not be doing it. In engineering, if you do not know what you are doing, you should not be doing it.”
In both cases though high quality data/metadata are just as important—perhaps more so, than the big ideas.
I don't agree with everything in this article (I don't disagree with everything either), but that being said, I liked the following quoted text:
>"By the mid 2000s there was also an extensive body of work on the biology behind the gene’s function and malfunction. And all of this was part of a much wider field of research called candidate gene association studies, a methodology that enjoyed massive media exposure from the early 90s to the late 2000s as biologists identified the genes they claimed were responsible for obesity, mental illness, diabetes, addiction, gambling, cancer, crime, and numerous other behavioural disorders and diseases.
This was a golden age for high-profile genetics research. Almost every week brought another announcement that a candidate gene for some social problem or illness had been found. And, these announcements concluded, now that the gene causing the problem was known and the biological nature of the malady identified, a cure was surely close. Grants were funded and biotech companies were launched, billions of dollars were invested and exciting new technologies were trialed, all based on candidate gene discoveries.
And none of them worked because all of this was bullshit."
An overly click baity title which actually refers to the well known reproducibility crisis. It is also unfair to paint with such a brush. Biology and the medical sciences have always been less exact and more malleable.
>> Which is to say: how much science only looks like science but has no actual truth value because it’s junk science that just hasn’t been debunked yet?
I wonder, if every scientific theory that is eventually disproved "only looks like science but has no actualy truth value", how about Newtonian physics? Was that "junk science that just hadn't been debunked" until Einstein and General Relativity?
Are all scientists who have followed an avenue of research that didn't pan out in the end quacks, pseuds and wackos?
Or is there maybe a simpler, more nuanced view that doesn't happen to tar every past generation of science with a very offensive brush?
So the author argues that trans people's receptors are inhibited and estrogen helps unihibit them. Why is then transition from female to male allowed, this would inhibit the estrogen and worsen the situation.
Putting kids on hormones is wrong.
I am thinking about the next nareative, and I am pretty sure it's going to be pedophilia.
If you read the article FtM people dissociate too - the dissociation is the point. Why do you club this with pedophilia or think it's going to be the next narrative?
The stuff they are doing to trans people - hormones to change the traits, cutting off genitals is very strange, and the people who enable that are sick.
All this stuff is used to confuse people into submission to nonsense, and after some years when the trans narrative is worn out something new will have to appear, and looks like pedophilia is a good candidate.
I also think we will have implanted cips in the future. Everybody ridicules people that say that Bill Gates wants to cip people because it's too ridiculous. But I think we are not too far away from that (maybe 20 years). Social Credit Score is doing well in China, and there is https://id2020.org/ by Microsoft and Gavi The Vaccine Alliance. When I read the website I can't not laugh. They present the idea in a nice way but if you look trough it is actually just enabling government to have maximum control over you. Also there is this phrase: But doing digital ID right means protecting civil liberties and putting control over personal data back where it belongs...in the hands of the individual.
and people who say that saturated fat causes heart disease are like people who say we should stop driving cars because they have been shown to raise death rates. there is no randomized trial that shows saturated fat is harmful. there is no study where people were assembled, divided randomly into fat + and fat - groups, kept under supervision and only allowed to eat the meals provided by the study (without being excluded from the study). it is so blindingly simple and yet nobody does it. meanwhile, our ancestors ate nothing but meat for millions of years.
> meanwhile, our ancestors ate nothing but meat for millions of years
Our ancestors ate almost entirely plants. Even we modern humans only recently started getting a significant proportion of our caleries from meat/animal fat.
Now we have cardiovascular diseases being the main cause of death and one of the leading causes of poor quality life in peoples final years. It's unfortunate
vaccines do cause autism, as do regular infections and other forms of stress. these things also cause chronic fatigue syndrome, and the two are intimately related. these diseases and many other well known diseases are all basically the same disease and they will be resolved in what will be known as the "metabolic revolution" in medicine.
the reason why the studies done so far have not been able to find a link between vaccines and autism is that they do not take into consideration that other things also cause autism. even though there is a connection between vaccines and autism, vaccines save too many lives for any rational person to want to stop their administration.
> they do not take into consideration that other things also cause autism
Fortunately, we have figured out how to tease out the influence of a single variable among many: test vs. control groups. If the sample size is large enough, most variables will average out to have the same effect in both groups.
there has not been a single randomized large scale study on any vaccine that investigates its relationship to autism. without that, the bars are too big. and the relationship is extremely tiny. from a practical perspective, it isnt even worth going after. the studies that have been done so far prove that it wouldnt be worth it to stop vaccinations, not even close. but they dont definitively disprove a connection. they only disprove a meaningful connection.
I saw a funny facebook group that convinced me that people whose children's lives were ruined by vaccines are dumb. And not just dumb but very dumb. Because if it's SCIENCE you have to believe it. Never mind the countless examples where the science is political and motivated by money.
i think usually snake oil is something you pay money for. in this case, im just expressing my opinion which is that there is a very significant medical breakthrough in the pipes and that it is best summarized as a "metabolic revolution." this is because it has to do with metabolic dysfunction and the pathologies that are caused by it. the connection between inflammation and metabolism is a very exciting area of research. PERK and eif2a are a good example.
Medicine has gone through numerous revolutions. Not asserting the truth or falsity of the comment above, but it's not unreasonable to think we're missing large pieces of the puzzle. I'm reliably informed that a similar revolution is happening right now with immunology.
If any science is related to politics or there is some business/financial incentive I just assume it's skewed.
Take for example the harvard study that is responsible for the US obesity. The study found that sugar does not make you fat, because of food conpanies.
Or the guy that discovered the ulcer cause and cure. It was ignored because the fake ulcer treatment industry was a multi billion dollar one.
The "I F***g LOVE science" guys that will beleive anything, because SCIENCE are the worst