
Science and scientific expertise are more important than ever - MindGods
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/science-and-scientific-expertise-are-more-important-than-ever/
======
cuspy
Given the track record of institutional science and the ever-growing list of
regulatory failures, moral failures and outright abuses pushed in the guise of
scientific expertise, why do so many people seem to think that simply doubling
down and bullying the general population into compliance with expert consensus
will ever work? What if institutional science in the US has a legitimacy
crisis because it has failed to police its own corruption and failed to
address its own limitations and vulnerabilities? What if everyday people can
see this more clearly than those striving on the margins of these
institutions?

Personally, as a scientist, I am comforted that there are enough others out
there who doubt the entire notion of a scientific establishment that the
population should "trust" to make decisions without oversight. Our numbers are
growing, and I know many people who fight every day to ensure we will never be
ruled by unquestionable expert consensus. Anyone who has been inside these
institutions knows exactly how petty and arbitrary the hierarchical structures
can be. I'd rather be ruled over by elite families than squabbling,
territorial, overconfident scientists who can be bought off for nothing and
blackmailed easily.

I think the constant stream of these articles just illustrates the massive
social blind spot that comes from training STEM professionals solely for
careers rather than for citizenship, communication and community membership.
STEM training itself has sadly become a hierarchical, cult-like, anti-
intellectual system that deprives students of critical thinking skills.

~~~
manux
> scientists who can be bought off for nothing and blackmailed easily.

Bought off by who? I presume the "elite families" you mention. So either way
we are ruled by the wealthy in this model. There are other options of course
and I assume you would agree, I just wanted to point out my surprise at this
false dichotomy (that's not even a dichotomy since they're mostly the same
scenario).

I also agree 100% that STEM professionals should be trained to be citizens
first.

~~~
ptero
I heard of tailoring findings to the preferences of the grant giver (advocate
a wrong view and kiss your grant good-bye). This is very worrisome as a lot of
experimental science labs are so grant dependent.

I actually think this is partly a self-inflicted wound -- a large fraction of
major grant givers want truth and can stand findings that go against their
beliefs, but given the heavy dependence of labs on grants there is a tendency
to sugar coat findings to the taste of the money source.

Which is totally, completely and absolutely against the spirit of real
science. My 2c.

~~~
achillesheels
Hence the reason science has always been an aristocratic pursuit. Georg
Feuerbach demonstrates this point with the thought-provoking claim that only a
polytheistic tradition (such as Athens) can breed a love of natural beauty
which obligates a love of knowing its ways.

But it is principally a love of Nature (and it’s universals) and not a love of
wealth which moves the civilization higher. Galileo, Descartes, Newton had
pretensions but immortal ones.

~~~
danielam
Don't follow the part about polytheism. I would say, if anything, polytheism
is a hindrance to the development of science. For one, the capriciousness of
the gods makes nature arbitrary and unpredictable.

FWIW, Stanley Jaki argues something quite different to what you've written in
"Science and Creation" and "The Road of Science and the Ways of God".

P.S. A quick search doesn't bring up any noteworthy Georg Feuerbachs.

~~~
achillesheels
[https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/feuerbach/works/e...](https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/feuerbach/works/essence/ec11.htm)

George, my mistake. (Polytheism brings up the relevant passage starting with
Jews)

The philosophers did not follow the gods, they believed in the divinity of
reason. If anything, and consistent with the Scientific Revolution, the
confidence in the self-certainty of reason permitted the imagination to expand
“beyond” the natural, to examine it, to know it, to necessarily effect it for
our reasonable ends.

Where I think the pagans fall short is in their worship of visible objects,
where they have no concept of an invisibly present permanence in nature, ie
electromagnetic radiation.

~~~
danielam
Oh, _Ludwig_ Feuerbach.

If I restrict myself to the topic at hand, then I have to say I don't see how
he manages to construe the doctrine of creatio ex nihilo (CEN) as
intrinsically opposed to contemplation or speculative knowledge—science that
seeks knowledge for its own sake and not merely to master nature—or how he
construes it as essentially utilitarian. I have a suspicion that this is a
corollary of his position that God is merely a projection of Man, but my
understanding is that this position is a consequence of Kantian skepticism and
the resulting agnosticism. If you can't know things in themselves, then all
you have left is science as mastery of nature.

One difficulty with the claim that somehow CEN is intrinsically opposed to
theory is the failure to explain the entire Christian intellectual tradition.
Since we're talking about science specifically, it becomes impossible to
explain the enormous successes of the sciences in the West and historically
the relative poverty of their success in every other civilization. While the
stirrings of science occurred in a number of civilizations—and we should give
them their due—and while the Greeks may be argued to be the most successful of
the bunch, nowhere but the West, whatever its faults, do we see the
flourishing of a sustained and vibrant scientific culture. If we take a
broader and classical view of science, one embraced by the Greeks, to include
any systematic body of knowledge, then this period of flourishing extends far
into the centuries preceding the rise of modern science and includes the
intellectually vibrant Middle Ages. Indeed, without the Middle Ages, it is
difficult to imagine how modern science could have emerged in the first place.
Without arguing that this could only have happened in the West (that is Jaki's
position, as far as I understand it), it suffices to note that it did happen
in the West and it did so in a culture that embraced CEN.

The fact that neither Jewish civilization, nor Islamic civilization for that
matter, ever truly had a sustained and sophisticated philosophical or
scientific culture does not support Feuerbach's thesis. Again, his claim is
that CEN is intrinsically opposed to theoretical endeavors (which includes
philosophy). But all I need to show is one example of where CEN did not stifle
science.

Here I would add that one thing that stifled science in the Islamic world is
not CEN, but the belief that Allah is essentially pure will, and a pure will
that can contradict itself. Accepting that kind of creator can only discourage
speculative science. Here, we can appeal to Feuerbach's own words when he says
that the origin of a thing tells us about that thing. A world created by a
self-contradicting creator doesn't inspire much confidence in the
intelligibility of what he's created.

In stark contrast, Christianity (certainly Catholic Christianity) conceives of
the world as utterly intelligible. To put it somewhat poetically, the world is
divine thought or divine word and therefore intelligible and knowable through
and through (we have to note both the immanence and transcendence of God to
avoid both pantheism and deism). When John says "In the beginning was the
Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.", the original Greek
uses the word "λόγος" for word. Anyone familiar with Greek knows that the
English translation of λόγος is utterly inadequate to express its meaning (the
Latin "verbum" does a better job). In Exodus, when Moses asks God who he
should say has sent him, God responds with "I Am" (or "Ehyeh", from which we
get Yahweh). God is revealing himself as Being itself and in revealing himself
is making himself known. So God himself is intelligible and therefore Being is
intelligible. (Aristotelian metaphysics dovetails nicely because while
Aristotle managed to provide us with a rich and robust theory of being, he
stops short of discovering the act or principle of existence which Gilson
argues was stifled by pagan eternalism. We have to wait for Avicenna for that
to happen, later refined by Averroes and finally Aquinas.

------
arotical
I've seen the term 'evidence-based policy' pop up all over the place. I take
issue with people who use this phrase because most of the time their
definition of evidence is not very well developed, and when the evidence is
something they don't like they start to stretch their definition of evidence
so they can dismiss implementing a certain policy. If evidence is only
restricted to, and dictated by, academic papers, you leave room for companies
and news media to start selectively reporting and funding studies they want to
see or want people to see. And where are the scientific papers dedicated to
studying this problem? No one is going to fund them. Now you have an entire
society believing that corporate influence is not real because there is
seemingly no evidence for it.

If you only make decisions based on science you can pretend problems aren't
real without a scientist's approval, and you can pretend solutions to those
problems are bad if there is even a tiny bit of counter-evidence that supports
your viewpoint.

~~~
mindcrime
_If you only make decisions based on science you can pretend problems aren 't
real without a scientist's approval, and you can pretend solutions to those
problems are bad if there is even a tiny bit of counter-evidence that supports
your viewpoint._

And if you make decisions based on anything other than science, is the final
outcome going to be any better?

I admit that something that we might call "misuse of science" is a real thing,
and a problem. But I don't see any solution that in any way involves de-
emphasizing the importance of science in decision making.

~~~
arotical
Here's a scenario: You are tasked with dealing with a problem where there is
little research and no scientific consensus. There is plenty of video evidence
and other related pieces of non-so-scientific evidence, but most people don't
count that in evidence-based policy. What do you do?

Sometimes, I think, we have to make decisions when there's no clear solution,
and it's better than just dismissing a very obvious problem as non-existent.
So yes, include science in every decision, but it's not the be all end all of
society, it never has been, and it's not good to teach people that you can't
tackle issues without a known best solution.

~~~
acqq
> a problem where there is little research and no scientific consensus.

> There is plenty of video evidence

I can't even what you talk about. "Video evidence"?

Edit: if I'd guess it's about "UFOs" for these there practically exists
scientific consensus: no aliens proved, ever. "Video evidence" _isn 't_ the
evidence of aliens.

~~~
domnomnom
Lmao, turtles all the way down my friend.

------
Press2forEN
> An engaged and well-informed public has always been the foundation of our
> democracy

Is there even a shred of scientific evidence to support this hypothesis? I see
it in print so often that it appears to be a axiom that is considered so
correct as to be unquestionable.

~~~
jfengel
Democracy has never really relied on people being well-informed. The "wisdom
of crowds" incorporates a lot of ignorance. It just assumes that ignorance is
random, while informed opinion will tend to have a bias in favor of reality.
If 49% of the people make a random guess one way, and 49% of people make a
random guess the other way, then 2% of people who actually know something will
put the best-informed answer over the top.

So democracy is robust against ordinary ignorance. It's just not robust
against deliberately-induced ignorance[1]. The nudge towards reality is easily
overwhelmed by a thumb on the scale of the wrong answer.

Ignorance has never been really random, but the press of misinformation is
more widespread than ever. As is the press of information, but when people
don't know which to choose, misinformation is often more attractive.

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agnotology](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agnotology)

~~~
LordFast
Huh, never thought about the math like that. It makes a lot of sense, thanks
for sharing.

P.S. Before the age of social media, was there not the same level of risk of
induced ignorance through traditional media campaigns and propaganda? If not,
why not?

~~~
jfengel
Propaganda has always been a problem, and it's hard to quantify if it's
actually worse now or merely different. Even if it's merely different, though,
it feels like it's the kind of problem that should be solvable. In so many
cases people aren't merely misinformed but actively hostile to science in a
way that should bite them in the butt sooner rather than later. Surely, one
thinks, that should make it possible to resolve it, at least a little.

~~~
JadeNB
> Propaganda has always been a problem, and it's hard to quantify if it's
> actually worse now or merely different.

I think that part of what makes it both different and worse now is the way
that, thanks to automatic personalisation of content, what _feels_ like honest
intellectual inquiry will be met with automated replies that drive us deeper
in the direction of our beliefs (inadvertently; they optimise for engagement,
but it's more likely that a random browser will engage with something that
supports their beliefs than that challenges them).

Of course, there was always propaganda before, but there was at least the
chance of realising critically that it was being forced upon you, and so
choosing to resist it; or, if you _wanted_ to be swallowed up by the
propaganda, at least you had to make some effort to find the material that
would support that position. It's the way that our filter bubbles are now more
than ever hidden from us and, even worse, presented as ever more rarefied
intellectual inquiry that I think causes so much 'unswayability'.

~~~
LordFast
Is there any way to realistically and gradually reduce the prevalence and
thickness of these filter bubbles, so that people can be encouraged to
practice critical thinking in a sustainable way? Will this have to necessarily
be a governmental effort, or can there be business value in such practices?
Will there ever be sufficient incentives for any government to work on this?

Sorry for all the questions, I'm just thinking out loud.

~~~
JadeNB
> Is there any way to realistically and gradually reduce the prevalence and
> thickness of these filter bubbles, so that people can be encouraged to
> practice critical thinking in a sustainable way? Will this have to
> necessarily be a governmental effort, or can there be business value in such
> practices? Will there ever be sufficient incentives for any government to
> work on this?

The problem that I see is that filter bubbles keep people happy, so the effort
to fix it has to be an effort that's going to make people unhappy—and what
business or democratic government is going to do that? To me, it's like being
a teacher (my profession); there are ample studies that show that teaching
_effectiveness_ is in many ways inversely correlated with student satisfaction
(because true learning is often uncomfortable), and yet the incentives for
teachers are all in the direction of encouraging student satisfaction even
when everyone knows it can be at the expense of learning.

~~~
LordFast
I see, that makes sense. Kind of a "eat your vegetables" type of situation.

I really hope we can learn and get to a better place from here, but I'm not
holding my breath. The way I see it, there's a good chance that the world will
only continue to become increasingly more authoritarian and dictatorial.
Because in a world filled with more and more widespread filter bubbles and
entrenched divides, authoritarianism and dictatorships logically become the
optimal solution to get society to cooperate and function.

It saddens me to think about it.

------
renewiltord
There's science and then there's the theatre of science and the fans of the
theatre of science will attempt to browbeat you into ignoring the science
because they are concerned with the continued operation of the theatre.

So, for instance, when the CDC recommended no mask usage and all the
conformist fans of the theatre of science started pulling their shit, the ones
who follow the science ignored them.

Government scientific institutions have reputations that are shot through with
these "for the greater good" lies. Science is important, but no one is going
to listen to the Scientific Theatre any more.

~~~
timr
[https://www.cebm.net/covid-19/masking-lack-of-evidence-
with-...](https://www.cebm.net/covid-19/masking-lack-of-evidence-with-
politics/)

~~~
renewiltord
Interesting. Semi-convincing. Adjusting priors on the mask thing downward
slightly.

------
octaveguin
Politicizing science will make science less scientific and more political. It
will not work the other way.

~~~
jp555
“When you mix politics and science, you get politics.” — John M. Barry

from
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Great_Influenza](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Great_Influenza)

~~~
btrettel
As far as I can tell, that quote does not appear in the cited book.

[https://books.google.com/books?id=BYsW6qTP0pMC&printsec=fron...](https://books.google.com/books?id=BYsW6qTP0pMC&printsec=frontcover&dq=%22When+you+mix+politics+and+science,+you+get+politics.%22&hl=en&newbks=1&newbks_redir=0#v=onepage&q=politics&f=false)

A nearly identical quote appears in this editorial by the same author:

[https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/14/opinion/coronavirus-
shutd...](https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/14/opinion/coronavirus-
shutdown.html)

~~~
jp555
Ah nice thx!

------
AcerbicZero
Honest question, why is democracy always the "flag" people wrap themselves in
when defending these kinds of positions?

I get that democracy is somewhat better than feudalism, but at the end of the
day I don't really care if the king is standing on my neck, or if its a mob of
unruly peasants. Tyranny is tyranny, and democracy has demonstrated a great
affinity for it when it suits the mob. Democracy seems to be the best of the
bad options available, but without the strong protections afforded by an deep
seated respect for individual liberty and freedom, there isn't much difference
in end result.

If anything modern academia's treatment of "Science!" is a nice little peak
under the covers of what happens when you let the mob make the rules - Thought
becomes regimented to the point of absurdity and you either get on board, or
get (thrown) over board.

------
jp555
First thing that came to my mind was..

"Guys, guys, Galileo wasn't actually cancelled. He just found out that free
speech has consequences." @KonstantinKisin

Good luck!

~~~
throwaway29102
He wouldn’t be the first academic in history to get the facts right and the
delivery wrong.

~~~
jp555
Eric Weinstein talks about the DISC - Distributed Idea Suppression Complex.

I had a friend get tenure at a university, and her stories added fuel to the
fire in my mind that the DISC is very real, and _everywhere_.

~~~
throwaway29102
One man’s DISC is another’s memetic immune system.

Communicating new ideas is hard, and the burden is carried exclusively by the
originator of the idea.

------
AlexTWithBeard
Science is important. Science is great. I love science. Let's just be
extremely careful when trying to apply the latest scientific achievements in
our day to day lives.

Phlogiston theory of 17th century was wrong.

Race theory of 18th century was wrong.

Semmelweis was laughed at in 19th century.

And lobotomies were perfectly scientific for treating depressed patients for
most of 20th century.

I doubt 21st century's science is any special here...

~~~
readingnews
Four examples of bad science? I see a trend in these comments that people here
are pretty anti-science. I would like to remind us all to just take a peek
around us, and look at what was not even possible, not even imaginable, a mere
fifty to one hundred years ago. We are speaking to one another using faradays
laws and discoveries, teslas fascination with wireless and countless
physicists and engineers that build practically everything you see. Computers,
the internet, wireless... does anyone here remember polio, or how the flu used
to kill far more than today (with the exception of the COVID)? I find it
fascinating how easily we beat down on science and academic scientists in
general. Are there bad scientists? Sure. Are there bad people? Sure, but the
narrative I find myself reading more and more is all scientists are bad, and
all research should be stopped, as it is somehow costing everyone else money
or the money is being used wrongly. I think the percentage of that is
incredibly small. I only hope we are still educating our children enough in
the future to realize the tiny bad percentage of people we hear about (be it
in science or the general population) is not representative of all.

~~~
marcosdumay
Were all of them bad science? (The first two were clearly so, but I'm not sure
about the last ones.) Because if so, it's easy to look a bit more and find
completely wrong conclusions taken from good science too.

But anyway, all of those were mainstream at some time. The point is that
yielding to experts is anti-science. The fact that your experts work in a
research lab instead of a church makes little difference here.

Scientific decision making requires that at a minimum you verify your experts
results, and be ready to notice when they are wrong. This article is as anti-
science as the policies it is trying to fight, and this is a bad thing that
can only create mistrust from the public.

~~~
patagurbon
Is it possible for non-experts to verify science in most fields? It's possible
and important for other experts to verify, but research is _very_ hard to
contextualize and verify without being or becoming an expert.

~~~
marcosdumay
> Is it possible for non-experts to verify science in most fields?

If they don't know a thing about statistics and science methodology, no it's
not. If they do know those, settled research with real impact is not that hard
to verify (that's why it's settled), verifying science without impact is not
important, and unsettled science shouldn't get a lot of trust anyway.

That would be a good subject for an article with that same title. But for the
current article, the question is not really relevant.

------
gukov
Independent interpretation (ie. done not for clicks and views) of scientific
data is more important than ever.

------
DrNuke
That’s why I started a content project earlier this year but my admittedly
very small evidence is not in the line of this article: my readers just want
easy & simple bullet point to grasp “facts”, instead of first-hand expertise,
references or debates. Science is a process, though, not black or white
definitive assertions.

------
raziel2701
What's the point of being an expert if no one will listen?

------
tengbretson
A lot of what is said in this article only really makes sense if you define
science to be "what is said or done by someone called a scientist."

------
SubiculumCode
Then fund us. I'm about to leave science because I can't find a position.

~~~
btrettel
I'm almost done my PhD (defense next week) and I'm starting as a patent
examiner later this month. That was the only job I was offered, and I applied
overwhelmingly to research positions. There really aren't enough research
positions out there. (And before someone asks: I worked in a very practical
area of engineering.)

With that being said, increasing total funding can only go so far. A bigger
problem to me is that the available funding is not allocated well. When
certain professors make $300K+ per year yet can't find money for postdocs and
their students make less than $20K per year, CERN asks for billions that could
be spent on more important projects, and universities take a huge percentage
of grants as overhead (often without clear justification), it seems obvious to
me that there are plenty of ways to improve the situation without increasing
funding. I could go on. I think the research enterprise is incredibly
inefficient, and not by necessity.

~~~
pnw_hazor
Good luck at the USPTO. I worked with some former examiners (patent attorneys
now). The early years are a grind to say the least.

------
cyberrod411
This is true, but at least in the US, its more and more devalued everyday.

------
boxed
It's a pity they didn't use the word "truth". that's what's at stake here: not
just the lack of science but the total abolishing of truth, no matter how
trivial.

------
faangFar
Mods have deleted this question with no reasoning- Why is the "science"
solution to lockdown? This is a prioritization of a minority population at the
expense of an overwhelming majority.

Logic would say to prioritize (pick your numbers, I don't care) the 99.5% over
the 0.5%.

My hypothesis is that since it's a healthcare issue, the leaders are less
math/statistics inclined and more focused on biology.

~~~
newacct583
That's just wrong. Is Japan, or Korea, or Germany needlessly locked down to
"prioritize a minority population"? No. Those economies are largely open now.

The US isn't making the wrong decision about prioritizing hard choices, it's
simply _MAKING THE WRONG CHOICES_. This was a largely solvable problem. We
just failed.

~~~
faangFar
The question isn't what we should have done, that's easy. What should we do
now?

~~~
newacct583
Exactly the same things! There's no too late with a virus, the same things
work to treat it no matter what the infection counts are.

Stay home. If you can't stay home, wear a mask and stay outside. Don't travel.
Get tested regularly if you can't meet these rules. Follow the instructions of
the scientists we've all been ignoring. Vote for people who will (or against
those who won't).

Your argument seems to be of the form "Well, we fucked up, but it's too late
now so we might as well open up." That's just not true. We can still fix this
and save tens or hundreds of thousands of lives.

------
ohduran
Maybe the reason we are in this mess is because we relied too much on science,
and too little on actual humanities (rhetoric, logic, and so on)? I hear about
hermeneutics more and more in my circle: how to communicate trumps what is
communicated.

I can see why Fauci and many top scientists fail to convince people like Trump
and his supporters: he knows, but can't communicate what he knows so that
information is conveyed, and not simply stated.

~~~
mistermann
> he knows, but can't communicate what he knows

One example of this was when he knowingly misled (as one player in a
coordinated effort) the public about the usefulness of the general public
wearing masks at the initial outbreak of the pandemic. Now that the truth came
out, Trump supporters have indeed latched onto this as proof that what the
medical establishment says is not always true. Whether the benefit was worth
the cost is another one of those things that is unknown.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0XHC5Kxxv_w](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0XHC5Kxxv_w)
(1:30 onward)

[https://www.facebook.com/BettzDNS/videos/10216890195312387/](https://www.facebook.com/BettzDNS/videos/10216890195312387/)
(Note the rhetorical "fact checking" warning about the video.

Whether you like it or not, people will react to this behavior in ways that
are non-beneficial to overall society. I wonder if that is taken into
consideration when strategic decisions are made behind closed doors on what
_representation_ of reality is projected into people's minds. Another one of
those things that will remain unknown I imagine.

~~~
giardini
mistermann says> _" Now that the truth came out,... "_

Are you sure of the truth?

In recent news, the Dutch aren't requiring masks (except under limited
circumstances, e.g., on buses):

"Dutch Dr. Fauci Thinks Masks Won't Work. Here's Why":

[https://www.newsweek.com/netherlands-mask-
policy-1522917](https://www.newsweek.com/netherlands-mask-policy-1522917)

~~~
mistermann
> Are you sure of the truth?

Not at all, I am only going by what Dr. Fauci said in those videos - perhaps
he is once again saying something that is not actually truthful. Maybe Donald
Trump is not the only person in Washington who is skilled in the black art of
4D Chess...I seem to recall one or two items in the past where the public was
told, in a coordinated fashion, things that were not true. In fact, this
behaviour seems to be a rather common attribute in most any human being I've
encountered, in any community.

> Dutch Dr. Fauci Thinks Masks Won't Work. Here's Why

Another interesting behaviour I've noticed is how doctors and the media
portray the masks issue as being essentially universal consensus in the
medical field.

I often wonder what is really true. I wonder if the experts ever wonder what
is really true.

------
pvaldes
Translation. "Is year of elections and we should say something about science".

To enjoy the article at this fullest, play this in the background with an
orchestra of tiny violins

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XMbvcp480Y4](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XMbvcp480Y4)

My pleasure

