

All science is anthropological at the margins - pak
http://tedpak.com/2013/02/28/all-science-is-anthropological-at-the-margins

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lutusp
> All science is anthropological at the margins

Not really. Science by design rises above its sources, positing principles
that owe no debt to those who discovered them.

The author of the linked article summarizes his thesis this way:

> Until then, to make sense of brand-new science, you have to learn just as
> much about the people behind the ideas, because that is often the only way
> to comprehend and contextualize what they are trying to say.

This is innately post-modern, and it's also innately unscientific. Useful,
robust science must be based on evidence and principles derived from evidence,
not on the quirks of individual researchers.

Useful scientific observations have the property of objectivity -- similarly
equipped observers will make the same observation and come to the same
conclusion. This eliminates "the people behind the ideas", as it should.

Useful scientific principles arise from observations based on the simplest
explanation for those observations, principles that are consistent with
established scientific theories and that successfully predict unobserved
corollaries. This also eliminates "the people behind the ideas".

Scientific findings must be able to rise above their origins and stand alone,
supported only by the _evidence_ that supports them, not by the _eminence_ of
the originators.

More here: <http://arachnoid.com/building_science>

~~~
pak
Thanks for reading! And the essay you wrote on this topic is equally
interesting.

I get what you are saying, and you are right that what I am proposing is
innately unscientific. What I am trying to say is that the process of making
new science often has to have these flaws, because ideas in the real world are
rarely evaluated on their merits alone. Ideas come from people who are
fallible and have to fit their ideas into a social context. What you hold to
be the ideal:

    
    
        Scientific findings must be able to rise above their origins and stand alone
    

is the same as what I hold to be ideal, and I also mentioned it's what my dad
admires about science. But the reality is more complicated: when a fresh
result comes out of a lab, people judge it by the affiliations of the authors,
what journal it came from, and that person's prior ideas and assumptions,
because replicating or depending on the truth of that result could be a costly
mistake (millions of dollars, years of work). The sparsity of biological
research in particular means that there are sometimes only a few labs in the
world that can readily run experiments with any relevance to a given topic, so
until enough attention is given for it to be replicated, a single result and
corresponding "story" pretty much stands solely on the reputation of the
authors.

So while it is absolutely correct that a scientific principle should stand on
its own, and those principles are the ones we learn in the college intro
courses, until a hypothesis gathers enough supporting data to _become_ a
principle (let's say it is only a few years old), the _process_ of science at
the margins is inherently social.

I didn't even get into matters of ethics and politics. For example, there are
important medical principles today that were gathered through highly unethical
(and regrettable) research in the early 20th century; if similar experiments
were performed today, the experimenters would be vilified and the results
discarded out of principle, even if it was robustly scientific with a
significant impact.

~~~
lutusp
The reason I replied to the article is that I see too much peudoscience being
put forth as science. And this matters very much -- there are groups in
society who want science's status without the discipline. Creationists and
Christian Scientists are just two of many examples.

My point is that, below an easily detected threshold, it's no longer science.
It may be part of an overall scientific enterprise, but to call something
science that depends on someone's personal tastes or preferences is very
misleading, and may grant credibility to activities that don't deserve the
name "science".

> until a hypothesis gathers enough supporting data to become a principle, the
> process of science at the margins is inherently social.

Yes, which is why we have science. Science is a method to get around humans'
predisposition for distorted thinking. If humans were rational, there would be
no science -- what we call "science", those rational creatures would call
"thinking".

My point is that, when science becomes social, it's at the border of science,
at the border of anything useful. And it may explain why most published
research findings are false:

[http://www.plosmedicine.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal...](http://www.plosmedicine.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pmed.0020124)

> I didn't even get into matters of ethics and politics. For example, there
> are important medical principles today that were gathered through highly
> unethical (and regrettable) research in the early 20th century; if similar
> experiments were performed today, the experimenters would be vilified and
> the results discarded out of principle, even if it was robustly scientific
> with a significant impact.

Interesting example. It turns out that scientific results are scientific
results regardless of their origins. We should do all we can to prevent
travesties like the Tuskegee syphilis experiment
(<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tuskegee_syphilis_experiment>), but once the
data have been collected, it would be foolish to throw them away because of
their origins.

> ... and the results discarded out of principle ...

Not really. Most studies that are carried out with appropriate scientific
discipline are accepted as legitimate, regardless of their origins. Remember
that scientific experimentation is not about whether a result makes us feel
good, it's about whether the result reflects reality.

For those reasons, the Tuskegee researchers should all be thrown in jail, the
public outrage is entirely justified, policies should be put in place to
prevent any such thing from ever happening again, but the results should not
be discarded. And, as it happens, they weren't.

~~~
carpet
What you're saying is fine and true, but I think you've missed the point of
Ted's article. Most of the end goals of scientific research are humanist; for
example, in biomedical science, the major end goal is to cure human disease
(I'm sure that some physicists will disagree with this claim, but if they like
getting public funding for their research, they at the very least are good at
convincing others that they have humanist end goals). When a field of study is
complex enough, a scientist must develop a way to prioritize what to study. In
biomedical science, this often means that scientists choose particular areas
of focus based around the area's likelihood of being implicated in disease.
Choosing the right area of study is not inherently scientific, but will
nonetheless have a huge impact on how others view a scientist's skill.
Likewise, understanding the anthropological sub-context of another scientist's
work provides an advantage in understanding the impact of that work.

This is what I think Ted meant when he claimed that science is anthropological
at the margins. While what we publish in journals is definitely science, the
path to get to the bottom line takes something more, and being able to
understand what that was in other people's work and use it in your own
ultimately makes you a better scientist. The difference between us and
pseudoscientists such as Creationists is that our results are predictable,
repeatable, and understood mechanistically once we are done, but this does not
mean that there isn't an anthropological nature to what we do.

