
Science by democracy doesn’t work - Red_Tarsius
https://medium.com/starts-with-a-bang/science-by-democracy-doesnt-work-ea74d160daa4
======
lumberjack
>But it isn’t arguments or votes or opinion that herald the acceptance of a
scientific explanation: it’s the evidence. Follow it wherever it leads.

But you cannot actually do that. You cannot be an expert in every field and
actually follow the evidence to make up your own conclusion (which btw does
not guarantee that your interpretation of the evidence is correct).

As an aspiring physicist I feel helpless every time I'm at the doctor's
office. I cannot just "follow the evidence". Heck I cannot "follow the
evidence" on anything in physics unrelated to my field.

This is more generally an economics problem about information asymmetry and it
will become more prominent as professions become increasingly sophisticated
and specialized. I don't think better access to information makes up for it,
either, because there is just as much misinformation.

The solution seems to me to build ever more complex social institutions with
complex trust relationships which I know makes some cryptofans cringe.

~~~
emptytheory
"You cannot be an expert in every field and actually follow the evidence to
make up your own conclusion (which btw does not guarantee that your
interpretation of the evidence is correct)."

It's pretty easy to follow the evidence in most situations, actually. That
doesn't make me an expert. That makes me a person who understands the
methodology of science, logic, and statistics. You have to know precisely what
your assumptions (observations) are and how to make correct conclusions from
those assumptions. The only constraints are your time, your determination, and
your ability to get the original research (a constraint is not "guaranteeing
your interpretation is correct").

Some people are highly opinionated and don't have the understanding to match.
That doesn't mean you can't have any sort of understanding as a non-expert.

"As an aspiring physicist I feel helpless every time I'm at the doctor's
office. I cannot just "follow the evidence"."

Doctors aren't necessarily better trained at making inferences and
recommendations. Consider their education. Some of them are very poor
thinkers.

~~~
ics
> The only constraints are your time and your determination.

...The combination of which is often a luxury that experts in one field cannot
afford, thus the statement that one cannot be an expert in every field.
"Cannot" is most likely being used for practicality, not in the literal sense
of information being totally unfathomable given infinite time and
determination.

You both have good points but they really needn't conflict so harshly.

~~~
woodman
> You both have good points but they really needn't conflict so harshly.

I disagree, lumberjack's point is essentially an appeal to authority - which
is dark-age style thinking.

Just represent everything in a machine readable set of axioms, problem solved.
You don't need to be an expert in every field, you just need to have a basic
understanding of first order logic.

~~~
Qwertious
I disagree, this is a "fallacy fallacy" \- you named a fallacy which
lumberjack (apparently) used, but that doesn't actually make the argument
wrong.

And you seem to ignore the fact that getting a degree takes most people
multiple years, and that "student" is an occupation. If you follow the
evidence, people can't learn everything because it takes way too much time.

~~~
woodman
> I disagree, this is a "fallacy fallacy"

I disagree, this is a "fallacy fallacy fallacy". You seem to ignore the fact
that I did not suggest that people can learn everything. I suggested that
people learn enough logic to use it as a tool to make learning everything else
unnecessary.

Also, the scarcity of time being used to justify the economically reasonable
appeal to authority, in the context of global warming / scientific method
consensus, may be the most unintentionally funny thing ever.

~~~
coldtea
> _I suggested that people learn enough logic to use it as a tool to make
> learning everything else unnecessary._

Which doesn't even make sense. Logic by itself is useless. Could as well talk
about some abstract unexisting universe.

It's only when you feed it items ("learning everything else") that you make
something out of it.

~~~
woodman
Wow, I see I'm going to have to break this down Barney style in order to reach
you:

The silly argument that started this all off was that you have to be an expert
in every field in order to examine complex systems or problems that span
multiple domains. This is simply not true, because a complex idea depends upon
simpler ideas. These ideas can be formalized, where scientific theory occurs
at the edge nodes and verification occurs at well connected nodes. This would
allow an individual to select a layer of abstraction to work on - not unlike
software development.

This isn't very far off from the present system of scientific journals and
peer review.

~~~
coldtea
> _This is simply not true, because a complex idea depends upon simpler ideas.
> These ideas can be formalized, where scientific theory occurs at the edge
> nodes and verification occurs at well connected nodes._

Only this is a very naive reductionistic epistemology, and not enough to cover
modern science.

~~~
woodman
That would only be true if the finest component of information in "modern
science" could not be represented in true/false/unknown. I know that back in
the day folks working on cybernetics struggled with something kind of like
this in neural networks, where they were stumped by nonsteady state output
(they were hoping to represent everything in true/false). The solution was to
just increase the layer of abstraction in representing the output, leaving
enough room on lower layers to describe nonsteady state as another potential
output state. Problem solved. If you've got an example demonstrating your
concern, that would be helpful.

~~~
coldtea
The reductionistic part is in the very belief that there's such a thing as a
"finest component of information" in the first place.

> _If you 've got an example demonstrating your concern, that would be
> helpful._

What I say is that sufficiently rich theories such as those we have today
don't have "finest components" in the sense of being parsable down to some
kind of "atoms" that are independent of the overall structure.

The whole intelligence lies in the connections between the components, and
verifying that them are individually "correct" doesn't say much.

~~~
woodman
> The reductionistic part is in the very belief that there's such a thing as a
> "finest component of information" in the first place.

That seems like a major leap. I've heard people propose that there are limits
to human understanding due to complexity, but this is the first time I've
heard the suggestion that there is some level of information beyond any
possible measurement. The lowest level I can think of is existence vs
nonexistence - and you are essentially suggesting that there is some other
state beyond measurement and therefor reasoning. Of course, such a thing would
be impossible to prove... so the scientific method would be of no use. So if
what you are suggesting is true, then it would have no influence on what I'm
proposing anyway. Wait... you aren't religious are you? I'm not trying to pry
or be insulting, but this suggestion would only really make sense in the
context of trying to establish a place for religion in science.

As far as the rest, formal logic exists to do exactly what you say can't be
done. Your argument sounds more like an appeal to emotion than anything else.

------
johnpowell
I wish people would just come out and say, "Humans can change the climate. The
question is how we deal with that from a economic standpoint."

I understand that argument and would like to have the debate about the trade-
offs. But flatly denying isn't helping us move forward.

~~~
iopq
Oh, I totally agree with that. But try telling that to your average Green
Peace liberal who just wants to abandon technology because it's "killing our
planet" or some such. Nuclear plants on average pollute less than coal? Nope,
gotta get rid of both, YESTERDAY. It's this kind of all-or-nothing debate that
makes people not want to give in.

~~~
mercurial
> But try telling that to your average Green Peace liberal who just wants to
> abandon technology because it's "killing our planet" or some such.

Why do you feel so concerned about Greenpeace when they don't make the laws
anywhere (not that I think you're representing their position accurately
anyway)? They're not the lobbying heavyweight that fossil fuel industries are.

~~~
iopq
I don't have a problem with Greenpeace, I just have a problem with how it's
all or nothing to their members. We can't have nuclear because nuclear
pollutes our planet! Forget that overall it might reduce emissions compared to
the current electrical power sources...

------
nine_k
It's funny how the article's epigraph quotes Trofim Lysenko, who was known for
his book-cooking and numerous earth-shaking irreproducible results.

Is it used ironically? I failed to grasp that.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trofim_Lysenko](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trofim_Lysenko)

~~~
pervycreeper
Unquestionably, yes.

------
fapjacks
This person doesn't get it. The vote was introduced as a means of identifying
with a single vote who is a climate change denier and who is not. There is no
scientific consensus attempted here. It's just a clever way of getting a
solid, no-frills yes or no out of our elected officials.

~~~
aswanson
Climate change is a funny topic. I don't see the populace or scientifically
illiterate senators (read that as James Inhofe of Oklahoma) weighing in on the
standard model of physics, proteomics, or the results/implications of steroid
use...but when it comes to anthropogenic warming...everybody has an
unequivocal answer. Those most certain seem to be of the political stripe that
had the certainty that Iraq had wmd and posed an existential threat to human
existence. The scary thing about these folk is that they are so convinced they
are right that they are able to convince the people who look at things
probabilistically that they are ABSOLUTELY right. Because economics.

~~~
tjradcliffe
Climate change is a funny topic in part because some elements on the far Left
(represented by Naomi Klein, for example) want to use it as a lever to justify
the kind of radical social engineering that failed so spectacularly and
murderously and repeatedly throughout the 20th century, and the far Right have
decided that to fight the politics they have to fight the science.

This has resulted in a situation where the Left, who abandoned science decades
ago, pretend to care about it, while the Right--which has long had an
ambivalent relationship with reality--has decided to go full-post-modern and
construe all facts as pure social constructs, which is exactly what the Left
has been saying for a long time.

Almost none of the discussion of "climate science" in the public sphere has
anything to do with science, and if you're an actual scientist with relevant
expertise and you say anything about the science you will get beaten up by
both sides.

As a computational physicist I've given my opinion on occasion that climate
models are non-physical and therefore non-predictive, no matter how well-tuned
they are to past climate (because only the correct physics can extrapolate the
past forward, and the unphysical approximations in climate models are not
small in the relevant sense.) What climate models do show fairly convincingly
is that we are increasing the Earth's heat budget by 1.6 W/m __2 or so, which
is in the range of 0.5% overall, and this is plausibly a very bad thing.

So because I criticize climate models the Left attacks me as a denialist, and
the Right embraces me as one, whereas I'm actually saying the models give a
pretty decent reason to take some fairly mundane steps, like implementing
carbon taxes and tariffs. The "tariff" part is important because it exports
the cost of emissions to other jurisdictions. At this point the Right attacks
me as being a socialist taxer (because taxes are socialist?) and the Left
attacks me for not wanting to "change everything" (because that always works
so well.)

There simply isn't any science in the "climate science" debate. It's all
politics.

~~~
jquery
Honest question: why is "global warming" or "climate change" (as a non-
scientist, not sure what I'm supposed to call it) supported by such a vast
majority of scientists? Can you elaborate on what political pressure is doing
to scientists?

~~~
thisrod
Scientists believe in global warming because Earth is warm and space is cold.
Scientists also believe they know what causes that. It seems very plausible
that increasing one of the causes will increase the effect.

------
Houshalter
But really, who did win? And what is M31-V1? And what does any of this have to
do with determining who's right, which really does matter, e.g. climate
change?

~~~
cjg
This explains what M31-V1 is:

[http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/hubble/science/star-v1.htm...](http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/hubble/science/star-v1.html)

------
malchow
Hm. Maybe taxing and benefits assignation by democracy do not work, either.

------
snowwrestler
The vote in the Senate was not about science, it was about policy. Scientists
obviously understand the science of climate change, and don't take votes on
it. But policy is made by politicians, and in the U.S., they _do_ operate by
democracy. Hence the vote.

------
Udik
So I guess this means that the whole 'consensus' thing around global warming
is pointless. "What matters isn’t what people thought the answer was- since
they only had incomplete information- but rather that this debate was an
important step in laying out what the arguments would be to support each of
these two competing ideas."

Just about time, now please let's stop with the (completely flawed) 97% meme.

