
The David Peters Problem - apsec112
http://tetzoo.com/blog/2020/7/23/the-david-peters-problem
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geofft
I don't know anything about paleontology or zoology, but this general class of
problem resonates with me. What do you do about people who are good at saying
things confidently and quickly while you, in accordance with the norms of
reliable science, want to say things slowly and tentatively after lots of
research?

This is the old "A lie can get halfway around the world before the truth gets
its pants on" problem, but exacerbated, I think, by modern communication.
While it's genuinely good for science and for human knowledge that anyone can
type up something on their blog and have it instantly readable to everyone
around the world, and while it does open the possibility of a more
meritocratic approach to science than journals controlled by established
academics, we haven't really figured out how to apply our own skeptical eye to
everything that we see in place of the traditional systems of review. And
while others in the community technically can respond with "I'm not sure this
is true yet, but my gut says it might not be, I'll spend a few days
investigating it and let people know," it's unlikely to get anywhere near as
much attention as the original flashy claim.

~~~
gameswithgo
it certainly feels as if people have become markedly stupider due to this
phenomenon and the internet. has anyone attempted to quantify this? some
measure of falsely held beliefs over time? level of conspiratorial thinking
over time?

~~~
geofft
I don't think people are stupider in the sense of less knowledge (or less _g_
, for sure), but there is a phenomenon where people are expected to know more
and know it quickly. Before the internet, if you were a working scientist and
you wanted to know about something that wasn't in your field, it was a fairly
involved process to figure it out, not 10 seconds reading Wikipedia.
Analogously, if you weren't a scientist at all, you'd have to ask a scientist,
you couldn't spend 10 seconds reading and potentially misreading Wikipedia,
you'd just say "I don't know."

I think this has consequences in other fields besides science too. The general
public now has the ability to have well-formed opinions about government
policy and its effects, for instance. That may in practice be making people
more confident in their ill-formed opinions, where they would have previously
deferred to experts. (Of course, it also is a great potential benefit if we
use it right, because those experts will generally have their own biases and
agendas.)

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gumby
This is a sad story but I really like the idea of “decrying the mainstream
palaeontological world as if it’s part of a conspiratorial cabal of blinkered
elites”.

I mean I can at least understand the _internal_ logic of, say the climate
conspiracists who think that climate scientists somehow stand to profit from
their reports. But paleontologists...seem beyond the pale, so to speak.

~~~
bsder
The problem is that in the past (up through about 1980) paleontology/biology
was kind of ... hokum/voodoo.

There is a reason why the Tree of Life had to undergo a lot of rearrangement
once we could sequence DNA.

However, now that we have DNA sequencing, the foundations of
biology/paleontology on on _much_ more solid ground. If you want to attack
them, you have a much higher bar to clear nowadays.

~~~
nn3
I assume you mean classification here, full biology is a lot more.

I wouldn't describe cladistics as hookum/voodoo. It's a quite well defined and
successful method when used correctly, and has been in wide spread us since
way before the 80ies.

The only problem is that it didn't really work for micro organisms, which is
the majority of living things because they all look very similar. Sequencing
has changed that, and that's why we see so many changes to the tree of life
now (in fact it's not even a pure tree anymore)

For the specific problem of pterosaurs (which this article is about)
sequencing doesn't help at all because there is no DNA. It's still all only
bones and cladistics.

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da39a3ee
I think it would have helped if the article had discussed the work Peters got
published in Nature, Science and any other top journals. Was it good work, or
was that a failure of peer review? In principle at least, a lot of the problem
being discussed should be addressable by the peer review process: rather than
adjudicate on all of Peters' work en bloc, evaluate it on an article-by-
article basis, via peer review. And don't engage with him at all in other
contexts. But it sounds like part of the problem is that comment threads under
journal articles and blog posts are being taken as a serious part of
scientific discourse.

~~~
geofft
Well, the problem is that they _are_ , in fact, a serious part of scientific
discourse. Peer-reviewed publications are the output; the process of science
also requires conversations in offices and labs and conferences, preprints,
letters between researchers, etc. - and always has required it. You need to
figure out what's interesting enough to research, what angles you may not have
thought of yet, what ideas seem fruitful but lack someone pursuing them, etc.
Blog comments (and mailing lists and newsgroups and Twitter) are a new way of
accomplishing this at a larger scale, but they're not fundamentally anti-
scientific - the conversations at Solvay weren't peer-reviewed either.

The major claim of the article is that Peters is pushing his ideas in that
realm - not the realm of peer-reviewed articles - and taking mindshare away
from legitimate and worthwhile ideas.

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p1necone
It's really astounding how he's clearly just pulling stuff out of thin air a
lot of the time. Surely at some level he must realize he's just winging it?

It really bothers me when people act like they really _know_ something for
certain, when actual experts aren't even as certain as they are. Is there just
some sweet spot of ignorance where you can easily convince yourself you've
learned all there is to know about something, or do they know they're
bullshitting?

