
The Mistrust of Science - yarapavan
http://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/the-mistrust-of-science
======
beloch
One thing not touched on in this article is how much distrust in science is
generated by bad journalism. Journalists routinely overstate and misinterpret
results willfully to sell more copy, and all too often they just get things
plain wrong. Even if their error is so egregious that they feel compelled to
print a retraction a week later, the damage is done. A lot of people will
remember the original article as "Truth" for decades.

The current decline of paid jobs in journalism suggests that insisting on more
qualified journalists to report on science may not be an achievable goal. What
we should be doing instead is encouraging scientists to make greater efforts
in explaining their work directly to the public.

Universities routinely employ publicists to write "plain English" articles
about the accomplishments of their researchers to promote their University's
brand. These articles, despite being created in collaboration with the
scientists, are frequently full of all the journalistic excesses I've
described above. If you show errors in such articles to the scientists the
article is about, they'll just laugh nervously and shrug, because the final
copy was out of their hands.

If you speak both French and English, there's no need to communicate to
another English speaker using French put through a bad translator. Most
scientists are capable of writing well enough to communicate with other
humans. It's time to cut the translators out and have scientists communicate
directly with the public. Yes, give them editorial feedback to weed out jargon
and simplify things adequately, but leave them with full control of what is
actually published. The results may be less impressively bombastic and poetic,
but they should at least not be hopelessly _wrong_ or outright dishonest.

~~~
joe_the_user
The article goes into the area of ideologies but perhaps in not enough detail.
The Internet accelerates the existing situation where any broadly popular
position, whether religion or New Age Healing or whatever, can create self-
contained, self-reinforcing network of self-defined experts.

And even more, even if journalists correctly report scientific results, the
real challenge is correctly conveying the "skeptical and imaginative (but not
too imaginative)" quality described in the article.

------
stephengillie
The nearly unbelievable level of rigor achieved by particle physics gives a
harmful level of credence to numerous other fields, especially nutrition &
medicine. Studies done across 8 people are given the same authorial
credibility as studies done across 8 million protons, by lumping them all
together as "science".

~~~
Bromskloss
> Studies done across 8 people are given the same authorial credibility as
> studies done across 8 million protons

The number alone doesn't tell us how reliable the conclusions are.

This doesn't necessarily invalidate your point, though.

~~~
bobdole1234
Six orders of magnitude does give a little bit of an insight into reliability.

~~~
tremon
reliability, yes, extrapolation beyond the original 8 test subjects, no.

------
jcoffland
This speech has a lot of valid points with which I mostly agree but it seems
to argue for unquestioned acceptance of the current conclusions of mainstream
science. Although it's very much in mode right now, this has been proven
repeatedly to be a bad idea. Unless you believe that we now finally have
everything right you only have to look at history to see that consensus among
scientists has been repeatedly incorrect.

I don't make this argument to justify bad science or to argue for even less
well supported conclusions. We don't know the answer to some questions and
logically, some of the questions which we think we know the answer to, we do
not. Therefore it is wise to remain skeptical _while_ stamping out
pseudoscience.

~~~
jthacker
Unquestioning acceptance of science is definitely not a conclusion of this
piece nor is it alluded to.

The main argument of this piece is how "an understanding of what real truth-
seeking looks like" can allow you to reject claims when they are
scientifically proven to be false. While he does not directly state that one
should be skeptical of the scientific community he also never states that
there should be unquestioning acceptance of it either. It is however made
clear that skepticism is a key trait of being a scientist.

He begins by pointing out the seeming contradiction of being a scientist who
is "supposed to have skepticism and imagination, but not too much" while
"gathering facts and testing your predictions" before you "either affirm or
reject the ideas at hand". Even then you still must "accept that nothing is
ever completely settled, that all knowledge is just probable knowledge."
Establishing early on that a scientist must be willing to accept that "a
contradictory piece of evidence can always emerge" while still advancing our
collective understanding.

"Knowledge has become too vast and complex for any one person [...] to
convincingly master more than corners of it". You therefore must rely on the
collective of scientific knowledge and those who practice it, the "scientific
community". He points out the difference between this group and one of
pseudoscientific thought is that the claims of the latter can be demonstrably
rejected using the scientific method.

A scientist must remain skeptical, but in order to be productive you also need
to rely on your community, no one person can verify all claims. Being
skeptical is inherit in being a scientist, and therefore part of the
scientific community. Relying on the scientific community is not akin to
unquestioning acceptance. Questioning established beliefs while backing it
with scientific evidence is the key difference between the scientific
community and the pseudoscientific one.

------
bluenose69
Fifty years ago, an academic told the world: "think for yourself and question
authority" (T. Leary, 1967: how to operate your brain). The second part of the
phrase has been repeated on everything from bumper stickers to toddler's
clothing, but the first part has largely been put aside, for, while the
academy has continued to tell people that authorities are to be mistrusted, it
has at the same time ignored its mission of helping young people learn how to
think. Top grades are awarded to students who struggle with simple
mathematics, sentence construction, and the elements of logic.

Fifty years is a long time. The vast majority of high-school teachers were
taught in todays watered-down system, so there is little hope at that location
on the educational conveyor belt. There is some potential at the university
level, because university professors are largely self-made people. But it is
hard to hold to standards, when universities regard students as clients and
professors as service providers, and where the path to promotion is paved by
good "metrics" (bums in seats, enthusiastic course reviews, etc.) that are
bought most easily by grade inflation.

The commencement speech is wonderful. But these words don't need to be heard
by students at Caltech, regularly ranked the top university in the world. And
replaying them in the New Yorker magazine doesn't exactly get them to the ears
that need to hear them. Maybe social media will help, so thanks, HN, for this.

------
yummyfajitas
I would love to see these studies repeated, but asking whether the public
believes _different_ reliable, well-studied conclusions of science. For the
most part, all these studies ask is whether people trust scientific results
that contradict _conservative_ ideology.

But there are a variety of reliable scientific results that contradict other
ideologies. What would happen if they were included?

Examples:

\- Variance in female intelligence/math ability/other traits is smaller than
for men, at roughly the rate Larry Summers famously speculated about.

\- Different races within the US have different intelligence levels, and that
intelligence is highly predictive of adult outcomes.

\- Demand curves for labor are downward sloping.

\- In the nature vs nurture battle, nature won.

\- Teacher performance can be reliably evaluated with statistics (e.g. VAM).

\- There is no scientifically demonstrated benefit to organic food, and no
harm from GMO.

~~~
Alex3917
The problem is most of those aren't even true, e.g. c.f. my notes on VAM:

[http://www.alexkrupp.com/Citevault.html#vam-
efficacy](http://www.alexkrupp.com/Citevault.html#vam-efficacy)

[http://www.alexkrupp.com/Citevault.html#vam-statistical-
prob...](http://www.alexkrupp.com/Citevault.html#vam-statistical-problems)

[http://www.alexkrupp.com/Citevault.html#vam-
implementation](http://www.alexkrupp.com/Citevault.html#vam-implementation)

Most of which are from the primary sources referenced in Diane Ravitch's book:

[https://www.amazon.com/Death-Great-American-School-
System/dp...](https://www.amazon.com/Death-Great-American-School-
System/dp/0465036589/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1465651203&sr=8-1&keywords=diane+ravitch+the+death+and+life+of+the+great+american+school+system)

~~~
yummyfajitas
Diane Ravitch, such an unbiased source. Lets assume the counterfactual - that
teacher performance has no measurable effect. The logical conclusion is that
since quality is irrelevant, we should focus on cost. I assume that you
support this conclusion? Diane Ravitch certainly doesn't.

The bulk of your notes show simply that variance is high, that the effect of
teachers fades over time, and that the effect of teachers is small. None of
this implies VAM doesn't work.

Many of your sources don't even agree with you. For instance, the Mathematica
evaluation suggests a 74% accuracy rate!

Some years back I recall we discussed this, and I suggested you go learn about
the difference between variance and bias. Have you done this?

Incidentally, you do bring up yet another solid scientific conclusion that
cuts against non-conservative ideologies: teachers don't matter much at all.

~~~
Alex3917
> The bulk of your notes show simply that variance is high

There is a lot in there about bias also, that's what all the stuff about
standardized tests not being on an interval scale is about. Gifted vs
mainstream vs special ed students show wildly different rates of progress on
standardized tests that's completely divorced from how much they're actually
learning, which means that the scores of teachers are largely determined by
which populations they're teaching.

> None of this implies VAM doesn't work.

High variance absolutely implies that VAM doesn't work. If you are firing good
teachers at random then only morons would go into teaching, especially given
the barrier to entry.

> the Mathematica evaluation suggests a 74% accuracy rate!

In this context, 74% accurate means 100% useless for the above reason.

> another solid scientific conclusion that cuts against non-conservative
> ideologies: teachers don't matter much at all.

I would say that most of the research using standardized tests to 'prove' that
teachers matter is wrong, but that's not the same as proving that teachers
don't matter. Any research purporting to 'prove' that teachers don't matter is
going to be flawed for the same reason, because you can't reliably measure
teacher quality by using tests meant to evaluate students.

~~~
yummyfajitas
_High variance absolutely implies that VAM doesn 't work. If you are firing
good teachers at random then only morons would go into teaching._

So only a moron would trade stocks, speculate on real estate, or take a job as
a salesman?

Of course, we just agreed that even if this is true, it doesn't matter. Morons
are nearly as good at teaching as anyone else, and the results of good
teaching fades over time anyway. So what would be the harm?

It's a simple fact of statistics - the bigger the effect size, the easier it
is to measure. It's simply innumeracy to claim large effects sizes and also
impossibility to measure them. Why all the left wing mathematics denialism?

(Another example of left wing mathematics denialism applies to the pigeon hole
principle. If you have N houses and K > N people, K - N people won't have a
house.)

~~~
wfo
The risk vs. reward profile for these jobs is very different. A stock trader
can be successful one year and make up for losses the next, so long as he is
successful more often than not. If an excellent teacher has a 25% chance of
being fired every evaluation session, he has nothing to compensate for this
risk -- just low pay, unconscionable hours, and a very difficult, thankless
job.

Most teachers are teachers because of belief in helping children and personal
dedication. Flipping a coin and saying "you're fired if I get two heads in a
row" every year means that is gone.

It is not innumeracy to suggest there are so many confounding variables that
are nearly impossible to separate from the treatment that it isn't a realistic
or effective method for making real decisions about performance that
negatively impact the careers and lives of dedicated public servants. It is
innumeracy to suggest that "the bigger the effect size, the easier it is to
measure" \-- it is not incorrect technically, but it is very misleading. No
matter how large the effect size, it can be very difficult to separate the
effect of different variables with limited data (which is always the case --
we are testing one teacher against another)

Granted, I haven't read those particular sources and I'm not sure if this is
the approach they take.

Of course phrases like "left wing mathematics denialism" are purposefully
incendiary, contentless, and laughably absurd -- they belong somewhere like
Breitbart, not here. Most Mathematicians are left-wing, for the record. I've
never heard of anyone denying the pigeon hole principle in that context (or
any context), but straw men are a very effective rhetorical device.

~~~
yummyfajitas
_A stock trader can be successful one year and make up for losses the next, so
long as he is successful more often than not_

If you don't get good returns your first couple of years, you'll likely be out
permanently. A couple of bad years on a 20 year trading record, you might be
fine. Then again, Alex's sources all note that VAM stabilizes after a number
of years (between 3 and 5). So long term teachers should be fine too.

Similarly for salespeople. Like it or not, getting a professional evaluation
based on a noisy objective measurement is nothing special. It happens in many
professions - why should teachers be protected?

Also, I didn't realize 38.5 hours/week, 9 months/year was "unconscionable".

[http://www.bls.gov/opub/mlr/2008/03/art4full.pdf](http://www.bls.gov/opub/mlr/2008/03/art4full.pdf)

Also, teaching is not "thankless". Teachers are given a high degree of respect
- #2 below nurses, in terms of ethics/honesty.

[http://www.gallup.com/file/poll/166364/Honesty_and_Ethics_of...](http://www.gallup.com/file/poll/166364/Honesty_and_Ethics_of_Professions_131216.pdf)

In terms of competence and warmth teachers also rank near the top on both
axes.

[http://www.pnas.org/content/111/Supplement_4/13593.abstract?...](http://www.pnas.org/content/111/Supplement_4/13593.abstract?sid=70a3fb78-4496-48b1-af32-fe27b57550fd)

Or just note the typical language used to describe them, e.g. "dedicated
public servants".

What makes you think teaching is "thankless"?

 _I 've never heard of anyone denying the pigeon hole principle in that
context (or any context), but straw men are a very effective rhetorical
device._

Go listen to discussions of housing in SF.

~~~
nitrogen
No good teacher only works 38.5 hours a week. They will often be awake at 1AM
several nights a week grading papers and tests, they are expected to stay past
contract time to meet with students, and they have significant continuing
education requirements. Many also need to take on extracurricular activities
or summer teaching to get enough money to live within 30 minutes of work.

Teaching is absolutely a thankless job in the actual work. Students are
constantly disrupting class, calling teachers names, threatening teachers and
other students. Administrators blame teachers for their students' behavior.
Parents routinely shout at, insult, and threaten teachers. Other teachers are
often hostile. Any perceived glory in teaching is just whitewashing the real
nature of the job (kind of like military service -- lots of talk about glory
and honor, but immense disrespect in day to day experiences).

"Dedicated public servants" is almost a pejorative euphemism at this point.

~~~
yummyfajitas
Then a significant majority of teachers are not "good", by your definition.

Some simple arithmetic: given that teachers are excluded from that study if
they work less than 35 hours, we discover at most (38.5-35)/(K-35) % of
teachers work K hours/week. (This is based on the extreme case of x% of
teachers working K hours, 1-x% working 35 hours.) So if 50 hours/week is
"good", then at most 23% of teachers are good.

As for your subjective opinions about "thankless", what evidence - if any -
would cause you to change your belief?

~~~
nitrogen
How did they define and report "work", and are they including breaks in those
averages?

I know several teachers. The burden of proof would be on you to demonstrate
that teaching is a higher status profession with endlessly respectful and
eager students.

------
dctoedt
Dr. Atul Gawande is one of my heroes; he's arguably one of the most
influential public-health thinkers around. Practicing surgeon. Med-school
professor. Stanford undergrad, Harvard Medical School. Rhodes Scholar.
MacArthur Fellow. Frequent contributor to the New Yorker. Author of several
books; I think I've read them all, and all of them were excellent.

"Atul Gawande (born November 5, 1965) is an American surgeon, writer, and
public health researcher. He practices general and endocrine surgery at
Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, Massachusetts. He is also a professor
in the Department of Health Policy and Management at the Harvard T.H. Chan
School of Public Health and the Samuel O. Thier Professor of Surgery at
Harvard Medical School. In public health, he is executive director of Ariadne
Labs, a joint center for health systems innovation, and also chairman of
Lifebox, a nonprofit that works on reducing deaths in surgery globally." [0]

[0]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atul_Gawande](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atul_Gawande)
(footnotes omitted)

------
mcguire
I was recently listening to a Science magazine podcast[1] discussing this
year's AAAS meeting[2] and particularly a session called, "A War on Science?
Vaccines, Climate Change, GMOs, and the Role of Science"[3]. The presenter was
especially impressed by the argument of one of the speakers, that there is no
"War on Science". There are conflicts on specific issues, but "science" itself
is so powerful that it is the backdrop for those conflicts. Both sides on any
of the conflicts want to present science to support their side.

The point being that framing any issue as being a "War on Science" (or a
mistrust of science) is (a) sloppy, (b) misrepresenting all of the sides, and
(c) unlikely to be effective.

[1] [http://www.sciencemag.org/podcasts](http://www.sciencemag.org/podcasts)

[2] [http://www.aaas.org/event/2016-aaas-annual-
meeting](http://www.aaas.org/event/2016-aaas-annual-meeting)

[3]
[https://aaas.confex.com/aaas/2016/webprogram/Session12441.ht...](https://aaas.confex.com/aaas/2016/webprogram/Session12441.html)

------
lips
Just a little reminder that non-nutjobs can:

\- Object to GMO crops on basis of politics and intellectual property.

\- Support organic cultivation for reasons of environmental and cultural
preservation.

~~~
douche
Organic cultivation is kind of a silly concept. Who cares whether the
fertilizers that you put on crops are processed industrially, or biologically?
Objections to pesticides, I can understand, given that some of them,
incidentally the ones that actually work, like DDT, are sort of detrimental to
humans as well as pests.

Mostly it's an excuse to mark up vegetables 250%.

Hybrid seed that doesn't grow true if reused is kind of an issue, but that has
nothing to do with GMO crops, versus regular, naturally bred hybrids.

EDIT: source, grew up as basically a poor white Yankee subsistence farmer.
Could probably have qualified as an organic farmer, if we didn't sprinkle
Sevin and Rotenone on things to keep them from having the invasive beetles
chew the bejeesus out of them. Hint: bugs eat Sevin and Rotenone and just
become larger, angrier mutant variations of themselves, like the Hulk munching
on concentrated gamma radiation.

------
PCMcGee
As most protectors of the establishment are wont to do, the author conflates
lack of trust in science with lack of trust in the system used to produce
medicines. Putting the profit motive ahead of concerns for safety, performing
biased studies while burying relevant data through intimidation and lawsuits,
and past history of incredible breaches of public trust is quite enough
evidence to make any rational person question the medical system and it's
willful, arrogant ignorance in pursuit of competitive advantage. If you want
to increase the rate at which people immunize, the answer is simple and
obvious, change the for-profit medical industry to an open, verifiable and
free model. Anyone who would put the future of the human race into the hands
of for profit corporations, deserves to be ejected from the gene pool at the
soonest opportunity. A virus is more trustworthy than the likes of Monsanto,
Bayer, GSK or any other of these vampires of human misery.

------
im3w1l
In response to the paragraphs about bad-faith pseudo science "To defend those
beliefs... Science’s defenders have identified..."

One field that has a lot of experience dealing with this is law. I wonder if
the scientific community can learn anything from it.

~~~
adrianratnapala
Mostly what scientists and lawyers can learn from each other is humility.

For both (in different ways) invesitgating the truth of purported facts is
important -- as is understanding the laws governing those facts. But lawyers
are dealing with interested, intelligent agents, some of whom will try to game
whatever environment they are faced with.

Science has less of this problem, so it pushes harder into realms of precision
that lawyers ought not dare enter. But scientists who wade into policy or
legal fights should remember that they are n00bs who's methods are easily
perverted.

------
internaut
Atul has missed something very important here.

Firstly; it is true that many right wing persons and groups mistrust science
for fallacious reasons.

However this is not interesting. And it does not explain the decline in trust
in science. Take the theory of evolution. Many religious conservatives do not
believe it. However they were certainly aware of the concept fifty years ago.
They didn't believe it then either. Logically their trust level on that point
can't have changed much. So; it is something else.

My opinion is that the right wing rely on their intuitions. This will sound
like I'm castigating them as unscientific, but this is not true. Intuition is
a genuine information discovery system, sometimes flawed, but, and this is the
key point, usually right in a way that increases the odds of survival or else
it could not exist.

So the question we need to ask is: why would the right wing feel queasy about
science today?

Consider the following:

1\. Their tribal enemy has overwhelming majorities in large scientific fields.

That by itself is enough of an explanation. The intuition that your native
enemy is likely out to get you by means fair or foul is a pretty good
intuition.

2\. Universities teach liberalism. It is so pervasive that commonly students
and professors don't realize this. They are the proverbial fish in water. If
you believe conservatives have low IQs or are intrinsically biased against the
scientific method, you've been drinking the kool-aid.

If universities don't teach liberalism then it is quite remarkable how
synchronized the students are in their beliefs on liberal talking points. This
isn't an accident and it has nothing to do with rigorous logical arguments.

If as a student you read enough old books you'll run into trouble pretty
quickly because the right wing weren't the straw men identified on television
shows such as the Colbert Report or The Daily Show. Quite simply there exists
a strong intellectual heritage on the right and most students never encounter
it because the media and faculty are usually incapable of steelmanning their
opponents arguments. That does tend to happen when point (1) is true.

3\. There have been no major scientific discoveries seen as directly
beneficial to the human race for some time now.

This will be my controversial point I think. It is a simple one. Every field
has a need to justify its existence, regardless of whether it's astrology or
astronomy. Astronomy needs to provide useful data, new evidence of discovery,
and astrology needs to make people feel entertained. If either field stops
accomplishing those things they become stagnant and eventually they get
forgotten.

This will be a bitter pill to swallow but consider that the discovery of DNA
and the Human Genome Project has had no meaningful effect on people's lives.
They aren't living longer or better because of these projects. Many promises
have been made with each development, but no meaningful change has occurred.

Naturally there are many worthwhile scientific projects which don't directly
affect us and especially not right away. However the intuition when hearing
that 'something doesn't affect you but could in the distant future and also by
the way could you please give us money today' is that you may be listening to
a description of a scam.

Perhaps technology has stopped integrating scientific knowledge into useful
products and services in the way it used to. What matters is that people are
broadly looking over their lives, hearing how batteries/cancer will be solved
soon by some whiz-bang-discovery and then later hearing nothing and thinking
they've been hearing a lot of squealing but not much pork.

Common people use common sense, and that's saying to them we haven't been back
to the moon in half a century. That major diseases remain unsolved problems.
That their wages haven't gone up in decades. Eventually youthful optimism
becomes lost for what is a completely rational intuition.

These are all areas science is supposed to indirectly relate to, and people
aren't seeing it anymore. All the time they have heard how wonderful
'progress' and 'science' is, but not seen it for themselves outside of, say,
computing or information science.

So those are my 3 reasons why a right wing person would grow to distrust
science and scientists.

~~~
mrkgnao
I think you _may_ be confusing the intellectual right-wing with the, e.g.
evolution/climate change-denying right wing.

There is a lot to be said for the need for differing opinions on, say, social
mores, finance, healthcare, government, and philosophies of life in general.
That is to say, I agree that the intellectual/philosophical right-wing is
indeed not at all similar to the caricatures we see.

I have a hunch, though, that highly religious and closeted people (of the "Do
not be educated lest you lose your humility" kind) are almost tautologically
biased against evidential "scientific method" models of the world, as opposed
to one where all truth flows from $HOLY_BOOK. And if you'll look closely, it
is this part that is ridiculed, largely for the unquestioning nature of its
beliefs and worldviews.

Aside: I have a feeling I'm stepping on the wrong side of the Slate Star Codex
"outgroup" essay with this. If there are any logical fallacies in this, or
anything similar, I would appreciate comments. I'm not a seasoned observer of
politics or society :)

~~~
MaysonL
Name a few outstanding members of the intellectual right wing.

~~~
internaut
Historically; people like Edmund Burke and Issac Newton. In more recent
history people like William Buckley and Milton Friedman. I would also say that
somebody like Stephen Pinker is strongly approved of in right wing
intellectual circles although I doubt he'd characterize himself as such.

There exists a large 'grey tribe' that doesn't classify itself as a purist
left wing or right wing, but has strong elements of both under it's banner. I
think of somebody like Eliezer Yudkowsky or Scott Alexander as continuing the
Enlightenment tradition which has strong right wing influences. There was
always a strong link between classical liberal thinking and the Enlightenment
scholars.

In HN's own backyard we have Curtis Yarvin and Peter Thiel. Our history is of
course very recent but there are still people who stand out with their ideas
and are mostly on the right.

In the more public sphere we have people like Julian Assange and Edward
Snowden who are more easily claimed by the modern right wing intelligentsia
than the left.

Obviously there is some noise with the signal but you've got to anticipate it
is not often that a human being is a ideological purist to the degree of say:
William Buckley or Noam Chomsky.

------
meeper16
Why did science reject women in the past as if it was scientific to do so?

