
Why don’t Americans understand science better? Start with the scientists. - robg
http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/ideas/articles/2009/07/26/why_dont_americans_understand_science_better_start_with_the_scientists/
======
etal
Or, start with the various leaders who discovered that anti-intellectualism is
a great defense against criticism of bad ideas that they want to do anyway.
This tactic isn't new -- remember Adlai Stevenson? Notice that the issues
where public and scientific opinion diverge the most are the most politicized
ones? It doesn't just happen in America; this is the effect of politicians and
religious leaders targeting mindshare while scientists simply can't make that
the priority. We eggheads don't stand a chance unless our research lines up
with someone else's goals.

~~~
robg
Or that our research aligns with the public's needs. That's what I take away
from the miles of unused tubes in Texas.

The other problem is scientists aren't very good at organizing and lobbying.
The biggest neuroscience organization, the one I belong to, has a well-known
health care lobbyist representing them. His name? Newt Gingrich.

------
DanielBMarkham
_Scientific literacy is no shield against anti-evolutionists or global warming
deniers, for example, who are often scientists themselves, who couch their
arguments in sophisticated scientific language, and who regularly cite
articles in the peer-reviewed scientific literature. Having the knowledge
equivalent of a PhD is more along the lines of what’s necessary to refute
them, and even then, the task requires considerable research and intellectual
labor, far more than most people have the time for._

As a "global warming denier", now I'm being lumped into the anti-evolutionist
camp. What's next? Sticking us in with the flat-earthers and the folks who
believe men didn't walk on the moon? Perhaps we can be included with the
holocaust deniers. That's a fun group.

Science is about adbuction (inferring patterns from data), deduction
(inferring rules from patterns), and induction (inferring new data from
rules). You hypothesize and test to validate, and it's always provisional.

That means that science doesn't play the role of the oracle of ultimate truth.
As the article points out, for scientists to take on this role is counter-
productive.

Taking a cheap shot at the critics of current global warming theory is just so
much political genuflecting. The article could have done without it.

~~~
timr
_"As a "global warming denier", now I'm being lumped into the anti-
evolutionist camp. What's next? Sticking us in with the flat-earthers and the
folks who believe men didn't walk on the moon....Taking a cheap shot at the
critics of current global warming theory is just so much political
genuflecting."_

Misuse of the word "theory" to imply debate where none exists puts you
squarely in the same rhetorical camp as anti-evolutionists. It's not a cheap
shot to group pseudo-scientific criticisms based on the common logical
fallacies used to advance their respective agendas.

~~~
DanielBMarkham
Hypothesize and validate. It's as simple as that.

If that puts me in some rhetorical camp of yours (or anybody else's) then I'm
happy to be there.

~~~
timr
Show me the part of your comment where you advance and validate a hypothesis.

~~~
ars
You didn't understand him.

Just "having no debate" is NOT a good way or determining "this is science".
Until a hypothesis has been tested, it's not science.

Global warming has not been tested. It's not even a theory, it's a conjecture,
or a hypothesis.

Science is not done by majority vote, I don't care that more scientists that
not believe in it. By that criterion phlogiston and luminiferous aether were
both science. Until you test it, it's just an idea.

~~~
timr
I understood him perfectly. There have been multiple, public IPCC reports,
summarizing _thousands_ of peer-reviewed, scientific journal articles
documenting global warming in fields as diverse as oceanography, geology,
biology, ecology and chemistry over the last 30 years. Meanwhile, neither of
you have provided evidence for your own opinions, yet you have the gall to
characterize an entire _field_ of scientific research as completely false.

This exchange is a case study of why global warming critics are rhetorically
identical to anti-evolutionists and flat-earth believers: it's trivially easy
to throw stones from the fringe of a scientific debate, then hide behind the
fallacy that that you're the unsung outsider, defending science from the bad
logic of the mainstream. It's a remarkably convenient position, since it
allows you to criticize everything, but provide evidence for nothing.

~~~
varjag
Yes, yes, and the maligned hockey stick graph swifted through IPCC and made it
to justify Kyoto protocol.

I'm actually in favor of Kyoto agreements, but please, it's more complicated
than Al Gore vs. ignorants.

~~~
timr
The IPCC reports have a lot more than just the "hockey-stick" graph. The
"Understanding and Attributing Climate Change" report alone has over 500
citations to peer-reviewed papers.

Given that the report is public and free, I think you might want to take a
look at it, rather than debating a straw-man.

~~~
DanielBMarkham
This is a very simple argument.

Given fixed inputs, produce a testable, repeatable output.

It has nothing to do with peer reviews, political committees, cited papers,
consensus or any of that. Nice try, but no banana.

So predict the worldwide temp in the year 2029. We'll wait around and see if
that prediction holds true. As far as I know, nobody has yet been able to
actually forecast climate and validate it. It's just all arm-waving and
hysteria. That may pass as science for you, but it doesn't work for a lot of
other people. Their position, which is mine, is that unless science is
falsifiable, it's not science, no matter how much you gussy it up with
anything else.

 _It doesn't even have to do on whether mankind is changing the climate_ \--
that's a whole nother can of worms. Along with whether and how much we should
do about it if we are. Or the role of science in politics (hint: both will
have a corrupting influence on the other) Or the question of what the perfect
climate should be, or how fast it should change. This is just about whether or
not you talk about global warming with the confidence as you do gravity,
integrals, or electromagnetism.

~~~
timr
That is, indeed, a simplistic argument. Unfortunately, it has absolutely
nothing to do with anything I've said here. I have not -- and would not --
suggest that science is a matter of consensus. The IPCC is relevant only in
that it acts as an excellent, public summary of the scientific knowledge on
global warming. It's a review article, not a popularity contest.

Your comment is only interesting in that you have, once again, used a favorite
rhetorical tool of the pseudo-scientific debater: a faulty redefinition of
"science". By your standards, a scientific experiment must:

 _"Given fixed inputs, produce a testable, repeatable output."_

which is supposed to imply that global warming can't be science, since we
can't predict the weather next Wednesday, let alone a random Wednesday in
2030.

Unfortunately, while this line of faulty reasoning is superficially appealing
to those untrained in scientific thinking, this definition excludes 99.9% of
all scientific research done today. We can't evolve a complex organism in the
lab -- yet we know that it happens in nature. We can't grow a human in a dish
-- yet we've been able to do a huge amount of research into human embryonic
development. We can't do repeatable experiments with nearly any human genetic
disease -- yet here we are, making measurable scientific progress year over
year in nearly every field that touches human genetic medicine.

A scientific theory needs to produce a testable _hypothesis_ , nothing more.
The experiment doesn't have to be practical on any particular time-frame. And
since you've (rather conveniently) provided a experiment for any theory
related to global warming, you've refuted your own straw-man attack. Global
warming theory is quite obviously within the domain of "science". It is
patently absurd to suggest otherwise.

~~~
DanielBMarkham
_The IPCC is relevant only in that it acts as an excellent, public summary of
the scientific knowledge on global warming. It's a review article, not a
popularity contest._

It's not a review article, it's a political statement put out by a political
organization in order to effect political change. Read some of the dissenting
opinions.

 _which is supposed to imply that global warming can't be science, since we
can't predict the weather next Wednesday, let alone a random Wednesday in
2030._

Sometimes I think you're just talking to yourself, timr. Nobody is talking
about the weather. Pick _any_ inputs, predict _any_ outputs. Take projected
levels of greenhouses gases in the atmosphere (what are those, anyway?) and
predict average global temperature. Take solar input and predict cloud cover.
You choose. For us to have any sort of reasonable discussion about this
"science" of yours, _you actually have to make some testable hypothesis_.
Without that we have bupkis go on. _You're_ the person saying something bad is
going to happen. Logically you have to have some idea of what output amounts
to "bad". It's your problem, not mine.

Have the conversation that we're having, not some other conversation you wish
we were having.

We have no idea how gravity works, yet we are able to model it quite
accurately. Why? Let's take a look at your examples to see what we can learn
there: life evolving, embryonic development, etc. These examples are complex
systems that we can only make Bayesian links between. Why would we do that?
Because we're still in the process of abduction in a lot of these areas.
Nothing wrong with that. With gravity we've moved to induction. But it means
that the science in those fields has not advanced to the same point as
physics, for instance. Various fields of science are harder or softer than
others.

Because you choose to conflate all of this for purposes of argumentation, let
me give you an easy discrimination rule: the amount of data observed makes
correlation more reliable even if hypotheses are flimsy. To give a real-world
example, if I go to my doctor with cancer, he prescribes some medications. Now
_even though he may have no idea of how cancer works or be able to predict how
it will progress in me, I can have confidence his treatment will be "mostly"
good._ Why? Because he has a million other cancer cases to statistically draw
on. He may have not idea why the treatment he is using works (he may have not
deduced any rules), but he knows from the patterns of a large set of data
that, given a certain treatment, most patients get better. (He has abductively
progressed)

Compare to those millions of patients (or millions of embryos or millions of
cells to use your example) to the global warming guys who have one earth and
about a hundred years of data. That's like me going to a witch doctor for
brain surgery. Ain't happening.

The problem we have is that the softer the science and the sparser the data,
the more easily Kuhn's observation of scientific paradigms plays itself out in
research. In other words, groupthink takes over. It's very difficult to get
anybody to believe that scientific consensus means anything when talking about
integrals, but if you're talking about something like psychology consensus is
really all you have. That's because without an inductive model we're stuck
looking at data and attempting to find patterns. Biology sits nicely between
hard and soft sciences. So it's a good example. The basic chemistry we have
down. Some of the other stuff we're just guessing.

So while I think it's very interesting that current scientific thinking is
that some sort of string theory explains the universe, I'll feel a lot better
when we have a theory that can't be bent into saying whatever you'd like it to
say. While I think evolution is a profitable and reasonable generally good
thing for folks to believe, I don't think it's the answer to every open
biological question there is. It's simply the best we have to address the big
questions. And while I'm certain the absorption spectra of various greenhouse
gases are well known and reliable, I'm completely unwilling to take that
simple piece of data and extrapolate it using various forms of cellular
automata into predictions of world-wide catastrophe. Yes, scientists are doing
all of these things, and I'm sure it would hurt their feelings to hear that
they're just blowing smoke up each other's posteriors, but that's all it
amounts to. Guesswork. Relying on the paradigm because that's all we have.
It's a great starting place. Now just complete the circle of the scientific
method to get something useful out of it.

------
tokenadult
PZ Myers's blog has a good comment on this opinion piece:

[http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2009/07/solution_blame_sc...](http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2009/07/solution_blame_scientists_add.php)

Earlier on his blog he provided detailed criticisms of the book by the same
authors.

~~~
mrcharles
Actually, that's not really much of a comment. Based on your pitch I was
expecting a nice little tear-down, instead it's just drive-by on a book they
wrote.

~~~
arakyd
The "nice little tear-down" is in the book review mentioned, but not linked,
by the parent
([http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2009/07/unscientific_amer...](http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2009/07/unscientific_america_how_scien.php)).
Apparently these guys aren't very fond of PZ, and he isn't very fond of them
either.

~~~
mrcharles
Should've linked that one first!

------
ars
This article starts by complaining about lack of basic knowledge "what is a
stem cell", and then ends with complaints about the unwashed masses not toeing
the line on global warming.

Science used to be only about testable things. Not anymore, now if you think
about it really hard, and everyone else does too, and no one can find a flaw,
it's science.

Global warming, evolution, and most of cosmology are not testable. Are they
true? Maybe. But they are not at the same level as the rest of science. Will
they be testable? I hope so.

So I'm not surprised that many people don't believe in those things, and
scientists too. It's for a good reason. And complaining when scientists
dispute global warming, when they have every right to is part of the problem!
This article does EXACTLY what it itself is complaining about.

~~~
scott_s
How are global warming, evolution and "most of cosmology" untestable?

------
reasonattlm
You might look at Aubrey de Grey's thesis on this topic. His focus is applied
biogerontology, but the general incentives and situation he describes can be
applied just as well to any field of science. See the diagrams in this short
article:

The Curious Case of the Catatonic Biogerontologists
[http://www.longevitymeme.org/articles/viewarticle.cfm?articl...](http://www.longevitymeme.org/articles/viewarticle.cfm?article_id=19)

------
mynameishere
The author seems to think that real science is a subcategory of political
science.

------
mrcharles
Pretty sure that what science is is taught pretty early in school.

"Scientists must make it clear that while they don’t have all the answers,
science is about searching for the truth, an imperfect process of doing the
best one can with the information available"

Really? I'm pretty sure I knew this when I was given an overview of scientific
process in grade school.

