
Yeah well you can prove anything with science - jonp
http://www.badscience.net/2010/07/yeah-well-you-can-prove-anything-with-science/
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CapitalistCartr
If I want to persuade someone of a different point of view, my viewpoint is
essential. Instead of adopting a debating view, A teaching view is more
effective. Not a condescending view, a real teaching view.

Then I have to find out their real motivation for holding that view. If their
views on sexuality are tied to their religion, I need to proffer a religious
based explanation for changing that viewpoint.

Most people don't put a great deal of logical thought into their views, and
they are amenable to being "converted" given an understanding of their
reasons, which they themselves may not be clear on.

~~~
pbhjpbhj
>Then I have to find out their real motivation for holding that view [...] I
need to proffer a [apposite] explanation for changing that viewpoint.

It depends on whether your goal is to determine the truth or to convince
someone of your viewpoint.

~~~
CapitalistCartr
When I'm having a discussion with someone who isn't clear on the Scientific
method, or whether science can find the truth, as the people in the article,
I'm on pretty safe ground. Although, yes, in theory, they could convince me of
their views that homosexuality is a mental illness, etc. I think the odds are
poor.

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aufreak3
I wonder what kinds of answers you'd get from the same study group if you
asked the question "what is science?". Heck, I wonder what answers that'll get
on Hacker News!

If you read "science" as "survival of the fittest for theories", then there is
indeed room for people to have all sorts of biases. There are always folks who
watch out for these biases. The big pool of those biases evolves towards some
consensus about "reality" through argument and evidence collection. Over time,
the most persistent of these ideas become "intuition".

... but that's probably a gross simplification of affairs. If it can take
science 20 years to confirm some simple causal relation such as "smoking
causes cancer", it is not at all surprising that people might doubt the power
of the scientific method. If skepticism is healthy, isn't it also healthy to
be skeptical about the completeness of science? Is the "scientific community"
saying "you have to skeptical about everything ... except science"? Isn't that
a religion then?

Psychology and medicine probably have the hardest time here. It seems
particularly easy to read "lack of evidence for X" as "evidence for absence of
X".

~~~
jeromec
_Is the "scientific community" saying "you have to skeptical about everything
... except science"?_

Not at all, which is why gravity and evolution which are both understood well
enough to be labeled accepted facts (especially evolution) are still called
"theories". Religion is inherently based on faith, not observation, testing,
and proof which supports its tenets or claims -- a key distinction.

~~~
aufreak3
On the dot. I was trying to point out that the original research seemed to
come from the point that being skeptical about the absolute power of
scientific method is _not_ ok. The authors were "shocked to find" .. blah
blah.

------
narrator
To do real science you need a hypothesis, a control and an experiment. Finding
correlations in historical datasets after the fact is not really science. It's
good for formulating hypothesis but it's not science, at least as described by
Francis Bacon or Karl Popper. Good science provides falsifiable predictions,
more dubious things that are called "science" merely provide scientific
sounding explanations for natural phenomenon.

~~~
nagrom
Under your definition, astronomy is not a real science since astronomical
experiments are pretty much impossible and the term 'control' has no meaning
there.

It is perfectly acceptable in science to use observations of natural phenomena
that can be used to build explanatory frameworks that have some predictive
power. You can then formulate, ex ante, an event that either works towards
confirming your explanation, or disproving it. By observing the outcome of
that event (or even finding that event in a historical data set! Although you
must be certain that it did not enter your hypothesis), you can gain useful
scientific data.

Hypotheses-based predictions need not come from controlled experiments. If
that were the case, the scientific method would be much less generally
applicable.

I appreciate that the term 'scientific' is thrown around with gay abandon, but
if you intend to educate people on the true meaning of the term you should not
exclude what is arguably the oldest of the pure sciences.

~~~
narrator
If we constructed the laws of physics merely by observing the planets we could
have concluded that a mass rotated around an axis will move in epicycles,
which is how the pre-Copernican astronomers explained the movements of Mars.
Astronomy is merely the application of experimentally determined physics here
on earth to the movement of celestial bodies.

~~~
nagrom
You're missing an awful lot of astronomy if you think that orbital mechanics
is the sum total of astronomical knowledge. There's no earth-bound laboratory
that can create the hundreds of Teslas magnetic fields found in the sun;
there's no earthbound laboratory where one can see high-mass effects like
gravitational lensing; there's no earth bound laboratory that can explain or
even observe the existence/absence of dark matter. Astronomy is much, much
more than dynamics.

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philwelch
This article has an odd futility about it--it cites scientific studies on why
people aren't persuaded by scientific studies, and intends them to be
persuasive.

Seriously, I can imagine a scenario where, in an argument, someone presents
scientific evidence. Their opponent responds in the usual dismissive way, and
then the first person presents this very argument.

~~~
aufreak3
_This article has an odd futility about it_

I agree. Something very pretentiously meta about it. The author writes that
the findings are shocking, but I'd have been shocked only if people ended up
trusting "science" (whatever their notion of that is) in both groups.

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shib71
Classic case of cognitive dissonance
[<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognitive_dissonance>]. I assume the people in
the study changed the belief that was less personal / emotional: that science
was useful.

~~~
dkarl
Classic case of common sense, at least when it comes to political questions.
You can be sure that any politically contentious issue will generate
scientific studies on both sides, and the mere existence of those studies
means nothing unless you are able to assess the validity of the research.
Therefore, if you're an ordinary person who isn't capable of critically
assessing the research, science _doesn't_ help you resolve such questions.
Disbelieving contradictory research is not the cognitive mistake; trusting
research that supports a political belief is the mistake.

The effect on general belief in science is clearly evidence of bias, but the
bias of the writer also shows, in his one-sided condemnation of the folks
whose faith in science was decreased by the exercise. After all, they just had
a reminder of how easily (from their point of view) science can be hijacked
for political (or economic) purposes. They also may have a more pragmatic
approach to the question than geeks like us; when we are asked if science
_could_ be usefully employed to answer a question, we imagine designing and
executing a valid scientific study. A normal person is more likely to imagine
reading about a study in the newspaper or hearing it on television, in which
case it's much more reasonable to think, "Science will never answer this
question for me," because they have no authority they trust to tell them which
studies are valid and which are distorted by commercial or political
interests. The validity of a study is irrelevant unless you can assess it
yourself or trust an authority to assess it for you.

------
jeromec
_When presented with unwelcome scientific evidence, it seems, in a desperate
bid to retain some consistency in their world view, people would rather
conclude that science in general is broken_

That's not all that surprising if the sample group didn't feel very
knowledgeable or comfortable about how science works to start with. For
example, I'd wager a group of non-computer literate people would hold more
favorable or less favorable views about the merits of computers if results for
some computer experience gave them a very positive or negative experience. I
mentally walked myself through that study, and presented myself with the
"scientific results" that contradicted my existing view. My reaction was
simply "are you sure?" I'd likely be skeptical of the testing/measurement
methods, but not the merits of science itself.

------
mtodd
"Proofs" in Science is a misnomer, though, isn't it? You don't "prove"
something with science, you simply construct a theory that matches closest to
reality based on experimental data. Science doesn't prove, it provides a
framework for inquiry.

~~~
dantheman
Exactly, philosophy and math provide proofs based on axioms - science is all
empiricism and induction; it provides predictions based on our current
context.

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edanm
For most people, the statement "Yeah well you can prove anything with science"
is true. In the same way that a car mechanic can convince me of anything he
wants, since I know so little about cars (and he knows so much). Just like I
can convince most people anything I want about computers, since I know a lot
more than them.

Given that, people's strategy of ignoring scientific studies is smart. There
are usually studies that "prove" both sides of the issue, and people have no
way of telling which is more accurate.

~~~
pbhjpbhj
>Just like I can convince most people anything I want about computers, since I
know a lot more than them.

"All computers are based on a trifle, the "chip" or "CPU" people talk about is
just a biscuit on top of the jelly layer coated with blancmange ..."

Good luck!

------
stretchwithme
you can try to squint at the world so you only see evidence supporting your
beliefs. Or you can continually refine your beliefs as you look at the world
with eyes wide open.

Both are a lot of work, but only one is a joy. One makes you stand on your own
two feet, while the other makes you want to stand on the feet of others.

------
DanielBMarkham
I'm a bit of a contrarian, as some of you may know. When the crowd goes one
way, I look to see what the other way looks like.

I find articles like this -- where the underlying premise seems to be "people
are stupid, science is not" to be deeply flawed. People use the word "science"
to cover all sorts of things. In this example, it was used to cover the
results of a study. Guys? Studies are inherently non-conclusive -- for lots of
reasons, including the correlation and causation problem. I can show you
studies that will show correlations between about any two things you would
like. What's the old saying? "If you torture the data enough, you can get it
to confess to anything". The stats on medical studies, in particular, are very
concerning. The proper response to being presented with _any_ study is to say
something like "That's interesting. What other pieces of data do we have?"

It's not to change your world-view. If your world-view is so flimsy that
you'll change it on a dime, you're not exactly being a critical consumer of
information.

Secondly _scientists are people too, just like the ones studied._. Everybody
seems to overlook this fact. We all have these wonderful gems of how people
act irrationally, self-reinforce in groups, are slow to change opinions, etc.,
and nobody asks "wonder how all of that affects the study of science?"

Why? Because the purpose of such self-congratulatory bullshit like this is to
tell ourselves "I am a creature of reason and science. These other people are
primitive non-thinking dweebs"

It's all just so much intellectual self-stimulation.

I'm all for studies in human irrationality to continue. This is a very
interesting and fruitful area of research. But the picking it apart and trying
to make social or political observations out of it? Not so much.

~~~
jeromec
_Secondly scientists are people too, just like the ones studied.. Everybody
seems to overlook this fact._

I disagree that people overlook that fact. Humans are certainly not
infallible, and that's why peer review is an important part of the process for
confirming scientific discoveries and claims. That's what is so great about
science; claimed results must be reproducible independent of the scientist,
otherwise the claims are generally discarded.

~~~
anamax
> I disagree that people overlook that fact. Humans are certainly not
> infallible, and that's why peer review is an important part of the process
> for confirming scientific discoveries and claims.

Peer review compares to the literature and does some minor arithmetic checks.
It rarely redoes the statistics, let alone verify that the measurements were
real.

That's part of why peer review is almost useless in detecting fraud. It has
other failings as well.

It is better than nothing.

~~~
jeromec
I agree, but I meant peer review in an objective sense. There is nothing
stopping anyone else from verifying their own measurements. The bigger and
more unbelievable the claim, the more subject it is to scrutiny.

