
Stop Equating “Science” with Truth - alphonsegaston
http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/science/2017/08/evolutionary_psychology_is_the_most_obvious_example_of_how_science_is_flawed.html
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xaa
Oh, boy. Yes, it is true, no one knows better than we scientists that science
is flawed and bias-prone.

You can say science is flawed but the best available source of truth we can
have, or you can say science is too fallible to be more privileged than any
other source of knowledge/belief. What you _cannot_ do is have it both ways,
to pretend science is infallible when you agree with it, and biased or
problematic when you don't. This seems to be what many on the left are trying
to do.

~~~
peatmoss
A thousand times this.

There is absolutely an institutionalist argument to be made against how
science is practiced by fallible and biased humans. However, I've never heard
of any method I'd trust more.

Science seems to be the only fair process for adjudicating when factual claims
are at odds. I'd hate to rely on rhetoric, as that certainly isn't less
subject to human fallibility.

At the same time, we need to be thoughtful about what are scientific questions
and which are normative/ value questions.

Science could help us figure out whether ground up humans make good plant
fertilizer. Humans need to make a value judgement on whether or not to
fertilize plants with ground up humans.

Believing in the scientific method, recognizing the institutional ways that we
can systematically fall short of its lofty platonic ideal, and understanding
the limitations of science to tell us the "right" social policy is what I
want.

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averagewall
_Eliminate structural biases in education, health care, housing, and salaries
that favor white men and see if we fail. Run the experiment. Be a scientist
about it._

That experiment's been done and "we failed". India has greater structural
biases against women than the US but a higher percentage of women in tech. And
it's a pretty consistent correlation between bias and women's involvement
across countries.

~~~
xaa
Take a look at this:

[http://slatestarcodex.com/2017/08/07/contra-grant-on-
exagger...](http://slatestarcodex.com/2017/08/07/contra-grant-on-exaggerated-
differences/)

Apparently, and paradoxically, greater eqalitarianism in a society can result
in higher amounts of individual choice, which can actually exacerbate inherent
differences between groups (if you believe they exist).

------
gizmo686
Yes, our institutions of science are flawed and subject to human biases.
However, what alternative to we have? At the end of the day, we need to have
some notion of what is "true". We could go with taking the dominate ideology
as being "true", but this is literally political correctness. We could go back
to using religion to tell us what is true [0]. Or we could realize that
science is the best method we have invented to find truth.

The question then becomes how much we trust our current scientific
institutions. I will agree that the general public tends to put too much trust
in any given finding (and often misunderstands the finding itself), but, in
general, our scientific institutions are still doing some of the best science
in our society. They are certainly doing better science than our political
institutions are. [1]

So what do we do when our scientific institutions findings do not align with
our political findings? One option is to ignore the science entirely; but
without the science, we will proceed along with an ideology that becomes
increasingly divorced from reality.

In the case of the Google memo, we have a disagreement about facts [2]. The
question here is how to resolve this disagreement. I have seen two proposals:
1) Science and 2) Ideology and mob rule.

Both sides can play in the science debate. There is a lot of science to
support the "pro (gender) diversity" side, and we can have a discussion where
both sides try to use science to arrive closer to the truth. In fact, if we
look at the two sides of the broader diversity debate, the pro diversity side
is far more represented in our scientific institutions [3].

[0] Although it is worth noting that, even if we accept religion as the
correct arbiter of truth, our religious _institutions_ also have a record of
reaching a truth that supports the biases of the time.

[1] Which is not a criticism of our political institutions; their job is not
to do science. It is, however, a criticism of deferring to our political
institutions for factual judgements.

[2] Actually, in my opinion, most of the disagreement is about words;
specifically one side not understanding what the other side is trying to say
moreso than disagreeing with it. However, for the sake of arguement, I will
assume that both sides understand what the other is saying and have a factual
disagreement.

[3] Again, talking about populations, not individuals.

~~~
xaa
I don't think the disagreement in the case of the memo is about facts. Few
outlets that reported on this controversy even seem to have read the memo, nor
are the criticisms of it I have read based on facts (or on words).

They seem to be based on the idea that the writer has _drawn the wrong
conclusion_. The facts or lack thereof seem to be irrelevant: if he had cited
the same papers but made the opposite argument, he would have been fine.

The idea of scientists being some kind of arbiters of truth makes me very
uncomfortable. The process of science is really messy. People want to publish
surprising and extraordinary findings (which often turn out to be false, and
the more extraordinary, the more likely this is). We have to publish or
perish. And many other problems.

Over the long term, science finds truth. In the short term, it is quite
unreliable. Scientists are tired of having their work used to support agendas,
when in reality we only observe, and usually the observations don't even
support the agendas they're being used for.

At this point, I think more and more scientists would prefer that science just
be left out of politics. Politics appears to be a lost cause, far beyond any
ability for facts or reason to be useful, and we have always done our best to
leave politics out of science. To the left and right, I would just plead:
leave us out of your petty squabbles and let us get on with advancing
humanity's future. But I must admit there are some publicity-seeking members
of this profession who undercut this hope.

To more directly respond to your post, there is an awful lot of confusion
between what science says, and the value judgments derived from a combination
of scientific observations and some ideology. I do not think the public, left
or right, is generally capable of disentangling facts from their
interpretations of the consequences of those facts.

~~~
gizmo686
>I don't think the disagreement in the case of the memo is about facts.

Neither do I, see footnote 2. However, the article this thread is responding
to was talking about factual decisions, so I stuck with that assumption.

>At this point, I think more and more scientists would prefer that science
just be left out of politics.

By all means, leave politics out of science [0], but we need science to inform
are politics. Otherwise, we just get more of the raw ideology that is the very
reason you don't like politics.

Science should not be left to just the scientists. They do the hard work of
collecting data and running experiments. But mostly, they end up answering
very specific questions with varying degrees of confidence. Once they have
those answers, they guess at broader implications. These are informed guesses,
based on their knowledge of other highly specific results and thinking that
others have done. However, this latter part of science is far more accessible
than most people realize. So, instead of actually engaging with the science,
they simply appeal to the scientists. This is made even worse because they are
attempting to understand the conclusion without the argument, and so will tend
to misunderstand. Further, since the general public almost never engages with
the actual science, politicians and activists have near free reign to
misrepresent the results.

[0] Mostly, the question of what to study _should_ be a political one, but
politics is so corrupting that I see no problem giving scientists a lot of
insulation from it.

~~~
xaa
Right. I read your footnote, but if indeed the disagreement is based on
"misunderstanding", it is a willful misunderstanding. Damore's opponents
appear to me to not even have tried to understand his argument. They are not
even attempting to engage the argument and failing; they're just not trying.
The conclusion is heretical, therefore the reasoning must be
wrong...somewhere. I say this as one who doesn't know and doesn't care about
this argument, I just worry very much about the free speech implications.

> but we need science to inform are politics. Otherwise, we just get more of
> the raw ideology that is the very reason you don't like politics.

Well, I do like politics, in the sense that I think it is a fascinating window
into the most irrational sides of human behavior. But politics is far more
powerful as a cultural force than science is. Politics appeals to the most
tribal instincts in humans.

Yes, it would be wonderful for science to inform politics. To have a president
and Congress who would look at the facts and make decisions based on those
facts, which neither a Democratic or Republican administration would really
do. So the best we can hope for is for politics not to infect science while we
wait for science to make these silly arguments irrelevant, if indeed it does.

For example, I will note that the Obama administration, despite all its lip
service to climate change, never did realize the simple fact that modern
civilization requires energy, and it will consume the cheapest form of that
energy available, and therefore green energy will only win if and when it
becomes cheaper than fossil fuels. When researchers make green energy cheaper,
I predict Republicans will, as if by magic, lose all their skepticism and
reservations about climate change, and the left will abandon their unrealistic
talk about emissions caps, and it will all become a non-issue.

------
geoffpado
I was going to deride Slate for presumably being on the side of the people
equating "Science" with truth at the March for Science just a few months ago,
but it turns out they had the exact same issue then:
[http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/science/201...](http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/science/2017/04/the_march_for_science_was_eerily_religious.html)

I figure if I was going to smear Slate for assumed hypocrisy, I should do the
right thing and praise them for their (IMO, correct) consistency when I was
wrong.

------
ryebit
One mistake that (easily) gets made is thinking science is a product, a body
of knowledge. Science is a _process_ , that (through repeated application) can
take a body of knowledge, and improve it's depth and accuracy.

You want to get close to "the full truth, and all the truth"? It'll take
asymptotically more man-hours.

At any point, there will be gaps and mistakes; but the nice thing about the
process of "science" is that it's an algorithm, and exists as part of the body
of knowledge it's acting on. So it can itself be improved, using it's own
rules.

That's the difference between a process, and a static set of facts, when even
it the core tenets permit for the possibility of mistakes, and allow for their
own replacement.

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kazinator
Science aligns (or at least should, ideally) rather more with "honesty".
"honesty" isn't "truth", so ...

