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The Encroachment of Fact-Free Science
G3ckoG33k writes "Fact-free science is not a joke; it is very much on the move, and it is quite possibly the most dangerous movement in centuries, for the entirety of mankind. One can say it began as counter-movement to Karl Popper's ground-breaking proposals in the early 20th century, which insisted that statements purporting to describe the reality should be made falsifiable. A few decades later, some critics of Popper said that statements need peer acceptance, which then makes also natural science a social phenomenon. Even later, in 1996, professor Alan Sokal submitted a famous article ridiculing the entire anti-science movement. Now New York Times has an article describing the latest chilling acts of the socially relativistic, postmodern loons. It is a chilling read, and they may be swinging both the political left and right. Have they been successful in transforming the world yet? How would we know?"
Let's agree not to call this a "Republican" or "Democratic" position. The problem is that there are adherents to scientific claims who don't know the truth on both sides. I don't claim to know much about climate science, evolution, natural history or reproductive biology. So me claiming a "scientific" position on global warming, creationism, evolution or abortion is to some extent who I want to have faith in. Generally I choose respected scientists, but its still faith on my part because I haven't done the research myself.
Intron: the portion of DNA which expresses nothing useful.
When I think about about fact free science...
What's up with this box everyone has to think inside of or outside of? Why does there have to be a box?
Oh, well, even if we cause an ecological holocaust, wiping out all animals on earth larger than a mouse, the biosphere will adapt in the long run. I, for one, welcome our new cockroach overlords!
Have you read my blog lately?
I love how the article is equally fact-free, but makes sure to include several opinion polls.
For what it's worth, string theory is firmly in "hypothesis" range, and even string theorists acknowledge that. The question, if it is a complete mental masturbation or not, is kind of undecided, but judging by the number of people involved and effect on anything practical, it's not important at this point.
Contrary to the popular belief, there indeed is no God.
A) There are lots of climate change deniers out there
B) Postmodernism has caused lots of people to think that science is all relative, and the folks in A) have adopted that banner.
I'll really argue the link here- I doubt that *anyone* in A has really, seriously read the literature from B. A is comprised primarily of folks who are either highly religious and refuse to adopt a scientific worldview at all (and would be totally horrified by the philosophy of B if they actually read it) or people who have massive financial incentives to believe that climate change isn't true. The fact that A people argue against science has far more to do with those two factors than anything a bunch of academic nutcases wrote about.
"Seven Deadly Sins? I thought it was a to-do list!"
Call it what it is: religion. And no, that does not exclude the "Left".
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
Why the hell does this article quote a literature professor on the topic of the quality of scientific research? How the fuck would he know?
Professor David Nutt uses science in a paper against prohibition of drugs, and is fired the next day. Article from 2009
Popular opinion and straw men are the new trusted sources of facts, guys! Science and statistical analysis are for fringe nutjobs and quacks!
That's the whole idea of the scientific process, though, in that being wrong drives change. The fact that we've "so often been wrong" I think proves the process works: someone publishes a paper, others peer review it and find it ok but with a few nagging yellow flags, other independent labs perform the same experiment and publish different results, consensus breaks down and alternate, more feasible theories are produced instead. Wash, rinse, repeat.
Also, as a student in research who only just had his first-ever paper accepted and published, I'd have to say your blanket statement about the "most powerful clique" ensuring their papers get published and "no one else"s is patently false. There are always going to be bad apples in research, just like any other field, but that doesn't make the whole process broken.
"I'd just like to emphasise that taking a million years isn't a metaphor here..." -Rich Bradshaw
If your idea of a "not completely decided science" is one in which we "get new information daily" then there is no completely decided science. I haven't seen any information contrary to the hypothesis of AGW. I see lots of claims of this evidence, just like I see lots of claims that evolution is not how the variety of species came to be, or claims that the theory of relativity is all wrong. These are all examples of "fact-free science", in that they do not involve scientific evidence. What scientific evidence contrary to AGW do you think you've seen?
What a fool believes, he sees, no wise man has the power to reason away.
Excellent point. Its funny how anyone who goes against Global Warming is instantly labeled as a perpetrator of "Bad Science", yet a lot of the initial politically funded and motivated research has turned out to be complete garbage.
I tend to believe that if the early research and consensus had been left to the scientists, and politicians like Al Gore had stayed out of it, it wouldn't be a political issue at all by this point.
When politics gets involved in science it ruins both.
Its just like rock music and religion.
Things are getting more difficult to prove.
Depending on what you mean by "prove". It's all too easy to present an argument and have it taken seriously, because the rigor in filtering out bad science is lacking, so it's easy to get something published that "proves" a position. Of course, when the proof/review system starts allowing proofs of all sorts of contradictory things, people's faith in the inscrutability of the proof system goes out the window.
Now, when you have several thousand people doing scientific research into one subject, you're going to get some dissenting results, either as a result of the "law of averages"-kind of thinking, or because sloppy methodology will creep in. It doesn't matter how rigorous the review system is, this is going to happen occasionally. So we need to figure out how to prevent people from latching onto the one result that shows what they want it to show, as opposed to the thousands that show the opposite.
"You know, Hobbes, some days even my lucky rocketship underpants don't help" -- Calvin
popper's analysis of science is weak. It's based in the idea that their are 'facts' and that these facts are truths. If we accept certain axioms such as that we are not living in 'the matrix' etc then we can all agree that yes the sun is 'above' the earth, that planes fly, that this conversation is happening on server somewhere. Anybody who understands anything about the philosophy of science will understand and accept these things. The issue with popper is that he fails to recognise that the creation of scientific truth is a human endeavour and thus subject to human flaws, a far better analysis of the production of science is produced by Bruno Latour in Science in action - see Google books http://is.gd/07KejQ Perhaps the OP should widen their circle of scholarship before making such muddle-headed comments PS Sokal may have got a paper published in social text, but various scientific journals have accepted papers from people that show they are equally as gullible to accepting papers devoid of logic or proof. The problem with peer review is that it is peer review: ideas that are only acceptable to ones peers will be published. Challenges to the current orthodoxy typically have to be publicised through journals outside the mainstream view
Yes there are bozos out there who push their illogical political. views. There always have been. And some people want to deny science and/or critical thinking, to push a political agenda.
But I do not see where this is impacting actual scientific research.
This article is a liberal democrat biased "news" source, trying to smear the republicans. I am not repub myself, and I am not trying to defend the repubs. But, to say this article is shallow, and biased, would be understatements.
This whole topic pisses me off. The non-science idiots who try to pervert science with their armchair observations polluted with religion are ruining this country.
We need science policy based on fact - not fantasy. This creationist crap is what leads to bad policies for the country as a whole too and impacts global warming and energy policy just as much as science funding.
Keep the nut jobs out of science.
it's like believing that the earth is flat, which was widely held by even scientists centuries ago.
No, it wasn't. That's a fallacy.
"There never was a period of 'flat earth darkness' among scholars (regardless of how the public at large may have conceptualized our planet both then and now). Greek knowledge of sphericity never faded, and all major medieval scholars accepted the earth's roundness as an established fact of cosmology." -- Stephen Jay Gould
Reference: http://www.inf.fu-berlin.de/lehre/WS06/pmo/eng/Gould-FlatEarth.pdf
This is not even a thinly disguised attack piece. Yet another "if you don't subscribe to the current global warming facts you are an idiot" . As in, there is no room for debate, it has been decided, any contrary view is automatically wrong. Any discussion which does not state full agreement is wrong. Any facts not in the approved list are wrong.
I don't like the article either, it casts aspersions and doesn't say much. However, I don't like your comment either.
If you don't subscribe to the current facts, then you are an idiot.
Global warming is happening. We have hard evidence that the global average surface temperature of the earth has risen between 0.4 and 0.8 degrees C in the past 100 years, and that the majority of this increase can be attributed to human activity.
This has been under sustained scrutiny for years, and while there have been plenty of improvements in the accuracy, nobody has provided credible evidence that the contrary is true; that AST is not increasing, or that its not primarily attributable to human activity.
You are free to debate what we should do about it, you're free to model what you think the localised effects of global AST increase will be, you're free to critique the methodology used for data collection, you're even free to throw out the "conclusions" section of any paper and come up with your own conclusions based on the same facts. You're just not free to make up your own "facts".
Does my bum look big in this?
Can someone tell me how the same people who believe that pumping tons of smoke into the air and pouring millions of gallons of oil into the ocean has no effect on the environment and that the Earth is 6000 years old, are willing to buy off on at least basic atomic theory? Is it because the atomic theory gives them weapons?
Yet another "if you don't subscribe to the current global warming facts you are an idiot"
Well, yes, if they are facts, then 'not believing' in them makes you an idiot. You can still debate, but there are certain facts in the global warming debate that are not debatable.
The article is talking about those who completely deny all facts. The fact you get offended and consider it 'the voice of the democratic party' means you're probably more in the ideology camp than you are in the science camp.
Have they been successful in transforming the world?
Anti-intellectualism, anti-science, or anti-whatever-else has been prevalent in at least the United States for a very, very long time. And it starts when you're very young.
I remember being in school, in first grade. I was smarter than a lot of other kids in my class, and because of that I was ostracized. I wasn't allowed to be an intellectual; stupidity was celebrated. Acts of buffoonery were promoted and lauded.
Is it any coincidence why the most socially-outgoing people, in the history of K-12, are typically *not* the intellectuals? The "nerds" and "geeks" are always kept from ever rising above the "jocks" on the social ladder.
When you make it to college/university, it doesn't change very much. The nerds are at least not the brunt of jokes, and they're allowed to sit in the science and engineering buildings well into the night, silently doing their nerdy sciency and engineery things.
But the loud ones -- in sports, and poli-sci -- are still the non-intellectuals of the high school years. And these are the ones who grow up to be politicians.
So when articles like this act surprised that the majority of the government is filled with anti-elitist and anti-intellectuals, I have to wonder – were they paying attention any, growing up? This sort of conditioning –letting people know that being smart is NOT COOL – starts from a very young age.
But these people became successful? So they must be smart, right? Oh, if only. It's not about what you know, but rather about who you know. Nerds don't really socialize; we focus on our work, because that makes us happy. The others schmooze and network like crazy, with like-minded anti-science colleagues, who later become leaders, while we're the ones left wondering where the world is heading.
They become rich and powerful, and spread their ideas to the next generation. Of course, not all of them are successful. Many of them are not. Many of them remained dumb because they didn't realize the importance of knowledge, since it was ingrained to them from a very early age to think that knowledge and intellect are ELITIST and UNCOOL. And so they raise their kids that same way.
And we're back to square one.
I've experienced this first hand, and I am sure many have here as well.
It sucks; it's terrible. It shouldn't be like this. But it is. And I really have no idea what to do to stop it, but the article is right about one thing – it's terribly dangerous.
Well my "casual" observation shows there was another global warming period during the time of Ancient Egypt (circa 3500 BC) and again in the Roman Empire (circa 300-1300).
Clearly those global warming periods were not caused by cars, so there's no reason to think the present period is either. We need to find the REAL cause for these three Warming periods, which are not man-made.
Also Julius Caesar was assassinated in 44 BC, long before firearms were invented.
Clearly he was not killed by a firearm, so there's no reason to think someone could die as a result of being hit by a gunshot.
Of course it is wrong - science is always wrong. It is simply a process of iteratively reducing the amount of error by which you are wrong. And, quite frankly, the current scientific margin of error in most fields is far beyond comprehension. How far is it from LA to NY? How precisely do you want the answer? We have scientific theories in many fields that can give you answers in their respective fields that are equal to giving you the LA-NY distance in millimeters, with the margin of error meaning they're not quite sure about the numbers after the decimal point.
Science is not a status quo. Science is a method by which to improve the status quo. We had times when the ether was a scientific theory, then it was replaced by a better theory. Any and all current theories are up for grabs - if you can come up with a better one.
That includes peer review. If you have a method that can be proven to provide better results, show it.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
The West is already on its way out as a manufacturing and innovation base , most of which has headed east. Soon the chinese will be doing most of the science too and the west will be free to degenerate back into superstition and ignorance once more.
Oh, please. The climate summit farces in Copenhagen and Cancun show how seriously the rest of the world takes the issue. Most of the Kyoto treaty signers actually increased emissions, some by *more* than the US did. Your high horse is made of straw.
The summary is talking about the evils of postmodernism, cultural relativism, and deconstructivism.
The New York Times article linked is about head-in-the-sand data denial.
These two things have nothing to do with each other. The Republican congressmen in question don't give a damn about postmodernistm or cultural relativism. They don't believe that the truth depends on your perspective, or that morals and ethics are culturally informed. They believe that their ideal of the traditional American way of life is the only truth, and that anything that contradicts that must not be true.
TFS author is trying to shove a square peg down his favorite round hole.
Actually 'climate change' was created by republican political consultants in the Bush era to sound less scary, not because of some nefarious scheme by climate scientists.
“Climate change” is politically correct nonsense, but Republican pollster Frank Luntz and George W. Bush are to blame, not Al Gore. Luntz sold the phrase to Bush: “Climate change” is less frightening than “global warming.” While “global warming” has catastrophic connotations attached, “climate change” suggests a more controllable challenge. Bush agreed. Republican political appointees at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, where I was a biologist, forced scientists to always use “climate change” instead of the accurate and alarming “global warming.”