Slashdot Mirror
Crowdsourcing and Scientific Truth
ygslash writes "In an
opinion piece in the New York Times Sunday Review,
Jack Hitt states that comments posted to on-line articles, and elsewhere on line,
have de facto become an important factor
in what is accepted as scientific truth. From the article: 'Any article, journalistic or scientific, that sparks a debate typically winds up looking more like a good manuscript 700 years ago than a magazine piece only 10 years ago. The truth is that every decent article now aspires to become the wiki of its own headline.'"
Is the article author aware of how pervasive astroturfing is in the comments sections? Perhaps if the article is about a subject that no one has a financial or political interest in, comments sections could serve this way. But as soon as someone's got an interest to protect, you can't trust the comments to be anything other than posts made by paid people creating fake personas to do so. Slashdot has had articles about this type of astroturfing before.
Since "science" cannot prove historical events, the only thing left is opinion. By definition, if something is repeatable or testable, it cannot be "proven" by scientific methods. All you are left with is belief.
It'd be difficult to find a more misleading characterization of science.
First off, as various historians and theoreticians of science have observed, scientific methods rarely (if ever) "prove" anything. Scientific methods are all based on 1) proposing explanations for observations, and the 2) attempting to disprove those explanations. After sufficiently many such attempts at disproof have failed, an explanation gets promoted to "hypothesis", and then to "theory". But these are only tentative, with further attempts at disproval continuing whenever anyone can come up with a new test that hasn't been tried.
As part of this, an explanation that is untestable isn't considered scientific at all. It's neither true nor false by scientific standards, until someone comes up with tests that could possibly disprove it. Some explanations (e.g., "God did it") have remained in this state for centuries.
Actually, there is one situation where there is a sort of scientific "proof". This is dealing with negative claims of the form "There are no X".A canonical example is the old "There are no Black Swans". This was disproved by the discovery of a species of swan that is (mostly) black. It lives in Australia, so at one time it was Unknown to Science. You can rephrase this in the positive form, "There are Black Swans", and such existence statements can be "proved" by simply presenting examples. But this is generally classified as data collection, which is understood to always be incomplete. And such negative claims are generally not taken seriously by scientists unless you can give good reasons why X can't exist, based on previously accepted theories. Even then, a single (non-fraudulent) example can suffice to shoot down your reasoned argument against X existing.
In any case, "proof" is something done by mathematicians, not scientists. If you reject science that doesn't present proof, you reject all science, since proof isn't what science does.
If all you have left is belief, then you are susceptible to being defrauded by anyone who comes along with a new belief. But history shows that science's testing process has been pretty good at disproving most beliefs. In the process, the leftover ("not disproved") beliefs that fell out of the process have led to all the technical advances of the previous several centuries, something that the earlier purveyors of belief systems ("religions") have failed to do for as long as we have recorded history.
Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.
What's common is the accusations of astroturfing by fans of competing products, theories, or systems. It's become the "in thing" to claim that any dissenting opinion is astroturfing.
Unfortunately for those who like to use terms without understanding their meaning, it's only "astroturfing" if you're compensated for broadcasting a statement. People are entitled to share their opinions as they see fit provided they're not paid to take a side.
Even if they disagree with you.
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.