The concept of doing something politically damaging appears to have escaped you completely. If you want science and scientists to earn the mistrust and contempt of the public, let them get involved in politics.
That's why we have things like peer review and the scientific method.
I can only conclude that you didn't read any of the ClimateGate emails and that you aren't aware of attempts to hide code, data and methods from people wanting to review results - in that particular field at least.
That isn't what happened. The scientists gave their advice. The government didn't agree with the proposed policy and the scientist then ran to the media to complain about how unfair it all was. That is why he was fired. Not for disagreeing with government policy, but for attempting to influence government policy through the media.
In that case you should enforce disclosure of scientists' political leanings. How else are the people to judge their motives? The "cloud cuckoo land" argument is that all scientists have 100% integrity, are completely impartial with how they analyse their data, have no financial interest in their results and do not suffer from any of the usual careerist/ego-based political shenanigans that politicians or other such social climbers do. This "faith" in the integrity of scientists is, on the whole, misplaced. They are no different to anyone else.
That is why we have newspapers and other media, to tell us when the politicians voted for ignore reality and instead base their decisions on the mad little voices in their heads.
Ironically, the very same media that criticise politicians for ignoring advice (in this case), would be the first to criticise a change in government policy and its potential consequences. That is why the policy doesn't change, regardless of the scientific evidence.
Politicians do what is politically expedient given the various social, moral and ethical mores of their voters (on the whole). Such things are often irrational, yes. The issue here is that the political leanings and views of the politicians are generally known and so can be taken into account by the voters whenever they give an opinion. If scientists wish to weigh-in on political issues then they should be subject to the same kind of disclosure.
The problem with scientists is that they are no more able to predict the unintended consequences of the actions they promote than anyone else. The difference is that they don't realise it, because people like you hold them up as Delphic Oracles. They are just as likely to make catastrophic errors, resulting in millions of deaths, as politicians are.
A new Pew Research report on American attitudes toward science finds that 55% of scientists identify as Democrats, while 32% identify as independents and just 6% say they are Republicans. When the leanings of independents are considered, fully 81% identify as Democrats or lean to the Democratic Party, compared with 12% who either identify as Republicans or lean toward the GOP
Wouldn't this suggest that the scientists should be providing "data" that backs up the intended government policies in order to continue receiving funding? And then the government would have no reason to censor them?
There are examples I can think of where this is the case (AGW, in my opinion) and there are cases where scientists have presented findings the implementation of which would contradict Government policy (the classification of drugs, for example). In the latter case the scientists in question were fired from the policy body (Advisory Council in the UK) by the Secretary of State, because they disagreed with Government policy and were actively promoting what they thought the "policy" should be in the media. When scientists are both advising the government and promoting their own political views in public, there is an obvious conflict. I am speaking here not simply of publishing results, but of promoting a policy response in the context of these results.
I think he may be mistaking scientists who work for a university with scientists that work for industry
Whilst respecting all scientists, you will listen to the scientist who's work agrees with your pre-conceived beliefs and ignore the one who's work contradicts them. Where science is black or white, there isn't a problem. Where science is grey (particularly where it intersects with social policy), there is. This is true regardless of whether or not the scientist works in a University (and therefore is more likely to be a leftie or green), or if he works in industry.
A good example is the UK Drugs Advisory Panel. Here we have scientists coming out directly contradicting government policy. Scientists cannot advise politicians on the one hand and then go off and actively campaign for their particular view-point in the media, on the other. It would be uncontroversial if the scientific evidence itself was incontrovertible; often it is not. But even so, would implementing such policy be politically expedient? That is why we have politicians and don't decide every issue on balance of evidence.
It's also important to understand that scientists do not set public policy, they provide the ingredients -- information -- for democratically-elected politicians to make informed decisions
I was with you up to this point. So you see no conflict of interest between scientists receiving research grants and continued funding (or their institutions doing so) and the requirements of the people actually paying the bills (the Government)? Interestingly, you are aware of the conflict when it comes to private corporations and research into the effects of tobacco smoking, for example, but you are strangely blind when exactly the same scenario presents itself in the public sphere. Why?
According to David Goodstein of Caltech, there are motivators for scientists to commit misconduct, which are briefly summarised here.
Career pressure
Science is still a very strongly career-driven discipline. Scientists depend on a good reputation to receive ongoing support and funding; and a good reputation relies largely on the publication of high-profile scientific papers. Hence, there is a strong imperative to "publish or perish". Clearly, this may motivate desperate (or fame-hungry) scientists to fabricate results.
To this category may also be added a paranoia that there are other scientists out there who are close to success in the same experiment, which puts extra pressure on being the first one. It is suggested as a cause of the fraud of Hwang Woo-Suk. A main source of detection comes when other research teams in fact fail or get different results.
Laziness
Even on the rare occasions when scientists do falsify data, they almost never do so with the active intent to introduce false information into the body of scientific knowledge. Rather, they intend to introduce a fact that they believe is true, without going to the trouble and difficulty of actually performing the experiments required.
Easiness of fabrication
In many scientific fields, results are often difficult to reproduce accurately, being obscured by noise, artifacts and other extraneous data. That means that even if a scientist does falsify data, they can expect to get away with it - or at least claim innocence if their results conflict with others in the same field. There are no "scientific police" which are trained to fight scientific crimes, all investigations are made by experts in science but amateurs in dealing with criminals. It is relatively easy to cheat.
Finances
There is the additional incentive of money. If one has a promising proposal in an area in which federal or other grant money or funding is available, especially in a new technology in which there is no existing standard to compare it with, the submission of preliminary data cannot be confirmed until further research is done.
Ideology
While perhaps the least common incentive, it is still there. The classic example would be anti-abortionists claiming sonograms show the silent scream of an aborted fetus demonstrates the fetus is alive with feeling, while pro-abortionists would submit demographic studies showing that women who considered abortion but later decided against it are doomed to life of dependency on welfare, lower socioeconomic status, relationship abuse, child abuse, drug abuse, etc.
Scientists are Human and subject to all of the same frailties as the rest of us. If you want the political sphere, as Dwight said, "to be held captive" by them, then in my view that is a very naive viewpoint indeed. There are many cargo-cults in science. Its practitioners are no more suited to directing public policy than anyone else.
The very idea that it could be a good thing if policies at a national level were influenced by such nonsense as "evidence" or "data" or "reality" is absurd!
Your argument is really lacking in any intellectual rigour. It is also insufficiently nuanced.
Nobody is arguing that evidence shouldn't be used when making policy decisions. What I am arguing is that science isn't always black and white. There can be a range of opinion on any given issue, with supporting or contradictory evidence on both sides, provided of course that those with contradictory evidence or opinions aren't black-balled by the scientific establishment.
The role of politicians is to take a view on the evidence, not to simply accept it at face value.
Please try a little comprehension with your reading.
There's nothing wrong with my reading comprehension. The sarcasm in the OP is obviously directed towards the idea that politicians have no right to contract scientists in the area of public policy, where scientists produce evidence that supports a particular point of view (which, I might add, they are well able to do for any point of view). This is plainly absurd, for the reasons I have given.
Don't you know that the truth is whatever the Party says it is?
The problem with your argument is that it assumes scientists are always right and are always better able to conduct public policy than politicians. Wasn't this precisely what Dwight Eisenhower warned us about in the 1950's?
Today, the solitary inventor, tinkering in his shop, has been overshadowed by task forces of scientists in laboratories and testing fields. In the same fashion, the free university, historically the fountainhead of free ideas and scientific discovery, has experienced a revolution in the conduct of research. Partly because of the huge costs involved, a government contract becomes virtually a substitute for intellectual curiosity. For every old blackboard there are now hundreds of new electronic computers. The prospect of domination of the nation's scholars by Federal employment, project allocations, and the power of money is ever present -- and is gravely to be regarded.
Yet, in holding scientific research and discovery in respect, as we should, we must also be alert to the equal and opposite danger that public policy could itself become the captive of a scientific-technological elite.
Your point also completely disregards the growing philosophy of post-normal science, where scientists can "produce" evidence to support a viewpoint they consider to be politically expedient, even if the evidence does not necessarily incontrovertibly entail the conclusions.
It's rather sweet that you hold all of science in so high a regard. I used to. These days I see Scientists pretty much in the same was as I see politicians: I always want to follow the money.
I've been reading lots of stupefyingly idiotic stories recently, including this one (mountains will collapse and cities will be destroyed due to Global Warming).
It is now my firm opinion that the whole world has gone stark raving mad, and that the Scientific establishment has been so hopelessly corrupted by special interests, Government institutional and research funding and the new philosophy of post-normality, that it has regressed to a kind-of pre-enlightenment age.
It is my firm belief that the UN, a body that has a Human right commission chaired by Libya, should not be given any power over anything whatsoever.
Which side of this argument has the most financial interest in arguing either for or against limiting our use of Earth's resources? Let's face it, you don't get super rich by becoming a climate scientist.
One has a financial interest (the businessman), the other has a political interest (the Climate Scientist - especially if he's a post-normal scientist) and his employers (most likely an academic institution) have a financial interest. It's likely that the scientist will be involved in consultancy, so he will actually have a financial interest tangentially too. Your argument, attempting as it does to attribute motive, is entirely bogus.
Sure we did. They're better than the preprocessor of course, but that isn't to say they aren't over-used in many cases. The example I gave was a good one in that templates there are used solely to generate tighter code, rather than because there is some problem that needs solving with generics. In return for the tighter code, you get an almost incomprehensible source file.
There's almost always a different way to design your hierarchy that will avoid the problem. Over the years I've come to despise the whole concept of "hierarchy" in any case, because few problems map naturally to a single solution (there's too much ambiguity). I much prefer to use encapsulation wherever possible instead. I do use inheritance of course, but mostly I inherit abstract interfaces that gradually build to a single concrete interface. Where implementation details are similar between concrete classes, instead of making one a base and deriving for the other, I will prefer a third class that contains the behaviour both will use that can be encapsulated, rather than inherited.
So you don't have 10 levels of inheritance, 'creative use' of STL, etc, etc
C++ is an obfuscationists dream, especially when people start to do clever "tricks" with templates. If you've ever peeked into the boost:: libraries, you'll see what I mean. But I don't want to do away with it because let's face it, you can do that with any language (to me Perl looks like an utter mess). If you use a good coding style (lots of whitespace) and patterns like dependency injection, smart pointers, RAII etc. it generally works well.
Consider the Swiss study to be a `peer review' of the American one. Peer review doesn't guarantee correctness in any case, it just guarantees the paper is in agreement with the views of a group of carefully selected others.
Slashdot Mirror
The concept of doing something politically damaging appears to have escaped you completely. If you want science and scientists to earn the mistrust and contempt of the public, let them get involved in politics.
I can only conclude that you didn't read any of the ClimateGate emails and that you aren't aware of attempts to hide code, data and methods from people wanting to review results - in that particular field at least.
That isn't what happened. The scientists gave their advice. The government didn't agree with the proposed policy and the scientist then ran to the media to complain about how unfair it all was. That is why he was fired. Not for disagreeing with government policy, but for attempting to influence government policy through the media.
In that case you should enforce disclosure of scientists' political leanings. How else are the people to judge their motives? The "cloud cuckoo land" argument is that all scientists have 100% integrity, are completely impartial with how they analyse their data, have no financial interest in their results and do not suffer from any of the usual careerist/ego-based political shenanigans that politicians or other such social climbers do. This "faith" in the integrity of scientists is, on the whole, misplaced. They are no different to anyone else.
Ironically, the very same media that criticise politicians for ignoring advice (in this case), would be the first to criticise a change in government policy and its potential consequences. That is why the policy doesn't change, regardless of the scientific evidence.
Politicians do what is politically expedient given the various social, moral and ethical mores of their voters (on the whole). Such things are often irrational, yes. The issue here is that the political leanings and views of the politicians are generally known and so can be taken into account by the voters whenever they give an opinion. If scientists wish to weigh-in on political issues then they should be subject to the same kind of disclosure.
The problem with scientists is that they are no more able to predict the unintended consequences of the actions they promote than anyone else. The difference is that they don't realise it, because people like you hold them up as Delphic Oracles. They are just as likely to make catastrophic errors, resulting in millions of deaths, as politicians are.
Article I don't expect the facts are any different in my country either.
There are examples I can think of where this is the case (AGW, in my opinion) and there are cases where scientists have presented findings the implementation of which would contradict Government policy (the classification of drugs, for example). In the latter case the scientists in question were fired from the policy body (Advisory Council in the UK) by the Secretary of State, because they disagreed with Government policy and were actively promoting what they thought the "policy" should be in the media. When scientists are both advising the government and promoting their own political views in public, there is an obvious conflict. I am speaking here not simply of publishing results, but of promoting a policy response in the context of these results.
Whilst respecting all scientists, you will listen to the scientist who's work agrees with your pre-conceived beliefs and ignore the one who's work contradicts them. Where science is black or white, there isn't a problem. Where science is grey (particularly where it intersects with social policy), there is. This is true regardless of whether or not the scientist works in a University (and therefore is more likely to be a leftie or green), or if he works in industry.
Is the answer to every social or political problem either right or wrong? Can you think of any scientific conclusions that were acted upon but turned out to have been wrong but that as a side-effect caused the deaths of millions of people?
A good example is the UK Drugs Advisory Panel. Here we have scientists coming out directly contradicting government policy. Scientists cannot advise politicians on the one hand and then go off and actively campaign for their particular view-point in the media, on the other. It would be uncontroversial if the scientific evidence itself was incontrovertible; often it is not. But even so, would implementing such policy be politically expedient? That is why we have politicians and don't decide every issue on balance of evidence.
I was with you up to this point. So you see no conflict of interest between scientists receiving research grants and continued funding (or their institutions doing so) and the requirements of the people actually paying the bills (the Government)? Interestingly, you are aware of the conflict when it comes to private corporations and research into the effects of tobacco smoking, for example, but you are strangely blind when exactly the same scenario presents itself in the public sphere. Why?
Are you seriously suggesting that results are never fabricated? Or that it's not possible for Scientists to behave in a generally dishonest manner in order to advance their own agendas? Or that scientists do not have political opinions that are in direct conflict with the work they perform?
Scientists are Human and subject to all of the same frailties as the rest of us. If you want the political sphere, as Dwight said, "to be held captive" by them, then in my view that is a very naive viewpoint indeed. There are many cargo-cults in science. Its practitioners are no more suited to directing public policy than anyone else.
Your argument is really lacking in any intellectual rigour. It is also insufficiently nuanced.
Nobody is arguing that evidence shouldn't be used when making policy decisions. What I am arguing is that science isn't always black and white. There can be a range of opinion on any given issue, with supporting or contradictory evidence on both sides, provided of course that those with contradictory evidence or opinions aren't black-balled by the scientific establishment.
The role of politicians is to take a view on the evidence, not to simply accept it at face value.
There's nothing wrong with my reading comprehension. The sarcasm in the OP is obviously directed towards the idea that politicians have no right to contract scientists in the area of public policy, where scientists produce evidence that supports a particular point of view (which, I might add, they are well able to do for any point of view). This is plainly absurd, for the reasons I have given.
The problem with your argument is that it assumes scientists are always right and are always better able to conduct public policy than politicians. Wasn't this precisely what Dwight Eisenhower warned us about in the 1950's?
Your point also completely disregards the growing philosophy of post-normal science, where scientists can "produce" evidence to support a viewpoint they consider to be politically expedient, even if the evidence does not necessarily incontrovertibly entail the conclusions.
It's rather sweet that you hold all of science in so high a regard. I used to. These days I see Scientists pretty much in the same was as I see politicians: I always want to follow the money.
I've been reading lots of stupefyingly idiotic stories recently, including this one (mountains will collapse and cities will be destroyed due to Global Warming).
It is now my firm opinion that the whole world has gone stark raving mad, and that the Scientific establishment has been so hopelessly corrupted by special interests, Government institutional and research funding and the new philosophy of post-normality, that it has regressed to a kind-of pre-enlightenment age.
It is my firm belief that the UN, a body that has a Human right commission chaired by Libya, should not be given any power over anything whatsoever.
One has a financial interest (the businessman), the other has a political interest (the Climate Scientist - especially if he's a post-normal scientist) and his employers (most likely an academic institution) have a financial interest. It's likely that the scientist will be involved in consultancy, so he will actually have a financial interest tangentially too. Your argument, attempting as it does to attribute motive, is entirely bogus.
Sure we did. They're better than the preprocessor of course, but that isn't to say they aren't over-used in many cases. The example I gave was a good one in that templates there are used solely to generate tighter code, rather than because there is some problem that needs solving with generics. In return for the tighter code, you get an almost incomprehensible source file.
There's almost always a different way to design your hierarchy that will avoid the problem. Over the years I've come to despise the whole concept of "hierarchy" in any case, because few problems map naturally to a single solution (there's too much ambiguity). I much prefer to use encapsulation wherever possible instead. I do use inheritance of course, but mostly I inherit abstract interfaces that gradually build to a single concrete interface. Where implementation details are similar between concrete classes, instead of making one a base and deriving for the other, I will prefer a third class that contains the behaviour both will use that can be encapsulated, rather than inherited.
C++ is an obfuscationists dream, especially when people start to do clever "tricks" with templates. If you've ever peeked into the boost:: libraries, you'll see what I mean. But I don't want to do away with it because let's face it, you can do that with any language (to me Perl looks like an utter mess). If you use a good coding style (lots of whitespace) and patterns like dependency injection, smart pointers, RAII etc. it generally works well.
Am I the only one here who is starting to lament the passing of the honey-trap? I can't get laid any other way...
This rant would have been entertaining if it actually contained any substance or analysis.
Consider the Swiss study to be a `peer review' of the American one. Peer review doesn't guarantee correctness in any case, it just guarantees the paper is in agreement with the views of a group of carefully selected others.