Scientism and Critiques of Science

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Mr. Perfect
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Scientism and Critiques of Science

Post by Mr. Perfect »

Trust the scientific method. "Scientific consensus" is anti-science. Only repeatable, repeated, verifiable laboratory results mean anything.

http://theweek.com/articles/618141/big-science-broken
Science is broken.

That's the thesis of a must-read article in First Things magazine, in which William A. Wilson accumulates evidence that a lot of published research is false. But that's not even the worst part.

Advocates of the existing scientific research paradigm usually smugly declare that while some published conclusions are surely false, the scientific method has "self-correcting mechanisms" that ensure that, eventually, the truth will prevail. Unfortunately for all of us, Wilson makes a convincing argument that those self-correcting mechanisms are broken.
Man, where have we heard that before.
For starters, there's a "replication crisis" in science. This is particularly true in the field of experimental psychology, where far too many prestigious psychology studies simply can't be reliably replicated. But it's not just psychology. In 2011, the pharmaceutical company Bayer looked at 67 blockbuster drug discovery research findings published in prestigious journals, and found that three-fourths of them weren't right. Another study of cancer research found that only 11 percent of preclinical cancer research could be reproduced. Even in physics, supposedly the hardest and most reliable of all sciences, Wilson points out that "two of the most vaunted physics results of the past few years — the announced discovery of both cosmic inflation and gravitational waves at the BICEP2 experiment in Antarctica, and the supposed discovery of superluminal neutrinos at the Swiss-Italian border — have now been retracted, with far less fanfare than when they were first published."

What explains this? In some cases, human error. Much of the research world exploded in rage and mockery when it was found out that a highly popularized finding by the economists Ken Rogoff and Carmen Reinhardt linking higher public debt to lower growth was due to an Excel error. Steven Levitt, of Freakonomics fame, largely built his career on a paper arguing that abortion led to lower crime rates 20 years later because the aborted babies were disproportionately future criminals. Two economists went through the painstaking work of recoding Levitt's statistical analysis — and found a basic arithmetic error.

Then there is outright fraud. In a 2011 survey of 2,000 research psychologists, over half admitted to selectively reporting those experiments that gave the result they were after. The survey also concluded that around 10 percent of research psychologists have engaged in outright falsification of data, and more than half have engaged in "less brazen but still fraudulent behavior such as reporting that a result was statistically significant when it was not, or deciding between two different data analysis techniques after looking at the results of each and choosing the more favorable."

Then there's everything in between human error and outright fraud: rounding out numbers the way that looks better, checking a result less thoroughly when it comes out the way you like, and so forth.

Still, shouldn't the mechanism of independent checking and peer review mean the wheat, eventually, will be sorted from the chaff?

Well, maybe not. There's actually good reason to believe the exact opposite is happening.

The peer review process doesn't work. Most observers of science guffaw at the so-called "Sokal affair," where a physicist named Alan Sokal submitted a gibberish paper to an obscure social studies journal, which accepted it. Less famous is a similar hoodwinking of the very prestigious British Medical Journal, to which a paper with eight major errors was submitted. Not a single one of the 221 scientists who reviewed the paper caught all the errors in it, and only 30 percent of reviewers recommended that the paper be rejected. Amazingly, the reviewers who were warned that they were in a study and that the paper might have problems with it found no more flaws than the ones who were in the dark.

This is serious. In the preclinical cancer study mentioned above, the authors note that "some non-reproducible preclinical papers had spawned an entire field, with hundreds of secondary publications that expanded on elements of the original observation, but did not actually seek to confirm or falsify its fundamental basis."

This gets into the question of the sociology of science. It's a familiar bromide that "science advances one funeral at a time." The greatest scientific pioneers were mavericks and weirdos. Most valuable scientific work is done by youngsters. Older scientists are more likely to be invested, both emotionally and from a career and prestige perspective, in the regnant paradigm, even though the spirit of science is the challenge of regnant paradigms.

Why, then, is our scientific process so structured as to reward the old and the prestigious? Government funding bodies and peer review bodies are inevitably staffed by the most hallowed (read: out of touch) practitioners in the field. The tenure process ensures that in order to further their careers, the youngest scientists in a given department must kowtow to their elders' theories or run a significant professional risk. Peer review isn't any good at keeping flawed studies out of major papers, but it can be deadly efficient at silencing heretical views.

All of this suggests that the current system isn't just showing cracks, but is actually broken, and in need of major reform. There is very good reason to believe that much scientific research published today is false, there is no good way to sort the wheat from the chaff, and, most importantly, that the way the system is designed ensures that this will continue being the case.

As Wilson writes:

Even if self-correction does occur and theories move strictly along a lifecycle from less to more accurate, what if the unremitting flood of new, mostly false, results pours in faster? Too fast for the sclerotic, compromised truth-discerning mechanisms of science to operate? The result could be a growing body of true theories completely overwhelmed by an ever-larger thicket of baseless theories, such that the proportion of true scientific beliefs shrinks even while the absolute number of them continues to rise. Borges' Library of Babel contained every true book that could ever be written, but it was useless because it also contained every false book, and both true and false were lost within an ocean of nonsense. [First Things]

This is a big problem, one that can't be solved with a column. But the first step is admitting you have a problem.

Science, at heart an enterprise for mavericks, has become an enterprise for careerists. It's time to flip the career track for science on its head. Instead of waiting until someone's best years are behind her to award her academic freedom and prestige, abolish the PhD and grant fellowships to the best 22-year-olds, giving them the biggest budgets and the most freedoms for the first five or 10 years of their careers. Then, with only few exceptions, shift them away from research to teaching or some other harmless activity. Only then can we begin to fix Big Science.
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Re: Scientific Regress

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Re: Scientific Regress

Post by Zack Morris »

A bunch of nonsense. I like how the article starts off with an alleged replication crisis which was in the first place discovered using the "broken" scientific method the author disparages, and the idea of which itself has come under scrutiny. People are pissed off that everyone who has grappled with the climate data and models -- even noted former skeptics -- have come away admitting that they are the best we have, and that no alternative hypotheses have emerged. Sour grapes from the peanut gallery.

Science and math are progressing full steam ahead. Within a few decades, we'll have AIs doing all the new science anyway, so any concerns about methodology are already obsolete ;)
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Re: Scientific Regress

Post by noddy »

does appear to be a bit of strawman bashing going on, im not sure the self correcting rhetoric ever claimed to be instantaneous realtime perfection - its like attacking capitalism because the market self correction has simmilar delays in it.

lots of uni's are hotbeds of petty politics and ideological retardation, science itself will chug along and some other group will discover the failings of the initial research.
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Re: Scientific Regress

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noddy wrote:does appear to be a bit of strawman bashing going on, im not sure the self correcting rhetoric ever claimed to be instantaneous realtime perfection - its like attacking capitalism because the market self correction has simmilar delays in it.
A someone all too familiar with what goes on inside the sausage factory, I have to reluctantly agree that most of the article is right on the mark.

The one point of contention is the criticism of "the supposed discovery of superluminal neutrinos at the Swiss-Italian border". A bit unfair, as the OPERA experiment was upfront, when they published that this result, that they suspected that it was due to some systematic error, as was later confirmed. The team was puzzled and looking for ideas at to the possible source(s) of systematic error. Of course, if this result turned out to be physical . . .

On the other hand, the BICEP2 experiment rushed to publish without sweating sufficiently about their systematic errors and deserve a fair bit of criticism, as do the theoreticians who so uncritically promoted the claims.

The problem of lack of replication and inability to replicate when attempted is most acute in the biological sciences. The problem is that societies devote billions to such research and if most of it is bogus, due to poor experimental design, poor data statistical data analysis, and/or outright fraud, then this is an enormous misallocation of resources.

The Cult of Scientism is very real as our fellow poster above so eloquently demonstrates.
noddy wrote:lots of uni's are hotbeds of petty politics and ideological retardation, science itself will chug along and some other group will discover the failings of the initial research.
What uni's are now first and foremost are self-serving businesses.

The main professional scientific society of which I am a member seems disproportionately concerned with climate, women's, and LGBT issue in it's other than scientific journal publications.

Still, I would like to think that science will continue to "chug along" rather than descend into nonproductive empty ceremony.
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Re: Scientific Regress

Post by Simple Minded »

Typhoon wrote:

The Cult of Scientism is very real as our fellow poster above so eloquently demonstrates.
Beautifully & sensitively stated.

Typhoon wrote:

The main professional scientific society of which I am a member seems disproportionately concerned with climate, women's, and LGBT issue in it's other than scientific journal publications.
old quote: "Given the choice between publishing and perishing, most experts choose wrong."
Typhoon wrote:
Still, I would like to think that science will continue to "chug along" rather than descend into nonproductive empty ceremony.
Of course it will. It is a self-correcting methodology. Stupid may be popular (and profitable) in the short run, but the long run it is painful enough to wear thin and encourage self-correction.
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Scientism

Post by Mr. Perfect »

In case there hasn't been a thread, and I am putting in the philosophy section, there needs to be so here goes.

Hard to find a greater example of this toxicity.

sClOP52DAig

Here are 2 morons. First, the moron Bill Maher. Bill Maher probably can't do algebra, can't tell a periodic table upside down or right side up, and yet he is creating an association with something that is far beyond his intellect and then trying to establish a superiority based on his association rather than his ability. Then, he creates an "other" that is a nemesis to society because they don't accept his postulate which he can't even articulate, and creates strawmen and false characterizations. Further, he begins to explain his religious views and is constantly corrected by his superior. Another deeply troubling doctrine in the Maher religion is his idea that all of human progress is due to a handful of people from his cult. Who he has never met, never met him, he doesn't name and probably don't agree with him about much. And again, if you go against the religion of Maher you are a threat to humanity.

De Grasse Tyson is supposedly a highly credentialed dude who somehow got famous but mouths off regularly about stuff he has no idea about and has not problem using his perceived authority to give his personal opinions validity. We will be covering his moronity into the future.

These people are dangerous to humanity.
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Re: Scientism

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So scientism is a word I got from Nonc Hilaire and I don't know the source, but it works for me. Scientism I think is a belief system that turns science into a Complete Theory philosophy, that is that every aspect of human life and be benefitted from science, or all answers of life can be found in science.

Is this valid? The answer is no.

To explore this issue, we must first define what a scientist is.

What is a scientist? And, what is science? We will start with the former.

Wikipedia has a startlingly good answer.
A scientist is a person engaging in a systematic activity to acquire knowledge that describes and predicts the natural world. In a more restricted sense, a scientist may refer to an individual who uses the scientific method.
This is fantastic, I can't find a flaw with it. So you may notice there are multiple answers, we'll focus on three 1) Possesses scientific knowledge, 2) looking for scientific knowledge and 3) follows the scientific method.

I'm happy with this so far. Maher meets none of these criteria, but is a high priest of scientism. So you have a non scientist who can rise in the Scientism priesthood. De Grasse Tyson has some scientific knowledge, astronomer of some sort, so the answer is does he follow the scientific method. The answer we will discover is no, and in fact he often uses his authority to make pronouncements and not the scientific method.
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Re: Scientism

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So why is scientism dangerous. Simply put, the priesthood is made up of men, and men make mistakes. Science is infallible, men desire to be infallible and be seen as infallible, and so the temptation is enormous to become a priest of science where you can make claims on infallibility.

These can be the results.

LJDgVlv55Uw

Scientism can produce lethal results.

3FmEjDaWqA4

It dehumanizes

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Re: Scientism

Post by Nonc Hilaire »

My original scientism thread here is over three years old. A lot of overt evidence for scientism has accumulated in that time, so a new thread is worthwhile. So much popular science is now propaganda, and any critical thinking in the public sphere about about science is either quickly disparaged by the press as conspiracy theory or ignored.

viewtopic.php?f=5&t=2814&hilit=Scientism

The original Atlantic article in the first post is long, but still required reading.
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Re: Scientism

Post by Nonc Hilaire »

Mr. Perfect wrote:So scientism is a word I got from Nonc Hilaire and I don't know the source, but it works for me. Scientism I think is a belief system that turns science into a Complete Theory philosophy, that is that every aspect of human life and be benefitted from science, or all answers of life can be found in science.

Is this valid? The answer is no.

To explore this issue, we must first define what a scientist is.

What is a scientist? And, what is science? We will start with the former.

Wikipedia has a startlingly good answer.
A scientist is a person engaging in a systematic activity to acquire knowledge that describes and predicts the natural world. In a more restricted sense, a scientist may refer to an individual who uses the scientific method.
This is fantastic, I can't find a flaw with it. So you may notice there are multiple answers, we'll focus on three 1) Possesses scientific knowledge, 2) looking for scientific knowledge and 3) follows the scientific method.

I'm happy with this so far. Maher meets none of these criteria, but is a high priest of scientism. So you have a non scientist who can rise in the Scientism priesthood. De Grasse Tyson has some scientific knowledge, astronomer of some sort, so the answer is does he follow the scientific method. The answer we will discover is no, and in fact he often uses his authority to make pronouncements and not the scientific method.
One aspect of scientism is that a scientist is assumed to be an expert in anything scientific, when in reality scientists know more about increasingly minute details of their particular field and relatively little about other fields.

In the AGW question meteorologists, palentologists, oceanographers, astrophysicists, geologists and biologists all have an extensive and relevant scientific corpus. Scientism ignores all but the handful of meteorologists funded by the pro-AGW gatekeepers in government funded academia and the peer-review research cartel.
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Re: Scientism

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Indeed I thought there had been a thread but I didn't look hard enough for it. Apologies.
Nonc Hilaire wrote: One aspect of scientism is that a scientist is assumed to be an expert in anything scientific, when in reality scientists know more about increasingly minute details of their particular field and relatively little about other fields.

In the AGW question meteorologists, palentologists, oceanographers, astrophysicists, geologists and biologists all have an extensive and relevant scientific corpus. Scientism ignores all but the handful of meteorologists funded by the pro-AGW gatekeepers in government funded academia and the peer-review research cartel.
Game set match.

Scientism is a real threat to humanity. As such, I will be on the job and we will fight back in this place and other places.
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Re: Scientism

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Something Mr. P, that might intrigue you:

http://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php? ... nt=reviews
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Re: Scientism

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Something that is galling beyond words is the self praise of the Harvard Democrat world. The book reviews are puke worthy.

Other than that, same as always, you can go to any church you want or none at all.
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Re: Scientism

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We have a whole channel dedicated to scientism.

eZSE68WlbMw
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Re: Scientism

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_kxKTX_GH4k
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Re: Scientific Regress

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Bump
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Re: Scientism

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This is one of the better delineations between various types of experts and expertise of which scientism, so-called, and science are a subset.

Quillette | The limits of expertise
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Re: Scientific Regress

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One should not confuse a consensus of scientific opinion with a consensus of scientific evidence/data.
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Re: Scientism

Post by Simple Minded »

Typhoon wrote:This is one of the better delineations between various types of experts and expertise of which scientism, so-called, and science are a subset.

Quillette | The limits of expertise
Damn shame, especially in light of the fact that modern tech allows all of us to be experts after a few minutes of Googling a subject.

It is always, well usually, best to consult other experts prior to expressing one's expertise publicly.

Devaluation of the opinion of experts occurred after everyone became one? Kinda like fake gold coins or art forgeries.

Probably no connection there.....
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Re: Scientism

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Typhoon wrote:This is one of the better delineations between various types of experts and expertise of which scientism, so-called, and science are a subset.

Quillette | The limits of expertise
This is only one aspect of scientism. Not discussed are the differences between world science and science in the US.

Funding for all science in the US must go through university and journal gatekeepers, who ensure that for most disciplines only politically and commercially supported hypotheses are funded and often the results altered to supply the desired outcomes. Anecdotal evidence, but much of the research I find interesting comes from Spain and Denmark.

Since the death of Carl Sagan, the media has tried to replace him as high priest of Scientism with Bill Nye, Michio Kaku, and NGT. But these are figureheads. The eminence grice in the US are the Deep State bureaucrats in the agencies, universities and industries.
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Re: Scientism

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It's not such a far drop from being the wielder of the sole valid methodology to being the sole mind when you think of it. This gets to be a real problem when considering viewpoints philosophical and theological:
Observing that the bodies of other human beings behave as my body does in similar circumstances, I can infer that the mental life and series of mental events that accompany my bodily behavior are also present in the case of others. Thus, for example, when I see a problem that I am trying unsuccessfully to solve, I feel myself becoming frustrated and observe myself acting in a particular way. In the case of another, I observe only the first and last terms of this three-term sequence and, on this basis, I infer that the "hidden" middle term, the feeling of frustration, has also occurred.

There are, however, fundamental difficulties with the argument from analogy. First, if one accepts the Cartesian account of consciousness, one must, in all consistency, accept its implications. One of these implications, as we have seen above, is that there is no logically necessary connection between the concepts of "mind" and "body;" my mind may be lodged in my body now, but this is a matter of sheer contingency. Mind need not become located in body. Its nature will not be affected in any way by the death of this body and there is no reason in principle why it should not have been located in a body radically different from a human one. By exactly the same token, any correlation that exists between bodily behavior and mental states must also be entirely contingent; there can be no conceptual connections between the contents of a mind at a given time and the nature and/or behavior of the body in which it is located at that time.
https://www.iep.utm.edu/solipsis/
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Re: Scientism

Post by Simple Minded »

Miss_Faucie_Fishtits wrote:It's not such a far drop from being the wielder of the sole valid methodology to being the sole mind when you think of it. This gets to be a real problem when considering viewpoints philosophical and theological:
Observing that the bodies of other human beings behave as my body does in similar circumstances, I can infer that the mental life and series of mental events that accompany my bodily behavior are also present in the case of others. Thus, for example, when I see a problem that I am trying unsuccessfully to solve, I feel myself becoming frustrated and observe myself acting in a particular way. In the case of another, I observe only the first and last terms of this three-term sequence and, on this basis, I infer that the "hidden" middle term, the feeling of frustration, has also occurred.

There are, however, fundamental difficulties with the argument from analogy. First, if one accepts the Cartesian account of consciousness, one must, in all consistency, accept its implications. One of these implications, as we have seen above, is that there is no logically necessary connection between the concepts of "mind" and "body;" my mind may be lodged in my body now, but this is a matter of sheer contingency. Mind need not become located in body. Its nature will not be affected in any way by the death of this body and there is no reason in principle why it should not have been located in a body radically different from a human one. By exactly the same token, any correlation that exists between bodily behavior and mental states must also be entirely contingent; there can be no conceptual connections between the contents of a mind at a given time and the nature and/or behavior of the body in which it is located at that time.
https://www.iep.utm.edu/solipsis/
the author of this article reminds of yesterday. I was out running the dogs. Their usual 2 hour Wednesday romp of wrestling, running, jumping, swimming, fetching, over/under/around any trees/logs/rocks they encounter, rolling in any poop they can find etc. I walk/work 2 miles, they cover 30+ miles. Dog-essence at it's finest. The neighbors hunting dog was out. It is a Coon hound, born to run/hunt/bark simultaneously and continually. Spends 99% of it's life in a cage, only gets out to hunt with the pack.

My pack wasn't hunting, they were playing. the Coon hound does know what playing is. It only knows that it should run with the pack and bark. So it barked continually for no reason, other than genetic programming.

Intellectuals are like Coon hounds. Occassionally, they slip out of their academic cages and discover they have no purpose.... So they have to bark. Even if they have no reason to bark.

Barking feels good. Maybe that is where the expression "barking mad" comes from.

Arf! Arf! Arf! Arf! Arf! Arf!
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Re: Scientism

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Good stuff.
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Re: Scientism

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Nonc Hilaire wrote:
Typhoon wrote:This is one of the better delineations between various types of experts and expertise of which scientism, so-called, and science are a subset.

Quillette | The limits of expertise
This is only one aspect of scientism. Not discussed are the differences between world science and science in the US.

Funding for all science in the US must go through university and journal gatekeepers, who ensure that for most disciplines only politically and commercially supported hypotheses are funded and often the results altered to supply the desired outcomes.
Public funding agencies and publication in journals is the current model for the industrialized nations including the US, the EU, Japan, and China.

The rule of thumb is the more a field has impact on current public policy, the higher the probability of the gates being closed to non-consensus opinions.

A lot of pure research is still done in the US and elsewhere.

The US is notable is that there is a significant amount of private philanthropic funding of pure scientific research:

Philanthropic Funding Makes Waves in Basic Science
Nonc Hilaire wrote:Since the death of Carl Sagan, the media has tried to replace him as high priest of Scientism with Bill Nye, Michio Kaku, and NGT. But these are figureheads. The eminence grice in the US are the Deep State bureaucrats in the agencies, universities and industries.
Carl Sagan was a talented explainer of science. The others you mention, not so much.

Not everything is a conspiracy. Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.
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