Scientifical accuracy not actually that high?

[Sauron]

Originally Posted by Crumb

Someone needs to start publishing the Journal of Negative Results.

No.

[Qingdai]

YES.

I really would like to publish something like this, but was saddened that there are already examples.

My father had a friend who never graduated from school because they didn't accept thesis that had a negative result.
This person spent an entire summer in the Salten Sea (man made thing) cutting up fish to see what parasites they had. They had none, he couldn't turn in his thesis because of this, but that the fish in the Salten Sea didn't have parasites was interesting in it's own right, yes?

[Dingfod]

I'm still waiting on the Follow Up television channel, where they would follow-up on all the news stories to tell us whatever happened after the news media quit covering the stories.

[fragment]

Originally Posted by lisarea

The funny thing is that I was actually thinking of taxonomies when I said that. Pretty much any academic field has its own taxonomies, and any (descriptive) taxonomy is subject to definitional fine-tuning and testing.

So identifying something as a pastoral elegy, a verbal phrase, an electron, a polymer, an animal, a hormone, an interpretive dance, a synthetic flavoring, a bird or a reptile is always dependent on some taxonomy or another, whether the taxonomy is prescriptive or descriptive.

Taxonomy is really good to throw up in philsci, as it often breaks simplistic notions of what is science, to the extent that it's been dismissed as not-science altogether ("stamp-collecting").

NOOOOO! I'm trying to distinguish between disciplines vs. phenomena, or something like that. So phenomena would be just things the way they are, and a discipline would be a particular type of study of a defined subset of phenomena. Physics itself isn't 'science.' The study of physics (usually) is.

I'm going to go all pomo and problematise the hegemonic assertion that the significand (the phenomena under study) can be fully distinguished from the paradigm of the significatrices (the disciplines doing the studying).

Only being half tongue-in-cheek there.

I think it's problematic not to, not because I think it's necessarily inaccurate as a characterization, but because, like I said, just the word 'science' seems to create a sense of false authority, and because laying some kind of science vs. not science framework on top of entire fields of knowledge contributes to some too broadly dismissive attitudes toward critics.

Y'know, for some time I had some antipathy towards science for something like that. But I came to look at that as not a necessary part of science, and more of a broader societal problem about attitudes towards and portrayal of science.

I have at times wished people would stop getting het up about saying what is and isn't science and just look at whether the reasoning makes sense or the observations were accurate. Too many internet arguments have foundered on cries of "Not Science!" & "Is too!" It's useful to have a common ground of words and their references, but the semantics shouldn't become a proxy battleground for disagreements over the things themselves.

Anyways, these days, I see the clout of "science" as an authority in society as waning, and also as having been co-opted. And I started writing why but kept not getting anywhere so it's a whole other post that I'll probably never make.

[lisarea]

Originally Posted by fragment

I'm going to go all pomo and problematise the hegemonic assertion that the significand (the phenomena under study) can be fully distinguished from the paradigm of the significatrices (the disciplines doing the studying).

Only being half tongue-in-cheek there.

brandonbird_noam.jpg

Y'know, for some time I had some antipathy towards science for something like that. But I came to look at that as not a necessary part of science, and more of a broader societal problem about attitudes towards and portrayal of science.

I have at times wished people would stop getting het up about saying what is and isn't science and just look at whether the reasoning makes sense or the observations were accurate. Too many internet arguments have foundered on cries of "Not Science!" & "Is too!" It's useful to have a common ground of words and their references, but the semantics shouldn't become a proxy battleground for disagreements over the things themselves.

Anyways, these days, I see the clout of "science" as an authority in society as waning, and also as having been co-opted. And I started writing why but kept not getting anywhere so it's a whole other post that I'll probably never make.

I'd be obliged if you did, because I would like to subscribe to your newsletter.

And I'm having the same thing, where I'm sort of going around in circles and not being able to come up with a cohesive something about that.

All I gots is a jokey picture about the signifier and signified so far.

[fragment]

Originally Posted by lisarea

I'd be obliged if you did, because I would like to subscribe to your newsletter.

Thanks, but I dunno, it's too unformed and gets on to ground where I'm talking out of my ass too much. I started off thinking that anti-science seems to be on the rise, but then I realised this often happens by nonsensical stuff posing as science, e.g. intelligent design, assorted climate crackpots, HIV denial. So while the influence of quality science on public opinion and policy seems to be going down, the strength of the "science" brand is still pretty big. (And yes, I didn't even express this thought without resorting to the science/non-science distinction thingy you criticise).

And then I got thinking about the falling apart of the Roman empire, as one does, and successor states with their claims to the heritage of Rome and so on.

So you'll have to make the rest up yourself. Let me know what you come up with.

[Ensign Steve]

Originally Posted by lisarea

In conclusion, scientists are, effectively, just extremely weak, limited purpose leprechauns.

YOINK!

[The Lone Ranger]

As an aside, I'd like to point out that modern taxonomists most-assuredly do generate and test hypotheses. I've often heard people say that [biological] taxonomy is just so much "stamp-collecting," but that's only said by people who don't know what modern taxonomists actually do.

In the past, taxonomy really was more or less just "stamp-collecting." Especially before Darwin. And even today, taxonomy is, to say the least, an unglamorous and often-overlooked field of biology. But it's not even remotely true that modern taxonomists don't generate and test hypotheses regarding how organisms are related.

Indeed, it's precisely because taxonomists are constantly testing and refining our understanding of how organisms are related that we have to keep reevaluating our understanding in such matters. For example, it wasn't that long ago that it was generally assumed that fungi and plants are closely related, but in fact, the evidence has shown quite conclusively that fungi are actually much more closely related to animals than they are to plants.

That's on a macro scale. On a micro scale, we frequently have to re-name individual species as we learn more about different species are related. This can be frustrating when you've learned a species' name only for someone to come along and show that it should be considered as a member of a different species -- and maybe even a different genus.

I hear that sort of thing fairly often: "Why can't you biologists keep the names constant?" The answer is: "Because the whole point of biological classification is to show how organisms are related; as we learn more about evolutionary relationships, we must adjust our classification schemes accordingly."


That having been said, there are a lot of problems involved when it comes to classifying organisms -- particularly extinct organisms. And by no means is it always a cut-and-dried case regarding how a given organism should be classified. Far from it. That, of course, is because the evolutionary process does not sort organisms into nice, neat boxes. There's necessarily an awful lot of gray area involved. And that gets into the "lumpers vs. splitters" debate in taxonomy, but that's a discussion for another time.

[Dragar]

And of course, stamp collecting done well is very scientific, and an important part of a scientific study. Observations and classifications are important. They're not glamorous or exciting or even enlightening on their own, but they're part of science.

[LadyShea]

Gah! Hopefully, even with the problems, scientists are still doing actual science, otherwise real science that has been actually done with some kind of methodology or real science will get drowned out by the quacks and frauds.

Because the lunatics are doing shit like finding numbers of things and graphing them against some other numbers, concluding correlations and getting published.

[JoeP]

Originally Posted by Dragar

Another problem with negative results that are never published: statistically, given enough studies that should produce a negative result, one will spuriously yield a positive result. And that will get published.

It's particularly pronounced in the pharmacology industry (where I currently work). Industry has tried to reproduce a lot of results academics have published. The success rate is well under 30%.

What is the response of the pharmacology industry to academic results that are widely published but can't be reproduced?
a) Sensibly redirect investment to other areas that can be reproduced?
Or b) invest heavily in persuading GPs, retailers, and the public that the results are sound and important, and into further suppression of negative results and challenges if any accidentally get through?

I'm not thinking so much of scheduled drugs that have already gone through years of investment - which they want to protect at any cost - but areas more like the "health" food and supplements industry. Which isn't pharmacology I suppose.

[JoeP]

Originally Posted by Crumb

Someone needs to start publishing the Journal of Negative Results.

Motto: Think what you like, and say what you think.

[LadyShea]

Originally Posted by JoeP

What is the response of the pharmacology industry to academic results that are widely published but can't be reproduced?
a) Sensibly redirect investment to other areas that can be reproduced?
Or b) invest heavily in persuading GPs, retailers, and the public that the results are sound and important, and into further suppression of negative results and challenges if any accidentally get through?

I'm not thinking so much of scheduled drugs that have already gone through years of investment - which they want to protect at any cost - but areas more like the "health" food and supplements industry. Which isn't pharmacology I suppose.

The nutrition industry only needs studies for marketing purposes, so there is no pressure to replicate. Actual drugs have to show some level of efficacy for FDA approval....not so with supplements.

[Dragar]

Originally Posted by JoeP

What is the response of the pharmacology industry to academic results that are widely published but can't be reproduced?

They do their own research at a higher quality. But these results tend not to be published due to the way patent law works.

[Dragar]

Originally Posted by LadyShea

Actual drugs have to show some level of efficacy for FDA approval....not so with supplements.

I just want to point out that: most drugs need to show efficacy in early stages, and are then rigorously screened for safety in later stages. Very, very few drugs make it past this point. The few that do are often lacking in efficacy, even if they're deemed safe for the regulators.

[lisarea]

Originally Posted by fragment

Anyways, these days, I see the clout of "science" as an authority in society as waning, and also as having been co-opted. And I started writing why but kept not getting anywhere so it's a whole other post that I'll probably never make.

Yes, hello.

The thing that has been sticking in my craw--and I have tried to complain about this before I'm p. sure--is this weird sort of something like superficial cynicism that I've been seeing used a lot, combining overly simplistic interpretations of "science" with, ironimically, memeification, as a kind of appeal to ego.

So for example, look at this image search for "science memes" and look at how many of them are nothing more than a picture of someone (a famous scientist or Jesse Pinkman, usually) saying "WOO! SCIENCE IS RIGHT!" and too often, "U R WRONG." And things like this. Or this. "It’s science, my good friend. Science." Present an obviously improbable if not impossible study result, and say the word 'science' like a magical incantation that protects you from criticism or even from anyone thinking for 20 seconds about the hows of the supposed methodology or anything.

Which is mostly just stupid and largely harmless, but what about my friend's son's science teacher, who told his entire class on their first day of high school that 'scientific studies' had shown that girls are better at multitasking, and boys are better at singletasking? Not only did he take a weak and poorly sourced result as gospel because 'science,' without considering other factors that may have played into it, but as far as I'm aware, the part about boys being better at single tasks was just made up, probably as an attempt to make things come out even. And just that one dumb misunderstanding or misrepresentation or whatever it is has the potential to cause a whole lot of problems in a whole lot of ways.

It's that kind of 'SCIENCE!' attitude that creates a childishly simplistic perspective of complex systems such as human biology and behaviors, the environment, and everything else.

I finally remembered where I saw some things:

The Trap - 2 - The Lonely Robot - YouTube

That's an hourish long, but it covers pretty well some of the real life effects of an oversimplified man as machine model on public policy. As a bonus, it has a snippet of Food Network executive Marc Summers shilling for Prozac. And it is worth that hour anyway.

This pattern of 'science' as ultimate authority tends to cast less quantifiable patterns, such as economics, human behavior, etc., but also of nuanced and unknown aspects of the physical world as almost fictional or imaginary, and it's become an increasingly common tactic to use that dichotomy to cast critics of emergent technologies as dumb, superstitious hippies.

I don't know if you've seen these US commercials, but they're a pretty clear example:

Corn Refiners Association HFCS Commercial - Party - YouTube

I've been getting robocalls lately from pro-fracking groups that all have a pretty similar message, that those arguing for more studies on the effects of fracking are just alarmist and anti-science. It does strike me that this is an increasingly common tactic lately.

And it's all predicated on this popular notion that 'science' is some sort of simplistic, concrete thing. That results are predictable, so rather than conducting long-range, long-term, open ended studies of the effects of some new thing, we should be able to just identify any possible results beforehand and then test for those specific results to see if they happen. Which betrays a fundamentally childish misunderstanding of the world and how much of it we understand.

In drug research, for example, unpredicted side effects show up all the time. Nobody was expecting Viagra to produce boners or Wellbutrin to help people stop smoking. By the same token, nobody was expecting Thalidomide and Propecia to deform fetuses. Things show up unexpectedly all the time, and this notion that you can just introduce something new into a complex system and predict its effects is not just wrong and silly, but it's dangerous.

Using the buzzword "SCIENCE" and a synonym for "FACT" only encourages a sort of smug overconfidence that is a huge obstacle for people absorbing new information or understanding nuance. People make up their minds too easily and too staunchly, convinced that they've learned some objective truth, which puts them into some weird defensive mode where they become impervious to understanding anything that goes against their understanding.

The whole "Science, bitches!" position seems to rely very heavily on the notion that the things we know about the natural world ARE the natural world, and that we understand a whole lot more about the vastly complex, intertwined systems we inhabit are much, much duller and more predictable/replicable than they are.

So, in conclusion, Ramses didn't die of tuberculosis because it hadn't been invented yet when he died. (Trufax postmodern criticism is way over my head, but I swear some people have got to be pretending to miss the point.)

[BrotherMan]

[Ensign Steve]

Originally Posted by lisarea

Using the buzzword "SCIENCE" and a synonym for "FACT" only encourages a sort of smug overconfidence that is a huge obstacle for people absorbing new information or understanding nuance. People make up their minds too easily and too staunchly, convinced that they've learned some objective truth, which puts them into some weird defensive mode where they become impervious to understanding anything that goes against their understanding.

Nah, we don't know anybody like that. Do we?!

[lisarea]

I feel like that probably means it's me.

[Ari]

Too many people have this idea of science as a machine, you put x in and get y out, science! But that's more like a craft/skill than actual scientific process. One of my favorite Chem labs in highschool was when the teacher purposely gave a few groups a slightly wrong reactant for a color change reaction. When they mixed the ingredients and didn't get at all what was expected they looked completely dumbfounded and the teacher just shrugged her shoulder's and said, 'I don't know, figure it out.' Causing them to then do real science to discover what was wrong instead of following a set of instructions to a predetermined result and calling it science.

[ceptimus]

My chemistry teachers must have done that all the time: whether my team was supposed to get a clear liquid or some blue crystals or a green powder, we always seemed to end up with a test tube full of brown sludge.

The workbooks where I wrote up my experiments repeated the phrase, '...this was most likely due to impurities in the reagents.' so often that I considered inventing a special shorthand symbol for the phrase so as to save space.

[Dingfod]

I try so hard to inspire.

[JoeP]

Are you saying you're the impurities in all our reagents? There's a cool custom user title in there.

[JoeP]

Also, I've just noticed your sig. Are you trying to tell us something?

[Dingfod]

No, just cute pictures.