from Hacker News

Scientists must fight for the facts

by jkimmel on 1/25/17, 9:30 AM with 144 comments

  • by intended on 1/25/17, 1:53 PM

    Comments here are still talking about defending facts. This is a losing argument.

    This is bread and circuses.

    Let scientists do science - comics and comedians are the weapon to reach for.

    America has lead the way for the past 4 decades in bringing the public into areas they don't have the prior knowledge to navigate.

    Anyone old enough to remember the climate change debates will remember a time when scientists didn't debate climate deniers because it gave climate deniers too much credibility!

    But what scientists didn't realize is that vested interests were setting them up.

    Cranks and fakers were nurtured and given air time by a certain news channel till they eventually the "public interest" invaded the scientific.

    At which point "science" lost. Science expected a debate, but walked into Spectacle.

    Trump showed that with Twitter and crap you can cross the very low threshold required to beat the current crop of presidential candidates.

    This is entertainment. If you don't treat it as such you lose space to the person who generates better TRPs.

  • by lhnz on 1/25/17, 11:17 AM

      > Within two days of Trump assuming power, White House
  > officials have found themselves embroiled in a
  > scandal over “alternative facts”.
    Those weren't alternative facts, those were lies.

    Actual alternative facts do exist because we often select the facts we represent based on our tribal affiliations.

    I won't be able to reclaim the term now that is smeared. But I wish people could point out when somebody is lying (or misleading) without trying to smear the existence of counterzeitgeist truth.

    Aside: why didn't anybody in the Trump administration respond by pointing out that Washington, D.C. is majority democrat, and that Bush's inauguration might have been a better comparison? Quite embarrassing that they would lie when deflating the authority of the comparison would have probably been more effective...

  • by anon1253 on 1/25/17, 11:56 AM

    This isn't about facts. Science is rarely about facts. Empirical science is and cannot be about proofs. Proofs and facts are for the abstract, the ideal, left to philosophers, logicians, and occasionally mathematicians and computer scientists. No, this is about something much more sinister: denying the ability to reason about and disseminate observations. All empirical science can do is look at things, do experiments and come up with logically consistent and plausible theories or hypotheses that explain them. The value is rarely in the data: the value is in the reasoning around it. Observing, for example, that beaks in birds change depending on the environment is rarely interesting. The interesting bit is reasoning that traits get passed down to offspring in a survival of the fittest scheme. Similarly, observing that combustion engines release CO2, and there is more of it than before we had them … not particularly interesting. The interesting bit is that it acts as insulation to sunlight and that a lot of ecological and climate systems act as non-linear under the influence of temperature and CO2.

    Do I say this to downplay empirical science? On the contrary. However, the focus on facts is I think more harmful than it might appear in trying to protect our scientific legacy. Dump every table ever recorded on the internet as a torrent, and very little useful things will come from it. It's protecting the institutions and freedom to reason about, and talk about, those findings that is important; to be able to openly challenge them, and rigorously come up with "best explanations" (a human intellectual construct, not fact, not truth).

    Gag orders to silence academic findings, that is problematic. More so than trying to "protect" facts-of-the-matter as if they are somehow the pinnacle of human intellect.

    Corollary this is also why I always find "humanities are not science" or "this is not Nature worthy"-statements rather annoying. It's a no-true Scotchman fallacy. Science is more than stamp collection, it's more than peer-review, it's more than running elaborate statistical tests on randomized experiments: it's the collective human endeavor to understand the universe and ourselves, it's a mindset. A mindset that can, and should be, in constant flux as our understanding progresses (and sometimes regresses).

  • by cderwin on 1/25/17, 11:39 AM

    I think of late one of the problems is that there is a certain dogma within political circles and the media that the body of facts produced by scientists is absolute and irrefutable, when the truth is somewhat the opposite: the body of knowledge produced by science is constantly changing, individual results are continually reevaluated, and theories are compared against each other until there is a preponderance of evidence in favor of one over the others.

    I don't want to get too political, but one can't help but wonder if the way science has been talked about in the media has led to a skepticism of academia to an unhealthy degree.

  • by grabcocque on 1/25/17, 11:10 AM

    Facts are weird beasts. We are terrible at recognising facts, for a number of reasons. For a start people tend to confuse them with truth.

    A fact is generally considered to be a proposition that is true. The problem is, science doesn't deal in what's true. Science deals in what's falsifiable.

    Most things that are believed to be true aren't falsifiable, and therefore fall into the epistemologically nebulous category of "things which are not yet false". I'd suggest that trying to build a positivist bastion of truth on such shifting epistemological sands is doomed to fail.

  • by nonbel on 1/25/17, 2:49 PM

    I don't think it is as easy to identify "facts" as this article implies. For example, which of the following statements are factual:

    1) The effective radiating temperature of the earth, T_e, is determined by the need for infrared emission from the planet to balance absorbed solar radiation:

      pi*R^2(1-A)*S_0 = 4*pi*R^2*sigma*T_e^4
    where R is the radius of the earth, A the albedo of the earth, S_0 the flux of solar radiation, and sigma the Stefan-Boltzmann constant.

    2) Rearranged, this equation gives:

      T_e = [S_0*(1-A)/(4*sigma)]^0.25
    3) For A - 0.3 and So = 1367 watts per square meter, this yields T_e ~ 255 K.

    4) The mean surface temperature is T_s ~ 288 K.

    5) The excess, T_s - T_e, is the greenhouse effect of gases and clouds

  • by tomkinstinch on 1/25/17, 2:34 PM

  • by RcouF1uZ4gsC on 1/25/17, 5:53 PM

    Maybe scientists should first set their own house in order.

    * Reproducibility crisis - http://www.nature.com/news/1-500-scientists-lift-the-lid-on-...

    * P-hacking http://www.nature.com/news/scientific-method-statistical-err...

    * Prominent scientists criticizing those who find math errors in their works http://www.vox.com/science-and-health/2016/9/30/13077658/sta... (There are few facts more basic than math, and one of the scientists actually used the words "methodologic terrorism" to describe this effort)

    * Not publishing raw data so others can analyze it http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/neuroskeptic/2016/08/16/sc...

    These issues, especially the last two make it seem that a lot of scientists are not fighting for the facts, but for their own academic position.

  • by imh on 1/25/17, 4:56 PM

    People communicating scientific knowledge to the general public need to become more responsible in talking about uncertainty. Scientists in certain fields need to as well. When people hear a bunch of scientific facts that later turn out to be false, they will stop believing the experts. This happens all the time with nutrition and health "facts." Today drinking red wine is good for you and next decade it's bad for you. Hear that enough and you stop trusting nutrition studies. Same with anything coming out of the fields with reproducibility crises. You stop trusting them. If we properly communicated the limits of and uncertainty around these ideas, people wouldn't say we're crying wolf. If we had different layman's language to denote a theory of bunk and the theory of evolution, people wouldn't say "but it's just a theory," and experts might regain trust. If people stop presenting "X affects Y in certain conditions for mice, maybe" as "X affects Y for all humans, definitely" then lay people might stop associating that level of trust to things like climate change. At the very least, it becomes more defensible.

  • by crawfordcomeaux on 1/25/17, 5:37 PM

    The problem isn't people holding these anti-science beliefs.

    It's people holding these beliefs receiving human connection in the context of these beliefs primarily from people who share the same beliefs! We use differing beliefs as a reason to disconnect & disassociate, which is EXACTLY what got us Trump in the first place.

    Science knows this! We have to temporarily affirm their worldview before challenging specific pieces of it. The more foundational the belief, the deeper the connection needs to be.

    My hypothesis: we need to collectively learn nonviolent communication in order to hear the right on an emotional level. By connecting with them over all their deep-seated fears & beliefs, we can then more easily stay changing them.

  • by juskrey on 1/25/17, 11:11 AM

    Scientists must have their skin in the game - so the facts will fight for themselves.

  • by jbmorgado on 1/25/17, 7:41 PM

    I disagree with this premise.

    A scientist job is to present the facts. It's the media, and ultimately the citizen job to fight for them.

  • by Tloewald on 1/25/17, 7:08 PM

    Using the word "unconventional" instead of a more accurate word such as "counterfactual" or "intentionally ignorant" is a poor start.

  • by lstroud on 1/25/17, 2:00 PM

    Selective outrage. Where has this been when scientists were quoting pharmaceutical jobs because they were being asked to omit facts?

  • by lutusp on 1/25/17, 10:46 AM

    Has anyone else noticed the disturbing parallel between Trump's "Alternative facts" and the famous Nixon-era press office claim that "Previous statements are inoperative"?

  • by msier79 on 1/25/17, 3:33 PM

    Seems like Python could use more TCL influence in regards to "split" and other nuances, from your description.

  • by return0 on 1/25/17, 11:12 AM

    This kind of article does not belong to Nature. It talks about what the media said as evidence , undefined alternative facts, how "Rejecting mainstream science has become a theme for Trump", yet the only fact presented is that tillerson acknowledged climate change. Other than the fair criticism of pushing fossil fuels, it's a purely political fluff article. Even editorials should be based on facts in Nature.