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Comment by arein2 | Hacker News Reader

Some time ago corruption was direct. Now a lot of corruption and business is done trough "science".

If any science is related to politics or there is some business/financial incentive I just assume it's skewed.

Take for example the harvard study that is responsible for the US obesity. The study found that sugar does not make you fat, because of food conpanies.

Or the guy that discovered the ulcer cause and cure. It was ignored because the fake ulcer treatment industry was a multi billion dollar one.

The "I F***g LOVE science" guys that will beleive anything, because SCIENCE are the worst

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The “Fuck yeah SOYENCE” crowd doesn’t realize that science (as a process) can only hope to get to the truth in the asymptotic (infinite) future. The path to getting there is incredibly messy, especially because it is carried out by sacks of meat and emotions (cue: Planck’s observation that science progresses one funeral at a time).

At any finite time, it is difficult to guarantee that science has the correct answer — especially in ”complex systems” where many factors interact, including through feedback loops. The very idea of repeatable controlled experiments (at the heart of the scientific method) is fundamentally limited in its ability to address such systems. So for all practical purposes, decisions (be it individual, or policy) need to often accommodate uncertainty/incompleteness in knowledge and try to “convexify exposure” — rather than trying to bank on having the correct & complete knowledge.

I think you are being downvoted for your overloading of the word science exactly the way politics has corrupted it. Are we supposed to just start using another word?

How about we start calling it rationality? A bit more self-descriptive, and perhaps a harder to word to weigh down with political gibberish and marketing speak. Scientific Method -> Rational Method, For Science! -> For Rationality!

Science traditionally demanded speaking in clear terms, now it is all about obscuring incentives and methods in order to P-hack a conclusion.

The math and physics are exact sciences, I am assuming there is no way to fool that.

For the "non-exact" ones there is always possibility of corruption. I think the current establishment for some areas in science is politicised, and there is a system in place - you have to be published in certain prestigious publications to receive money, but if you do not follow the political status quo, everybody will cut ties with you.

I guess more transparency about data collected and videos of experiments would help, but I don't think that's a solution. This is a problem only few worry about, the system is perfectly happy the way it is.

This whole incentive - corruption relation reminds me about greek democracy: You want to chose the leader that doesn't want to be chosen, so that he would not have incentives. The athenians also chose people at random instead of elections, to minimize the chance of picking someone with special interests.

Brave soul posting this kind of truth to HN comments. But you are right, there is corruption, arrogance and ego in the science fields just the same as any things else.

Not disagreeing with you on your latter point. I think the frustration lies in part with an awareness that these problems exist, and that the system proceeds as if they don't, and the way the problems manifest in public policy-type discussions is distorted (for instance, in the US, it tends to manifest in these anti-science versus pro-science positions, as if science is nobel and pure all the way down, or fraudulent and flawed all the way down).

Maybe it's like that in every field, but it's frustrating to see documentation of the problems, know that everyone knows about them at some level, but nothing is done about them, and everyone goes on as if the problems don't exist. It's going to take a lot of massive change, like at the level of congressional intervention or something, and once it does, there won't be any restitution or anything. Everyone who benefited still benefits, there's no correction, nothing.

The change that's going to happen is loss of public trust of science, and people will start burning down 5g towers or refusing to take vaccines.

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