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Comment by jclulow | Hacker News Reader

Who can say? Consider, though, that just because someone writes an open letter and resigns, doesn't necessarily make them right -- certainly, at minimum, it does nothing to cement them as somehow free from their own agenda or biases.

Neither, then, does the ostensibly irony free use of terms like "wokeness", or the placement of "lived experience" in scare quotes, do anything to bolster a putatively data-driven perspective hounded by some opposing team.

Whole fields of medical and psychological science have changed over just the course of my lifetime. I expect they will continue to change to reflect the complex needs of our society, and based on new understanding we continue to uncover. This letter is not especially moving.

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> Whole fields of medical and psychological science have changed over just the course of my lifetime. I expect they will continue to change to reflect the complex needs of our society, and based on new understanding we continue to uncover.

Ok, but that’s not the scientific method. The actual scientific method should be free of all political and societal needs. It is based on reproducable results. It doesn’t care if you’re black, white, trans, bi, or toxically masculine. It only cares about actual facts.

That's really a narrow-minded view on the scientific method. While it's true that the process of carrying out an experiment should (at least in theory) be free of human biases, the reality is that bias pervades science just as much as any human endeavour.

Even if you manage to completely get rid of biases in the actual experiment, what we choose to study, how the study is structured, and how we interpret the results will be subject to our biases. Science doesn't "care if you're black, white, trans, bi, or toxically masculine" because it doesn't "care" about anything. It's the fallible humans carrying out science that choose what to care about and investigate.

Very odd (or telling, at least) that this is getting downvoted. Of course there are all sorts of forces at play on what gets studied, what gets published once it’s studied, and what gets shared once it’s published. The scientific method has many tools to mitigate biases within itself/its practitioners. But as you say, the scientific method is a very, very small part of an enormous scientific apparatus that doesn’t (yet) have similar tools for mitigating these forces in itself.

A trivial example: It’s hard for non-native English speakers to get published in the world’s premiere journals because, well duh, they publish in English. Are we to conclude the scientific method can only be carried out to Nature’s standards in English? Obviously not.

The scientific method is about disproving hypotheses.

There is tons of ugliness in that process, going back well before our time (e.g. Galileo).

Phrased differently, the scientific process is about the multi-generational accumulation of empirical mastery. The details by which humans have achieved mastery is a complicated story.

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