Comment by marginalia_nu | Hacker News Reader

Comment by marginalia_nu | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

The backlash against science is fairly reasonable, given how often science is misrepresented and how often preliminary findings are reported as facts, often in some misguided attempt to help make it easier for people to understand.

People pick up on the discrepancies, and overstating our confidence early makes it look really bad when it turns out that the results were incorrect.

The Covid pandemic is a great example of this, a lot of extremely sketchy and highly preliminary studies were misrepresented as certainties. It takes many months to produce a solid scientific study, sometimes even years. Yet here we were, a month into the pandemic inundated in studies that simply could not be solid. But they sounded scary, so they made the news. This created the appearance that science kept contradicting itself. One week the virus had a 40% mortality rate, and then next it had 0.1%. What gives, science?

The basic posture of science is "I don't know". If you gloss over that fact because it's scary when science doesn't have answers yet, then what you are communicating isn't science, it's something else, speculation, the party line, I dunno.

Overall the fundamental problem is a basic lack of faith in grown adults to make their own judgements, and a willingness to simplify the message so much that it no longer is good science. If you don't let people be adults, they will be children instead. That is exactly where we are right now.

> The backlash against science is fairly reasonable, given how often science is misrepresented and how often preliminary findings are reported as facts, often in some misguided attempt to help make it easier for people to understand.

Oh, that's nothing. You should have seen the post-WWII era, when the backlash against Science was rooted about efficient new ways of killing people and destroying the environment (both with and without the atomic bomb), and against authoritarians touting Progress while demanding the regimentation of society and destruction of traditional values and ways of life.

The position of science in society is a discussion worth having.

Excessive optimism toward science has had fairly detrimental results in the past. Often the problem isn't science itself though.

A trap is that you can't actually derive values from science, because it doesn't provide any -- whatever values you extract from science are those you put in yourself through hidden assumptions. That makes it very easy to lean on science to ostensibly support almost any action through some line of reasoning like "Science shows that if we kill the poor, we'll be able to reduce taxes by 90%. Therefore we should get our guns!" Science doesn't care if our taxes are high or low, it doesn't care if we live or die. Even if the premise about taxes is scientifically correct (I don't know), the conclusion isn't based on science alone.

That's a bit of a parallel to the discussion of lockdowns and masks and so on, while science may be able to answer what effects these have, science can't say we ought to do these things. That requires something else to be added, although sadly the discussion has almost entirely been about what the science says about these things, not the relative worth of saving lives versus individual freedom vs GDP, which is the real discussion.

The science itself is good. It's scientism that's dangerous. Also malicious intents of some academia members to get grants or lifelong job based on the misleading research.

>a lot of extremely sketchy and highly preliminary studies were misrepresented as certainties.

Were they? I thought they were being represented as the best current understanding, and it was a given that it was a new disease.

My point is we didn't have an understanding. Science doesn't move that fast, and whatever was published was highly speculative, but the it sounded scary so it got media coverage.

Don't forget the huge swath of "science" that is almost wholly unreproducible.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com