Comment by lutusp | Hacker News Reader

Comment by lutusp | Hacker News Reader

> All science is anthropological at the margins

Not really. Science by design rises above its sources, positing principles that owe no debt to those who discovered them.

The author of the linked article summarizes his thesis this way:

> Until then, to make sense of brand-new science, you have to learn just as much about the people behind the ideas, because that is often the only way to comprehend and contextualize what they are trying to say.

This is innately post-modern, and it's also innately unscientific. Useful, robust science must be based on evidence and principles derived from evidence, not on the quirks of individual researchers.

Useful scientific observations have the property of objectivity -- similarly equipped observers will make the same observation and come to the same conclusion. This eliminates "the people behind the ideas", as it should.

Useful scientific principles arise from observations based on the simplest explanation for those observations, principles that are consistent with established scientific theories and that successfully predict unobserved corollaries. This also eliminates "the people behind the ideas".

Scientific findings must be able to rise above their origins and stand alone, supported only by the evidence that supports them, not by the eminence of the originators.

More here: http://arachnoid.com/building_science

Thanks for reading! And the essay you wrote on this topic is equally interesting.

I get what you are saying, and you are right that what I am proposing is innately unscientific. What I am trying to say is that the process of making new science often has to have these flaws, because ideas in the real world are rarely evaluated on their merits alone. Ideas come from people who are fallible and have to fit their ideas into a social context. What you hold to be the ideal:

    Scientific findings must be able to rise above their origins and stand alone

is the same as what I hold to be ideal, and I also mentioned it's what my dad admires about science. But the reality is more complicated: when a fresh result comes out of a lab, people judge it by the affiliations of the authors, what journal it came from, and that person's prior ideas and assumptions, because replicating or depending on the truth of that result could be a costly mistake (millions of dollars, years of work). The sparsity of biological research in particular means that there are sometimes only a few labs in the world that can readily run experiments with any relevance to a given topic, so until enough attention is given for it to be replicated, a single result and corresponding "story" pretty much stands solely on the reputation of the authors.

So while it is absolutely correct that a scientific principle should stand on its own, and those principles are the ones we learn in the college intro courses, until a hypothesis gathers enough supporting data to become a principle (let's say it is only a few years old), the process of science at the margins is inherently social.

I didn't even get into matters of ethics and politics. For example, there are important medical principles today that were gathered through highly unethical (and regrettable) research in the early 20th century; if similar experiments were performed today, the experimenters would be vilified and the results discarded out of principle, even if it was robustly scientific with a significant impact.

The reason I replied to the article is that I see too much peudoscience being put forth as science. And this matters very much -- there are groups in society who want science's status without the discipline. Creationists and Christian Scientists are just two of many examples.

My point is that, below an easily detected threshold, it's no longer science. It may be part of an overall scientific enterprise, but to call something science that depends on someone's personal tastes or preferences is very misleading, and may grant credibility to activities that don't deserve the name "science".

> until a hypothesis gathers enough supporting data to become a principle, the process of science at the margins is inherently social.

Yes, which is why we have science. Science is a method to get around humans' predisposition for distorted thinking. If humans were rational, there would be no science -- what we call "science", those rational creatures would call "thinking".

My point is that, when science becomes social, it's at the border of science, at the border of anything useful. And it may explain why most published research findings are false:

http://www.plosmedicine.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal...

> I didn't even get into matters of ethics and politics. For example, there are important medical principles today that were gathered through highly unethical (and regrettable) research in the early 20th century; if similar experiments were performed today, the experimenters would be vilified and the results discarded out of principle, even if it was robustly scientific with a significant impact.

Interesting example. It turns out that scientific results are scientific results regardless of their origins. We should do all we can to prevent travesties like the Tuskegee syphilis experiment (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tuskegee_syphilis_experiment), but once the data have been collected, it would be foolish to throw them away because of their origins.

> ... and the results discarded out of principle ...

Not really. Most studies that are carried out with appropriate scientific discipline are accepted as legitimate, regardless of their origins. Remember that scientific experimentation is not about whether a result makes us feel good, it's about whether the result reflects reality.

For those reasons, the Tuskegee researchers should all be thrown in jail, the public outrage is entirely justified, policies should be put in place to prevent any such thing from ever happening again, but the results should not be discarded. And, as it happens, they weren't.

What you're saying is fine and true, but I think you've missed the point of Ted's article. Most of the end goals of scientific research are humanist; for example, in biomedical science, the major end goal is to cure human disease (I'm sure that some physicists will disagree with this claim, but if they like getting public funding for their research, they at the very least are good at convincing others that they have humanist end goals). When a field of study is complex enough, a scientist must develop a way to prioritize what to study. In biomedical science, this often means that scientists choose particular areas of focus based around the area's likelihood of being implicated in disease. Choosing the right area of study is not inherently scientific, but will nonetheless have a huge impact on how others view a scientist's skill. Likewise, understanding the anthropological sub-context of another scientist's work provides an advantage in understanding the impact of that work.

This is what I think Ted meant when he claimed that science is anthropological at the margins. While what we publish in journals is definitely science, the path to get to the bottom line takes something more, and being able to understand what that was in other people's work and use it in your own ultimately makes you a better scientist. The difference between us and pseudoscientists such as Creationists is that our results are predictable, repeatable, and understood mechanistically once we are done, but this does not mean that there isn't an anthropological nature to what we do.

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