The new EPA administration is reducing peer reviews?

Some of us HN readers, call ourselves Computer Scientists, some Software Engineers, some are other type of scientists. I believe that for many HN readers, science is a core component of who we are, professionally, and of what we do, or at the very least, we understand the vital importance of rigor in science.

We should collectively be extremely concerned that the EPA administration appears to be attacking the scientific method and replacing it with what I fear will become pseudoscience.

It is difficult for me to understand why this article has not received more attention and prominence on HN. Surely this is important to many of HN readers, even if it's not a technical article?

> call ourselves Computer Scientists, some Software Engineers,

Which means you are not scientists. You might be very positive towards it but I've met a lot of the above and seen some very anti-science rhetoric from them.

I've seen "real scientists" be very anti-science too. Remember the hubbub about people complaining that other people were trying to reproduce their experiments?

That's very sad.

Computer science is in no way a field of science. Not even close. It's a branch of mathematics. Science is the practice of generating and testing putative facts using experimental evidence. Computer science and mathematics do not rely on empirical evidence and in fact empirical evidence is entirely illegitimate as a proof method.

Maybe if all we did was concern ourselves with mathematical complexity of algorithms but analysis of caching, network traffic, performance heuristics and countless other aspects of computer science require the scientific method and empirical data.

That, too.

"I hypothesize the bug is in X. I predict if I add assertions Y and Z, they will trigger. My testing contradicts my predictions - I hypothesize the bug is in ..."

"I hypothesize the performance problem is in X. I predict if I add instrumentation Y and Z, it will show X is wasting several milliseconds per frame. My testing..."

"I hypothesize a blue background will be liked more by our users. I predict using a blue background will increase our retention rate. My testing..."

"I hypothesize the following invariants will hold about the code I've just written. I predict if I write these unit tests..."

"I hypothesize game mechanic X will be lots of fun. I predict if we build this prototype, ..."

For being "pure math", we're sure using the scientific method a lot. And measuring the real world. And decision-making based on empirical evidence. If your argument is there isn't enough science in computer science education, I might agree.

But then there are questions like "what's the impact on static vs dynamic typing on bug rates and productivity?" - in our current state, this is not computer math. It's not even on the mathy side of computer science right now - it is closer to being computer philosophy. We lack the experiments (can't control the other variables for A/B testing programming languages without perhaps actually writing bespoke programming languages for that very purpose!), and we've had a relatively short time to build our models of the computing universe... we're perhaps still building out the math necessary to create all those models...

There are aspects of the scientific method in programming work, but I feel it has much more in common with engineering than science.

Science uses the scientific method to model the universe. The experiments serve the purpose of clarifying that model and uncovering new information.

I feel programming is more like building a bridge. An engineer uses his knowledge of physics and (much more importantly) a wealth of field knowledge and best practices to design the bridge. As a programmer, I have tasks much like building bridges, only they are apps. I don't discover new algorithms through experimentation. I implement algorithms that are already well understood. If there is a problem in my code and I run performance tests, the tests do not clarify hitherto unknown phenomena regarding the nature of computers. They simply highlight human errors or bottlenecks caused by well understood characteristics of the underlying computer system.

If this is considered science, then basically anything that involves trial and error, be it snowboarding or checkers, is science.

Of course I admit it may depend on what you do (programming is a broad field). There are those, for example, that invent algorithms and such, though it seems to me those computer scientists are more mathematicians than scientists.

The one area of my work I have felt was scientific was AB testing, which is a kind of consumer science.

Are all biologists scientists, or only researchers? Because your statements seem to imply that you believe the latter (where CS researchers also lie).

Biologists are clearly scientific researchers, tasked with discovering the immense body of unknown knowledge about living organisms. Based almost entirly on systematic observation and experimentation, Biology explifies science.

I feel their job is very different than most CS researchers that seem to me more like mathematicians, or industry programmers which are more like engineers.

Mathematicians and philosophers generate hypotheses and test them using the tools of their discipline as well, which often includes statistical reasoning to guide more rigorous analysis. The difference is that in true science there is no more rigorous analysis; it's statistics and empiricism all the way down.

At my university, our mathematics courses were taught by the Mathematical Sciences Institute in the College of Physical and Mathematical Sciences.

Not disputing your statements about proof methods and use of empirical evidence, just pointing out that the term "science" can and indeed commonly is applied to mathematical disciplines in the academy.

And at my university the philosophy department was in the college of arts and sciences; does that make philosophy science?

...no?

(though on a related note, many a science student should pay much more attention to philosophy than they do)

Even if I agree with you, and I am wrong in including Computer Non-Science, my point stands just as strongly. Mathematics is a foundation of science, and people working in the objective, analytical disciplines, like computers and engineering, should, I expect, understand the value of science.

My main point stands, even if my appeal to Computer Scientists was wrong.

That is certainly one way to define the term "Computer Science", but (A) it's not the only way, and (B) the comment you're replying to had nothing to do with the definition of the term "Computer Science".

Science is building a hypothesis that can be proven or disproven after hard work.

Computer science is science.

That's a terrible definition of science. All of human knowledge can be captured that way, including philosophy, which is clearly not science, even if people are so misinformed to call math science.

Nope, math fits the above description as well.

The essence of science is the scientific method - using experiments to zone in on the truth.

Is theoretical physics not science as well?

Theoretical physics wouldn't exist without experiments that back it up. In particular, for a theory to be relevant, it has to correctly predict the outcomes of all past experiments. In contrast with math, where you can easily make up "worlds" (models) that have no basis in reality whatsoever.

I have the distinct idea that you have never read Popper.

http://www.iep.utm.edu/pop-sci/

"Partially in response to worries such as these, the logical empiricists’ later work abandons the verifiability criterion of meaning and instead emphasizes the importance of the empirical confirmation of scientific theories. Popper, however, argues that verification and confirmation played no role in formulating a satisfactory criterion of demarcation. Instead, Popper proposes that scientific theories are characterized by being bold in two related ways. First, scientific theories regularly disagree with accepted views of the world based on common sense or previous theoretical commitments. To an uneducated observer, for example, it may seem obvious that Earth is stationary, while the sun moves rapidly around it. However, Copernicus posited that Earth in fact revolved around the sun. In a similar way, it does not seem as though a tree and a human share a common ancestor, but this is what Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection claims. As Popper notes, however, this sort of boldness is not unique to scientific theories, since most mythological and metaphysical theories also make bold, counterintuitive claims about the nature of reality. For example, the accounts of world creation provided by various religions would count as bold in this sense, but this does not mean that they thereby count as scientific theories.

With this in mind, he goes on argue that scientific theories are distinguished from non-scientific theories by a second sort of boldness: they make testable claims that future observations might reveal to be false. This boldness thus amounts to a willingness to take a risk of being wrong. On Popper’s view, scientists investigating a theory make repeated, honest attempts to falsify the theory, whereas adherents of pseudoscientific or metaphysical theories routinely take measures to make the observed reality fit the predictions of the theory. Popper describes his proposal as follows:@

Thus my proposal was, and is, that it is this second boldness, together with the readiness to look for tests and refutations, which distinguished “empirical” science from non-science, and especially from pre-scientific myths and metaphysics. (1974, pp. 980-981)

In other places, Popper calls attention to the fact that scientific theories are characterized by possessing potential falsifiers—that is, that they make claims about the world that might be discovered to be false. If these claims are, in fact, found to be false, then the theory as a whole is said to be falsified. Non-scientific theories, by contrast, do not have any such potential falsifiers—there is literally no possible observation that could serve to falsify these theories."

From this perspective you are confusing "scientific" with "empirical".

I haven't read Popper, and thanks for this quote.

Although I don't quite understand what your objection is. It seems to me that the main difference is between "empirical" science and non-science, so "empirical" is kind-of superfluous (as there is no science that isn't empirical).

Still, I'd argue that science is more than just empirical, as it needs to be sound/coherent as well, not just based on empirical evidence but actively trying to analyse an ddisprove that evidence - e.g. we can hardly say that traditional medicine (or even alternative medicine) isn't empirical, but it's hardly scientific (in fact, the same could be said for much of actual medicine as proper experiments are rarely performed and replicated even more rarely).

> "It is first necessary to ask what is meant by mathematics in general. Illustrious scholars have debated this matter until they were blue in the face, and yet no consensus has been reached about whether mathematics is a natural science, a branch of the humanities, or an art form."

There isn't yet a concensus as to whether mathematics is a science or not.

You may not think so, but it is currently a point of contention.

Luckily, the existence of confused or insincere persons doesn't provide any evidence against my claims. Any pair of people who believe themselves to have a sincere disagreement about whether mathematics is science are in fact both mistaken; what they really have is a disagreement about what "science" is. Furthermore anyone who thinks mathematics is science must define science to be the whole sum of human knowledge (rendering the word meaningless) or else some uselessly large subset thereof.

> Luckily, the existence of confused or insincere persons doesn't provide any evidence against my claims. Any pair of people who believe themselves to have a sincere disagreement about whether mathematics is science are in fact both mistaken

The arrogance dripping from this statement is hard to not consider insulting, when such "confused" individuals include those such as Stephen Hawking, and Godel struggled with it for some time.

> what they really have is a disagreement about what "science" is.

No, the difficulty lies in defining the philosophy of mathematics. It's a tool underpinning nature, so despite its abstraction, does it explain the natural world? Proofs are most certainly empirical in nature.

The upshot is, better people than you or I say there is not yet an answer.

i

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This is a total non-surprise. He's following through on campaign promises, is all. And seriously, the EPA has been on a short leash since the start. Sure, it was worse under Reagan and Bush vs Clinton and Obama. But remember:

> 1970 was a year of tremendous environmental action by Nixon and Congress.The President signed the National Environmental Policy Act on January 2nd, delivered a call to make "the 1970s a historic period when, by conscious choice, [we] transform our land into what we want it to become" in his State of the Union Address, and ended the year with the creation of an independent agency to regulate the environment.

https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2010/12/galle...

Nixon has a bad reputation, obviously, but he was arguably quite enlightened about environmental and social issues. He might have championed a national minimum income, if he hadn't crashed and burned.

We seriously need a non-profit who creates NGOs to continue the scientific research that's being smothered by the current administration.

I agree. If anything good comes from this administration, it'll be that important work will be less vulnerable to the whims of politicians. That's why I've donated to NGOs that replace the things Trump is killing.

Unfortunately, in the case of climate, we'll never be able to compensate for the dismantling of the EPA. NGOs can't regulate.

They can however make recommendations for regulations, and influence U.N. regulatory guidelines.

This could make a low-staffed EPA significantly more effective, because then it would only have to pick and choose regulations to implement/try to pass.

But they'd never pass.

Not in the next 3,5 years, no.

Except who would fund this non-profit?

Teapot dome, if no one is watching the hen house, the foxes will walk right in: https://www.britannica.com/event/Teapot-Dome-Scandal

Can you elaborate on how you believe this relates to the linked article? (Genuinely asking.)

Great... leveraging the usual "broaden the competitive landscape" rhetoric - who can possibly say no to competition! - they're re-opening all the disputes over settled science that were a thorn in the ass of their corporate cronies.

No biggie, we'll have to re-discus them to death once again and while this battle of attrition works another round, it's more profit for them, and irreparable damage for the whole darn world.

At some stage we will have to implement retroactive reparations, this game is so obvious it borders deliberate affront

I love how instead of discussing the (important) topic of the OP we are debating whether CS is a science or art or humanities or not.

Articles like this keep getting flagged (because some people on HN are more interested in living in their little tech bubble), so I will say this before that happens: this administration will set back American science and technology by at least a couple of decades. And that's a conservative estimate.

Pruitt will surround himself with yes-men, and that is super scary when it comes to science. Essentially, all science that does not fit the administration's agenda will be rejected. This is just one of the precursors.

And they'll all get replaced and their policies revoked in another few years. "At least a couple of decades"? You're dreaming.

Policies have institutional inertia. International accords can be broken, numerous polluting plants and pipelines built, and irreversible environmental damage can be done in four years. It's a matter of rolling back the effects of the policies that may take decades (or never, if the environment is pushed past the point of no return).

The danger of a supermajority in COTUS, POTUS and SCOTUS is alt-right and Freedom Party extremist agendas being railroaded through and ripping up sensible, sane policies into tatters for those special interest$ and crazy fringe groups.

Two healthy political parties provide countervailing powers which limit what the other can do. Without this protection, fascist themes become more prevalent and more difficult to stop.

Did you mean to reply to the parent comment rather than mine? It seems more relevant:)

How long does it take to break a window? How long does it take to replace that window?

Destruction and creation are asymmetrical with respect to the time and effort required to do either, and that's not even looking at immaterial stuff such as international reputations and treaties.

You act like agencies and experts can be rebuilt and rehired as quickly as they were dismissed. That isn't true of anything I can think of.

Hence relatively conservative BAS advanced the doomsday clock closer to midnight: unwillingness to tackle climate change and an insane chief of staff lunging to push the button to start WW III.

> Pruitt will surround himself with yes-men, and that is super scary when it comes to science. Essentially, all science that does not fit the administration's agenda will be rejected. This is just one of the precursors.

As an independent, I question how this situation is much different from years past. It's just a different set of yes-men.

Peer review is meant to compensate for scientific bias (i.e. "yes-men"). This administration is reducing peer review. Therefore the new yes-men are worse than the old.

We are entitled to our own opinions, not our own facts. Scientific fact is not the exclusive domain of any political party. A question that's worth asking is: which political party is more interested in scientific fact when it comes to the climate?

This article does not support what you are saying.

> EPA spokesman J.P. Freire said in an email that “no one has been fired or terminated,” and that Pruitt had simply decided to bring in fresh advisers"

> “We’re not going to rubber-stamp the last administration’s appointees. Instead, they should participate in the same open competitive process as the rest of the applicant pool,” Freire said. “This approach is what was always intended for the Board

> Courtney Flint ... said ... that she was also surprised to learn that her term would not be renewed, “particularly since I was told that such a renewal was expected.”

> “In the broader view, I suppose it is the prerogative of this administration to set the goals of federal agencies and to appoint members to advisory boards,” she added.

> Conservatives have complained about EPA’s approach to science, including the input it receives from outside scientific bodies

> “They’re going to have to start dealing with science and not rigged science”

> “The EPA routinely stacks this board with friendly scientists who receive millions of dollars in grants from the federal government,” Smith said at the time. “The conflict of interest here is clear.”

Even if you believe that the conservatives are trying to pack EPA with "climate change deniers", you should be glad that their research is now going to reach a wider audience and therefore can be subject to more crictism.

This seems like a good move for science

"In a budget proposal obtained by The Washington Post last month, the panel is slated for an 84 percent cut — or $542,000 — from its operating budget. That money typically covers travel and other expenses for outside experts who attend the board’s public meetings.

The reasoning behind the budget cut, said the document, reflects 'an anticipated lower number of peer reviews.'"

Doesn't sound like a "good move for science" to me.

Also doesn't sound like it will result in "more input from outside scientific bodies", because the budget for that got cut by 84%...

By the way, was that a euphemism for commerce-backed science? Like the science done for cosmetics companies and the tobacco industry?

It doesn't feel like they're talking about foreign Universities.

Why do they expect a lower number of peer reviews ? If there is a legitimate reason, then cutting the funding in proportion seems reasonable

Reducing peer review is antithetical to good science, first of all.

Second of all, the failure to renew the terms of the current members, who were led to believe they would get a second term, and labeling them as "Obama appointees" rather than examining their merits as scientists, looks more like a pogrom than a rational adjustment.

And inviting the terminated scientists to reapply is a transparent ploy. I wonder, were they all to reapply, how many of them would be rehired, and what reasons would be given should they be unsuccessful?

My take is, none of them will be rehired, because if they were wanted, the EPA would simply have renewed their contracts.

And if anything, the science is more likely now to be "rigged" than it may have been (and I doubt it was) before.

Let's be objective here: which group of people in the USA have stood mostly for science, and which group against it (hint: "intelligent design" proponents and climate change deniers).

Maybe I read too much into what you wrote, but it seems that you have high confidence that the EPA will emerge a better agency from this. If so, I'm curious why given Trump's and Pruitt's negativity toward science, the environment, regulation, and the EPA. What's your angle?

I usually have high confidence that scientists will do their jobs. If a Republican controlled EPA confirms the catastrophic effects of climate change, you would expect more bipartisan support to tackle the problem. As far as I can tell, conservative viewpoint on climate change is varied, from 'the effects of man made climate change will be mild and not catastrophic' to 'golabal warming is caused by increased solar activity'

The point I was making was that there is no reason to stir up hysteria just because you heard the words 'Republican' and 'EPA' in the same sentence

> As far as I can tell, conservative viewpoint on climate change is varied, from 'the effects of man made climate change will be mild and not catastrophic' to 'golabal warming is caused by increased solar activity'

Unfortunately, that range lies outside what mainstream climate science has been telling us for decades.

Your confidence in this administration's eagerness to fund scientific research is ... well, surprising. To me, at least.

But, are you confident enough in their willingness to continue unbiased scientific research into climate change that you would bet money on it? I am very interested in a friendly (but financially significant) wager now. :)

It's not solar activity. That has been debunked for a long time.

https://www.skepticalscience.com/solar-activity-sunspots-glo...

We'll probably still be debating this as we row to work one day.

Or in short, "I'm hoping for the best".

> "Sen. James M. Inhofe (R-Okla.), who questions the link between human activity and climate change and has several former aides now working for Pruitt, said in an interview earlier this year that under the new administration, “They’re going to have to start dealing with science and not rigged science” at EPA.:

Rigged science? What rigged science?

> "“The EPA routinely stacks this board with friendly scientists who receive millions of dollars in grants from the federal government,” Smith said at the time. “The conflict of interest here is clear.”"

This coming from Lamar Smith?

> This seems like a good move for science

You must be joking. Or you think that science is what Lamar Smith thinks it is science, get ride of any fact, and put conclusions and then look at anything that can be a proof for those conclusions.

What they are doing is not science

I'm of the impression that they want to replace government-backed science with commerce-backed science here.

I think they have the right idea; everone knows following the market is a moral imperative, that smoking is attractive and you are #healthyatanysize.

Obviously those leacherous government scientists should be put out of a job. They are harming commerce and therewith the proletariat. They gotta go!

If government-backed science is science, then commerce-backed science is science too.

Unless you're suggestion that scientists - as humans = can fall prey to the same corruption and motivations that anyone else can. If that is the case, are you suggesting that government-backed scientists are above human motivations?

I'm suggesting it is an odd assumption that government-backed science would be less prone to conflicts of interest than commerce-/corporate-backed science.

I find it hard to understand the conflict of interest with government-backed science. Scientist A gets a grant to do research, spends it on research and reasonable salaries for PhD's, and goes on to join the EPA board. So what?

It only becomes a conflict of interest if they then start allocating funds to their friends or to themselves, but that's almost too obvious. What does them having previously received grants have to do with anything? Why would they then be more corruptable than private sector scientists?

At least in the case of government-backed science, the research goals are generally aligned with government interests. I don't see how that's sinister in the general case.

On the other hand, it seems much easier to find dark motives in research conducted by corporations. For instance, why would you publish research that is bad for your company?

What am I missing here?

> At least in the case of government-backed science, the research goals are generally aligned with government interests.

Personally, I prefer science to be aligned with finding truth and understanding, not with any particular group's interests.

Sadly truth and understanding do not have a budget to pay scientists. So funding must flow from somewhere...

Indeed, a group that provides funding might be aligned with truth and progress, but that's just one of the many options and often there are many conflicting values and incentives at play.

Should we be happy if the EPA had to deal with "science" papers from Flat Earthers? Or from people who've "invented" over-unity devices? Having to debunk stuff that has already been debunked, or which is incoherent, is a time sink and prevents EPA doing actual work.

Finally! I can use DDT again to get rid of those pesky bald eagles around my property.

Treason and Reason are confusingly similar to some...

What do scientists know?

To be very precise in the questions they ask.

What kind of a question is that? Does it add value to the discussion?