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Re:The rise and fall of scientific authority, and how to bri... by Erlich_Bachman on Monday March 18, 2019 @11:47AM (#19422072)
A dogmatic belief in anything is detrimental. It takes wisdom to understand this. Many followers of science lack this. Scientific method is a great tool - for the type of questions that it is designed to deal with - and a disaster waiting to happen if used for other areas of inquiry.
Re:The rise and fall of scientific authority, and how to bri... by devoply on Monday March 18, 2019 @11:51AM (#19422108)
Except wisdom in large complex systems is impossible. Like for instance take any piece of technology you are going to introduce into the system. How can anyone be wise about how that technology will effect the system before hand? After the fact how can you get rid of the technology when millions or people depend on it for their existence?

The same is true of pure knowledge. You introduce a new paradigm. You don't know how it will effect all the other knowledge that depends on it. Once it's adopted careers of many scientists depend on it... it's only after those scientists die and a new paradigm is found that the next generation can build its career on that old knowledge dies.

None of this is due to wisdom. It's just the way the political economy works. Wisdom only applies to individual action about things that have a small enough scope to have some idea about their impact on decisions. For anything bigger than that, it's political... and I highly doubt the crowds have wisdom especially about untested things.

Re:The rise and fall of scientific authority, and how to bri... by stdbrouw on Monday March 18, 2019 @12:23PM (#19422471)
> Scientific method is a great tool - for the type of questions that it is designed to deal with - and a disaster waiting to happen if used for other areas of inquiry.

What other areas of inquiry would that be?

Re:The rise and fall of scientific authority, and how to bri... by maire on Monday March 18, 2019 @04:29PM (#19424922)
A really good book to read on this is "the Signal and the Noise" by Nate Silver. Basically, the scientific method requires modeling the system correctly which only works for certain kinds of systems. Systems where the complexity exceeds the available data causes people to see patterns where they don't exist and to be overly confident in their interpretation of the data.

The entire area of nutrition and weight management is a joke. Medicine is problematic and Psychology is questionable.

Another problem is that the popular media publishes inconclusive studies because they are click bait. People read them because they are interested in living longer and losing weight and being happy.

Fear also turns studies into clickbait. The latest was the blizzard of articles on if bugs are dying off or not.

Then there is the fact that negative studies tend to be ignored and when the study failed or it introduces data that does not conform to general knowledge.

All this makes people question studies where the data is conclusive.

Re:The rise and fall of scientific authority, and how to bri... by bsder on Monday March 18, 2019 @05:07PM (#19425322)
> The entire area of nutrition and weight management is a joke. Medicine is problematic and Psychology is questionable.

Note that the issue is that there is a human in that system.

The problem is that we (rightfully!) don't easily allow experiments on humans that might be harmful.

And, as an aside, nutrition and weight management does have people doing real science (things like studies of hunter gatherer societies with deuterated water), it's just that the results aren't very flashy (ie. a human burns roughly the same amount of calories regardless of activity level--so the only way to lose weight is to eat less--moving more is healthy but doesn't contribute substantially to weight loss).

Re:The rise and fall of scientific authority, and how to bri... by maire on Monday March 18, 2019 @08:02PM (#19426648)
Scientists are trying to study nutrition, it is just that the data is inconclusive. Yet the popular media reports each conflicting study as fact.

Here is an interesting Stanford Medicine study of individual variation on the impact on low carb vs low fat. The punchline is that they still don't know after a fairly rigorous study.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3SBZ4HYOxf0

Re:The rise and fall of scientific authority, and how to bri... by vharuck on Monday March 18, 2019 @03:07PM (#19424083)
What we value. The scientific method can be used to make better paints, but we decide what styles of art we prefer.
Re:The rise and fall of scientific authority, and how to bri... by pfortuny on Monday March 18, 2019 @03:24PM (#19424265)
Raising your children, talking to strangers, charity, you name it.
Re:The rise and fall of scientific authority, and how to bri... by benj111 on Monday March 18, 2019 @04:36PM (#19425011)
Do you mean you shouldn't raise your kids based on science? You shouldn't experiment to see what works with your child, or you just shouldn't do experiments on your child?
Re:The rise and fall of scientific authority, and how to bri... by Erlich_Bachman on Monday March 18, 2019 @05:37PM (#19425584)
Children need love, compassion and a lot of patience. They want to be treated like living beings, not like science projects. Yes science in general can obviously make some generic guidelines or provide some good insights in very specific questions of this childraising enterprise, but the vast majority of choices and everyday actions will fall outside of this.
Re:The rise and fall of scientific authority, and how to bri... by benj111 on Monday March 18, 2019 @05:53PM (#19425712)
"and a lot of patience"

I find the distance, that analysing behaviour brings, actually helps with the patience, and compassion (if they're having a weird tantrum because they wanted something trivial). I also think it keeps me motivated in consciously raising my kids, rather than just passively whiling away the years.

Maybe I have younger kids, so there aren't really any philosophical issues being raised.

Re:The rise and fall of scientific authority, and how to bri... by featherrust on Monday March 18, 2019 @01:02PM (#19422834)
Interpersonal relationships?
Re:The rise and fall of scientific authority, and how to bri... by igor47 on Monday March 18, 2019 @02:07PM (#19423460)
I'm a fan of NVC(non-violent communication) and that framework could be summarized by the sentence, "when you do X,I feel Y". You basically become an instrument that reports on your internal state, plus you're also supposed to avoid assuming anything about the other person's internal state.

This is a lot more like science then the usual default of blaming and assumptions and implicit expectations that most people conduct their relationships in.

Re:The rise and fall of scientific authority, and how to bri... by groovy2shoes on Monday March 18, 2019 @05:35PM (#19425562)
When you talk like that, I feel as though I am talking to the emacs psychotherapist. It too is a mere instrument that reports on its internal state.

If you have found it a useful communicative tool, then I am glad for you. No doubt communication can be hard, so we've gotta use whatever tools we find effective. But honestly when I try speaking like that, I can't help but feel like a robot or a program. It feels very unnatural and very awkward to me. Perhaps that distance is exactly what lends it efficacy for some people, but that very distance only lends it offputticacy for me.

Am I right and you wrong? No, I don't think so. I have no reason to doubt that you have found success with such an approach. But were I a barkeep and you a patron responding like that when asked "why the long face?", you'd be getting a double of tequila on the house. (Tequila has a funny way of bringing out one's inner party, in my experience—or getting one started where there's yet only a quiet inner evening get-together).

https://i.imgur.com/ShGZjQ6.png

Re:The rise and fall of scientific authority, and how to bri... by TimTheTinker on Monday March 18, 2019 @05:58PM (#19425758)
> "when you do X,I feel Y"

Communication like that can be very helpful when dealing with personal conflict -- marriage, friendships, etc., but I can't see how that would help in the public sphere.

If a political opponent, writer, or public speaker were to say or write something like that, it would be irritating and off-putting. I'd think "OK, but what's your point?"

Re:The rise and fall of scientific authority, and how to bri... by TimTheTinker on Tuesday March 19, 2019 @06:20AM (#19429523)
To clarify, if a Senator stood up on the floor and began: “Mr President, when my honorable colleague argues in favor of [some policy], I feel shamed, belittled, and angry.”

... That would be inappropriate, unhelpful, and unproductive. It would be better to engage with the opponent’s argument with another argument than to resort to talking about personal feelings in that context.

Re:The rise and fall of scientific authority, and how to bri... by justtopost on Monday March 18, 2019 @04:13PM (#19424739)
I find that type of communication childing and dehumanizing. To each their own.
Re:The rise and fall of scientific authority, and how to bri... by cobbzilla on Monday March 18, 2019 @04:36PM (#19425013)
Kinda ironic that your comment is a good example of this style, in describing your feelings using an “I” statement without attacking the speaker.
Re:The rise and fall of scientific authority, and how to bri... by synecdoche on Monday March 18, 2019 @05:01PM (#19425251)
I would contend that despite the "I" the form of those words implies projection, or at least victimization of oneself.
Re:The rise and fall of scientific authority, and how to bri... by tunesmith on Monday March 18, 2019 @05:51PM (#19425700)
If it were limited to "when you do blah, I feel blah" verbiage, it would feel like that. But it's more generally about taking accountability for one's own side, while listening to the other side, without needless escalation. I can't really see a flaw with that approach, other than it taking more work.

I wonder how many arguments would be defused if both sides could phrase the other side's point of view in a way they would agree was accurately stated.

Re:The rise and fall of scientific authority, and how to bri... by benj111 on Monday March 18, 2019 @04:43PM (#19425077)
Really? I do a similar thing when dealing with idiots (not idiots, fully formed human beings, with a legitimate point of view, probably not evil, probably quite normal in person) on the internet.

I find it helps keep me sane.

Re:The rise and fall of scientific authority, and how to bri... by mensetmanusman on Monday March 18, 2019 @08:27PM (#19426831)
What the Germans did during WW2: which race is better, etc., etc.
Re:The rise and fall of scientific authority, and how to bri... by 50656E6973 on Monday March 18, 2019 @06:39PM (#19426077)
Social and political science.

Psychiatrists paved the way for the Holocaust:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/23511221

Re:The rise and fall of scientific authority, and how to bri... by sqrt17 on Tuesday March 19, 2019 @10:45AM (#19431244)
> Scientific method is a great tool - for the type of questions that it is designed to deal with - and a disaster waiting to happen if used for other areas of inquiry. ... which is why the actual sciences (and other research disciplines) use methods that have more of a family resemblance to the prototypic scientific method than being point-for-point identical with it.

Many common points exist - showing your reasoning and evidence rather than to appeal to authority, and the idea that hypotheses should be falsifialbe (in the sense of Thomas Kuhn) to be central ideas. Both of these very good idea in all situations in which you're actually interested in the truth, rather than having a shoot-first-ask-questions-later situation where you need to act on imperfect information.

There's no disaster waiting to happen, at least not in comparison to other tools of reasoning being misused. Sophism (i.e. people playing mind games to make their claims look better) exists inside and outside of science, just as self-interest and wanting to increase your own sphere of influence do, but that's no fault of the scientific method (any more than it is a fault of religion when it occurs there). Any system that lends credibility and authority to people will (loosely mis-citing Bourdieu) attract power-mongery.

Re:The rise and fall of scientific authority, and how to bri... by cameronh90 on Monday March 18, 2019 @07:27PM (#19426395)
I agree. However, most people are not philosophers, and are going to essentially pick a dogma. I think it's better that is the scientific method.