Re:Trusting science leaves people vulnerable to believing ps...
by retrac on Saturday August 07, 2021 @03:55PM
(#28101325)
The people chanting "trust the science" were never making a scientific argument, it's an appeal to authority, usually whatever authorities they consider to be scientific authorities. Same with the refrain about "follow what the science says" as a political and moral argument. The science doesn't say anything about policy or morality. It gives us models which predict certain consequences for certain scenarios should we act a certain way.
For example, we might have models on expected suicide rates, economic losses and deaths from COVID-19 if we just ignored the virus vs. a total lockdown approach. But it doesn't tell us whether a suicide of a young person is preferable to an elderly person dying. And if so, what the preference for the ratio should be. It's very hard to quantify intangibles like "quality of life" or "societal openness" or "loss of hope", even if you look at metrics like various outcomes.
Ultimately, science doesn't tell us much if anything about what would actually be preferable morally or politically. If and when we come up with an exact science for that, do let me know though; it'll save a lot of headaches.
Re:Trusting science leaves people vulnerable to believing ps...
by sparkplug94 on Sunday August 08, 2021 @02:18AM
(#28104608)
This is clearly a double-bluff by science. Nice try science, I don’t trust science enough to believe this pseudoscience!
In all seriousness though, with the magnitude of the psychology replication crisis right now, you might legitimately be better off with a blanket mistrust of ALL social psychology. I think the replication rate for social psychology papers is under 50%.
For example, we might have models on expected suicide rates, economic losses and deaths from COVID-19 if we just ignored the virus vs. a total lockdown approach. But it doesn't tell us whether a suicide of a young person is preferable to an elderly person dying. And if so, what the preference for the ratio should be. It's very hard to quantify intangibles like "quality of life" or "societal openness" or "loss of hope", even if you look at metrics like various outcomes.
Ultimately, science doesn't tell us much if anything about what would actually be preferable morally or politically. If and when we come up with an exact science for that, do let me know though; it'll save a lot of headaches.
In all seriousness though, with the magnitude of the psychology replication crisis right now, you might legitimately be better off with a blanket mistrust of ALL social psychology. I think the replication rate for social psychology papers is under 50%.