Statements about importance are value judgements that no doubt you have made, but are not really science and are basically political.
An easy example, "covid restrictions curb covid" may be true and you can provide experimental evidence. "We need to impose restrictions" makes a judgement about the overall situation under the restrictions being preferable to the one without them. This is not a scientific call, this is a societal judgement.
People too often pretend that an action immediately follows from some identified causal relationship. Smoking kills you does not immediately imply you should quit smoking, without the intermediate step of "you value your later life and health more than the ongoing benefits you get from smoking" (disclaimer, nonsmoker)
But eventually, someone needs to do the work to convince people "science is trustworthy." And for a variety of reasons (both objective and social), scientists should be on the front lines of that work.
The question of "this is important" is tricky because it must involve a two-way discussion with the audience. But there are cases where a scientist must be making that case, e.g. in order to procure funding.
This is exactly the source of the trouble. Hearing scientists project their value system onto everybody else destroys their credibility. If people felt that scientists were sticking to the facts and avoiding ideology and values, science would be better received all around.
Whether or not the Earth is getting warmer, and the cause of that warming, are scientific questions. Also science is a discussion of possible remediations and their costs. Which remediation to choose, if any, is a question of values and outside the scope of science.
Also important for science is being clear about levels of uncertainty and ranges of possible outcomes. Recent global temperatures have little uncertainty. Distant-past temperatures have a much higher level of uncertainty, and predictions about ranges of possible distant-future temperatures have yet more uncertainty. I never hear much about this from scientists or the media that cover them though.
So how do you propose scientists "stick to" the discussion of remediations of "we can remediate X by doing Y at expense Z" without it being portrayed maliciously as pesky interfering scientists saying "we should do Y"?
The problem of lack of trust is hardly the sole responsibility of scientists here.
Do you think discussing uncertainty more is going to raise trust or just be more fodder for the people with non-scientific reasons to oppose action?
I propose scientists "only stick to the science" if and only if everyone else in the world sticks to their wheelhouse as well. Lotta citizens, politicians, and pundits out there without much training in making good ethical decisions either!
As long as the output of a scientist will be interpreted through other people's political lenses its fair game for them to frame it politically too.
Not if they want to be credible.
> sticking to the facts and avoiding ideology and values
I think a few different things are being confused here, but as far as value is concerned, the choice to do science, to take scientific findings into account and to decide what to investigate are themselves the result of value judgements. There is no fact-value dichotomy. There is no "clean" separation between fact and value (as if value were a dirty word contrary to fact).
This fact-value dichotomy can be tied to the materialist worldview which denies objective value because it presumes a metaphysics that renders the world a kind of theater of senseless extension in space. Any value must therefore be a matter of subjective projection (and therefore delusion, putting to one side materialism's inherent inability to account for subjectivity). But this metaphysics is, to put it gently, problematic. The wish to separate fact from value (which I take to occupy one order, not two) is no doubt further encouraged by liberalism's pretensions to neutrality and the inherent tension within Lockean liberalism between science and liberty.
But I do agree that the actual deciding of policy is not to be left to scientists but to politicians and the like. Scientists are specialists who can supplement our knowledge in specific ways that generalists can then take into account along with other data and understanding when making judgements.
Of course lots of scientists cares about facts first, but the scientists with an agenda are much juicier for journalists to interview and write articles about so they are who we see.
(I believe in climate change, I am pro vaccine. Just noting this here since many will think that me having the above view means I am a climate change denier and anti vax)
I think you misunderstood, I am not saying that they try to discover facts to support them using science. I am saying that they want the credibility of a scientist. You know how people start to listen a lot to the views of a Nobel Laureate regardless if it is their field of expertise or not? That sort of authority is very attractive to a lot of people and they will work really hard to get it, I am saying lots of people go into science since they want that authority, they don't have any care at all about doing science.
Yes, I judge people who try to corrupt our view of science. I never denied that.
> our concern for bad motives is separate from the question of whether science if value-laden (which it is)
Science having value is exactly why I don't want people to corrupt it. If you agree with me that science has value then you should agree that we should try to stop people from corrupting it.
If you argue that we can't judge who is corrupting, then I'd argue that you are so out there on the clouds with your definitions that we could just as well argue that a random youtube commenter is also doing science and that is a good thing and that we can't really say that youtube commenters are worse scientists than the people at universities since that is just a value judgement.
W.r.t. value, the only point I was making is that there is no fact/value dichotomy. It doesn't follow that I am therefore arguing that one cannot make value judgements. On the contrary, if no fact/value dichotomy exists and value is a matter of fact, then it follows that we can indeed make value judgements on par with factual claims.
But what I was addressing in an earlier post was the suggestion that there is a fact/value dichotomy and the notion that problems occur in science when value mingles with fact. I rejected this claim by arguing that there is no such dichotomy and by implication that the diagnosis is incorrect. Questions about corruption are fine as far as they go, but they are not relevant to this thread because they do not address the question of fact/value dichotomy and they presume value judgement.
This is where I've noticed mainstream political discussion often go off the rails. The best example is when "because science" is used to end conversation on the idea that 100% of the population should wear masks. Science, at least in this case, is clearly not prescriptive, so it can't be applied as a single justification like that. Perhaps science confirms that masks reduce transmission, therefore 100% of the population wearing masks is certainly one valid design. But one could come up with multiple other designs that would be equally confirmed by science to be effective at reducing transmission. So reducing transmission is not the hard part. The hard part is all the other variables that cause consequences in economics, mental health, other areas of healthcare, etc. Each model needs to be tested for it's utility across a variety of factors, but that idea is lost with the "science" cancel cudgel.
It will not care about narratives and may bring facts that we don't want to accept.
One sample is -> https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/j.1467-9477....
After this paper several other papers tried to milk other interpretation.
It's harder than that though.
Science is complicated, frequently messy and often adversarial, and that is how science makes progress.
There is no single narrative for scientific truth -- even when there is overwhelming consensus, science places high value on the coherent arguments at the margins.
This scientific embrace of complexity has been weaponized against us.
"Society" prefers a clear narrative they can comprehend, and science does not always provide it.
The media used to be relatively responsible stewards of the narrative, but that is very much no longer the case. (not the blame the media -- the media is us)
This question is not tricky. It is weighty and scary. If it was tricky, there would be a puzzle you could solve to answer it.
Instead as you say it must first involve listening because people have the freedom to choose what is important to them.
Otherwise, you might assume that people place a highest value on sustaining human life. This can fail if you go to New Hampshire and encounter a person who value liberty more highly than life.
Yes, and science as an institution has been failing pretty badly at that. I posted this on HN just last week, but it's worth repeating:
1. Science journalism is almost universally terrible, so people already get sold half truths and sometimes even outright falsehoods from allegedly reputable sources. Messaging needs dramatic improvement.
2. The replication crisis has shown that up to 50% of published results in medicine can't be replicated (and up to 66% in social sciences), and there are virtually no incentives to replicate or publish negative results, and too many incentives to data mine/p-hack and publish sensationalized results (in fact, results that fail replication get cited more). There are now some efforts towards correcting this, but it's only just beginning.
I think there's another part that is also underappreciated, which is that the honesty of the public faces of science should be above reproach, and if someone in public facing positions lose their credibility by violating public trust, they should no longer be the public face.
The best recent example is Dr. Fauci. He has openly admitted to lying to the public on multiple occasions, such as whether the public should wear masks and about vaccination levels for herd immunity. It doesn't matter whether you think he did the right thing in those cases, he has unquestionably violated public trust and eroded trust in science as a result.
Strictly speaking no, but that's more of a long digression on epistemology than what I think you mean. (but think of indiana jones here: "archaeology is concerned with _fact_, not _truth_ ...")
My role as a scientist is to work diligently to understand, as best as we are able, the natural world.
Yet, "I will always be conscious that my skill carries with it the obligation to serve humanity by making the best use of the Earth's precious wealth."
That thing may be true, but the rising disdain for not accepting a conclusion when the evidence isn't presented alongside is worrisome. The difference between science and religion is that science draws conclusions from reproducible research. Yet - especially now - many people take the naked word of 'a scientist' the same way a religious fanatic takes the word of their spiritual leader.
This definition gave me a lot of clarity: an expert is someone who has, can get, can make, or can cause to be made - and presents - evidence that supports their conclusions.
If you treat logos, pathos, and ethos as a self-certified checklist, you are doomed to fail as well. You must provide arguments of each three types that are convincing to others. Above all else, preaching to the choir is (IMHO) the biggest problem in my political environment (USA).
Given how strong gerrymandering is there's no benefit to reaching out to the other side, just hold the line while scoring political points.
This is why I categorically ignore everything from Dr Fauci. He's known to have lied to the public before to influence behavior. Since I'd have verify his claims from some other source anyway, there's no sense using him as a source at all.
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/preventing-coronavirus-facemask...
> "There's no reason to be walking around with a mask," infectious disease expert Dr. Anthony Fauci told 60 Minutes.
> While masks may block some droplets, Fauci said, they do not provide the level of protection people think they do. Wearing a mask may also have unintended consequences: People who wear masks tend to touch their face more often to adjust them, which can spread germs from their hands.
Like, they acknowledge Fauci lying about not needing masks, which would imply that they should be wearing masks, but will now refuse to wear a mask because they think Fauci is lying about needing masks.
The situation gets even murkier when you talk about mask _mandates_ instead of individual decision making. The argument that mask mandates are helpful is tough to support in the face of the differences in the delta-variant curve, for example, in different counties in California.
Just to say it: even daring to compare the results in contra costa county and san diego county, california (which have different mask requirements) got me shadow-banned on reddit. The reasoning here is mostly political, not scientific/rational. No one cares what the science says.
Claims that "Masks slow the spread of COVID" gets interpreted as "Masks stop the spread of COVID", and so when we have mask mandates and yet COVID still spreads, people use that as evidence that masks are worthless.
It's interesting that people can draw opposite conclusions from the same scenario. COVID has continued to spread despite mask mandates. Some claim that means the masks are worthless. Others (including me) would claim that, despite how bad it is, the spread would be even worse without them.
> individual decision making
In most cases, I agree that people should be able to make their own health choices. You wanna eat McDonald's for every meal and walk less than 50 steps a day? Go for it. Hell, snort a few lines of cocaine for dessert if you want to.
But when it comes to a pandemic, it's different. Sure, the vaccines are 95+% effective, and masks might be X% effective, and social distancing is Y% effective, and so on...but when >30% of the population has zero interest in doing any of that, then you can take every protective measure you can (Besides just staying in your house) and still get the disease from some asshole at the grocery store that doesn't care if they spread it.
Also, consider last year's toilet paper shortage, and the short gas shortage a few months ago. Individuals will often act irrationally in their own interests rather than what's good for everyone as a whole.
To think of it another way, when at a pizza party, you will have some people who take 3 slices of pizza because there might not be enough for everyone so they want to make sure they get their share. Others might only take a single slice because there might not be enough for everyone so they want to make sure as many people get some.
Individual decision making only makes sense if people aren't selfish.
It isn't just that COVID continues to spread despite mask mandates. It's that the curves look nearly identical in areas with and without mask mandates. And, to show their effectiveness, epidemiologists have resorted to pretty serious P-value hacking.
Separately, I find it hard to get worried for my personal safety because of the 30 percent of people refusing to vaccinate themselves. It's just not that hard to avoid the sorts of places where such people are likely to be. And, being vaccinated and healthy makes it less of an issue for me than, say, the risk of a car accident. Sure, I could pass it on to someone else if I get it, but with reasonable precautions I don't think that's likely at all.
I don't see how that is necessarily a lie. It could have been the best public health recommendation he could make at the time based on the available information. Research into how best to use masks is ongoing, so I would not expect today's masking recommendations to be the same as tomorrow's.
It's also not the only lie he's told and admitted to. See his claims about herd immunity, where the numbers kept going up, and when he was questioned on this, he outright said he just gave out numbers that he thought the public would accept at the time.
It's clear that what he and other scientists said about masks early in the pandemic certainly changed over time. I think science is like that. People who like simple, certain, unchanging answers can get them from religion or ideology. People who don't mind complexity, nuance, and change are more comfortable with science.
Assuming Fauci was lying because what he said then isn't what he is saying now just isn't logical.
He literally explained his reasons for lying.
Fauci admits to lying about masks and explains why: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kLXttHlUgK8
Fauci admits to moving the goalposts on vaccination rates and explains it's because of his "gut feeling that the country is finally ready to hear what he really thinks": https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/24/health/herd-immunity-covi...
> It's clear that what he and other scientists said about masks early in the pandemic certainly changed over time.
This isn't about that, this is about literal deception from a public health figure about public health.
It is not the specific content of the lie that is the issue, but the lack of integrity on display. It is used as a retort to "official X declared Y", and is meant to undermine the integrity of official pronouncements in general. There are many who bristled at these initial claims by pointing out (correctly) that promoting "noble lies" is terrible for public health officials and doing so would come back to bite them. For some reason, the medical profession seems to accept noble lies as being justified when the rest of society does not. This goes back to the old saw of doctors lying to their patients about their own health. It's a blemish on the profession, and one that needs to be erased and apologized for ASAP, and IMO, Fauci belongs to that old school and doesn't really get it -- and probably never will.
Also, as a protip to your finding of the fact that masks were being lied about but they themselves don't want to wear masks as being "ironic": the literal meaning of "irony" refers to saying something but meaning the opposite. For instance "Sure, I trust you", when the speaker clearly doesn't. There is also situational irony, which would be when the opposite of what is intended happens. E.g. trying to kill someone by giving them a poison that ends up curing them. So in this case, the irony would be saying a "noble lie" with the intention of saving lives but actually causing more lives to be lost -- that would be the true irony here.
It's similar but more emphasized with chimpanzees.
The problem is that we're not chimpanzees. We are smart enough to make very powerful technology, but not smart enough to use it sustainably.
Nice word choice.
Nobody's perfect; what builds the sort of trust that permits action is a history of publically doing one's best:
I would like to add something that’s not essential to the science, but something I kind of believe, which is that you should not fool the layman when you’re talking as a scientist. I’m not trying to tell you what to do about cheating on your wife, or fooling your girlfriend, or something like that, when you’re not trying to be a scientist, but just trying to be an ordinary human being. We’ll leave those problems up to you and your rabbi. I’m talking about a specific, extra type of integrity that is not not lying, but bending over backwards to show how you’re maybe wrong, that you ought to do when acting as a scientist. And this is our responsibility as scientists, certainly to other scientists, and I think to laymen.
Do that, and you'll earn your Ethical appeal easily enough.
Let me be clear, I think arguments about ethos generate the most argumentation and heat right now, but the silent killer is really pathos. People feel comfortable arguing ethos. Most people will not argue pathos openly though.
We have a crisis of pathos in our culture. How do you claim that something is important without an appeal to authority? You can't. We live in a culture that is fragmenting its sources of authority; different groups of people have different sources of authority.
Here's a good example. The external dialogue that a lot of conservatives give on climate change is that scientists can't be trusted. The internal dialogue that a lot of them (though not all) engage in goes something like, "The earth doesn't matter. God is going to come back and set things right. So we don't need to worry about it anyway."
This is particularly apropos in the wake of Russell Brand's recent video on FB's Fact Checkers for Covid 19 vaccine information [1] funded by BigPharma, having a huge financial stake in bigpharma, and intentionally hiding their funding by BigPharma, and not adding a notification that the fact checkers are in fact funded/invested by/in BigPharma.
I am starting to read completely disinterested 3rd party sources more, because weighing the pros and cons of a thing is more challenging when the supposed experts are deliberating concealing material relationships. Some old Emeritus professor, already retired, with several phds and just a passing bit of information often gives great criticism of a thing without having any stake in the outcome.
While I understand your argument, I'm believe there's something more going on.
Taking COVID, for example. From the pro-science side, we get:
"COVID is a dangerous virus. We should take X, Y, Z actions" from somebody with a PhD in public health, medicine, or similar.
And from the anti-science side, we get: "It's fake. It's the flu. X wasn't perfect, therefore X, Y, Z are all a plot to make you magnetic" from somebody on YouTube with no credential beyond being on Youtube.
I guess what I'm saying is there's something fundamentally broken about how people process information. All the Logos, Ethos, and Pathos in the world doesn't help when a significant portion of the population is brainwashed.
Many of the "facts" about COVID are not actually in much dispute. The people who view it as "a dangerous virus" and those who see it as "the flu" are much less far apart than they appear.
Nobody has seriously disputed the R0 values for COVID, nor the (rather) broad range of deaths per 100k cases. What isn't agreed upon is what the implications for policy should be.
Those who view it as a dangerous virus point to its transmissibility and capacity to cause hospitalization, and therefore its implications for public health issues.
Those who view it as "the flu" point to its relatively low death rate compared to other global pandemics of the past, particularly when adjusted for demographics, and correctly note that a given individual's chance of dying from COVID are extremely low (at least in countries with roughly adequate health care systems).
Both can claim "facts" on their side. The question is what policy consequences follow, and that is where the major differences lie. Depending on your perspective, the deaths (and long term illness) caused by COVID are variously worse, better or about the same as the damage caused by policies to contain it. Since making this assessment necessarily involves subjective judgements and questions of morality, it can't be settled by an appeal to science let alone mere facts.
None of this is to say that there are not relatively fact-ignorant people making various cases for certain policy approaches. But we could ignore those people, and the core debate would remain, and it's not a debate about truth or science, but policy.
On vaccines, case rates, etc. I agree with what you said.
As far back as you can go, yes. 2.5M years. But I think the point is not to call what exists "broken," but to understand and then use it to the advantage of humanity. Cult-like behavior is human behavior--i.e. the rule, not the exception. Now how do we use this to advance the species?
For context: I grew up Mormon, which I consider "cult-lite mainstream" on the cult<->religion spectrum. Having gone through that and left the church, I've spent some time deconstructing what influenced me to think the way I did as a believing member.
The best advice I can give is (a) make friends with people who are inside information bubbles [1], (b) people are motivated primarily by feelings and needs [2] despite what they say, (c) people often cover what they're really feeling with political, philosophical, and ideological language, which is often very difficult to decrypt to outsiders, and leads to significant misunderstandings, which usually serves to further separate and prevent friendship from happening, which is what's needed in the first place.
[1] see Daryl Davis (https://www.huffpost.com/entry/black-man-daryl-davis-befrien...)
[2] see Nonviolent Communication, a book that I place in the "top 3" most influential books in my life (https://amazon.com/Nonviolent-Communication-Language-Life-Ch...)
Then why do we see articles saying that Youtube etc bans people with great credentials who are anti vax? There are people with great credentials on every side of every argument. Great credentials doesn't stop you from being an idiot or being wrong. If you believe the first person with great credentials you see, and that person happened to be anti vacc, would you be anti vax? Sounds like it to me. I'm pro vaccine, but I am strongly anti blindly listening to people with credentials.
And there's a big difference between a scientist saying "people with previous COVID infections have more anti-bodies than those with vaccinations" and Joe Rogan saying "COVID is fake/just the flu".
The first is potentially true and most of us aren't qualified to either verify it or derive any course of action from it - regardless of it's truth, vaccination is probably the appropriate action for any individual (better safe than sorry). Using the statement as a argument to avoid vaccination is bad policy.
The second is on outright fabrication, yet we still have a significant portion of the population believing that crap.
Secondly, Rogan has never said COVID was fake or just the flu, and the reason people assert that COVID is fake is down to motivated reasoning, which is the same reason Fauci thinks he was justified in lying to the public.
Getting people to change their behaviour starts by not dismissing them or dehumanizing them, and trying to steelman their position so they and you fully understand why they want to dismiss COVID. When that's done, it's often clear where you can compromise. Sadly, that's not what we see going on.
Including wanting to implement many of the same draconian policies we see today for communities where AIDS was discovered.
And how do they get funding to do science without showing its important?
Human gossip is societies field effect.
A thing may be true but politics is obfuscating the importance.
This ivermectin thing basically proves that logos isn't useful. Ethos + Pathos alone can convince a large population of people.
The Apple "Reality Distortion Field" was never about logic. It was about making people feel good about buying Apple products. That's fine, because Apple has decent enough products (I don't like them myself, but I can see why some others would like them).
But today, we can apply the "Reality Distortion Field" to any subject. Most recently: ivermectin.
-------------
What I don't get: why are people choosing to push snake oil (like ivermectin), instead of pushing the drugs that do work (3 different vaccines, dexamethasone, and monoclonal antibodies)?
Society has developed working treatments for COVID19: dexamethasone cut the death rate in half IIRC, and monoclonal antibodies cut it in half yet again. And yet, people are seeking treatments that straight up have no evidence of working.
I can put papers up for the efficacy of dexamethasone + monoclonal antibodies, and how this cocktail saves the lives of countless people across this country. But then I'm suddenly left in a "Russet's teapot" scenario where I'm apparently supposed to prove-a-negation when discussing ivermectin (even if countless papers fail to distinguish ivermectin from the null-hypothesis).
People's brains turn off. Because today's reality distortion fields / marketing / propaganda are much, much stronger than logic.
---------
Let me tell you how to do things in today's world.
1. Automatically find the people who have the poorest logic. Use ads, memes, and other such "low-quality" discussion points to find the lowest functioning brains. For example, clickbait headlines or "Nigerian Prince" scams. The dumber the argument, the better.
2. Reasonable people will ignore you. The only people who will interact with you are people with weaker argument skills. Spend as much time convincing _this_ group of your benefits.
3. Make it fun: give them memes to share with their friends. Even if its a bad / crappy argument, that's okay. That's what memes are about.
4. Sit back and relax as your crowd automatically spreads whatever argument you want amongst their friends and family. Now they're doing the hard work for you.
5. Bonus points: get enough people moving as a crowd, and even smart people start to get drawn into the masses. You'll start finding apologists who make better arguments on behalf of you. Keep up with the meme culture and pick/choose the best arguments. Crowdsource your marketing: the memes that become popular are the arguments you want to use.
At no point is "working" on logos actually beneficial to building a RDF (reality distortion field). You can build ethos + pathos simultaneously by just seeding opinions into a crowd through meme culture.
Bonus points#2: Use really, really bad arguments (World is flat. Lets to go Mars. 9/11 was a hoax. Hydroxychloroquine can save you from COVID19) as practice. The better you get at seeding bad arguments, the better you get at seeding any argument.
> I'm apparently supposed to prove-a-negation when discussing ivermectin
is it possible there is some physiological issues about "going to the doctor" vs "self help/healing" ?
Its not physiological. Its simply marketing.
Its no secret that ivermectin / hydroxychloroquine makers are benefiting from this snake-oil bullcrap. Its no different from essential oils or other such snake oil products.
We just didn't care about essential oils 3 years ago because its fine for idiots to waste their own money on snake oil. But when the masses are tricked into distrusting COVID19 precautions and start spreading the virus around even more, its a bigger deal.
> Its no secret that ivermectin / hydroxychloroquine makers are benefiting from this snake-oil bullcrap. Its no different from essential oils or other such snake oil products.
> We just didn't care about essential oils 3 years ago because its fine for idiots to waste their own money on snake oil.
It's "Russell's Teapot", it's named after Bertrand Russell, not a potato.
We are so lucky that COVID is only going to kill a million americans or so (700k and counting, probably 850k by Jan 1st), if this was the death rates of smallpox or the black death... ye gods. Our lack of respect in science is a huge part of vaccine hesitancy and our key role in continuing the pandemic.
The news media are terrible because for decades they have reduced science and technology either to simplistic caricatures, star trek gobbledygook, or even worse the WELL THEY SAID THIS, NOW THEY SAY THAT.
The general media's constant use of the high school nerd trope for all science and technology proficiency has been a long term failure in the progress of our civilization. Only, and only, because such proficiency leads generally to some degrees of upper middle class money to vast wealth is the reason it hasn't been worse.
But that media trope has always colored all science and technology policy as culturally "well, that's what the nerds say, and they aren't cool or fun".
Possibly it goes back to how most ultra-rich """elite""" made their money in America: by control and exploitation. People that have influence and position distrust science, because it is complicated and unknown and preys on their paranoia, and so often for industrialists produces complications to their overall plan of "make money by selling products, offloading the actual environmental cost/impact of those products on ... anyone else".
Maybe I'm paranoid, but it does seem with the mastery of social media propaganda/manipulation by monied interests, sowing distrust in science is now at an all time high.
So the business-friendly right will distrust science because it threatens their money and power. The apathetic center won't like science because it isn't cool. The left... well, scientists are generally white and male so they are distrusted by identity activists, and the rest of the left is too disorganized to rally around science policy effectively.
Logos, Ethos, Pathos: you need all three. "This is true. I am trustworthy. This true thing is important."
It is very frustrating, especially to many of my fellow scientists, that bellowing "THIS IS TRUE" as loudly as possible is insufficient. But it is insufficient.