I noticed a map of obesity overlaps very well with a map of diabetes. high alcohol consumption mapped very well with the areas the prior map didnt correlate. in other words, in areas where obesity was not correlated with diabetes, there was high alcohol consumption. paper worthy or worth looking into? no. I lied to a different section of the group and said these were areas of increased correlation, and it wasn't alcohol but soda consumption. They immediately wanted to seek grants to write papers.
You can see how this leads to junk science. if you ignore things that dont fit your political agenda and only research things that fit your agenda, that's junk science. it gets worse because when the data doesnt suggest the political agenda pushed, they try to 'account' for other factors or re-run the study in a different way until it says what they wanted it to say. worse case, it doesnt get published.
The experts are not to be trusted.
https://www.news-medical.net/health/Peptic-Ulcer-History.asp...
What else could they be wrong about today? Often when you really dig into consensus statements you find that they're based on a handful of old studies which don't really meet modern evidence based medicine criteria.
Expert consensus says that washing hands prevents the spread of disease. It's been like that since the 1950s. Has that consensus been wrong?
What about the expert consensus that azithromycin is an effective treatment against (most strains of) streptococcus? Is that consensus wrong?
You are correct, expert consensus will be wrong at times and it will take a fairly large push and evidence to change course. However, for every example of the experts "getting it wrong" there are 100s if not 1000s where you are better off following the consensus. Further, as time goes on, the process of developing consensus improves itself. It looks for faults that lead to bad conclusions and corrects for those faults in future studies.
It is a truth that experts and their consensuses will be wrong. However, if I follow and accept what a strong expert consensus says about something in that field of study 99% or even 99.99% of the time, they will be right. Or said another way, if you make the claim that "This expert consensus is wrong" You'll be right 0.01% of the time and wrong 99.99% of the time. Unless you are an expert in that field of study and you have a bunch of very strong research backing the claim, you've got no footing to really go against the consensus.
My subjective impression is that expert accuracy rates vary widely by scientific field. High energy particle physicists might actually be hitting 99.99%. Psychologists and nutritionists might not even be at 50%. Epidemiologists are somewhere in the middle.
Experts lose credibility when they make sweeping recommendations based on flawed or limited research rather than remaining silent as they should. Once trust is lost it takes a generation to regain.
> My subjective impression is that expert accuracy rates vary widely by scientific field. High energy particle physicists might actually be hitting 99.99%. Psychologists and nutritionists might not even be at 50%. Epidemiologists are somewhere in the middle.
All fair points that I don't really disagree with.
> Experts lose credibility when they make sweeping recommendations based on flawed or limited research rather than remaining silent as they should. Once trust is lost it takes a generation to regain.
I don't think it's quiet as binary. I agree, they should limit recommendations based on the data and be very open when "the data is limited and more information could change our recommendation".
But I don't think that means they need to be silent when data is limited, just careful with communication.
Health experts are in the worst position for this sort of thing. In a pandemic situation, data will simply be limited and action required to prevent lose of life. You can't just sit back and do nothing.
But, I'd agree that you need to be very open and frank about why you are taking actions and how confident you are that the actions you are taking will be effective. COVID hasn't been handled perfectly in that regard, but it could be worse.
As for trust and credibility, I think a major social issue we have is that we are quick to distrust experts over being wrong or mistepping on any given issue but for some reason we are extremely forgiving of religious leaders and politicians that repeat platitudes we agree with. I'm not advocating for blind trust in experts, but I wish it wasn't so reactionary, where any wrong statement causes people to lose all trust in expert credibility. That's not something I could control anyways.
"First, do no harm" is a fundamental principle of medical ethics. Unfortunately iatrogenic harm from over treatment is still a serious cause of injuries and deaths. The default should always be to do nothing unless there is clear and reliable evidence to support intervention. That applies equally to pandemics as to other situations.
https://www.nap.edu/catalog/9728/to-err-is-human-building-a-...
I understand that politicians might sometimes have to take rapid actions based on political factors. But don't deceive the populace by falsely claiming those actions are supported by scientific consensus.
Saying correctness approaches 0 because knowledge is effectively infinite would be like saying our ability to do math correctly is 0 because there are an infinite amount of numbers. Or, that our ability to write correct software is 0 because there are infinite possible programs.
Scientific consensus correctness is calculated as true assertions / all assertions.
If we stopped making assertions, today, the scientific consensus correctness would be fixed at whatever level it is at. The amount of knowledge that hasn't been studied has no bearing on the correctness of scientific consensus. That's a number that is finite with a denominator squarely fixed by the number of assertions that happen as human knowledge expands.
The assertion 1 + 1 = 2 will always be true. If that was the only assertion the scientific community ever made and had consensus over then they'd be at 100% correctness. It doesn't matter that you can also calculate 1 + 2, or 3 + 5, or an infinite number of numerical combinations. The denominator is the assertions, not the unasserted assertions. It doesn't matter that knowledge is "fractile" or whatever. Because, assertions by the scientific community are pretty much always couched as "Given the current data, this model fits best". Newtonian physics isn't "incorrect" it's incomplete. This is the same for most knowledge with that "fractile" understanding.
The only way you approach 0 is if our fundamental understanding of reality is completely fundamentally flawed, but then, that'd be an unknowable knowledge.
scientific consensus has no hope of outrunning even what humans in general know, let alone every scientific conjecture ever made, most of which aren't disproven, but rather merely discarded. and all that is a tiny speck next to everything that's within reach of human knowledge, which is miniscule next to everything that could ever be known but is forever beyond our reach. it really does approach 0 at the limit.
Further, the scenario of this entire thread is about current and future scientific consensus, not past consensus. The fact that protoscience said that that you need to balance the 4 humors to cure illness does not affect current scientific consensus which soundly rejects that notion.
The number of assertions we have scientific consensus on is finite. The number of those assertions which are true is a finite number. The infinite nature of knowledge does not change that ratio because, again, we aren't making assertions about everything that is knowable.
The entire point of this conversation is "What is more likely true, what the experts say or something else?". You are making the claim that because scientists don't know what every atom in the sun is doing, they can't correctly say that the sun will rise in the morning. Because, their knowledge of the sun is an infinitesimally small percentage of everything there is to know about the sun.
My point is, scientists aren't making assertions about what every quark in the sun will do. They aren't making assertions about the temperature of every square inch of the sun. The assertions they are making are far more broad and, shocker, likely 90+% true. Which circles back to my main point. If an expert tells you "The surface of the sun is roughly 6000C" That's a correct statement.
If you aren't going to address this in your next comment then don't bother because I'm done with this. You are being purposefully obtuse.
That's how trust works. It only takes 1 miss to lose it.
The issue isn't that experts are wrong or change their stance when the data changes. That isn't a problem and is exactly how things should work.
The issue is when politicians and leaders treat "expert opinion" as settled truth. Our decisions and policies need to be crafted knowing that experts are wrong and the situation changes when the data changes. Instead, politicians and leaders hold up expert opinion as settled and let the blame fall on the scientists, researchers, etc. when they "miss". If their work was not co-opted by politicians there would be no issue.
No, that’s only how things work when you are looking for a pretense to ignore expert advice.
Most of the reasons for distrust I've seen have basically boiled down to "I don't like what the expert is saying" or "They were wrong once, obviously all experts are wrong about everything".
Obviously knowing somebody personally makes this much easier.
WRT Covid, yes that advice was wrong and has been abandoned as Covid isn’t spread by surface transmission.
I wholly trust science that independently replicates and the fact that it's missing from the process means much of what we see is less than wholly trustworthy.
Certainly, a lot of the social sciences and "soft" sciences have a fair bit of replication/data problems. That said, the biomedical, environmental, geologic, and chemical sciences by and large have really solid data and repeats of that data. The areas of sciences we have a harder time controlling for are those where it'd be unethical to get better data and examples (nutritional science, for example).
There are far too many fields of study to lump all science into the same bucket and call it all untrustworthy.
A bigger problem is that scientific journalism treats every study as being equal. When, in fact, some studies are far better than others and carry a much larger weight of truth.
But FB, and other platforms, treat them as if they are when making their decisions on what to censor. FB even trusts so called "independent fact checkers," who don't even claim to be scientists and write mostly on political topics, to act as arbiters of truth.
> A bigger problem is that scientific journalism treats every study as being equal.
And it's these journalists that FB is relying on for its determination of fact, not the actual scientists.
It's happened before, especially when a select few command the majority of the field's grants/publications. If you are interested in how this could happen, here's an example of where basically the entirety of the Alzheimer's disease research field of study succumbed to bias:
https://www.statnews.com/2019/06/25/alzheimers-cabal-thwarte...
as well as the HN discussion on it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21911225
They may not be doing a particularly good job un-distorting it, but it's not a choice between pure and free exchange of information and censorship. It is between whether Facebook is going to manipulate in both directions -- promoting and taking down -- or just one.
(Note that I don't think either of these choices are particularly good. I would prefer that Facebook did neither.)
And stop dissembling. For instance, Fauci's early statements on mask-wearing were calculated to preserve the supply of N95 masks for medical personnel. However laudable the intent, it betrays what I imagine is an endemic world-view that the masses must be manipulated, rather than dealt with honestly.
This morning, an NPR report about the new CDC quarantine guidelines acknowledged criticisms/allegations of corporate lobbying for the policy change and internal fears of staffing for critical services, which was followed-up by a "follow the science" platitude.
While there are bad actors, consensus is generally going to guide you closer to the truth than fringe experts. What does the community of experts who have studied this say about it? Is it something generally accepted by the experts or is it something that most experts disagree with?
It is nearly impossible that an entire field of study will succumb to bias. Climate change is the poster child here. Where experts disagree isn't that it is happening and caused by man, they disagree about the degree that it will be a problem (With all of them agreeing it's a major issue). Yet, I've often seen it claimed that those experts are all biased and this fringe expert funded by Koch research is really the one to be trusted (which, shocker, finds we should be burning MORE fossil fuels!)