Re:Royal Society cautions against censorship of scientific m...
by cm2187 on Monday January 31, 2022 @05:18AM
(#30146488)
There are also different variations of “science”.
You have hard science where the research is based on repeatable experiments in a lab where you can clearly isolate every other effect.
You also have softer sciences where experiments are difficult or impossible, and where people try to come up with the best approach. Climate science falls in that category (you can’t really experiment with Earth’s atmosphere, at best backtest your model to check it is compatible with your data).
The problem is that medicine falls within both of those categories. Some parts are fully replicable (like test 3 anti-allergy creams on the same skin at the same time), but many others don’t have the luxury of being able to experiment on humans. So you end up relying on correlation analysis with low samples and a million possible variables. Some bits like epidemiology are more akin to climate science.
The problem with these softer sciences isn’t that they aren’t science (the progress of medicine over the last century is prodigious), but that it’s hard to trust any study individually. So when someone points to a paper that shows a reduction of X by Y% if you do Z, my first reaction is skepticism. So I am struggling with the whole “follow the science” thing, and the idea that any objecting opinion must be crushed.
You have hard science where the research is based on repeatable experiments in a lab where you can clearly isolate every other effect.
You also have softer sciences where experiments are difficult or impossible, and where people try to come up with the best approach. Climate science falls in that category (you can’t really experiment with Earth’s atmosphere, at best backtest your model to check it is compatible with your data).
The problem is that medicine falls within both of those categories. Some parts are fully replicable (like test 3 anti-allergy creams on the same skin at the same time), but many others don’t have the luxury of being able to experiment on humans. So you end up relying on correlation analysis with low samples and a million possible variables. Some bits like epidemiology are more akin to climate science.
The problem with these softer sciences isn’t that they aren’t science (the progress of medicine over the last century is prodigious), but that it’s hard to trust any study individually. So when someone points to a paper that shows a reduction of X by Y% if you do Z, my first reaction is skepticism. So I am struggling with the whole “follow the science” thing, and the idea that any objecting opinion must be crushed.