Re:Harvard professor Francesca Gino was accused of faking data
by AlbertCory on Wednesday August 02, 2023 @02:47PM
(#36975211)
Well stated. Inevitably this discussion reverts to a practical one: what happened with COVID? A few powerful people used "trust the science" to elevate their own conclusions (which, to use your #3 and #5, are subtly wrong some of the time) to forcibly silence discussion. We have ample proof that top health officials and top political officials did exactly that.
People who spend an afternoon clicking links, to use your language, are entitled to voice their opinions, however ignorant they are. Just like you're entitled to say that the Earth is 6,000 years old. Most people will ignore it, but those who are receptive to those beliefs already will listen.
Again, using your language, "non-stop big-brother gestapo police state surveillance" of wrong opinions does have "a lot of negative externalities."
1. The optimal rate of fraud is not 0%, just like the optimal rate of shoplifting in a store is not 0%, and the optimal amount of crime in a society is not zero. Science, just like the grocery, and the street, has to operate on some degree of trust, and not non-stop big-brother gestapo police state surveillance. Just like a zero-crime society, a zero-scientific fraud society would have a lot of negative externalities that aren't accounted for by paperclip-maximizaiton.
2. If even one bit of dishonesty is enough to distrust a system, you shouldn't trust anything. But nobody actually thinks or operates in that kind of insane solipsism. You wouldn't get anything done.
3. What actually happens is that people from low-integrity fields (Politics, sponsored media, lobbying, corporate PR) are trying their fucking hardest to use that argument to bring public perception of everyone else down to their level. If they are blatantly lying half the time, and someone working in science blatantly lies, say, 0.5% of the time, that solipsist from #2 would look at it and conclude 'well, there's no difference'. He couldn't be more wrong.
4. You shouldn't use a single paper, or two papers, or even fifteen papers as an arbiter of expert consensus. Papers disagree. Expert consensus is reached by looking at the whole body of a work.
5. You shouldn't use expert consensus as a definitive arbiter of truth.
6. But you sure as hell should defer to an expert, over your own judgement, about non-trivial technical matters. I don't care how smart you are and how many papers you read, I have serious doubts that you're going to be any good at performing, say, an open-heart surgery. There's a reason we leave it to the experts, even if what they know is wrong.