1. Science as the body of knowledge
2. Science as a method / approach
I also find that mixing the meanings/perspectives/intent up in a single conversation is common, sometimes accidentally sometimes intentionally.
In my ignorance (ComSci major, so not a real science :), I would describe myself as extremely positive / confident to "Science, the approach/method" and, through that approach, pragmatic about the "Science the current body of knowledge".
In other words:
Yes, there are very much limits to what we currently know, and some of what we think we know will turn out to be wrong, subtly or catastrophically. There are definitely huge limits and uncertainties to Science the body of knowledge!
But, acknowledging it is kinda the point, and the best way to figure it out that we are currently aware of is through scientific approach.
I find distinction is crucial especially in political and religious discussion frameworks. Otherwise, I never know if I disagree or disagree with statements regarding "limits of science" etc.
(This is all further mixed up by zillion of daily popular articles where "Science says that [...]!!!" or "[...], scientists find", which... ugh, oversimplify at best and deceive more likely)
What are your thoughts?
The way we learn and study topics is divorced from the original method of discovering those topics. The way people learn Computer Science is generally by absorbing the information, not by doing the experiments. So it is difficult for people to understand that the way we have this knowledge is through hypothesis forming and experimentation i.e. Science.
3. What is actually happening in academia
I think most people exposed to science#3 from the inside can agree that science#2 works – and indeed works surprisingly well – despite science#3, not because of it.
But I don't think as academia as the only, or even necessarily the most important place that science is happening in the world today.
My adjacent refrain is "Science is not the same as people trying to do science".
> 3. What is actually happening in academia
While we're enumerating, I think there's a fourth definition:
4. "Science" as a belief system rather than as a tool/technology. I think in this respect, there's often an unacknowledged (or denied) blurring between science and science fiction (the more traditional "spaceship books" kind, as well as overconfident speculation). There's also a tendency to claim the prestige and authority of science for one's own personal opinions and preferences.
1. The belief that the scientific method and the assumptions and research methods of the physical sciences are applicable to all other disciplines (such as the humanities and social sciences), or that those other disciplines are not as valuable.
2. The belief that all truth is exclusively discovered through science.
Maybe the second definition kind of fits if you stretch it. I think 'futurism', not in the sense of the artistic movement, is a closer fit; '2. The study and prediction of possible futures.'
Meanwhile, these people mock the religious [in their imagination] for "being" insular/fundamentalist.
A key feature of scientism is that science itself is never well defined or understood by its adherents, so science is a floating signifier that can mean whatever its proponents want it to mean. Typically, these are not people with firsthand experience doing science, but consumers of second and thirdhand science media and science culture (TED Talks, "I fucking love science", NASA t-shirt, "I believe in science" bumper sticker, etc.). Lack of scientific literacy results in science taking on a ritual status, where following the ritual (scientific method, peer review, etc.) produces truth, and failure to find truth is always the fault of the mislead individual scientist. Because science is the ultimate source of truth, it is also the organizing principle for society, and those "anti-science" people who would question science are dangerous and stand in the way of progress--basically a religion.
I agree.
> A key feature of scientism is that science itself is never well defined or understood by its adherents, so science is a floating signifier that can mean whatever its proponents want it to mean. Typically, these are not people with firsthand experience doing science, but consumers of second and thirdhand science media and science culture...
I don't think that completely true. I think you have different levels of adherents of scientism, and what you say is definitely true of most of the lower levels ("consumers of second and thirdhand science media and science culture").
However the top tier consists of the creators of a decent chunk of that "science media and science culture." Many of those people are actual scientists, but ones who have sought out the public eye as "science popularizers" and are best known for their works for general audiences.
That’s too many hyphens.
The scientific method works best in fields such as physics and chemistry, where you have an established model of reality. The model has been extensively tested and validated, and you can use it to design experiments that will likely test what they are supposed to, taking all relevant factors into account.
Other fields, particularly those that are most affected by the replication crisis, study phenomena that are too complex for such comprehensive models. Instead of testing established mechanisms, such fields often use the scientific method to investigate black boxes. Designing experiments is harder, because it's not clear if you are measuring the right things in the right way, or which factors could plausibly affect the results. You may not even be sure if the mechanisms the experiments rely on actually exist and if they are properly understood.
I like to think that the replication crisis is the social process trying to deal with the issues resulting from overreliance on the scientific method. When you can't rely on an established body of knowledge, a focus on the method takes your attention away from questioning your assumptions and understanding them.
Which particular research are you thinking of?
Younger people are more at risk of getting this wrong because their scope of knowledge and experience are shallower. Introspection grows with age, but when introspection is not deliberate older people are more catastrophically at risk of getting this wrong.
Along these lines, I think the role of consensus in science has been overly dramatized by those with various policies to push. Max Planck's principle is famous in the short form "Science progresses one funeral at a time". One of the professors I worked with as a graduate student had a sign on his desk, "First They Ignore You, Then They Laugh at You, Then They Attack You, Then You Win".
These two quotes captures an important tension in the practice of science: consensus both retards the progress of science and captures it for others to build on.
Many people regard Einstein's later career as fruitless, but by attacking quantum mechanics, he improved its foundations as well as making it much more acceptable.
3. Science the institution.
As in "What Science says about X" as if there was a single authoritative, coherent entity we could call Science.
But what does that actually mean? How do you manifest this in your daily life and in your decisions?
My grandmother told me God told me I heard on the news
Well, that does not seem scientific nor following the tenants of science. But how can you evaluate information you receive that is called science and in so far as you know from a source of a scientist. Esp. these days in the US everything is incredibly politicized.
There is no way to dig deep enough into every tidbit of knowledge we are exposed to. A lot of scientific fields these days are so complicated that you need a degree to start understanding what is going on or to evaluate data.
If we are lucky we know a few people in different fields whom we trust. We trust the people to we trust what the say, since they are scientists. We all walk around and -believe- in various things we hear and elect not to believe in others. Then we claim that we believe in this or that "because of science". and because of the scientific method. But we dont know that for a fact because we dont know and probably could not understand all the steps from beginning to end needed to ensure that the scientific model had been applied appropriately at all stages.
I dont think real science should state "THIS IS TRUTH BECAUSE THIS IS SCIENCE" it should be "This is our best understanding right now, and there are some other theories out there that may also be valid."
3. Science, the mass psychological phenomenenon.
Like many ideologies it behaves a lot like a religion, and online discussions are chock full of artifacts.
In my case, I have a negative view of "science" because of this phenomenological aspect of it, which I consider dangerous because it results in irrational, tribal thinking (see: covid, climate change, etc)...and it ain't only the "deniers" who are guilty.
> Yes, there are very much limits to what we currently know, and some of what we think we know will turn out to be wrong, subtly or catastrophically. There are definitely huge limits and uncertainties to Science the body of knowledge!
> But, acknowledging it is kinda the point, and the best way to figure it out that we are currently aware of is through scientific approach.
Pro-science people absolutely love this meme, I encounter it several times a day in the online spaces I frequent.
> when a research paper is peer reviewed by its author .. that's clearly not science
Peer review is something academia evolved only relatively recently. Science long pre-dates peer review, and you can do science without peer review (or with useless peer review) just like you can write programs without code review. As recently as Einstein, peer review was being seen as some offensive newfangled thing which he had no time for.
The goal of peer review is to try and ensure that claims that are presented as being scientific actually are. It frequently fails at that task but even when it works it's still just a safety check, not an actual required component of true science.
> when the heads of multiple top university epidemiology departments come together to speak out about it, that should be regarded as science
A bunch of academics making an announcement is definitely not science. The whole point of science is that it doesn't rely on People With Titles deciding by fiat what's true. That's what religion is!
> What happened with COVID is that ... most scientists were pushed aside
We have very different memories of these events.
Oh? In what field are you working?
>A bunch of academics making an announcement is definitely not science.
A bunch of heads of Ivy League Universities who are the foremost experts on debunking junk epidemiology and who have all contributed significantly to the field are more wortg listening to than the media who has current joint ownership and board control of Pfizer. Even if only from a Bayesian logical perspective. Conflicts of such interests don't make for good science. But of course, as the general public doesn't know the difference, you can tell anyone whatever you want. Well, anyone except actual scientists.
I feel that I've never had the first problem, but have definitely had the second.
On one hand, there is the natural limitation of Science itself in terms of the type of questions (that are amenable to the scientific method) it can answer. On the other hand, it is still the best way of generating knowledge that we have.
My overconfidence was that scientists, as individuals and as a community, would always do the right thing, driven by, and honestly following, the scientific method. But in the past few years I've had to revisit this assumption several times and be reminded to always retain some healthy skepticism.
Most recent example is this climate scientist who just published in Nature, and then went ahead afterwards and penned an op-ed [0] saying he actually misrepresented the actual factors in order to get published.
[0] https://www.thefp.com/p/i-overhyped-climate-change-to-get-pu...
This is a great point. I'm shocked by how often I end up working on a project with a colleague who is taking the path of least resistance. In my field, this usually results in using decades old statistical methods than have been proven time and time again to be unsatisfactory. They just don't want to learn new methods or their technical expertise aren't good enough to learn how to implement the new approaches. So they just coast. I'm not sure what to do in these situations other than just try and set a positive example.
Environment is important but we could still have huge improvements in medical care using genomics. It's easy to obtain and still has a very strong relationship to disease, and is a problem best solved by deep learning. I've watched people tilt against this windmill for 25+ years and it's kind of funny just how bad our labelling of diseases is.
First we did not "fail" in drug development, our collaboration with GSK yielded substantially more programs than we had anticipated when we started. The verdict on whether the strategy is successful or not will not be clear for another 5-10 years because being better at picking targets doesn't shorten the timeline for bringing a drug to market, it mostly means that you should have a modestly higher proportion of programs that end up being successful.
Second we did not start with a premise that we could or needed to do a great job of predicting disease from genetics alone, that is not required to identify good targets. You're correct we don't have huge genomics datasets, we largely use the same genomics datasets others use. Identifying targets with genetics in the simplest sense requires using genetics to identify an association at a genomic location, and then using genomics for functional interpretation of that association. And having the largest database of genetic associations enables the first step of that.
I'm not sure what you mean by "the underlying relationship between the genome and phenotypes... is a highly nonlinear function". Simple additive models account for most of the heritability of complex phenotypes.
I was a team from Google that evaluated 23&Me's data and technology many years ago for a business deal. We already talked about this with Anne and she confirmed what I said above. It might have been before you were hired- but I'm pretty sure we talked about building a variant store and a transpose service? I stand by my statements (note: I work at a competitor of GSK and I know all about these deals). It's not correct that being better at picking targets doesn't shorten the timeline, either- at least in the opinion of the scientists at my company.
Additive models don't really account for most of the heritability of complex phenotypes. They're what have worked best and been published so far. Complex phenotypes are nonlinear because the generative processes in biology have feedback, homeostasis, enormous numbers of individual elements... etc...
By the way, does 23&Me still put tongue-twisting as a heritable trait on its reports? https://blog.23andme.com/articles/tackling-tongue-curling-th... It's not.
You may be correct that better targets are also be faster to market. We would also hope so: better targets might be more straightforward to validate in the lab and may enable smaller trial sizes, for instance. Timelines are still long and this doesn't alter my statement that the success or failure of our target selection strategy won't be known for some years.
Do you have any evidence for additivity not accounting for most heritability? I'll give one cite (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2265475/). The fact that biology is very complex and non-linear is not inconsistent with most genetic effects being small and approximately additive.
We have never had a trait report on tongue curl, the 15-year-old blog post you linked to says it isn't a Mendelian trait, so I'm not sure where you were going with that. I can tell you that it is somewhat heritable but complex.
"The gods did not reveal, from the beginning, all things to us, but in the course of time through seeking we may learn and know things better. But as for certain truth, no man has known it, nor shall he know it, neither of the gods Nor yet of all the things of which I speak. For even if by chance he were to utter the final truth, he would himself not know it: for all is but a woven web of guesses"
Xenophanes via Karl Popper
I suppose you missed her recent video about economics? Her content is getting more and more clickbaitey by the day. Some really half-baked data creeping into her videos.
Celebrating someone's achievements in a specific domain is not giving them carte blanche across the board. Personally, I think it more productive to celebrate someone's successes while lamenting their failures. If one thinks that mediocrity is the norm (which it is, by definition), then transcending it, even briefly, it something to celebrate and use as inspiration, even while acknowledging that all individuals have flaws (to some degree).
I only heard her arguing others are wrong because she's right. That's not a demonstration of the limits of knowledge.
For example, 23andMe thought they would revolutionize drug development with a huge genetics dataset. In practice, genetic information alone is not sufficient to treat the majority of diseases that affect individuals and society. There is too much environmental variation affecting human biology for purely genetic approaches.
Understanding the real limits of knowledge is vital to pushing knowledge forward where we can. As a biologist, one of the things I most appreciate about Sabine Hossenfelder (a physicist) is that she highlights the limits of knowledge in her (and adjacent) fields. She gets a lot of push back (and is sometimes wrong), but having the discussion is vital to science.
Acknowledging the limits of science is not a negative attitude about science, but a positive one. A clear idea of the current limits of science (both theoretically and practically) is instrumental to pushing through them. For example, the scholarly papers highlighting the replication crisis (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Replication_crisis) are actually very useful to maintaining the health of science as a human endeavor, not a critique of science. Scientists need a clear understanding of the scientific foundations that they are building on.