Home
Weiye Loh's Library tagged → View Popular, Search in Google
Firestein is Professor and Chair of the Department of Biological Sciences at Columbia University, where he teaches a wildly popular course on ignorance, inviting scientists in as guest speakers to tell students not what they know but what they don’t know, and even what they don’t know that they don’t know. (Would you rather earn an A or an F in a class called “Ignorance”?, he muses.)
-
Firestein captures the essence of the problem by contrasting the public’s understanding of science as a step-wise systematic algorithm of grinding through experiments that churn out data sets to be analyzed statistically and published in peer-reviewed journals after a process of observation, hypothesis, manipulation, further observation, and new hypothesis testing, with the Princeton University mathematician Andrew Wiles’ description of science as “groping and probing and poking, and some bumbling and bungling, and then a switch is discovered, often by accident, and the light is lit, and everyone says, ‘Oh, wow, so that’s how it looks,’ and then it’s off into the next dark room, looking for the next mysterious black feline” (p. 2), in reference to the old proverb: “It is very difficult to find a black cat in a dark room. Especially when there is no cat.”
-
It has been estimated that from the beginning of civilization around 5,000 years ago to the year 2003, all of humanity created a grand total of five exabytes of digital information. From 2003 through 2010 we created five exabytes of digital information every two days. By 2013 we will be producing five exabytes every ten minutes. The 2010 total of 912 exabytes is the equivalent of 18 times the amount of information contained in all the books ever written. It isn’t knowledge that we need more of; it is how to think about what we know and what we don’t know that is becoming ever more critical in science, through a process Feinstein calls “controlled neglect.” Scientists “don’t stop at the facts,” he explains, “they begin there, right beyond the facts, where the facts run out” (p. 12). It must be this way, he argues, because “the vast archives of knowledge seem impregnable, a mountain of facts that I could never hope to learn, let alone remember” (p. 14). Doctors and lawyers and engineers need many facts at their ready, as do scientists, but for the latter “the facts serve mainly to access the ignorance” because this is where the action is. “Want to be on the cutting edge? Well, it’s all, or mostly, ignorance out there. Forget the answers, work on the questions” (pp. 15–16).
- 4 more annotation(s)...
“appreciates the power of science as a problem-solving tool and that seeks to exploit its methods of inquiry to resolve the great questions of the day”. Geek or non-geek, this is a manifesto we should all feel able to endorse.
the problem is not so much people turning their faces against uncomfortable truths, but rather that we don't appreciate the vital role science has to play in evidence-based policymaking.
Mark Henderson: There's very little of what you might term "anti-science" in politics, very few MPs who are actively hostile to what science has to offer. But there is, I think, a much broader problem of indifference to science. It's simply not something that the vast majority of our elected representatives, and indeed civil servants, have actually thought about.
skeptics (and, hum, philosophers!) are in the criticism business, and nobody likes to be criticized (including skeptics and philosophers). But we may cut some slack to critics if they also propose ways forward, constructive solutions to the problems they identify. This, I think, is a mistake. Criticism is valuable per se, as a way to engage our notions, show where they may go wrong, and help (other) people see ways forward. Criticism — pace Bacon — is inherently constructive, even when negative, because it allows us to make progress by identifying our errors and their causes.
-
keptics (and, hum, philosophers!) are in the criticism business, and nobody likes to be criticized (including skeptics and philosophers). But we may cut some slack to critics if they also propose ways forward, constructive solutions to the problems they identify. This, I think, is a mistake. Criticism is valuable per se, as a way to engage our notions, show where they may go wrong, and help (other) people see ways forward. Criticism — pace Bacon — is inherently constructive, even when negative, because it allows us to make progress by identifying our errors and their causes.
-
This under-appreciated role of criticism, incidentally, may also be responsible (in part, i.e. egos and turf wars aside) for the continuing diatribes between philosophers and physicists, where too often the latter do not appreciate that the role of philosophy is a critical one, with the discipline making progress by eliminating mistaken notions rather than by discovering new facts (we’ve got science for the latter task, and it’s very good at it!).
if you're a senior scientist wanting to set up a lab in another institution, the first question you're going to ask is whether you're going to have good students (who of course do all the actual lab work). Unfortunately, Singapore seems to do a very good job of exporting its best students. They're sent overseas on fully-funded, prestigious scholarships to foreign institutions.
-
if you're a senior scientist wanting to set up a lab in another institution, the first question you're going to ask is whether you're going to have good students (who of course do all the actual lab work). Unfortunately, Singapore seems to do a very good job of exporting its best students. They're sent overseas on fully-funded, prestigious scholarships to foreign institutions.
-
If the best students do not stay in the country, then it is difficult to develop local institutions to higher levels. Worse still, we are not building confidence in our own institutions.
- 1 more annotation(s)...
Post-Normal Science in a German Landscape
This essay explores the management and creation of ignorance via an exploration of the landscape of eastern Germany, which has seen profound social, political, and technological changes over the past several decades. Like in many places around the world decision makers in eastern Germany are seeking to reach a future state where seemingly conflicting outcomes related to the economy and the environment are simultaneously realized. The management of ignorance is an important but often overlooked consideration in decision making that the concept of “post-normal science” places into our focus of attention.
Bias is an inescapable element of research, especially in fields such as biomedicine that strive to isolate cause–effect relations in complex systems in which relevant variables and phenomena can never be fully identified or characterized. Yet if biases were random, then multiple studies ought to converge on truth. Evidence is mounting that biases are not random. A Comment in Nature in March reported that researchers at Amgen were able to confirm the results of only six of 53 'landmark studies' in preclinical cancer research (C. G. Begley & L. M. Ellis Nature 483, 531–533; 2012). For more than a decade, and with increasing frequency, scientists and journalists have pointed out similar problems.
-
Bias is an inescapable element of research, especially in fields such as biomedicine that strive to isolate cause–effect relations in complex systems in which relevant variables and phenomena can never be fully identified or characterized. Yet if biases were random, then multiple studies ought to converge on truth. Evidence is mounting that biases are not random. A Comment in Nature in March reported that researchers at Amgen were able to confirm the results of only six of 53 'landmark studies' in preclinical cancer research (C. G. Begley & L. M. Ellis Nature 483, 531–533; 2012). For more than a decade, and with increasing frequency, scientists and journalists have pointed out similar problems.
-
Initially these biases seemed easy to address, and in some ways they offered psychological comfort. The problem, after all, was not with science, but with the poison of the profit motive. It could be countered with strict requirements to disclose conflicts of interest and to report all clinical trials.
- 3 more annotation(s)...
The belief is that progress in science means the continual production of positive findings. All involved benefit from positive results, and from the appearance of progress. Scientists are rewarded both intellectually and professionally, science administrators are empowered and the public desire for a better world is answered. The lack of incentives to report negative results, replicate experiments or recognize inconsistencies, ambiguities and uncertainties is widely appreciated — but the necessary cultural change is incredibly difficult to achieve.
-
A biased scientific result is no different from a useless one. Neither can be turned into a real-world application. So it is not surprising that the cracks in the edifice are showing up first in the biomedical realm, because research results are constantly put to the practical test of improving human health. Nor is it surprising, even if it is painfully ironic, that some of the most troubling research to document these problems has come from industry, precisely because industry’s profits depend on the results of basic biomedical science to help guide drug-development choices.
-
It would therefore be naive to believe that systematic error is a problem for biomedicine alone. It is likely to be prevalent in any field that seeks to predict the behaviour of complex systems — economics, ecology, environmental science, epidemiology and so on. The cracks will be there, they are just harder to spot because it is harder to test research results through direct technological applications (such as drugs) and straightforward indicators of desired outcomes (such as reduced morbidity and mortality).
There is increasing concern that most current published research findings are false. The probability that a research claim is true may depend on study power and bias, the number of other studies on the same question, and, importantly, the ratio of true to no relationships among the relationships probed in each scientific field. In this framework, a research finding is less likely to be true when the studies conducted in a field are smaller; when effect sizes are smaller; when there is a greater number and lesser preselection of tested relationships; where there is greater flexibility in designs, definitions, outcomes, and analytical modes; when there is greater financial and other interest and prejudice; and when more teams are involved in a scientific field in chase of statistical significance. Simulations show that for most study designs and settings, it is more likely for a research claim to be false than true. Moreover, for many current scientific fields, claimed research findings may often be simply accurate measures of the prevailing bias. In this essay, I discuss the implications of these problems for the conduct and interpretation of research.
Kuhn wanted to free us from the illusion that knowledge is independent of history and of the sociality that marks us as humans, but he did not think that all beliefs that our history and sociality put before us are equally worthy. Indeed, he quickly moved away from the "shift happens" conception of paradigms as bundles of beliefs, emphasizing instead that they're examples of good scientific practice that researchers apply in their daily work.
-
Ever since Newton, we in the West have thought movement changes an object's position in neutral space but does not change the object itself. For Aristotle, a change in position was a change in a quality of the object, and qualitative change tended toward an asymmetric actualization of potential: an acorn becomes an oak, but an oak never becomes an acorn. Motion likewise expressed a tendency for things to actualize their essence by moving to their proper place
-
From this, Kuhn learned several important lessons that surfaced in SSR 15 years later. First, scientific ideas occur within a context that enables them to make sense. Second, context is accepted for different sorts of reasons than are the hypotheses that emerge within it. Third, the idea of a new scientific context occurs roughly the way his own illumination of Aristotle's ideas did: all at once, an entire whole snapping into view the way a duck-rabbit illustration switches instantly from one view to another.
- 11 more annotation(s)...
Public-policy issues always have dimensions beyond science, and require more than technical responses. When framing debates, policy-makers should prioritize discussion of social benefits as well as science: there are many good non-scientific reasons to reduce global environmental footprints and consumption frenzy, and to pursue greater justice, for instance.
...
Rather than assuming that disputes are solely scientific, opening up these decision-making processes would render their primary nature more honestly political and economic, while giving proper weight to scientific reason and evidence.
-
[T]hey miss a crucial point: the ingrained assumption that scientific evidence is the only authority that can justify policy action — scientism — is what renders both policy and its supporting science vulnerable to the dogmatic amplification of doubt.
The doubters' success lies in the way that policy questions are framed, with science placed at the centre. If a policy commitment is reduced only to a question of whether the science is right or wrong, then evidence can easily be made to unravel. Paradoxically, this happens when science attains its greatest political influence, when it goes beyond supplying the facts to defining the public meaning of problems. Public-policy issues always have dimensions beyond science, and require more than technical responses. When framing debates, policy-makers should prioritize discussion of social benefits as well as science: there are many good non-scientific reasons to reduce global environmental footprints and consumption frenzy, and to pursue greater justice, for instance. If the many factors that go into a policy commitment are recognized, science does not become the sole centre of authority and the sole target for opposition.
-
A more enlightened institutional culture around science and policy would foster wider debate about the implications of interventions, and of burdens of proof weighed against social benefits and the costs of erroneous outcomes. This might resemble the 'extended peer review' system of philosopher-sociologists of science Jerome Ravetz and Silvio Funtowicz, in which specialists (including non-scientists) review policy-relevant scientific claims but a wider variety of stakeholders bring further knowledge to bear in interpreting them. Rather than assuming that disputes are solely scientific, opening up these decision-making processes would render their primary nature more honestly political and economic, while giving proper weight to scientific reason and evidence.
Those seeking greater political authority for science may actually be contributing to a loss of trust in institutions of science among parts of society. If science is to well serve democratic governance, then the scientific community needs to move beyond exhortation.
-
The body of knowledge in Earth System Sciences in the broadest sense, is impressive. Yet, most scientists at Planet under Pressure feel their knowledge is hardly translated into actions. Below the surface, frustrations can easily be sensed. Frustration may provoke scientists to even stronger formulate their messages, and choose words that fit better in the realm of societal and political discussions than in the scientific domain: ‘We must’, ‘we should’, ‘an imperative to act’, ‘we can no longer afford waiting’ and comparable phrases are frequently used to mask frustrations.
However understandable, these expressions are unlikely to be effective. The audience may think that the scientist using these terms have a political agenda. This perception undermines the scientific credibility, whether the scientist in question has a political agenda indeed or not. My take is: they don’t; most scientist don’t even really understand the nature of politics and policy-making processes. And to the extend they do, they are doing a lousy job in terms of lobbying and influencing the public and policy debate. Otherwise, more scientists would realise that overstating is not really effective in getting the message across. -
for many scientists active in political exhortation the key issue is not "policy" in the sense of "what we should do" but rather "authority" as in "who should determine political outcomes." The appeal to the political authority of science is a common one -- Nico Stehr and Hans von Storch wrote about it in Der Spiegel several years ago (and a translation appeared here, see also Brian Wynne here):
- 2 more annotation(s)...
Where both administrations and their respective critics get into trouble is when they try to hide political judgments by invoking science to justify or crticize decisions that are ultimately grounded in values. A perfect example is the debate over the so-called "emergency contraception" which is inherently political as a battleground for the US abortion wars. Combatants on all sides of the debate invoke science as justification for their political positions.
So long as we live in a democracy rather than a technocracy, such debates are to be expected. Bringing the values at stake out into the open will not only help to depoliticize science, but will also help to improve the practice of democracy.
-
All judgments that involve "drawing a line" between one thing and another are inherently political judgments, in the sense that trade-offs between competing values are unavoidably involved.
-
If democracy is to work, political representatives must not only be formally installed in government posts but must in some sense gain control of large-scale bureaucracies that constitute the modern state. (p. 4)
A commitment to the orderly transition of governmental control via elections necessarily means that those in charge will change (p. 109):
Any commitment to democratic values necessarily means accepting a measure of instability in the top governing levels.
Both advocacy and journalism are fundamental to a healthy democracy, but when they are mixed together, especially on the news pages of the NYT, neither is served particularly well. Please count me among those who prefers to get news from plain vanilla journalism, not the yellow kind.
philosophy is not science. For it employs the rational tools of logical analysis and conceptual clarification in lieu of empirical measurement. And this approach, when carefully carried out, can yield knowledge at times more reliable and enduring than science, strictly speaking. For scientific measurement is in principle always subject to at least some degree of readjustment based on future observation. Yet sound philosophical argument achieves a measure of immortality.
So if we philosophers want to restore philosophy’s authority in the wider culture, we should not change its name but engage more often with issues of contemporary concern — not so much as scientists but as guardians of reason. This might encourage the wider population to think more critically, that is, to become more philosophical.
-
One such example is Thrasymachus’ claim that justice is best defined as the advantage of the stronger, namely, that which is in the competitive interest of the powerful. Socrates reduces this view to absurdity by showing that the wise need not compete with anyone.
Or to take a more positive example, Wittgenstein showed that an ordinary word such as “game” is used consistently in myriad contrasting ways without possessing any essential unifying definition. Though this may seem impossible, the meaning of such terms is actually determined by their contextual usage. For when we look at faces within a nuclear family, we see resemblances from one to the next. Yet no single trait need be present in every face to recognize them all as members of the family. Similarly, divergent uses of “game” form a family. Ultimately as a result of Wittgenstein’s philosophy, we know that natural language is a public phenomenon that cannot logically be invented in isolation.
These are essentially conceptual clarifications. And as such, they are relatively timeless philosophical truths.
-
Though philosophy does sometimes employ thought experiments, these aren’t actually scientific, for they are conducted entirely in the imagination. For example, judges have imagined what might happen if, say, insider trading were made legal. And they have concluded that while it would lower regulatory costs and promote a degree of investor freedom, legalization would imperil the free market itself by undermining honest securities markets and eroding investor confidence. While this might appear to be an empirical question, it cannot be settled empirically without conducting the experiment, which is naturally beyond the reach of jurisprudence. Only legislatures could conduct the experiment by legalizing insider trading. And even then, one could not conduct it completely scientifically without a separate control-group society in which insider trading remained illegal for comparison. Regardless, judges would likely again forbid legalization essentially on compelling philosophical grounds.
- 1 more annotation(s)...
I’m going to tell you something that my Republican friends are loath to admit out loud: climate change is real. I am a moderate Republican, fiscally conservative; a fan of small government, accountability, self-empowerment, and sound science. I am not a climate scientist. I’m a meteorologist, and the weather maps I’m staring at are making me uncomfortable. No, you’re not imagining it: we’ve clicked into a new and almost foreign weather pattern. To complicate matters, I’m in a small, frustrated and endangered minority: a Republican deeply concerned about the environmental sacrifices some are asking us to make to keep our economy powered-up, long-term. It’s ironic. The root of the word conservative is “conserve.” A staunch Republican, Teddy Roosevelt, set aside vast swaths of America for our National Parks System, the envy of the world. Another Republican, Richard Nixon, launched the EPA. Now some in my party believe the EPA and all those silly “global warming alarmists” are going to get in the way of drilling and mining our way to prosperity. Well, we have good reason to be alarmed.
-
I’m a Christian, and I can’t understand how people who profess to love and follow God roll their eyes when the subject of climate change comes up. Actions have consequences. Were we really put here to plunder the Earth, no questions asked? Isn’t that the definition of greed? In the Bible, Luke 16:2 says, “Man has been appointed as a steward for the management of God’s property, and ultimately he will give account for his stewardship.” Future generations will hold us responsible for today’s decisions.
I’m going to tell you something that my Republican friends are loath to admit out loud: climate change is real. I am a moderate Republican, fiscally conservative; a fan of small government, accountability, self-empowerment, and sound science. I am not a climate scientist. I’m a meteorologist, and the weather maps I’m staring at are making me uncomfortable. No, you’re not imagining it: we’ve clicked into a new and almost foreign weather pattern. To complicate matters, I’m in a small, frustrated and endangered minority: a Republican deeply concerned about the environmental sacrifices some are asking us to make to keep our economy powered-up, long-term. It’s ironic. The root of the word conservative is “conserve.”
-
His views deeply echo those of Kerry Emanuel, the Republican climatologist from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (my posts on him are here), and the folks who run Republicans for Environmental Protection (which I once mused appeared to be an endangered species).
-
the fight over climate science, to my mind, is a spillover from the more heated, and deeper, debate over climate policy. As a result, even if the public had unfiltered, “perfect” information on greenhouse-driven climate change, uncertainties and all, that would hardly settle the public debate. Clarifying the terms of the debate is vital (see my graph aiming to help), but only a first step.
In a survey taken of over 4,000 scientists across the globe, 70% of whom were men, researchers found that people consider science a "family unfriendly" career. Over half of survey respondents said that work clashed with family responsibilities several days per week. While women in the sciences have long complained of problems with work/family life balance, this is one of the first studies to reflect widespread male dissatisfaction with the same issue.
-
Perhaps the trouble started with Theodozius Dobzhansky, one of the fathers of modern evolutionary theory, who famously said that nothing makes sense in biology except in the light of evolution (the phrase is, in fact, approvingly quoted by Pross). Problem is, Dobzhansky was writing for an audience of science high school teachers, and his statement is patently wrong, as an even cursory examination of the history of biology makes clear. For instance, developmental biologists had done a lot of highly fruitful research throughout the 19th and 20th centuries even as they ignored Darwin. And molecular biologists made spectacular progress from the 1950’s though the onset of the 21st century, again pretty much completing ignoring evolution. This is not to say that evolutionary theory doesn’t help in understanding developmental and molecular systems, but it is a stretch of the record to make claims such as those of Dobzhansky. (It would be like saying, for instance, that nothing makes sense in physics except in the light of quantum mechanics. Plenty of things in physics make perfect sense even as one brackets quantum mechanics and considers it a background theory.)
-
Of course, Darwinian evolution is indeed applicable to some non biological systems, particularly to so-called genetic algorithms, a type of evolving computer program whose properties have been studied by computational scientists over the past few decades. Indeed, genetic algorithms mimic biological evolution so closely that a number of population geneticists I know have been annoyed by repeated claims of computer scientists to have discovered this or that principle describing such systems, apparently without realizing that many of those discoveries had already been made by theoretical population geneticists decades earlier.
- 1 more annotation(s)...
It is of course perfectly acceptable for people to challenge data and analyses on the possible relationship of human-caused climate change and disaster losses, and ideally they will do so in the academic literature. But when existing peer-reviewed studies are fundamentally misrepresented in popular discussions, no one's interests are served.
Selected Tags
Related Tags
Top Contributors
Groups interested in Science
Diigo is about better ways to research, share and collaborate on information. Learn more »
Join Diigo