One bit of advice you hear about blogging is to pick a focus - to choose one thing you are particularly knowledgeable about or good at and mostly write about that, so people know what your blog is about and what they can expect from it. I would like to do this, but attentive readers have probably already picked up on the fact I’m a generalist at heart - I’m not especially knowledgeable about or good at any one thing, even if I like to think I’m OK at a bunch of them. The practical implication of this is that my articles tend to be about the best idea I had that week, prompted perhaps by something I read or an argument (real or imagined) that I had.
I used to work for a quantitative hedge fund. We hired really really smart scientists and statisticians and gave them all the resources they could ever want. A high level description of their job was basically to develop hypotheses and test them. Incentives were aligned: Once their results were verified in the real world they got paid lots of money, and if not, they got nothing. It would be difficult to come up with a more ideal setting for correct research and statistics to take place. Whenever I read articles like this I think yup we solved those problems.
And bad science still happened. I can't overstate how insanely hard it is to do correctly. Humans are fallible. So are all the processes we design. We can fix every single issue anyone has ever thought up and we'll still be far from the ideal. A healthy understanding of the scientific method incorporates this.
But hey, Humans keep trying and it's been working pretty well, on average, over long periods of time.
I really wish that schools, the media, et al - really all of us - would internalize the reality that a particular field is best understood through consensus. Sure, a single study may shake the ground in a field (i.e., "paradigm shift"), but understanding is really about integrating and synthesizing a breadth of findings. No wonder the public feels whipsawed when they constantly read contrary results (often unintentionally p-hacked and/or with small effect sizes) in click-bait articles.
As a Brazilian, I read lots of Evangelicals complaining (regarding COVID-motivated restrictions to religious services and other activities) about science being "deified". What they meant, as far as I can tell, is that authorities were being too risk-adverse, but, since saying more people should die doesn't play well, they decided scientists warning about how the disease spreads were the problem. Also, every time the government tries to deny science data (usually generated by the government technical bureaus, like the deforestation and forest fires ones), Evangelicals have been in the front lines of the pro-government propaganda. So that is that.
As for the American situacion -- and vaccination specifically --, well, there are the New Age, hippie-like types on the left, but Trump, who knows political expediency when he sees it, attacked vaccines durante the Republican primaries for 2016. Not some rushed-out COVID vaccine no one had dreamed about back then, but time-tested vacinas. It is hard to be more anti-science than that and still having a right to turn the lights on at night. Yet, he knew it would play well with the Republican right, and it did. At this point, it is hard to see any moral difference between these tapes and the Talita, except maybe the Taliban is braver.
Back when I was teaching college I often would spend an entire class talking to this point. I would have LOVED to have this post to link to as a reading assignment! Thank you for writing it so that I don't have to in the future.
On Being "Antiscience", XKCD Jellybeans, and the Mechanics of Scientific Bias Accumulation
"I approach every study I read assuming potential fishiness and needing an awful lot of scientific rigor to shake me out of that pattern"
That sounds a lot like "scientist" if you ask me.
I used to work for a quantitative hedge fund. We hired really really smart scientists and statisticians and gave them all the resources they could ever want. A high level description of their job was basically to develop hypotheses and test them. Incentives were aligned: Once their results were verified in the real world they got paid lots of money, and if not, they got nothing. It would be difficult to come up with a more ideal setting for correct research and statistics to take place. Whenever I read articles like this I think yup we solved those problems.
And bad science still happened. I can't overstate how insanely hard it is to do correctly. Humans are fallible. So are all the processes we design. We can fix every single issue anyone has ever thought up and we'll still be far from the ideal. A healthy understanding of the scientific method incorporates this.
But hey, Humans keep trying and it's been working pretty well, on average, over long periods of time.
I really wish that schools, the media, et al - really all of us - would internalize the reality that a particular field is best understood through consensus. Sure, a single study may shake the ground in a field (i.e., "paradigm shift"), but understanding is really about integrating and synthesizing a breadth of findings. No wonder the public feels whipsawed when they constantly read contrary results (often unintentionally p-hacked and/or with small effect sizes) in click-bait articles.
As a Brazilian, I read lots of Evangelicals complaining (regarding COVID-motivated restrictions to religious services and other activities) about science being "deified". What they meant, as far as I can tell, is that authorities were being too risk-adverse, but, since saying more people should die doesn't play well, they decided scientists warning about how the disease spreads were the problem. Also, every time the government tries to deny science data (usually generated by the government technical bureaus, like the deforestation and forest fires ones), Evangelicals have been in the front lines of the pro-government propaganda. So that is that.
As for the American situacion -- and vaccination specifically --, well, there are the New Age, hippie-like types on the left, but Trump, who knows political expediency when he sees it, attacked vaccines durante the Republican primaries for 2016. Not some rushed-out COVID vaccine no one had dreamed about back then, but time-tested vacinas. It is hard to be more anti-science than that and still having a right to turn the lights on at night. Yet, he knew it would play well with the Republican right, and it did. At this point, it is hard to see any moral difference between these tapes and the Talita, except maybe the Taliban is braver.
Back when I was teaching college I often would spend an entire class talking to this point. I would have LOVED to have this post to link to as a reading assignment! Thank you for writing it so that I don't have to in the future.