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Quote of the Day
Putting aside whether the author correctly applies this standard to his own beliefs — Novella’s a little quick to dismiss all questioning of global warming’s severity as “denial” for my taste — the quote is magnificent:
Published in Science & TechnologyOne’s dedication to science [and empiricism in general] is tested when the science conflicts with your agenda. Then you have to be able to adapt to what an objective review of the science says. If you only accept the scientific consensus when it agrees with your ideology, then you are not pro-science. You just selectively use science to support your ideological agenda.
Tru dat mi amigo. And I’d argue it occurs pretty regularly on both sides of the aisle.
Perfectly put. And that agenda is? Socialism. Thank you.
A “consensus” is an opinion. Opinions are fine, but they do not qualify as scientific, empirical fact. And if the term “consensus” is thrown around so freely, I’ll throw a term of my own: Neo-Lysenkoist.
“All in favor of a flat-earth, raise your hand!”
*counting*
“Then it’s settled: The earth is flat!”
This quirk of Dr. Novella’s has bothered me for years, because he is actually is fairly rational and consistent, except when it comes to the “scientific consensus.” He understands that an Argument from Consensus is logically fallacious, but then will argue that “scientific consensus” is a special exception, because science.
Pro-tip: If you’re making arguments that claim a special exception that is merely asserted and not actually proven, it’s special pleading.
To the extent that the mere presence of consensus is cited as proof of a position’s validity, wholly agreed. Novella himself addressed this rather well a several years ago:
I do agree that Novella’s overly prone to deference to expertise, even if he’s vastly more honest and self-critical than a lot of Science! fanboys. (I’d be very curious to know what he thinks of Hayek, if he’s read him). That said, I think there’s an opposite tendency, particularly on the Right, that — for totally understandable reasons — is downright anti-clerical.
Well, no. Not “consensus” in that raw word. Anyone who has had any experience with scientific research know better than to make such a statement (I negotiated IP contracts resulting from university research at a large top 20 research university for 15 years, and very close relatives are professors who have published a lot of research).
What you accept is what is well established by good methodology, where there are not data critical holes that the Queen Mary would float through. For example, where all research is welcomed even if it upsets the “consensus” and assumptions (assigned data values) are not orders of magnitude more significant than actual derived or test data.
For example, in the global warming “debate”, tropospheric positive feedback is simply assumed where it is impossible to measure, because positive feedback supports the research and negative feedback upsets the political consensus.
h-pylori should have cured a lot of scientists, but there are still lots of bad ones out there. Look at the Harvard Center for Risk Analysis Second Hand Smoke study, a model of fraudulent “consensus”.
Ricochet seems to be having a lot of discussions about epistemology lately. Good, because I enjoy such discussions!
This “quote of the day” hinges on the theory of empiricism, that is, there can be no knowledge without sense experience. We might not appreciate why “sense experience” is so crucial. It’s because in empiricism, knowledge depends on “truth” and (for an empiricist) truth is reserved only for statements that are objective – and therefore demonstrable – and therefore based on sense experience. By its nature, argues the empiricist, knowledge must be out in public, so to speak, such that anyone can experience it. Knowledge cannot be apprehended only privately and internally. Truth has to be public, and that’s why, in turn, consensus is so important.
As it is, I’m not an empiricist. My disagreement is based on negation. Negation cannot be sensed, cannot be demonstrated, and yet negation is unquestionably a meaningful truth. In fact, the whole of logic depends on negation – it is usually as important to know that something is Not-X (or that there is no X) as it is to claim that something is X. And I consider is semantic gymnastics to claim that negation is simply a contrast against existing things, because one then needs to explain how you came to understand the notion of “contrast” to begin with? (Which sets off a new round of questions, but that’s for later.)
If “pro-science” is interpreted as “absolute empiricism,” count me out.
Could you provide an illustration?
I certainly wouldn’t sign-up for that myself. I do think we should try to push for as much empiricism as possible, with the understanding there there are very real limits to it. Values, ultimately, cannot be wholly empirical.
No. No. NO! It’s shaped like an up-side-down plate.
“…vastly more honest and self-critical than a lot of Science! fanboys.” That describes a website I’ll refer to as [I. F. L.] Science for CoC reasons. It’s increasingly an aggressively foul-mouthed and anti-theist clickbait meme-sharing site with scientific pretensions, but I think “Science! fanboys” describes it pretty well. It’s gotten so bad that even some of my fairly radical friends in the field have gotten fed up with it.
Before I blocked it entirely from my Facebook feed, I noticed that it seemed to mix up a scientific approach to discovery with the set of knowledge that comes from those discoveries. The discoveries are not themselves “science.”
I agree with you that we get some of the same type of special pleading from our side.
That site is a very bad offender that way. I find it similarly obnoxious.
There’s actually a kind of verbal “sleight of hand” in the quote.
In the first sentence, he says “One’s dedication to science [and empiricism in general] is tested when the science conflicts with your agenda.”
By the third sentence, he’s altered it subtly to “If you only accept the scientific consensus when it agrees with your ideology, then you are not pro-science.”
They’re not the same thing.
“Science” is an epistomology — a way of establishing truth through observation, experiment, testing, and repeatability.
“The scientific consensus” is a set of widely held views, held by fallible humans, about what has and hasn’t been proven true through the use of science.
Hopefully “the scientific consensus” about what is true is highly correlated with what is, in fact true. I believe that it is.
But we know it is not a 1:1 correlation because we can all point to examples of even strongly held scientific consensuses being proven wrong — see Einstein and Copernicus, among others.
Moreover central to “science” — the epistomology — is openness to that very possibility — of the consensus being proven wrong through the aforementioned observation and experiment.
It is those who lack that openness who really lack a dedication to “science.”
I think, if I may, that if presented with a tomato from my grocery store, I may reasonably conclude from empiricism, that tomatos are red. After all, this is what I have experienced whether I shop at Publix, Aldi’s, or Wal Mart.
However, if someone presented me with an heirloom tomato from their garden, this would negate my previous observation and require modifying my definition of a Tomato.
You mean, of negation? Modus tollens: if p then q; not-q; therefore not-p.
For instance, Hume’s argument against “cause” is based on the idea that you never experience it, so you can’t claim to know it. (“To know that BilliardBallA caused BilliardBallB to move, you would see some kind of transfer between the balls; but you don’t see any transfer; therefore you can’t say that you know that A caused B.”). When the second billiard ball starts moving after proximity to the first, you cannot say that you saw anything transfer between the billiard balls; you only saw two movements timed fortuitously. Therefore, you can’t claim to “know” about any cause.
But to even make that argument, you have to employ negation (i.e., you did not see any transfer). When did you experience the negation? Let’s face it, you didn’t.
Yes.
Well, if one is being scrupulously skeptical then I suppose it might be correct to say that the relationship cannot be positively stated based on merely this single observation. But a single observation isn’t science.
Science often relies on inference and/or indirect data all the time (@timh, correct me if I’m wrong) and this is in no way opposed to empiricism.
I still feel like I’m not wholly following the objection here.
Yes, but it doesn’t matter whether it’s single or a thousand … there is never any observation of negation, never.
Empiricism is based on the belief that that all ideas and concepts are grounded in sense experience, even if that chain extends for many rounds. Empiricists believe that even the most basic intellectual functions must be based on some experience … that’s why Hume went to such great lengths to debunk the assumption that a “cause” can be knowledge, since a cause is perhaps the most foundational inference.
But I always thought that empiricists twisted themselves into pretzels when they tried to explain negation – how can an inference that “something is-not-here” possibly be said to be grounded in experience?
Consensus is not merely overrated. It has been fetishized to the point where it will hinder advances.
In the 1840s, Ignaz Semmelweis noted that women who gave birth outside of any hospital rarely contracted puepural fever. Of the ones that gave birth in his hospital, the part of the hospital where births were assisted by doctors had a pueperal fever rate of 18%. The births assisted by midwives had a rate of around 2-3%. The doctors regularly participated in autopsies — something the midwives were not allowed to do. His solution (for which he had no underlying scientific theory whatsoever) was wash your hands. The infection rate for doctors fell to around 2-3%. For that, he was mocked, hounded, and widely ignored. That is, until much later, when the consensus caught up.
About 100 years ago, Alfred Wegener proposed that the continents may be drifting apart. The “fit” between South America and Africa was just one indication — the way the continental shelves lined up were more so. For this, he was mocked, hounded, and widely ignored. That is, until much later, when the consensus caught up.
Anyone insisting on consensus as evidence of anything other than consensus should be told to pipe down and wash the test tubes for the real scientists.
Oh, and anyone still insisting that this consensus is for keeps can get busy producing a climate model that is consistent with the past, explains the present, and predicts the future. When they have one of those that comes anywhere near working, I’ll listen. Until then, they are merely blowing carbon dioxide.
There are good reasons to consider the “scientific consensus” rather than the “science.” On the other hand, I disagree with Novella’s fundamental point, at least as it applies to me.
In favor of the “scientific consensus,” the first point is that there are always to be people who are unreasonably recalcitrant. There are doubtless a few people who will insist that the earth is flat, ignore or dismiss all contrary evidence, and then question the motives of those who disagree. (They’ll probably end the discussion by telling you to check your privilege.)
Second, I think that in the real world, almost everyone accepts the claims of “science” on the basis of faith in the scientific consensus. I’ve never done any experiments or tests involving DNA, or particle physics, or any of thousands of other scientific theories. I’ve read or heard, for example, that there is this gravity lens effect, measurable during a solar eclipse, that proved that Newton’s theory of gravity was incorrect, while the observation was consistent with Einstein’s theory. I have no observed this myself, nor have I ever confirmed the calculations. I take it on, well, something like faith.
By this I mean that I believe something because I’ve learned it from sources that I consider reliable.
If I wanted to avoid the theological implications, I could say that I believe things “on authority.” But this really just means that I have faith in the authority.
[Cont’d]
[Cont’d]
This applies to almost everything that I think I know about the world, whether the belief is about a scientific or non-scientific issue.
For example, I believe that there is a city in England called London. I have never been there. I have seen pictures and videos of it. But I’ve also seen pictures and videos of Minas Tirith, and I don’t believe that there is any such place. My parents, and a number of friends, have told me that they visited London. I’ve probably read hundreds of articles and books asserting that there is such a place as London. I can check it on Wikipedia.
So, I believe in the existence of London on the basis of faith.
Now, it’s not a blind faith. Many of the same people and sources of information that lead me to believe in London also told me that there were places like New York, and Denver, and Rome, and Caracas. I’ve been to these places. This strengthens my faith in London, because my sources have been reliable about other things.
Of course, they still might be lying to me about London.
This leads to the question of motivation. I can think of no plausible reason for there to be a vast, world-wide conspiracy to deceive me about the existence of London. Or, for that matter, the gravity lens effect or the shape of the Earth.
[Cont’d]
[Cont’d]
This is where ideology comes into the picture. I can think of plausible reasons, for example, that people would want to deceive me into believing that there is catastrophic anthropogenic global warming (CAGW). I notice that I hear about CAGW almost exclusively from Left-wing politicians. What they say is that, because of CAGW, they need to have vast regulatory powers over our economy and my life.
Well, that’s what they were saying before this CAGW thing came along. I’m old enough to remember when the scientific consensus was global cooling. I also know, though I don’t personally remember this, that before there was any talk of global cooling, those Left-wing politicians were saying . . . that they needed to have vast regulatory powers over our economy and my life. Because, um, something like social justice or the proletariat or racism.
So I’d turn around Novella’s point. I think that it is very reasonable to be skeptical of any “scientific consensus” that seems tailor-made to serve the interest of a particular ideological agenda.
Especially when it’s on the side of the folks who wear Che t-shirts to a gay wedding at a Bernie Sanders rally.
AP: I’ve been to New York, Denver, Rome, Caracas and London. If my testimony means anything to you, I can testify to you that each is, in fact, there.
At least, they were there when you were there.
They only told you that you were in those places. You didn’t fly the plane. Could have been London, could have been Amarillo.
Randy and Percival —
I concede both of your points with one lone caveat, to wit — in the case of Caracas, I took a boat, not a plane. But I didn’t drive it either, so it probably comes to the same thing. :)
“resting on the back of a giant tortoise.”
“And what is the turtle standing on?”
“It’s turtles all the way down…”
Yes, we do often use indirect evidence and inference. I can’t quite follow all of the philosophy of science in this thread, but in the cases of indirect evidence, we are usually (or ideally, I think) testing competing models to explain the phenomenon.
For example, the existence of dark matter relies on several pieces of indirect evidence. The original (from the 1930s) was Fritz Zwicky’s observation that the orbital speeds of stars in galaxies was too fast for the amount of visible matter we could account for. (The more mass in the galaxy, the faster the stars should orbit.) If Newton’s law of gravity is correct (or Einstein’s—either one gives the same results here), then we can use the motions of the stars to measure the total mass of the galaxy. The results showed that we’re missing 90%+ of the galaxy’s mass. The “dark matter” that doesn’t glow.
An alternative explanation is that the existing theory is wrong. If we use a different equation for the force of gravity (there have been several versions under the heading of MOdified Newtonian Dynamics, or MOND; the most popular is nicknamed TeVeS), then we can fit the rotation speed data pretty well….
[cont’d]
So if the theory is changed, we don’t need to account for the existence of dark matter, which we haven’t been able to find in the first place, and the indirect evidence is just evidence for changing the theory.
On the other hand, these pieces of indirect evidence have been adding up over the past 80 years. Now it’s not just galaxy rotation speeds, but it’s the mass measurements from gravitational lensing that point towards dark matter. We can make maps of the distribution of dark matter (if it exists), showing how it clumps in galaxy clusters. More and more, the evidence is pointing towards its existence.
But what is it? Here we can be more direct in our tests. We know it doesn’t emit light, or at least not enough to detect it. That could point to subatomic particles with no electric charge (WIMPs) or to small black holes (MACHOs). Direct searches for both have turned up empty handed. So while most of us believe in the existence of dark matter, based on lots of indirect evidence, the direct searches have failed to tell us what kind of stuff it is.
I confess I’m a little surprised by it as well.
I do not believe the quote connotes that science and empiricism are the only means we have of interpreting and understanding the world (a proposition I would greatly disagree with). Novella may well think so, but it’s not in the quote.
Rather, I took it to mean that everyone — and particularly leftist Science! fanboys — consider that they may be using science merely as a cudgel against their enemies on certain topics without genuinely seeking truth.