Another long and rambling article I'm afraid. Concision isn't my strong point. There's just something about the idea that scientists are closed-mined that really winds me up the wrong way.
This time I look at the idea that a scientific consensus doesn't mean anything because scientists all want to / have to agree with each other. In astronomy at least, this isn't true. There's an abundance of examples, past and present, of people publishing very non-mainstream ideas in reputable journals. One reason it might appear so is that there is a media obsession with making things exciting. This tends to happen at the slightest provocation without good evidence. It's great for generating enthusiasm, but that turns sour if astronomers have to keep saying, "nope, that's not true" all the time.
There's nothing wrong with being excited, it's just that scientists hate getting excited about things which aren't true.
On the other hand there are some scientific trends which should start warning bells ringing. Astronomy is a competitive subject made of many different small groups each trying to outdo the other. This means there's very little incentive for everyone to agree and lots of incentive to claim new, unexpected discoveries. With projects that requires hundreds of people, this rivalry is by necessity much reduced. We don't need to eliminate huge project groups by any means, but it would be a mistake to rely exclusively on large groups.
There's also a "publish or perish culture" which is potentially more serious. You cannot sensibly evaluate someone's abilities in a multifarious subject like astronomy using only the number of papers they've published. If your ranking as an astronomer depends only on this, there's a strong motivation to publish a lot of mediocre papers rather than a few good ones. Which encourages you to go for small, easy, boring projects.
Finally, the "research grant" funding system. It doesn't exactly encourage a false consensus, but it comes close. Grants typically expect a certain number of publications relating to their given topic. This is hardly a sensible way to encourage original thinking and innovation. The postdoctoral system (which is where most of the research is done) is ever-more reliant on this model of funding, and that's dangerous.
https://astrorhysy.blogspot.com/2015/10/false-consensus.html
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Of course you can prove a negative. In one sense this can be the easiest thing in the world : your theory predicts something which doesn...
A wise person does not "believe" in the results of scientific inquiry anyway.
ReplyDeleteThat term irritates me in this context.
The recent 'peer review' scandals illustrate the pitfalls of politicized/crony science culture. Science per se isn't the issue; academia is.
ReplyDeleteThanks, Bunyip Bonsai !
ReplyDeleteJames Karaganis Dunno, I don't have a problem using belief as a synonym for "provisionally accept". E.g. I can "believe" in dark matter since we aren't certain it exists; that doesn't imply I'm devoted to it or can't change my mind about it.
ReplyDeleteJames Karaganis First you have " to believe" because is the way your teachers opened for you when you was a child.
ReplyDeleteAftermath, you MUST get understanding on the scientific approach to knowledge.
Beyond that you MUST understand that science does not cover the whole field of knowledge.
Rhys Taylor Oh, I understand that, and for those who grasp the distinction it is a valuable shorthand. I use it that way myself, but I try to be aware of context.
ReplyDeleteFor the bulk of humanity, the word has a very different meaning. You know what I mean: "oh, you believe in science, I believe in God. What's the difference?", in much the same way you hear "evolution is just a theory" and my perennial favorite "miracle of science."
Rhys Taylor
ReplyDeleteOughtn't you rather say 'I posit the hypothetical possibility of the existence of dark matter'?
Someone once said, "Belief is not an idea the mind possesses. It is an idea that possess the mind."
ReplyDeleteUnfortunately we don't have good English words that can differentiate between this highly devout, unquestioning belief, and simple opinions (well, not without making sentences more clumsy, at any rate). "Belief" is used interchangeably with "opinion". I suppose "faith" covers things pretty well, no-one in their right mind would have "faith" in dark matter, but most of those who are rational and religious would accept that belief in deities requires faith. Language is tricksy.
+Rhys Taylor
ReplyDeletetricksssy...falsssse...we hates it forever!!!
James Karaganis Rhys Taylor I think that even the most trivial, basic and taken for granted things in our reality, those that form a belief system are provisional in a scientific context. For example I believe there is a floor under my feet, ...until some new evidence comes about that places some doubt in the existence of the floor... I believe I am typing on a keyboard...until some new evidence comes about that places that into question...My point is that the use of the word "belief" should never be taken as an absolute from a scientific stand point. My philosophical belief is that there is absolutely nothing that we can attribute a 100% certainty to. There will always be a tiny, even almost infinitesimal statistical chance that something might turn out to be not what it seems...of course that absolute is not 100% either.. ;-)
ReplyDeleteCiro Villa Well, I would say more that you accept them as being true (to a certain quantifiable degree of accuracy) until and unless new evidence (or a more accurate scientific model) becomes available. Newton's Laws of Motion come to mind: they work very well for most things, but it turns out they aren't actually universal.
ReplyDeleteWe're playing with semantics here, but the key is recognizing that words can be used differently in certain contexts. To the religious, the word belief doesn't mean the same thing to someone who is more scientifically minded.
James Karaganis Totally agree.
ReplyDeleteTotally agree. No scientist should ever be close mined.
ReplyDeleteRhys Taylor I think that mine was more of an extrapolated philosophical/statistical observation than a scientific one.
ReplyDeleteI don't think questioning everything necessarily becomes unscientific, insomuch that I think that there are things that we can question and try to find a scientific answer to, and there are other things that we can question but we cannot find a scientific answer to (at least based on what's currently understood about the nature of physical reality)...
But, again, my point was more of a philosophical extrapolation based on the word "belief". There are some controversial theories, however at the boundary between physics and philosophy regarding the nature of reality that do indeed bring forward the question of whether or not reality as we perceive it is not completely illusory or at a minimum some sort of "construct" but, this is not my argument, I am merely mentioning.
I do realize that the proper scientific method rejects certain fringe notions on the basis of their lack of falsifiability...
James Karaganis Agree.
ReplyDeleteRhys Taylor re:"we don't have good English words", I would submit: "strong views, weakly held."
ReplyDeleteCiro Villa
ReplyDeleteAlso consider: a priori v a posteriori reasoning. Complimentary methodologies that can provide 'parralax', if you will.