Stats for nerds
4recommend
5mentions
5people
2012–2022years
80% recommend20% neutral
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- Leviathan and the Air-Pump: Hobbes, Boyle, and the Experimental Life.
- I think the topline, that Facebook would rather be seen as competently evil than incompetent, is dead on.
But I think that, in his larger arc, Vinsel's epistemology isn't correct. Early optimistic predictions about emerging technology are just that - early and optimistic. There are always extreme early ideas about new tech. Just go google up peoples' predictions (and fears) from 2015 about how VR would transform things. The thing that makes them dangerous is when they show potential for being correct society warps around them. We start spending billions of dollars on self driving cars in 2015 with valuations based on them being delivered in 2020.
But what is the alternative? Vinsel wants us to have "sound information" - but making predictions that end up being wrong is part of checking that something is sound! The future is uncertain. It's true that nothing is ever as big as people think - sometimes it's bigger - but mostly it's much smaller. That guy who wrote the report for McKinsey (a group one should never trust in general) was really hyped to get headlines or really hyped on AI and because he's good at his job you can't tell which it is. The article is clearly nonsense, but it has credibility because it exists on the far side of a sea of uncertainty about something. It's fantasy to imagine we can "know" what something will be and this process seems unfortunately human and unavoidable.
I also think there are a lot of people doing good work in STS on these issues. John Cheney-Lippold, Natasha Dow Schüll, Virginia Eubanks, and Adrian Mackenzie are some of my favorites. I'm excited to read Your Computer Is on Fire but I haven't gotten to it yet. Heck, I think 90% of the bad tech hype is covered the old classic Leviathan and the Air-Pump.
- My argument is that basically all of what Sagan says is wrong.
The argument from authority is paramount in science; in fact it is the entire basis of the scientific enterprise. This is why it is important for you to ridicule other ways of knowing, as you did above ("You'll have to use the scientific method to research whether your alternative methods result in better outcomes for patients. Otherwise its just faith or some other nonsense."), implying that there are no other valid or useful epistemologies besides science. Of course this is not true, because the vast majority of people are not scientists, and yet are able to gain useful knowledge about the world without making use of "scientific methods".
You have continually asserted that all it takes to reject incorrect scientific knowledge is for one person to show up with new observations controverting a theory. But this is not true; it is not sufficient for you to do an experiment showing X to be false or Y to be true - because science produces knowledge by consensus. The basic requirement of science, above all else, is that your result must be peer-reviewed. That is it; there are no requirements of method, no statistical thresholds that must be crossed, no rules about the kinds of evidence that are admissible. The entry of your experiment into the domain of science requires you to cross this threshold. Even after that your experiment faces further review and scrutiny from members of your community.
This immediately means there is an important social dimension to doing science, based on a principle of authority: who gets to do peer review? The answer is: those who have been accorded respect by the community of scientists.
What this means is that powerful scientists are gatekeepers on what is considered to be "true" according to science. It is their judgement that determines what is scientifically valid and invalid, above and beyond the evidence. In general we expect that these people are correctly motivated and believe ideologically in the project of science, are good moral actors, scrupulous, etc. - but all of these things must be true in order for science to succeed.
Without this foundation of authority, science has no mechanism for validating evidence, which, unfortunately, is not self-evident. It is up to these people, and their judgment, to make the determination that some hypothetical is consistent or inconsistent with the facts - that is, whether something is true. It has been observed many times that this can hold up the progress of science.
And, to underscore, this is the extent of the scientific method. There are no rules for what the reviewer must do; they are merely handed a paper, told to critique it, and their determinations are handed back for further argumentation. The bounds of the disputation are up to the disputants. What this means is that the actual epistemology (how we decide "what is true") is continually shifting. One might summarize this by saying that the "scientific method" at any given moment consists of the set of instruments (physical or conceptual) that the community of scientists brings to bear on a problem. Right now there is a vogue of meta-analysis papers; meanwhile, multiple-test correction didn't even exist before 1960.
This is just a taste, I'm not really prepared to develop what should be a book-length argument in a HN comment, but it indicates basically what I am saying: there is a lot, lot more to the "scientific method" than falsificationism can present to us, and the sociological dimension of scientific knowledge is equally important to understand, but underappreciated by people like Popper.
Most of my thinking here has been shaped by two books, both seminal works: one is "Leviathan and the Air-Pump" by Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer; the other is "Against Method" by Paul Feyerabend. I recommend you read them both.
- It doesn't appear that you've ever read anything about the history of science. When some physics experiment comes out, "every living physicist" doesn't immediately know "exactly what that result meant." It not nearly as rational and positivist as you would think. Science is a human activity. Read some Thomas Kuhn or Leviathan and the Air-Pump for starters: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leviathan_and_the_Air-Pump
And you should read a basic primer in psychology. You claim there have never been "central, unifying, falsifiable" theories that are "amenable to practical test" that have the potential to fail. I guess you've never heard of behaviorism or cognitive psychology. Evolutionary theory and computational models are also important components of psychological research.
- Replication as part of scientific consensus-building dates back at least to the air-pump experiments of 17th century.
See e.g. “Leviathan and the Air-Pump”
