Science-a-thon next week – won’t you support scientists?

This is extremely good and cool.

If science weren’t a political endeavor, activities devoted to “raising public awareness” wouldn’t matter. If it is a political endeavor, then scientists themselves can hardly be the politically (and ethically) neutral “arbiters of truth” they claim to be. Indeed, if the latter alternative is true, the hue and cry of scientists when they are treated as politically motivated agents seems a tad self-righteous and hypocritical.

The truth ought to be defended, and people ought to have the right to speak the truth as they see it. But the ” science community” “speaking the truth” in the political arena seems a little odd doesn’t it? Because they’re not just stating facts. They are pushing policy prescriptions and demanding that they put into effect without regard of their trade offs or consequences, at the peril of ignoring the truth.

But that’s not usually how redress of grievances in the political sphere works. What usually happens is some segment of the population calls attention to a problem in their community. Think blm. But climate change isn’t really a problem for people in the science community. It’s really just a domain they have expertise in. Really, for most of them the negative consequences of policy one way or the other are largely theoretical.

Clearly the political process has determined that climate change is not in fact a problem. I’m not sure on what basis members of the science community, who are neither accountable to the people or have any sense of their well being, are in a position to legitimately override their will.

Pseudo-gorgias
The truth ought to be defended, and people ought to have the right to speak the truth as they see it.
You do realise that those two statements are not equivalent, and that the justifications for them are different?

Clearly the political process has determined that climate change is not in fact a problem. I’m not sure on what basis members of the science community, who are neither accountable to the people or have any sense of their well being, are in a position to legitimately override their will.

Are you familiar with the tag Mundus vult decipi? Whenever the world wishes to be deceived, the truth can be defended only in despite of the people’s will.

Let’s put it a little differently. The left rightfully doesn’t care about the consensus of the economics profession, built over decades of theoretical insights and empirical observation, that the minimum wage doesn’t do much to help low income workers. They are right because the policy has a huge popular constituency, and it is meant to alleviate a felt problem within a large sector of the political community. We can let the policy fail of its own accord, if it will fail at all. That is the proper relation between the scientific community and the political process.

The left rightfully doesn’t care about the consensus of the economics profession, built over decades of theoretical insights and empirical observation, that the minimum wage doesn’t do much to help low income workers.

You are confident there’s consensus, but when I search the Web, I don’t find consensus, I find disagreement.

At number 10, they are two things. But the latter is the only way I can see to preserve the former.

What you see depends on where, when, and how you look. It seems you think it’s a good idea to seek abstract general answers to the question ‘How is the truth to be defended?’, independent of any context; I don’t.

“The Structure of Scientific Revolutions” (Kuhn) already told me how science gets done. It ain’t pretty.

anon

Anyway the larger point still stands, that the “science community” is adept at presenting themselves as the simple apolitical bearers of “inconvenient truths” when really they are political advocates of policies that will create winners and losers, like every other policy a politician may propose or oppose. It just so happens the policies the science community promotes have no constituency, and so in a democracy no basis for actualization.

@16 The question is not whether the process by which “science gets done” is pretty, but whether it nevertheless largely works. This is of course a completely open question. Now if you’ll excuse me, my internet connection is slow, so I have to go splash some more goat blood on it.

Also, donated, because the least I can do is drag ignoramuses like Pseudo-gorgias along kicking and screaming while the rest of us try to make sure that the planet doesn’t turn into a unliveable nightmare in the next 30 years or so.

This thread is making me feel old. I can remember a time when ill informed reflexive hostility to science was a fashion on the left instead of the right.

“Just because somebody tells you something doesn’t mean it has to be true; just because they’ve written it down in a book doesn’t mean it has to be true.” Careful there, cowboy. An Inconvenient Truth was a book, too, you know.

“Given the pseudo-knowledge -and its arrogant ignorance- we must redouble our support of science.
Kuhn for understanding science?”

Really? Kuhn is as close to being conventional wisdom as it is possible to be. I read him in graduate school-where it’s part of the canon.

I had no idea you folks were so hostile to the Academy. I thought this was an academics’ blog…

“This thread is making me feel old. I can remember a time when ill informed reflexive hostility to science was a fashion on the left instead of the right.”

See the comments, above. The Left still selectively rejects thinkers who are doubleplusungood.

anonymousse

JRLRC@27 advocates reading Bunge. I happen to agree, but have to admit for consumer warning that not only is Bunge a relative unknown, Bunge out of date. Besides being a literal centenarian, no philosopher working in philosophy of science today pays any attention to him. Popper is still the king among non-philosophers. And among philosophers of science, Popper, Kuhn, Lakatos, Feyerabend, Nagel, Kitcher, Sober, van Fraassen, Laudan, Cartwright, Hacking, Chalmers, Dennett, Dupre, Swinburne, Stove, Polkinghorne, Ruse, Boudry, Pigliucci and Dawid all have more credit.

@24 I have a post coming on this, quite soon.

Actually, it’s interesting that we are getting genuine anti-science from the right wing trolls here. It’s a shift from the previous line which was “I support science, it’s the leftwing scientists conspiring to produce inconvenient research that I hate”. As I hinted above, once you vote for Trump, you may as well go full nihilist, as our commenters are doing.

Don’t want to be a downer but I guess someone should point out that while science gave us the accurate diagnosis and possible solutions to climate change it also gave us most of the stuff that caused climate change. Critical and qualified support would seem to be the way to go.

This thread is making me feel old. I can remember a time when ill informed reflexive hostility to science was a fashion on the left instead of the right.

Oh, indeed. When I was in college, there was one of the waves of “electrons are a social construct,” etc., promulgated by people who certainly didn’t have their own measurable explanations for why electricity worked. Then again, back in those days, support for murderous authoritarian Russian leaders was to be found primarily in a particular subset of the left, too. How times change. Based on the right-wingers in this thread, I’m wondering if in the next few years, I’ll be hearing about commercial aircraft crashing because the power of prayer can’t actually substitute for Bernoulli and Newton.

Really, for most of them the negative consequences of policy one way or the other are largely theoretical.

You mean like solving the problem of dwindling resources by developing renewables (kind of a bonus, that)? Cleaner environment? A lower chance of having ones’ house inundated or getting a mysterious new disease? Oh, throw me into that briar patch mr Pseudo!

” science gave us the accurate diagnosis and possible solutions to climate change it also gave us most of the stuff that caused climate change”

The guilty party is (certain applications of) engineering, not science. If you’re going to blame science, you might as well blame differential equations which caused understanding of physics which caused understanding of electrical power systems which caused fossil fuel based electricity generation.

anonymousse

“Just because somebody tells you something doesn’t mean it has to be true; just because they’ve written it down in a book doesn’t mean it has to be true.” Careful there, cowboy. An Inconvenient Truth was a book, too, you know.

That reads as if it’s supposed to be a sick burn, or a ‘Gotcha!’, or something of the sort; as if it will discomfit me to have to concede that just because something is written in An Inconvenient Truth doesn’t mean it has to be true. But it is not so. I am just as comfortable acknowledging that something doesn’t have to be true just because it’s written in An Inconvenient Truth as for any other book; I acknowledge no Holy Writ. If you imagine, mistakenly, that you know what I think about An Inconvenient Truth, you are substituting prejudice for analysis.

Kuhn is as close to being conventional wisdom as it is possible to be. I read him in graduate school-where it’s part of the canon.

Being part of a canon is not synonymous with being infallible.

I had no idea you folks were so hostile to the Academy.

Questioning authority is an academic tradition. I am not hostile to the Academy, whatever that may be; I am not hostile to Kuhn. I am not even hostile to you, but I am not prepared to accept that a statement is true solely because you tell me that it is the conclusion you drew from reading Kuhn.

Pseudo-gorgias @35:
“… tradeoffs”

You seem to believe that we are in still in the cost-benefit analysis stage of the debate. We are not. The question of costs and benefits could be validly addressed about 30 years ago when AGW was still reversible. Today we know we are locked in for 1.8-2.0 C warming by the end of the century. We know that different parts of the ecosystem are more sensitive to climate change and will start to fall apart in the next 20-30 years. We know that there are multiple feedback loops that will accelerate the release of CO2 and Methane into the atmosphere, thus heating of the system far faster than we can currently predict (clathrate gun hypothesis, slowing/stopping of the AMOC, wildfires and deforestation, ocean acidification, soil erosion and drought). We know that some of these feedback loops could lead to runaway temperature increases by as much as 8 C in the next few decades (this would more or less be game over for all of us). All of these factors are working against us as a species. The cost to not fighting global warming is the inexorable destruction of most complex life on Earth. I’m perfectly willing to pay any price to prevent that from happening, even as you quibble over pennies.

““Really? Kuhn is as close to being conventional wisdom as it is possible to be. I read him in graduate school-where it’s part of the canon.”
As a bona fide philosopher of science: No.”

“The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962; second edition 1970; third edition 1996; fourth edition 2012) is a book about the history of science by the philosopher Thomas S. Kuhn. Its publication was a landmark event in the history, philosophy, and sociology of scientific knowledge and triggered an ongoing worldwide assessment and reaction in—and beyond—those scholarly communities.”

“The Structure of Scientific Revolutions has been credited with producing the kind of “paradigm shift” Kuhn discussed.[3] Since the book’s publication, over one million copies have been sold, including translations into sixteen different languages.[24] In 1987, it was reported to be the twentieth-century book most frequently cited in the period 1976-83 in the arts and the humanities.”

“1998 Modern Library 100 Best Nonfiction: The Board’s List (69)”

“The enormous impact of Kuhn’s work can be measured in the changes it brought about in the vocabulary of the philosophy of science: besides “paradigm shift”, Kuhn popularized the word “paradigm” itself from a term used in certain forms of linguistics and the work of Georg Lichtenberg to its current broader meaning, coined the term “normal science” to refer to the relatively routine, day-to-day work of scientists working within a paradigm, and was largely responsible for the use of the term “scientific revolutions” in the plural, taking place at widely different periods of time and in different disciplines, as opposed to a single “Scientific Revolution” in the late Renaissance. The frequent use of the phrase “paradigm shift” has made scientists more aware of and in many cases more receptive to paradigm changes, so that Kuhn’s analysis of the evolution of scientific views has by itself influenced that evolution.[citation needed]
Kuhn’s work has been extensively used in social science; for instance, in the post-positivist/positivist debate within International Relations. Kuhn is credited as a foundational force behind the post-Mertonian sociology of scientific knowledge. Kuhn’s work has also been used in the Arts and Humanities, such as by Matthew Edward Harris to distinguish between scientific and historical communities (such as political or religious groups): ‘political-religious beliefs and opinions are not epistemologically the same as those pertaining to scientific theories’.[19] This is because would-be scientists’ worldviews are changed through rigorous training, through the engagement between what Kuhn calls ‘exemplars’ and the Global Paradigm. Kuhn’s notions of paradigms and paradigm shifts have been influential in understanding the history of economic thought, for example the Keynesian revolution,[20] and in debates in political science.[21]”

I think what is really going on is that academics resent when their tools (Kuhnian paradigm shift, deconstructivist hermeneutics, etc) are used not on the religious, old white Europeans, and conservatives, but on themselves. “Hoisted on their own petard,” and all that.

anon

“Kuhn is great, but I don’t think you have a single solitary clue about where Kuhn is actually applicable. Kuhn’s strength lies is describing what happens at the edges of science, when the evidence accumulated on behalf of several competing paradigms is almost equal and a revolution in views is about to take place.”

Right. But after that revolution, Kuhn says that developments in the paradigm essentially don’t do science: they don’t present hypotheses, perform experiments that may contradict those hypotheses, and accept that the hypothesis is flawed. Rather, they attempt to ‘evolve’ the paradigm to overcome contradictions-contradictory data is explained (or explained away) to continue to support the hypothesis, until the contradictions are so great, a new paradigm is necessary. The prevailing paradigm is defended-not attacked (or ‘questioned’-the fundamental purpose of the scientific method)-until its flaws are so extensive, it simply isn’t possible any more.

So, for instance: when global warming had to be replaced with ‘climate change,’ that was a clear attempt to explain away contradictory data. And now we have the ’15 year pause’-the same thing. Adjustments to raw data. The contradictions keep piling up. A new paradigm is due.

anon

Hi Steven. I wouldn´t say that: Bunge is not a relative unknown within science, in a historical sense; he is not a current “star”, which is another thing… But he´s underrated. His age is mostly irrelevant (what about the dead?!). My point is: Bunge is a great read, if you don´t pay attention to certain conventions of the day.
Best regards.

Okay okay I get it, science doesn’t kill people, people kill people

anonymousse @44

I love how you blindly copied a bunch of wikipedia summaries with the [citation needed] tag still present. Also please try to read the crap you actually pretend to understand:

“Kuhn’s work has been extensively used in social science… used in the Arts and Humanities… influential in understanding the history of economic thought”.

You may notice that this is primarily focused on Kuhn’s impact on the humanities/social sciences, not on the practice of hard science.

Also, you still haven’t answered my question about how Kuhnian analysis actually applies to the AGW paradigm. Are there competing paradigms or even models that account for all the evidence? Specifics please.

We use our Kuhnian Paradigm Shift Spectrometer all the time.

We put one in our last grant proposal, but didn’t get funded. If we want to measure paradigm shifts, we have to deconstruct the hermeneutics by hand. Like animals.