If I want to persuade someone of a different point of view, my viewpoint is essential. Instead of adopting a debating view, A teaching view is more effective. Not a condescending view, a real teaching view.
Then I have to find out their real motivation for holding that view. If their views on sexuality are tied to their religion, I need to proffer a religious based explanation for changing that viewpoint.
Most people don't put a great deal of logical thought into their views, and they are amenable to being "converted" given an understanding of their reasons, which they themselves may not be clear on.
When I'm having a discussion with someone who isn't clear on the Scientific method, or whether science can find the truth, as the people in the article, I'm on pretty safe ground. Although, yes, in theory, they could convince me of their views that homosexuality is a mental illness, etc. I think the odds are poor.
The article implicitly assumes that a scientific determination of the truth has been made. (Which is problematic in itself. Bad science gets published all the time.)
To do real science you need a hypothesis, a control and an experiment. Finding correlations in historical datasets after the fact is not really science. It's good for formulating hypothesis but it's not science, at least as described by Francis Bacon or Karl Popper. Good science provides falsifiable predictions, more dubious things that are called "science" merely provide scientific sounding explanations for natural phenomenon.
Under your definition, astronomy is not a real science since astronomical experiments are pretty much impossible and the term 'control' has no meaning there.
It is perfectly acceptable in science to use observations of natural phenomena that can be used to build explanatory frameworks that have some predictive power. You can then formulate, ex ante, an event that either works towards confirming your explanation, or disproving it. By observing the outcome of that event (or even finding that event in a historical data set! Although you must be certain that it did not enter your hypothesis), you can gain useful scientific data.
Hypotheses-based predictions need not come from controlled experiments. If that were the case, the scientific method would be much less generally applicable.
I appreciate that the term 'scientific' is thrown around with gay abandon, but if you intend to educate people on the true meaning of the term you should not exclude what is arguably the oldest of the pure sciences.
If we constructed the laws of physics merely by observing the planets we could have concluded that a mass rotated around an axis will move in epicycles, which is how the pre-Copernican astronomers explained the movements of Mars. Astronomy is merely the application of experimentally determined physics here on earth to the movement of celestial bodies.
You're missing an awful lot of astronomy if you think that orbital mechanics is the sum total of astronomical knowledge. There's no earth-bound laboratory that can create the hundreds of Teslas magnetic fields found in the sun; there's no earthbound laboratory where one can see high-mass effects like gravitational lensing; there's no earth bound laboratory that can explain or even observe the existence/absence of dark matter. Astronomy is much, much more than dynamics.
I wonder what kinds of answers you'd get from the same study group if you asked the question "what is science?". Heck, I wonder what answers that'll get on Hacker News!
If you read "science" as "survival of the fittest for theories", then there is indeed room for people to have all sorts of biases. There are always folks who watch out for these biases. The big pool of those biases evolves towards some consensus about "reality" through argument and evidence collection. Over time, the most persistent of these ideas become "intuition".
... but that's probably a gross simplification of affairs. If it can take science 20 years to confirm some simple causal relation such as "smoking causes cancer", it is not at all surprising that people might doubt the power of the scientific method. If skepticism is healthy, isn't it also healthy to be skeptical about the completeness of science? Is the "scientific community" saying "you have to skeptical about everything ... except science"? Isn't that a religion then?
Psychology and medicine probably have the hardest time here. It seems particularly easy to read "lack of evidence for X" as "evidence for absence of X".
Is the "scientific community" saying "you have to skeptical about everything ... except science"?
Not at all, which is why gravity and evolution which are both understood well enough to be labeled accepted facts (especially evolution) are still called "theories". Religion is inherently based on faith, not observation, testing, and proof which supports its tenets or claims -- a key distinction.
On the dot. I was trying to point out that the original research seemed to come from the point that being skeptical about the absolute power of scientific method is not ok. The authors were "shocked to find" .. blah blah.
This article has an odd futility about it--it cites scientific studies on why people aren't persuaded by scientific studies, and intends them to be persuasive.
Seriously, I can imagine a scenario where, in an argument, someone presents scientific evidence. Their opponent responds in the usual dismissive way, and then the first person presents this very argument.
I agree. Something very pretentiously meta about it. The author writes that the findings are shocking, but I'd have been shocked only if people ended up trusting "science" (whatever their notion of that is) in both groups.
Classic case of cognitive dissonance [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognitive_dissonance]. I assume the people in the study changed the belief that was less personal / emotional: that science was useful.
Classic case of common sense, at least when it comes to political questions. You can be sure that any politically contentious issue will generate scientific studies on both sides, and the mere existence of those studies means nothing unless you are able to assess the validity of the research. Therefore, if you're an ordinary person who isn't capable of critically assessing the research, science doesn't help you resolve such questions. Disbelieving contradictory research is not the cognitive mistake; trusting research that supports a political belief is the mistake.
The effect on general belief in science is clearly evidence of bias, but the bias of the writer also shows, in his one-sided condemnation of the folks whose faith in science was decreased by the exercise. After all, they just had a reminder of how easily (from their point of view) science can be hijacked for political (or economic) purposes. They also may have a more pragmatic approach to the question than geeks like us; when we are asked if science could be usefully employed to answer a question, we imagine designing and executing a valid scientific study. A normal person is more likely to imagine reading about a study in the newspaper or hearing it on television, in which case it's much more reasonable to think, "Science will never answer this question for me," because they have no authority they trust to tell them which studies are valid and which are distorted by commercial or political interests. The validity of a study is irrelevant unless you can assess it yourself or trust an authority to assess it for you.
When presented with unwelcome scientific evidence, it seems, in a desperate bid to retain some consistency in their world view, people would rather conclude that science in general is broken
That's not all that surprising if the sample group didn't feel very knowledgeable or comfortable about how science works to start with. For example, I'd wager a group of non-computer literate people would hold more favorable or less favorable views about the merits of computers if results for some computer experience gave them a very positive or negative experience. I mentally walked myself through that study, and presented myself with the "scientific results" that contradicted my existing view. My reaction was simply "are you sure?" I'd likely be skeptical of the testing/measurement methods, but not the merits of science itself.
"Proofs" in Science is a misnomer, though, isn't it? You don't "prove" something with science, you simply construct a theory that matches closest to reality based on experimental data. Science doesn't prove, it provides a framework for inquiry.
Exactly, philosophy and math provide proofs based on axioms - science is all empiricism and induction; it provides predictions based on our current context.
For most people, the statement "Yeah well you can prove anything with science" is true. In the same way that a car mechanic can convince me of anything he wants, since I know so little about cars (and he knows so much). Just like I can convince most people anything I want about computers, since I know a lot more than them.
Given that, people's strategy of ignoring scientific studies is smart. There are usually studies that "prove" both sides of the issue, and people have no way of telling which is more accurate.
you can try to squint at the world so you only see evidence supporting your beliefs. Or you can continually refine your beliefs as you look at the world with eyes wide open.
Both are a lot of work, but only one is a joy. One makes you stand on your own two feet, while the other makes you want to stand on the feet of others.
I'm a bit of a contrarian, as some of you may know. When the crowd goes one way, I look to see what the other way looks like.
I find articles like this -- where the underlying premise seems to be "people are stupid, science is not" to be deeply flawed. People use the word "science" to cover all sorts of things. In this example, it was used to cover the results of a study. Guys? Studies are inherently non-conclusive -- for lots of reasons, including the correlation and causation problem. I can show you studies that will show correlations between about any two things you would like. What's the old saying? "If you torture the data enough, you can get it to confess to anything". The stats on medical studies, in particular, are very concerning. The proper response to being presented with any study is to say something like "That's interesting. What other pieces of data do we have?"
It's not to change your world-view. If your world-view is so flimsy that you'll change it on a dime, you're not exactly being a critical consumer of information.
Secondly scientists are people too, just like the ones studied.. Everybody seems to overlook this fact. We all have these wonderful gems of how people act irrationally, self-reinforce in groups, are slow to change opinions, etc., and nobody asks "wonder how all of that affects the study of science?"
Why? Because the purpose of such self-congratulatory bullshit like this is to tell ourselves "I am a creature of reason and science. These other people are primitive non-thinking dweebs"
It's all just so much intellectual self-stimulation.
I'm all for studies in human irrationality to continue. This is a very interesting and fruitful area of research. But the picking it apart and trying to make social or political observations out of it? Not so much.
Secondly scientists are people too, just like the ones studied.. Everybody seems to overlook this fact.
I disagree that people overlook that fact. Humans are certainly not infallible, and that's why peer review is an important part of the process for confirming scientific discoveries and claims. That's what is so great about science; claimed results must be reproducible independent of the scientist, otherwise the claims are generally discarded.
> I disagree that people overlook that fact. Humans are certainly not infallible, and that's why peer review is an important part of the process for confirming scientific discoveries and claims.
Peer review compares to the literature and does some minor arithmetic checks. It rarely redoes the statistics, let alone verify that the measurements were real.
That's part of why peer review is almost useless in detecting fraud. It has other failings as well.
I agree, but I meant peer review in an objective sense. There is nothing stopping anyone else from verifying their own measurements. The bigger and more unbelievable the claim, the more subject it is to scrutiny.
Then I have to find out their real motivation for holding that view. If their views on sexuality are tied to their religion, I need to proffer a religious based explanation for changing that viewpoint.
Most people don't put a great deal of logical thought into their views, and they are amenable to being "converted" given an understanding of their reasons, which they themselves may not be clear on.