This is bread and circuses.
Let scientists do science - comics and comedians are the weapon to reach for.
America has lead the way for the past 4 decades in bringing the public into areas they don't have the prior knowledge to navigate.
Anyone old enough to remember the climate change debates will remember a time when scientists didn't debate climate deniers because it gave climate deniers too much credibility!
But what scientists didn't realize is that vested interests were setting them up.
Cranks and fakers were nurtured and given air time by a certain news channel till they eventually the "public interest" invaded the scientific.
At which point "science" lost. Science expected a debate, but walked into Spectacle.
Trump showed that with Twitter and crap you can cross the very low threshold required to beat the current crop of presidential candidates.
This is entertainment. If you don't treat it as such you lose space to the person who generates better TRPs.
Before I moved here, I remember thinking that Americans must be too stupid to understand "The Simpsons" because it takes apart and laughs at all the obvious flaws in American society, but discovered instead that Americans can cheerfully laugh at Homer, understand why they're laughing at Homer, and be Homer all at once.
Bear in mind that a Christian Conservative is already managing epic levels of cognitive dissonance "the love of money is the root of all evil.... mmmmm tax cuts" so a bunch more is barely going to have an impact.
This is not unique to Americans.
You can generalize your assertions to humanity as a whole. America is not unique in believing wildly irrational, logically inconsistent ideas and compartmentalizing cognitive dissonance. This is the story of human politics since the beginning of history...
My father has been in the GOP base his whole life. The refrain when I challenged his views on science was: "those scientists are all liberals. Why should I believe anything they have to say?"
He encouraged me to study sciences anyway because it offered a better life than his. Now, of course, he explicitly regrets providing me that education, because he sees me as "brainwashed."
We know that bullshit is asymmetric: it takes long to clear up than to cast. The way to take it down is to rip on the caster until they stop (or look ridiculous in voters' eyes) - this requires facts yes, but more importantly presentation.
I said it in another thread, if you keep demonizing people, they will eventually send demons.
At least you don't lose more ground or have to rebuild more institutions.
Bringing dry facts to a Comedy Central roast isn't good strategy.
As a scientist, I instinctively trusted other data scientists to be as rigorous as I was when I did research. It turned out they were using extremely wonky simplistic models for complex human behavior, and it left me cold and clueless.
If poll-based divination is a better descriptor than political data science, then scientists should decry their stealing of the term.
Of course, some people built bad models and predicted 90+% chance of winning for Hillary, and those people need to rethink their approach. But this election was not a refutation of polling and modeling as a whole.
At a visceral level Americans are beginning to revolt against a system that continues to grow in its power to pick winners and losers through a systematic war on education, media, and democracy.
Obama promised change; Trump didn't have to.
The American oligarchs became complacent. A shrewd sexist, racist shark capitalized on the structures they have built to perpetuate their power.
Well, the fake news factories are also good at pushing people to take a hard stance on things they have no clue about.
It is undeniable that humans and human-run institutions are subject to all the same corrupting factors that every other person or institution is.
It's alarming that most of the comments here start off with the default of "the science must be true".
Science as a process is virtually infallible, but science as practiced by humans in human-run institutions is very very far from infallible.
Hyper group-think is one of the more unfortunate aspects of our modern technological dilemma. Places like HN breed it. I find it utterly despicable...it's as if most of the people here are willfully incapable of considering any point of view except their own.
If you disagree with the local group-think in the slightest, you just get censored and your words start fading away into nothingness. It's such crap.
I have designs for a new, better commenting and comment voting system could solve this problem. The up/down vote is so childish and overly simplistic. I look forward to a time when people get sick of it and finally change to something better.
Unless you're taking the time to do the science yourself and verify the results - you could be getting lied to or otherwise misinformed. Do you ever actually do that or do you generally just trust people who call themselves a scientist and who are trusted by other so-called scientists?
This article is also a bullshit piece of propaganda that is going on attack because somebody in the White House wrote a 7 paragraph energy plan summary that didn't include their favorite word. The plan clearly states that "Lastly, our need for energy must go hand-in-hand with responsible stewardship of the environment." and last time I checked the "climate" is part of our environment.
Do you really think that Science as an institution is incorruptible?
> Within two days of Trump assuming power, White House
> officials have found themselves embroiled in a
> scandal over “alternative facts”.
Actual alternative facts do exist because we often select the facts we represent based on our tribal affiliations.
I won't be able to reclaim the term now that is smeared. But I wish people could point out when somebody is lying (or misleading) without trying to smear the existence of counterzeitgeist truth.
Aside: why didn't anybody in the Trump administration respond by pointing out that Washington, D.C. is majority democrat, and that Bush's inauguration might have been a better comparison? Quite embarrassing that they would lie when deflating the authority of the comparison would have probably been more effective...
But when a reporter on CNN says "Why did the Donald Trump tell the Press Secretary to come out and tell falsehoods?" that diminishes what actually happened. The PS lied on national television. Call him out on it. Use the word "lied" or "liar" and stop dressing it up by using terms like "telling falsehoods."
When a liar is said to be "telling falsehoods" it's only one small step for them to reply with "alternative facts."
This has been a tried and true strategy of con men and salesmen and marketers throughout history. (It was also a tried and true strategy of various NBA teams -- foul so much that that level of fouling seems normal and the refs stop calling it. Highly, highly successful strategy; you basically force the game to unfold the way you want.)
The man is remarkably insecure. Everything he does has to be the "best ever" or it's just not good enough. Having someone like that in charge scares me.
We all experience alternative realities and use our 'alternative facts' to justify our beliefs. We all literally do this every single day.
As a libertarian or a marxist one has 'alternative facts' about the nature of humans, society and the environment, from there they build up their world.
I wrote about this recently:
"When we are interested in a topic and have time, we read about it and contrast different points of views. But when we don’t have time or are not interested in something, we believe what our culture, friends and influencers say. And we are so bombarded with information nowadays that we can’t get informed about everything all the time" [1]
Do you think that a site tracking expert's opinions on important topics might help?
That's what we are doing on AgreeList.com / Wikiopinion.org We haven't decided yet if it should be a for-profit startup or a nonprofit organisation.
Do you think this would help to tackle fake news?
[1] https://medium.com/@HectorPerez/wikipedias-social-network-57...
http://www.hopesandconcerns.org/
I'm not super excited about "expert" opinion. An expert, to quote Niels Bohr, "Is a man who has made all the mistakes which can be made, in a narrow field." A jet engine mechanic is an expert if none of the planes she works on experiences engine failure. A scientist is, almost by definition, not an expert. This is especially the case when experiments cannot be carried out. For instance, we cannot instantiate 1000 earths, vary their CO2 content, and then observe what happens. We can only model, and modeling is based on assumptions, or "alternative facts." Almost everything controversial today (e.g., drug policy, economic interventions, climate change, etc.) falls into this quasi-scientific realm. I'm not sure that there is a quick way to reach a consensus on such issues other than by having all of the interested parties slug it out in public over an extended period. I also believe we must be careful about overzealously applying the precautionary principle to the point that policies that are objectively not working become sacred cows (e.g., the War on Drugs).
I would really hope that there's a threaded discussion component, and I would hope that differing opinions/theories are allowed (and critiqued, obviously).
The indiscriminate usage of the term by the mainstream media is a strategic mistake since they are giving ground to the frame of all facts being subjective and equally applicable. Remember that 'fake news' was quickly and effectively used by the alt-right to tarnish mainstream media. I expect 'alternative facts' will eventually be used against them, too.
Also 'alternative facts' might be a position that the mainstream media needs to defend, if the current administration upped their game and began to mislead through selective usage of facts rather than more overt lying.
1) The President and his staff are mistaken, but honestly believe what they say
2) The President and his staff are lying, and know they are spreading falsehoods
3) The President and his staff are delusional
What other options are there?
If (1) is the case, and the actual facts are presented and they refuse to believe them, that would also seem to imply (3).
There are no alternative facts, only additional ones.
Do I say this to downplay empirical science? On the contrary. However, the focus on facts is I think more harmful than it might appear in trying to protect our scientific legacy. Dump every table ever recorded on the internet as a torrent, and very little useful things will come from it. It's protecting the institutions and freedom to reason about, and talk about, those findings that is important; to be able to openly challenge them, and rigorously come up with "best explanations" (a human intellectual construct, not fact, not truth).
Gag orders to silence academic findings, that is problematic. More so than trying to "protect" facts-of-the-matter as if they are somehow the pinnacle of human intellect.
Corollary this is also why I always find "humanities are not science" or "this is not Nature worthy"-statements rather annoying. It's a no-true Scotchman fallacy. Science is more than stamp collection, it's more than peer-review, it's more than running elaborate statistical tests on randomized experiments: it's the collective human endeavor to understand the universe and ourselves, it's a mindset. A mindset that can, and should be, in constant flux as our understanding progresses (and sometimes regresses).
No, it's more than that. Without the rigor to come up with testable hypothesis and reproducible results, you might as well be practicing religion. You can have a very inquisitive mindset but without applying scientific rigor, you're right in line with numerologists and whatever else.
That's why people are so hard on shaky humanities studies that have poor experimental design, poor analysis, or terrible biases in the data. You can't derive meaningful conclusions from bad science. Garbage in => garbage out.
“Science is a tribute to what we can know although we are fallible… We have to cure ourselves of the itch for absolute knowledge and power.”
I saw The Ascent of Man at a young age (probably 7 or 8) and I've always remembered this scene:
http://repository.cmu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=3032&c...
So, it comes down to trust. Unless you're going to do the science yourself, you have to trust somebody.
Also, despite mainstream scientific consensus being based on "testable hypothesis and reproducible results", it's still managed to get things terribly wrong. That's what they call a paradigm shift but most people would just call it being proven wrong.
Let's face it: Joe H. Average does not "reason". He just takes it on faith that there are various authorities on different matters, and just subscribes to the points of view of those authorities.
So then, the really sinister thing is this massive push to denigrate some authorities, while setting up "alternatives" in their place.
The vast, vast majority of people are puppets with very limited mental autonomy. If you think otherwise then you have no chance of understanding what's really going on now - because that's how the manipulators are thinking about the world, and they are succeeding.
I don't want to get too political, but one can't help but wonder if the way science has been talked about in the media has led to a skepticism of academia to an unhealthy degree.
Scientists understand this, headline writing journalists less so, and agenda-pushing activists and politicians definitely don't.
Being willing to believe things based on what reality says is the thing we should value. And it should be very highly-valued indeed.
However, in other contexts it seems like the prevailing consensus is reported without any controversy. For example; many popular psychology books have been written and findings reported as truth, which is now being thrown into question by the recent reproducibility crisis in that field. I've not seen any coverage of "big bang denialists" or "inflation denialists", despite how esoteric some of these theories are.
I'm tempted to see a link between those issues which negatively affect people's lives and the rise in belief in alternatives which are less negative (but potentially falsifiable). However, this is by no means a thorough review of the issues, and perhaps reflects my bias in recalling examples.
1. Facts may exist in the abstract, but in the real world, most facts aren't knowable as such. Every experiment makes decisions about how to set up its apparatus, what to do about measurement error. As such, everything that we choose to use the convenience of calling "observed facts" is really filtered through those factors of human judgment. And thus, all of our knowledge is tentative, depending on the quality of our experimental judgments. We really don't know with certainty as much as we tell ourselves that we do. In general, it's not an unpardonable sin for someone to claim your observations are not valid. (although in doing so, one, would expect more of an argument about why the method of observation was faulty, rather than just a "he said, she said" argument.)
2. As mentioned elsewhere in this thread, science even at its best can only tell us raw information. This does not lead inexorably to decisions about policy. This process necessarily passes through our values, at an individual and at a societal level. In a universe of finite resources and finite opportunities, we must always make the value judgments of which course of action is best, by analyzing expected benefits versus opportunity costs (not just monetary, but also in our moral and aesthetic senses), to see which course gives the greatest net benefit.
(sorry for not giving concrete examples to explain. I'm afraid that if I were to do so, it would distract by causing debate about the examples themselves rather than my actual point)
A fact is generally considered to be a proposition that is true. The problem is, science doesn't deal in what's true. Science deals in what's falsifiable.
Most things that are believed to be true aren't falsifiable, and therefore fall into the epistemologically nebulous category of "things which are not yet false". I'd suggest that trying to build a positivist bastion of truth on such shifting epistemological sands is doomed to fail.
That's the epistemology of Popper. Not necessarily how science works. See e.g. Fayerabends arguments in "Against Method".
Where do you get that idea? A fact has to be "established." As in the trial, in front of a jury.
Now in science, the jury are qualified scientists. Others simply aren't qualified. Even unqualified people can invalidate something that is believed to be a fact. But they can't do by just being loud. The jury has to acknowledge that that unqualified guy is not speaking nonsense.
Read about the testing of EmDrive as an example. The guy who made it and can't explain it will still be accepted to be the discoverer, if his claimed effect gets to be really proved. The jury was skeptical, but they will still accept the results, if the measurements demonstrate it "beyond any doubt." At the moment, what was measured is far from that.
Another example: global warming is a scientific fact. There are some loud persons claiming that it isn't so, but what they bring to support their claims is truly and utterly worthless. Who says that: the climate scientists, all in the world. How do we know it's true? Because that's how science works, the specialists are trained the whole life to recognize the valid claims. The valid claims would become a new facts. The deniers don't have them.
Fact: "I measured the CO2 content in a sample of air, and it was 400ppm." (I didn't actually measure. Bear with me.)
Fact: "50 year old textbooks list the content of CO2 in air as 280ppm."
Theory: "The increase of CO2 content in air is caused by the burning of fossil hydrocarbons."
You can argue with the theory. You can not argue with the facts. All three of them are science, and yes, that explicitly includes the argument.
> Most things that are believed to be true aren't falsifiable
What?! Citation needed.
1) The effective radiating temperature of the earth, T_e, is determined by the need for infrared emission from the planet to balance absorbed solar radiation:
pi*R^2(1-A)*S_0 = 4*pi*R^2*sigma*T_e^4
2) Rearranged, this equation gives:
T_e = [S_0*(1-A)/(4*sigma)]^0.25
4) The mean surface temperature is T_s ~ 288 K.
5) The excess, T_s - T_e, is the greenhouse effect of gases and clouds
2, 3) Simple conclusions from (1).
4) Fact... sort of. It needs a precise defintion of "mean surface temperature" that makes sense in the face of the equation in (1). Shouldn't you take the fourth root of the mean of the fourth power of temperature? For practical purposes, this is called a "ball park number".
5) Plain wrong. The correct coclusion is that either (a) the theory presented in (1) is wrong or (b) one of your inputs (R, A, sigma, S_0) is wrong. Turns out the value of A is wrong, and the simplistic idea of albedo is not good enough for the theory in (1).
https://www.washingtonpost.com/amphtml/news/speaking-of-scie...
* Reproducibility crisis - http://www.nature.com/news/1-500-scientists-lift-the-lid-on-...
* P-hacking http://www.nature.com/news/scientific-method-statistical-err...
* Prominent scientists criticizing those who find math errors in their works http://www.vox.com/science-and-health/2016/9/30/13077658/sta... (There are few facts more basic than math, and one of the scientists actually used the words "methodologic terrorism" to describe this effort)
* Not publishing raw data so others can analyze it http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/neuroskeptic/2016/08/16/sc...
These issues, especially the last two make it seem that a lot of scientists are not fighting for the facts, but for their own academic position.
It's people holding these beliefs receiving human connection in the context of these beliefs primarily from people who share the same beliefs! We use differing beliefs as a reason to disconnect & disassociate, which is EXACTLY what got us Trump in the first place.
Science knows this! We have to temporarily affirm their worldview before challenging specific pieces of it. The more foundational the belief, the deeper the connection needs to be.
My hypothesis: we need to collectively learn nonviolent communication in order to hear the right on an emotional level. By connecting with them over all their deep-seated fears & beliefs, we can then more easily stay changing them.
A scientist job is to present the facts. It's the media, and ultimately the citizen job to fight for them.
We need to act, and we need to act now. Science is what got this man elected (twitter, television), now it needs to fight for the very basic principles.
The word "science" seems to mean almost everything nowadays.
Twitter and television are not science. They are social constructs built around the works of engineering, which itself was based on some established scientific knowledge.
Still looking for the facts in this article...
That's not science, that's politics. You might very reasonably disagree with it, but there's no branch of scientific inquiry that says that the EPA should be funded to a specific amount or be communicating in a certain way.
Obama expanded the EPA to care about climate change, Trump is reining it back in. C'est la political vie, and it should be dealt with like any other politics one might disagree with, but it's nothing to do with science.
So it's a bad article, aka a political fluff piece. I got that message from reading it.
But what are these facts?