With the rise of so-called populist movements across the globe and the loss of common sources of information in favour of partisan news outlets and conspiracist websites, the past few years have been characterised by a breakdown of socially authoritative knowledge.
The people, some commentators caterwaul in dismay, just don’t trust the experts anymore. But an essential part of this story is that the experts have to a significant extent lost trust in each other and in their institutions. This shift came, in large part, due to the replication crisis in science.
In 2010 Dana Carney, Amy Cuddy and Andy Yap wrote a paper in the academic journal Psychological Science detailing a finding about a certain kind of “powerful” pose — most iconically, one in which the poser has their hands on their hips and their legs spread apart. The authors, based on a study with 42 participants, asserted that “minimal posture changes” could “over time and in aggregate… potentially… improve a person’s general health and well-being.”
They went on to say: “This potential benefit is particularly important when considering people who are or who feel chronically powerless because of lack of resources, low hierarchical rank in an organization, or membership in a low-power social group.” In 2012, Cuddy gave a popular TED Talk called “Your Body Language May Shape Who You Are,” and in 2015 she published a self-help book called Presence: Bringing Your Boldest Self to Your Biggest Challenges.
It was a New York Times best-seller, but right around the same time her psychologist colleagues were starting to try, and fail, to “replicate” her findings — to redo her experiments and achieve similar results. They could not find independent evidence of the effect she had become rich and famous for trumpeting.
Power posing was like catnip for a lot of people, and it’s symptomatic in many ways of the problems with public engagement by experts in social psychology. First, it suggests that humans and our social world are highly malleable, our identities susceptible to massive alterations as consequences of tiny, simple interventions. There’s no particular a priori reason to think that these interventions will have the claimed effects: no first principles, no overarching theory. Second, it presents a kind of feel-good solution to problems of a vulnerable group: here, the homogenised “chronically powerless.” Third, while it originated within the scientific community, it made its way to the public consciousness at least in part through being commodified for an audience that was only superficially scientifically literate — the TED Talk crowd.
The replication crisis is an ongoing event across the sciences involving the failure of published and often celebrated results to replicate in subsequent experiments. It is the most important science story of our times and the subject of psychologist Stuart Ritchie’s new book Science Fictions.
Ritchie tells the story very well; the achievement of the book as a work of popular science comes from the way it switches smoothly back and forth among three tasks, all of which it performs with considerable success.
First, it gives the unfamiliar reader an overview of the details of professional science — grants, journals, peer review, that kind of stuff. Second, it develops evocative and engaging narratives, sometimes funny, sometimes shocking, of specific instances of scientific misconduct and error. Third, it delves into quite technical material about statistics and experimentation, covering problematic research practices like p-hacking and potential stopgaps and solutions like specification-curve analysis.
Ritchie focuses on psychology, his area of expertise and the field most prominently hit by the replication crisis. Recent papers seemingly established things like “college students having psychic powers” (Ritchie was personally involved with the unsuccessful attempt to replicate that paper) and “messier or dirtier environments cause a rise in prejudice and stereotyping” (the author of that paper turned out to have wholly fabricated the data).
As these results started being discredited, classic results came under scrutiny too. The Stanford Prison Experiment of Philip Zimbardo, which found students assigned to be “guards” in a week-long simulation abusing students assigned to be “prisoners,” has been famously used to suggest the near-universality of human cruelty; and the “priming” studies, in which tiny, unconscious suggestions can lead participants to behave in very different ways, were taken by Nobel laureate Daniel Kahneman to “threaten our self-image as conscious and autonomous authors of our judgments and our choices”. A meta-replication in 2015 found that of 100 chosen studies from three psychology journals, only 39% of experimental results replicated.
Other such studies found rates of 62%, 77%, 54% and 38%. Not good numbers! And Ritchie notes that similar meta-replications have produced worrying results in economics, neuroscience, evolutionary biology, marine biology and organic chemistry, and, perhaps most worryingly, medicine. In some cases, studies fail not replication but “reproduction” — other researchers analyse the data set actually obtained in the original study and come to different conclusions due to errors, unspoken assumptions or unjustified analytic decisions.
Ritchie begins his book with a humorous overview of the scientific process. His goal is to show that this process is ineluctably social, and he does this convincingly. Scientists must justify their work to other scientists, both in terms of its importance and in terms of its accuracy, and scientists must check other scientists’ work. When one scientist publishes a result, if that result is true, another scientist should, barring chance deviations, be able to replicate it in their own lab. If such a replication cannot be done, the result means much less, because it now describes not how the world is in general, but at best how one scientist’s experiment went.
Why might a published result fail to replicate — that is, why might an academic journal publish a result that’s ultimately false? Ritchie mentions four underlying causes: fraud, bias, negligence and hype. Fraud can be objectively very obvious while still escaping notice, as in studies which use the same image for purportedly different situations. And scientific institutions often fail to hold fraudulent scientists to account when those scientists are prestigious, due to both gullibility and self-interest.
“Bias” includes various kinds of political biases and identity-based stereotypes, but Ritchie stresses that biases in favor of intellectual novelty and impact are if anything more significant in the current scientific landscape, including the well-known bias against publishing negative results — that is, against publishing papers that tell us only that something exciting did not happen.
Ritchie’s section on bias also includes a clear account of some technical elements of statistical reasoning, failures to adhere to which are Ritchie classes as “analytic biases.” These biases include things like only reporting a portion of collected data, excluding certain data points for arbitrary reasons, and deciding whether or not to continue looking for data based on initial results. These biases can in fact creep into a scientist’s work rather innocently, based merely on their conviction that their hypothesis is correct — the “bias” in question.
Surveys found that 65%, 40% and 57% of psychologists respectively had engaged in those three practices. The section on negligence also includes some great descriptions of statistical techniques and instruments that have been developed to detect various kinds of scientific error, and the section hype mentions NASA’s claim, later debunked, to have found arsenic-based life on Earth, as well as the “growth mindset” fad, the “probiotics” fad, and the ever-changing directives of nutritional science.
Serious though this is, there is also something more specifically pernicious about the replication crisis in psychology. We saw that the bias in psychological research is in favour of publishing exciting results. An exciting result in psychology is one that tells us that something has a large effect on people’s behavior. And the things that the studies that have failed to replicate have found to have large effects on people’s behavior are not necessarily things that ought to affect people’s behaviour, were those people rational. Think of the studies I mentioned above: a mess makes people more prejudiced; a random assignment of roles makes people sadistic; a list of words makes people walk at a different speed; a strange pose makes people more confident. And so on.
All of these studies involve odd effects from environmental cues. Taken together, they suggest an image of human behaviour which is highly irrational and highly manipulable. This is, in fact, the image of human behaviour which I think a great many educated people hold at the moment.
Of course, the existence of the replication crisis does not by itself mean that this image is the wrong one. But as these overhyped and ultimately flawed studies have made their way through the press releases and TED Talks Ritchie discusses into the broader consciousness of a certain class, I think they’ve helped persuade that class that that image is indeed the right one. As we reevaluate our scientific institutions, it may pay to reevaluate this image as well, and its influence on our social organisation more broadly.
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SubscribeI think the journalists would have done good if he had taken the role of journalists into account. Today’s crop of journalists is too often taken ‘scientific’ results that match their activism and amplifying it to the general public. It is the combination of the ‘scientists’ and ‘journalists’ that is so lethal.
Agreed.
Newspaper revenues are decreasing.
To keep their heads above water, journalists are knocking out reams of low quality articles where they re-print the press pack from the most self-promoting scientists, or simply bullhorn the nastiest opinions from the latest twitter spat.
How many times have you read this article in the paper?
“Murder in suburbia:
Despite living in a £1,750,000 house John Doe was murdered yesterday.
A friend wrote “I am going to really miss you, you are an angel” on his Facebook page.
Please contact local police on etc. etc.”
Journalistic method:
Police request for information goes to paper
Zoopla
Facebook
Move on to next “story”.
If a press release arrives, on the journalist’s desk, they don’t even have to go to Zoopla and Facebook. Just print it and move on to the next “story”.
That’s the sorry state of journalism today
This article is framed incorrectly – science was undermined by disciplines with loose scientific scruples.
There’s a reason why the journal “Psychological Science” shoehorned the word science onto the end – in a way that would not be required on biology, physics or chemistry (etc) publications.
Properly conducted science has been undermined in the public eye by pseudo-scientific disciplines’ inability to conduct reliable, accurate and adequately scrutinised research. This research is then taken and trumpeted by scientifically illiterate journalists.
As much was decried by Ben Goldacre and others for years – so I would not say the ‘replication crisis’ was that influential in this.
I am not trying to be snobby – I am not a scientist but a historian – but disciplines that can apply the scientific method to their research to improve its quality should do so at all opportunities (history included). However they should apply a rigorous honesty to how they present their findings. It is impossible to get the required degree of scientific accuracy in many disciplines – so these disciplines should be careful trying to parade around as accurate science.
Agreed, and I would add ‘economics’ to the pile of subjects that aren’t sciences but often purport to be.
The only way science can be called science, is when an experiment can be replicated.
As it is not possible to replicate an experiment with human beings, the experimental results are not science.
Psychologists and other social “sciences” are not science. Hence I do not trust their results.
I think I understand your point but you go too far. If an experiment can be reproduced reliably then it is valid, scientific and inferences are useful. It is possible even straightforward to find some such.
The problem comes when researchers cheat, or samples are too small or the wrong inference is drawn through lack of consideration for other factors or poor understanding of statistics. That can happen in natural science too.
100%.
Applying scientific methods to disciplines directly outside of pure science is sensible and leads to better accuracy. But should not therefore automatically qualify them completely as ‘scientific’.
To apply this to history as an example; we can 100% ascertain what crops the Romans grew in Britain through pollen studies and actual scientific methods. But to determine what that might mean to the society or why they grew them is more problematic. One is discovered through pure science, and is easily falsifiable, the other should still undergo scrutiny and peer review and other (just good academic) practices, but can only survive on a certain amount of good faith and the strength of what circumstantial evidence is available.
The ‘people don’t trust experts’ trope became utterly tedious during the Brexit debate, and is still regularly sneered in Guardian comments; but seems largely a fiction to me. As many of the comments here remark, many people don’t trust politicians or the media; but these people cannot be said to be ‘experts’ about anything much. Likewise psychologists or economists, there is little hard science behind their conclusions. In terms of the Brexit debate economist’s forecasts were largely or entirely partisan: and we remember how many of them predicted the 2008 crash… I think there were 2.
I would trust the expertise of the bloke who comes to mend my boiler, the people who manage our utilities, my GP and so on, but politicians: most of them know little or nothing and have done little or nothing useful with their lives before entering politics.
Even those predicting 2008 got the timing wrong or had been pessimistic for so long that sooner or later they’d be correct.
I’d love to meet the person who predicted correctly twice. There aren’t any in those fields. It was luck & comes out of the law of large numbers, moneys & dartboards etc.
Yup. Thus the adverts for the fund that made 25% last year, comes with a warning that past results don’t predict future earnings, will go bust this year, and won’t be advertising next year.
I don’t think this quite addresses the distrusts in “experts” – quotes deserved.
Sure, there is a replication crisis (I work in medical research and have had many projects abandoned when the originating basic results turn out to be false. We have an easier ride than psychology as we can at least better control our trials and blind our interventions.) Causes: others below have mentioned “pressure to publish” as that is how quality is measured. Why re-test your results and risk falsifying them or being pipped to publish when whether you’re any good is based on a publication rather than its veracity.
The distrust of “experts” is something else – it’s the pushing of dodgy results by activists passed off as experts by those commentators that support their cause.
Climate science is an excellent example. Top-notch explanations of the phenomena, allowing for the data difficulties and uncertainties inherent in such a difficult issue. The problem is the activist that claims with absolute certainty that if we don’t do what they say then the world will end in five years. And is still saying this ten and then twenty years later. Trust the science, please, but don’t trust the hysterical ER representative.
Climate change, economics, politics (Brexit!),…, too many examples of so-called experts found wanting but still being promoted without correction by the right-thinking commentariat.
One of the problems from my own experience comes from the “need to publish”. There are so many articles published that attempting to carry out a serious peer review is almost impossible. This is all driven by the race for tenure or the need to be famous and be on TV.
Making available raw measurement data is also important, because conclusions often rely heavily on processing data through models of how the system is expected to behave. Replication is not just in the raw measurements, but in understanding how the data are processed.
I would second that. Recently I have read a number of scientific papers puplished on-line that present their findings as averages, either mean or medium, occasionally without even stipulating the range or standard deviation. Some of these papers have multiple result sets presented thus, making it impossible to determine if there is any correlation between the individual results. This also means its dificult to asses their conclusions / interpretation of the data, scientific papers should publish the raw data as well as the aggregated / interpreted.
The two most important sentences in good science ought to be (but seldom are):
“we don’t know”
“we were wrong”
followed by:
“peer review is no guarantee of quality”
Research that demonstrates the opposite of what you expected is (in general) much more valuable than that which confirms a hypothesis. But is far less likely to be published…
Perhaps the abundance of “experts” for every eventuality has correctly worn thin.
Self appointed and selling themselves rather than the science or facts. A certain Neil Ferguson comes to mind.
That’s not fair, he is an expert. Sadly, not in the field he appears to work in.
He’s actually a theoretical physicist.
I’m certain to be biased, as I’m originally a biochemist/toxicologist then added pharmacology. I used the training to conduct research (which is all a PhD is) in the field of new drug discovery, within which a large number of other scientific disciplines collaborate. 25y of that gives one a decent nose both for bullshit & also patterns that others can’t yet discern.
I find the covid19 literature pretty good & also not contentious. You wouldn’t know if if you listened only to the talking head scientists the mass media use as their go-to people.
I appreciate that it isn’t a seminar, but I’m used to interacting with fellow scientists in such a way that no one including me ever gets away with exaggerations, misleading emphases, deliberately missing out key context which could reverse entirely the implications and the like. You do that & you will see your credibility flushed pdq.
However, that is my experience of watching TV / listening to the radio on this topic. The number of times either a scientist or science correspondent gets away with asserting something that’s either demonstrably not true, or is regarded as possible but much less likely than alternatives not mentioned, etc.
To a man / woman, the “journalists” holding positions like Science correspondent, Editor, Medical / Health etc have so blotted their copy books that I’m no longer interested in hearing what they’ve got to say or reading their opinions. They’ve joined their anchor colleagues in becoming useful idiots & ‘red topped terrorisers’.
I’m old enough to appreciate James Burke was such a game changer. He was an excellent communicator who simplified things only as far as required to get key concepts out there. If he made leaps or guessed, he would tell us he was doing it.
a few problems, the world did not know what it was missing when it had not heard of NF, or more accurately his litany of previous failures.
He over egged the death toll on his lazy outdated code and then went on every TV and radio he could to show the world how great he was.
The problem being he is not. What he is is the product of jealous, envious, strange world of bitchy academia, full of narcissism and puff. It was his chance to prove them all wrong.
He failed
The “scientification” of psychology has left young people in particular with an endless list of “conditions” on which to blame their lack of forward progress in and understanding of the real world. Do we really need a scientist to tell us that body language is important in shaping the way we feel about ourselves? In this instance the real surprise is how on earth other “scientists” haven’t been able to replicate what most of us would regard as common sense.
To any young person looking for answers to the irrational fears generated by spending so much time online I would encourage them to come out from behind their safety screens and conduct these experiments for themselves in the real world. In that way through personal experience develop their own judgement rather than relying on the ether to tell them what to do, think or feel.
Rule One in Jordan Peterson’s multi-million selling book “12 rules for life”, increasingly quoted by young people as a positive influence on their self-image is:
“Stand up straight with your shoulders back”.
Th reason is quite simple: it’s complexity! Proper science can only deal with simple situations – compared to the real world.
Classically science altered one variable at a time in controlled conditions & observed the effect on the system with reference to particular output parameters which a theoretical model had predicted to behave in a particular way. Thus the model was validated (or not). This could be replicated at any time by any other scientist & thus was real in an objective sense.
Despite the narrow range of investigation possible the results were powerful in their implications for humanity. By applying these models to the behaviour of materials in the real world technology advanced at a rapidly increasing rate &, for better or worse, it gave us a control over our environment never seen before.
The amazing success of science led to the idea it could be applied to ever more complex situations & systems, the obvious (& most complex one) being human beings.
So far any attempt to scientifically model human behaviour has been a signal failure. Any model which may seem to work for a certain time (passage of events) soon fails & thus has no utility.
Perhaps one day we may have enough computing power to model individual humans & how they interact, but as yet I see no sign.
So the problem with experts, outside of the ‘hard’ sciences, is that they aren’t. Their predictions are useless, & often worse than useless.
I am not sure it’s that human beings and society is too complex for ‘science’ to manage, especially with the growing power of AI and computing.
But actually the issue is perhaps actually a question of data and ethics.
It’s very hard and in many cases unethical to test reliably and to a sufficient level of detail and repetition with real life humans – it’s why much medical research is undertaken with fruit flies, zebra fish and other animals before it gets anywhere near humans. Similar issue with social issues – as to create a true control you’d have to remove or make constant various measures which is not possible with real humans.
Not disagreeing with your point as such, just proposing a layer underpinning it. We know how to and we could – we just shouldn’t and quite rightly.
A huge leap forward for western science was made when we pardoned Japanese War criminals in Manchuria for the results of their experiments on the Chinese during WW2.
Well I don’t think anyone would expect anything other than the above-featured shenanigans from a bunch of psychologists. These people live in their own world and they do what they do. And such nonsense is not really the reason we don’t trust experts. The reason we don’t trust exerts is that they invariably turn out to be hopelessly wrong. For instance, all of yesterday the experts promised rain for early evening, so we cancelled our planned game of football. Needless to say, it didn’t rain and was in fact quite sunny during the time we intended to play.
While I do tend to agree with you comments about psychologists, I do take exception to
Experts on the whole turn out to be almost always correct (or at least far more often than people who just have a wild guess), its politicians and the media who try to interpret what they are saying and twist it to meet their own ends that causes the problem.
Yes, you are probably correct and it is fair to say that I am being somewhat simplistic for effect. It is certainly true to say the media is very selective in terms of the experts that it cites.
Don’t you think it is also that on any given subject the media can find an ‘expert’ who will give the view that they want to purvey?
This became very obvious with the run up to Brexit, with wilder and wilder statements made by ‘experts’. Most of which have, so far, proved to be wild of the mark.
It is so prevalent today of Covid-19 that a significant % of people don’t even believe it exists.
In addition over the last 50 years that I can remember, medical experts have told us to not eat peanut butter (causes cancer)’, don’t eat eggs or prawns (raises cholesterol), don’t eat fats (They make you fat). Only for them, a few years later, to reverse those edicts.
It is hardly surprising that experts are not listened to, or trusted.
1980’s Ice age
2000’s Global warming
2010’s Climate Change
To be fair, experts may not have said all those things per se.
Over 1,000,000 academic papers are published each year.
If one study finds a correlation between say peanut butter and cancer then they report it and often with the most cursory third party examination it is published. The press then report the finding as if it has become mainstream scientific consensus and the result is established. That is not the scientists fault per se.
For eggs, you are clearly right – there was a strong movement to reduce consumption of them – which was really ill advised.
Please correct me if I am wrong by my understanding is that the initial hype regarding Omega 3 was down to the as agency looking for a new scientific angle to market their clients fish based products and came across an undergraduate paper which included an incedental, couple of line suggestion that there might be health benefits from Omega 3 fatty acids and latched onto it for their advertising campaign.
Subsequently every expert under the sun was vaunting the benefits without any scientific research having ever been done at that time.
I’d say there’s another aspect to this – as there are whether, we like it or not, different tiers of experts.
A person might be what can be described as an expert in their field, but that field might be fundamentally flawed as a legitimate and serious intellectual/academic discipline. Such is the issue with a lot of the more niche science-sounding epithets added to more obscure and highly specific areas.
incorrect just look at economists who could forecast what the next day let alone any meaningful economic future trends
I have always felt that economics, like investment analysis, is a mixture of science and art based on the principle that:
1. Data on its own is worthless so
2. You apply quantitative analysis (the science part) to produce information.
3. You then subject that information to qualitative analysis to produce the hypothesis (the art bit as it is purely subjective.)
I could add
4. Leverage of the hypothesis is power if used correctly (also art.)
indeed – you produce what you wanted to start with by black art science
Nice cheap stereotyping there. Hopefully you can learn to do better in future.
Do you get paid for each dumb sentence you write here? I myself trust the genuine experts because they have made a huge positive difference to my life (e.g. still being alive many times over). I don’t trust the official pseudo-experts because their lies have caused such huge harm to me. And my own expert research shows they have caused huge harm to millions of others.
More can be learned by checking out pseudoexpertise com or searching for Experts Catastrophe.
I think that the reality is that as the population becomes more and more distracted and bombarded by an increasingly pointless and shouty range of opinions we tend to retreat into our own in-built knowledge base. As children we are taught to respect all authority and seniority. As we grow older and have experiences of authority in many different fields we learn of medical practitioners who make many tragic mistakes, we hear of scientist, bankers, accountants, lawyers, police, teachers, MP’s, Royalty etc. behaving appallingly and this drip drip of failings slowly erodes our trust in anyone apart from ourselves. We learn to trust our own judgments. That is the position that I find myself in. At the end of the day just what exactly does being a so called expert actually mean?
I am reminded of a famous quote from Richard Feynman: “Science is the belief in the ignorance of experts.” At the current time this is very pertinent, given that the so-called experts, spewing the so-called “Science”, together with the press and many progressive politicians continually braying “Follow the Science”, have proven wildly wrong at every step of the game. Unfortunately, somebody like the esteemed Dr. Anthony Fauci, together with the ever-arrogant, never in doubt but always wrong Prof. Neil Ferguson, prove the point. No wonder the public no longer has any trust in the experts, as in fact these experts are nothing more than arrant fools, hoist with their own petard and devoid of any common sense.
Show me the replication of the results that show so-called ‘surgical’ and cloth masks unambiguously prevent respiratory virus transmission when used by the general public…..
One other factor I think is relevant is the use of ‘scientific experts’ in trials, especially in the ritualised combat that is American trial-by-jury. The experts are not there to help the jurors discover where the truth is, but instead to manipulate the jurors into believing their side’s narrative, whether or not it is true. I run into too many people, these days, who sincerely believe that most of the time the truth is almost completely unknowable, and thus attempting to find it out is a waste of time — in all aspects of life, not just in the courtroom. I think they believe that science is some sort of performative art, like the LARPing mentioned in a different article because they think that that is all that *everything* we do is, including convicting criminals of crimes.
Yes – muddying the waters through trying to cack-handedly stuff “science” onto multi-various and highly complex issues.
We have lost faith in psychology “experts” because they inform us, in pompous jargon, of the bleedin’ obvious. Tell us something we don’t already know and we might start listening again.
If the main issue is ‘why we stopped trusting experts’ ( the ‘we’ is undefined but I assume it means the general person in Western democracies ) then I am pretty sure that it because the printed and broadcast news services are far, far too quick to announce the latest findings of some research or another. It’s printed and broadcast as if the originator is ‘the authority’. Inevitably and quite correctly, those findings will be overtaken as understanding and knowledge develops but rarely do the news services make clear that the original report was just either one finding or part of an evolving understanding of the subject. Such caveats don’t make for eye catching headlines and, ‘why ruin a good story with the facts’. We are all bombarded with constant headlines about the latest findings or to be more accurate, a select few headlines. ‘Expert opinion’ fatigue begins to set in and creates fertile ground for any number of snake oil pedlars and conspiracy theories.
As a German Biochemist Ph D my view is, when we started our studies, we had to learn, there is nothing to be trusted. The concept of any research is, to test, to validate, to be on alert, to be skeptic. Anything else is a sort of Theology. The principles of thought based on the concept of mathematoi, Pythagoras.
Science is Business- and untalented, persons are drawn to make money with the sale of quick fabrications. Even worse, the Art to design Mind Opiates. Or Mind Toxins. To slander. Arthur Schopenhauer published the handbook on the Art of Rabulistics.
In first Semester Physics, we had to study:
Error propagation.
Propaganda is the Art to propagate errors and Mind toxins.
I run away…
Or as I once said to a guy in a bar, regarding another guys 9/11 theories
“If there is no way to prove a theory isn’t true it’s a worthless theory”
How much does this apply to climate science where there are many variables and models have consistently failed to match observation?
I think science and scientists are having an appallingly torrid pandemic – they are coming across as a bunch of guessers who cannot admit when they are wrong – and ignoring data on the ground that does not fit their models – they have got it the wrong way round – completely – the media tail is wagging the whole dog all over the place and its been painful to watch ….. I think the reputation of science and experts is being severely damaged by the charlatans peddling models based on ill considered initial conditions
The Contemporary hysteria over SARS2 shows the danger of believing everything 24/7 non-stop media throws out ..Actual deaths out of 45,000 is nearer 900 due to SARS2(2%) 98% had underlying conditions ie Cancer,Sickle cell,obesity,Diabetes et al…Prof Niall Ferguson predictions,ie models on Zika virus,SARS2,CJd, SARS1 were ALL wrong,but mainstream left him alone as he was A ”Remainer” it has nothing to do with ‘Populism” Reason ITV,ch4,BBC are increasingly shunned ,is because they make their ‘Prejudices” well known.. I look at Al Jazeera,Russia Today as they usually show news,Weather etc .NOT opinion…Same as ”Climate Gate” lies over ‘Hockey stick” I was called a ”Climate denier” at recent Dec 12 General election. No i just had to correct my Opponents when they claim it was Coldest,hottest month ever, Even Met office records Show their hype.most applications have trouble with ten days Correct weather,let alone next 100 years..
It would help greatly if studies that do not meet statistical criteria were not published as science, but as “incomplete research”.
The fields mentioned systematically have two flaws:
1. The word SCIENCE should practically never apply to any field that does not use The Scientific Method, that eliminates ALL the humanities, and social studies, economics, politics, finance, etc.
2. Popular “sciences” with poor biostatistical credentials, like the joke that is neuroscience, and the low threshold for marine biology and evolutionary biology and “nutrition” and organic chemistry are indeed pushed along by profits and identity politics.
Politics and society have NO business messing with the scientific method. And the “popular science” industry has become a cash crop of lies and pseudoscience and talking heads, sometimes perpetrated by our biggest celebrities, like Canada’s Suzuki and McDonald and Goldman.
I’ve got no issue with experts. My boiler broke last year so I employed a man who has had 30 years experience repairing boilers to come and repair it. His repeated exposure to the mechanics of boilers placed him at a better vantage point than me to rectify the problem.
A boiler / plumbing system is a closed one. You cannot ascribe the title of “expert” to a person who claims to know the outcome of the systemic socio-economic interactions between billions of people, and then call anyone who disagrees with them as stupid (see Brexit).
Politics is merely taste – the nation I would like to live in will most likely differ from the next person, so its role is to endeavor to smooth out the disparities of our wishes to attain an average tolerable for us all. This will not be achieved by experts, but by us.
Correct. I’ve noticed a tendency to equate sociological ‘expertise’ with, for example, double-blind clinical trials or as you say, decades of experience in a closed system, particularly amongst lockdown fanatics and remainiacs. And so it follows if you’re not a ‘believer’ you must be an anti-vaxer.
Turns out Gove was onto something when he said the public were fed up with experts. In their anti-Brexit frenzy, the media had weaponised expertise and too many experts – not to mention those who were merely commentators but were introduced as experts – were happy to go along with it. To make matters worse, the area of their supposed expertise was economics. Forgetting, if they’d ever known it, the maxim that economic forecasting was invented to make astrology look respectable, the media treated “expert” forecasts as if they were fact, never troubling to interrogate the models and their assumptions. No wonder the public – or, at least 50% of them, were fed up with experts.
Expertise should always be questioned. Why else did medicine develop the entirely accepted concept of the second opinion? Experts, in science and other fields, should know the limits of their knowledge and be humble enough to welcome scrutiny. Now though, every side of an argument has its own experts and woe betide any opponent who dares to doubt the truth of their prognoses.
Our recent Covid experience has shown that a degree of scepticism from the public is entirely appropriate. Google makes it simplicity itself to find thousands of well-qualified (and unqualified) experts very happy to take to social and mainstream media to share their opinions on a novel virus where the science cannot possibly be settled. Whatever your opinion on lockdown, testing, tracing, herd immunity and anything else, there is an epidemiologist out there on the global interweb that you can quote in your support. This doesn’t mean that expertise is without value but it does mean that experts, those they advise and the general public must understand the limits of what this expertise can deliver and how to use, and not abuse, it.
Our working definition of an expert is a former drip under pressure, likewise PhD is pronounced fud, the very sound of them hitting the floor with a f(th)ud. Ok I’m extracting the urine, slightly, but working with top expert researchers you soon learn just how ‘narrow’ they’ve become due to their specialisation. And the higher they get up the greasy pole the worse it gets. Yes they are often brilliant in their own field, but rarely anything else, yet they were/are the one’s who got/get to venture their opinions on things like Brexit, even though it was/has nothing to do with their field of ‘real’ science, after a while people start to see through the façade and bull and once that happens any trust they had evaporates. Scientists attempting to cultivate a TV persona beware…
This article might have some credence if the ‘experts’ used as exemplars practiced science rather pseudo-science; e.g. psychology. There have, of course, been instances of malpractice in the so-called ‘hard’ sciences, in which experiments have a high degree of validity and reliability, but relatively few compared to, say, medicine, in which there have been notable instances; e.g. MMR vaccine ‘denial’.
There are issues regarding replication in academia but this review is framed appallingly and falls to adopt an objective approach (oh the irony etc). for a detailed, balanced and informed review of the book see https://www.spectator.co.uk…
In looking up what TED talks are all about I came across this:
Here are 7 really simple tricks you can use to look amazing next time you’re on stage.
Add some sparkle. …
Don’t wear black. …
Highlight your cheekbones. …
Wear extra make-up. …
Wear a costume not just an outfit. …
Wear pantyhose without any sheen. …
Don’t go too heavy on the black eyeliner.
I had not realised that I would need to do these things to get my ideas across.
Note the use of the word ‘tricks’. I realise that that the writer probably meant to say ‘techniques’ but they have revealed themselves with this Freudian slip.
That’s all very well, Mike, but where are the 7 tips for the ladies?
Six of those seem to be good advice sir, but I refuse to wear pantyhose with or without sheen. My shortish, muscular legs would look ridiculous in them 🙂
You’re right however, there is theatre in science just as there is in law, politics, business, religion and education.
>> I refuse to wear pantyhose with or without sheen
Don’t knock it til you’ve tried it. Tights are awfully freeing, you suddenly find yourself prancing about like Mick Jagger.
My general impression of psychology is that it is getting better and better, as a science, as it becomes much more skeptical about results.
This has partly been a result of having better experimental methods. 20 years ago fMRI proved that psychosomatic pain doesn’t exist. It’s finally been removed from DSM only a few years ago. And your average doctor over 40 years of age certainly believes in it, since they were taught it at medical school, but luckily sends you to a psychologist who doesn’t. So bad ideas hang around a long time, especially if they strike a chord – i.e. chime with our biases.
Psychology has been paying a lot more attention to what it means to be normal, rather than concentrating on pathology, which is also a very good thing.
It may take psychologists as a whole some time to overcome their biases on where the nature-nurture tipping point is but even that seems to be improving.
I suspect the fact that this book is out is a symptom of psycholgy trying to get its house in order, and that is surely a good thing.
Compare this situation to the social “sciences”, which are group-think dogma exercises, in which creating a slogan via a portmanteau or rhyme elevates your “research” above the rest, and finding an ultra-marginalised group for your readers to trump their fellow dinner guests’ level of “self education” gets you mega brownie points. Not surprising when all of the university intake for these degrees are failed creatives.
We should double the funding of university grievance studies departments, if only to keep their intake from joining psychology departments like they would have done 50 years ago, and ruining what could, with time and patience, become a perfectly good science.
But hasn’t Psychology decried masculinity as toxic while describing transgenderism as perfectly normal?
https://www.amhf.org.au/mal…
https://www.vox.com/identit…
There seems to be more information than ever, none of which should be either believed or disbelieved completely. There is probably some truth in much of this, excluding the most radical & stupid nonsense. What is most essential is to approach this plethora of data with common sense, careful thought and a profound understanding of human nature.
It does make sense that an editor would not want to upset whoever endorses his annual broadcast license, or go against strongly-held convictions of whoever rubber-stamps his annual bonus.
This notwithstanding, a strong-minded editor with integrity, would print the truth regardless. His sponsor will either take in on the chin …. or take offence and sack him..
My own anchor and mainstay through this particular troubled moment in history has been provided by two elderly gentleman, one American (Noam Chomsky) one Norwegian (Johan Galtung). I’m proud to endorse and recommend both.
We are probably being offered five types of printed information : The Truth, Filtered Truth, Fake News, Conspiracy Theories of debatable merit, Conspiracy Theories of absolutely no merit. Our duty as thinking people is to seek the truth exactly as it is, and share it with our loved ones. The most beautiful, lifelong goal should be the pursuit of wisdom.
Stereotyping is unproductive. Absolute declarations are not helpful in pursuit of truth. Lying in order to please a corrupt sponsor is abhorrent and this does happen from-time-to-time. When mankind is challenged (as we are being challenged today) evil people and evil deeds are revealed in sharper focus, but there is also a tremendous amount of good. The most beautiful manifestation of which (for me at least) is an army of brave doctors and nurses, offering their lives in the service and care of others.
What wonderful people these carers are! Their example shines as a beacon of hope for humanity.
Simply put : all we can do in the face of information-bombardment by experts or idiots, is careful research, based on fundamentals, logic, common sense, tempered with a healthy cynicism. As the wise Arab advises ….. “Trust in God, but tie your camel!!’.
The Lancet.
What is medicine’s 5 sigma?
“A lot of what is published is incorrect.” I’m not allowed
to say who made this remark because we were asked
to observe Chatham House rules.
https://www.thelancet.com/p…
Much of modern psychological science fails to take account of the fact that human beings are reflective, flexible, rational and self-conscious beings. This is odd given that the scientist herself requires all of these characteristics in order to pursue scientific research in the first place.
There’s a fifth, which is chance. The usual criterion for publication is that the result obtained should be one which, if it were purely random, would be expected by chance less often than some pre-determined threshold, typically 1 time in 20. But scientists and journals are not interested in failed experiments. So if twenty labs do an experiment to test whether there is an association between two things, where there is in reality no such association, one might expect on average 19 of the labs to find no association, which of course they do not publish, and one which, by pure chance, does: this is the result that gets published. Of course there’s no such effect and so (nineteen times out of twenty) the experiment fails to replicate. This is known as p-hacking. Careful experimenters are well aware of this, and well-designed experiments avoid it. And Ritchie’s book devotes quite a lot of space to it.
I think that while there may be a decline in socially authoritative knowledge, it’s not a result of the replication crisis in science, but the result of a much longer process involving such things as the decline of deference and the rise of “theory”. But the specific “people in this country have had enough of experts” refers to none of these: it was a specific reaction to a specific situation. There were people who wanted to frame the Brexit referendum as if it were an opinion poll on the management of the UK economy, as opposed to a decision to do something. There was, as it happens, no clear consensus among economists as to whether leaving the EU was likely to be beneficial or not to the UK economy, but even so that question might be one on which it was possible to have an expert opinion, and where one might reasonably hold than some peoples’ opinions were more weighty than others. But that question wasn’t the question on the voting paper. The question was whether the UK should leave the EU. It was and is perfectly rational to vote for a course of action that would be less beneficial economically it the voter believes that the economic result was outweighed by some more important issue such as national sovereignty or international solidarity. In the final analysis, in our democracy, every vote is as weighty as any other, and each voter is as expert, or not, as any other when it comes to a democratic choice.
May I ask why my two comments on this review have been deleted. They were intended to be, and I think were, polite, constructive and well-argued. But they have disappeared. Why is that?
Later … it seems they have reverted to “pending” and have remained in that state for four days. I don’t know why.
Two things come to mind. One, it depends on who you define as an expert and secondly, maybe part of the problem is how the media filter and present science to the masses. I often find that when I go to the original studies that have been presented in the media, they have been misrepresented and exaggerated. A good example, are the numerous dietary and general health studies reported. So it is no wonder that people stop believing.
As a “consumer” of science, I simply no longer trust anything I read. The good news is that I have been forced to fall back on my own reason. 20 Years ago, faced with a myriad of health issues, and sick of being given ineffective advice by “expert” doctors, I decided to do my own homework. I went to a high fat diet and stopped eating wheat. Within 30 days I had cured myself of years of acid re-flux disease, carpal tunnel syndrome, migraines and mood swings. My doctor basically implied that I was an idiot, and that I was going to die of heart disease. Long story short today my blood work is perfect, I have more energy than I had at 25 and I am trim and healthy. The “inevitable” surgery that was going to be required for my acid re-flux issue never happened and is no longer “inevitable”.
How did I arrive at this crazy idea? Common sense. I spent two weeks reading about the diets of indigenous cultures and those who live in blues zones. The Masai and Native Eskimo traditionally ate a diet free of grains and loaded with animal products and suffered from none of the disease that afflicts modern societies. I switched to a diet that emulated theirs and cured myself. Simple logic. And yet the medical community at the time was telling me to eat a diet that was literally killing me. How many thousands of Americans died prematurely from consuming “whole grains” and trans fats? (We are now of course being told that trans fats are “evil”).
I am fascinated by the idea that billions of dollars and hundreds of studies led the medical community to recommend a diet that led to misery, disease, and early death for millions of Americans; and yet any layman can do some reading and see the obvious.
..
There is a rather more critical review of this book in the Spectator. It’s very interesting and moderately encouraging.
https://www.spectator.co.uk…