Not to mention that citations are not all they are touted to be.
Just because something has been written by someone somewhere doesn't make it an objective reality fact.
Just because something has been published on a peer reviewed journal doesn't make it an objective reality fact.
Just because something has the consensus opinion doesn't make it an objective reality fact.
Just because something is supported by the numbers given by some government, state agency, NGO etc doesn't make it an objective reality fact.
And in many cases someone with actual "skin in the game", who knows a subject empirically can be right, and know they are right, against "citations" from all of the above.
All you are really saying is its impossible to know anything for certain.
Having a citation from a well regarded source is better than having no citation. Peer review is better than no review. There is probably a higher correlation for a statement from an official state agency being true, than a random statement with no attribution.
So yes, a statement can satisfy any of the things you mention, and still not be true. But that doesn't mean those factors can't be helpful in assessing the likelihood of a given assertion.
> That said, you'd be surprised how often the fact (pun intended) that it's "impossible to know anything for certain" is lost on people.
I think David Hume was quite good on this subject. If chance of being right is all there is to knowledge, then maximizing your chance of being right is what knowledge is. So all the peer review, the numbers and statistics, for example, contribute to knowledge even if it might be wrong. And if you dismiss, as you do, statistics because they just might be misleading or biased, and are thus not "objective reality fact", that does damage to your ability to know things, because you are discarding data without considering it, and that damage should be avoided. Whereas the proper thing to do is consider it on merits, whatever the actual merits are.
Selection bias is a huge problem though. Statistics in politics basically have negative utility because people just omit the ones that contradict their favored narrative, and then you get this:
Maybe, but consider adding another constraint to the game of maximizing your chance to being right -- you have a finite amount of resources (eg, time) to spend on examining evidence, so you need to strategize even what evidence is worth considering and to what extent -- looking more carefully at one thing means you now have less time to look carefully at something else, nothing is free
Of course, in real life, we do have this constraint
Your comment is vacuous if you don't expand on it; it goes without saying we want to try to minimize bias as much as possible. Science is part of a world of limited resources too, and investigators have to decide what experiments to try, what topics to pursue
In the context of confirmation bias being an evolved trait, my comment was meant to imply that we should expect science to spend much more resources than mere intuition, but doing so is still worthwhile.
Any scientist will be subject to cognitive bias at some level (if only by choosing the core principles and axioms on which their reasoning is based), but there are systematic ways to mitigate it. Applying more resources to a particular problem will get rid of at least the superficial levels of cognitive bias.
The article you linked doesn't actually address either of the points you claim it negates. It doesn't look at peer-reviewed status or citation quality (or quantity) as variables. It claims that most published research findings are false, but you're making a misleading interpretation of its findings.
> That said, you'd be surprised how often the fact (pun intended) that it's "impossible to know anything for certain" is lost on people.
It's certainly not lost on the millions of newly minted epistemic skeptics, who all of sudden over the last few months feel a calling to publicly argue against the knowability of objective facts.
I took an epistemology class in college, and I do agree that there is a sense in which facts are never truly and finally knowable to us. But I vehemently disagree that we should import this philosophical doubt into matters of everyday life. Even if our ability to capture facts is imperfect, throwing up our hands and saying "nobody's ever actually known a single fact, so why bother trying to agree on the terms of debate, lets just agree to disagree about the facts" is a transparent gesture towards legitimizing ignorance.
> Even if our ability to capture facts is imperfect, throwing up our hands and saying "nobody's ever actually known a single fact, so why bother trying to agree on the terms of debate, lets just agree to disagree about the facts" is a transparent gesture towards legitimizing ignorance.
Why is the alternative to "throw our hands up.." instead of just becoming more skeptical and scrutinizing sources more rigorously? These days, people cite sources like they are gospel, often having not read through the sources themselves.
> it's "impossible to know anything for certain" is lost on people
In my experience, people tend to use this phrase as a bludgeon to exclude ideas they don't like. It's a way to stop a discussion, not help promote understanding and find real facts.
The paper you cite says that most published research is false.
You infer from this that published research is no better than no source.
But this is wrong! If published research is true 30% of the time, but people's intuitions (on questions research is published on) are so only say 10% of the time, then going with published papers is a better choice.
I'd like to know if people feel, after reading TFA (or the psychology literature), how likely it is that people are wrong most of the time on important questions.
>But this is wrong! If published research is true 30% of the time, but people's intuitions (on questions research is published on) are so only say 10% of the time, then going with published papers is a better choice.
Only if "people's intuitions" are true on a less than a "published research" percentage.
Why on Earth would you assume your intuitions are better than professionals combining intuition with methodology in good faith?
The article we're commenting on (which you can discard more easily than I) describes a study you can reproduce easily to prove it to yourself. Why don't you?
Indeed, technical error on my part. The parent commenter is only "most likely wrong" given the psychological literature on this is most likely right. Some of it you can prove to yourself by experiment such as by following along this ASAP science video[1] (it's essentially Kanehman's Thinking Fast and Slow in accessible form).
Exactly, it has been a fact for a very long time that fats are quite bad for you and you should mostly eat carbs. A fact published in reputable sources and irrefutable to most people.
>All you are really saying is its impossible to know anything for certain.
Which is to say, that what ever being said isn't a fact in the absolute extent people tend to mean when they talk about how facts should change one's mind, and thus why it doesn't change our mind (well one reason at least).
> But that doesn't mean those factors can't be helpful in assessing the likelihood of a given assertion.
But what of the likelihood that the one presenting the information (or someone further up the chain) specifically picked information that would meet all the criteria will being misleading? I've seen this behavior from think tanks on every side of the political spectrum. They begin with a view they want to push and then go searching for the best back information that lets them push it. Unless you are an expert, you don't hear what is left out, which bits are using very precise definitions that are being confused by the layman who is the intended recipient, or what similarly backed information outright calls into question the information being presented. Add in people's own biases to ignore their side when it does it while focusing on the other side, and it creates this view that the well back information from the other side is of far less value than the the poorly backed information from their own side.
Cogito ergo sum res cogitans. Descartes though only one thing is certain: that you can reason, hence that you are a reasoning thing. Not so fast, Descartes.
Even leaving philosophical skepticism completely aside, there's an indeterminate gap between a "fact" according to peer-reviewed literature, and a fact that would actually stand up to verification indefinitely, unless it's a fact that naturally gets verified a lot.
"Having a citation from a well regarded source is better than having no citation."
Not if the "well regarded source" has a clear motive to lie.
"There is probably a higher correlation for a statement from an official state agency being true"
Not when the statement conveniently exculpates the agency or high ranking members of the agency of wrongdoing. Then there is probably a higher correlation for a statement being false.
For example, when Jean Paul de Menezes was gunned down by the London Metropolitan police almost every claim made to defend themselves in the succeeding three days turned out to be false. They said that there were wires visible from his jacket. They said he was wearing a heavy coat. They said he vaulted the turnstile. They said that they shouted "armed police!" and he turned and walked towards him. None of it was true.
The police are considered a well regarded source by the general public:
"THOUSANDS of people plead guilty to crimes every year in the United States because they know that the odds of a jury’s believing their word over a police officer’s are slim to none."
Your article is inaccessible to me beyond the first 2 paragraphs. Please provide additional quotation. I do see that it is in the opinion category, so perhaps a more reliable source could be provided? Something like a main article of the NYT would probably have less chance to be skewed into a bias, than an opinion piece by the author of "Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness".
The reason I would like to know more, is because I learned so many years ago of the importance of doubt in criminal cases in the US. As Wikipedia tells it[1]:
>Beyond a reasonable doubt is the highest burden of proof in any court in the United States. Criminal cases must be proven beyond a reasonable doubt.
If it's currently the case where all that's needed for a suspect to be found guilty, is for a police officer to say they are, then the entire justice system needs to be reworked.
The community of people who have spent their time becoming knowledgeable in that field. Or do you suppose that any quack peddling snake oil is as knowledgeable as someone who went to medical school and practices medicine?
Semmelweis proposed the practice of washing hands with chlorinated lime solutions in 1847 while working in Vienna General Hospital's First Obstetrical Clinic, where doctors' wards had three times the mortality of midwives' wards.[5] He published a book of his findings in Etiology, Concept and Prophylaxis of Childbed Fever.
Despite various publications of results where hand washing reduced mortality to below 1%, Semmelweis's observations conflicted with the established scientific and medical opinions of the time and his ideas were rejected by the medical community. Semmelweis could offer no acceptable scientific explanation for his findings, and some doctors were offended at the suggestion that they should wash their hands. Semmelweis's practice earned widespread acceptance only years after his death, when Louis Pasteur confirmed the germ theory and Joseph Lister, acting on the French microbiologist's research, practiced and operated, using hygienic methods, with great success. In 1865, Semmelweis was committed to an asylum, where he died at age 47 of pyaemia, after being beaten by the guards, only 14 days after he was committed.
I am sure there are many others, those are just ones I readily remember off the top of my head. Current "experts" are really terrible about defending their current belief system, and actual evidence be damned. Their jobs and whatever depend on them being right, so don't confuse them with the facts LA LA LA NOT LISTENING. (And because they are experts, many other people simply defer to them.)
This does not appear to have changed in the modern world.
I completely disagree. These particular incidents highlight those occasions when new knowledge had to overcome challenges between experts,
It completely ignores the many times experts knew things, and applied them and improved the working of their field.
You are absolutely overfitting an example used to highlight a pitfall. Instead you are using it to dismiss experts.
In other words you are re-broadcasting the anti expert propaganda which is constantly being spread for the past several decades.
Do note: if this was a modern news channel, The usual next step would be to bring up a total hack and have them repeat some truly outlandish claim, and state "the experts are all in cahoots, and are against homeopathy/AGW/etc. they have a monetary interest!"
Of course experts have a monetary interest. Expert Programmers are experts in their code. They earn a living off of it. Does that stop them from making rational choices.
Honestly, he has a point. It's not even that their jobs depend on stagnation: often being an expert makes you blind to new facts and change, shielded on your own expertise. Being an expert only means you've had lots of exper-ience in the field.
Less empirical sciences rapidly change (or worse, simultaneously holds contradicting) views and thus, generate distrust.
Experts, except the truly groundbreaking ones, are only good at touting the status quo. They're just more likely to be correct because, well, the status quo in science is the most "unincorrect" knowledge we have. So far.
You're just bringing up a strawman with the homeopathy "example".
It would be better if you provided more recent examples: medical science was very primitive in the 19th century, and Galileo was not persecuted by scientists. More recently, Marshall and Warren's research on stomach ulcers quickly led to the rejection of the expert consensus which had prevailed for decades, because technological advances enabled them to present convincing evidence to a profession which had come to accept the importance of scientific research.
I was diagnosed with Atypical Cystic Fibrosis at age 35. It is genetic, thus incurable. Having managed my condition without a diagnosis for decades, I had my own ideas about what was going on with my body, different from the current scientific consensus.
Armed with a proper diagnosis, I began to get myself well. My CF doctor's response was to express zero curiosity and schedule me fewer appointments because "other patients needed him and I did not."
I have been shit on left and right on multiple internet forums for trying to talk about my experiences. I have been called a quack and accused of being mentally ill and had uglier personal attacks made against me. I have had "sciency" people tell me that "13 years of consistent forward progress is a wild coincidence, stranger things have happened, it isn't evidence that you know anything."
No one has yet locked me up in an insane asylum or beaten me to death, but I have absolutely experienced firsthand that this has not really changed. I am currently homeless, which I guess is a slightly better fate than being essentially murdered for trying to share new information, but the way I get treated doesn't speak well of society at large.
> Current "experts" are really terrible about defending their current belief system, and actual evidence be damned.
While it is true that Semmelweis could have communicated his ideas better than he did, his true problem was that he had the brilliance to see and test the correlation he could not show causation: There was no direct evidence of the germ theory of disease. We had to wait a few more decades for Louis Pasteur and Robert Koch.
I ABSOLUTELY agree with this, and this is completely lost on people. For every study that says coffee is bad there's 10 more that say it's good, simply because people want it to be good, NOT because it's actually good. The problem is, we humans play right into that as if the number's game actually means something - 1 out of 10 studies says something is bad - the other 9 say it's good. So rather than actually work off the truth (the objective fact of whether coffee is good or bad) we go off the numbers instead. Now take coffee and replace that with any number of other things.
Isn't this more a distinction between science and science reporting. Coffee is complex and interacts in ways that can be described as good and bad. The press reporting blows by the wind of the press release that day. Hence the Daily Mail and others reporting lots of common things both causing and protecting us against cancer.
One 'fact' I remember was men are more likely to physically harm their spouse, women are more likely to kill their spouse. [used as an example, may not be correct] If it's true that means domestic violence is biased in both directions. In other works Men are not more, less, or just as violent as women. Instead violence is a insufficiently complex model for the behaviors being discussed.
The hardest part of science is our desire to simplify past the point of accuracy. Consider, cities albino alter their local climate in more ways than just temperature. However, temperature is easy to model and complex interactions with various layers of the atmosphere and wind patterns is so guess what's ignored about this interaction. You don't teach middle school students about chimera when they study DNA, but it's a very real thing that actually happens.
This seems to extend in every direction. Do we want trade policy for today, next year, our children's future?
>Isn't this more a distinction between science and science reporting
In a way yes, but if we include the summaries of findings that scientists deliver to the public/governments/etc as "science reporting", then science reporting is 100% of science as we know it (unless we happen to practice it).
Consider dietary advice that has since found to be BS, that was passed in the 70s and 80s as "scientific fact", not just by the press, but by scientific advisory boards (to governments etc) comprised by actual scientists.
Right but wasn't that advice basically the state of the field at the time? That we know different now doesn't mean the scientists then should have acted on information unavailable to them.
Maybe this is why facts don't change our minds. Given exact evidence that it was wrong, which we all accept, and then turn around and say, oh yeah, we got it right this time. We're all trying to feed into our biases, not change our minds. I'm not trying to point out what you're beliefs in low-fat vs low-sugar diets have changed, I'm trying to point out the fact that you see evidence that science was wrong, and you still believe in it.
I'm not a luddite, I think everyone should believe in what is most likely true, I mean what else can we fucking do right? What I'm saying is don't turn "science facts" into a religion and believe it blindly. I think actual scientists do a good job at this, because they're actually testing it.
We fail when we convert science reports into articles and then into policy so quickly simply because it feeds into the biases of the people in charge at the time.
>Right but wasn't that advice basically the state of the field at the time?
Then perhaps it wasn't a field that should feel confident enough to give public policy/health suggestions?
>That we know different now doesn't mean the scientists then should have acted on information unavailable to them.
Most of the issue was because BS studies, referenced but not replicated papers, assumptions and the like. Not because they lacked some more precise instruments or such.
It's not like Einstein's theories, which complete Newtons, giving more accurate predictions at edge cases, while Newton's are still accurate enough for everyday calculations (e.g. ballistics).
It's like claiming X (e.g. on fat) and finding out that it's actually -X, or that X is irrelevant.
Sometimes the state of the field at the time was inherently biased. See "How the Sugar Industry Shifted Blame to Fat" [0] for example. Science is not always a progressive quest for the truth.
Right? Might as well be critical of public schools not teaching object oriented programming in the 1950's. And that's why my parents can't program, because schools were inferior...
Well, how about refraining from teaching BS state of the art?
Newton's theory wasn't proven wrong -- just inefficient at larger units / speeds, and was superseded by a more accurate theory that still gives the same results (more or less) for regular everyday observations.
Contrast with the kind of dietary advise of the 70s/80s which has been totally reversed. It wasn't "correct, but not entirely accurate", it was irrelevant, or worse, opposite, of what actually holds (according to what science says today).
Newton's theory was proven wrong: astronomers have observed movement patterns of celestial bodies which Newton's theory did not predict. But that doesn't change the fact that the first-order description of the planets' movements that Newton's theory produced is correct. And it doesn't change the fact that Newton's theory describes very accurately all types of motion across which we come in our daily life.
Facts always are true or false forever. If something can be considered true one day and false the next one, it never was a fact. It's just a theory.
Good and bad are opinions. 9/10 studies saying coffee causes earlier mortality (not saying this is true, just giving an example) is a fact. For me the enjoyment of coffee might outweigh loosing a year of my life, and wind up saving the government money on my pensions and healthcare in the long run. So is this good or bad?
This fails because things can't simply be broken down into a sets of "good" and "bad," and people really only do this because they want to justify things they already believe. Those who want to actually learn and understand things tend not to be satisfied with "coffee is good" or "coffee is bad." Neither of those represent the results of any kind of expertise.
If you're reading a study who's conclusion is 'x is bad' then I question whether you're actually reading any scientific literature to begin with. No scientist in their right mind would try and support an argument so broad.
It sounds like you're just reading some news article's terrible summary of an already terribly summarised abstract.
I agree with what you're saying here. I'm just trying to point out how lay people take in so called "science". In fact most people are just reading headlines and confirming their own bias, and then they tell all their friends that their new coffee drinking habit is confirmed as good by science. All I'm saying is that at the end of the day, the science that was paid for is distilled into sound bites and propaganda for someone's agenda.
(I actually love coffee and just finished my latte).
There's an old joke along the lines of, if an old, white haired scientist tells you something is possible, he's probably right; if he tells you something isn't, he's probably wrong. My extension to that is, if 100 scientists tell you something, it may be right or wrong, but that's the way you should place your bets.
OK, but many times that I see people making this argument they turn around and point me to some conspiracy theory from some guy yelling on youtube.
There are dark ugly forces that benefit from the destruction of trust in the press and democratic institutions. You have to maintain a balanced world view. The government and the press have their biases but they are not always in conspiracy mode out to destroy the little guy. Many times they are on your side.
>The government and the press have their biases but they are not always in conspiracy mode out to destroy the little guy.
No, but they often are. And not just in easy to point fingers at regimes.
Not that long ago, the might NYT were writing about the fabled "WMDs", were independent bloggers (no YouTube existed yet) were speaking against that BS. To a third party those would have looked like conspiracy theorists.
So, the Saddam regime was the little guy the mainstream media was out to destory? I'm not sure what this example is trying to show. That a good portion of the world was misled into thinking Iraq still had WMDs, which justified an invasion?
But the NYT, along with the rest of the world, was misled by the Bush administration. Sure they could have been more circumspect in evaluating the "facts" as presented by Colin Powell - but why do you jump from them being notably mistaken on a handful of occasions to believing they are "often" "in conspiracy mode out to destroy the little guy"?
>OK, but many times that I see people making this argument they turn around and point me to some conspiracy theory from some guy yelling on youtube.
So special interests can pay the money to tell their opinions on TV and in newspapers so they get to be "legitimate", but people who use cheaper channels accessible to the poor are "conspiracy theorists".
If I remember my science training properly "fact" is a synonym for "observation". One interprets facts in order to develop a model or "theory". So facts published in peer reviewed articles probably represent objective reality (if you believe in objective reality and trust the author to record observations accurately); the conclusion in peer reviewed articles (theories for example or statistical associations) should not be considered objective reality.
What do you mean? Heisenberg just implies that you cannot observe everything at once. It puts an upper limit on the amount of facts (as in: observations).
and amazingly the amount of information that comes out with peer reviewed science that has been repeatable enough to be accepted as fact and advertised as such can be thrown away 15 years later as wrong... how can a fact be wrong? Either it was a fact back then and you were right or you were wrong back then and it wasn't a fact but information supporting a non-factual hypothesis... given how often we see this presented on news programs, newspapers and touted as fact only to have it revoked years later leads us all to question how much we really know about these "facts".
Case in point: Sugar is great, sugar is bad, fat is great, fat is bad, red wine is bad, red wine is good... blah blah blah.
A fact is a fact, indisputable. Yet many of the facts when chased back to first principles seem to have enough ambiguity to beg questions over just how much we really know and how much we just think we know. I have whole days where I question everything I think I know and am still no wiser at the end of the day.
A scientific fact is "a repeatable careful observation or measurement (by experimentation or other means), also called empirical evidence" [2].
The media and general public doesn't really understand the distinction, and tends to call widely-accept scientific theories "facts" and treat them as if they are proven true -- when in the reality is the best science can do is just not yet prove something false.
Unfortunately, there are also a ton of perverse incentives such as when the sugar industry pays to fund science that 'proves' fat is the cause of problems[3], not sugar.
This doesn't mean science can't be trusted. Even flawed scientific theories can still be useful: for example, school children learn how to do basic quantum physics using the Bohr-Rutherford model before learning that model is actually disproven, because the model is still adequate to explain what's necessary at that level of education.
You have to judge the source of the study, who funded it (and why), and if it has been reproduced enough to be widely accepted -- especially in cases where there are contradictory results or theories.
> The media and general public [...] tends to call widely-accept scientific theories "facts" and treat them as if they are proven true -- when in reality the best science can do is just not yet prove something false.
That Popperian view (published 1934) is itself somewhat problematic, and I'd say obsolete. The distinction between pure unambiguous observation statements and the edifice of theory on top (concepts, operationalisation, hypothesis, test, theory, etc.), stemming from Positivism even before Popper, is also problematic. Even the distinction between analytic (logical, "by definition") and synthetic (empirical, "by observation") statements is problematic, see Quine's Two Dogmas of Empiricism (1951). Newer approaches see scientific theories as a "web of beliefs" - basically, "empirical facts" and "theory" and "auxiliary theories" are all intertwined.
The question, then, whether science can give us real facts about the real world (beyond what's immediately observable) is subject of an ongoing debate between instrumentalism and scientific realism.
Personally, I come down on the realist side - I think there are electrons and there were dinosaurs, even if I haven't seen them.
And thus, I think it's legitimate to call very well established scientific theories "facts"
(also, btw, because of the "oh, but it's just a theory" response of various anti-science trolls (not you, mind you!)).
Your definition of fact is dangerous to science. As soon as something is declared "fact" (is this done by some sort of high science cleric handing down edicts in an ivory tower or something) it can never be contradicted. All progress in that area will effectively halt, since the assumption is that there is no more progress to be made. I for one thank God we haven't regarded fact in this way, otherwise we may not have General Relativity (among countless other contradictory scientific findings).
> No. They are accepted as a scientific theory [1].
Thanks for clarifying that... indeed, I agree with that adjustment.
The problem you highlight is that most people aren't exposed to anything but "this is fact" spewed by the media and don't have the benefit of time or contradictory evidence at hand to decide what is true and what isn't... so even with the ability to think critically, they're bombarded with so many alternative-facts that eventually they begin to believe it too.
I think this is why science education is so important, even for people not going into hard science. Really the two main takeaways should be understanding the difference between empirical evidence and scientific theory, and that theories can never be proven 'true', but they can be proven false, and until then they're really only considered 'not yet false'.
Using their critical thinking skills they can then apply this knowledge to non-scientific situations, so when a politician say something is a "fact" they can figure out if it's a "fact" like empirical evidence, or they just mean it's a theory they believe in.
Through this lens, "alternative fact" must mean either "alternative theory" -- which is fine, and can be tested against another theory by figuring out a way to prove one false -- or "alternative empirical evidence" -- which is not possible, and therefore is just a fancy way of saying 'lie'.
Because the reality is humans don't really "know" anything the absolute certainty, but there are still ways of assessing which beliefs are more likely to be true than others.
There is always the possibility the findings of a peer reviewed, journal published, replicated study are wrong. They are just more likely to be correct than assertions without such support.
This is fundamental to science though. Nothing is ever proven to be true. Scientific facts are contingent and corrigible. Science is just more rigorous than our other methods of establishing facts about reality.
Scientists will absolutely tell you what they believe to be true based on the available evidence and we colloquially call those facts. So it's both true of science as an abstraction and working science.
Fact: a truth known by actual experience or observation; something known to be true.
So... are you saying that a fact isn't something that's known to be true? Because my understanding of the word "fact" is that it means something indisputable, an underlying truth upon which you can base other truths and know them all to be true. If this is the case, then what can we possibly know with any sense of conviction?
Yes, correct. Humans are not capable of having access to indisputable truth. However, indisputable truth is not necessary for forming useful foundations for other knowledge. Humans exist in the space of the "probably good enough."
What becomes a fact for you depends on how tolerant you are for uncertainty. You're probably going to die. That's almost 100%. A solipsistic universe is likewise very unlikely. Those are pretty good bases for facts, but they're not indisputable.
Facts are not a simple structure. They are a conclusion of a series of comparisons after which we have considered many things and at the end decided that the evidence satisfies our threshold for uncertainty. People regularly make assumptions on which facts are predicated, and so we can say that we only have access to contingent facts, because they will always lead back to some assumption sooner or later.
If you want facts that won't change after 15 years, you should study Mathematics.
> If you want facts that won't change after 15 years, you should study Mathematics.
It's true, of course, in a sense, but a great book to get some perspective on the development and "historicity" of mathematical fact is Imre Lakatosh's great Proofs and Refutations.
It's a great read, as a fictional dialogue of students and teacher on Euler's "simple" formula
V - E + F = 2
about the numbers of vertices (corners), edges and faces. They go and prove it, and oops, someone comes up with a counterexample, and they realise they have to refine things. Very instructive book.
True, but Hilbert was a mathematician and was expressing the general thought, that mathematics could be formalized and when that was done, it would be complete, consistent, firm, round, and fully-packed. When that was demonstrated to be false, it had no great effect on day-to-day mathematics.
Right, there are game-changing advances in mathematical logic and sea changes in mathematical philosophy. The discovery of non-euclidean geometry did not mean euclidean geometry was false, and real analysis is the same whether you found it on sets or categories, by definition. Incompleteness doesn't eliminate the possibility of consistency. Mathematics changes by becoming more expressive and growing outwards and inwards.
Sometimes, a theorem is proven to be inconsistent and thrown out. My point was this happens a lot less often with mathematical theorems than it does with scientific facts because facts are based on our inductive study of the universe, whereas mathematics only makes statements about syllogisms. Unlike the real world, math is an area of study where incontrovertible facts are at least possible, because we make everything up, and just have to make sure we're consistent about it. We do not have access to such a priori knowledge about reality.
Dictionaries are not sources of objective facts either. The subject you're looking to know more about is the philosophy of science and in particular how it relates to epistemology which tackles this subject.
These days I wonder if anything is a source of objective fact. The more I try and remain objective and strive for enlightenment, the cloudier everything seems to become.
Objective facts are so few and far between and based on assumptions that are either vague in their definitions, limited or flawed that chasing them appears to enforce keeping an open mind. These two paradigms appear to be intrinsically linked.
Probably because in all of your examples the science generally didn't say that - the news did. Nuance is lost when things get summarized, especially by people rewarded for viewership/ads and not accuracy.
I have a background in Nuclear Physics. One of the major themes was that Physicists recognize that they are humans, and that they make human mistakes. The take active steps to double-check their assumptions. To have independent third parties check their work, so that bias is avoided.
Except for Climate Change Denialism, those problems predate empiricism as a thing noticeable enough to have coherent opposition, by (at least) hundreds of generations. They aren't produced by anti-empiricism (though, insofar as empiricism threatens them, they may be a source of resistance to empiricism.)
That's the flavor of the decade, yes, but back in the 70s there was "zero population denialism" which is roughly equivalent (there was a big scare that the earth's population was unsustainable and we were rapidly running out of resources and couples needed to stop having more than 2 babies and if you disagreed you were a zero population denier)
Well, sure, climate change denialism is also a manifestation of something older than empiricism and not a product of anti-empiricism, but that's a more involved argument and the other examples were clearer and simpler.
On a broader view, if one considers how hard it is to get quality in anything, then the majority of things you encounter are going to be of dubious quality to begin with, and population count should factor against the common thing, not for it.
Otherwise, there are more Starbucks so does that mean they have the best coffee? McDonald's has the best burgers? No. They are numerous because they pander, and because of ethically questionable but not illegal business policies.
Why would anything else be different? How often is the popular or loudest choice the right one?
This is the classic boiling down of empiricism, not to make a judgement either way. But, if anyone is interested in the philosophy that coldtea is espousing here, check out this treatment of Rationalism vs. Empiricism https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/rationalism-empiricism/#1...
The problem is that any layman not specifically in that chain has no way of making a determination between the person with "skin in the game" that is right and the corpus of information stating otherwise, not the contemporary expert with "skin in the game" that agrees with the existing literature.
The opposite scenario can be true as well,where the literature is correct but the expert is wrong, for any number of reasons (including random distribution of experience).
In the end, without some probability distribution between the scenarios, which is likely wildly different based on field, we can't use this information to any useful effect beyond acknowledging that the consensus can be wrong, which is useful in itself.
In the end we are left having to decide whether following what we hope is usually careful scientific consensus has left us better off than alternatives, to which the answer is I don't know, but I sure hope so. :/
There are two types of citations. There are, of course, the Wikipedia, CNN, or HuffPo links, which are at best facts mingled with opinion, or, at worst, contextually inaccurate sound bites. Then there are scholarly citations, which consist of scientific data, complete, primary-source media, etc. The latter are the only types of citations I typically take seriously.
Even then, as you point out, there are other things to consider. For example, if a scientist publishes something controversial in a peer-reviewed journal, you still have to wonder what his or her motivations are. Who is funding them? Have their personal biases, or those of their benefactors, tainted their results?
I tend to strive for scholarly citations in my arguments, but in the end, I realize we are all emotional beings, and personal biases and emotions tend to trump knowledge, wisdom, and logic more often than we'd like to admit.
It's often pretty simple to check that studies are biased and wrong:
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Q1: For black people, how many times have you mugged a white person?
Q2: For white people, how many times have you been mugged by a black person?
Conclusion: There's a one-sided racial problem!
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It's not always that simple, but too many times it is. I've found the various social sciences to be the worst at this. All of the popular media tropes of "X people are like Y!" are generally not just wrong, but biased and often opposite to well-done studies.
Not to mention that citations are not all they are touted to be.
Just because something has been written by someone somewhere doesn't make it an objective reality fact.
Just because something has been published on a peer reviewed journal doesn't make it an objective reality fact.
Just because something has the consensus opinion doesn't make it an objective reality fact.
Just because something is supported by the numbers given by some government, state agency, NGO etc doesn't make it an objective reality fact.
And in many cases someone with actual "skin in the game", who knows a subject empirically can be right, and know they are right, against "citations" from all of the above.