Now that we have a new thread, in order to ensure that this thread continues to meet TL standards and follows the proper guidelines, we will be enforcing the rules in the OP more strictly. Be sure to give them a complete and thorough read before posting!
NOTE: When providing a source, please provide a very brief summary on what it's about and what purpose it adds to the discussion. The supporting statement should clearly explain why the subject is relevant and needs to be discussed. Please follow this rule especially for tweets.
Your supporting statement should always come BEFORE you provide the source.
I didn't vote for Trump so I'm not in a mood to make a case on his economic policy atm. I will only say that A) "expertise" has really taken a hit recently and B) Kamala Harris absolutely *had* to lose and the sound, undeniable defeat she suffered and manner in which it occurred will be a great good for the future of the country on its own.
On November 07 2024 13:32 KwarK wrote: Filling my car is essentially unchanged. Milk, bread, pasta, sauce, etc. are essentially unchanged..
Are you talking about prices adjusted for wage growth or something? Because prices are definitely way higher than they were before the pandemic. I used to get the hot n ready pizza for $5 with crazy bread combo for another $2.79 when I was in college. The crazy bread combo at my local lil Caesar’s is like $7.99 just by itself. Not saying that’s normal, just another anecdote to go along with yours.
Nah, large pepperoni went from $5 to $6 in the last 5 years or so. They do try to trick you with the extra most bestest though. That’s a rip off.
That’s just cherry picking though. Sure a Costco hot dog and soda is still a $1.50. That doesn’t disprove that prices are significantly higher than they were 5 years ago. Not to mention that even your example represents a 20% increases. I think that’s the floor.
On November 07 2024 13:32 KwarK wrote: Filling my car is essentially unchanged. Milk, bread, pasta, sauce, etc. are essentially unchanged..
Are you talking about prices adjusted for wage growth or something? Because prices are definitely way higher than they were before the pandemic. I used to get the hot n ready pizza for $5 with crazy bread combo for another $2.79 when I was in college. The crazy bread combo at my local lil Caesar’s is like $7.99 just by itself. Not saying that’s normal, just another anecdote to go along with yours.
Nah, large pepperoni went from $5 to $6 in the last 5 years or so. They do try to trick you with the extra most bestest though. That’s a rip off.
That’s just cherry picking though. Sure a Costco hot dog and soda is still a $1.50. That doesn’t disprove that prices are significantly higher than they were 5 years ago.
It is an area in which the consumer has some ability to cherry-pick. There are foods that I look at and think “fuck that” when I see the price. You don’t have to buy everything. You have to eat something but there’s plenty of affordable food out there.
As I said before, housing and insurance are the ones that I’ve seen go through the roof and they’re the ones more impacted by macroeconomic factors.
On November 06 2024 18:36 Uldridge wrote: A surprising amount of things are based on how people feel about a thing. Weird how that works. Even science.
Could you clarify what you mean by that? Are you talking about the scientific process or how non-scientists feel about science?
I'm talking about the process of how we, as humans - organisms that filter a highly selective part of reality - try to understand reality. Don't get me wrong, we understand a vast amount already, but it's possible we're limited in understanding only a fraction of it due to our limitations of the brain. Now, science is a framework that hinges upon the actors being, so to speak, completely objective and truth and reality, or our understanding of that at least, kind of depends on that. Time and time again it has been shown that history, personal and institutional biases, funding etc. get in the way of accurately finding out how things work. People abuse statistics to get more interesting results, replication crisis remains an issue, people try to get funding for potentially futile endeavors because it's trending right now, when other theories that could be as challenging get less because that's how hype and momentum works and humans are not devoid of that.
We can agree on basic facts. We can observe things on our world and we can describe them pretty rigorously. Often times, though, a narrative of reality is created that we adhere to because that's the current hype or does a particular thing in that point in time pretty well, but will then be torn to shreds because it was incomplete or because it was simply wrong. And none of it matters really because at the end of the day all you do as a human is sleep, eat, drink, shit, piss, socialize and if you're lucky fuck. It's a feelings based reality we live in. How much energy do you have today? How hungry are you? Our scientifically based jnfrastructure we have is nice, but... completely unnecessary. I'm starting to ramble now so I'll see myself out.
Thank you for the clarification, I get what you're saying.
The beauty of science is that it is a self-correcting system. If you have bad scientists or bad system implementation (which is what you're describing in the majority of your post), this leads to results that will not be replicated and research that will not lead to new breakthroughs. If you expect scientists to be accurate and correct 100% of the time, that's unfeasible. Mistakes in methodology happen. Data is misinterpreted all the time. It can derail the field in the short term, sure, but in the long-term, no scientist clings to an approach that doesn't work, flawed methodology leads to results that simply do not match reality and are eventually discarded. Scientific consensus emerges and we make progress -- it is designed to be an iterative process after all.
I agree with all of that.
But if the incentives are bad enough, it can lead to all kinds of bodies of horrible research, founded and built upon more horrible research, that people try to shoehorn into ever more aggressively.
Evolution wise, even if a civilization stuck to that, it's likely it would be outcompeted by a civilization that did better science in due course.
At it's worst, you're talking about essentially the next scientific dark age. (No, I don't think this is happening or will happen)
But it can easily set progress back a decade or three.
And cause tremendous pain and wasted energy and resources trying solutions based on science built on a house of cards. Not to mention the issues with creativity and the fact that funding very strongly rewards immediate results doing in paradigm science and shows less interest in studies that accept the null.
I believe we're in the dark ages of scientific research because it's all to do with funding and clout and unwillingness to reflect on biases.
Replication crisis, predatory journals, actual fraudulence in papers (made up data etc), peer reviews being shit at times because reviewers don't like the research due to it clashing with their work or they want to publish that type of research first. It's crazy. People lose faith in the framework because people abuse everything that's built on the solid foundations. In this aspect I don't think science a self correcting thing any longer.
More fundamentally I think it's one of the narratives on how we can shape society, just like religion. It's important becuase it's useful. Make science useless and it's existence stops.
As far as reality goes, a thing I wanted to mention that is very apt right now: no matter the facts, if people feel a certain way, you won't change that by flaunting numbers in their faces. Example: people feel unsafe in public spaces, even though empirically speaking, the crime rate has gone down. Saying this won't make a difference. "Reality" in this case is that people, through a variety of paramaters, feel less safe than it actually is. The idea is the find out why that is, not saying that they're wrong.
I will direct the same question to yourself as I did to L_master. Do you have any evidence that modern science is being misled by these perverse incentives and that the self-correcting nature of the scientific consensus is not working? I would genuinely like to look at this.
On November 06 2024 18:36 Uldridge wrote: A surprising amount of things are based on how people feel about a thing. Weird how that works. Even science.
Could you clarify what you mean by that? Are you talking about the scientific process or how non-scientists feel about science?
I'm talking about the process of how we, as humans - organisms that filter a highly selective part of reality - try to understand reality. Don't get me wrong, we understand a vast amount already, but it's possible we're limited in understanding only a fraction of it due to our limitations of the brain. Now, science is a framework that hinges upon the actors being, so to speak, completely objective and truth and reality, or our understanding of that at least, kind of depends on that. Time and time again it has been shown that history, personal and institutional biases, funding etc. get in the way of accurately finding out how things work. People abuse statistics to get more interesting results, replication crisis remains an issue, people try to get funding for potentially futile endeavors because it's trending right now, when other theories that could be as challenging get less because that's how hype and momentum works and humans are not devoid of that.
We can agree on basic facts. We can observe things on our world and we can describe them pretty rigorously. Often times, though, a narrative of reality is created that we adhere to because that's the current hype or does a particular thing in that point in time pretty well, but will then be torn to shreds because it was incomplete or because it was simply wrong. And none of it matters really because at the end of the day all you do as a human is sleep, eat, drink, shit, piss, socialize and if you're lucky fuck. It's a feelings based reality we live in. How much energy do you have today? How hungry are you? Our scientifically based jnfrastructure we have is nice, but... completely unnecessary. I'm starting to ramble now so I'll see myself out.
Thank you for the clarification, I get what you're saying.
The beauty of science is that it is a self-correcting system. If you have bad scientists or bad system implementation (which is what you're describing in the majority of your post), this leads to results that will not be replicated and research that will not lead to new breakthroughs. If you expect scientists to be accurate and correct 100% of the time, that's unfeasible. Mistakes in methodology happen. Data is misinterpreted all the time. It can derail the field in the short term, sure, but in the long-term, no scientist clings to an approach that doesn't work, flawed methodology leads to results that simply do not match reality and are eventually discarded. Scientific consensus emerges and we make progress -- it is designed to be an iterative process after all.
I agree with all of that.
But if the incentives are bad enough, it can lead to all kinds of bodies of horrible research, founded and built upon more horrible research, that people try to shoehorn into ever more aggressively.
Evolution wise, even if a civilization stuck to that, it's likely it would be outcompeted by a civilization that did better science in due course.
At it's worst, you're talking about essentially the next scientific dark age. (No, I don't think this is happening or will happen)
But it can easily set progress back a decade or three.
And cause tremendous pain and wasted energy and resources trying solutions based on science built on a house of cards. Not to mention the issues with creativity and the fact that funding very strongly rewards immediate results doing in paradigm science and shows less interest in studies that accept the null.
I believe we're in the dark ages of scientific research because it's all to do with funding and clout and unwillingness to reflect on biases.
Replication crisis, predatory journals, actual fraudulence in papers (made up data etc), peer reviews being shit at times because reviewers don't like the research due to it clashing with their work or they want to publish that type of research first. It's crazy. People lose faith in the framework because people abuse everything that's built on the solid foundations. In this aspect I don't think science a self correcting thing any longer.
More fundamentally I think it's one of the narratives on how we can shape society, just like religion. It's important becuase it's useful. Make science useless and it's existence stops.
As far as reality goes, a thing I wanted to mention that is very apt right now: no matter the facts, if people feel a certain way, you won't change that by flaunting numbers in their faces. Example: people feel unsafe in public spaces, even though empirically speaking, the crime rate has gone down. Saying this won't make a difference. "Reality" in this case is that people, through a variety of paramaters, feel less safe than it actually is. The idea is the find out why that is, not saying that they're wrong.
Disclaimer: This is going to be a big block of text and it's barely relevant to the topic at hand (election), so if you're not interested in following this line of discussion, just scroll down now.
A lot of what I'm going to be writing about in this post is based on my experience in the field of psychology. While I absolutely think that research in psychology is usually a science (as in, adhering to the scientific method), there are also situations where I believe it is not a science so it may not be the best fit for this line of discussion opened by @Ender. However, enough people believe in the validity of the field without digging into whether a "consensus" is reached through scientific or unscientific means, and I will be providing some examples which apply to the sciences at large.
I would also like to disclose that I absolutely have a chip on my shoulder about how research is conducted in certain areas of psychology and how conclusions within those fields are arrived at, but I will try to present my position as objectively as possible.
Taking place over 2017 and 2018, their project entailed submitting bogus papers to academic journals on topics from the field of critical social theory such as cultural, queer, race, gender, fat, and sexuality studies to determine whether they would pass through peer review and be accepted for publication. Several of these papers were subsequently published, which the authors cited in support of their contention.
The Sokal affair, additionally known as the Sokal hoax,[1] was a demonstrative scholarly hoax performed by Alan Sokal, a physics professor at New York University and University College London. In 1996, Sokal submitted an article to Social Text, an academic journal of cultural studies. The submission was an experiment to test the journal's intellectual rigor, specifically to investigate whether "a leading North American journal of cultural studies—whose editorial collective includes such luminaries as Fredric Jameson and Andrew Ross—[would] publish an article liberally salted with nonsense if (a) it sounded good and (b) it flattered the editors' ideological preconceptions."[2]
“I had no choice but to commit [research] misconduct,” admits a researcher at an elite Chinese university. The shocking revelation is documented in a collection of several dozen anonymous, in-depth interviews offering rare, first-hand accounts of researchers who engaged in unethical behaviour — and describing what tipped them over the edge. An article based on the interviews was published in April in the journal Research Ethics1.
Based on my personal experience, this issue is definitely not exclusive to China or Chinese researchers. I could speak about this topic at length but the TL;DR here is that there are situations where social, societal, hierarchical, professional, and financial pressures all lead to "bad" science. "Bad" science here being research done in bad faith, more specifically methods which reject data that goes against a hypothesis that is socially beneficial to espouse.
A US-based biophysicist who is one of the world’s most highly cited researchers has been removed from the editorial board of one journal and barred as a reviewer for another, after repeatedly manipulating the peer-review process to amass citations to his own work.
As mentioned above, there is a lot of politics and ego involved in science, because science is conducted by humans who are often bound by politics and ego. This isn't as egregious as submitting entirely fake research and having it published, but it is still a factor in terms of what gets published, who gets published, etc.
5. As Uldridge mentioned, there is also the Replication crisis, which basically infers that a lot of the research we have been relying on for decades has been tainted by the aforementioned "bad" science.
The replication crisis[a] is an ongoing methodological crisis in which the results of many scientific studies are difficult or impossible to reproduce. Because the reproducibility of empirical results is an essential part of the scientific method,[2] such failures undermine the credibility of theories building on them and potentially call into question substantial parts of scientific knowledge.
6. At this point I'll go into one of the areas of psychology/psychological research which I was most familiar with due to my work as a research assistant within it. It is also what exposed me to the aforementioned elements of politics, ego, personal sentiment, social pressures, etc. being involved in science.
This was shortly after the reclassification of Gender Identity Disorder (GID) into Gender Dysphoria (GD). I was conducting literature analysis on the presentation of GID and GD in new editions of textbooks in order to determine whether they have changed structurally in order to accommodate this reclassification. In short, my research was inspired by what I would consider to be a "pro"-trans position held by the head researcher, as it sought to evaluate whether the stigma of their condition being a "disorder" was appropriately being mitigated. This is something that I was on board with, because I believe that textbooks should present the most accurate and up-to-date information. For example, if one textbook simply changed the title and text of the subchapter GD without moving it out of the "Disorders" chapter, or if GD was squished firmly between the topics of drug addiction and gambling, then perhaps that publisher is not doing their best in understanding and presenting this change from GID to GD.
At some point, a question arose in my mind: "Why was this change made in the first place?" While the explanation offered by one of the people who was allegedly on the board* which made this decision does a great job of outlining the logic behind it, the under reason is even more simple reason: it offended people.
*I did some cursory research to try to see if I can conclusively place this person on the DSM panel which made this decision, but was unable to do so. However, this is because I'm not finding any comprehensive list anywhere. As it stands, I am inclined to believe that this person was indeed on this panel.
It should be noted that the person who posted this is transgender, which may present a conflict of interest, but it's not a claim I will try to argue here. For example, I'm not sure that we should bar people who have an anxiety disorder from doing research on anxiety disorders. However, when it comes to classification and the writing of definitions, I think that there may be a greater possibility of bias seeping in.
Anyway, from Natalie Walker's explanation, emphasis mine:
The reclassification from an identity issue to a dysphoric issue was a direct result of the stigma and psychological distress of the idea that being transgender was a type of psychiatric disorder, and it absolutely is not.
On the surface, this seems very much in line with the removal of homosexuality from the DSM back in 1973. I could discuss the differences between these two decisions, but this is not the crux of the issue for me. The crux of the issue for me is that because the old classifications offend people, they are changed. What were the studies conducted to support this outcome? I can't imagine that there were any real experiments being conducted (due to obvious ethical restraints). As such, I find this to be - within the context of this discussion - not scientific.
Yet, research within this field seems to be at least somewhat curated by the governing bodies that be. In other words, if your research goes against the grain of the consensus, that research might not be supported by your university, funded, or published. Even if it is published, it may then be removed or censored. In my personal experience, even broaching the topic of conducting research on what may be a sensitive topic for the transgender community can at the very least be heavily discouraged by your research advisors.
For an example beyond my own experience, this article was written by a researcher whose research was allegedly censored because it went against the narrative. Naturally, this is a first-hand source and is thus almost assuredly biased, but I wanted to provide one concrete example within this specific field of research.
I'm not saying that research on these topics doesn't happen. After all, there have been some incendiary studies published which report on the prevalent comorbidity of narcissism and GID, as well as some research looking into the hypothesis that there is a prevalent comorbidity with autism (and thus that autism may be a contributing factor to GID). My point is that this type of research is difficult to get off the ground, raises eyebrows, and can receive significant negative backlash. I believe it was Uldridge that mentioned that publishing certain kinds of research can end a person's career. There are many self-reported cases of "blackballing" in various fields of academia for this very reason.
I want to be clear that this is not exclusive to the hot button issue of GID and transgender rights. For example, studies on the performance of women vs. men in various disciplines are also affected. I can't find the article now, but one researcher had their research approved for publishing but then the governing body retracted it before publication, meaning that the researcher cannot publish it in a different journal and that no one can read it, either. The were then fired from their position at a western university, which they alleged was because female researchers at their university went on a warpath against them. Why? Because they went against the currently established narrative that women are equal to men in all ways, and thus any findings which purport that women might perform worse in math-related subjects is seen as actively harmful to women, and thus the research has effectively been sealed. I wish I could find this article but I have to head out soon and am running out of time; I'm sure I have it saved somewhere, so if I run into it later I will add it here.
Now, I'm not saying that I believe that men are superior to women in math. I just find it unscientific that research which supports this position doesn't see the light of day due to politics and individual feelings, while research supporting absolute equality is incredibly well-represented. Science, in my opinion, should not be constrained by optics.
Anyway, I'll circle back to ask: why is GID present in the most up-to-date DSM while something like Body Identity Dysphoria/body integrity identity disorder - roughly, the desire to have a limb amputated - is not? Why do we perform gender-affirming surgeries on people and give them hormone treatments, while the idea of operating on someone with BID/BIID generally dismissed? Representation, politics, and bias are almost certainly contributing factors - and this is almost assuredly the case in other areas of academia as well.
Definitely some disciplines are more vulnerable to bad actors than others, with psychology being a prime candidate. Likewise with high impact fields such as anything to do with medicine, where success leads to lots of research funding and even possibly fame, creating an environment where lying to succeed becomes, if not commonplace, uncomfortably common as was pointed out in the study that Uldridge linked and the more recent one I found. Nevertheless, you're still talking about less than 3% of total scientists, or, in other words, 97% of scientists are honest. That's a pretty big number.
I would argue that the fact that stuff like the reproducibility project has sprung up as a result of the 'reproducibility crisis' is the self-correcting nature of Science taking direct action. A bunch of researchers realised that a lot of the stuff couldn't be reproduced and was built on very shaky foundations, so they came up with new publishing standards and methodology to ensure that future publications are proofed against this. Again, it's an iterative process. It does not require everyone to get everything right all of the time.
Regarding the discussion about research into hot-button topics like "are men better than women" and "should trans people be classified as having a mental disorder": If you actually look at the literature, it is absolutely chock full of articles comparing men vs women in every imaginable combination of tasks, etc. with many finding differences. What is your contention?
I was mostly addressing the first half of your initial queation ("Do you have any evidence that modern science is being misled by these perverse incentives") more so than the latter (self-correction working). I agree with basically everything you've written here.
The only thing I'd reiterate is that even if there is published research which finds a hypothesis to be true (A) and there is research which finds the same hypothesis to not be true (B), that doesn't mean that they both had the same journey toward publication. A may have received generous funding, tons of support from the university, and was welcomed with open arms by a publisher. Meanwhile the researcher behind B lost support when it became evident that their research was going against the established belief, they were ridiculed by their colleagues and superiors, they had to apply to a different university to conduct research there instead, then they were stonewalled by the top journals and could only get published in a minor journal with little recognition and reach. In fact, the researcher behind B wasn't the first one to try, there were many others before them who for one reason or another didn't manage to or didn't want to overcome all of these obstacles. That in itself is the evidence of politics and bad actors in academic research, though I do agree with you that some fields are naturally more susceptible to this than others.
I'd also like to posit that improvement/revision in one field or on one topic does not necessarily imply that it happens everywhere and always, again due to the potential difficulty of even getting approval for research which goes against the grain, much less have it be objectively peer-reviewed and published.
This is very vague. You only get in high impact journals if the result is surprising or explains some major mechanism, I.e. you've contributed a major insight. Researcher B that you're describing has a better chance of getting into a high impact publication than researcher A to be perfectly honest, assuming the methodology is solid. The funding system is designed so the cost is paid upfront, so if you got the funding, you get to do the research. To do more research, you need to apply for more funding. You don't always get that funding.
While what you have written makes sense to me and I've known it to be true in some cases, what I wrote has been true in other cases, too. Limitations on funding may be systemic or prejudicial. There are some topics which may be the wrong kind of controversial and results which may be the wrong kind of revolutionary if accepted as the new gospel, so to speak.
I don't mean to assume too much but I suspect that we come from different academic backgrounds and thus anecdotal evidence is bound to be different, both first- and second-hand. In at least my case and the stories told to me by former colleagues, as well as articles written by disenfranchised, ostracized, and blackballed researchers in my former field of study, it seems that having world-upheaving, incendiary research often leads to your becoming a pariah rather than a celebrated revolutionary.
This is still super vague. One of my coworkers gets millions in funding from extreme Christian organisations explicitly to prove that life could not have arisen organically and must have been designed. He clowns it up on X posting extreme content regularly. Yet, he still publishes his findings without issue in high impact journals and he is not blackballed.
Do you have specific sources I can look at that substantiate your point that incendiary research gets you blackballed?
Isn't inflation unavoidable for the US? I read up on how the UK used devaluation of the pound as a way to inflate away their debt. It worked, but the British Pound also lost its position as a global standard currency.
I agree that Trump is very dangerous for the economy. My impression is that he believes in both low taxes, low interest rates, high spending and low inflation, and that is completely impossible. When he fails, he will find some outer or inner enemy to bully to distract his voters, I hope it won't work.
Corporate greed and Trump is very interesting as well. The solution to corporate greed is to... make it easier for big corporations to be greedy?
On November 07 2024 16:02 Introvert wrote: I didn't vote for Trump so I'm not in a mood to make a case on his economic policy atm. I will only say that A) "expertise" has really taken a hit recently and B) Kamala Harris absolutely *had* to lose and the sound, undeniable defeat she suffered and manner in which it occurred will be a great good for the future of the country on its own.
The problem are "Experts" presented in the media. Those people are here for entertainment and sell advertising space.
People want experts, that can tell the future, to be real, but in politics and economy, you can't predict the future. But for the Act on TV, you need to convey absolute knowledge, when at best any ad-hoc question can only be answered with an educated guess.
Many experts by education (in german media) now even have adopted "Framing" into their language, which is painful to watch.
On November 07 2024 16:02 Introvert wrote: I didn't vote for Trump so I'm not in a mood to make a case on his economic policy atm. I will only say that A) "expertise" has really taken a hit recently and B) Kamala Harris absolutely *had* to lose and the sound, undeniable defeat she suffered and manner in which it occurred will be a great good for the future of the country on its own.
The problem are "Experts" presented in the media. Those people are here for entertainment and sell advertising space.
People want experts, that can tell the future, to be real, but in politics and economy, you can't predict the future. But for the Act on TV, you need to convey absolute knowledge, when at best any ad-hoc question can only be answered with an educated guess.
Many experts by education (in german media) now even have adopted "Framing" into their language, which is painful to watch.
You can make educated guessed, but it is impossible to predict the future in any field. The left also likes to predict things like global warming, and the most disastrous predictions with the least emphasis on uncertainty are awarded by the media. People are tired of it.
On November 07 2024 16:02 Introvert wrote: I didn't vote for Trump so I'm not in a mood to make a case on his economic policy atm. I will only say that A) "expertise" has really taken a hit recently and B) Kamala Harris absolutely *had* to lose and the sound, undeniable defeat she suffered and manner in which it occurred will be a great good for the future of the country on its own.
The problem are "Experts" presented in the media. Those people are here for entertainment and sell advertising space.
People want experts, that can tell the future, to be real, but in politics and economy, you can't predict the future. But for the Act on TV, you need to convey absolute knowledge, when at best any ad-hoc question can only be answered with an educated guess.
Many experts by education (in german media) now even have adopted "Framing" into their language, which is painful to watch.
You can make educated guessed, but it is impossible to predict the future in any field. The left also likes to predict things like global warming, and the most disastrous predictions with the least emphasis on uncertainty are awarded by the media. People are tired of it.
Climate change isn't a prediction. It's already a reality.
On November 07 2024 04:53 Introvert wrote: I have a bit of anecdata... at work taking to a 30 yr old, devout Catholic Mexican-American woman. She didn't vote, but when I brought it up she said after asking me who I wanted to win, before I even finished volunteered that Kamala was "terrible, like really bad." Said her brother voted Trump because of the economy, one sister and brother in law voted Trump also, and another sister and brother in law were also (?) Dems but undecided. "I asked why were they thinking about voting for her, she is against everything you believe."
Atm, Trump is doing far, far better with Hispanics and Catholics ever before. Sure, much of that is the economy (her brother's vote).
But... Devout Christians knew she wasn't on their side, knew she'd use the power of the state to coerce their schools and hospitals. It might be why Trump is getting 40% in CA rn.
This actually gives me hope, nit only might we finally witness the end of the "coalition of the ascendant" thst dems have been trying to make happen for two decades now, but it seems like the categorical rejection of Harris really is a blow against Dems lurch to the left on so many social and cultural issues. Some dem senate candidates will win or almost win where Trump won, but they stayed away from Harris like the plague (Rosen in NV and Baldwin in WI). They have to at least appear more moderate. Iirc Casey in PA was running ads about working with Trump. There is no silver lining in the presidential race, she and what people thought she stood for was rejected by the most diverse Republican vote in modern history.
And finally, Trump outran the rest of the GOP everywhere. This again is giving vibes to the last century, the FDR coalition didn't crack all at once (you could argue it's still cracking) but Republicans started winning the South with the presidency before it trickled down. There is a change happening here, and it's fascinating to watch. He is not an anchor, at least not this year.
Of course we have to remember thet much of this is because Kamala Harris sucks, too.
Do you believe in the separation of church and state? that the US should be a secular country?
Do you think that perhaps these devout Christians actually want a Christian nationalist state that imposes their Christian values on everyone else?
And also, Trump is the living embodiment of the 7 deadly sins, he fills every single one of them. lust, gluttony, greed, sloth, wrath, envy and pride. I question any devout Christian that would vote for such a man.
You seem confused, perhaps. I don't know why you are going on about "Christian nationalism" (even Harris had the presence of mind to not say something like that) but I'm saying Catholics know Kamala wasn't on their side. It doesn't have anything to do with a theocracy (you are getting it mixed up because in left-wing discourse it's specifically Evangelicalism that is supposed to bring out a new Christian Nationalism. Conservative Catholics are instead just doing something like "ignoring the history of social justice in the Church" )
Stuff like abortion bans is, generally, christians imposing their values on others. Im fine with people who think abortions are a bad thing, they are completely free to not have one.
But sure lets put that to one side, my biggest wtf how with Christians voting for is this 'Kamala isnt on my side' but the serial adulterer who has cheated on every single one of his wives, who tear gasses protestors so he can pose outside a church he never visits with a bible he has never read and in fact sells a grift bible that guy surely is the embodiment of christian values.
The notion that a man who tramples on every single supposed christian value is their guy just makes absolutely no sense to me. Unless your goal is not to follow christian values for your own sake but are willing to look past any an all fault to impose your supposed values on others by any means necessary.
And yes these are not your values, I think, but someone elses. But my god it makes no sense if you take their supposed belief at face value.
On November 07 2024 04:53 Introvert wrote: I have a bit of anecdata... at work taking to a 30 yr old, devout Catholic Mexican-American woman. She didn't vote, but when I brought it up she said after asking me who I wanted to win, before I even finished volunteered that Kamala was "terrible, like really bad." Said her brother voted Trump because of the economy, one sister and brother in law voted Trump also, and another sister and brother in law were also (?) Dems but undecided. "I asked why were they thinking about voting for her, she is against everything you believe."
Atm, Trump is doing far, far better with Hispanics and Catholics ever before. Sure, much of that is the economy (her brother's vote).
But... Devout Christians knew she wasn't on their side, knew she'd use the power of the state to coerce their schools and hospitals. It might be why Trump is getting 40% in CA rn.
This actually gives me hope, nit only might we finally witness the end of the "coalition of the ascendant" thst dems have been trying to make happen for two decades now, but it seems like the categorical rejection of Harris really is a blow against Dems lurch to the left on so many social and cultural issues. Some dem senate candidates will win or almost win where Trump won, but they stayed away from Harris like the plague (Rosen in NV and Baldwin in WI). They have to at least appear more moderate. Iirc Casey in PA was running ads about working with Trump. There is no silver lining in the presidential race, she and what people thought she stood for was rejected by the most diverse Republican vote in modern history.
And finally, Trump outran the rest of the GOP everywhere. This again is giving vibes to the last century, the FDR coalition didn't crack all at once (you could argue it's still cracking) but Republicans started winning the South with the presidency before it trickled down. There is a change happening here, and it's fascinating to watch. He is not an anchor, at least not this year.
Of course we have to remember thet much of this is because Kamala Harris sucks, too.
Do you believe in the separation of church and state? that the US should be a secular country?
Do you think that perhaps these devout Christians actually want a Christian nationalist state that imposes their Christian values on everyone else?
And also, Trump is the living embodiment of the 7 deadly sins, he fills every single one of them. lust, gluttony, greed, sloth, wrath, envy and pride. I question any devout Christian that would vote for such a man.
You seem confused, perhaps. I don't know why you are going on about "Christian nationalism" (even Harris had the presence of mind to not say something like that) but I'm saying Catholics know Kamala wasn't on their side. It doesn't have anything to do with a theocracy (you are getting it mixed up because in left-wing discourse it's specifically Evangelicalism that is supposed to bring out a new Christian Nationalism. Conservative Catholics are instead just doing something like "ignoring the history of social justice in the Church" )
Stuff like abortion bans is, generally, christians imposing their values on others. Im fine with people who think abortions are a bad thing, they are completely free to not have one.
But sure lets put that to one side, my biggest wtf how with Christians voting for is this 'Kamala isnt on my side' but the serial adulterer who has cheated on every single one of his wives, who tear gasses protestors so he can pose outside a church he never visits with a bible he has never read and in fact sells a grift bible that guy surely is the embodiment of christian values.
The notion that a man who tramples on every single supposed christian value is their guy just makes absolutely no sense to me. Unless your goal is not to follow christian values for your own sake but are willing to look past any an all fault to impose your supposed values on others by any means necessary.
And yes these are not your values, I think, but someone elses. But my god it makes no sense if you take their supposed belief at face value.
Christian values in America specifically are extremely flexible. Remember "It is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle" and all that?
On November 07 2024 16:02 Introvert wrote: I didn't vote for Trump so I'm not in a mood to make a case on his economic policy atm. I will only say that A) "expertise" has really taken a hit recently and B) Kamala Harris absolutely *had* to lose and the sound, undeniable defeat she suffered and manner in which it occurred will be a great good for the future of the country on its own.
Can you describe why it will be good for the future of the country in its own ?
On November 07 2024 04:53 Introvert wrote: I have a bit of anecdata... at work taking to a 30 yr old, devout Catholic Mexican-American woman. She didn't vote, but when I brought it up she said after asking me who I wanted to win, before I even finished volunteered that Kamala was "terrible, like really bad." Said her brother voted Trump because of the economy, one sister and brother in law voted Trump also, and another sister and brother in law were also (?) Dems but undecided. "I asked why were they thinking about voting for her, she is against everything you believe."
Atm, Trump is doing far, far better with Hispanics and Catholics ever before. Sure, much of that is the economy (her brother's vote).
But... Devout Christians knew she wasn't on their side, knew she'd use the power of the state to coerce their schools and hospitals. It might be why Trump is getting 40% in CA rn.
This actually gives me hope, nit only might we finally witness the end of the "coalition of the ascendant" thst dems have been trying to make happen for two decades now, but it seems like the categorical rejection of Harris really is a blow against Dems lurch to the left on so many social and cultural issues. Some dem senate candidates will win or almost win where Trump won, but they stayed away from Harris like the plague (Rosen in NV and Baldwin in WI). They have to at least appear more moderate. Iirc Casey in PA was running ads about working with Trump. There is no silver lining in the presidential race, she and what people thought she stood for was rejected by the most diverse Republican vote in modern history.
And finally, Trump outran the rest of the GOP everywhere. This again is giving vibes to the last century, the FDR coalition didn't crack all at once (you could argue it's still cracking) but Republicans started winning the South with the presidency before it trickled down. There is a change happening here, and it's fascinating to watch. He is not an anchor, at least not this year.
Of course we have to remember thet much of this is because Kamala Harris sucks, too.
Do you believe in the separation of church and state? that the US should be a secular country?
Do you think that perhaps these devout Christians actually want a Christian nationalist state that imposes their Christian values on everyone else?
And also, Trump is the living embodiment of the 7 deadly sins, he fills every single one of them. lust, gluttony, greed, sloth, wrath, envy and pride. I question any devout Christian that would vote for such a man.
You seem confused, perhaps. I don't know why you are going on about "Christian nationalism" (even Harris had the presence of mind to not say something like that) but I'm saying Catholics know Kamala wasn't on their side. It doesn't have anything to do with a theocracy (you are getting it mixed up because in left-wing discourse it's specifically Evangelicalism that is supposed to bring out a new Christian Nationalism. Conservative Catholics are instead just doing something like "ignoring the history of social justice in the Church" )
Stuff like abortion bans is, generally, christians imposing their values on others. Im fine with people who think abortions are a bad thing, they are completely free to not have one.
But sure lets put that to one side, my biggest wtf how with Christians voting for is this 'Kamala isnt on my side' but the serial adulterer who has cheated on every single one of his wives, who tear gasses protestors so he can pose outside a church he never visits with a bible he has never read and in fact sells a grift bible that guy surely is the embodiment of christian values.
The notion that a man who tramples on every single supposed christian value is their guy just makes absolutely no sense to me. Unless your goal is not to follow christian values for your own sake but are willing to look past any an all fault to impose your supposed values on others by any means necessary.
And yes these are not your values, I think, but someone elses. But my god it makes no sense if you take their supposed belief at face value.
Despite you deriding them for not acting theocratically enough, Republican-voting Christians are smart enough to realize the act of voting is not one of selecting a monk, or spouse, or priest, or pope, or Jesus, or God, or pastor. Likewise Democratic voting Christians are not some kind of apostates diverging from the patriarchy of the Bible by trying to elect a matriarch such as Clinton or Harris, or because her husband impregnated a nanny and aborted the result, or because she wanted no restrictions on abortion violating the sanctity of life.
You can find parallels and not parallels. And pick and choose. For example, Drumpf is very publicly and very obviously a target of persecution.
But the main thing is, in short, countries aren't churches. They are different fields. Athens has nothing to do with Jerusalem. When you go to worship at a church you don't have to pass a vow saying you will never vote for someone who had an affair in order to be Christian. That's not one of the commandments.
Climate change isn't a prediction. It's already a reality.
Well, global warming is the reality, and the contribution of hoomans that free more greenhouse gases has been theoreticly and qualitatively proposed by big baller Joseph Fourier.. 200 years ago.
Lab results for the greenhouse effect by Eunice Newton Foote in 1857. Her paper was presented to the American Association for the Advancement of Science by magnetizing Joseph Henry with the following introduction:
"Science was of no country and of no sex. The sphere of woman embraces not only the beautiful and the useful, but the true".
So I got to say.. Things aren't really changing AT ALL. People were dumb and ignorant for 200 years, and they are today.
So far we experience just weather extremes.. imagine a "once in a century" hurricane now happening every 3 years.
In Valencia Spain extreme autumn/winter rainfalls are well know.. but now there es about 4x as much rain
You have a gift for explaining difficult economic concepts in a way that a non-expert can understand. You should consider collecting all the posts you've made over the years and turn them into a simple document.
Pricing of goods depends on area and availability. If you're living in a rural area in the middle of bumfuck nowhere, it's possible these things that 'are not as bad for you', are way worse for other people. Your prices are not their prices.
Well, global warming is the reality, and the contribution of hoomans that free more greenhouse gases has been theoreticly and qualitatively proposed by big baller Joseph Fourier.. 200 years ago.
Lab results for the greenhouse effect by Eunice Newton Foote in 1857. Her paper was presented to the American Association for the Advancement of Science by magnetizing Joseph Henry with the following introduction:
What has already happened is one thing, predictions about the future is something else. One example is sea level rise. Yes, it is rising, but only around 2,3mm per year. There are scenarios of a more dramatic increase, but it is impossible to predict. Currents can also change to make it colder near the poles, but that does not fit the main narrative about a human caused disaster.
On November 06 2024 18:36 Uldridge wrote: A surprising amount of things are based on how people feel about a thing. Weird how that works. Even science.
Could you clarify what you mean by that? Are you talking about the scientific process or how non-scientists feel about science?
I'm talking about the process of how we, as humans - organisms that filter a highly selective part of reality - try to understand reality. Don't get me wrong, we understand a vast amount already, but it's possible we're limited in understanding only a fraction of it due to our limitations of the brain. Now, science is a framework that hinges upon the actors being, so to speak, completely objective and truth and reality, or our understanding of that at least, kind of depends on that. Time and time again it has been shown that history, personal and institutional biases, funding etc. get in the way of accurately finding out how things work. People abuse statistics to get more interesting results, replication crisis remains an issue, people try to get funding for potentially futile endeavors because it's trending right now, when other theories that could be as challenging get less because that's how hype and momentum works and humans are not devoid of that.
We can agree on basic facts. We can observe things on our world and we can describe them pretty rigorously. Often times, though, a narrative of reality is created that we adhere to because that's the current hype or does a particular thing in that point in time pretty well, but will then be torn to shreds because it was incomplete or because it was simply wrong. And none of it matters really because at the end of the day all you do as a human is sleep, eat, drink, shit, piss, socialize and if you're lucky fuck. It's a feelings based reality we live in. How much energy do you have today? How hungry are you? Our scientifically based jnfrastructure we have is nice, but... completely unnecessary. I'm starting to ramble now so I'll see myself out.
Thank you for the clarification, I get what you're saying.
The beauty of science is that it is a self-correcting system. If you have bad scientists or bad system implementation (which is what you're describing in the majority of your post), this leads to results that will not be replicated and research that will not lead to new breakthroughs. If you expect scientists to be accurate and correct 100% of the time, that's unfeasible. Mistakes in methodology happen. Data is misinterpreted all the time. It can derail the field in the short term, sure, but in the long-term, no scientist clings to an approach that doesn't work, flawed methodology leads to results that simply do not match reality and are eventually discarded. Scientific consensus emerges and we make progress -- it is designed to be an iterative process after all.
I agree with all of that.
But if the incentives are bad enough, it can lead to all kinds of bodies of horrible research, founded and built upon more horrible research, that people try to shoehorn into ever more aggressively.
Evolution wise, even if a civilization stuck to that, it's likely it would be outcompeted by a civilization that did better science in due course.
At it's worst, you're talking about essentially the next scientific dark age. (No, I don't think this is happening or will happen)
But it can easily set progress back a decade or three.
And cause tremendous pain and wasted energy and resources trying solutions based on science built on a house of cards. Not to mention the issues with creativity and the fact that funding very strongly rewards immediate results doing in paradigm science and shows less interest in studies that accept the null.
I believe we're in the dark ages of scientific research because it's all to do with funding and clout and unwillingness to reflect on biases.
Replication crisis, predatory journals, actual fraudulence in papers (made up data etc), peer reviews being shit at times because reviewers don't like the research due to it clashing with their work or they want to publish that type of research first. It's crazy. People lose faith in the framework because people abuse everything that's built on the solid foundations. In this aspect I don't think science a self correcting thing any longer.
More fundamentally I think it's one of the narratives on how we can shape society, just like religion. It's important becuase it's useful. Make science useless and it's existence stops.
As far as reality goes, a thing I wanted to mention that is very apt right now: no matter the facts, if people feel a certain way, you won't change that by flaunting numbers in their faces. Example: people feel unsafe in public spaces, even though empirically speaking, the crime rate has gone down. Saying this won't make a difference. "Reality" in this case is that people, through a variety of paramaters, feel less safe than it actually is. The idea is the find out why that is, not saying that they're wrong.
I will direct the same question to yourself as I did to L_master. Do you have any evidence that modern science is being misled by these perverse incentives and that the self-correcting nature of the scientific consensus is not working? I would genuinely like to look at this.
On November 06 2024 18:36 Uldridge wrote: A surprising amount of things are based on how people feel about a thing. Weird how that works. Even science.
Could you clarify what you mean by that? Are you talking about the scientific process or how non-scientists feel about science?
I'm talking about the process of how we, as humans - organisms that filter a highly selective part of reality - try to understand reality. Don't get me wrong, we understand a vast amount already, but it's possible we're limited in understanding only a fraction of it due to our limitations of the brain. Now, science is a framework that hinges upon the actors being, so to speak, completely objective and truth and reality, or our understanding of that at least, kind of depends on that. Time and time again it has been shown that history, personal and institutional biases, funding etc. get in the way of accurately finding out how things work. People abuse statistics to get more interesting results, replication crisis remains an issue, people try to get funding for potentially futile endeavors because it's trending right now, when other theories that could be as challenging get less because that's how hype and momentum works and humans are not devoid of that.
We can agree on basic facts. We can observe things on our world and we can describe them pretty rigorously. Often times, though, a narrative of reality is created that we adhere to because that's the current hype or does a particular thing in that point in time pretty well, but will then be torn to shreds because it was incomplete or because it was simply wrong. And none of it matters really because at the end of the day all you do as a human is sleep, eat, drink, shit, piss, socialize and if you're lucky fuck. It's a feelings based reality we live in. How much energy do you have today? How hungry are you? Our scientifically based jnfrastructure we have is nice, but... completely unnecessary. I'm starting to ramble now so I'll see myself out.
Thank you for the clarification, I get what you're saying.
The beauty of science is that it is a self-correcting system. If you have bad scientists or bad system implementation (which is what you're describing in the majority of your post), this leads to results that will not be replicated and research that will not lead to new breakthroughs. If you expect scientists to be accurate and correct 100% of the time, that's unfeasible. Mistakes in methodology happen. Data is misinterpreted all the time. It can derail the field in the short term, sure, but in the long-term, no scientist clings to an approach that doesn't work, flawed methodology leads to results that simply do not match reality and are eventually discarded. Scientific consensus emerges and we make progress -- it is designed to be an iterative process after all.
I agree with all of that.
But if the incentives are bad enough, it can lead to all kinds of bodies of horrible research, founded and built upon more horrible research, that people try to shoehorn into ever more aggressively.
Evolution wise, even if a civilization stuck to that, it's likely it would be outcompeted by a civilization that did better science in due course.
At it's worst, you're talking about essentially the next scientific dark age. (No, I don't think this is happening or will happen)
But it can easily set progress back a decade or three.
And cause tremendous pain and wasted energy and resources trying solutions based on science built on a house of cards. Not to mention the issues with creativity and the fact that funding very strongly rewards immediate results doing in paradigm science and shows less interest in studies that accept the null.
I believe we're in the dark ages of scientific research because it's all to do with funding and clout and unwillingness to reflect on biases.
Replication crisis, predatory journals, actual fraudulence in papers (made up data etc), peer reviews being shit at times because reviewers don't like the research due to it clashing with their work or they want to publish that type of research first. It's crazy. People lose faith in the framework because people abuse everything that's built on the solid foundations. In this aspect I don't think science a self correcting thing any longer.
More fundamentally I think it's one of the narratives on how we can shape society, just like religion. It's important becuase it's useful. Make science useless and it's existence stops.
As far as reality goes, a thing I wanted to mention that is very apt right now: no matter the facts, if people feel a certain way, you won't change that by flaunting numbers in their faces. Example: people feel unsafe in public spaces, even though empirically speaking, the crime rate has gone down. Saying this won't make a difference. "Reality" in this case is that people, through a variety of paramaters, feel less safe than it actually is. The idea is the find out why that is, not saying that they're wrong.
Disclaimer: This is going to be a big block of text and it's barely relevant to the topic at hand (election), so if you're not interested in following this line of discussion, just scroll down now.
A lot of what I'm going to be writing about in this post is based on my experience in the field of psychology. While I absolutely think that research in psychology is usually a science (as in, adhering to the scientific method), there are also situations where I believe it is not a science so it may not be the best fit for this line of discussion opened by @Ender. However, enough people believe in the validity of the field without digging into whether a "consensus" is reached through scientific or unscientific means, and I will be providing some examples which apply to the sciences at large.
I would also like to disclose that I absolutely have a chip on my shoulder about how research is conducted in certain areas of psychology and how conclusions within those fields are arrived at, but I will try to present my position as objectively as possible.
Taking place over 2017 and 2018, their project entailed submitting bogus papers to academic journals on topics from the field of critical social theory such as cultural, queer, race, gender, fat, and sexuality studies to determine whether they would pass through peer review and be accepted for publication. Several of these papers were subsequently published, which the authors cited in support of their contention.
The Sokal affair, additionally known as the Sokal hoax,[1] was a demonstrative scholarly hoax performed by Alan Sokal, a physics professor at New York University and University College London. In 1996, Sokal submitted an article to Social Text, an academic journal of cultural studies. The submission was an experiment to test the journal's intellectual rigor, specifically to investigate whether "a leading North American journal of cultural studies—whose editorial collective includes such luminaries as Fredric Jameson and Andrew Ross—[would] publish an article liberally salted with nonsense if (a) it sounded good and (b) it flattered the editors' ideological preconceptions."[2]
“I had no choice but to commit [research] misconduct,” admits a researcher at an elite Chinese university. The shocking revelation is documented in a collection of several dozen anonymous, in-depth interviews offering rare, first-hand accounts of researchers who engaged in unethical behaviour — and describing what tipped them over the edge. An article based on the interviews was published in April in the journal Research Ethics1.
Based on my personal experience, this issue is definitely not exclusive to China or Chinese researchers. I could speak about this topic at length but the TL;DR here is that there are situations where social, societal, hierarchical, professional, and financial pressures all lead to "bad" science. "Bad" science here being research done in bad faith, more specifically methods which reject data that goes against a hypothesis that is socially beneficial to espouse.
A US-based biophysicist who is one of the world’s most highly cited researchers has been removed from the editorial board of one journal and barred as a reviewer for another, after repeatedly manipulating the peer-review process to amass citations to his own work.
As mentioned above, there is a lot of politics and ego involved in science, because science is conducted by humans who are often bound by politics and ego. This isn't as egregious as submitting entirely fake research and having it published, but it is still a factor in terms of what gets published, who gets published, etc.
5. As Uldridge mentioned, there is also the Replication crisis, which basically infers that a lot of the research we have been relying on for decades has been tainted by the aforementioned "bad" science.
The replication crisis[a] is an ongoing methodological crisis in which the results of many scientific studies are difficult or impossible to reproduce. Because the reproducibility of empirical results is an essential part of the scientific method,[2] such failures undermine the credibility of theories building on them and potentially call into question substantial parts of scientific knowledge.
6. At this point I'll go into one of the areas of psychology/psychological research which I was most familiar with due to my work as a research assistant within it. It is also what exposed me to the aforementioned elements of politics, ego, personal sentiment, social pressures, etc. being involved in science.
This was shortly after the reclassification of Gender Identity Disorder (GID) into Gender Dysphoria (GD). I was conducting literature analysis on the presentation of GID and GD in new editions of textbooks in order to determine whether they have changed structurally in order to accommodate this reclassification. In short, my research was inspired by what I would consider to be a "pro"-trans position held by the head researcher, as it sought to evaluate whether the stigma of their condition being a "disorder" was appropriately being mitigated. This is something that I was on board with, because I believe that textbooks should present the most accurate and up-to-date information. For example, if one textbook simply changed the title and text of the subchapter GD without moving it out of the "Disorders" chapter, or if GD was squished firmly between the topics of drug addiction and gambling, then perhaps that publisher is not doing their best in understanding and presenting this change from GID to GD.
At some point, a question arose in my mind: "Why was this change made in the first place?" While the explanation offered by one of the people who was allegedly on the board* which made this decision does a great job of outlining the logic behind it, the under reason is even more simple reason: it offended people.
*I did some cursory research to try to see if I can conclusively place this person on the DSM panel which made this decision, but was unable to do so. However, this is because I'm not finding any comprehensive list anywhere. As it stands, I am inclined to believe that this person was indeed on this panel.
It should be noted that the person who posted this is transgender, which may present a conflict of interest, but it's not a claim I will try to argue here. For example, I'm not sure that we should bar people who have an anxiety disorder from doing research on anxiety disorders. However, when it comes to classification and the writing of definitions, I think that there may be a greater possibility of bias seeping in.
Anyway, from Natalie Walker's explanation, emphasis mine:
The reclassification from an identity issue to a dysphoric issue was a direct result of the stigma and psychological distress of the idea that being transgender was a type of psychiatric disorder, and it absolutely is not.
On the surface, this seems very much in line with the removal of homosexuality from the DSM back in 1973. I could discuss the differences between these two decisions, but this is not the crux of the issue for me. The crux of the issue for me is that because the old classifications offend people, they are changed. What were the studies conducted to support this outcome? I can't imagine that there were any real experiments being conducted (due to obvious ethical restraints). As such, I find this to be - within the context of this discussion - not scientific.
Yet, research within this field seems to be at least somewhat curated by the governing bodies that be. In other words, if your research goes against the grain of the consensus, that research might not be supported by your university, funded, or published. Even if it is published, it may then be removed or censored. In my personal experience, even broaching the topic of conducting research on what may be a sensitive topic for the transgender community can at the very least be heavily discouraged by your research advisors.
For an example beyond my own experience, this article was written by a researcher whose research was allegedly censored because it went against the narrative. Naturally, this is a first-hand source and is thus almost assuredly biased, but I wanted to provide one concrete example within this specific field of research.
I'm not saying that research on these topics doesn't happen. After all, there have been some incendiary studies published which report on the prevalent comorbidity of narcissism and GID, as well as some research looking into the hypothesis that there is a prevalent comorbidity with autism (and thus that autism may be a contributing factor to GID). My point is that this type of research is difficult to get off the ground, raises eyebrows, and can receive significant negative backlash. I believe it was Uldridge that mentioned that publishing certain kinds of research can end a person's career. There are many self-reported cases of "blackballing" in various fields of academia for this very reason.
I want to be clear that this is not exclusive to the hot button issue of GID and transgender rights. For example, studies on the performance of women vs. men in various disciplines are also affected. I can't find the article now, but one researcher had their research approved for publishing but then the governing body retracted it before publication, meaning that the researcher cannot publish it in a different journal and that no one can read it, either. The were then fired from their position at a western university, which they alleged was because female researchers at their university went on a warpath against them. Why? Because they went against the currently established narrative that women are equal to men in all ways, and thus any findings which purport that women might perform worse in math-related subjects is seen as actively harmful to women, and thus the research has effectively been sealed. I wish I could find this article but I have to head out soon and am running out of time; I'm sure I have it saved somewhere, so if I run into it later I will add it here.
Now, I'm not saying that I believe that men are superior to women in math. I just find it unscientific that research which supports this position doesn't see the light of day due to politics and individual feelings, while research supporting absolute equality is incredibly well-represented. Science, in my opinion, should not be constrained by optics.
Anyway, I'll circle back to ask: why is GID present in the most up-to-date DSM while something like Body Identity Dysphoria/body integrity identity disorder - roughly, the desire to have a limb amputated - is not? Why do we perform gender-affirming surgeries on people and give them hormone treatments, while the idea of operating on someone with BID/BIID generally dismissed? Representation, politics, and bias are almost certainly contributing factors - and this is almost assuredly the case in other areas of academia as well.
Definitely some disciplines are more vulnerable to bad actors than others, with psychology being a prime candidate. Likewise with high impact fields such as anything to do with medicine, where success leads to lots of research funding and even possibly fame, creating an environment where lying to succeed becomes, if not commonplace, uncomfortably common as was pointed out in the study that Uldridge linked and the more recent one I found. Nevertheless, you're still talking about less than 3% of total scientists, or, in other words, 97% of scientists are honest. That's a pretty big number.
I would argue that the fact that stuff like the reproducibility project has sprung up as a result of the 'reproducibility crisis' is the self-correcting nature of Science taking direct action. A bunch of researchers realised that a lot of the stuff couldn't be reproduced and was built on very shaky foundations, so they came up with new publishing standards and methodology to ensure that future publications are proofed against this. Again, it's an iterative process. It does not require everyone to get everything right all of the time.
Regarding the discussion about research into hot-button topics like "are men better than women" and "should trans people be classified as having a mental disorder": If you actually look at the literature, it is absolutely chock full of articles comparing men vs women in every imaginable combination of tasks, etc. with many finding differences. What is your contention?
I was mostly addressing the first half of your initial queation ("Do you have any evidence that modern science is being misled by these perverse incentives") more so than the latter (self-correction working). I agree with basically everything you've written here.
The only thing I'd reiterate is that even if there is published research which finds a hypothesis to be true (A) and there is research which finds the same hypothesis to not be true (B), that doesn't mean that they both had the same journey toward publication. A may have received generous funding, tons of support from the university, and was welcomed with open arms by a publisher. Meanwhile the researcher behind B lost support when it became evident that their research was going against the established belief, they were ridiculed by their colleagues and superiors, they had to apply to a different university to conduct research there instead, then they were stonewalled by the top journals and could only get published in a minor journal with little recognition and reach. In fact, the researcher behind B wasn't the first one to try, there were many others before them who for one reason or another didn't manage to or didn't want to overcome all of these obstacles. That in itself is the evidence of politics and bad actors in academic research, though I do agree with you that some fields are naturally more susceptible to this than others.
I'd also like to posit that improvement/revision in one field or on one topic does not necessarily imply that it happens everywhere and always, again due to the potential difficulty of even getting approval for research which goes against the grain, much less have it be objectively peer-reviewed and published.
This is very vague. You only get in high impact journals if the result is surprising or explains some major mechanism, I.e. you've contributed a major insight. Researcher B that you're describing has a better chance of getting into a high impact publication than researcher A to be perfectly honest, assuming the methodology is solid. The funding system is designed so the cost is paid upfront, so if you got the funding, you get to do the research. To do more research, you need to apply for more funding. You don't always get that funding.
While what you have written makes sense to me and I've known it to be true in some cases, what I wrote has been true in other cases, too. Limitations on funding may be systemic or prejudicial. There are some topics which may be the wrong kind of controversial and results which may be the wrong kind of revolutionary if accepted as the new gospel, so to speak.
I don't mean to assume too much but I suspect that we come from different academic backgrounds and thus anecdotal evidence is bound to be different, both first- and second-hand. In at least my case and the stories told to me by former colleagues, as well as articles written by disenfranchised, ostracized, and blackballed researchers in my former field of study, it seems that having world-upheaving, incendiary research often leads to your becoming a pariah rather than a celebrated revolutionary.
This is still super vague. One of my coworkers gets millions in funding from extreme Christian organisations explicitly to prove that life could not have arisen organically and must have been designed. He clowns it up on X posting extreme content regularly. Yet, he still publishes his findings without issue in high impact journals and he is not blackballed.
Do you have specific sources I can look at that substantiate your point that incendiary research gets you blackballed?
I don’t know about blacklisted but this Harvard Professor speaks about the external pressures to not publish research that tells an inconvenient truth
There’s also the NYT article that came out recently where a researcher studying transgenderism basically admitted to delaying publishing their findings because they weren’t favorable to her cause
I think the sun will explode, and the sooner mankind wipes itself out, the chances getting better for evolution to create another dominant species that will figure out of how to get off this rock.
I don't argue "Climate Change" but to me that would mean that the quality of temperature/rain diagramms changes dramaticly, but at the moment the quality is similar but will go to extremes (not mexico city become a ski resort type of stuff.)
Maybe one should express the energy in "the weather system" that is added by greenhouse effect on a scale of Nukes to make it understandable to "why are there fires now every year, and how could god burn my 1971 'cuda?"
On November 06 2024 18:36 Uldridge wrote: A surprising amount of things are based on how people feel about a thing. Weird how that works. Even science.
Could you clarify what you mean by that? Are you talking about the scientific process or how non-scientists feel about science?
I'm talking about the process of how we, as humans - organisms that filter a highly selective part of reality - try to understand reality. Don't get me wrong, we understand a vast amount already, but it's possible we're limited in understanding only a fraction of it due to our limitations of the brain. Now, science is a framework that hinges upon the actors being, so to speak, completely objective and truth and reality, or our understanding of that at least, kind of depends on that. Time and time again it has been shown that history, personal and institutional biases, funding etc. get in the way of accurately finding out how things work. People abuse statistics to get more interesting results, replication crisis remains an issue, people try to get funding for potentially futile endeavors because it's trending right now, when other theories that could be as challenging get less because that's how hype and momentum works and humans are not devoid of that.
We can agree on basic facts. We can observe things on our world and we can describe them pretty rigorously. Often times, though, a narrative of reality is created that we adhere to because that's the current hype or does a particular thing in that point in time pretty well, but will then be torn to shreds because it was incomplete or because it was simply wrong. And none of it matters really because at the end of the day all you do as a human is sleep, eat, drink, shit, piss, socialize and if you're lucky fuck. It's a feelings based reality we live in. How much energy do you have today? How hungry are you? Our scientifically based jnfrastructure we have is nice, but... completely unnecessary. I'm starting to ramble now so I'll see myself out.
Thank you for the clarification, I get what you're saying.
The beauty of science is that it is a self-correcting system. If you have bad scientists or bad system implementation (which is what you're describing in the majority of your post), this leads to results that will not be replicated and research that will not lead to new breakthroughs. If you expect scientists to be accurate and correct 100% of the time, that's unfeasible. Mistakes in methodology happen. Data is misinterpreted all the time. It can derail the field in the short term, sure, but in the long-term, no scientist clings to an approach that doesn't work, flawed methodology leads to results that simply do not match reality and are eventually discarded. Scientific consensus emerges and we make progress -- it is designed to be an iterative process after all.
I agree with all of that.
But if the incentives are bad enough, it can lead to all kinds of bodies of horrible research, founded and built upon more horrible research, that people try to shoehorn into ever more aggressively.
Evolution wise, even if a civilization stuck to that, it's likely it would be outcompeted by a civilization that did better science in due course.
At it's worst, you're talking about essentially the next scientific dark age. (No, I don't think this is happening or will happen)
But it can easily set progress back a decade or three.
And cause tremendous pain and wasted energy and resources trying solutions based on science built on a house of cards. Not to mention the issues with creativity and the fact that funding very strongly rewards immediate results doing in paradigm science and shows less interest in studies that accept the null.
I believe we're in the dark ages of scientific research because it's all to do with funding and clout and unwillingness to reflect on biases.
Replication crisis, predatory journals, actual fraudulence in papers (made up data etc), peer reviews being shit at times because reviewers don't like the research due to it clashing with their work or they want to publish that type of research first. It's crazy. People lose faith in the framework because people abuse everything that's built on the solid foundations. In this aspect I don't think science a self correcting thing any longer.
More fundamentally I think it's one of the narratives on how we can shape society, just like religion. It's important becuase it's useful. Make science useless and it's existence stops.
As far as reality goes, a thing I wanted to mention that is very apt right now: no matter the facts, if people feel a certain way, you won't change that by flaunting numbers in their faces. Example: people feel unsafe in public spaces, even though empirically speaking, the crime rate has gone down. Saying this won't make a difference. "Reality" in this case is that people, through a variety of paramaters, feel less safe than it actually is. The idea is the find out why that is, not saying that they're wrong.
I will direct the same question to yourself as I did to L_master. Do you have any evidence that modern science is being misled by these perverse incentives and that the self-correcting nature of the scientific consensus is not working? I would genuinely like to look at this.
On November 06 2024 18:36 Uldridge wrote: A surprising amount of things are based on how people feel about a thing. Weird how that works. Even science.
Could you clarify what you mean by that? Are you talking about the scientific process or how non-scientists feel about science?
I'm talking about the process of how we, as humans - organisms that filter a highly selective part of reality - try to understand reality. Don't get me wrong, we understand a vast amount already, but it's possible we're limited in understanding only a fraction of it due to our limitations of the brain. Now, science is a framework that hinges upon the actors being, so to speak, completely objective and truth and reality, or our understanding of that at least, kind of depends on that. Time and time again it has been shown that history, personal and institutional biases, funding etc. get in the way of accurately finding out how things work. People abuse statistics to get more interesting results, replication crisis remains an issue, people try to get funding for potentially futile endeavors because it's trending right now, when other theories that could be as challenging get less because that's how hype and momentum works and humans are not devoid of that.
We can agree on basic facts. We can observe things on our world and we can describe them pretty rigorously. Often times, though, a narrative of reality is created that we adhere to because that's the current hype or does a particular thing in that point in time pretty well, but will then be torn to shreds because it was incomplete or because it was simply wrong. And none of it matters really because at the end of the day all you do as a human is sleep, eat, drink, shit, piss, socialize and if you're lucky fuck. It's a feelings based reality we live in. How much energy do you have today? How hungry are you? Our scientifically based jnfrastructure we have is nice, but... completely unnecessary. I'm starting to ramble now so I'll see myself out.
Thank you for the clarification, I get what you're saying.
The beauty of science is that it is a self-correcting system. If you have bad scientists or bad system implementation (which is what you're describing in the majority of your post), this leads to results that will not be replicated and research that will not lead to new breakthroughs. If you expect scientists to be accurate and correct 100% of the time, that's unfeasible. Mistakes in methodology happen. Data is misinterpreted all the time. It can derail the field in the short term, sure, but in the long-term, no scientist clings to an approach that doesn't work, flawed methodology leads to results that simply do not match reality and are eventually discarded. Scientific consensus emerges and we make progress -- it is designed to be an iterative process after all.
I agree with all of that.
But if the incentives are bad enough, it can lead to all kinds of bodies of horrible research, founded and built upon more horrible research, that people try to shoehorn into ever more aggressively.
Evolution wise, even if a civilization stuck to that, it's likely it would be outcompeted by a civilization that did better science in due course.
At it's worst, you're talking about essentially the next scientific dark age. (No, I don't think this is happening or will happen)
But it can easily set progress back a decade or three.
And cause tremendous pain and wasted energy and resources trying solutions based on science built on a house of cards. Not to mention the issues with creativity and the fact that funding very strongly rewards immediate results doing in paradigm science and shows less interest in studies that accept the null.
I believe we're in the dark ages of scientific research because it's all to do with funding and clout and unwillingness to reflect on biases.
Replication crisis, predatory journals, actual fraudulence in papers (made up data etc), peer reviews being shit at times because reviewers don't like the research due to it clashing with their work or they want to publish that type of research first. It's crazy. People lose faith in the framework because people abuse everything that's built on the solid foundations. In this aspect I don't think science a self correcting thing any longer.
More fundamentally I think it's one of the narratives on how we can shape society, just like religion. It's important becuase it's useful. Make science useless and it's existence stops.
As far as reality goes, a thing I wanted to mention that is very apt right now: no matter the facts, if people feel a certain way, you won't change that by flaunting numbers in their faces. Example: people feel unsafe in public spaces, even though empirically speaking, the crime rate has gone down. Saying this won't make a difference. "Reality" in this case is that people, through a variety of paramaters, feel less safe than it actually is. The idea is the find out why that is, not saying that they're wrong.
Disclaimer: This is going to be a big block of text and it's barely relevant to the topic at hand (election), so if you're not interested in following this line of discussion, just scroll down now.
A lot of what I'm going to be writing about in this post is based on my experience in the field of psychology. While I absolutely think that research in psychology is usually a science (as in, adhering to the scientific method), there are also situations where I believe it is not a science so it may not be the best fit for this line of discussion opened by @Ender. However, enough people believe in the validity of the field without digging into whether a "consensus" is reached through scientific or unscientific means, and I will be providing some examples which apply to the sciences at large.
I would also like to disclose that I absolutely have a chip on my shoulder about how research is conducted in certain areas of psychology and how conclusions within those fields are arrived at, but I will try to present my position as objectively as possible.
Taking place over 2017 and 2018, their project entailed submitting bogus papers to academic journals on topics from the field of critical social theory such as cultural, queer, race, gender, fat, and sexuality studies to determine whether they would pass through peer review and be accepted for publication. Several of these papers were subsequently published, which the authors cited in support of their contention.
The Sokal affair, additionally known as the Sokal hoax,[1] was a demonstrative scholarly hoax performed by Alan Sokal, a physics professor at New York University and University College London. In 1996, Sokal submitted an article to Social Text, an academic journal of cultural studies. The submission was an experiment to test the journal's intellectual rigor, specifically to investigate whether "a leading North American journal of cultural studies—whose editorial collective includes such luminaries as Fredric Jameson and Andrew Ross—[would] publish an article liberally salted with nonsense if (a) it sounded good and (b) it flattered the editors' ideological preconceptions."[2]
“I had no choice but to commit [research] misconduct,” admits a researcher at an elite Chinese university. The shocking revelation is documented in a collection of several dozen anonymous, in-depth interviews offering rare, first-hand accounts of researchers who engaged in unethical behaviour — and describing what tipped them over the edge. An article based on the interviews was published in April in the journal Research Ethics1.
Based on my personal experience, this issue is definitely not exclusive to China or Chinese researchers. I could speak about this topic at length but the TL;DR here is that there are situations where social, societal, hierarchical, professional, and financial pressures all lead to "bad" science. "Bad" science here being research done in bad faith, more specifically methods which reject data that goes against a hypothesis that is socially beneficial to espouse.
A US-based biophysicist who is one of the world’s most highly cited researchers has been removed from the editorial board of one journal and barred as a reviewer for another, after repeatedly manipulating the peer-review process to amass citations to his own work.
As mentioned above, there is a lot of politics and ego involved in science, because science is conducted by humans who are often bound by politics and ego. This isn't as egregious as submitting entirely fake research and having it published, but it is still a factor in terms of what gets published, who gets published, etc.
5. As Uldridge mentioned, there is also the Replication crisis, which basically infers that a lot of the research we have been relying on for decades has been tainted by the aforementioned "bad" science.
The replication crisis[a] is an ongoing methodological crisis in which the results of many scientific studies are difficult or impossible to reproduce. Because the reproducibility of empirical results is an essential part of the scientific method,[2] such failures undermine the credibility of theories building on them and potentially call into question substantial parts of scientific knowledge.
6. At this point I'll go into one of the areas of psychology/psychological research which I was most familiar with due to my work as a research assistant within it. It is also what exposed me to the aforementioned elements of politics, ego, personal sentiment, social pressures, etc. being involved in science.
This was shortly after the reclassification of Gender Identity Disorder (GID) into Gender Dysphoria (GD). I was conducting literature analysis on the presentation of GID and GD in new editions of textbooks in order to determine whether they have changed structurally in order to accommodate this reclassification. In short, my research was inspired by what I would consider to be a "pro"-trans position held by the head researcher, as it sought to evaluate whether the stigma of their condition being a "disorder" was appropriately being mitigated. This is something that I was on board with, because I believe that textbooks should present the most accurate and up-to-date information. For example, if one textbook simply changed the title and text of the subchapter GD without moving it out of the "Disorders" chapter, or if GD was squished firmly between the topics of drug addiction and gambling, then perhaps that publisher is not doing their best in understanding and presenting this change from GID to GD.
At some point, a question arose in my mind: "Why was this change made in the first place?" While the explanation offered by one of the people who was allegedly on the board* which made this decision does a great job of outlining the logic behind it, the under reason is even more simple reason: it offended people.
*I did some cursory research to try to see if I can conclusively place this person on the DSM panel which made this decision, but was unable to do so. However, this is because I'm not finding any comprehensive list anywhere. As it stands, I am inclined to believe that this person was indeed on this panel.
It should be noted that the person who posted this is transgender, which may present a conflict of interest, but it's not a claim I will try to argue here. For example, I'm not sure that we should bar people who have an anxiety disorder from doing research on anxiety disorders. However, when it comes to classification and the writing of definitions, I think that there may be a greater possibility of bias seeping in.
Anyway, from Natalie Walker's explanation, emphasis mine:
The reclassification from an identity issue to a dysphoric issue was a direct result of the stigma and psychological distress of the idea that being transgender was a type of psychiatric disorder, and it absolutely is not.
On the surface, this seems very much in line with the removal of homosexuality from the DSM back in 1973. I could discuss the differences between these two decisions, but this is not the crux of the issue for me. The crux of the issue for me is that because the old classifications offend people, they are changed. What were the studies conducted to support this outcome? I can't imagine that there were any real experiments being conducted (due to obvious ethical restraints). As such, I find this to be - within the context of this discussion - not scientific.
Yet, research within this field seems to be at least somewhat curated by the governing bodies that be. In other words, if your research goes against the grain of the consensus, that research might not be supported by your university, funded, or published. Even if it is published, it may then be removed or censored. In my personal experience, even broaching the topic of conducting research on what may be a sensitive topic for the transgender community can at the very least be heavily discouraged by your research advisors.
For an example beyond my own experience, this article was written by a researcher whose research was allegedly censored because it went against the narrative. Naturally, this is a first-hand source and is thus almost assuredly biased, but I wanted to provide one concrete example within this specific field of research.
I'm not saying that research on these topics doesn't happen. After all, there have been some incendiary studies published which report on the prevalent comorbidity of narcissism and GID, as well as some research looking into the hypothesis that there is a prevalent comorbidity with autism (and thus that autism may be a contributing factor to GID). My point is that this type of research is difficult to get off the ground, raises eyebrows, and can receive significant negative backlash. I believe it was Uldridge that mentioned that publishing certain kinds of research can end a person's career. There are many self-reported cases of "blackballing" in various fields of academia for this very reason.
I want to be clear that this is not exclusive to the hot button issue of GID and transgender rights. For example, studies on the performance of women vs. men in various disciplines are also affected. I can't find the article now, but one researcher had their research approved for publishing but then the governing body retracted it before publication, meaning that the researcher cannot publish it in a different journal and that no one can read it, either. The were then fired from their position at a western university, which they alleged was because female researchers at their university went on a warpath against them. Why? Because they went against the currently established narrative that women are equal to men in all ways, and thus any findings which purport that women might perform worse in math-related subjects is seen as actively harmful to women, and thus the research has effectively been sealed. I wish I could find this article but I have to head out soon and am running out of time; I'm sure I have it saved somewhere, so if I run into it later I will add it here.
Now, I'm not saying that I believe that men are superior to women in math. I just find it unscientific that research which supports this position doesn't see the light of day due to politics and individual feelings, while research supporting absolute equality is incredibly well-represented. Science, in my opinion, should not be constrained by optics.
Anyway, I'll circle back to ask: why is GID present in the most up-to-date DSM while something like Body Identity Dysphoria/body integrity identity disorder - roughly, the desire to have a limb amputated - is not? Why do we perform gender-affirming surgeries on people and give them hormone treatments, while the idea of operating on someone with BID/BIID generally dismissed? Representation, politics, and bias are almost certainly contributing factors - and this is almost assuredly the case in other areas of academia as well.
Definitely some disciplines are more vulnerable to bad actors than others, with psychology being a prime candidate. Likewise with high impact fields such as anything to do with medicine, where success leads to lots of research funding and even possibly fame, creating an environment where lying to succeed becomes, if not commonplace, uncomfortably common as was pointed out in the study that Uldridge linked and the more recent one I found. Nevertheless, you're still talking about less than 3% of total scientists, or, in other words, 97% of scientists are honest. That's a pretty big number.
I would argue that the fact that stuff like the reproducibility project has sprung up as a result of the 'reproducibility crisis' is the self-correcting nature of Science taking direct action. A bunch of researchers realised that a lot of the stuff couldn't be reproduced and was built on very shaky foundations, so they came up with new publishing standards and methodology to ensure that future publications are proofed against this. Again, it's an iterative process. It does not require everyone to get everything right all of the time.
Regarding the discussion about research into hot-button topics like "are men better than women" and "should trans people be classified as having a mental disorder": If you actually look at the literature, it is absolutely chock full of articles comparing men vs women in every imaginable combination of tasks, etc. with many finding differences. What is your contention?
I was mostly addressing the first half of your initial queation ("Do you have any evidence that modern science is being misled by these perverse incentives") more so than the latter (self-correction working). I agree with basically everything you've written here.
The only thing I'd reiterate is that even if there is published research which finds a hypothesis to be true (A) and there is research which finds the same hypothesis to not be true (B), that doesn't mean that they both had the same journey toward publication. A may have received generous funding, tons of support from the university, and was welcomed with open arms by a publisher. Meanwhile the researcher behind B lost support when it became evident that their research was going against the established belief, they were ridiculed by their colleagues and superiors, they had to apply to a different university to conduct research there instead, then they were stonewalled by the top journals and could only get published in a minor journal with little recognition and reach. In fact, the researcher behind B wasn't the first one to try, there were many others before them who for one reason or another didn't manage to or didn't want to overcome all of these obstacles. That in itself is the evidence of politics and bad actors in academic research, though I do agree with you that some fields are naturally more susceptible to this than others.
I'd also like to posit that improvement/revision in one field or on one topic does not necessarily imply that it happens everywhere and always, again due to the potential difficulty of even getting approval for research which goes against the grain, much less have it be objectively peer-reviewed and published.
This is very vague. You only get in high impact journals if the result is surprising or explains some major mechanism, I.e. you've contributed a major insight. Researcher B that you're describing has a better chance of getting into a high impact publication than researcher A to be perfectly honest, assuming the methodology is solid. The funding system is designed so the cost is paid upfront, so if you got the funding, you get to do the research. To do more research, you need to apply for more funding. You don't always get that funding.
While what you have written makes sense to me and I've known it to be true in some cases, what I wrote has been true in other cases, too. Limitations on funding may be systemic or prejudicial. There are some topics which may be the wrong kind of controversial and results which may be the wrong kind of revolutionary if accepted as the new gospel, so to speak.
I don't mean to assume too much but I suspect that we come from different academic backgrounds and thus anecdotal evidence is bound to be different, both first- and second-hand. In at least my case and the stories told to me by former colleagues, as well as articles written by disenfranchised, ostracized, and blackballed researchers in my former field of study, it seems that having world-upheaving, incendiary research often leads to your becoming a pariah rather than a celebrated revolutionary.
This is still super vague. One of my coworkers gets millions in funding from extreme Christian organisations explicitly to prove that life could not have arisen organically and must have been designed. He clowns it up on X posting extreme content regularly. Yet, he still publishes his findings without issue in high impact journals and he is not blackballed.
Do you have specific sources I can look at that substantiate your point that incendiary research gets you blackballed?
I don’t know about blacklisted but this Harvard Professor speaks about the external pressures to not publish research that tells an inconvenient truth
There’s also the NYT article that came out recently where a researcher studying transgenderism basically admitted to delaying publishing their findings because they weren’t favorable to her cause
Doesn't sound like either of them is blackballed and the research got funded and published anyway.
On November 06 2024 18:36 Uldridge wrote: A surprising amount of things are based on how people feel about a thing. Weird how that works. Even science.
Could you clarify what you mean by that? Are you talking about the scientific process or how non-scientists feel about science?
I'm talking about the process of how we, as humans - organisms that filter a highly selective part of reality - try to understand reality. Don't get me wrong, we understand a vast amount already, but it's possible we're limited in understanding only a fraction of it due to our limitations of the brain. Now, science is a framework that hinges upon the actors being, so to speak, completely objective and truth and reality, or our understanding of that at least, kind of depends on that. Time and time again it has been shown that history, personal and institutional biases, funding etc. get in the way of accurately finding out how things work. People abuse statistics to get more interesting results, replication crisis remains an issue, people try to get funding for potentially futile endeavors because it's trending right now, when other theories that could be as challenging get less because that's how hype and momentum works and humans are not devoid of that.
We can agree on basic facts. We can observe things on our world and we can describe them pretty rigorously. Often times, though, a narrative of reality is created that we adhere to because that's the current hype or does a particular thing in that point in time pretty well, but will then be torn to shreds because it was incomplete or because it was simply wrong. And none of it matters really because at the end of the day all you do as a human is sleep, eat, drink, shit, piss, socialize and if you're lucky fuck. It's a feelings based reality we live in. How much energy do you have today? How hungry are you? Our scientifically based jnfrastructure we have is nice, but... completely unnecessary. I'm starting to ramble now so I'll see myself out.
Thank you for the clarification, I get what you're saying.
The beauty of science is that it is a self-correcting system. If you have bad scientists or bad system implementation (which is what you're describing in the majority of your post), this leads to results that will not be replicated and research that will not lead to new breakthroughs. If you expect scientists to be accurate and correct 100% of the time, that's unfeasible. Mistakes in methodology happen. Data is misinterpreted all the time. It can derail the field in the short term, sure, but in the long-term, no scientist clings to an approach that doesn't work, flawed methodology leads to results that simply do not match reality and are eventually discarded. Scientific consensus emerges and we make progress -- it is designed to be an iterative process after all.
I agree with all of that.
But if the incentives are bad enough, it can lead to all kinds of bodies of horrible research, founded and built upon more horrible research, that people try to shoehorn into ever more aggressively.
Evolution wise, even if a civilization stuck to that, it's likely it would be outcompeted by a civilization that did better science in due course.
At it's worst, you're talking about essentially the next scientific dark age. (No, I don't think this is happening or will happen)
But it can easily set progress back a decade or three.
And cause tremendous pain and wasted energy and resources trying solutions based on science built on a house of cards. Not to mention the issues with creativity and the fact that funding very strongly rewards immediate results doing in paradigm science and shows less interest in studies that accept the null.
I believe we're in the dark ages of scientific research because it's all to do with funding and clout and unwillingness to reflect on biases.
Replication crisis, predatory journals, actual fraudulence in papers (made up data etc), peer reviews being shit at times because reviewers don't like the research due to it clashing with their work or they want to publish that type of research first. It's crazy. People lose faith in the framework because people abuse everything that's built on the solid foundations. In this aspect I don't think science a self correcting thing any longer.
More fundamentally I think it's one of the narratives on how we can shape society, just like religion. It's important becuase it's useful. Make science useless and it's existence stops.
As far as reality goes, a thing I wanted to mention that is very apt right now: no matter the facts, if people feel a certain way, you won't change that by flaunting numbers in their faces. Example: people feel unsafe in public spaces, even though empirically speaking, the crime rate has gone down. Saying this won't make a difference. "Reality" in this case is that people, through a variety of paramaters, feel less safe than it actually is. The idea is the find out why that is, not saying that they're wrong.
I will direct the same question to yourself as I did to L_master. Do you have any evidence that modern science is being misled by these perverse incentives and that the self-correcting nature of the scientific consensus is not working? I would genuinely like to look at this.
On November 06 2024 18:36 Uldridge wrote: A surprising amount of things are based on how people feel about a thing. Weird how that works. Even science.
Could you clarify what you mean by that? Are you talking about the scientific process or how non-scientists feel about science?
I'm talking about the process of how we, as humans - organisms that filter a highly selective part of reality - try to understand reality. Don't get me wrong, we understand a vast amount already, but it's possible we're limited in understanding only a fraction of it due to our limitations of the brain. Now, science is a framework that hinges upon the actors being, so to speak, completely objective and truth and reality, or our understanding of that at least, kind of depends on that. Time and time again it has been shown that history, personal and institutional biases, funding etc. get in the way of accurately finding out how things work. People abuse statistics to get more interesting results, replication crisis remains an issue, people try to get funding for potentially futile endeavors because it's trending right now, when other theories that could be as challenging get less because that's how hype and momentum works and humans are not devoid of that.
We can agree on basic facts. We can observe things on our world and we can describe them pretty rigorously. Often times, though, a narrative of reality is created that we adhere to because that's the current hype or does a particular thing in that point in time pretty well, but will then be torn to shreds because it was incomplete or because it was simply wrong. And none of it matters really because at the end of the day all you do as a human is sleep, eat, drink, shit, piss, socialize and if you're lucky fuck. It's a feelings based reality we live in. How much energy do you have today? How hungry are you? Our scientifically based jnfrastructure we have is nice, but... completely unnecessary. I'm starting to ramble now so I'll see myself out.
Thank you for the clarification, I get what you're saying.
The beauty of science is that it is a self-correcting system. If you have bad scientists or bad system implementation (which is what you're describing in the majority of your post), this leads to results that will not be replicated and research that will not lead to new breakthroughs. If you expect scientists to be accurate and correct 100% of the time, that's unfeasible. Mistakes in methodology happen. Data is misinterpreted all the time. It can derail the field in the short term, sure, but in the long-term, no scientist clings to an approach that doesn't work, flawed methodology leads to results that simply do not match reality and are eventually discarded. Scientific consensus emerges and we make progress -- it is designed to be an iterative process after all.
I agree with all of that.
But if the incentives are bad enough, it can lead to all kinds of bodies of horrible research, founded and built upon more horrible research, that people try to shoehorn into ever more aggressively.
Evolution wise, even if a civilization stuck to that, it's likely it would be outcompeted by a civilization that did better science in due course.
At it's worst, you're talking about essentially the next scientific dark age. (No, I don't think this is happening or will happen)
But it can easily set progress back a decade or three.
And cause tremendous pain and wasted energy and resources trying solutions based on science built on a house of cards. Not to mention the issues with creativity and the fact that funding very strongly rewards immediate results doing in paradigm science and shows less interest in studies that accept the null.
I believe we're in the dark ages of scientific research because it's all to do with funding and clout and unwillingness to reflect on biases.
Replication crisis, predatory journals, actual fraudulence in papers (made up data etc), peer reviews being shit at times because reviewers don't like the research due to it clashing with their work or they want to publish that type of research first. It's crazy. People lose faith in the framework because people abuse everything that's built on the solid foundations. In this aspect I don't think science a self correcting thing any longer.
More fundamentally I think it's one of the narratives on how we can shape society, just like religion. It's important becuase it's useful. Make science useless and it's existence stops.
As far as reality goes, a thing I wanted to mention that is very apt right now: no matter the facts, if people feel a certain way, you won't change that by flaunting numbers in their faces. Example: people feel unsafe in public spaces, even though empirically speaking, the crime rate has gone down. Saying this won't make a difference. "Reality" in this case is that people, through a variety of paramaters, feel less safe than it actually is. The idea is the find out why that is, not saying that they're wrong.
Disclaimer: This is going to be a big block of text and it's barely relevant to the topic at hand (election), so if you're not interested in following this line of discussion, just scroll down now.
A lot of what I'm going to be writing about in this post is based on my experience in the field of psychology. While I absolutely think that research in psychology is usually a science (as in, adhering to the scientific method), there are also situations where I believe it is not a science so it may not be the best fit for this line of discussion opened by @Ender. However, enough people believe in the validity of the field without digging into whether a "consensus" is reached through scientific or unscientific means, and I will be providing some examples which apply to the sciences at large.
I would also like to disclose that I absolutely have a chip on my shoulder about how research is conducted in certain areas of psychology and how conclusions within those fields are arrived at, but I will try to present my position as objectively as possible.
Taking place over 2017 and 2018, their project entailed submitting bogus papers to academic journals on topics from the field of critical social theory such as cultural, queer, race, gender, fat, and sexuality studies to determine whether they would pass through peer review and be accepted for publication. Several of these papers were subsequently published, which the authors cited in support of their contention.
The Sokal affair, additionally known as the Sokal hoax,[1] was a demonstrative scholarly hoax performed by Alan Sokal, a physics professor at New York University and University College London. In 1996, Sokal submitted an article to Social Text, an academic journal of cultural studies. The submission was an experiment to test the journal's intellectual rigor, specifically to investigate whether "a leading North American journal of cultural studies—whose editorial collective includes such luminaries as Fredric Jameson and Andrew Ross—[would] publish an article liberally salted with nonsense if (a) it sounded good and (b) it flattered the editors' ideological preconceptions."[2]
“I had no choice but to commit [research] misconduct,” admits a researcher at an elite Chinese university. The shocking revelation is documented in a collection of several dozen anonymous, in-depth interviews offering rare, first-hand accounts of researchers who engaged in unethical behaviour — and describing what tipped them over the edge. An article based on the interviews was published in April in the journal Research Ethics1.
Based on my personal experience, this issue is definitely not exclusive to China or Chinese researchers. I could speak about this topic at length but the TL;DR here is that there are situations where social, societal, hierarchical, professional, and financial pressures all lead to "bad" science. "Bad" science here being research done in bad faith, more specifically methods which reject data that goes against a hypothesis that is socially beneficial to espouse.
A US-based biophysicist who is one of the world’s most highly cited researchers has been removed from the editorial board of one journal and barred as a reviewer for another, after repeatedly manipulating the peer-review process to amass citations to his own work.
As mentioned above, there is a lot of politics and ego involved in science, because science is conducted by humans who are often bound by politics and ego. This isn't as egregious as submitting entirely fake research and having it published, but it is still a factor in terms of what gets published, who gets published, etc.
5. As Uldridge mentioned, there is also the Replication crisis, which basically infers that a lot of the research we have been relying on for decades has been tainted by the aforementioned "bad" science.
The replication crisis[a] is an ongoing methodological crisis in which the results of many scientific studies are difficult or impossible to reproduce. Because the reproducibility of empirical results is an essential part of the scientific method,[2] such failures undermine the credibility of theories building on them and potentially call into question substantial parts of scientific knowledge.
6. At this point I'll go into one of the areas of psychology/psychological research which I was most familiar with due to my work as a research assistant within it. It is also what exposed me to the aforementioned elements of politics, ego, personal sentiment, social pressures, etc. being involved in science.
This was shortly after the reclassification of Gender Identity Disorder (GID) into Gender Dysphoria (GD). I was conducting literature analysis on the presentation of GID and GD in new editions of textbooks in order to determine whether they have changed structurally in order to accommodate this reclassification. In short, my research was inspired by what I would consider to be a "pro"-trans position held by the head researcher, as it sought to evaluate whether the stigma of their condition being a "disorder" was appropriately being mitigated. This is something that I was on board with, because I believe that textbooks should present the most accurate and up-to-date information. For example, if one textbook simply changed the title and text of the subchapter GD without moving it out of the "Disorders" chapter, or if GD was squished firmly between the topics of drug addiction and gambling, then perhaps that publisher is not doing their best in understanding and presenting this change from GID to GD.
At some point, a question arose in my mind: "Why was this change made in the first place?" While the explanation offered by one of the people who was allegedly on the board* which made this decision does a great job of outlining the logic behind it, the under reason is even more simple reason: it offended people.
*I did some cursory research to try to see if I can conclusively place this person on the DSM panel which made this decision, but was unable to do so. However, this is because I'm not finding any comprehensive list anywhere. As it stands, I am inclined to believe that this person was indeed on this panel.
It should be noted that the person who posted this is transgender, which may present a conflict of interest, but it's not a claim I will try to argue here. For example, I'm not sure that we should bar people who have an anxiety disorder from doing research on anxiety disorders. However, when it comes to classification and the writing of definitions, I think that there may be a greater possibility of bias seeping in.
Anyway, from Natalie Walker's explanation, emphasis mine:
The reclassification from an identity issue to a dysphoric issue was a direct result of the stigma and psychological distress of the idea that being transgender was a type of psychiatric disorder, and it absolutely is not.
On the surface, this seems very much in line with the removal of homosexuality from the DSM back in 1973. I could discuss the differences between these two decisions, but this is not the crux of the issue for me. The crux of the issue for me is that because the old classifications offend people, they are changed. What were the studies conducted to support this outcome? I can't imagine that there were any real experiments being conducted (due to obvious ethical restraints). As such, I find this to be - within the context of this discussion - not scientific.
Yet, research within this field seems to be at least somewhat curated by the governing bodies that be. In other words, if your research goes against the grain of the consensus, that research might not be supported by your university, funded, or published. Even if it is published, it may then be removed or censored. In my personal experience, even broaching the topic of conducting research on what may be a sensitive topic for the transgender community can at the very least be heavily discouraged by your research advisors.
For an example beyond my own experience, this article was written by a researcher whose research was allegedly censored because it went against the narrative. Naturally, this is a first-hand source and is thus almost assuredly biased, but I wanted to provide one concrete example within this specific field of research.
I'm not saying that research on these topics doesn't happen. After all, there have been some incendiary studies published which report on the prevalent comorbidity of narcissism and GID, as well as some research looking into the hypothesis that there is a prevalent comorbidity with autism (and thus that autism may be a contributing factor to GID). My point is that this type of research is difficult to get off the ground, raises eyebrows, and can receive significant negative backlash. I believe it was Uldridge that mentioned that publishing certain kinds of research can end a person's career. There are many self-reported cases of "blackballing" in various fields of academia for this very reason.
I want to be clear that this is not exclusive to the hot button issue of GID and transgender rights. For example, studies on the performance of women vs. men in various disciplines are also affected. I can't find the article now, but one researcher had their research approved for publishing but then the governing body retracted it before publication, meaning that the researcher cannot publish it in a different journal and that no one can read it, either. The were then fired from their position at a western university, which they alleged was because female researchers at their university went on a warpath against them. Why? Because they went against the currently established narrative that women are equal to men in all ways, and thus any findings which purport that women might perform worse in math-related subjects is seen as actively harmful to women, and thus the research has effectively been sealed. I wish I could find this article but I have to head out soon and am running out of time; I'm sure I have it saved somewhere, so if I run into it later I will add it here.
Now, I'm not saying that I believe that men are superior to women in math. I just find it unscientific that research which supports this position doesn't see the light of day due to politics and individual feelings, while research supporting absolute equality is incredibly well-represented. Science, in my opinion, should not be constrained by optics.
Anyway, I'll circle back to ask: why is GID present in the most up-to-date DSM while something like Body Identity Dysphoria/body integrity identity disorder - roughly, the desire to have a limb amputated - is not? Why do we perform gender-affirming surgeries on people and give them hormone treatments, while the idea of operating on someone with BID/BIID generally dismissed? Representation, politics, and bias are almost certainly contributing factors - and this is almost assuredly the case in other areas of academia as well.
Definitely some disciplines are more vulnerable to bad actors than others, with psychology being a prime candidate. Likewise with high impact fields such as anything to do with medicine, where success leads to lots of research funding and even possibly fame, creating an environment where lying to succeed becomes, if not commonplace, uncomfortably common as was pointed out in the study that Uldridge linked and the more recent one I found. Nevertheless, you're still talking about less than 3% of total scientists, or, in other words, 97% of scientists are honest. That's a pretty big number.
I would argue that the fact that stuff like the reproducibility project has sprung up as a result of the 'reproducibility crisis' is the self-correcting nature of Science taking direct action. A bunch of researchers realised that a lot of the stuff couldn't be reproduced and was built on very shaky foundations, so they came up with new publishing standards and methodology to ensure that future publications are proofed against this. Again, it's an iterative process. It does not require everyone to get everything right all of the time.
Regarding the discussion about research into hot-button topics like "are men better than women" and "should trans people be classified as having a mental disorder": If you actually look at the literature, it is absolutely chock full of articles comparing men vs women in every imaginable combination of tasks, etc. with many finding differences. What is your contention?
I was mostly addressing the first half of your initial queation ("Do you have any evidence that modern science is being misled by these perverse incentives") more so than the latter (self-correction working). I agree with basically everything you've written here.
The only thing I'd reiterate is that even if there is published research which finds a hypothesis to be true (A) and there is research which finds the same hypothesis to not be true (B), that doesn't mean that they both had the same journey toward publication. A may have received generous funding, tons of support from the university, and was welcomed with open arms by a publisher. Meanwhile the researcher behind B lost support when it became evident that their research was going against the established belief, they were ridiculed by their colleagues and superiors, they had to apply to a different university to conduct research there instead, then they were stonewalled by the top journals and could only get published in a minor journal with little recognition and reach. In fact, the researcher behind B wasn't the first one to try, there were many others before them who for one reason or another didn't manage to or didn't want to overcome all of these obstacles. That in itself is the evidence of politics and bad actors in academic research, though I do agree with you that some fields are naturally more susceptible to this than others.
I'd also like to posit that improvement/revision in one field or on one topic does not necessarily imply that it happens everywhere and always, again due to the potential difficulty of even getting approval for research which goes against the grain, much less have it be objectively peer-reviewed and published.
This is very vague. You only get in high impact journals if the result is surprising or explains some major mechanism, I.e. you've contributed a major insight. Researcher B that you're describing has a better chance of getting into a high impact publication than researcher A to be perfectly honest, assuming the methodology is solid. The funding system is designed so the cost is paid upfront, so if you got the funding, you get to do the research. To do more research, you need to apply for more funding. You don't always get that funding.
While what you have written makes sense to me and I've known it to be true in some cases, what I wrote has been true in other cases, too. Limitations on funding may be systemic or prejudicial. There are some topics which may be the wrong kind of controversial and results which may be the wrong kind of revolutionary if accepted as the new gospel, so to speak.
I don't mean to assume too much but I suspect that we come from different academic backgrounds and thus anecdotal evidence is bound to be different, both first- and second-hand. In at least my case and the stories told to me by former colleagues, as well as articles written by disenfranchised, ostracized, and blackballed researchers in my former field of study, it seems that having world-upheaving, incendiary research often leads to your becoming a pariah rather than a celebrated revolutionary.
This is still super vague. One of my coworkers gets millions in funding from extreme Christian organisations explicitly to prove that life could not have arisen organically and must have been designed. He clowns it up on X posting extreme content regularly. Yet, he still publishes his findings without issue in high impact journals and he is not blackballed.
Do you have specific sources I can look at that substantiate your point that incendiary research gets you blackballed?
I don’t know about blacklisted but this Harvard Professor speaks about the external pressures to not publish research that tells an inconvenient truth
There’s also the NYT article that came out recently where a researcher studying transgenderism basically admitted to delaying publishing their findings because they weren’t favorable to her cause
Doesn't sound like either of them is blackballed and the research got funded and published anyway.
I know. I addressed that in my post. Just because he wasn’t blackballed doesn’t mean there aren’t negative pressures related to reputation and ostracism that could lead less brave people to self censor themselves.
EPT
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