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Alternative Science Respectability Checklist

Meta-science

Someone comes along and says “I’ve discovered that there’s no need for dark matter.” A brief glance at the abstract reveals that the model violates our understanding of perturbation theory. Well, perhaps there is something subtle going on here, and our conventional understanding of perturbation theory doesn’t apply in this case. So here’s what any working theoretical cosmologist would do (even if they aren’t consciously aware that they’re doing it): they would glance at the introduction to the paper, looking for a paragraph that says “Look, we know this isn’t what you would expect from elementary perturbation theory, but here’s why that doesn’t apply in this case.” Upon not finding that paragraph, they would toss the paper away.

– www.discovermagazine.com/the-sciences/the-alternative-science-respectability-checklist

From that article, the checklist is:

  1. Acquire basic competency in whatever field of science your discovery belongs to.
  2. Understand, and make a good-faith effort to confront, the fundamental objections to your claims within established science.
  3. Present your discovery in a way that is complete, transparent, and unambiguous.

This looks very similar to the Ideological Turing Test (ITT).

What links here

Created (4 years ago)

Strange memecluster

These are memeclusters (collections of ideas) of which I am suspicious, as of [2022-01-26 Wed]. Do they pass the Alternative Science Respectability Checklist?

Homeopathy🔗

A strong distrust of the medical establishment is why pointing out simple facts like "homeopathy has never been shown to work" may be insufficient to get a homepathy user to use medicine instead. There's motivated cognition going on – if you don't think medicine works, what are you gonna do when it turns out your alternative doesn't work either?! Just conclude there exists no substance that will help any health problem, and let God sort you out?

Basically if you care about a homeopathy user and want them to use medicine, it isn't a productive approach to say homeopathy doesn't work, because even if you convince them it doesn't work, they will still decline to use medicine because they feel they can't trust it.

This distrust is built on experience that hospitals seek to make money to the extent of only ever caring to treat superficial symptoms, and are actively interested in keeping people sick. Well—hopefully it's built on experience. It could be built on a huge pile of anecdotes that the user bought into because it fit into e.g. an anti-corporate world-view. This is one reason it's so important to understand that anecdotes are not experience or evidence, even if they feel similar!

This same reasoning also seems to fuel the Anti-vax group and probably others, and ultimately the poor souls in the overlap of all these groups seem to be trying to reinvent medicine from scratch with new-old interpretation frameworks like "Detox", which ret-cons all development in medicine since Hippocrates, pretending it didn't happen so you can re-do the research, how fun! That's easy to do when you don't know the history, which is why people should study history!

Question: why would the same logic behind distrusting the medical establishment not apply to their homeopathic doctor? Homeopathy is big business, just like health care, so are they any different wrt. profit motive? One difference is that health care is partly government-regulated, but that doesn't necessarily say anything since so many governments are corrupt.

Anti-vax🔗

The movement started with Andrew Wakefield's fraudulent paper. If only it mattered to them that it turned out to be fraudulent…

That the movement appears so unaffected by new facts makes me disinclined to listen to its perspective. Probably there's been a feedback loop: the reasonable anti-vaxxers already quit, so the ones still in have other reasons to stay than just truth.

Interpretivism🔗

Basically the stance that findings in social sciences can't be evaluated on the same standards as those in natural sciences. While in a trivial sense, this is TRUE, and it's good to point out that it's hard to get solid knowledge in social sciences, and therefore we shouldn't just sit on our hands and do nothing while waiting for the perfect knowledge, I'm worried this stance gets used to excuse the poor quality of any finding, and excuse not applying a scientific framework even when it could be. I suspect it gets abused as a form of Anti-epistemology, to guard Neo-Nazi and other belief systems (literally any belief system), and any bullshit will get accepted in prestigious journals if prestigious people pay lip service to the interpretivists "yeah the truth is unknowable so I can't say this is not science" because they don't want to harm their careers. Also concerned it's throwing the baby out with the bathwater: "science sometimes doesn't work, so let's ignore everything that historically successful scientists would have thought about our current method".

This is also named antipositivism, because it was born in the 60s at least partly as a counterreaction to logical positivism. May be good to point out that positivism itself has been dead since the 70s – the philosopher Quine effectively killed it with his 1951 paper. So it's anti-nothing in particular, because no one today holds that position, and the name is dishonest because you leverage someone's disreputability to elevate yourself. Instead of antipositivist, you could just as well call yourself anti-stupid. Free points for you!

Components used to prop up interpretivism:

Critical theory🔗

This field seems to try to get at the general principles underlying "critical readings" of anything, using any framework, like reading texts from a psychoanalytic perspective, a feminist perspective, a Marxist perspective and so on.

[2022-01-18 Tue]: I tried to read a textbook on this topic and it was hard to understand what the point of it all was. That implies a high Bullshit quotient. Had the same experience attempting to read Foucault.

OK, one of the aims is to reveal and challenge power structures. "With origins in sociology and literary criticism, it argues that social problems are influenced and created more by societal structures and cultural assumptions than by individual and psychological factors." (what does this mean?)

"ideology is the principal obstacle to human liberation"

Horkheimer described a theory as critical insofar as it seeks "to liberate human beings from the circumstances that enslave them."

Martin Jay has said that the first generation of critical theory is best understood not as promoting a specific philosophical agenda or ideology, but as "a gadfly of other systems."

Critical theory has been criticized for not offering any clear road map to political action (praxis), often explicitly repudiating any solutions… A primary criticism of the theory is that it is anti-scientific, both for its lack of the use of the scientific method, and for its assertion that science is a tool used for oppression of marginalized groups of people.[28]

What links here

Created (4 years ago)

Science quality assurance

Retraction Watch🔗

Why? Because retractions too often pass quietly and with vague reasons given or no reason given, like it's all a big embarrassment to involved parties, rather than an essential part of the March of Science.

The people who took part of a study early on don't learn that the study's been retracted, so they go on spreading incorrect conclusions.

Thus, Retraction Watch. Since they began their work around 2010, retractions have become lots more informative [see RW self report], and they've helped some scientific sleuths gain fame.

Related: Health News Review "Note to our followers: Our nearly 13-year run of daily publication of new content on HealthNewsReview.org came to a close at the end of 2018. Publisher Gary Schwitzer and other contributors may post new articles periodically. But all of the 6,000+ articles we have published contain lessons to help you improve your critical thinking about health care interventions. And those will be still be alive on the site for a couple of years." Who wants to guess that they got a little too famous? I'm glad they opted to shut down, for all I know they were offered "donations" for continuing, and we wouldn't have known. [ Rhetoric device: show the actual website, and point out the date on the last review, makes it more real ]

PubPeer🔗

I'm honestly surprised that PubMed and other classic databases haven't thought of having a discussion forum for their publications. I'm glad though, because can you imagine paywalling the discussion? And giving bribeable journals the power to delete or edit critical posts?

It brings to mind you know, the bibliography app Mendeley which was bought by Elsevier. Lots of people got suspicious about why Elsevier would do that as it runs counter to their business model and it's probably not a good idea to use Mendeley now. There is an open source app Zotero which can't be bought. But the moral is that you don't let the researchers and publishers own the rights to the discussion, the discussion must be done elsewhere, in a medium created by readers for readers.

Publons

Ioannidis 2005🔗

John Ioannidis

Review/summary, may be good prior to reading the study intensiveblog.com/ioannidis-2005-published-research-findings-false/

Some qualification replicationindex.com/2019/01/15/ioannidis-2005-was-wrong-most-published-research-findings-are-not-false/

The problem with the title www.painscience.com/articles/ioannidis.php

Read-along www.greaterwrong.com/posts/dBt7aE3fKkY9WtSBr/sentence-by-sentence-why-most-published-research-findings

Social media for science critique🔗

When it comes to pointing out errors in published work, social media have been necessary. There just has been no reasonable alternative. Yes, it’s sometimes possible to publish peer-reviewed letters in journals criticizing published work, but it can be a huge amount of effort. Journals and authors often apply massive resistance to bury criticisms.

It's funny because when I was growing up, the term "peer review" made me imagine that the journals quickly correct and take down faulty studies, that scientists are fiercely critical of badly done studies. Apparently I was optimistic. Until the airing of the reproducibility crisis around 2010, publications were treated as permanently incumbent. You could write a letter with criticism, and presumably many naive optimists did, but you'd never get a response or see any change. A journal editor was recently cited as saying "I'm not quite sure what a retraction is".

What do I like about blogs compared to journal articles? First, blog space is unlimited, journal space is limited, especially in high-profile high-publicity journals such as Science, Nature, and PPNAS. Second, in a blog it’s ok to express uncertainty, in journals there’s the norm of certainty. On my blog, I was able to openly discuss various ideas of age adjustment, whereas in their journal article, Case and Deaton had nothing to say but that their numbers “are not age-adjusted within the 10-y 45-54 age group.” That’s all! I don’t blame Case and Deaton for being so terse; they were following the requirements of the journal, which is to provide minimal explanation and minimal exploration. . . . over and over again, we’re seeing journal article, or journal-article-followed-by-press-interviews, as discouraging data exploration and discouraging the expression of uncertainty. . . . The norms of peer reviewed journals such as PPNAS encourage presenting work with a facade of certainty.

— statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2014/11/22/blogs-twitter/#comment-252332

Not being allowed to express uncertainty is just about the most unscientific thing there is!

Let me conclude with a key disagreement I have with Fiske. She prefers moderated forums where criticism is done in private. I prefer open discussion. Personally I am not a fan of Twitter, where the space limitation seems to encourge snappy, often adversarial exchanges. I like blogs, and blog comments, because we have enough space to fully explain ourselves and to give full references to what we are discussing.

Related

What links here

Created (4 years ago)

Jupiter

Jupiter, the planet.

Its distance from Sol is 5.2 AU (770 million km).

Earth has 10% the diameter of Jupiter, and Jupiter in turn has 10% the diameter of Sol.

Jupiter's mass is 2.5 times that of all the other planets in the Solar System combined—this is so massive that its barycentre with the Sun lies above the Sun's surface at 1.068 solar radii from the Sun's centre.[44] Jupiter is much larger than Earth and considerably less dense: its volume is that of about 1,321 Earths, but it is only 318 times as massive.[7][45] Jupiter's radius is about one tenth the radius of the Sun,[46] and its mass is one thousandth the mass of the Sun, so the densities of the two bodies are similar.[47] A "Jupiter mass" (MJ or MJup) is often used as a unit to describe masses of other objects, particularly extrasolar planets and brown dwarfs.

Somehow, while school had plenty of astronomy and I liked those parts, no one told me astronomy was this interesting!

Theoretical models indicate that if Jupiter had much more mass than it does at present, it would shrink.[49] For small changes in mass, the radius would not change appreciably, and above 160%[49] of the current mass the interior would become so much more compressed under the increased pressure that its volume would decrease despite the increasing amount of matter. As a result, Jupiter is thought to have about as large a diameter as a planet of its composition and evolutionary history can achieve.[50] The process of further shrinkage with increasing mass would continue until appreciable stellar ignition was achieved, as in high-mass brown dwarfs having around 50 Jupiter masses.[51]

Although Jupiter would need to be about 75 times more massive to fuse hydrogen and become a star, the smallest red dwarf is only about 30 percent larger in radius than Jupiter.[52][53] Despite this, Jupiter still radiates more heat than it receives from the Sun; the amount of heat produced inside it is similar to the total solar radiation it receives.[54] This additional heat is generated by the Kelvin–Helmholtz mechanism through contraction. This process causes Jupiter to shrink by about 1 mm (0.039 in)/yr.[55][56] When formed, Jupiter was hotter and was about twice its current diameter.[57]

Created (4 years ago)
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