Is not the same ting
That thing we call Science
I suspect that as with religion: We don’t know what we mean when we talk about religion; Nor do we know what we talk about when we talk about science. And that ting we call science is not the same thing for everyone.
Science is on the one hand a philosophical approach to life, which allows us to put some order into the world we experience. That allows us to recognize what is likely to be known systematically, verifiable with the observations of the world, from what is not. That endeavor that seeks to identify what is an invariant objective of what is not. In this way this ting Science is a sensor, an instrument that allows us to explore the objective part of our reality. If one adopts this instrument as the main tool of interpretation of the world, then some are constrain to having a critical thought, to asking for evidence to weigh the narratives, to contrast their own and others ideas with the balance of observation and experimentation.
Another thing closely related to the first is Science not as an instrument or method of interpretation of the world but as a body of knowledge. That is to say science not as a verb but as a noun. This thing called Science is then the fruit distilled by the time of the first thing we have called Science. Of course the second could not exist without the first and it is to this binomial that Carl Sagan referred to in his beautiful book “The world and its demons, Science as a light in the dark”
A very different thing is the Modern science as a professional activity. It is here that things cease to be clear and become foggy. Although science as a professional activity in principle would seek to expand Science (noun) by using the method of Science (verb), to become more widespread due to the pressure that exists to obtain from Science (noun) technological and economic benefits, it remained relatively trapped in a trap that I call “The tragedy of the peers.”
This term refers to the tragedy of the commons, where a resource is common if we have unrestricted access to it and when a user makes use of it that portion of the resource is inaccessible to other users. The tragedy emerges from the collective effect of many users all using the resources selfishly to obtain the profits generated from its use, until it is exhausted.
How to escape the dilemma in which many individuals acting rationally in their own interest, can ultimately destroy a shared and limited resource, even when it is clear that this does not benefit anyone in the long term? […] We now face the tragedy of the global commons. There is an Earth, an atmosphere, a source of water and six billion people sharing them. Poorly. The rich are overconsuming and the poor are waiting impatiently to join them. Barry Schwartz
In the case of science (profession) the way to massively articulate the efforts of multiple users was by peer review that has the principle that when a user (still does not want to put a label but is what most would understand by scientist) proposes a product, this is reviewed and validated by a set of users, peers. The problem is that the product is an element new of Science (noun) encoded essentially in the form of a published article. So we generate a zero-sum game (when one player wins other loses) in which the way to win is to obtain the validation of the pairs.
About this Nassim Nicholas Taleb has spoken extensively in his work of “The Uncertain” highlighting that it is a way to avoid having the skin in the game, at the end of the day it is no longer about truly expanding to Science (noun) by Science method (verb) but to sell to a specific group of people, peers, the proposed product to obtain the benefits that can be obtained from them, such as academic prestige, economic stimuli, job promotions, etc. This has multiple repercussions from the low quality of “scientific” products that could even fall into pseudoscience, repeatability problems, plagiarism problems or data falsification, among others. Another damage of “The tragedy of the peers” is that we systematically generate hidden risks as Harry Crane shows in his article “In peer review we (don’t) trust: How peer review’s filtering poses a systemic risk to science” in theportal researchersone which aims to contribute to eliminate “The tragedy of the peers.”
In his article, Harry Crane describes how the filter role played by peer review can actually be detrimental rather than useful for the quality of scientific literature. The author argues that, instead of trying to filter out low quality research, as traditional magazines do, a better strategy is to let everything go, but with a recognition of the uncertain quality of what is published, as is done in researchersone, in a kind of “academic mithridatism”. When researchers focus on what they read with uncertain confidence rather than blind trust, they are more likely to identify errors, which protects the scientific community from the dangerous effects of their propagation. In a way, the peers generate a “paradox of the fence” as described by @DrCirillo.
In the face of a visible risk such as a precipice, an individual approaches with the utmost caution, while most even choose to stay away. This way, if an accident happens, it is typically local, it does not scale. However, if an administrator before this occasional accident decides to put a fence to make the system safer, then more people approach with less and less caution. In this way if the fence breaks, we now have a much more serious accident because it has escalated.
Without peer review each reader assumes the risk of believing in what is proposed in an article or not (which in fact is Landau’s approach). With peer review catastrophes can occur as the idea that vaccines are related to autism. An idea that was propagated because it was initially published in a fraudulent article in the prestigious magazine The Lancet, written by Andrew Wakefield in 1998 in which it was stated (falsely) that there was a link between the MMA vaccine (which was later generalized to all vaccines) and autism spectrum disorders. Although the article was removed when its fraudulent origin and false conclusions were proven, the damage was already done and today we have a worldwide anti-vaccine movement. Of course, the mass media and social networks had a lot to do with it. Imagine that we are naive users of social networks and a friend tells us — Hey, you saw that it came out in the news that there is a study that links vaccinating children with autism? — Not as you think? That may not be true — Really, look I have researched it and it comes out in a prestigious scientific journal. From there, everything is propagation of ideas in the style of the Axelrod model being very easy to generate a “rule of minorities”, a term coined by Taleb to explain the triumph of intolerant minorities.
Now if I wanted to put some labels because it turns out to be important in the context of my country’s Mexico policy where the “scientists” have been under continuous discrediting and attack. Following somewhat the Taleb classification form, one should understand as a scientist that person who seeks to advance Science (noun) through the method of Science (verb) do so within the formal structure of science (profession) or not. In return, those who are in the institution of science (profession) but who only seek to generate scientific products (articles), these must be called academics. So scientists are scholars while academics are experts. Although different kind of expert say a surgeon, a dentist, a programmer or a plumber, because all of them are evaluated not by peers but by reality. So things can be even non-academic experts.
Initially I had not considered it but they made me see that it is necessary to write about that other thing that is the “social sciences” and I make the difference not because of a bias of doing them less but because the level of complexity of their object of study is much greater than for example the object of study of Physics. The fundamental difference is probabilistic. While the physical systems are in the vast majority of cases well modeled by normal distributions, that is to say they live in mediastan (Taleb term), the vast majority, but it is that all social phenomena live in extremistan or require tail distributions long
If for example we think of a Pareto distribution (80/20) (a long-tailed distribution) it has been shown that 10 ^ 9 (one billion) would be required more observations than those required if the phenomenon were Gaussian (mediastan). Essentially that tells us that to have statistical rigor in a social study, it may be necessary to sample at least 1 in 7 people of humanity. Thus (leaving aside the crisis of reproducibility or other problems) the vast majority of quantitative works, for example in psychology, lack rigor in the method of Science (as a verb).
Finally we have something different in regards to the administration of science (as a profession) carried out by academics.
The academy is to Science what prostitution is to love, for the naive they may look the same, but they are not the same thing. Taleb
The academy is to Science what prostitution is to love, for the naive they may look the same, but they are not the same thing. Taleb
