Cingulate posted:

I don't think this is all that bad; for example: quoting your own blog posts can be better than linking to one primary study, because no single study is conclusive, but a blog post can discuss and evaluate multiple studies. Citing popular media discussions of studies is of course terrible, but then, it's not like anyone else would not be doing this - it's terrifyingly common.
And Scott isn't a scientist, he's a blogger and a doctor. He should be held to the standards of journalists, not scientists.
You're right though that he's conveying an impression that does not stand to proper scrutiny.

My personal take on what's most wrong with his post there is how he's fully buying into this, here's-one-narrative-here's-another-one-is-false thing in the way he is setting it up (even though he'd probably argue he is above that). He is, surely, to some extent correct. The question is, how large of a factor is this in the grand scheme of things? How do the alternatives fare, what's their cost/benefit trade-off? This should be viewed numerically, not categorically.

But that's admittedly hard, and it's much easier on human brains. (This is in fact a primary reason why machine-based reasoning is often superior.)

Lastly, you should not give the impression that he's actually in the Moldburg camp politically speaking; he finishes off the post by saying that he thinks it would be terrible if the "red tribe" was in power, because even though the "blue tribe" is bad, the "red tribe" is so much worse. (It's just that his argument makes him look like he's anti-"blue tribe".)

There is also very interesting research by Andrew Gelman showing that this perceived absolute polarization (red tribe only eats moose and Blacks, blue tribe gay marries and eats kale, and there is no contact ever but hatred) is pretty false. The world is much more purple than hard-red or hard-blue. But again, this is about quantitative, not categorical thinking, which people are bad at.

Cingulate posted:

I don't think this is all that bad; for example: quoting your own blog posts can be better than linking to one primary study, because no single study is conclusive, but a blog post can discuss and evaluate multiple studies. Citing popular media discussions of studies is of course terrible, but then, it's not like anyone else would not be doing this - it's terrifyingly common.
And Scott isn't a scientist, he's a blogger and a doctor. He should be held to the standards of journalists, not scientists.
You're right though that he's conveying an impression that does not stand to proper scrutiny.

My personal take on what's most wrong with his post there is how he's fully buying into this, here's-one-narrative-here's-another-one-is-false thing in the way he is setting it up (even though he'd probably argue he is above that). He is, surely, to some extent correct. The question is, how large of a factor is this in the grand scheme of things? How do the alternatives fare, what's their cost/benefit trade-off? This should be viewed numerically, not categorically.

But that's admittedly hard, and it's much easier on human brains. (This is in fact a primary reason why machine-based reasoning is often superior.)

Lastly, you should not give the impression that he's actually in the Moldburg camp politically speaking; he finishes off the post by saying that he thinks it would be terrible if the "red tribe" was in power, because even though the "blue tribe" is bad, the "red tribe" is so much worse. (It's just that his argument makes him look like he's anti-"blue tribe".)

There is also very interesting research by Andrew Gelman showing that this perceived absolute polarization (red tribe only eats moose and Blacks, blue tribe gay marries and eats kale, and there is no contact ever but hatred) is pretty false. The world is much more purple than hard-red or hard-blue. But again, this is about quantitative, not categorical thinking, which people are bad at.

Cingulate posted:

I don't think this is all that bad; for example: quoting your own blog posts can be better than linking to one primary study, because no single study is conclusive, but a blog post can discuss and evaluate multiple studies. Citing popular media discussions of studies is of course terrible, but then, it's not like anyone else would not be doing this - it's terrifyingly common.
And Scott isn't a scientist, he's a blogger and a doctor. He should be held to the standards of journalists, not scientists.
You're right though that he's conveying an impression that does not stand to proper scrutiny.

blastron posted:

I strenuously disagree with this concept. Scott should be held to the highest intellectual standard because he is a thought leader whose writings have a significant influence on a particular set of subcultures. He presents himself as an authority and thus should be held to the standards we would accept from one. Claiming that he should be held to a lesser standard because he's not actually as smart as he says he is completely ignores the fact that people treat his writings as if he really is.

Woolie Wool posted:

The guy's spent years and years lying down with neoreactionary dogs, it should not be surprising that he picks up their intellectual fleas. At this point he might as well sign on as neoreaction's propaganda minister.

blastron posted:

I strenuously disagree with this concept. Scott should be held to the highest intellectual standard because he is a thought leader whose writings have a significant influence on a particular set of subcultures. He presents himself as an authority and thus should be held to the standards we would accept from one. Claiming that he should be held to a lesser standard because he's not actually as smart as he says he is completely ignores the fact that people treat his writings as if he really is.

Cingulate posted:

Yeah I don't think NRx would be happy with a propaganda minister who tells people anybody but Hillary Clinton or Sanders would be extremely bad though.

And really, there is nothing he does there that you won't find in abundance on the left.

I don't think so - what you're saying applies to every NYT, and most Slate or Vox, writers, and we should clearly not hold them to the standards of science. Science is very peculiar. Even scientists shouldn't be held to the standards of science when they're making blog posts.

That is not to say journalists and bloggers shouldn't be held to standards, just that these should not be the standards of science (e.g. citing near-exclusively peer reviewed sources).

Woolie Wool posted:

Maybe we need an ad like happyelf's that adds him to your ignore list when you click it.

Literally The Worst posted:

Who? Oh you mean hpayplef

Woolie Wool posted:

D&D shitposter who made Effectronica look like a reasonable and pleasant person. The smiley exists in his dishonor.

Cingulate posted:

You guys sound angry.

Cingulate posted:

You guys sound angry.

Nessus posted:

I smell an impending puppetmaster play

Who What Now posted:

I don't think you're actually capable of recognizing human emotions if you think anyone is angry.

Cingulate posted:

No ..?

It is important that the opposition is not human. In fact, less than human.

Cingulate posted:

No ..?

It is important that the opposition is not human. In fact, less than human.

Cingulate posted:

Citing popular media discussions of studies is of course terrible, but then, it's not like anyone else would not be doing this - it's terrifyingly common.

Cingulate posted:

I don't think so - what you're saying applies to every NYT, and most Slate or Vox, writers, and we should clearly not hold them to the standards of science.

Merdifex posted:

https://twitter.com/paxdickinson/status/699973230904352768

I guess this ridiculous blogpost is 100% factual, then:

https://danieljmitchell.wordpress.com/2016/02/14/the-right-kind-of-class-warfare-workers-vs-looters/


e: When it comes to more technolibertarian evidence-free garbage about reality or skeletons, I like this tirade (read that entire thread if you dare):

https://twitter.com/alicemazzy/status/698347139718512640

Parallel Paraplegic posted:

I've always found this really weird because if you link to a news article talking about a study people seem to almost implicitly take it with a grain of salt but if you link to the abstract of a study people will see it and either not read it but assume what you're claiming is true or read it and accept it as universal truth because science said it using science words

Like it's "convincing overconfident dunning-kruger science nerds 101" and i don't know why more people haven't figured that out.

Parallel Paraplegic posted:

"Clearly"? Why not? I mean maybe if they're writing about breaking news or opinion pieces or something like that sure it doesn't really fit there but if they write an article ostensibly about science presenting themselves as an authority why shouldn't we hold them to the same standards as an actual authority? It'd certainly nip in the bud most of the stupid "SCIENTISTS CURE CANCER" stories we get any time there's a single study that made cancer in a rat go away in 4 out of 6 rats tested.

Cingulate posted:

Well first of all, it's not that the standards of science are inherently particularly high. And they're not necessarily reasonable standards for politicians, judges or journalists.

Have you looked at the actual publication for the Gravitational Waves discovery? It's absolutely opaque to me. Like, I understand the stats they're running (because I've used the same software), but for example, from reading the abstract alone, I would not have been able to tell this is about Gravitational Waves at all. This is why journals and universities make press releases - to let in lay people a bit. Okay, maybe you think science journalists should be expected to only write about fields they understand well enough to read the original papers in, maybe you think social sciences and politics stuff is much more open to lay people, and so on. But fundamentally, I think it makes sense to keep science in its own standard, and hold journalism to another. Scientific writing is about neutrality, enforcing rigor above style, clarity and conciseness, referring exclusively to scientific sources, universal peer review, and so on. Journalism should of course have standards of research, and I think the important investigative venues do have good standards (and science doesn't necessarily have the best standards even for its own purposes), but they should not need to be held to scientific standards because the job description is clearly different. In politics, you want a journalist to pick a side (the right one!), and defend it, and be eloquent and readable and concise and convincing. In science, you want a rigorous description of every single detail that would be necessary to perfectly replicate an experiment, and you want a long description of statistical analyses, including checking various assumptions, that are of zero interest but for the fact that had they not been checked, they might have made the result inapplicable, and are in the final product of zero information value to the vast majority of people, even the vast majority of people who would be interested in the topic.

Imagine what a decent journalist will do when writing a piece relying on, or even focusing on, science. They'll read the press release, and then maybe try and figure out the incredibly opaque paper, but then, and this is of critical importance in journalism, but would be absolutely inappropriate in science, they will talk to a representative panel of authorities on the subject. They're gonna call professor X at university Y and ask this authority: okay, so what does it mean that in experiment A, parameter B was measured to have value C? What's the importance of this to people who're not doing experiments on B themselves? And then they'll ask another authority, and so on. And by this process, something completely different than science emerges, but it's not necessarily worse, or even correct less often.

For example, a scientist describing a machine learning result will write about how they set up their cross validation, how they parametrized their model, on what systems they ran it, and so on. None of these are at all interesting or relevant to anybody but other machine learning researchers. They're absolutely essential to know for other researchers, but of zero value to outsiders. Outsiders just want to know that science was done "properly", and that is checked by other experts - peer review - so a science journalist should just check expert opinions and then file all of the assumption checking and methodological details and so on under "yes, science has been done properly, as confirmed by experts", and get to the meat of it ("Crazy Science Machine beats Tony Hawk at Tony Hawk on a PS1!").

Imagine, just for the sake of the argument, a sociologist somehow observes homosexual men in particularly religious societies (including the US and Pakistan) commit pedophile acts at a rate about 5% more often than expected (statistically significant after controlling for every relevant aspect, and in a huge, cross-national sample). Should this finding be publicized scientifically? Yes, of course - ideally written up in such an opaque way that no outsider knew what is even being talked about, but in the end, it should be published so long as it conforms to scientific standards. Would it be ethical for Fox News or Iranian State TV or Return of Kings or whatever to run a piece on how fags are disproportionally often kiddy twiddlers, science proves? Obviously not - because now you don't reach 150 people who calmly talk about it during a conference and then maybe use it as a footnote in a grant app, you reach 750.000 or 7.500.000 reactionary idiots, some of them young men who're out for trouble, and they're not inclined to consider nuances such as 1. this still would mean most gay men are not pedophiles, 2. this does not say that being disproportionally more commonly pedophiliac is intrinsically linked to homosexuality, but might just be an artifact of oppression (in this hypothetical world I'm speaking about), etc. No; they'll just go outside and possibly kill somebody who looks effeminate.

If I had 3 wishes about science journalism, I'd wish for:
- always include a link to the primary publication
- be much more conservative and pessimistic
- write about my research, I know it's mostly not super interesting to people not in the field, but wish is wish haha bitches

A White Guy posted:

Literally everything in this post is misinformed.

Merdifex posted:

What did you do, divabot, to piss off Wesley on Tumblr (other than existing and being a leftist)?

e: Cingulate, what the hell does Scott's NRx ramblings have to do with the state of science journalism?

Merdifex posted:

e: Cingulate, what the hell does Scott's NRx ramblings have to do with the state of science journalism?

Cingulate posted:

Well first of all, it's not that the standards of science are inherently particularly high. And they're not necessarily reasonable standards for politicians, judges or journalists.

Have you looked at the actual publication for the Gravitational Waves discovery? It's absolutely opaque to me. Like, I understand the stats they're running (because I've used the same software), but for example, from reading the abstract alone, I would not have been able to tell this is about Gravitational Waves at all. This is why journals and universities make press releases - to let in lay people a bit. Okay, maybe you think science journalists should be expected to only write about fields they understand well enough to read the original papers in, maybe you think social sciences and politics stuff is much more open to lay people, and so on. But fundamentally, I think it makes sense to keep science in its own standard, and hold journalism to another. Scientific writing is about neutrality, enforcing rigor above style, clarity and conciseness, referring exclusively to scientific sources, universal peer review, and so on. Journalism should of course have standards of research, and I think the important investigative venues do have good standards (and science doesn't necessarily have the best standards even for its own purposes), but they should not need to be held to scientific standards because the job description is clearly different. In politics, you want a journalist to pick a side (the right one!), and defend it, and be eloquent and readable and concise and convincing. In science, you want a rigorous description of every single detail that would be necessary to perfectly replicate an experiment, and you want a long description of statistical analyses, including checking various assumptions, that are of zero interest but for the fact that had they not been checked, they might have made the result inapplicable, and are in the final product of zero information value to the vast majority of people, even the vast majority of people who would be interested in the topic.

quote:

Imagine what a decent journalist will do when writing a piece relying on, or even focusing on, science. They'll read the press release, and then maybe try and figure out the incredibly opaque paper, but then, and this is of critical importance in journalism, but would be absolutely inappropriate in science, they will talk to a representative panel of authorities on the subject. They're gonna call professor X at university Y and ask this authority: okay, so what does it mean that in experiment A, parameter B was measured to have value C? What's the importance of this to people who're not doing experiments on B themselves? And then they'll ask another authority, and so on. And by this process, something completely different than science emerges, but it's not necessarily worse, or even correct less often.

For example, a scientist describing a machine learning result will write about how they set up their cross validation, how they parametrized their model, on what systems they ran it, and so on. None of these are at all interesting or relevant to anybody but other machine learning researchers. They're absolutely essential to know for other researchers, but of zero value to outsiders. Outsiders just want to know that science was done "properly", and that is checked by other experts - peer review - so a science journalist should just check expert opinions and then file all of the assumption checking and methodological details and so on under "yes, science has been done properly, as confirmed by experts", and get to the meat of it ("Crazy Science Machine beats Tony Hawk at Tony Hawk on a PS1!").

quote:

Imagine, just for the sake of the argument, a sociologist somehow observes homosexual men in particularly religious societies (including the US and Pakistan) commit pedophile acts at a rate about 5% more often than expected (statistically significant after controlling for every relevant aspect, and in a huge, cross-national sample). Should this finding be publicized scientifically? Yes, of course - ideally written up in such an opaque way that no outsider knew what is even being talked about, but in the end, it should be published so long as it conforms to scientific standards. Would it be ethical for Fox News or Iranian State TV or Return of Kings or whatever to run a piece on how fags are disproportionally often kiddy twiddlers, science proves? Obviously not - because now you don't reach 150 people who calmly talk about it during a conference and then maybe use it as a footnote in a grant app, you reach 750.000 or 7.500.000 reactionary idiots, some of them young men who're out for trouble, and they're not inclined to consider nuances such as 1. this still would mean most gay men are not pedophiles, 2. this does not say that being disproportionally more commonly pedophiliac is intrinsically linked to homosexuality, but might just be an artifact of oppression (in this hypothetical world I'm speaking about), etc. No; they'll just go outside and possibly kill somebody who looks effeminate.

quote:

If I had 3 wishes about science journalism, I'd wish for:
- always include a link to the primary publication
- be much more conservative and pessimistic
- write about my research, I know it's mostly not super interesting to people not in the field, but wish is wish haha bitches

Merdifex posted:

What did you do, divabot, to piss off Wesley on Tumblr (other than existing and being a leftist)?

Merdifex posted:

e: Cingulate, what the hell does Scott's NRx ramblings have to do with the state of science journalism?

divabot posted:

This post, which started the usual shitshow of a thread wherein post-rationalists asked what was so bad about perfectly nice fascists after all. It is nice to see Wesley testifying that my memes are of superior dankness that will destroy fascism with my Tumblr alone entirely by accident. Apparently. (Also, if Tumblr isn't "leftist" already then everything the alt-right's been telling me MAKES NO SENSE AAAA)


Cingulate is to Scott as Scott is to NRx.

The Vosgian Beast posted:

Also he is doing the "this makes me too angry to formulate a coherent response, so I will just use overblown sarcasm in an attempt to browbeat possible neutral third parties into supporting me" gambit.

Peel posted:

Cingulate keeps this thread from entering the mock thread death spiral.

Parallel Paraplegic posted:

divabot posted:

Cingulate is to Scott as Scott is to NRx.

Merdifex posted:

That's what he has always done. What he never does is actually take up the arguments he doesn't like and compose a credible and meaningful response, because assertions and sarcasm and ~*darkly hinting*~ are all easier. It's easier to say that "progressivism" is object-level wrong and intellectually bankrupt without qualifying that, after all.

Peel posted:

Cingulate keeps this thread from entering the mock thread death spiral.

quote:

Biblical prophecy is that Israel gets to rule the Middle ast [sic], and clearly the Middle East would be better for it. Plus I don’t much care what happens to the middle east, and someone needs to keep Muslims in line. Fine by me if Jews plot to implement Biblical prophecy. They are supposed to plot to do that.