Most Scientifically Literate Senator explains how science can be wrong, so we should never question it when it's settled :sciencejak:

https://x.com/ianmSC/status/1885114774247399621

IDK what the context is


https://i.rdrama.net/images/17187151446911044.webp https://i.rdrama.net/images/1735584487Pd3ql1pai5_mfA.webp https://i.rdrama.net/images/17177781034384797.webp

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Quarks don't follow Newtonian kinematics therefore science is fake and straight and you can fly

All this chick said was "many emerging hypotheses get disproven when tested, but once we fail to disprove them repeatedly we accept them as established theory, and you are fighting against established theory."

But she had to use small words so JDs and MBAs could understand it.

!ifrickinglovescience !sophistry

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Heliocentrism was settled science for 1000 years. There's always room for doubt and criticism. If you think otherwise you are fake academic, you believe in Scientism not science.

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ill stop doubting The Science when the replication crisis stops being a crisis

https://www.nature.com/articles/533452a

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Replication_crisis

https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-39054778

The point of real :marseythissmall: science is to continuously question and test things. When :sciencejak: convinces people to stop doing that you end up ina world with talcum powder causing ovarian cancer, glycophosphate causing lymphoma, and a "consensus of experts" agreeing that children who play with the wrong doll should be given chemicals to prevent them from going through puberty.

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continuously question and test things

I agree if what you mean is closer to "continually nootice and test things." You don't question something unless there is a deviation from the expectation, which is how we learned about the isotopes of chlorine.

But just randomly declaring something to be wrong without having nooticed a deviation is how you introduce a biased conclusion before you even state the nature of the problem to be solved.

As for discovering that chemicals cause cancer decades after their discovery and use, that's called "discovering new data that you didn't test for because it wasn't part of the experiments, and then regulating its use."

People discovered how to stack bricks to make houses but sometimes they fell down, so they found better ways to stack bricks so that they didn't fall down anymore.

The issue with :marseytrain2:ing your kindergartener is based on a targeted demographic (biased) population given the chance to opt-in (biased twice) resulting in a sample size of less than 60 people.

Two questions asked them were "are you trans" and "have you ever attempted suicide." 27 said yes to both, and that's where we get 40%. And then :marseytrain2:s paraded that data so that they can accuse people of trans genocide.

Yet those two questions were never asked in connection. That is to say, they didn't establish if they attempted suicide due to issues with being trans. But the social narrative being pushed is that not letting kids :marseytrain2: out is causative of high suicide, based on shitty science.

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As for discovering that chemicals cause cancer decades after their discovery and use, that's called "discovering new data that you didn't test for because it wasn't part of the experiments, and then regulating its use."

In other words, question "the science" constantly.

Trans lives matter

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Not quite.. If nobody was getting cancer, then you wouldn't ask the question if something was causing cancer.

If you constantly questioned everything all the time without having noticed anything different you'd just keep doing the same thing over and over again.

You need to "nootice constantly" and then ask a question (form a hypothesis) and retest it and refine rhe conclusion with the extra data.

When you see deviations in the results from the theoretical expectation, you need to review your methodology and apparatus first, and then after that explore other reasons why the deviation occurred.

It's how we developed quantum theory because it just didnt follow how cannon balls fly.

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The problem is, with any sufficiently complicated questions you can't "just notice deviations". The guy who invented half of the modern statistical methods argued that smoking doesn't cause lung cancer but alleviates the symptoms. Or, in case of global warming, there's no such thing as "global average temperature", you can't measure it, you can measure local temperatures and feed them into a model that averages them over space and time. And then you have models that make predictions, but these predictions are not expected to work on timeframes shorter than decades (for example, apparently there were 10 years of inexplicable global cooling between 2005 and 2015 or so).

So what do you do when you don't have anything resembling a smoking gun, no possible experiment where you record the trajectory of a cannonball and show that it fits the prediction of some theory better than the other, but you still want to predict the future despite this uncertainty, like for Covid or AGW? There's one thing you can do, you can try to evaluate the health of the field.

For example, if you wake up in a world where there's a consensus among 97% of the tobaccologists that tobacco cures many ills (schizophrenia! It's true!) and definitely doesn't cause cancer, and coincidentally 97% of the tobaccologists are paid by tobacco companies, we can be certain that the consensus has nothing to do with truth. In a world where smoking is good for you they will say so, in a world where smoking is bad for you they will say that it's good, so hearing them saying that it's good gives you zero information about the state of the world.

Note that the scientists here are not bad people, they are good people and honestly believe that they are doing good, and that tobacco skeptics are the bad people actually. They just have these incentives...

1. There's a guy in a tobacco company that goes before the shareholders a couple of times per year and reports on the money spent on science grants and the wondrous properties of tobacco this helped to discover. A scientist that fails to discover wondrous properties, or God forbid discovers some less than wondrous properties of smoking, is useless for the corporate guy and will not receive any more grants and will have to go study something else.

2. Other scientists are not too fond of a maverick whose message is basically "our field is useless, pack up and go study something else." As good scientists they will find and point out all sorts of methodological problems during peer review.

3. Once the consensus that smoking is good is established, most of them will see their mission not as discovering the truth (which is known) but as educating the public. Rogue scientists yapping about lung cancer are just... evil?

4. Oh yeah God help us if the issue becomes politicized, i.e. for some reason that has nothing to do with truth people's opinions on the issue will become strongly correlated with their opinions on gay marriage or immigration.

Now observe that there's a guy in the Department of Energy that goes before the Congress and tells them about all the horrible consequences of climate change that scientists have discovered, and how the DoE budget must be increased to fund more studies into that and into green energy solutions. And most climate researchers are funded by his grants or other agencies with same incentives. And as the 2008 "Climategate" emails demonstrated, they were a) sloppy as frick, b) had this siege mentality in spades.

Same applied to all the bullshit that has ever been said about Covid. The moment Trump called it "China virus" the mainstream scientific community consensus about its origin became useless. The moment there were PPE shortages the WHO started lying that masks don't work. The moment Trump said that HCQ works, all science about it became useless.

We don't know how to do science on uncertain politically charged topics, and, like, the problem is not that we don't know how, it's that we don't know how to convince scientists that if they keep making clowns of themselves to dunk on political opponents, the society might fall apart.

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how about you dont tone police people and not discourage people asking questions/habe an open discourse? Asking too many questions in any case is a far better circumstance than asking too few. Though I will concede not every question needs to be asked, however dont see asking too many questions as big a problem as asking too few/being unquestioning.

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"can I see your work / can you show me the math"

Yeah dude, that's part of the review process.

There is a difference between asking questions (trying to learn) and questioning (rejecting the data and theory).

However the only way to have an actual honest open dialog is to have the person who disagrees to replicate the others guy's work.

If you don't know how to replicate it, then you honestly don't possess the training to question someone else's results.

It's like telling someone they spelled something wrong if you don't know how to read.

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If you don't know how to replicate it, then you honestly don't possess the training to question someone else's results

>its not that the study was wrong, its just that that scientist who couldnt replicate it was a big dumb. Also they shouldnt try to replicate/question other studies bc of this. :marseysmoothbrain:

Also the senator in this thread isnt even referring to what science is being questioned, so the nuance thay your takking about may not apply. Again, in a general sense questioning/being skeptical of science is a better circumstance, than just blindly agreeing with "experts" especially when it comes to public policy. Also its insane to browbeat people for "questioning the science" when it comes to matters of public health after how poorly "the experts" handled that.

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Or maybe we shouldn't reverse the burden of proof which is kind of was @ACA was eluding to.

Everyone loves to try and cherrypick shit to disrupt the normal process since it's a million times easier than proving their own conspirashit.

e.g.

>I have this really cool study from China funded by the Chinese government that says Acupuncture acktually works. The fact that there's an existing preponderance of evidence from across the globe and a variety of unbiased sources coupled with a lack of biologic plausibility or mechanism effectively demonstrating Acupuncture is bullshit is irrelevant because sometimes science is wrong, therefore we cannot definitely say Acupuncture is bad or ineffective and we should continue to waste large amounts of resources re-answering questions that are already addressed by the premise which is science can be wrong therefore we should just accept Acupuncture good because you can't prove a negative

Despite conspiracy shit about covid etc. there remains a reasonable consensus and a preponderance of data for balancing safety and efficacy, so in lack of actual proof, antivaxxers give up on solving this peoblem and attack the question ad nauseum, which is kind of what it sounds this dumbass politician was trying to shit out of her mouth instead of saying:

"stfu we're tired of playing whack-a-mole with conspiracy shit lol get fukd"

https://i.rdrama.net/images/1738440691QuowXmvCi8E2uw.webp

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there remains a reasonable consensus and a preponderance of data for balancing safety and efficacy,

they say that about putting kids on puberty blockers/gender affirming care.

also The Science says your wrong about studying brave and valid accupuncture

https://hms.harvard.edu/news/exploring-science-acupuncture

https://www.hopkinsmedicine.org/health/wellness-and-prevention/acupuncture

https://www.va.gov/greater-los-angeles-health-care/stories/its-amazing-how-the-ancient-art-of-acupuncture-is-making-waves-at-west-la-va/

:marseyjewoftheorientglow: and :marseyjones: stay winning

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they say that about putting kids on puberty blockers/gender affirming care.

No there never was consensus or preponderance of evidence which is why it is self righting as a function of this very process which started to turn tide even at the peak of leftoid political dominance and is so weak it literally took one angry ugly woman to make all :marseytrain2:s online collectively piss their panties because they've gotten away with trying to abuse these same arguments without doing any of the actual work which allows it to be easily contradicted unlike hard science stuff like vaccines, nuclear power, evolution etc.

The cass report is definitely also a case of cherrypicking but the fact that was better researched than 99.999% of all garbage studies on :marseytrain:s is a testiment to the fact that this was always some post-modern Sokal affair hoax that literally got out of hand and escaped from a gender study lab in Portland, Oregon.

https://rdrama.net/post/193924/marseydoctortalking-doctors-rise-up-new-marseytrain

https://rdrama.net/post/270363/wpath-phenology-in-shambles-because-of

The Science says your wrong about studying brave and valid accupuncture

Yes, like I said, cherrypicking is a million times easier. Thats why people advocate for science based medicine over evidence based medicine because r-slurs call qualitative data about fefes valid despite having mostly shit utility.

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I couldn't have said it better. And I didn't. Nice work.

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Impressive. Normally people with such severe developmental disabilities struggle to write much more than a sentence or two. You really have exceeded our expectations for the writing portion. Sadly the coherency of your writing, along with your abilities in the social skills and reading portions, are far behind your peers with similar disabilities.

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I'm talking way too general probably.

But yes, a farmer who has a personal anecdote about boofing anti-parasite medication to cure a viral infection has as much validity as a college girl who used crystals to cure cancer. They're both completely uncontrolled and don't aggregate with other uncontrolled anecdotes.

Like I said, if I can't read, I can't correct someone else's spelling. I'm not qualified to conduct a vaccine study, and though I don't feel like people should blindly follow, there's a limitations to how informed my questions would be.

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Like I said, if I can't read, I can't correct someone else's spelling. I'm not qualified to conduct a vaccine study, and though I don't feel like people should blindly follow, there's a limitations to how informed my questions would be.

You're talking like understanding statistical significance requires a PhD. It does not.

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Anyone can stats.

Finding a systemic problem in someone correctly following the methodology, implementing positive and negative controls at different intervals, determining if someone selected the correct analytical equipment to gather and quantity samples, reviewing overall QAQC from a parent standard to a prepared concentrated solution -- these are somewhat specialized and very useful for looking at an experiment.

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Kinda. There's more to it with OLS and other methods. It also helps to know the competing theories for a specific field, but yeah if I wanted to pick apart a vaccine paper, I could, but I wouldn't be surprised if I made a wrong conclusion because of something particular that I didn't know with that field.

I know you like to troll around, but I wanted to give me 2 cents. :marseyexcited:

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I feel like your arguing that the questioning especially when done by the lesser educated isnt perfect, butt that hardly vitiates my argument that questioning is important and in general people who tell you to simply not question something have malicious intentions for you.

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I was just saying elsewhere that once the discussion enters the political arena, scientific discussion ends and everything becomes an accusation that the opponent is a secret skill for something nefarious.

If you want to put up wind turbines, you're a communist shill who wants to destroy the American economy by burning less oil.

If you don't want to put up wind turbines, you're a Big Oil shill who sees his profit margins dwindling.

Everyone who disagrees with you secretly wants to hurt you. That's modern science discourse.

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The talcum powder cancer thing isn't even real, it's just another example of bad science driven by some lawyer's desire for profit

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j/k b-word I'm out double checking for aether again. :marseytwerking:

Teach the controversy.

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Frick yeah, you can use my phlogiston bottle

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The michaelson-morey never disproved it and the idea of propagation without a medium is impossible

Trans lives matter

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This is still unbelievably r-slurred

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It's r-slurred that she had to explain the scientific method to educated decision-making adults after the year 1700

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No.

Science is changing rapidly and many hypothesis that are "proven" become disproven in other contexts (improved testing methodology). There is a replication crisis because of various failures in the scientific community, typically due to monetary and social pressure.. And lastly, much of what is colloquially considered settled science and theories are often just hypothesis, like much of evolution.

There is no such thing as settled science.

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We know the spin and mass and charge of leptons.

There's a shit ton of settled science.

People just get pissed off watching us continue to poke at new shit and we watch stuff get disproven in our own lifetimes.

A major failure is that we don't keep a Giant Book of Disproven Shit because nobody wants to waste the time or be published in it.

But it would save us so much money and wasted effort.

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In scientific circles, but most colloquially conversation or political topics aren't talking about chemical properties or something. In these contexts "settled science" is often bullshit.

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True, a huge blind spot is in science communication. You can't talk like an egghead, and you can't aim too low. You can't explain every exception and caveat, but you can't leave them out entirely.

But also, once something scientific has entered the political arena the message has been lost, because the political opinion must prevail over everything else.

"If you spin a magnet in a coil then you induce electricity."

People are okay with this.

"There is a massive spike in the infrared absorption in the C-O region."

People are okay with this.

"Alkane combustion fully oxidizes carbon in the presence of oxygen."

People are okay with this.

"CO2 interacts with water and becomes carbonic acid and lowers its pH."

People are okay with this.

"If you combust alkanes to spin a magnet you can power a city but it also comes with increased CO2 in the air and is heated by infrared rays from the sun and also alters ocean pH which isn't good for plant or animal life in it. Maybe we can implement other ways to spin magnets to get all the positives without the negatives."

COMMIE CUTE TWINK I'LL FRICKING KILL YOU

The discussion stops being about science and becomes an accusation that the scientist is secretly motivated to destroy the American economy and the nation as a whole.

He just wanted to make magnet go spinny.

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A lot of scientists have ulterior and even subconscious motivations. Led to the replicability crisis. It's a problem and it leads to a lot of distrust.

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That's why we need to quit letting Chinese students into US PhD programs. I was fricking around in a lab and the grad student was pissed because the foreigners didn't know that falsifying data was bad, and so now all PhD candidates had to complete an "ethics in science" courses.

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CO2 interacts with water and becomes carbonic acid and lowers its pH."

People are okay with this.

I'm not. I don't like water with lower pH levels. :marseyindignant:

If you combust alkanes to spin a magnet you can power a city but it also comes with increased CO2 in the air and is heated by infrared rays from the sun and also alters ocean pH which isn't good for plant or animal life in it. Maybe we can implement other ways to spin magnets to get all the positives without the negatives."

Keynes's dad has a great article about the difference between positive science and normative claims. You know, the "is" versus "ought to be" distinction.

That reminds me of James Buchanan, the economist, and his article about economists having two roles available: one as merely describing phenomena and the other as prescribing advice like a doctor. The latter usually gets into trouble because he's stepping into the realm of politics, emotional voters, and all that claptrap.

What annoys people about science is when they start prescribing policy, especially when the scientist gets an attitude about it while ignoring other factors (namely, costs of implementing some environmental policy or regulation, and they also ignore externalized costs like mandating everyone to have an EV bevause CO2 emissions would be lower).

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Then there's the opposite situation.

9/11 happens and people say "why didn't the government do something to stop this?"

If the government described the collection of theories around global warming yet said "but we aren't going to do anything about it" they would get blasted for being negligent and allowing a dangerous situation to escalate.

Unfortunately there's a strong lobby whose job is not to attack the policies but to "just ask questions" at the core science so that people can't tell the difference between two proposals and make a truly informed decision.

The choices they are given are

"Let's spin magnets a different way"

Vs

"scientists are watermelons, green on the outside and red on the inside."

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I'm sorry but if you're unable to properly explain concepts in simpler terms, then you shouldn't act as an authority. Part of being a good leader or politician is being able to bridge the gap between groups and be an effective communicator. This? not so much.

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Idk it was obvious to me but then again I watch a lot of Rick and Morty

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