Relevant Sequences post: Scientific Evidence, Legal Evidence, Rational Evidence. I think this may be a byproduct of the leadership of governmental organizations having too many lawyers (and legal culture); the “only a published peer-reviewed study counts as evidence” thing seems like a natural result of hybridizing the legal notion of evidence (something admissible in court) with the scientific notion of evidence (something produced via the scientific method).
To pick a nit: science accepts (or should accept) evidence which is not produced “via the scientific method”. Ordinary everyday experience, anecdotes from friends, historical records, intuitive arguments about “beauty” or “naturalness”, inferences from causal models, and pure math all contribute to scientific knowledge. The reason for privileging scientific experiment over most of these is not that the others cannot be evidence, but that rigorous experiment allows us to more thoroughly rule out alternate explanations and establish causation.
You probably already know this, but it’s worth reiterating given the context of the above.
nit on the nit: anything that is in fact used to produce science becomes by definition part of the scientific method.
And within research the distintiction whether something is on the “anecdotes from friends level” or “meta-analyses from decades” is a pretty significant one.
And if we as someone to “believe science” that is often how their personal “anecdotes from friends” level clashes with productions from professional belief formers.
The danger model where science gets ignored is when that everyday experience dominates and that is suspected to form bad epistemics. There is atleast the idea hovering around that science is more reliable because it can get by without the utilization of this kind of “dirty epistemics” that scienced should strive to be as dirt-free as possible to practise.
Relevant Sequences post: Scientific Evidence, Legal Evidence, Rational Evidence. I think this may be a byproduct of the leadership of governmental organizations having too many lawyers (and legal culture); the “only a published peer-reviewed study counts as evidence” thing seems like a natural result of hybridizing the legal notion of evidence (something admissible in court) with the scientific notion of evidence (something produced via the scientific method).
To pick a nit: science accepts (or should accept) evidence which is not produced “via the scientific method”. Ordinary everyday experience, anecdotes from friends, historical records, intuitive arguments about “beauty” or “naturalness”, inferences from causal models, and pure math all contribute to scientific knowledge. The reason for privileging scientific experiment over most of these is not that the others cannot be evidence, but that rigorous experiment allows us to more thoroughly rule out alternate explanations and establish causation.
You probably already know this, but it’s worth reiterating given the context of the above.
nit on the nit: anything that is in fact used to produce science becomes by definition part of the scientific method.
And within research the distintiction whether something is on the “anecdotes from friends level” or “meta-analyses from decades” is a pretty significant one.
And if we as someone to “believe science” that is often how their personal “anecdotes from friends” level clashes with productions from professional belief formers.
The danger model where science gets ignored is when that everyday experience dominates and that is suspected to form bad epistemics. There is atleast the idea hovering around that science is more reliable because it can get by without the utilization of this kind of “dirty epistemics” that scienced should strive to be as dirt-free as possible to practise.