The underlying question “is gender biasing the production of scientific knowledge and scientific narratives?” I think is important and deserving of careful consideration, and the application of that question to the area of glaceology no more narrow than something like “the categorial semantics of the pi-calculus”. De-biasing knowledge in psychology is a recurrent theme in LessWrong, and gender is possibly a bias that is hampering scientific discovery.
It is doubly unfortunate that the theme is treated as if it were literary critique or politology, instead of experimental psychology: on one side, narrative instead of experimental exploration gets us no closer to the truth, on the other side it exposes the whole field to ridicule, thereby pushing away positive contribution.
Am I steel-manning too much? There were no such things as “feminist study” when I attended university, and even now it’s not so widespread here in Italy, so I don’t know if such disciplines are well-known academic jokes or not.
I agree that we should pay more attention to biases, including gender biases.
Unfortunately, it seems to me that people who talk loudest about these topics are even worse than average; that their strategy is more or less “reversed stupidity plus strong political mindkilling”. They usually don’t care about scientific method at all, because they see this whole process as a fight between the good side and the evil side, and the scientific method itself is a part of the evil side. (They seem unable to understand the difference between “a white cis het man said ‘2+2=4’” and “‘2+2=4’ is an evil white cis het fact”.)
They usually don’t care about scientific method at all, because they see this whole process as a fight between the good side and the evil side, and the scientific method itself is a part of the evil side.
No. The would go after Kuhn and the majority of people who investigated scientifically what scientists do and say that there isn’t one method that can be called the scientific method. The standard HPS belief is that scientists in different fields use different methods.
They usually don’t care about scientific method at all, because they see this whole process as a fight between the good side and the evil side
The scientific method is a tool of fascist oppression!
You think I’m joking? Let me quote you from a presumably peer-reviewed International Journal of Evidence-Based Healthcare:
the objective of this paper is to demonstrate that the evidence-based movement in the health sciences is outrageously exclusionary and dangerously normative with regards to scientific knowledge. As such, we assert that the evidence-based movement in health sciences constitutes a good example of microfascism at play in the contemporary scientific
arena.
Right, but criticising the movement isn’t the same thing as criticising the scientific method.
For example, doors the writer believe that the movement actually succeeds in applying the scientific method?
To be fair, I haven’t checked out the source, and I’m unlikely to, on mobile. The quote doesn’t establish what you want to say, but maybe the source does, and I should have considered that in my first reply.
doors the writer believe that the movement actually succeeds in applying the scientific method?
The writer is interested in power structures and fighting the fascists:
Because ‘regimes of truth’ such as the evidence-based movement currently enjoy a privileged status, scholars have not only a scientific duty, but also an ethical obligation to deconstruct these regimes of power.
As far as I can see, basically the authors of the paper want decouple the idea of “truth” from empirical reality and evidence. Demanding evidence to support your claims is an act of oppression and intolerance.
As far as I can see, basically the authors of the paper want decouple the idea of “truth” from empirical reality and evidence.
That’s not true. The ‘regimes of truth’ used by judges at court don’t decouple truth from empirical reality and evidence. At the same time it’s not the same ‘regime of truth’ used in EBM. They argue against monoculture and that there’s one standard of truth that everybody in science has to follow.
That not only means that the existing questions might get biased answers but also that important questions don’t get scientific investigation because they are not interesting in the EBM paradigm. That’s classic Kuhn. Scientific paradigms not only determine answers but also questions and old questions often get forgotten with new paradigms.
They bring the question: How should a woman assign meaning to the diagnosis she just received that,
genetically, she has a 40% probability of developing breast cancer in her lifetime? What will this number mean in real terms, when she is asked to evaluate the meaning of such personal risk in the context of her entire life, a life whose value and duration are themselves impossible factors in the
equation?
Under classic EBM that’s not a question about which you can write a scientific paper.
Yes, I think that’s about correct—there should be.
In high-energy physics there seems to be a 5-sigma standard. Does that mean that climate scientists shouldn’t say they found strong evidence for global warming when climate scientists don’t have 5-sigma’s? No. It’s quite alright for the climate scientists to use different standards.
Bioinformatics isn’t part of medical statistics because the bioinformatics community uses different standards of evidence. It least that’s how my statistics professor explained why a distinct bioinformatics community developed.
When we look at 23andMe we see the conflicts of those standards. Risk profiles developed by 23andMe are reasonable from a bioinformatics perspective. At the same time they don’t fulfill the values of the medical statistics community.
Science doesn’t profit from forcing the same standards on everyone. That doesn’t mean that the FDA can’t have a uniform standards for approving drugs but the scientific community as a whole benefits from plurality.
Whether a question is “interesting” has nothing to do with single or multiple standards of truth.
That might be true, but is besides the point. Their claim doesn’t focus on standards of truth but on regimes of truth, with they equate with Kuhn’s term paradigm.
The fact that Kuhnian paradigm change comes with a change of the questions that interest scientists, seems to be well-established to me. Do you think that’s wrong?
That’s not a question for science. It’s a question for a psychotherapist, lay or professional.
How does that make the question non-scientific? Do you consider psychotherapy a non-scientific field?
Saying that the question isn’t scientific also opens up the area for lunatics. There are pro-life Christians who’s insistance on doing everything to keep people alive results in old people getting effectively tortured. Our society would profit if we had good scientists who would work on the topic of how to provide old people a dignified way to die.
In high-energy physics there seems to be a 5-sigma standard. Does that mean that climate scientists shouldn’t say they found strong evidence for global warming when climate scientists don’t have 5-sigma’s?
You are still confused.
In the context of this thread the standard that we are talking about is the standard of the objective reality. Things are measured and evaluated by how well they match the reality. This is the standard—common to physicists and (hopefully, though I have my doubts) climate scientists.
different standards of evidence
Still confused.
Here you are not even talking about standards of evidence (which determine what kind of evidence would you find acceptable). You are talking about standards of proof where “proof” is defined as “enough to convince us to accept the following as true”. That can certainly be different in different fields. Even from the theoretical-optimal point of view, it should vary depending on how much you stand to gain if the hypothesis turns out to be actually true and how much you stand to lose otherwise.
The standard of proof for physicists is five sigmas, usually.
But those are not the standards about which we are talking in this thread.
Do you consider psychotherapy a non-scientific field?
Yes. At best it’s at a proto-science stage, trying to gather evidence. I don’t think it had much success in systematising it yet.
Our society would profit if we had good scientists who would work on the topic of how to provide old people a dignified way to die.
No, I don’t think so. In fact, I think it would be very harmful for the society to decide that there is a single, objective, “scientific” dignified way to die.
Things are measured and evaluated by how well they match the reality.
No, you are confused because you try to build up a strawman.
The criticism of EBM made in the article isn’t that the authors want that truth isn’t evaluated by how well something matches reality. It’s that the particular way of checking how well something matches reality used by EBM claims a monopoly and that this monopoly is bad.
In practice the authors consider it facism that the FDA forbids 23andMe for giving patient data interpretation. 23andMe doesn’t provide evidence for their product that’s high in the Cochrane hierachy and that’s why the FDA blocks them.
In addition they also argue that focusing on objective measurements isn’t enough. It’s easy to find subjective measurements that are generally believed to be of importance: Statements of conflicts of interest. If a paper declares a conflict of interest that’s not about the objective facts the paper investigates but about a subjective feature of the investigator. Having knowledge about that subjective feature helps the reader to know how well the paper matches up with reality.
It’s a complete strawman to assume that requiring papers to report conflicts of interest and having the readers take them into account somehow moves the reader away from reality.
Apart from the the IPCC report does contain subjective expert credence as a standard for whether certain statements have something to do with reality. It’s not just that the particle-physics community has a higher bar for discoveries.
In fact, I think it would be very harmful for the society to decide that there is a single, objective, “scientific” dignified way to die.
The whole point of this discussion that to be able to have good scientific view on the topic, medicine would need to move away from focusing on trying to provide a single objective answer.
I don’t know. I bothered because he thought you might see that your characterization of the views of other people as not thinking that truth should be about reality is a strawman. I don’t know why you believed that you could convince me that the evil outgroup holds that view. Especially without really doing anything besides saying: “Look those morons don’t believe in reality”.
The underlying question “is gender biasing the production of scientific knowledge and scientific narratives?”
The problem is that the article doesn’t just focus on that question. It also frequently makes deontological claims about how natives knowledge should be more respected. Including knowledge that supposes that glaciers don’t like certain smells.
The underlying question “is gender biasing the production of scientific knowledge and scientific narratives?”
Not quite—your question belongs to the field of sociology of science, more or less, and this is a paper in an Earth sciences journal. The authors don’t ask questions about gender bias, they specifically propose a “feminist glaciology framework”, in part because they unconditionally assume that this bias exists and severely impacts the study of glaciers.
gets us no closer to the truth
I see no evidence whatsoever that this paper has any interest in what you or I might consider “truth” of the scientific kind.
I don’t know if such disciplines are well-known academic jokes or not.
The underlying question “is gender biasing the production of scientific knowledge and scientific narratives?” I think is important and deserving of careful consideration, and the application of that question to the area of glaceology no more narrow than something like “the categorial semantics of the pi-calculus”.
De-biasing knowledge in psychology is a recurrent theme in LessWrong, and gender is possibly a bias that is hampering scientific discovery.
It is doubly unfortunate that the theme is treated as if it were literary critique or politology, instead of experimental psychology: on one side, narrative instead of experimental exploration gets us no closer to the truth, on the other side it exposes the whole field to ridicule, thereby pushing away positive contribution.
Am I steel-manning too much? There were no such things as “feminist study” when I attended university, and even now it’s not so widespread here in Italy, so I don’t know if such disciplines are well-known academic jokes or not.
I agree that we should pay more attention to biases, including gender biases.
Unfortunately, it seems to me that people who talk loudest about these topics are even worse than average; that their strategy is more or less “reversed stupidity plus strong political mindkilling”. They usually don’t care about scientific method at all, because they see this whole process as a fight between the good side and the evil side, and the scientific method itself is a part of the evil side. (They seem unable to understand the difference between “a white cis het man said ‘2+2=4’” and “‘2+2=4’ is an evil white cis het fact”.)
No. The would go after Kuhn and the majority of people who investigated scientifically what scientists do and say that there isn’t one method that can be called
the scientific method. The standard HPS belief is that scientists in different fields use different methods.The scientific method is a tool of fascist oppression!
You think I’m joking? Let me quote you from a presumably peer-reviewed International Journal of Evidence-Based Healthcare:
(source)
“The evidence-based movement in the health sciences” is not the scientific method. It’s a movement.
It’s a movement to use the scientific method.
Right, but criticising the movement isn’t the same thing as criticising the scientific method.
For example, doors the writer believe that the movement actually succeeds in applying the scientific method?
To be fair, I haven’t checked out the source, and I’m unlikely to, on mobile. The quote doesn’t establish what you want to say, but maybe the source does, and I should have considered that in my first reply.
The writer is interested in power structures and fighting the fascists:
As far as I can see, basically the authors of the paper want decouple the idea of “truth” from empirical reality and evidence. Demanding evidence to support your claims is an act of oppression and intolerance.
That’s not true. The ‘regimes of truth’ used by judges at court don’t decouple truth from empirical reality and evidence. At the same time it’s not the same ‘regime of truth’ used in EBM. They argue against monoculture and that there’s one standard of truth that everybody in science has to follow.
That not only means that the existing questions might get biased answers but also that important questions don’t get scientific investigation because they are not interesting in the EBM paradigm. That’s classic Kuhn. Scientific paradigms not only determine answers but also questions and old questions often get forgotten with new paradigms.
They bring the question:
How should a woman assign meaning to the diagnosis she just received that, genetically, she has a 40% probability of developing breast cancer in her lifetime? What will this number mean in real terms, when she is asked to evaluate the meaning of such personal risk in the context of her entire life, a life whose value and duration are themselves impossible factors in the equation?Under classic EBM that’s not a question about which you can write a scientific paper.
Yes, I think that’s about correct—there should be.
Whether a question is “interesting” has nothing to do with single or multiple standards of truth.
That’s not a question for science. It’s a question for a psychotherapist, lay or professional.
Correct and I like it this way. Not everything has to be science.
In high-energy physics there seems to be a 5-sigma standard. Does that mean that climate scientists shouldn’t say they found strong evidence for global warming when climate scientists don’t have 5-sigma’s? No. It’s quite alright for the climate scientists to use different standards.
Bioinformatics isn’t part of medical statistics because the bioinformatics community uses different standards of evidence. It least that’s how my statistics professor explained why a distinct bioinformatics community developed.
When we look at 23andMe we see the conflicts of those standards. Risk profiles developed by 23andMe are reasonable from a bioinformatics perspective. At the same time they don’t fulfill the values of the medical statistics community.
Science doesn’t profit from forcing the same standards on everyone. That doesn’t mean that the FDA can’t have a uniform standards for approving drugs but the scientific community as a whole benefits from plurality.
That might be true, but is besides the point. Their claim doesn’t focus on standards of truth but on regimes of truth, with they equate with Kuhn’s term paradigm.
The fact that Kuhnian paradigm change comes with a change of the questions that interest scientists, seems to be well-established to me. Do you think that’s wrong?
How does that make the question non-scientific? Do you consider psychotherapy a non-scientific field?
Saying that the question isn’t scientific also opens up the area for lunatics. There are pro-life Christians who’s insistance on doing everything to keep people alive results in old people getting effectively tortured. Our society would profit if we had good scientists who would work on the topic of how to provide old people a dignified way to die.
You are still confused.
In the context of this thread the standard that we are talking about is the standard of the objective reality. Things are measured and evaluated by how well they match the reality. This is the standard—common to physicists and (hopefully, though I have my doubts) climate scientists.
Still confused.
Here you are not even talking about standards of evidence (which determine what kind of evidence would you find acceptable). You are talking about standards of proof where “proof” is defined as “enough to convince us to accept the following as true”. That can certainly be different in different fields. Even from the theoretical-optimal point of view, it should vary depending on how much you stand to gain if the hypothesis turns out to be actually true and how much you stand to lose otherwise.
The standard of proof for physicists is five sigmas, usually.
But those are not the standards about which we are talking in this thread.
Yes. At best it’s at a proto-science stage, trying to gather evidence. I don’t think it had much success in systematising it yet.
No, I don’t think so. In fact, I think it would be very harmful for the society to decide that there is a single, objective, “scientific” dignified way to die.
No, you are confused because you try to build up a strawman.
The criticism of EBM made in the article isn’t that the authors want that truth isn’t evaluated by how well something matches reality. It’s that the particular way of checking how well something matches reality used by EBM claims a monopoly and that this monopoly is bad.
In practice the authors consider it facism that the FDA forbids 23andMe for giving patient data interpretation. 23andMe doesn’t provide evidence for their product that’s high in the Cochrane hierachy and that’s why the FDA blocks them.
In addition they also argue that focusing on objective measurements isn’t enough. It’s easy to find subjective measurements that are generally believed to be of importance: Statements of conflicts of interest. If a paper declares a conflict of interest that’s not about the objective facts the paper investigates but about a subjective feature of the investigator. Having knowledge about that subjective feature helps the reader to know how well the paper matches up with reality.
It’s a complete strawman to assume that requiring papers to report conflicts of interest and having the readers take them into account somehow moves the reader away from reality.
Apart from the the IPCC report does contain subjective expert credence as a standard for whether certain statements have something to do with reality. It’s not just that the particle-physics community has a higher bar for discoveries.
The whole point of this discussion that to be able to have good scientific view on the topic, medicine would need to move away from focusing on trying to provide a single objective answer.
Why did I even bother.
Tap.
I don’t know. I bothered because he thought you might see that your characterization of the views of other people as not thinking that truth should be about reality is a strawman. I don’t know why you believed that you could convince me that the evil outgroup holds that view. Especially without really doing anything besides saying: “Look those morons don’t believe in reality”.
The problem is that the article doesn’t just focus on that question. It also frequently makes deontological claims about how natives knowledge should be more respected. Including knowledge that supposes that glaciers don’t like certain smells.
Not quite—your question belongs to the field of sociology of science, more or less, and this is a paper in an Earth sciences journal. The authors don’t ask questions about gender bias, they specifically propose a “feminist glaciology framework”, in part because they unconditionally assume that this bias exists and severely impacts the study of glaciers.
I see no evidence whatsoever that this paper has any interest in what you or I might consider “truth” of the scientific kind.
It depends on who you ask :-/