Thread by @lymanstoneky

the reason we conduct experiments and collect evidence is so that we can reveal those who disagree with us to be cranks and fools, to threaten them with serious costs, penalties, and shame if they persist in the offense of disagreement.

this will be a controversial reading of how science works but i think it's basically correct.

the objective of experiments is to show as clearly as possible that objections *are untenable,* that a rational person *must* agree

that is, they carry with them the not-too-subtle threat that to the extent the new evidence is credible, disagreement marks a person as a cook or a crank of some kind

i think this is the actual reality of how scientific argument works and since those arguments occur among smart people who dislike being seen as cranks, it helps explain why so many petty scientific debates become so rancorous

this also dovetails nicely with the view that science often advances through funerals more than arguments: if you believe that basically all scientific argument is at least coercion-adjacent, then it is no surprise that attrition would be a key part of changing ideas!

i mean at the extreme, the idea that scientists collect evidence despite believing that it will *not* be "compelling" even if collected is ridiculous. evidence is collected precisely because it is hoped that it *will* be compelling.

i.e. that people who disagree will feel that they *must* accept it, even if they don't want to do so, because disagreeing with the evidence presented would obviously be crazy

this is why robustness tests proliferate to counter possible rebuttals: because we want to show that no good faith refutation is possible! but while we style this as persuasion, we're simultaneously creating a system where any continued disagreement is presented as bad faith!

so my developing view here is that science is mostly just trying stuff to see what happens, theory exists to explain why you should get scarce resources dedicated to the stuff you want to try, and evidence is collected for quasi-coercive reasons.

https://twitter.com/lymanstoneky/status/1436369605220618241?s=20

this is arising from doing all my theory readings and concluding that scientists have absolutely insanely high views of "what theory is," what we can/do know, and how change-in-opinion happens

most change of opinion happens for idiosyncratic, non-rational reasons, and any theory of science which does not acknowledge that is not in fact a scientific theory of science

note that none of this precludes the possibility that science might create large bodies of useful and true knowledge and correct theories! indeed, the mechanism im proposing seems highly likely to produce *very* useful knowledge!

humans are highly motivated to avoid personal bad consequences and the best way to show your theory is good is to produce your own compelling evidence

compelling evidence tends to be evidence that is hard to ignore or "Explain away" without looking like a crazy person

and that kind of evidence will often be useful in its own right

my theory also contains an endogenous theory of fraud in science btw which suggests that far from being a "betrayal" of science, fraud and scientific misconduct is endogenous to the scientific system

the idea that fraud exists *at odds with* the scientific system is troubling because fraud, misconduct, or consciously negligent methodology is so extraordinarily common. True Science must be extremely rare within the visible world of science!

whereas my argument is that since all theory exists to compete for scarce real resources, and all evidence exists to create compelling arguments in that competition, it is extremely obvious and intuitive that some people would just invent evidence.

it's obviously unethical, but it's also not surprising. whereas if you think of the scientific investigator as first and foremost engaged in some truth-oriented task, or committed to a method, or what have you, the frequency of not-doing-that-stuff is a problem

see, i think that the main reasons scientists experiment are
1) it is their job and if they do not do it they will get fired
2) it's fun and they like to do it
3) to battle with peers
4) because someone told them they had to

https://twitter.com/Daniel_Marbella/status/1438129016012148745

i do not in fact believe most scientists come into the office, hang their coat on the hook, and say, "today, i will find the truth."

and i think it's actually common for them to come into the office, hang their coat on the hook, and say, "today, i will prove richard is an idiot"

or "today, i will prove Green Needle Theory is nonsense" or "today, i will do the thing ive been putting off for months but i have to do because otherwise my funding is in jeopardy" or "today, i will finally get to light a chemical on fire and see what happens"

i spend a lot of time around people who tell me they are scientists and their self-described motivations are usually not To Obtain The Truth, unless you prime them on higher matters beforehand

as an aside, if my theory is correct it changes interpretation of tenure. tenure in this reading is not really there to protect people from coercion against their beliefs, but simply to *set limits on* coercion. it's like arms control or the Geneva Convention.

that we set limits on the extent of allowable coercion does not mean there is not coercion any more than the fact that we set limits on the practices of war would mean that there is no war.

one could argue the existence of laws-of-war necessarily implies the existence of war.

one might then also argue that the existence of strong and explicit limits on scientific coercion put in place specifically to protect dissent imply that coercive means of persuasion are in fact sufficiently common within science to require formal regulation

that we have laws against murder implies that murder is a credible social concern. we do not have laws against blowing up distant planets, because blowing up distant planets is not a credible concern.

i appreciate all the science folks responding by basically saying, "science is an unobtainable ideal we can never observe, a thing we simply take on faith as existing; your criticisms of the visible scientific method can never taint the one, true, ideal scientific method"

please, just join a cult already