Disparity Between Scientists and General Public on Scientific Views

[sprinkles]

I do agree that emotional attachment to information is not only unnecessary but counterproductive. I don't see trust as an emotional matter, though, at least not in relation to the information one uses in making decisions. By "trust" here I mean more of a confidence level. There is very little we can know with 100% certainty, but we can often have some idea of how reliable information is based on its source, our familiarity with the topic, and whatever internal consistency checks we are able to do on it. Not foolproof, but helps one to sort out the wheat from the chaff.

Yeah I figured it was probably a misunderstanding of word choices.

 

[Xander]

Interesting... Personally I take nothing as 100% certain as that only seems to reduce the likelihood that the outcome is correct.

I did used to get emotionally invested in ideas but I'm learning to just take the approach that I believe I'm right currently but I'm prepared to be proven wrong and move to a new position of being right later. For me there is little in the way of external verification so I use my own analysis of what is to establish what is right. I guess this affords me to luxury of being almost immune to critique as I haven't anchored myself to anything.

I guess the most logical question following that would be "why would you if all it lends is characteristics which people can use to deconstruct your idea/ position?".

Perhaps that's the issue with "scientists". They've hung their hat with any old crackpot who wants to call themselves a scientists and in doing so have undermined their own work.

 

[Mole]

Modernity is the search for origins whether it is biology and life, physics and energy and matter, or astronomy and the universe, or consciousness, or the origins of personality.

The search for origins in biology and life gave us The Origin of Species by Charles Darwin. Physics gave us Quantum Mechanics. And astronomy gave us Relativity and the accelerating expansion of the universe. And interestingly, archeology gave us The Origin of Consciousness. And psychology gave us The History of Childhood.

We have found there is a great difference between the modern account of origins and the traditional account of origins. This seems to be true from everything from religion to gender to personality.

The public is only aware of the traditional account of origins and don't even speak the language of modernity which is mathematics and statistics.

Indeed the public is somewhat offended by mathematics and statistics and seem to believe they are a conspiracy against them, simply because they don't understand them.

 

[sprinkles]

Interesting... Personally I take nothing as 100% certain as that only seems to reduce the likelihood that the outcome is correct.

I did used to get emotionally invested in ideas but I'm learning to just take the approach that I believe I'm right currently but I'm prepared to be proven wrong and move to a new position of being right later. For me there is little in the way of external verification so I use my own analysis of what is to establish what is right. I guess this affords me to luxury of being almost immune to critique as I haven't anchored myself to anything.

I guess the most logical question following that would be "why would you if all it lends is characteristics which people can use to deconstruct your idea/ position?".

Perhaps that's the issue with "scientists". They've hung their hat with any old crackpot who wants to call themselves a scientists and in doing so have undermined their own work.

I look at it this way. Let's say you have a robot with basic avoidance logic which uses an ultrasonic sensor. The robot is running into walls when it shouldn't. Diagnostic reading says the sensor is wrong, but it could be the logic chip which is wrong. Which do you trust?

To me, if I 'trust' the sensor, that means even if it appears to be wrong I must assume it is correct. For all I know it might not actually be wrong, something else could make it appear wrong such as a faulty math processor. So if I trust the sensor then I must look for the problem elsewhere. But in actuality it is usually best to rule out the most obvious problems first - if the sensor seems broken, I shouldn't just trust it i.e. I shouldn't assume it is right even if it appears wrong but rather I should test the sensor directly. If it turns out the sensor was right after all then that is good and I know the problem is somewhere else.

 

[Xander]

I look at it this way. Let's say you have a robot with basic avoidance logic which uses an ultrasonic sensor. The robot is running into walls when it shouldn't. Diagnostic reading says the sensor is wrong, but it could be the logic chip which is wrong. Which do you trust?

To me, if I 'trust' the sensor, that means even if it appears to be wrong I must assume it is correct. For all I know it might not actually be wrong, something else could make it appear wrong such as a faulty math processor. So if I trust the sensor then I must look for the problem elsewhere. But in actuality it is usually best to rule out the most obvious problems first - if the sensor seems broken, I shouldn't just trust it i.e. I shouldn't assume it is right even if it appears wrong but rather I should test the sensor directly. If it turns out the sensor was right after all then that is good and I know the problem is somewhere else.

True. Would you not say though that although you "shouldn't" run into walls according to your desired goals that it has become necessary to achieve them?

 

[Xander]

Modernity is the search for origins whether it is biology and life, physics and energy and matter, or astronomy and the universe, or consciousness, or the origins of personality.

The search for origins in biology and life gave us The Origin of Species by Charles Darwin. Physics gave us Quantum Mechanics. And astronomy gave us Relativity and the accelerating expansion of the universe. And interestingly, archeology gave us The Origin of Consciousness. And psychology gave us The History of Childhood.

We have found there is a great difference between the modern account of origins and the traditional account of origins. This seems to be true from everything from religion to gender to personality.

The public is only aware of the traditional account of origins and don't even speak the language of modernity which is mathematics and statistics.

Indeed the public is somewhat offended by mathematics and statistics and seem to believe they are a conspiracy against them, simply because they don't understand them.

Like all religions, they offer certainty despite contradiction.

Like all religions they have their followers and their opponents. Declaring your new God as superior to all others is literally as old as the hills.

I would have thought that someone who spends a significant amount of time decrying the MBTI (on a forum dedicated to it no less) would understand that.

 

[sprinkles]

True. Would you not say though that although you "shouldn't" run into walls according to your desired goals that it has become necessary to achieve them?

What? No. I can imagine trying to explain that to an employer or customer. "All these errors are necessary to achieve my goals"

"Oh really? You're fired."

 

[Xander]

What? No. I can imagine trying to explain that to an employer or customer. "All these errors are necessary to achieve my goals"

"Oh really? You're fired."

That leads to insulated thinking and a lack of innovation. You stagnate for fear of doing something other than the expected.

A good boss plans for failure in the search for improvement. A poor one blames employees for failing when they are trying.

Believe it or not but it's the boss' job to insulate the business from any failures not the employees job to never make one.

Seriously though, this goes to the old saying "if you never did anything wrong then you weren't trying hard enough".

 

[sprinkles]

That leads to insulated thinking and a lack of innovation. You stagnate for fear of doing something other than the expected.

A good boss plans for failure in the search for improvement. A poor one blames employees for failing when they are trying.

Believe it or not but it's the boss' job to insulate the business from any failures not the employees job to never make one.

Seriously though, this goes to the old saying "if you never did anything wrong then you weren't trying hard enough".

I never said anything about not doing things wrong. Mistakes are incidental. You made it sound like everyone should make them on purpose and that they're not still in general to be avoided even though they some times bring upsides.

Without insulation you get short circuits and shit starts blowing up and catching on fire.

 

[Xander]

I never said anything about not doing things wrong. Mistakes are incidental. You made it sound like everyone should make them on purpose and that they're not still in general to be avoided even though they some times bring upsides.

Without insulation you get short circuits and shit starts blowing up and catching on fire.

It's just the assumption that doing it wrong is to be avoided almost at all cost which sets my heckles off. I'm with Socrates, assuming I know nothing. Ergo hitting the wall could be the right result. If the robot hit the wall ten thousand times in trial but never once on a customer then I'd call that a win, the other way around I'd call a fail. It all depends on where you're trying to get to and what you're prepared to do to achieve it.

 

[sprinkles]

It's just the assumption that doing it wrong is to be avoided almost at all cost which sets my heckles off. I'm with Socrates, assuming I know nothing. Ergo hitting the wall could be the right result. If the robot hit the wall ten thousand times in trial but never once on a customer then I'd call that a win, the other way around I'd call a fail. It all depends on where you're trying to get to and what you're prepared to do to achieve it.

And it sets my hackles off when someone tries to tell me the moral of the story like I'm some kind of flipping idiot who actually believes we can perfectly avoid mistakes all the time, especially in a thread that isn't actually about me.

[MENTION=70]Xander[/MENTION]

Moreover almost nobody worthwhile actually avoids errors at all costs, let alone do they advocate it. Eventually you reach a point where avoiding the error is a bigger headache than the error itself. Nobody who makes any sense actually holds this view that you seem to be accusing me of.

 

[sprinkles]

Also do you think they did this without mistakes? No.
Do you think it gets done if they let those mistakes hang around? Also no.
And do you think it gets done if they use philosophy as an excuse for straight up sloppy work? Definitely not.

 

[sprinkles]

And no, letting the robot hit the wall 10,000 times in a trial is not a good result if it can be avoided.

Recently I was working on a robot in a simulator which was supposed to navigate a wall maze, follow a line, then go onto a platform. I got it to go through the maze just fine but for some infernal reason there was a problem with the line following. The sensors kept missing the line it seemed. I must have run it hundreds of times trying to make it work, I'd spent about 20 hours straight on it just failing over and over and over. This wasted a lot of my time and taxing my brain to that extent makes me very stressed and irritated. It makes my blood pressure go up and I can just feel the heat coming out of my ears! And the worst part of it is that since I spent so much time trying to get the line portion to work over and over, I never got to work on the platform bit. My goal didn't advance due to errors, it was halted due to errors!

This is time that I can't get back! There's less things that I can innovate now simply because I wasted so much time trying to fix something which should have been trivial. It is NOT ok to let something like that happen repeatedly and just sit there and say "gee maybe it's supposed to do that."

Edit:
And it ends up looking a lot like
"Let's see if this works" *clonk*
"Let's see if this works" *clonk*
"Let's see if this works" *clonk*
"Let's see if this works" *clonk*
"Let's see if this works" *clonk*
"Let's see if this works" *clonk*
"Let's see if this works" *clonk*
[...] *clonk*

Eventually it stops being "Let's see if this works" and sounds more like "Are you fucking kidding me"

 

[Coriolis]

Perhaps that's the issue with "scientists". They've hung their hat with any old crackpot who wants to call themselves a scientists and in doing so have undermined their own work.

That's quite a generalization. Do you have anything to back it up?

 

[Xander]

That's quite a generalization. Do you have anything to back it up?

It's more the social perception of a scientist. Consider the comedy "Big Bang Theory". People associate that kind of behaviour with some generalised model of a scientist. They fail to see the engineering, the precision and the level of critical thinking involved.

Many whom seem prone to not believe in in scientists views also seem to be those who think that scientists are unchallenged and can basically make stuff up.

What doesn't help is when the media will report until their blue that a "scientist" has discovered that apples can kill cancer but don't seem that interested in showing its BS and the guy who the theory came from is actually a fake. Of course unless that will sell more papers...

 

[Xander]

And no, letting the robot hit the wall 10,000 times in a trial is not a good result if it can be avoided.

Recently I was working on a robot in a simulator which was supposed to navigate a wall maze, follow a line, then go onto a platform. I got it to go through the maze just fine but for some infernal reason there was a problem with the line following. The sensors kept missing the line it seemed. I must have run it hundreds of times trying to make it work, I'd spent about 20 hours straight on it just failing over and over and over. This wasted a lot of my time and taxing my brain to that extent makes me very stressed and irritated. It makes my blood pressure go up and I can just feel the heat coming out of my ears! And the worst part of it is that since I spent so much time trying to get the line portion to work over and over, I never got to work on the platform bit. My goal didn't advance due to errors, it was halted due to errors!

This is time that I can't get back! There's less things that I can innovate now simply because I wasted so much time trying to fix something which should have been trivial. It is NOT ok to let something like that happen repeatedly and just sit there and say "gee maybe it's supposed to do that."

Edit:
And it ends up looking a lot like
"Let's see if this works" *clonk*
"Let's see if this works" *clonk*
"Let's see if this works" *clonk*
"Let's see if this works" *clonk*
"Let's see if this works" *clonk*
"Let's see if this works" *clonk*
"Let's see if this works" *clonk*
[...] *clonk*

Eventually it stops being "Let's see if this works" and sounds more like "Are you fucking kidding me"

Okay, I'll" bite " though my earlier comment wasn't intended to wound or irritate, just observe and report.

I usd to be a CAD tech working with 2D CAD. Now this was fine until my colleague sneaked a solid modelling program and started to include isometric views of the finished article which really did help visualise the resulting tool. I wanted to do the same but the solid modelling program wasn't there for me. So, confident that as the result was 2D then there must be a way of creating the view.

I spent a whole day and most of the next batting my head off the desk trying every angle of reflection I could think of and getting close but jot getting it right. In exasperation I spoke to my colleague who was much lore experienced in design and asked for help stating that I'd tried every angle I could think of. He replied simply "What makes you think it's just one angle of reflection?". Blew my mind at the time and made the job a lot harder but I eventually figured it out.

Do I consider my time wasted when the answer could have been simply relayed? Do I consider my failed attempts as nothing but dead ends? No. I consider the whole process worthwhile and not because I achieved my goal so much as I endured.

Okay so I hate the sappy line about "learning about myself " (yeuch) but that's pretty much what happened. It want what I was aiming for and it won't in the plan but it happened.

If I was more awake I'm certain I could think of examples where the robot hit the wall when it shouldn't and lead to something new being found. All from a "failure".

I just think we get too tied up in delivering right now to save costs and improve profits and to squeeze more in. It lacks... Appreciation. Something about the journey being worthwhile on its own merits.

And I'm sorry if it comes across as preachy or contrary to your point. I believed it a valid point and so posted it. I engage in no competition here. Just scrolling past and posting thoughts.

 

[sprinkles]

Okay, I'll" bite " though my earlier comment wasn't intended to wound or irritate, just observe and report.

I usd to be a CAD tech working with 2D CAD. Now this was fine until my colleague sneaked a solid modelling program and started to include isometric views of the finished article which really did help visualise the resulting tool. I wanted to do the same but the solid modelling program wasn't there for me. So, confident that as the result was 2D then there must be a way of creating the view.

I spent a whole day and most of the next batting my head off the desk trying every angle of reflection I could think of and getting close but jot getting it right. In exasperation I spoke to my colleague who was much lore experienced in design and asked for help stating that I'd tried every angle I could think of. He replied simply "What makes you think it's just one angle of reflection?". Blew my mind at the time and made the job a lot harder but I eventually figured it out.

Do I consider my time wasted when the answer could have been simply relayed? Do I consider my failed attempts as nothing but dead ends? No. I consider the whole process worthwhile and not because I achieved my goal so much as I endured.

Okay so I hate the sappy line about "learning about myself " (yeuch) but that's pretty much what happened. It want what I was aiming for and it won't in the plan but it happened.

If I was more awake I'm certain I could think of examples where the robot hit the wall when it shouldn't and lead to something new being found. All from a "failure".

I just think we get too tied up in delivering right now to save costs and improve profits and to squeeze more in. It lacks... Appreciation. Something about the journey being worthwhile on its own merits.

And I'm sorry if it comes across as preachy or contrary to your point. I believed it a valid point and so posted it. I engage in no competition here. Just scrolling past and posting thoughts.

Yeah the issue is that it wasn't actually my problem with the robot. I made several line followers with that simulator already and I exported the design and tested it in places where it was known to work before, and it did work. It wasn't my mistake and it was a pretty routine thing which should work, but wasn't. It was the simulator having a problem and I was trying to work around it anyway. I eventually had to report it as a bug.

 

[Coriolis]

It's more the social perception of a scientist. Consider the comedy "Big Bang Theory". People associate that kind of behaviour with some generalised model of a scientist. They fail to see the engineering, the precision and the level of critical thinking involved.

Many whom seem prone to not believe in in scientists views also seem to be those who think that scientists are unchallenged and can basically make stuff up.

What doesn't help is when the media will report until their blue that a "scientist" has discovered that apples can kill cancer but don't seem that interested in showing its BS and the guy who the theory came from is actually a fake. Of course unless that will sell more papers...

More often, the media will report a legitimate finding in an oversimplified way such that, to use your example, people think they just have to eat an apple every so often and they won't get cancer. Even if the experiments show a definite connection, it is never as simple as that, especially where entire lifestyles are involved.

Scientists do need to be challenged; in fact, our entire mode of operation is predicated on that happening. We just do best with intelligent challenges rather than the ignorant, misguided, often alarmist charges levelled by the media and the public all too often. Shows like Big Bang do a huge disservice in terms of public image. I have no patience with that show on so many levels (including technical inaccuracies, but that's another topic). I am a scientist and so are most of the people I interact with on any regular basis, and we simply are not like that.

 

[Xander]

More often, the media will report a legitimate finding in an oversimplified way such that, to use your example, people think they just have to eat an apple every so often and they won't get cancer. Even if the experiments show a definite connection, it is never as simple as that, especially where entire lifestyles are involved.

Scientists do need to be challenged; in fact, our entire mode of operation is predicated on that happening. We just do best with intelligent challenges rather than the ignorant, misguided, often alarmist charges levelled by the media and the public all too often. Shows like Big Bang do a huge disservice in terms of public image. I have no patience with that show on so many levels (including technical inaccuracies, but that's another topic). I am a scientist and so are most of the people I interact with on any regular basis, and we simply are not like that.

I can give you a wonderful example of why science needs to get it's collective arse in gear. Vaping.

It's been around for years now and multiple different sources have done trials, tests and experiments. The consensus? There is none. I might tell you that vaping should be safer but I'm going off other's research not my own. There are still reports of these things having formaldehyde in the vapor only for another guy to say "oh no, it's formaldehyde hemiacetals" which are harmless.

Now put this in front of the general public. You're using terms which sound like they came from the bible's era, explaining them in terms which would mean something to a chemist to keep the article short and then declaring a conclusion. Why would I believe you? I'd have to do a ton of research to find out for sure and even then it'd be book based and so not 100%. This mean that the whole thing is unverifiable to me.

So...not a problem? Make up your own mind? That's fine...then include the oh so scientific high vis brigade who want to ban it all. Suddenly you've provided them with a stick. The media holds this stick also, hence the misreporting of trials done in Boston in the last couple of months.

Basically with all these respected minds I would have thought that if this is a big issue and has millions of consumers then some kind of agreement would have been reached. I spoke to my chemist friend and in about ten minutes he'd deduced that there shouldn't be any real issues depending upon what's added to the liquid to flavour it. So surely the best idea would be to produce a safe recipe and give it to the community? Still nothing.

All that's going on at the moment (and this includes the WHO) is scare mongering and scandal. Hardly a good light for "science" to be shown in and yet that's the word which keeps being bandied about. Basically the vaping community seems to be ignoring all of them. The thing is, what if one of them is right? If so....which bloody one?

 

[sprinkles]

I can give you a wonderful example of why science needs to get it's collective arse in gear. Vaping.

It's been around for years now and multiple different sources have done trials, tests and experiments. The consensus? There is none. I might tell you that vaping should be safer but I'm going off other's research not my own. There are still reports of these things having formaldehyde in the vapor only for another guy to say "oh no, it's formaldehyde hemiacetals" which are harmless.

Now put this in front of the general public. You're using terms which sound like they came from the bible's era, explaining them in terms which would mean something to a chemist to keep the article short and then declaring a conclusion. Why would I believe you? I'd have to do a ton of research to find out for sure and even then it'd be book based and so not 100%. This mean that the whole thing is unverifiable to me.

So...not a problem? Make up your own mind? That's fine...then include the oh so scientific high vis brigade who want to ban it all. Suddenly you've provided them with a stick. The media holds this stick also, hence the misreporting of trials done in Boston in the last couple of months.

Basically with all these respected minds I would have thought that if this is a big issue and has millions of consumers then some kind of agreement would have been reached. I spoke to my chemist friend and in about ten minutes he'd deduced that there shouldn't be any real issues depending upon what's added to the liquid to flavour it. So surely the best idea would be to produce a safe recipe and give it to the community? Still nothing.

All that's going on at the moment (and this includes the WHO) is scare mongering and scandal. Hardly a good light for "science" to be shown in and yet that's the word which keeps being bandied about. Basically the vaping community seems to be ignoring all of them. The thing is, what if one of them is right? If so....which bloody one?

All of that is moot since vaping fluids aren't well regulated. What might be true about one bottle of stuff could be completely false in another bottle for all we know.

It makes no sense and is in fact useless to talk about vaping like it's one consolidated thing, because it isn't. It's like saying toys aren't safe because Transformers knockoffs had lead paint in them back when.

Edit:
Also people being on board with something means zip. Like Bill fucking Gaede and his fanclub. He even sells books! I've talked to the man personally and it is my opinion that he is batshit insane, and dangerous to the public with his nonsense.