GuessTheAltAccount wrote:Omniabstracta wrote:Scientists may be prone to bias (in all manner of directions), but science itself is not some monolithic “thing” or “viewpoint,” it is already an inherently adversarial process. That’s like, the entire point of the scientific method and competition in publishing, to play ideas and people against each other and to encourage looking at what we think we know and seeing if it’s accurate. Scientific publishing already contains lots of incentive for “dissent,” to question past results and come out with more accurate, (and juicer), results over time.
The difference is that that adversarial process already occurs between people who are actually fucking qualified, not random people on the street who think they know better on a topic they don’t actually know anything about. Which is, you know, logical.
Suppose there were an issue that would be a threat to the careers of many if not most in a particular discipline of science if they were to be honest about it. Would that not outweigh competitive incentives? How, if at all, would we find out?
No walk of life should be held immune from outsiders' criticism.
Again, you’re treating science as this thing where everybody’s buddy-buddy and concerned with each other’s well-being. Publishing is an grueling, exhausting, cutthroat process, and an international one at that. Most scientists really couldn’t care less if their fellow scientists are discredited or put out of a job.
And we know that because it
happens all the time. You ever wonder what happened to all the phrenologists out there? You ever heard about the large and vocal group of geologists that tried (unsuccessfully) defending an Expanding Earth and geosynclines literally to their grave? What about the doctors on the tail end who still advised lobotomies and got their psychiatry patients addicted to ecstasy and God knows what else, you think the decades have treated them particularly well? Maybe we should look at fields like archaeology and history instead, where even
within the field there are hundreds of bitter rivalries and antipodal ideas, and where scientists would love the opportunity to destroy the theories their opponents have spent half their lives on (hell, that’s practically a trope in movies at this point).
(I’ll add that in most of these cases, the public “dissent” or whatever you believe in was
staunchly in favor of the scientific status quo, despite it being proven wrong and the field beginning to move past these things. As it turns out, people don’t just automatically provide a counter viewpoint without any incentive to do so, they just believe what they want to believe.)