Guest post: Scientists don’t get stuff right by applying their gut-feels
Originally a comment by Bruce Gorton on On both sides.
Science isn’t magic. It isn’t some innate sense that people are born with that is “science” – it isn’t natural and it isn’t instinctual. It requires quite rigorous training to get good at it.
And a lot of it is all about taking the shit you think you know, the stuff you think is just “common sense” and testing it.
Scientists don’t get stuff right by applying their gut-feels to it, part of the training they undergo is learning not to apply gut feels to things, to actually come at the evidence in as unbiased a manner as possible because their brains will screw with their perceptions.
This is why you get research into stuff that seems obvious – because what is obvious isn’t always what is right.
And you know what? Even with all the training they undergo, even with how hard they work to do it, even the best scientists in the world do not have an instinct for science.
Albert Einstein couldn’t accept quantum mechanics, Linus Pauling sparked the vitamin craze, Isaac Newton was a whackjob alchemist.
Great physicists will wax lyrically wrong about biology, and great biologists will wax lyrically wrong about physics, both sets are scientists and even with lifetimes worth of training their abilities are often limited to their fields.
That is why there is peer review, why science has to work collectively and not individually, why the replication crisis is a crisis.
Even with peer review you still get issues with the biases of the reviewers, science takes a long, long time to figure stuff out precisely because it is not instinctual.
To even suggest you have an instinct for science is to fundamentally not get it.
The closest I’ve ever encountered to an ‘instinct for science’ would be in those individuals who, upon discovering that they are wrong about something–even something once held near and dear–respond with a thoughtful, “Oh, that’s interesting!” Since Trump can’t even admit being wrong, about anything, ever, he’s pretty much the polar opposite of this view.
Bruce, glad this got elevated to a guest post. I thoroughly endorse it. Science is not instinctive, it is often quite the reverse. Good scientists have clusters of certain character traits, but still require rigorous training and mentoring to move from ‘potential’ to ‘actual’.
Apparently the whole Einstein family had problems with qm. :)
(Seriously, nice post.)
Isaac Einstein is my second favourite scientist, after Galileo Brahe :)
Okay, Albert *blushes*.
I liked the post. What has become very clear to me, though, in reading certain scientists’ books and blogs, as well as about certain scientists (e.g. James Watson, Haldane), is that outside the area of their expertise, and particularly where the sheer messiness of life is concerned, they are just as ready to espouse wrong-headed ideas as anyone else, but too often suppose that because they are scientists they have a natural affinity for the truth and are therefore not like anyone else. This is linked usually with a contempt for disciplines like history, and an ignorance of them. I can’t remember the name of the politically conservative American scientist with an Indian name who wrote, very sensibly, I thought, to the effect that too often scientists, simply by virtue of being scientists, supposed that they had a superior understanding of human affairs and politics, when they don’t.
A bit off topic but perhaps relevant, when I first read “Isaac Einstein” I knew it was wrong but couldn’t immediately remember that it was Albert. It also had the effect of corrupting my memory because after I finished reading the post I glanced back a couple times trying to recall, it started to look right, and I started doubting my initial “instinct” that it was wrong. I first read this yesterday before there were comments, and hadn’t bothered to look it up so seeing the correction today in the comments was simultaneously a “oh yeah, duh” moment and yet another data entry in my own observation of my crappy memory. As many before have mentioned, it’s often more interesting to find out how wrong you are than how right you are.
Yep. It’s fun, in a way, that the media seem to see peer review as some sort of solemn process carried out by an august body of respected scholars very seriously deciding what’s true and what isn’t.
The overwhelmingly vast majority of scientific peer review is carried out by students because they do it for free and it is (rightly) considered a vital part of scientific training. Lots of bad papers get through because students are inexperienced and hugely overworked. But here’s the thing: it doesn’t matter. At all. You won’t find scientists making Big Important Statements about peer review because they – for the most part – are not idiots. But wow does the press like to treat it like magic.
Mike @ 7 – Seriously. I have that problem with the flowering shrub “daphne.” I learned the name only a couple of years ago and since learning it I’ve twice had a memory blackout of it which lasted for a couple of days. I didn’t look it up either time, because I was curious to see if my memory would cough it up eventually. The most recent time was just last week, and I kept at intervals running through lady-names (because I don’t forget that part) and telling myself to stop because I can just Google it any time. Then one time I was doing that I hit on it – oh THAT’s the one. But daaaaaamn I’d gone through a lot of names, most of them multiple times. Ivy? Amanda? Lucy?
You can drive yourself crazy.
Tim Harris @6: Yeah, I’ve seen a few reports that suggest that Dunning-Kruger is generally stronger in well-educated people, because you’ve spent mroe of your time being right about things, and so the idea that you could be wrong is harder to accept on an instinctive level.
Honestly, I think it was a big factor in how the Big Names In Atheism dug in their heels over social justice issues during the first big blow-ups. Dick Dawkins was so used to standing in front of an audience of creationists and being the only correct person in the room that he utterly failed to comprehend that there could be situations that didn’t work the same way. The notion that someone could actually have expertise on a thing (cultural power dynamics and social systems) by studying it for decades, that would make them more authoritative than someone who just was following their gut, suddenly was utterly foreign to a man who’d spent his life studying biology and evolution.
Christ, yeah, Dear Muslima. I have to admit that I doubted at first that it was really Dawkins who wrote that. I’d met the guy a few times. I’d enjoyed some of his books. The Selfish Gene was one of the reasons I grew up to be a scientist. And then… well, that shit. And then the way he was such a dick about refusing to be on the same bill as Rebecca Watson effectively blackballing her from skeptic/atheist conferences. And then the way he issued a joint statement with Ophelia and then broke it in a spectacular fashion like TWO FUCKING DAYS LATER. He gets quite a lot of latitude from me for being married to Romana but even that only goes so far.
Sam Harris? I got about 1/3 of the way into the first paragraph of The End of Faith before I realised there was a rabbit away. PZ? OK, I still have some time for him despite his regrettable views on gender issues. Shermer? I hated his books even before I knew he was a rapist. Hitchens was at least entertainingly problematic. Greta turned out to less smart and more awful than I thought, too.
At least Dan Dennet still seems OK, although I think he wrote some good blurb about Harris recently.
The only two people who came out of that shitstorm with any integrity were Rebecca Watson and Ophelia Benson.
He and Romana separated a couple of years ago, you know. [ziiiip, credit gone!]
Did they? Shows how much attention I’m paying these days.