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MrMind comments on Open Thread March 7 - March 13, 2016 - Less Wrong Discussion
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Comments (125)
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.
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.
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".)
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.
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.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 :-/