Science - Idealistic Versus Signaling
[This is a version of an first draft essay I wrote for my blog. I intend to write another version, but it is going to take some time to research, and I want to get this out where I can start getting some feedback and sources for further research.]
The responses to the recent leaking of the CRU's information and emails, has led me to a changed understanding of science and how it is viewed by various people, especially people who claim to be scientists. Among people who actually do or consume science there seem to be two broad views - what they "believe" about science, rather than what they normally "say" about science when asked.
The classical view, what I have begun thinking of as the idealistic view, is science as the search for reliable knowledge. This is the version most scientists (and many non-scientists) espouse when asked, but increasingly many scientists actually hold another view when their beliefs are evaluated by their actions.
This is the signaling and control view of science. This is the "social network" view that has been developed by many sociologists of science.
LessWrong anti-kibitzer (hides comment authors and vote counts)
Related to Information Cascades
Information Cascades has implied that people's votes are being biased by the number of votes already cast. Similarly, some commenters express a perception that higher status posters are being upvoted too much.
If, like me, you suspect that you might be prone to these biases, you can correct for them by installing LessWrong anti-kibitzer which I hacked together yesterday morning. You will need Firefox with the greasemonkey extention installed. Once you have greasemonkey installed, clicking on the link to the script will pop up a dialog box asking if you want to enable the script. Once you enable it, a button which you can use to toggle the visibility of author and point count information should appear in the upper right corner of any page on LessWrong. (On any page you load, the authors and pointcounts are automatically hidden until you show them.) Let me know if it doesn't work for any of you.
Already, I've had some interesting experiences. There were a few comments that I thought were written by Eliezer that turned out not to be (though perhaps people are copying his writing style.) There were also comments that I thought contained good arguments which were written by people I was apparently too quick to dismiss as trolls. What are your experiences?
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