Letters to the Editor
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To Sam, Xrandadu, and everyone else (part 2)
There’s nothing in my background that allows me to relate to any of Sam’s life. I’m 25 years old and, except for one year spent on my own in Alaska working as many different jobs as I could simply to experience new and different things, I’ve been in school my entire life. The only time I was ever in a fist fight, if you could even call it that, was when I was nine years old; the class bully pushed a much younger kid who was a family friend, so I decked the bully in the face and he ran home crying. Fucker.
So, Sam, you don’t like or trust science. I’m with you there. I don’t particularly like it or trust it either. It’s a wily bastard that will try to fool you and confound you if you’re not exquisitely careful. You’ve got to be skeptical as all hell of it. Strangely, weirdly, crazily, though, it’s precisely the fact that I don’t like it or trust it and am totally skeptical of it that makes me a damn good scientist. I have a love-hate relationship with science. I love the fact that there’s always something to argue with; if someone’s wrong in their analysis or interpretation of their data, if their methods are flawed and have led them to gather data that don’t measure what they’re purporting to measure, or if someone’s grossly overstating the case that the available evidence can support, you have an almost moral imperative and duty to shoot them down and carve them a new asshole. That part’s great. You get mega crazy bonus points as a scientist if you find an assumption or conclusion that’s incorrect and you rip it to shreds, the caveat being that it takes convincing scientific evidence, and piles and piles and piles of it, to convince the establishment that your new model/explanation/results are truly more believable. That’s probably the main reason Einstein is so respected – he discovered general relativity by looking at the data and saying, “you know, there’s something fishy about the way we’ve been looking at space and time all these years. Why are we assuming that either of these are fixed and constant when the data keep telling us that it’s the speed of light that’s constant; everything else is subordinate to and derived from that.” It was such a backwards way of looking at things, but damn it, good data proved him right. And it wasn’t so much that he “discovered” something new, either. He just restructured the way we understood data that had been around for a while, and his explanation made a hell of a lot more sense in the end. Ultimately, his restructuring told us something very important about how the universe worked. Yep, Einstein was a dude.
What I hate about science, though, is its endless reductionism; it’s constantly finding new variables and causes and relationships, but as it does that, the world just gets endlessly more complex and enormous. People become specialists and sub-specialists, and as they go deeper and deeper into one tiny area of expertise, it can become very difficult for them to zoom out and see and appreciate the “big picture”. Furthermore, it becomes more difficult to relate to and have patience with others outside their field. I’m not at all convinced that reductionism is a good lens through which to view the world. It does a number on you psychologically. It’s not the least bit comforting. It doesn’t offer much at all in the way of wisdom or perspective. You can’t get drunk with it on the front porch on a hot summer evening. You don’t enjoy the time you spend with it. Fucking reductionism. So, Sam, in a weird way I think I respect you a lot more for having beef with science and being up front with that.
In this forum, we’ve been talking a lot about “what science says.” That phrase is bullshit. “Science” doesn’t say anything. If it did, we’d knock on its door and politely ask it all sorts of questions and get easy, definitive, effortless knowledge. The idea that science can say anything is an oversimplification that gets used by the media in reporting headline findings. Science is a process; think of it as a VERB, not a noun. How the hell could science be a noun? It’s an abstract idea at best, but with no more substance than a ghost. The only nouns in science, the only things you can actually point to and say “see, see, look what they’re telling us!” are the data.
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To Sam, Xrandadu, and everyone else (part 3)
When I read a scientific article in a journal, here’s my scientific process: First, I read the title, which ought to tell me, in just a couple words, what their big claim is. Then, I skip over the abstract and everything else and I go straight to the figures and tables, which is how all their raw findings (data) are presented, along with the results of their statistical tests. I spend a good ten minutes or more poring over the data. I’m not interested in the authors’ interpretation of the data yet; screw them – I want my impressions to be fresh. When I’ve generated my impressions of what the data seem to be saying, I look at the Methods section, which describes exactly what they did in generating their data; it includes the models they used, the assumptions they made, the computer programs they used, the statistical tests they used, and everything about how their samples were gathered and processed and what all equipment they used, right down to the brand and model number of the important analytic equipment. As I look through their methods, I’m being as creative as I can, thinking of ways that Mama Nature might have screwed them up in ways they didn’t anticipate. Only after I’ve done all that do I go back and actually read the rest of the text of the paper.
Reading a scientific paper is an exercise in extreme pessimism. You’re not supposed to give the authors the benefit of the doubt on anything! You’re supposed to assume every bad thing you possibly can about them and their study, and if they don’t prove you wrong on every single point in their data, methods, analysis, and discussion, then damn, that’s a paper I respect. However, just because I read one good paper on a subject that reaches a particular conclusion doesn’t mean I’d stake my life on that conclusion. For important findings, the same basic question gets asked over and over and over again, in slightly different ways each time, by different teams of scientists around the world, and they all publish their data and interpretations. And if their data and interpretations all agree over time, well, that’s how scientific consensus eventually gets formed.
Sam – Given that process, which, I admit, is about the most anally retentively thorough thing humanity has ever come up with, I hope that you can understand how goddamn frustrating and infuriating it is to Xrandadu and I when you or anyone casually and ignorantly dismisses scientific consensus. I understand why you’d do it, and I’m (paradoxically) totally sympathetic with you and your perspective, but I’m still pissed at you and Cap’nGroove and Camille Paglia-the-arts-and-fashion-and-politics pundit and everyone else who thinks that, , with a wave of their magical rhetorical wand, they can make it all disappear! Because Piss Shit Fuck, NO, you can’t! The data are still there! You can’t make it go away by closing your eyes and pretending it’s not there! Scientific consensus was not arrived at following a leisurely stroll in the park! Not everyone on the planet is a scientist – humanity wouldn’t have any food or factories or mines if they were – but the scientists ARE DOING SOMETHING IMPORTANT! Scientists ask big questions, they have the statistical tools to know whether they’re right (or, more precisely, with the exact percentage of their certainty!), and when scientific consensus tells the world it has something Very Important to report, the world would do well to Shut The Fuck Up And Listen!
Scientific consensus is not the same thing as a newspaper headline reporting on the latest fad “scientific study” on a new miracle weight loss cure. There are thousands of things about which no scientific consensus exists – just a lot of ideas and theories with mild to moderate evidence in their favor.
Now that I’ve written this, it’s worth noting that there are people out there who are still going to think I’m an ass. What nasty but exceedingly effective one-liners would Karl Rove use to describe and discredit me? Am I out of the Ivory Tower yet? Y’all tell me what you think, and if this approach and these ideas are all right, then hold them close.