The Myth of the Noble Scientist

Everyone has to pay their bills. The money comes in from somewhere... As you say, that's what the world is like.

 

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Right..that is the gritty reality. Everybody acts chiefly for themselves and their own prosperity. Hence the myth of the noble scientist.

 

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"Flame bait" is a perfect description, Bells. If this is not troll behaviour, then I'd like to know what is.

 

Now this I grant.

 

I think that MR was commenting on a common 'mindset about the world' that perceives science as a 'higher calling', something similar to a religious priesthood. Scientists are supposedly the rational ones, possessors of what's imagined as an infallible intellectual method (at least in the long term, taking into account the 'self-correcting' idea from the other thread), individuals dedicated to the cause of truth itself.

But is the science that these people practice just another human activity alongside other human activities, or does it have a special status of some sort that makes it more noble somehow?

 

That would be a much more acceptable assertion. The OP has gone a little hyperbolic; his/her conclusion was over-reaching the limit of his/her premises.

 

Who is "Aunt Sally"? I looked it up and she seems to be a British slang expression for what we here in the US would call a "straw man". The other day I heard an Australian say that a crowd at a sporting event was "barracking", that one went by me too.

Practitioners embody the enterprise through their actions. I doubt if anyone literally doubted that religious priests were human beings, but nevertheless they believed that their service of the gods put them in a higher position than other people.

The original post contained some observations from a disillusioned doctoral student that suggested, among other things, that science (as it is practiced) is as much a mad scramble for funding as it is the production of credible results. I believe that research grants might be the University of California's largest single source of income. So researchers there are kind of measured by their ability to write successful grant-proposals and to win grants. The author noted that a disproportionate amount of the actual research work is done by doctoral students, not the professors whose names are on the research groups. He/she noted that these students, whose futures depend on the good favor of the professors, are in no position to tell the professor that a favored avenue of research upon which all the funding and the professor's reputation are hanging, isn't working. He/she notes the 'publish-or-perish' imperative, that leads to most of the scholarly papers that are published these days being meant only to pad cv's. And he/she notes how some avenues of research become popular and trendy, leading to lots of projects that are only tired played-out extensions of what went before.

I think that anyone who has been around academic research will recognize that there is a lot of truth to those complaints. They may be exaggerated and over-spoken, but they aren't entirely baseless.

 

Yes in argument we speak of "knocking down an Aunt Sally", when someone elaborates destroys a position that nobody actually holds. I think it comes from coconut shies at the fairground. So indeed it seems to be effectively the same as a "straw man". I did not realise you did not use the term across the water.

I have no quarrel with the quoted observations: in fact I fear that the current vogue for assessing researchers on their volume of output may well create pressures that in fact militate against really good quality research.

But I would still like to know what evidence there is that anyone thinks scientists are superior, disinterested human beings, or even, a sort of modern priestly caste, as has been suggested. This is the Aunt Sally, or straw man, to which I was referring.

Many scientists may be a bit proud of themselves, but that is true of any walk of life in which people have to be intelligent, well-educated and hard-working to get there. Try lawyers, doctors, bankers, pilots... it is only natural to be proud of one's chosen profession, otherwise why stick at it? And again, it is true certain professions are more respected than others, doctors, perhaps, being a good example. Perhaps people tend, ceteris paribus, to respect scientists, as people who are intelligent, can understand a lot of maths and techie stuff that they can't, and are engaged (at least in theory!) in understanding nature, rather than simply making money or seeking power. But what evidence is there that scientists are placed uniquely on a pedestal?

 

I don't understand the relevance of ghosthunters to the topic of this thread. Ghosthunting seems to have been introduced as a bit of snark in post #20 by Daecon. MR was challenging the social standing of science and scientists, so apparently the intention was to attack something that MR values and approves of as payback. Then the thread predictably went off track, like most Sciforums threads do.

It was certainly poking a sacred cow.

I don't think that's necessarily a bad thing. Sometimes sacred cows need to be poked. Here on Sciforums there seem to be certain ideas that must not be challenged. Metaphysical naturalism, atheism, political left ideology, and scientism in general. Any idea that diverges from any of that constitutes flame bait and will will come under attack from all directions. The individual posting the idea will probably end up a smoking lump of charcoal.

In other words, this board can be extremely intolerant towards those who don't agree with the preconceptions of the majority who post here and who treat it as their private club. That kind of creates an enforced group orthodoxy which isn't a good thing in my opinion. (It reminds me of fundamentalists' faith in their scriptures.) Sometimes that kind of thing demands a little poking, just to keep things honest.

JamesR closed the other thread, so it's impossible to continue the discussion there.

 

Yazata, I would remind you of what MR actually said in the OP:-

The ones who don't take science as some value system are probably egocentric careerists only in it for the money anyway. The ones who DO take science to be some grand enterprise are otoh snotty elitists who look down on humanity as ignorant and in desperate need of their guidance.

There then followed a lengthy extract from a disenchanted person, expressing views that anyone could sympathise with and which by no means supported the pejorative terms he chose. MR was doing little more than abuse scientists gratuitously, for the express purpose of annoying. That is "flame bait".

I know you are keen to smoke out "scientism", but in your zeal to do so you I think you are defending the indefensible here.

 

While David Goodstein apparently coined this expression some time ago, the underlying sources of the problem still continue: Like competition for funding and "publish or perish" pressures that have led to a reproducibility crisis in areas like biomedical studies and psychology, where less than half of the "approved" or qualifying output may hold up after re-testing.

 

This says it pretty well.

 

It's a legitimate topic of discussion in the ethics forum. I know it's considered blasphemous by some to question the virtue and authority of scientists, but I'm not one for bowing before idols. This is a discussion forum where we are free to discuss issues proper to the forum we post in. I see nothing in the forum rules saying you can't post criticism about trends in science or about scientism. And if anyone flames me about this, you need to moderate that. That's your job here, remember?

It's the trolls' way of derailing all my threads to drag in stuff from other threads. Every thread I post has some smartass comment about ghosts, aliens, and bigfoot even though I'm not talking about it. There was a time when this sort of crap was moderated here. But those days are long gone as can be seen by Bells herself sidetracking the op with claims about ghosthunters.

 

"Sometimes, trusting what scientists tell us can be a bit difficult. One day we are told that artificial sweeteners help prevent obesity; the next, that they actually cause it.

One day coffee is bad for us, then it's good, then it's bad again. The generous explanation for these see-saws is that science is always developing our understanding. But there is a more sinister concern: fraud.

No fewer than 15 per cent of scientists at the National Institutes of Health (the American government's top health laboratory) recently admitted to bending data to fit their theories.

The myth is that science is the noble search for truth. The reality is that scientists are selfish. In the old days, scientists often published secretly to safeguard - and profit from - their discoveries.

On writing a paper, a researcher at a university might deposit it in a college's safe, publishing it only if someone else made the same discovery later. The first scientist would release his data to make sure everyone knew he had got there first.

The same principle was behind the use of codes to protect intellectual property. In 1676, Hooke published his law of elasticity as a Latin anagram - "ceiiinosssttuu".

This made sure that he would be credited for the idea, which he later revealed to be "ut tension sic vis": stress is proportional to strain.

Inevitably, this secrecy caused problems, so during the 17th century Robert Boyle created a club within which scientists did reveal everything to their fellows. Among the group, people still worried about being scooped, but as members kept their findings secret from non-members, the insiders enjoyed huge advantages.

The name of this association was the Royal Society."====http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/sci...r-review-the-myth-of-the-noble-scientist.html

 

The issue is rarely about what is attacked, so much as how it is attacked. Too many posters here have too little idea how to make a claim that is defensible, how to address refutations and how to accept when a point has been made.

Unfortunately, pretty much every one is guilty of that.
Here is an example in this thread:

This is an implicit reference to other threads where you have made the same accusation.

So yeah, we'll just have to live with it.

 

Abit of hyperbole perhaps on my part in order to provoke discussion. But I do think those generalizations hold true in many cases. People who deem science as some kind of utopian program for social betterment implicitly look down on those not educated in science matters. I see that attitude here all the time. A sort of unspoken class distinction between the educated degree holders and the common man as if he is an inferior dolt who requires their assistance and instruction. The truth is we are all hairless simians punching on keyboards. We would do well to remember our common humanity here.

 

It's coming into focus:

So his hate almost certainly comes from this first-hand experience. Either someone treated him badly because he wasn't a scientist or he just envied them for being smarter/making more money than him and he hates them because he hates himself.

 

One wonders how moderator evaluations of such threads go.

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Here on SciFo, I'd say my observation goes doubly so:

More to the point, SciFo attracts a lot of people who have very tightly-held beliefs that they have been polishing in a vacuum of in-depth knowledge and feedback. (One hears all the time about 'blindly following the mainstream' etc. As if one person is categorically smarter than a community of professionals)

Again, it is not necessarily scientists per se, or scientists as a community that criticize, so much as it is people who recognize a valid, defensible assertion from an unfounded belief. IMO, the over-reach you were making was to attribute the behavior to scientists, as opposed to simply individuals who are confident they know what they're talking about. You'd probably find similar people on every other loosely-moderated fora in any other industry.