Sagan on changing one’s mind
The other day, commenter “AesopFan” offered the following quotes from astronomer Carl Sagan, who died in 1996:
“One of the saddest lessons of history is this: If we’ve been bamboozled long enough, we tend to reject any evidence of the bamboozle. We’re no longer interested in finding out the truth. The bamboozle has captured us. It’s simply too painful to acknowledge, even to ourselves, that we’ve been taken. Once you give a charlatan power over you, you almost never get it back.”
…
“You can’t convince a believer of anything; for their belief is not based on evidence, it’s based on a deep-seated need to believe.”
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“In science it often happens that scientists say, ‘You know, that’s a really good argument; my position is mistaken,’ and then they would actually change their minds and you never hear that old view from them again […] I cannot recall the last time something like that happened in politics or religion.”
I’ve seen these things play out prominently in my life, so the quotes really got my attention.
For example, I recently had a conversation that demonstrated the first two, and it’s certainly not the first time. The form such conversations take is that the person states an opinion that is based on some things that I have found to be untrue, but also tells me that I shouldn’t offer any rebuttal. Sometimes the person says there is nothing that would act to change that person’s mind. In the recent conversation, when I tried to say that perhaps what I would add would actually make that person feel better about things, or at least understand what the other side thinks and believes and why, the response was that I don’t understand that person’s feelings.
Depressing.
For Sagan’s third quote, I couldn’t help but think how outdated it was. Nowadays, I don’t think it often happens that scientists change their minds, at least not in any field that has become politicized – and a great deal of science has become more politicized. And of course, I (and others) have changed my mind in politics – or at least, my political designation, although not really my basic principles. That change was based in large part on evidence and arguments by conservatives such as Thomas Sowell.
And surely people change their minds regarding religion quite often – there are converts, for example, or people who come back to the fold of their original religion, or people who lose their faith. But Sagan is correct, I think, in indicating it doesn’t usually happen as a result of someone presenting a good argument about religion.
“Science advances one funeral at a time.”
I think his self-identification as a scientist may have biased his observations.
These quotes are the absolute truth.
I regularly appear before the Omaha Public Power District and tell the Board that nothing they will do will make one bit of difference about global warming.
The Directors are all true believers in CAGW.
In August 2023, this belief in global warming becomes real. OPPD wants to spend $2b plus and raise rates 10% plus in order to build and buy more solar and wind power.
Two more from Sagan. Both are almost clairvoyant.
“We’ve arranged a society based on science and technology in which nobody understands anything about science and technology,” Sagan says. “And this combustible mixture of ignorance and power, sooner or later, is going to blow up in our faces.”
“I mean, who is running the science and technology in a democracy if the people don’t know anything about it?” he asks rhetorically.
“Science is more than a body of knowledge. It’s a way of thinking, a way of skeptically interrogating the universe with a fine understanding of human fallibility,”
“I have a foreboding of an America in my children’s or grandchildren’s time—when the United States is a service and information economy; when nearly all the manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries; when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; when the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority; when, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what’s true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness.”
I’m going to read those Sagan quotes at the OPPD August Board meeting.
Thanks, Aesopfan and neo.
““I mean, who is running the science and technology in a democracy if the people don’t know anything about it?”
World Economic Forum asserted that passengers going through turnstiles in the Paris Metro could generate enough energy to power one complete subway line.
https://www.linkedin.com/posts/world-economic-forum_your-commute-could-be-a-source-of-renewable-activity-7083474879496212481-akK4/
Anyone who has taken high school science, or done any practical work involving energy and/or electricity, should know immediately that this is nonsense.
The vast majority of articles on energy storage attempt to state storage capacity in megawatts or gigawatts, which is a category error and makes no sense. This happens in the business media and the ‘tech’ media, not only the general media.
Sagan was quite willing to subordinate science to politics when it suited him. He was a celebrity scientist a la Neil de Grasse Tyson and not a prominent researcher.
The effect of propaganda and indoctrination, of conditioning and programming (especially over long decades) is very hard to overcome, requiring much effort and great struggle, as well as a willingness to acknowledge that one has been too gullible, indeed “bamboozled”. Also working against any hope of political conversion (despite massive evidence against the “received opinion” or the “prevailing wisdom” of the so-called “experts”) is the “sunk-cost” fallacy, as well as the fear of being ostracized from a particular social circle or working environment, not to mention the desire of so many humans to be “in with the in-crowd” (in the words of the old pop-song).
Stan is right.
From Wikipedia on J. Harlen Bretz (the guy that came up with the Spokane Floods for the creation of the Channeled Scab-Lands.
“Bretz encountered resistance to his theories from the geology establishment of the day. The geology establishment was resistant to such a sweeping theory for the origin of a broad landscape for a variety of reasons, including lack of familiarity with the remote areas of the interior Pacific Northwest where the research was based, and the lack of status and reputation of Bretz in the eyes of the largely Ivy League-based geology elites. Furthermore, his theory implied the potential possibilities of a Biblical flood, which the scientific community strongly rejected.[9] The Geological Society of Washington invited the young Bretz to present his previously published research at a meeting on 12 January 1927, where several other geologists presented competing theories. Bretz saw this as an ambush, and referred to the group as six “challenging elders”. Their intention was to defeat him in a public debate, and thereby end the challenge his theories posed to their conservative interpretation of uniformitarianism.
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Bretz defended his theories, kicking off an acrimonious 40-year debate over the origin of the Scablands.
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National Geographic observes: “As philosopher Thomas Kuhn observed, new scientific truths often win the day not so much because opponents change their minds, but because they die off. By the time the Geological Society of America finally recognized Bretz’s work with the Penrose Medal, the field’s highest honour, it was 1979 and Bretz was 96 years old. He joked to his son, “All my enemies are dead, so I have no one to gloat over.”
To paraphrase those English fellow-travelers who in the middle of the previous century proudly proclaimed, “I’d rather betray my country than betray my friends” (and not infrequently translated that “high-minded” sentiment into action):
I’d rather betray myself than lose my friends….
(Not that anyone should have to lose their friends, mind you, but…,
Still, the truth is that it’s tough, very tough; and no one should have to be placed in that kind of predicament…even though this appears to be happening all the time.)
He was a celebrity scientist a la Neil de Grasse Tyson and not a prominent researcher.
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Again, no. Sagan was on the faculty at Cornell and published regularly. He also produced trade books and broadcast material. (This was status lowering at the time, because it does take away time from research).
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As for Tyson, he is a planetarium director. Science education is his business, though he has published in academic and professional journals.
I’d be fascinated to know about what, in politics and religion, Sagan ever changed his mind.
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I’ve never noticed professors have thoughtful things to say about civic life unless that’s their particular book of business.
traison de clerc, as benda put it, but it was about avoid icky bourgeouis sentiments, instead of internationalism or the proletariat,
Re Stan’s comment about “science advances one funeral at a time” and Chases Eagles’ comment wrt Sagan “In science it often happens that scientists say…”
I just wonder if Sagan ever read Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolution
Because it’s not about the nail
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-4EDhdAHrOg&pp=ygUXaXQncyBub3QgYWJvdXQgdGhlIG5haWw%3D
We are always taught that “seeing is believing,” but the reality is more often that “believing is seeing.”
The bamboozle quote is profound. It is written in Sagan’s 1996 book “The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark”. I recently located this book at my public library and began reading it. The first chapters were autobiographical. I found it interesting to read Sagan explain the development of his scientific philosophy. It is in these early chapters where the bamboozle quote is found.
The remainder of the book is Sagan discussing the pressing scientific issues of the late 20th centuries. This includes Global Warming / Climate Change as well as Medicine & Vaccines. Here is what I find fascinating: Nothing Sagan writes challenges conventional progressive thinking on those issues.
So there is a paradox. Sagan writes and talks of the importance of skepticism in evaluating scientific claims, and yet it is difficult to find examples where Sagan expressed skepticism where such skepticism threatens the political mainstream. I am unaware of Sagan ever attacking the political Left, whereas he did participate in attacks on the political Right and religious fundamentalists. Surely Sagan enjoyed being popular and he seemed very aware of what he could say to remain popular. At the same time, Sagan was not overtly political, and I give him credit for that.
Sagan’s 1996 interview with Charlie Rose is fantastic. Yet the political Left celebrates Sagan’s words as a victory for their cause. We see this in this link to the Rose / Sagan interview. The promoters of it are fully confident that Sagan agrees with their politics! Would Sagan be on board today with the Progressive view of Science? I hope not. But we will never know.
https://www.openculture.com/2022/10/carl-sagan-issues-a-chilling-warning-to-america-in-his-last-interview-1996.html
Regarding Bretz, the Channeled Scablands, The Missoula Floods, and the Bonneville Floods. By the early 1970s the glacial floods were accepted by geologists. Something about technology (aerial photography, satellite images, proving beyond doubt that Bretz’s field observations were correct. Context in geology matters however. Geology as a science had to contend with the power of Christain biblical interpretation regarding how the Earth was formed, Biblical Noachian floods, fossils, catastrophic sometimes rare events (meteors, not just meteorites, much less asteroids), flood basalts, extinctions, and of course the vastness of geologic time. So the geologic science elders were a bit skeptical about floods. Not that Plate Tectonics was shaking up the science of geology, driven in part by the availability of oceanographic data on patterns of magnetic polarity and orientation of the ocean floor. Data collected mostly to help the Navy find submarines (IIRC). Now of course geology is captured by climate change dogma (big geology anyway).
Would Sagan be on board today with the Progressive view of Science?
As a white heterosexual (married three times to birthing persons) male, Sagan was lucky that he died before DEI came to exert its present influence on recruitment of scientists as well as topics considered appropriate for scientific research. OTOH, Sagan smoked pot from the late ’60s onward and advocated for the liberalization of marijuana laws, so progs can canonize him for that.
I attended a talk that Carl Sagan gave when I was an undergrad. It was a small group (100 or so) in the mid ’70s. He was quite personable, someone asked an astrology question; the influence of planets and constellations, he replied that the “stop” sign at the street corner had more influence on a person than Jupiter. Which was and is true every day; ignore “stop” signs and see how it turns out.
The remainder of the book is Sagan discussing the pressing scientific issues of the late 20th centuries. This includes Global Warming / Climate Change as well as Medicine & Vaccines. Here is what I find fascinating: Nothing Sagan writes challenges conventional progressive thinking on those issues.
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Aye. Sagan had a weakness for the fashionable, and you could see that in the articles he was able to place in Science and Nature. These are peer-reviewed publications whose content is produced by professors, but they’re not specific to any discipline. Professors read them, but they’re more consequential for their students. He was the lead author of a paper on global cooling, published in 1979 (in Science, as I recall). He was a co-author of another on nuclear winter around about 1984. I think atmospheric physics might have been somewhere in the vicinity of his regular research program, but I don’t think it was precisely in his wheel-house. (I’d have to review his bibliography). You remember the era, though.
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and yet it is difficult to find examples where Sagan expressed skepticism where such skepticism threatens the political mainstream.
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Not the political mainstream, but the cultural mainstream of arts and sciences faculty.
Not for the first time, Neo has mentioned Thomas Sowell (who is black). Recently I think she mentioned Sowell’s 1999 book The Quest for Cosmic Justice, which consists of four related essays. I’ve owned it for surely more than a decade but never got very far into it. My loss.
Just yesterday I read the first part of the fourth essay, “The Quiet Repeal of the American Revolution,” and it takes my breath away: Sowell launches off Abraham Lincoln’s 1838 Lyceum speech, which I’d heard of but never really encountered. Key point: humans of great talent and ambition (in the limit think: Alexander, Caesar, Napoleon) won’t be content to simply keep a great innovation — e.g. the American republic, as founded — going, with maybe modest course changes and enhancements. No, they’ll want to make their mark, fulfill their destiny. So given the opportunity they’ll upend things.
At some point I’ll want to read the whole Lyceum speech, from which Sowell quotes two paragraphs.
Here’s a follow-up comment on this point from Sowell himself:
If the dangers in our own times were limited to those of “towering genius,” there would be much less danger than there is. However all that is needed are towering presumptions, which are increasingly mass-produced in our schools and colleges by the educational vogue of encouraging immature and inexperienced students to sit in emotional judgment on the complex evolution of whole ages and of vast civilizations.
Related post I did a week or so ago: The End of Science Education in the West?
https://chicagoboyz.net/archives/69764.html
@Chases Eagles:National Geographic observes: “As philosopher Thomas Kuhn observed, new scientific truths often win the day not so much because opponents change their minds, but because they die off.”
This has not generally been true, and especially not true for some of the biggest changes in scientific thinking.
Sticking with geology for now, between the late 1950s and early 1970s continental drift became rapidly accepted as plate tectonics, after having been a minority position. The reason for the quick change in opinion was largely due to the discovery of the mid-ocean ridges and the characteristics of the rocks found near there, coupled with a plausible physical mechanism for moving the continents.
Special relativity was first proposed in 1905, by 1911 most theorists had accepted it and by 1912 Einstein was recommended to the Nobel committee for it, though they decided to award his Nobel for something else in 1921.
Quantum mechanics got started in 1900 and by 1918 Planck was getting a Nobel prize for it.
In all three cases the new theories solved a lot of outstanding puzzles, were well supported by evidence both old and new, and also led to fruitful new avenues of research.
These timelines are far too short to be explained by an old guard dying off…
Frederick:
Speaking as a geologist educated when Plate Tectonics theory became testable,
….. So the geologic science elders were a bit skeptical about floods. Not that Plate Tectonics was shaking up the science of geology, driven in part by the availability of oceanographic data on patterns of magnetic polarity and orientation (of magnetic anomolies) on the ocean floor. Data collected mostly to help the Navy find
submarines (IIRC). Now of course geology is captured by climate change dogma (big geology anyway).
Geophysics helped immensely as well as other technologies such a deep diving submersibles (observations of eruptions of lava at spreading centers ocean ridges, black smokers, etc.), seismometer networks, SQUID magnetometers, GPS satellite navigation that allowed measurement of movement of large land masses, etc., drilling technology to core into the sea floor (Deep Sea Drilling Project and successor JOIDES).
The Navy had other practical reasons for figuring out the magnetic anomolies of the sea floor; magnetic detonators (fuses) on torpedoes (MK 14) didn’t work because such anomalies were not known when those fuses were developed in the late 1930s.
Lots of things were used to establish the Plate Tectonic model, not just the musings of Wagner. Or the field work of Bretz for the Missoula Flood theory.
Art Deco is quite correct in the pithy summary “Sagan had a weakness for the fashionable.” Indeed he did.
Which includes both the good and the bad of the post-Apollo science decades.
At the time, this weakness in his writing was admitted among my friends. Therefore, I was steeled against the fashionable tides raging after 9/11. First the atheist/Dawkin’s wars. And second, the Religions all say “the Same Things” argument. Including Islam — and if you opine differently, “you’re an Islamophobic” monster!
By the bye, the Second edition of David Cook’s “Understanding Jihad” came out, and it will gently, carefully, and authoritatively disabuse you of such “universal humanist” notions. (Pace, Israel’s new internal developments – that I expect our host to share sometime soon.)
More St. Carl Sagan, Patron Saint of Scientists… IMO “Demon-Haunted Universe” was a terrible book.
Sagan was a charming guy, a great science popularizer, but a questionable scientist. Though compared to Neil deGrasse Tyson, Sagan was a shining beacon.
If Sagan were alive today, I am confident he would be backing Climate Change and the full force of the Deep State and Big Tech to suppress differing opinions.
He was complicit with scientific shortcuts (such as ignoring the earth’s rotation after nuclear war) to get the political results he wanted.
Not a fan.
I know of a scientist who did research for years into a debilitating condition. The conventional wisdom was that it was caused by X, which was eventually supposed to lead to a breakthrough in treatment. This scientist did a lot of lab work with mice based on the “conventional wisdom.” For years. Tossed around a lot of theories, but never came up with anything that really worked in reversing the condition.
A friend of his came to him asking for real help as they had been diagnosed with the condition. This then grew into a cohort of about ten to fifteen people with the condition and the scientist and two of his colleagues working on an idea. They reversed the progress of the condition! They did it through a strict diet, exercise, meditation/yoga, supplements. The scientist, in the years since, has essentially been drummed out of the scientific community. The work he did is denigrated because there was no blind trial. The idea that there wasn’t just a magic pill means it’s not really a “cure.”
But they people who do follow his regime see dramatic change.
It then turned out that much of the work that had been published by other scientists that led to the “conventional wisdom” had been faked. The faked research led to THOUSANDS of hours and MILLIONS of dollars being sunk into research based on the so-called “conventional wisdom”: People with Condition A, exhibit X. Therefore, X must cause Condition A. And the fake research supposedly proved it. Except, it didn’t.
The scientist I know of is still being pretty much reviled by many of his former colleagues. I googled his name and the name of the department he used to chair, and the current chair was slamming his work.
I know him. He is a real old school scientist: You test a hypothesis, and if it doesn’t work, it proves the hypothesis is wrong. And that in and of itself is valuable.
Anyhow, he changed his mind. And was open to doing so.
If Carl Sagan ever changed his mind in a significant way after the age of 30, I’d like to hear about it.
Sagan was a charming guy, a great science popularizer, but a questionable scientist.
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Which of the publications in Sagan’s bibliography of research articles have you read?
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Though compared to Neil deGrasse Tyson, Sagan was a shining beacon.
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Dr. Tyson is an amiable television presenter whose main employment is running a planetarium. You’re the second person on these threads who has trashed him. I don’t get you guys.
Which of the publications in Sagan’s bibliography of research articles have you read??
Which have you read?
Dr. Tyson is an amiable television presenter whose main employment is running a planetarium. I don’t get you guys.
You don’t get a lot of things. Tyson advertises himself, as do his apologists, as a serious public intellectual at the same level as Carl Sagan.
Which I consider a low bar, but Tyson fails it.
The “bamboozled” is not just what one absorbs due to a random encounter and cannot shed.
It must make the believer feel good.
If not, it can be shed.
Tyson is an old-fashioned, village-atheist, Christian baiter with 21st C progressive trimmings.
Sagan, in “The Demon-Haunted Universe,” was politically smart enough to limit his attacks on faith to the New Age and astrologers.
But today I’m sure Sagan would be emboldened to join Tyson and the New Atheists to attack Christianity and Christians directly.
But Sagan is correct, I think, in indicating it doesn’t usually happen as a result of someone presenting a good argument about religion.
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It’s not actually uncommon. The reason people don’t know that is that philosophy of religion isn’t a well covered subject. But many have been converted by argument; C S Lewis is only the most famous. It’s probably much more common than among scientists, who generally are at sea when philosophy enters the picture. They – and this was definitely true of Sagan – are too often talking about philosophy without knowing it, and without examining their assumptions. In his case, he had the common fault of clinging to kind of self-refuting positivism.
Related? (on the JWST):
“Big Bang Is Over! James Webb Telescope Detects a Structure that Should Not Exist.”—
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mvpbZGwZ6_4
File under: Change my mind. Come on, just try it….
Dear Neo:
You have no way of knowing how important–what a treasure–this day’s post has been to myself and my beloved. It has turned churning, muddy waters of emotion into a crystal clear stream of sweet pure goodness!
Thank you!
Eeyore:
I disagree. I’m well aware of C.S. Lewis’s books and his arguments, and of people who found him convincing. I have written about Lewis in this post. There are many comments there, too. My conclusion is that the vast majority of people convinced by his arguments were raised as Christians and are returning to the faith after some time away, and that Lewis’s arguments resonate with them for that reason and because they are emotionally ready to return.
Which have you read?
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Why would I read something in Journal of Geophysical Research? I don’t have any critical engagement with that material. You passed judgment on his teaching and research, you tell me why what you said is so.
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Using GoogleScholar, not any specialized database, you dredge up 357 publications with Sagan’s name on them. Some of the citations are to pieces pitched to general audiences, some are to conference presentations, some are to book reviews, some to commentaries. In that set, about 213 might be called research papers. By my count, 143 are papers in specialized academic journals (among them The Astronomical Journal, The Astrophysical Journal, Icarus, sections of Journal of Geophysical Research, Astronomy & Astrophysics. Supplement Series), 55 appeared in general science journals (Nature and Science, with a scatter in other publications like Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences), and 15 were working papers produced for public agencies. I doubt the working papers were peer-reviewed and it wouldn’t surprise me to discover that the material in Nature and Science consisted of recycled papers which in essence appeared elsewhere. He’s often not the lead author and the conventions of scientific publication being what they are, you can wager that when he is, he’s often taking credit for leg work done by those farther down the faculty / graduate student food chain. (Other branches of science frown on an excess of collaborative work and a mathematician once told me that the the common admonishment in his field was “If you haven’t done it alone, you haven’t written the paper”). Still, 143 research papers over the period running from 1957 to 1996 and a full professorship at Cornell seem adequate to me. YMMV.
@neo:I’m well aware of C.S. Lewis’s books and his arguments, and of people who found him convincing.
Pretty sure Eeyore meant C. S. Lewis himself was converted by arguments.
My conclusion is that the vast majority of people convinced by his arguments were raised as Christians and are returning to the faith after some time away,
I do think this is the case for Lewis himself. His period of “atheism” lasted from his teens into his late twenties; that sort of path is not so unusual …
Tyson advertises himself, as do his apologists, as a serious public intellectual at the same level as Carl Sagan.
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Where did he do that?
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(While we’re at it, some of Sagan’s published work was of the ‘public intellectual’ variety, but the bulk of it was disciplinary publication for others in his field).
sagan’s work was fine, except when he spoke ex cathedra
https://nypost.com/2023/07/24/our-societys-top-brains-have-gone-mad-and-dysfunctional-politics-is-the-result/
re Atheism vs Religion, there’s a relevant post & discussion at Quillette:
https://quillette.com/2023/07/24/new-atheism-and-the-demand-for-dogma/
Getting away from science for a sec…
My father-in-law is utterly convinced that he’s a Democrat and that Republicans are, minimally, bad people (myself and my husband, his “stepson” – he married my husband’s mother when my husband was already out of the house, so never was a day-to-day father to him – provisionally excepted). Here are his policy positions:
* The government shall not infringe the right of the people to keep and bear arms.
* The border ought to be vigorously enforced. Illegal immigration is a terrible problem.
* Taxes are too high. Period.
* Small business is the foundation of society and government ought to stay out of its way. Over-regulation is a cancer.
* While people ought to be free to live their lives as they choose, it makes no sense to “celebrate” one or another group on the basis of their sexual orientation or whatever, and NOBODY is going to force him to APPROVE of life choices he doesn’t like.
* Abortion ought not to be illegal, but once the fetus looks like a baby, it’s ghoulish to kill it (he’s quite a concrete guy with no scientific or philosophical training or interest whatsoever, so this is about where he comes down). Why don’t people just use birth control?
* Biden is an idiot, Obama was horrible for race relations, and Clinton did ok as president but was a gross horndog.
Doesn’t he sound center-right? But there is NO convincing him that he might consider voting for a (California!) Republican for ANY office, including dog catcher.
My point being, he begins with an unexamined belief in something that doesn’t hold up to even a little scrutiny, because it’s core to him. He is a Democrat, his father was a Democrat, his father before him… To challenge that “truism” is to challenge his sense of identity.
well california republicans are a mixed blessing, but yes there is tunnel vision there,
The Sagan quotes in the post are accurate within the restricted field of empirical knowledge. But he said a lot of fatuous stuff about religion because of his philosophical materialism. Like most holders of that view (Richard Dawkins!), he didn’t seem to understand that it isn’t axiomatically and self-evidently true and is only one of many rational philosophical positions.
Jamie,
It seems to me there are a lot of people out there just like that. It is all very odd to me. Out of curiosity, do you think he’d have voted for Bernie Sanders had he won the nomination?
I have a friend who started work on his PhD in Chemistry at MIT. He took over the work of another post grad student who’d moved on to be a professor. He could not get the same results. His professor wasn’t happy. Those results were going to be important in his next big, published paper.
My friend was frantic. He did the experiments over and over and over. There just wasn’t any way that his results matched up. Eventually, the truth did come out. The previous student, now a professor at a quality university, had faked it all. Nothing happened to him. Indeed, my friend’s professor was mostly pissed at my friend for being unhelpful. Because fraud is just not something that anyone cares about in modern science. See also the experiences of Amgen and Bayer in trying to replicate work from the two best journals, Science and Nature.
Another friend worked on a masters in environmental engineering. His thesis was to be on a pet project of his professor. Problem — the data didn’t bear out her claims. After working through it over and over and over, he went to her to present his findings. Her response — “I am presenting on this in the fall at the big conference. We will just make these numbers work.” She simply threw out all data as outliers that were unhelpful getting her needed p value and published. He was so disgusted he dropped out of the program having completed 99% of the work.
Science is broken because the cheaters and liars are not disciplined, and incompetence readily accepted. Encouraging corruption just begets more. The incentives are strong and the morals weak.
As for the ability to change one’s mind — my friend left the MIT program. He eventually became a doctor. Near the tail end of the Covid hysteria we went out to dinner with our wives. I asked him his take on all the bad advice that the CDC had pushed. He disagreed. He considered the CDC to be the gold standard of care. All the doctors followed the recs.
Interesting how his own experience with blatant fraud wasn’t relevant to him in evaluating the CDC despite so much evidence that the CDC had been disastrously wrong.
A while back I posted on Facebook a joke that involved peer review. I’ve forgotten how it went now, but it was truly a joke. A scientifically-minded friend was offended by it. I was questioning peer review! Undermining science, our only path to truth! I wasn’t doing that at all, and was surprised at the reaction. At worst it was a joke about some scientists, not about science itself.
This person is also very much of the Dawkins-Sagan-et-al mind about “religion” vs “science.” I once had a long exchange with him in which I tried to get across the point I made above, that philosophical materialism is not the only point of view compatible with reason. His absolute imperviousness to the idea was exactly the sort of thing Sagan decries in those quotes. The combination of that and his reaction to the joke seems significant. Maybe that exaggerated reverence for science tending toward reverence for scientists is part of the reason “science is broken.”
stan:
I think your friend was able to consider the experience with the professor as a one-off. But once he’d been a doctor practicing for years, he’d relied on the CDC for many things and it was too threatening to see them as having been deceptive.
He disagreed. He considered the CDC to be the gold standard of care. All the doctors followed the recs.
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The commercial prompt care which diagnosed my COVID case notified the local health department per standing regulations and I received a call from said health department. They, no doubt, followed CDC guidelines. The phone was delivered to me while I was on the john. Well, lady health department apparatchik tells me, we should self-isolate. I reminded her that my period of peak contagion was several days past; well, she tells me, you can still transmit it until x days after symptoms appear. She also told me that I should wear a mask indoors until such and such a time. I tell her the square footage of our home and thank you very much, ma’am, bye bye.
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Dame was just doing her job. I don’t need to tell anyone here how inane was this proffered advice by late December 2022. One thing we’ve discovered in the last three years or so is how little we can trust (1) the public health apparat and (2) doctors.
Science is broken because the cheaters and liars are not disciplined, and incompetence readily accepted. Encouraging corruption just begets more. The incentives are strong and the morals weak.
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In the Catholic blogosphere, I used to cross paths with a fellow named John Simmins. He was an engineer who had once been employed by Oak Ridge National Laboratories. He maintained that fraud in pursuit of grant money was standard behavior in his observation.
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It has struck me that everyone in a position of influence in higher education is routinely disingenuous if not frankly mendacious. I’d attributed that to the scum rising to the top, but maybe its just a more obtrusive manifestation of the ethics and morals of the faculty.
stan:
My spouse has a rare genetic retinal disease. It was identified in her by a PhD researcher at OHSU Casey Eye Clinic. He went on to falsify research on the condition. The diagnosis is correct. The genetic test data are good, but he appeared to have falsified further research on the condition. Repeated, so you will understand.
He was fired, terminated, by OHSU and The Casey Eye Clinic.
Sometimes actions have consequences. You don’t know “all.” Science is hard.
Scientists and others may “speak truth to power” when the party they favor is out of power. That’s when they come up with all the wonderful quotes about the value of dissent and independent thinking. When their party is in power, they tend to speak the “truth” of those in power, and “follow the science” becomes another way of saying “obey those in power.” It’s possible that they may show more probity when it comes to their specializations, but so much opining is about matters far from one’s own field, and even within one’s field, the consensus of experts may go unquestioned and unchallenged when politics is a consideration.
“Argument” is another ambiguous word. Over the course of one’s life one may encounter thousands of “arguments” in books and articles, and one may find at some point that a new “argument” is closer to evidence or to one’s own experience than one’s old view. But an “argument” in the sense of a debate or an immediate personal exchange with someone of another opinion is extremely unlikely to change one’s opinion. There isn’t enough time for rumination and examining all of the evidence. That’s something one does by oneself, not at another’s command or urging.
neo on July 25, 2023 at 12:02 am said:
Eeyore:
I disagree. I’m well aware of C.S. Lewis’s books and his arguments, and of people who found him convincing. I have written about Lewis in this post. There are many comments there, too. My conclusion is that the vast majority of people convinced by his arguments were raised as Christians and are returning to the faith after some time away, and that Lewis’s arguments resonate with them for that reason and because they are emotionally ready to return.
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Totally misses the point, which Frederick saw. I was referring to Lewis’s own conversion. (Might also include his wife’s.)
Your immediate jump to “emotionally ready” is, frankly, what our culture teaches us to think. Oddly, people like Sagan are NEVER assumed to be emotionally tied to scientism. And they are.
And that’s a bad argument, anyway. One converted by argument was an Anglican theologian, now forgotten, named William Chillingworth. A very big part of his argument was that it really didn’t matter what was the role of a person’s feelings or motives. Once he’s stated his argument, it’s out there on its own, and should be analyzed solely on its merits. But we have been trained – and I’m afraid you’ve falling into this – to see religious people as somehow specially emotive in their beliefs. And its just not so. If you want to go there (and I don’t care for this) you will find that Bertrand Russell was himself the product of a long progressive lineage. Does that make him worthless as a thinker?
I’ve just been reading Waugh’s essays. He’s one who wasn’t; he also has an essay on Edith Stein, who wasn’t. This is just one of those bits of myth that is ingrained in our minds. A lot of learning is unlearning our assumptions.
BTW, I went back and read the old linked Lewis post. It misses Lewis’s point. He was speaking of philosophy, and therefore was being binary : true/false. In that sense Christianity is unimportant if false because everything is unimportant if false. It’s a mistake to just grab a sentence out of its context like that, though we do so all the time.
Some people just don’t have a philosophical bent. Most scientists clearly don’t get it, though a few do. But they get by with it because we are taught to revere and defer to them. (I think one good development is that Fausti seems to have hurt that.)
in other news
https://www.thebrighterside.news/post/breakthrough-rocket-engine-could-accelerate-to-99-the-speed-of-light