Comments on Ragesoss 2.02: The Paranoid Style in American Science

The errors generally reflected an unprofessional d...

2008-04-27T23:11:00.000+01:00

The errors generally reflected an unprofessional degree of accuracy, excellence, and ethics in online media, either by omitting primary bibliographic references altogether, or referring to them via poorly written amateur reviews that were little more than hatchet jobs.

I judged them as biased against Berlinski, but mainly they were just erratic and unprofessionally described.

Were these problems you were pointing out biased f...

2008-04-27T22:50:00.000+01:00

Were these problems you were pointing out biased for or against Berlinksi?

Since this blog post is about David Berlinksi, per...

2008-04-27T21:03:00.000+01:00

Since this blog post is about David Berlinksi, perhaps it would be illuminating to examine a pair of related editorial conflicts involving Berlinski, to illustrate my concern...

There was an article entitled Icons of Evolution that referenced a video in which Berlinski appeared, but the bibliographic reference had the wrong description, including a wrong description of what was in the video.

I obtained the actual video and watched it several times. At first I thought there must be two radically different videos of the same name, as the one I had bore little relationship to the one described on Wikipedia.

I pointed out all the errors on the talk page, but the adversarial editors dismissed my observations as unreliable or unsourced, even though my source was the actual video.

A similar error found its way into Berlinski's BLP, and again the editors resisted correcting the errors and omissions, preferring to rely on an amateurish review of a video (including an erratic and unjournalistic excerpt) rather than examine the video itself to obtain an accurately quoted excerpt.

These are the kinds of editorial improvements that, to my mind, would improve the accuracy, excellence, and ethics of the treatment of these admittedly controversial subjects. These were fairly minor revisions, but note how much opposition I ran into from a particularly intransigent editor. Unless this kind of uncongenial and uncollegial attitude subsides, it's not productive for someone like me to make the effort to improve articles in Wikipedia.

And from what I've learned since my unhappy experience last August, this sort of exasperating editorial conflict is far from uncommon.

And yet, Wikipedia often succeeds in ways that are...

2008-04-27T19:45:00.000+01:00

And yet, Wikipedia often succeeds in ways that are more convincing (because of the continual input of interested parties) even if they less coherent than traditional sources.

For evolution and global warming, for example, I think Wikipedia's coverage is more convincing to skeptics than any number of professionally produced pieces that have the same aim, precisely because the results are multivalent in ways that sources direct from authorities are not. It's easier to dismiss arguments from authorities you feel are illegitimate than to dismiss arguments that acknowledge conflicting positions including your own.

On Wikipedia, it works surprisingly often, given the lack of epistemologically or politically robust mechanisms for resolving disputes. Enough people are amenable to reason, argument and evidence that the system works most of the time.

It's hard enough to construct a coherent account o...

2008-04-27T19:25:00.000+01:00

It's hard enough to construct a coherent account of a scientific theory for a traditional print encyclopedia.

Given the absence of a functional procedure for resolving editorial conflicts on Wikipedia (especially when scientific theories are not universally accepted), the challenge may well be insurmountable on Wikipedia.

Right. And part of the problem with issues like e...

2008-04-27T19:17:00.000+01:00

Right. And part of the problem with issues like evolution and global warming is that the evidence and reasoning are too complex to be both widely understandable to non-experts and decisively more convincing than the arguments of skeptics at the same time.

(Valiant attempts at such accounts are the great virtue of Wikipedia, in my view, even when they fall short for the most contentious issues.)

It's important for the consumers of such transmitt...

2008-04-27T19:06:00.000+01:00

It's important for the consumers of such transmitted findings to be able to ask of their sources, "What is your evidence and reasoning?" and be provided with a coherent and forthright account.

Moulton, thanks for your comments.Part of the prob...

2008-04-27T18:54:00.000+01:00

Moulton, thanks for your comments.

Part of the problem, which is at the core of this "paranoid science" argument, is that there are remnants of, as you put, cultish beliefs in the way that science works.

That is, at some point most of the factual grounding of science has to rely directly or indirectly on social convention. This is the point Engber makes in bringing up Shapin and Schaffer. In the time of Boyle and Hobbes, S&S argue, Boyle and his colleagues established the "literary technology" that set the ground rules for what kinds of reports about science and experimental "matters of fact" could be relied upon. Natural philosophers, as gentlemen, could be relied upon to faithful and authoritatively recount the events of an experiment, so that the results could be taken as fact even by those without access to the reported phenomena.

In that sense, the line between cultish beliefs (where authority is vested in the word of a leader to whom knowledge has been revealed) and grounded scientific knowledge (where authority is vested in scientists to whom direct experimental knowledge has been revealed) is pretty muddled.

The same thing applies to journalism, of course. Whether it's science, religion, journalism, or any other realm of knowledge that reaches beyond personal experience, it comes down to the political question of whose word can/should be trusted.

A culture where all such knowledge is challenged and doubted (within the limits of common sense) is a good thing, even if it partly undermines the cultural authority of science in the short term.

A healthy skepticism is essential to the scientifi...

2008-04-27T12:10:00.000+01:00

A healthy skepticism is essential to the scientific enterprise.

It occurs to me that part of the challenge of teaching science is discovering how to imbue young would-be scientists with the level of healthy skepticism that best serves the enterprise of getting to the ground truth on the basis of reliable evidence and sound reasoning.

The alternative is the emergence of cults where the cultish beliefs (and derivative practices concordant with those beliefs) are little more than ungrounded flights of fancy.

That's fine if one is planning a career in science fiction or fantasy fiction.

But it's not a good idea for a culture that relies on well-grounded science, reported to the public by well-grounded journalism.