Haha what? If I am to understand this correctly, you've basically completely forfeited your entire argument by rendering it toothless.

And I'm sure you would be happy if I self-censored.

Oh, so in a way that conforms to your own very specific criteria concerning what the public needs to know in order to understand a certain topic? lol

lol. Seriously. This, for example, is a forfeit:



This makes no sense. What is a criticism in this context except an assertion that Stephen Hawking should've done something other than what he did? Isn't that precisely a statement of a preference?

I think Reid doesn't like looking into details because he's bad at details.

Reid just weasled his way out of admitting that he is in favor of such a norm, but my follow-up point was going to be that he is greatly underestimating people's abilities to decide for themselves the merit of stated points of view, right or wrong.

Look, if people are at least talking about the potential problems of A.I., we are all better off. This is what Cunningham's law is about: when a wrong idea is broadcast, an expert is motivated to step up and promulgate a correction. I think Reid is arguing for a very closed and academic set of norms for public discourse that aren't really well adapted to the modern world.

Actually even the academy represents a far more open protocol conpared to what he seems to be promoting. Maybe it's better understood as elitism.

There's a conflation going on here that criticism of one part of an action amounts to a criticism of the entire action.

Dawkins is a bad example because as far as the public is concerned he isn't a biologist, he's a religion critic. It's the job he'd rather be doing, too. He probably studied biology in the first place because of that impulse. And yeah, maybe Neil deGrasse Tyson shouldn't be described as an astrophysicist either. He's rebooted his career into management, politics, and public outreach. But people don't listen to him because he is an astrophysicist, they listen to him because he is a charismatic general sciences advocate. Same with Bill Nye, whose only scientific credential is a mechanical engineering undergraduate.

The stuff you're complaining about doesn't matter as much as you think it does. Yes, some people might be tricked into thinking that an unqualified person's opinion is important. Welcome to politics.

Agreed. Democracy is not a venue where speaking "truthfully" ought to be a barrier of entry for discussion. One of the presuppositions of prominent theories of democracy is that the truth is not something that is known at the outset. Rather, it is something arrived at through public discussion. False opinions and their proponents are actually incredibly valuable in a democracy, according to some theorists.

Elaborate? What's the one part your criticizing, and what's the whole that I'm conflating it with?

Do you think that a person who publicly advocates for science should also try teaching the public skills like how one can identify relevant experts in a field, or one can successfully weigh various scientific opinions against each other? That science advocacy and education is about teaching the culture of science as well as the results?

I feel it's almost a truism that this is a desirable goal.

I criticized Hawking for not mentioning other experts in the area. It would be preferred if he did. I don't think that means he should not speak if he doesn't do it.

I don't know if I can be bothered to find the precise line, but I'd be surprised if some of the critical things you've written about people like Hawking weren't a hell of a lot stronger than that.

I can't tell whether you're too thick to keep your own argument straight or whether you're deliberately being contradictory, but i'm inclined to believe it's the former. Anyway, I'm done with this.

My criticism of people who aren't Hawking would be stronger than any criticism of Hawking himself. Maybe confusion arose because, while my original comment was oriented more generally, later on the conversation slipped into discussing Hawking specifically.

I feel that cherry picking experts in order to support an opinion you independently formed is much more intellectually dishonest than claiming to be the author of that opinion.

And frankly I don't see how teaching the culture of science is supposed to be a positive or encouraging thing. The culture of science is broken. Until the academy solves the replication crisis, fixes their disincentive against negative results, stops over-recruitment of graduate students for cheap exploitable labor, and starts opening up a whole lot more tenure track positions, they don't have any place telling the public whose opinion is best or even any intellectually honest means of determining it.

You could refer to one of my first posts in the discussion which stated:



You and Jones jumped on me interpreting this as a desire for censorship, but I basically just repeated the same thing and you're claiming I'm being contradictory. My line I feel has been consistent since I made it.

Still, I feel you are simply replacing one hierarchy for another: you don't like famous people using their public platform to state their own opinions, so you'd prefer for them to defer to the existing hierarchy of experts in academia.

I mean honestly, on some level you are simply advocating for society to be more inculcated in academic norms of doing research about prior art and citing experts every time they so much as speak about a topic. But this idea has its limits. I mean, remember that time when I said something to Jon`C about citing the source of an algorithm used in source code each time it was used, and he simply remarked, "academic spotted"? There's a reason why this kind of thoroughness isn't universal: it is time consuming, painstakingly, and ultimately tedious. There are plenty of people who can speak off the cuff about topics for which they haven't completely immersed themselves in the research literature of. For example, almost all of software engineers! Would it have been better if instead of writing this website in PHP, authors of vBulletin had gone and read TAoCP and implemented it in assembly? So long as the website isn't hurting anyone, I'm not sure it matters. Well, in a way it does, because I'd they tried that, they'd never finish. And in all likelihood, the same applies to public figures, in the sense that imposing stiffling levels of rigor is tantamount to censorship.

(Which, of course, is exactly how most grad students I know find citations.)

That could be, yeah. Maybe someone could offer multiple opinions, show that there's a real debate on the issue, and present reasons for why they believe in the correctness of their stance over the other's.



Earlier you commented that science advocacy is good for bringing about funding. But, public science advocacy is in part responsible for the bias against negative results. People get funding off of positive results because those results can sometimes make it into the news.

I'm not sure disappointing information about the state of the scientific community is a reason not to teach people about it, it seems to me that then we should inform people about the problems in the scientific community and why they don't live up to ideals. Since the replication crisis, for instance, has become more publicly known, I've seen quite a bit more skepticism around me towards regression-heavy social science research. That education about the current state of science helps people know how to interpret public-facing research, and how much to weigh their beliefs in its truth.

I don't think you get quite the same from listening to a person share their opinions.

See the second part or this post for the hierarchy I was talking about.

Isn't that what it means to be an advocate of science? To be an advocate of science, but not to teach people about science, to not accurately reflect what it really is, isn't actually advocacy of science, it's become advocacy of a Platonic ideal of science. And that, I feel, is a different thing.

I'm finding that my opposition is not in favor of people learning more about science at all.



I said above, off the cuff remarks I have no quarrel or qualm with. What NDT posts on Twitter, for instance, is often dumb, but him being dumb there is no issue. If he went and said some of that stuff to reporters, though, it could be a different story.

tl;dr: Reid is offering the particular discourse protocol of his own profession (academia) as a panacea to the all venues of discourse.

Perhaps the real question is, since Steven Hawking was a scientist, is he beholden to those discourse protocols by definition? Are scientists ONLY academics, or are they also merely human beings, public figures, etc.

You know better than I do that academia ranks researchers based on cashbux. Not soundness or rigor. Full professors are the folks who publish the most. That's why the replication crisis is so damning. It's not just a problem because some papers are wrong, it's saying the way professors are hired and promoted is wrong, the way academic incentives work is wrong, the way research is done is wrong.

A normal person looks at a field and sees a 1/20 study publication rate, and they should say "lol, literally no science is happening in this field". But nope, those papers get published too. And the people who make full professor, who get all of the funding, they're the folks who've somehow magically found a way to publish even more! Nothing shady going on here! No sir! It's definitely not because he's lying, or because he's actually very bad at his job. We should trust the academy when they say how brilliant this researcher is and pay attention to his expert opinion.

Pfft.

Anthropogenic climate change is an overwhelming consensus from across multiple fields, An opinion made by a democracy of experts. You should pay attention to that, and pay similar attention whenever something similar happens. When an experimental result has been confirmed repeatedly. Past that, everything the academy produces, especially how they rank and evaluate their own, deserves harsh scrutiny.

Well this is a reasonable distinction, but everybody here disagreed with the example you found of Hawking going to the media to talk about artificial intelligence.

I think the next big distinction that Reid is going to need to make to save his argument here is that science is not the same thing as the academy. And I'm not sure he's going to be able to pull that off.

Also, if I am to understand this correctly, most of what Carl Sagan did does not count as science advocacy, because he was "too Platonic" in presuming the existence of the cosmos without first explaining how scientists actually arrived at their understanding of astronomy.

So the exact same result, but done in a much less concise and comprehensible way?

Sure, it contributes. But lots of these papers are should be invalidated when researchers try to build upon earlier results, and fail to reproduce them. The money's already been wasted, and people - both other researchers and the general public - deserve to know, but the negative result isn't ever published. Why? Because journals don't accept them. Because of the political pressure against publishing negative results against a politically powerful researcher. Because nobody wants to be seen as wasting their time. There are lots of reasons, but the net is, the academy isn't rewarding people for doing science. The science is an afterthought.

Look, I'd love to live in a world where, instead of science journalism, the newspapers just reprinted the original article verbatim. I'd love a world where people understand statistics, have open access to primary sources, and are interested enough to validate the information for themselves. The reason I so respect science advocates, like Neil deGrasse Tyson, is because they're doing the most to make that world happen. But it's not the world we live in yet. The whole reason we need science advocates is because they can distill the debate down into something the mainstream media is able to communicate. Yes, you lose a lot of context in this process. But it's still better to have a well-meaning scientist sharing his or her opinion than a political pundit.

I don't see why this would contradict my view. I think science advocacy should bring light to these issues, and try to educate the public on them. Maybe if there was stronger public awareness with the problems in academia, there would be more forces pushing against them to straighten its course.

I don't know if you saw it, but a few pages back I linked the results of a computer simulation some researchers did on meritocratic funding, and the simulation's result was that equitable funding produced better scientific results. I'm absolutely on board with killing the current method of scientific funding. Science advocacy is, I believe, the best way the research community has to express these concerns to the public. And if the public is aware, with any luck one day we might see changes in policy.



In looking up information about Stephen Hawking's comments, I found this wiki page. Stephen Hawking sat on the advisory board of an institute which published a paper reflecting many researcher's warnings about AI. It could very well be that, in his comments to reporters, he was speaking as an advocate of these views and was representing the institute, I don't know because I couldn't find the transcripts.

Point being, the criticism might not be deserved because he might have been doing the thing I was criticizing him for not doing. I didn't know that, though, since most of the articles I found made no mention of it. So my criticism might actually be landing on the reporters rather than on Stephen Hawking himself.

Sure, why not?



I highly agree..?

If there's one thing this subthread has done to remind me of something important, it's that life is no more than an overlapping collection of pecking orders, each with their own myths and sacred cows. And at the end of the day, when you see how the sausage is made in each culture, you are left with few myths that don't begin to wilt.

Maybe the world would be better off if Steven Hawking referred to a report on the danger of artificial intelligence. Or maybe not, and the report is full of self-important academics and questionable science. And regardless of that, maybe everything that needed to be said about the topic for the purpose of his warning is more easily understood by the lay public without chucking a fat document at them, which more or less imparts the impression that science is tedious and boring work.

Also, yes, it's bizarre to live in a world where reporters, of all people, are the gatekeepers of knowledge dissemination for lots of people. They are overworked and don't have the background to know really anything about anything. It's still probably a good idea to talk to them, so long as you think the world is better off hearing what you have to say about a topic, rather than what Sean Hannity would say about it (as Jon`C already said).

Also, God yes, don't expect a reporter to produce what you tell them verbatim. In all likelihood it will be a cherry picked subset, so you had better be prepared for every single statement you make to be printed in total isolation and out of context.

[quote=Mark Twain]If you don't read the newspaper, you're uninformed. If you read the newspaper, you're mis-informed.[/quote]

.

I mean, in this way, self-publishing on Twitter is more, not less, a public record of what a public figure actually believes than what a newspaper prints of their statements.

Scientific advocacy has an inherit idealism to it. You must believe that the public is, on some level, willing and capable of learning about it.

I'm finding a bit that, we all seem to agree on the importance of scientific advocacy. But whenever I raise points about how or why that should be done differently, I'm faced with an immediate skepticism about it.

Why? If people can grasp the dangers of AI with some accuracy, they can grasp the complications of scientific research. I don't see how the cynicism and idealism are compatible.

I would be highly amused if the outcome of this argument were for Reid to hold Twitter in higher esteem. Maybe Steven Hawking's first mistake was to talk to the old school media rather than setting up a Twitter backend to his speech synthesizer.

I think the origin of the disagreement lied simply on the degree to which you deferred to the academic pecking order to accomplish this. I say, if a scientist has a public platform, they use it as they see fit, for science advocacy, for what you call overly Platonic demonstration of science results (Carl Sagan?), and even simply to change people's minds about AI, whatever. All are fine so long as the promulgation of the scientist's views isn't hurting anyone.

No, it's not a reasonable distinction. When I asked Reid what the difference is between these two things, he said this:



A tweet is just as capable of being spreading misinformation and therefore just as capable of being "damaging" to the public as a quote in a NYT article.

Maybe what you are really pining for is for old school print media to die off. Of course, it's being replaced with social media, which is arguably worse in many ways.

Speaking of which, an article by Ross Douthat from today:

[Quote=Ross Douthat]

Let’s get one thing straight: I am not a fan of Facebook. I’m confident that social media is a cancer on our private lives and a source of derangement in our politics. I take it for granted that the tech barons are acquiring the power to tilt elections, and that they’ll be happy to play handmaidens to tyrants soft and hard so long as they can monetize our data. I take a certain mordant pleasure in watching Mark Zuckerberg and his minions scapegoated for the political failures of late-Obama-era liberalism.

But the liberal establishment’s fixation on Facebook’s 2016 sins — first the transmission of fake news and now the exploitation of its data by the Trump campaign or its appendages — still feels like a classic example of blaming something new because it’s new when it’s the old thing that mattered more. Or of blaming something new because you thought that “new” meant “good,” that the use of social-media data by campaigns would always help tech-savvy liberals and not their troglodytic rivals — and the shock of discovering otherwise obscures the more important role that older forms of media played in making the Trump era a reality.

No doubt all the activity on Facebook and the apparent use of Facebook’s data had some impact, somewhere, on Trump’s surprise victory. But the media format that really made him president, the one whose weaknesses and perversities and polarizing tendencies he brilliantly exploited, wasn’t Zuckerberg’s unreal kingdom; it wasn’t even the Twitter platform where Trump struts and frets and rages daily. It was that old pre-internet standby, broadcast and cable television, and especially TV news.

Start with the fake news that laid the foundation for Trump’s presidential campaign — not the sort that circulates under clickbait headlines in your Facebook feed, but the sort broadcast in prime time by NBC, under the label of reality TV. Yes, as media sophisticates we’re all supposed to know that “reality” means “fake,” but in the beginning nobody marketed “The Apprentice” that way; across most of its run you saw a much-bankrupted real estate tycoon portrayed, week after week and season after season, as a titan of industry, the for-serious greatest businessman in the world.

Where did so many people originally get the idea that Trump was the right guy to fix our manifestly broken government? Not from Russian bots or targeted social media ad buys, but from a prime-time show that sold itself as real, and sold him as a business genius. Forget unhappy blue collar heartlanders; forget white nationalists and birthers: The core Trump demographic might just have been Republicans who watched “The Apprentice,” who bought the fake news that his television program and its network sponsors gladly sold them.

That was step one in the Trump hack of television media. Step two was the use of his celebrity to turn news channels into infomercials for his campaign. Yes, his fame also boosted him on social media, but there you can partially blame algorithms and the unwisdom of crowds; with television news there were actual human beings, charged with exercising news judgment and inclined to posture as civic-minded actors when it suits them, making the decision to hand day after day of free coverage to Donald Trump’s rallies, outrages, feuds and personal attacks.

Nothing that Cambridge Analytica did to help the Trump campaign target swing voters (and there’s reason to think it didn’t do as much as it claimed) had anything remotely like the impact of this #alwaysTrump tsunami, which probably added up to more than $2 billion in effective advertising for his campaign during the primary season, a flood that drowned all of his rivals’ pathetic tens of millions. And as cynical as I believe the lords of Silicon Valley to be, the more important cynicism in 2016 belonged to those television execs who were fine with enabling the wild Trumpian takeover of the G.O.P., because after all Republicans deserved it and Hillary was sure to beat him in the end.

Except that she didn’t beat him, in part because he also exploited the polarization that cable news, in particular, is designed to feed. In 2016 this polarization didn’t just mean that Fox became steadily more pro-Trump as he dispatched his G.O.P. rivals; it also meant that a network like CNN, which thrives on Team Red vs. Team Blue conflict, felt compelled to turn airtime over to Trump surrogates like Jeffrey Lord and Corey Lewandowski and Kayleigh McEnany because their regular stable of conservative commentators (I was one of them) simply wasn’t pro-Trump enough.

The depth and breadth of Trump skepticism among right-wing pundits was a pretty solid indicator of his unfitness for high office. But especially once he won the nomination this skepticism was often filtered out of cable coverage, because the important thing was to maintain the partisan shouting-match model. This in turn encouraged a sense that this was just a typical right-versus-left election, in which you should vote for Trump if you usually voted for Republicans … and in the end that’s what most G.O.P. voters did.

My own CNN experiences were positive; I admire the many fine journalists who work in television news. But it was clear enough being in that orbit in 2016, as it should be clear to anyone who watched Trump’s larger relationship to his television coverage, that the business model of our news channels both assumes and heightens polarization, and that it was ripe for exploitation by a demagogue who was also a celebrity.

It’s also clear — as the economists Levi Boxell, Matthew Gentzkow and Jesse Shapiro wrote in these pages late last year — that among older white Americans, the core demographic where first the primaries and then the general election were decided, television still far outstrips the internet as the most important source of news. And indeed, the three economists noted, for all the talk about Breitbart’s influence and Russian meddling and dark web advertising, Trump only improved on Mitt Romney’s showing among Americans who don’t use the internet, and he “actually lost support among internet-using voters.” In a sense, you could argue, all those tweets mattered mainly because they kept being quoted on TV.

Which is not to say that the current freakout over Facebook doesn’t make a certain kind of sense. Beyond the psychological satisfaction of weaving the often-genuinely-sinister side of Silicon Valley into stolen-election theories, there’s a strategic wisdom to the center-left establishment’s focus on the internet.

What Trump did will be hard for a future demagogue to imitate: The generations who get their information from newscasts are dying out, the web is taking over at an accelerating pace and in the long run there is more to be gained in going after Mark Zuckerberg than in pillorying Jeff Zucker. And pillorying Fox’s hosts only helps their brand: the big tech companies regard themselves as part of the liberal cultural complex, so they’re vulnerable to progressive bullying and shaming; not so Sean Hannity, whose stalwart support for Trump was and remains vastly more important than any online stratagem.

In the end, as Michael Brendan Dougherty wrote recently for National Review, one implicit goal of the Facebook freakout is to ensure that “conservatives and populists will not be allowed to use the same tools as Democrats and liberals again, or at least not use them effectively.” If the trauma of Trump’s victory turns social-media gatekeepers into more aggressive and self-conscious stewards of the liberal consensus, the current freakout will have more than served its political purpose.

But like the television channels whose programming choices did far more than Facebook to make Donald Trump president, it won’t have served the truth.
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https://nytimes.com/2018/03/21/opinion/trump-facebook-cambridge-analytica-media.html