<story><title>Online activists are silencing us, scientists say</title><url>https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/science-socialmedia/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>onion2k</author><text>&lt;i&gt;Unfortunately we have some people who put their beliefs and politics above science and will actively act against investigation only because a line of inquiry could result in evidence against their view.&lt;/i&gt;&lt;p&gt;You say that&amp;#x27;s people putting beliefs and politics above science, but while that&amp;#x27;s a rational thing to suggest there are two problems with it.&lt;p&gt;Firstly, &lt;i&gt;a lot&lt;/i&gt; of issues don&amp;#x27;t &lt;i&gt;and can&amp;#x27;t&lt;/i&gt; have any scientific rationale behind them. They&amp;#x27;re moral judgements. For example, if you want to go looking for scientific evidence for why the death penalty is a terrible idea you won&amp;#x27;t find any. You&amp;#x27;ll only find ethical and moral rhetoric about why killing innocent people by mistake is bad, or why the economics of keeping people in prison for decades when you could just kill them is irrational. Science has nothing to say. Science doesn&amp;#x27;t judge.&lt;p&gt;Secondly, people don&amp;#x27;t always believe evidence even if it&amp;#x27;s there. For example, if you take a random sample of teams and find the ones that make the best decisions are more diverse[1], some people will demand &amp;quot;positive discrimination&amp;quot; is a terrible idea and a meritocratic system must be better &lt;i&gt;even in the face of the evidence&lt;/i&gt; or they&amp;#x27;ll just argue that the evidence is plain wrong. How do you persuade those people to change their minds?&lt;p&gt;[1] &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.forbes.com&amp;#x2F;sites&amp;#x2F;eriklarson&amp;#x2F;2017&amp;#x2F;09&amp;#x2F;21&amp;#x2F;new-research-diversity-inclusion-better-decision-making-at-work&amp;#x2F;&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.forbes.com&amp;#x2F;sites&amp;#x2F;eriklarson&amp;#x2F;2017&amp;#x2F;09&amp;#x2F;21&amp;#x2F;new-resea...&lt;/a&gt;</text></item><item><author>mc32</author><text>This is sad.  Unfortunately we have some people who put their beliefs and politics above science and will actively act against investigation only because a line of inquiry could result in evidence against their view.&lt;p&gt;It comes from both the left and right depending on the topic.  It’s not simply dissent it also is about pressuring institutions to not fund certain areas of investigation which is a very detrimental consequence.&lt;p&gt;I sure hope we grow out of this phase, or another society like China or Japan avoid this fate so studies can go on without interference [obviously they’ll have their own blinders but we can at least be complementary]</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>dataduck</author><text>While there may be evidence that diversity leads to better decision making, this isn&amp;#x27;t it.  It&amp;#x27;s a marketing piece for a company that sells a decision making co-working platform.  Direct from the white paper:&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;The study was able to measure when teams made better
decisions by tracking how often the decision maker changed
their mind based on the input of the team. This is presumed to
be a better decision since the Cloverpop process ensures that
decisions are well framed with clear goals, adequate
information and multiple alternatives to avoid groupthink.&amp;quot;&lt;p&gt;In other words, this study defines better decisions as ones which make their product relevant, which unless you&amp;#x27;re a Cloverpop marketing exec, probably isn&amp;#x27;t a good metric.</text></comment>
<story><title>Online activists are silencing us, scientists say</title><url>https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/science-socialmedia/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>onion2k</author><text>&lt;i&gt;Unfortunately we have some people who put their beliefs and politics above science and will actively act against investigation only because a line of inquiry could result in evidence against their view.&lt;/i&gt;&lt;p&gt;You say that&amp;#x27;s people putting beliefs and politics above science, but while that&amp;#x27;s a rational thing to suggest there are two problems with it.&lt;p&gt;Firstly, &lt;i&gt;a lot&lt;/i&gt; of issues don&amp;#x27;t &lt;i&gt;and can&amp;#x27;t&lt;/i&gt; have any scientific rationale behind them. They&amp;#x27;re moral judgements. For example, if you want to go looking for scientific evidence for why the death penalty is a terrible idea you won&amp;#x27;t find any. You&amp;#x27;ll only find ethical and moral rhetoric about why killing innocent people by mistake is bad, or why the economics of keeping people in prison for decades when you could just kill them is irrational. Science has nothing to say. Science doesn&amp;#x27;t judge.&lt;p&gt;Secondly, people don&amp;#x27;t always believe evidence even if it&amp;#x27;s there. For example, if you take a random sample of teams and find the ones that make the best decisions are more diverse[1], some people will demand &amp;quot;positive discrimination&amp;quot; is a terrible idea and a meritocratic system must be better &lt;i&gt;even in the face of the evidence&lt;/i&gt; or they&amp;#x27;ll just argue that the evidence is plain wrong. How do you persuade those people to change their minds?&lt;p&gt;[1] &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.forbes.com&amp;#x2F;sites&amp;#x2F;eriklarson&amp;#x2F;2017&amp;#x2F;09&amp;#x2F;21&amp;#x2F;new-research-diversity-inclusion-better-decision-making-at-work&amp;#x2F;&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.forbes.com&amp;#x2F;sites&amp;#x2F;eriklarson&amp;#x2F;2017&amp;#x2F;09&amp;#x2F;21&amp;#x2F;new-resea...&lt;/a&gt;</text></item><item><author>mc32</author><text>This is sad.  Unfortunately we have some people who put their beliefs and politics above science and will actively act against investigation only because a line of inquiry could result in evidence against their view.&lt;p&gt;It comes from both the left and right depending on the topic.  It’s not simply dissent it also is about pressuring institutions to not fund certain areas of investigation which is a very detrimental consequence.&lt;p&gt;I sure hope we grow out of this phase, or another society like China or Japan avoid this fate so studies can go on without interference [obviously they’ll have their own blinders but we can at least be complementary]</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>dTal</author><text>You know, I think science is a lot more capable of converting &amp;quot;is&amp;quot; into &amp;quot;ought&amp;quot; than it is commonly given credit for. I think there&amp;#x27;s room for a kind of &amp;quot;moral pragmatism&amp;quot;. After all, our morals all came from &lt;i&gt;somewhere&lt;/i&gt; - some type of reasoning drove their creation, be it conscious or evolutionary. There&amp;#x27;s a rock bottom, and science can expose contradictions between our core axiomatic beliefs, and our more shallow cached beliefs.&lt;p&gt;As an example, I&amp;#x27;ll run through a sample &amp;quot;scientifically pragmatic&amp;quot; argument against the death penalty: The death penalty is a terrible idea because it fails a cost benefit analysis. The benefit is a deterence to commit certain types crime, and a cost savings compared to life imprisonment. These are measurably small (research has shown that severity of a penalty has a nonlinear relationship with deterrent effect). The cost is the violation of a moral imperative not to kill. A society with the death penalty has made a conscious decision to compromise a moral imperative. This weakens the authority of moral imperatives, particularly the one against killing. The purpose of such moral imperatives is to promote a more civil, less violent society, because such societies enjoy an evolutionary advantage, hence their evolution in the first place.&lt;p&gt;How the argument proceeds from this point depends on core axioms - whether one values happiness or survival more, for instance. But the point is that it&amp;#x27;s possible to logically break down what appear to be moral questions into purely pragmatic ones, in service of deeper axioms.&lt;p&gt;The problem with this isn&amp;#x27;t that it&amp;#x27;s ineffective - it&amp;#x27;s that it&amp;#x27;s complicated, error prone, and relies heavily on a correct accounting of second-order effects and beyond. Science is hard - you need research and facts. Moral judgement is easy - you just say what pops into your head. As such, people mistrust the very idea that morals &lt;i&gt;could&lt;/i&gt; be calculable, because it removes their agency. If someone has a strong, irrational feeling that Billy Murderer has it coming and should fry for what he did to those kids, my above argument (fleshed out properly to appeal to their core values, provided that&amp;#x27;s possible) will not convince them that it&amp;#x27;s a bad idea in the long run, no matter how scientific or testable it is. So they say things like &amp;quot;science has nothing to say&amp;quot;. In fact, it does - we just don&amp;#x27;t want to listen.</text></comment>