… so they just pretend it doesn’t exist.
The Pareto principle Pareto principle - Wikipedia (or Pareto Distribution) applies to scientists too. Roughly 20% of the important science come from approximately 20% of the scientists. The rest of the scientists are just mediocre and follow the leading scientists.
Visit any scientific conference and you will see only a very few sessions (maybe 20% ?) heavily attended. The rest are just there to humor egos.
Visit any good University’s science or engineering departments, you will find the same distribution. About 20% of the professors get 80% or more of the grant money. The rest of the professors are just mediocre.
So, on the whole, the idea of “percent of scientists” is kinda invalid. Just convince the important 20% and the rest will follow.
I believe the correct number is 80% of the important science come from approximately 20% of the scientists.
Yes Czarcasm - thank you for the correction.
Similarly, when someone asks for me to donate money for, say, heart disease, I always ask if the money will be used for or against heart disease.
The question is meaningless - scientists don’t “support” or “believe” in global warming, or gravity, or the Big Bang. They deal with verifiable data.
This is the first thing that went through my mind too, along with: Does the OP really think there are scientists out there who are gung-ho about changing the climate? That we’re not doing enough to make the Earth warmer, because there’s so much useless land in Canada and Russia now because it’s too cold there?
Yes, but scientists will often speak colloquially/lazily/imprecisely(?) and say “believe.” For example, a scientist might say “I believe in hypothesis A,” when what is actually meant is, “based on the evidence and data I am familiar with, I think that hypothesis A is mostly likely correct.”
Among scientists talking to each other this usually isn’t a problem, but when somebody who doesn’t think like a scientist hears it, they are likely to interpret “believe” wrong. Even with scientists, when discussing their field of knowledge I would interpret it differently than if we were talking about religion or something.
I disagree with your conclusion. It’s pretty much universally true that the most important advancements come from a minority of researchers, but only for the simple reason that in any body of research the relative importance of discoveries follows more or less a normal distribution, so only a small number of them will be rated at the high end of the bell curve. But it’s ridiculous to characterize the majority of research scientists as “followers” in the pejorative sense of being non-creative or non-critical. Every legitimate scientist contributes new knowledge in some area, and for those seeking fame, there is no surer path to fame than disproving a widely held theory and blazing a new trail to discovery. So there’s in fact good motivation to be critical, but for that you need good evidence.
What you seem to be disparaging with the “followers” trope is the important fact that science advances incrementally by building on previously established foundations. It’s no different in climate science, where well established theories in, for example, the radiative forcing associated with greenhouse gases is the foundation for pursuing a better understanding of our climate system. The fact that scientists don’t sit around perpetually questioning whether CO2 is truly an important factor in climate change is not because they’re “followers”, it’s because they’re scientists, not conservative pundits on a late-night talk radio show.
It’s your right to disagree. Scientists are humans too and the Pareto principle is a scientific principle that applies to all human endeavors, scientists included. Consider the following :
-
Go to any University and look at the library records of the thesis written in the last 10 years. You will find that only about 20% of them have been referred to extensively while the rest collect dust.
-
Look at Reference papers in any scientific publications. You will find that a few publications are referenced by a lot of other publications.
-
Talk to PhD students at any university. They will tell you the few key professors that can make or break their careers by being co-authors on their paper.
-
And then there is the great crisis in science. The crisis of reproducibility. Just do a google search.
I have held the title of “Research Scientist” in the past (thankfully no more) and am fully aware of the dances that go on for getting research grants and the levels of exaggeration on grant proposals.
Confirmation bias and p hacking was (and maybe is) so prevalent that special committees exist just to stop this behavior.
Pick any science related conference and checkout bibliographic evidence on all attendees. You’ll see that only a fraction of them have most publications.
I’ll make the following responses to your points.
Items 1 through 3 just reiterate the fact that contributions to scientific advancement fall along a bell curve, a fact that I do not dispute but consider irrelevant in this context.
I disagree with the use of the word “crisis” in item 4, although this term has been bandied about because it’s much more newsworthy than saying “potential issues in some fields of research”. I consider it a cynical view of the state of scientific research, and such truth as there is to it is very much field-dependent. When I have seen reports and papers making this type of claim, they usually tend to come from medical research sources and whether they explicitly say so or not, they usually pertain to reproducibility problems in medical research and sometimes “soft” sciences like psychology (and yes, I’m aware of some of the sensationalized articles that have appeared in Nature and elsewhere). They are most acute in clinical drug trials and in cancer therapies, where one frequently hears about the so-called “decline effect” in the Kaplan-Meier curve used to track cancer survival rates in response to specific therapies.
But my greatest objection to your earlier comments and those about reproducibility is that such claims are subject to really serious misinterpretation by the casual reader who might be tempted to conclude that scientific findings are just unreliable, particularly in politically controversial areas like climate change. And this would be totally false and extremely unfortunate. It would overlook the fact that from a layman’s point of view, these criticisms – such as they are – apply to relative technical minutiae and not to foundational principles such as the scientific understanding that drives public policy in climate change.
The reproducibility issue thus has exactly zero relevance to our well-established knowledge of the radiative forcing of CO2 or to its post-industrial increase from anthropogenic sources. The reproducibility or lack thereof and therefore the validity of any given set of scientific research papers might have the effect of changing conclusions and projections by perhaps some figure after the decimal point. The IPCC conclusions, for instance, are supported by thousands of cited research papers with broadly consistent conclusions. Landmark papers like some of those of Michael Mann et al. (particularly the early temperature reconstructions that showed the classic “hockey stick” post-industrial temperature spike) have been subject to more scrutiny and reproducibility tests than any other research that I know of, to the point that Mann has quite literally been persecuted by climate change denialists – and have emerged unscathed and even more strongly confirmed.
And finally – and I apologize if I’m reading too much into your comments – but ISTM that the reference to “followers” tries to imply that there are few climate scientists capable or willing to take a critical position on AGW. This is just flat-out untrue. The reality is that the basic true-or-false dichotomy over AGW exists as a “controversy” only in the media and among the scientifically uninformed. There’s no such basic “controversy” in the actual science and legitimate climate scientists don’t get into these stupid arguments because they’re busy doing science. There are rare exceptions like Willie Soon and Sallie Baliunas whom I mentioned earlier, who are just shills for the fossil fuel industry and produce discreditable junk science, like their claims that solar variations are solely responsible for everything. Or Roy Spencer, who openly admits to being motivated by anti-government libertarian views.
Or the now-retired Richard Lindzen, who was actually a legitimate atmospheric physicist at MIT, and who mostly confined his idiotic denialism and puerile pronouncements (“who can say what the ideal temperature is for the earth?”) to the lay media, and aside from a few discredited forays into the journals, mostly managed to keep his real research well separated from his contrarian pontifications. It was a remarkable performance, because in his writings and lectures to the everday audience, the man obviously knew he was spouting deceptive bullshit. This is diametrically opposite to someone like Christopher Monckton (his grace the 3rd Viscount Monckton of Brenchley) whose climate denialism stems from being a congenital imbecile.
You definitely don’t have to provide any evidence for this. Clearly, 80% of the mileage run in the Boston Marathon is run by only 20% of the runners.
Likewise, 20% of the runners account for 80% of the time spent running the marathon.
These facts are self-evident. There’s no need to use evidence to show the Pareto principle actually applies in a specific situation.
Wolfpup - first of all apologies. It seems like I’ve offended you at some deeper level. The objective of my post was not to divide the scientific community into winners and minced meats. I agree with many of your points except the quoted above.
There is a wide spread bias (IMO) in the scientific community that the so called “casual reader” does not understand science. I have seen no scientific studies to prove this. For example :
-
Five years back, the scientific consensus on many organic foods was that there is no benefit from many organic foods and their nutrition values were the same as regular foods. Yet many of my scientist friends (and yes they supported climate change data) insisted on buying organic food for their family. The scientific consensus on organic food was irrelevant to them. Would the nutrition scientists consider these scientists as “casual readers” ?
-
Most of my scientist friends have the same median carbon footprint as my non scientist friends
I understand that the above is anecdotal data but these things do not have actual data .
My point is that the belief that scientists are rational creatures while the general population is not is a flawed belief. Or maybe it is true, but I have not seen hard data to confirm (or deny) this.
If only it were so. IME undergrad programs are more about teaching the introductory technical material than about critical and logical faculties, and learning how to be a good scientist gets pushed into grad school. That is a very broad brush, mind you.
True, a good scientist will get through the undergrad program just fine, but a mediocre or bad scientist with some good recall likely will as well. Most of my fellow chem majors were aiming at medical school, not a place known for cultivating good scientists.
Even with grad school, a lot of real doozies slip through. I’m sure every person with a PhD reading this is nodding and thinking of multiple people. To a point, a mediocre or even bad grad student can be better for the advisor than no grad student. Handing out degrees to duds does hurt reputation, but a pair of hands is a pair of hands.
You did not offend me but my responses were prompted by the belief that your comments about the weaknesses of science and its practitioners could easily be interpreted in a very misleading way in the context of the OP’s question. In a word, the scientific consensus on the basic facts of anthropogenic climate change is very strong and very important, yet you appeared to be suggesting that 80% of climate scientists are mediocre duffers and therefore presumably uncritical, so they’ll just uncritically believe whatever the leading research says, so the consensus is meaningless. The reality is that the consensus exists because the science has long been settled far, far beyond these elementary basics.
Let me now address your observation that it’s false to say that the general public doesn’t understand science in an area like climate change. If you think the general public does, you must be joking. In fact the disconnect between well-established scientific findings about climate change and the beliefs of much of the public is the largest disconnect I have ever seen on any subject in my life. It’s genuinely a crisis of ignorance: the October 29 - November 4, 2011 issue of New Scientist ran a cover emblazoned with the title “Unscientific America: A dangerous retreat from reason” with a special report citing the extent of public misinformation about climate change – including among top political leaders – as one of the most disturbing examples of this phenomenon. The central thesis of the report is that even as science advances, we are becoming a nation retreating into the darkness of scientific illiteracy.
It’s a crisis of ignorance that’s being systematically fed by dark money from industrial vested interests. An estimated $900 million a year is being spent by what one study calls “US climate change countermovement organizations” on the spread of disinformation about climate change. The most cursory Google search will turn up hundreds if not thousands of blogs and websites questioning, undermining, and denying the science. A huge segment of the US population just recently elected a president who declared climate change to be a hoax and withdrew the US from the Paris climate agreement, and many members of Congress agree with him. Right now one of the most notorious of the plethora of denialist websites, run by a former TV weatherman named Anthony Watts, has a lead article that begins with the following sentence: “Professionals and academics who disagree with the theory of Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW) have been ostracized for their contrary views, resulting in termination of their employment, or in forced retirement.” The battle against the science is being accompanied by personal attacks against scientists and the integrity of an entire scientific discipline. Ross McKitrick and Steve McIntyre continue their vicious and unsubstantiated attacks on climate research in general and Michael Mann in particular – and they are just two prominent deniers among thousands, most with their own blogs.
And you’re going to tell us that “There is a wide spread bias (IMO) in the scientific community that the so called “casual reader” does not understand science”? I assure you, it’s not a bias, it’s a fact – at least in areas that are politically controversial like climate change.
To be clear, one can make all kinds of criticisms of the scientific process in the appropriate venue and context: sure, scientists are only human; they can make mistakes; they have their pet theories and may disparage competing theories with emotional zeal; there are in certain contexts reprodicibility problems that are worth discussing. But none of these things are relevant in the broader context of major scientific findings that have long been settled. In the same way that such observations have no relevance to central questions about biogical evolution, they have no relevance to the central questions about anthropogenic climate change and the requisite public policies to mitigate it.
So to bring up in this context, in a thread like this, the allegation that the majority of scientists are “followers” and presumably therefore uncritical of mainstream climate theories is highly misleading and therefore a disservice to the interests of fighting ignorance. It is, indeed, perilously close to the same sentiment advanced in that first sentence I quoted from the denialist Watts website.
This presumes that scientists are strictly objective harvesters and analysts of data, with no stake in the outcome of their research and its impact on society.
Scientists vary in the degree to which they defend their conclusions (in public or on a more subdued academic level), but many choose activism to support their beliefs.
First - here’s only one way to find out for sure - but it will take quite a few years and there’s no going back. We are in the midst of one giant experiment with an 8,000 mile in diameter petri dish (globe). What scientists think is irrelevant, unless it can change something. “What scientists think” is also irrelevant unless you define who and about what. Physicists can discuss greenhouse effect; chemists can talk about carbon dioxide and water acidification; biologists can discuss effects like coral bleaching and polar bears starvation, etc. Few people can address all details. Beyond their specialty, what they “believe” is as relvant as what the rest of us believe.
What scientists believe is actually very important because scientists need to be advisors to policymakers on what actions to take and why they need to be taken. This role of science has been seen as essential to public policy since some dude named Abraham Lincoln authorized the formation of the National Academy of Sciences in 1863, but it has never been as important as it is now, not even when the government put its faith in science for the NASA missions or the Manhattan Project. But this role is difficult to fulfill when half of Congress is still arguing that climate change is a hoax perpetrated either by the Chinese or by a conspiracy of alarmist grant-seeking climate scientists.
There are other reasons besides nutrition to choose to buy organic foods.
There are almost no reasons to buy organic foods. There are reasons to buy sustainable foods, or small-batch foods, or cruelty-free foods, or heirloom foods, or many other categories. But despite what many people think, those categories have only incidental overlap with “organic”.