Arguing the Science of Models
I have been arguing with a longtime Conservative friend about the models. His criticisms are all across the board.
I have been trying to keep him straight on how to interpret science and not fall victim to other people with ulterior motives explaining it to him.
Long story short is that I have a simple approach. Criticism of science is desired and necessary as long as the goal is to improve the science for future use. It is not OK to criticize science with the goal of discrediting science as a whole.
Anyway, I stumbled on this blogger that almost perfectly aligned with what I was trying to explain to him.
Starting with a defending models against the anti-science crowd.
https://windypundit.com/2020/04/a-brief-and-unnecessary-defense-of-epidemic-models/
Then explaining why some criticism is different than other criticism.
https://windypundit.com/2020/05/how-to-criticize-an-epidemic-model/
From this second post...
Unlike some of the nuttier tweets I quoted in my previous post, these criticisms come from the epidemiological community.
...
I don’t want to fall into the fallacy of appeal to authority, but since most of us are not expert enough to understand the subject completely ourselves, authority certainly helps make the criticisms more credible. But there are other reasons to take the criticisms in the STAT article seriously.
Credible scientific criticism tends to have certain recognizable characteristics. Most importantly, in order to credibly criticize a piece of science, you have to actually understand the science. The great scientific revolutionaries, such as Albert Einstein, thoroughly understood the system they were seeking to overthrow. Failing to meet this obligation is a common problem with cranks and people driven by ulterior motives.
I thought it was interesting and could be of use to some of you trying to explain to your brainwashed kin why some of those facebook posts are not credible
= new reply since forum marked as read
(Science, 24 April 2020)
