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iamfondofpigs t1_jdxz08w wrote

Reply to comment by MpVpRb in Linguistic analysis of 177,296 Reddit comments sheds light on negative attitudes toward science by HeinieKaboobler

> Skeptical redditors, like me, respond

Yep. Especially on a science subreddit, the majority of comments should be critical.

If you go in person to a conference, or a paper presentation, the majority of questions will be critical. Not attacking, but questions that probe for weaknesses in the experimental design. This is not "anti-science sentiment." This is science itself.

On Reddit, the average level of expertise is lower than at a conference. So, a higher proportion of the criticisms will be spurious. But we should still expect mostly critical comments.

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JaiOW2 t1_jdyl3xj wrote

Critical analysis, and criticality are not always the same thing. So I can probe at the logical validity of a claim as a way to critically challenge the material, or I offload a bunch of adversarial gish gallop.

Both are being critical, one is doing it in an analytical or constructive mode. The other is doing it in a rhetorical or biased mode. Just being "critical" is not sufficient, science is critical in of itself but via the hypothetico-deductive model, it's not just critical, it has a logical system by which it facilitates criticality, that is, the criticality is systematic.

Criticality can be as irrational and illogical as it can the opposite. That shines here, the amount of criticality that stems from A) not actually reading the study or cherry picking small sections, B) not reading the authors conclusion or analysis and C) just reacting to the title, it's not that some individuals are spurious, it's that criticality without the scientific or philosophical foundations of reasoning is spurious.

Which I think has potential for feedback loops. Commenters without the academic understanding of the topic and systems might make judgements, that means you get an overly skeptical (or positive too) presentation in the comments, people reading the comments might derive their conclusion from the theme of the comments, rather than the paper itself, and thus you have a process by which a skepticism develops that sits upon rickety, rotten foundations. But the real crux is that a lot of critical comments can completely stem from a preconception (I disagree with the study -> so I'm going to find things to be critical of), that means that criticism is literally antithetical to science.

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iamfondofpigs t1_jdynusw wrote

I agree with all this.

I guess when I think of science, I think of a machine that sucks up judgments from biased humans, and somehow spits out results that converge on the truth. Of course, this convergence happens faster when the humans do their best to be less biased in advance. And the convergence can be reversed if the biased humans are bad enough.

So I'm willing to tolerate a lot of trash criticism if it means that a little good criticism also gets through. Maybe in the face of the current political environment, I should be less tolerant of trash criticism; not sure.

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jordanManfrey t1_jdzw9er wrote

> a machine that sucks up judgments from biased humans, and somehow spits out results that converge on the truth

cough chatgpt cough reddit comment voting cough

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