The reason stems from my thinking that all of the following are important and true (and too often overlooked) regarding science:

1) A lot of science is real AND valuable to society.

2) A lot of “science” is actually fake – see, for instance, a decent percentage of papers in psychology 15 years ago.

3) “Science” (as an approach to knowledge discovery) is one of humanity’s greatest inventions – but in practice, it is reasonably often misapplied, or the process is distorted due to bad incentives or poor training. Unfortunately, not all fields of science have done a good job of being self-correcting either, so sometimes, fields go in bad directions for quite a while and need reform. There are different kinds of bad science:

(i) Sometimes, science is “bad” because it uses unsound methods for figuring out the truth (such as when p-hacking is rampant).

(ii) Sometimes it is “bad” because it overclaims (e.g., “Importance Hacking” where scientists claim they found something important/valuable when they didn’t actually demonstrate what they claim in their study. Or cases where science is used to “prove” questions that can’t be proven by science – such as which policy is better in a particular context when it’s actually a tradeoff between different values).

(iii) Other times science is bad because it is biased (e.g., when people are only willing to run or publish studies that show X but not that show the opposite of X).

(iv) And sometimes science is bad because it’s simply fraudulent.

4) Promoting broad “trust the science” is misguided (and actually harmful) because a bunch of science is fake. If you tell people to always just “trust the science,” then you are going to cause them to be tricked by a bunch of bad science, or you are going to contribute to their disillusionment and loss of trust when they discover (correctly) that some of the science you’re saying is good is actually garbage.

5) The “distrust all science” view is probably an even worse take than “trust the science.” If you distrust all science, you are likely to miss out on incredible things (such as highly effective treatments), and you set yourself up to fall for tons of things that don’t work (e.g., widely used unscientific treatments). Those who tell people to always just “trust the science” sometimes accidentally push people into the “distrust all science” view when those people realize that some of what they are being told to trust is crap.

6) So, hard as it is, rather than promoting either “trust all science” or “distrust all science,” the course of action I believe in with regard to science education is to teach people that “Science” (as a method) is an incredibly powerful and useful invention, but that “science” (as actually practiced) is much like every other field: some of it is good, some of it is crap. There are good hairdressers and bad hairdressers, and there is good science and bad science (and unfortunately, some bad science ends up in the very top journals – while journals and peer review absolutely do block some bad science, they unfortunately still let through quite a lot of it).

Since some science is well done, and some of it is poorly done, it’s very valuable to learn to tell the difference to make the best use of scientific results – both with regard to applying it in your own life and using it to form your beliefs about the world.

If we pretend science is all good or all bad, we do a lot of harm. We need nuance to see through the bad stuff while maintaining the tremendous benefits.

This piece was first written on November 20, 2024, and first appeared on my website on January 14, 2025.

1. Narratives Serve Power – powerful groups do tend to have a substantial influence on narratives, beliefs, and what’s “normal.” Something “obvious” or “objective” or “a fact” may just (invisibly) be a part of the narrative you’re immersed in and subtly be serving those in power.

2. Categories Bleed – just about any dichotomy or grouping will be leaky and imperfect (e.g., male/female, straight/gay). Some won’t fit any categorization, and there’s a subjective choice of where to draw boundaries. Yet we often treat categories as reality, forgetting their arbitrariness.

3. Intersectionality Can Matter – being perceived to be part of two categories can cause different treatment/perceptions than the sum of the effects of each category alone (i.e., there is non-linearity). A Chinese woman’s experience isn’t just Chinese experience + female experience.

4. Truth Is Elusive – many assumptions are baked into our interpretations. The truth is incredibly complex; epistemic modesty is warranted. Many have attempted to (or claimed to) use “science,” “objectivity,” or “rationality” yet have come to conclusions that were incorrect and harmful.

5. Values Differ – it’s very hard to argue in a principled way that one set of common intrinsic values is superior to another. For instance, if one culture values honesty and loyalty more than other values, and another values freedom and happiness instead, who’s to say one of those cultures is “right”?

6. Word Choice Can Have Consequences – for instance, suppose person P takes action X, and person Q dies. It matters if society calls that action “murder,” “manslaughter,” or “an accident.” Beyond legal questions, it matters socially (for the victim’s family and the perpetrator).

7. Universals are Rare – people claim to find universals (in economies, societies, individual psychology), yet almost none of them stand up to scrutiny as being actually universal. Truth turns out to be contextual with lots of variation. Even our theories of physics get supplanted.

8. Normal Is Not Better – what’s “normal” is often considered superior, and yet normal in one place and time may be weird in another. Much of human behavior is trying to fit in/be normal/be in fashion, which can help you to be liked, but normal is in flux and is not inherently better.

9. Art Is Arbitrary – stories tend to be linear and to follow the hero’s journey, architecture has a certain look based on location, and paintings in one era tend to be in a similar style to each other. But stories, art, etc., can still be compelling when fragmented, non-linear, convention-violating, or subversive. A much broader range of things can produce the effects of art than the limited array we usually see created.

10. Our Qualia are Unique – it is genuinely extremely hard to know what it’s like to be another person or to have had their experiences. We tend to overestimate our ability to relate. Those who have had an experience often do have unique information critical for understanding it.

11. The Oppressed Should Be Helped – some people continue to be oppressed, and those who are should obviously be helped. It’s important to remind ourselves of this oppression and try to stop it.

12. Context Often Matters – knowing who was saying something, what point in history they were saying it, who the audience was, the history of people saying similar things, and so on, can substantially change the meaning of what was said.

13. Some Things Are Said Without Being Said – meaning can be implied without saying something directly (e.g., through dog whistles, euphemisms, and by hinting at something). Even the omission of an idea that one would expect to have been said can imply a meaning.

The elements I listed above related to postmodernism are those that I find most helpful or useful. On the other hand, while I’m far from an expert on the topic, my perspective is that a number of aspects of postmodernist thought are quite unhelpful or mistaken.

Here is what I most dislike about the postmodern way of thinking (and related ways of thinking, like through the lens of critical theory):

1. It can ignore genuine progress made towards truth and a better society.

2. It can assume that word usage/language choices are more powerful than they are.

3. It can deny useful categories.

4. It can be self-undermining (if you apply its critiques to itself).

5. It’s not (I think) that effective at changing the problems it points out (since its proposed solutions to these problems seem, in my opinion, unlikely to achieve their own aims).

6. It can overemphasize the importance of certain problems over other equally or more important ones.

7. It uses obscure language/complex sentence structure that makes it confusing or even impenetrable.

8. It can be overly cynical about society and human nature.

9. It can seem to be in denial that many valuable things were discovered using reason, rational thinking, science, etc., and some of these have greatly improved people’s lives.

10. It can view society through too much of a zero-sum lens, not sufficiently acknowledging the importance of the many opportunities for positive-sum interactions.

11. It can overemphasize the value of information gained from the personal experience of individuals relative to aggregate information and scientific evidence.

12. It can treat large groups as monoliths, as though there really is an “X” perspective (for some large group, X).

13. It sometimes uses non-standard definitions for common words in a way that leads people to draw confused conclusions (assuming the conclusion applies to the common-sense meaning when it only applies to the non-standard one).

14. It can sometimes come across as idealizing those who are oppressed, creating weird incentives for some people to emphasize (or, in extreme cases, exaggerate) the oppression they experience in order to gain social points, or it can even create competition over who is more oppressed.

15. It can act as though feelings are facts, and that person A being upset by person B’s actions or words implies that A was wronged by B.

16. It doesn’t do a good job of summarizing itself, meaning that it can take a large time investment to begin to have a sense of what it even is.

17. It can fall into moral relativism and so runs the risk of being too reluctant to condemn harmful cultural practices of some societies (e.g., a practice of sometimes killing people for having premarital sex).

Overall, while I think that postmodern thinking contains some important ideas, I also believe that reliance on it tends to make things more confused rather than less and that many of its proposed methods and solutions don’t stand up well to scrutiny.

This piece was first written on March 29, 2021, and first appeared on this site on July 2, 2023.