Tag: science

String theories in trouble

As supersymmetry looks as if it’s going down:

Researchers at the Large Hadron Collider have detected one of the rarest particle decays seen in Nature.  The finding deals a significant blow to the theory of physics known as supersymmetry.  Many researchers had hoped the LHC would have confirmed this by now.  Supersymmetry, or SUSY, has gained popularity as a way to
explain some of the inconsistencies in the traditional theory of
subatomic physics known as the Standard Model.

The new observation, reported at the Hadron Collider Physics
conference in Kyoto, is not consistent with many of the most likely
models of SUSY.

Stickwick can explain this much better than I can, but while string theory would survive the shooting down of the supersymmetry concept, at least for a while, the falsification of three of the seven string theories would seem to reduce the likelihood that it is scientifically viable.

On the other hand, it would be a useful demonstration of the intrinsic bankruptcy of democratic popularity in science.

The Italian war on science continues

As we learned in the reaction to the L’Aquila verdicts, holding scientists accountable for actions that lead directly to the deaths of innocent people is a direct attack on science:

Italian police say they have arrested nine cardiologists accused of performing unauthorized experimental treatments on patients.  Carabinieri
Col. Giovanni Capasso says the investigation began over a year ago
after consumer groups raised alarm about some suspicious deaths at the
Polyclinic hospital in the northern city of Modena.

Capasso said
nine doctors were arrested Friday on accusations of corruption, criminal
association, embezzlement, defrauding the national health system and
performing unauthorized experimental treatments. One was jailed while
the others were given house arrest.  In addition, he said, a dozen
medical equipment companies have been barred from working with the
national health system for their alleged involvement in the scheme.

What an outrage!  Obviously these heroes of science must be released at once!  How dare the Italian authorities put such fine, reputable scientists on trial for the “crime” of adding to the the body of scientific knowledge?

It’s too late, Republicans

Ron Paul, who was rejected by Republicans in favor of the supposedly more electable Mitt Romney, concludes it is Game Over for the USA as well:

Rep. Ron Paul, whose maverick presidential bids shook the GOP, said
in the wake of this week’s elections that the country has already veered
over the fiscal cliff and he sees no chance of righting ship in a
country where too many people are dependent on government.

“We’re
so far gone. We’re over the cliff,” the Texas Republican told Bloomberg
Television’s “In the Loop” program. “We cannot get enough people in
Congress in the next 5-10 years who will do wise things.”

Since the “drive toward the cliff slower” strategy has worked so well, perhaps Republicans will now consider attempting a “fall slower” approach.

Richard Dawkins on US politics

Keep in mind, this is the same keen political observer who fell for Sam Harris’s ridiculous Red State argument because he didn’t know that American states are divided into counties:

If anyone is in doubt that Dawkins is a staunch liberal, take a quick look at his Twitter feed. On it, he describes Mitt Romney as an “awful Republican,” and — this might sound familiar
— disdains every Republican candidate and president since Eisenhower.
He constantly, almost obsessively, retweets Barack Obama’s campaign
missives. He approvingly quotes
Obama’s infamous line about those who “cling to guns or religion or
antipathy to people who aren’t like them” and contrasts it favorably
with Romney’s NRA membership, which he characterizes thus:
“No dang libruls gonna take away mah constitootional raht to carry a
gun. Pow! Bang! Weehaaar! Good shoot’n pardner.” Indeed, so partisan is
the man that he even entertained the absurd dual conspiracy theories
that Bush cheated in his debates with a radio (it’s “undeniable,” apparently) and Romney with a handkerchief in his.

This is a shame, but it is not a surprise. I’ve very much enjoyed
Dawkins’s books on science, biology, and evolution, and I enjoyed The God Delusion,
too. The lattermost, however, made it clear that whatever genius
Richard Dawkins has for science does not extend into politics or current
affairs. (His passage on how to set up the “ideal society” is one of
the most excrutiatingly infantile things I’ve read.) If anybody could
profit from Thomas Sowell’s advice that experts should stay in their
fields, it is Richard Dawkins.

On the lecture circuit, Dawkins likes to explain to his audiences
that faith corrupts thinking people. Alas, his love affair with Barack
Obama appears to have proven him correct.

Charles Cooke fails to follow the logic to its obvious conclusion.  Richard Dawkins does not possess any genius at all.  I’ve read his books on science, biology, and evolution too, and while I find him to be a generally engaging writer, I find his reasoning to be ever bit as abysmally bad with regards to science, biology, and evolution as it is to US politics.  Keep in mind that of the two “scientific” concepts for which he is most famous, there is no material evidence for the one and the other is looking increasingly dubious.

Mailvox: the logic of God II

In which Passerby attempts to poke holes in the logical argument demonstrating the irrationality of his position concerning the simultaneous existence of evil and the nonexistence of God.

Well! I wasn’t expecting an entire fresh post devoted to my challenge
in that other thread. I’m so honored. Pardon my late arrival.  Okay,
first off, VD, looks like you threw a gutter ball from your second
premise, as Riki-Tiki-Tavi already sensed. Let’s have a look at it:

2.
The existent fact of wrongdoing necessarily requires that there is a
material universal standard of right and wrong by which actions can be
classified.

Incorrect. The existent fact of wrongdoing/evil
does not require a material universal standard of right and wrong. The
existent fact of wrongdoing is self-evident because the alternative is…
the nonexistence of wrongdoing. Good luck making a sound argument for
the nonexistence of wrongdoing. Think anyone can do it passably? I
don’t and I suspect you don’t either. So we should agree there. That’s
point number one.

Point number one is incorrect.  Notice here that Passerby is not only taking exception to my point, but to entire philosophies such as nihilism, existentialism, and, ironically enough, rational materialism.  His argument is surprisingly weak, based as it is on the self-evidence of wrongdoing.  Is it self-evident that stealing is wrong?  That not voting is wrong? 

Consider how little sense his argument makes if we substitute a non-existent fact for wrongdoing/evil.  The existent fact of unicorns
does not require a material universal standard of unicorns and not-unicorns. The
existent fact of unicorns is self-evident because the alternative is…
the nonexistence of unicorns.

If we cannot tell the difference between a unicorn and a not-unicorn, then we cannot possibly declare that unicorns do or do not exist.  But if we have established the fact that unicorns do exist, we have necessarily established a material and universal standard for what a unicorn is and what a unicorn is not.  Therefore, point number one fails and the second step in the logical argument remains standing.

Point number two. Another thing wrong
with this “necessary universal standard” claim of yours (I noticed you
used that word “standard” seventeen times in your post, so to continue
the bowling metaphor, it’s like your very bowling ball to bowl with,
without which… well, game over — but I’ll give you a dollar so you can
go play some Ms. PacMan) is that six billion people in the world could
have six billion different standards of wrongdoing, but everyone would
nonetheless agree that wrongdoing does exist in the world.

So
let’s imagine those six billion individuals’ six billion different
standards of wrongdoing can be each given a numerical value. I’m not
saying it can ever actually be done, but just go with me here. After
they’ve all been given a numerical value, they’re arranged in order on a
vertical meter with a red zone on the bottom and a green zone on the
top. Put the meter on the lowest setting of “1”. That setting belongs
to a guy who disagrees with all 5,999,999,999 people above him whom he
considers to be an increasing bunch of prissy Miss Manners types who see
wrongdoing in all kinds of ways he doesn’t. But he at least sees one
instance of wrongdoing in the world and everyone above him agrees that
he at least got one right. So it seems to me (I’m just now coming up
with this, but I’ll try to land this thing in one piece) that this
minimum setting of “1” is the standard, if anything, for the existence
of wrongdoing. Below that is “0” which represents nonexistence of
wrongdoing.

Point being, our subjectivity is flawed, but it’s far
from useless! There is, after all, communication and agreement. It’s
precisely because of our limitation as trapped individuals of
subjectivity that science is the best idea we’ve ever come up with (or
happened upon) to make gains on objectivity. To paraphrase Steven
Pinker, science is our highest, purest expression of reason.
Objectivity is perhaps an unattainable goal, but we’ve seemingly made
lots of progress toward it given our technological conquests, our
steadily decreasing rate of violence in ever larger, more complex
populations, etc. I say seemingly because a cosmic rug pulling could be
in store for us a la The Matrix at any time, but that caveat aside,
it’s our processes of communication, cooperation, record keeping,
rhetorical persuasion, experimentation, reason, science, etc. that we
arrive at standards of right and wrong be they amoral (e.g., math,
chemistry, physics) or moral. And we arrive at them, to the extent we
do, through our own shared reasoning, thank you very much. No divinity
needed or even evident. 

Point number two is not so much incorrect as irrelevant, bordering on a category error. In this section, Passerby fails to grasp that an objective standard is more than the sum of six billion subjective opinions, and in fact, no number of subjective opinions can produce an objective standard, by definition.  The more the standard is “influenced by personal feelings, interpretations, or prejudice”, the less objective it can be, regardless of whether those competing feelings, interpretations, and prejudices are harmonious or not.  Existent evil/wrongdoing requires a material and universal standard, even if our subjective experience of the objective reality is different in six billion different ways.

If the readers don’t mind indulging me in following Passerby on one of his tangents, I will add that Stephen Pinker is wrong about science as he is wrong about so many things.  Science is most certainly not the highest and purest expression of reason.  Not only is it not reason at all, it was specifically conceived, developed, and utilized to replace pure reason.  This is why Science is so often at odds with Philosophy as well as Religion; Science is nothing more than the systematic codification of experience.

The importance of IQ

As much as people slaver to denigrate and discredit it, the statistical fact of the matter is that IQ is actually more important than most people believe when it comes to certain types of success.  While it’s not necessarily a surprise that college grades and years of education strongly correlate with IQ, (which may be the cause of the common confusion of academic credentials with intelligence), it may be a surprise to learn that IQ is a better predictor of successful job performance than openness, extraversion, agreeableness, confidence, or even conscientiousness.

IQ surpasses any single Big Five personality factor in the prediction
of the two academic outcomes, college grades (r = .45) and years of
education (r = .55). Big Five conscientiousness is by far the best
personality predictor of grades (r = .22).…Conscientiousness predicts
job performance (r = .13; corrected r = .22) better than does any other
Big Five factor, but not as well as IQ does (r = .21; corrected r =
.55). The importance of IQ increases with job complexity, defined as the
information processing requirements of the job: cognitive skills are
more important for professors, scientists, and senior managers than for
semiskilled or unskilled laborers.…In contrast, the importance of
conscientiousness does not vary much with job complexity….

Now, we all know the brilliant guy who has wasted his 175 IQ by spending twenty years in search of the eternal buzz.  I do, anyhow, he used to live in my basement.  But such individuals are complete outliers, what matters more is the advantage that the moderately intelligent man with the 115 IQ has over the even more moderately intelligent 105 IQ guy.

For some reason, the discussion of IQ differences makes people uncomfortable; it doesn’t matter how obviously intelligent one is, people still find it offensive in a way that they never find a tall man being straightforward about his height is.  This is strange, because one can’t do much more about one’s intelligence than one can about one’s height.  One can, perhaps, attempt to make more efficient use of it, but then, a tall man can strive to avoid slouching as well.  Is it because we value IQ more than height, is it because it seems a more intrinsic element of ourselves, or is it merely that height is more readily observed by the average individual?

Regardless, the reality is that the more everyone realizes that intelligence, as measured by IQ, is merely a tool and a natural advantage little different than any other genetic gift, the better off everyone will be.  Being smart doesn’t make one any morally better or intrinsically wiser; the myopic foolishness of the cognitive elite is one of the greatest dangers that face humanity today.  But pretending that a potential danger does not exist is stupid and short-sighted, especially when one necessarily has to pretend that the antidote to that danger doesn’t exist as well.

If you don’t think it makes sense to treat a normal individual like a retard, then it should not be hard to understand that you cannot communicate with a brilliant individual as if he were a normal one.  And on the societal level, the goal should not be to try to make the retards normal or the normals brilliant, (such efforts are futile), but rather, to endeavor to teach each group of individuals wisdom and strong moral character to the best of their capacity to understand and apply it.  Even one conscientious and confident normal individual of good character can do wonders for correcting the ills caused by a gaggle of highly intelligent, evil-minded fools.

The forked tongue of the fetishist

I thought this exchange on Slashdot between an engineer and a science champion concerning the recent Italian court verdicts was as illuminating as it was entertaining:

 E1: As a professional engineer, accountability starts the moment you have a license number in your state.  Any opinion you give on any project makes you liable.  The
problem is that too many people are giving opinions on subjects that
affect other people’s lives and have zero accountability. this trial is
a precursor to what may eventually become the norm. Picture these
so-called experts on TV talking about this and that and if they are
found wrong and someone was affected by it, then they can be held
accountable. The same will be applied to lawyers and politicians
and before you know it, people will be better off if we hold people with
some sort of power (over other people) accountable.

S1: You seem to be conflating science with engineering. Now I have news for
you: there’s a reason why we have two different words for these things
(and no, it’s not so that poets can have a richer vocabulary for writing
odes).

S2: The difference is obvious. An engineered system is just that — a
system that is fully understood and can have predictable outcomes from
known initial conditions. So…it is reasonable to expect engineers to
be liable for their work. Predicting earthquakes is not anywhere near
as simple. To find criminal accountability from such failures is
preposterous.

As a pro-scientody critic of scientistry, I am very much enjoying the flailing about of the professional scientific community and its cheerleaders in response to the L’Aquila verdicts.  Notice how these attempts to argue that scientists cannot be held liable for their false predictions completely flies in the face of the absurd, but common claim that science is the only possible means of genuinely knowing anything.  What we’re witnessing here in real time is the logical unraveling of the rational materialist’s science fetish; the next time you encounter an appeal to science, you now possess a powerful rhetorical weapon that will be much more effective than the logical arguments which the science fetishists ignore so readily.

If science is so obviously unreliable that scientists cannot reasonably be held responsible for the accuracy of their science-based predictions, then how can one rationally assert that it is always more reliable than documentary evidence, eyewitness testimony, or even haruspicy?  If evolution and global warming are scientific facts, then why can’t they be used predict any future events with a degree of accuracy that comes anywhere close to that of a street bookie?  Is there a single biologist on the planet who is willing to risk his job on the basis of a scientific prediction, the way that so many non-scientists do every single day?

The observable and provable fact is that most science that has not already been confirmed by its transformation into engineering is absolutely and utterly unreliable and most factual assertions by scientists are guaranteed to be false.  One need not know anything about science to correctly conclude this, one need only understand basic human behavior and witness the way in which scientists are highly accountability-avoidant.  Moreover, it is worth noting that the position taken by the science champions is a point I have previously articulated, which is that science can only be considered reliable to the extent that it has evolved into engineering.

Let Science be silent

There is an wise old saying that I very much attempt to apply to life, the universe, and everything.  “Let Reason be silent when Experience gainsays it.”  In this postmodern scientific age, we very much require a new aphorism.   

Let Science be silent when it cannot predict future events.  

The fear and outrage being expressed in light of the conviction of the Italian geologists who are guilty of manslaughter at L’Aquila are entirely misplaced, as it is not science that is being found guilty, but rather, the abuse of the common man’s faith in science by scientists.  Consider the facts of the case, as described by Nature, a publication that can hardly be considered hostile to science:

The indictments have drawn global condemnation. The American
Geophysical Union and the American Association for the Advancement of
Science (AAAS), both in Washington DC, issued statements in support of
the Italian defendants. In an open letter to Napolitano, for example,
the AAAS said it was “unfair and naive” of local prosecutors to charge
the men for failing “to alert the population of L’Aquila of an impending
earthquake”. And last May, when Italian magistrate Giuseppe Gargarella
ruled at a preliminary hearing that the scientists would have to stand
trial this September, the Italian blogosphere lit up with lamentation
and defence lawyers greeted the decision with disbelief….

The view from L’Aquila, however, is quite different. Prosecutors and
the families of victims alike say that the trial has nothing to do with
the ability to predict earthquakes, and everything to do with the
failure of government-appointed scientists serving on an advisory panel
to adequately evaluate, and then communicate, the potential risk to the
local population. The charges, detailed in a 224-page document filed by
Picuti, allege that members of the National Commission for Forecasting
and Predicting Great Risks, who held a special meeting in L’Aquila the
week before the earthquake, provided “incomplete, imprecise, and
contradictory information” to a public that had been unnerved by months
of persistent, low-level tremors. Picuti says that the commission was
more interested in pacifying the local population than in giving clear
advice about earthquake preparedness.

“I’m not crazy,” Picuti says. “I know they can’t predict
earthquakes. The basis of the charges is not that they didn’t predict
the earthquake. As functionaries of the state, they had certain duties
imposed by law: to evaluate and characterize the risks that were present
in L’Aquila.” Part of that risk assessment, he says, should have
included the density of the urban population and the known fragility of
many ancient buildings in the city centre. “They were obligated to
evaluate the degree of risk given all these factors,” he says, “and they
did not.”

“This
isn’t a trial against science,” insists Vittorini, who is a civil party
to the suit. But he says that a persistent message from authorities of
“Be calm, don’t worry”, and a lack of specific advice, deprived him and
others of an opportunity to make an informed decision about what to do
on the night of the earthquake. “That’s why I feel betrayed by science,”
he says. “Either they didn’t know certain things, which is a problem,
or they didn’t know how to communicate what they did know, which is also
a problem.”

The article and the account it provides of the fate of the Vittorini family is damning to guilty geologists.  It is clear that the Italian families resident there no longer abided by their traditional custom of clearing out of their houses when there were tremors, primarily due to the assurances they received from the National Commission, which is why the death toll was larger than it would have been if it hadn’t been for those assurances.  The defenders of the scientists around the world are observably bending the truth, even lying, for claiming that science is on trial or that the basis of the charges are that they failed to do the impossible by not “pinpointing the time, location and strength of a future earthquake in the short term”, as Nature puts it.

As the prosecutor points out, the basis of the charges is not that the scientists didn’t predict the earthquake, but rather that they did not fulfill their legal duties to perform a proper risk assessment.  Moreover, if it is impossible to predict an earthquake, then how could any honest geologist accept a paid position on a government body called the National Commission for Forecasting
and Predicting Great Risks?  If you know you can’t do the job required, then you had better not accept it in the first place.

I have to disagree with Instapundit’s take on the matter.  He sees this Italian attempt to hold scientists accountable for engaging in unscientific activity that led directly to great loss of life as creating “incentives for scientists to leave Italy and
to avoid giving any sort of earthquake advice to the Italian government.
I predict a run of bad luck.”

First, I note the inapplicability of the quote to the situation.  Heinlein was talking about entrepreneurs and technological and conceptual innovators when he described his “extremely small minority, frequently despised, often condemned, and almost always opposed by all right-thinking people”.  He most certainly wasn’t describing publicly acclaimed, government-funded individuals hailed as the nation’s “most respected geophysicists”.

Second, I very much doubt Italy will have any trouble at all finding top-credentialed scientists to continue accepting government funding.  And to the extent that those scientists learn to keep their mouths shut about things they can neither predict with any reasonable accuracy nor support with credible scientific evidence, that would be an entirely desirable advancement from the current state of scientistry, which so often attempts to confuse credentialed democracy and amateur editing for genuine scientody.

La responsabilità della scientista

Avanti azzurri!  Much to the shock and horror of the world’s scientists, Italy holds seven “experts” accountable for their criminal negligence:

An Italian court convicted seven scientists and experts of manslaughter
on Monday for failing to adequately warn citizens before an earthquake
struck central Italy in 2009, killing more than 300 people.  The
court in L’Aquila also sentenced the defendants to six years in prison.
Each one is a member of the national Great Risks Commission.

Scientists worldwide had decried the trial as
ridiculous, contending that science has no reliable way of predicting
earthquakes.  Among those convicted were some of Italy’s most
prominent and internationally respected seismologists and geological
experts, including Enzo Boschi, former head of the national Institute of
Geophysics and Volcanology. 

It’s both fascinating and informative, isn’t it.  Scientists are absolutely certain that the science is settled and they are more than willing to declare what laws should be passed, what classes should be taught, and what massive economic interventions and intrusions on individual freedom should be suffered due to the absolute reliability of their scientific knowledge.

But hold them personally responsible for their predictions and declarations?  Well, that’s an outrage!  Science isn’t actually expected to be reliable, after all!  I look forward to seeing climate scientists being similarly prosecuted one day for the complete failure of their predictive models.  The evolutionary biologists should be safe, unfortunately, since they don’t even have any predictive models.

Cancer-free sterility

On the plus side, with Gardasil, young women are theoretically protected from a few of the many strains of HPV, which can, but usually doesn’t, result in cervical cancer.  On the con side, it appears that it can render teenage girls sterile.  How fortunate for the manufacturers that Congress has rendered them immune to civil liability for their defective products.

The BMJ has published the case report of a healthy 16-year-old
Australian girl whose womanhood appears to have been stolen by Gardasil
vaccinations. She has been thrust into full-fledged menopause, her
ovaries irrevocably shut down, before becoming a woman. The
authors, Deirdre Therese Little and Harvey Rodrick Grenville Ward,
draw direct attention to the fact that, though the girl has been
thoroughly examined and tested, there is no known explanation other than
the series of three Gardasil vaccinations she had.

 The potentially damning information is here:

 “It is not known whether this event of premature ovarian failure is
linked to the quadrivalent  HPV vaccine. More detailed information
concerning rat ovarian hist-ology and ongoing fecundity post-HPV
vaccination was sought from the Therapeutic Goods Administration (TGA). Although the TGA’s Australian Public Assessment Report for Human
Papillomavirus Quadrivalent Vaccine, February 2011, does report on the
histology of vaccinated rat testes and epididymides, no histological
report has been available for vaccinated rat ovaries.”

Translation: Neither Merck nor the TGA ever tested for ovary-related problems, in rats or in humans.  This is why the “vaccines are safe” arguments are so inherently vacuous.  The various studies purporting to “prove” their safety do absolutely nothing of the kind, most of them aren’t even relevant to the primary risk factors.  It is certainly too soon to say that Gardasil sterilizes girls, but on the other hand, it is also too soon to assert that it doesn’t.  If it is true that Gardasil causes premature ovarian failure, this is likely to be the biggest medical scandal since thalidomide was shown to be a teratogen.