Tag: science

Mailvox: considering self-correction

Azimus is interested in the possibility that science is not, in fact, self-correcting.

Experimental replication, in the very rare instances it is actually performed and is successful, is nothing more than auditing. There is no substantial difference between one scientist re-running another scientist’s experiment and one accountant re-calculating another accountant’s books. In other words, science isn’t self-correcting in any meaningful sense even in its ideal form.”

Interesting thought. Tilting a little in the direction of a “let’s have a definition war” argument, but an interesting thought. By that yardstick would you call the market, or engineering self-correcting?

Very well, we can certainly do this the methodical way. Rather than risk a definition war, I will first ask Azimus for his definition of “self-correcting” before I answer his question about the market or engineering being self-correcting. I’m not avoiding his question, it’s only that as I’ve pointed out before, depending upon how one defines “self-correcting”, science is either NOT self-correcting or else it is TRIVIALLY self-correcting in the same manner that practically every human activity is.

To which Azimus responded:

As I read your post, it struck me that the definition of “self” is scaleable. In your accountant example, accountant #1 may not be self correcting, but if accountant #2 audits #1 as part of a departmental auditing system, the accounting department is “self correcting.” In the same way an engineering firm has a green-horn doing most of the design work, which is then reviewed by a 5yr+ experienced PE who examines the work and makes corrections. The greenhorn is not self correcting, but scaling the word “self” to be the engineering firm, would the firm not be “self correcting”?

A marksman firing at a target makes allowances for distance, elevation distances, windspeed, etc. His first shot misses. He interprets the fall of the round and hypothesizes the wind was stronger than he allowed for and he adjusts accordingly in the second shot hitting the target. Is this self correcting?

Since there is no argument on the word “correctiong”, The battle line seems to be drawn along the word “self”. I see it as scaleable and will define the term thus:

Self correcting: an entity is self correcting if it contains a mechanism by which error is identifed and eliminated.

Very good. So, Azimus has chosen the option by which we must ultimately conclude that science is TRIVIALLY self-correcting. He is correct, and in his examples given, the auditing department, the engineering firm, and the marksman would all be considered self-correcting.

But from both his definition and his examples follow three obvious questions. They are:

1. What is the entity of science?
2. If there is no successful replication of a scientific experiment, and therefore no self-correction, is the experiment still science?
3. Since scientific reliability and authority claim is based on its self-correcting mechanism, how is science any more reliable than any other entity that possesses its own mechanism for self-correction?

I’m sure we shall all await his answers to those three questions with interest. In the meantime, I owe him a direct answer to his previous question: yes, the market and the engineering discipline are both self-correcting by his definition provided. The market self-corrects incorrect corporate valuations. Engineering self-corrects technologies that do not work and structures that do not stand.

That touching faith in science

I thought it was interesting to see that one of Wängsty’s commenters, Cornucopia, still erroneously clings to a blind faith in the “self-correcting” nature of science:

In the operational sense, does it really matter whether science is intrinsically or extrinsically self-correcting? The study you alluded to previously was done by confirming the results of scientists by scientific means. It’s not as if somebody sat down with a Ouija board and confirmed or refuted scientific findings or had them fed to them by revelation. If you happen to be basing your claim that science is not intrinsically self-correcting on something as superficial as who happens to be funding the effort to confirm it, I think you’ll just engaged in a cheap slander against the process of science.

He missed the point. Science isn’t self-correcting by any sense that doesn’t apply equally well to any number of other non-scientific fields. Peer review is nothing more than editing. Experimental replication, in the very rare instances it is actually performed and is successful, is nothing more than auditing. There is no substantial difference between one scientist re-running another scientist’s experiment and one accountant re-calculating another accountant’s books. In other words, science isn’t self-correcting in any meaningful sense even in its ideal form.

And, of course, as was demonstrated in the paper I cited, most “science” is not performed according to the ideal form, and even when it is, it often turns out to be unreliable. Even the best, “gold standard” science has been reported to be 89 percent unreliable, as a matter of fact. It must also be pointed out that if scientific error is identified by non-scientists who aren’t engaged in science, then the correction cannot be considered extrinsic self-correction because it is not self-correcting in any sense.

One might as reasonably claim that crime is self-correcting because the police sometimes arrest criminals.

And while I find it strange to have to point this out, my argument about the unreliability of science is absolutely not based upon an appeal to a genetic fallacy of who happens to be funding the science, although it is worth noting that the intrinsic unreliability of modern science does create the opportunity for a significant amount of undetected corruption.

Feminism is failure

Female careers are a fallback plan:

Forget ambition, financial security and that first-class degree. A controversial study has concluded that the real reason women pursue careers is because they fear they are too unattractive to get married. The research team, made up of three women and two men, said that when men are thin on the ground, ‘women are more likely to choose briefcase over baby’.

And the plainer a woman is, they claim, the more she is driven to succeed in the workplace.

It’s long been observed that the uglier a woman is, the more likely she is to be a feminist. And it was always logical, too, that women who couldn’t compete with other women in the traditional manner would seek to change the rules of the game. But now there is some scientific evidence supporting both the logic and the observation, and it could be very useful in helping counteract the feminist propaganda that inundates young women from the time they are girls, encouraging them to waste their youth and fertility in chasing careers rather than families.

The message is a simple and straighforward one: feminism is for female losers in the game of Life.

The global medieval

While it is generally a category error to talk about the medieval period outside of Europe, it is perfectly appropriate to discuss the warming that took place during medieval times and has bedeviled the climate change propagandists. Unsurprisingly, the latest evidence indicates that the AGW/CC scammers are incorrect – again – and the warming period was not limited to Europe:

Current theories of the causes and impact of global warming have been thrown into question by a new study which shows that during medieval times areas as far apart as Europe and Antarctica both warmed up. It then cooled down naturally and there was even a ‘mini ice age’.

A team of scientists led by geochemist Zunli Lu from Syracuse University in New York state, has found that the ‘Medieval Warm Period’ approximately 500 to 1,000 years ago wasn’t just confined to Europe. In fact, it extended all the way down to Antarctica.

At present the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) argues that the Medieval Warm Period was confined to Europe.

It shouldn’t be at all surprising that the climate scientists have been shown to be wrong again. Remember, experiment-backed science is only about 11% reliable according to the scientific method itself, so you can safely expect that whenever scientists make a new public announcement, they’re going to be wrong around 90 percent of the time.

The rule of thumb is that if you can’t make a physical object or machine based on the scientific principles involved, the scientists are wrong. One can reasonably trust engineers, engineering, and technology, one cannot reasonably place any confidence in scientists, science, or the current scientific consensus.

The intrinsic unreliability of science

Further evidence that science can only be trusted at the point it becomes engineering:

A former researcher at Amgen Inc has found that many basic studies on cancer — a high proportion of them from university labs — are unreliable, with grim consequences for producing new medicines in the future.

During a decade as head of global cancer research at Amgen, C. Glenn Begley identified 53 “landmark” publications — papers in top journals, from reputable labs — for his team to reproduce. Begley sought to double-check the findings before trying to build on them for drug development.

Result: 47 of the 53 could not be replicated. He described his findings in a commentary piece published on Wednesday in the journal Nature.

Fascinating. That’s an 88.6 percent unreliability rate for landmark, gold-standard science. Imagine how bad it is in the stuff that is only peer-reviewed and isn’t even theoretically replicable, like evolutionary biology. Keep that figure in mind the next time some secularist is claiming that we should structure society around scientific technocracy; they are arguing for the foundation of society upon something that has a reliability rate of 11 percent.

Now, I’ve noted previously that atheists often attempt to compare ideal science with real theology and noted that in a fair comparison, ideal theology trumps ideal science. But as we gather more evidence about the true reliability of science, it is becoming increasingly obvious that real theology also trumps real science. The selling point of science is supposed to be its replicability… so what is the value of science that cannot be repeated?

A failure of narrative

Conservatives increasingly distrust scientists:

Just over 34 percent of conservatives had confidence in science as an institution in 2010, representing a long-term decline from 48 percent in 1974, according to a paper being published today in American Sociological Review. That represents a dramatic shift for conservatives, who in 1974 were more likely than liberals or moderates (all categories based on self-identification) to express confidence in science. While the confidence levels of other groups in science have been relatively stable, the conservative drop now means that group is the least likely to have confidence in science….

Less-educated conservatives didn’t change their attitudes about science in recent decades. It is better-educated conservatives who have done so, the paper says.

In the paper, Gauchat calls this a “key finding,” in part because it challenges “the deficit model, which predicts that individuals with higher levels of education will possess greater trust in science, by showing that educated conservatives uniquely experienced the decline in trust.”

The left-liberal narrative wants to push the idea that conservatives have turned away from the scientific method for ideological reasons and are willing to do so because they are less educated. But that won’t fly, since it is the more educated conservatives who don’t trust “science as an institution”. Which, of course, is very different than science as a method.

And the reason is obvious. Science as an institution is increasingly abandoning science as a method, so much so that it is often not even appropriate to refer to “science” or “scientists” when one is discussing some of the various quasi-sciences such as econometrics, the theory of evolution by (probably) natural selection, and what presently goes by the name of “climate change”.

Working mothers harm children

Working mothers are quite literally damaging their children by chucking them into childcare rather than raising them:

The study, being presented today at the Royal Economic Society’s annual conference, suggests that childcare leads to a substantial drop-off in parents’ involvement in their children’s upbringing. The damaging effects are most marked for boys and for youngsters aged from birth to two, prompting the researchers to suggest that childcare may not ‘be suited for children aged zero to two’.

Children were assigned a series of scores for their development and behaviour, based on the results of assessments and questionnaires. Childcare was found to significantly improve development for disadvantaged children. But the ‘lion’s share of the population experienced significant declines in motor-social development and health measures as well as increased behavioural problems’, the study found.

In other words, unless you’re a dysfunctional single mother who spends her days living off the state, doing drugs, and entertaining thugs, in which case the minimal childcare provided by indifferent minimum-wage workers is actually an improvement, your kids will be worse off.

The tragic thing is that most of these absentee mothers historically did not work and the main reason they are working now is in order to provide what they imagine will be to their children’s advantage. But what is the point of being able to afford an extra car or give your child a computer and a smartphone if you’re going to handicap him with “significant declines in motor-social development and health” from an early age?

Throw in the reduced wages produced by the entry of middle class women into the labor force and the 30 percent increase in female labor force participation from 1950 to 2010 and it’s not hard to understand why the USA is now facing a perfect storm of children’s issues combined with marital and familial problems.

Shoot the scientists

They’re now openly embracing technocratic world totalitarianism:

Since doing that issue, I’ve come to the conclusion that the technical details are the easy part. It’s the social engineering that’s the killer. Moon shots and Manhattan Projects are child’s play compared to needed changes in the way we behave.

A policy article authored by several dozen scientists appeared online March 15 in Science to acknowledge this point: “Human societies must now change course and steer away from critical tipping points in the Earth system that might lead to rapid and irreversible change. This requires fundamental reorientation and restructuring of national and international institutions toward more effective Earth system governance and planetary stewardship.”

Scientists have been on the wrong side of every political movement of the 20th century. Because they are narrowly educated elitists almost completely unschooled in both logic and history, they tend to be heavily inclined towards top-down authoritarianism. And there is absolutely no reason to believe they will be on the right side of any of the geo-political issues of the 21st century.

Scientific Dilbertism

Remember, this is the very process by which most secularists believe society should be governed:

The CERN particle physics laboratory in Geneva has confirmed Wednesday’s report that a loose fiber-optic cable may be behind measurements that seemed to show neutrinos outpacing the speed of light. But the lab also says another glitch could have caused the experiment to underestimate the particles’ speed.

In a statement based on an earlier press release from the OPERA collaboration, CERN said two possible “effects” may have influenced the anomalous measurements. One of them, due to a possible faulty connection between the fiber-optic cable bringing the GPS signals to OPERA and the detector’s master clock, would have caused the experiment to underestimate the neutrinos’ flight time, as described in the original story. The other effect concerns an oscillator, part of OPERA’s particle detector that gives its readings time stamps synchronized to GPS signals. Researchers think correcting for an error in this device would actually increase the anomaly in neutrino velocity, making the particles even speedier than the earlier measurements seemed to show.

What is clear from all of this is that the scientists and science fetishists fantasizing of a technocratic dictatorship that will usher in the shiny, sexy, science fiction, seculatopia of their dreams haven’t realized is that their totalitarian vision will ultimately be a dictatorship of the IT department.

In which I quote Instapundit

HE’S A SCIENTIST — you can’t expect him to be good at math:

Heh. Of course, in fairness, given that Gleick only has a B.S. from Yale University and a Ph.D. in Energy and Resources from Berkeley, there is a very good chance that he never took much in the way of math or statistics courses.

As I’ve previously noted, one of the dirty secrets of science education is that most science majors study very little in the way of logic, history, math, or statistics, which is why they so often reveal themselves to be every bit as clueless as the average individual whenever they venture outside their very narrow areas of education and professional expertise.