Tag: science

The problem with American science

As I have repeatedly pointed out, none of the various problems facing science have anything to do with religion, the baseless assertions of the New Atheists notwithstanding:

America’s schools, it turns out, consistently produce large numbers of world-class science and math students, according to studies by Harold Salzman of the Heldrich Center for Workforce Development at Rutgers University and his co-author, B. Lindsay Lowell, director of policy studies for the Institute for the Study of International Migration at Georgetown University. But the incentives that once reliably delivered many of those high scorers into scientific and technical careers have gone seriously awry.

If the nation truly wants its ablest students to become scientists, Salzman says, it must undertake reforms — but not of the schools. Instead, it must reconstruct a career structure that will once again provide young Americans the reasonable hope that spending their youth preparing to do science will provide a satisfactory career. “It’s not an education story, it’s a labor market story,” Salzman says….

Today, only a handful of young scientists — the few lucky or gifted enough to win famous fellowships or score outstanding publications that identify them early on as “stars” — can look forward to such a future. For the great majority, becoming a scientist now entails a penurious decade or more of graduate school and postdoc positions before joining the multitude vainly vying for the few available faculty-level openings. Earning a doctorate now consumes an average of about seven years. In many fields, up to five more years as a postdoc now constitute, in the words of Trevor Penning, who formerly headed postdoctoral programs at the University of Pennsylvania, the “terminal de facto credential” required for faculty-level posts.

One of the interesting things about the problem with American science is that those reviewing the situation are entirely forthright about the way the best and brightest have avoided pursuing scientific careers for decades now. To put it simply, the smartest students are not dumb enough to fail to notice the way in which the supply of science degrees considerably outstrips the number of jobs available in the various scientific fields or that there are far more remunerative and intellectually satisfying fields in which to pursue employment.

And yet, those who weren’t smart enough or aware enough to consider their future employment possibilities are the very individuals who tend to claim that those who were are less intelligent and their opinions about scientific and non-scientific matters alike are less valid because they do not have science degrees. (Never mind that I do, in fact, have a Bachelor of Science, that’s beside the point.)

So, this tends to suggest that in addition to whatever structural changes are being proposed by the various parties that are interested in solving the problem, a course or two in logic would not be amiss. And for a group of people who claim to be better educated and more highly intelligent than the norm, they do tend to expose a shocking ignorance of some very basic economic concepts that were solidly established more than 200 years ago. The reality is that the problem is simply a variant of the conventional one of malinvestment caused by credit expansion; the huge and unsustainable government allocation of financial resources to the scientific sector in the thirty years from 1940 to 1970 clearly sent a false signal about the market’s demand for scientists to students pursuing science degrees over the subsequent three decades.

The rational ignore science

Or rather, they ignore the predictions made by scientists:

Strange. It’s like we privately agree that when these scientists say the end of the world is nigh, they don’t mean it, not literally, but are just scaring us for our own good. Or that they do mean it, but are frankly batty.

After all, it’s not as if even Dark Greens have resolved never to breed, to thus spare their child the horror of spending their shortened life in terror at the doom to come.

Yet we’re still meant to treat everything else these scientists say as the gospel truth. As in: sure, they’re way out there about the end of human life, but on the small stuff they are bang on.

The important thing to remember about scientific predictions is that they are reliably wrong. It’s rather like contrarian investing. The correct thing to do is figure out what they are saying today, then bet on the opposite. More than half the time, much more than half the time, that is the correct thing to do. What science fetishists almost always forget is that scientists are human, not golems animated by the spirit of the scientific method. And because scientists are human, those who are skilled at understanding and anticipating human behavior can correctly ascertain the truth or untruth of a scientific matter without knowing anything whatsoever about the science involved.

I will leave my theoretical explanation for why scientific predictions are so reliably wrong for another day.

Congress passes Title IX: Science Edition

Needless to say, all of the Pharyngularons will believe the application of Title X to academic science is a great idea right up to the moment that their program is slashed due to disproportional representation or they are denied a job or a slot in a PhD program on the basis of their incorrect race or sex. And then, all the wailing and the gnashing of teeth will be a sweet, sweet sound indeed.

Section 201(a) of such Act (15 U.S.C. 5521(a)) is amended—
“(2) the National Science Foundation shall use its existing programs, in collaboration with other agencies, as appropriate, to improve the teaching and learning of networking and information technology at all levels of education and to increase participation in networking and information technology fields, including by women and underrepresented minorities;’’.

The amusing thing is that despite hundreds of male athletic programs being cut in favor of hapless juggling and basket-weaving teams that can’t get enough women to participate even when offered full scholarships, scientists and science fetishists alike can’t foresee the obvious result of this Congressional action. If the pattern holds, and given that women are even less interested in science than they are in sports, it will probably even stronger, then up to three times as many male positions will be cut as female positions are added. Consider what has happened in the recent past.

“It is clear that women’s sports are growing at the expense of male sports. From 1992 to 1997 approximately 5,800 female athletes have been added to sports teams. During that same period over 20,000 male athletes were cut (Hoornstra 2002).”

Lest you wonder why I harbor such complete contempt for the intelligence and logical capacity of scientists, note that many of them continue worrying about the hypothetically negative effects on science supposedly caused by creationists and state curriculums as they simultaneously cheer on Congress ordering the science bureaucracy to actively begin managing the sex distribution of academic science. I strongly suggest those who think favorably of the idea of government by scientific technocracy, or worse yet, genuinely believe that science can define morality, to consider the implications of taking their opinions seriously, let alone govern.

No doubt they will end up blaming the decline of American science on America’s excess religiosity. As we have seen again and again and again, history and temporal order is mystery to them.

Mailvox: a consensus of go karts

JB muses on the limits of science:

It’s funny how the same bad epidemiological science (weak and inconsistent macro correlations instead of hard causations) that underpins the disaster of modern dietetics is also responsible for the entirety of the case against smoking. Confusion also arises on both issues when experiments conflate the effects of processed, unfresh, adulterated ingredients with fresh, unadulterated ones, and forget to factor the rise of industrial processing into their timelines.

These massive scientific errors have caused untold premature deaths. The entirety of western civilizational diseases, including cavities, heart disease, cancer and diabetes, could be eliminated in an instant by returning to a paleolithic high or all meat diet. This is indisputable: the onset of all these diseases has been observed in paleolithic societies switching to western food.

But then, the fifth highest cause of death in America is medical error. And global warming scientists recently attempted to construct a framework for world government on a knowingly fraudulent premise. So we should all be wary of science.

What else has science disastrously gotten wrong? Ah yes, psychology, politics, history, sociology, the family, gender relations, economics… better to ask what science gets right: Physics. Math. Engineering. Repeatable, testable, non-human endeavors.

Human-heavy fields are still too filled with biases and complications and dynamism for one to trust the scientific consensus to be correct, much less the popular consensus. It is necessary to read widely and with a mind not only open but eager to absorb ideas intelligently presented but patently insane. Otherwise one will never escape the idiosyncratic mental strictures of one’s time and place.

With the singularity approaching before the next century, human brains will soon be regarded as little more than go karts in a world of F-15s. Now why would one blindly trust a consensus of go karts?

I have always found it amusing that science fetishists seldom realize how hopelessly wrong their understanding of material reality is. For example, they genuinely believe that technology is the fruit of science, when both history and logic conclusively demonstrate that science is the result of technological advancement. They have the basic relationship between the two precisely backward.

Given their inability to understand such a simple and obvious fact, to say nothing of all of the many manifest failure of the scientific method in areas where its application is either complicated or simply inappropriate, their confidence in it as the only method of human understanding or “progress” is not only remarkable, but risible. Hence the quasi-religious aspect of scienceology, which should never be confused with the actual scientific method.

Tragedy and irony

Darwin Dynasty Cursed By Inbreeding:

Charles Darwin’s family suffered from the deleterious effects of inbreeding, suggests a new study that serves as ironic punctuation to the evolutionary theorist’s life work. Pioneer of the theory that genetic traits affect survival of both individual organisms and species, Darwin wondered in his own lifetime if his marriage to first cousin Emma Wedgwood was having “the evil effects of close interbreeding” that he had observed in plants and animals.

Three of their children died before age 10, two from infectious diseases. The survivors were often ill, and out of the six long-term marriages that resulted, only half produced any children. According to researchers at Ohio State University and Spain’s Universidad de Santiago de Compestela, that alone is a “suspicious” sign that the Darwins suffered from reproductive problems.

Setting aside the fact that Darwin was by no means a pioneer of genetics, as that would be Mendel some years later, it is more than a little ironic that the evolutionist’s loss of his Christian faith after the tragic loss of his children may have been at least partially the result of his family’s habitual inbreeding. How often we blame God for the inevitable consequences of our own actions.

There goes global warming

Without the ability to hide the data, there won’t be much room for sustaining the manufactured “scientific” consensus:

Scientists at Queen’s University in Belfast have been ordered to hand over 40 years of research data on tree rings after a three-year battle with climate sceptics. The ruling by the Information Commissioner sets a precedent for scientists having to comply with the strictest interpretation of the Freedom of Information (FoI) Act. It suggests that in future academics will not be able to avoid handing over data by claiming that the task would be too onerous or that it would breach intellectual property rights.

No doubt we will soon be hearing great lamentations about how open data and independent verification is anti-science.

Mailvox: Obama vs science education

Scott Hatfield of Monkey Trials writes about the standards of science education:

I invite you to read the state science standards for high school biology in California. You’ll find those on pages 51-56 of this PDF file. It’s true that evolution is in there, but there is absolutely no requirement to teach ‘scientific history.’ I admit that I give one lecture on Mendel and his experiments when I teach genetics, and one lecture on Darwin’s voyage of the Beagle and how that (and the thought of others, like Malthus) influenced his thought.

Other than that, the other 178-days of instruction are pretty much the concepts and facts that you can see on the standards, which are in fact voluminous. I can’t speak for PZ and Dawkins, but I assure you that I care very much about the fact that there is less time for experiments and far too much time spent prepping for the standardized tests which, under NCLB, are used by the states and the fed to rate schools.

By the way, if your looking for a way to improve science ed, then please join me in rejecting the OBAMA administration proposal to tie teacher evaluations more closely to testing. A rare offer for you and I to unite in a criticism of the present administration!

Again, check out what we actually have to teach. There’s a lot to cram in 180 days, and to do it, we typically are sacrificing labs, especially the highly-instructive but time-consuming ones that take weeks to complete.

I have no problem whatsoever condemning the Obama administration proposal. Teacher evaluations and education standards are not Constitutional concerns of the U.S. federal government and Obama has no business attempting to dictate such things. Now, I’m certainly not against the use of standards in evaluating teachers; one reason for the drive towards objective standards is that the political power of the teachers unions is completely out of hand in some states. Given that testing can be an over-blunt club, I’m curious to know how Scott would prefer to see teachers evaluated. And while I don’t understand how opposing a proposal for a change can improve the current situation, I am happy to oppose it nonetheless.

Obviously, a science teacher whose black, inner-city, public school students score an average 80th percentile is probably a much better teacher than one whose Chinese, suburban, private school students average 85th percentile. And it’s also clear that straightforward teaching to the test will tend to restrict a teacher’s ability to focus on whatever aspects of his subject he thinks is important. But I’m sure Scott also realizes that for every good science teacher who wants to push his students and expose them to actually learning how to utilize the scientific method, there are several who would spend the entire school day haranguing their students on anything from Marxism and patriarchal oppression to Genesis and Scientology if given the opportunity.

I don’t have an answer myself. But I’m curious to know what Scott’s recommendation would be. As for “science history”, that’s often what is taught in lieu of science. Whether one considers the cult of Adam Smith or the cult of Charles Darwin, even a moment of reflection should suffice to determine that the Great Men of Science theme is actually a historical theme, not a scientific one. An astronomer has absolutely no need to know if it was Pythagoras or Copernicus who thought the Sun orbited the Earth in order to calculate the orbit of an extrasolar planet just as a biologist has absolutely no need to know if it was Darwin or Paley who articulated evolution by natural selection when he is figuring out the utility of junk DNA.

Don’t get me wrong, I think scientific history is tremendously interesting and knowledge of economic history is actually quite valuable in understanding how and why the present orthodoxy went so badly awry. The more unsettled a science is, the more important the historical knowledge will be. Reading Joseph Schumpeter’s mammoth History of Economic Thought played a major role in my critical revisitation of Ricardian free trade, then Friedmanite monetarism. But repeating anecdotes about finches and shoemakers should never be confused with actually calculating debt/GDP ratios or collecting butterflies.

For the record, I no more object to teaching evolution than I do to teaching Keynesian macroeconomics or any other extant idea. In other words, I insist on them being taught and being taught accurately. It is only when you have fully and correctly understood a concept that you can truly grasp the intrinsic and/or potential flaws in it. For example, I found this requirement to be more than a little amusing: “8. Evolution is the result of genetic changes that occur in constantly changing environments. As a basis for understanding this concept: a. Students know how natural selection determines the differential survival of groups of organisms.” I should, of course, be very interested to know how they know that, given that even Richard Dawkins has now admitted that the science is still unsettled on whether Darwin was fundamentally wrong about the very core of his so-called “dangerous idea”. The logic is at least superficially sound, but is the science? After all, that is precisely what still remains to be determined.

But to be clear, it must be understood that while I am an outright Keynesian Denier, a Marxian Denier, and a Friedmanite Denier, I am but a mere Darwinian Skeptic.

No mention of the real problem

Which is, of course, those crafty creationists:

Traditional science experiments ‘disappearing’ from schools
Almost all science teachers and lab technicians said they were now being prevented from staging certain practicals in biology, chemistry and physics lessons, it was claimed.

The study – by Science Learning Centres, a network of teacher training colleges – said more than two-thirds of staff admitted axing experiments because of a lack of space in the curriculum. Four-in-10 blamed the demands of exams and assessment. According to the study, some 28 per cent of teachers had been forced to drop classroom practical because of bad behaviour among pupils, while one-in-10 cited health and safety fears.

The amusing thing is that the self-styled defenders of science who are so vocal about so many unrelated issues don’t give a damn about the state of scientific education. Atheists such as Richard Dawkins and PZ Myers are FAR more concerned with preventing creationism from being taught as an alternative to time + chance + natural selection (probably) + magic stardust/aliens than they are with the fact that students are increasingly being taught scientific history rather than science.

When science is no longer science

Or, at least, finds itself directly contradicted by the basic scientific method:

The problem now is that we’re rapidly expanding our ability to do tests. Various speakers pointed to data sources as diverse as gene expression chips and the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, which provide tens of thousands of individual data points to analyze. At the same time, the growth of computing power has meant that we can ask many questions of these large data sets at once, and each one of these tests increases the prospects than an error will occur in a study; as Shaffer put it, “every decision increases your error prospects.” She pointed out that dividing data into subgroups, which can often identify susceptible subpopulations, is also a decision, and increases the chances of a spurious error….

It’s pretty obvious that these factors create a host of potential problems, but Young provided the best measure of where the field stands. In a survey of the recent literature, he found that 95 percent of the results of observational studies on human health had failed replication when tested using a rigorous, double blind trial. So, how do we fix this?

The consensus seems to be that we simply can’t rely on the researchers to do it. As Shaffer noted, experimentalists who produce the raw data want it to generate results, and the statisticians do what they can to help them find them. The problems with this are well recognized within the statistics community, but they’re loath to engage in the sort of self-criticism that could make a difference. (The attitude, as Young described it, is “We’re both living in glass houses, we both have bricks.”)

To me, the central problem appears to be that few scientists understand statistics and probability well enough to be permitted to make use of them in a manner which merits any credibility. The widening gap between econometric models and the performance of the real economy, combined with situations like the recent revelation that many, if not most genetic studies purporting to show natural selection were based entirely upon false positives, highlights the importance of performing actual science according to the scientific method rather than substituting a derivative and passing it off as science.

Like logic and philosophy, statistical analysis is informative and useful, but it is not intrinsically science.

Mailvox: the implications of evolution

John C. Wright responds to the recent CNN report on religion, political tendencies, intelligence, and evolution that cited a 6-point average IQ advantage for liberal atheists:

I love how these ‘Just So’ stories always just so happen to flatter the person telling it. Just for the sake of contrast, I’d like to see an evolutionary sociobiologist
say something along the lines of: “Being an atheist, like being a sociopath, is a defective mutation of the genes human beings use to recognize meaning in life. Robbed of this basic faculty of human thought, atheists tend to retreat into paranoid fantasies of superiority, as if their inability to grasp reality were a result of greater, rather than lesser, intellectual activity.

“Consequently they tend to be bookish, and selfish, and to cut social ties to family and friends: but this crippling isolation and arrogance, ironically, allows some of them to score well on I.Q. tests, which do not, after all, measure those social skills that tribes of hunter-gatherers need to survive.

“The fact that no civilization and no tribe in the history of the world has been atheist, except for a very few malignant Twentieth Century regimes of unparalleled savagery and bloodshed, might indicate why atheism has had no positive influence on the philosophy, art, culture, law or advancement of civilization since the dawn of time. Natural selection culls this unfavorable mutation, and only in the
luxurious modern day, when science can keep alive even worthless and backward members of the bloodline, has it been possible to preserve a statistically significant moiety of this evolutionary dead end.

“Sufferers of what is now called ‘The Dawkins Syndrome’ are generally acknowledged to be harmless irritants in their host sociieties, but, as the cases of Russia and China make abundantly clear, when this dangerous ‘meme’ of self-centered defensive arrogance spreads to others, the result is genocidal levels of mass murder.”

There are several amusing aspects to this. First, I find it very funny indeed to see people whose IQs are more than thirty points lower than mine attempting to cite a six-point average IQ advantage as proof of their superior intelligence, and therefore, their belief systems as well. I’m impressed, to be sure, albeit not exactly in the way they intended. An appeal to authority is bad enough, but an appeal to average statistical advantage is insane.

Second, this appears to be confirmation of something I described in TIA. Atheists are going to be more intelligent than the average by literal self-definition. The ability to understand and identify with an abstract concept that departs from the norm requires some basic level of intelligence, which excludes many less intelligent and non-religious individuals who are by every meaningful definition atheists but do not self-identify as atheists. Libertarians, for example, would benefit from the same self-selecting mechanism. It is possible that the Kanagawa study corrected for this identification bias, but that is unlikely as I am unaware of any study of atheism and religion that has done so.

To me, the most interesting and counterintuitive discovery is the reported link between sexual exclusivity and male atheism. That surprised me, although I suppose it shouldn’t have if I had thought about it more. Now, one can’t read too much into this yet, since we don’t know what exactly what “sexual exclusivity” means, but it does tend to contradict what one would expect given the male atheist obsession with religious sexual restrictions. The hint is the divergence between male and female atheists, so my suspicion – and at this point it is nothing more than that – is that the Kanagawa report will provide some evidence of the link between atheism and social autism. The dichotomy between the theoretical sexual freedom of the male atheist provided by his belief system and his actual sexual limitations caused by his sub-standard attractiveness to women suggests that male atheists, on average, are more inclined to be gamma/omega males whose sexual options are more restricted than the norm. This hypothesis is supported by observing the consistently gamma behavior of male atheists on this site and around the Internet in general.