Tag: science

The problem with explanatory models

This critique of economic models might be helpful in explaining why I am so strongly skeptical about TE(p)NSBMGDaGF as well as the various dating methodologies. As I have mentioned on several occasions before, scientists in many fields simply don’t realize that the conceptual tools they utilize on a regular basis are significantly less reliable than they assume. The foundations upon which their “evidence” rests is much shakier than they understand, for the most part. This is understandable, since very few biologists, geologists, or astronomers have any actual training in history, logic, statistics, probability, higher mathematics, or even spreadsheet use, but that doesn’t excuse their stubborn and willful ignorance when errors, or even the likelihood of errors, based on these factors are pointed out to them.

Carter had initially used arbitrary parameters in his perfect model to generate perfect data, but now, in order to assess his model in a realistic way, he threw those parameters out and used standard calibration techniques to match his perfect model to his perfect data. It was supposed to be a formality–he assumed, reasonably, that the process would simply produce the same parameters that had been used to produce the data in the first place. But it didn’t. It turned out that there were many different sets of parameters that seemed to fit the historical data. And that made sense, he realized–given a mathematical expression with many terms and parameters in it, and thus many different ways to add up to the same single result, you’d expect there to be different ways to tweak the parameters so that they can produce similar sets of data over some limited time period.

The problem, of course, is that while these different versions of the model might all match the historical data, they would in general generate different predictions going forward–and sure enough, his calibrated model produced terrible predictions compared to the “reality” originally generated by the perfect model. Calibration–a standard procedure used by all modelers in all fields, including finance–had rendered a perfect model seriously flawed. Though taken aback, he continued his study, and found that having even tiny flaws in the model or the historical data made the situation far worse. “As far as I can tell, you’d have exactly the same situation with any model that has to be calibrated,” says Carter.

I first realized the nature of the problem when a perfectly straightforward question about the average speed of the evolutionary process was not so much mocked as greeted with complete confusion. And yet, if a process has taken place more than once over time, logic requires that there must be both various measurable speeds as well as an average speed. It doesn’t matter if the process measured is from mutated state to mutated state or from species to species, there must be an answer if the process is occurring. It wasn’t the lack of an answer that was the red flag, but rather, the inability to understand that there absolutely had to be an answer even if the answer was unknown at the present time.

The calibration problem that Carter is pointing out is tangentially related to the “backdating” problem I have hitherto observed. Economists and finance guys are keenly aware of the precarious nature of their models because they are forced to see them tested rigorously in real-time. For example, the administration economists who estimated a 1.6 multiplier effect in 2008 already know they were wrong. (They may not find it politically feasible to openly admit this, but they definitely know it, which is why they’re not proposing another stimulus package on the same basis.) And investment models blow up literally all the time, sometimes in a spectacular, system-threatening manner.

But that same sort of performance pressure simply doesn’t exist in many of the various sciences that concern past events. This is why we can be confident, if not entirely certain, that in the absence of successful predictive models, they have gotten it so substantially wrong that their core concepts will not survive the eventual corrections when they finally arrive.

To give another example, if evolution were a real science, biologists would be able to predict what the next species to evolve would be, as well as which population groups within a species were more evolved than the norm. They would be able to discern the connection between race and evolutionary development in humans. In fact, given the pressure that human activity is putting on various environments, we should be seeing more and more species evolving every more rapidly in comparison with the more sedate natural changes in various environments over the years. But that does not appear to be the case.

And appeals to time don’t wash either. Homo sapiens sapiens is supposed to have evolved to full modernity 50,000 years AGO, a process that is said to have taken 150,000 years. But since there are 59,811 species of vertebrates, even if we assume that the complex human evolution is the norm, we should be seeing a new vertebrate species evolve once every 2.5 years, (and a new mammal species every 27.3 years) even without the increased selection pressure of human habitat modification.

Now, there have been a number of new mammalian species, mostly lemurs and monkeys, discovered since 2000. So, perhaps there is some evidence for this process, if any of those species can be determined to be newly evolved rather than merely previously undiscovered. But the observable fact remains that evolutionary biologists, and many other scientists in other fields, simply don’t even think in a systematic manner that would allow them to perceive the logical holes in their fundamental models.

What could go wrong?

Some scientists really seem quixotically determined to convince the masses that it is in the best interests of humanity to turn scientist-hunting into a sport:

The bacterium that causes plague, Yersinia pestis, is still highly virulent today but has somewhat different symptoms, leading some historians to doubt that it was the agent of the Black Death.

Those doubts were laid to rest last year by detection of the bacterium’s DNA in plague victims. With the full genome now in hand, the researchers hope to recreate the microbe itself so as to understand what made the Black Death outbreak so deadly.

Full credit to science for nearly eliminating smallpox and polio. And I’m sure we all support the efforts to rid the world of cancer. But recreating the Black Death virus seems like an epically stupid idea. Of course, a member of the team says “the ancient plague would presumably be susceptible to antibiotics”. Presumably. That’s confidence-inspiring. The universities of the West should really consider making a semester in basic risk/benefit analysis a mandatory requirement for any science major.

Besides, if scientists are going to recreate something, i think they should bring back the dire wolf and the sabertooth tiger. Those would be cool and neither used to kill millions of people at a time.

Mailvox: No True Scientist?

A hard scientist casts a skeptical eye on those outside her discipline:

You’ll find this quite interesting. It’s in line with your assertions about corruption in the sciences. However, you’re making an error to apply charges of significant corruption and professional laziness to all of science. Perhaps you are in possession of evidence of which I’m not aware*, but based on what I know you’re committing the same error as atheists when they make blanket assertions about atheists vs. religious people. As you have pointed out many times, there are important distinctions within these groups. Likewise, there are important distinctions within the sciences. No field of science is free of flaws, but I have good evidence that corruption is significantly lower in physics and its sub-fields, and that research proceeds as well as can be expected for any human endeavor. I strongly suspect the increase in retractions noted by Nature traces the increased and alarming politicization of some specific fields, namely biology, medicine (including psychiatry/psychology), and climate science.

It’s important to draw a distinction between the different sciences, because developments in physics and even chemistry actually demonstrate that these fields are relatively healthy. Several discoveries in this year alone show that physicists are quite willing to abandon cherished ideas (after only a modest degree of initial resistance) in the face of new data. Also, look at the Nobel prizes announced for physics and chemistry. Both were for experiments that overturned accepted ideas, and in both cases it was only a few years to go from discovery to implementation. That’s unprecedented in other sciences.

There is no question that physics has been the gold standard of science since Isaac Newton. And I’m under no illusion that all science is created equally or that fraud pervades all of it to an equal degree. It hasn’t escaped me, after all, that Daniel Dennett and others have attempted to justify their belief in the predictions of biologists by appealing to the accuracy of predictions by physicists, which is about as sensible as claiming that one should believe psychics due to the accuracy of predictions by economists.

And the response of the physics community to the news of the superluminal neutrinos has been encouraging to those who are accustomed to witnessing very different behavior from scientists in other, softer fields. Moderate skepticism and an expectation that the experiment will be independently replicated before the existing theories are considered to be overturned is entirely reasonable and very different than the way biologists and climatologists have regarded theoretical upheavals in their scientific fields.

The division between hard science and soft science is perhaps better described as the difference between actual science and non-science designed to look like the real thing.

Science that isn’t science

The materialist argument against testimonial evidence is that it relies heavily on the truthfulness of the witness. The great irony is that this is also true of science as it is actually practiced, as opposed to that imaginary ideal science in which every experimental result is duly replicated multiple times. The Economist describes an episode of scientific misconduct that reveals how most of what passes for science today holds no claim to even being called science, let alone possesses any scientific authority.

ANIL POTTI, Joseph Nevins and their colleagues at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina, garnered widespread attention in 2006. They reported in the New England Journal of Medicine that they could predict the course of a patient’s lung cancer using devices called expression arrays, which log the activity patterns of thousands of genes in a sample of tissue as a colourful picture (see above). A few months later, they wrote in Nature Medicine that they had developed a similar technique which used gene expression in laboratory cultures of cancer cells, known as cell lines, to predict which chemotherapy would be most effective for an individual patient suffering from lung, breast or ovarian cancer.

At the time, this work looked like a tremendous advance for personalised medicine—the idea that understanding the molecular specifics of an individual’s illness will lead to a tailored treatment. The papers drew adulation from other workers in the field, and many newspapers, including this one (see article), wrote about them. The team then started to organise a set of clinical trials of personalised treatments for lung and breast cancer. Unbeknown to most people in the field, however, within a few weeks of the publication of the Nature Medicine paper a group of biostatisticians at the MD Anderson Cancer Centre in Houston, led by Keith Baggerly and Kevin Coombes, had begun to find serious flaws in the work….

Finally, in July 2010, matters unravelled when the Cancer Letter reported that Dr Potti had lied in numerous documents and grant applications. He falsely claimed to have been a Rhodes Scholar in Australia (a curious claim in any case, since Rhodes scholars only attend Oxford University). Dr Baggerly’s observation at the time was, “I find it ironic that we have been yelling for three years about the science, which has the potential to be very damaging to patients, but that was not what has started things rolling.”…

The process of peer review relies (as it always has done) on the goodwill of workers in the field, who have jobs of their own and frequently cannot spend the time needed to check other people’s papers in a suitably thorough manner.

Now, there are two significant points here. First, the reason the hypothesis was eventually falsified wasn’t due to the scientific method, but because of historical documentary evidence, namely, the false claim of Dr. Potti to have been a Rhodes Scholar in Australia. Second, most “science” is not only never experimentally replicated, but the unscientific editing process known as peer review isn’t even performed properly in most cases.

When comparing science and other forms of knowledge, it is not logically consistent to compare ideal science versus the practical real world application of those alternatives. Either ideal science can be compared to ideal alternatives or actual science can be compared to actual alternatives. It is as nonsensical to claim that all reported science is reliable as it would be to claim that all historical documents are accurate and all eyewitness testimony is true.

Just as some eyewitness testimony is false and some historical documents are inaccurate, most scientific reports are neither properly peer-reviewed nor replicated in any manner. Therefore, no scientific paper can credibly claim the authority of science until it has been demonstrated that it has been both properly peer-reviewed and duly replicated.

Mailvox: the hypocrisy of the anti-scientist

One can’t truly appreciate how effectively Dominic has argued the atheist case without comparing it to the conventional talking points usually presented by the average atheist:

Yeah, heaven forbid that we actually learn from our mistakes! Tell me vox, if you have such distrust of our present snapshot, how about you jump off your roof to test it?

But you won’t. And I’ll tell you why. While you know it can be wrong, and certainly is at some points, the chance that it’s wrong regarding your fall is abysmally low. So low that you won’t stake your life on it.

You similarly will not trust historical evidence that says humans flew , for you know well that the chance of them lying as opposed to science being wrong on the subject is really, really huge.

When someone testifies to you that he has seen a dragon in your backyard, you will, like a true hypocrite, impose upon the scientific principles of biology and non-observation of dragons despite the fact that you know full well it can be wrong.

And I’ll tell you why. You know it can be wrong, but you’re pretty sure it isn’t. When we bet, we bet on good odds, not bad ones. There’s the difference between probable and plausible that you’re unable to grasp. There’s a chance that your car will crash, your aeroplane will be hijacked by Islamic fundamentalists, you’ll be mugged while walking, etc. Does that prevent you from going out ?

You just happen to forget this game of odds when it suits you. It’s called hypocrisy, and you play this game well.

The amusing thing about the average atheist is the way they illogically attempt to simultaneously deny the relevance of historical and testimonial evidence while appealing to it under the misapprehension that it is science. I don’t refrain from jumping off my roof because science has confirmed that the effect of Earth gravity will draw me to the ground at 9.8 m/s and I have performed a rapid calculation involving my mass, the distance of the fall from the roof, and reached a conclusion that I will not jump. Instead, I rely upon the testimonial evidence of others, which simply states “don’t jump off the roof or you will hurt yourself.”

The amusing thing about this atheist’s example of flight is that scientists of the early 20th century refused to believe the historical evidence that the Wright Brothers had, in fact, flown, in part due to their reliance upon the scientific consensus of the time which insisted that heavier-than-air flight was impossible. In fact, Lord Kelvin, the leading scientist and President of the Royal Society of England, in 1895 stated unequivocally that “Heavier than air flying machines are impossible”.

If someone testifies that he has seen a dragon in my backyard, I may or may not believe him depending upon his historical record of truthfulness. Science won’t enter into it at all. I have already seen far too many things take place that I previously thought to be impossible to place more confidence in “the scientific principles of biology and non-observation of dragons” than in the truthfulness of an individual known to have been reliably truthful in the past.

The problem with atheists who make a fetish of science is that they simply don’t understand that science is not a universal tool ideal for all purposes, but is rather more akin to a hammer. A hammer works very well for driving nails and rather less well for cutting down trees. But preferring the use of a saw when the task at hand involves cutting down a tree does not make one intrinsically anti-hammer, nor does it make one hesitate before picking up a hammer to drive a nail.

Scientific evidence and historical evidence are complimentary, not intrinsically adversarial. They may overlap at times, they may conflict at others, but in no case are they the same thing and both types of evidence are capable of being wholly unreliable if applied in an inappropriate manner. It is far from hypocrisy to recognize the limits to a type of knowledge and restrict one’s use of it to the situations when it is relevant, especially since doing otherwise is misguided at best and quite possibly delusional.

TIA: it is science

Okay, you can all stop sending this to me now. Look, I don’t think anyone should have been terribly shocked by news of the scientific link between atheism and autism which supports my original hypothesis from four years ago:

People with ‘mild’ forms of autism are more likely to be atheists, according to a controversial new study – and more likely to shun organised religion in general. The study, which looked at posts on autism forums, focused on people with high-functioning autism such as Asperger’s. The study, from University of Boston, speculates that common autistic spectrum behaviours such as ‘a preference for logical beliefs’ and a distrust of metaphor and figures of speech, could be responsible.

The amusing thing about the vehement reaction by many atheists to my description of their observable tendency towards socially autistic behavior is that it was not only based on my personal observations over the years, but also by the Asperger’s Quotient results proudly reported by dozens of the Internet’s most militant atheists. But the link should have always been obvious because it is logically inevitable. Even if one believes that a god is nothing but a social construct, it should not be hard to grasp that a degree of social dysfunction would tend to inhibit one’s understanding of those constructs.

Now, obviously god-blindness will take a variety of forms, just as color-blindness does. My belated discovery of my own very mild color-blindness has, in some ways, helped me understand what Brent Rasmussen once described as a missing sense more than my longtime agnosticism ever did. You can explain it to me all you like, you can walk me slowly and patiently through all the lines on the image, but I am still not going to see it. Even if I trust that it is there, I simply cannot see it and no amount of desire allows me to detect it. It is perhaps worth recalling that just as my color-blindness is totally undetectable by others whereas the total or red-green versions are readily observable to anyone paying attention to the individual’s behavior, god-blindness is not going to automatically translate into full blown New Atheist social autism.

What is slightly misleading about the article’s description of these socially autistic individuals is that what is described as a “preference for logical beliefs” should actually be phrased as a “preference for beliefs that appear to be logical”. For, as we have repeatedly seen, socially dysfunctional atheists tend to be extraordinarily illogical, to such an extent that they will deny the existence of straightforward dictionary definitions in use for hundreds of years in order to cling to their pseudo-logic.

It’s not so much logic as static rules that appeal to them. Where the cognitive deficiency is revealed is in their inability to understand that the decision tree they have adopted with quasi-religious fervor is insufficiently dynamic. I suspect it is somehow related to their concomitant emotional immaturity, as I see a similar problem with static decision trees all the time in children’s soccer.

For example, you might tell a young defender to closely mark #12 because he is the most dangerous striker on the other team. Then you will watch in disbelief as that defender obediently stays wide and out of the play at #12’s side instead of moving into the center and attacking the other striker who has the ball and is heading for a shot on goal. What the young defender doesn’t understand that the order to mark the one player is a conditional one and that the order should no longer be considered in effect once a greater danger to the goal presents itself. So, it’s necessary to keep building more and more complex decision trees as the player develops until the light bulb goes off, the logical bases underlying all the various trees are finally understood, and the defender can begin thinking and analyzing the situations for himself rather than simply attempting to identify which branch of the decision tree applies to the present situation.

An inability or dislike for processing dynamic if-then situations has nothing to do with logic per se, it is simply a need for clear-cut rules that remove any necessity for active thinking. To the socially autistic, both “Science” and “Reason” are perceived as The Legitimate Rulegivers and they represent far more than the simple tools they are to the neurotypical. Of course, it is more than a little ironic that those who claim to be freethinkers and paragons of logic are actually exhibiting illogical behavior that is fundamentally based on an aversion to thinking.

Kill only in ignorance

Unsurprisingly, the advance of technology is rapidly forcing pro-abortion feminists into severe logical contortions:

The Council of Europe is due to consider a draft resolution in October which recommends that all its 47 member states – including Britain – instruct hospitals to “withold information about the sex of the foetus” from parents. The move is a bid to prevent the practice of selective abortion, which they say has reached worrying proportions in some former Soviet states…. Now, a survey of maternity units in England discloses that several are already refusing to share the information.

What a pity scientists never managed to find that gay gene. Then we would be presented with the spectacle where women only possessed “the right to choose” so long as she was carrying a normal male child. But how interesting that a woman’s “right” to her own body doesn’t appear to extend to the knowledge of what is in it.

There goes another “constant”

And with it, apparently, the Standard Model of physics:

Antonio Ereditato, spokesman for the international group of researchers, said that measurements taken over three years showed neutrinos pumped from CERN near Geneva to Gran Sasso in Italy had arrived 60 nanoseconds quicker than light would have done.

“We have high confidence in our results. We have checked and rechecked for anything that could have distorted our measurements but we found nothing,” he said. “We now want colleagues to check them independently.”

If confirmed, the discovery would undermine Albert Einstein’s 1905 theory of special relativity, which says that the speed of light is a “cosmic constant” and that nothing in the universe can travel faster.

And, of course, this is a totally awesome discovery, because everyone knows what this means. HYPERSPACE! But is it even properly considered science, when it is “a totally unexpected finding”? Obviously, science will now be brought to bear on it, at least the replication aspect.

But what is the hypothesis for this faster-than-light neutrino movement that was being tested?

Mailvox: holding scientists accountable

BT wonders if the Italians are taking a science fetish one step too far in holding scientists accountable for their failure to correctly predict an imminent earthquake:

I know you are skeptical about the scientific community. But don’t you think that this is an extreme step- unless somebody can prove that they deliberately did not carry out their duties, isn’t it unfair to expect them to be superknowledgible? Can we see this as a result of the secular society going too far by putting science in an infallible pedestal that they are now expecting the scientists to answer every question? Just like may be how the priest sorcerer would have been held accountable for any “false prophesies” in the old clans on questions of winning battles or where to cultivate?

This actually represents an interesting attack on Naturalism. If we are to take the Naturalist perspective, which insists that science is not only the “most reliable source of knowledge” but “the best description of reality”, then obviously scientists must be held more responsible than other individuals who depend entirely upon less reliable sources of knowledge such as personal experience, testimonial evidence, hearsay, and documented historical evidence.

If an accountant can be held liable for failing to properly advise his clients about the probable consequences of information he possesses on the basis of one of these less reliable sources of knowledge, than obviously scientists should similarly be held liable for their similar failures when damages are suffered by the public, especially when the public is paying their salaries.

It would certainly be interesting to see a scientist who subscribes to Naturalism, or more likely, a science fetishist, to simultaneously attempt to argue that a) science is the most reliable source of knowledge but b) scientists should not be held responsible for avoidable damages suffered by other parties caused due to the inherent unreliability of science.

It’s an intriguing question, because this dichotomy between claims made on the behalf of science and the legal responsibilities of those who utilize it fundamentally calls into account the basic validity of science as a source of knowledge.