Tag: science

Gamers > Scientists

Many people have sent me this link about gamers doing scientists’ work for them, so I figured I better post it just to end the incoming barrage. But it’s hardly any surprise to anyone who has read TIA and been able to compare the intellectual difference between a minor game industry figure and a world-famous scientist.

Gamers have solved the structure of a retrovirus enzyme whose configuration had stumped scientists for more than a decade. The gamers achieved their discovery by playing Foldit, an online game that allows players to collaborate and compete in predicting the structure of protein molecules.

After scientists repeatedly failed to piece together the structure of a protein-cutting enzyme from an AIDS-like virus, they called in the Foldit players. The scientists challenged the gamers to produce an accurate model of the enzyme. They did it in only three weeks.

Ten years versus three weeks. Yeah, that sounds about right. In truth, there are few groups more different than gamers and scientists, especially if you’re talking about the most elite group of gamers known as the game designers. (There is no such thing as a game designer who isn’t a gamer, although it would surprise you how many other people in the game industry don’t play anything. There are unfortunately an awful lot of John Sculleys in the industry these days.) The major difference is not that game designers are smarter and wealthier than scientists, although that’s also true, but that game designers could not possibly care less about academic credentials whereas few scientists appear to care much about anything else, unless it is attaching their name to something someone else intends to publish in an scientific journal.

I once had a European head-hunter ask me how I could possibly have gone into game development when I didn’t have a degree in it… never mind that there weren’t any degrees or courses in it at the time and I still, to this day, have never met a single person in the industry who formally studied game design or development in college. More than a few of the most successful guys in the industry dropped out of college if they ever even went; not dropping out during my sophmore year to focus on selling my 16-channel, 44 KHz, stereo sound board is one of my few big regrets now.

By the way, I’m presently working with Markku on a new game design which is based on the boundless evil of cats and may be the first mobile game inspired by a Tanith Lee short story. I don’t know when we’ll have the first alpha available, but if you’re interested in being a tester and you’ve got an Android device, let me know.

Putting science back into political science

Now here is a proposal for a scientific approach to politics I would absolutely get behind the idea of bringing back the states as the laboratories of democracy:

What do politicians do when they think they have a great idea? They just go and implement it. It’s like someone thinking he’s got a cure for cancer and immediately injecting it into everyone he can. That’s a madman, not a scientist. You always have to at least try out your idea on monkeys to make sure it doesn’t kill them.

Were farm subsidies first tried on monkeys? Social Security? Bank bailouts? No, the unscientific politicians went straight to trying all their ideas on humans, and now we have a bunch of bankrupt people instead of harmless bankrupt monkeys.

But the problem with testing political ideas on monkeys is that forcing them to go billions into debt would violate animal-cruelty laws. The only ones we’re allowed to do that to are people.

So we have to just observe the effects of the politicians’ policies — but that’s not so simple. Many say the Obama stimulus was a failure; others say we’d be even worse off without it. With the data we have, we can’t prove who’s right.

In science, when testing things on people, you always use a control group. If you have a drug you think will cut cholesterol, you give it to one set of test subjects. If everyone in the group that took the drug turns purple and starts choking but the control group is fine, we scientifically conclude there’s a problem with the drug. We have an economy that’s turning purple and choking. Did the stimulus cause that? If we had a control group that looked fine, we’d know.

So what we need to do is isolate part of the country to be the control group. They’ll be free from new taxes, won’t take part in government programs and regulations and can have all the guns they want. In the rest of America, politicians can go crazy with every Keynesian idea, ban trans fats and salt and just generally control everything. Then we can compare the results of the two groups and finally have a scientific answer on what works.

The only serious problem with the proposal is that everyone with half a brain or more would want to live in the unfortunately named control group. And even the liberals would start to figure it out eventually, as can be seen by their ongoing migration from the liberal states they’ve ruined to more conservative states.

Here’s the ironic thing. Due to their tendency towards the political left and their increasing dependence upon government spending, some of the biggest opponents of a scientific approach to politics would probably be scientists and the science lobby.

But it would certainly be amusing to see all the leftists in the experimental groups arguing that the policy would have worked if only it hadn’t relied on a population full of morons like themselves.

PS – For those who are following the Memorial Debate, I have just sent off my Round Two post to Dominic. So, we’re on schedule.

Homecare or die

At this point, I won’t be surprised to see it reported soon that daycare leads to sterility, Satanism, suicide, and supporting the Green Bay Packers:

n an article for The Biologist journal, Dr Sigman cites studies which show higher levels of the stress hormone cortisol in children who go to day care. The increase only appears up until the age of three or so, but Dr Sigman says it is still important, as the brain develops rapidly during these years. High levels of cortisol are linked to lower resistance to infection in the short-term and heart disease in the long-term.

Of course, no sooner will the reports be published than the supporters of these kiddy concentration camps will argue that while there is a broad consensus that day-care influences the suicide rate in the short term, there is no evidence that this has long-term detrimental consequences.

Throw in the fact that the median male worker now makes less than he did in 1968, and a very solid case can be made that mothers with young children not only should not work, they should probably be legally barred from working if they are married or cohabitating.

Of snakes and science fads

You will likely recall my citation of Cabal as a poster snake for his claim that Darwinism is a meaningless expression that only exists in creationist literature. Not only was this easily demonstrated to be false, given frequent uses of the term by famous creationists such as Richard Dawkins, but thanks to the Google Ngram Viewer we can see precisely how ludicrously dishonest a claim it was.

The Google Ngram viewer shows the number of times a term was used in various books from 1800 to 2008. This is the tracking of the term Darwinism. Notice how use of the term rises rapidly from 1860 to 1910, then from 1945 to 1998.

Now, what could the two fall-offs that begin in 1928 and 1998 have in common? My initial suspicion is economics. As per socionomic theory, in times of economic contraction, people are less attracted to the purely materialist position for which Darwinism is the primary justification. Everyone is too busy surviving to care much about prehistoric matters or the philosophies that can be derived from them; even the scientists are forced to turn their attention to subjects that provide more immediate grant-generating possibilities and more practical applications. Furthermore, I also surmised that the greater decline in the post-1998 decline may be related to the likely motivation behind Cabal’s claim, because it is apparent that the secular humanist movement has decided to try to move away from the albatross that the term “Darwinism” has become.

However, this latter theory appears to be incorrect, as the use of the term “evolution” has also fallen off at a similar rate of decline. This would tend to support the socionomic theory and disprove the propaganda-related one. And this raises an even more interesting possibility, which is that this relatively recent dropoff may mark the beginning of the abandonment of Darwinism, evolution, and particularly natural selection as real scientific concepts and the end of a 148-year quasi-scientific fad.

Courtier science

I have repeatedly pointed out that the profession of science does not create wealth, but is utterly dependent upon societal wealth and the willingness of the people to spend money on it. Scientistry is basically a potentially more useful National Endowment for the Arts. This action by the Turkish government will likely mark the first of many reminders that modern government-funded science will no longer be deemed important enough to justify its existence as the economic contraction continues to reduce tax revenues and the ability of the average individual to pay his bills:

The decree, issued on 27th August, which was just after the start of a nine-day holiday in Turkey, says that one-third of the members of the academy will now be appointed by the government and a further one-third by the Council of Higher Education, which is also a government body. Only the remaining one-third will be elected by current members. The president and vice-president of the academy will in future be appointed by the government rather than by sitting members. In addition, honorary members will lose their voting rights and the age at which members are deemed honorary will be reduced from 70 to 67.

TÜBA has issued a statement that says the government’s decree effectively ends the Academy and replaces it with a new Academy of Sciences that will be under the control of the government. They add: “There is no science academy in the world where the majority of members and the president are appointed directly by the government.”

The academy has been given no reasons for the changes, but the government has the right to make changes to the academy’s structure because the academy is publicly funded.

The Turkish scientists aren’t upset because they are losing an imaginary independence that never existed in the first place, they are upset because those who hold the purse strings are finally exercising the control they have had all along. This should prove an object lesson for science fetishists who have long dreamed of a war between religion and science, imagining that government would naturally side with the scientific elite.

This was always a ridiculous notion, since both the money and the popular support upon which government depends are generated by the religious masses. Scientists had better pray that the coming years don’t bring about a genuine war between religion and science, in the Muslim world or in the West, because it is readily apparent that the scientific world not only can’t hope to win, it can’t even support its own existence and is dependent upon access to the wealth of the other side.

The static answer

In related news, a similar study has determined that increased cholera outbreaks cannot be explained by rainbow-striped unicorns:

Cholera outbreaks seem to be on the increase, but a new study has found they cannot be explained by global warming…. Vibrio lives in water near river mouths, waxing and waning in cycles based on blooms of plant plankton. The plankton are eaten by tiny crustaceans to whose shells Vibrio attaches. Warmer ocean surface waters suppress plankton growth, so scientists had assumed cholera outbreaks would decrease with global warming.

So, the hypothesis was that cholera outbreaks would decrease with global warming. But the subsequent observation is that cholera outbreaks are increasing. Now, the logical mind would conclude that the most likely explanation is that global warming is therefore not taking place, even if it is possible that there is no relationship between cholera outbreaks and global temperatures. But since what presently passes for the scientific mind no longer permits the questioning of certain assumptions revealed by the Divine Consensus, the conclusion is that the hypothesis must be wrong. In fact, it must be reversed.

So, even when science is wrong, it is right. That sounds rather familiar, doesn’t it…. The question is, is this better described as “self-correction” or “the answer is static, only the question is dynamic”?

AGW/CC exploded

Those pesky Swiss just cut the legs out from under the global warming fascists:

The first results from the lab’s CLOUD (“Cosmics Leaving OUtdoor Droplets”) experiment published in Nature today confirm that cosmic rays spur the formation of clouds through ion-induced nucleation. Current thinking posits that half of the Earth’s clouds are formed through nucleation. The paper is entitled Role of sulphuric acid, ammonia and galactic cosmic rays in atmospheric aerosol nucleation.

This has significant implications for climate science because water vapour and clouds play a large role in determining global temperatures. Tiny changes in overall cloud cover can result in relatively large temperature changes.

Unsurprisingly, it’s a politically sensitive topic, as it provides support for a “heliocentric” rather than “anthropogenic” approach to climate change: the sun plays a large role in modulating the quantity of cosmic rays reaching the upper atmosphere of the Earth….

Climate models will have to be revised, confirms CERN in supporting literature: “[I]t is clear that the treatment of aerosol formation in climate models will need to be substantially revised, since all models assume that nucleation is caused by these vapours [sulphuric acid and ammonia] and water alone.”

So the globalists will be expected to provide substantially revised versions of models that already didn’t work in the first place. Is that the familiar spinning sound of scientific epicycles that I hear off in the distance?

Solve for X

If scientists wish to better understand why the rest of humanity sometimes doesn’t view Asimov’s “Nightfall” as a classic cautionary tale, but rather as a cheerful little story with a happy ending, this sort of thing might be why:

The Alliance for Human Research Protection speaks out against a US government-proposed anthrax vaccine experiment on children. Such an experiment would sacrifice children’s welfare, much as canaries sent into the coal mines were sacrificed. The National Biodefense Science Board,convened a two day meeting of the Anthrax Vaccine Working Group at the request of the Department of Health and Human Services. The July 7 meeting was open to the public, followed by a closed meeting on July 8.

I propose a new law that dictates any scientist who seriously proposes experiments on unconsenting children that involves lethal diseases be officially stripped of human status and turned over to cosmetic research laboratories. I mean, precisely how obtuse do you have to be to fail to understand that this sort of thing is simply not done?

“Performing experiments in non-consenting children, especially when they do not have a condition the experiment is designed to address, is carefully regulated.”

Carefully regulated? Why is it regulated, carefully or not? It should be completely illegal. And the Tuskeegee experiment was far from the last time this sort of thing happened, as they’re still doing similar experiments with clueless, uninformed people even today.

The amazing thing is that many scientists genuinely believe they should be running the world. I think a much more relevant debate is whether the rest of the human population should take them out and shoot them in preemptive self-defense now or simply keep a closer eye on the myopic bastards. The usual arguments about the niftyness of technology and increased populations don’t really matter all that much when the only extant threats to human existence have all been produced by scientists.

Since so few scientists, and even fewer science fans, have any capacity for comprehending logic, I will put the argument into mathematical terms. It doesn’t matter how many positive integers you add together if in the end, you multiply the sum by zero.

Here is the test: Sum(1:N)*0 = X. Solve for X. Then explain what value of N will cause a change in the value of X.

Um, that’s no planet….

First economists, then biologists. Do I really have to explain the obvious to astrophysicists too?

An alien world blacker than coal, the darkest planet known, has been discovered in the galaxy. The world in question is a giant the size of Jupiter known as TrES-2b. NASA’s Kepler spacecraft detected it lurking around the yellow sun-like star GSC 03549-02811 some 750 light years away in the direction of the constellation Draco. The researchers found this gas giant reflects less than 1 percent of the sunlight falling on it, making it darker than any planet or moon seen up to now.

“It’s just ridiculous how dark this planet is, how alien it is compared to anything we have in our solar system,” study lead-author David Kipping, an astronomer at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, told SPACE.com. “It’s darker than the blackest lump of coal, than dark acrylic paint you might paint with. It’s bizarre how this huge planet became so absorbent of all the light that hits it.”

It’s not ridiculous or bizarre, it’s absorbing light BECAUSE IT’S A GIANT ALIEN SPACE STATION WITH GALACTIC STEALTH TECHNOLOGY, you overeducated morons! Now, hurry up and figure out the only thing about it that really matters… is it heading this way?

It’s not all nails

I am aware certain Pharyngulans and anklebiters are dubious about the legitimacy of the intellectual contempt in which I hold one PZ Myers. They appear to genuinely believe that the Fowl Atheist is not only capable of holding his own in debate with me, but that he has only been avoiding any such encounter because his argumentative skills are so much superior to mine that it would somehow pollute them to actually put them to use.*

The fact is that PZ knows perfectly well that I will destroy every last bit of his credibility if he is ever foolish enough to permit a direct engagement again. By way of evidence, I offer his latest bit of philosophical buffoonery as but one of many examples of how PZ can’t argue his way out of a paper bag.

[L]et’s cut straight to the statement Brown finds objectionable: “Science is the only philosophical construct we have to determine TRUTH with any degree of reliability.” And there, I disagree with Brown completely: it is an eminently scientific statement. It may make philosophers gack up their breakfast, but who cares?

Science is a process of empirical rationalism that produces testable answers about the nature of the universe. We learn new knowledge, knowledge that actually holds up to critical scrutiny and testing against the real world. The pipes don’t leak — not much, anyway, and we have a method that allows us to test and tighten everything up. And yes, we have evidence that it is true: I can show you a cell phone that uses the principles of quantum physics, I can show you statistics on infant mortality that are improved by vaccinations and antibiotics and hygiene. We have progressively deeper understanding of ourselves and our environment that is produced by this powerful tool.

Science works. That is the criterion for saying it is a way “to determine truth with any degree of reliability.” That is a valid statement, and yes it can be relied on as true, in the scientist’s sense of the word: provisionally and usefully. Both of Brown’s denials were simply wrong.

But there’s another part of Kroto’s statement that bugs Brown, and that he doesn’t really address. This is the missing part of his argument, and the one he fills in by telling us that we were expected to giggle at the claim… the idea that science is the only useful tool we have.

“The illogical positivism of Kroto’s talk is symptomatic of a widespread problem. Although Kroto is exceptional in his self-confidence and lack of intellectual self-awareness – few other people would state as baldly as he does that science is the only way to establish the truth – no one in the audience seems to have reacted with a healthy giggle. They may have felt there was something a bit off about the idea, but the full absurdity was veiled by layers of deference and convention. The great attraction of telling everyone else to think, to question, and to take nothing for granted is that it makes a very pleasant substitute for doing these things yourself.”

You know, if someone tells me there is only one way of doing something, and I want to show that they’re wrong, the very first thing I think of is to demonstrate an alternative. If someone were to say something truly false and giggleworthy, like for instance, “all cats are black,” what I’d do is go out and find a Siamese and a white Persian and wave them in his face. Isn’t that obvious?

I have often heard apologists wax indignant at statements by scientists that science, that is this kind of objective, constantly tested, empirical rationalism, is the only way to determine the truth of a matter. Usually it’s theologians who want to insist that they have another path. But never do they actually show me something about which we have reliable knowledge that was not determined by observing, measuring, poking, testing, evaluating, verifying…all that stuff that is part of common, mundane science.

So show me something that we reliably know without testing it against consequences in the real world, and then maybe I’ll see the joke here.

It’s at times like this that one has no choice but to shake one’s head and realize that despite one’s contempt, one has actually somehow managed to overrate the moron.

First, as Robert Winston, the former Professor of Science and Society at Imperial College London and past Director of NHS Research and Development, Hammersmith Hospitals Trust has said, “dogmatist scientists need to be reminded, now and again, that the discipline of science is not about absolute truth.” It is not, as my erstwhile biology tutor used to say, “in the truth business”. To say “science works” is not at all synonymous with saying it has the ability “to determine truth”, much less to claim that it is “the only philosophical construct we have to determine TRUTH with any degree of reliability.” Engineering works even better than science, logic works quite effectively in most situations, and there is no shortage of empirical evidence indicating that revelation and intuition work as well.

Like all these alternative paths to knowledge, science sometimes works and sometimes does not work. There is little point in resorting to a scientific version of the Atheist Dance here, as the oft-chronicled failures and financial corruption of scientists inevitably amounts to the confirmed unreliability of science as it is actually applied in the real world. One cannot reasonably compare practical logic and practical religion with ideal science, and while one could argue that ideal science would lead to perfect understanding, the same is also true of ideal revelation, ideal logic, ideal intuition, and ideal history.

But concerning the question posed, there are so many obvious answers that it is almost astonishing to have to wave them in PZ’s bearded face. Both math and logic permit things to be reliably known without testing them against the consequences, indeed, they are often utilized by scientists in lieu of science when the scientific method cannot be applied. The same is also true of all the documentary and archeological evidence that makes up recorded human history. It would be interesting to see what sort of replicable scientific experiment one would propose testing in order to prove the historical existence of Homer, as even DNA testing of current human populations matched to ancient DNA samples would not suffice to prove that one of them once wrote The Iliad. How would science go about proving or disproving the story that George Washington chopped down the cherry tree? It might be used to establish that there was no evidence to be found indicating that cherry trees grew in Mount Vernon during the reported lifetime of “George Washington”, but that is the most it could hope to accomplish.

There are entire fields of human knowledge that have absolutely nothing to do with modern science. One cannot scientifically demonstrate that Brad loves Angelina or that Marius served as the consul of Rome seven times. PZ cannot even scientifically prove that he exists, or as Nick Bostrom would have it, that the material world even exists as anything but a sophisticated electronic simulation.

To reduce TRUTH to nothing more than “that which science can discover” is to eliminate the greater part of the truths that matter. Love, Life, Consciousness, Meaning, Purpose, and Probability are all well beyond the scope of science. Even Sam Harris would not go so far as Myers has gone, his most recent book, The Moral Landscape is nothing more than a futile attempt to, (ironically enough), make a philosophical argument for what PZ blithely asserts to be the case.

This is a deeply stupid statement by a dogmatic, mid-witted scientist who, due to his affection for his hammer, has concluded that all knowledge must necessarily be comprised of nails.

* It would be very interesting to see a Pharyngulan attempt to prove that conclusion scientifically, for as we are informed, science is the only way we could reliably determine the truth of it.