Scientific American turns to Critical Studies of Science to conclude that we should retire the idea of falsification, upon which the negative half of scientific epistemology rests. The sciences are under serious threat.https://t.co/loEZMiFjdd— James Lindsay, relevant white dude (@ConceptualJames) September 8, 2020
I don't know if Lindsay's trashing of the article is correct. I simply invite discussion. From the article:
Falsification is appealing because it tells a simple and optimistic story of scientific progress, that by steadily eliminating false theories we can eventually arrive at true ones. As Sherlock Holmes put it, “When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.” Such simple but incorrect narratives abound in science folklore and textbooks. Richard Feynman in his book QED, right after “explaining” how the theory of quantum electrodynamics came about, said, "What I have just outlined is what I call a 'physicist’s history of physics,' which is never correct. What I am telling you is a sort of conventionalized myth-story that the physicists tell to their students, and those students tell to their students, and is not necessarily related to the actual historical development which I do not really know!"Well, I can see right there that the article writer is missing something. Feynman wasn't talking about a problem with doing science. He was talking about the problem with doing history!
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132 comments:
Probably aimed at Sokol's Hoax and the Climate Scam refutations.
The author of this article apparently also wrote a book called, "The Great Paradox of Science: Why Its Conclusions Can Be Relied Upon Even Though They Cannot Be Proven"
Which, you know, used to be the realm of faith and religion.
I wonder what Ayn Rand's 'State Science Institute' has to say about this?
I agree that I don't think this article has anything to do with the whole critical theory nonsense. And I actually agree with the general sentiment of the article that absolute falsification, in the sense of completely eliminating a certain idea or theory forever as a possibility or consideration, is actually not really scientific.
Can the collective left politicize science into a game of policed thought and preferred theoretical outcomes?
You bet they can.
It's quite well understood by scientists and mathematicians that no progress is made by means of logical deduction (A implies B, we know A, therefore B, a rule technically known as "modus ponens"), but rather by logical induction: we have a hypothesis, A implies B; we find many examples of B, so A becomes more likely. The proper tool for reasoning of this kind is probability theory, and that field, unto itself, has been controversial ever since the Reverend Thomas Bayes came up with Bayes' Theorem, starting with the fact that he actually did no such thing—what we today call "Bayes' Theorem" is actually due to Simon-Pierre Laplace, who arrived at it independently, read the proceedings of the Royal Society where a friend of Bayes had published Bayes' own result (which, interestingly, Bayes himself didn't do), and, being intellectually honest, ceded priority to Bayes.
But inductive reasoning is not the same as deductive reasoning: you never reach an iron-clad conclusion. Your conclusion can always be... falsified, by a single counter-example. Albert Einstein looked at Newton's theory of motion applied to light and James Clerk Maxwell's theory of light and noticed that Maxwell's theory accorded more closely to experimental results, which meant there were limitations to Newton's theory. The result was the Special Theory of Relativity. But Einstein knew that couldn't be the whole story—there were experimental phenomena that theory was inconsistent with—so that led to the General Theory of Relativity. Which is inconsistent with Quantum Mechanics. And so it goes.
But the answer to this is not to say, we should stop falsifying theories. The answer is to say, we should significantly improve mathematical, and especially probability theory, education. We could start by throwing out almost all probability theory education from the first 3/4 of the 20th century ("frequentist" probability), and emphasizing the realization after Claude Shannon's 1948 paper "A Mathematical Theory of Communication" that "probability" is a measure of information an agent has—no more, and no less.
I was talking to my wife about this in the past few days in relation to mask and social distancing rules (not just guidelines anymore!).
The article starts with such statements as "Such simple but incorrect narratives abound in science...", and then doesn't go on to explain the assertion. So you just know it's not trying to present an actual argument.
Where science, history, and policy meet is covered in bad science, false/refuted studies, incorrect history, and terrible policy.
My favorite examples are in nutrition: Salt and cholesterol intake as drivers behind both high blood pressure/blood cholesterol leading to worse health outcomes.
Around paper thin science conducted ~60-70 years ago, entire guidelines were promulgated for decades on reducing salt intake and cholesterol intake. The EGG was said to be bad, cause it had lots of cholesterol.
It took multiple generations of additional research, publication, and discussions before there were allowed to be cracks in these theories. Now they are uncertain, but the policies remain.
There is strong evidence the food pyramid first developed has contributed to massive increases in weight, obesity, and diabetes. But it's hard to switch those policies because people think to themselves "Well what will we recommend instead?" - because now they are institutionalized to believe government and medicine HAS to dictate nutritional policies to people. When the evidence shows they are terrible at it.
This is why refutability and falsification is so IMPORTANT and if anything we need MORE scientists looking to constantly debunk and challenge all the terrible research being produced nowadays.
Individual scientists don't follow the methodology laid out by philosophers because that isn't how people think and invent. Ramanujan would be a good example from mathematics, he offered little in the way of proofs, yet proofs are considered fundamental to the mathematical enterprise. How things are discovered is different from how they are written up and published. That doesn't mean that science and mathematics as a whole don't depend on discussion, refutation, and most importantly for science, experimental results.
If the theory can't be falsified then there's nothing, according to the theory, that can't happen.
Agree with Michael K. This has been around in philosophy of science for ages because much science is now not falsifiable. The argument is "that old fuddy duddy idea of falsification isn't how we do science anymore if we ever did." The new model appears to be more like a priesthood who control the mysteries and say "trust us."
Build a Social-Justice-Warrior-Science! bridge and see who wants to cross it.
Phil 101 in the 50s called it the principle of non-vacuous contrast.
Scientific American became toxic garbage about 30 years ago.
Feynman wouldn't have used it for birdcage liner.
On what basis does he assert the Haldane story is apocryphal?
In any event, Haldane's example is spot on. If we found rabbit fossils old enough, evolutionary theory would collapse. Everyone knows this.
Scientists build the cachet of "science" by rewriting history each time they undergo a revolution and coalesce on a new paradigm. The new, rewritten history always implies that the progress of science has inexorably led to the most recent finding - that the prior abandoned "truth" was a necessary stepping stone to the new, better truth. This is the lie. The new paradigm - the new truth - was the last refuge of a consensus group who mostly expected the old paradigm - the old truth - to survive. That's why they called it "truth." Or in other words, they don't call it scientific truth because they expect to later call it wrong.
But scientific truth can never be definitively stated as true. Science produces as much falsehood as it does "truth". The history of science is littered with abandoned "truths", now held to be false, but that science once proclaimed as absolutely true.
Science can only validly assert that it produces new explanations. (See e.g. "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions" by Thomas Kuhn)
Coyne had a long post about the SciAm article. I didn't read either, except to notice that Coyne mangled Feyman's idea about the uselessness of a "philosophy of science".
Smart people trust science. So, if on March 1, 2020, science tells them not to wear a mask, smart people will listen to the science. And then, if in April, science changes its mind and tells you to wear a mask, smart people will listen to the science.
Smart people don't need the scientific method or falsification or any of that junk anymore. We just need to know what the science is and we will comply.
For example, the statement "All scientists are right" is falsifiable because one can observe that lying asshole Lefty scientists exist.
This nonsense, like the argument that 2 + 2 does not necessarily equal 4 will soon do for the education of poor kids what defunding the police does for their safety.
When I was a young corporate associate in New York, I represented the German publisher that bought Scientific American. It hasn’t been the same since.
Just last night I watched "Mathematical Challenges To Darwin’s Theory Of Evolution".
Yale computer scientist David Gelernter sums it up.
"Darwinism is no longer just a scientific theory but a basis of a worldview, and an emergency religion for the many troubled souls who need one.
Cued at key point, but watch the whole thing sometime if you have the time.
Peer review is no good in climate science. The peers are climate scientists, where they should be experts in statistics, fluid dynamics, spectral analysis, and so forth.
Climate science has no standards in these.
I see signs on people's lawns saying "Science is Real." I don't know that the statement is making the point that the sign posters seem to think it's making. In fact, I'm not sure what the point is supposed to be. Maybe I should put a sign on my lawn saying "Junk Science is Real." I've seen plenty of that in my legal career.
Coyne, who is a first rank biologist, discusses the article here. https://whyevolutionistrue.com/2020/09/08/can-scientific-theories-be-falsified-one-scientist-says-no/ He is not a fan!
Science is a simplified model of reality. It advances through both trial and error (falsification) as well as logical or intuitive insights.
Engineering is using scientific advancements to mold the world around us.
Falsification is a necessary requirement for technological advancement.
The “science" that so many people claim to “believe in” is a method, not an entity of some kind like Ba'al, and falsification is part of that method. So if you don’t believe in falsification, you can drop your pretense that you believe in “science”.
This has all come about because global warming is not falsifiable. First they fired any journal editor who believed enough in the scientific method to publish results that contradicted the narrative being pushed by a tiny cabal of “scientists” who had the backing of university political insiders, then they dismissed counter arguments because they couldn’t get published.
The West is going to die due to a crisis of confidence.
The point is obviously to keep the deploreables from trying to argue against "their" religion. The sad part is that "their" religion is a downer, hence it must be propped up against competing religions that are much more attractive.
I hear lot's of politicians and pundits talk about believing in science! They believe the science they exclaim. Trouble is, science is not something you can believe in. That's faith. I can trust the scientific process if it has been followed to a T. That includes falsification. Wanting to remove falsification from the process stinks of science turning into a religion for some people. You cant falsify that theory, I believe in that theory, and because I believe in it, it must be true! SCIENCE!
There is a lot of mythologizing in the history of science.
That is not controversial, generally. The heroic idea of the lone scientist, for one thing, is almost never true. In most cases there is an idea "out there" that several people are actively developing, often in teams, formal or ad-hoc. And then one of these announces "it", somewhat before the others.
This sort of history of science is more an argument about credit, after the fact, than about the genesis and development of an idea. It is in the development of ideas where falsification is extremely important. Try, fit, adjust, try again, until it "clicks". 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration. And the failure of others often, or usually, feeds into the eventual success of someone else.
Or as "Chitty Chitty Bang Bang" has it -
"From the ashes of disaster grow the roses of success."
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=GND10sWq0n0
A weirdly true movie in so many ways. Our boy insisted on watching it @100 times.
The other important route of "success" is exploitation of success in another field. The exploitation of new technology in scientific reasearch for instance. Louis Pasteur could not have gone where he went without the improvement of microsope technology by a couple of generations of European opticians. If there were a Nobel prize in those days it should have been shared with his Parisian microscope makers. As today credit should often be shared with computer developers.
Or, how many astronomers owe their gold medals to Corning Glass?
Solipsism.
"Did you know that gravity is just a theory?" This is what happens when ignorance becomes profundity.
Evolution is so thoroughly documented along with cross checks that come from quantum physics, "the most spectacularly successful theory of all time” in terms of not being falsified to such a high precision, that it’s not even worth discussing some mathematicians theory that is undoubtedly depending on some cryptic prestidigitation or perhaps he has simply overlooked something.
The age of rocks are determined in two main ways, by the micro fossils found within them, which progress through phases of evolution as the eons pass by, and radioactive decay of very stable, but not 100% stable elements, where QM comes in. This works every where it is tried and nobody has come up with examples of evolution going backwards in time for all the looking that scientists do for anything novel that might upend a current theory. There is so much continuous fossil evidence for evolution in the lower life forms that the discovery of some “missing link” between the other great apes and mankind would just be icing on the cake.
If you want to choose to believe in Creationism, that’s one thing, and I have no problem with that, but when you start calling it a scientific theory or claim a mathematical “proof” exists, I have to say that you are shit canning rigorous thought for motivated reasoning, just like the global warming people do.
Chuck: How things are discovered is different from how they are written up and published.
This is, to elaborate, well understood by actual researchers. There are whole books on the subject!
How to Solve It
Mathematics and Plausible Reasoning
Scientific Inference
The Algebra of Probable Inference
Data Analysis: A Bayesian Tutorial
Probability Theory: The Logic of Science
Statistical Rethinking
All highly recommended.
"Well, I can see right there that the article writer is missing something. Feynman wasn't talking about a problem with doing science. He was talking about the problem with doing history!"
True. But even the history can be falsified in principle. Sometimes it's hard, sometimes the evidence is ambiguous, sometimes the story is just too pleasing to refute. But it can be done, and often should.
Making claims (more) falsifiable makes them (more) interesting.
Which Althouse may wish to refute, since I seem to recall she once said she doesn't care much about making refutable claims. On which point I am happy to be corrected.
Too much of this science stuff is the work of white men. Not only are they white, but many of them are Jewish or even German and WASP. We're supposed to put our trust in such people? If there's one thing smart people have learned, it's that the subtext of any white man's work is the advancement of white men. I'm waiting for feminist, POC and LBQT science. That will be real science. All this quantum physics and Higgs boson stuff is just propaganda for the patriarchy. I'm sorry that so many woke people have fallen for it. Madame Curie is the only true scientist of the last two hundred years.
anything Karl Popper popped in his popper is suspect
Ask a conservative how they determine something to be true or false, and you'll get answers ranging from revelations of Divine Truth to the scientific theory and everything in between, including asides about Monty Python's skit, "She's a Witch."
Ask a progressive how they determine something to be true or false, and you'll get an argument that those categories are merely social constructs meaning nothing. Get past that idiocy and they stare at you, because they don't know how to test anything for validity. Only feelings are valid. Point out feelings change, and they stare even more blankly.
Gun rights advocates have labeled this problem the Peterson Syndrome, after a board member of the Brady antigun group. She would not, or could not, agree that if gun violence declined with gun bans, but total criminal violence increased, it was a bad thing.
"Smart people trust science....”
Or smart people might look at the actual science, which demonstrates that face masks work, and write off the earlier advice to the fog of war and the novelty of the situation.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-020-0843-2
Our findings indicate that surgical masks can efficaciously reduce the emission of influenza virus particles into the environment in respiratory droplets, but not in aerosols12. Both the previous and current study used a bioaerosol collecting device, the Gesundheit-II (G-II)12,15,19, to capture exhaled breath particles and differentiated them into two size fractions, where exhaled breath coarse particles >5 μm (respiratory droplets) were collected by impaction with a 5-μm slit inertial Teflon impactor and the remaining fine particles ≤5 μm (aerosols) were collected by condensation in buffer. We also demonstrated the efficacy of surgical masks to reduce coronavirus detection and viral copies in large respiratory droplets and in aerosols (Table 1b). This has important implications for control of COVID-19, suggesting that surgical face masks could be used by ill people to reduce onward transmission.
Of course the real problem with this virus is that so many people who have it don’t have any idea that they are actually “ill.” So a smart person might conclude that when people are forced into close quarters with strangers, especially inside of buildings, it would be better for everybody if those people wore surgical masks. These aren’t even the N-95 masks people talked about, simple disposable surgical masks.
Of course I am always happy to hear counter arguments that depend on actual scientific findings and solid logic, and not on the idea that masks are scary somehow.
That article was so imprecise in its categorizations and changing conceptual levels that it felt like one of the air-taxis in a futuristic movie, flying through a crowded city.
"This Idea Must Die: Scientific Theories That Are Blocking Progress," edited by John Brockman
(Harper Perennial, 2015).
With contributions from dozens of eminences, many familiar names here.
Narr
Not recommended for those who already know everything
I cancelled my subscription to Scientific American many years ago when they published an article arguing that the development of agriculture thousands of years ago ended the ice age and was, therefore, the first instance of human-caused climate change.
Of course the Lysenkoists have a problem with falsification--to Scientific American, whether the theory is true or not is beside the point.
Academia appears to be reverting to an earlier epistemology - that of authority over enlightenment produced by the scientific method.
It used to be priests who were the oracle of truth before people could read the Bible themselves. Now it will be the post modern Marxists whose fiat will determine what is accepted truth.
It is a brave new world that we are entering.
I don't suppose it would be off topic to suggest that everyone read or reread Richard Feynman's article on "Cargo Cult Science"
Cargo Cult Science
by RICHARD P. FEYNMAN
Some remarks on science, pseudoscience, and learning how to not fool yourself. Caltech’s 1974 commencement address.
During the Middle Ages there were all kinds of crazy ideas, such as that a piece of rhinoceros horn would increase potency. (Another crazy idea of the Middle Ages is these hats we have on today—which is too loose in my case.) Then a method was discovered for separating the ideas—which was to try one to see if it worked, and if it didn’t work, to eliminate it. This method became organized, of course, into science. And it developed very well, so that we are now in the scientific age. It is such a scientific age, in fact, that we have difficulty in understanding how witch doctors could ever have existed, when nothing that they proposed ever really worked—or very little of it did.
...
Read the whole thing
http://calteches.library.caltech.edu/51/2/CargoCult.htm
John Henry
Nothing printed in Scientific American is "serious".
During the last century, science went from being the peculiar hobby of a devoted few to being a vast government-subsidized enterprise. There is a lot of government science around, and most of it is worthless at best. But that doesn't mean that science is under threat. It just means that a lot of bullshit artists are labeling their scams "science".
Best part of the whole speech:
I was sitting, for example, in a hot bath and there’s another guy and a girl in the bath. He says to the girl, “I’m learning massage and I wonder if I could practice on you?” She says OK, so she gets up on a table and he starts off on her foot—working on her big toe and pushing it around. Then he turns to what is apparently his instructor, and says, “I feel a kind of dent. Is that the pituitary?” And she says, “No, that’s not the way it feels.”
I say, “You’re a hell of a long way from the pituitary, man.”
John Henry
Ah, another opportunity for me to recommend Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying's podcast.
One of their themes is that there is a trend toward "verificationism," a trend that must be opposed. Verificationism means you start with a hypothesis, then look for evidence that it is true. As humans are experts at motivated reasoning, they will inevitably find at least some evidence to support their cherished hypotheses. And now, this attitude is bleeding into the sciences -- even though is it literally the opposite of science. Science was invented to combat verificationism.
Ken B said...If we found rabbit fossils old enough, evolutionary theory would collapse. Everyone knows this.
Such a shame, then, for the Intelligent Design crowd that those rabbit fossils haven't turned up yet.
OK, so based on a couple comments above, I read the article. Defend this balderdash:
But the field known as science studies (comprising the history, philosophy and sociology of science) has shown that falsification cannot work even in principle. This is because an experimental result is not a simple fact obtained directly from nature. Identifying and dating Haldane's bone involves using many other theories from diverse fields, including physics, chemistry and geology. Similarly, a theoretical prediction is never the product of a single theory but also requires using many other theories. When a “theoretical” prediction disagrees with “experimental” data, what this tells us is that that there is a disagreement between two sets of theories, so we cannot say that any particular theory is falsified.
How would finding a pre-Cambrian rabbit cast doubt on physics? I hear what he says here, but the physics used to determine the age of rock has been completely validated to an astounding degree of success completely independently of its engineering type use in aging fossils.
Maybe he has just chosen a bad example, but the interdisciplinary use of scientific results to uphold other scientific results is not two way, unless maybe you are Michael Mann making up your own statistics to validate your dodgy hockey stick. Which probably is what this is all about.
The real problem Creationists have with evolution is that there is a complete lack of evidence for Creationism and that the evidence for evolution is ubiquitous. It’s like the guy who claims he can’t get a fair trial because there is video proof he committed the crime.
But it's hard to switch those policies because people think to themselves "Well what will we recommend instead?"
They could say each less starch and sugar, but how would that play in states that produce wheat, corn, potatoes, sugar cane or any of the other crops that would be on the "eat fewer of these" end?
SA article: "It is the single-minded focus on finding what works that gives science its strength, not any philosophy."
True.
"Albert Einstein said that scientists are not, and should not be, driven by any single perspective but should be willing to go wherever experiment dictates and adopt whatever works."
Einstein is the only scientist that I'm aware of (FWIW) who claimed to be influenced by the ideas of a philosopher (Hume).
@Wince, Gelernter is one of the smartest, and most humane, people who have ever lived. No wonder Ted Kaczynski, the Unabomber, tried so hard to kill him.
"Peer review is no good in climate science. The peers are climate scientists, where they should be experts in statistics, fluid dynamics, spectral analysis, and so forth."
The basic idea here is that we have chosen to regard what goes on in the Earth's atmosphere in the long term as a phenomenon called "Climate". Since we cannot perform scientific experiments to understand that phenomenon, we will develop grossly reductionist models to simulate it. There is little likelihood that this will reveal anything fundamental about climate, but it certainly provides employment for a lot of experts in statistics, fluid dynamics, spectral analysis and so forth.
Scientific American has been a laughingstock for some time. Good God, read some of their stuff on gender "science". A fifth-grader could see they're pulling it out of their asses.
My own take: some theory that the editors hold dear has been — or is on the verge of being — falsified. Probably the climate change hoax, but it could be something else.
Falsification is appealing because it tells a simple and optimistic story of scientific progress, that by steadily eliminating false theories we can eventually arrive at true ones.
Straw man. You don't "arrive at true [theories]," you arrive at better theories, ones that predict more accurately, and haven't been falsified yet. But "not falsified yet" does not make them "true."
It helps to understand the method before you critique it. Did he get around to saying that falsification is a white male privileged concept?
Corollary: if falsification is not important then we really should teach Creationism and Intelligent Design alongside Evolution.
This is why refutability and falsification is so IMPORTANT and if anything we need MORE scientists looking to constantly debunk and challenge all the terrible research being produced nowadays.
Every experiment begins with a null hypothesis. Prove it or prove it wrong.
"Darwinism is no longer just a scientific theory but a basis of a worldview, and an emergency religion for the many troubled souls who need one.
Cued at key point, but watch the whole thing sometime if you have the time.
Remember that Darwin was still in the observational era of science. He did know what a chromosome was.
Where does SciAm's argument come from?
It comes from the reality the left wing belief is contrary to reality, and that, as such, any method designed to destroy incorrect theories is a threat to Left wing desires.
If your hypothesis does not provide predictions that can be tested, then it's astrology: a source of tales to make you feel better
To test a hypothesis, there must be possible results that prove the hypothesis wrong. ("I predict that over the next 20 years the temperature will rise by 2 degrees". Ok, we measured in 1998, when you made the prediction, and in 2018 your prediction proved false. This means your hypothesis is garbage. Go back to the drawing board. When you've made a correct 20 year prediction (note: predictions are about the future, not the past), then we'll take a look at your hypothesis")
If you go through many, reasonable, tests that don't disprove your hypothesis, then it might be worth looking at.
It is the single-minded focus on finding what works that gives science its strength
What "works"? What a weasel word, "works"! I'll bet if you unpacked what scientists mean when they say that a theory "works" is that it 1) explains the appearances & 2) has not yet been found to have phenomena that cannot be explained by the theory, i.e. it has not yet been falsified.
So, when anti-vaxxers or anti-evolutionists or climate change deniers point to this or that result to argue that they have falsified the scientific consensus, they are making a meaningless statement. What they need to do is produce a preponderance of evidence in support of their case, and they have not done so.
No, not true. I cannot see any justification here for the epistemological claim that a "preponderance of evidence" must be presented to falsify a claim. I can't imagine how any claim of how much evidence is needed for falsification can be made a priori. To give an example from the history of science, the most famous failed experiment in the history of science, the Michelson-Morley experiment, seemed at first to be just this weird fluke in the universe of Newtonian physics. It just seemed that the velocity of the Earth through the lumeniferous ether was zero, which seemed, well, strongly counterfactual, to say the least. It was left to Lorentz & Einstein to take this one little crack in the Newtonian edifice & through this crack wedge in a whole new way of seeing the universe. That had nothing to do with "preponderances".
government and medicine ... When the evidence shows they are terrible at it.
You can never really trust statements from a gov't (beyond e.g when the county plans to start a road project), and the CDC, e.g. isn't just terrible, they've been reliably misleading or dishonest about AIDS, smoking and other drugs, and influenza.
But some basic things remain "true", like you can get vitamin deficiencies from certain diets.
Yale computer scientist David Gelernter sums it up.
He doesn't know what he's talking about, which is why he publishes articles on evolution in the MSM, rather than in peer-reviewed journals. He's not an actual biologist who is familiar with evolution.
Here's a non-peer-reviewed article by someone who has written many reviewed articles:
"Gelernter’s claim—that evolution as envisioned by Darwin (and expanded into “neo-Darwinism” since the 1930s) cannot explain features of organisms and of the fossil record—depends heavily on the arguments of ID creationists. And every one of those arguments has been soundly rebutted over the past few decades."
A scientist told me a long time ago that the Scientific Method is not replacing a falsehood with the truth. Rather, it's replacing a falsehood with a more subtle falsehood.
Still, there is a big problem today in institutional science because there's so much grant money to be had in supporting falsifiable theories that falsifiability is essentially dead (at least for Approved Theories).
A scientist told me a long time ago that the Scientific Method is not replacing a falsehood with the truth. Rather, it's replacing a falsehood with a more subtle falsehood.
Still, there is a big problem today in institutional science because there's so much grant money to be had in supporting falsifiable theories that falsifiability is essentially dead (at least for Approved Theories).
Blogger Hari said...
"This nonsense, like the argument that 2 + 2 does not necessarily equal 4 will soon do for the education of poor kids what defunding the police does for their safety.
If 2 + 2 does not necessarily equal 4 how will we be able to determine if the police have actually been defunded?
This is a follow-up to the revelation that "there is no such thing as the scientific method," after years of telling school children and the general public that there was.
The idea is that there was no one simple method that underlies everything scientists do and leads them to the conclusions that they reach. I suppose it all depends on whether you are a lumper or a splitter - whether you are looking for unity or for multiplicity.
Philosophers of science do what philosophers do: they love to saw off the branches they are sitting on. And yet so many people believe that "science is real," and don't see all of the conflicts, uncertainty, and disagreements that scientists experience in their work.
re: "Science Is Real" signs:
Propaganda is also real. Agenda-driven research - also real. Lies are real. Mistakes are real. All sorts of things are real; it doesn't mean that everything is equally valid - or even valid at all. Why do people insist on speaking in bumper stickers?
Hair splitting is popular because everyone is right.
"All scientists are right"
Marxist collective Bullshit. Eliminates dissent of any individual scientist that runs counter to current 'scientific dogma'.
-Believe all women-no, not that one.
-All educators are elite-no, not that one.
-All blacks are repressed-no, that one isn't really black.
-All single moms are heroes-no, not her.
-All government officials are public servants-no, he's a grifter.
-All meaningful labor is unionized-pay up, scab.
If you don't identify as part of the collective and follow marxist ideology to a T, you don't exist.
It's quite chilling.
Postmodernism strikes at the sciences. Facts can be whatever one wants them to be. Just ask Dan Rather.
Just last night I watched "Mathematical Challenges To Darwin’s Theory Of Evolution".
Thanks for the link. An important discussion. Watched to the end, and am going back to the beginning.
Shorter Singham: If scientists, collectively, say something is so, it is so, because scientists say it is so. Ignore the heretics who dare question the Faith.
Just finally watched the HBO/Sky miniseries Chenobyl. The start seems unpromising but it builds. I shed a tear during the episode 5 4 minute coda with Russian funeral hymn background.
I'm not even sure I buy into the "falsifiable" idea anyway, from a theoretical standpoint. If your theory is an actual theory -- internally consistent, logical, etc. -- then the ideational theory itself is true. Whether it has any application or not is what I consider to be "testing" the theory. Are the variables (the empirical referents) even measurable? How narrow or wide is the scope? Do the hypotheses derived from the theory hold up to empirical testing?
That's the trouble with "climate science" at least in its popular formulation: it's not really even a theory, it's just a bunch of statements with various theories in the background. Therefore, it really has no limits and can, as they say, explain everything so it explains nothing.
I have a good quote on that sort of thing somewhere but can't remember exactly what or who. . . . .
I should have bolded this
We also demonstrated the efficacy of surgical masks to reduce coronavirus detection and viral copies in large respiratory droplets and in aerosols (Table 1b).
Masks are breeding grounds for pathogens that like warm, moist environments.
The argument against masks is that on net they are more harmful than helpful.
tim in vermont once again cannot look past his own bias and represent the arguments of the other side faithfully.
Or smart people might look at the actual science, which demonstrates that face masks work, and write off the earlier advice to the fog of war and the novelty of the situation.
The science didn't change its mind. It had nothing to do with the "fog of war." Everyone knew that masks were effective--they were effective back in 1918!--our "experts" lied to us. They have since admitted to it. They lied to us and because we collectively have replaced calibrating bullshit detectors with just doing what we are told even when what we are told is objectively stupid.
I can't be the only one who remembers the insane contradiction that: masks don't work and actually make things worse and we also need to make sure there are enough of them for nurses. The food is terrible and the portions are too small! If masks make things worse--why would we want nurses to wear them? Are these not the basic questions we would want smart people to ask? "Smart people" will believe anything if you can trick them into thinking it is science.
“This has all come about because global warming is not falsifiable.”
My view is just the opposite- it is falsifiable, and has been falsified, as was global cooling before it. Which is why we now have Climate Change which is unfalsifiable and thus cannot be falsified. The climate scientists saw what they believed to be the global temperature going down, drew a lot of nice graphs and theorized a lot of nice theories of why it was happening all based on the idea that fossil fuels caused an increase in atmospheric CO2, which was obviously bad, because we now had global cooling and the earth was ending unless we immediately got rid of our fossil fuel usage. But reality intruded, and temperatures appeared headed up a bit, they drew new graphs predicting Armageddon based on rising CO2 levels from fossil fuels, etc. But reality intruded yet again, and it appeared that the global temperature (which is a fictitious construct in the first place) has dropped a bit. So now, we have climate change where bad weather events and the like, are predicted to increase or decrease, as usual, based on rising CO2 levels as a result of using fossil fuels. Since there are innumerable weather events that could possible increase or decrease in amplitude or frequency, it cannot be falsified. But it also means nothing, because it really doesn’t predict anything, except that the weather always changes, which we have known for eons.
This is just ballast for the older tactic of claiming that "Climate Science" is so super super true that it must be declared the "null hypothesis" and critics must prove that it is not true. Science by fiat. Great claims require great evidence.
Falsifiability has been degraded by the anti-intellectual practice of micro-modifying the hypothesis to plaster over any contradiction. Show some honesty, decency, and humility.
So, should I be worried about an excess of phlogiston in my apartment?
The article in question should be viewed as a political tract in favor of deferring to people who claim "the science" is on thei side, when it is in fact not clear.
Preponderance of evidence, which he asserts should be good enough, may be the best we can do in some cases--but in such cases we are not dealing with scientific proof, we are dealing with probabilities and possibilities, which is altogether different. Preponderance of evidence is generally not even adequate in a court of law trying a criminal case, where "beyond a reasonable doubt is the standard." Preponderance of evidence applies in some civil matters. That is reasonable given the stakes, the uncertainties in real-world cases, and the need to efficiently adjudicate them. But it is NOT the standard of a science we were taught to respect.
Like other postmodernists in the tradition of Derrida, he is playing word games with us, changing the definitions of common words so we think he is using the traditional one but he is using a new one of his own creation, but he didn't make the change explicit. He then makes assertions based on his new definitions, that mislead us. Specifically, an assertion that is supported only by a preponderance of evidence is NOT science as we understand it.
Lincoln famously joked that "If I say a dog's tail is a leg, how many legs does it have?" To those who answered "Five," he would respond, "No, he only has four legs. Calling a tail a leg does not make it a leg." And calling an assertion "scientific" based on a mere preponderance of evidence does not make it science unless you change the definition of science and we can reconsider to what degree we should defer to it.
Scientific American has not been a reputable source for some decades, they always follow the trend of the week.
"Well, I can see right there that the article writer is missing something. Feynman wasn't talking about a problem with doing science. He was talking about the problem with doing history!"
This is why I absolutely adore Ms. Althouse! This is what is called cutting the head off of someone's argument with a giant scalpel. Well done!
tim maguire said...
Such a shame, then, for the Intelligent Design crowd that those rabbit fossils haven't turned up yet.
9/9/20, 10:47 AM
Please don't confusion intelligent design with creationism.
Creationism says the earth is only a few thousand years old and all the bible stories are literal.
Intelligent design says everything is as old as it is, the big bang and all the rest likely happened (which is all anyone can say) but that it was all started by a higher being/power that designed it all to come out this way (think of a well designed computer program or formula). God was that designer.
They only thing they both have in common is the believe in God the creator.
Mask compliant blue states hammered by Covid early on have the lowest positive percent for those tested. Results confirmed @ Sturgis.
DD Driver is wrong. There were many articles written in the 20 years - before it became political - that concluded wearing masks was ON NET worse than not wearing masks. Other pathogens love your warm, moist mask. It is a breeding ground for bacteria.
The science didn't change.
That is true.
The politics did.
When I was growing up, 'falsification' was something guys did with IDs and girls did with their breastesses.
Narr
Trust but verify
Masks have limited, circumstantial value. They are ineffective at best, and counterproductive at worst, in general to mitigate transmission of sub-micron particles. The science hasn't changed, but their acceptance has been driven by intuitive, em-pathetic, and authoritarian appeal. That said, don't forget the goggles, and avoid black holes.
Science: Masks and Aerosols*
Finito On The Covid Nonsense
Singapore had a horrid problem with PPE in their hospitals like everyone else when Covid hit and their health care workers were getting Covid just like everywhere else. Rather than screaming at people they took what they learned from SARS and instituted militant hand-washing before and after every contact with a person or thing.
They found when they did this that other than being directly exposed to someone coughing or when performing a high-aerosol procedure like intubation their staff didn't need N95s and other high-grade PPE yet their transmission rate to and between their staff went to a statistical zero.
Planned Parent and cross-contamination in medical facilities were principal vectors for progressing viral contagion.
WHO offers a disclaimer for mask effectiveness in special and general use, and advises that social distancing is not a proper substitute for physical distancing when the virus is spread through aerosols.
That said, the effectiveness of masks depends on environment, duration, handling, particulate shape and size, and transmission modes (e.g. fecal tranmission).
Falsification is appealing because it tells a simple and optimistic story of scientific progress, that by steadily eliminating false theories we can eventually arrive at true ones.
Bzzt
By steadily eliminating more false theories, we get theories that are less false, and more useful.
So, when anti-vaxxers or anti-evolutionists or climate change deniers point to this or that result to argue that they have falsified the scientific consensus, they are making a meaningless statement. What they need to do is produce a preponderance of evidence in support of their case, and they have not done so.
"Preponderance of evidence" is a meaningless standard when judging scientific theories and hypotheses. In the vast majority of human endeavors, Newtonian mechanics works. It was dropped for special relativity because cases were found where Newtonian mechanics didn't work, and special relativity did.
To have a valid theory you must be able to explain ALL the available evidence.
Mask compliant blue states hammered by Covid early on have the lowest positive percent
The at risk popoulation is substantially less than predicted and those who were died (e.g. Planned Parent, stigmatized early treatment, social contagion). Also, the virus evolved, following the same path in every jurisdiction, and reached peak viability before the mandates were instituted. The places where there are spikes or plateaus are sustained through partial or deceptive mitigation strategies (e.g. masks) and external factors (e.g. immigration, migration).
Howard said...
Mask compliant blue states hammered by Covid early on have the lowest positive percent for those tested.
States hammered by Covid early didn't flatten the curve. Anyone with any reasonable understanding of mathematics would realize that the inevitable result is that States that DID flatten the curve will have high rates of infection NOW than States that didn't flatten the curve, and so had Covid burn through earlier
Why are you insisting on writing such moronic things, Howard?
https://pjmedia.com/instapundit/wp-content/uploads/2020/09/Screen-Shot-2020-09-08-at-10.48.47-PM.png
if the US had the death rate of NY/NJ we'd be at half a million dead, not less than 200k
"Masks are breeding grounds for pathogens that like warm, moist environments.”
This might carry water if it hadn’t been shown that states that mandated masks had better outcomes, but I can see how there is a problem with masks for people with low IQs and I can understand why they scare Birkel.
A normal person might say that a public education campaign on the proper use of masks would be in order. A person who actually wanted to see this come to and end.
It's quite well understood by scientists and mathematicians that no progress is made by means of logical deduction
Science advances one funeral at a time.
Max Planck
the Gesundheit-II
Gesundheit?
You're welcome!
Me smells a satire.
Howard thinks Sturgis proved his pet theory correct.
Sadly, to Howard, cases and deaths have not spiked.
Go peddle your death pint fantasies elsewhere.
Also regarding mask mandates, as with everything to do with the spread of disease, it has to do with "frequentist statistics” and if you can force the number of secondary infections from an infection to below one, the disease will die away over time, just like SARS did. Therefore, as studies of states who implemented mask mandates showed, perfect compliance is not necessary to drive the re-infection rate down. It’s enough that all of the people with room temperature IQs do it.
Statistics are subtle and the above might be too subtle a point for a person who thinks with his ideology first. Which is why arguing with such people is a waste of time.
"Intelligent design says everything is as old as it is, the big bang and all the rest likely happened (which is all anyone can say) but that it was all started by a higher being/power that designed it all to come out this way (think of a well designed computer program or formula). God was that designer."
****************
Then why did He put the Playground so close to the Dump?
"When I was growing up, 'falsification' was something guys did with IDs and girls did with their breastesses.”
Not to mention the cucumber at the airport scanner scene in Spinal Tap.
D.D. Driver said...
"If masks make things worse--why would we want nurses to wear them?"
*****************
They don't wear the kind of masks that we are being forced to wear. They wear N95's.
BTW, I asked my doc and some nurses working in the Lahey Health system in the Boston area if any of their fellow workders had died of covid.
They said they didn't know of any---despite thousands of patients being treated in their facillities.
On the good news front, the odds of a child who has contracted COVID-19 of being saddled with a possibly lifelong inflamatory condition seems to be only on the order of 1 in a 1,000. So far 500K kids have tested positive and only about 800 children have been diagnosed with the syndrome. Probably a lot more kids have had COVID than tested positive.
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/covid-kids-multisystem-inflammatory-syndrome-united-states/
It is true that one can never prove anything absolutely true in science or math but this does NOT mean that there is no truth at all, which is where the deconstructionists go. They claim that anything discovered by white men is just white man's science, but science is made up of discoveries by every race and is true for every race. Science is made up of devices (x-ray machines), theories, tools (stats, carbon dating), and facts. With these pieces we try to reconstruct how something works. When the tools are inadequate, we get ambiguous answers, such as the debate about when humans first came to the Americas (dating stuff 20,000 yrs ago is hard). Over time we often overcome these limitations.
The power of falsification is often not understood in these debates. In a math proof, when you come to a contradiction and have not made a mistake, this indicates that the theorem is false. QED. If a proposed invention (cold fusion) violates conservation of energy and also quantum mechanics, it is for sure false. Conversely, quantum mechanics predicted multiple particles and phenomena before they were observed--pretty strong proof.
Literary critics like Foucault have a point about literature containing biases of the culture etc. but applying this to math and science is simply nonsense. Those lacking talent and who want to prove something that is absurd love critical theory because it frees them from being wrong. Having read enough of this tripe I can say that critical theory (of any type, feminist or social or racial) is devoid of meaning because they eschew logic and structure in favor of feelings and being clever with words. Words along do not produce a cell phone or vaccine.
This is scary stuff! If enacted would mean the end of reasonable scientific discovery and a massive brain drain to other disciplines or other countries not promulgating this 'voodoo theory'.
Any new theory which describes reality more closely, more accurately, than existing theories, replaces those existing theories. Nobody argues against this, nobody.
Seeing wave and particle behavior in light is best explained by quantum theory. Hobbes kicking a stone to disprove atomic theory, does not do so, except in Hobbes' mind.
They could say each less starch and sugar, but how would that play in states that produce wheat, corn, potatoes, sugar cane or any of the other crops that would be on the "eat fewer of these" end?
One sees your point, but ultimately to my mind this kind of thinking is numb. Presumably all humans will continue to have to eat something. If they need to eat less wheat and more meat, I'm sure that Iowa can export fewer grains and more hogs. California can produce less citrus and more eggs. The land is the land is the land, whatever food you need will come out of it in one way or another. Farmers switch crops all the time.
If the ultimate losing of weight or reduction of obesity means that, say, 10% fewer net calories, however composed, are consumed in the US, in whatever form of food, then yes, I suppose the US needed food crop measured in calories will drop by 10%. But then you have the capacity to export more to the rest of the world, or to support for their population growth.
Your new calorie mix may also be higher value than before, if the concern is for revenue. If people ate, say, a pound of coffee (to be absurd) instead of five pounds of flour, they would pay $5-10-$100 for that pound of coffee, instead of $2-5-10 for that five pounds of flour.
So other than temporary disruption of the convenience of agribusiness, it seems that it would be better for people to eat what is healthy, than what it is currently convenient and customary for agribusiness to produce.
They could say each less starch and sugar, but how would that play in states that produce wheat, corn, potatoes, sugar cane or any of the other crops that would be on the "eat fewer of these" end?
One sees your point, but ultimately to my mind this kind of thinking is numb. Presumably all humans will continue to have to eat something. If they need to eat less wheat and more meat, I'm sure that Iowa can export fewer grains and more hogs. California can produce less citrus and more eggs. The land is the land is the land, whatever food you need will come out of it in one way or another. Farmers switch crops all the time.
If the ultimate losing of weight or reduction of obesity means that, say, 10% fewer net calories, however composed, are consumed in the US, in whatever form of food, then yes, I suppose the US needed food crop measured in calories will drop by 10%. But then you have the capacity to export more to the rest of the world, or to support for their population growth.
Your new calorie mix may also be higher value than before, if the concern is for revenue. If people ate, say, a pound of coffee (to be absurd) instead of five pounds of flour, they would pay $5-10-$100 for that pound of coffee, instead of $2-5-10 for that five pounds of flour.
So other than temporary disruption of the convenience of agribusiness, it seems that it would be better for people to eat what is healthy, than what it is currently convenient and customary for agribusiness to produce.
Tim,
All of the studies demonstrate that masks do little to nothing to stop respiratory viruses, and quite likely induce bacterial illnesses given the way the unhygienic way they are used by the typical person. The reason is pretty fucking simple- almost no one does masking the way it has to be done to be effective. They don't use the proper masking materials, they don't wear them properly, nor do people replace the proper masks with the frequency that is needed- like every few hours. Even worse, all the evidence suggests that the wearing of masks undercut all the other things that actually are effective by giving people a false sense of security.
In the end, we will all end up in the same place as Sweden who mandated none of this nonsense.
The global warming models would be a current example of of not paying attention to falsification or, to say it another way, of ignoring data that contradicts your theory. The truth is that all the global warming models are failing. All of them are making predictions that in a relatively short time are proved false. All of them are not only failing at making predictions but they are even failing at hindcasting. Hindcasting is where a model makes a prediction about an event that has already occurred and where the model makers know the prediction that the model should make as they are constructing the model.
In fact, astonishingly the latest global warming models are even worse at hindcasting than the earlier ones were. Actually that is not so amazing when you look at this another way. As we get ore data, and in particular more accurate data, it becomes harder and harder to match the path the climate actually traced. It's easier to construct a model that can match the path for five decades of data than for seven decades of data.
See this essay, New conformation that climate models overstate global warming that discusses two recent papers that, from different perspectives, demonstrate this.
Now this doesn't mean that the hypothesis that increasing CO2 will cause global warming is wrong, but it does mean that the current models are wrong and that we do not know how to calculate quantitatively in any meaningful sense how much warming should occur for a given CO2 increase.
It should also be obvious that either (1) what some of us think they know is wrong or (2) there are other factors, having a substantial impact, pushing the climate that we are unaware of.
But of course there are a great many people emotionally and ideologically committed to the erroneous predictions of current climate models, and so there is an incentive to construct a rationale for a 'science' that ignores data that contradicts a theory.
I could or should at this point write a much longer essay on how this argument doesn't apply to the theory of evolution or Newton's theory of gravitation, two theories mentioned in the essay that Mano Singham offers as evidence that the idea of falsification is wrong.
Well first off it's amusing to note that Singham does not offer any data that would contradict or falsify the theory of evolution. Instead he asserts that it would be difficult to disprove or falsify the theory of evolution. Now yes that is true. But this hardly demonstrates that the idea of falsification is wrong. Actually, we might note that it would be much easier to prove the theory of evolution is wrong if in fact the theory of evolution is wrong.
Singham then goes on to say that the reasons we believe in the theory of evolution are multiple and complicated. And that is true. And the theory of evolution stands out from most other scientific theories for exactly that reason. But what does this have to do with nullification, or falsification? Saying that it is difficult to apply an idea to something doesn't mean the idea is wrong.
So contrasting climate models with the theory of evolution, we see it's easy to imagine data that could falsify climate models but it's much harder to do so for evolution. And this could be because of the different nature of these two theories or it could be not unconnected with theory of evolution being correct. People that are trying to falsify the theory of evolution take for granted all the information that is consistent with the theory of evolution.
Moving on to Issac Newton's theory of gravity. I have to wonder at this point, does Singham actually understand the theories he's talking about? Because there is no real evidence in this essay that he does.
I know if I were trying to advance the argument he is making, I would try to understand my examples. For instance I would talk about the many things that the Theory of Gravity explains that we were previously unexplained or poorly explained. I would think about how we deal with a theory that explains almost everything about some huge part of the universe but is wrong in some areas.
There's a lot of interesting things to think about here. For instance we almost always use Issac Newton's theory in preference to Einstein's because the math is so difficult in Einstein's theories that they are often unworkable. It's amazing that this is true, ie. that a wrong theory is more useful than the correct one in most contexts.
It's also interesting to wonder what would have happened if physicists had not believed in falsification when Einstein came up with his theories. Would he have just been ignored?
But to compare the climate models with Newton's theory of gravity, the climate models are surely better than no theory at all, even if they fail many practical tests. That is they consistently predict things that don't happen. And they can't even hindcast with any accuracy.
But we should not be pretending that the climate models are accurate.
Newton's Theory of Gravitation is a spectacularly successful theory that correctly predicted a vast range of phenomena that in many cases no one had ever even thought about. It fails in a special set of circumstances. Historically, evidence gradually accumulated that there were problems and most scientists acknowledged them. And of course that meant there was an effort to come up with a better theory. But in most domains Newton's theory is still extremely accurate and useful.
I think Singham imagines that 'falsification' means we should have completely rejected Newton's theory of gravity once the first evidence of a problem came up. But it does not mean that. And it would have been ridiculus to do that, and physicists did no such thing.
Singham probably imagines that the same logic applies to climate models. But that's not true. We wouldn't lose that much if we just flat out abandoned the current models and started over. It may even be necessary to do that to make further progress.
Working scientists just do science. I read the philosophical stuff with interest, but I sure don't let it worry me.
tim in vermont said...
Also regarding mask mandates, as with everything to do with the spread of disease, it has to do with "frequentist statistics” and if you can force the number of secondary infections from an infection to below one, the disease will die away over time, just like SARS did. Therefore, as studies of states who implemented mask mandates showed, perfect compliance is not necessary to drive the re-infection rate down. It’s enough that all of the people with room temperature IQs do it.
https://coronavirus.jhu.edu/map.html
Click on Spain. Look at their daily cases. They put in a mask mandate in May / June. So, why are their daily cases climbing?
More than three standard deviations above the mean here, tim in vermont.
But tell yourself whatever you must to pretend life isn't about trade-offs.
tiv: I am talking about Winnie Xi Flu .
Me: What about all the other pathogens that harm humans?
tiv: But Winnie Xi Flu stuff and you are low IQ.
Yeah, if you could just once treat the arguments against you seriously, you might not suck so bad.
Faithfully represent the other sides' views just once.
Math is hard (for some) so 2+2 may not = 4.
Scientific positions can be proven false so, when dealing with the (LOL) Party of Science we just can't have that allowed.
Excellent timing by Glenn Reynolds over at 'Instapundit'.
"...Solzhenitsyn: “There are no loopholes for anybody who wants to be honest.” As he knew, the left hates honesty because it lives by lies, and has to..."
https://pjmedia.com/instapundit/
Effective:
Get sunshine that produces Vitamin D.
Wash your hands.
The distinguishing characteristic between religion and science is falsification. No beliefs in a religion can be falsified, they are matters of faith. There are no "facts" that matter nor experiments that can be done to show the religious belief is wrong.
Any scientific theory can require modification or complete abandonment when it is falsified. Most all theories are just mathematical approximations or simplifications of some real observed event. Newton's laws were good until better observations detected some small discrepancies. Within engineering limits, Newton's laws still hold for large body actions. A real mathematical model of every micro interaction of every photon, atom, and sub atomic particle, would produce the same general effect as Newton's laws but would be impossible to build.
At least in mathematics, for any set of axioms, there are statements that are neither provably true or probably false (cf. Goedel’s Incompleteness Theorem). So falsification already fails for the language of science.
tim in vermont: "On the good news front, the odds of a child who has contracted COVID-19 of being saddled with a possibly lifelong inflamatory condition seems to be only on the order of 1 in a 1,000. So far 500K kids have tested positive and only about 800 children have been diagnosed with the syndrome. Probably a lot more kids have had COVID than tested positive."
Unfortunately, the actions of the alarmists have shoved tens of millions, possibly hundreds of millions, more children into extreme poverty across the globe due to the shutdown which will yield hundreds of thousands of excess childhood deaths across the globe.
Of course, just saying that makes one a callous capitalist murderer.
"At least in mathematics, for any set of axioms, there are statements that are neither provably true or probably false (cf. Goedel’s Incompleteness Theorem). So falsification already fails for the language of science."
I don't think that true. All we need to care about is that there are propositions that can be proven wrong. As long as there are propositions that are provably false, then falsification matters and this is in fact crucial to the advancement of science and mathematics.
What we would do if we ever encountered such a problem is an interesting question. But we would probably just say it is outside of science.
But meanwhile pragmatically I don't think any scientist has yet come up with a theory that would fall into Goedel's special category of being true but unprovable. I'm not saying this will always be the case, but other than Goedel himself, I don't think anyone has ever come up with an example of such a thing.
And Goedel's proof by the way is probably dependent in some deep sense on the logic of falsification. So if you don't believe in falsification, then you can also throw Goedel's Incompleteness Theorem out the window.
Birkel said...
DD Driver is wrong. There were many articles written in the 20 years - before it became political - that concluded wearing masks was ON NET worse than not wearing masks. Other pathogens love your warm, moist mask. It is a breeding ground for bacteria.
Which is why I blame masks for my recent BACTERIAL sinus infection, when for a few days in a row I was going to places where I had to wear one. And was there for several hours each day. The repeated rebreathing of contaminated air, contaminated from the breath I just breathed out, overloaded my nasal passages with bacteria allowing an infection foothold. Since I was prescribed azithromycin I took it each day with 50 mg zinc to load my body up just in case...
+1 to all of Mandrewa's comments above. All of them.
The Gödel's incompleteness theorem applies to the language of mathematics. Which is a language all it's own, and while an integral part of science, isn't science itself. It applies only to math. Teaching math is a sequence of learning and unlearning, and each unlearning step loses people.
Early math- you cannot subtract a larger number from a smaller number.
next step- you can - buy going into negative numbers!
Later math- negative numbers do not have square roots.
next step- well, they can- using imaginary numbers, represented by i. i is i, and is the square root of -1. So iˆ2=-1, iˆ3=-i, and iˆ4=1. This is when you first start to really lose people in advanced math. You lose even more when you transition from Euclidian geometry where the interior angles of a triangle always add up to 180° to non-Euclidian where they could be more than, less than, or equal to 180° depending on which way space is curved....
As for the rest of science- anything can be disproven- if it isn't true. But the fuzzier the science, the more it relies on consensus, the less on actual observation and measurement. Hence- the global warming scam. And the great mask debate- useless, useful, or yes and no, depending on who's being masked? The real numbers say mostly useless- mask the infected- or isolate them, and mask the most vulnerable- or isolate them. Leave the rest of us to conduct our lives as we always have, making our individual decisions on how much risk we're willing to take. Hell, we let people bungee jump, mountain climb, bicycle, motorcycle, and skydive for fun- knowing some of the participants will die. Some will also die from random infections picked up from casual contact. Such is life.
I also approve mandrewa's points, except as they pertain to "climate" science.
There is no such animal.
We may as well call it climate alchemy.
She blinded me with science!
Science!
https://youtu.be/V83JR2IoI8k
But meanwhile pragmatically I don't think any scientist has yet come up with a theory that would fall into Goedel's special category of being true but unprovable.
String theory (so far). Or to be more precise, no one has yet been able to design an experiment capable of falsifying it.
And it is simply not true that no major scientific theory has ever been falsified. Go look up phlogiston.
And it is simply not true that no major scientific theory has ever been falsified. Go look up phlogiston.
9/10/20, 7:25 AM
Epicycles
"And it is simply not true that no major scientific theory has ever been falsified. Go look up phlogiston."
Oh, I agree with you. There is a very long list of scientific theories that have been falsified. We could reinterpret the history of science as the list of scientific theories that have been falsified, and such a history would basically touch on every aspect of what and why scientists believe what they believe today.
"String theory (so far). Or to be more precise, no one has yet been able to design an experiment capable of falsifying it."
If we can't imagine a way to test a theory then that theory is not a scientific theory.
But that is not the same as saying that string theory is not part of science because I believe, perhaps mistakenly, that we can imagine experiments that might test string theory even if they are beyond our current abilities. But still that leaves string theory with a problematic status since we have no practical way to test the idea right now.
It's been decades since I read "Godel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid" but as I recall what Godel demonstrated is that any comprehensive, coherent, and complete logical system of proof will always fail to prove some true statements. Now although it's just amazing that it is possible to prove such a thing, I've always wondered how much practically speaking that really matters. Since these comprehensive, coherent, and complete logical systems of proof -- which by the way have never actually been completed -- would still cover a staggering number of different ideas, and hence would be extremely useful to have.
But the problem is I suspect that mathematicians wanted to be able to say, "I can't prove this and I have proven I cannot prove this, and that should mean it is not true" but Godel's Incompleteness Theorem means you can't reason that way.
" The real numbers say mostly useless- mask the infected- or isolate them, and mask the most vulnerable- or isolate them.”
So how do you know who is infected when a significant number of cases have zero symptoms and the tests are not perfect? A better question is “Why am I arguing with a moron who can’t handle thoughts that contain more than one or two variables?”
But I would be happy to see a link to “The real numbers” that rebuts what has been published in Nature and The Lancet. With the arguments summarized in your own words. Another stupid question. I mean how are you going to summarize your knee jerk ideological reaction?
You guys are worse that Howard and Gadfly sticking by their guns on the Atlantic story after it has been thoroughly debunked.
"Of course, just saying that makes one a callous capitalist murderer.”
I really think it was good news. Not sure what you are thinking. I was worried about that syndrome and the kids going back to school and that the numbers would be worse. Considering that there are only 82 deaths showing on the CDC tracker for kids under 18, It’s an encouraging number. I think it is pretty funny that you think I am a lefty because I look at the numbers and care about people affected. Are you trying to show Howard that he is right?
BTW, I wonder why there is no huge epidemic of people who work in hospitals developing sinus infections due to wearing masks all the while they are at work? Just curious, if you have a cut and you put a bandage on it, do you use the same bandage over and over without cleaning it thoroughly or using a fresh one? Masks are cheap. After I use one, I put it aside, bring it home and hang it on a clothesline in the sun for a day to sterilize. They come in boxes of 50, you know.
It’s precisely because I care about other people that I am not a leftie.
"Intelligent design says everything is as old as it is, the big bang and all the rest likely happened (which is all anyone can say) but that it was all started by a higher being/power that designed it all to come out this way (think of a well designed computer program or formula). God was that designer."
One ID theory seems to work like this. There is little debate that one gene mutation evolution works. One example is three color vision. Ite essentially exists in old world monkeys (which includes the Apes, including Humans), but not new world monkeys. It essentially involved a genetic duplication of the gene for green light cones on the X chromosome. The second copy was then “tuned” to respond to redder light, through the swapping of bases. Scientists pretty much know when it occurred, based on when the linages of old and new world monkeys split. One theory is that the evolutionary advantage of this mutation was that our monkey ancestors could now distinguish more nutritional red leaves from less nutritional green leaves.
Genetic mutations occur on a statistically fairly consistent basis. Most are bad, even lethal. They typically die out fairly quickly, unless on the same chromosomes as a comparatively more advantageous gene (such as is probably the case for the various maladies experienced by Ashkenazi Jews that are propagated by being on the same chromosomes that make them so smart). Many are neutral, and may linger in the gene pool for long periods of time. And some are situationally beneficial and will often spread throughout the advantaged population.
But scientists have a hard time finding single genetic jumps. The more usual situation is finding genetic jumps of dozens, if not more, mutations. There is a statistical range of time over which single beneficial mutations occurred, and the cumulative range of time for a related series of mutations is thus a range, derived by summing the corresponding statistical distributions. The problem is that a number of these multi mutational genetic jumps are down at the bottom in terms of probable time required for that many beneficial mutations. It is statistically possible, but somewhat improbable that the multi mutational jump may be strictly Darwinian. Or there may be some divine force putting a thumb on the scale, and pushing evolution in a specific direction.
"t is statistically possible, but somewhat improbable “
Given enough time and enough opportunities, everything that is possible but improbable is going to happen.
The other problem with that argument is that it pretty much assumes that the solution that happened was the only possible solution in any given case that would have advanced the progress of whatever life form we are talking about.
As an analogy, what were the odds that *you* would be born even if calculated from the moment your mom and dad decided to have sex when you were conceived? Close enough to zero so that the difference isn’t worth talking about. What were the odds that *some* child would be born out of it? Much higher.
It’s like calculating the odds that a dart thrown out of a helicopter is going to find the singe ace of spade in a field of millions of playing cards (the exact thing that happened in evolution) verses the odds that the dart might hit any one of an unimaginably large number of *possible* evolutionary improvements if we don’t focus precisely on what exactly did happen.
This is what I mean by missing stuff.
tim in vermont said...
So how do you know who is infected when a significant number of cases have zero symptoms and the tests are not perfect? A better question is “Why am I arguing with a moron who can’t handle thoughts that contain more than one or two variables?”
Last I checked, "asymptomatic" people were not thought to be major spreaders.
Because "lack of coughing and sneezing" == "not a lot of spreading of virus, and not a lot of infected cells to provide virus to spread".
Because if you had a lot of virus to spread to other people, it would be coming from infected cells that were causing you to cough and sneeze.
Oh, *that’s* your problem. No, people are getting this by being in enclosed spaces and exposure to aerosolized virus from infected people’s simple breathing. This is why it spread in church choirs, and meat packing plants where the noise level is so hight that people have to shout. If it were as easy as avoiding people who are coughing and have symptoms, the thing would be gone by now.
Asymptomatic people include people who have been infected but have not yet begun to show symptoms, usually for a couple days before showing symptoms these people are breathing out enough virus to infect other people if exposed for a prolonged period, like sitting down in a movie theater or restaurant. There is a study of a restaurant in China where the virus was spread for several tables, which they were able to explain by noting the position of the infected person and the direction the air handlers blew. This person infected six other people, IIRC, most of whom were not even at his table.
That’s why the finding that surgical masks trap this particular virus, probably due to static charge, unlike for example flu viruses, which pass through a mask as if it were a chain link fence, is such a lucky break, and why studies of mask usage show that they slow the spread of the virus.
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