A useful essay:
…for all our bleating about “science” we live in an astonishingly unscientific and anti-scientific society. We have plenty of anti-science people, but most of our “pro-science” people are really pro-magic (and therefore anti-science).
This bizarre misunderstanding of science yields the paradox that even as we expect the impossible from science (“Please, Mr Economist, peer into your crystal ball and tell us what will happen if Obama raises/cuts taxes”), we also have a very anti-scientific mindset in many areas.
For example, our approach to education is positively obscurantist. Nobody uses rigorous experimentation to determine better methods of education, and someone who would dare to do so would be laughed out of the room. The first and most momentous scientist of education, Maria Montessori, produced an experimentally based, scientific education method that has been largely ignored by our supposedly science-enamored society. We have departments of education at very prestigious universities, and absolutely no science happens at any of them.
Our approach to public policy is also astonishingly pre-scientific. There have been almost no large-scale truly scientific experiments on public policy since the welfare randomized field trials of the 1990s, and nobody seems to realize how barbaric this is. We have people at Brookings who can run spreadsheets, and Ezra Klein can write about it and say it proves things, we have all the science we need, thank you very much. But that is not science.
Modern science is one of the most important inventions of human civilization. But the reason it took us so long to invent it and the reason we still haven’t quite understood what it is 500 years later is it is very hard to be scientific. Not because science is “expensive” but because it requires a fundamental epistemic humility, and humility is the hardest thing to wring out of the bombastic animals we are.
A useful thought as well see tens of thousands of anti-science, anti-market marching morons in New York today.
“Science is little tweeting bird, chirping in meadow. Science is a wreath of pretty flowers, that smell bad.” – M. SPock
“Man is not a rational animal, he is a rationalizing animal.” — Heinlein.
I was hoping that the Skeptics would win the AGW battle, because the next step would be to reform Science. I assume most physics and chemistry would be exempt, but the earth sciences, medicine, social studies and psychological fields are in need of a re-think due to their politicization.
Upon what do you base the assumption that Physicists and Chemists are immune to these very human failings?
He’s missing half of the story: science as pioneered by Galileo, explained by Bacon, and brought to full flower by Newton, not only answers questions with experiments, but uses the experiments to construct theories that can then be used to generate more predictions that can be experimentally tested. Maybe I missed it, but I didn’t see Gobry discuss with depth the theory-building and prediction part of the scientific method. Theories are more than what Gobry describes as reliable predictive rules; a good theory engenders deeper understanding.
And he’s at least partly off base on his criticisms of climate science. You don’t necessarily need to run a formal, completely controlled experiment to test a prediction. Think about geologists and plate tectonics, for example. It is perfectly acceptable to observe the natural world to develop evidence in favor of a theory; Nature runs experiments for us all of the time. But when the evidence disagrees with the theory, adding epicycles and fudge factors and sweeping problems under the rug damned sure isn’t science. That’s where his criticisms of the soft “sciences” should have been too.
And he loses it badly on his defense of religion and statement that science cannot concern itself with “ultimate causes”. Science can concern itself about anything that can be tested via experiment. Life after death? A god or gods created life on earth? What is human consciousness? What is morality? How did the universe come to be? These are, every one and many more, completely legitimate questions for scientific enquiry, no matter how much Gobry prattles on about “ultimate causes”.
I look forward to reading the peer-reviewed papers describing these experiments.
As I recall, the SS conducted some experiments on some of those topics in 1944 or so, decapitating a volunteer SS soldier and trying to reach him in the afterlife with a ouija board or some such thing. The results were inconclusive, as the subject was an idiot with his head cut off, and scientific journals have been remiss in publishing negative results, so many such experiments get needlessly repeated.
I think what’s holding liberal science back is insufficient faith to follow up on the research experiments of truly groundbreaking, paradigm shifting heroes who are willing to cast aside the straight jacket of Western, capitalistic, conservative morality and break all new ground to establish newly liberated socialist truths.
“You go first, Indy”
The origins of life on earth, the universe, human consciousness, morals, etc., are very active topics of scientific research and have been for decades; a little searching will turn up lots of interesting work. Your lack of imagination is sad.
Research into life after death has an interesting and solid scientific history despite George Turner’s attempt to Godwin the thread below. For example, the attempts several decades ago to determine the mass of the putative soul by measuring any change in weight as someone died were done with meticulous accuracy, leading to the conclusion eventually that, if there were a soul, it was massless. More recently, the solid work has been more of the debunking kind (near death experiences, for example) but clear scientific principles are applied.
Of course people tend to get carried away, but I think the author is too dogmatic. For instance, there is nothing in theory that would make it impossible to do accurate predictions of the climate a century from now. Make really effective models, show that they can predict the climate accurately for five years, then twenty years, in all kinds of detail, develop a picture of the kinds of errors you make and how they propagate, and you can make a convincing case that you have a good enough understanding to make predictions for a century in the future.
Hasn’t been done yet, perhaps can’t be, but there’s nothing unscientific about that. I doubt anyone has a problem with predicting orbital mechanics a century into the future: it just works a lot better than climate models.
Same thing with economics. The problem with modern macro-economics is not that you can’t do experiments. It’s that we can’t do accurate predictions. We’re just not very good at it yet.
Ah – I see that the Immortal Cthulhu got there first with his comment. He, of course, should also know about life after death and the like.
Chaos Theory.
There are systems in which even if you had close to perfect measurement of initial state and system dynamic parameters (such as mass, stiffness, damping) you cannot predict their (fine-scale) behavior beyond a certain time horizon. This is why the 50’s dream regarding weather prediction did not come to be when computers became “powerful enough.”
This is a kind of “Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle” writ large, but it doesn’t have to do with the random nature of a disturbance as it does the growth of a disturbance (the “butterfly wing” analogy). Chaos along with Quantum Mechanics and Godel’s Theorem are part of the 20th century puncturing of Enlightenment ideals that all questions will eventually be answered.
Now I know that climate is not weather, and just because a CFD (computational fluid dynamic code) does not predict every swirl and eddy, and least it gives you the “big picture” of the distribution of momentum and energy in a flow field. But CFD codes can be validated against wind tunnel models whereas it is impossible to do such physical experiments (do a wind tunnel run, fly a plane out of Edwards, run an engine on a test stand) on a planetary scale.
A plug for Godel was needed in the discussion. There are necessarily some areas beyond the grasp of science.
Quoth cthulhu: “But when the evidence disagrees with the theory, adding epicycles and fudge factors and sweeping problems under the rug damned sure isn’t science.”
Agreed. And it is here that I think Physics went off the rails in about 1980 or so. Nobody has ever observed superstrings, or dark matter, or dark energy. “Oh, but we see their effects!” No, we don’t. We see what the universe presents to us, and we make calculations based on our theories, and when the theoretical values don’t match the observed values, we made up dark matter and dark energy out of whole cloth. That is, the universe and our equations disagreed, and rather than look for the flaw in our equations we added fudge factors that are supposedly 96% of the universe. To me, that’s not science. That’s intellectual cowardice.
Dark energy is made out of phlogiston, while dark matter is the empyrean. All embedded in the luminiferous aether.
Before you diss the aether too hard, read “A Different Universe” by the Nobel physics laureate Robert Laughlin, and pay particular attention to the correspondence between the inside of semiconductors and the vacuum. Solid state physicists are weird, but Laughlin has the guts to ask the hard questions. And the book is really well written too, a great read.
Phlogiston and empyrean can suck it, though.
I disagree on the disrespect for epicycles. You can think of epicycles as a kind of mechanical “series expansion”, of which there is nothing wrong with that if you can get the series to converge. It is just that the Keplerian ellipse is a much more economical representation of the path (it is not an exact representation either owing to orbital perturbations in the N-body problem), which didn’t speak to a physical explanation either until Newton came along. And Newtons’ gravity was something that “just is” until Einstein came along, and General Relativity is still controversial as a deep explanation as it lacks quantum effects.
” It is just that the Keplerian ellipse is a much more economical representation of the path…”
It is more than that. It sorts the larger and smaller objects into a hierarchy according to mass. It puts the Sun at the center of the solar system, which is not a trivial leap forward all by itself.
Exactly right Ed.
Not only that, but these 2nd handed thinkers completely fail to consider the context of those earlier theories. Were Newton and Einstein observing the rotations of galaxies? Why would you expect the theories they created from their limited observations of the universe necessarily be correct for a new set of data to which they were never exposed? It is just as religious as believing Abraham brought down the entirety of ethics on his stone tablets, never to be amended, regardless of the great advances we’ve made in civilization since his time.
I’m pretty sure that was Moses.
Were you there, smart guy? Pics or it didn’t happen.
“Pics or it didn’t happen”
http://i.telegraph.co.uk/multimedia/archive/02689/CHARLTON-HESTON_2689484b.jpg
Completely photoshopped.
Looks like a damned dirty ape to me.
Googled ‘ape with tablets.’ I should have known.
The very strong form of this argument is much the same as the philosophical/epimistological position of “General Semantics”, or the constructed language E-prime.