31–40 of 63 posts
I really wish "data" journalism did a better job of conveying uncertainty. It is incredibly common to see comments like such-and-such increased 10%, without any comment on what the number of such-and-such actually was or if the 10% change was statistically significant. Likewise journalists often make claims that are not supported by the research. Scientists don't have the reach to describe their results to the public…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
(Bioinformatics) I wonder if he means not that evolution is false/unfalsifiable/irreproducible, but that it is not really a very predictive theory. I agree there is a lot of evidence that it happened and continues to happen, but predicting how it will happen, i.e., how an organism will evolve, what genes will mutate etc, in a certain environment, is very difficult and really basically impossible. > What about the bea…
> but predicting how it will happen, i.e., how an organism will evolve, what genes will mutate etc, in a certain environment, is very difficult and really basically impossible. By that measure physics isn't predictive either. Any moderately complex system and the best we can do is statistical models, often with little to no predictive power.
This is not currently possible at all in biology because even the most minimal functional, self-reproducing biological system is very complex. Indeed even a single protein is quite complex. I suppose by "complex" in this context I mean: lots of acting entities, and many physical laws operating at once rather than just a few.
Physics does have predictive problems when it is applied to weather, climate, etc, because those are complex systems. But that kind of the thing is a minority of the subject matter in physics.
(I've posted this before, but it's very relevant to this topic) Learning to filter guesswork and scams from robust claims is easily the most important skill that the general pubic needs to learn. It's hard to progress in any other topic if you don't understand the basic methods for filtering good information from the many mistakes, misinterpretations, scams and other bad data. Democracy and modern civilization itself…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
(Bioinformatics) I wonder if he means not that evolution is false/unfalsifiable/irreproducible, but that it is not really a very predictive theory. I agree there is a lot of evidence that it happened and continues to happen, but predicting how it will happen, i.e., how an organism will evolve, what genes will mutate etc, in a certain environment, is very difficult and really basically impossible. > What about the bea…
> but predicting how it will happen, i.e., how an organism will evolve, what genes will mutate etc, in a certain environment, is very difficult and really basically impossible. By that measure physics isn't predictive either. Any moderately complex system and the best we can do is statistical models, often with little to no predictive power.
If we look at a (perfectly random) coin flip we can predict a 50% chance of heads. We can also predict the likelihood of distributions of values over x flips. If the system we are modeling is inherently statistical we would expect our prediction to be statistical.
You are also confusing the fact that the stuff in physics that isn't statistical in nature has extreme precision. Think of how well we know the orbits of planets.
(I've posted this before, but it's very relevant to this topic) Learning to filter guesswork and scams from robust claims is easily the most important skill that the general pubic needs to learn. It's hard to progress in any other topic if you don't understand the basic methods for filtering good information from the many mistakes, misinterpretations, scams and other bad data. Democracy and modern civilization itself…
"easily the most important skill that the general pubic needs to learn" <-- important for who, them or you?
(I've posted this before, but it's very relevant to this topic) Learning to filter guesswork and scams from robust claims is easily the most important skill that the general pubic needs to learn. It's hard to progress in any other topic if you don't understand the basic methods for filtering good information from the many mistakes, misinterpretations, scams and other bad data. Democracy and modern civilization itself…
"easily the most important skill that the general pubic needs to learn" <-- important for who, them or you?
Physics and chemistry are pretty robust, everything else is far squishier. It's pretty easy to get identical atoms or molecules or subatomic particles. It's much harder to grow a field of identical plants or raise hundreds of identical mice.
IMO the "March for Science" movement and these kinds of "People who don't vote the same as me do so because they're not as smart as me" kinds of things are starting to really annoy me. Science is a tool/process. Not an agenda. Everyone in their own heads will choose whether or not to believe something regardless of how much SCIENCE they shout. The same people who yell SCIENCE on the internet could be the same people…
There are precursors to the scientific method than can be traced back millennia. While over 2600 years separate us from when the Edwin Smith Papyrus[0] was written (c. 1600 BCE), the rationalism present in most of the text, its case study approach, and an emphasis on observation and diagnosis are all things that any doctor today would clearly recognize despite the very obvious differences in medical knowledge between then and now. Or consider the Empirics of the 3rd century BCE and their approach to medicine versus the Dogmatic school. Babylonian astronomers in the 8th century BCE developed a systematic approach that would later inform classic Greek and Hellenistic astronomers (and likely philosophers in general), even though the Greeks would develop an unhealthy obsession with cosmology and spheres that...led them astray a bit. In On the Parts of Animals: Book III, Aristotle stated that "Males have more teeth than females in the case of men, sheep, goats, and swine; in the case of other animals observations have not yet been made." While his observations were dead wrong, and have been mocked for years, his point about further observation is important. Thinkers from Bertrand Russel to B. F. Skinner have misinterpreted Aristotle's approach: despite his erroneous conclusions, the fact that they were due to incorrect data/observations rather than flawed logic is important.
That said, empiricism in this vain didn't have nearly as much of an effect on cultures as did traditional beliefs, cosmology, ontology, theology, etc. With the Enlightenment and the scientific revolution, everything changed: empiricism and rationalism (despite the disputes between the two), came to shape European intelligentsia. Cue Francis Bacon's Novum Organum and deliberate experimentation. Taken together, it changed the direction of western civilization.
Anyhow, my belabored point is this: "science" is intrinsically tied to a fundamental change in human thought that helped shape how even non-scientists think about and interact with the world around them. When people talk about the need for scientific understanding in politics, they aren't saying that those they disagree with politically are stupid. Or that their voices are of less worth. Rather, they're looking at what's becoming a rejection--in whole or part--of a scientific mindset in favor of one that can be immensely dangerous. In the public discourse, the debate over climate change is largely being waged over dogmatic and ideological terms, rather than as a scientific debate over the data itself. Anti-vaxers, anti-GMO activists, etc. all pursue lines of argument where empirical data is not only not used, but in many cases, is categorically rejected. By allowing ideology to shade or even shape perception, such individuals--and those who implement policies on the basis of their arguments--are creating an environment where enlightenment ideas and the scientific method are able to be marginalized.
That doesn't make those individuals "stupid." It makes them human, and it's natural to prioritize beliefs and values differently from one another. But one of the greatest legacies of the scientific revolution is the ability to, as William Whewell described it, was a "transition from an implicit trust in the internal powers of man's mind to a professed dependence upon external observation; and from an unbounded reverence for the wisdom of the past, to a fervid expectation of change and improvement."[1] To step back from that legacy is to limit our ability to apply scientific knowledge in how all of us develop those beliefs and values. Is all shouting about "SCIENCE" enlightened? Of course not. But that's often the case regardless of the subject at hand.
One of my biggest fears about the March for Science is that it will make it even easier for people to cherrypick scientific data to support their beliefs by rejecting scientists as yet another political grouping. Instead of being a separate, apolitical force, "science" becomes nothing more than another political grouping. And that would be disastrous.
0. https://ceb.nlm.nih.gov/proj/ttp/flash/smith/smith.html
1. https://archive.org/stream/philosophyinduc04whewgoog#page/n3...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> but predicting how it will happen, i.e., how an organism will evolve, what genes will mutate etc, in a certain environment, is very difficult and really basically impossible. By that measure physics isn't predictive either. Any moderately complex system and the best we can do is statistical models, often with little to no predictive power.
Statistical models doesn't mean that there is no predictive power. If we look at a (perfectly random) coin flip we can predict a 50% chance of heads. We can also predict the likelihood of distributions of values over x flips. If the system we are modeling is inherently statistical we would expect our prediction to be statistical. You are also confusing the fact that the stuff in physics that isn't statistical in natu…
Thus even our models of planetary orbits are statistical. The inverse-square law, GM1M2/r^2, even if it perfectly describes reality (probably, but not entirely certain! see [1]), will have some degree of measurement error in M1, M2, and r (not to mention G) and so the resulting Fg will be a distribution, not a single number technically speaking.
It seems that the situations where physics can best describe things with very high accuracy is when it can abstract away many relatively homogeneous particles or entities into a bigger "thing" with aggregate properties. For example, in fluid dynamics or gravity, you don't attempt to determine the behavior of individual particles, which would be subject to enormous uncertainty, only the behavior of the system-as-a-whole. By the law of large numbers then the uncertainties decrease dramatically.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modified_Newtonian_dynamics