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Science without Validation in a World without Meaning

americanaffairsjournal.org

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Re: Science without Validation in a World without Meaning

#11

Post by pacala »

snowwrestler wrote: post #4

An article by an electrical engineer, published in a political journal, about climate change... I had low hopes, which were met. IMO few categories of professions have a harder time understanding cutting-edge science than engineers. That is because they think they know science because they use similar mathematical and technical tools, when in fact the professions do the exact opposite of one another. Engineers use wh…

Corollary: Climate science models should be built by engineers, not by scientists. Task people who 'use what is known and understood to construct systems that can be validated'. Perhaps the whole scientist-as-faux-priest meme should be toned down a notch.

Re: Science without Validation in a World without Meaning

#12

Post by pjkundert »

eli_gottlieb wrote: post #7
guscost wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If science is truly what you describe, then it has no place in the making of public policy. Never again.

Never again should public policy be made subject to uncertainty? I may have some bad news for you about the human condition.

Uncertainty is always going to be a problem, and (if history is any guide), allowing free peoples to self-organize and make individual/community decisions about how to live has worked out the best.

Having a few elites (or a strident majority) make decisions for everyone else has turned out ... less good.

The worst outcomes tend to arrive when these groups shield themselves from evidence-based reality (usually by forcibly stripping liberty and wealth from their unfortunate subjects and inferiors), to temporarily suspend them experiencing the results of their actions. There's alot of that going around, presently.

Good luck with all that!

Re: Science without Validation in a World without Meaning

#13

Post by guscost »

eli_gottlieb wrote: post #7
guscost wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If science is truly what you describe, then it has no place in the making of public policy. Never again.

Never again should public policy be made subject to uncertainty? I may have some bad news for you about the human condition.

Never again should we allow people to pretend that their favorite brand of uncertainty deserves special accommodation.

Re: Science without Validation in a World without Meaning

#14

Post by snowwrestler »

AnimalMuppet wrote: post #10
snowwrestler wrote: post #4

An article by an electrical engineer, published in a political journal, about climate change... I had low hopes, which were met. IMO few categories of professions have a harder time understanding cutting-edge science than engineers. That is because they think they know science because they use similar mathematical and technical tools, when in fact the professions do the exact opposite of one another. Engineers use wh…

> Engineers love to point out how scientists don't know, and can't prove, whether their climate models are accurate. Scientists know that that is the whole point of building such models. I disagree, strongly. A big part of the point of building such models is to get models that are more accurate than the currently-existing models.

We agree.

Re: Science without Validation in a World without Meaning

#15

Post by paganel »

snowwrestler wrote: post #4

An article by an electrical engineer, published in a political journal, about climate change... I had low hopes, which were met. IMO few categories of professions have a harder time understanding cutting-edge science than engineers. That is because they think they know science because they use similar mathematical and technical tools, when in fact the professions do the exact opposite of one another. Engineers use wh…

> But we don't. And the only way to expand what we know is to spend a ton of time doing things that we don't know.

That can sound great, at least from a scientist's point of view, the issue is that many times those "things the scientists don't know about" are taken as a given (i.e. closer to the "truth" compared to the things that non-scientists reason about) and they come back to bite us non-scientists, meaning the general public.

This virus has proven just that, with scientists in many countries believing lots of different things (they still do, even after ~4 months since the whole thing has reached a new level), about which things it was obvious "they didn't know that much about", but it didn't matter, because most of the time their voices were heard louder compared to everyone else's and as such the powers that be decided to follow those scientists' lead/advices.

In other words, it's ok that scientists don't know everything, but they should also be aware of that and they should let their "superiors" (government officials, people having the power to influence the lives of millions of other people) know about them not knowing everything. Going back to this virus, I've personally never heard an "expert" say out loud in the media something like: "we just don't know how this virus really works and we really don't know how best to fight it, we're really navigating in the dark here, we're asking you to stay locked-down in your houses because we think it's the right thing to do but we can't say exactly for how long because we really don't know".

Re: Science without Validation in a World without Meaning

#16

Post by pacala »

eli_gottlieb wrote: post #7
guscost wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If science is truly what you describe, then it has no place in the making of public policy. Never again.

Never again should public policy be made subject to uncertainty? I may have some bad news for you about the human condition.

We already know quite a bit about the world. Unclear why should we reach out into the fog of unknown for some cutting edge unproven state-of-the-art system, when there are quite a bit of well established and widely agreed upon known ones that can get us 90% of the way there, with much lower risks of catastrophic failure.

Case in point: covid19 policies inadvertently triggering the mega-depression of 2020 and beyond, for what appears to be relatively minor medical gains in the big picture. How bad can you botch it if it takes 5 months to come up with 'masks are good, perhaps, more research is needed' from a peer reviewed source, when even a 14 year old could have been told you that's rather a good idea all the way back in January.

https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6...

Re: Science without Validation in a World without Meaning

#18

Post by pdonis »

snowwrestler wrote: post #8
pdonis wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Working without knowing whether you're correct is not epistemological conflict. It's the fundamental condition of being a scientist. This is true, but it's also true that, when making public policy, we should be thinking like engineers, not scientists. Public policy is not about constructing new knowledge. It's about working out conflicts between different values and priorities based on our best current knowledge.…

There are no sidelines in public policy. There's nowhere to wait to see how things turn out before making a decision. So, there are no neutral decisions. "Waiting until we're more sure about something" is not actually waiting, it is an affirmative decision to disregard what we think we know right now. That can be a valid choice, and something to debate, but it's fundamentally different from the feined neutrality of t…

> "Waiting until we're more sure about something" is not actually waiting, it is an affirmative decision to disregard what we think we know right now.

No, it's an affirmative choice to not impose a public policy on everyone based on what we think we know right now. And often that is the right choice.

> To make such an argument requires attacking that knowledge directly, showing specifically how it's wrong. Not just vaguely complaining that it's not good enough yet.

You have this backwards. Claimed knowledge doesn't get to be assumed to be right until it's shown to be wrong. It needs to demonstrate that it's right with a sufficient level of confidence before it even gets considered at all. "Not good enough yet" just means "you haven't shown your claims to be right with enough confidence to make them worth considering in this public policy debate".

> leaders act to address needs in real time, making the best decisions they can with the information available to them.

"Leaders" aren't the only ones who act to address needs in real time and make decisions. Everybody does that. Often the best thing for "leaders" to do is to not make any decisions at all as "leaders", but to simply let individual people, who have far more accurate information about their individual situations than any "leader" can possibly have, make their own decisions.

For a "leader" to make a decision and dictate a public policy, the policy needs to be based on knowledge that is strong enough to justify overriding the billions of individual decisions that people are making all the time about their individual lives, with a top-down dictated decision that everybody must follow. That's a much, much stricter requirement than most people appear to think.

Re: Science without Validation in a World without Meaning

#19

Post by guscost »

> Four conditions must be satisfied to have a valid scientific theory: (1) There is a mathematical model expressing the theory. (2) Precise relationships, known as “operational definitions,” are specified between terms in the theory and measurements of corresponding physical events. (3) There are validating data: there is a set of future quantitative predictions derived from the theory and measurements of corresponding physical events. (4) There is a statistical analysis that supports acceptance of the theory, that is, supports the concordance of the predictions with the physical measurements—including the mathematical theory justifying the application of the statistical methods.

This definition appears rigorous at a glance, but it is deficient. We cannot properly test a theory if it only predicts things which we already expect to happen. Popper said that scientific theories must instead make "risky predictions":

"Confirmations should count only if they are the result of risky predictions; that is to say, if, unenlightened by the theory in question, we should have expected an event which was incompatible with the theory–an event which would have refuted the theory."

Re: Science without Validation in a World without Meaning

#20

Post by pjkundert »

paganel wrote: post #15
snowwrestler wrote: post #4

An article by an electrical engineer, published in a political journal, about climate change... I had low hopes, which were met. IMO few categories of professions have a harder time understanding cutting-edge science than engineers. That is because they think they know science because they use similar mathematical and technical tools, when in fact the professions do the exact opposite of one another. Engineers use wh…

> But we don't. And the only way to expand what we know is to spend a ton of time doing things that we don't know. That can sound great, at least from a scientist's point of view, the issue is that many times those "things the scientists don't know about" are taken as a given (i.e. closer to the "truth" compared to the things that non-scientists reason about) and they come back to bite us non-scientists, meaning the…

That's a great example; and, the instant we got 1 (one!) report that gave evidence of a significant percentage of the population having experienced the virus with few symptoms -- thus lowering the CFR (Case Fatality Rate) for that segment of the population to something near a low multiple of the normal Flu -- the "lockdown" hypothesis should have been discarded, violently, for that segment of the population!

But, it wasn't; because these "falsifying" signals were ignored (or worse yet, stridently denied), and were certainly not actually tested -- we have yet to see even a single case of a country aggressively testing a random sampling of their entire population for immunity!

This one example is an astonishing repudiation of the global response to Coronavirus. Its insane! Wholesale self-destruction of the global supply-chain and division of labor, because the political, medical and scientific elites just don't want to be shown to be wrong.

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