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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

#61

Post by [deleted] »

pdonis wrote: post #47
bobbydroptables wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>As I responded elsewhere in this thread, by this criterion, we should stop pretty much everything we are doing. Which is not a viable option, never has been, and never will be. No, I'm not saying this. I'm saying we need to stop pretending its sustainable to keep burning carbon at the rates we are. It's not sustainable and we need to take painful steps immediately to stop this. It does not mean we need to "stop doin…

> It does not mean we need to "stop doing pretty much everything we're doing". Not sure where you get that idea. Because your own stated criterion is that we need to be able to justify what we're currently doing based on scientific knowledge. We cannot justify most of the things we're currently doing on that basis. > The idea is we should live in reality We apparently don't agree on what "reality" actually is, at lea…

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Re: Science without Validation in a World without Meaning

#62

Post by bobbydroptables »

pdonis wrote: post #58
bobbydroptables wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>We cannot justify most of the things we're currently doing on that basis. Exactly my point. Why do you think we need to have a higher justification for good ideas (engaging in sustainable behavior) than for bad ideas (engaging in unsustainable behavior)? >We apparently don't agree on what "reality" actually is, at least with respect to how much of an emergency CO2 emissions are. You think they're a dire emergency. >…

> Why do you think we need to have a higher justification for good ideas (engaging in sustainable behavior) than for bad ideas (engaging in unsustainable behavior)? You're misstating the alternatives. We're talking about public policy. The alternatives for public policy are "don't dictate what everyone must do in area X" or "dictate what everyone must do in area X". The former does not need a "higher justification".…

>You're misstating the alternatives.

No.

>We're talking about public policy.

Yes.

>The alternatives for public policy are "don't dictate what everyone must do in area X" or "dictate what everyone must do in area X".

The world is not this simple. Regardless, we must dictate that people cannot inflict externalities on third parties without compensation.

>The former does not need a "higher justification". The latter does.

Where are you getting this idea? You're just stating a conclusion without any support. I can do that too:

You are wrong, I am right. You need to scientifically justify acts that have harmful externalities. You do not need to justify harmful acts that restrict harmful externalities.

Wow, this is easy! I should have been arguing like this all along!

Re: Science without Validation in a World without Meaning

#63

Post by jbay808 »

pdonis wrote: post #46
snowwrestler wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think I claimed they were based on "best current knowledge," but I hope we can agree that is an ideal to aspire to.

> I hope we can agree that is an ideal to aspire to. It's an ideal to aspire to, but only if the ideal includes a very strict standard on what level of knowledge justifies dictating a public policy at all.

snowwrestler has repeatedly made the point that you can't not have a public policy about something; you can only accept or change the status quo.

England has a public policy that people drive on the left. America has a public policy that people drive on the right. In a society that had no codified rule about which side of the road to drive on, where people just weave back and forth, the choice to not enforce a particular convention would also be a defacto public policy.

It seems to me that in general you should only need the preponderance of evidence to suggest that a public policy change will do more good than harm in order to adopt it; otherwise you're unnecessarily biasing yourself in favour of the status quo. This of course should be done with an appropriate risk-weighting decision theory (how you weigh a small chance of large negative utility against a large chance of small positive utility, etc).

Re: Science without Validation in a World without Meaning

#64

Post by bobbydroptables »

pdonis wrote: post #35
didibus wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hum, I think both of you provide a good point. Ultimately though, I have to agree with snowwrestler, public policy often needs to make a decision with incomplete information. There's probably a middle ground here, I'd say having 70% of the information, something like that. Otherwise, it is too slow to act to prevent future problems. In that regard, I feel it's best paralleled with business. Business decisions are oft…

> public policy often needs to make a decision with incomplete information I disagree. Individual people and businesses often need to make decisions with incomplete information, but individual people's or businesses' decisions are only about their own actions, not about everybody else's. But public policy decisions affect everybody, so the criterion needs to be a lot stricter for how complete the information needs to…

>But public policy decisions affect everybody, so the criterion needs to be a lot stricter for how complete the information needs to be and how confident we need to be in our knowledge before we impose a public policy on everybody.

Again, your own logic destroys your argument.

We have made public policy decisions that heavily subsidize oil, cars, lowered air quality, etc.

These decisions affect everyone not just car drivers. These decisions were not based on complete information (in fact, we had very limited knowledge of global warming, air pollution, etc. when we made public policy decisions to favor air pollution).

>The idea that public "leaders" should be able to take calculated risks with everybody else's money (and lives) is, IMO, pernicious. This is exactly the mentality that has created so much mess in the world throughout history. No, "leaders" should not take calculated risks that affect everybody.

So why should Cletus who like to roll coal on Tesla drivers be able to take uncalculated risks that affect everybody?

I seriously think you don't understand what externalities are.

Re: Science without Validation in a World without Meaning

#65

Post by pjkundert »

guscost wrote: post #55
bsder wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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! You are deeply into "Not even wrong" territory. The plural of anecdote is not data. Did you forget HCQ already? Lots of "positive reports" and yet controlled studies shows that it kills…

The HCQ thing is a complete shit show, it has been politicized to the point where everyone pretty much just says whatever they want about it. It might be helpful as a prophylactic or with milder cases (when used in smaller doses). Other studies gave higher doses to severely ill patients and it did not help. Anyway, not trying to start another argument over this, but there is a vigorous argument still going on. A coup…

Besides the ... weird situation where most of the “refuting” studies didn’t include Zinc, which was widely suspected to be a major component of how it attacked Covid-19!

There are no words for the level of incompetence displayed in the handling of these HCQ studies.

Re: Science without Validation in a World without Meaning

#66

Post by jbay808 »

pdonis wrote: post #35
didibus wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hum, I think both of you provide a good point. Ultimately though, I have to agree with snowwrestler, public policy often needs to make a decision with incomplete information. There's probably a middle ground here, I'd say having 70% of the information, something like that. Otherwise, it is too slow to act to prevent future problems. In that regard, I feel it's best paralleled with business. Business decisions are oft…

> public policy often needs to make a decision with incomplete information I disagree. Individual people and businesses often need to make decisions with incomplete information, but individual people's or businesses' decisions are only about their own actions, not about everybody else's. But public policy decisions affect everybody, so the criterion needs to be a lot stricter for how complete the information needs to…

It seems like you have an implied view that some particular policies constitute non-policies, and others constitute policies. I think that you haven't succeeded in either communicating or justifying this point, which is why all these discussions are going in circles.

There's a certain symmetry to, say, FDR in the USA suggesting "maybe we should consider a new public policy restricting certain private business activities" with his New Deal and, say, Lenin in the USSR suggesting "maybe we should consider a new public policy allowing certain private business activities" with his New Economic Plan.

It seems like most of the users here have acknowledged that both of these constitute public policy changes. In fact, we could even imagine a scenario where passing one act is equivalent to repealing the other.

To say that both changes would require extremely high confidence, just "because they affect everybody", doesn't seem rational on this regard. Either the evidence supports one thing over the other, or it doesn't.

But I think you're taking a different view -- that there's a default anarchy / state of nature policy, that should be favoured with a very high prior, and any policy to deviate from it would require a much higher certainty than doing the opposite. Is that your position?

Re: Science without Validation in a World without Meaning

#67

Post by dang »

guscost wrote: post #37
arrozconcosas wrote: post #3

I could use a TLDR on this one ...

We can't easily validate models of reality that are complex/stochastic, because any experimental result could be a statistical anomaly. In particular this is a problem for models of long-term and/or global phenomena like climate or public health, since we only get one "experimental run", so to speak. Therefore: > Confronting the problems of complexity, validation, and model uncertainty, I have previously identified f…

I haven't read the article, but #4 is the interesting item on that list. #3 is the Goldilocks option, the one that sounds between-the-extremes like the just-right porridge that Goldilocks ate—but it's not realistic, because "be extremely cautious when interpreting them" exceeds what the human mind is capable of.

Re: Science without Validation in a World without Meaning

#68

Post by danharaj »

cgiles wrote: post #44

I work in molecular biology research, and I think this is a great article that strikes at the heart of many problems in the field. I can't comment on the climate change stuff, although I wish he hadn't included it because it was almost certain to distract people from the overall point. The problem is that there are no remotely comprehensive, predictive, and mathematical models of what goes on inside of cells. It is p…

Some mathematicians have come together to investigate systematically the science of composing and decomposing systems made of systems. There is a dire need for breakthroughs in this area all across society. https://www.azimuthproject.org/azimuth/show/HomePage

Re: Science without Validation in a World without Meaning

#69

Post by dang »

whywhywhynot wrote: post #49
guscost wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

What an insane statement. This is literally everything that politicians do: advocate for what they think is best based on our collective lack of understanding of science/economics/relations etc

Would you mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and sticking to the rules when posting here? Note these two:

When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names. "That is idiotic; 1 + 1 is 2, not 3" can be shortened to "1 + 1 is 2, not 3."

"Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith."

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Re: Science without Validation in a World without Meaning

#70

Post by dang »

guscost wrote: post #6
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…

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

You may have a good point, but this is a bad HN comment. For it to be a good HN comment you'd have to develop the point (1) in more detail, (2) with more explanation, and (3) without denunciatory rhetoric. If you were to do that, I'd be interested in reading it.

To post like this is against your interest because, to the extent that readers can tell what you're saying, they'll just be turned against it by the grandiosity and indignation. Those commodities are much too cheap on the internet.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

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