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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

#101

Post by roelschroeven »

guscost wrote: post #81
pjkundert wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why, indeed. It's almost like people just don't want to know the CFR of this thing... Why wouldn't you want to know the CFR, in exquisite detail, down to groups refined by as many distinguishing details as you can possibly measure? But, surprise! You simply cannot know the CFR of Covid-19 without statistically valid immunity studies of the general population. Which nobody is doing! Just ... crazy. Its stunningly clea…

> In 2-3 weeks, a brutal "second wave" is just ... guaranteed. And, it'll be presented as a "surprise"! Who could have possibly predicted it! By golly, we'll have to really put the hammer down, this time! I don’t think this will happen in the northern hemisphere, thankfully. There is reason to believe both that effective R drops off a cliff in the summer months, and that we’re much closer to herd immunity (or whateve…

> I don’t think this will happen in the northern hemisphere, thankfully. There is reason to believe both that effective R drops off a cliff in the summer months, and that we’re much closer to herd immunity (or whatever is possible with this kind of virus) than most people think. If you want references I can dig them up, but I guess we’ll see either way in a few weeks.

All sources I've seen before say something different about those two things (i.e. supposedly effective R will maybe go a bit down in summer but in all likelihood not by much; and herd immunity is in most (or all) places still very far away), but I'm not following the science very close so I might very well be wrong. I'd be very grateful if you could dig up those references!

Re: Science without Validation in a World without Meaning

#102

Post by cambalache »

snowwrestler wrote: post #24
btrettel wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You claim that engineers apply known science, and consequently have a hard time understanding and doing quality science themselves. This is a common view in some groups, but it isn't true in my experience. Fact is that engineers receive training in science that is similar that of scientists as far as I can tell. (I'd argue that it's superior in some aspects!) Don't focus too much on the titles . Look at the content o…

I want to be clear that I'm not intending to make a value judgment, like scientists are better than engineers or vice versa. And I agree that it's not about degrees; people with engineering degrees work in science and vice versa.

You have a very restrictive, and frankly naive view, of what constitutes science and what is engineering. There is not a clear-cut distinction (same as with "pure" and applied mathematics), not royal line which clearly separates the disciplines.It is a continuum. Were Penzias and Wilson doing science or engineering? What about Barden or Marconi or Nakamura? What about the guys at the Manhattan project? God knows engineers suffer a lot of the "let-me-tell-you-how-your-field-should-work" syndrome, but guess what? So does physicists, so it has nothing to do with understanding what science is all about and more with overestimate our success in transferring our knowledge,experience and capability to a different field.

Re: Science without Validation in a World without Meaning

#103

Post by WildParser »

guscost wrote: post #23
pjkundert wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

The botched response to COVID-19 will bring the whole institution of modern science crashing down, when all is said and done. Maybe you don't want to believe that, but there it is: https://guscost.com/2020/05/12/pandemic-woo/ By the way, I still have not heard of a single serosurvey being run in South Korea. Why is that?

Yes, indeed. When you talk to an epidemiologist (e.g. a doctor of physics), ask him to look at f'/f (death per day/death total) in a log-chart they'll tell you that it is 'useless' to look.

If you show him a straight line with R²>0,99 (e.g. Germany using 7 day averages) - they will tell you that it all means nothing and that the curve in fact is bending - because the 'policies' must have worked.

If you tell them that working policies should have left visible marks in the curve and that the curve is converging: They will just block you.

Science is dead - at least in the field of epidemiology.

Re: Science without Validation in a World without Meaning

#104

Post by ur-whale »

Feynmann: "It is whether or not the theory gives predictions that agree with experiment. It is not a question of whether a theory is philosophically delightful, or easy to understand, or perfectly reasonable from the point of view of common sense"

Then proceeds to invent string theory.

Don't get me wrong, I have a lot of admiration for Feynmann,but if he did indeed say the above, that strikes me as rather inconsistent : string theory is exactly what he preaches not to do : widely successful because of how beautiful it is, but unfalsifiable (as of yet).

Re: Science without Validation in a World without Meaning

#105

Post by bsder »

logicchains wrote: post #96
bsder wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> against something with known, definite badness (the lockdowns). You've now left the realm of science and entered the realm of politics. The "badness of the lockdowns", however, is not a given and varies depending upon the competence of your government and the idiocy of the people. Yes, everybody locked WAY down at the beginning. However, governments that had universal healthcare and actually paid unemployment benef…

>You've now left the realm of science and entered the realm of politics. All badness is the realm of morality and politics, not science. Science can predict how many people will die, it can't weigh this up against other consequences. Science can't make moral judgements, only inform them. >"Lockdown badness" is something that is the result of poor government policy and actually has solutions--it is not immutable scien…

South Korea is also contemplating murder charges against a church. They also did massive contact tracing when they were still under 100 cases. South Korea took this massively seriously.

As did Taiwan after Wuhan. Taiwan also rationed emergency supplies. Here's what Taiwan did: https://www.cbc.ca/news/business/taiwan-covid-19-lessons-1.5...

See any of those dividers in the US? Yeah, no, you can't even get people to put masks on.

Japan seems to be cooking the books because of the Olympics even though that's simply not going to happen.

Sweden is about to pass the US in cases and deaths per capita and is right about the same economics as the other European countries (which are all benefiting from their social safety net). Not sure that's counts as better than the rest of the EU--we'll see if it continues.

Your economic claims are dubious.

The primary difference is how fast a country reacted, not how hard. The problem is that if a country didn't react fast enough, it is then required that you react harder and longer.

Re: Science without Validation in a World without Meaning

#106

Post by Gatsky »

Ma8ee wrote: post #98
Gatsky wrote: post #94

"Medicine is a form of engineering in which the physician takes some action (drug, surgery, etc.) to alter the behavior of a physical system, the patient. Its underlying science is biology. Hence our ability to characterize medical knowledge depends on our ability to represent and validate biological knowledge." This is really very wrong. The 'physical system' is conscious and suffering, which excludes Medicine from…

> "The simplest complete model of an organism is the organism itself." But that is trivially true about everything, including golf balls. The interesting question isn't if the model is complete, but if it is sufficient (or complete enough) to make predictions. And in the case of golf balls we can make quite good predictions with a very simple model, mostly because we are only interested in if it ends up in the hole o…

It is definitely not trivially true about anything. A golf ball can be modelled easily. You are adding external complications to the system. An electron can be impossible to model if you inject it into a complex system.

Anyway the point is a golf ball will not evolve into a sentient being who will then fly to mars and write poetry, which is what cells have done. This shows you can’t even put a meaningful bound on what you need to model for an organism.

Re: Science without Validation in a World without Meaning

#107

Post by logicchains »

bsder wrote: post #105
logicchains wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>You've now left the realm of science and entered the realm of politics. All badness is the realm of morality and politics, not science. Science can predict how many people will die, it can't weigh this up against other consequences. Science can't make moral judgements, only inform them. >"Lockdown badness" is something that is the result of poor government policy and actually has solutions--it is not immutable scien…

South Korea is also contemplating murder charges against a church. They also did massive contact tracing when they were still under 100 cases. South Korea took this massively seriously. As did Taiwan after Wuhan. Taiwan also rationed emergency supplies. Here's what Taiwan did: https://www.cbc.ca/news/business/taiwan-covid-19-lessons-1.5... See any of those dividers in the US? Yeah, no, you can't even get people to pu…

>South Korea is also contemplating murder charges against a church. They also did massive contact tracing when they were still under 100 cases. South Korea took this massively seriously.

>As did Taiwan after Wuhan. Taiwan also rationed emergency supplies. Here's what Taiwan did: https://www.cbc.ca/news/business/taiwan-covid-19-lessons-1.5....

But they didn't mass-close businesses. That's what causes the economic damage.

>the same economics as the other European countries (which are all benefiting from their social safety net

You sure about that? https://www.dw.com/en/as-coronavirus-lockdown-eases-italians... , https://www.euronews.com/2020/04/23/unrest-hunger-and-hardsh... .

> The problem is that if a country didn't react fast enough, it is then required that you react harder and longer.

Required by what? Sweden hasn't "reacted" harder and the spread of the virus is already slowing there: https://aatishb.com/covidtrends/?location=Brazil&location=Ca...

Re: Science without Validation in a World without Meaning

#108

Post by pdonis »

bobbydroptables wrote: post #64
pdonis wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

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

Yes, and I have already said that I oppose those decisions. The government should not be playing favorites.

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

Cletus' behavior doesn't affect everybody; it only affects the few people who are within range of his coal rolling.

Re: Science without Validation in a World without Meaning

#109

Post by pdonis »

renewiltord wrote: post #80
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.…

It's just a status quo bias to choose "act to preserve without prior of belief > 0.95". It's a novelty bias to choose "act to change without prior of belief > 0.95". But there are many modes of action in between. Knowledge is necessarily imperfect (cf. Conjectures and Refutations ). The engineer/scientist difference isn't all that useful in reality. Even disciplines dominated by engineering rapidly see advances over…

> the hypothesis-test-apply loop of knowledge acquisition

Public policy, affecting the lives of everybody, is not the same as engineering with inanimate objects.

> It's like any intervention: if the patient will almost certainly die if you do nothing

A country of 300 million people, or a planet of 8 billion people, is not one "patient" to which one thing will or will not happen. Treating public policy as though it were just a matter of deciding "what is best for the patient" is foolish. There is no one "best" thing for everybody.

Re: Science without Validation in a World without Meaning

#110

Post by pdonis »

bobbydroptables wrote: post #59
pdonis wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Everything the government does is a subsidy of something or other. No, a "subsidy" is not the same as a purchase. Purchasing something at whatever the current market price is is just a purchase. Fixing prices at lower than the current market price, and making up the difference in various hidden ways, which is what the government does with fossil fuels, is a subsidy. > Building out roads nice new roads in every podu…

>No, a "subsidy" is not the same as a purchase. Did I a say "subsidy" was the same as a purchase? Not sure what you're getting at. >Purchasing something at whatever the current market price is is just a purchase. Um. It's a purchase. It can also be a subsidy and generally is when the government does it. If the government purchases a bunch of oranges to give away (or throw in the gutter) it is subsidizing the orange m…

> We know a lot about the costs of C02 emissions.

No, we don't. We have a lot of ideological beliefs, hypotheses, and speculations about the costs of CO2 emissions, with no predictive track record to back them up. So we don't have the kind of knowledge that we would need to have to justify dictating public policy to everyone in this area.

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