Science’s Biggest Fail

Ethylmercury and methylmercury are not the same thing.

Based upon my definition, you may be wondering about something like the theory of evolution, since evolution concerns the past (and progresses too slowly to observe in the present). But the science in that field is still a future prediction -- the nature of the prediction is that it just so happens to be about the past. In other words, as new evidence emerges that explains what happened in the past, we can compare this evidence to our prediction for what kind of evidence we would find.

So, if science is prediction, then good science is "better" prediction. Then what's the best science? Physics. Physics can make theoretical predictions that match reality up to twelve decimal places. That's insane. The next best science is chemistry, followed by biology, followed by nutrition and health (as the article discusses), followed by psychology.

Does this mean that psychologists are not as intelligent as physicists? No, it just means understanding quantum mechanics is far easier than understanding how people work -- a view which I would hazard to guess most physicists would confirm. Despite the fact that QM requires advanced math that few can understand, the totality of information necessary to make predictions at a subatomic level is very small in comparison to the amount of information necessary to model a human (biologically or mentally). A few postulates, a few mathematical definitions, some numerical methods, and BOOM -- twelve decimal places of accuracy for the gyromagnetic ratio of an isolated electron. One textbook would be completely sufficient to describe this prediction and the math behind it (although it may be kind of hard to read). On the other hand, there's no way a highly predictive model of a human could fit in one book.

Unlike the elegant laws of physics, a human body is the result of millions of years of all kinds of adaptive chaos and evolution. There's no pretty equation that describes it.

My point with all this is that the public hears "science" and they lump all science together. Instead, they should be educated on which fields of science are the most predictive, and which are still in major development. In this sense, they would have a better idea of what to trust when making decisions for themselves.

Scott Adams bemoans the fact that the wildly varying conclusions of diet science cause people's pattern recognition to conclude that this is not trustworthy information.

However, the problem is not pattern recognition. The problem is the weight that people give to signals. When each signal is given a weight of 1 or 0, the pattern recognition will never converge on the underlying trend. The media and the public must understand that some studies should be given more weight than others.

Thus, scientists have a duty to communicate which studies should be most influential. They CANT trust the media to this.

Science is never done, or at least it shouldn't be. We create models and update them or change them as we get more evidence and the technological advancements allow us to perform better tests.

Gravity was not done with Newton. sure, it's a great model to explain how objects are attracted to each other, but Einstein came alone and proved that that the model was not correct and it made incorrect assumptions (constant time for example).

I think that is the great misunderstanding. We expect science to give us final answers. We expect it to study something and then be "done". But that is not the case.