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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

#121

Post by bobbydroptables »

pdonis wrote: post #110
bobbydroptables wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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.

So why are you supporting a system that has assumptions of zero cost of CO2 emissions?

There is no reason whatsoever to think there is zero cost. Why would we implement public policy assuming this?

Re: Science without Validation in a World without Meaning

#122

Post by infogulch »

bobbydroptables wrote: post #88
infogulch wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Negative externalities" seems to be the operating pivot of this conversation. It seems to me that many laws are a system to identify entities producing negative externalities, and make them bear the cost of that externality. The purpose of the lawmaking process, then, is to be a system that discovers new externalities, or more precisely, defines what is a negative externality and what is not, as it relates to chosen…

Yeah you're pretty much right. But this can be solved pretty simply with a pigovian tax. It's not inconsistent with any definition of rights that I'm aware of to say that you can't pollute our air without consequences. By contrast, the current state of affairs does not mesh with any philosophical system that I've found. Under what theory can some stranger pollute my air? That's no more justifiable than me pouring per…

I think the problem with your argument is that you assume there is always an a priori agreed upon definition of what constitutes negative externality, and this is just not true. Specifically, the line (emphasis mine):

> It's not inconsistent with any definition of rights that I'm aware of to say that you can't pollute our air without consequences

What exactly does pollute mean here?

I could say that my neighbor generating sawdust while sawing wood to build their deck is "polluting" the air. Or me sneezing while standing on my porch outside is "polluting" the air. Or if I'm watering my plants and some water flows downhill to my neighbor is "polluting" their lawn. Or me practicing piano in my house is polluting the soundscape of the neighborhood. Or, ..., or, ..., or, ..., or, ... See, there are limitless ways that one could construe basically any action someone takes as producing a negative externality. Almost certainly all of the examples I mentioned have been argued as negative externalities, and the answer is not to either accept every argument or reject every argument, because the details and circumstances matter.

My point is: Don't presume that negative externalities are automatically identified, and don't presume that every identified negative externality automatically justifies action to correct it, and don't presume that your chosen favorite corrective action produces no externalities of its own.

To be clear, I agree that there is enough evidence against CO2 that it is worth considering taking action to force CO2 generators to bear the cost of the externalities they produce. I don't agree that it's "obvious" that: 1. the negative externality exists, 2. the chosen remedy will actually solve the problem, 3. that the chosen remedy is known to be sufficiently free of its own negative externalities to consider forcibly changing our behavior. I think these things are true, but I don't think it's obvious that they're true, and trying to assert their truth by trying to make them axioms is dangerous and counterproductive.

Re: Science without Validation in a World without Meaning

#123

Post by cgiles »

mturmon wrote: post #114
cgiles wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Mere Monte Carlo state exploration is wasteful and doesn't provide much insight. Often we don't have error bars on model outputs to even know if an "improvement" in a metric is significant. The funny thing is, I didn't check the author's name until just now. Ed Dougherty, who people below have derided as a "mere engineer", has been working on these problems forever. I'm honestly surprised he's still active or even…

I also didn't care for the coarse characterizations nearby. I take your point about the distinction between models that reproduce behavior ("simply predictive") vs. models of underlying components, and what you can learn from both. This comes up in fields I work on with machine learning models vs. physics-based models. E.g., ML models that take a field of wind vectors at time t, and predict the wind at time t+1, vs.…

> we certainly have more confidence in the robustness of the physics-based models.

That is interesting. I don't know to what extent wind vectors are considered chaotic in the technical sense, but I would have guessed that chaotic systems would be more robustly modeled by ML instead of a physics approach. This is because I have a vague idea in my mind that ML would somehow compensate for the initial condition dependence in a way physics modeling would not. ML models tend to also have more parameters with smaller coefficients which I would identify with robustness (up to a point). I'm not gainsaying you, just expressing that I find this counterintuitive.

Of course the physics models would provide more insight into the nature of the problem.

And more generally it is my understanding that one way to define the difference between a "complex system" and a "system" is that a complex system is not predictable by physics simulations because of emergent properties and so forth.

For this reason, I interpreted OP's call for a "mathematical epistemology" not so much as a call for more physics-based modeling, or for opaque ML models, but as an expression of the need for a (currently undefined) new type of mathematical language to model, describe, and predict complex emergent systems.

> I'll bet that if you started scanning conference abstracts in your domain for "uncertainty quantification," then some more carefully-posed modeling activities would crop up.

I'm sure you're right. I let my wistful longing that there would be more of this type of thinking in biology drag me into hyperbole suggesting that there is none of it.

I appreciate the pointers to terms and books that could get me up to speed on modeling. It's not really relevant to my primary area, but I do wish these approaches well from afar. And who knows, if I learn more, maybe I can apply more of this type of approach in my work. Getting audiences to understand it would be another task entirely...

Re: Science without Validation in a World without Meaning

#124

Post by webmaven »

mturmon wrote: post #2

A very nice article -- more pessimistic than I'd be -- about the limits of outsider understanding when predictions come from complex models that few understand.

The pessimism seems to comes from the proposition that no one really understands models beyond a certain complexity, even insiders. Even whoever created the model.

Re: Science without Validation in a World without Meaning

#125

Post by webmaven »

btrettel wrote: post #84
guscost wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It may be possible for a person to succeed with #3, but I have a hard time believing it could work in a community of people who disagree. For #4, the closest thing I can imagine is a utilitarian approach, which of course I’m going to prefer as an engineer, and which (I think) ultimately reduces to #1. That is a tough problem I don’t expect to see solved in my lifetime, but I’d be happy to be proven wrong.

On reflection, option 1 includes like Taleb's philosophy. At first I wrote it off as leading to arguments like "no one knows so let's do what I, an 'expert' say", which I hate. But it's written generically enough to include rules like Minimax, where you don't need model estimates to make a decision. This rule is very conservative, though. I think there are a fair number of people who succeed at option 3. I can think…

> (Or at least some DOE labs; I can say from personal experience that groups at both Los Alamos and Sandia take this fairly seriously, though I don't think it has fully permeated their culture.)

It has not. In the current funding environment it can't, given that the way research grants and contracts are awarded will always constrain organizational culture.

Re: Science without Validation in a World without Meaning

#126

Post by guscost »

roelschroeven wrote: post #101
guscost wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 differ…

Keep in mind these are mostly preprints, so adjust their value accordingly:

https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.05.26.115832v1

https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.05.18.100545v1

https://www.cell.com/cell/fulltext/S0092-8674(20)30610-3

https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.04.17.20061440v...

https://hal-pasteur.archives-ouvertes.fr/pasteur-02569149

https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.05.21.108308v1

https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.06.02.20120477v...

https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.04.27.20081893v...

There isn't much completed research about the seasonality of COVID-19 itself (understandably), the "cliff" is mostly an educated guess based on the strong seasonal pattern we see with every other respiratory virus. Here are a couple papers:

https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.03.12.20034728v...

https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.02.22.20025791v...

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