Science

From Daniel Sarewitz at the Weekly Standard, reflecting on Sabine Hossenfelder’s Lost in Math: How Beauty Leads Physics Astray, … What, then, joins Hossenfelder’s field of theoretical physics to ecology, epidemiology, cultural anthropology, cognitive psychology, biochemistry, macroeconomics, computer science, and geology? Why do they all get to be called science? Certainly it is not similarity of method. The methods used to search for the subatomic components of the universe have nothing at all in common with the field geology methods in which I was trained in graduate school. Nor is something as apparently obvious as a commitment to empiricism a part of every scientific field. Many areas of theory development, in disciplines as disparate as physics and economics, have little contact Read More ›

From climate scientist Kate Marvel at Scientific American: Once you put established facts about the world up for argument, you’ve already lost In fact, as a general rule, I refuse to debate basic science in public. There are two reasons for this: first, I’m a terrible debater and would almost certainly lose. The skills necessary to be a good scientist (coding, caring about things like “moist static energy”, drinking massive amounts of coffee) aren’t necessarily the same skills that will convince an audience in a debate format. It is very fortunate that things like the atomic model of matter do not rest on my ability to be charming or persuasive. But second, and maybe more importantly: once you put facts Read More ›

From Ben Blum at Medium: Whether you learned about Philip Zimbardo’s famous “Stanford Prison Experiment” [1973] in an introductory psych class or just absorbed it from the cultural ether, you’ve probably heard the basic story. Zimbardo, a young Stanford psychology professor, built a mock jail in the basement of Jordan Hall and stocked it with nine “prisoners,” and nine “guards,” all male, college-age respondents to a newspaper ad who were assigned their roles at random and paid a generous daily wage to participate. The senior prison “staff” consisted of Zimbardo himself and a handful of his students. The study was supposed to last for two weeks, but after Zimbardo’s girlfriend stopped by six days in and witnessed the conditions in Read More ›

From Alex Berezow at American Council for Science and Health: Scientists have a common saying about models: “Garbage in, garbage out.” That means if you put bad data into a model, you can fully expect for the model to spit out bad conclusions. The same is true for organizations. If a newspaper hires improperly educated, hyperpartisan people who possess merely a casual relationship with the truth, we can fully expect the newspaper to produce absolute rubbish. And that’s exactly what has happened at the New York Times. Consider the following: – Just two days ago, a piece in Slate criticized the NYT for its coverage of topics like “wellness” and “detox.” The NYT has entire pages dedicated to these wishy-washy Read More ›

While we are talking about the Bible anyway… What would our ancestors have made of news of the dinosaurs? The dinosaurs made no impact on human life to which a religious teacher could point, then or now. The animals discussed in the Bible are known to the hearers; their habits are familiar and therefore useful as illustrations: Go to the ant, you sluggard; consider its ways and be wise! It has no commander, no overseer or ruler, yet it stores its provisions in summer and gathers its food at harvest. So far as we know to this day, ants don’t have a “ruler” in the human sense; the queen lays the eggs that keep the colony going. They seem to Read More ›

Or does he get a pass because he is pop culture squared? Or (hold your breath) does progressivism make people stupid as well as unpleasant? From Philip Ball at the Guardian: The row over racist remarks made by Einstein says more about the pedestals we put great scientists on than the man himself Was Albert Einstein racist? In pondering the disobliging remarks he made about Chinese and Japanese people in the private diaries he kept about his travels to east Asia in 1922-3, just published by Princeton University Press, it’s not a particularly helpful question. On the one hand, there’s the view that even this famously humane and broadminded scientist was inevitably a man of his time. Accordingly, we can’t Read More ›

Further to Why we should trust “science,” whatever that is, from a long form article by Rebecca Trager at Chemistry World: Concerns about forensic science have lurked for some time. Major science advisory bodies in the US and UK had warned about deficiencies in the field that require action. In 2013, the US National Institute of Standards and Technology (Nist) initiated a study, known as Mix13, which involved more than 100 crime labs analysing the same DNA mixtures in five mock cases. The complexity of the mixture increased in each case, and in the final case, which was the most complex, about 70% of those labs falsely included a DNA profile that was not actually in the mixture. Nist has Read More ›

From Alex Berezow at American Council on Science and Health: Pro-GMO Professor Fired for Endorsing Glyphosate David Zaruk is an expert in European Union regulations and risk communication. He writes a blog, titled The Risk-Monger, which largely examines regulatory issues involving biotechnology, such as GMOs and glyphosate. For nearly a decade, he also was an adjunct professor of communications at Université Saint-Louis in Brussels, Belgium. As Dr. Zaruk writes in a lengthy blog post, he recently lost his job from the university. Why? According to Dr. Zaruk, it’s because he is avidly pro-biotechnology and another professor (at a different university!) didn’t like it. So, he pulled a few strings and got Dr. Zaruk fired. It should be noted that Olivier Read More ›

From David Darling at New Scientist: But, as far as I am concerned, the fact that the Universe was an incredibly weird place 10-43 seconds after “time zero” is no big deal. What is a big deal—the biggest deal of all—is how you get something out of nothing. Don’t let the cosmologists try to kid you on this one. They have not got a clue either—despite the fact that they are doing a pretty good job of convincing themselves and others that this is really not a problem. “In the beginning,” they will say, “there was nothing—no time, space, matter or energy. Then there was a quantum fluctuation from which . . . ” Whoa! Stop right there. You see what Read More ›

Abstract: This article addresses questions in human geography and the geographies of sexuality by drawing upon one year of embedded in situ observations of dogs and their human companions at three public dog parks in Portland, Oregon. The purpose of this research is to uncover emerging themes in human and canine interactive behavioral patterns in urban dog parks to better understand human a-/moral decision-making in public spaces and uncover bias and emergent assumptions around gender, race, and sexuality. Specifically, and in order of priority, I examine the following questions: (1) How do human companions manage, contribute, and respond to violence in dogs? (2) What issues surround queer performativity and human reaction to homosexual sex between and among dogs? and (3) Read More ›

From Denyse O’Leary at MercatorNet: … She worries about the fact that some prominent atheists are attracted to the intellectual dark web, “an alliance of heretics” making “an end run around the mainstream conversation” (New York Times). The dark web includes figures like Jordan B. Peterson, Steven Pinker, and Bret Weinstein,) who want to discuss research findings and contemporary events without the muzzle of political correctness. New atheist Sam Harris, a dark webber, has recently been accused of “pseudoscientific racialist speculation” by assorted progressives. Why? Having finally read sociologist Charles Murray’s controversial book on IQ, The Bell Curve (1994), Harris doesn’t think it is mere “racist trash” but an argument from a body of data that a scientist like himself Read More ›

From Daniel Greenfield at Sultan Knish: “Why do you hate science?” That’s the question leftists have taken to asking non-leftists. Leftists claim to love science, insofar as anyone can love a method for testing a hypothesis, and accuse their enemies of hating it. How can anyone love or hate an indifferent set of techniques? And how can an ideology that believes technological civilization is destroying the planet really claim to love the science behind it? But swap out “science” for “god” and the question, “Why do you hate science” makes perfect sense. So do the constant assertions of love for science. These aren’t scientific assertions, but religious ones. Actual science doesn’t care whether you love or hate it. That’s not Read More ›

Ross Pomeroy, writing at RealClearScience, tells us that his holy book is Carl Sagan’s The Demon-Haunted World (1997). He offers eight commandments of Sagan (1934–1996) with supporting comments from him, including Thou shalt demand evidence for claims to knowledge. “If it were widely understood that claims to knowledge require adequate evidence before they can be accepted, there would be no room for pseudoscience.” More. That sounds nice but it is breathtakingly naive. What is and isn’t adequate evidence is always a matter in dispute. Many in science believe strongly that there must be extraterrestrial intelligences out there, to say nothing of a multiverse, yet there is no evidence for either. And does that matter to them? There is lots of Read More ›

From Matthew Hutson at Science: Computer science was born of a rebellious, hacker culture, a spirit that lives on in the publishing culture of artificial intelligence (AI). The burgeoning field is increasingly turning to conference publications and free, open-review websites while shunning traditional outlets—sentiments dramatically expressed in a growing boycott of a high-profile AI journal. As of 15 May, about 3000 people, mostly academic computer scientists, had signed a petition promising not to submit, review, or edit articles for Nature Machine Intelligence (NMI), a new journal from the publisher Springer Nature set to begin publication in January 2019. The petition, signed by many prominent researchers in AI, is more than just a call for open access. It decries not only Read More ›

Recently, Joshua Gidney linked to a piece by philosopher Robin Collins on why design in nature is not part of science. Really, it’s a misleading question that enables academics to huff and puff casuistries, while ducking the key question, as follows: If the evidence clearly points to design in nature (fine-tuning, irreducible complexity, etc.), must science refuse to acknowledge that and accept any alternative as a starting point? The price is high. A multiverse, in which the fine-tuning of our universe is just a fluke, is accepted as an alternative, without evidence. A war on falsifiability ensues. Claims for Darwinian evolution (natural selection acting on random mutation within the genome) must be accepted, even though they defy any meaningful relationship Read More ›