Science

We are informed in the Chronicle Review that We have entered an age of willful ignorance To see how we treat the concept of truth these days, one might think we just don’t care anymore. Politicians pronounce that global warming is a hoax. An alarming number of middle-class parents have stopped giving their children routine vaccinations, on the basis of discredited research. Meanwhile many commentators in the media — and even some in our universities — have all but abandoned their responsibility to set the record straight. (It doesn’t help when scientists occasionally have to retract their own work.) No indeed, it doesn’t help. The mounting scandals in science make it difficult to regard many disciplines as sources of legitimate Read More ›

In “The Importance of Not Being Certain: Understanding why the science is never settled,” Charlie Martin writes There’s this thing “science” that people talk about a lot. Climate science, political science, social science, and not to leave out my own field, computer science. And, of course, areas of study that don’t need to have “science” in their names, like chemistry and physics. But what is this thing “science”? I’ve been thinking a lot and reading a lot about it, and no, I don’t have a final answer… and then it occurred to me that “I don’t have a final answer” is really the key to understanding “science.” I think the perfect example is in mechanics. In scientific terms, “mechanics” is Read More ›

From Nature: If the British public likes chemistry — at least more than the chemists believed — then it is positively glowing about science in general. Survey respondents described it with words such as ‘welcoming’, ‘sociable’ and ‘fun’. And a separate poll by Ipsos MORI this year showed that scientists are among the most trusted professionals in Britain; some nine in ten people said that they trust scientists to follow all of the research rules and regulations relevant to them. “Nine in ten people trust scientists to follow the rules. How many scientists would say the same?” How many scientists would say the same? Not many, probably, of the attendees at this week’s 4th World Conference on Research Integrity in Read More ›

Underway: Sheldrake For committed materialists, psychic (psi) phenomena such as telepathy and the sense of being stared at must be illusory because they are impossible. Minds are inside brains. Mental activity is nothing but electro-chemical brain activity. Hence thoughts and intentions cannot have direct effects at a distance, nor can minds be open to influences from the future. Although psi phenomena seem to occur, they must have normal explanations in terms of coincidence, or subtle sensory cues, or wishful thinking, or fraud. Dogmatic skeptics often repeat the slogan that “extraordinary claims demand extraordinary evidence.” But the sense of being stared at and telepathy are not extraordinary, they are ordinary. Most people have experienced them. From this point of view, the Read More ›

Here.  (But one must admit this is at least fun.) I am Johannes Bohannon, Ph.D. Well, actually my name is John, and I’m a journalist. I do have a Ph.D., but it’s in the molecular biology of bacteria, not humans. The Institute of Diet and Health? That’s nothing more than a website. Other than those fibs, the study was 100 percent authentic. My colleagues and I recruited actual human subjects in Germany. We ran an actual clinical trial, with subjects randomly assigned to different diet regimes. And the statistically significant benefits of chocolate that we reported are based on the actual data. It was, in fact, a fairly typical study for the field of diet research. Which is to say: It Read More ›

It can insulate people from it. The Wall Street Journal article by John Horgan that reviews Darwin follower Jerry Coyne’s latest is behind some paywall. But we hear from a reliable source that it says, among other things: Mr. Coyne repeatedly reminds us that science, unlike religion, promotes self-criticism. but he is remarkably lacking in this virtue himself. … The popularity of multiverse theories, a hypothetical corollary of several highly speculative physics theories, merely shows how desperate scientists are for answers. Multiverse enthusiasts seem to think that the existence of an infinite number of universes will make ours appear less mysterious. The problem is none of these other universes can be observed, which is why skeptics liken multiverse theories to Read More ›

Could that be because humans are naturally deceitful? Stay tuned. It sounds as though the intelligent design view is right after all. Humans are not meat puppets, and anything one human thinks up can be trumped by another one. Not something one has to deal with much with cattle. See also: Why is it okay for tenured profs to be dumber than the rest of us? Follow UD News at Twitter!

Further to: Slate has discovered why you shouldn’t use Wikipedia as a source (In other breaking news, pigs don’t really fly faster than light), we now read, once again, a story like: The sad tales of the Wikipedia gang war regarding WUWT This illustrates the most basic problem with the reliability of Wikipedia in any entry where human opinion is involved. There are roving gangs (and sometimes individuals who appear gang-like due to their output level, such as disgraced Wikipedia editor William Connolley, who will no doubt wail about this note, and then proceed to post the usual denigrating things on his “Stoat, taking science by the throat” blog) and individuals who act as gatekeepers of their own vision of “truth”, Read More ›

“ … reportage that is mostly aimed at insulting Republicans and Christians.” But isn’t that what a pop science page would typically understand science reporting to be?  Oh yes, there are also a-crock-alypses to cover. Sorry, forgot. Here: Now, for some reason, Slate’s science page has partially abandoned its strong tradition of in-depth analysis to promote an angry, opinion-driven reportage that is mostly aimed at insulting Republicans and Christians. … This is counterproductive. Science journalism that forsakes its primary mission of science communication to engage in partisan culture wars does a grotesque disservice to the scientific endeavor and is doomed to fail. Just ask ScienceBlogs, which has become a shell of its former self … Yuh. I often send ScienceBlogs Read More ›

Drat, just when I (O’Leary for News) complained that the new atheists had given up threatening each other with legal action, raising cain about genome mapper Francis Collins, or starting hoo-haws in elevators, this item turned up in the In Bin: Jerry Coyne in The Scientist : But while science and religion both claim to discern what’s true, only science has a system for weeding out what’s false. In the end, that is the irreconcilable conflict between them. Science is not just a profession or a body of facts, but, more important, a set of cognitive and practical tools designed to understand brute reality while overcoming the human desire to believe what we like or what we find emotionally satisfying. Read More ›

Good question to ponder overnight. John Hartnett quotes cosmologist Lee Smolin*: It is true that mathematics is not a human invention, but more of a discovery, and thus has objective existence in that sense. But to declare the magnificent edifice of Mathematics to inhabit an orthogonal dimension that is inaccessible to scientific scrutiny, is a hypothesis that cannot in principle be falsified, and thus, it is not a scientific hypothesis but more of a belief, for those who are inclined to believe it. Best read the whole thing. But is this part of the current, quite serious, war on falsifiability? If not, how not? Readers? (*see also: Should we be nicer to cosmologist Lee Smolin? ) Follow UD News at Twitter!

Yesterday, johnnyb asked whether doubt is the engine of science: The narrative goes like this: science proceeds by taking everything we think we know and hold dear and doubting it; this doubt is what allows the progress of knowledge. Christopher Hitchens said he was “a skeptic who believes that doubt is the great engine, the great fuel of all inquiry, all discovery, and all innovation.” Here’s one approach: Doubt isn’t “the engine” of anything at all. Doubt is by definition a retardant: It causes us to stop, hold back, get more advice, check the stats, read the manual again, phone someone, don’t shoot, don’t shoot, don’t shoot … wait for backup, wait for backup … As johnnyb points out, doubt Read More ›

Many people have claimed that doubt is the great engine of scientific advance. In this article, I would like to contend against that thought, and show the true virtue that lies behind science that is often mistaken for doubt.
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So the editors actually noticed?: Duarte et al provide evidence suggesting that social psychology is not a welcoming environment for conservatives. Papers are reviewed differently depending on whether they are considered to support liberal vs. conservative positions, and anonymous surveys reveal a considerable percentage of social psychologists willing to explicitly report negative attitudes towards conservatives. This shouldn’t surprise us. Everything social psychologists know about group behavior tells us that overwhelming homogeneity, especially when defined through an important component of one’s identity like political ideology, will lead to negativity towards an outgroup. We also know a thing or two about confirmation bias and all the ways in which it can affect our decision-making, and it is odd to suggest it might Read More ›

Jeff Leek, at the Bloomberg School of Public Health (Johns Hopkins U), writes the Simply Statistics blog, at which he noted today the tyranny of the idea in science. In business, he says, startup ideas are a dime a dozen and only winners are rewarded. In science, startup ideas are rewarded, and the people who made them matter are forgotten. He gives, as an example, Higgs Boson – Peter Higgs postulated the Boson in 1964, he won the Nobel Prize in 2013 for that prediction, in between tons of people did follow on work, someone convinced Europe to build one of the most expensive pieces of scientific equipment ever built and conservatively thousands of scientists and engineers had to do Read More ›