The Limits of Science
nationalaffairs.com
nationalaffairs.com
For example in "The Problem of Induction" you can see a bajillion sunrises but can't infer that there will be another. Likewise you can conduct a bajillion controlled experiments and can't really tell if the result will generalize. Worse yet is that the more conditions you control, the less likely it's to generalize. Infamously, clinical trials wanted to control for the variations caused by periods so they only tested on men and it turns out some drugs affect women differently! In general, if you control for everything, you can't say anything about the real world outside of those precise lab controlled conditions.
Which is why scientists, like everyone else, uses statistical reasoning.
> In general, if you control for everything, you can't say anything about the real world outside of those precise lab controlled conditions.
This is one of those statements which is only true if you ignore all the times it's false. It's like Zeno's Paradox: If this really troubles you, it's a sign your model's incomplete, not that there's something irreconcilably wrong with the universe. Some of what you're getting at can be fixed with better experimental design, but the rest can only be fixed by, as I said, statistical reasoning, which is universally used in practice.
It's possible to be somewhat uncertain. Some people don't get that, or refuse to acknowledge it so they can sow FUD.
Zeno: "How can movement exist? A flying arrow, at any point in its trajectory, is static, but at the next moment, it-"
Pragmatic: "Hey, I shot ten arrows. They took 4 seconds average to reach the target at 200 m, so they move at 50 m/s, therefore movement does exist. Can we eat something? I'm hungry."
Nature is the authority, and we have understanding that is incomplete.
> Scientism is the promotion of science as the best or only objective means by which society should determine normative and epistemological values. The term scientism is generally used critically, implying a cosmetic application of science in unwarranted situations considered not amenable to application of the scientific method or similar scientific standards.
The whole "true story of a middle-schooler whose mother wanted to arrange for her son to get more time to take his math tests" has a big problem in it as well. There's a real discussion to be had about disability labeling and diagnosis, but that's not how this is framed - it's framed as the mother wanting a benefit for her son that others would not have, the son not actually having a disability, and the scheme to invent one for him failing because she refused to role-play it.
A lot of people can tell the opposite story; they knew something was different about them in ways that were disadvantageous, but other people kept attributing it to a moral defect until they got a diagnosis. (This comes up a lot in conversations about ADHD and to a lesser extent autism/aspergers.)
1. Using "true story," then telling a very general story without any citation. That he did it twice was worrying.
2. People like the writer who treat our current understanding of science as if it were a religious text that is complete. Science is an ongoing process of discovery and experimentation to try to further our understanding of the world. The fact that it's wrong is kinda the point, because it motivates us to challenge the assumptions underlying our theories.
3. The story about his mother losing her job is likely true, but the way he tells is seems like it purposely omits relevant information.
For example, he says his mother lost her job as a "social worker," but according to this wedding announcement (https://www.nytimes.com/1988/03/06/style/alexandra-roosevelt...), she was the Director of Social Services at Hillcrest Convalescent Hospital in Long Beach, CA.
I also checked the Federal Register for that date, and it seems that the change also included an exception to the bachelors degree requirement, provided the individual had two years experience. His claim in the article that his mother had 20 years of experience should have been sufficient.
http://cdn.loc.gov/service/ll/fedreg/fr054/fr054021/fr054021... Page 135
"In § 483.15(g), we are requiring that social services be provided by a qualified individual defined as an individual with a bachelors degree in social work or two years experience in a health care setting working directly with patients or clients, or similar professional qualifications."
For 2; this is not about the contingent knowledge that science produces, it's about the applicability of the process that produces that knowledge so effectively in some domains. There are domains where it is not appropriate or useful to think exclusively and uncritically in a scientific way, medicine and economics being just two examples of domains in which uncritical application of the scientific method and mindset have done significant harm to a significant number of people.
Isn't that kind of ridiculous? If you say "Thing A happens! Here's an example of when thing A happened," but it turns out that your example did not actually happen, well it sure seems like your argument is likely not true, or that thing A happens with such low frequency that I don't need to worry about it.
The argument is not how you phrased it "here's one time this thing didn't happen," it's the fact that the example you provided did not happen. You have every incentive to find real examples to support your case.
Experiments and dispassionate language are about gathering clear data and representing it accurately. Claiming that science is all about "clarity and economy" is ironically unscientific - if nature is unclear and uneconomical then good science has to represent that too. That part of science isn't taught as much because it takes longer to communicate. Ignoring data, such as from your senses, is also not a good scientific idea.
Being unscientific is ignoring data. There are different standards and a bit of judgement about what quality of data and how relevant it is, but ultimately the person with the most relevant and comprehensive data on a subject is the 'truest' scientist in a very meaningful way.
First; a point made in the article - the breadth of data available in many domains (economics, business, medicine, psychology, linguistics, biology, and more) is vast and unmanageable. An a-priori selection made by the attention of the investigator misdirects us. Additionally some data is not captured due to process problems, a classic is missed opportunity in business. You advocate focus on new business opportunities, I advocate focus on our old markets - I show that by treating our current customers differently a 5% reduction in cost is possible. You claim a 50% revenue opportunity, but how do you know? I can claim a causal link, you are claiming hypotheticals. I win the argument and then a year later we examine the data - I have achieved the cost saving, and there is no record of all the business that we didn't get. The opportunity loss is not on the spreadsheet. Conversely if you win and we look a year later I can show that our customers still cost us what they did, and I can show (if you were successful) that my initiative would have saved 7.5% of the spend one year ago (+50% thanks to you).
Problem two; outside physics and chemistry not many things are comparable in the sense that statistics expects them to be. This is closely related to the scope of data problem, but hides it. Widgets made by machines or seeds carefully selected and screened can be made to share (approximately) an identity so that they can be statistically reasoned about in bulk. Other things can't and medicine is really running up against this now. Pain killers work differently on people with different genetics and different genders (also different ages, contexts...) Cancer evolves differently from case to case. The assumption of similarity and category membership is often broken and we often do not notice before doing a t-test.
There are easier and harder ways to come up with useful data and I endorse predict -> check-> refine as a great model; but if someone figured out laws by guessing what data they needed to gather then did a curve fit doesn't somehow make the laws invalid or the process particularly unscientific. If someone had just gotten lucky and just happened to plot mass vs velocity to recover the laws of gravity we'd still include it in all the science textbooks. What is the alternative - claim they figured out universal truths in the wrong way and ignore them until someone else figures it out?
If all the data fits the model then science has happened. Everything else is quibbling how robust the data is (which is still important).
I am not so sure it would have been a hit as a stand alone formula. Newton discovered calculus and used it to lay the groundwork for almost the entire field of physics, gravity was just a minor detail in his work. Or if you are talking about General relativity, there is no way people would have discovered it from observations alone, we'd get some kind of correction term explanation similar to dark matter or dark energy since the formula is extremely complicated.
It is even possible that most physicists would have accepted those corrections as the correct solution and would be looking for the new dark particles inside of large stars for a hundred years before someone corrected them. Or the discovery of black holes would be seen as evidence of these particles, cementing our ignorance forever.
Calculus is maths. Different field, and frequently classified into the arts or astand-alone discipline as opposed to a science.
People have lonog been suspect about classifying math as a science. Mainly, I suspect, because it does not rely on data as a form of evidence instead using logical proof as a foundation.
The problem with the data first approach you are advocating for is that it almost never results in a good explanation, and almost all the value in science lies with the good explanations we have built up throughout history. Formulas are mostly useless, you need an intuitive explanation or people won't be able to build on top of it.
So a shower is science if the warm water inspires someone to come up with a new theory? That is a terrible place to draw the boundary; it opens up a can of semantic worms about what 'using' means. Major scientific results that are most easily expressed using calculus can be derived using processes other than calculus.
> The problem with the data first approach you are advocating for is that it almost never results in a good explanation
Science doesn't provide good explanations at the best of times. I'll willingly bet not 1 engineer in 100 can explain gravity. We just know if we measure mass we get predictive estimates of velocity. That isn't an explanation; that is reliable magic. In fact there have been a couple of centuries where even the scientists were basically just plotting data and curve fitting.
Math is a tool, yes, but it is a tool that is very useful to do science in and the act of creating and distributing a tool you use to do science is a large part of science. A shower on the other hand has no direct relationship to science, you don't need to be a physicist to make a shower, it is just a commodity. Calculus however needed to be discovered by a physicist as the math was too strange for mathematicians to find but simple enough that two different physicists found it in parallel.
No, the point is that is the wrong way around. Given any big amount of data you are going to find something that fits, e.g https://www.xkcd.com/882/ . You are not "predicting" anything if you come up with your fit afterwards.
You can however use the fit you got to try to predict the outcome of future experiments. Checking that those experiments fit is science.
Exactly, and that's the main problem at the base of all "data mining": it is probable that you will find a model that will only work with your data. Take a step outside and everything falls. You are basically giving a formula to noise.
But often discoveries happen also by chance, so we shouldn't stop looking at unexpected patterns. However, once you find one, you should create a theory to explain it and setup a new experiment to confirm your theory. If you can....
The XKCD comic isn't making a judgement on whether the characters in it are or are not scientists - in fact, it calls them scientists - it is pointing out that statistical significance is a low bar of evidence and best treated with suspicion.
And then you get into a philosophical discussion about what represents "clear data" (not to mention the "representing it accurately" part, which imho it's an issue we've been trying to solve for at least 2500 years and haven't progressed too much in doing it).
isn't it about the replication of experiments?
you can gather all the data you want, but if you can't repeat an experiment to get the same data, then I don't think all your data qualifies as science.
Feynman said it best that with each question you keep going back and back and back trying to exemplify through allusion?
Words will always fail to accurately describe the totality of the system and even worse the math formulas don’t do any better especially when considering statistics.
The average grades in my class is 80 but that doesn’t mean Ryan sitting in the front row got a 100 and Andrew in the middle row got a 62. Maybe everyone did get an 80, so then how can I describe not only in words but in function the distinction between these two environments; ie the 100&62 and the all 80s class?
Temperature is a very inexact model of the dynamics of a system. It does not tell you anything about the energy of any individual atom. It's an aggregate number.
Thermodynamics was an eye opening course for me. Its impressive how much real engineering can be done with lumped parameter models. The author wants to convey the limitations of that approach.
This gets exacerbated in two "softer" ways: our brains are nonlinear systems, so trying to understand ourselves with just general principles can still result in significant deviations from predictions (for example, a single neuron could significantly affect our entire mental state in an un-accounted-for way). Secondly, this doesn't even try to account for the rest of the universe...
On the plus side, I think this implies some fundamental limits for any artificial intelligence...?
> The time has come to pause the second phase of the scientific revolution — to recover a more humble and skeptical approach to what the scientific method can achieve, to unite the emotional, spiritual, and intellectual dimensions of life, and to find our way back to our humanity.
The problem is in forcing your choices on others.
The point is, we're not rational beings, at least not exclusively. We're emotional beings, and even if, ultimately, emotions are accounted for by physical factors, there needs to be a way to reconcile our rational side (which includes science) with our emotional one. This include realizing that unbiased, fully-rational science is just impossible. Our biases, as part of our phenotype, are there because whatever caused them to emerge either helped enough ancestors survive, or at least did not get them killed before reproducing, so they're always going to be there.
I'm sorry I'm ranting and again, I get what you're saying. I've been through enough experiences of accepting "spiritual" and other words in conversations with people I don't know well, where the other party shortly starts talking about alien abductions and astral traveling, that I know what you mean. But I've also been through enough conversations with people who think science is infallible and will eventually find a solution to everything and an answer to every question.
The only way to train the AI would be to give it the same human experience - to make an artificial human to walk around and interact with people in similar situations. Even then, not everyone will make the same discoveries about hair and wellness.
The patient making a general statement about not feeling well is something that may not even come out with an AI. That kind of comment seems more likely to be made in a "real" conversation between two people.
This desire to quickly move to "train an AI" seems to miss the entire point of the article.
> Ronald W. Dworkin is a physician AND political scientist. (emphasis mine.)
He's also written an essay entitled "Where Science Ends and Religion Begins" and a self-published book called "How Karl Marx Can Save American Capitalism."
If I was writing a novel and wanted to make it absolutely clear a given character should not be taken seriously, I would have tone it down a little to make it believable.
In other words: if someone doesn't follow, say, fire prevention guidelines, and starts a fire, it is misleading and socially dangerous to say that a person burnt by the fire was a victim of the fire prevention guidelines!
Elsewhere, the article's just wrong. It claims "the concept of temperature lacks clear meaning" amongst scientists. This isn't true: temperature has a perfectly clear meaning through statistical mechanics.
I came away with the feeling the author doesn't really understand the science under discussion, which is frustrating because I share the conclusion and I think it's an interesting question
> In the modern world, science has become the ultimate guide for describing reality.
I'm an atheist but I recognise that religion does exactly that function for the religious.
> and with such an appearance of impartiality, that we feel satisfied with its answers and seek nothing more
So climate change is fully agreed upon by everyone and anti-vaxxers don't exist. Sure.
People like to have solid explanations or at least excuses, and crackpots go further in this need than others.
As usual, if you have better method than experiment, measurement and observation, describe it in detail. Science is not just numbers and words are quantifiable too, if not accurately. The condition is that the results have to be attempting objectivity.
If you have a beef with using statistics for particular cases, say so and propose a better approach. (Many people feel they're special or above average. Wobegon effect also known as illusory superiority or inferiority.)