Scientific Models Too Often Prove Whatever the Grant Provider Wants Proven | Hacker News Reader

Scientific Models Too Often Prove Whatever the Grant Provider Wants Proven

ourfiniteworld.com

41 pointsSQL221915 comments

The most frequent misunderstanding of science, (and it applies to many other fields such as cyber security security, politics, etc.) is that an imperfect solution is worthless, that if a model is incomplete it's as good as no model, etc.

Perfect is the enemy of good. At the core of science is settling for the least errors model. You suggest solutions because doing them is better than doing nothing at all. Of course they will be partial if the problem is of such a large scale as climate change. That's not a reason not to do them.

So what if all the politicians are dirty scumbags? Voting for none is still worse than voting for the least shitty politician.

You need to accept you can't have a perfect solution. I find a perfectionist attitude to problems more common with religious people. Because once you already have one single generalizing solution to so many questions (god / religion), it is just so tempting to believe the same applies to other problems.

Note that there is absolutely no evidence in the article for the HN title. The only link in that section is to the Bible.

The title also fails to even type-check. Models don't prove things, scientists using models do. While this may sound pedantic, it's not. A good part of the title's shock value disappears if you replace it with "Scientists too often prove...".

Yes. Also even though we do know of studies which were paid to produce specific results... that proves there is some quality control from wider community. Sure, we may have reproducibility crisis in different areas. But we also caught WV emissions issue and the study regarding MMR - even if they cause lots of issues, not all is lost - we keep advancing.

  23. https://www.amazon.com/Overshoot-Ecological-Basis-Revolutionary-Change/dp/0252009886
  24. http://www.paulchefurka.ca/Adaptive Cycles.html
  25. https://www.youtube.com/embed/JYHX-Ib3Q5Q?version=3&rel=1&fs=1&autohide=2&showsearch=0&showinfo=1&iv_load_policy=1&wmode=transparent
  26. https://www.internationalrivers.org/resources/8394
  27. https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2406852
  28. https://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1969-76v38p1/d46
  29. https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Revelation+18&version=NIV
  30. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thor
  31. https://www.bbc.com/reel/video/p07n0ww0/the-creature-behind-uganda-s-moral-monster
  32. https://www.amazon.com/Oneness-Great-Principles-Shared-Religions-ebook/dp/B000XUBBR8

The article says:

'Australia’s attempt to put renewable electricity on the grid has sent electricity prices skyrocketing and resulted in increased blackouts. It has been said that intermittent electricity has “wrecked the grid” in Australia.'

whereas reality is somewhat more nuanced:

https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2019/dec/24/south...

'Hugh Saddler, the author of the monthly audit and an associate professor at the Australian National University, said wind and solar power supplied more than 50% of the electricity generated in South Australia for most months over the past two years. “That’s made electricity in SA the cheapest in the national electricity market and dramatically increased reliability.”'

To give an idea of the quality of the analysis from "Our Finite World", consider this post from 2017:

https://ourfiniteworld.com/2017/01/10/2017-the-year-when-the...

"Things could start falling apart badly in 2017, or alternatively, major problems may be delayed until 2018 or 2019."

or this post from 2015:

https://ourfiniteworld.com/2015/08/26/deflationary-collapse-...

"The big thing that is happening is that the world financial system is likely to collapse."

>'Hugh Saddler, the author of the monthly audit and an associate professor at the Australian National University, said wind and solar power supplied more than 50% of the electricity generated in South Australia for most months over the past two years. “That’s made electricity in SA the cheapest in the national electricity market and dramatically increased reliability.”'

[...] the combination of significant network investment over the past decade, recent increases to gas prices, more concentrated wholesale markets, and the transition from large scale synchronous generation to variable and intermittent renewable energy resources has had a more pronounced effect on retail prices and number of offers in South Australia than any other state in the National Electricity Market.

http://theconversation.com/factcheck-qanda-are-south-austral...

There’s no nuance about it, the rising prices are the result of reduced supply capacity and a well established triopoly gaming the market bidding and pricing rules.

The 100MW capacity Hornsdale Power Reserve effectively capped the market to a trifling $14/kW, saving the state tens of millions of dollars a year in contingency and ancillary services costs.

In addition the AEMO is taking advice from the coal burners about how to regulate renewables, with the unsurprising outcome that we end up with oscillations in frequency due to poorly tuned controllers.

Then the AEMO wants to throw good money after bad by installing more synchronous condensers rather than seeking advice from the battery suppliers about how to best tune the batteries to prevent over-compensation for frequency drift.

Prompting purely from the HN headline "Scientific Models Too Often Prove Whatever the Grant Provider Wants Proven" (to quote in case it changes), I wanted to provide two small anecdotes. Preface: science rarely claim to prove anything.

1) It is often the case that researchers "suspect" the result before they have formally been given a grant to investigate. This ranges from forming a hypothesis based on other experience to having stumbled upon something interesting, and then afterward making a proposal for funding to thoroughly investigate. Both of these cases might look like the scientist is proving what the grant provider wants.

2) As @age_bronze hints at, models are often built to explain or reproduce observations. Think: "all models are wrong, some models are useful". Modern science tends towards "X is understood if X can be explained". Having a model that reproduces X is the correct direction to understand X, so the observation that "Scientists tasked with understanding X tend to produce models demonstrating X" is... _shocking_?

I just assume most scientific research is worthless these days.

Fake news is working. If you saturate the information channels with enough misinformation it overwhelms people and they give up.

One great thing about science is that it encourages reproducing results. Many clickbait articles review un-reproduced or preliminary results. Those feel free to disregard.

Science isn't perfect but peer-reviewed, reproducible experiments are still the best data source we have.

>One great thing about science is that it encourages reproducing results.

The replication crisis (or replicability crisis or reproducibility crisis) is, as of 2020, an ongoing methodological crisis in which it has been found that many scientific studies are difficult or impossible to replicate or reproduce. The replication crisis affects the social sciences and medicine most severely.[1][2] The crisis has long-standing roots; the phrase was coined in the early 2010s[3] as part of a growing awareness of the problem. The replication crisis represents an important body of research in the field of metascience.[4]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Replication_crisis

> If you saturate the information channels with enough misinformation it overwhelms people and they give up.

But that's the whole problem. As the replication crisis is currently demonstrating, some scientific fields are absolutely saturated with misinformation - or, should I say bullshit, under Frankfurt's definition[0]. There isn't any cabal with an agenda trying to confuse people (or at least I believe there isn't) - it's just regular scientists that are incentivized to care less about whether their papers are correct, and more about churning out a lot of them to acquire grants and propel their careers.

[0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullshit#Harry_Frankfurt's_con... - tl;dr: bullshit is orthogonal to truths and lies; bullshitters don't care whether what they say is true or not - what matters is whether it serves their interests.

Probably in the contract it will say if you can prove it, it triggers another $

TLDR; Religious person thinks religion is helpful and renewable energy isn't: https://ourfiniteworld.com/author/gailtheactuary/

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