Science by democracy doesn’t work
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But you cannot actually do that. You cannot be an expert in every field and actually follow the evidence to make up your own conclusion (which btw does not guarantee that your interpretation of the evidence is correct).
As an aspiring physicist I feel helpless every time I'm at the doctor's office. I cannot just "follow the evidence". Heck I cannot "follow the evidence" on anything in physics unrelated to my field.
This is more generally an economics problem about information asymmetry and it will become more prominent as professions become increasingly sophisticated and specialized. I don't think better access to information makes up for it, either, because there is just as much misinformation.
The solution seems to me to build ever more complex social institutions with complex trust relationships which I know makes some cryptofans cringe.
I find it interesting in that it's a useful argument, but only at a communal level - if the entire community hates the direction of a project (e.g. OpenOffice), they can fork it and take it in a different direction.
You're still boned as a discerning individual if you dislike the program, though.
You can take leadership of the community and lead by example: fork it yourself and start hacking, then try to get more people to join.
It's pretty easy to follow the evidence in most situations, actually. That doesn't make me an expert. That makes me a person who understands the methodology of science, logic, and statistics. You have to know precisely what your assumptions (observations) are and how to make correct conclusions from those assumptions. The only constraints are your time, your determination, and your ability to get the original research (a constraint is not "guaranteeing your interpretation is correct").
Some people are highly opinionated and don't have the understanding to match. That doesn't mean you can't have any sort of understanding as a non-expert.
"As an aspiring physicist I feel helpless every time I'm at the doctor's office. I cannot just "follow the evidence"."
Doctors aren't necessarily better trained at making inferences and recommendations. Consider their education. Some of them are very poor thinkers.
...The combination of which is often a luxury that experts in one field cannot afford, thus the statement that one cannot be an expert in every field. "Cannot" is most likely being used for practicality, not in the literal sense of information being totally unfathomable given infinite time and determination.
You both have good points but they really needn't conflict so harshly.
I disagree, lumberjack's point is essentially an appeal to authority - which is dark-age style thinking.
Just represent everything in a machine readable set of axioms, problem solved. You don't need to be an expert in every field, you just need to have a basic understanding of first order logic.
We all look forward to the day that you or anyone else can do this.
emptytheory's suggestion: have tons of time and determination to solve the problem. Caveat: the problem has already been solved and applied by many experts many times, where the main criticism is that some of the time these experts' application over repeated attempts is not 100% consistent.
Your suggestion: encode all necessary knowledge to solve the problem so that a computer can solve it for you. Caveat: this is either being done already by domain experts, or you must go out of your way to navigate the problem based on logic and not experience (tedious, but potentially very rewarding) so as to encode this information yourself (taking some unknown amount of time).
Caveat in all cases: You are just as apt to fuck up along the way as anyone else who possesses the same logical faculties as you, which presumably at least some other experts in question would.
lumberjack's argument may not possess the logical upper hand, but it is a valid concern for people who are mortal, employed (or otherwise occupied with their time), and without access to a medical library. Perhaps the best way to put this is, I look forward to the day when you can prove their reasoning wrong in such a reproducible way rather than completely dismissing a conclusion due to some fault along the way.
A set of axioms with a reasoner would do both of those things. That will be web 3.0, it is being worked on.
And you seem to ignore the fact that getting a degree takes most people multiple years, and that "student" is an occupation. If you follow the evidence, people can't learn everything because it takes way too much time.
I disagree, this is a "fallacy fallacy fallacy". You seem to ignore the fact that I did not suggest that people can learn everything. I suggested that people learn enough logic to use it as a tool to make learning everything else unnecessary.
Also, the scarcity of time being used to justify the economically reasonable appeal to authority, in the context of global warming / scientific method consensus, may be the most unintentionally funny thing ever.
Which doesn't even make sense. Logic by itself is useless. Could as well talk about some abstract unexisting universe.
It's only when you feed it items ("learning everything else") that you make something out of it.
The silly argument that started this all off was that you have to be an expert in every field in order to examine complex systems or problems that span multiple domains. This is simply not true, because a complex idea depends upon simpler ideas. These ideas can be formalized, where scientific theory occurs at the edge nodes and verification occurs at well connected nodes. This would allow an individual to select a layer of abstraction to work on - not unlike software development.
This isn't very far off from the present system of scientific journals and peer review.
Only this is a very naive reductionistic epistemology, and not enough to cover modern science.
>If you've got an example demonstrating your concern, that would be helpful.
What I say is that sufficiently rich theories such as those we have today don't have "finest components" in the sense of being parsable down to some kind of "atoms" that are independent of the overall structure.
The whole intelligence lies in the connections between the components, and verifying that them are individually "correct" doesn't say much.
That seems like a major leap. I've heard people propose that there are limits to human understanding due to complexity, but this is the first time I've heard the suggestion that there is some level of information beyond any possible measurement. The lowest level I can think of is existence vs nonexistence - and you are essentially suggesting that there is some other state beyond measurement and therefor reasoning. Of course, such a thing would be impossible to prove... so the scientific method would be of no use. So if what you are suggesting is true, then it would have no influence on what I'm proposing anyway. Wait... you aren't religious are you? I'm not trying to pry or be insulting, but this suggestion would only really make sense in the context of trying to establish a place for religion in science.
As far as the rest, formal logic exists to do exactly what you say can't be done. Your argument sounds more like an appeal to emotion than anything else.
In addition, your assumption is that everything can be encoded in an axiomatic language (probably not true), and that we have enough information to encode it all even if it was possible.
The same people writing papers now.
> and how can you ever know that someone is encoding it correctly?
Reasoning engine. As new data is entered it is run against prior data, to the end user it would look almost like a spell check.
> ...your assumption is that everything can be encoded in an axiomatic language (probably not true)...
That is an extremely safe assumption to make, as the problem has been studied for a long time and I'm aware of no evidence that would back up your position.
> ...and that we have enough information to encode it all even if it was possible.
We do.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Godel's_incompleteness_theorems
Great idea! Let me just tell my friends, Hilbert and Russel about it! Maybe my friend Kurt will like it too!
/s
Not to mention that most of the problems science has to tackle we cannot even begin to have them formulated in some concise "set of axioms" even if that worked in theory.
And that's for hard sciences...
In short: even for a relatively easy-to-quantify universe of discourse like Mathematics, this theorem implies that (of necessity) some propositions will not be provably true or false, or that the system will contain a contradiction. You have a choice of either incompleteness or contradiction (incompleteness seems better).
That's for Mathematics. Now, consider physics, biology, or sociology. And more important, consider that the questions present are at the frontiers, so are very much not reducible to codification. It's a real problem. If you'd ever worked on a really complex, multifaceted, end-to-end science problem (say, weather forecasting, or drug design), you'd have a little more humility.
Can you think of an idea that cannot be represented as true, false, or unknown? Now consider a hypothesis. I'm not saying it would be simple or easy, just possible and preferable to the present system.
As far as my apparent lack of humility: in the interest of not wasting your time or my own, I've truncated my correspondence. From now on, just imagine that all my posts are prefixed with a paragraph in which I grovel before the throne of scientific greatness.
You should write some code, that when you press the reply button it appends some form of lexical prostration that is derived from the comment space of the identity you're commenting to :P
In all seriousness, it appears that for the effort that goes into all the signaling that goes in within academia (and to the external world) to all the "real problems" people are solving, automatic approaches to all aspects of how research is conducted will happen because it is more efficient and consumes less energy than say a human being worrying about if their methods paper will be accepted and how to please reviewers, and etc…
I mean the fact that my PI hired me, as someone who didn't graduate from undergrad over all the phds who get rejected for volunteer positions, because i can slap some code together must say something about the direction things are going in this world. But when I tell the postdoc that the reason his spectrograms looks the way they do when he downsamples due to less constructive interference (while also trying signaling to appear humble because how dare some non-degreed folk pontificate on such things as a matter of established fact like the rest of the folks do around here, even when asked for help), he has to go ask the sr. research scientist the next day to only tell me that I was right… that's 24 hours his clunky matlab script could have ran! lol
Meh… inefficiencies, inefficiencies…
This problem is being worked on, and I'm pretty confident that the solution will be based on the principals of the semantic web. I have a feeling that academia will be pretty late to the party when it comes to implementation though, if half of the stories I've heard are true.
</tongue-in-cheek>
I'm a physicist who has done work on data analysis in cancer genomics. The depth and complexity of cancer biology is enormous, and "following the evidence" is the work of years.
It's easy to follow superficial arguments about specific experiments. It is very, very difficult to get hold of the ambiguous morass that is the true leading edge, which is so far away from the layperson's event horizon they aren't even aware it exists, and so end up believing that it's not that hard to follow the evidence in most situations.
"It is very, very difficult to get hold of the ambiguous morass that is the true leading edge, which is so far away from the layperson's event horizon they aren't even aware it exists, and so end up believing that it's not that hard to follow the evidence in most situations."
What are you talking about here? How does that conflict with what I said? In my original post, one thing I asserted is that you should be aware of your assumptions. I don't see the relevance of saying "knowledge of the leading edge is hard to attain" or "the leading edge is ambiguous".
I don't think I ever denied that there are technical fields where coming to a conclusion takes time. Should I be apologizing for my use of "most"? The only point I was trying to make was that "guaranteeing your interpretations are correct" is not a constraint (see my response to lumberjack). As a result, being able to form correct conclusions is possible as a non-expert. Is this a surprising statement to anyone?
tjradcliffe's post reads essentially as "non-experts are so unaware/ignorant that they form naive beliefs such as yours". What a constructive comment! Maybe I should just shut up and listen to the experts!
This is true; but it doesn't mean that trusting experts is necessarily going to make you any better off. If the experts themselves aren't following the evidence, either because they have an ideological axe to grind or because there simply isn't enough evidence to be helpful, their opinions won't be of any more value than yours.
> I feel helpless every time I'm at the doctor's office. I cannot just "follow the evidence".
And many doctors can't either. Medicine is not a very advanced science compared to your field, physics. In fact, there are practically no sciences which are as advanced as physics. So if you're expecting that experts in other fields are basing their advice on the sort of evidence and predictive theories that you're used to seeing in physics, you're going to be very disappointed.
I understand that argument and would like to have the debate about the trade-offs. But flatly denying isn't helping us move forward.
We cannot accurately model changes in the climate yet there is no shortage of people who want to scream bloody murder we are all going to die. Trouble is, far too many of them come off as traveling religious leaders, just missing a tent.
That's weather not climate.
Abandoning something (e.g. some technologies) because it's "killing our planet"? What a crazy idea!
No, we gotta have more of it, forever increasing, and it will sort out the problems it creates itself. Why ever be content with anything we have? After all the meaning of life is having more and more of everything.
Why do you feel so concerned about Greenpeace when they don't make the laws anywhere (not that I think you're representing their position accurately anyway)? They're not the lobbying heavyweight that fossil fuel industries are.
It wouldn't make financial sense to build anything other than solar, hydro or wind farms.
Clean energy via free markets. Imagine.
"Climate is changing, and climate has always changed, and always will, there's archeological evidence of that, there's biblical evidence of that, there's historic evidence of that, it will always change," [GOP Sen. James Inhofe of Oklahoma] said on the Senate floor. "The hoax is that there are some people that are so arrogant to think that they are so powerful that they can change climate. Man can't change climate."
"Biblical evidence", indeed.
You are right in saying that it is at its heart an economic question. Unfortunately, an economic model based on ever-increasing consumption of physical goods, combined with a large population with increased access to emission-creating technologies doesn't seem compatible with our mid-term survival (not to mention the rate at which non-renewable resources are consumed). But sticking your head the sand is much easier than come out and say that hard choices are coming.
Is it used ironically? I failed to grasp that.
This has resulted in a situation where the Left, who abandoned science decades ago, pretend to care about it, while the Right--which has long had an ambivalent relationship with reality--has decided to go full-post-modern and construe all facts as pure social constructs, which is exactly what the Left has been saying for a long time.
Almost none of the discussion of "climate science" in the public sphere has anything to do with science, and if you're an actual scientist with relevant expertise and you say anything about the science you will get beaten up by both sides.
As a computational physicist I've given my opinion on occasion that climate models are non-physical and therefore non-predictive, no matter how well-tuned they are to past climate (because only the correct physics can extrapolate the past forward, and the unphysical approximations in climate models are not small in the relevant sense.) What climate models do show fairly convincingly is that we are increasing the Earth's heat budget by 1.6 W/m2 or so, which is in the range of 0.5% overall, and this is plausibly a very bad thing.
So because I criticize climate models the Left attacks me as a denialist, and the Right embraces me as one, whereas I'm actually saying the models give a pretty decent reason to take some fairly mundane steps, like implementing carbon taxes and tariffs. The "tariff" part is important because it exports the cost of emissions to other jurisdictions. At this point the Right attacks me as being a socialist taxer (because taxes are socialist?) and the Left attacks me for not wanting to "change everything" (because that always works so well.)
There simply isn't any science in the "climate science" debate. It's all politics.
If the models are solid then the matter of getting or keeping Earth dialed-in to the "right" temperature is just a question of agreement (ha!) and of course large energy inputs and some yet to be developed 21st-22nd century tech. Think of the funding this could generate for R&D! And the conferences and travel to debate the finer points of the right temperature. It would swamp the paltry sums currently dedicated to studying climate change. Climate engineering!
If our task is to engineer an ideal climate for all on Earth we need to develop levers of control. Modulating CO2 emissions -- a massive project in global social coordination of dubious prospect -- may not be the best or first method to reach for in such a project.
However, I suspect engineering an ideal climate is not the objective of the people in this field or even considered a possibility. We could evaluate the success of such a project easily -- when we dial up 0.1 degree, does the system do what we expect? When we dial it down, does it do what we expect? Yes? Fine, we're done. Problem solved.
I rather suspect climate change is just another one of these endless war things that keeps a lot of people employed and isn't meant to be "won" in such a way as I have described. We must be careful not to define the criteria for victory lest we accidentally achieve it.
If climate study is more than a jobs program for less brilliant scientists, what then is the point of studying climate change and recommending and implementing public policy suggestions resulting from research?
Is it to prevent any change to the climate? To prevent unintentional change? What about non-anthropogenic climate change (which could potentially be more severe and more disastrous) -- should we not seek to prevent that also? What if by some enormous effort and sacrifice we are able to completely eliminate the anthropogenic component of climate change only to see the climate do its own thing and push life the edge of extinction anyway. A meteor perhaps. A new, severe ice age. A prolonged solar anomaly. Any of these could make a cosmic joke out of our meagre well-intentioned efforts.
I just don't think people are thinking about this clearly or it is as you say, all politics.
http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/hubble/science/star-v1.htm...
Just about time, now please let's stop with the (completely flawed) 97% meme.