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Andrew Lo and Mark Mueller at MIT have a paper called “WARNING: Physics Envy May Be Hazardous to Your Wealth,” also available as a video.

inability to recognize radical UNCERTAINTY is what leads to excessive confidence in mathematical models of reality, and then on to bad policy and prediction. 

key concept of the paper is to define a continuum of uncertainty from the less radical to the more radical. You get into trouble when you think there is a higher level of certainty than there really is. 1. Complete Certainty 2.  Risk without Uncertainty (randomness when you know the exact probability distribution) 3. Fully Reducible Uncertainty (known set of outcomes, known model, and lots of data, fits assumptions for classical statistical techniques, so you can get arbitrarily close to Type 2). 4. Partially Reducible Uncertainty (“model uncertainty”: “we are in a casino that may or may not be honest, and the rules tend to change from time to time without notice.”) 5: Irreducible Uncertainty:  Complete Ignorance (consult a priest or astrologer) Physics Envy in Development leads you to think you are in Type 2 or Type 3, when you are really in Type 4. This feeds the futile search for the Grand Unifying Theory of Development.

British sociologist Harry Collins asked a scientist who specializes in gravitational waves to answer seven questions about the physics of these waves. Collins, who has made an amateur study of this field for more than 30 years but has never actually practiced it, also answered the questions himself. Then he submitted both sets of answers to a panel of judges who are themselves gravitational-wave researchers. The judges couldn't tell the impostor from one of their own. Collins argues that he is therefore as qualified as anyone to discuss this field, even though he can't conduct experiments in it.

The journal Nature predicted that the experiment would have a broad impact, writing that Collins could help settle the "science wars of the 1990s," "when sociologists launched what scientists saw as attacks on the very nature of science, and scientists responded in kind," accusing the sociologists of misunderstanding science. More generally, it could affect "the argument about whether an outsider, such as an anthropologist, can properly understand another group, such as a remote rural community." With this comment, Nature seemed to be saying that if a sociologist can understand physics, then anyone can understand anything.

It will be interesting to see if Collins' results can indeed be repeated in different situations. Meanwhile, his experiment is plenty interesting in itself. Just one of the judges succeeded in distinguishing Collins' answers from those of the trained experts. One threw up his hands. And the other seven declared Collins the physicist. He didn't simply do as well as the trained specialist—he did better, even though the test questions demanded technical answers. One sample answer from Collins gives you the flavor: "Since gravitational waves change the shape of spacetime and radio waves do not, the effect on an interferometer of radio waves can only be to mimic the effects of a gravitational wave, not reproduce them." (More details can be found in this paper Collins wrote with his collaborators.)

being both a working scientist and a science writer gives me a unique perspective on science, scientific publications, and the significance of scientific work. The final disclosure should be that I have never published in any of the top rank physics journals or in Science, Nature, or PNAS. I don't believe I have an axe to grind about that, but I am also sure that you can ascribe some of my opinions to PNAS envy.

If you asked most scientists what their goals were, the answer would boil down to the generation of new knowledge. But, at some point, science and scientists have to interact with money and administrators, which has significant consequences for science. For instance, when trying to employ someone to do a job, you try to objectively decide if the skills set of the prospective employee matches that required to do the job. In science, the same question has to be asked—instead of being asked once per job interview, however, this question gets asked all the time.

Because science requires funding, and no one gets a lifetime dollop-o-cash to explore their favorite corner of the universe. So, the question gets broken down to "how competent is the scientist?" "Is the question they want to answer interesting?" "Do they have the resources to do what they say they will?" We will ignore the last question and focus on the first two.

Scientists these days tend to keep up a polite fiction that all science is equal. Except for the work of the misguided opponent whose arguments we happen to be refuting at the time, we speak as though every scientist's field and methods of study are as good as every other scientist's and perhaps a little better. This keeps us all cordial when it comes to recommending each other for government grants.

Why should there be such rapid advances in some fields and not in others? I think the usual explanations that we tend to think of - such as the tractability of the subject, or the quality or education of the men drawn into it, or the size of research contracts - are important but inadequate. I have begun to believe that the primary factor in scientific advance is an intellectual one. These rapidly moving fields are fields where a particular method of doing scientific research is systematically used and taught, an accumulative method of inductive inference that is so effective that I think it should be given the name of "strong inference." I believe it is important to examine this method, its use and history and rationale, and to see whether other groups and individuals might learn to adopt it profitably in their own scientific and intellectual work. In its separate elements, strong inference is just the simple and old-fashioned method of inductive inference that goes back to Francis Bacon. The steps are familiar to every college student and are practiced, off and on, by every scientist. The difference comes in their systematic application. Strong inference consists of applying the following steps to every problem in science, formally and explicitly and regularly: Devising alternative hypotheses; Devising a crucial experiment (or several of them), with alternative possible outcomes, each of which will, as nearly is possible, exclude one or more of the hypotheses; Carrying out the experiment so as to get a clean result; Recycling the procedure, making subhypotheses or sequential hypotheses to refine the possibilities that remain, and so on.

On any new problem, of course, inductive inference is not as simple and certain as deduction, because it involves reaching out into the unknown. Steps 1 and 2 require intellectual inventions, which must be cleverly chosen so that hypothesis, experiment, outcome, and exclusion will be related in a rigorous syllogism; and the question of how to generate such inventions is one which has been extensively discussed elsewhere (2, 3). What the formal schema reminds us to do is to try to make these inventions, to take the next step, to proceed to the next fork, without dawdling or getting tied up in irrelevancies.

Another example illustrating the central dogma is the French optical telegraph.

The telegraph was an optical communication system with stations consisting of large movable pointers mounted on the tops of sixty-foot towers. Each station was manned by an operator who could read a message transmitted by a neighboring station and transmit the same message to the next station in the transmission line.

The distance between neighbors was about seven miles. Along the transmission lines, optical messages in France could travel faster than drum messages in Africa. When Napoleon took charge of the French Republic in 1799, he ordered the completion of the optical telegraph system to link all the major cities of France from Calais and Paris to Toulon and onward to Milan. The telegraph became, as Claude Chappe had intended, an important instrument of national power. Napoleon made sure that it was not available to private users.

The 10:23 demonstrations and the CBC Marketplace coverage have elicited fascinating case studies in CAM professionalism. Rather than offering any new information or evidence about homeopathy itself, some homeopaths have spuriously accused skeptical groups of being malicious Big Pharma shills.

Mike Adams of the Natural News website

has decided to provide his own coverage of the 10:23 campaign

Question #1: Does this mean I don’t have to believe in climate change? Me: I’m afraid not. One of the sad ironies of scientific denialism is that we tend to be skeptical of precisely the wrong kind of scientific claims. In poll after poll, Americans have dismissed two of the most robust and widely tested theories of modern science: evolution by natural selection and climate change. These are theories that have been verified in thousands of different ways by thousands of different scientists working in many different fields. (This doesn’t mean, of course, that such theories won’t change or get modified – the strength of science is that nothing is settled.) Instead of wasting public debate on creationism or the rhetoric of Senator Inhofe, I wish we’d spend more time considering the value of spinal fusion surgery, or second generation antipsychotics, or the verity of the latest gene association study. The larger point is that we need to be a better job of considering the context behind every claim. In 1952, the Harvard philosopher Willard Von Orman published “The Two Dogmas of Empiricism.” In the essay, Quine compared the truths of science to a spider’s web, in which the strength of the lattice depends upon its interconnectedness. (Quine: “The unit of empirical significance is the whole of science.”) One of the implications of Quine’s paper is that, when evaluating the power of a given study, we need to also consider the other studies and untested assumptions that it depends upon. Don’t just fixate on the effect size – look at the web. Unfortunately for the denialists, climate change and natural selection have very sturdy webs.

biases are not fraud. We sometimes forget that science is a human pursuit, mingled with all of our flaws and failings. (Perhaps that explains why an episode like Climategate gets so much attention.) If there’s a single theme that runs through the article it’s that finding the truth is really hard. It’s hard because reality is complicated, shaped by a surreal excess of variables. But it’s also hard because scientists aren’t robots: the act of observation is simultaneously an act of interpretation.

(As Paul Simon sang, “A man sees what he wants to see and disregards the rest.”) Most of the time, these distortions are unconscious – we don’t know even we are misperceiving the data. However, even when the distortion is intentional it’s still rarely rises to the level of outright fraud. Consider the story of Mike Rossner. He’s executive director of the Rockefeller University Press, and helps oversee several scientific publications, including The Journal of Cell Biology.  In 2002, while trying to format a scientific image in Photoshop that was going to appear in one of the journals, Rossner noticed that the background of the image contained distinct intensities of pixels. “That’s a hallmark of image manipulation,” Rossner told me. “It means the scientist has gone in and deliberately changed what the data looks like. What’s disturbing is just how easy this is to do.” This led Rossner and his colleagues to begin analyzing every image in every accepted paper. They soon discovered that approximately 25 percent of all papers contained at least one “inappropriately manipulated” picture. Interestingly, the vast, vast majority of these manipulations (~99 percent) didn’t affect the interpretation of the results. Instead, the scientists seemed to be photoshopping the pictures for aesthetic reasons: perhaps a line on a gel was erased, or a background blur was deleted, or the contrast was exaggerated. In other words, they wanted to publish pretty images. That’s a perfectly understandable desire, but it gets problematic when that same basic instinct – we want our data to be neat, our pictures to be clean, our charts to be clear – is transposed across the entire scientific process.

Peer to peer file sharing (P2P) has made media distribution free and has become the bane of media monopolies. P2P file sharing means digital files can be copied and distributed at no cost. CD's, DVD's, and other older forms of holding media are no longer necessary, nor is the cost involved in making them or distributing them along a traditional logistical supply chain. Disc burners, however, allow users the ability to create their own physical copies at a fraction of the cost of buying the media from the stores. Supply and demand is turned on its head as the more popular a certain file becomes via demand, the more of it that is available for sharing, and the easier it is to obtain. Supply and demand increase in tandem towards a lower "price" of obtaining the said file.Consumers demand more as price decreases. Producersnaturally want to produce more of something as priceincreases. Somewhere in between consumers and producers meet at the market price or "marketequilibrium."P2P technology eliminates material scarcity, thus the more afile is in demand, the more people end up downloading it, andthe easier it is for others to find it and download it. Considerthe implications this would have if technology made physicalobjects as easy to "share" as information is now.

In the end, it is not government regulations, legal contrivances, or licenses that govern information, but rather the free market mechanism commonly referred to as Adam Smith's self regulating "Invisible Hand of the Market." In other words, people selfishly seeking accurate information for their own benefit encourage producers to provide the best possible information to meet their demand. While this is not possible in a monopoly, particularly the corporate media monopoly of the "left/right paradigm" of false choice, it is inevitable in the field of real competition that now exists online due to information technology.

Compounding the establishment's troubles are cheaper cameras and cheaper, more capable software for 3D graphics, editing, mixing, and other post production tasks, allowing for the creation of an alternative publishing, audio and video industry. "Underground" counter-corporate music and film has been around for a long time but through the combination of technology and the zealous corporate lawyers disenfranchising a whole new generation that now seeks an alternative, it is truly coming of age.

Q. The debate over climate science has involved very complex physical models and rarefied areas of scientific knowledge. What role do you think social scientists have to play, given the complexity of the actual physical science?

A. We have to think about the process by which something, an idea, develops scientific consensus and a second process by which is developed a social and political consensus. The first part is the domain of data and models and physical science. The second is very much a social and political process. And that brings to the fore a whole host of value-based, worldview-based, cognitive and cultural dimensions that need to be addressed.

Social scientists, beyond economists, have a lot to say on cognition, perceptions, values, social movements and political processes that are very important for understanding whether the public accepts the conclusions of a scientific body.

In 1950 Martin Gardner published an article in the Antioch Review entitled "The Hermit Scientist," about what we would today call pseudoscientists.

there has been some progress since Gardner offered his first criticisms of pseudoscience. Now largely antiquated are his chapters on believers in a flat Earth, a hollow Earth, Atlantis and Lemuria, Alfred William Lawson, Roger Babson, Trofim Lysenko, Wilhelm Reich and Alfred Korzybski. But disturbingly, a good two thirds of the book's contents are relevant today, including Gardner's discussions of homeopathy, naturopathy, osteopathy, iridiagnosis (reading the iris of the eye to deter- mine bodily malfunctions), food faddists, cancer cures and other forms of medical quackery, Edgar Cayce, the Great Pyramid's alleged mystical powers, handwriting analysis, ESP and PK (psychokinesis), reincarnation, dowsing rods, eccentric sexual theories, and theories of group racial differences.

The "hermit scientist," a youthful Gardner wrote, works alone and is ignored by mainstream scientists. "Such neglect, of course, only strengthens the convictions of the self-declared genius."

American magazine the Atlantic lobs an intellectual grenade into our culture. In the summer of 1945, for example, it published an essay by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) engineer Vannevar Bush entitled "As We May Think". It turned out to be the blueprint for what eventually emerged as the world wide web. Two summers ago, the Atlantic published an essay by Nicholas Carr, one of the blogosphere's most prominent (and thoughtful) contrarians, under the headline "Is Google Making Us Stupid?".

Carr wrote, "I've had an uncomfortable sense that someone, or something, has been tinkering with my brain, remapping the neural circuitry, reprogramming the memory. My mind isn't going – so far as I can tell – but it's changing. I'm not thinking the way I used to think. I can feel it most strongly when I'm reading. Immersing myself in a book or a lengthy article used to be easy. My mind would get caught up in the narrative or the turns of the argument and I'd spend hours strolling through long stretches of prose. That's rarely the case anymore. Now my concentration often starts to drift after two or three pages. I get fidgety, lose the thread, begin looking for something else to do. I feel as if I'm always dragging my wayward brain back to the text. The deep reading that used to come naturally has become a struggle."

Carr's target was not really the world's leading search engine, but the impact that ubiquitous, always-on networking is having on our cognitive processes. His argument was that our deepening dependence on networking technology is indeed changing not only the way we think, but also the structure of our brains.

leaving aside the fact that from the figures given by Prof Feng, about 80 per cent of obese people are NOT "perfectly healthy with normal cholesterol and blood sugar", and 70 per cent of people who die suddenly of heart attacks ARE obese (see my take on the 'fat but fit' argument here), and that Prof Feng has written in a previous letter of obesity being "a serious medical problem and [that] studies in the United States show that obesity will be the No. 1 public health problem and cause of death in five years' time", I am amused by Prof Feng's definition of good health as "not a number... [but] a sense of well-being physically, mentally, socially and spiritually".

much of what we do in "medicine" today is about numbers. Your "weight, body mass index, how often you jog or the number of kilometres you run", your "cholesterol and blood sugar", your smoking, alcohol intake, exercise, sexual behaviour, diet and family history are all quantified and studied, because they give us an idea of your risk for certain diseases. Our interventions, pharmacological or otherwise, aim to modify or reduce these risks. These are numbers that translate to concrete events in real-life.You may argue that one can have bad risk factors and still have a sense of "physical, mental, social and spiritual well-being", in which case you don't need a doctor or drugs to make you feel better - but that doesn't mean you are not going to die of a heart attack at 40 either.

The problem with using the term "well-being" in defining something as important as healthcare or medicine, is that it is a vague term (a weasel word, I like to call it) that allows quacks to ply their trade, and for people to medicalise their problems of living - and that is something Prof Feng disapproved of, isn't it?Do I have a better definition for "health"? Well, not yet - but I certainly don't think my job is only about giving people "a sense of well-being".

Macroscopic decoherence - the idea that the known quantum laws that govern microscopic events, might simply govern at all levels without alteration - also known as "many-worlds" - was first proposed in a 1957 paper by Hugh Everett III.  The paper was ignored.  John Wheeler told Everett to see Niels Bohr.  Bohr didn't take him seriously.

It wasn't until 1970, when Bryce DeWitt (who coined the term "many-worlds") wrote an article for Physics Today, that the general field was first informed of Everett's ideas.  Macroscopic decoherence has been gaining advocates ever since, and may now be the majority viewpoint (or not).

What is the one bit of science from your field that you think everyone should know?David Attenborough: The unity of life.Richard Dawkins: The unity of life that comes about through evolution, since we're all descended from a single common ancestor. It's almost too good to be true, that on one planet this extraordinary complexity of life should have come about by what is pretty much an intelligible process. And we're the only species capable of understanding it.

RD: I know you're working on a programme about Cambrian and pre-Cambrian fossils, David. A lot of people might think, "These are very old animals, at the beginning of evolution; they weren't very good at what they did." I suspect that isn't the case?DA: They were just as good, but as generalists, most were ousted from the competition.RD: So it probably is true there's a progressive element to evolution in the short term but not in the long term – that when a lineage branches out, it gets better for about five million years but not 500 million years. You wouldn't see progressive improvement over that kind of time scale.DA: No, things get more and more specialised. Not necessarily better.RD: The "camera" eyes of any modern animal would be better than what had come before.DA: Certainly... but they don't elaborate beyond function. When I listen to a soprano sing a Handel aria with an astonishing coloratura from that particular larynx, I say to myself, there has to be a biological reason that was useful at some stage. The larynx of a human being did not evolve without having some function. And the only function I can see is sexual attraction.RD: Sexual selection is important and probably underrated.DA: What I like to think is that if I think the male bird of paradise is beautiful, my appreciation of it is precisely the same as a female bird of paradise.

People say Richard Feynman had one of these extraordinary minds that could grapple with ideas of which I have no concept. And you hear all the ancillary bits – like he was a good bongo player – that make him human. So I admire this man who could not only deal with string theory but also play the bongos. But he is beyond me. I have no idea what he was talking of.

Is it legitimate to cite one’s intuitions as evidence in a philosophical argument?

appeals to intuitions are ubiquitous in philosophy. What are intuitions? Well, that’s part of the controversy, but most philosophers view them as intellectual “seemings.” George Bealer, perhaps the most prominent defender of intuitions-as-evidence, writes, “For you to have an intuition that A is just for it to seem to you that A… Of course, this kind of seeming is intellectual, not sensory or introspective (or imaginative).”2 Other philosophers have characterized them as “noninferential belief due neither to perception nor introspection”3 or alternatively as “applications of our ordinary capacities for judgment.”4

Philosophers may not agree on what, exactly, intuition is, but that doesn’t stop them from using it. “Intuitions often play the role that observation does in science – they are data that must be explained, confirmers or the falsifiers of theories,” Brian Talbot says.5 Typically, the way this works is that a philosopher challenges a theory by applying it to a real or hypothetical case and showing that it yields a result which offends his intuitions (and, he presumes, his readers’ as well).

an interesting article I read recently, penned by Julian Savulescu for the Practical Ethics blog.

Savulescu discusses an ongoing controversy in Germany about genetic testing of human embryos. The Leopoldina, Germany’s equivalent of the National Academy of Sciences, has recommended genetic testing of pre-implant embryos, to screen for serious and incurable defects. The German Chancellor, Angela Merkel, has agreed to allow a parliamentary vote on this issue, but also said that she personally supports a ban on this type of testing. Her fear is that the testing would quickly lead to “designer babies,” i.e. to parents making choices about their unborn offspring based not on knowledge about serious disease, but simply because they happen to prefer a particular height or eye color.

He infers from Merkel’s comments (and many similar others) that people tend to think of selecting traits like eye color as eugenics, while acting to avoid incurable disease is not considered eugenics. He argues that this is exactly wrong: eugenics, as he points out, means “well born,” so eugenicists have historically been concerned with eliminating traits that would harm society (Wendell Holmes’ “three generation of imbeciles”), not with simple aesthetic choices. As Savulescu puts it: “[eugenics] is selecting embryos which are better, in this context, have better lives. Being healthy rather than sick is ‘better.’ Having blond hair and blue eyes is not in any plausible sense ‘better,’ even if people mistakenly think so.”