SCIENTISTS have often been accused of exaggerating the threat of climate change,
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Playing Dumb on Climate Change - NYTimes.com - 1 views
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The year just concluded is about to be declared the hottest one on record,
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Science is conservative, and new claims of knowledge are greeted with high degrees of skepticism.
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if there’s more than even a scant 5 percent possibility that an event occurred by chance, scientists will reject the causal claim.
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correlation is not necessarily causation, because we need to rule out the possibility that we are just observing a coincidence.
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. In the 18th and 19th centuries, this conservatism generally took the form of a demand for a large amount of evidence; in the 20th century, it took on the form of a demand for statistical significance
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scientists place the burden of proof on the person making an affirmative claim.
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the 95 percent level has no actual basis in nature. It is a convention, a value judgment.
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The 95 percent confidence level is generally credited to the British statistician R. A. Fisher, who was interested in the problem of how to be sure an observed effect of an experiment was not just the result of chance.
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It places the burden of proof on the victim rather than, for example, on the manufacturer of a harmful product.
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it might be reasonable to accept a lower statistical threshold when examining effects in people, because you already have reason to believe that the observed effect is not just chance.
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WHY don’t scientists pick the standard that is appropriate to the case at hand, instead of adhering to an absolutist one?
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the history of science in relation to religion.
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long tradition in the history of science that valorizes skepticism as an antidote to religious faith
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scientists consciously rejected religion as a basis of natural knowledge, they held on to certain cultural presumptions about what kind of person had access to reliable knowledge.
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they do practice a form of self-denial, denying themselves the right to believe anything that has not passed very high intellectual hurdles.
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vigorously denying its relation to religion, modern science retains symbolic vestiges of prophetic tradition, so many scientists bend over backward to avoid these associations.
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The decline effect and the scientific method : The New Yorker - 3 views
www.newyorker.com/...101213fa_fact_lehrer
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The test of replicability, as it’s known, is the foundation of modern research. Replicability is how the community enforces itself. It’s a safeguard for the creep of subjectivity. Most of the time, scientists know what results they want, and that can influence the results they get. The premise of replicability is that the scientific community can correct for these flaws.
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But now all sorts of well-established, multiply confirmed findings have started to look increasingly uncertain. It’s as if our facts were losing their truth: claims that have been enshrined in textbooks are suddenly unprovable.
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This phenomenon doesn’t yet have an official name, but it’s occurring across a wide range of fields, from psychology to ecology.
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If replication is what separates the rigor of science from the squishiness of pseudoscience, where do we put all these rigorously validated findings that can no longer be proved? Which results should we believe?
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Schooler demonstrated that subjects shown a face and asked to describe it were much less likely to recognize the face when shown it later than those who had simply looked at it. Schooler called the phenomenon “verbal overshadowing.”
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The most likely explanation for the decline is an obvious one: regression to the mean. As the experiment is repeated, that is, an early statistical fluke gets cancelled out. The extrasensory powers of Schooler’s subjects didn’t decline—they were simply an illusion that vanished over time.
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yet Schooler has noticed that many of the data sets that end up declining seem statistically solid—that is, they contain enough data that any regression to the mean shouldn’t be dramatic. “These are the results that pass all the tests,” he says. “The odds of them being random are typically quite remote, like one in a million. This means that the decline effect should almost never happen. But it happens all the time!
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this is why Schooler believes that the decline effect deserves more attention: its ubiquity seems to violate the laws of statistics
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In 2001, Michael Jennions, a biologist at the Australian National University, set out to analyze “temporal trends” across a wide range of subjects in ecology and evolutionary biology. He looked at hundreds of papers and forty-four meta-analyses (that is, statistical syntheses of related studies), and discovered a consistent decline effect over time, as many of the theories seemed to fade into irrelevance.
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Jennions admits that his findings are troubling, but expresses a reluctance to talk about them
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publicly. “This is a very sensitive issue for scientists,” he says. “You know, we’re supposed to be dealing with hard facts, the stuff that’s supposed to stand the test of time. But when you see these trends you become a little more skeptical of things.”
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While publication bias almost certainly plays a role in the decline effect, it remains an incomplete explanation. For one thing, it fails to account for the initial prevalence of positive results among studies that never even get submitted to journals. It also fails to explain the experience of people like Schooler, who have been unable to replicate their initial data despite their best efforts.
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Jennions, similarly, argues that the decline effect is largely a product of publication bias, or the tendency of scientists and scientific journals to prefer positive data over null results, which is what happens when no effect is found. The bias was first identified by the statistician Theodore Sterling, in 1959, after he noticed that ninety-seven per cent of all published psychological studies with statistically significant data found the effect they were looking for
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Sterling saw that if ninety-seven per cent of psychology studies were proving their hypotheses, either psychologists were extraordinarily lucky or they published only the outcomes of successful experiments.
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One of his most cited papers has a deliberately provocative title: “Why Most Published Research Findings Are False.”
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suspects that an equally significant issue is the selective reporting of results—the data that scientists choose to document in the first place. Palmer’s most convincing evidence relies on a statistical tool known as a funnel graph. When a large number of studies have been done on a single subject, the data should follow a pattern: studies with a large sample size should all cluster around a common value—the true result—whereas those with a smaller sample size should exhibit a random scattering, since they’re subject to greater sampling error. This pattern gives the graph its name, since the distribution resembles a funnel.
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after Palmer plotted every study of fluctuating asymmetry, he noticed that the distribution of results with smaller sample sizes wasn’t random at all but instead skewed heavily toward positive results. Palmer has since documented a similar problem in several other contested subject areas. “Once I realized that selective reporting is everywhere in science, I got quite depressed,” Palmer told me. “As a researcher, you’re always aware that there might be some nonrandom patterns, but I had no idea how widespread it is.”
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Palmer summarized the impact of selective reporting on his field: “We cannot escape the troubling conclusion that some—perhaps many—cherished generalities are at best exaggerated in their biological significance and at worst a collective illusion nurtured by strong a-priori beliefs often repeated.”
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Palmer emphasizes that selective reporting is not the same as scientific fraud. Rather, the problem seems to be one of subtle omissions and unconscious misperceptions, as researchers struggle to make sense of their results. Stephen Jay Gould referred to this as the “sho
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horning” process.
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“A lot of scientific measurement is really hard,” Simmons told me. “If you’re talking about fluctuating asymmetry, then it’s a matter of minuscule differences between the right and left sides of an animal. It’s millimetres of a tail feather. And so maybe a researcher knows that he’s measuring a good male”—an animal that has successfully mated—“and he knows that it’s supposed to be symmetrical. Well, that act of measurement is going to be vulnerable to all sorts of perception biases. That’s not a cynical statement. That’s just the way human beings work.”
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For Simmons, the steep rise and slow fall of fluctuating asymmetry is a clear example of a scientific paradigm, one of those intellectual fads that both guide and constrain research: after a new paradigm is proposed, the peer-review process is tilted toward positive results. But then, after a few years, the academic incentives shift—the paradigm has become entrenched—so that the most notable results are now those that disprove the theory.
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John Ioannidis, an epidemiologist at Stanford University, argues that such distortions are a serious issue in biomedical research. “These exaggerations are why the decline has become so common,” he says. “It’d be really great if the initial studies gave us an accurate summary of things. But they don’t. And so what happens is we waste a lot of money treating millions of patients and doing lots of follow-up studies on other themes based on results that are misleading.”
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In 2005, Ioannidis published an article in the Journal of the American Medical Association that looked at the forty-nine most cited clinical-research studies in three major medical journals.
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the data Ioannidis found were disturbing: of the thirty-four claims that had been subject to replication, forty-one per cent had either been directly contradicted or had their effect sizes significantly downgraded.
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the most troubling fact emerged when he looked at the test of replication: out of four hundred and thirty-two claims, only a single one was consistently replicable. “This doesn’t mean that none of these claims will turn out to be true,” he says. “But, given that most of them were done badly, I wouldn’t hold my breath.”
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According to Ioannidis, the main problem is that too many researchers engage in what he calls “significance chasing,” or finding ways to interpret the data so that it passes the statistical test of significance—the ninety-five-per-cent boundary invented by Ronald Fisher.
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One of the classic examples of selective reporting concerns the testing of acupuncture in different countries. While acupuncture is widely accepted as a medical treatment in various Asian countries, its use is much more contested in the West. These cultural differences have profoundly influenced the results of clinical trials.
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The problem of selective reporting is rooted in a fundamental cognitive flaw, which is that we like proving ourselves right and hate being wrong.
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“It feels good to validate a hypothesis,” Ioannidis said. “It feels even better when you’ve got a financial interest in the idea or your career depends upon it. And that’s why, even after a claim has been systematically disproven”—he cites, for instance, the early work on hormone replacement therapy, or claims involving various vitamins—“you still see some stubborn researchers citing the first few studies
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That’s why Schooler argues that scientists need to become more rigorous about data collection before they publish. “We’re wasting too much time chasing after bad studies and underpowered experiments,”
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The current “obsession” with replicability distracts from the real problem, which is faulty design.
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“Every researcher should have to spell out, in advance, how many subjects they’re going to use, and what exactly they’re testing, and what constitutes a sufficient level of proof. We have the tools to be much more transparent about our experiments.”
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Schooler recommends the establishment of an open-source database, in which researchers are required to outline their planned investigations and document all their results. “I think this would provide a huge increase in access to scientific work and give us a much better way to judge the quality of an experiment,”
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scientific research will always be shadowed by a force that can’t be curbed, only contained: sheer randomness. Although little research has been done on the experimental dangers of chance and happenstance, the research that exists isn’t encouraging.
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The disturbing implication of the Crabbe study is that a lot of extraordinary scientific data are nothing but noise. The hyperactivity of those coked-up Edmonton mice wasn’t an interesting new fact—it was a meaningless outlier, a by-product of invisible variables we don’t understand.
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The problem, of course, is that such dramatic findings are also the most likely to get published in prestigious journals, since the data are both statistically significant and entirely unexpected
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This suggests that the decline effect is actually a decline of illusion. While Karl Popper imagined falsification occurring with a single, definitive experiment—Galileo refuted Aristotelian mechanics in an afternoon—the process turns out to be much messier than that.
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Many scientific theories continue to be considered true even after failing numerous experimental tests.
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Even the law of gravity hasn’t always been perfect at predicting real-world phenomena. (In one test, physicists measuring gravity by means of deep boreholes in the Nevada desert found a two-and-a-half-per-cent discrepancy between the theoretical predictions and the actual data.)
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Such anomalies demonstrate the slipperiness of empiricism. Although many scientific ideas generate conflicting results and suffer from falling effect sizes, they continue to get cited in the textbooks and drive standard medical practice. Why? Because these ideas seem true. Because they make sense. Because we can’t bear to let them go. And this is why the decline effect is so troubling. Not because it reveals the human fallibility of science, in which data are tweaked and beliefs shape perceptions. (Such shortcomings aren’t surprising, at least for scientists.) And not because it reveals that many of our most exciting theories are fleeting fads and will soon be rejected. (That idea has been around since Thomas Kuhn.)
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The decline effect is troubling because it reminds us how difficult it is to prove anything. We like to pretend that our experiments define the truth for us. But that’s often not the case. Just because an idea is true doesn’t mean it can be proved. And just because an idea can be proved doesn’t mean it’s true. When the experiments are done, we still have to choose what to believe. ♦
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Biomimicry in Reverse: 5 Inventions That Help Animals Survive Humans | Big Think - 0 views
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Scientists have been stealing ideas from animals for years.
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One industrial “nose job” later, the bullet train is far quieter and goes 10% faster on 15% less fuel.
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There are countless examples of similar “biomimicry.” The velcro on your coat is based on those aggravating burrs that cling to your jeans after a hike. Scientists are developing painless hypodermic needles modeled on mosquito mouths that get your blood out without your even noticing.
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“Reciprocal Biomimicry Initiative.” The idea is to leverage human technology for the benefit of animals for a change.
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The star attraction, arguably, is GPS for birds.
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Keats is suggesting specially-designed shell coverings boasting urban colors and visual patterns to help them avoid notice.
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This article reminded me of an article I read in my SAT reading section. Biomimicry is a very interesting subject because it learns from the nature. An example I have read about is the arrangement of the solar plants. Scientists arrange them like how seeds arranged in a sunflower to maximize the amount of solar energy absorbed. And now, Scientists are using human technology to benefit nature. But somehow I think it is inefficient because if we have to spend money to make the environment we influenced to feel like natural, why don't we protect it and keep it natural at the first place? --Sissi (3/2/2017)
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2013 Life Sciences Salary Survey | The Scientist Magazine® - 0 views
www.the-scientist.com/?articles.view/articleNo/38033/title/2013-Life-Sciences-Salary-Survey/
sciences salary survey research
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US researchers across academia, industry, and government earn an average of nearly $96,000 per year in total compensation, including base salary, bonuses, and other income, compared with a European average of just $66,700. Life scientists in Canada come in right in the middle, at $78,200, while researchers in India lag far behind, earning an average of just $11,200.
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life sciences, could explain the oft-cited “brain drain,” which has seen foreign researchers flock to the U.S. in search of good jobs with ample compensation.
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Across the globe, scientists earn a wide range of salaries, with US researchers earning nearly $96,000 total compensation per year while India lags far behind at less than $11,200, though this discrepancy is at least partly explained by the vast differences in cost of living in the two countries. Still, this enormous gulf is a strong driver of “brain drain
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Dramatic budget cuts in the past few years, however, may make US academia less of a paradise.
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European salaries also lag behind those in the U.S., with the average European life scientist making anywhere from 41 to 82 percent of what the average American researcher earns.
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Europe make around 50 percent of what full professors there make, postdocs in the U.S. earn less than a third of a professor’s salary.
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Equal Pay Act prohibited unequal pay for men and women doing the same jobs. But salary disparities remain, including in the life sciences. “It is a persistent problem,” says Curtis. “It’s important for people to realize that there are continuing inequalities.” In this year’s survey, for example, male respondents in the U.S. reported an average total income of around $111,000 per year, while their female counterparts averaged just $77,000 in annual pay.
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fewer women make it to high-level positions than men do, says Curtis.
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life-science specialty is often tomorrow’s overcrowded field. Case in point: genomics versus genetics. Genomics relies heavily on bioinformatics, mathematics, and computational modeling
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survey highlights the well-established discrepancy between industry and academic salaries. According to the data, life scientists in industry make around $136,000 per year, compared to average academic earnings of $85,000.
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Post-Publication Peer Review Mainstreamed | The Scientist Magazine® - 0 views
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peer review scientist research knowledge publication
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peer review. The process has been blamed for everything from slowing down the communication of new discoveries to introducing woeful biases to the literature
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peer review does not elevate the quality of published science and that many published research findings are later shown to be false. In response, a growing number of scientists are working to impose a new vision of the scientific process through post-publication review,
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organized post-publication peer review system could help “clarify experiments, suggest avenues for follow-up work and even catch errors.” If used by a critical mass of scientists, he added, “it could strengthen the scientific process.”
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allowing for an
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onymous comments, PubPeer aims to create an open, debate-friendly environment, while maintaining the rigor the closed review process currently used by most journals. Its creators, who describe themselves as “early-stage scientists,” have also decided to remain anonymous, citing career concerns.
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Santorum to Pope Francis: 'Leave science to the scientists' | MSNBC - 0 views
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Santorum rebuked Pope Francis this week, saying the pope should “leave science to the scientists” with regard to the pontiff’s remarks on climate change.
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Pope Francis — who has a degree in chemistry — has said causing climate change is a sin because the Earth is God’s creation and should be protected. “Safeguard Creation,” he said in a speech last month. “Because if we destroy Creation, Creation will destroy us! Never forget this!”
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far right conservative, has expressed disbelief in climate change — and evolution, for that matter — and routinely rejects evidence scientists present on both matters.
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“the church has gotten it wrong a few times on science, and I think that we probably are better off leaving science to the scientists and focusing on what we’re really good at, which is … theology and morality.”
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“When we get involved with political and controversial scientific theories, I think the church is probably not as forceful and credible.”
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Great Scientists Don't Need Math - WSJ - 0 views
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science math modeling intuition social science knowledge progress
shared by Javier E on 20 Mar 15
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Without advanced math, how can you do serious work in the sciences? Well, I have a professional secret to share: Many of the most successful scientists in the world today are mathematically no more than semiliterate.
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I was reassured by the discovery that superior mathematical ability is similar to fluency in foreign languages. I might have become fluent with more effort and sessions talking with the natives, but being swept up with field and laboratory research, I advanced only by a small amount.
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Far more important throughout the rest of science is the ability to form concepts, during which the researcher conjures images and processes by intuition.
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exceptional mathematical fluency is required in only a few disciplines, such as particle physics, astrophysics and information theory
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When something new is encountered, the follow-up steps usually require mathematical and statistical methods to move the analysis forward. If that step proves too technically difficult for the person who made the discovery, a mathematician or statistician can be added as a collaborator
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Ideas in science emerge most readily when some part of the world is studied for its own sake. They follow from thorough, well-organized knowledge of all that is known or can be imagined of real entities and processes within that fragment of existence
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Ramped up and disciplined, fantasies are the fountainhead of all creative thinking. Newton dreamed, Darwin dreamed, you dream. The images evoked are at first vague. They may shift in form and fade in and out. They grow a bit firmer when sketched as diagrams on pads of paper, and they take on life as real examples are sought and found.
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Over the years, I have co-written many papers with mathematicians and statisticians, so I can offer the following principle with confidence. Call it Wilson's Principle No. 1: It is far easier for scientists to acquire needed collaboration from mathematicians and statisticians than it is for mathematicians and statisticians to find scientists able to make use of their equations.
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If your level of mathematical competence is low, plan to raise it, but meanwhile, know that you can do outstanding scientific work with what you have. Think twice, though, about specializing in fields that require a close alternation of experiment and quantitative analysis. These include most of physics and chemistry, as well as a few specialties in molecular biology.
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Newton invented calculus in order to give substance to his imagination
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Darwin had little or no mathematical ability, but with the masses of information he had accumulated, he was able to conceive a process to which mathematics was later applied.
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For aspiring scientists, a key first step is to find a subject that interests them deeply and focus on it. In doing so, they should keep in mind Wilson's Principle No. 2: For every scientist, there exists a discipline for which his or her level of mathematical competence is enough to achieve excellence.
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Are scientists blocking their own progress? - The Washington Post - 1 views
www.washingtonpost.com/...ts-blocking-their-own-progress
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Max Planck won a Nobel prize for his revolutionary work in quantum mechanics, but it was his interest in the philosophy of science that led to what is now called “Planck’s Principle.” Planck argued that science was an evolving system of thought which changes slowly over time, fueled by the deaths of old ideas. As he wrote in his 1968 autobiography: “A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.”
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Is our understanding of the world based in pure objective reason, or are the theories that underpin it shaped by generational biases? Do our most famous thinkers actually block new ideas from gaining ground?
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A new paper published by the National Bureau of Economic Research suggests that fame does play a significant role in deciding when and whether new scientific ideas can gain traction. When a prominent scientist dies, the paper’s authors found, the number of articles published by his or her collaborators tends to fall “precipitously” in the years following the death — those supporters tend not to continue advocating for a once-famous scientist’s ideas once the scientist is gone.
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the number of research articles written by other scientists — including those with opposing ideas — increases by 8 percent on average, implying that the work of these scientists had been stifled before, but that after the death of a ubiquitous figure, the field becomes more open to new ideas. The study also found that these new articles are less likely to cite previous research and are more likely to be cited by others in the field. Death signifies a changing of the guard
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Our instinct is often to view science as a concrete tower, growing ever upward and built upon the immovable foundations of earlier pioneers. Sir Isaac Newton famously characterized this as “standing on the shoulders of giants.”
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Mid-20th century philosopher Thomas Kuhn was among the first to come to this conclusion, in his 1962 book “The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.” He argued that scientific theories appeared in punctuated “paradigm shifts,” in which the underlying assumptions of a field are questioned and eventually overthrown
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Kuhn’s book was, to some extent, a paradigm shift in its own right. According to his logic, commonly held notions in science were bound to change and become outdated. What we believe today will tomorrow be revised, rewritten — and in the most extreme cases ridiculed.
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the journal Nature earlier this year said scientific data is prone to bias because researchers design experiments and make observations in ways that support hypotheses
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equally as important are simple shifts in perspective. It only takes one researcher seeing an accepted scientific model in a new light for a solidified paradigm to enter what Kuhn called a “crisis phase” and beg for alternative explanations
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The NBER study shows that those who questioned consensus ought to be given the opportunity to make their case, not ignored, silenced or pushed to the back of the line.
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We’re likely to see these “paradigm shifts” happen at a much faster rate as data and research become easier to share worldwide. For some, this reality might seem chaotic; for the truly curious, it is exhilarating. The result may be a more democratic version of science — one in which the progress of ideas doesn’t have to wait until the funeral of a great mind.
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How to Use Critical Thinking to Separate Fact From Fiction Online | by Simon Spichak | ... - 2 views
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Critical thinking helps us frame everyday problems, teaches us to ask the correct questions, and points us towards intelligent solutions.
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Critical thinking is a continuing practice that involves an open mind and methods for synthesizing and evaluating the quality of knowledge and evidence, as well as an understanding of human errors.
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Step 1. What We Believe Depends on How We Feel
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One of the first things I ask myself when I read a headline or find a claim about a product is if the phrase is emotionally neutral. Some headlines generate outrage or fear, indicating that there is a clear bias. When we read something that exploits are emotions, we must be careful.
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misinformation tends to play on our emotions a lot better than factual reporting or news.
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When I’m trying to figure out whether a claim is factual, there are a few questions I always ask myself.Does the headline, article, or information evoke fear, anger, or other strong negative emotions?Where did you hear about the information? Does it cite any direct evidence?What is the expert consensus on this information?
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Step 2. Evidence Synthesis and EvaluationSometimes I’m still feeling uncertain if there’s any truth to a claim. Even after taking into account the emotions it evokes, I need to find the evidence of a claim and evaluate its quality
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Often, the information that I want to check is either political or scientific. There are different questions I ask myself, depending on the nature of these claims.
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Political claims
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Looking at multiple different outlets, each with its own unique biases, helps us get a picture of the issue.
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I use multiple websites specializing in fact-checking. They provide primary sources of evidence for different types of claims. Here is a list of websites where I do my fact-checking:
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SnopesPolitifactFactCheckMedia Bias/Fact Check (a bias assessor for fact-checking websites)Simply type in some keywords from the claim to find out if it’s verified with primary sources, misleading, false, or unproven.
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Science claims
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Often we tout science as the process by which we uncover absolute truths about the universe. Once many scientists agree on something, it gets disseminated in the news. Confusion arises once this science changes or evolves, as is what happened throughout the coronavirus pandemic. In addition to fear and misinformation, we have to address a fundamental misunderstanding of the way science works when practicing critical thinking.
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It is confusing to hear about certain drugs found to cure the coronavirus one moment, followed by many other scientists and researchers saying that they don’t. How do we collect and assess these scientific claims when there are discrepancies?
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A big part of these scientific findings is difficult to access for the public
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Sometimes the distinction between scientific coverage and scientific articles isn’t clear. When this difference is clear, we might still find findings in different academic journals that disagree with each other. Sometimes, research that isn’t peer-reviewed receives plenty of coverage in the media
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Correlation and causation: Sometimes a claim might present two factors that appear correlated. Consider recent misinformation about 5G Towers and the spread of coronavirus. While there might appear to be associations, it doesn’t necessarily mean that there is a causative relationship
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To practice critical thinking with these kinds of claims, we must ask the following questions:Does this claim emerge from a peer-reviewed scientific article? Has this paper been retracted?Does this article appear in a reputable journal?What is the expert consensus on this article?
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The next examples I want to bring up refer to retracted articles from peer-reviewed journals. Since science is a self-correcting process, rather than a decree of absolutes, mistakes and fraud are corrected.
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Briefly, I will show you exactly how to tell if the resource you are reading is an actual, peer-reviewed scientific article.
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How does science go from experiments to the news?
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researchers outline exactly how they conducted their experiments so other researchers can replicate them, build upon them, or provide quality assurance for them. This scientific report does not go straight to the nearest science journalist. Websites and news outlets like Scientific American or The Atlantic do not publish scientific articles.
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Here is a quick checklist that will help you figure out if you’re viewing a scientific paper.
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Once it’s written up, researchers send this manuscript to a journal. Other experts in the field then provide comments, feedback, and critiques. These peer reviewers ask researchers for clarification or even more experiments to strengthen their results. Peer review often takes months or sometimes years.
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Some peer-reviewed scientific journals are Science and Nature; other scientific articles are searchable through the PubMed database. If you’re curious about a topic, search for scientific papers.
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Peer-review is crucial! If you’re assessing the quality of evidence for claims, peer-reviewed research is a strong indicator
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Finally, there are platforms for scientists to review research even after publication in a peer-reviewed journal. Although most scientists conduct experiments and interpret their data objectively, they may still make errors. Many scientists use Twitter and PubPeer to perform a post-publication review
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Step 3. Are You Practicing Objectivity?
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To finish off, I want to discuss common cognitive errors that we tend to make. Finally, there are some framing questions to ask at the end of our research to help us with assessing any information that we find.
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Dunning-Kruger effect: Why do we rely on experts? In 1999, David Dunning and Justin Kruger published “Unskilled and unaware of it: how difficulties in recognizing one’s own incompetence lead to inflated self-assessments.” They found that the less a person understands about a topic, the more confident of their abilities or knowledge they will be
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How does this relate to critical thinking? If you’re reading a claim sourced or written by somebody who lacks expertise in a field, they are underestimating its complexity. Whenever possible, look for an authoritative source when synthesizing and evaluating evidence for a claim.
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Survivorship bias: Ever heard someone argue that we don’t need vaccines or seatbelts? After all, they grew up without either of them and are still alive and healthy!These arguments are appealing at first, but they don’t account for any cases of failures. They are attributing a misplaced sense of optimism and safety by ignoring the deaths that occurred resultant from a lack of vaccinations and seatbelts
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When you’re still unsure, follow the consensus of the experts within the field. Scientists pointed out flaws within this pre-print article leading to its retraction. The pre-print was removed from the server because it did not hold up to proper scientific standards or scrutiny.
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Now with all the evidence we’ve gathered, we ask ourselves some final questions. There are plenty more questions you will come up with yourself, case-by-case.Who is making the original claim?Who supports these claims? What are their qualifications?What is the evidence used for these claims?Where is this evidence published?How was the evidence gathered?Why is it important?
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“even if some data is supporting a claim, does it make sense?” Some claims are deceptively true but fall apart when accounting for this bias.
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Technopoly-Chs. 9,10--Scientism, the great symbol drain - 0 views
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shared by Javier E on 02 Oct 21
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By Scientism, I mean three interrelated ideas that, taken together, stand as one of the pillars of Technopoly.
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The first and indispensable idea is, as noted, that the methods of the natural sciences can be applied to the study of human behavior. This idea is the backbone of much of psychology and sociology as practiced at least in America, and largely accounts for the fact that social science, to quote F. A. Hayek, "has cont~ibuted scarcely anything to our understanding of social phenomena." 2
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The second idea is, as also noted, that social science generates specific principles which can be used to organize society on a rational and humane basis. This implies that technical meansmostly "invisible technologies" supervised by experts-can be designed to control human behavior and set it on the proper course.
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The third idea is that faith in science can serve as a comprehensive belief system that gives meaning to life, as well. as a sense of well-being, morality, and even immortality.
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the spirit behind this scientific ideal inspired several men to believe that the reliable and predictable knowledge that could be obtained about stars and atoms could also be obtained about human behavior.
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Among the best known of these early "social scientists" were Claude-Henri de Saint-Simon, Prosper Enfantin, and, of course, Auguste Comte.
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They held in common two beliefs to which T echnopoly is deeply indebted: that the natural sciences provide a method to unlock the secrets of both the human heart and the direction of social life; that society can be rationally and humanely reorganized according to principles that social science will uncover. It is with these men that the idea of "social engineering" begins and the seeds of Scientism are planted.
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Information produced by counting may sometimes be valuable in helping a person get an idea, or, even more so, in providing support for an idea. But the mere activity of counting does not make science.
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Nor does observing th_ings, though it is sometimes said that if one is empirical, one is scientific. To be empirical means to look at things before drawing conclusions. Everyone, therefore, is an empiricist, with the possible exception of paranoid schizophrenics.
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What we may call science, then, is the quest to find the immutable and universal laws that govern processes, presuming that there are cause-and-effect relations among these processes. It follows that the quest to understand human behavior and feeling can in no sense except the most trivial be called science.
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Scientists do strive to be empirical and where possible precise, but it is also basic to their enterprise that they maintain a high degree of objectivity, which means that they study things independently of what people think or do about them.
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I do not say, incidentally, that the Oedipus complex and God do not exist. Nor do I say that to believe in them is harmful-far from it. I say only that, there being no tests that could, in principle, show them to be false, they fall outside the purview Scientism 151 of science, as do almost all theories that make up the content of "social science."
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in the nineteenth centu~, novelists provided us with most of the powerful metaphors and images of our culture.
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This fact relieves the scientist of inquiring into their values and motivations and for this reason alone separates science from what is called social science, consigning the methodology of the latter (to quote Gunnar Myrdal) to the status of the "metaphysical and pseudo-objective." 3
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The status of social-science methods is further reduced by the fact that there are almost no experiments that will reveal a social-science theory to be false.
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et us further suppose that Milgram had found that 100 percent of his 1 subjecl:s did what they were told, with or without Hannah Arendt. And now let us suppose that I tell you a story of a Scientism 153 group of people who in some real situation refused to comply with the orders of a legitimate authority-let us say, the Danes who in the face of Nazi occupation helped nine thousand Jews escape to Sweden. Would you say to me that this cannot be so because Milgram' s study proves otherwise? Or would you say that this overturns Milgram's work? Perhaps you would say that the Danish response is not relevant, since the Danes did not regard the Nazi occupation as constituting legitimate autho!ity. But then, how would we explain the cooperative response to Nazi authority of the French, the Poles, and the Lithuanians? I think you would say none of these things, because Milgram' s experiment qoes not confirm or falsify any theory that might be said to postulate a law of human nature. His study-which, incidentally, I find both fascinating and terrifying-is not science. It is something else entirely.
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Freud, could not imagine how the book could be judged exemplary: it was science or it was nothing. Well, of course, Freud was wrong. His work is exemplary-indeed, monumental-but scarcely anyone believes today that Freud was doing science, any more than educated people believe that Marx was doing science, or Max Weber or Lewis Mumford or Bruno Bettelheim or Carl Jung or Margaret Mead or Arnold Toynbee. What these people were doing-and Stanley Milgram was doing-is documenting the behavior and feelings of people as they confront problems posed by their culture.
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the stories of social r~searchers are much closer in structure and purpose to what is called imaginative literature; that is to say, both a social researcher and a novelist give unique interpretations to a set of human events and support their interpretations with examples in various forms. Their interpretations cannot be proved or disproved but will draw their appeal from the power of their language, the depth of their explanations, the relevance of their examples, and the credibility of their themes.
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And all of this has, in both cases, an identifiable moral purpose.
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The words "true" and "false" do not apply here in the sense that they are used in mathematics or science. For there is nothing universally and irrevocably true or false about these interpretations. There are no critical tests to confirm or falsify them. There are no natural laws from which they are derived. They are bound by time, by situation, and above all by the cultural prejudices of the researcher or writer.
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Both the novelist and the social researcher construct their stories by the use of archetypes and metaphors.
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Cervantes, for example, gave us the enduring archetype of the incurable dreamer and idealist in Don Quixote. The social historian Marx gave us the archetype of the ruthless and conspiring, though nameless, capitalist. Flaubert gave us the repressed b~urgeois romantic in Emma Bovary. And Margaret Mead gave us the carefree, guiltless Samoan adolescent. Kafka gave us the alienated urbanite driven to self-loathing. And Max Weber gave us hardworking men driven by a mythology he called the Protestant Ethic. Dostoevsky gave us the egomaniac redeemed by love and religious fervor. And B. F. Skinner gave us the automaton redeemed by a benign technology.
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Why do such social researchers tell their stories? Essentially for didactic and moralistic purposes. These men and women tell their stories for the same reason the Buddha, Confucius, Hillel, and Jesus told their stories (and for the same reason D. H. Lawrence told his).
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Moreover, in their quest for objectivity, scientists proceed on the assumption that the objects they study are indifferent to the fact that they are being studied.
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If, indeed, the price of civilization is repressed sexuality, it was not Sigmund Freud who discovered it. If the consciousness of people is formed by their material circumstances, it was not Marx who discovered it. If the medium is the message, it was not McLuhan who discovered it. They have merely retold ancient stories in a modem style.
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Unlike science, social research never discovers anything. It only rediscovers what people once were told and need to be told again.
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Only in knowing ~omething of the reasons why they advocated education can we make sense of the means they suggest. But to understand their reas.ons we must also understand the narratives that governed their view of the world. By narrative, I mean a story of human history that gives meaning to the past, explains the present, and provides guidance for the future.
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In Technopoly, it is not Scientism 159 enough to say, it is immoral and degrading to allow people to be homeless. You cannot get anywhere by asking a judge, a politician, or a bureaucrat to r~ad Les Miserables or Nana or, indeed, the New Testament. Y 01.i must show that statistics have produced data revealing the homeless to be unhappy and to be a drain on the economy. Neither Dostoevsky nor Freud, Dickens nor Weber, Twain nor Marx, is now a dispenser of legitimate knowledge. They are interesting; they are ''.worth reading"; they are artifacts of our past. But as for "truth," we must tum to "science."
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In Technopoly, it is not enough for social research to rediscover ancient truths or to comment on and criticize the moral behavior of people. In T echnopoly, it is an insult to call someone a "moralizer." Nor is it sufficient for social research to put forward metaphors, images, and ideas that can help people live with some measure of understanding and dignity.
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Such a program lacks the aura of certain knowledge that only science can provide. It becomes necessary, then, to transform psychology, sociology, and anthropology into "sciences," in which humanity itself becomes an object, much like plants, planets, or ice cubes.
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That is why the commonplaces that people fear death and that children who come from stable families valuing scholarship will do well in school must be announced as "discoveries" of scientific enterprise. In this way, social resear~hers can see themselves, and can be seen, as scientists, researchers without bias or values, unburdened by mere opinion. In this way, social policies can be claimed to rest on objectively determined facts.
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given the psychological, social, and material benefits that attach to the label "scientist," it is not hard to see why social researchers should find it hard to give it up.
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Our social "s'cientists" have from the beginning been less tender of conscience, or less rigorous in their views of science, or perhaps just more confused about the questions their procedures can answer and those they cannot. In any case, they have not been squeamish about imputing to their "discoveries" and the rigor of their procedures the power to direct us in how we ought rightly to behave.
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It is less easy to see why the rest of us have so willingly, even eagerly, cooperated in perpetuating the same illusion.
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When the new technologies and techniques and spirit of men like Galileo, Newton, and Bacon laid the foundations of natural science, they also discredited the authority of earlier accounts of the physical world, as found, for example, in the great tale of Genesis. By calling into question the truth of such accounts in one realm, science undermined the whole edifice of belief in sacred stories and ultimately swept away with it the source to which most humans had looked for moral authority. It is not too much to say, I think, that the desacralized world has been searching for an alternative source of moral authority ever since.
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We welcome them gladly, and the claim explicitly made or implied, because we need so desperately to find some source outside the frail and shaky judgments of mortals like ourselves to authorize our moral decisions and behavior. And outside of the authority of brute force, which can scarcely be called moral, we seem to have little left but the authority of procedures.
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It is not merely the misapplication of techniques such as quantification to questions where numbers have nothing to say; not merely the confusion of the material and social realms of human experience; not merely the claim of social researchers to be applying the aims and procedures of natural scien\:e to the human world.
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This, then, is what I mean by Scientism.
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It is the desperate hope, and wish, and ultimately the illusory belief that some standardized set of procedures called "science" can provide us with an unimpeachable source of moral authority, a suprahuman basis for answers to questions like "What is life, and when, and why?" "Why is death, and suffering?" 'What is right and wrong to do?" "What are good and evil ends?" "How ought we to think and feel and behave?
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Science can tell us when a heart begins to beat, or movement begins, or what are the statistics on the survival of neonates of different gestational ages outside the womb. But science has no more authority than you do or I do to establish such criteria as the "true" definition of "life" or of human state or of personhood.
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Social research can tell us how some people behave in the presence of what they believe to be legitimate authority. But it cannot tell us when authority is "legitimate" and when not, or how we must decide, or when it may be right or wrong to obey.
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To ask of science, or expect of science, or accept unchallenged from science the answers to such questions is Scientism. And it is Technopoly's grand illusion.
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In the institutional form it has taken in the United States, advertising is a symptom of a world-view 'that sees tradition as an obstacle to its claims. There can, of course, be no functioning sense of tradition without a measure of respect for symbols. Tradition is, in fact, nothing but the acknowledgment of the authority of symbols and the relevance of the narratives that gave birth to them. With the erosion of symbols there follows a loss of narrative, which is one of the most debilitating consequences of Technopoly' s power.
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What the advertiser needs to know is not what is right about the product but what is wrong about the buyer. And so the balance of business expenditures shifts from product research to market research, which meahs orienting business away from making products of value and toward making consumers feel valuable. The business of business becomes pseudo-therapy; the consumer, a patient reassl.,lred by psychodramas.
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At the moment, 1t 1s considered necessary to introduce computers to the classroom, as it once was thought necessary to bring closed-circuit television and film to the classroom. To the question "Why should we do this?" the answer is: "To make learning more efficient and more interesting." Such an answer is considered entirely adequate, since in T ~chnopoly efficiency and interest need no justification. It is, therefore, usually not noticed that this answer does not address the question "What is learning for?"
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What this means is that somewhere near the core of Technopoly is a vast industry with license to use all available symbols to further the interests of commerce, by devouring the psyches of consumers.
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In the twentieth century, such metaphors and images have come largely from the pens of social historians and researchers. ·Think of John Dewey, William James, Erik Erikson, Alfred Kinsey, Thorstein Veblen, Margaret Mead, Lewis Mumford, B. F. Skinner, Carl Rogers, Marshall McLuhan, Barbara Tuchman, Noam Chomsky, Robert Coles, even Stanley Milgram, and you must acknowledge that our ideas of what we are like and what kind of country we live in come from their stories to a far greater extent than from the stories of our most renowned novelists.
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social idea that must be advanced through education.
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Confucius advocated teaching "the Way" because in tradition he saw the best hope for social order. As our first systematic fascist, Plato wished education to produce philosopher kings. Cicero argued that education must free the student from the tyranny of the present. Jefferson thought the purpose of education is to teach the young how to protect their liberties. Rousseau wished education to free the young from the unnatural constraints of a wicked and arbitrary social order. And among John Dewey's aims was to help the student function without certainty in a world of constant change and puzzling· ambiguities.
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The point is that cultures must have narratives and will find them where they will, even if they lead to catastrophe. The alternative is to live without meaning, the ultimate negation of life itself.
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It is also to the point to say that each narrative is given its form and its emotional texture through a cluster of symbols that call for respect and allegiance, even devotion.
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by definition, there can be no education philosophy that does not address what learning is for. Confucius, Plato, Quintilian, Cicero, Comenius, Erasmus, Locke, Rousseau, Jefferson, Russell, Montessori, Whitehead, and Dewey--each believed that there was some transcendent political, spiritual, or
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The importance of the American Constitution is largely in its function as a symbol of the story of our origins. It is our political equivalent of Genesis. To mock it, to• ignore it, to circwnvent it is to declare the irrelevance of the story of the United States as a moral light unto the world. In like fashion, the Statue of Liberty is the key symbol of the story of America as the natural home of the teeming masses, from anywhere, yearning to be free.
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There are those who believe--as did the great historian Arnold Toynbee-that without a comprehensive religious narrative at its center a culture must decline. Perhaps. There are, after all, other sources-mythology, politics, philosophy, and science; for example--but it is certain that no culture can flourish without narratives of transcendent orjgin and power.
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This does not mean that the mere existence of such a narrative ensures a culture's stability and strength. There are destructive narratives. A narrative provides meaning, not necessarily survival-as, for example, the story provided by Adolf Hitler to the German nation in t:he 1930s.
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What story does American education wish to tell now? In a growing Technopoly, what do we believe education is for?
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The answers are discouraging, and one of. them can be inferred from any television commercial urging the young to stay in school. The commercial will either imply or state explicitly that education will help the persevering student to get a ·good job. And that's it. Well, not quite. There is also the idea that we educate ourselves to compete with the Japanese or the Germans in an economic struggle to be number one.
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Young men, for example, will learn how to make lay-up shots when they play basketball. To be able to make them is part of the The Great Symbol Drain 177 definition of what good players are. But they do not play basketball for that purpose. There is usually a broader, deeper, and more meaningful reason for wanting to play-to assert their manhood, to please their fathers, to be acceptable to their peers, even for the sheer aesthetic pleasure of the game itself. What you have to do to be a success must be addressed only after you have found a reason to be successful.
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Bloom's solution is that we go back to the basics of Western thought.
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He wants us to teach our students what Plato, Aristotle, Cicero, Saint Augustine, and other luminaries have had to say on the great ethical and epistemological questions. He believes that by acquainting themselves with great books our students will acquire a moral and intellectual foundation that will give meaning and texture to their lives.
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Hirsch's encyclopedic list is not a solution but a description of the problem of information glut. It is therefore essentially incoherent. But it also confuses a consequence of education with a purpose. Hirsch attempted to answer the question "What is an educated person?" He left unanswered the question "What is an education for?"
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Those who reject Bloom's idea have offered several arguments against it. The first is that such a purpose for education is elitist: the mass of students would not find the great story of
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Western civilization inspiring, are too deeply alienated from the past to find it so, and would therefore have difficulty connecting the "best that has been thought and said" to their own struggles to find q1eaning in their lives.
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A second argument, coming from what is called a "leftist" perspective, is even more discouraging. In a sense, it offers a definition of what is meant by elitism. It asserts that the "story of Western civilization" is a partial, biased, and even oppressive one. It is not the story of blacks, American Indians, Hispanics, women, homosexuals-of any people who are not white heterosexual males of Judea-Christian heritage. This claim denies that there is or can be a national culture, a narrative of organizing power and inspiring symbols which all citizens can identify with and draw sustenance from. If this is true, it means nothing less than that our national symbols have been drained of their power to unite, and that education must become a tribal affair; that is, each subculture must find its own story and symbols, and use them as the moral basis of education.
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nto this void comes the Technopoly story, with its emphasis on progress without limits, rights without responsibilities, and technology without cost. The T echnopoly story is without a moral center. It puts in its place efficiency, interest, and economic advance. It promises heaven on earth through the conveniences of technological progress. It casts aside all traditional narratives and symbols that· suggest stability and orderliness, and tells, instead, of a life of skills, technical expertise, and the ecstasy of consumption. Its purpose is to produce functionaries for an ongoing Technopoly.
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It answers Bloom by saying that the story of Western civilization is irrelevant; it answers the political left by saying there is indeed a common culture whose name is T echnopoly and whose key symbol is now the computer, toward which there must be neither irreverence nor blasphemy. It even answers Hirsch by saying that there are items on his list that, if thought about too deeply and taken too seriously, will interfere with the progress of technology.
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Climate Change Data Deluge Has Scientists Scrambling for Solutions - WSJ - 0 views
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For decades, scientists working to predict changes in the climate relied mostly on calculations involving simple laws of physics and chemistry but little data from the real world. But with temperatures world-wide continuing to rise—and with data-collection techniques and technologies continuing to advance—scientists now rely on meticulous measurements of temperatures, ocean currents, soil moisture, air quality, cloud cover and hundreds of other phenomena on Earth and in its atmosphere.
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“Now we can truly do climate studies because now we have observations to precisely say how weather trends have changed and are changing,
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“When you are trying to develop long-term environmental records, including climate records, consistent measurement is incredibly valuable,” says Kevin Murphy, who as NASA’s chief science data officer oversees an archive of Earth observation data used by 3.9 million people last year. “It’s irreplaceable data.”
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Over the next decade, officials managing the main U.S. repositories of climate-related information expect their archives’ total volume to grow from about 83 petabytes today to more than 650 petabytes.
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One petabyte of digital memory can hold thousands of feature-length movies, with 650 enough to hold the contents of the Library of Congress 30 times over.
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All that information, though, is more than conventional data storage can handle and more than any human mind can readily assimilate,
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To accommodate it all, the federal workers tasked with managing the data are moving it into the cloud, which offers almost unlimited memory storage while eliminating the need for scientists to maintain their own on-site archive
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archive managers are devising new analytical techniques and adapting a standard format for the data no matter who collected it and who wants to study it.
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In essence, they are reinventing climate science from the ground up.
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“We are in the midst of a technology evolution,
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As of last September, government agencies and private companies had about 900 Earth-orbiting satellites gathering data about our planet, according to the Union of Concerned Scientists. That is almost three times as many as were aloft in 2008. More are being readied for launch.
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ASA’s $1 billion Surface Water and Ocean Topography mission will measure Earth’s lakes, rivers and oceans in the first detailed global survey of the planet’s surface water.
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That is a drop in the data bucket compared with the space agency’s $1.5 billion Nisar radar imaging satellite, which is scheduled for launch in January 2023. Its sensors will detect movements of the planet’s land, ice sheets and sea ice as small as 0.4 inches, transmitting 80 terabytes of data every day.
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With current data handling systems and typical internet connections, it would take a climate researcher about a year to download just four days’ worth of Nisar dat
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NASA and NOAA are working with Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud and Microsoft Corp. to move their climate databases into the cloud.
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Earlier this year, the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change for the first time used data on past climate behavior to gauge the reliability of climate models for policy makers.
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The new science of death: 'There's something happening in the brain that makes no sense... - 0 views
www.theguardian.com/...iousness-near-death-experience
death science brain science research psychology
shared by Javier E on 04 Apr 24
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Jimo Borjigin, a professor of neurology at the University of Michigan, had been troubled by the question of what happens to us when we die. She had read about the near-death experiences of certain cardiac-arrest survivors who had undergone extraordinary psychic journeys before being resuscitated. Sometimes, these people reported travelling outside of their bodies towards overwhelming sources of light where they were greeted by dead relatives. Others spoke of coming to a new understanding of their lives, or encountering beings of profound goodness
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Borjigin didn’t believe the content of those stories was true – she didn’t think the souls of dying people actually travelled to an afterworld – but she suspected something very real was happening in those patients’ brains. In her own laboratory, she had discovered that rats undergo a dramatic storm of many neurotransmitters, including serotonin and dopamine, after their hearts stop and their brains lose oxygen. She wondered if humans’ near-death experiences might spring from a similar phenomenon, and if it was occurring even in people who couldn’t be revived
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when she looked at the scientific literature, she found little enlightenment. “To die is such an essential part of life,” she told me recently. “But we knew almost nothing about the dying brain.” So she decided to go back and figure out what had happened inside the brains of people who died at the University of Michigan neurointensive care unit.
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Since the 1960s, advances in resuscitation had helped to revive thousands of people who might otherwise have died. About 10% or 20% of those people brought with them stories of near-death experiences in which they felt their souls or selves departing from their bodies
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According to several international surveys and studies, one in 10 people claims to have had a near-death experience involving cardiac arrest, or a similar experience in circumstances where they may have come close to death. That’s roughly 800 million souls worldwide who may have dipped a toe in the afterlife.
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In the 1970s, a small network of cardiologists, psychiatrists, medical sociologists and social psychologists in North America and Europe began investigating whether near-death experiences proved that dying is not the end of being, and that consciousness can exist independently of the brain. The field of near-death studies was born.
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in 1975, an American medical student named Raymond Moody published a book called Life After Life.
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Meanwhile, new technologies and techniques were helping doctors revive more and more people who, in earlier periods of history, would have almost certainly been permanently deceased.
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“We are now at the point where we have both the tools and the means to scientifically answer the age-old question: What happens when we die?” wrote Sam Parnia, an accomplished resuscitation specialist and one of the world’s leading experts on near-death experiences, in 2006. Parnia himself was devising an international study to test whether patients could have conscious awareness even after they were found clinically dead.
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Borjigin, together with several colleagues, took the first close look at the record of electrical activity in the brain of Patient One after she was taken off life support. What they discovered – in results reported for the first time last year – was almost entirely unexpected, and has the potential to rewrite our understanding of death.
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“I believe what we found is only the tip of a vast iceberg,” Borjigin told me. “What’s still beneath the surface is a full account of how dying actually takes place. Because there’s something happening in there, in the brain, that makes no sense.”
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Over the next 30 years, researchers collected thousands of case reports of people who had had near-death experiences
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Moody was their most important spokesman; he eventually claimed to have had multiple past lives and built a “psychomanteum” in rural Alabama where people could attempt to summon the spirits of the dead by gazing into a dimly lit mirror.
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near-death studies was already splitting into several schools of belief, whose tensions continue to this day. One influential camp was made up of spiritualists, some of them evangelical Christians, who were convinced that near-death experiences were genuine sojourns in the land of the dead and divine
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It is no longer unheard of for people to be revived even six hours after being declared clinically dead. In 2011, Japanese doctors reported the case of a young woman who was found in a forest one morning after an overdose stopped her heart the previous night; using advanced technology to circulate blood and oxygen through her body, the doctors were able to revive her more than six hours later, and she was able to walk out of the hospital after three weeks of care
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The second, and largest, faction of near-death researchers were the parapsychologists, those interested in phenomena that seemed to undermine the scientific orthodoxy that the mind could not exist independently of the brain. These researchers, who were by and large trained scientists following well established research methods, tended to believe that near-death experiences offered evidence that consciousness could persist after the death of the individua
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Their aim was to find ways to test their theories of consciousness empirically, and to turn near-death studies into a legitimate scientific endeavour.
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Finally, there emerged the smallest contingent of near-death researchers, who could be labelled the physicalists. These were scientists, many of whom studied the brain, who were committed to a strictly biological account of near-death experiences. Like dreams, the physicalists argued, near-death experiences might reveal psychological truths, but they did so through hallucinatory fictions that emerged from the workings of the body and the brain.
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Between 1975, when Moody published Life After Life, and 1984, only 17 articles in the PubMed database of scientific publications mentioned near-death experiences. In the following decade, there were 62. In the most recent 10-year span, there were 221.
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Today, there is a widespread sense throughout the community of near-death researchers that we are on the verge of great discoveries
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“We really are in a crucial moment where we have to disentangle consciousness from responsiveness, and maybe question every state that we consider unconscious,”
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“I think in 50 or 100 years time we will have discovered the entity that is consciousness,” he told me. “It will be taken for granted that it wasn’t produced by the brain, and it doesn’t die when you die.”
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it is in large part because of a revolution in our ability to resuscitate people who have suffered cardiac arrest
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In his book, Moody distilled the reports of 150 people who had had intense, life-altering experiences in the moments surrounding a cardiac arrest. Although the reports varied, he found that they often shared one or more common features or themes. The narrative arc of the most detailed of those reports – departing the body and travelling through a long tunnel, having an out-of-body experience, encountering spirits and a being of light, one’s whole life flashing before one’s eyes, and returning to the body from some outer limit – became so canonical that the art critic Robert Hughes could refer to it years later as “the familiar kitsch of near-death experience”.
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Loss of oxygen to the brain and other organs generally follows within seconds or minutes, although the complete cessation of activity in the heart and brain – which is often called “flatlining” or, in the case of the latter, “brain death” – may not occur for many minutes or even hours.
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That began to change in 1960, when the combination of mouth-to-mouth ventilation, chest compressions and external defibrillation known as cardiopulmonary resuscitation, or CPR, was formalised. Shortly thereafter, a massive campaign was launched to educate clinicians and the public on CPR’s basic techniques, and soon people were being revived in previously unthinkable, if still modest, numbers.
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scientists learned that, even in its acute final stages, death is not a point, but a process. After cardiac arrest, blood and oxygen stop circulating through the body, cells begin to break down, and normal electrical activity in the brain gets disrupted. But the organs don’t fail irreversibly right away, and the brain doesn’t necessarily cease functioning altogether. There is often still the possibility of a return to life. In some cases, cell death can be stopped or significantly slowed, the heart can be restarted, and brain function can be restored. In other words, the process of death can be reversed.
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In a medical setting, “clinical death” is said to occur at the moment the heart stops pumping blood, and the pulse stops. This is widely known as cardiac arrest
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In 2019, a British woman named Audrey Schoeman who was caught in a snowstorm spent six hours in cardiac arrest before doctors brought her back to life with no evident brain damage.
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That is a key tenet of the parapsychologists’ arguments: if there is consciousness without brain activity, then consciousness must dwell somewhere beyond the brain
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Some of the parapsychologists speculate that it is a “non-local” force that pervades the universe, like electromagnetism. This force is received by the brain, but is not generated by it, the way a television receives a broadcast.
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In order for this argument to hold, something else has to be true: near-death experiences have to happen during death, after the brain shuts down
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To prove this, parapsychologists point to a number of rare but astounding cases known as “veridical” near-death experiences, in which patients seem to report details from the operating room that they might have known only if they had conscious awareness during the time that they were clinically dead.
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At the very least, Parnia and his colleagues have written, such phenomena are “inexplicable through current neuroscientific models”. Unfortunately for the parapsychologists, however, none of the reports of post-death awareness holds up to strict scientific scrutiny. “There are many claims of this kind, but in my long decades of research into out-of-body and near-death experiences I never met any convincing evidence that this is true,”
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In other cases, there’s not enough evidence to prove that the experiences reported by cardiac arrest survivors happened when their brains were shut down, as opposed to in the period before or after they supposedly “flatlined”. “So far, there is no sufficiently rigorous, convincing empirical evidence that people can observe their surroundings during a near-death experience,”
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The parapsychologists tend to push back by arguing that even if each of the cases of veridical near-death experiences leaves room for scientific doubt, surely the accumulation of dozens of these reports must count for something. But that argument can be turned on its head: if there are so many genuine instances of consciousness surviving death, then why should it have so far proven impossible to catch one empirically?
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The spiritualists and parapsychologists are right to insist that something deeply weird is happening to people when they die, but they are wrong to assume it is happening in the next life rather than this one. At least, that is the implication of what Jimo Borjigin found when she investigated the case of Patient One.
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Given the levels of activity and connectivity in particular regions of her dying brain, Borjigin believes it’s likely that Patient One had a profound near-death experience with many of its major features: out-of-body sensations, visions of light, feelings of joy or serenity, and moral re-evaluations of one’s life. Of course,
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“As she died, Patient One’s brain was functioning in a kind of hyperdrive,” Borjigin told me. For about two minutes after her oxygen was cut off, there was an intense synchronisation of her brain waves, a state associated with many cognitive functions, including heightened attention and memory. The synchronisation dampened for about 18 seconds, then intensified again for more than four minutes. It faded for a minute, then came back for a third time.
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n those same periods of dying, different parts of Patient One’s brain were suddenly in close communication with each other. The most intense connections started immediately after her oxygen stopped, and lasted for nearly four minutes. There was another burst of connectivity more than five minutes and 20 seconds after she was taken off life support. In particular, areas of her brain associated with processing conscious experience – areas that are active when we move through the waking world, and when we have vivid dreams – were communicating with those involved in memory formation. So were parts of the brain associated with empathy. Even as she slipped irre
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something that looked astonishingly like life was taking place over several minutes in Patient One’s brain.
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Although a few earlier instances of brain waves had been reported in dying human brains, nothing as detailed and complex as what occurred in Patient One had ever been detected.
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In the moments after Patient One was taken off oxygen, there was a surge of activity in her dying brain. Areas that had been nearly silent while she was on life support suddenly thrummed with high-frequency electrical signals called gamma waves. In particular, the parts of the brain that scientists consider a “hot zone” for consciousness became dramatically alive. In one section, the signals remained detectable for more than six minutes. In another, they were 11 to 12 times higher than they had been before Patient One’s ventilator was removed.
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“The brain, contrary to everybody’s belief, is actually super active during cardiac arrest,” Borjigin said. Death may be far more alive than we ever thought possible.
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“The brain is so resilient, the heart is so resilient, that it takes years of abuse to kill them,” she pointed out. “Why then, without oxygen, can a perfectly healthy person die within 30 minutes, irreversibly?”
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Evidence is already emerging that even total brain death may someday be reversible. In 2019, scientists at Yale University harvested the brains of pigs that had been decapitated in a commercial slaughterhouse four hours earlier. Then they perfused the brains for six hours with a special cocktail of drugs and synthetic blood. Astoundingly, some of the cells in the brains began to show metabolic activity again, and some of the synapses even began firing.
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How One Psychologist Is Tackling Human Biases in Science - 0 views
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It’s likely that some researchers are consciously cherry-picking data to get their work published. And some of the problems surely lie with journal publication policies. But the problems of false findings often begin with researchers unwittingly fooling themselves: they fall prey to cognitive biases, common modes of thinking that lure us toward wrong but convenient or attractive conclusions.
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Peer review seems to be a more fallible instrument—especially in areas such as medicine and psychology—than is often appreciated, as the emerging “crisis of replicability” attests.
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Psychologists have shown that “most of our reasoning is in fact rationalization,” he says. In other words, we have already made the decision about what to do or to think, and our “explanation” of our reasoning is really a justification for doing what we wanted to do—or to believe—anyway. Science is of course meant to be more objective and skeptical than everyday thought—but how much is it, really?
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common response to this situation is to argue that, even if individual scientists might fool themselves, others have no hesitation in critiquing their ideas or their results, and so it all comes out in the wash: Science as a communal activity is self-correcting. Sometimes this is true—but it doesn’t necessarily happen as quickly or smoothly as we might like to believe.
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The idea, says Nosek, is that researchers “write down in advance what their study is for and what they think will happen.” Then when they do their experiments, they agree to be bound to analyzing the results strictly within the confines of that original plan
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He is convinced that the process and progress of science would be smoothed by bringing these biases to light—which means making research more transparent in its methods, assumptions, and interpretations
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Psychologist Brian Nosek of the University of Virginia says that the most common and problematic bias in science is “motivated reasoning”: We interpret observations to fit a particular idea.
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Surprisingly, Nosek thinks that one of the most effective solutions to cognitive bias in science could come from the discipline that has weathered some of the heaviest criticism recently for its error-prone and self-deluding ways: pharmacology.
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Sometimes it seems surprising that science functions at all.
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Whereas the falsification model of the scientific method championed by philosopher Karl Popper posits that the scientist looks for ways to test and falsify her theories—to ask “How am I wrong?”—Nosek says that scientists usually ask instead “How am I right?” (or equally, to ask “How are you wrong?”).
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Statistics may seem to offer respite from bias through strength in numbers, but they are just as fraught.
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Given that science has uncovered a dizzying variety of cognitive biases, the relative neglect of their consequences within science itself is peculiar. “I was aware of biases in humans at large,” says Hartgerink, “but when I first ‘learned’ that they also apply to scientists, I was somewhat amazed, even though it is so obvious.”
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Nosek thinks that peer review might sometimes actively hinder clear and swift testing of scientific claims.
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Sorry, climate change deniers, but the global warming 'pause' still never happened | Sy... - 0 views
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Another day, another series of ridiculous and incorrect claims about global warming getting far more air than they deserve. The latest comes from none other than David Rose, a man who has serially misunderstood climate change so consistently that if he told me the sun would rise tomorrow, I'd be more inclined to believe the Earth had stopped rotating. He writes articles for the Daily Mail —it would be an insult to the fish to wrap them in this tabloid — and he uses a lot of typical techniques wielded by deniers, including cherry picking and misdirection. While he doesn't always deny global warming is happening, he does think it's not as bad as scientists say. I'll also note he has claimed the world is cooling, too, despite all the evidence (and I do mean all of it). But if you deny what the overwhelming majority of climate scientists are telling you, then in my opinion that makes you a denier.
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Rose is, as usual, grossly exaggerating the death of global warming.
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First, the "pause" is a claim that global warming has stopped since 1998 or so. This claim was never really true. 1998 was an unusually warm year, so if you start your measurements there it doesn't look like temperatures have risen much. But if you go back farther in time, the upward trend is very obvious. You have to look at the trend, and not short-term fluctuations!
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This shows that there can sometimes be a disconnect between the honest research of scientists and the way the public perceives that research. It's not anyone's fault really; the scientists are using the best methods and practices they have to understand reality, but the public gets and processes their information differently (not in a worse way, just different). It reminds me of the trouble we get using the word "theory"; to a scientist it means an extremely well-tested and reliable idea, but to the public it means more like a "guess." Same word, different uses, and it can give someone the wrong idea when used in the wrong context.
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A New Form of Stem-Cell Engineering Raises Ethical Questions - The New York Times - 0 views
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researchers at Harvard Medical School said it was time to ponder a startling new prospect: synthetic embryos.
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They are starting to assemble stem cells that can organize themselves into embryolike structures.
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But in the future, they may develop into far more complex forms, the researchers said, such as a beating human heart connected to a rudimentary brain, all created from stem cells
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Whatever else, it is sure to unnerve most of us.
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Scientists, for example, should never create a Sheef that feels pain.
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Scientists began grappling with the ethics of lab-raised embryos more than four decades ago.
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In 1979, a federal advisory board recommended that the cutoff should be 14 days.
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The embryonic cells develop into three types, called germ layers. Each of those germ layers goes on to produce all the body’s tissues and organs.
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This triggered communication by the cells, and they organized themselves into the arrangement found in an early mouse embryo.
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Even if ethicists do manage to agree on certain limits, Paul S. Knoepfler, a stem cell biologist at the University of California, Davis, wondered how easy it would be for scientists to know if they had crossed them.
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Spotting a primitive streak is easy. Determining whether a collection of neurons connected to other tissues in a dish can feel pain is not.
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Scientists wonder about the response in terms of ethics to their new idea and possibility of synthetic embryos. They might be able to grow into structures that could help in the human body, but to what extent would they stop growing, or would they feel pain? Are we creating life?... just to destroy it?
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untitled - 0 views
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Scientists at Stanford University and the J. Craig Venter Institute have developed the first software simulation of an entire organism, a humble single-cell bacterium that lives in the human genital and respiratory tracts.
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the work was a giant step toward developing computerized laboratories that could carry out many thousands of experiments much faster than is possible now, helping scientists penetrate the mysteries of diseases like cancer and Alzheimer’s.
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cancer is not a one-gene problem; it’s a many-thousands-of-factors problem.”
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This kind of modeling is already in use to study individual cellular processes like metabolism. But Dr. Covert said: “Where I think our work is different is that we explicitly include all of the genes and every known gene function. There’s no one else out there who has been able to include more than a handful of functions or more than, say, one-third of the genes.”
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The simulation, which runs on a cluster of 128 computers, models the complete life span of the cell at the molecular level, charting the interactions of 28 categories of molecules — including DNA, RNA, proteins and small molecules known as metabolites, which are generated by cell processes.
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They called the simulation an important advance in the new field of computational biology, which has recently yielded such achievements as the creation of a synthetic life form — an entire bacterial genome created by a team led by the genome pioneer J. Craig Venter. The scientists used it to take over an existing cell.
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A decade ago, scientists developed simulations of metabolism that are now being used to study a wide array of cells, including bacteria, yeast and photosynthetic organisms. Other models exist for processes like protein synthesis.
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“Right now, running a simulation for a single cell to divide only one time takes around 10 hours and generates half a gigabyte of data,” Dr. Covert wrote. “I find this fact completely fascinating, because I don’t know that anyone has ever asked how much data a living thing truly holds. We often think of the DNA as the storage medium, but clearly there is more to it than that.”
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scientists chose an approach called object-oriented programming, which parallels the design of modern software systems. Software designers organize their programs in modules, which communicate with one another by passing data and instructions back and forth.
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“The major modeling insight we had a few years ago was to break up the functionality of the cell into subgroups, which we could model individually, each with its own mathematics, and then to integrate these submodels together into a whole,”
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Advice To Put Up With Ogling Adviser Hurts Scientists And Science - 0 views
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In the career advice column “Ask Alice” at Science Careers, an early career researcher asked what to do about the adviser who is a good scientist but who keeps trying to look down her shirt.
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advice offered by Alice Huang, noted microbiologist and past president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, was problematic — so much so that in mere hours the column was removed by Science editors.
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While problematic, however, Huang’s advice to the writer to put up with the adviser’s ogling is advice that many women in science have heard, and continue to hear.
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She identifies herself as having just started her second postdoc in the lab of the adviser trying to look down her shirt. A postdoctoral researcher already has a Ph.D., and frequently has her own funding, but does not yet have a permanent position or the institutional affiliation and (relative) job security that goes with it
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Postdocs rely on the forbearance of an adviser who gives them lab space (and usually some other resources), an institutional affiliation, and, one hopes, some mentoring in how to succeed as a member of their scientific community.
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terrible advice
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postdoc wants an adviser that engages her as a scientist, someone committed to helping her gain both the competence and the confidence to become a full-fledged colleague in the scientific community. These are not goals that are fostered when the adviser regularly tries to look down the postdoc’s shirt.
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Huang’s column suggested that, because workplaces are part of life, they are also places where we ought to expect people’s libido to influence their behavior. She wrote, “the kind of behavior you mention is common in the workplace.”
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Huang offered her opinion that the adviser in question had not crossed that legal line. On that basis, Huang argued that even though leering is inappropriate workplace behavior, the postdoc should “put up with it, with good humor if you can.”
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postdoc may have more power than a graduate student, she has significantly less power than her adviser, especially given the importance of networking in building one’s scientific reputation, establishing future collaborations, and locating a permanent position.
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It matters not a whit whether the behavior rises to the level of unlawful sexual harassment. It
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Telling this early career scientist to grin and bear unprofessional behavior from her adviser, rather than doing something to mitigate it, leaves her stuck in a professional relationship where it may never be possible to engage the adviser’s scientific interest without concerns about engaging his carnal interest
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It will be hard to get mentoring without wondering if there are unspoken strings attached.
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It will be hard for the postdoc to believe her adviser sees her as a colleague — or for her to see herself as one
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So “Bothered” probably doesn’t want to confront her adviser in a way that comes across as accusing, and she should almost certainly have back-up from someone else in her scientific community with enough power to protect her
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If it doesn’t look like there’s a reasonable way to ask the adviser to stop without repercussions, the postdoc’s confidants can help her develop an escape plan so “Bothered” can receive the mentoring (and salary and benefits) she needs without the hassle of an adviser’s unprofessional behavior.
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Sensing Gene Therapy | The Scientist Magazine® - 0 views
www.the-scientist.com/?articles.view/articleNo/34778/title/Sensing-Gene-Therapy/
sensing gene therapy science research
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but gene therapy may be coming to the rescue. Gene therapy’s success in treating blindness disorders –many are in late stage trials—gave hope to a field deterred by early missteps. And now gene therapy researchers are expanding their gaze to focus on all manner of sensory diseases.
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notable success in using gene therapy techniques to treat a sensory disorder came last year when otolaryngolotist
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The neurons [in VGLUT3 mutant mice] are waiting for the neurotransmitter to activate them”—but no signal comes, and the mice are profoundly deaf,
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working on more broadly applying [the therapy] to other forms of genetic hearing loss,” he said. But in contrast to VGLUT3 mutant mice, which are missing the protein entirely, humans with missense mutations expressed a defective transporter, making it unclear whether Lustig’s strategy could translate to human VGLUT3-linked deafness.
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Taste and smell are two of the senses that have received less attention from gene therapy researchers—but that’s changing
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In olfactory dysfunction, there are few curative therapies,
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Treating the mice intra-nasally with gene therapy vectors carrying the wildtype Ift88 gene, researchers saw significant regrowth of nasal cilia, whereas control mice given empty vectors showed no regrowth. Treated mice almost doubled in weight compared to controls.
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So far, no scientists have designed a gene therapy to target taste buds, but at least one team is tackling an important factor in taste: saliva. If a person’s saliva production drops below 50 percent of normal, “you get tooth decay and trouble swallowing,”
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Scientists are also developing gene therapies for disorders involving touch—or at least pain-sensing—neurons, with one drug candidate
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Wolfe envisions that someday pain treatment could be as simple as visiting the doctor every few months for a quick skin prick “wherever it hurts”—choosing between a variety of genes to get the best effect.
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Upon closer look, a global warming hiatus is ruled out, U.S. scientists say - LA Times - 0 views
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fresh look at the way sea temperatures are measured has led government scientists to make a surprising claim: The puzzling apparent hiatus in global surface warming never really happened
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Mainstream scientists have struggled to explain to the public how climate change can be getting worse if the warming of the planet's surface slowed at the turn of the century. Their various theories have chalked it up to dust and ash blasted into the sky by volcanic eruptions, a rare period of calm in the solar cycle, and heat absorption by the Pacific Ocean and other waters.
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“I don't find this analysis at all convincing,” said Judith Curry, a climatologist at Georgia Tech who argues that natural variability in climate cycles dominates the impact of industrial emissions and other human actions. “While I'm sure this latest analysis from NOAA will be regarded as politically useful for the Obama administration, I don't regard it as a particularly useful contribution to our scientific understanding of what is going on.”
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In the study, the NOAA researchers argue that long-standing problems with the way temperatures are measured have masked years of sea surface warming. Once those problems are corrected for, “this hiatus or slowdown simply vanishes,” said lead study author Thomas Karl, director of NOAA's National Climatic Data Center in Asheville, N.C.
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Although researchers have long known that sea surface temperatures measured by autonomous buoys run cooler than temperatures measured by ships, they have failed to account for this as they expanded their use of buoy readings over the last two decades, the study authors argued.
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“The buckets, when you pull them up, tend to evaporate their water, and if they're canvas there's even more evaporation,” Karl said. “By the time people stick a thermistor in the bucket to measure temperature, it's already slightly cool.”
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“If you start a short-time series on an anomalous value, you tend to get an anomalous trend,” Karl said.
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A growing number of climate scientists have argued that this phenomenon, as well as other hiatus effects, are evidence of a poorly understood pattern of wind, ocean current and temperature variations that have far-reaching effects on global climate. They say the oceans have absorbed heat energy from the sun, causing Arctic ice to melt and sea levels to rise.
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“One way to think about it is that global warming continued, but the oceans just juggled a bit of heat around and made the surface seem cooler for a while,” said Joshua Willis, another climate scientist at JPL.
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“All of those factors are real,” Karl said. “If those factors had not occurred, the warming rate would have been even greater. … If anything we may still be underestimating the trend.”