Science is an Appeal to Authority

Science is an appeal to authority, but where does that authority come from? An interesting Guardian piece by Graham Redfearn on Naomi Oreskes (with a TED Talk of hers at the bottom)

There really is no scientific method.

  • Inductive of hypotheses and predictions, true, but actually a rare case
  • Deductive of observed evidence, true, but much judgement and interpretation of evidence and experience and of correlation and causation, and with varying faith and trust in people and reports – very little evidence is direct observation causally related to any hypothesis or law.
  • And, both confirmation and falsification logic can be flawed by unrecognised assumptions in your model.
  • So in practice, almost “anything goes” (Feyerabend), there is much creativity and imagination involved.
  • Ultimately science is the emergent and evolving collective consensus (of scientists).

Paradox of modern science:

  • Science IS an appeal to authority (albeit the authority of a collective consensus).

This is the root of a large part of the agenda here – where the topic is at the boundaries of accepted science, even questioning the accepted boundaries of science, the consensus cannot come entirely from those who are scientists or with declared interests in science.

Fact: The quality of thinking and questioning required to achieve such consensus cannot be derived entirely the received wisdom of the existing scientific consensus.

Wittgenstein Swimming Against Scientism

Ray Monk’s 1999 essay on Wittgenstein’s forgotten lesson – that

“scientism” is a tide against which we are swimming.

(I constantly use the word “scientism” to describe the prevailing problem and wasn’t aware of this source. Stumbled across it in Prospect Magazine, whilst following up the Nagel review below.)

Beyond Energy, Matter, Time and Space

Interesting NY Times science post by George Johnson.
(Hat tip to Rick Ryals on Facebook.)

” … it is almost taken for granted that everything from physics to biology, including the mind, ultimately comes down to four fundamental concepts: matter and energy interacting in an arena of space and time.”

” … maybe decades or millennia from now ” here or someplace yet to be imagined ” science on Earth, circa 2014, will look like nothing more than a good start.”

concludes Johnson.

In practice it’s a comparative review of two books:

Thomas Nagel’s 2012 “Mind and Cosmos:
Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature Is Almost Certainly False” and

Max Tegmark’s 2014 “Our Mathematical Universe:
My Quest for the Ultimate Nature of Reality”

The former gets slated by Pinker, so that’s a good recommendation for me. (Here a review in Prospect Magazine.)

BLDG BLOG

The Building Blog is one I’ve linked to individual posts before, usually when pointed out by BifRiv. Added the home page to my blogroll, but here a current example “Buy a Lighthouse”.

Peer Review Scam

There have been debates before about the validity of “peer review” and alternative publishing authority models – seem to recall some hoo-ha around arxiv.org a few years back. These here are technical articles rather than pure science, but show how systems are manipulated. (Hat tip to BifRiv for the link.)

Cargo Cult Physics

A phrase coined by Feynman apparently. Mentioned in a post from Scientia Salon, linked on Facebook by David Morey.

Promising, I commented …

“current practice of inflationary cosmology as [un]able to accommodate any experimental result, so, on philosophical grounds, no longer science – cargo cult physics (after Feynman)”

Thank you. And we already know “string theory” isn’t science, not even “theory”, according even to Krauss. Double whammy. If we just re-set science back to somewhere around Copenhagen, there may be some hope.

(If you’re not one of David’s FB friends you’ll need the direct link to the post on Silentia Salon.)

Imagining the Truth

Another IAI talk, from How The Light Gets In at Hay-on-Wye (though can’t tell which year this was recorded).

Not watched it yet, but looks like an addition to the BHA Limits to Logic thread below, daring to suggest reason is more than strict rationality, which it clearly is.

BHA Thread on Limits to Logic

I commented in this thread, since it was one of the talks at How The Light Gets In that I attended (sorry that links a long post covering several talks). Needless to say the scientistic humanists are in panic reaction mode:

Post by British Humanist Association.

I’ll Deal With You Later

Ho hum – re-enter the Higg’s Boson saga as CERN prepares to restart the LHC in Jan 2015.

Something’s missing from the standard model – the Higgs Boson or (shock horror) “something else”. Here’s wishing open minds for CERN scientists (and fewer computer graphics). There is some promise:

Physicists know that this framework, devised in the 1970s, must be a stepping stone to a deeper understanding of the cosmos. But so far, it’s standing up exceptionally well. Searches at the LHC for deviations from this elegant scheme – such as evidence for new, exotic particles – have come to nothing.

Start believing the evidence, please.

Ruth Chang – Subject-Created Reason

Hat tip to Maria Ana of The Thinking Hotel on LinkedIn for the link to this 15minute TED Talk from philosopher Ruth Chang.

For reasons of various IT and physical interruptions, I partially listened to this talk 4 or 5 times before finally listening right through this morning. The presentation of example life-choices seemed so simplistic and presented so simply, that I was convinced there could be nothing of value here. [In fact I posted some pre-emptive thoughts based on the topic before I’d even listened at all.]

Well I’m glad I eventually listened right through. Full transcript also available, but here my paraphrase summary:

As post-enlightenment creatures we tend to assume assume objective science holds the key to everything of importance in the world. When we compare objective evidence and predicted outcomes, without any clear best option, then we tend to take the least risky option. But often in tough choices, reasons are  “on a par”. Options in tough choices are in the same league but of different kinds (*), not necessarily quantifiable in real numbers. There is in fact no best alternative out there.

The choice we make is supported by reasons created by us. Think about it. This is preferable to a world where objective reasons are all out there, where facts in the objective world determine our choices.

We choose which options we put our agency behind, what we want to be, what we want the world to be. Hard choices are in fact a god-send, opportunities to change the world. Not just opportunity, but a precious normative power we hold. To create reason.

Excellent stuff. Very much on my agenda, avoiding the scientistic neurosis, that objective reason is the only valid form of rationality in decision-making. I completely agree, it’s not. Worth a listen.

And it perfectly illustrates the (Wordsworth) “murder to dissect” point I made in the comment thread on LinkedIn. If we assume reason is out there in an objective sense to be analysed (sliced-and-diced with Aristotelian knives) and presented (re-assembled) in matrices and decision-trees, we kill the very thing we value most – our agency in the world.

[(*) Not recognising things as being of different qualitative kinds is known formally in philosophy as a “category error”. And, when they are on a par – in the same league but different kinds – it’s often because they’re not actually a real binary choice either – it’s a false dichotomy to see all “what should I/we do” decisions that way.]

[PS – wonder if I could join up Ruth Chang to Larry Krauss on the limits to scientific thinking, without Larry getting all “religious” on us – as he did when Angie and Mary tried to set him right in Philosophy Bites Back.]