Shibboleth

[degringolade]

 

 Expressionism / Otto Mueller/ Zwei Mädchen Am Waldrand

Been spending time thinking about one of my long term pet peeves.  I suppose that this stupid COVID thing had exaserbated the problem.

There is a lot of woofing about there about “trusting the science”. I haven’t trusted the science for decades because of what science’s metamorphosis into a raw material supply for the public relations/business crowd.

Folks have been writing about and discussing the “replication crisis” for so long that the damn thing has it’s own Wikipedia Page.  But the gist of the matter is that most of the work being done and passed off as “the science” is not really very good.  Most of it is performed by folks who are racing to get out first, and in doing so they rush the job, botch the statistics, and fail to do the necessary replication work.  

So over time, the “science” being pushed out by Ivory tower types is not very good.  They are pushing hard to get out into the world to score some coin in order to start paying off the six figure student loans that they have racked up.  Students are frightened of the debt they are looking at, faculty are pushed to the edge by publish or perish, and the myriad journals are in thrall to the companies that pay advertising.  It is just a sadly broken system.

It is worse at the industry level.  Science is at best third tier important, Finance first, PR second, science third.  It’s about “sales” baby.  Nothing else.

Nope, science has turned into a shibboleth.  Nothing else.  When I hear/see folks talking about science’s role, most of what I see/here is more an act of defiance or suppliance rather than what the data means and that meanings connection the greater world that resides outside their laboratories or computer models.

Comments

SCIENCE AND CHRISTMAS

[mschmidt]

By definition science cannot be wrong. It is the understanding of what science means that can be wrong. This explains why people like to claim that their personal understanding is supported by science - because they hope everybody will think the understanding must be correct.

The reason that people refer to science, must be that it works. One reason it works, is the public has lost track of what science is - people do not understand why science itself cannot be wrong. The reason, in a nutshell, is that science never says that science means anything.

The only belief that science allows, is the belief that the results of an experiment happened. Science cannot be wrong because this is all that science promises. If science is discovered to be wrong, the cause will be human error or cheating, and the charge against science will be dropped.

Question: when somebody claims that their personal understanding is based on science, when do they ever explain why the result of a science experiment means that their understanding is correct?

The answer is never - when the message is intended for the general public. The reason is that if a person had to explain how a science experiment means more than science says it does, then everybody could see that the person making the claim is probably full of crap.

Question: What is the difference between what is produced by a charlatan scientist like Dr. Alexander, and scientists that build a jetliner that never crashes?

The answer is that the latter would never accept the conclusions that a charlatan draws from an experiment. Probably, the charlatan deals in probabilities that are one millionth of what might be acceptable for the airplane project. What saves the charlatans, and keeps them going, is they deal in projects where nobody can prove they are wrong.

So, what happened with the 737MAX?

What happened points to your point. Some businessmen found some charlatans, to say that a new experiment was not needed, because an old experiment meant more than it did. This is how people get killed by the pursuit of profit.

But capitalism is good and bad, not just bad. The good part is that crashes are bad for profits in the airline business; so, the crashes are like a warning light on the profit maximizer that indicates some limit has been reached. At that point, some real scientists fix the problem, and the advertising and marketing arms explain why such events will never occur again, because the same airplane now has a new name and image.

Maybe the charlatans have been banished for the moment, but sooner or later, the bad part of capitalism will come back around, and the charlatans will return. How soon might depend on the attention span of the public - how soon the public forgets, and that will depend on how well the advertising and marketing arms do their jobs.

Can science say how to use science?

Other than by using mathematics, it seems that science cannot say how to use science; all that science can offer, is another experiment. Thus, the science of using science is really the business of using science. The problem with this setup, is that the businesspeople are the ones who might call in the charlatan scientists.

Why would they do such a thing?

To get people to invest in their company; in other words, to increase profit.

It might be fair to say that everybody who has a 401K, regardless of their morals, wants the businesspeople to do it, whether they realize that this is what they want or not. Once an individual puts their money in the pot of the “system”, everybody must understand that the name of the game is maximizing profit. If somebody is willing to lose a bit due to their morals, then the others will be happy to take the extra to invest in maximizing their profit. And so it goes.

Who can we get mad at?

Well, because it is Christmas, nobody should be mad at anybody, even at the rich greedy bastards.