Indistinguishable from magic

[liv]

This entry is going to contain a lot of stuff that's been swirling around in my mind for several weeks, and I'm not sure it all quite fits together, but I want to put some thoughts out there.

The first trigger was that I tangentially got involved in one of those discussions about whether science is better than religion. I normally don't bother with that argument because it's boring and frequently stupid, and also because I don't think it's a meaningful comparison. Science is not only no good, but completely irrelevant, for organizing a regular rota of visitors to check up on an old lady with Alzheimer's who is estranged from her daughter. Religion is not only no good, but completely irrelevant, for understanding how prions in the old lady's brain aggregated to cause her to lose her memory and functionality. (I have no intention of asserting that atheists never visit lonely senile people, just that they don't use science to do so, because they are not idiots.)

But anyway, I joined in with this discussion because pw201 is intelligent and interesting, and there was an issue of terminology I was curious about. The discussion led to Paul asserting (relevantly):

I think it is fair to say that the established results of the physical and biological sciences are less likely to be overturned than those of the social sciences. Evolution is a fact, current theories of anthropology will be outdated in a few decades.

Woah! That really, really brought me up short. I mean, it's trivially not true, but even if it were it wouldn't be a good thing! The whole point of why science is "better" than religion as a way of understanding how the world works is that scientific theories and models get changed when someone finds new data that contradicts the old view. This is a really good example of the way that selling science as an alternative to religion does a massive disservice to science (I care surprisingly little about vocal atheists misrepresenting religion): it leads to people, intelligent people I respect, trying to treat science as a source of eternal verities. I also absolutely disagree that physical science is inherently better than social science; it just isn't, but trying to cram science into the niche where religion or Humanism or other philosophical systems belong can really easily lead to that sort of misguided hierarchy between branches of science.

The thing is, "believing in" science in this way doesn't just offend me as a scientist; it kills people. Let me talk about a lecture I attended recently. The talk was given by the DUETs people, who are working to put conventional, evidence-based medicine on an even more scientific basis. But they are not doing this by claiming that good science should still be true decades and centuries after findings are reported. Quite the opposite! They are claiming that good science, and good evidence-based medicine, should be flexible in how it responds to new evidence, and established views should be constantly challenged. This isn't just to make people feel better intellectually, it's a really critical aspect of patient safety.

Example 1: for many decades in the second half of the 20^th century, medical wisdom was that babies should be encouraged to sleep on their fronts. This advice was pretty universal, and even made it to Dr Spock's famous book about childcare. It was based on the best evidence available at the time, but by the 70s there was an increasing body of evidence that sleeping prone is a significant risk factor for cot death. However, this evidence took a very long time (decades) to percolate into mainstream medical advice, because doctors and even the medical research community were reluctant to challenge the established scientific fact. They were especially reluctant to rely on data from soft sciences and observation of large human populations, in order to overturn data based on the "more reliable" physical experiments that led to the earlier bad advice. Dr Spock was wrong, not because he was a bad scientist (neither morally bad nor incompetent), but because cot death wasn't really on the radar at the time he was writing. The data he relied on measured physical parameters of how well individual babies did, and was very likely correct that prone sleeping reproducibly improved those parameters in the short term. It was still wrong, and following Spock just because he had the authority accorded to a successful scientist still led to preventable deaths.

Example 2: some decades ago, there was some robust, reproducible, statistically valid scientific research showing that giving caffeine to premature babies helped to reduce the frequency of a condition called apnoea where the infant briefly ceases breathing. However, this research was often not applied clinically because there wasn't any real evidence to show that reducing apnoea occurrence was particularly important. Nobody was being a bad scientist, nobody was following superstition or religious beliefs at the expense of evidence, there wasn't even a big problem with doctors being unaware of the state of the art of research. It's a perfectly medically valid decision that you don't want to give a powerful drug with unknown long-term effects to premature babies who are extremely vulnerable anyway. It's a perfectly valid ethical decision that you don't want to do double blind randomized controlled trials on premature babies, with the very real possibility of harming them. Again, it took population studies and extrapolations from soft science observations to demonstrate that the frequency of apnoea is correlated with long-term risk of cerebral palsy and reduced life-expectancy. That's a lot of avoidable disability and death because only one sort of clinical trial counts as properly scientific.

Example 3: some decades ago, there was some robust, statistically valid, properly designed and controlled research showing that steroids can be helpful in patients with severe brain injury. So doctors very sensibly started treating brain-injured patients with steroids. And scientists very sensibly did what scientists do, and repeated and extended the original experiments over the course of the intervening decades. They didn't just assume that the original research must be "true" because it was "scientific". They didn't prefer to work on more glamorous, more prestigious new stuff at the expense of low-status confirmatory work. The effect size and statistical significance tended to decline with subsequent studies. This doesn't mean that the original research was wrong, or that the original scientists were biased, incompetent or lying, it's just an artefact of the way that scientific culture works. If you're going to publish something novel, you have to have a pretty watertight case, with strong statistical significance and a relatively big effect, and that's as it should be. But if you're just confirming something that is already known, then rather less dramatic and conclusive results are acceptable because they support the established fact. And of course, we all know but can easily forget that 1 experiment in 100 will show that something is true at the 99% significance level purely by chance and sampling error!

After many decades, a consensus started to emerge that the effect of steroids in brain injured patients was small and not terribly reproducible. Not false, just marginal. Meanwhile, treating people with high doses of powerful steroids has known side-effects. The medical community started to suspect that the definite, quite serious harm caused by steroids was greater than the small, poorly reproducible benefits. But there wasn't enough evidence to stop treating brain injured patients with drugs that might save at least some people's lives, until there was a huge, expensive publicly funded trial involving 10,000 brain injury patients across the EU which definitively proved that steroids do more long-term harm than good in this situation. So, ok, you might well say that this is a happy ending, this is medical research and evidence-based medicine working exactly as they should. But you have to take into account that even an optimal scenario means several decades of people receiving treatments which are actually harmful on balance, and which undoubtedly caused unnecessary deaths and suffering during this time period.

What are the implications for "rationalist" rhetoric? I think the most important is that scientific research, and particularly opinions couched in scientific-sounding language which include numbers, technical jargon and statistics, should be treated with at least a comparable level of skepticism to "woo" and alternative medicine. Lay people can't expect to directly evaluate every individual piece of research they read about; indeed scientists can't do that either, because most of it is outside their field and they have to spend at least some of their time studying new questions rather than confirming, validating and challenging old conclusions. But just accepting something as fact because it's "scientific" is not the way to deal with this!

Just accepting the authority of someone because they have scientific qualifications leads to things like believing Wakefield about MMR because he did experiments and used statistics and medical terms. It leads to believing a popular book based on extremely dubious research because the authors have some academic credentials. And because neuroscience is a "real" science, they have more authority to talk about anthropology and sexual psychology than, you know, actual anthropologists and sexuality researchers because human sciences don't count. It leads to giving racist propaganda the benefit of the doubt, because it uses statistics and hard sciencey jargon. Yes, it is a basic principle of science that one should accept unpalatable results if they are supported by data from well-designed and well-executed experiments. But all those people who piously recite this principle in response to badly-designed, biased and thoroughly debunked "experiments" "proving" that white people are inherently superior to other ethnic groups are strangely unwilling to give the same benefit of the doubt to the vast body of good research indicating that, you know, racism actually harms people. True, you can't weigh and measure those harms, you can't do double-blind experiments, but that doesn't mean that social science is just a matter of what's politically fashionable just now.

And that brings me on to my second point: if you believe that science is the best way of looking at the world, you should also accept that social science is the best way of studying human societies! That's especially the case if you (or the journalists you rely on for your information) can't tell the difference between actual physical / natural science and people using vaguely sciencey technobabble, but even good physics is relatively unhelpful for looking at social and cultural phenomena.

And yes, that goes for medicine too; there is lots of really vital medical information that just isn't going to be found by doing randomized controlled trials and measuring the physical outcomes and applying statistics. Partly because a lot of randomized controlled trials that would be informative are also unethical. And partly because the information that can be measured physically isn't always the most important; "how fast do babies put on weight?" can be measured easily, but a more important research question is "how likely are babies to die for no discernible reason?"

Drug trials are (relatively) easy to carry out in the time-honoured "hard" science way; you give the drug to half the patients and a placebo to the other half, and you measure objective parameters about how well the two groups do. I'm in no way arguing against doing this kind of experiment – hell, I spend most of my working life doing that myself – but it doesn't mean that drugs are the best possible treatment for all possible conditions! For example most patients with joint pain would prefer physiotherapy and exercise rather than strong painkillers (and by the way, the reason I know this is because social scientists did serious research into the issue, not because some arrogant biologist assumed that his credentials totally qualified him to throw together an internet survey.) There is some evidence that the former has more benefits and fewer side-effects for a greater proportion of patients than the latter. But it's rather harder to do a double-blind trial of physiotherapy, and you can't use pure bioscience to answer questions like "how well do patients on this regime integrate into their communities and lead normal lives?" which may be as important as "what is the level of pain-related chemicals in the bloodstream of patients taking this drug versus a placebo?"

And thirdly, I suppose, don't put too much faith in the scientific process. In the best possible circumstances it is slow and inefficient and people get harmed while science is sorting out the answer to difficult questions. When we're talking about medicine, individual variation within the population is inevitable, and however good the evidence is for a particular treatment, that best treatment will do nothing for or actively harm a proportion of patients. And to be honest, the best possible circumstances don't always apply; it's hopelessly naive to believe that all science is pure and unbiased and free of the influence of culture and political and financial considerations! Criticize superstition and woo and political bias, of course, but don't couch your criticisms in terms of assuming that the scientific mainstream is always right. That's bad rhetoric and it's atrociously bad science.

Comments

[smhwpf]

Just wanted to say what a brilliant essay this is. Feels like it ought to appear somewhere learned, but I guess blogs count can as such these days!

BTW you mentioned being in Stockholm at some point in June - I'm around except the 15-20th, although my dad's around a large proportion of the time, but could probably work around, and would be glad to meet up if you wanted to.

[liv]

Gosh, thank you, I'm really touched. Most of the scholarly content comes from DUETs, and the rest is random rant. But I do like the thing with blogs, where you can mix serious, researched stuff with personal opinions. I have tried writing a more academic blog a few times and I can never quite motivate myself, if I have to hold myself to a strict standard then posts just never get written.

Stockholm: could do afterwork and / or dinner on Tuesday 14^th; does that work for you?

[smhwpf]

14th works perfectly - just after my dad goes home and just before I pop off to England!

Afterwork followed by dinner sounds good! Hmm, did you ever go to the hummous cafe on Söder? It's right by me. Though doesn't have alcohol, so that would have to come before or after if desired.

But open to suggestions as to where to meet. As to when, I am pretty flexible, but don't usually leave work before about 6, though can do if more convenient.

[nameandnature]

I've no objection to saying that the original exchange was here, by the way: I don't object to anyone referencing something in my public posts.

I am in violent agreement with you, as is Jerry Coyne in the posting on scientism that started the discussion:

Scientists are nearly always tentative in their conclusions. Lately I’ve been reading a bunch of papers on evolution, and was struck by how often conclusions are qualified by words like “this suggests that” or “this conclusion should be regarded as provisional”. Many papers suggest additional lines of research that could support or falsify their conclusions.

Nevertheless, as Coyne says

...it’s bogus to suggest that all scientific truth is ephemeral, for some truths of today will remain truths of tomorrow. A water molecule will still have two hydrogen atoms and one oxygen atom; AIDS will still be caused by a virus; the Earth will still go around the Sun. Although the concept of absolute and unchangeable truth is alien to science, we’ve found out a lot of things that are likely to remain “true” in that they’re unlikely to be overturned.

The stuff about the social sciences was badly phrased: what I probably should have said was that I think those sciences are more likely to undergo true paradigm shifts where the old ways are revealed as just the wrong way to think about things. Individual results within the research programmes of any science are prone to overthrow whether we're talking physics or sociology, but evolution is true.

Nevertheless, even if I'm wrong about the frequency with which paradigms shift, which I may be, I still agree Coyne's point that accusing someone of "scientism" is often a way of saying "how dare you ask us for evidence?". That's sort of accusation is often a prelude to one of the standard Bad Arguments about science which some religious people use when they feel threatened either by some scientific result, or the very idea that beliefs ought to be evidenced (whether scientifically or not: I don't take the view that all valid evidence is scientific evidence, or vice versa).

Coyne's an evolutionary biologist working in the USA, so his beef with "religion" is with the apparent[1] ontological claims of Christianity, not with the praxis of Reform Judaism, but as far as those claims go, he is right: science is better at telling us what is out there than "religion". As I said on the original thread on my blog, even those people who think that their own particular "other ways of knowing" are valid when they use them to "know" the truth of their religious beliefs would demand some form of empirical evidence before accepting someone else's (the point is Chris Hallquist's, in the final paragraph of that post).

[1] "apparent" because I accept the views of sociologists and anthropologists (ha!) that there's some kind of emotivism behind a lot of this stuff: when a person says that the Holy Spirit "proceeds from the Father and the Son", they mean "Hurrah for us and boo to the Orthodox team" more often than they mean what the statement seems to mean, if indeed it means anything at all. Still, I take Blackburn's point that, as Hume says, "The usual course of men’s conduct belies their words, and shows, that their assent in these matters is some unaccountable operation of the mind between disbelief and conviction, but approaching much nearer to the former than to the latter": approaching, but not reaching. You might enjoy Blackburn's Religion and Respect, which starts with him wondering whether he should put on a hat at a Jewish Sabbath meal and goes into the differences between ontological and expressive religion.

[quizcustodet.livejournal.com]

To amplify on this slightly, while I also agree with the fundamental point that science must continue to be open to challenge (and that many rationalists fall into the lazy habit of 'it's scientific, so it must be true), I think there is more truth to the statement that there are - if not eternal - very long-term truths of science.

Being a physicist, the way I'd tend to explain this is around mechanics. At the turn of the twentieth century, scientists and mathematicians had spent the better part of three centuries thinking about how objects that are roughly human scale moved. They'd developed techniques that are very, very good at predicting that motion. But there were phenomena at very large and very small scales which they couldn't explain.

The development of relativity and quantum mechanics in the early 20th century did prove that Newtonian mechanics were wrong. They're not a complete description of the universe. We still teach them today because they are a very good description of the universe within certain limits. Something has gone very wrong if, when we apply our shiny new theory to the same conditions, it doesn't closely reproduce Newtonian mechanics.

So I think it's reasonable to say that within its element (e.g. pool tables and human-size structures) Newtonian mechanics is very unlikely to be overturned, having already withstood three centuries of tweaking. I agree with pw201 that this is a result of the history behind it, rather than anything about the discipline itself. In physics alone you move from Newtonian mechanics (pretty sure we've got it cracked) to quantum mechanics (we understand it pretty well, though we're still working out significant details) to the various candidates for Grand Unified Theories (we've got lots of pretty math, but not much observational evidence to distinguish between them - any of them could be shown to be wrong tomorrow.)

[liv]

Mm, these examples are definitely helpful, thank you. It's not an inherent property of physics that it leads to truth, it's a property of a particular very good and well-tested model. I agree with other comments in this discussion that physics is better than some sciences at providing very general truths; the fact that the results of physics are general I think is more important than the fact that they can last a long time.

What makes Newtonian mechanics so solid is not really its longevity, it's the quality of evidence that shows that it does consistently make valid predictions on the human scale. After all, people have believed for thousands of years that In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth; I think it's not the majority of human beings now, but it's pretty close to half and theistic creationists have been in the majority for much of the last 1500 years at least. That doesn't make Genesis (and related material in the Qur'an) a good scientific theory, it's just a successful meme.

[aphenine]

This. Absolutely.

I never found Paul's statement to be a rationalist statement. I too regard physics and biology as more complete sciences which will be less subject to change than social sciences, purely because of the length of time to which these disciplines have been subjected to experiment, testing and the frameworks they've created for themselves. In the example of physics, as was said, if things do not behave Newtonianly on the macro scale for sufficiently light bodies travelling at significantly less than the speed of light, then something is very wrong. Very, very wrong. As in, you can create physics models that can have non-Newtonian behaviour, but you have to start postulating multiple universes, or methods in which the laws of physics change within the Universe, all of which are really scary and icky and still have to predict anyway that for this bit of the Universe, you get Newtonian behaviour.

In biology, I get the impression that evolution and information encoding (e.g. DNA) is a similar fundamental framework that all theories have to return to, and that this is unlikely to change without having to rip biology to shreds and start again.

I simply think of it as being that the social sciences are younger than the older physical sciences. That makes social sciences more exciting, but also much more uncertain, and certainly less reliable in applying their results. But it neither makes them better nor worse.

[liv]

Ok, I've edited to include a link back to you. I normally would present the context of a discussion I'm referring to, but it's possible to read this post as 2000 words of "why Paul is WRONG". It isn't quite, but I wasn't sure how much you'd want a link in the circumstances, so I erred on the side of discretion. I know you generally appreciate (as I do) people engaging seriously with your arguments.

[liv]

I do think that part of the issue here is that you have got yourself sucked into the vortex of people debating about whether American schoolchildren should be taught God made the beast of the earth after his kind or Speciation occurs through the natural selection of random mutations. I mean, I entirely agree that the answer is "evolution", and I acknowledge that the debate is important given the political situation in the US, but it's not really something I want to spend a lot of brain-space on. Partly because it's so completely obvious to me what the answer is, and partly because the vortex distorts all kinds of discussions about things I do care about and ends up with people creating ever-more elaborate arguments to shore up their particular tribal positions, and it's just not productive.

For example, where Coyne is keen to assert that it’s bogus to suggest that all scientific truth is ephemeral, he's addressing (un)Intelligent Design propaganda that seizes on properly scientific use of qualifiers and provisional language in order to convince people that science isn't really true, it's just what a bunch of people think right now, and why should you listen to them? Which in turn is a slightly more sophisticated version of saying "well, evolution is just a theory, so isn't it better to accept the Truth of the Bible?" You can't refute that by saying Evolution is a fact, because then you've got both sides stating that their position is factual, and people are going to have to choose based on which side they like better, and they probably already like the Evangelical Christian side better for all kinds of only tangentially related reasons.

The trouble is that even having this argument distorts what science is, it is not a collection of (more or less reliable) facts, it's a method. Telling children facts that have been derived from scientific experiments is somewhat better than telling children falsehoods based on a bizarre literal reading of a couple of Bible verses, but it's not the kind of science teaching I'd like to see. And I fear that the ID people have succeeded in wrenching the Overton window over to a point where it's impossible to have any kind of good discussion about teaching biology, or even about biology itself. Once we're reduced to arguing about which set of supposed truths better represents reality, it's really hard to present a convincing, not overly academic argument in favour of the truth of Darwinism.

[liv]

I am not sure you are using the concept of paradigm shifts coherently here. It's as if you're using the vocabulary of a debate between Kuhnians and Popperians, and trying to apply it to a debate between science and religion, or a debate between physical and social science (both of which I think are unproductive debates anyway; in both cases you're talking about different tools for different jobs). Sure, the Darwinian theory of evolution, the atomic theory of matter, and the infection theory of disease, are paradigms that have lasted a reasonably long time. But the whole point of a paradigm is that it's just a way of thinking about a particular topic, and it's only useful as long as it's useful. It's part of the definition of a paradigm shift is that it's pretty impossible to imagine, pre-shift, what things will look like post-shift, so I can't come up with examples of what statements might come to replace Coyne's examples about water and AIDS. But I think it's highly probable that people will not be repeating those statements forever more.

I don't think you can really talk about the frequency with which paradigms shift. It's not an event that happens with a given frequency depending on how rigorous your science is. And telling me that a particular paradigm has continued to be useful for a relatively long time doesn't inform me at all how reliable a given fact that fits that paradigm may be. I could think of paradigms in anthropology which have lasted at least as long as the three science examples (ie between one and two centuries): the concept of social taboos, for example, or the concept of kinship networks. So what? An individual piece of research based on any given paradigm still has to be evaluated on its own merits.

[liv]

One of the reasons I enjoy your writing about religion more than most in the science v religion debate is that you are very clear about what it means for religion to make ontological claims. You've known me for long enough by now to know that I think such claims are a very minor part of religion, and I'm by no means unique in this. Having to explain that my religion is not a variant form of American Protestant Christianity is a problem that I'm always going to be stuck with, and I think the teaching creationism in schools debate is making my problem only slightly worse!

And yes, you are absolutely right that many people in this debate are just trying to weasel out of providing evidence for their beliefs. What's worrying me is that the pro-science side are saying things about science that are nearly as misleading as the anti-science side. For example, you state that science is better at telling us what is out there than "religion", which is sort of true, but I don't think it helps to see science as this impersonal source that "tells us" stuff. It's a scarily short step from "science tells us reliable things" to "scientists tell us reliable things", and that is little better than believing someone because he wears a white coat, (or because he cites a Biblical verse, for that matter).

I think Hume is quite right that the usual course of men’s conduct belies their words. But the point is that this is a problem for every human being, not just for religious people. Nearly everybody professes beliefs that don't really gel with the actions and decisions they make in practice. Some may strive to reduce how much they do this, and this, and that's all well and good, but if skeptics think they are above normal human psychology, well, they are deceiving themselves and are unlikely to get very far.

The Blackburn essay is interesting and I think he has a very good point about respect creep. Thanks for the link (and sorry about DW messing up links from OpenID accounts).

[rho]

I think the fundamental difference (currently) between physical science and social science isn't that either one is better or more scientific, but that physical science is much more mature as a discipline, and as a result has had a lot more time to discover what truly works within its bounds.

Consider, for example, that in 1905, Freud wrote Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality. In the same year, Einstein had his annus mirabilis, writing papers on Brownian motion, the photoelectric effect, and special relativity. I don't think it's just my physicist's bias that believes that Einstein's papers were better science than Freud's. Freud was pretty much just making things up as he went along, whereas Einstein was building on centuries of previous knowledge.

This isn't to say that Einstein was more intelligent or a better person than Freud. It's just that Einstein was working in a well-established scientific framework, whereas Freud was reaching into the unknown. Go back a few centuries, and you see things like Newton's attempts at alchemy, which were also entirely unscientific. Go back even further, and you find early attempts to codify what would become the physical sciences by Aristotle and the likes being conducted in a manner not dissimilar to how Freud worked on psychology. They had nothing to build on, and so they took a stab in the dark at how they thought maybe things ought to work.

Since the social sciences are so young, there are, unfortunately, still a few adherents around of the "make statements as to how we think things ought to work" school of thought, though thankfully these are becoming scarcer and scarcer as time passes, and as the discipline matures enough and finds its own feet and its own methods.

It would be worse than useless to apply physics methodology to a psychology experiment. It just wouldn't work. The things being studied are just too different. For instance, I would expect a good psychologist to have a much better understanding of statistics than a good physicist, whereas I'd expect the physicist to know more vector calculus.

I believe that the true heart of science is the assertion that the universe makes sense and that we can understand it and should strive to do so. The methods used, while often extremely important, are not inherent to my understanding of what science truly is. Any claim to the contrary feels uncomfortably dogmatic to me.

[liv]

Ooh, I really like this point, particularly with the comparison of Einstein and Freud. Really, really useful to compare the cultures associated with different disciplines in this way. And yes, different methodologies, absolutely.

I have been calling science a method, but I'm using "method" in a fairly general sense, referring to things like experimental controls, striving to minimize experimenter bias, trying to falsify theories rather than trying to prove them true, empiricism and reproducibility etc. Whether you use focus groups and structured interviews or balances and timers or whatever obviously depends heavily on what it is that you're trying to study! I think you're right as well that part of what science is is the assertion that the universe makes sense and can be understood, though.

[siderea]

Word up yo. I've had a similar essay/rant brewing in the back of my head, and you may have saved me the trouble.

That said, I would have to say that -- maybe it's because I've shoved a long week into three days and am just kinda cranky -- I'm also kinda down on the state of social science research right now. Speaking as someone who works in a social, er, science. Sorta. A consumer of social science research, at least.

I'm really quite freaking upset, at the moment, about the shenanigans with the STAR*D antidepressant trial, for one thing. More generally, in the interests of being an educated and informed consumer of clinical psych research, I made what may turn out to be the tactical mistake of following the blogs of two psychiatrists who critique psychiatric research papers, the institutions that produce them, and the state of psychiatric epistemology and nosology. This has done nothing to enhance my happiness or my faith in western medicine, or really in the scientific method as implemented by mere humans.

Add to this a side of one data falsification scandal after another in clinical trials (I started keeping a list, somewhere), and I am not a happy rationalist camper.

[liv]

Thank you! The essay nearly had stuff about drug trials and what can go wrong with them in it, but I decided that I already had 2000 words and quite a number of disparate topics, so I left that bit for another time.

The truth is that Sturgeon's Law applies to science just as much as anything else; there's a lot of bad science out there in any discipline, mostly stuff that's sloppy and assumes its conclusion and is driven by the desire to publish more than the pursuit of truth. There's certainly some instances of active dishonesty as well. I'm aiming for a middle ground between people who just reject science altogether because it tells them stuff they don't want to hear, and people who assume all scientific conclusions are eternally true because it's part of their identity to be "rational".

It would be nice to have faith in western medicine and the scientific method, but I don't think it's actually a good idea. I think it's like democracy in that it's the worst possible system apart from all the alternatives! I'm leaning more and more towards thinking that I need to start doing some serious reading about how institutions work, which is a bit disturbing because a lot of that is "management theory" and geeks hate everything to do with management. Anyway part III of this rant may be about the gap between the ideal of striving for Truth and the reality of researchers trying to keep their jobs and be respected by their colleagues, the reality of all the links in the chain that have to function in order for research to turn into technology and implementation and so on.

[lavendersparkle]

I've read a bit of philosophy of science and it always makes me worry a lot about people who believe in SCIENCE! as the infallible source of truth. I actually heard a scientist on the radio claiming that scientists use the kind of Popperian falsification methodology which even Popper had abandoned as unworkable by the end of his life.

Another issue with double blind random controlled trials is that the population of the trial can be quite different to the general patient population and therefore it can be difficult to tell how applicable the results are in a clinical setting.

[liv]

Aww, cuddly virus! I think most scientists are pretty useless at philosophy of science. And people who are good at philosophy of science quite often don't know how actual science works in practice. The group my post was really addressed to is mainly lay people who don't know much about either the philosophy or the day to day practicalities of science, but have decided that Science is Good and feel superior because they think of themselves as "scientific". When really what they mean is that they're better at thinking and handling evidence than a caricatured idea of a Christian fundamentalist, which is a pretty low bar, but arguing on the internet can easily lead to setting yourself up against that kind of straw man opponent.

[tig_b]

Thank you for this.

I only have to consider how many of the 'facts' I was taught at school have been overturned to know that much of science is theory not fact

BTW I have a joint Hons degree in Biology and Psychology; they both have good research and poor research.

[liv]

Yeah, there's a bit of a confusion between science, and the things you learn in science class early on in your school career. This is not surprising because most people don't know most subjects beyond the lies to children versions. School education in particular tends to be horribly out of date, even when it isn't over-simplified to the point where it's not really factual any more.

And yes of course, there's good research and poor research in any discipline. I'm trying to refute the tendency to compare the absolute best results from physical and natural sciences with the worst results from human and social sciences, and conclude that physical science is inherently better!

[ptc24]

lies to children

In my first year, the inorganic chemists taught us Crystal Field Theory. It explains why copper sulfate is blue, and a bunch of related phenomena.

Between the first and second year, various physicists, biochemists etc. drop chemistry - the structure of the Cambridge NatSci course means you get more specialised as you go along.

In my second year, the inorganic chemists said "Crystal Field Theory is wrong. Here are some cases where it makes demonstrably wrong predictions. Here's Lingand Field Theory, it builds on a slightly handwavy version of the quantum theory the physical chemists taught you earlier on in the year. It gets things right that Crystal Field Theory gets wrong."

Again, a few people drop chemistry between the second and third year.

In my third year, the inorganic chemists said "Here's some more about Crystal Field Theory. Yes, we know we told you it's wrong, but it's easier to work with than Ligand Field Theory and once you know its limitations it's very handy."

[ptc24]

Discussions like this remind me that the rationalist/empiricist split isn't quite as dead as a lot of people think. There's still a temptation to suppose that if only you could find the right first principles you could deduce everything else... and in my limited experience this seems to be more common amongst physicists, mathematicians, engineers, compscis and the like. I get frustrated when they try to reason deductively about biology and then get annoyed when biologist/medics don't agree with their conclusions.

My faith in the deductive/rationalist project kind of got ruined while sitting in computational chemistry lectures. The maths required to reliably turn physics into chemistry is just too hard, provably too hard, and so there's no substitute for doing the experiment. And, actually, you know, the handywavy explanations they give you in organic chemistry lectures turn out to be a lot more useful when doing those experiments than the mathematics they give you in physical chemistry lectures.

And if working out the binding constant between molecule A and protein B from first principles is too hard, then what of human societies?

[liv]

Yes, I'm still struggling for a word to describe the tribe of people that includes groups like the Pharyngula or Less Wrong commentariats. Rationalist isn't quite right, because it already has a meaning which is, exactly as you say, the opposite of empiricist. Rationality fans, maybe?

Also a very good point about the varying tendency of disciplines to generalize and try to argue from first principles. In regards to the Newtonian Mechanics subthread, I think a more relevant criticism of Newtonian Mechanics is not that it falls apart at the quantum or the whole galaxy scales, but rather that it isn't very useful for making predictions about anything other than extremely simplified toy systems. Like you, I don't infer from that that we should give up on science (or deductive reasoning) altogether, but rather that we need to carry out empirical experiments which yield information about particular, limited instances or domains.

Biology and medical sciences are usually quite good at being humble about the scope and universality of what can be achieved, I think. I remember talking to physicist colleagues when I was an undergrad and they expressed surprise at how few overarching theories there are in biology. But then, part of the reason I went into biology is because I'm a hardcore empiricist, and I like detail and specifics more than generalities.

[sunflowerinrain]

Excellently put. When is the book coming out? ;). No, seriously, I think you should publish a collection of your essays.

I was fortunate to go to a school where in one of the first science lessons we were taught about Phlogiston: the thinking behind it and the experiments that proved its existence. One might think that being taught something that has been debunked for centuries is a waste of time bordering on the insane. Not so. In the next lesson, we re-created the experiment which disproved the phlogistic theory and then we looked at some of the rants of the eminent and influential thinkers who fought against the evidence.

The lesson was that we have to be open to change in ideas and must always be ready to evaluate new evidence as objectively as possible, because what we believe about the multi-faceted 'verse is based on our own tiny view of it at the time. I hope I never forget that.

[liv]

Thank you, that's a really sweet response to my little rant. I think my essays are too disparate to make a collection, not to mention too off-the-cuff and unresearched. I do tell myself that 8 years of posting stuff on the internet has been good for my writing ability. Overall I'd rather have a decent blog than a mediocre book; this format really works for me because I try to write as well as I can, but I don't get discouraged because my best abilities aren't good enough yet.

Your science lesson about Phlogiston sounds absolutely brilliant! There's a horrible tendency to tell children to believe stuff "because teacher says so", and if the subject happens to be science, they're in danger of coming away with the idea that science is something you believe because scientists say so.

[nanaya]

Argh, you have found & pressed one of my buttons. Thank you for an excellent post about it.

[azurelunatic]

This essay made one of the screaming voices in my head stop ranting, because you'd said much of the same things, but better.

[seekingferret]

This is a great post, thanks for linking me to it.