

When Bad Theories Happen to Good Scientists - kjhughes
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702304388004577531270272951132.html

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drostie
It's important to get a perspective on "theory" and "model" in science, if
only because it's pivotal to understanding Kuhn's work and how he reconciled
it with the more-famous account due to Popper that science works by
_falsification_ rather than confirmation.

The point is that a good theory, like quantum mechanics or Newtonian mechanics
or atomic theory or heliocentrism, is Turing-complete -- at least for its
domain. These are _explanatory frameworks_ which offer a systematic
perspective on setting up _models_ of physical phenomena. Kuhn wants to say,
"Yes, scientists test and throw away, like Popper says. But usually, they test
and throw away at the level of this model. They don't usually throw away the
theory, they just say, 'oh, this effect is non-negligible and should be
included in a more detailed model.'"

Because a theory can compute anything which any other theory (in the same
problem domain) can compute, there is _no experiment_ which distinguishes the
two theories. A good example is geocentrism versus heliocentrism: Newtonian
mechanics _fully allows_ you to transform to a coordinate system which places
the Earth at the center of the universe with the Sun orbiting around it, by
adding centrifugal and Coriolis forces. That's perfectly well allowed! You can
accurately model all of the things which heliocentrism models with the Earth
at the center of the solar system.

How do we choose between these? Kuhn's answers are murky, having to do with
"aesthetic criteria", and I prefer an account due to Imre Lakatos. This is a
_feedback theory_ , but since one prototypical example of a feedback theory is
evolution by natural selection, you might think of it instead as _theory
evolution_ or so.

What happens is, grad students are lazy and want to publish interesting
results, so they select whichever theory makes it easiest for them to publish
something unexpected. The Standard Model of Particle Physics is ad-hoc as all
hell, and it turns out that we _know_ that it's wrong, and it has oodles of
parameters that could be tweaked to better conform with any experiment we
wanted, including ways to tweak it so that there is a Higgs particle or ways
to tweak it so that there is not a Higgs particle. It more or less violates
all of Kuhn's aesthetic criteria. Why does anybody suffer such a thing to
live? Because we can do insanely powerful calculations of real things with it,
and those calculations come out correct to very high accuracy without too-
complicated modelling.

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nessus42
Thomas Kuhn, the famous philosopher and historian of science (and physicist by
training), wrote all about this back in 1962 when he published _The Structure
of Scientific Revolutions_. This book brought us the term "paradigm shift",
which he argued typically only happened when older scientists retired, leaving
younger scientists to pursue avenues of research that disagreed with the
entrenched orthodoxy, without the threat of being denied tenure.

I.e., science as never been the direct route from hypothesis to proven theory
that they teach us in high school.

~~~
pjscott
Remember when relativity didn't need a generation of physicists to die before
it was accepted? How about quantum mechanics?

The big problem I have with Kuhn's idea of paradigm-shift-by-mass-retirement
is that there are a bunch of examples in the past century of _really big_
upsets in a number of fields that were accepted without dramatic wailing and
gnashing of teeth. They just don't get mentioned so much when the idea of
paradigm shift comes up -- classic confirmation bias.

(If you want to see big changes in action today, look at molecular biology.
Now _there_ is a lively field! It's kind of disconcerting how often they have
to update their textbooks, especially at higher levels.)

~~~
nessus42
I'm not sure that it would be correct to interpret Kuhn as stating that
paradigm shifts only occur upon death. His point was rather than science
_often_ doesn't proceed in the orderly way that we've typically been led to
believe. _Often_ does not preclude _sometimes_ , or even _frequently_.

I don't know much about molecular biology (other than currently working on RNA
Interference now for a living), but sometimes, I imagine, that there is just
too much solid data for a shift, that the orthodoxists don't need to die to
see the light. Or maybe these putative shifts don't really involve shifting
your entire mindset, which was required for things like the shift from
classical mechanics to quantum mechanics, or the shift from behavioral
psychology to cognitive psychology. Kuhn's model of paradigm shift only
applies if the _paradigm_ has to change--not if there's just a lot of churning
of the facts.

The shift from behaviorism to cognitivism was one that occurred relatively
recently in the history of science, and it certainly involved dramatic wailing
and the gnashing of teeth. In fact, there are still behaviorist holdouts.

Re relativity and quantum mechanics, these would be two of Kuhn's prime
examples, so I'm not sure what you are saying with respect to them. Einstein
didn't win a Nobel Prize for Relativity, because it still wasn't accepted well
enough even all those decades later, when he did win his Nobel prize.

~~~
a_bonobo
A current dramatic shift in biology (with wailing and the teeth and
everything) is the fight between the people who favor group selection vs. the
people who think group selection is bollocks and kin selection is to be
preferred.

This has been going on for the last 50 years, with kin selectionists
"winning", but E. O. Wilson recently published a book defending group-
selection which Richard Dawkins ripped apart, so right now the fight has come
back.

Check out this article: [http://www.huffingtonpost.com/david-sloan-
wilson/richard-daw...](http://www.huffingtonpost.com/david-sloan-
wilson/richard-dawkins-edward-o-_b_1588510.html)

I think we don't see any major paradigm shifts in molecular biology (or my
field, bioinformatics) because these aren't "declarative" per se, but rather
"explorative" - meaning that there are no big theoretical frameworks like
evolutionary biology has, but rather tiny steps of fiddling around in the dark
and _then_ using theory to explain what was found.

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jacobolus
Interesting referenced paper:
[http://www.journalofvision.org/content/11/12/2.full.pdf#page...](http://www.journalofvision.org/content/11/12/2.full.pdf#page=1&view=FitH)

The effect it calls into question was promoted by several articles that made
it to the front page around here recently. For instance,
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4121859>

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fwonkas
"There's a myth out there that has gained the status of a cliché: that
scientists love proving themselves wrong, that the first thing they do after
constructing a hypothesis is to try to falsify it."

This sounds horribly wrong to me. Isn't it the "myth" that the scientific
community is self-correcting, not individuals?

[edited for grammar]

~~~
snowwrestler
I agree...I thought the common wisdom is that scientists like proving _each
other_ wrong. In my experience that is not a myth.

~~~
hobin
And not even that is necessarily true. I'm a physicist, and I would be wary of
trying to prove any commonly accepted theory wrong - even if all my data
points that way. Contrary to popular belief, getting data that is _too_ non-
mainstream and trying to defend it is often academic suicide in science. While
science is one of the most rational fields to be working in, this is still a
sad but true fact about the human condition.

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D_Alex
Luckily, the fact that individual scientists are subject to the confirmation
bias does not greatly affect the workings of science as a whole... for as soon
as an interesting theory is developed by some scientist, hordes of _other
scientists_ will try to prove it false. For whatever reason...

~~~
username3
Where are the hordes of other scientists trying to prove Darwinism false?

~~~
tokenadult
_Where are the hordes of other scientists trying to prove Darwinism false?_

I hope they are reading the prior literature on the science of evolution, for
example as assembled in the "29+ Evidences for Macroevolution: The Scientific
Case for Common Descent,"

<http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/comdesc/>

so that they understand what "Darwinism" is today after 150 years of
scientists checking facts and refining the understanding of the origin of
species. Alas, there are still spectacular examples of people who purport to
be scientists who disagree with Darwin

[http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2012/07/21/creationist-
fu...](http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2012/07/21/creationist-fud-refuted/)

who totally misunderstand what Darwin meant and what evidence has turned up in
more recent generations to refine our understanding of evolution.

~~~
username3
I hope they are reading the critiques, but as your comment proves, scientists
trying to prove Darwinism false are just people purporting to be scientists.

[https://www.google.com/search?q=29%2B+Evidences+for+Macroevo...](https://www.google.com/search?q=29%2B+Evidences+for+Macroevolution)

e.g., A Critique of Douglas Theobald’s “29 Evidences For Macroevolution”
<http://www.trueorigin.org/theobald1a.asp>

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vdondeti
Somewhat related comment: "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." - Max Planck

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akanaber
Ridley has a hidden agenda here - he's a global warming denier and he
emphasizes confirmation bias to explain how all the climate scientists got it
wrong (unlike him).

Look at for example
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matt_Ridley#Views_on_climate_ch...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matt_Ridley#Views_on_climate_change)
"I see confirmation bias everywhere in the climate debate"

The cliche he derides that "scientists love proving themselves wrong" is a
cliche of the climate debate to argue that the whole field of climate science
is unlikely to be rotten (personally I think the point is more that scientists
love proving their colleagues wrong).

There's a endnote identifying the article as "The first of three columns on
the topic of confirmation bias" so I wonder if he'll do a big reveal of AGW-
denial or if he's just trying to sow subtle seeds of doubt in the background.

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dmlorenzetti
The article conflates "science" and "scientists". Science can test hypotheses,
even if individual scientists fall in love with their own theories.

The article itself gives a concrete example-- the work showing Sapir-Whorf
hypothesis is a "fluke" was done by a different research team.

A more interesting question than "Do scientists suffer from confirmation
bias?" might be "Are scientists more prone to confirmation bias than other
professionals?" Or "In the long run of history, do the conclusions of science
get overturned more often than the conclusions of other fields?"

~~~
learc83
>Science can test hypotheses, even if individual scientists fall in love with
their own theories.

The scientific process is incredibly useful, but I grow tired of the near
religious reverence for the nebulous "Science."

Science isn't monolithic. It isn't an object, it can't _do_ anything. Science
is merely a process practiced by people. Science is the scientists.

Science has hierarchies like any other human institution that can wrongly
prevent the spread of dissenting ideas. All it takes is enough people in the
right places to keep a bad idea firmly entrenched for years. As research
becomes more and more specialized we may become even more vulnerable to small
entrenched groups with incorrect conclusions.

Many of the incorrect theories overturned through the years, where done so,
not because the scientists who make up "Science" changed there mind after
seeing contradictory evidence, but because they died off.

~~~
lusr
Your comment seems to start off by agreeing with the parent but then diverges
when you say:

> Science is the scientists.

> Science has hierarchies...

No, scientists have human flaws which lead to biases, hierarchies, etc.
Science, as a method for discovering the truth about our world, works very
well in the big scheme of things and the reverence for it is _absolutely_ well
deserved.

Whether it's true or not that older scientists sometimes have to die off
before new scientists following more fruitful paths can have proper attention
is a human concern; the fact is that the scientific method is ultimately very
successful and the parent is quite correct in observing that the only issue
here is conflating science and scientists with unfair expectations.

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3dcart
I don't think I remember hearing that scientist love proving themselves wrong,
because they obviously don't. No one likes that. Scientists love proving other
scientists wrong, which is really what this article is about. Some scientists
were wrong, maybe because of confirmation bias, and other scientists without
the same confirmation bias proved them wrong.

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rubidium
When bad articles happen to interesting subjects. Thanks wsj.

~~~
homonculus
Your comment doesn't have much depth; would you care to explain why you think
the article is bad?

