
Do I have too much faith in science?  - wglb
http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/sciencefaith
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gizmo686
"As far as I know, no studies have shown that evidence-based medicine leads to
better patient outcomes" Actually, every medical study shows that using the
new method leads to better patient outcome than the old method (or that the
proposed new method leads to worse outcomes).

"[no studies have shown that] companies which practice comprehensive A/B
testing are more profitable than those which follow their intuition." The
question an A/B test answers is which option A or B will be most beneficial,
which companies then use as a tool in their decision making. Companies are not
stupid, if they think the resources required to answer the question with an
A/B test are more then the benefits from knowing the answer, they would not
invest in asking. I also suspect that the reason A/B testing is so common is
that companies found that using it greatly decreased the risk associated with
trying something different.

"The evidence that science is responsible for stuff like increased life
expectancy is surprisingly weak." I do not have access to the linked book, but
it is my understanding that increased life expectancy is a result of improved
hygiene, and a year round food supply. The food supply can either be got with
science or a smaller population. Native Americans had excellent hygiene, and
as a result relatively long lives. Europeans, in contrast, thought that
bathing was unhealthy, so by modern standards they had poor hygiene. Without
science, how can we determine who is right?

"This [cooking eggs in copper boals] was not something that chefs had ever
established as scientific knowledge" No, they established that through
generations of cooking eggs in what was handy, eventually realize that eggs
cooked in copper tended to be better. At this point, a couple of curios chefs
might have cooked a batch in copper, and an identical patch in silver, and see
if the copper ones really were different. That sounds like science. (In
fairness, an explicit experiment only speeds up the prosses, at the very least
you have evolutionary experimentation where those chefs who cook eggs in
copper tend to be more successful)

" If chefs were forced to follow 'evidence-based cooking', not using anything
special like a copper bowl until their was a peer-reviewed double-blind
randomized controlled trial proving its effectiveness, the result surely would
be worse food." Finally, half a sentence I agree with. But before that,
professional chefs do follow evidence based cooking. When they have a new
idea, they cook it up, taste it, improve it, get a final draft. They then make
sure there recipe reliably produces the same results, and gets several of
their peers (or employers) to taste it and confirm that it is good enough to
get on the menu. Even in the early stages, the decisions of how to make it
were informed by past experience of what works and what doesn't, and I suspect
there was a great deal of experimentation to get to the final product. The
standard of double-blind trials is overkill in this case, because it slows
down progress in exchange for making sure you do not go backwards. In medicine
this is good, because we don't want to risk killing someone, however in
cooking the risk of serving a bad dish is small enough that you can serve a
new dish with less evidence it would be good.

"Can Steve Jobs provide a proof for the rightness of every iPhone feature?"
No, but I suspect Apple performs usability testing.

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jsnk
So Swartz is unhappy that science has to take one step backwards for every 99
steps taken forward to the progress?

And I wonder what alternatives Swartz would like to provide instead of
science? Just so he is aware, we sort of tried astrology, religious doctrines,
voodoo Eastern philosophies, but none of them even come close to the knowledge
we acquire from physicalist point of view taken with science.

