
Science beyond individual understanding - michael_nielsen
http://michaelnielsen.org/blog/?p=465
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te_platt
Overall a very interesting article. Still this line made me chuckle:

"And it would disastrous if erroneous results were to have a major impact on
public policy."

This is probably one of the most routine occurrences in creating public
policy. Maybe only superseded by misunderstanding scientific results
(erroneous or not).

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michael_nielsen
I was thinking of things like the Y2K debacle (not really scientists who made
the call there, of course). Or imagine the global cooling scare in the 1970s
had had a major impact on public policy.

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hugh
In what way was y2k a public policy issue?

And was the "debacle" the bug itself or the over-reaction to it?

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michael_nielsen
A very incomplete summary of the public policy aspect:
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Y2K#Government_responses>

You can find far more by Googling around. A large number of countries seemed
to have mobilized resources, in many cases quite significant.

As to your second question, I was thinking about the over-reaction.

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SapphireSun
Interesting idea, but I don't think the problem he posits is new. Everything
is done along a chain of trust. Even current researchers don't reproduce every
experiment that led up to their current body of knowledge. No one has ever
understood the _entire_ chain of reasoning. More to the point, mistaken ideas
have always infected lots of people, this was the impetus for science in the
first place. This will resolve itself in the usual way- people rely on the
results, the results turn out to be wrong, and we search for more answers.

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yters
I wonder how long until the trust chain is automated? As long as the results
proceed along the lines of logical deduction and statistics, it can be machine
understandable.

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a-priori
"As long as the results proceed along the lines of logical deduction and
statistics, it can be machine understandable."

Gödel might have a few things to say about that.

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yters
He's fine with logical deduction from a given set of axioms.

