
Spooked: What do we learn about science from a controversy in physics? - akakievich
http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/11/30/spooked-books-adam-gopnik
======
dstyrb
The media is basically to blame for the pervasive myth that there exists some
magic science box you just crank long enough to pop out "correct universal
truths."

Scientists very rarely use the end-all-be-all language of the news reports. I
still hear people saying that the accelerating universe (a nobel prize
discovery) is 'quite probable' not 'didn't you know, we solved that, stop
thinking about it.'

There are whole branches devoted to disproving big bang cosmology. Are they
right? Probably not, but their presence and arguments are extremely valuable.
Disagreement is the founding, basic principle of science! It's what separates
scientific faith from religious faith. Seeing scientists argue and debate each
other in a public forum is the best possible evidence that the process is in
fact working properly.

~~~
noobermin
Media might be part of it, but I think it's a little deeper than that, it's an
issue with society and norms. I've learned as a scientist a bit more about
giving presentations than I thought I ever would, and something I've been told
time and time again is that you act with confidence; the smallest hint you
might doubt what you're presenting can be damaging to how people will receive
your message in the first place. This is a bit general in society, people
often equate confidence with truth and accuracy, which is not necessarily a
good correlation.

Because of that, scientists are under pressure when presenting to the public
to downplay their doubts or not mention particular points they are unsure of.
That's why issues in science don't get airplay even though most scientists are
aware of issues in their own field.

The reality is that reality is complicated, and people's perception of reality
is even more complicated, so it's no surprise that science is a very hairy
thing with a tinge of uncertainty at times. However, the outsider's reaction
to that is to respond to it with binary reasoning, saying that, "this means
they're wrong because it isn't 100% true" instead of how scientists really see
is, as "85% true, so,almost right."

~~~
dstyrb
That's interesting. To me an overconfident presentation / paper is a huge red
flag and I start to look even more carefully for things that are elided or
brushed under the rug. In the PhD we would have rip sessions, where we take
new publications from big names and just rip the analysis to shreds (with some
post doc help)-- it was an important lesson on "no experiment is anywhere near
perfect."

I vastly prefer presentations and articles where both sides of an argument are
presented. "We are in agreement with camp A, however camp B using procedure 2
find ... in the future experiment X will help solve this discrepancy"

My impression of scientific presentations to the community is that it's mostly
about _funding_. So they are want to make as bold a statement as possible then
-- but then "these stars may have actually come from another galaxy!" turns
into "Scientists find alien stars visiting the Milky Way from Andromeda!" I
actually remember a group issuing a counter press release to their own press
release when some reporter completely misinterpreted something and all of a
sudden bbc news was reporting that the sun was from the Sagittarius galaxy.

------
phkahler
If you want to know which parts of science are real, look to the engineers.

------
jrapdx3
As the article addresses, if the boundary between science and non-science is
fuzzy, then in a way it ironically mirrors the uncertainty so intrinsic to
development of quantum theory itself and echoed across the broader landscape
of disciplines.

Hardly a surprise that human activity, even one as exalted as real science,
reflects human nature which is a subset of all nature. What science has taught
and made us so much more aware of, is how much uncertainty is a central,
inescapable feature of the human condition, yet it is the fact of life we
resist most strongly.

So it's unsurprising scientists (and the progress of science) have often
stumbled on the merely human side of things, we are social creatures, and such
attributes are not removed just because we are "doing science", much less when
individuals become celebrities on account of it.

Seems to me the essence of the scientific approach is the willingness to say
"I don't know" when we don't know, and to own up to mistakes or wrong
conclusions when conclusions turn out to be incomplete or misguided. Well
maybe it would be better not to be so firm about conclusions anyway, as the
article points out, history has shown that whatever we regard as "facts" at a
particular time are at best temporary rest stops on the path of increasing
knowledge.

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akiselev
Ive read yhe whole article but I can't make heads or tails of what it is
_arguing_ (for lack of a better word). The article connects a lot of disparate
facts about science as an industry (academia/grants, journals, etc) to how
specific theories evolved to speculation about the nature of the scientific
method without ever connecting how those are related or even placing them in
the right chronological frame of reference. Renaissance "science" != 18th-19th
century "science" != first half of 20th century "science" != post WWII modern
"science" and I say "science" in scare quotes because the article entirely
fails to separate the scientific mindset, which has arguably been in play from
the beginning of human civilization as a logical extension of the natural
selection of ideas, from the infrastructure meant to support science as a
field, from funding to publication. The latter has changed drastically at
least once a century since the Renaissance and you can't understand the former
without knowing what that change looked like.

 _》One way or another, science really happens. The claim that basic research
is valuable because it leads to applied technology may be true but perhaps is
not at the heart of the social use of the enterprise. The way scientists do
think makes us aware of how we can think. Samuel Johnson said that a performer
riding on three horses may not accomplish anything, but he increases our
respect for the faculties of man. The scientists who show that nature rides
three horses at once—or even two horses, on opposite sides of the
universe—also widen our respect for what we are capable of imagining, and it
is this action, at its own spooky distance, that really entangles our minds._

What in the world does this even mean? Science is revered as much as it is
today simply because it has proven over and over again that it is the only
field and/or industry and/or intellectual pursuit that is capable of producing
truth that is independent of race, religion, or socioeconomic status. THAT is
the true utility of science: demonstrating that there is a frame of reference
that the vast majority of human beings can participate in and get the exact
same results as anyone else. Riding three horses at once is pointless but
providing a common language for the _epistemology of human civilization_ isnt
just for the warm fuzzies.

I think I have very much misunderstood the author and am butchering his
argument for the sake of a straw man, but I can't help but feel that every
other paragraph has yet another assertion that is too vague to be wrong but
too specific to be right, all without a central premise other than "science
works" and "fallible humans do science so science is fallible."

------
noobermin
_Where once logical criteria between science and non-science (or pseudo-
science) were sought and taken seriously—Karl Popper’s criterion of
“falsifiability” was perhaps the most famous, insisting that a sound theory
could, in principle, be proved wrong by one test or another—many historians
and philosophers of science have come to think that this is a naïve view of
how the scientific enterprise actually works. They see a muddle of coercion,
old magical ideas, occasional experiment, hushed-up failures—all coming
together in a social practice that gets results but rarely follows a definable
logic._

Ugh, that "many historians or philosophers of science" comes off as the
"informed sources" that conspiracy theorists claim have evidence of chemtrails
or the reptilian brotherhood. Who exactly are these people and what is
precisely their argument? In my opinion, this is the single greatest thing
that distinguishes science from other fields, it is inductive reasoning[0]
taken to an extreme. Therefore, if anyone has reason to doubt Popper's
criterion, then that should be of heavy focus in the article. The author is
almost guilty of "argument by inaccessible literature"[1] for what I would
think is the most important part of his argument.

However, he does make an important point. Science is a human endeavour, and
given that, it has issues that human institutions have. However, assuming
uniformity of cognitive biases across both scientists and magicians[2], this
just puts them on equal footing, while scientists have their experimental
criterion, which then puts them ahead of magicians anyway.

With regards to the entanglement saga, I think the reason no one heard about
it is much more mundane...there simply was no way to test it until Bell's
inequality, so scientists didn't think about it. So yes, "just ignore it" was
the solution because without a testable hypothesis, and may be some
interesting math, scientists just don't pursue it. In that way, science might
suffer due it being performed by human scientists who do have moods, but once
experiment entered the picture, boy did the field blow up! I don't think it
had much to do with changing attitudes as much as it came with the ability to
test Bell's inequality. The same could be said about GR, with the current
advances in numeric GR in the last decade spurring interest in it. It is
because our moods change, but I think it has a lot more to do with the
feasibility of advancement in a field that it does with external influences
like the internet or cultural changes.

There are many other interesting problems with established physics, like
Godel's metric[3], but, as you guessed it, you don't hear about it because
there is no experimental evidence of it, so physicists look elsewhere.

[0]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inductive_reasoning](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inductive_reasoning)

[1]
[http://staffhome.ecm.uwa.edu.au/~00043886/humour/invalid.pro...](http://staffhome.ecm.uwa.edu.au/~00043886/humour/invalid.proofs.html#1.13Proofbyreferencetoinaccessibleliterature)

[2] (which is a scientifically testable hypothesis! but I am unqualified to
give evidence for it either way

[3]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gödel_metric](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gödel_metric)

