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
-
-
I’m going to begin with two claims about the state of #science in the United States. I use the hashtag advisedly because one of my assertions is that the majority of what passes for science in the current zeitgeist is generally non-science, or, most charitably, bad conjecture, if we’re properly classifying some of the current crop of pop-culture fads attempting to pass themselves off as real Science (yes, I’m looking at you AGW). To begin with, here are my two claims:
-
- The current state of science in the United States is…unwell. This is not to say that there isn’t some good science being done to which one can point, but the measure of the health of science in any age isn’t simply what things are invented, or what new technologies may be invented or arise that lead to the ease of living of the species. I will take this up in detail below, but for now I make the claim that science in the U.S. is in a deplorable state, due to a confluence of factors that began from within science itself, but spread to other areas, such as the Law, for example, and reinforced the rot that has led us to our current state, which an esteemed scientist and friend of mine calls “the Post-Rational Epoch.” More on him below, as well.
- While a direct consequence of #1, it is also a piece of evidence while being its own separate problem, but the odds are that anything you’ve read recently in a mainstream media science piece, no matter how ‘peer reviewed’ it was, is garbage. My estimate is that it’s about 70/30 – in favor of garbage. I’ll back up that claim, as well.
Before I can properly begin my argument, however, I must first define what I mean by science, as well as a number of related concepts in order that a metric is established by which I can show where things are currently awry, as well as the how and why that happened. So, I’ll leave these here and return to their proof below. Without trying to be pedantic, and in respect to the science knowledge of the Glibertariat, I ask some forbearance on this reiteration of the basics. Blame public education – I do. (See my prior writing on that topic if you’re curious.)
What is Science?
It is a methodology for modeling the universe; nothing more, and certainly nothing less. To be more precise, science is the process by which we develop models of the real world with predictive power better than random chance. Science proceeds on an underlying assumption: that there are underlying truths of our material world, of the universe itself, that can be discovered, and modeled, by mankind. In some cases, like Newton’s Law of Gravity, the model can be so powerful, with such mathematical precision, that predictions can be made about the future time, position, and even energy state of bodies on Earth or in space.
Science is also how you have been understanding the world from the moment your senses turned on and became capable of taking in and processing stimuli. You have been producing models, using heuristics and other cognitive mechanisms, to come to grips with the stunning array of information presented to you, then updating these as more data comes in, confirming some hypotheses, discarding others, modifying yet others, limiting the domain and range of some theories… What we traditionally learned as the scientific method is an articulation of that mental machinery that churns out models of how the world works.
- Observe
- Ask a question
- Develop a testable hypothesis
- Experiment – TEST your hypothesis
- Analyze the data/results
- Conclusion
This is also an iterative process and can be entered from different points along the path. You may have a simple question that nags at you, or you may have a particularly well-developed theory – as in the case of Einstein’s gravitational waves – but in either case, if you don’t have a testable hypothesis, one that has measurements and criteria for validation, the problem remains. (P.S. it turns out Einstein was correct – it just took 100 years for the equipment to be invented to confirm it). As this example above (hopefully) illustrates, Science does not necessarily yield absolute, universal truth… at least not NOW, or maybe not on the first go-around, which is why we have categories for models. The generally agreed upon definitions are:
-
- Conjecture – An incomplete model, or an analogy to another domain;
- Hypothesis – A model based upon all data in its specified domain, with no counterexample, and incorporating a novel prediction that has yet to be validated by facts;
- Theory – a hypothesis with at least one non-trivial validating datum;
- Law – a theory that has received validation in all possible ramifications, and to known levels of accuracy;
One scientist, an author on the subject of science, science education, and former two-time chief scientist at Hughes Aircraft Company, has offered the following addenda to the hierarchy above.
- Rational argument must be the zeroth axiom.
- Observable evidence must be reduced to measurements—that is, to comparison against a standard.
- Scientific facts, the foundation of all model building and testing, are measurements with an established accuracy.
- Science is a branch of knowledge, the objective branch, and ultimately public.
- The application of science to public policy with unvalidated models is unethical. FN1
What Science Isn’t
With this as the foundation upon which we build, it’s evident that the IFL #Science! Crew traffics in something more akin to a religion – scientism, but certainly not science. For example, nowhere in our schema above for science does the word ‘consensus’ appear. For some of us of a certain age, the word ‘consensus’ was never taught in conjunction with science; the word was never spoken in a science classroom. This is because consensus is not a part of the scientific method and its adoption into #science has a direct correlation to the cheapening of real science. Science cares nothing for votes or popularity; either a model delivers predictions that can be tested and measured, that is validated or not, or it is either (1) an incorrect model, or (2) isn’t science at all. This is where the popularity of certain ideas, mingled with the need for funding for continued research, can lead to bad outcomes. This is at its worst when popularity includes the government concretization of ideas. FN2
In truth, the new #science is the politicization of science, and it is, unfortunately, nothing new. The Lysenkoism of the 1930’s charts its rise quite nicely with the fall to our current state of scientific illiteracy and innumeracy. Science in service to the state is another of the defining characteristics of statist systems of government, such as socialism, communism, fascism, and even corporatism, of which we have more than our share. AGW is simply the newest version of Trofim Lysenko’s politicized science that seeks its answers not in universal truths, but in power and control, in popularity, populism, and the censorship of competing ideas, all of which undermines the very foundations upon which science is built. Science proceeds on the refinement of models, as Einstein slightly narrowed the domain of Newton’s Laws of Motion to more accurately model what happens when the v = velocity in Newton’s equations approaches c, the speed of light. It is easy to forget that was a refinement that was four-hundred years in the making. Or to cast it in a slightly different light, five years before the Puritans started the Salem Witch trials of alleged witches, Isaac Newton published the Principia. Newton’s models withstood four-hundred years of human progress in science and even then, Einstein only narrowed them for a few special classes of objects traveling at light speed.
Einstein left us with numerous other models, some of which bear his name, on the basis of the profundity of his contributions. The same is true for Otto Warburg: the Warburg effect is what occurs when you drink a radioactive sugar and then have a PET Scan that “lights up” the cancerous tumor cells, as those cells preferentially uptake the glucose over surrounding healthy, non-cancerous cells. FN 3. It’s why Glenn T. Seaborg had an element of the periodic table named after him, (Seaborgium, Sg – 106), while he was still alive. Seaborg and Edwin McMillan discovered Plutonium and both won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1951. That line of transuranium elements on the bottom of the periodic table – the actinide series? Seaborg, as well.
Industrial Science
In the late 1960’s, a gentleman named Jeff finished his PhD in Engineering from UCLA. Like many of his fellow graduates, given their interests and multiple degrees in electronics, applied mathematics, applied physics, and communication and information theory, employment was plentiful in the corridor north of Los Angeles that contained the heart of the United States’ burgeoning aerospace/defense industry, chief among them Hughes Aircraft Company. Jeff’s family had a legacy at Hughes and it was no accident that he would spend half of his three decades at Hughes as the Division Chief Scientist for both the Missile Development and Microelectronics Systems Divisions.
Among the projects to which Jeff contributed significantly was the AWG (pronounced in military slang like it rhymes with dog) Nine (AN/AWG-9) radar. That caught my attention when I learned about it from his son. I was an attack helicopter pilot in the 1990’s, but I grew up keenly interested in American military aviation of the 1980’s. The AWG-9 radar, and the plane that ultimately carried the famous missile guided by it, would be featured in “Top Gun.” The F-14 Tomcat ultimately was what arrived at the end of a long acquisition process to find a fighter-intercepter capable of taking advantage of the standoff distance of both the radar and the vaunted Phoenix missile. While the Iranians claimed to have splashed over 60 Iraqi MiGs with the Phoenix and the AWG-9, the only three ever (admitted to being) fired by U.S. fighters missed their targets.
Regardless of its record, the chief deterrent effect of it lay in its effect on pilots on the other side of the Cold War. Almost all fixed-wing aircraft, and even some rotary-wing, have devices much like the ones you use in your car to detect police radar. The detectors work in specified frequency bands and detect the radiated electromagnetic energy that is being sent at your car by the cop’s radar gym. In return you get a tone, or a spike, on your detector. The ones in planes are using fundamentally the same principles, but the receivers will give returns for slightly more sophisticated radars, including a strobe for direction and strength of signal, up and including targeting radars, like the kind on missile seeker heads and their radars. These produce the “tone” that is now ubiquitous in modern aviation movies.
The old adage in dog-fighting is that ‘first in sight wins the fight.’ This is because in dog-fighting, the person in the higher energy state – typically the person at higher altitude – all other things being equal, can translate that extra potential energy into kinetic energy at some decisive point in the fight, usually as airspeed, sufficient to shoot down the opponent. For Soviet-bloc fighters going up against the Tomcat, its radar, and the accompanying Phoenix (AIM-54) missile, it meant getting a tone in our headset and a “lock” signal while you were still flying blind, unable to “see” anything, because that’s what happens when someone else’s radar can “outreach” yours. Hence, regardless of the U.S. record with the Phoenix missile, the AWG-9 likely helped keep the Cold War cold and gave the U.S. air superiority because it could see farther than anything the Russians had.
The AWG-9 and the accompanying technology for the missile seeker head, the ability for the missile to track multiple targets, to travel at supersonic speeds, and to be able to shunt fuel in turns at 5-6 times the force of gravity, is all Science at an extraordinary level, where getting it wrong means lives lost. Notice also that all of that work was classified top secret or better and therefore not subject to “peer review” or “publication” in a science-y journal; yet the mathematics behind radar is at a level that very few people can understand. Radar is, fundamentally, the ability to distinguish signal from noise among a radar return from, say, 75 nautical miles away… that is a math problem of a very, very high order. And none of that even begins to address the ability of the radar to acquire, track, and target multiple aircraft traveling at high velocities in different directions all intent on doing harm to the person sitting in front of that radar.
I want to finish this first chapter on Science with a reminder of Science’s truth-seeking function. I also note here that Science is in this aspiration no different than the Law, or Literature, or, more broadly, all of good Art. Good comedy is funny because of how well it presents the Truth – or apparent Truths – typically in an odd or unusual light. Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet was written in the context of 17th century Elizabethan drama, yet it has been remade time and time again, into the Sharks v. the Jets and many other variants. This isn’t because it’s false. Indeed, even Religion would be well included in this list of truth-seeking human endeavors and it serves (perhaps) as a reminder why the IFL #Science crew is so much closer to being a religion than they are to being scientists.
In the next installment, I will make good on proving the two propositions I began with and trace the history of the degradation of science, from Karl Popper and his colleagues to David Stove to Daubert v. Merrell Dow Pharmaceuticals. Yes, we finally get after the lawyers next time.
FN 1: Conjecture, Hypothesis, Theory, Law: The Basis of Rational Argument, by Dr. Jeff Glassman, Ph.D., CrossFit Journal #64, Dec. 1, 2007.
FN 2: I’ll explore a number of those specific instances in future articles, in order to show how wrong science can go in model-building, but how much worse it is when government becomes involved in choosing which is the “correct” model. This is true from nutrition guidelines to cancer research, from fitness to hydration, and many more. It’s almost as if the government is completely ignorant of the ‘procedural’ nature of genuine science. For the more cynical, it may be assumed that this is no accident at all, and instead a feature of politicians intentionally picking whatever theory works best for their political purposes, the truth-seeking function of science be damned.
FN 3: Warburg’s contributions to what might be called biochemistry now, but had no such name during his life, rival Einstein’s in physics. Warburg received the Nobel prize in 1928 for his articulation of the aerobic and anaerobic processes of cellular respiration.
FN 4: I am aware that various publications list the AWG-9 anywhere from 50-100nm depending upon what one reads and at what classification and when it was published. Suffice it to say that the AWG-9 outdistanced (and thus out-scienced) anything the Russians had during that timeframe.
Comments
306 responses to “WTF Happened to Science, Part 1: What is Science and What Isn’t It?”
I mostly worry about math. 4 out of 5 dentists sign a letter on climate change: how can they possibly be so confident about the any family of climate studies? The subject is immense, and we’ve seen a decade of games with data, and still: no predictive model emerges. We have a scientific consensus based on a predicted signal that barely rivals noise in the old data?
I am glad to tell you I don’t know about climate change. I doubt we are close to proving man is the culprit . . . or exonerating him . . . either one. It’s idiotic and disrespectful to look at all the engines in play and assert that we know which factors dominate the equation.
The propaganda effort around it is truly something to behold; a model with repeated invalidating outcomes. i.e. Multiple incorrect predictions about future events. And yet, it has been propagated as if it’s the Gospel Truth, including in our education system. My kids were bludgeoned with it in high school.
It’s just one of the trendy religions. There is hysteria in houses Blue and Red: confirmation bias, excuses, hypocrisy . . . plenty enough sin to go around. In fairness, though, a press secretary that can’t estimate crowd sizes isn’t going to undermine our freedom and the economy: some amped up idiocy can be safely ignored.
The models predict extreme weather events, and we get extreme weather somewhere on earth every day. That’s, like, 1000% certainty.
What are the odds that a team will win six straight games at the end of the season to win the NCAA men’s basketball championship ?
Zero – it was the Transwomen’s team competing in the female division.
Ba-ZING!
Wait, is this a trick question?
I was promised
there would be no mathcake.The likelihood is 100% that a team will win six straight games at the end of the season to win the NCAA men’s basketball championship. somebody wins the damn thing every year, after all.
The odds that any particular team will do so vary.
You can narrow the results by betting on the teams that won’t win.
exactly
Approaches 100%.
It’s the possible the bad orange man gets into a conflict with and the championship game is canceled.
Doesn’t like “” took as HTML. After the “with” should say “insert country of your choice”
This is why I always use false vacuum collapse for all my “anything is possible” contingencies.
I think it is undeniable that the earth has generally been warming since the 1950’s at least. I also think it is undeniable that human activity is responsible for *some* of that warming. I am willing to accept that it is more likely than not that humans are responsible for the majority of that warming. Anything past that however and you lose me because I have yet to see any evidence that supports it and the evidence I have seen says that contrary to the official story global warming is not likely to present a significant problem to humanity for another 250 – 400 years and even that assumes we do not make any technological changes that mitigate the impacts long before then.
since 1850 more likely. I doubt humans caused a majority. I don’t doubts some… But can’t see co2 as the main factor.
Yeah my willingness to believe that we cause the majority is not based just on CO2 but other things as well, such as our paving over a measurable part of the world lowering net albedio slightly, methane and water vapor that we pump into the air, and all of the waste heat we create with our various industrial processes.
Sure any one of those factors would be small compared to the natural forces at play but I can easily see all of them in the aggregrate combining to push the scale enough for us to be responsible for 50% of the warming since the middle of the last century
Warming since the Little Ice Age ended. Those were some brutal times in North America and Northern Europe.
but did the earth warm since 1250? how bout since 4550 BC?
1250 was warmer than now.
I’ll have to check on temperatures in 4550BC.
I know 14,550 BC was much colder than now, but significantly warmer than 19,550 BC
It has generally been warming for about 16K years as best as we can tell.
yes but with ups and downs
It is also undeniable that the temperature peak in the 1930s was at or above where we are now.
And that we are still exiting an ongoing ice age.
I am not willing to accept a majority share blame for any measured warming, as the causal models used to allot blame fail repeatedly to predict future values.
I also see no reason why we should not just adapt to the changes as they come, given the long, slow process presented.
As far as extreme weather events go, in the Southwest there were worse droughts than the most recent one in the 1900s. There were big chunks of West Texas where it didn’t rain for years, not a drop. So bad that the vegetation was permanently changed (used to be more grassland where there is now mostly mesquite hells).
the vegetation was permanently changed
Until a wet spell happens and the previous vegetation sweeps back in. Permanence!
the earth has generally been warming since the 1950’s at least.
There are cycles within cycles. We’ve been in a long-term warming cycle since the end of the last Ice Age. We’ve been in a shorter-term warming cycle since the end of the Little Ice Age, roughly the middle of the 19th century.
I also think it is undeniable that human activity is responsible for *some* of that warming.
I think its highly likely, but that’s not the same as undeniable. We are in a warming trend regardless, in a huge system that we don’t understand. The simple equation of more CO2 = more warming is attractive, but I honestly don’t know that it is actually the case, given the multiple feedback loops and confounding variables. The various models that attempt to account for the complexity and isolate the effect of anthro CO2 don’t seem terribly accurate.
From a lot of sources, the data indicates CO2 follows the warming, which makes me doubt it’s the cause of it.
The gentleman I mentioned in this article has concluded that the CO2 lags temperature, as well. I can link to his blog where he has all of his methods, math, and papers on the subject.
I do not think this argument is anywhere near as persuasive as people seem to think it should be.
Yes historically atmospheric CO2 levels rose in response to higher temperatures, what that tells us at most is that there is not a natural mechanism for CO2 to increase the temperature of the planet. However the CO2 that we are contributing is not a natural phenomenon. So the fact that CO2 did not cause any warming periods in the past does not prove that it cannot do so, all it says is that it is not natural for it to do so.
But it does say you’ve got a lot more work to do to say that it is causing warming rather than a continuation of one of the existing cycles.
So “unnatural” CO2 – from human beings – is different than “natural” – from CO2? Is that what you’re arguing? I’m sorry, I’m really trying to understand what you’re claiming – not snark at all. Does “man-made” CO2 somehow carry additional effects that “natural” CO2 doesn’t?
So the fact that CO2 did not cause any warming periods in the past does not prove that it cannot do so,
I think it indicates that the only correlation between increasing levels CO2 and warming is that warming precedes higher levels of CO2. I think that means that increasing levels of CO2 do not cause warming.
all it says is that it is not natural for it to do so.
Can CO2 do anything that its not “natural” for it to do?
Yes absolutely.
No I am claiming that historically at least there was no natural process which was capable of causing atmospheric CO2 concentrations to rise at a rate which was sufficient to trigger atmospheric warming. Instead CO2 increase was always itself caused by a warming process which was well under way. This does not prove that IF CO2 levels did rise for some reason it would not have caused warming, it merely proves that was not the cause of prior warming cycles. Further today we are living in a world where a mechanism never before present has caused CO2 levels to increase independent of any other natural phenomenon.
So as Uncivil says, this does not prove CO2 is to blame for the warming, it just says that you still have a lot of work to demonstrate that it is the driver.
Except this is not true. We can easily run a controled experiment on a closed system and demonstrate that increasing CO2 concentration raises the temperature of said system. To argue that CO2 could not cause a greenhouse effect on the atmosphere you would have to somehow argue that it behaves differently in a greenhouse than it does in the atmosphere as a whole.
In otherwords we KNOW that CO2 is a greenhouse gas and increasing the concentration of it in the atmosphere WILL absent other factors cause the earth to warm. What we don’t really know however is what other feedback loops are present in the atmosphere and whether they will amplify that CO2 signal or counteract it.
The question is not does CO2 cause warming, we know it does, we have undeniable experimental results proving it does, the question is whether the warming caused by CO2 is capable of driving the net temperature balance of the earth higher. Historically there is no evidence that it does because historically CO2 increases always trailed temperature increases this however does not mean that CO2 cannot drive temperature increases, just that it has not. In order to prove that CO2 cannot drive temperature increases you would need to identify a long term period of increased atmospheric CO2 concentrations that correlated with stable or falling temperatures.
Personally I do not believe that atmospheric CO2 concentrations are capable of driving global warming to a significant degree to be problematic because it is a very very weak greenhouse gas and significantly increasing the amount of it in the atmosphere will stimulate plant growth to counteract it and cause oceans to absorb more of it causing problems with ocean acidification maybe but not a runaway greenhouse effect.
That said I do not think the fact that historically CO2 always lags temperature increase proves my beliefs, it merely proves that nature has not so far as we know run that experiment for us.
The question is not does CO2 cause warming, we know it does,
Certainly, in closed systems. I don’t know that it has been established that increases in CO2 precede and cause warming in the Earth’s climate system.
And its not like the Earth doesn’t produce plenty of its own CO2 through volcanic activity, either. Big eruptions produce huge amounts of CO2, so there is a source other than people for CO2 inputs and increases. Once a CO2 molecule is in the air, I don’t think the source of it matters.
this however does not mean that CO2 cannot drive temperature increases, just that it has not. In order to prove that CO2 cannot drive temperature increases you would need to identify a long term period of increased atmospheric CO2 concentrations that correlated with stable or falling temperatures.If it doesn’t precede warming, I don’t see how it can cause it.
Fair point that to prove CO2 does not cause warming in our climate system your would need to identify a long term period where CO2 is elevated and temperatures do not rise. However, I think the overall lag of CO2 to warming is strong evidence that CO2 concentrations are not a significant factor in warming trends.
Big eruptions produce huge amounts of CO2, so there is a source other than people for CO2 inputs and increases. Once a CO2 molecule is in the air, I don’t think the source of it matters.
I was echoing this point in my head and started thinking how volcanoes also spew a lot of dust too, and how the overall mixture might affect the situation differently than what I’m assuming are relatively less-particulate-y human emissions. I’d say it just further complicates the picture, but it’s not crazy to say natural sources and manmade sources of CO2 might not have completely identical effects on climate on a volume/volume basis.
Rasilio: We are just seeing part of the oscillating sine wave that describes variations in earth’s climate so it is easy to see what looks like an upwards trend in temperature. Back off and look at it again. The long term wave oscillates. Look a little closer ant that line is fuzzy with oscillations itself.
My grandfather told me he was born in a cold trend and he remembered icicles from the roof to the ground…in Louisiana. By the time he was 20 they were in a warming trend and that resulted in grass staying green through the winter. By the time my father was growing up we were back in a cooling trend with snow, sometimes heavy, every winter. By the late nineties were were back at the peak of a mini warming trend and green grass all winter. Now we are back in a cooling cycle.
There are more than a few clues that the AGW assertion is bullshit and it’s proponents are grifters but the one that stands out to me are Carbon Credits. They are nothing more than indulgences, plain and simple. Indulgences paid to the govt and not the church. That is 100% of what this is all about. Money and power. In no way whatsoever will that alter the weather, but that is the preferred solution to heading off AGW. They haven’t been able to make one single accurate prediction out of hundreds, and kept changing the name of the con until they arrived at one that is unfalsifiable.
There is no statistical change in extreme weather events, no statistical change in ocean rise (which has been going on since the end of the little ice age at a steady pace), no statistical change in rainfall patterns or amounts and no statistical change in the long term warming trend that is the end of the last ice age. The whole AGW canon is complete horseshit. Actually it stinks so bad that calling it horseshit is an insult to horseshit.
Relax. Burn some old tires in your yard and crank the AC up. Take a road trip in an SUV. Enjoy your life.
I was on a float trip in Canada. Our guide was a fascinating character – kind of a hippe vibe, split his time guiding between Canada and the Himalayas. He was an Amerind (the one who referred to Canada as the “Dominant Culture”, first time I heard that, and I thought was very insightful).
Anyhoo, they were having an unusually dry and hot spring and summer, and he noted the differences in the river compared to a more normal summer. Somebody asked him if it was global warming, and he said no, it was all just natural cycles. His people had stories of hotter and colder times. Later, at dinner, somebody asked me if I thought global warming was real, and I said that the narrative claiming we were responsible for the warming trend was basically a hoax, based on cooked data. They were dumbfounded.
There are so many factors that the con assumes are constants when they are not but they have to to sell it.
The constituents of the atmosphere are not constant and never have been. The amount of water on the earth’s surface and in the atmosphere are not constant. The size and shape of the oceans are not constant. The level of the crust at any given point are not constant. Weather patterns and ocean currents are not constant.
Most importantly the suns radiation and surface patterns are not constant and never have been. They are all variables. All of this creates a very dynamic system that we barely have a clue about.
Oh look, here comes Chicken Little. Better get out your checkbook.
Anatomy of a con: In the mark’s mind create some impending doom. Create a sense of urgency so they don’t have time to think things out. Convince them that all they have to do is pay you and doom will be averted. Sound familiar?
There are more than a few clues that the AGW assertion is bullshit and it’s proponents are grifters but the one that stands out to me are Carbon Credits.
Chalk another answer up to “Follow The Money” .
“I think it is undeniable that the earth has generally been warming”
I know one thing – climate scientists are not measuring the temperature of the earth. They are measuring the temperature of the bottom of the troposphere.
If such scientists insist on using the wrong terms, then everything else they do is highly suspect.
something something hand measuring the bottom of the grope-o-sphere something something
Last time one of my in-laws was chirping about climate change, I told her it sounded like a null-hypothesis. She turned her head like I had blown a dog-whislte and looked confused. She holds a PhD from a majorr university.
I mostly worry about math. 95% confidence limit is the threshold of proof in most studies. Ergo, across the body of all work
* PhD theses proven
* drugs approved
* papers publish
at least 5% of them are wrong.
And it’s probably even more (consider weak design of experiments, bias in interpretation, and outright manipulation of data). I heard somewhere that in no field of study are correlations (p-tests, that sort of thing) normally distributed: there is profound skewness that belies the manipulation towards 95%.
You’re anticipating part 2 of this series. All I will say about “confidence levels” is that the American Statistical Association finally came out and debunked the notion that a .05 p-value ‘proves’ anything. It doesn’t. It’s incorrect and has led to a host of problems, including p-hacking and plagiarized data sets.
link was p hacked
Lol. Nice. I’m terrible at html. Here it is.
https://amstat.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00031305.2016.1154108#.XRuE7ZNKiu4
debunked
I never knew that anyone ever thought .05 proved anything.
Are you kidding? Virtually every garbage study that gets posted in the social “sciences” that has the “correct” conclusion is touted by the MSM as being “true” – and even argued by academics – because it’s got a p-value that makes them warm.
And (per my remarks below) has not even a hint of a rigorous control. So junk, not science.
My science-ing days are long, long behind me, but I’ve read and/or listened to a few podcasts on the “replication crisis” which seems to be largely a social science problem.
And, oddly to me, the NAS says don’t worry: https://cra.org/crn/2019/06/nas-report-on-reproducibility-and-repeatability-in-science/
FTA: “A key takeaway from the report is that there is no crisis, but we cannot be complacent either. Reproducibility and replicability are important to attain confidence in scientific knowledge, but they are not the end goal of science. The fact that a given result cannot be reproduced (or replicated) does not mean it is incorrect, and conversely, replication and reproducibility do not imply correctness.”
Wow.
It’s not odd at all when you consider that more and bigger funding is their goal, not knowledge.
there was focus on social science. but it goes beyond. Nutrition medicine are not much better
It’s also an issue in in vivo biology, nutrition, epidemiology, and toxicology.
Well, whatever they’re studying, ban it just to be safe. Especially in the state of California.
cs – well done science has ingredients thought to cause cancer in the state of California.
I know what you mean, but you understand that I’m not looking to the social sciences or Dan Rather for design-of-experiments advice. By debunked I took you to mean that there was ever any question amongst experts in math. The word is confidence, not certainty. . . the subjectivity of the matter is baked right into the name. I would be shocked to my core if any engineer I ever practiced with thought differently.
Of course the majority of this has happened in the ‘soft’ sciences, but the overall problem has bled into other areas. A .05 p value isn’t even close to the confidence level required in physics for example (which I think off the top of my head requires a six-sigma event).
Just saying “six sigma” makes my skin crawl from memories of quality engineering consultants.
Just saying “six sigma” makes my skin crawl from memories of quality engineering consultants.
THAT 6 sigma doesn’t even actually use 6 sigma as their standard.
Proves that someone is drunk when coupled with an LEO pinky swearing that the car was weaving and almost hit said LEO.
If you don’t have a complete picture of what you are trying to scientifically prove, odds are that you will get it wrong. Even with 95% of the information, you might still not have a clue wtf you are talking about. That goes double for complex systems.
My physics teacher once told me that the biggest problem with the highly educated science types was the inability to admit that despite all that they really knew, what they didn’t was orders of magnitude in size & scope.
Shit, even our understanding of gravity, a mechanism everyone is familiar with and nobody even questions, and which Newtonian mechanics can very accurately predict & simulate, falls apart and has gaps when pushed. This is why I scoff at people that say stupid shit like “scientific consensus” or “the science is settled”. If they understood how much science we took for granted even a decade ago now is seen from a completely different perspective, they might stop saying dumb shit like this.
Amen. Couldn’t agree more. There is a stunning lack of humility by the cheerleaders and even many of the so-called scientists.
at least 5% bust more likely half. Due to all the bad methods selective data p hacking etc
“at least 5% of them are wrong.”
No. That’s not how it works. It means you would only expect to see those results and have the “true” value match the null hypothesis 5% of the time. That does not translate to 5% of studies being wrong
In other words it’s an expression of confidence not an probability of correctness
This is great and totes in my wheelhouse. As a fellow scientist, I have been quite dismayed at the direction things have taken as well. Not just the politicization of the science itself (which is, lamentably, always to be expected at some level or another); but what troubles me much more is the pathetic state of peer-review. Your point about classified research not being subject to peer-review in the same way as academic research is well-taken. However, a key component of the scientific method is reproducibility, and reproducibility is intimately bound up with peer-review.
Unfortunately, the “publish or perish” mindset has contributed to this problem. Sheer volume of publications has become the academic currency against which a scientist’s productivity is measured. Nevermind the fact that there are highly respected scientists with relatively few publications, but each with great impact. This paradigm has contributed to a proliferation of low-quality journals with low-quality review standards simply to pad people’s CVs.
Another very troubling development is the overall lack of basic scientific literacy amongst the general populace. There’s never been a time in human history in which the majority of the population was well-versed in the scientific method. However, educational institutions were at least built around basic Enlightenment principles of rational inquiry, reason and critical thought. Since public education (quite intentionally) has purged this framework, it leaves the new generations vulnerable to the kind of religious scientism you describe in the article. Rather than approaching a problem with skepticism or even attempting to reason out the arguments applied to said problem, people approach “scientists” as if they are part of a priestly caste handing down knowledge from on high. And, of course, there are a multitude of grifters more than happy to take on the mantle of “scientist”.
I have no idea where we go from here but my guess is that it’s no place good.
Peer review isn’t sexy, and who ever made a trillion dollars proving a drug doesn’t work?
Class action lawyers?
BOOM
Why do I keep getting this impression that no real advances are coming from scientists working in academia?
I have no data to back it up, and you can probably falsify it easily by finding people who are scientists in academia which have developed something new and worthwhile.
But I keep getting that impression.
My friends in science feel the same way. Of course, they work at places like Raytheon, so bias alert! But I think there’s more truth to it than not.
This paradigm has contributed to a proliferation of low-quality journals with low-quality review standards simply to pad people’s CVs. – sadly so called high quality journals unless in highly specialized non politicized fields are little better. look at nature.
Q – See my reply to Don above. The ASA finally came out and said, “Enough. Stop with the bleeping p-value nonsense.” It’s not merely p-hacking, however.
As you note, the “replication crisis” is a HUGE problem that NO ONE in the “peer review” process wants to talk about. I’ll agree with that, while pointing out that publication isn’t the sine qua non of reproducibility.
For example, I had a missile “go stupid” during a test shoot; that is a “reproducibility problem” that doesn’t need a peer reviewer. When multiple shoots go bad, the engineers at (fill in the blank contractor) get sent out to find out just what the hell is going on because the USG paid cash money for missiles that hit targets, not fly off somewhere else or land in a farmer’s barn.
I’m sure you agree that’s still science and I didn’t need anyone from a university to spend weeks and months deciding it, nor did the academic Journal’s “impact factor” have anything to do with the missile’s flight.
This is exactly why applied/industrial research is where many of the most important discoveries of the past half-century have come from. Academic research has largely turned into a circle-jerk. It’s a shame because things like pure theoretical physics have no immediate industrial application, yet still provide important understanding of the universe, and could potentially result in marketable products on a long time scale. However, industry (understandably) doesn’t want to fund things like that, so they get relegated to the academic circle-jerk which throw up even more roadblocks (see commodious’ post below).
In automotive, most firms have advanced engineering departments that straddle the line. Those are the guys who come up with great ways to apply new technology that we’re only $80M away from taking to the plant/product/public. Sitting through those annual briefings are a beating when you look around and don’t see anyone with the seniority/longevity to imply that we’ll last on staff long enough to see X come to fruition.
*Nods knowingly*
The major advancements made by Academic Science in the last 50 years is in crypto. Crypto is notable because it is inherently self-provable in some dimensions, and in other dimensions the peer-review is *very robust* and doesn’t come in the form of academic journals.
Plus 1 early WWII torpedoes that didn’t explode on impact.
But is your science just? Is it equitable? Does it produce fairness? Or does it promote inequality? Did you check your privilege before looking through the telescope? Did you consult with any people of color when you designed your experiment? Do your observations cause violence to queer or transgender people? Or Muslims?
You’re beautiful. I laughed… then I realized how depressing this was by virtue of how much I laughed. Time to drink.
SciAm, is that. you?
I stopped reading that when they published their first global warming bullshit article, after 2 decades of telling us we needed a freedom robbing marxist big government solution to prevent global cooling, back in the late 1980s. I have not regretted that decision. That article I read was so much shit it reminded me of the crazy claims to authority that the people in the one humanities class (psychology of some kind I took) I had to take were using to peddle things as scientific. In fact, I take that back. The pseudo science I saw in that psych class was more scientific than the AGW nonsense then or now produced.
“Your point about classified research not being subject to peer-review in the same way as academic research is well-taken.”
The safeguard is “Does it work or not”
YOUR NOT EVEN A REAL SCIENTIST LOL
But… I have the decoder ring and everything.
the U.S. is in a deplorable state, due to a confluence of factors – this is due to the extreme libertarian views in US government keeping science underfunded. it does not hurt that rightwingers like you keep undermining science just because it proves left wing is right. Also this is just global warming denial. Why should we listen to a science denier?
All that being said, like in many things it will probably get worse until it gets better. And the internet hurts as much as helps… Scientism is quite appealing as most things that give the ignorant the feeling of moral high-ground.
Objective reality is for chumps, man.
– Tommy Chong
Look, man, not everyone can make a living by being stoned.
Some of us make a living despite being stoned.
*waves at the gang*
Hiya! This article is way above my pay grade, I’ll leave the more educated amongst you to it.
Then there are people like Nassim Taleb who say engineering is more important than pure science…
I have a great Taleb story in regards to the gentleman mentioned in my article; suffice it to say that my friend is thoroughly unimpressed by Taleb.
I am highly ambivalent to him. I agree to some of the things he says, disagree with others, don’t like his style or methods. And i think he is very wrong sometimes.
i mean I am ambivalent towards his style.
He went the extra 10 percent, didn’t he?
Who?
some fat guy
How can I engineer anything if I don’t have studies from scientists? I know that some steel has an allowable stress of 250MPa only because I looked it up somewhere, but I can’t even begin to size without it. Even then, I need some advice on the consistency of the materials that the process is delivering. How about fatigue and corrosion studies.
I wouldn’t want to be one, but I stand on the shoulders of pure scientists. Now go back to you lab and get out of my hair: I got shit to build.
The same way things were engineered for most of history – through trial and catastrophe. Sure, you get cleaner results and less overengineered waste if you can do all the fancy math beforehand and not just keep building ontil it stays up to determine workable parameters.
We model and math out everything today mostly because of the prohibitive cost and loss of time with the trial and error method, which is not a bad thing. What kills me is the slew of morons that claim expertise in things just because they are credentialed. Experience, logic, common sense, and actually following the scientific method matter far more. Maybe it is me, but I am always suspicious of people claiming technical expertise. especially in academia, as too many of them never have had to deal with any real life problems.
Shit, I am far more impressed by the people that solve problems with duct tape.
I am sure engineers used metal before they could look it up. less advanced than now, and some pure science is valuable. Still engineers could partially do it themselves. I am not against science though. I am against bad science. And somewhat against science with no practical application. Unless it is privately funded, then sure study the climate of planets 1000 parsecs away
Quite often, engineering drives science. The need directs the research.
Oi, where’s my Fusion reactor?
*pulls out mason jar with aluminum foil strips inside*
Right here.Where’s my funding?
Wot you trying to pull, m8?
Sorry, I dropped out of that program or we would have one by now.
You know, or not.
Here you go…
Also if I remember my forgotten weapons you can misunderstand the science and still engineer something that sort of works.
Thompson’s .30-06 1923 Autorifle: Blish Strikes Again
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EMO4o4yANpY
Engineering is applied science, and therefore the ultimate test (usually)
If the science is bad, the end product isn’t going to work.
Scientific theories that can be applied to engineering have been repeatedly not falsified. In other words, the predictions of these theories have been correct over and over again. That generally cannot be said about scientific theories without practical applications.
Ozzy, fine work, and now I feel better about feeding you and your remarkably charming (for a lawyer) wife.
A couple of notes and quibbles:
1. Despite high falutin’ titles like “Chief Scientist,” aerospace companies generally don’t do much science. The distinction between science and engineering often gets blurred, and engineering SHOULD be scientific, but they’re not quite the same thing.
2. There are various levels of science with respect to control and reliability. Things like nutrition and epidemiology (and climate science!) are inherently less reliable than in vitro biology or chemistry because they cannot ethically (or practically) use rigorous controls. Ditto cosmology.
3. The old joke that “anything with ‘science’ in its name is not science” is damn true. When exceptions are pointed out (like “materials science”), they are almost always in the realm of engineering.
LOL @ #3 because it’s so true. Same goes for things with “studies” in the title require nothing of the sort and things with “justice” in the title have none.
And leftist policies that have “smart” in the title (smart growth, smart development, smart power) are usually quite stupid.
+1 smart car
But can their chief scientists figure out which way to run when the downed spaceship begins rolling toward them?
Perpendicular to the direction the downed craft is moving.
Maybe – depends upon how close you are when it starts rolling. You might need to go at an angle to create a little time/space. 😉
That would also depend on how fast it’s going. You may just be splattered regardless of action taken.
I was in a helicopter crash on the side of a hill. I am very familiar with the varying factors at play.
I’m sorry to hear that.
I am fortunate to only have to operate on the theoretical when it comes to being on the receiving end of high speed objects.
-1 Gyroscope
UCS – the old joke in Naval Aviation is that any landing you walk away from is, by definition, a “good landing.” Notwithstanding the broken helicopter, it was a “good” landing. Me and the other guy were flying again the next day.
OMWC – I assure you that Hughes Aircraft in its heyday was doing “science.” You appear to be making a linguistic quibble that somehow “engineering” isn’t “science.” I’m going to have to call BS on that one. The “pure science” that went into the AWG-9 radar – was a HUGE component of the ‘engineering.’ You’re not suggesting, for example, that the Manhattan Project was just a bunch of ‘engineers,’ are you? (I think it was Oppenheimer who once said that after Einstein gave us E=mc2 that the bomb was a foregone conclusion… ‘it was an engineering problem’ from that point on, I believe he said, or something like that.)
Engineering (which is where I started, but didn’t finish, my college career) is, to my mind, the practical application of what I will call colloquially “classroom science.” Because it is inevitable that there are conditions that can’t be reproduced or even modeled in the laboratory, because they simply don’t exist there or aren’t known until the “rubber meets the road.”
I don’t think anyone would dispute that Bell Labs was doing both science and engineering.
Make the distinction between whether someone is a scientist or engineer and whether someone is doing science or engineering. As a personal example, I am trained as a scientist, published scientific research, but when I develop the stuff you use to repair your tire when it goes flat, I’m doing engineering.
Distinction without a difference. When I was a helo pilot, I did testing on aircraft after maintenance. I had no degree, wore no lab coat, yet every day on the flight line I was using devices, taking measurements, pursuing various competing hypotheses as to why we couldn’t get the rotor head tracked and balanced, despite doing everything the “book” said to do. That’s science, my friend. I suspect your time in academia has influenced you a bit in one direction. Science is about models with predictive power better than random chance. It can be done outside of an accredited university.
You use the tools of science- which is necessary for competent engineering. But that’s different than doing science. Engineering creates models (e.g., the Thevenin and Norton equivalents I use in designing amplifiers), but “creating models” does not convert engineering to science.
FWIW, I’ve been out of academia since 1984.
L’esprit d’escalier: Engineers use Kirchoff’s Law. And it’s a great model for understanding circuit operation. But… the law came from the scientific model of “conservation of charge.” So science provided the tool, and the engineer uses it to create a model which allows him to create a useful “thing.”
I think you’re going out into the weeds to defend the exclusivity of a title that is fairly broad in its meaning.
A scientist applies the scientific method to the work they are doing. As long as you are developing at attempting to falsify hypotheses, the label can be applied.
Other way around, akshually.
I don’t claim to be an engineer even when I sometimes do engineering and when people assume (from the stuff I do) that I am an engineer, I point out that engineers are trained and skilled in areas that I’m not. I know some really great engineers and I ain’t them!
I’d like to hear your definitions of “science” and how using the “tools of science” isn’t “science” butt somehow, “engineering.” Was Igor Sikorsky and engineer or a scientist? Sure, Bernoulli’s work preceded him, but no one had ever thought of a ‘rotary wing’ – and that would lead to discoveries about a TON of things that aren’t present in a typical wing. Science or engineering? I think you’re making a fine distinction that ends with a Potter Stewart-type answer.
Hah, there’s probably more than a little truth in that. But let me take a cut at it:
I think of things in terms of deliverables. If I’m doing science, my deliverable is knowledge or understanding of how nature or the physical universe works. If I’m doing engineering, my deliverable is something useful (whether a tangible object or a function like code) that was enabled by using the knowledge of nature arrived at by science. So Sikorsky (or Goddard, for that matter) were doing engineering, Bernoulli and Poiseuille were doing science. Maxwell did science, Marconi and deForest did engineering. FN1
FN1- things get blurriest when scientists do engineering as well as science, and engineers do science as well as engineering. It’s inevitable, I suppose, because there’s an overlap in our training and mindset. As well, scientists sometimes do engineering to pay the bills and justify their science, and engineers do science when there’s a gap in understanding nature that they need to know on order to do the engineering.
Okay. We probably agree, though I still think it’s a distinction without a difference. The Manhattan Project is the quintessential example of that. Einstein gives us E=mc2. That didn’t *have* to lead to a bomb, but that’s an obvious consequence. That project itself could be called an “engineering” project, but the outcome required entire fields of science to be “discovered”/invented. I think that’s another issue I have with your distinction: engineering projects frequently produce entire fields of “science” that others spend their lifetimes pursuing and, ultimately, the “deliverable” of science is a model that has predictive power. Sometimes that doesn’t have any obvious practical application (at the moment) but I can’t agree that definitions are contingent on the time-scale of when the knowledge gets put to use. A some point, if it’s science, even of the most theoretical variety, it has to get tested against Reality. I might be convinced that every experiment to test a hypothesis is nothing more than the engineering aspect of the scientific endeavor. In fact, the more I think of it. the more I like it. Most scientists have to be ‘engineers-enough’ to come up with experiments that test their models.
Well, I think that was captured in my FN- engineers often are forced to do science, and scientists often have to do engineering. But they’re not the same thing. And as you said, sometimes a project requires both, which is why I have been just as comfortable running engineering groups as running research groups.
Where stuff (for me) gets blurrier is when the Venn diagram drops math in as well. I’m currently writing an article that deals a lot with the Shannon-Nyquist theorem, and the same issue pops up- were they doing math or were they doing engineering?
Shannon-Nyquist is math IMO
Well, Michael Shannon has a great chin.
they cannot ethically (or practically) use rigorous controls
That certainly hasn’t dissuaded decades of government dietitians.
Wait you think givernment dieticians care one way or another which diet is healthiest?
No their job is to justify the chosen set of farm subsidies and encourage the people to eat a diet which most benefits the political powerful farm subsidies.
See, e.g., “pizza is a vegetable” controversy.
Pizza is the best possible vegetable.
Not wine?
The Science is Settled. Pizza is all things: it is the perfect food.*
*anything with pineapple on it is not pizza
I thought about you the other day while I was enjoying some lovely tacos al pastor.
Pineapple makes everything better.
I love pineapple. It just belongs nowhere near a pizza.
My wife certainly thinks so iykwimaityd
Science disagrees Or at least two scientists disagree.
#fakenews
If you have to tell people you are smart or funny or virtuous (or sciency) you are not.
The version on my “things to teach the kids” list includes smart, pretty, and in-charge.
That’s good, because I am none of those things.
Great piece.
the majority of what passes for science in the current zeitgeist is generally non-science, or, most charitably, bad conjecture
Nice.
Thank you, but I think the follow-up piece will be the one that makes people depressed… It does me and I’m writing it and already know the ending.
I like not this news! Bring me some other news!
BTW, everyone, and I mean everyone, should read the classic presentation by Irving Langmuir on “pathological science.”
I’m pretty sure he’s not talking to me though.
That was a fascinating read….and the phenomenon still exists today.
Another very troubling development is the overall lack of basic scientific literacy amongst the general populace.
I’m not a “hard numbers” person. I’m not innumerate, or some sort of troglodyte, but I’d say I understand things better in terms of relationships, if that makes any sense.
But- I have, for a long time, thought there is a gaping hole in science education which could be filled by creating a generalized science-for-non-scientists packaged as the history of curiosity. Maybe it’s out there somewhere, and i just am not aware of it. Certainly, the scientific method should be front and center.
Plenty of colleges offer “science for journalism majors” courses. The end result seems to be convincing people who know nearly nothing that they know it all.
I’m sorry but do you have a degree from Columbia school of Journalism? Who are you calling a no-nothing
SCIENCE!
There’s a totally non-biased source I’d trust with political advocacy.
/sarc
Good news. Lots of elementary school educators feel the same way.
Science when I was a lad was basically Here’s A Bunch of Trivia.
Science for my kid’s generation is actual science. They don’t know the crust/mantle/core model of the plant or (pick your pet grade school science fact.) But my kids can both propose a model, derive a test, perform it, and evaluate the model, and they learned that from grade school (not just from me).
That actually *is* good news.
My wife teaches her kids science by experimentation mainly. They find a problem to solve, learn how to clearly state it, propose a theory on how to solve it, derive a test, perform it, and measure the results. She does this with special education children as they typically have issues with theory and the math associated with it. She tries to get them to problem solve, do basic measurements, and learn cause and effect.
My elementary school was a hippy/farmer/factory influenced school district, but we were doing engineering projects in 4th grade. I went to another district a few years later and they stressed theory only.
Looks like Andy Ngo got himself a pipe-hitting lawyer:
Like Antifa terrorists have anything of their own.
Pretty sure more than a few of them are sitting on quite sizable trust funds
Are the funds actually in their names, or do they just phone home and ask their parents for another infusion of cash?
I guess it depends on whether they got the money from Mom and Dad or Grandma and Grandpa.
My guess is most of the antifa crowd are upper middle class and the ones who do have money got it from their “greatest Generation” or early Boomer grandparents not their late Boomer early Gen X parents
Not sure if trust funds can be tapped to pay damages, but I think probably not.
Trust funds are actually pretty rare when the parents are still alive. I doubt many antifa have them.
I personally would have no qualms at all about chasing them from employer to employer and garnishing their wages for the rest of their lives.
I’m pretty sure that gets “pipe-hitting lawyers” rock hard.
Many of them are from grandparents. I knew a kid from high school (no longer a kid, of course) who has been living off his millionaire grandparents his entire life.
That made me smile.
Bout to go to work on the homes here with a pair of pliers and a blowtorch, yeah
Dean: Since IANAL, is it possible for private parties to bring civil RICO suits? If so, I’d say this is ripe for such an approach.
She’s going after the conspiracy; it doesn’t matter if the individual blackshirts have assets (although their earnings, such as they are, can be garnished ). She can put the money funding antifa at risk.
is it possible for private parties to bring civil RICO suits
Indeed it is. And, jurisdiction is in federal courts, which I think would be a far better venue than the courts in Portland.
Civil RICO is hard to win, but as anyone who has been through litigation will tell you, the discovery is the punishment. Unmasking who supports antifa would probably cut off their funding all by itself, especially since the violent crimes committed by antifa open the door to criminal RICO.
Naming and shaming Antifa supporters would be a good start. Maybe that’s all it would take to defang the movement.
Since the lot of them conspire and plan those events if one of them commits a violent crime I would have no problem having all of them charge with the crime.
This shit can be shut down. Does anyone know who is behind all of it? It’s certainly not the masked thugs themselves.
I am slow. I see Dean covered this already.
Great article, Ozymandias. I look forward to future installments.
^^^
Thank you, sir! The follow up is about 50% done and I’m hoping to finish it up and have it to SP just after I sober up and get the powder residue off of myself from the Fourth.
Don’t post it… I’ll have looked upon your works and despaired.
Okay. That’s it. You win Internet today. I’m cracking one open and toasting you, UCS.
Science says kittens are the cutest.
Dicks are so cute omg(⁄ ⁄•⁄ω⁄•⁄ ⁄) when you hold one in your hand and it starts twitching its like its nuzzling you(/ω＼) or when they perk up and look at you like” owo nya? :3c” hehe ~ penis-kun is happy to see me!!（＾ワ＾)
A very large portion of modern science is engineering simply because it requires massive amounts of engineering to test hypotheses that exist on the fringes of human experience. To wit, CERN is/was an engineering effort to prove/disprove Higgs and Einstein, who were pure scientists, but I would still call those key people working on the accelerator scientists, as well as engineers.
Theoretical physicists see experimental physicists as glorified engineers, who themselves are glorified technicians.
The rest of us view theoretical physicists as prima donna aspie twats. So there’s that.
Oh sweet Jesus there’s a black girl working in one of the offices here wearing a delightfully unprofessional jean skirt and sweater top. She’s a pair of TEC-9s on being Lana in the flesh. Just about gave me a heart attack.
Make your move.
Knight to Queen’s Bishop 3.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunst_Opening
It’s at least a valid move.
why does her skin color matter?
Lana
Voiced by the delectable Aisha Tyler.
i got the reference
Aesthetics?
cuz RAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAACIST!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Pic!!!!
She’s a pair of TEC-9s on being Lana in the flesh
Are you saying she needs bigger hooters? Or that she literally needs a pair of firearms to look like Lana.
I need to know! Otherwise I am going to sit here all afternoon wondering.
The Pope won’t be able to fap properly without the correct image in his mind.
Look, I just want a clear picture in my head for when I put my dick through the glory hole in the confessional and order the sinner to do penance . Is that so wrong?
Talk about an Our Father!
Hell Mary, it isn’t going to suck itself
something something Danger Zone!
Fuck science, if I can’t figure figure something out by gutting a chicken and reading the entrails I consider it essentially unknowable.
But I thought that was science!
if science is so great why is the automatic faucet in my company toilet not working after 1 month?
Because your company bought a poorly made product?
Made by Lucas?
You have to go to the source.
https://www.iflscience.com/technology/this-racist-soap-dispenser-reveals-why-diversity-in-tech-is-muchneeded/
Apparently, a dark-skinned hand wasn’t light enough to register on the sensor. This simple problem would have been avoided if it had been tested on a variety of skin tones.
Or, maybe they just bought the cheapest one?
That, of course, requires people working in the industry from a variety of backgrounds.
I’m pretty sure you can test soap dispensers on people who don’t “work in the industry”. Nice stolen base there, though.
Took me 10 seconds to find the exact model in that video…
https://www.ebay.com/itm/112833306640?frcectupt=true
So what are the odds that there were ANY Caucasian or white skinned people involved in the design or manufacture of that particular model?
You’ll also note that none of the “key tech companies” they list the diversity numbers on are involved in producing ANY actual physical products
Once again, Better of Ted turned out to be prescient.
It’s the opposite of racism since it’s not targeting black people but ignoring them.
People who record their TV with their phone and post the results on facebook are worse than Nikki.
And people who posts links to it are worse than that.
I’m betting the real problem was the level of light the soap dispenser saw. It probably measures the difference in light levels, not the skin tone of the person. In poor lighting conditions a dark skin person will have more trouble than a light skinned person.
It’s real easy to seperate the #science folks from the science folks (even among academics). If you offer a solution to their stated problem that solves it yet isn’t GREEN (or Social Justice or what ever dejour) and they throw a fit, they aren’t worried about the stated problem and how to solve it, #science!
I hope you’ve seen this classic.
blocked by my organization.
It’s a guy ranting about the IFLS facebook fools who don’t actually know, or care about science.
Yes, read Maddox on the regular back in the day.
The short film I’m hoping to get done this summer takes a lot of shots at how science has been portrayed in pop-culture. (The scientist who declared smoking can extend your life-span by 13yrs is back as the lead)
Memes you didn’t know you wanted: Kamala quotes on Palpatine photos.
“That little girl was me” is the clear winner.
El Oh El.
https://twitter.com/TheBabylonBee/status/1145739106917523456
How can I tell if I like this story until Ozy tells me what type of Marine he was? Infantry or Swinging with the Wing? Also Zero vs enlisted?
We made many sneering references to you on Saturday when he and Mrs. O were over at our place.
Oh yeah?!? Were you riding around your palatial estate on my bike while you denigrated me too?
Or maybe that was just your way to distract him while SP stole the tires off his car?
Please. Ozy didn’t drive. He just whipped out his portal gun and arrived.
Did SP squeal when he said “Hang on while I whip this thing out”?
The only relevant question is how many languages he can bargain for sex in.
All of them.
RTFA.
I was an attack helicopter pilot in the 1990’s,…
Interesting article, Ozy!
I’m just a lowly businessguy, but I wonder how many companies can afford to do real science. Without a specific engineering challenge, it’s hard to imagine making investments in more speculative ventures.
My research into muskrat pheromones is going to pay off huge!
RTFA
Uffda. You realize where you are, right? There were a lot of words in the article. A lot of BIG words. And it looked like it was probably important to read them in some specific order. I ain’t got time for that.
Especially since I have to respond to OMWC’s scurrilous attacks on my character. I’m being victimized and you want me to read?
They’re only scurrilous if they aren’t true.
It’s always some minor technicality with you lawyer types.
Of course I realize where I’m at!
I just didn’t understand a fucking thing until the part about helicopters!
Perhaps I should have emphasized this point, but I’m of the same mind that Richard Feynman is: “Science is the belief in the ignorance of experts.” I don’t think science in the most general sense requires budgets. It requires people building models that can be tested and validated and have predictive power or not. We all do it constantly across the full gamut of human experiences; we just give it different names or, in most cases, simply aren’t conscious of it. I had a boss once who had a background in applied mathematics. It infused everything he did, regardless of whether the department had a budget for it.
“Science is the belief in the ignorance of experts.”
Gotcha. That means I am a Scientist!
Thanks for the response. I’m looking forward to the rest.
Your Holiness! A Zero, but raised/indoctrinated by a couple of prior-enlisted guys in college: one an 0851 and the other 0311. We all went on to serve together and they’re still like big brothers to me. The cannoncocker became a 46 pilot then an Osprey guy. I was a Cobra guy then a judge advocate. The infantryman… went back to the infantry and got a silver star in Iraq for his troubles. 😉
Swinging with the wing +1
Zero -1
A neutral score. Unfortunately for you OMWC seems to like you which sort of makes me think all your sciencey writing is bunkum. You might convince me if you manage to steal my bike back next time you visit SP and OMWC.
I smell a challenge…
Nobody swings like the Wing! And, of course, ATC is the Air Wing of the Air Wing 🙂
Oooh-Rah!
It’s deeply appreciated. I’ve had more than once GCA in gooey weather – once to the boat – that made me go down to ATC looking to buy someone an adult malted beverage of their choice.
Plenty of colleges offer “science for journalism majors” courses. The end result seems to be convincing people who know nearly nothing that they know it all.
Scientist 1, Brooks 0
Bailey is saddened by your lack of respect
Science says don’t eat random stuff.
https://www.foxnews.com/health/man-died-eating-gecko-dare-rotted-from-inside
Died from salmonella at 34? I’m guessing he had a few compounding health issues.
Looking at the picture I’m guessing those healing crystals didn’t help
He looks like a dirty hippie. That’s the problem.
That doesn’t seem necessary. The flora in a gecko’s gut and that of a human gut probably have very little in common. Different environment, different food, etc. Being exposed to bugs that your species has little or no history of exposure to is very risky.
Somebody’s got to be the guinea pig.
Yep and he is the poster boy for what I just said. A man of European decsent on a continent than humans have been on for a very short period of time eating a native critter that feeds on insects.
Rotting out, you say?
Related:
https://www.news.com.au/lifestyle/health/health-problems/sydney-man-who-contracted-rat-lungworm-after-eating-slug-dies/news-story/08b0e700a8d6d6c6709d2dd92dfeaa8f
What is the ruling on eating a sucker minnow during a drunken night ice fishing for northerns? Should that person see a doc? Asking for a friend.
Drink some moonshine. #science
That’s what I told my wife too. Sure it was 15+ years ago that I -er I mean my friend- ate that sucker minnow, but it is still important to take a preventative shot of medicine each day or so. Unfortunately she graduated with a sociology degree and doesn’t have a firm grasp on science like we do and keeps telling me that the danger is past and I can stop.
Oh, you are serious.
I would think you are safe. Sucker minnows are eaten by larger predator fish. Their bugs are transferred to the larger fish which you have probably been eating all of your life as did. your ancestors back to the beginning of time. Granted, the larger fish were cooked but chances are good you and your ancestors have been exposed many times to their bugs.
^not medical advice^
Suthenboy <——- not a doctor
Pathogens and parasites evolve towards being benign. If they are too deadly to their hosts they will die also. Hosts evolve towards resistance. If this goes on long enough, kumbaya and we have a symbiotic relationship.
How long this takes depends mostly on two factors: reproductive rate of both host and bug and the distance apart they are in deadly/resistant. As you can imagine it goes very quickly in the beginning of the process and tapers off as it nears the end.
There are zillions of bugs in our bodies and especially in the gut that we cannot survive without. every one of them started out as something that was a deadly pathogen. Since we probably inherited most of them from our ancestral species it has taken us many millions of years to build up the flora and fauna we have. The ones we have the most problems with are the ones still in the end stages of the process since they take a long time to kill us. We reproduce and so do they before the host is gone. Critters like Ebola are outliers…ones we have only recently been exposed to. They kill too fast so we are very unlikely to see the kind of wildfire epidemics people fear unless there is widespread deliberate infection (funerals where people dance with the dead). A little precaution and we can cut them off at the entrance.
This is something no one seems to ever take into account when they are dreaming about colonizing other planets to establish Libertopia.
A whole planet of new bugs? There would be peace in Libertopia alright because we would all be dead.
Maybe, or it could go the other way, the alien flora and fauna are simply inedible to us and us to them because we just don’t share the same biology
We might have trouble raising food in a place like that.
I’ve worked with guys that do radar. It’s not science. It’s not engineering. It’s black fucking magic. They scare me just a bit.
I miss my RF/Microwave days sometimes.
Does the math say it will work?
Who fucking knows, it’s going to take a month for the computer program to complete, but I’ve got a good feeling about it, turn it on.
Don’t melt your candybar!
“Don’t ever look in the end of the waveguide”
*waves dead chicken over radar antenna*
True story:
When my father was an electronics technician in the AF back in the fifties, he was stationed at the VLF beacon in the Azores. The power coming off that array was strong enough to draw an arc with a shovel. On colder days, the guys would get plastic lawn chairs and sit in front of the array to warm up.
Seems I remember reading about one dude who did that and drank a few beers. He fell asleep.
I don’t really need to finish this story, do I?
We kept 8′ neon tubes in the radar tower. Held them up in front of the antenna to make double sure the radar was off.
Wait until you deal with RCSR. Literally spooky magic.
This is true.
An anecdote about the gentleman I described in the article: one day his son comes home from middle school with the requirement to do a “science project.” The kid is hoping for magnets, but Jeff sends him to the hardware store to buy a micrometer and giant box of ten-penny nails. Then he makes the kid measure the whole box of nails to the .001 of an inch and graph the results. A little ways in, the kid – pretty sharp himself – recognizes the result: it’s a Gaussian distribution. i.e. a Bell curve. So the kid fakes the rest of the data and tries to pass it by the old man – whose specialty is mathematically detecting signal from noise… radar. He looks at the data, glowers at the kid, then slaps him and tells him to go *actually* measure the nails this time.
Next time you’re over, I’ll whip out a book that is one of the prides of my collection. It’s an engineering text written by a physician. And autographed. Punchline: it’s Swiss’s dad.
Next time you’re over, I’ll whip out . . .
Well, that didn’t go where I was expecting.
Me either.
You’re either way younger than your name looks or someone has kidnapped OMWC
That’s funny! I hope it’s true.
Why are all the EEs I associate with microwave engineers. One of my good friends is a PhD in, naturally, microwave engineering.
My next door neighbor, another EE, works on designs for cellular telephony.
It’s the fun part of electrical because nobody ever knows WTF you’re talking about.
“I was measuring the s-parameters of a Chebyshev combline filter LNA assembly the other day, when I noticed that the frequency response was showing leakage at the first harmonic and a particularly strong third order intermodulation product.”
Uh… did you check the thermostat?
shit…
I’m curious what the middle school teacher said when the kid came to school with 1,000 measurements of ten-penny nails as his project.
Nothing.. she was more focused on the bruising from the smack. (Jes’ kidding! ….It was the 60s, that was normal back then.)
I spent a summer making monolithic microwave filters and measuring the frequency response of different design features. That was the summer of MEK induced headaches each afternoon. Tape casting without much of an exhaust.
What would we do without a brave vanguard of heroes fighting Nazis?
https://hotair.com/archives/2019/07/02/andy-ngo-im-cognitive-issues-due-severity-attack-antifa/
Asian Nazis…?
Admiral Yamamngo?
Related
If a really good lawyer and a really good prosecutor get their teeth into this they could make a whole career out of it.
Some historical Science! being dictated by victims.
More science!
‘I have rarely endured such a day of woo-woo nonsense’: LIZ JONES goes inside Gwyneth Paltrow’s £1,000 a ticket Goop wellness festival
Did it include vaginal steaming?
“If you think education is expensive, try ignorance”
– reputedly Sam Clemens
Shouldn’t the testing phase include falsability of the hypothesis? Things like AGW are assumed true despite their predictions being wel outside the bounds of the model being tested because reasons. Maybe the model is decent but there is no comparison, no test or attempt at falsifying the hypothesis just iterations of the presumed cause.
Thanks for this O.
Just look at the language and tactics they use to sell climate change starting with climate change itself. Climate changes….duh. This term evolved from ‘global warming’ probably because the predictions they made weren’t panning out and in fact trends were going against their claims. Right off the bat the term is enough to raise a skeptical eye. Never mind, as we know, the endless failed prognostications going back to the late 60s. At the same time, like good little totalitarians, they had to attack the skeptics and not the assertions. This is where we get ‘deniers’ and calls for imprisonment. How dare they bring consensus into disrepute! 97% consensus to be exact! Do they not realize they act more like witch hunters than scientists when they behave like this? I’m a simple man. So may say a simpleton even. But gosh I can spot bull shit from miles away and this whole movement is nothing but a cynical political power play.
And dummies eat it up.
I noticed the rather blatant (to me) drop of “anthropogenic” from “global warming” early on. It’s intermediate phase before settling on the non-falsifiable “climate change.” I mean, holy shit. How much more obvious can you be? It’s a religion and has all of the same components, right up to and including punishment for heretics, now laughably called “deniers.” It’s just… I don’t even know. I could not have imagined I would see this in my lifetime. No way – not in a thousand years would I have believed I would see something like this.
Thank you Ozymandias. This is one of the best articles yet. I enjoy them all but this is a real stand-out. Keep ’em coming.