>But it isn’t arguments or votes or opinion that herald the acceptance of a scientific explanation: it’s the evidence. Follow it wherever it leads.
But you cannot actually do that. You cannot be an expert in every field and actually follow the evidence to make up your own conclusion (which btw does not guarantee that your interpretation of the evidence is correct).
As an aspiring physicist I feel helpless every time I'm at the doctor's office. I cannot just "follow the evidence". Heck I cannot "follow the evidence" on anything in physics unrelated to my field.
This is more generally an economics problem about information asymmetry and it will become more prominent as professions become increasingly sophisticated and specialized. I don't think better access to information makes up for it, either, because there is just as much misinformation.
The solution seems to me to build ever more complex social institutions with complex trust relationships which I know makes some cryptofans cringe.
"You cannot be an expert in every field and actually follow the evidence to make up your own conclusion (which btw does not guarantee that your interpretation of the evidence is correct)."
It's pretty easy to follow the evidence in most situations, actually. That doesn't make me an expert. That makes me a person who understands the methodology of science, logic, and statistics. You have to know precisely what your assumptions (observations) are and how to make correct conclusions from those assumptions. The only constraints are your time, your determination, and your ability to get the original research (a constraint is not "guaranteeing your interpretation is correct").
Some people are highly opinionated and don't have the understanding to match. That doesn't mean you can't have any sort of understanding as a non-expert.
"As an aspiring physicist I feel helpless every time I'm at the doctor's office. I cannot just "follow the evidence"."
Doctors aren't necessarily better trained at making inferences and recommendations. Consider their education. Some of them are very poor thinkers.
> The only constraints are your time and your determination.
...The combination of which is often a luxury that experts in one field cannot afford, thus the statement that one cannot be an expert in every field. "Cannot" is most likely being used for practicality, not in the literal sense of information being totally unfathomable given infinite time and determination.
You both have good points but they really needn't conflict so harshly.
> You both have good points but they really needn't conflict so harshly.
I disagree, lumberjack's point is essentially an appeal to authority - which is dark-age style thinking.
Just represent everything in a machine readable set of axioms, problem solved. You don't need to be an expert in every field, you just need to have a basic understanding of first order logic.
Right, but someone still has to do the representation (encoding the information into the machine readable format), and how can you ever know that someone is encoding it correctly?
In addition, your assumption is that everything can be encoded in an axiomatic language (probably not true), and that we have enough information to encode it all even if it was possible.
> Right, but someone still has to do the representation...
The same people writing papers now.
> and how can you ever know that someone is encoding it correctly?
Reasoning engine. As new data is entered it is run against prior data, to the end user it would look almost like a spell check.
> ...your assumption is that everything can be encoded in an axiomatic language (probably not true)...
That is an extremely safe assumption to make, as the problem has been studied for a long time and I'm aware of no evidence that would back up your position.
> ...and that we have enough information to encode it all even if it was possible.
> That is an extremely safe assumption to make, as the problem has been studied for a long time and I'm aware of no evidence that would back up your position.
> Just represent everything in a machine readable set of axioms, problem solved.
We all look forward to the day that you or anyone else can do this.
emptytheory's suggestion: have tons of time and determination to solve the problem. Caveat: the problem has already been solved and applied by many experts many times, where the main criticism is that some of the time these experts' application over repeated attempts is not 100% consistent.
Your suggestion: encode all necessary knowledge to solve the problem so that a computer can solve it for you. Caveat: this is either being done already by domain experts, or you must go out of your way to navigate the problem based on logic and not experience (tedious, but potentially very rewarding) so as to encode this information yourself (taking some unknown amount of time).
Caveat in all cases: You are just as apt to fuck up along the way as anyone else who possesses the same logical faculties as you, which presumably at least some other experts in question would.
lumberjack's argument may not possess the logical upper hand, but it is a valid concern for people who are mortal, employed (or otherwise occupied with their time), and without access to a medical library. Perhaps the best way to put this is, I look forward to the day when you can prove their reasoning wrong in such a reproducible way rather than completely dismissing a conclusion due to some fault along the way.
> I look forward to the day when you can prove their reasoning wrong in such a reproducible way rather than completely dismissing a conclusion due to some fault along the way.
A set of axioms with a reasoner would do both of those things. That will be web 3.0, it is being worked on.
I disagree, this is a "fallacy fallacy" - you named a fallacy which lumberjack (apparently) used, but that doesn't actually make the argument wrong.
And you seem to ignore the fact that getting a degree takes most people multiple years, and that "student" is an occupation. If you follow the evidence, people can't learn everything because it takes way too much time.
I disagree, this is a "fallacy fallacy fallacy". You seem to ignore the fact that I did not suggest that people can learn everything. I suggested that people learn enough logic to use it as a tool to make learning everything else unnecessary.
Also, the scarcity of time being used to justify the economically reasonable appeal to authority, in the context of global warming / scientific method consensus, may be the most unintentionally funny thing ever.
Wow, I see I'm going to have to break this down Barney style in order to reach you:
The silly argument that started this all off was that you have to be an expert in every field in order to examine complex systems or problems that span multiple domains. This is simply not true, because a complex idea depends upon simpler ideas. These ideas can be formalized, where scientific theory occurs at the edge nodes and verification occurs at well connected nodes. This would allow an individual to select a layer of abstraction to work on - not unlike software development.
This isn't very far off from the present system of scientific journals and peer review.
>This is simply not true, because a complex idea depends upon simpler ideas. These ideas can be formalized, where scientific theory occurs at the edge nodes and verification occurs at well connected nodes.
Only this is a very naive reductionistic epistemology, and not enough to cover modern science.
That would only be true if the finest component of information in "modern science" could not be represented in true/false/unknown. I know that back in the day folks working on cybernetics struggled with something kind of like this in neural networks, where they were stumped by nonsteady state output (they were hoping to represent everything in true/false). The solution was to just increase the layer of abstraction in representing the output, leaving enough room on lower layers to describe nonsteady state as another potential output state. Problem solved. If you've got an example demonstrating your concern, that would be helpful.
The reductionistic part is in the very belief that there's such a thing as a "finest component of information" in the first place.
>If you've got an example demonstrating your concern, that would be helpful.
What I say is that sufficiently rich theories such as those we have today don't have "finest components" in the sense of being parsable down to some kind of "atoms" that are independent of the overall structure.
The whole intelligence lies in the connections between the components, and verifying that them are individually "correct" doesn't say much.
> The reductionistic part is in the very belief that there's such a thing as a "finest component of information" in the first place.
That seems like a major leap. I've heard people propose that there are limits to human understanding due to complexity, but this is the first time I've heard the suggestion that there is some level of information beyond any possible measurement. The lowest level I can think of is existence vs nonexistence - and you are essentially suggesting that there is some other state beyond measurement and therefor reasoning. Of course, such a thing would be impossible to prove... so the scientific method would be of no use. So if what you are suggesting is true, then it would have no influence on what I'm proposing anyway. Wait... you aren't religious are you? I'm not trying to pry or be insulting, but this suggestion would only really make sense in the context of trying to establish a place for religion in science.
As far as the rest, formal logic exists to do exactly what you say can't be done. Your argument sounds more like an appeal to emotion than anything else.
>Just represent everything in a machine readable set of axioms, problem solved
Great idea! Let me just tell my friends, Hilbert and Russel about it! Maybe my friend Kurt will like it too!
/s
Not to mention that most of the problems science has to tackle we cannot even begin to have them formulated in some concise "set of axioms" even if that worked in theory.
I can't be sure from such a short reply, but in this glib statement, and the one you made above, you seem to be unaware of the very real consequences of the Godel Incompleteness Theorem. This is what @coldtea is referring to.
In short: even for a relatively easy-to-quantify universe of discourse like Mathematics, this theorem implies that (of necessity) some propositions will not be provably true or false, or that the system will contain a contradiction. You have a choice of either incompleteness or contradiction (incompleteness seems better).
That's for Mathematics. Now, consider physics, biology, or sociology. And more important, consider that the questions present are at the frontiers, so are very much not reducible to codification. It's a real problem. If you'd ever worked on a really complex, multifaceted, end-to-end science problem (say, weather forecasting, or drug design), you'd have a little more humility.
You saw my link to the open world assumption above... so I'm not sure why you'd go on about the incompleteness theorem.
Can you think of an idea that cannot be represented as true, false, or unknown? Now consider a hypothesis. I'm not saying it would be simple or easy, just possible and preferable to the present system.
As far as my apparent lack of humility: in the interest of not wasting your time or my own, I've truncated my correspondence. From now on, just imagine that all my posts are prefixed with a paragraph in which I grovel before the throne of scientific greatness.
>As far as my apparent lack of humility: in the interest of not wasting your time or my own, I've truncated my correspondence. From now on, just imagine that all my posts are prefixed with a paragraph in which I grovel before the throne of scientific greatness.
You should write some code, that when you press the reply button it appends some form of lexical prostration that is derived from the comment space of the identity you're commenting to :P
In all seriousness, it appears that for the effort that goes into all the signaling that goes in within academia (and to the external world) to all the "real problems" people are solving, automatic approaches to all aspects of how research is conducted will happen because it is more efficient and consumes less energy than say a human being worrying about if their methods paper will be accepted and how to please reviewers, and etc…
I mean the fact that my PI hired me, as someone who didn't graduate from undergrad over all the phds who get rejected for volunteer positions, because i can slap some code together must say something about the direction things are going in this world. But when I tell the postdoc that the reason his spectrograms looks the way they do when he downsamples due to less constructive interference (while also trying signaling to appear humble because how dare some non-degreed folk pontificate on such things as a matter of established fact like the rest of the folks do around here, even when asked for help), he has to go ask the sr. research scientist the next day to only tell me that I was right… that's 24 hours his clunky matlab script could have ran! lol
I'm happy to report that I have zero experience in the postgrad industry. While I'd love to spend most of my time working in pure theory and potentially influencing an entire field, I really don't think I'd be able to put up with some of the antics I've heard about. There is plenty of silliness that occurs in the corporate world, with the information silos and kingdom building, but at the end of the day money talks and bullshit walks - with little delay.
This problem is being worked on, and I'm pretty confident that the solution will be based on the principals of the semantic web. I have a feeling that academia will be pretty late to the party when it comes to implementation though, if half of the stories I've heard are true.
Hey everyone, let's all point and laugh at the primitive still using first-order logic rather than stochastic type theory! What does he think this is, the 1970s? Wake up, bro: a whole century has passed.
> It's pretty easy to follow the evidence in most situations, actually.
I'm a physicist who has done work on data analysis in cancer genomics. The depth and complexity of cancer biology is enormous, and "following the evidence" is the work of years.
It's easy to follow superficial arguments about specific experiments. It is very, very difficult to get hold of the ambiguous morass that is the true leading edge, which is so far away from the layperson's event horizon they aren't even aware it exists, and so end up believing that it's not that hard to follow the evidence in most situations.
"It is very, very difficult to get hold of the ambiguous morass that is the true leading edge, which is so far away from the layperson's event horizon they aren't even aware it exists, and so end up believing that it's not that hard to follow the evidence in most situations."
What are you talking about here? How does that conflict with what I said? In my original post, one thing I asserted is that you should be aware of your assumptions. I don't see the relevance of saying "knowledge of the leading edge is hard to attain" or "the leading edge is ambiguous".
I don't think I ever denied that there are technical fields where coming to a conclusion takes time. Should I be apologizing for my use of "most"? The only point I was trying to make was that "guaranteeing your interpretations are correct" is not a constraint (see my response to lumberjack). As a result, being able to form correct conclusions is possible as a non-expert. Is this a surprising statement to anyone?
tjradcliffe's post reads essentially as "non-experts are so unaware/ignorant that they form naive beliefs such as yours". What a constructive comment! Maybe I should just shut up and listen to the experts!
> You cannot be an expert in every field and actually follow the evidence to make up your own conclusion (which btw does not guarantee that your interpretation of the evidence is correct).
This is true; but it doesn't mean that trusting experts is necessarily going to make you any better off. If the experts themselves aren't following the evidence, either because they have an ideological axe to grind or because there simply isn't enough evidence to be helpful, their opinions won't be of any more value than yours.
> I feel helpless every time I'm at the doctor's office. I cannot just "follow the evidence".
And many doctors can't either. Medicine is not a very advanced science compared to your field, physics. In fact, there are practically no sciences which are as advanced as physics. So if you're expecting that experts in other fields are basing their advice on the sort of evidence and predictive theories that you're used to seeing in physics, you're going to be very disappointed.
It is a distant cousin of the "if you don't like software X, write your own", which is often impossible because we don't have ninety-hour days and the technical wherewithal to accomplish such a task.
Which is itself related to "if you don't like open-source software X, you can just fork it", which has the same problems.
I find it interesting in that it's a useful argument, but only at a communal level - if the entire community hates the direction of a project (e.g. OpenOffice), they can fork it and take it in a different direction.
You're still boned as a discerning individual if you dislike the program, though.
> I find it interesting in that it's a useful argument, but only at a communal level - if the entire community hates the direction of a project (e.g. OpenOffice), they can fork it and take it in a different direction.
You can take leadership of the community and lead by example: fork it yourself and start hacking, then try to get more people to join.
You're talking about trusting experts, which is a different thing. Doctors and judges are not selected by popular vote, but by formal exams, therefore you have a reason to trust them, even if they are wildly unpopular otherwise.
> I understand that argument and would like to have the debate about the trade-offs. But flatly denying isn't helping us move forward.
You are right in saying that it is at its heart an economic question. Unfortunately, an economic model based on ever-increasing consumption of physical goods, combined with a large population with increased access to emission-creating technologies doesn't seem compatible with our mid-term survival (not to mention the rate at which non-renewable resources are consumed). But sticking your head the sand is much easier than come out and say that hard choices are coming.
"Climate is changing, and climate has always changed, and always will, there's archeological evidence of that, there's biblical evidence of that, there's historic evidence of that, it will always change," [GOP Sen. James Inhofe of Oklahoma] said on the Senate floor. "The hoax is that there are some people that are so arrogant to think that they are so powerful that they can change climate. Man can't change climate."
Oh I am sure we could change the climate, China does with artificial rain. However I am not convinced about the dire predictions or short of a collective effort to affect the climate that we have a large effect by default.
We cannot accurately model changes in the climate yet there is no shortage of people who want to scream bloody murder we are all going to die. Trouble is, far too many of them come off as traveling religious leaders, just missing a tent.
Oh, I totally agree with that. But try telling that to your average Green Peace liberal who just wants to abandon technology because it's "killing our planet" or some such. Nuclear plants on average pollute less than coal? Nope, gotta get rid of both, YESTERDAY. It's this kind of all-or-nothing debate that makes people not want to give in.
> But try telling that to your average Green Peace liberal who just wants to abandon technology because it's "killing our planet" or some such.
Why do you feel so concerned about Greenpeace when they don't make the laws anywhere (not that I think you're representing their position accurately anyway)? They're not the lobbying heavyweight that fossil fuel industries are.
I don't have a problem with Greenpeace, I just have a problem with how it's all or nothing to their members. We can't have nuclear because nuclear pollutes our planet! Forget that overall it might reduce emissions compared to the current electrical power sources...
Kill the nuclear liability cap and start taxing carbon at a rate commensurate with the damage it actually does and we wouldn't have to debate about which form of energy generation was superior.
It wouldn't make financial sense to build anything other than solar, hydro or wind farms.
>Oh, I totally agree with that. But try telling that to your average Green Peace liberal who just wants to abandon technology because it's "killing our planet" or some such.
Abandoning something (e.g. some technologies) because it's "killing our planet"? What a crazy idea!
No, we gotta have more of it, forever increasing, and it will sort out the problems it creates itself. Why ever be content with anything we have? After all the meaning of life is having more and more of everything.
This person doesn't get it. The vote was introduced as a means of identifying with a single vote who is a climate change denier and who is not. There is no scientific consensus attempted here. It's just a clever way of getting a solid, no-frills yes or no out of our elected officials.
Climate change is a funny topic. I don't see the populace or scientifically illiterate senators (read that as James Inhofe of Oklahoma) weighing in on the standard model of physics, proteomics, or the results/implications of steroid use...but when it comes to anthropogenic warming...everybody has an unequivocal answer. Those most certain seem to be of the political stripe that had the certainty that Iraq had wmd and posed an existential threat to human existence. The scary thing about these folk is that they are so convinced they are right that they are able to convince the people who look at things probabilistically that they are ABSOLUTELY right. Because economics.
Climate change is a funny topic in part because some elements on the far Left (represented by Naomi Klein, for example) want to use it as a lever to justify the kind of radical social engineering that failed so spectacularly and murderously and repeatedly throughout the 20th century, and the far Right have decided that to fight the politics they have to fight the science.
This has resulted in a situation where the Left, who abandoned science decades ago, pretend to care about it, while the Right--which has long had an ambivalent relationship with reality--has decided to go full-post-modern and construe all facts as pure social constructs, which is exactly what the Left has been saying for a long time.
Almost none of the discussion of "climate science" in the public sphere has anything to do with science, and if you're an actual scientist with relevant expertise and you say anything about the science you will get beaten up by both sides.
As a computational physicist I've given my opinion on occasion that climate models are non-physical and therefore non-predictive, no matter how well-tuned they are to past climate (because only the correct physics can extrapolate the past forward, and the unphysical approximations in climate models are not small in the relevant sense.) What climate models do show fairly convincingly is that we are increasing the Earth's heat budget by 1.6 W/m2 or so, which is in the range of 0.5% overall, and this is plausibly a very bad thing.
So because I criticize climate models the Left attacks me as a denialist, and the Right embraces me as one, whereas I'm actually saying the models give a pretty decent reason to take some fairly mundane steps, like implementing carbon taxes and tariffs. The "tariff" part is important because it exports the cost of emissions to other jurisdictions. At this point the Right attacks me as being a socialist taxer (because taxes are socialist?) and the Left attacks me for not wanting to "change everything" (because that always works so well.)
There simply isn't any science in the "climate science" debate. It's all politics.
Honest question: why is "global warming" or "climate change" (as a non-scientist, not sure what I'm supposed to call it) supported by such a vast majority of scientists? Can you elaborate on what political pressure is doing to scientists?
Scientists believe in global warming because Earth is warm and space is cold. Scientists also believe they know what causes that. It seems very plausible that increasing one of the causes will increase the effect.
I keep asking, if the science is so sound, why can't we treat it as an engineering problem and create a global thermostat and climate regulating system?
If the models are solid then the matter of getting or keeping Earth dialed-in to the "right" temperature is just a question of agreement (ha!) and of course large energy inputs and some yet to be developed 21st-22nd century tech. Think of the funding this could generate for R&D! And the conferences and travel to debate the finer points of the right temperature. It would swamp the paltry sums currently dedicated to studying climate change. Climate engineering!
If our task is to engineer an ideal climate for all on Earth we need to develop levers of control. Modulating CO2 emissions -- a massive project in global social coordination of dubious prospect -- may not be the best or first method to reach for in such a project.
However, I suspect engineering an ideal climate is not the objective of the people in this field or even considered a possibility. We could evaluate the success of such a project easily -- when we dial up 0.1 degree, does the system do what we expect? When we dial it down, does it do what we expect? Yes? Fine, we're done. Problem solved.
I rather suspect climate change is just another one of these endless war things that keeps a lot of people employed and isn't meant to be "won" in such a way as I have described. We must be careful not to define the criteria for victory lest we accidentally achieve it.
If climate study is more than a jobs program for less brilliant scientists, what then is the point of studying climate change and recommending and implementing public policy suggestions resulting from research?
Is it to prevent any change to the climate? To prevent unintentional change? What about non-anthropogenic climate change (which could potentially be more severe and more disastrous) -- should we not seek to prevent that also? What if by some enormous effort and sacrifice we are able to completely eliminate the anthropogenic component of climate change only to see the climate do its own thing and push life the edge of extinction anyway. A meteor perhaps. A new, severe ice age. A prolonged solar anomaly. Any of these could make a cosmic joke out of our meagre well-intentioned efforts.
I just don't think people are thinking about this clearly or it is as you say, all politics.
In fairness, you don't see politicians arguing for energy taxes and subsidies by saying that the standard model indicates a global catastrophe will happen otherwise.
Granted. But the level of certainty espoused, with the downside risk considered, imply a level of competence in the concerned matters. From where I sit, the people with the loudest mouths seem to simply not know what the fuck they are talking about. The LHC, by the way, cost some $10 billion USD to date.
But really, who did win? And what is M31-V1? And what does any of this have to do with determining who's right, which really does matter, e.g. climate change?
The vote in the Senate was not about science, it was about policy. Scientists obviously understand the science of climate change, and don't take votes on it. But policy is made by politicians, and in the U.S., they do operate by democracy. Hence the vote.
So I guess this means that the whole 'consensus' thing around global warming is pointless.
"What matters isn’t what people thought the answer was- since they only had incomplete information- but rather that this debate was an important step in laying out what the arguments would be to support each of these two competing ideas."
Just about time, now please let's stop with the (completely flawed) 97% meme.
But you cannot actually do that. You cannot be an expert in every field and actually follow the evidence to make up your own conclusion (which btw does not guarantee that your interpretation of the evidence is correct).
As an aspiring physicist I feel helpless every time I'm at the doctor's office. I cannot just "follow the evidence". Heck I cannot "follow the evidence" on anything in physics unrelated to my field.
This is more generally an economics problem about information asymmetry and it will become more prominent as professions become increasingly sophisticated and specialized. I don't think better access to information makes up for it, either, because there is just as much misinformation.
The solution seems to me to build ever more complex social institutions with complex trust relationships which I know makes some cryptofans cringe.