[extropy-chat] Scientific standards of evidence

[Brett Paatsch]

Chris Phoenix writes:

> Rick wrote:
> > One should only believe according to evidence. And by
> > evidence I mean verifiable evidence as would be accepted
> > by those most schooled and  respected in the ways of
> > science.

> Is science really a good arbiter of evidence?  Until recently,
> I thought it was ...

I don't think any external process can arbitrate evidence for
one. One must weight and arbitrate 'evidence' personally. Else
one has not weighted or arbitrated at all. There is a difference
between reckoning and believing. There is no nonsense or
self serving rationalisation in reckoning. It's being honest with 
oneself. I really have no idea what is going on in peoples heads
who say that they believe. I think sometimes they are reckoning
but with huge delays in the re-evaluation of the data and re-
examination of the premises. The old mariners used dead-
reckoning, constantly checking stars, winds, speed of the boat
through the water etc, they didn't have certain GPS-like knowledge
of their proximity to things like landmasses but they could approximate
and continuously re-approximate in an ongoing relationship with
the evidence. One could not do a group dead-reckoning as I 
understand because the chattering and nattering would screw up
the good reckoners attention on the scarce data sources. One
might be able to show others how to reckon or explain later but
to do it well optimally and to describe it or teach it at the same 
time would be impossible. Compared with reckoning like the 
good mariners used to do, I don't think most people who say
they believe are mapping 'reckoning' and 'believing' to the same
process. Reckoning is qualitatively better, but it is necessarily a
solitary exercise as it goes on continually in real time. 

I think you may be anthropomorphising science which is ultimately
not a unitary judge but a shared and cross-subjective way of
seeing. Science never directs itself -  subjective individuals or
practitioners of the scientific method direct their attention to
places and describe to each other the method they employed
and the other can then see if they get the same result. Their is a
sort of cross-subjective feedback happening but not true
objectivity it seems to me. What purpose would subjective beings
have with true objectivity anyway - it seems to me that such is a
detachment not even to be wished.

No. Objectivity as talked about even by scientists is not true
objectivity it is rather a collective specie of shared subjectivity.
Subjective individuals have no use for objective seeing only for
shared subjective seeing and for personal seeing and not in that
order. 

[snip]

> Scientific theories, even the most elegant ones, are simply
> approximations that are good enough until something better
> comes along. It's easy to think that this implies continuous
> improvement and means we must be getting really close to
> the truth now--and perhaps in a few areas we are.

Perhaps because we are endeavouring to accommodate reality as
perceived by other subjunctive-s we direct our investigations to
the areas where the other subjective-s we want to commune
with require. We don't have to, but for the most part most of
us choose to. But all subjective-s want to accommodate so as to
overcome some exogenous realities (illness, discomfort etc)
that although still subjectively experienced are universally felt
and we combine our resources with those of others to .

> Scientific answers are decided by consensus.  

[anthropomorphising science as something that has answers
- it doesn't scientist's do and they share a method]

> In theory  this means that every answer is carefully checked

No.

> --yeah, and in theory, communism is a fair system. 

> One of the strongest lessons of the book is that scientists 
> usually see what they look for. 

Of course, unless they are looking for something new. 

> Especially in the centers of scientific endeavor.  Scientists
> who are good at finding what they  expect to find produce
> fewer controversial results.  And predictable results are
> easier to write grants for.  And long careers in one field are
> a good way to stop innovating. So, the way to maximize 
> funding (and minimize exploration) is to reach a consensus
> as soon as possible--doesn't matter if it's right, as long as it's
> good enough to run predictable experiments--and stick to it
> as long as possible. (Actually, I don't think this last is directly
> stated in the book, but it's pretty obvious.)
>
> I've seen this at work in the way the "most respected"
> scientists (and the bureaucrats they're symbiotic with)
> have closed ranks against molecular nanotechnology.  No
> one comes up with a serious argument against it--they just
> do a bit of handwaving and pretend that they've debunked
> it. 
.
> The scary thing is that this works.

No it doesn't. It just appears to for a time. You are forgetting 
the dead-reckoners who sometimes don't give a shit for what
other people think or more precisely they factor what they think
other people think (they practice politics and pyschology the
fiends :-) ! ) and upset the whole applecart by reckoning also
on the slow moving dim-wits and believers as well. It adds an
entirely new dimension to the game because science then seems
like merely a planar axis on a 3d space, with the whole interplay
between people filling out the 3rd dimension - Metaphorically
speaking of course. 

> The final straw came a few nights ago, when I remembered
> something I'd been trying for a year to forget.  One evening
> last summer, my wife suddenly got a pain in her lower ribs,
> in a place she'd never had pain before, bad enough that we
> cancelled our plans to go for a walk so I could rub her back 
> (and this had never happened before either). 

:-)

> When I started the massage, she said, "How come the more
> you touch me there, the more I want to cry?"  A few minutes
> later, the pain went away.  And a few hours after that, we
> learned that her brother had been killed in a motorcycle
> accident within a few minutes of that time, and his lower
> ribs had been run over.
> 
> Obviously this is not scientific evidence, it's not a repeatable
> phenomenon, and it leads to no useful theory.  I don't ask
> anyone else to accept it or act on it; that's not the point.  

Obviously. But its not scientific evidence for more reasons than
the obvious one. 

> The point is: Is it more "scientific" for me to ignore it, or to 
> accept that it happened and I can't explain it and it might be
> significant?  Any scientist worth their salt would tell me that,
> since there's no such thing as ESP, there must be some
> mundane explanation. 

I started a skeptic society at uni. I know what you mean about
any scientist worth their salt having no truck with ESP, but that
is like saying that scientist don't think UFOs exist. The acronym
through wide usage loses some of the subtley of the separate 
words and takes on a meaning of its own. Eg. A lot of folk
with use UFO as another word for flying saucer etc. But
to say a short sighted duck shooter a lots of birds are clearly
unidentified flying objects :-).  And a saucer can be thrown
does that mean it is not flying. A jet engine sort of catapults
an aeroplane along with a series of explosions as I understand
each explosion could be a throw. I think much of the fog lifts
if you unpack ESP into extra sensory perception. 

Then you think well what are the existing senses that would be
added to. The 5. But then one realises (or can ) that those 5
are just arbitrary classifications of sensory input. Why include
pressure and heat sensing under just one term of touch for instance.

When the sensors are arbitrarily clustered into 5 categories then
what is an Extra sense?  I hardly care except that some geezer will
expect me to know the conventional 5 to talk to him or her.  

> I told myself that for a year.  But I'm becoming convinced that
> this is the wrong answer.  It's the answer that makes scientists
> see only what they expect to see, every time. Science cannot
> progress if it can't deal with the unexpected, and science 
> without progress is dead. 

No your still anthropomorphising science. Science does not have
any sense of progress. Progress is a subjective judgement or 
a collective of subjective judgements summed. Who is included
in the polling of subjective-s summed will of course effect the
net rating of progress too. To Tasmanian aborigines of the 1800's
there has been little progress since then as they were wiped out. 

> But modern science, it seems, has only two categories: Things 
> that can be studied with the scientific method, and things that 
> cannot be addressed. 

It is not science that divides things into two classes it is individuals
and groups of individuals in agreement with each other. 

> There is no category anymore for observations that cannot be
> categorized, but only catalogued.  If there is such a thing as a
>  mundane theory that makes ESP possible, science will find it 
> only by chance. 

Science qua science ain't even looking (it can't) :-)  

> It's heresy even to look.
>
> Not long before I read _Discovering_, I participated in a 
> discussion on another list in which a philosopher/chemist
>  made statements like "Science is not about truth."  

Either that was what was said or it was not. "Like" is not helpful
here. 

> My defence  of science was energetic and often verged on
> scornful.

I think science did not care and that you were defending instead
your own world view ;-)

>  But now I'm wondering whether I owe that guy an apology. 
> Where is the truth in "Since your observation is impossible, it
> must be meaningless"? 

Hang on a unicorn is impossible in some senses but the word
unicorn is not meaningless. 

>  How is truth advanced by funding mostly research based 
> on well-established theory?  Why is it that the phrase "peer
> reviewed grant proposal" is not universally horrifying to
> scientists?

Partly, I suspect because some scientists practice the scientific
method amongst a variety of other practices for their own
subjective good (and don't anthropomorphise it) - the rascals ;-)

> Now, to get back to the quote that started this screed: 
> "...evidence as would be accepted by those most schooled
>  and respected in the ways of science."  Would this be 
> Richard Smalley, who won the Nobel Prize for chemistry?

Ah, see you have to judge that for yourself now. You have
to dead-reckon not just on the world as seen by Smalley
but on the world with subjective Smalley in it as subjective
participate. 

>  And who recently wrote that an ordinary chemical
> reaction involves five to fifteen atoms?  I guess he's never
> heard of flame chemistry, or the formation of ozone in the
> upper atmosphere?  Well, maybe he wasn't thinking too
> hard.  He wrote this--and Scientific American printed it--
> in an attempt to discredit molecular nanotechnology.
.
> We must hope that individual scientists are less reliable 
> than science as a whole--otherwise the entire institution is 
> bankrupt! 

What's hope got to do with it? Do some reckoning ;-) 

>  But your criterion requires asking the opinion of individuals,
> applying methods designed for groups, to insufficient data, 
> outside their field.  I really think you'd do better to ask 
> a lawyer; they're trained to deal with unfamiliar information
> and find weaknesses in strange arguments.
.
> Personally, I'd most rather have Richard Feynman evaluate 
> my evidence; 

Then it would be his evidence. And there would be no god but
Feynman and you may be lucky to be his prophet ;-). 

> but I think he would've been too humble to give the kind of
> official scientific opinion you're looking for.  A Google search
> for "Feynman religion" found some reviews of _The Meaning
> of It All_.  Amazon quotes him thus:
>  "In case you are beginning to believe that some of the things
> I said before are true because I am a scientist and according
> to the brochure that you get I won some awards and so forth,
> instead of your looking at the ideas themselves and judging 
> them directly...I will get rid of that tonight. I dedicate this
> lecture to showing what ridiculous conclusions and rare 
> statements such a man as myself can make."
>
> And according to a review on ePinions,
>  "His recurrent theme is freedom of thought: the freedom to
> doubt, to investigate, and to believe. For example, when
> noting the two legacies of western civilization - the "scientific 
> spirit of adventure" and "Christian ethics" - Feynman 
> concludes that these two legacies are "logically, thoroughly,
> consistent." We must be free to doubt and question to find
> new answers, and we must be free to believe and base our
> actions in a morality larger than ourselves."

[snip]

My summary - Chris I think you are anthropomorhising science
all over the place here. I was going to cut all the above down
to that comment - but heck some folks just might appreciate a little 
redundancy (my apologies to the others).

Regards,
Brett