Saving Science

[MachineGhost]

Great stuff, but it seems like the author is conflating "science" with the game of human politics and bureaucracy similar to how True Believers do. True science provides objective facts via unbiased observation or reason. It's what you do with the resulting facts that makes all the difference.

[Xan]

Great stuff, but it seems like the author is conflating "science" with the game of human politics and bureaucracy similar to how True Believers do. True science provides objective facts via unbiased observation or reason. It's what you do with the resulting facts that makes all the difference.

But that isn't necessarily the case. Science provides objective facts PROVIDED its assumptions are true. And it never provides truth. Science is a human creation, don't forget. It's a branch of philosophy.

[Mountaineer]

Great stuff, but it seems like the author is conflating "science" with the game of human politics and bureaucracy similar to how True Believers do. True science provides objective facts via unbiased observation or reason. It's what you do with the resulting facts that makes all the difference.

But that isn't necessarily the case. Science provides objective facts PROVIDED its assumptions are true. And it never provides truth. Science is a human creation, don't forget. It's a branch of philosophy.

Well said. I saw faulty assumptions bite a lot of new engineers (still wet behind the ears and in awe of professors that had no industrial experience) in the behind ........ the good ones were humble enough to thank the old farts for bailing them out.

... Mountaineer

[MachineGhost]

You really wanna go down to reality being subjective and therefore, all assumptions? That would make everything non-truthful because nothing can ever be determined to be objectively true, including Christianity.

Food for thought: How well did things work out for explaining the nature of reality and the universe before the Rational Enlightenment? We all laugh at them now because we have a better Operating System and that is science.

[Xan]

You really wanna go down to reality being subjective and therefore, all assumptions? That would make everything non-truthful because nothing can ever be determined to be objectively true, including Christianity.

Food for thought: How well did things work out for explaining the nature of reality and the universe before the Rational Enlightenment? We all laugh at them now because we have a better Operating System and that is science.

Speak for yourself. The idea that people now are so much smarter and better than people have always been is a pernicious one. In particular, would YOU do any better in the same situation than the people you now laugh at?

[MachineGhost]

Speak for yourself. The idea that people now are so much smarter and better than people have always been is a pernicious one. In particular, would YOU do any better in the same situation than the people you now laugh at?

Well, yeah, I'm super smart and I would have been back then as I would have now, which means I likely would have been imprisoned perpetually, drowned, beheaded, crucifixed or quartered by your very own religious-believing kind. So excuse my enemity to all those who glorify or preach a return to the way it was, which was ignorance and stupidity over knowledge and reason.

WHAT?! You say you're an exception unlike your brothers? Then stop tarring all of science with the same illogic.

[MachineGhost]

Not that science is unique in that regard.

Just thinking out loud but is there a possible correlation between the insidious pussification of men and the ongoing corruption of science? j/k

[Xan]

Speak for yourself. The idea that people now are so much smarter and better than people have always been is a pernicious one. In particular, would YOU do any better in the same situation than the people you now laugh at?

Well, yeah, I'm super smart and I would have been back then as I would have now, which means I likely would have been imprisoned perpetually, drowned, beheaded, crucifixed or quartered by your very own religious-believing kind. So excuse my enemity to all those who glorify or preach a return to the way it was, which was ignorance and stupidity over knowledge and reason.

WHAT?! You say you're an exception unlike your brothers? Then stop tarring all of science with the same illogic.

I think your execution would have more to do with the thick, slimy hubris that oozes out of your every pore. Assuming the executioner could make it through the billowing cloud of smug to actually reach you, of course.

EDIT: The above sounds nastier when reading it than it did in my head writing it. Still, I think MG's sense of self is vastly overinflated.

[MachineGhost]

EDIT: The above sounds nastier when reading it than it did in my head writing it. Still, I think MG's sense of self is vastly overinflated.

OTOH, my "vastly overinflated sense of self" is only relative to your self's willingness to submit and kowtow to your "God". You simply don't like or agree with anything that even remotely reeks of affirming one's own personal empowerment. Verboten! That's really sad from my worldview.

Nonetheless, both you and Mountaineer have brought up invaluable perspectives. I don't necessarily disagree... it's just that in a battle of Operating Systems, which would get us closer to the proverbial Mars... religion or science? We live in a physical reality and we should spend more time worrying about dealing with the physical reality than on metaphysical fiction. Why waste your time, money and life preparing for what may not even exist in the end? But hey, its your delusion. We all have to own up to ours.

[MachineGhost]

MG, I think you would have been devoutly religious if you'd existed back in those days. Your general philosophy seems to follow what is fashionable these days among intellectuals, and in those days being religious was fashionable. In fact if you'd been alive at the time of Jesus, I think you'd have been one of the top pharisees in all the land.

I mean that respectfully ... the pharisees were some of the smartest, most successful guys around.

Funny, but I follow what I please not what is fashion de jour at the moment. I'm an outsider and always will be. If It so happens that the fashion de jour is something that I agree with, of course it's going to sound like I'm one of them, but coincidence is not correlation. Do I strike you as one of those limp-wristed, Gated Liberal Privilege academics? I'll shred them as much as a rightwing nut.

I know you don't agree that "Christianity" is winning historical composite of many Messianic cults of the Roman times, but I'm not as smug and arrogant as Xan likes to make me out to be to definitely say that yes, I would have definitely been following one of the "Jesus" cults at the time.

It is very interesting to me the unspoken open secret dyhnamic going on here in terms of dominance vs submission.

[WiseOne]

The original topic of this thread is so good, it deserves not to be lost in the bickering. Do you guys mind taking it to personal messaging or maybe another thread, if you must?

This paragraph really nails it:

Yet, to fixate on systemic positive bias in an out-of-control research system is to miss the deeper and much more important point. The reason that bias seems able to infect research so easily today is that so much of science is detached from the goals and agendas of the military-industrial innovation system, which long gave research its focus and discipline. Nothing is left to keep research honest save the internal norms of the professional, peer-review system itself. And how well are those norms holding up? A survey of more than 1,500 scientists published by Nature in May 2016 shows that 80 percent or more believe that scientific practice is being undermined by such factors as “selective reporting” of data, publication pressure, poor statistical analysis, insufficient attention to replication, and inadequate peer review. In short, we are finding out what happens when objective inquiry is guided by Bush’s beautiful lie. “Scientific doomsday” indeed.

I see this over and over again: somebody comes up with a creative new idea that looks great if you don't examine it too closely, and the rest of the field starts to parrot it as a God-given truth. Eventually, everyone will realize that it was a wrong path to take, but it may take a lot of years, tons of papers, and gzillions of dollars in grant funding before that happens. Meanwhile, if you're trying to shout out that the emperor has no clothes, not only does the message get ignored, but you won't get published either. Which means, no grants.

There was a recent paper published in PNAS that I absolutely love, because the fact it got published in such a prestigious journal means that all is truly not lost. The paper states quite directly that some 40,000 published fMRI studies are trash, because those studies all assumed Gaussian distributions in the data. Most biologically data, however, is not Gaussian, and if you apply statistical methods to non-Gaussian data, you'll get a ton of false positives. I'd noticed this years earlier and I use statistical resampling techniques to avoid this problem. But most people don't, and the result is a false positive rate of 60-90% - assuming that was the only problem with those studies.

Link to the paper: http://www.pnas.org/content/113/28/7900.abstract

Still, I don't think things are as grim as the author of the saving science article is suggesting. It's a flawed system, true, but a lot of good things are happening along with the not so good things. Which is true of almost every human endeavor.

[MachineGhost]

The original topic of this thread is so good, it deserves not to be lost in the bickering. Do you guys mind taking it to personal messaging or maybe another thread, if you must?

I'm not the one that injected religion into this conversation and I'm going to defend myself against ad hominems or if "science" is attacked, not sweep it under the rug. We have to save "science" against the True Believers not just internal corruption, so it's still on topic in my book.

There was a recent paper published in PNAS that I absolutely love, because the fact it got published in such a prestigious journal means that all is truly not lost. The paper states quite directly that some 40,000 published fMRI studies are trash, because those studies all assumed Gaussian distributions in the data. Most biologically data, however, is not Gaussian, and if you apply statistical methods to non-Gaussian data, you'll get a ton of false positives. I'd noticed this years earlier and I use statistical resampling techniques to avoid this problem. But most people don't, and the result is a false positive rate of 60-90% - assuming that was the only problem with those studies.

That is true of financial time series data as well. What do you mean by "statistical resampling techniques"? I'm familiar with using the actual data to derive an accurate cumulative probability distribution rather than assuming a Guassian distribution.

But, what does having a large false positive rate in regards to fMRI actually mean?

[WiseOne]

That is true of financial time series data as well. What do you mean by "statistical resampling techniques"? I'm familiar with using the actual data to derive an accurate cumulative probability distribution rather than assuming a Guassian distribution.

But, what does having a large false positive rate in regards to fMRI actually mean?

Yes, you have it right - it means deriving your own probability distribution using a Monte Carlo technique. I usually shuffle the data, test 1000 times, and take the 5th percentile as the cutoff for significance.

Large false positive rate in fMRI studies plus selective publishing means that fMRI studies claiming to have found a center for gayness, autism, marijuana use, etc etc ad infinitum, should all be pitched out the window. It's got a lot more in common with reading tea leaves than science. The touchstone should be this: if you can't disprove it, it's not science. I've long despised fMRI work for all these reasons.