[Codo]

 gwnn, on 2013-July-25, 04:32, said:

I think someone already linked this essay when you made this point before, but maybe they didn't, or you didn't have a chance to read it.
http://chem.tufts.ed...vityofwrong.htm

Thanks for the quote, I really love Asimov, he was one of my favourite science fiction writers and this was a really nice and well written essay and I like the way he thinks.

But I have no clue, why you put this link as a response to what I wrote. Maybe you can elaborate?

I believe in progress and I am very sure that we are now less wrong then we had been 50/500/5000 years before and that we will know much more in 50/500/5000 years.

I just had the feeling (rightly or wrongly) that t Dwar has a more religious view on science, while I see it as a tool, which worked well quite often, but had been abused too often.
But maybe I understood him wrong.

[billw55]

 Codo, on 2013-July-25, 02:27, said:

So sciences works?
Do you really believe that?

You may compare all the errors made in science work, all the truth which had been told.
Think about medicines which had caused worse problems then they healed.
Think about truths which had been true for centuries but are abandoned now.
Think about all the tests which had been made and which had undoubtly show that kids have or don't have this or that ability at the age of 3 or 4....
Sciences does develop and our knowledge will continue to explode in the future. Many things which we take as given today will be remote in the future...

And you believe that our current knowledge will stand the test of time?

You are a real true believer.

I don't think you understand what science is very well.

Science is not a belief system that says "this is true, that is false". The fundamental point of science is that it can discover new and better information and cast aside its own errors along the way. In this sense, science does work very well, although sometimes more slowly than it could due to human tendencies.

[gwnn]

 Codo, on 2013-July-25, 07:01, said:

Thanks for the quote, I really love Asimov, he was one of my favourite science fiction writers and this was a really nice and well written essay and I like the way he thinks.

But I have no clue, why you put this link as a response to what I wrote. Maybe you can elaborate?

I believe in progress and I am very sure that we are now less wrong then we had been 50/500/5000 years before and that we will know much more in 50/500/5000 years.

I just had the feeling (rightly or wrongly) that t Dwar has a more religious view on science, while I see it as a tool, which worked well quite often, but had been abused too often.
But maybe I understood him wrong.

You asked "you believe our current knowledge will stand the test of time?" and the answer is "it depends what you mean it will stand the test of time." In fields like physics we will likely discover new effects and principles but none that would cause a huge uproar or disprove what we have done before. Einstein was amazing but none of his theories significantly affect the inner workings of a car or a wind turbine (bleh, the wind turbine uses Maxwell's equations which only ever got in harmony with Newton thanks to Einstein, but anyway, I'm going to leave it here). Quantum mechanics is very important in nanoscience but not so much in making Coca-Cola. Any new principles we find will only slightly revise QM or SR/GR. None of current science is logically true. All of its predictions (like the measurements themselves) have uncertainties. These error bars are likely to be reduced in time. Sometimes not, but you don't have to be a "true believer" to observe the obvious: we are making progress. And you yourself admit to all of this, so what are we talking about? Whether or not science works? Of course it does (witness all the stuff that we can make today that we couldn't do 100 years ago). And it works better every day.

This post has been edited by gwnn: 2013-July-25, 07:30

[barmar]

 Codo, on 2013-July-25, 02:27, said:

So sciences works?
Do you really believe that?

We wouldn't be having this conversation if it weren't for science.

Is it perfect? No, of course not. It's done by people, and people make mistakes.

[kenberg]

I had not seen that Asimov essay before. very nice.

Quote

My answer to him was, "John, when people thought the earth was flat, they were wrong. When people thought the earth was spherical, they were wrong. But if you think that thinking the earth is spherical is just as wrong as thinking the earth is flat, then your view is wronger than both of them put together."

Yes, exactly.

I would add that a society or a nation that chooses to regard science as irrelevant is a society that is headed for deep trouble.

[dwar0123]

 Codo, on 2013-July-25, 02:27, said:

So sciences works?
Do you really believe that?

You may compare all the errors made in science work, all the truth which had been told.
Think about medicines which had caused worse problems then they healed.
Think about truths which had been true for centuries but are abandoned now.
Think about all the tests which had been made and which had undoubtly show that kids have or don't have this or that ability at the age of 3 or 4....
Sciences does develop and our knowledge will continue to explode in the future. Many things which we take as given today will be remote in the future...

And you believe that our current knowledge will stand the test of time?

You are a real true believer.

Do I really believe that science works?

Absolutely. Do you really believe it doesn't?

Does science answer questions as inerrant absolute truths? Only someone who doesn't understand science could make the mistake of thinking that is a mistake that science could make.

Science is a process of arriving to a better truth through incremental improvements. Improvements that are made when errors are discovered, and errors will be discovered.

Which makes the question of do I believe our current knowledge will stand the test of time laughable. The only way our current knowledge could stand the test of time is if we abandoned science.

[PassedOut]

The news media perpetuates bad ideas by giving sensational publicity to preposterous claims, then burying the retractions: The case of ‘zombie’ voters in South Carolina

Quote

“We just recently learned that there are over 900 individuals who had died before the election (and had voted) and at least 600 of those individuals had died way outside the window that an absentee ballot could have been sent, so we know for a fact that there are deceased people whose identities are being used in elections in South Carolina.”

— South Carolina Attorney General Alan Wilson ®, on Fox News, Jan. 21, 2012

But there followed an investigation, proving Wilson wrong.

Quote

More than anyone, [Wilson] hyped these charges into certified “facts,” even before any real investigation had taken place. Indeed, the miniscule percentage of alleged dead votes, out of the number cast, should have urged caution.

Instead, he went straight to the television cameras—and then his office for months bottled up the report that revealed not a single claim was true.

Apparently, officials were hoping the whole thing would remain dead and buried. But zombies have a way of coming back to life.

But to many folks this foolishness is not -- and never will be -- dead and buried.

[akwoo]

My viewpoint is as follows:

Truth is relative to a context or a system.

We see this all the time in bridge. When someone asks on this forums what the right bid is for a hand, we ask them 'What system are you playing?'

Sometimes the context is implied. In a post-mortem at my local club, I'm going to assume a version of SAYC or 2/1 appropriate for the level and experience of the player. If it's my partner, I'm assuming the system we agreed to play. Similarly, if it's a science classroom or conference, I'm going to assume that only naturalistic explanations of a fairly precise and at least theoretically empirically testable form are permitted, and that explanations should be be backed up by empirical explanations having the requisite level (which varies depending on the field of science) of statistical certainty. But if it's a math, I expect that statements are backed up by logical proofs, whereas for history, I expect some reasonable narrative drawn from evidence from primary sources, or for theology, some chain of reasonable interpretations of sacred texts.

Note that not all systems are created equal. If your system has you opening 4♠ on any hand with 5-8 hcp, I'm going to laugh at you.

Good systems that people play tend to be improved over time. For example, there was a question recently about what to bid holding something like ♠ Kx ♥ KQxxx ♦ Qxx ♣ Qxx after 1♣ 1♥ 2♣ (opponents silent). Believing the Earth is flat is like bidding 4♣. Believing the Earth is spherical is like bidding 3N. Nowadays we have new minor forcing, so 2♦ is available, but 50 years ago, practically no one would have thought of that as a reasonable bid.

Meanwhile, there are people playing, for example, strong club systems, for which this whole conversation is pointless. They're like people who simply don't care what science will tell them about the shape of the world.

And on the freakish end, like people playing 4♠ openers show 5-8 hcp any, there are people who believe that no matter what your empirical observations tell you, believing that the Earth is flat and supported on the back of an elephant wearing a green necklace is part of what will get you into Elysia when you die, but believing the elephant wears a blue necklace will get you sent to Hell.

[onoway]

 helene_t, on 2013-July-25, 04:57, said:

There is science and there is science. On a scale where astrology is zero and relativity theory is 98, maybe many clinical trials are between 20 and 30 (just two numbers i pulled out of the sleeve).

Also, there is a difference between saying that science holds the absolute truth, and saying that science "works".

Absolutely agree with you BUT I also think that lots of people tend to present science AS absolute truth. Teachers in school said, "the atom is the smallest particle there is." and never ever modified it to add, "as far as we now know". I'm sure I am dating myself with that comment but I'm also sure that much of what is being taught in at least most schools now is equally dogmatic.

So what happens when science turns out to be as riddled with errors, charlatans and snakeoil salesmen as any other enterprise? It isn't surprising that people who don't have the expertise or interest or time to distinguish between the real thing and the fake simply say, "a pox on all of it" and stick with whatever they feel comfortable with. When people who "believe" in science then mock such people it will only turn the mistrust into hostility.

Outside of what normally come to mind when someone says "science" much the same thing is beginning to happen with the medical community. Very few people seem to trust their doctors as people used to do and even fewer don't have concerns about big pharma. It's a little scary where that can lead sometimes, I just tried to bring some sense into a thread in another forum where someone was - apparently seriously - suggesting using some herb written about in 1887 to treat rattlesnake and other poisonous snakebites. OTOH when a modern prescription for a mild infection has as possible potential side effects permanent liver damage or even death can you really blame people for looking at alternatives?

Just to be clear, I don't think science ought to be regarded with the disdain that it often is, but I do think that the scientific community has brought it on themselves. (Helped along by cynical politicians and predatory businessmen in some cases.)

I found the title of this thread mildly offensive and arrogant and that's brought out my devil's advocate side.

[mike777]

One can easily see the trap of having epiphenomena fuel action, then justify it retrospectively.

Clive Granger suggests a method to dig out epiphenomena in the cultural discourse and consciousness by looking at the sequence of events and checking out whether one always precedes the other. Also to study differences, that is changes in A and B, not just levels of A and B.

----------------------------

An epiphenomenon (plural - epiphenomena) is a secondary phenomenon that occurs alongside or in parallel to a primary phenomenon

In medicine, an epiphenomenon is a secondary symptom seemingly unrelated to the original disease or disorder. For example, having an increased risk of breast cancer concurrent with taking an antibiotic is an epiphenomenon. It is not the antibiotic that is causing the increased risk, but the increased inflammation associated with bacterial infection.

In the more general use of the word a causal relationship between the phenomena is implied: the epiphenomenon is a consequence of the primary phenomenon; however, in medicine this relationship is typically not implied: an epiphenomenon may occur independently, and is merely called an epiphenomenon because it is not the primary phenomenon under study. (A side-effect is a specific kind of epiphenomenon that does occur as a direct consequence
http://en.wikipedia....i/Epiphenomenon
---------------------------------------------------

Sir Clive William John Granger /ˈɡreɪndʒər/ (September 4, 1934 – May 27, 2009) was a British economist, who taught in Britain at the University of Nottingham and in the United States at the University of California, San Diego. In 2003, Granger was awarded the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences, in recognition that he and his co-winner, Robert F. Engle, had made discoveries in the analysis of time series data that had changed fundamentally the way in which economists analyse financial and macroeconomic data

http://en.wikipedia....i/Clive_Granger

[Vampyr]

 onoway, on 2013-July-25, 14:22, said:

Teachers in school said, "the atom is the smallest particle there is." and never ever modified it to add, "as far as we now know". I'm sure I am dating myself with that comment

You certainly are, since the electron was discovered in 1897.

[barmar]

 onoway, on 2013-July-25, 14:22, said:

Absolutely agree with you BUT I also think that lots of people tend to present science AS absolute truth. Teachers in school said, "the atom is the smallest particle there is." and never ever modified it to add, "as far as we now know". I'm sure I am dating myself with that comment but I'm also sure that much of what is being taught in at least most schools now is equally dogmatic.

I think it's a bit much to expect teachers to qualify every statement they make -- the lessons would be full of more qualifiers than actual information. For the purposes of most lessons, describing things to the extent of our knowledge is good enough.

In fact, it's even OK to lie, sometimes. Einstein's Special and General Relativity made Newton's Laws of Motion obsolete over 100 years ago. Yet every physics student still learns them, and there's no need for teachers to add caveats about the fact that they're not really "true". 99.9% of people will never find themselves in situations where they need to worry about relativistic effects. If teachers want to mention this, it would be a nice "fun fact", but it doesn't really need to be part of the lesson. Newton's Laws are still good enough for most purposes, just as (in Asimov's essay) it's close enough to consider Earth to be either a sphere or oblate spheroid, and for some purposes you can even treat it as flat (a mapmaker needs to worry about spherical projections if he's mapping a large portion of the world, but usually not if he's mapping a county or state).

[mike777]

"Bad Ideas That Won't Go Away Can they ever be eradicated?"

Really Bad ideas go away when one has "skin in the game"

The absence of being at risk if your bad idea is indeed bad is the greatest generator of crises in society.

Gaining at the expense of others by getting the upside from volatility, variations, and disorder and exposing others to the downside risks of losses or harm by those in power with no personal exposure is the issue.

In the past People of power and rank were those who had the downside for their actions and heroes were those who did so for the sake of others, today we see example after example of the reverse taking place.

I for one want to encourage ideas even though many of them may be bad or just plain wrong as long as those who may gain from the idea accept the downside.

Bad ideas or bad or wrong science theory is not the big problem.

[blackshoe]

 barmar, on 2013-July-25, 15:20, said:

Einstein's Special and General Relativity made Newton's Laws of Motion obsolete over 100 years ago.

"Obsolete" is way too strong. As you mentioned, Relativistic effects are only important at relativistic speeds - speeds much higher than most people will normally encounter. Newtonian physics is a very useful approximation at non-relativistic speeds, so it is hardly obsolete. It's also important to an understanding of the history and evolution of our scientific knowledge. So again, not obsolete.

In the same way, Euclidean geometry does not adequately describe space in regions of high gravitational fields (such as near a black hole) but is a perfectly adequate approximation in regions of weak gravity. So the development of Riemannian geometries which enabled Einstein's General Theory of Relativity did not make Euclidean geometry obsolete, it merely relegated it to the status of "approximation".

[barmar]

 blackshoe, on 2013-July-25, 15:49, said:

"Obsolete" is way too strong. As you mentioned, Relativistic effects are only important at relativistic speeds - speeds much higher than most people will normally encounter.

Which is exactly my point. Teachers don't have to worry about such minor details in their lessons, and the same goes with the "as far as we know" qualifier. Science is good enough that what we "know" is usually close enough to the truth that it can be treated as fact. Sometimes it's just an approximation, but the margin of error isn't enough for most people to worry about.

If you read actual science articles, they're full of qualifiers. Try to find any article in Scientific American that declares something as an absolute fact, and I'm sure that science journal articles are even less definitive. Mostly they talk about how some new discoveries or experiments are evidence of an alternate theory of something, or how a new conjecture better fits some old data, and things like this. They rarely call a new theory "right" or declare that an old one was "wrong", there are lots of "maybe"s. Over time, more and more evidence accumulates, and predictions of the theory are discovered to be true, and eventually a concensus may be reached that it's a better approximation than the previous ones. Or it may be refuted. That's how science works.

[dwar0123]

 blackshoe, on 2013-July-25, 15:49, said:

"Obsolete" is way too strong. As you mentioned, Relativistic effects are only important at relativistic speeds - speeds much higher than most people will normally encounter. Newtonian physics is a very useful approximation at non-relativistic speeds, so it is hardly obsolete. It's also important to an understanding of the history and evolution of our scientific knowledge. So again, not obsolete.

In the same way, Euclidean geometry does not adequately describe space in regions of high gravitational fields (such as near a black hole) but is a perfectly adequate approximation in regions of weak gravity. So the development of Riemannian geometries which enabled Einstein's General Theory of Relativity did not make Euclidean geometry obsolete, it merely relegated it to the status of "approximation".

You are restating Barmars actual points, almost point by point as an explanation of your quibble about word choice. Word choice on the topic of physics on a bridge forum that draws an international audience.

I actually agree with you, obsolete is to strong a word, but the word obsolete wasn't the point.

[gwnn]

And they were both restating my (admittedly far from clear) second post.

[barmar]

Even the discovery that something like 95% of the universe is made of Dark Energy, which we didn't even know about a generation ago and still don't know what it's made of, doesn't really invalidate most previous scientific discoveries. It just fills in an (admittedly large) gap, much as the discovery of the Americas filled in a gap in Europe's knowledge of world geography, but didn't make maps of Europe and Africa wrong.

[blackshoe]

Or at least not more wrong than they already were.

[mike777]

Bad Ideas That Won't Go Away Can they ever be eradicated?


me thinks people are sidetracked from the topic...

I think we all can agree that 1+1=3 can never be eradicated but is that our biggest bad idea...

bad ideas...bad or wrong/false/incorrect science is not the issue...I hope.

failure...bad ideas..wrong ideas are ok, not best, but ok......lets not shame people for a bad/wrong idea.

Instead let us all embrace failure and move on and learn a better idea...perhaps not perfect but better in terms of science/review/explain/test/etc


worst is to embrace/implement ideas from people that don't have "skin in the game".

If you want to bet on local farming or astrology..fair enough...no prlb