January 16, 2006
THE WEIGHT OF THE ERRORS:
Trial and Error (DAVID DOBBS, 1/15/06, NY Times Magazine)
Many of us consider science the most reliable, accountable way of explaining how the world works. We trust it. Should we? John Ioannidis, an epidemiologist, recently concluded that most articles published by biomedical journals are flat-out wrong. The sources of error, he found, are numerous: the small size of many studies, for instance, often leads to mistakes, as does the fact that emerging disciplines, which lately abound, may employ standards and methods that are still evolving. Finally, there is bias, which Ioannidis says he believes to be ubiquitous. Bias can take the form of a broadly held but dubious assumption, a partisan position in a longstanding debate (e.g., whether depression is mostly biological or environmental) or (especially slippery) a belief in a hypothesis that can blind a scientist to evidence contradicting it. These factors, Ioannidis argues, weigh especially heavily these days and together make it less than likely that any given published finding is true.Ioannidis's argument induces skepticism about science. . .and a certain awe. Even getting half its findings wrong, science in the long run gets most things right - or, as Paul Grobstein, a biologist, puts it, "progressively less wrong."
If you stack your errors high enough does your paradigm become as true as it is hard for you to get out from under? Posted by Orrin Judd at January 16, 2006 12:00 AM
Mr. Judd;
No, because as the article itself states, science doesn't achieve truth but greater accuracy.
No again, because errors don't stack, they tend to cancel each other out over the long term.
No a third time because in many situations adding noise helps to detect faint signals.
AOG:
Yes, it's your faith that the current paradigms just become more and more right. It's why you can't feel the ground shifting under them.
Posted by: oj at January 16, 2006 12:37 PMA shift away from science ?
Only if the Earth soon gets hit again by one of those almost-all-life-killing asteroids that your Intelligent Designer likes to use for fine-tuning.
Barring that, humanity will become more and more technological, and although you like to differentiate between the two, new technology flows directly and necessarily from new science.
Nanorings today, eh wot ?
MP3s and DVDs over the weekend...
Some recommendations dealing with "television".
"Printed books" were the hot new thing at one time, and the movable-type printing press was only possible due to metallurgy and chemistry.
Posted by: Michael Herdegen![[TypeKey Profile Page]](http://brothersjuddblog.com/nav-commenters.gif)
at January 16, 2006 1:08 PM
Mr. Judd;
It's not my faith, it's my everyday experience with the results of those increasingly accurate theories. To manage to avoid that is to be even more cocooned than the chatterati at the NY Times.
AOG:
Your everyday experience of things like Darwinism, String Theory and the like is non-existent. You just have faith in the stacks.
Posted by: oj at January 16, 2006 10:31 PMYes, you like to play in the fringes of science, where indeed the status quo is always in flux - this thing could be true, or maybe that - but you don't seem to notice that the wild & woolly chaos of the frontier is always moving further away from the center...
Posted by: Michael Herdegen at January 17, 2006 4:07 AM
Michael:
Those fringe movements get taught in our schools. Meanwhile, there is no scientific center, few of us know anything about science, nor believe in even the most orthodox theories.
Posted by: oj at January 17, 2006 7:10 AMOJ, mostly all of us believe in the orthodox theories. You're in a time warp.
Posted by: Robert Duquette at January 17, 2006 11:04 AMMr. Judd;
I was thinking more of things like quantum theory, molecular chemistry, and information theory, the fruits of which I use on a daily basis, and, I dare say, so do you or you wouldn't be able to respond to my comments. Ah, but we can't talk of that sort of science, because it works.
You remind me much of those who disparage artificial intelligence work by labeling any working results of that effort as "not-A.I." so by definition it could never work. You just label any bits of science that do achieve accuracy and utility (e.g., those I mentioned above) as "technology", thereby leaving only the fringes and dregs as "science".
Yes, that's precisely right. Technology is knowledge that can be applied. Science is theories.
Posted by: oj at January 17, 2006 2:05 PM"Science" is hypotheses, theories, and knowledge that can be applied.
"Technology" is the devices that we build using applied science.
An X-ray machine, or CAT or PET scanner, is "technology".
Discovery and description of the electromagnetic spectrum is "science".
Posted by: Michael Herdegen at January 18, 2006 10:15 PM
There's no hypothesis or theory--you tinker and it works or doesn't. There's no need to understand it--indeed, we seldom do.
Posted by: oj at January 18, 2006 10:20 PM