Continuing the Science discussion; pledge drive ends; follow-up to last night

View 810 Saturday, February 15, 2014

If a foreign government had imposed this system of education on the United States, we would rightfully consider it an act of war.

Glenn T. Seaborg, National Commission on Education, 1983

Christians to Beirut. Alawites to the grave.

Syrian Freedom Fighters

Cheer. The pledge drive ends, and I won’t bug you about money for a while. I time my financial appeals to coincide with the KUSC pledge drive. KUSC is the Los Angeles Classical Music station, and this place operates on the Public Radio model: it is free to everyone, but it will only stay open if it brings in enough money to make that feasible. So far it has done that. I want to thank all those who have recently subscribed, and also some of you who subscribed long ago and have recently returned. If you haven’t subscribed, or did so but haven’t renewed in a while, this would be a very good time to do so. https://www.jerrypournelle.com/chaosmanor/

I continue to recover from last night’s trip to the Kaiser Emergency Room. I am pleased to say that Sable, who was the indirect cause of my whamming myself on the concrete deck by leaving the remains of a stolen box of chocolate there – see last night’s View for details – was a bit droopy this morning, but has recovered from the effects of eating chocolate. She has always been a hardy dog. She does wonder why we are not going for a walk, and she also looks at me curiously, which is no surprise because my face is a bloody wreck, and is likely to be that way for a week or two. There’s no permanent damage, but I have a fine Harry Potter lightning scar in the middle of my forehead – I suppose for accuracy I should say I have a wound of that shape now, with stitches, which will inevitably become a Harry Potter scar. I also have abrasions and bruises and such all over the place. Not something to expose my neighbors to. I am wondering if I should wear a ski mask to church tomorrow. And brunch at the local restaurant we go to is likely to be a bit embarrassing. Ah well.

Continuing last night’s thoughts on where science is going:

The State of Modern Science Message

Jerry,

I, and I believe I can speak for most scientists, am with you on the desire to see simpler models. Most of us think that when we REALLY understand what is going on we will develop simpler models. But, that understanding may be a long way off as we are trying to find ways to conceptualize behaviors our brains have NEVER experienced — traveling at the speed of light, sitting in a black hole, or whizzing around as a sub-atomic particle. The every day universe we evolved to model intuitively in our brains is vastly different from these realms.

The other issue is that our models are vast simplifications of reality. The only way to model the universe in all of its detail is to run the whole universe, not very practical. This means our models will always have inaccuracies in them, conditions that they cannot model fully. I know that there has been a lot of noise about closing in on the Theory of Everything, that one elegant equation that predicts all things in the universe, including itself. I have always thought that such a theory is not possible because it runs hard up against Godel’s incompleteness theorem and Turing’s halting problem. (Which are two shades of the same thing.)

I, too, am dismayed by the rise of shoddy science, misconduct in science, and outright fraud in science. There are some good articles on this problem in Scientific American. One point that the articles make is that there is very little replication work being done for any of the major claims being published these days. Perhaps major journals should require at least one independent replication of a major result before they agree to publish? I don’t know; this may be too cumbersome and time consuming, but peer review seems to be failing miserably these days.

Kevin Keegan

I will also add this link:

Science has lost its way, at a big cost to humanity

Researchers are rewarded for splashy findings, not for double-checking accuracy. So many scientists looking for cures to diseases have been building on ideas that aren’t even true.

October 27, 2013| Michael Hiltzik

In today’s world, brimful as it is with opinion and falsehoods masquerading as facts, you’d think the one place you can depend on for verifiable facts is science.

You’d be wrong. Many billions of dollars’ worth of wrong.

A few years ago, scientists at the Thousand Oaks biotech firm Amgen set out to double-check the results of 53 landmark papers in their fields of cancer research and blood biology.

The idea was to make sure that research on which Amgen was spending millions of development dollars still held up. They figured that a few of the studies would fail the test — that the original results couldn’t be reproduced because the findings were especially novel or described fresh therapeutic approaches.

But what they found was startling: Of the 53 landmark papers, only six could be proved valid.

"Even knowing the limitations of preclinical research," observed C. Glenn Begley, then Amgen’s head of global cancer research, "this was a shocking result."

Unfortunately, it wasn’t unique. A group at Bayer HealthCare in Germany similarly found that only 25% of published papers on which it was basing R&D projects could be validated, suggesting that projects in which the firm had sunk huge resources should be abandoned. Whole fields of research, including some in which patients were already participating in clinical trials, are based on science that hasn’t been, and possibly can’t be, validated.

http://articles.latimes.com/2013/oct/27/business/la-fi-hiltzik-20131027

There is considerably more, all worth your time since you’re the ones paying for it. Note that this was not a scare piece in some anti-science publication. Even the popular press is becoming concerned.

It’s dinner time and I don’t know my schedule today, I slept late. I may get some more done later tonight.

And here endeth the Winter Pledge Drive. If you haven’t subscribed recently this would be a great time to do it. And thanks to all those who responded.

Paying for this place: http://www.jerrypournelle.com/paying.html

Freedom is not free. Free men are not equal. Equal men are not free.