Month: February 2021

Inconvenient Truths about Science

Why Listen to this video? There are many heavily promoted dangerous misconceptions about modern “science,” many of which I once shared. These misconceptions generally lead to an excessive and dangerous confidence in scientists and claims labeled as science. These can even cost you your life as happened to many arthritis sufferers who trusted scientific claims about the blockbuster painkiller Vioxx. Many other examples exist, some discussed briefly in the following video. I will discuss over a dozen common misconceptions. The discussion reflects my personal experience and research.

Why me? I have a B.S. in Physics from Caltech, a Ph.D. in experimental particle physics from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, worked for a successful video compression startup in the Silicon Valley, NASA, HP Labs, and Apple.

TOPICS COVERED

1. Scientists are people too. Rarely the altruistic truth-seekers depicted in fiction and popular science writing. Egos, glory, greed. Comparable to less revered and even actively distrusted professions such as attorneys. Many examples of error and gross misconduct up to the present day: “Tuskegee Study of Untreated Syphilis the Negro Male” by US Public Health Service and US Centers for Disease Control (1932-1972), Eugenics, Vioxx scandal.

In her 2009 article “Drug Companies & Doctors: A Story of Corruption”, published in The New York Review of Books magazine, (former NEJM Editor-in-Chief Marcia) Angell wrote :[7]

…Similar conflicts of interest and biases exist in virtually every field of medicine, particularly those that rely heavily on drugs or devices. It is simply no longer possible to believe much of the clinical research that is published, or to rely on the judgment of trusted physicians or authoritative medical guidelines. I take no pleasure in this conclusion, which I reached slowly and reluctantly over my two decades as an editor of The New England Journal of Medicine.

Moral character and intelligence (IQ, general intelligence) are uncorrelated.

2. Since World War II most modern science is funded by the government, by giant bureaucratic funding agencies such as the National Institutes of Health, the National Science Foundation, the Department of Energy, and the DoD in the USA. There was a large transformation of science during and after World War II from small scale, often more independent research to huge government programs.

(Video segment from Eisenhower’s Farewell Address on the danger of the scientific technological elite)

3. The success of the wartime Manhattan Project which developed the first nuclear reactors and atomic bombs appears to have been a fluke. Most New Manhattan Projects have largely or completely failed including several in physics involving the same people or their students.

https://mathblog.com/the-manhattan-project-considered-as-a-fluke/https://mathblog.com/the-mathematics-of-the-manhattan-project/

4. There is an illusion of independence in scientists because so many are directly employed by universities such as Harvard, Stanford, Caltech and others, but those universities depend mostly on government funding. High profile academic dissidents such as linguist Noam Chomsky usually stay well away from truly taboo topics often labeled as “conspiracy theories,” e.g. the Kennedy Assassination, “pseudoscience,” or both.
5. The federally funded academic research system is a pyramid scheme with many, many more Ph.D.’s produced than long term faculty or staff positions, typically 5-20 times more Ph.D.s. Remarkably, leading scientists and scientific institutions continue to claim terrible shortages of scientists despite this. A never ending supply of young, cheap, often starry-eyed workers — graduate students and post-docs.

https://wordpress.jmcgowan.com/wp/category/stem-shortage-claims/

6. A well-paid but precarious elite of tenured faculty, principal investigators, senior scientists at government labs who can easily be replaced by a tiny fraction of the younger Ph.D’s if they rock the boat.
7. Brilliant, well-educated, hard working people sometimes do dumb things, both individually and collectively.
8. Knowledge of cognitive biases such as “confirmation bias” or “cognitive dissonance” does not immunize people from the biases.
9. Brilliant, well-educated, hard working people are often better at rationalizing away obviously contradictory evidence or logic and convincing others to accept their rationalizations. Paradoxically knowledge of cognitive biases provides an arsenal of excuses to rationalize away the evidence or logic.
10. The heavily promoted popular concept of “falsifiability,” usually attributed to Karl Popper, does not work in practice. Scientists can usually (not always) find technically plausible, sophisticated “explanations” for supposedly falsifying evidence. A double standard that sets an impossible obstacle for deprecated views.

The Myth of Falsifiability

11. The scientific uncertainty excuse. Scientists often make confident statements claiming or implying no or negligible uncertainty. When the statement proves wrong, they will ridicule critics by claiming science is tentative, an ever evolving process, there is an 80-90% failure rate in science, there is uncertainty they never mentioned and by implication everyone should know that. Once the criticism is beaten back often by this ridicule they revert to more confident statements, sometimes grossly contradicting the previous statement.
12. Modern scientists make heavy use of complex, error-prone, usually computerized mathematical models and advanced statistical methods that are difficult to reproduce or criticize. These methods are prone to finding small signals that rarely exceed the normal variation of the data when small mistakes are made, whether innocently, due to subconscious bias, or intentionally.
13. The error rate of top science students in school, college, university, academic settings is very low, possibly zero percent for some top students (800 on SAT, a few top students at Caltech, MIT etc.). BUT this does not translate to real world R&D where failure rates are clearly much higher. Scientists selectively cite a failure rate of 80-90 percent when confronted about obvious falures (cost and schedule overruns, failed cancer breakthroughs etc.)
14. Prodigies/highly successful scientists (tenured faculty etc.) frequently have unusual family backgrounds such as extremely wealthy, politically connected families or an often prominent academic family. Parents know calculus which is a significant hurdle for most “nerds.” Not like Good Will Hunting or The Big Bang Theory where prodigies are portrayed as working class, poor etc. Purely genetic fluke implied.
15. “Science” (in scare quotes) is promoted by scientists as a religion or substitute for religion, a comprehensive “rational” worldview demanding fealty and paradoxically irrational “rational” obeisance. Extreme examples include the use of the term “God Particle” for the Higgs particle in particle physics, promoted by the late Nobel Laureate Leon Lederman and others. Carl Sagan’s inaccurate account of the destruction of the Library of Alexandria and murder of Hypatia in Cosmos. Often closely tied to militant atheism and materialism despite the strong use of religious and mystical terms and ideas at the same time. Organized skeptics such as CSI/CSICOP, Michael Shermer and others. Dissenting or differing points of view are labeled as anti-science, conspiracy theories, pseudoscience, denialism and other labels.

Carl Sagan, Neil deGrasse Tyson and Hypatia (Debunked):

Cosmos follow-up: Hypatia and the Library of Alexandria

Carl Sagan Was Really Bad at History

Conclusion: I’ve discussed over a dozen major heavily promoted, dangerous misconceptions about “science.” If you find some of these hard to accept, perform your own research. I have numerous articles on the false scientist shortage claims, also known as STEM shortage claims, on my web site. I also have articles on the Manhattan Project as a fluke and the Myth of Falsifiability. I will likely post more supporting information on the other misconceptions in the future. Most importantly, true science requires thinking carefully and critically for yourself and not treating something labeled “science” as a religion or substitute for religion, either consciously or subconsciously.

References:

[Video/Presentation] Eugenics and Modern Statistics

https://mathblog.com/the-manhattan-project-considered-as-a-fluke/https://mathblog.com/the-mathematics-of-the-manhattan-project/

The Myth of Falsifiability

https://wordpress.jmcgowan.com/wp/category/stem-shortage-claims/

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(C) 2021 by John F. McGowan, Ph.D.

About Me

John F. McGowan, Ph.D. solves problems using mathematics and mathematical software, including developing gesture recognition for touch devices, video compression and speech recognition technologies. He has extensive experience developing software in C, C++, MATLAB, Python, Visual Basic and many other programming languages. He has been a Visiting Scholar at HP Labs developing computer vision algorithms and software for mobile devices. He has worked as a contractor at NASA Ames Research Center involved in the research and development of image and video processing algorithms and technology. He has published articles on the origin and evolution of life, the exploration of Mars (anticipating the discovery of methane on Mars), and cheap access to space. He has a Ph.D. in physics from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and a B.S. in physics from the California Institute of Technology (Caltech).