My original observation taken from the other thread was made because of the uncanny similarities of posters like abashed and MantraPhilter and the infinite number who insist that 0.999~ does not equal 1. They want words, which they think they can deal with, to prevail over the math they can’t handle. They therefore latch on to others on the Internet who bestow that gift upon them.
This is a particular subset of the much larger tendency to reflexively reject the pronouncements of actual mainstream experts. The larger group also accuses the mainstream of having a belief system that keeps out their brilliant, fresh, new thinkers, true. This is common across all conspiracy mongers. Look up the threads about whether Shakespeare wrote Shakespeare, e.g. A common accusation in those is that the academic community somehow conspires to keep out those with contrary judgements because… Well, because Big English, I guess. The notion that a true maverick who actually proved the mainstream wrong would be acclaimed as the greatest genius of the day is utterly rejected. That can’t be true because it diminishes all their favorite mavericks who are scorned as cranks and crackpots.
Despite all the commonalities, I’m not yet sure that the math cranks aren’t a separate species. They go back a long way. They may be the first body of cranks to be recognized by the scientific community as a counter-community of their own, even preceding the Shakespeare cranks. Look up the history of the circle-squarers and angle-trisectors and pi is rational crowd. Whole books have been written on them based on the illiteracies they sent to math professors, in the proverbial green crayon on butcher’s paper tomes. Math is hard and requires years of study, to be sure. But many of these cranks devote so many hours to their hieroglyphics that they could pick up a good math education in that time. They simply don’t want to. That would give others authority over their heads, an intolerable situation.
I don’t think anything can be done to change minds like these. Refute them, dismiss them, ridicule them, patiently explain the truth, each works equally badly. Another trait we see frequently here is seeming to accept correction and then returning to their exact first crackpot post the very next time they show up, like they leave to hit a reset button. Yeah, you see that in political and religious posters as well. Maybe there really aren’t any differences. They all make my head hurt.
Oh, yeah. They all hate being told that their crankness is exactly the same as all the other cranks’ crankness and that their style of argument is so cliched that the ending can be predicted from the first post they go off the rails. People here, especially the ones that spend so much time repeating the same ignored refutations, might want to watch out for these tells and cut their losses earlier than they do.
I wish I knew what motivated these cranks. The Mantraphilter thread was interesting because he finally made (reluctantly and after six or so pages) a definite prediction from his half-assed and incoherent ideas: Protons are more massive than neutrons (because they’re actually neutrons that receive electric charge from compressed photon waves, but one step at a time). But when it was pointed out that experiment in fact shows the opposite, he predictably started rambling about how he’s actually right but the scientific orthodoxy just switched around the names of protons and neutrons, how math can prove anything that’s even remotely true, how relativity means that all experiments are wrong, or etc. The moral is, these are not rational people, and there’s literally nothing that will cause them to reconsider their sneer-quoted ‘theories’. For example, from the original thread:
I’m going to intervene here in John’s defense as he is absolutely right. Perhaps the most egregious thing you said, and that he quite correctly contradicted, was your statement that “Scientists tend to be overconfident of whatever theory is prevailing any particular time. This is something which has been true of scientists in previous generations and is true of scientists today.”
This is nonsense that reflects a fundamental misunderstanding of science. It’s the opposite of how science works, and if it were true it would be hard to make any progress. Science is inherently skeptical and accepts theories only on the basis of extensive and persuasive evidence, and by the same token, accepts changes and new theories if, but only if, they are supported by a commensurately persuasive body of evidence. Since science is conducted by human beings with human foibles and failings, you’re always going to get occasional zealots dedicated to defending their own views at any cost, but that’s not how science as a discipline works, and if it did it would fail as the marvelous tool for discovery that it is and it wouldn’t make the astonishingly rapid progress that it does.
Which incidentally, on the subject of this thread, is exactly why individuals engaged in armchair speculation with no knowledge of facts and evidence are wasting their time and everybody else’s. Unfortunately, due to the Dunning-Kruger effect, they’re blissfully unaware of this.
That Planck said this doesn’t make it true. He was very wrong in this belief, and his own discoveries are plentiful proof of that – he himself introduced the quantum theory of blackbody radiation which was widely hailed, earned him the Nobel Prize, and led to new theories of quantum physics that revolutionized science in the 20s. In order to do this, however, Planck had to reject his own long-held absolutist view of the second law of thermodynamics and instead acknowledge Boltzmann’s statistical interpretation.
It’s not clear why he would make a statement that so flies against the facts of the rapid advancement of science. He was perhaps jaded by the stresses of a very tragic and unhappy life in his later years, and he personally rejected many of the tenets of quantum theory that were being advanced by his contemporaries in the 20s despite the fact that he himself had helped establish the basics some decades earlier.
One of the more conservative areas of science, in my experience, is the study of hunan evolution. But just look at the revolution we are seeing in that field since Svante Pääbo first found Neanderthal DNA in modern humans (i.e., “us”).
For good science to happen, there needs to be some tension between accepting new ideas and maintaining the established ones. We can’t re-write the books every time someone comes up with a new hypothesis, so we do demand that something be tested and retested and put up for debate before it’s accepted as the new theory. But it’s been my experience that most scientists are trying their best to break new grounds, not cement in the orthodoxy.
As you might say, that you said this doesn’t make it true.
Over the course of thousands of years, an enormous amount of what scientists have believed has turned out to be incorrect. But at any point scientists have been quite confident that the consensus of science is correct. There’s no reason to just assume that human nature is different now.
What does make sense is to assume that science has advanced over time, so that scientists are closer to the true understanding than in prior generations. But if you’re considering the tendency towards overconfidence, there’s no logic to assuming that that’s any different. Just faith.
It’s also possible that he happened to observe that this is in fact the case.
It’s not like this is some obscure quote either - it’s pretty well known, which bespeaks a resonance with many other people.
A non-expert knows something about the subject; at the very least, he knows that he isn’t an expert.
The problem is people who don’t know or understand the first thing about the subject but who do not have the self-awareness and humility to accept that they don’t know anything about it. We all make mistakes, but those of us whose pride isn’t linked to never accepting we’re wrong can accept that we are (on the rare occasions in which it happens ;)).
I had a dude in one of my projects who had been hired as “a SAP expert” despite not knowing anything about SAP. In fact, despite the people doing the hiring knowing that he didn’t know anything about SAP (he’d been hired as a personal favor). Before the first meeting he went to SAP’s help webpage and tried to read up on the subject: a subject that’s complicated, a webpage that’s specifically designed to obscure information, and in a language he didn’t speak. And then he blocked up half the meeting angrily yelling that we could not use “activities”, it had to be “aktivitaten!!!” (meeting in English, SAP used in English, he’d been reading the help in German). Because the one thing he was not ever going to do is admit that he didn’t know his SAP from his ABCs.
The Dunning Kruger effect is sweet. I try to constantly remind myself to not get caught up in it.
The other day I was talking to someone and I realized they were arguing their point solely because of the Dunning Kruger effect. I explained to them (as gently as possible) what was happening, but they were unable to understand/comprehend the Dunning Kruger effect, even as I pulled up the Wikipedia page and read sections to them.
I changed the subject. “Hey, how about them Steelers, huh!”
Scientists ourselves are at least partly to blame. A lot of scientists seem to take the attitude that they have to tell the public something, and that if the truth is too complicated for the public to understand, then the next best thing is an untruth that’s easier to understand. And so we get things like the molasses analogy for the Higgs field, which throws science all the way back to the Aristotelian concept of mass as impeding motion. That’s not at all how the Higgs field works, and it explains exactly nothing about the real behavior of the Higgs field, and serves as a useful analogy for exactly nothing about it, too. But people can understand it, and so science popularizers who ought to know better keep repeating it, without caring how untrue it is.
That’s a great example. Not only is the mechanism in that analogy wrong (and actually wrong, not just in the oversimplified, lies-to-children sense), but it doesn’t explain what why the Higgs was conjectured or what problem is was proposed to solve. It was quite a significant discovery and vindicated an extraordinary theory, but it’s really not possible to explain that significance to laymen, and clumsy and inaccurate analogies like the one you describe don’t help in the slightest.
Only thing I can add, is the meme of “What the bleep do scientists know?” i.e. that science is frequently wrong, and constantly gets rewritten.
This is a popular idea, and scientists themselves sometimes, sadly, agree that this is how science works. So Bob Ordinary thinks “We only *think *we understand <blah>, we’re probably wrong”
When you look at the details though, it’s extremely rare that a theory that regularly makes accurate predictions one day gets completely jettisoned.
Most of the examples people can think of were either never formal science (e.g. geocentrism) or actually are still useful theories, just within a more limited domain and/or make less accurate predictions that a more refined or complex theory (e.g. Newton’s laws of motion).
OTOH it’s also extremely rare that a theory that regularly makes accurate predictions becomes controversial and subject to attack by non-experts. Generally the fields which feature these are those which either don’t make regularly make accurate predictions, either because they make few predictions to begin with or because their predictions tend to be inaccurate (climate change comes to mind).
No one is assuming that human nature is different. What’s different is the existence of the scientific method, and the accumulated body of knowledge on which it now operates.
Again, I think you’re fundamentally misunderstanding what science is. I’m saying that science is evidence-based, period. That’s not controversial. It is a discipline that assesses evidence based on a rigorous methodology to arrive at truths and understanding. It is nonsense to say that “Over the course of thousands of years, an enormous amount of what scientists have believed has turned out to be incorrect” since thousands of years ago there was no science and no scientists as we currently use the term. There were just some smart people speculating about things, who were sometimes right but more often wrong, because they didn’t actually know anything and had no systematic methodology for discovering things. Science did not yet exist. Like some of our posters here who like to speculate about QM, what they had was philosophy, and a lot of spare time.
Whether modern science is wrong a lot as you claim turns into the question of whether the scientific method works. This has to be assessed on the basis of its success. Do we or do we not live in a technologically advanced world that has been enabled by science? Do we or do we not have amazing insights into the nature of the universe whose predictive powers have been experimentally verified countless times in countless different ways?
Those who think that scientists are “overconfident” in the correctness of some particular theory are usually folks who have no knowledge at all of the evidence that supports it, or of how science actually works to challenge, modify, and advance existing knowledge, or, as in the infamous “it’s only a theory” mantra, don’t even know what the word “theory” means in science. How many times have we heard that evolution is “only a theory”; anthropogenic climate change is “only a theory”? And then their inevitable zinger is, “and science has often been wrong”. Such discussions with armchair pundits with zero knowledge of the subject matter are a frustrating waste of time. It’s kind of why this thread was started.
It bespeaks a resonance with people who don’t understand science.
Which specific scientific theory involved in climate science fails to make predictions or makes inaccurate ones? Radiative transfer theory? That seems pretty damn solid. No reasonable person disputes the quantifiable net climate forcings of greenhouse gases. The Clausius-Clapeyron relation? No one disputes that rising temperatures produce feedback effects from increased water vapor. What actual scientific theories here are non-predictive or inaccurate?
This is itself a fundamental misunderstanding. Something being “evidence-based” means very little. Almost anyone who has any theory about anything thinks it’s “evidence-based”, and this will generally be true, to one extent or another. Sometimes you have more evidence and sometimes you have less, but pretty much everyone is dealing with some sort of evidence and using that to support some theory or other.
The nature of evidence is that it can be inconclusive. Evidence is something that changes the odds of something being true, in one form or another, but unless your evidence is a message from God saying “YES MY SON YOUR THEORY IS TRUE” there’s going to be some form of leap of logic in extrapolating from evidence to proof.
So just waving the term “evidence-based” as if it’s some sort of magic incantation that wins arguments, and that anyone who can claim to be using “evidence-based” science can be assumed to be completely rational and objective in his extrapolations from that data, as compared to those others who for whatever reason chose to not use the superior “evidence-based” approach, is a mistake. That’s not how it works.
In sum, in this context “evidence” is observations which - to one extent or another - have a bearing on the likelihood of one theory or another being true or false. But the extent to which this changes the likelihood is a subjective assessment, which is why you can frequently have disagreements among intelligent and educated people who view the same evidence. And the question here is whether theories whose evidence should support them with a likelihood of (let’s say) 60% will come to be accepted as theories whose likelihood is 95% (or whatever). And what I’ve pointed out is that based on history it would appear that there’s some natural tendency of scientists to be overconfident in the extent to which the evidence proves the prevailing consensus theory.
ISTM that you’re being careful in specifying and highlighting the words “scientific theory”. And probably for good reason.
Frankly, I have no idea about any of this, and FTR it’s not my intention here to challenge any theory or the notion that man-made global warming is real. But I have observed that while I have no reason to think the underlying science is wrong (or even whether anyone disputes any specific theories), it does appear that climate scientists have had a very difficult time constructing a climate change model which “regularly makes accurate predictions” in this area. I imagine the reason is not because of any flaw in any scientific theories, but rather because scientists constructing these models have underestimated the complexity of climate change dynamics and thus overestimated their own ability to model it. Something along those lines. But the bottom line is that those who do challenge scientific consensus on climate change - however wrong they may be - are strengthened by the fact that in this area they are not challenging a scientific consensus which has regularly made accurate predictions.
Right on. My late colleague had a form letter when he got a Fermat solver’s letter that said his fee for reading such a manuscript was $1000 and he guaranteed to read it till he found the first error. Of course, they never bit. I suppose they are now silenced. Same for 4 colorists. But there are still angle trisectors out there. And unlike science, mathematical truths are truths, not theories subject to possible refutation (unless it were to turn out that the axioms of mathematics were inconsistent).
Not so, after years of looking at that issue it is clear that the troubled predictions are mostly dealing with extreme weather events, climate change has been very accurately predicted by most scientists and even the few scientists that got it wrong in the 70’s did so by overestimating the increase of particulates in the atmosphere (dark smog and other compounds that caused sun dimming)
I have to point out here that that 70’s “scientists predicted that global cooling was coming” is one myth that many sources of information do not correct and continue to mislead many like you.
What is clear is (as Republican scientist Richard Alley told us) while we do have trouble to predict some results of climate change, like hurricanes or tornadoes, we already do know enough about other items like increase in global temperature, Ocean rise, Ocean acidification, intensification of droughts and an increase of the time when weather events take place were observed and confirmed. Following closely what most of the scientists told us that was going to take place.
[QUOTE]
It's true that Earth's a massive jigsaw puzzle, with lots of pieces intricately fitting together. But, Richard Alley argues, we already know enough to see the Big Picture. The missing pieces of scientific understanding - exactly how clouds work, how extreme weather will change with global warming - are important, but we can already see how Earth works.
[/QUOTE]
Why don’t you wait until I make some reference to supposed global cooling predictions before announcing that I’ve been misled by them?
Just trotting out stock refutations to things that have never been said, like some wind-up doll which can utter a few pre-set phrases whenever you pull the string, is not productive.
