[hijack] To give you all a better grade of gristle to chaw upon, please visit my latest thread at:
http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/newreply.php?action=newreply&threadid=38281
Everyone drop on by, ya hear? [/hijack]
[more hijack] Try this one folks. Shoulda previewed that last one.[/more hijack]
http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?threadid=38281
See you there.
David B,
I don’t believe you don’t have any opinion about these matters and your simply asking me to back mine up. I have tried to back my opinions up, but since there is no clear standard for what constitutes evidence for over or underspecialization, it has been all too convenient too dismiss my arguments as irrelevant. If you tried proving the opposite, you’d see what I mean.
You would’t demand proof for my assumptions unless they somehow contradicted your perception of reality.
Pretending that your hanging out in the ether without believing anything at all is rather silly. An obvious cop-out in my book.
Why nitpick my arguments if you could just prove to me I was wrong? If you really want me to stop “whining” why don’t you just do prove something yourself and show me a good example of how to back up a claim?
I still waiting for you to explain what you were talking about when you said I was saying things that were untrue (talk about making claims!).
MJH,
Your post was too long and careful for me to fully respond right now (I’m in the middle of having a life at the moment). Things might slow down in the next few days and I’ll give a closer look. Off the top of my head, I would have to say that there are a lot of topics that are appopriate for this board that are highly subjective.(x=topic of the hour) Do we have the right to do x? Does the government have a right to do x? Is saying x racist? etc…
Zenster,
I was aware that you were using caps to indicate shouting. Just because I corrected you once doesn’t mean I’m obsessed with it. I was saying that I was sorry that I offended you so much that you felt you had to shout.
Apology accepted m3. Please take the time to review the post by MJH2 and get back to us. I will stay tuned to this thread to see your response.
I would also be interested to see what you think of the parallels between my comparison to religious disputes and your own disputes with science.
m3 (who apparently isn’t leaving) said:
I don’t believe I said that I didn’t have any opinion. I said I hadn’t made the claims – you did.
Of course, I didn’t claim the opposite. You made a claim and then hemmed and hawed about backing it up. Actually, you made several claims and never got around to backing them up. That seems to be your general modus operandi.
Actually, you’re wrong (this is not surprising). I don’t just limit myself to seeking evidence for claims only if they contradict the position I already have.
Good thing nobody’s done that, eh?
You really just don’t get it, do you? You made the claim, you back it up. This is a simple concept. What part are you having trouble understanding?
Look around at other threads. I don’t have time to run a clinic for those who don’t understand simple concepts.
If you’re “still waiting” then that’s just more evidence that you haven’t been paying attention.
We can start back at the cancer stuff. You as much as admitted you were wrong there – some of the things you said were simply untrue (you never actually did come out and admit it, but I didn’t actually expect that much, um, intestinal fortitude [as Zenster called it] from you).
Oh, wait, I forgot, you don’t want to deal with that… Or anything else, for that matter.
I’ll pick up the gauntlet and offload the work from David.
Let’s pretend that you want to write a scholarly article on your hypothesis. You’re going to submit it to a peer-reviewed journal.
First of all, to make the assertion that scientists are ‘too specialized’, you’re going to have to define your terms, show some examples, and then give reasons why you believe so. Let’s say that your reason for saying that is that you believe science does some bad things. You cite the atom bomb, rising cancer rates, dangerous genetic manipulation, etc.
Now, before you can use these, you have to prove them. You can do so two ways - you can reference studies that have done the legwork to establish these facts, or you can do the legwork yourself.
Let’s start with that. You believe that cancer rates have increased this century. How would you go about proving that? Well, you can collect data. But not just any data. You have to collect data that is normalized, and has no second-order interactions. For example, people have been living longer. Some of the main killers in the past have been eradicated. Therefore, more people are going to die of cancer since cancer is highly correlated with age. So you have to take that into account.
So, let’s normalize the incidence of cancer with age. To do that, you’ll have to determine the correlation of cancer rates with age, again by referencing work already done or doing it yourself. That means collecting data, plotting it, running regression analysis (or chi-square, or whatever tool suits the data best). It’s a lot of work.
So now we’ve done that, and we’re ready to collect and interpret our data. Since both axes of our plot are variant, we can use a regression analysis to determine if there is a correlation between subsequent years and an increase in cancer.
Let’s say that we plot our data, draw our best-fit line (regression analysis), and discover that there is a significant correlation. Before the experiment, we set our criterion for certainty to be 2 standard deviations, or a confidence interval of 95%. If our regression shows a correlation within that range, we will say that cancer rates have in fact risen.
There. We’ve completed one tiny step. Or have we? When you submit your article to a peer review, be prepared to answer hard questions about your test. Did you forget some other dependent variables? You’ve shown a correlation, but is there causation? Could a third variable be driving both? What about infant mortality? How does that fit? What about the fact that poor people were harder to communicate with in earlier years, and therefore went under-reported? Is there a correlation between wealth and cancer, and if so, would that not translate into a correlation between years and cancer if people have been wealthier over time and/or the nature of the reporting population changed?
So it goes. You will have to defend this, which means when you write it you want to anticipate these objections so you don’t flunk your peer review and have your article rejected.
Let’s say that we’ve shown a correlation to the satisfaction of all. It turns out that cancer rates have in fact increased this century, even after correcting for age. Now you have to show a causative link between this and ‘specialization’. That’s going to be hard to do, but being a bright scientist perhaps you’ll figure out a way.
Implicit in all this is a basic fundamental axiom: Whenever you have a hypothesis, the burden of proof is on YOU to prove it. Or, as a scientist might put it, the Null hypothesis (there’s nothing to what you are saying) is assumed to be true. This is critical - it’s the only way to expand human knowledge.
Now, as you may see, this is a lot of work. But some of us are used to having to think and work at this level. We have the discipline to be able to back up what we say, or at least be willing to if asked (or recant and say we hadn’t thought it through, or spoke too hastily, or whatever).
It can be very frustrating when you’ve spent the last 8 hours laboriously proving a very simple system, and then have to read someone say, “I think scientists are over-specialized, and I’M RIGHT. But don’t ask me to prove it, or even offer evidence that my assertion is right.” This is just laziness.
This is also why scientists get so frustrated with pseudo-science. Graham Hancock, Erich Von Daniken, and their ilk see no need to actually verify their hypotheses. They simply see something that looks interesting and write about it. When asked for proof, they bluster and claim that scientists are blind to new ideas. Perhaps they’ll mention that Galileo was once considered to be a heretic, to defend themselves and smear real scientists by association. But what they won’t do is give you the hard numbers that can be proven.
This is exactly what you’re doing. You had this cool idea - you think that if scientists were less specialized the world would be a better place. But you haven’t REALLY thought about it. You haven’t thought about what it really means to be specialized. You haven’t considered what scientists would have to give up to expend some energy in non-scientific issues. Are you going to reduce the number of science courses in university in favor of more breadth? If so, what do you give up? Or do you just make potential scientists study longer? What will this do to the numbers of scientists, and will the negative effect of having fewer scientists outweigh the benefits of generalization?
Do you know ANYTHING about any of this? If not, rather than get mad because people demanded proof from you, why don’t you go out and actually study? Think hard about it, and present your ideas here. If you did that, I think you’d find that the tone of the messages you’re seeing would change dramatically. The same people who are hassling you would jump in and sincerely help you find out the truth, if you’re willing to listen to what they have to say even if it contradicts what you want to believe. That’s called being objective, and it’s another important attribute when trying to discover the truth.
Now, this isn’t a peer-reviewed journal, and we’re not going to hold you to these standards. I don’t expect you to show me a regression plot just because you said something I doubt. But you’d better be able to back up your assertion at least in plain english. If you say that scientists are too specialized because cancer rates are going up, you can count on one thing: I’m going to ask you WHY. What’s the causative link? Explain yourself. If you can’t even begin to, I’m going to dismiss what you have to say about this subject until you can.
Superb monograph Sam Stone! My hat goes off to you for an outstanding example of applied scientific thought. You are welcome to comment in any of my threads anytime. What a pleasure it is to see such diligent analysis.
Huzzah!
I echo Zenster’s comments, Sam. Great job!
Not that I expect m3 to pay any attention whatsoever, if history is any guide, but that doesn’t detract from the effort you put into it.
Thanks!
Sam Stone [applause]Nicely done, good effort.[/applause] However, since m3 has not yet plowed through my last post, he may be sometime in digesting yours.
Originally posted by Sam Stone
And the converse is also true: you don’t have to waste your time disproving ideas that have not been adequately supported or proven. I went round and round with a reviewer of a paper I wrote about two years ago on this issue. In my work, I found that an unsupported assertion made in an earlier paper (by someone else) was not, in fact, correct. I pointed out that my work seemed to contradict the earlier assertion which the authors had not supported with any data. The reviewer wanted me to do experiments to disprove the assertion more thoroughly, but I said that I felt no obligation to disprove something which had not been adequately supported to start with. And in the end I won the debate.
It was an important point, too, because the unsupported assertion had restricted the work which came after to one narrow area – until I presented work outside this area and cast doubt on the assertion. This “ripple effect” is a dangerous side-effect of unsupported assertions.
m3Yes, the issue of under/over/just right specialization would be difficult to prove one way or another. I haven’t said that I think science is “under” or “just right”; I said that specialization is what happens of necessity. It is no longer feasible to do as Isaac Newton, and try to learn it All. Some of us become highly specialized, by desire or by necessity; others choose to remain more general – teachers and professors, for example. It’s just what happens. The basic question, “Is science over-specialized?” is rather meaningless because not everyone in science is specialized (or not) to the same degree. Asking the question the way you did suggests that specialization is more or less uniform, and can therefore be examined as a particular “thing”. Actually, specialization as a phenomenon is not about science; it’s about the choices people make for themselves. So a far more interesting question would be the sociological one: “What factors [personal interest, societal need or pressure, intellectual capacity, gender, race, etc.] influence an individual scientist’s choice to specialize or not?”
And yes, perhaps some of the other posts on this board deal with topics on which people may have a wide range of personal opinions. You might well argue that by their very nature, some topics can be discussed only in subjective terms. Still, a debate on slavery, for example, has a wide base of historical fact from which many different opinions can be argued effectively; but not without first considering all of the historical evidence available, and perhaps allowing for the known gaps as well. It is acceptable to present a personal opinion (theory) so long as you examine data across the board, not just pull out the facts which support you and ignore those which don’t.
And, I might add, since you began this thread with the intention of debating scientific method and philosophy, you ought to stick to its basic standards. Since you haven’t, this is what’s called “situational irony” and there was a thread about that recently, too.
[Side note to David B: Obviously my account is still having problems. Somehow my username and password were re-formatted. I emailed tech support about this but I thought I’d draw your attention to it as well, in case it’s still affecting more than just me. Thanks]
That ‘Ripple Effect’ is very important, and it’s what I alluded to when I say that the presenter of a new hypothesis carries the burden of guilt is the key to building human knowledge.
Let’s look at an analogy from engineering - the pace of human invention is not linear. We build amazingly complex things today. How? By standing on the shoulders of giants.
If I have an idea for an innovative new computer, I don’t have to learn how to make a transistor, how to make an integrated circuit, etc. I can accept this stuff as prior, proven art. This frees me to move the design to the next stage of evolution. In essence, prior knowledge is a black box that can be used as a tool to create new knowledge.
But the only way this can happen is if that prior knowledge is rigorously proven. If someone makes an Integrated circuit based on faulty methods and use it with the expectation that it will perform as advertised, then my new system may break down in unexpected ways that I cannot comprehend. It’s critically important that I be able to trust the datasheet from the component I buy.
And so it is in science. If I want to work on a new theory of information, I may draw on tools like Chebychev polynomials, Shannon’s laws, Gaussian Distributions, etc. It is critically important that I be able to trust that these tools work as advertised. That way, if I get results that don’t agree with my hypothesis, I can assume that my model is incorrect, rather than that perhaps a Gaussian Distribution isn’t really what it claims to be.
The reason mankind didn’t progress very quickly without the scientific method was because we had no way to logically build on prior knowledge. An important person would claim that disease is caused by newts living in the stomach, and this would be accepted as truth. But this information was useless to anyone who tried to invent a diagnostic method, or a prediction technique, or whatever. And THAT person wouldn’t know how to prove his technique, so it would be accepted. Now we have an incredibly shaky foundation. Years are wasted as people try new and innovative ways to apply this information, and finally the whole rickety structure would come crashing down, and we’d be back at square one.
This is the danger of pseudo-science, and of accepting new hypotheses that have not been proven. What are we saying when we say that we accept a hypothesis? We’re saying that we will USE that information. We will attempt to build on that foundation. Eventually, we will pay dearly for that decision.
“Burden of Guilt”???
That should be, “The presenter of a new hypothesis carries the burden of PROOF”.
Guilt is sometimes a good emotion too. (-:
No nit picking here Sam Stone, I just wanted to assure that your example is clear to any who reads it. I wholeheartedly agree that we routinely build upon the shoulders of giants. Working with known good theories, data and products allows us to achieve greater accomplishments without reinventing the wheel every time we wish to advance science. As to whether this leads to any degree of overspecialization is up to m3 to establish.
This is a critical aspect of the scientific method. It is that others have had to rigorously test their own theories prior to submission into the academic and industrial mainstream. If we routinely expected some one else to verify or prove our own work (any of this getting through to you m3?) we would be hostage to the ability of outsiders. They might or might not validate our efforts with whatever questionable methods they elected to use. This is why self examination is so vital to the postulation and proof of new theories.
What fun to have this dicussion on even firmer footing for a change.
Oh, I don’t know. “Burden of Guilt” has a much more serious ring to it, and the suggestion of dire consequences for failure.
m3 This is exactly what Francis Bacon advocated in The Great Instauration: let’s scrap everything that we think we know, start over by establishing the most basic things with a “scientific method”, and gradually build up to more complex understandings. He spoke of this in terms of building a house/edifice, which interestingly enough applies to your question about “specialization”.
As the structure of “science” grows, eventually it becomes impossible (or extremely difficult) for any one person to know about every single brick in the building – but that doesn’t mean that each person knows only about one brick and nothing else. Some scientists may be working on the wall in this room, some on the window in another. They know the wall, the window; they are rather familiar with the surrounding room and its contents; and familiar enough with the hallways that they know how to get to their respective rooms. Other scientists might be envisioned as plumbers, electricians: they work on the systems which tie everything together. They have to be very familiar with the overall structure and will know how to find many more rooms than the first group of scientists – but their work is spread out, their efforts less focussed on any one thing because their skills are needed everywhere. Which of these people is more, or less, specialized than the other? Which is a “better” scientist? I’m certainly not qualified to answer that, I only work over here in this wing of the building. Can you answer it? Where in the building do you work?
Keep in mind that Francis Bacon did not advocate specialization per se not did he, to my recollection, say anything about it. It was just a natural consequence of the scientific method which he proposed. The days of the Renaissance man (as scientist) are over; now we call people who know only a little bit about a lot of things “dilettantes”.
And some of us work on the same wall at the same time but from different rooms - it’s called collaboration and it is necessary because to answer some problems, you need that scope of knowledge applied at the same time. I and a colleague want to tell resident and migratory Canada Geese apart. Another colleague has access to these geese and understands their behavior and movements far better than the two of us. Now we know we can tell them apart somewhat by morphology, but not enough to satisfy the regulations set forth by the Migratory Bird Treat Act. We also know that there is a “new” (well, we hadn’t used it before) technique called stable isotope analysis that is quite good at distinguishing populations from each other based on the differential incorporations of said isotopes from their diet. We find a fourth person, one who has an isotope analyzin’ machine and who finds our questions interesting. We are now into our 3rd year of collaboration and while the original question is being answered (more fully than we had anticipated), a whole new set of questions we hadn’t even considered are presenting themselves to us like candy to a dieter.
Each of us brings a set of knowledge to the question at hand. We combine our knowledge in a way that may appear to be more specialized than answering the question before, but it really isn’t. The question is still “How do migrant populations of Canada Goose differ from resident populations?” When, as a grad student, I asked how much genetic variability there were in a population of Black-billed Magpies, I ansered that question using starch gel electrophoresis. I’m sure someone can answer that using a newer hotter technology and they may have the added bonus of seeing additional possibilities. Are they more specialized? Perhaps it’s just in my area of study, but I don’t think they are.
Nice simile.
I don’t think it’s just you. This was my point a little way back: everyone might be “specialized” in a different way but not necessarily to a different degree, which was what the OP was contending. So then how exactly would we measure specialization across the board?
Hey, m3 has been gone for a while. Busy having that life of his, I guess. Or do we take this last absence as Nolo contendere?
Maybe he finally looked up “goodbye” in a dictionary…