Tag Archives: Bad science

What exactly is ‘science’?

Education, Environment, Evolution, History, In the media, Mathematics, Philosophy, Physics, Relativity, Science, Science communication, Skepticism, Things Explained, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

I used to think science was the practice of the scientific method; i.e. you propose a hypothesis, you develop a test of the hypothesis, execute it and prove the hypothesis.

That worked for me until the end of high school.

At university, I was a true nerd. I read all my textbooks cover to cover (mainly because as I was too shy for girls and too poor for booze). During this time, the definition above started to fail. So much of the science was maths, statistics, observation, pattern recognition, logic and quite a bit of rote learning. Not all of it fitted into my definition of science. I became a fan of a new definition: science is the study of the nature of reality .

But then I did post-grad, and I realised that not much in science is ‘proven’ (I guess this is the point of post grad study). Evolution, for example, is not proven. That the sun revolves around the earth is not ‘proven’. I discovered that the only things that could be proven were ‘ideas’ about ‘other ideas’. Bear with me on this one.

Let us say we define the number system – this is an ‘idea’ or conceptual construction. Within this construction we can ‘prove’ that one and one is two. Because we ‘made’ the system, with rules, then we can make factual and true statements about it. We can’t do this about the real world – we cannot say anything with absolute certainly because we rely on flaky inputs like our own highly fallible perception.

It’s like that old chestnut: how can you be sure you are not living in a giant simulation? Of course you can argue that it is pretty unlikely and I would agree, and right there we have a clue to a better definition of science.

It turns out that much of modern science deals in ‘likelihood’ and ‘probability’ rather than proof and certainty. For example, we can say that the theory of evolution is very likely to be more-or-less right, as there is a lot of corroborating evidence. Science cannot be run like a law court – where the prosecution only need to reach a threshold of reasonable doubt to ‘prove’ someone guilty.

Aside for nerds: Science says you can use logic to prove things absolutely, but logic only works with ideas, and there is a breakdown between ideas and reality, so one can never prove things in reality. So it is thoroughly wrong for a court to say that someone has been proven guilty. The courts use this language as a convenience, to “draw a line under” a case as they have not found a moral way to dole out punishments based on probabilities. Imagine a world in which a murder suspect gets a 5 year sentence because the was a 20% chance he was guilty! Sports referees often operate in this decisive way, perhaps because it saves a lot of arguing!

Anyway, good science cannot just give up and say once there is consensus something passes from theory to fact. This is sloppy. We have to keep our options open – forever.

Think for example of Newton’s Laws of Motion. They are called ‘Laws’ because the scientific community had so much faith in them they passed from theory (or a proposed model) to accepted fact. But they were then found wrong. Strange that we persist in calling them laws!

It took Einstein’s courage (and open mindedness) to try out theories that dispensed with a key plank of the laws – that time was utterly inflexible and completely constant and reliable.

So it is that the canon of scientific knowledge has become a complex web of evidence and theories that attempt to ‘best fit’ the evidence.

Alas, there are still many propositions that many so-called scientists would claim are fact or at least ‘above reproach’. Evolution is attacked (rather pathetically), but the defenders would do well to take care before they call it ‘fact’. It is not fact, it is a superbly good explanation for the evidence, which has yet to fail a test of its predictions. So it is very very likely to be right, but it cannot be said to be fact.

This is not just a point of pedantry (though I am a bit of a pedant) – it is critical to keep this in mind as it is the key to improving our model.

Two great examples of models people forget are still in flux…

1) The big bang theory

2) Quantum theory

I will not go into global warming here though it is tempting. That is one where it doesn’t even matter if it is fact, because game theory tells you that either way, we better stop making CO2 urgently.

Back to the big bang.

I heard on the Skeptic’s Guide podcast today about an NSF questionnaire that quizzed people about whether they believed the universe was started with a massive explosion, and they tried to paint the picture that if you didn’t believe that, then you were ignorant of science. This annoyed me, because the big bang theory is now too often spoken of as if it were fact. Yes, the theory contributes viable explanations for red-shifted pulsars, background radiation, etc, etc, but people are quick to forget that it is an extrapolation relying on a fairly tall pile of suppositions.

I am not saying it is wrong, all I am saying is that it would be crazy to stop exploring other possibilities at this point.

You get a feeling for the sort of doubts you should have from the following thought experiment:

Imagine you are a photon born in the big bang. You have no mass, so you cannot help but travel at ‘light speed’. But being an obedient photon, you obey the contractions in the Lorentz equations to the letter, and time thus cannot pass for you. However, you are minding your own business one day when suddenly you zoom down toward planet earth and head straight into a big radiotelescope. Scientists analyse you and declare that you are background radiation dating from the big bang and that you have been travelling for over 13 billion years (they know this because they can backtrack the expansion of the universe). Only trouble is, that for you, no time has passed, so for you, the universe is still new. Who is right? What about a particle that was travelling at 0.999 x the speed of light since the big bang? For it, the universe is some other intermediate age. So how old is the universe, really?

This reminds us of the fundamental proposition of relatively – time is like a gooey compressible stretchable mess, and so is space, so the distance across the universe may be 13.5 billion light years, or it might be a micron (how it felt to the photon). It all depends on your perspective. It is much like the statement that the sun does not revolve around the earth and that it is the other way around. No! The sun does revolve a round the earth. You can see it clearly does. From our perspective at least.

Now, quantum theory.

Where do I start? String theory? Entanglement? Please.

The study of forces, particles, EM radiation and the like is the most exciting part of science. But being so complex, so mysterious, so weird and counter intuitive, it is super vulnerable to abuse.

Most people have no idea how to judge the merits of quantum theories. Physicists are so deep in there, they have little time (or desire or capability) to explain themselves. They also love the mystique.

I do not want to ingratiate myself with physicists, so I will add that the vast majority have complete integrity. They do want to understand and then share. However, I have been working in the field for long enough to know that there are weaknesses, holes and downright contradictions in the modern theory that are often underplayed. In fact these weaknesses are what make the field so attractive to people like me, but is also a dirty little secret.

The fact is that the three forces (weak nuclear, strong nuclear and magnetic) have not been explained anything like as well as gravity has (by relativity). And don’t get me started on quantum gravity.

———————-

Anyway, thinking about all these issues, I concluded that science was (definition #3) the grand (platonic) model we are building of reality, ever evolving to best fit our observations.

My man, Plato

That works well for me. However, I recently came across a totally different definition for science:

# 4) “Science is a tool to help make the subjective objective.”

OK I paraphrased it to make it more snappy. It was really a discussion about how science was developed to overcome the fallibility of the human mind. Examples of weaknesses it needs to overcome are:

  1. The way our perception is filtered by preconceptions
  2. How we see pattern where there is none
  3. How we select evidence to match our opinion (confirmation bias)
  4. How we  read too much into anecdotal evidence
  5. etc etc.

I could go on. So ‘science’ is the collection of tricks we use to overcome our weaknesses.

I like this definition. We are all going about, and in our heads we are building our model of the world… and its time for an audit!

Family Tree Nonsense

Evolution, History, Mathematics, Science, Science communication, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

For many, learning about their family tree can be a real joy and pleasure.

Realising that a long distant grandfather was in the guild of barber-surgeons, or that you have a criminal or judge or, heaven forfend, someone famous in your lineage, can be a real thrill, and provide you with significant ego-boost, or perhaps a nice feeling of belonging.

The reason why it’s so often a positive experience, is due to an interesting mathematical oversight.

What do I mean?

This fractal can teach us something about ancestry: we have more ancestors than we tend to suppose...(image credit: Northwest Liberty School http://nwls.us/)

This fractal can teach us something about ancestry: we have more ancestors than we tend to suppose...(image credit: Northwest Liberty School http://nwls.us/)

I mean that people can read anything they want from a family tree, and this is made easy by the exponential nature of ancestry.

Would you find it remarkable for someone to say they were directly descended from Isaac Newton, Henry VIII or even Jesus? Would you think more of them?

What about people who say they are ‘from’ somewhere? – “my family originally come from Brittany…”, or “my family fought in the  revolutionary war…”

Analysis…

Now anyone who knows about the maths of ancestry, knows that there is actually very little remarkable about relations with famous people, especially from a long time back. If you have two parents and four grandparents, eight great-grand parents and so on, you can guess the numbers get big quite quickly.

The American revolutionary war was around 230 years ago, so perhaps eight or nine generations[1].  Nine generations back we had perhaps 2^9 (or 512) ancestors, and their folks were probably still around you can add them to the mix (another 1024)  giving over 1500 relatives, all swanning about somewhere in the world around the time of the war.

OK, you might want to reduce the number a bit due to some folks appearing  multiple times in your tree; (yes, in-breeding happens to all of us), but the number is probably still well in excess of  a thousand.

So, with over a thousand ancestors around at the time, the chance of having at least one involved in the war is pretty darn good (especially if you are were born to US citizens). I would argue that for anyone who can trace back three generations (to your eight great-grandparents) in the US, it would be far more remarkable if they didn’t have ancestors that fought in the war.

As you get further back in time, the numbers get more serious. A thousand years back , or forty generations, the straight maths gives 1 099 511 627 776 ancestors. Of course, this is impossible, as there were not enough people in the gene pool; the real number is clearly much lower and this is due to our old friend, in-breeding – where the family tree morphs into more of a family ‘web’ and involves the majority of the (breeding) population of your “gene pool”, the group that share enough in-breeding to behave somewhat like a super-organism. Where cross flow of genes between parts of the pool becomes retarded, (most usually by geographic barriers) the pool may divide and racial difference may develop.

Of course, we live in a time of great ‘connectivity’, and the US is a great example or a melting pot, with a very ‘open’ gene pool. This means that statistically, the chance that all 1000+ of one’s ancestors were around in the revolutionary war is hopelessly optimistic (unless there were special circumstances, like a closed community with a high degree of in-breeding, as may be the case with some religious groups).

So basically, anyone who says their family is all-American, “since the revolution” is being highly selective in their analysis.

Of course, western society does tend to invest much importance in the male line – which is far more specific – and would only give a couple of  chaps alive in ~1780, and if you can indeed prove this then the claim may be considered more interesting.

However, the argument that the male line is more important in some way (such as in the forming of character, or of any particular heritable trait) is pretty unconvincing. So even if you can trace a direct male line to Isaac Newton, this is no guarantee that you will pass your physics tests! Any advantages he had, will have been diluted by the 16,000 or so other folks who contributed just as many genes.

The male and  female lines can actually be traced (using mitochondrial DNA for the female line and Y-chromosomal DNA for the male line), but though this makes it easier to trace these ancestors,  it is perhaps still unwise to assume this line is more important than the thousands of other ancestors.

In the case of the USA, there is another factor, the large family sizes, and the resulting high population growth rate. The population present during the revolution have, by all accounts, been very fruitful. That means that even if you could trace your male line right back to, say, Thomas Jefferson, the chances are, you are not unique.

The Opinion Bit…

Hard-earned privilege...
Hard-earned privilege…

I am constantly annoyed by selective analysis of ancestry. I hope that the above simple illustrations alert the reader to this trickery, or at least confirm the reader’s suspicions (or convictions) that much of this is wishful thinking. What is most important to our own ‘value’ in the world is surely what we ourselves decide to do, not what our remote ancestors may have done.

However, I cannot deny that family research is still hugely interesting, even if what it really confirms is that we are all brothers and sisters, and none of us is superior due to our ancestry.

Don’t even get me started on so-called “royalty”!

[1] How long is a generation? http://www.ancestry.com/learn/library/article.aspx?article=11152

Unproven medicine : an alternative name for alternative medicine

In the media, Medicine, Science, Science communication, Skepticism, The scientific method, , , , , , , , , , , , ,

“Alternative and complimentary therapies”. They sound so nice. So warm and fuzzy. Surely they augment the cold clinical scientific approach to regular medicine, and have a more holistic approach catering to the soul and spirit as well as the flesh?

I argue not. Hear out my logic…

Any treatment that has proven to provide reliable benefit, is automatically added to the canon of ‘western’ medicine. Therefore the only treatments left available for ‘alternative’ to claim, are those that are unproven, or worse, treatments known to be actively harmful.

Promoters of alternative medicine will argue that western medicine is still woefully weak, and not tuned into holistic and spiritual matters and that such things defy proof. This is clearly claptrap. If you do a well designed double-blind, placebo-controlled test of an ‘alternative therapy’ and the outcomes are no better than for the placebo, then the participants who got the treatment are no better off, spirit or no spirit.

I personally prefer the sort of benefits that can be detected!

How did this situation come to pass, where unproven medications have such a grip?

I think there are three main ingredients:

  1. People make money from other people’s fear (in both western and alternative medicine) and that causes folks on both sides to hide or twist the facts – and also erodes the public’s trust.
  2. The fact that complimentary medicines do actually offer benefits – the well-known benefit of care and attention and also the benefit of the placebo effect – muddies the waters.
  3. It is however the human weakness of putting far too much value on anecdotal evidence that assures the future of unproven medicine.

I think that people who understand this do a disservice to our communities by giving this bad medicine the label ‘alternative’ or ‘complimentary’, so I would like to propose the term ‘unproven medicine’. I would however welcome some more lyrical suggestions!

Marvellous… homeopathy

Skepticism, The scientific method, , ,

Homeopaths are definitely on to something.

If you visit one, you will find a caring & honest person. They will look at your problem holistically, and explain how western medicine has been corrupted by money & big pharma, and has been blinkered so successfully it cannot see the big picture. They may explain perhaps that “just like the universe, the body acts as a living open self-organizing system susceptible to entropy yes, but also chaos and new order,” (I quote the tenacious Marty from a homeopathy blog). So hence modern science, which is really about pigeon-holing everything, is not really up to the job of working with the real system.

Now, there are many critics. What exactly is their issue? What on earth do they have against this clearly beneficent endeavour?

Anti-homeopathy rants are two-a-penny on the blogs, and they are very interesting to analyse. They argue that science cannot quantify/comprehend/explain the effect of homeopathy, and therefore, clearly, homeopathy is all poppycock. Fine, no point in engaging with them, they are ‘stuck in their own paradigm’.

But much more interesting is the question: what motivates of these nay-sayers?

Well, the blogosphere has its theories. One that crops up often is the suggestion that significant opponents must be aiming to hold back the good news from the public so they stay trapped in the western way, taking expensive drugs that never clear up their problems completely and therefore leave them financially trapped, but ignorantly grateful. Good for the capitalist systems that run our world, no?

Does this add up? Could all those who denigrate homeopathy really have something to gain from its demise? Another suggestion is that these folks have invested too much in the western system of understanding the universe, which has gone down a blind alley, and they are desperately holding on…

What a lot of bollocks.

The reason people keep popping up who despair at homeopathy is because a certain fraction of the population just happen to grow up with the ability (and desire) to only ever believe things that they fully understand.

Some of those people go on to study science, and they go on to see the marvellous wonder of nature, all the more wondrous because it make sense. It adds up. It is logical.

Science can predict solar eclipses, it can make your satnav work, it can even allow you to talk to someone in New Zealand (they are nice folks, after all).

Even the stuff that sounds like hocus pocus – such as Quantum tunnelling, Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle, quarks, photonic crystals or wave/particle duality – is quite understandable. Yes it may take years of nerdy concentration, but these theories, while complex, are consummately understandable.

Energy is an interesting example. It’s hard to pin down, even scientists can’t give a good account for what it is. A few hundred years back there were plenty of theories, but the application of logic has sorted the wheat from the chaff, and now, although science struggles to define it, they know where it is, how to measure it, how it flows, and even how to use it. But people confuse these proper energy flows (electricity, nerves) with things like acupuncture meridians and leylines and the like. People who think for themselves can quickly spot when things like energy are being used logically, and when it is being used nonsensically.

Now these people, these thinkers, will, if unlucky enough, come across homeopathy. Attractive at first: lots of proponents, lots of jargon, and above all hugely promising. At first things go well. Any really smart student of a new subject will experience the frisson of the unknown, the new, and with good intention will go with the flow, like a foreigner trying to a pick up a new language.

However, as time passes, while usually, with other subjects like language, or quantum physics, it all slowly starts moving into place, homeopathy simply stays at arm’s length. It still ‘sounds’ good, as do other ‘sensible’ subjects, but it never reduces to complete sense – the complete sense where every cause is linked to every effect via an unbroken chain of explainable steps.

So these people, these thinkers-for-themselves, these take-nobody’s-word-for-nothing types, eventually realise it is all a sham.

But sadly, they can also see exactly how others, more trusting, may take it in, hook, line and sinker, so much so they really believe it, feel it & trust it.

They do so because it works.

Yes, that’s what I said. The proof is in the pudding. Those who try it, report that it works.

So what does that smug group of logical smarti-pants have to say about that? Well, they will happily explain that the benefits are real, but are rather due to:

  1. The placebo effect
  2. Regression to the norm
  3. The simple attention of another person
  4. And others you can read about if you are one of those nerds, who wants to be convinced, like me.

Dumbing down?

Education, In the media, Science, , , , , ,

This is my first ever blog post. Ra-ra and all that, let’s get to the subject matter.

Yes, its going to be one of those repositories for all those thoughts I probably vastly overvalue when I first conceive of them. But as I cannot be objective and they may actually serve some purpose, I might as well pop them on-line.

Topic of today? UK exam scores. Why? I just read some other blog on the subject: http://www.badscience.net/2007/08/calling-all-science-teachers/ and have some feelings on the matter.

I am not particularly qualified to comment on the education system, so I beg of you don’t listen to my ‘opinion’, but rather follow my logic…

Many people have suggested, and most recently in the public eye, Dr Goldacre in his excellent book “bad science”, that exam standards may be dropping in the UK.

I’d like to analyse this statement for the general case (i.e. any population of which a subset write an annual exam in which the questions do not repeat). Let’s try to frame the question of their ease in a less emotive logical statement…

Let’s say we have data that show the pass rate is gradually moving up year-on-year.

This must mean that one or more of the following is true:
i) the population is getting genetically smarter
ii) the population is increasing well prepared by its environment (parents, teachers, peers, the internet, etc.)
iii) the subset of people in doing the test has changed
iv) the questions are becoming better correlated to what people know
v) or last, the test questions are getting gradually ‘easier’ (or the marking more generous)

There may be more, but don’t want the extreme complexity to cloud my (eventual) point.

Now each of these statements is hard to prove without more data – and the only data we seem to have is the test scores (although we do have the tests themselves which may prove useful).

It may well be that people are getting smarter – but we might use some science to tackle that – for example you could argue that evolution cannot work this fast (and I personally doubt that nerdyness is particularly good survival and seduction tool).

But the environment is certainly changing, the subset doing the tests may be drifting, schooling techniques are being constantly refined and the correlation between what’s interesting (celebrities, MMR vaccines) and what’s examined is also hard to pin down.

I would say there is more than enough vagueness to ensure that no-one, no matter how well qualified, could answer the question “are we dumbing down” with any conviction.

However, there is a “but”.

The examiners can set the difficulty of each fresh test to be whatever they want (in theory). They could make it easy and let everyone get A’s, or they could make them so hard that only the brightest “X” percent get an A. Yet what we see, year on year, are slight improvements.

There are (at least) two hypotheses as to what the examiners are doing:
a) they are aiming to make the questions identical in difficulty to the last year, despite the full knowledge that this strategy has, to date, resulted in a gradual trend toward better marks.
b) they are deliberately aiming to get just slightly better results than last year due to some “incentive”

As the examiners for all the subjects are probably a fairly independently minded bunch and as there is no evidence for it, there are good reasons to doubt the latter hypothesis. Occam’s razor would surely favour the former, though we can’t be sure.

So where does that leave us?

We can’t suddenly make the tests harder, thus lowering the number of A grades to what they were years back – that would be unfair, and would mean that future young people will actually have to know more and work harder than their colleagues from the present time to get an A.

Why not simply rank the scores, then place predetermined fractions into each grade? This, incidentally, is what (I believe) was done when I went to school, which was essential as we had several different regional exam boards with different exams, so rankings rather than absolute results were felt more comparable. Isn’t this how IQ tests scores work? This would mean, incidentally, that by definition, exam/IQ scores for a population simply couldn’t increase with time.

Perhaps most attractive is the option to leave things as they are in the UK, and ignore the media circus. After all, what does their opinion matter?