So . . . as it happens, three interesting items came to attention this past weekend, all having to do with science and the pursuit of knowledge. They actually make quite an unexpectedly matched set, coming from different sources (the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, the science desk of the New Yorker, and a comedian's clip on Youtube) and having slightly different perspectives (one using scientific method to prove the supernatural, one looking critically at the execution of scientific discovery and one looking critically at the denial of science's validity). The links, and my input, after the jump.
Item one is a clip of comedian Tim Minchin performing his nine-minute long beat poem (don't be frightened off, it goes by pretty quick and is highly entertaining) entitled Storm. The basic theme of the poem/story is a dinner companion who insists that there is no such thing as a "fact" and that science is at best lacking and at worst evil. The poem concludes with the point that we should be happy with the mystery that naturally exists in the world without having to invent crap like auras and palmistry and Scientology (I added the last one).
Naturally I agree with this point; people tend to invent phenomena (or believe they have observed them) to try to gain greater meaning from their lives and the world around them. I remember one instance back when I was managing a bookstore and an author of a book about angels came to give a reading. I could not fathom a human mind believing that angels play an intercessionary role in our lives (and that she could communicate with them). I knew that many people believe in angels, but to have a person write a book about their role in our lives (and an good-sized audience who came to see the reading) was to me a bit delusional and a bit sad. Minchin says in his poem that anyone who claims to have such contact is lying or mentally ill. I would add to that list a slightly more human trait, that of belief in magical thinking. We all do it often, like when we think that a friend called because we were thinking about him or her, but for some it is more ingrained and frequent than for others.
The second item is a scholarly article on ESP (oxymoron?) set to be published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, a top academic psychology journal. The author is a highly-respected researcher. The results seem scientifically sound. And yet they indicate the existence of phenomena that most scientifically-minded people do not believe exist. What happens when a foundational method is used to support a result that rocks the foundation? Is it as though God has created a stone so heavy that he himself cannot lift it?
To deny the results is to either accuse the reseacher of lying or to deny the validity of the experimental method. While any statistical result could be due to chance (generally the likelihood of that is very small), we can't pick and choose which ones we believe to be due to chance just because we don't like what the study shows. In other words, if we believe that studies indicating the existence of aversion to uncertainty or the confirmation bias, or any other psychological phenomenon, we have to accept these ESP findings.
Which leads right into the third item, which is an excellent article on a potential problem with the scientific method itself. It seems that studies that have been used as the basis for both theories and practices (e.g. pharmaceutical drug design) cannot be replicated, or when replicated have a much smaller effect. I had considered writing an entire blog post on this article alone, but I really don't have much to add - I think that Jonah Lehrer did a great job covering the topic. Personally I believe that it is a combination of the drive for positive results to gain publication, and the possibility that randomness is much more potent that we give it credit for.
This article is not saying that current methods of scientific inquiry are not valid, but rather that maybe we do not use them rigorously enough. The current practice of conducting research leads to a "vast graveyard of silent evidence" (to borrow a phrase from Nassim Taleb), where studies that did not lead to the desired result were abandoned and unpublished. This leads to a dangerous assymetry - one great result, possibly due to chance, gets published and is accepted as theory or fact; one null result, possibly due to chance, never sees the light of day. The odds of the study being due to chance are the same in both cases, but one gets attention and the other doesn't. And over time, this difference in focus creates a huge disparity between the two. After all, the entire mass of the universe can be accounted for because there is one extra matter particle for every billion matter-antimatter particle pairs. Small differences in symmetry add up over time.
But hey, flawed as it is, I'll take science over scientism, or intelligent design, or Crossing Over any day.
i really agree. thanks for posting.
ReplyDelete