The Limits of Science

There is this strain, especially among popular communicators of science, that if you don’t look at the world through a scientific lens, then what’s the point; you’re just fooling yourself; you’re living in a world of delusions.  

But my pushback to that is, I’m a professional scientist; the vast majority of decisions that I make in my everyday life are not based on the scientific method. When I’m trying to pick what to have for dinner tonight, or who to fall in love with, I’m not using the scientific method, I’m just following my gut —literally when it comes to dinner. I’m just using other tools than the scientific method to arrive at conclusions and decisions.

There are many, many questions that science does not have a solid answer on, and may not ever have a solid answer on. And it’s perfectly legitimate for people to turn to other modes of inquiry and investigation into this beautiful, messy world that we live in, to seek answers and comfort from that.

Astrophysicist Paul M. Sutter quoted in Undark

The Intersection of Science & AI in 10 Articles

Protecting scientific integrity in an age of generative AI - PNAS 

Generative A.I. Arrives in the Gene Editing World of CRISPR – New York Times

Researcher will use AI to test new materials so engineers don’t have to – Arizona State University

Democratizing the future of AI R&D: NSF to launch National AI Research Resource pilot - National Science Foundation

NASA accelerates science with gen AI-powered search - CIO

A physicists’ guide to the ethics of artificial intelligence – Symmetry Magazine 

Interdisciplinary group suggests guidelines for the use of AI in science - TechExplore 

Scientists use generative AI to answer complex questions in physics – MIT

AI Is Moving Biology From Science To Engineering, Advancing Medicine - Forbes

AI gets scientists one step closer to mapping the organized chaos in our cells – NPR

The Soul of Science

Pseudoscience, which are beliefs or practices that look like science on the outside — they ape or mimic many of the qualities of science — but they miss the central components of science that make it so powerful.

Science isn’t about the jargon. It’s not about the mathematics. It’s not about the lab coats and the experiments and the orbiting observatories. 

Science is about curiosity. It’s about rigor. It’s about doubting yourself. It’s about doubting your peers. It’s about applying a strict methodology to problem solving, to arrive at results. That’s the soul of science. That’s what science is really all about. And that’s what many, or all, pseudoscientific beliefs lack.

Astrophysicist Paul M. Sutter quoted in Undark

Fake scientific papers are alarmingly common ­­­

When neuropsychologist Bernhard Sabel put his new fake-paper detector to work, he was “shocked” by what it found. After screening some 5000 papers, he estimates up to 34% of neuroscience papers published in 2020 were likely made up or plagiarized; in medicine, the figure was 24%.

Jeffrey Barinard writing in Science Magazine

Ditching Peer Review

If we let people say whatever they want, they will sometimes say untrue things, and that sounds scary. But we don’t actually prevent people from saying untrue things right now; we just pretend to. In fact, right now we occasionally bless untrue things with big stickers that say “INSPECTED BY A FANCY JOURNAL,” and those stickers are very hard to get off. That’s way scarier.

Adam Mastroianni writing in Experimental History

Science has been in a “replication crisis” for a decade

In an attempt to test just how rigorous scientific research is, some researchers have undertaken the task of replicating research that’s been published in a whole range of fields. And as more and more of those attempted replications have come back, the results have been striking — it is not uncommon to find that many, many published studies cannot be replicated.

A decade of talking about the replication crisis hasn’t translated into a scientific process that’s much less vulnerable to it. Bad science is still frequently published, including in top journals.

Kelsey Piper writing in Vox

Two Ways to Understand the World

The psychologist Jerome Bruner has argued that human beings understand the world in two very different ways. The first he calls the “paradigmatic mode” of thought. In the paradigmatic mode, we seek to comprehend our experience in terms of tightly reasoned analyses, logical proof, and empirical observation. In the second, “narrative mode” of thought, we are concerned with human wants, needs and goals. This is the mode of stories, wherein we deal with “the vicissitudes of human intention” organized in time. 

Masters of the Heritage Matic mode try to “say no more than they mean.” Examples are scientists or logicians seeking to determine cause-and-effect relationships in order to explain events and help predict and control reality. Their explanations are constructed in such a way as to block the triggering of presuppositions.

By contrast, good poets and novelists are masters of the narrative mode. Their stories are especially effective when, in Bruner’s words, they “mean more than they can say.” A good story triggers presuppositions. Good stories give birth to many different meanings, generating “children” of meaning in their own image.

Dan McAdams, The Stories We Live By

How Science Fuels a Culture of Misinformation

Covid-19 hasn’t been just a viral pandemic, but also a pandemic of disinformation—what the World Health Organization calls an “infodemic.” Many scientists blame social media for the proliferation of Covid-related falsehoods, from the suggestion that Covid could be treated by drinking disinfectants to the insistence that masks don’t help prevent transmission. Facebook, Twitter, TikTok, and other platforms have indeed propagated dangerous misinformation. However, social media is a symptom of the problem more than the cause. Misinformation and disinformation often start with scientists themselves.

Joelle Renstrom writing in OpenMind

People are susceptible to being deceived by the trappings of science

"Although trust in science has important societal benefits, it is not a panacea that will protect people against misinformation. Spreaders of misinformation commonly reference science. Science communication cannot simply urge people to trust anything that references science, and instead should encourage people to learn about scientific methods and ways to critically engage with issues that involve scientific content." - study lead author Thomas O'Brien

From the abstract:

We identify two critical determinants of vulnerability to pseudoscience. First, participants who trust science are more likely to believe and disseminate false claims that contain scientific references than false claims that do not. Second, reminding participants of the value of critical evaluation reduces belief in false claims, whereas reminders of the value of trusting science do not. We conclude that trust in science, although desirable in many ways, makes people vulnerable to pseudoscience. 

Press Release 

Read the study is here

Science Is Truth Until It Isn’t

No religion can claim all its priests are holy, so it’s probably not surprising that science can’t claim all its researchers are pure of heart. In most examples of scientific fraud, “follow the money” seems to answer the question “why?” For scientists lured to do fraudulent research for tobacco, energy or perpetual-motion companies, the capitalist money bags loom large – if not for direct personal gain, then at least for nice laboratories and tenured career paths at desirable universities. In these challenging times for higher education, science remains a career-driven field. A good reputation brings support and funding, and reputation is still built on that old cliché, “publish or perish”. Therein lies the constant temptation for a struggling or fame-seeking researcher to maybe tweak the data a little.

Thomas O’Dwyer writing in 3 Quarks Daily

Inconvenient Conclusions

Conspiracy theories may be deployed as a rhetorical tool to escape inconvenient conclusions. People selectively appeal to a conspiracy among scientists to explain away a scientific consensus when their political ideology compels them to do so—but not when the scientific consensus is of no relevance to their politics.

Stephan Lewandowsky & John Cook, The Conspiracy Theory Handbook

Tuesday Tech Tools: Science News Sites

Here are some sites that are fairly reliable on science news. Checking them from time-to-time will give you an idea as to what is being talked about among the science-interested public. 

Aeon - https://aeon.co/

BBC Future - https://www.bbc.com/future 

The Conversation - https://theconversation.com/us

Live Science - https://www.livescience.com/

Massive Science - https://massivesci.com/

Multibriefs - https://exclusive.multibriefs.com/

The Naked Scientist - https://www.thenakedscientists.com/

NY Times Health - https://www.nytimes.com/section/health

NY Times Science - https://www.nytimes.com/section/science

The Pudding - https://pudding.cool/

Retraction Watch - https://retractionwatch.com

Reveal News - https://revealnews.org/

Scholarly Kitchen - https://scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org/

Science Central - https://www.scicentral.com/

Science News for Students - http://sciencenewsforstudents.org/

Stat News - https://www.statnews.com/

Study Finds - https://www.studyfinds.org/

Undark - https://undark.org/

The Walrus - https://thewalrus.ca/

The Limits of Science

The Ten Commandments of the Old Testament and the two great commandments (to love God, and to love one’s neighbor as oneself), according to Freud, come from human experience, not from revelation. The scientific method, he writes, is our only source of knowledge.

(CS) Lewis strongly disagrees. The scientific method is simply cannot answer all questions, cannot possibly be the source of all knowledge. He says the job of science- a very important and necessary job – is to experiment and observe and report how things behave or react. He writes, “But why anything comes to be there at all and whether there is anything behind the things science observes.. this is not a scientific question.”

Armand Nicholi, The Question of God

The Great Mystery

The first-ever “photo” of a black hole. It’s an achievement once thought impossible, given that black holes exert such monstrous gravity that they swallow light itself. 

Over the last century, science has shown that our universe is a far stranger place than our everyday experience would suggest. Space itself is curved and warped by mass. Time slows down on an object the faster it travels. Electrons act both as particles and waves. “Entangled’’ particles seem to instantly know and react to what happens to their partner across vast distances. At the quantum level, there is no empty space: Particles constantly pop in and out of existence, creating an ephemeral quantum “foam.” At the other end of the scale, there are least 2 trillion galaxies in the universe, each containing billions of stars and probably more than a few planets where intelligent life has evolved and is puzzling over the same questions as we are. The more we discover, the more it becomes clear that our certainties, whatever they may be, are built on illusions. We live in a great mystery.  

William Falk writing in The Week Magazine 

Treat Failure like a Scientist

When a scientist runs an experiment, there are all sorts of results that could happen. Some results are positive and some are negative, but all of them are data points. Each result is a piece of data that can ultimately lead to an answer.

And that’s exactly how a scientist treats failure: as another data point.

This is much different than how society often talks about failure. For most of us, failure feels like an indication of who we are as a person.

Failing a test means you’re not smart enough. Failing to get fit means you’re undesirable. Failing in business means you don’t have what it takes. Failing at art means you’re not creative. And so on.

But for the scientist, a negative result is not an indication that they are a bad scientist. In fact, it’s quite the opposite. Proving a hypothesis wrong is often just as useful as proving it right because you learned something along the way.

Your failures are simply data points that can help lead you to the right answer.

James Clear 

Denialism and Science

Denialism, and related phenomena, are often portrayed as a “war on science”. This is an understandable but profound misunderstanding. Certainly, denialism and other forms of pseudo-scholarship do not follow mainstream scientific methodologies. Denialism does indeed represent a perversion of the scholarly method, and the science it produces rests on profoundly erroneous assumptions, but denialism does all this in the name of science and scholarship. Denialism aims to replace one kind of science with another – it does not aim to replace science itself. In fact, denialism constitutes a tribute to the prestige of science and scholarship in the modern world. Denialists are desperate for the public validation that science affords.

While denialism has sometimes been seen as part of a post-modern assault on truth, the denialist is just as invested in notions of scientific objectivity as the most unreconstructed positivist. Even those who are genuinely committed to alternatives to western rationality and science can wield denialist rhetoric that apes precisely the kind of scientism they despise. Anti-vaxxers, for example, sometimes seem to want to have their cake and eat it: to have their critique of western medicine validated by western medicine.

The rhetoric of denialism and its critics can resemble each other in a kind of war to the death over who gets to wear the mantle of science. The term “junk science” has been applied to climate change denialism, as well as in defence of it. Mainstream science can also be dogmatic and blind to its own limitations. If the accusation that global warming is an example of politicised ideology masked as science is met with indignant assertions of the absolute objectivity of “real” science, there is a risk of blinding oneself to uncomfortable questions regarding the subtle and not-so-subtle ways in which the idea of pure truth, untrammelled by human interests, is elusive. Human interests can rarely if ever be separated from the ways we observe the world.  

I do not believe that, if only one could find the key to “make them understand”, denialists would think just like me. If denialists were to stop denying, we cannot assume that we would then have a shared moral foundation on which we could make progress as a species.

Keith Kahn-Harris, Denial: The Unspeakable Truth