Guest essay by Dr. David Deming
We live in a scientific age. The sciences are viewed as the only real sources of authoritative information. Knowledge derived from other epistemological systems is regarded as having less credibility. The conclusions of philosophy are untestable, and religion is often cynically interpreted as nothing more than superstition and myth. Public policy decisions made upon the basis of scientific recommendations may have economic consequences measured in trillions of dollars. Yet few people realize how unreliable scientific authority can be.
The popular conception is that scientists dispassionately discover truth through a foolproof technique called the scientific method. In some simplistic views, the scientific method reduces to a series of procedural steps analogous to instructions in a cookbook. The results produced by this hypothetical scientific method are verified by something called peer review, a process that allegedly certifies reliability.
But the common understanding of science is largely an ignorant misconception.
Although most science is based on observation and reason, there is no such thing as an agreed upon scientific method. It doesn’t exist. With the exception of supernaturalism, almost everything is allowed in the sciences. Both inductive and deductive logic are employed. Analogical reasoning is alright. So are speculation and hunches. Serendipity plays a role in scientific discovery. Both radioactivity and penicillin were discovered accidentally. Objectivity is not required or taught, nor are there any totally objective human beings. Bias is ubiquitous and fraud occurs.
Peer review is a highly unreliable process that produces nothing but opinion. A study conducted in 2010 concluded that reviewers agree “at a rate barely exceeding what would be expected by chance.” Furthermore, the peer review process may be, and usually is, cynically manipulated. Scientists aggregate in social cliques that facilitate orthodoxy and suppress dissent. When manuscripts are submitted for review authors are commonly asked to suggest reviewers. Invariably these tend to be acquaintances holding the same views. Thus peer review often amounts to pal review. Neither does peer review detect fraud. In 2011, Tilburg University in the Netherlands suspended psychologist Diederik Stapel for publishing at least 55 scientific research papers based on fabricated data.
US Secretary of State John Kerry has said that climate science is “irrefutable.” He is categorically wrong. There is no certainty in science. The very notion of scientific consensus implies that the validity of scientific knowledge is subject to human judgment and therefore inherently problematic. No one speaks of consensus when discussing geometrical proofs. Scientists are not philosophers trained to avoid intellectual fallacies, but technical specialists possessing ideological and political persuasions that influence their scientific activity. Like other human beings, they tend to take note of what is consistent with preexisting beliefs and filter out what contradicts preconceptions. The influence of money can be corrupting. A group of people offered billions of dollars to investigate climate change is unlikely to conclude that it is a benign, natural process unworthy of further attention.
The history of science is a chronicle of revision. For two thousand years, physicists maintained that heavy objects fall faster than light ones. Astronomers thought the Sun moved around the Earth. Physicians supposed that plagues were caused by bad air and treated their patients by bleeding them to death. The icons of the Scientific Revolution, Galileo, Kepler, and Newton, all made serious errors. In the late eighteenth century, Neptunists formulated a theory to explain the origin of rocks. They described their conclusions as incontrovertible because everywhere they looked they found evidence that supported their theoretical conceptions. The Neptunist theory turned out to be completely erroneous. At the end of the nineteenth century, geologists thought the Earth was less than 100 million years old. Radioactive dating in the twentieth century showed they were in error by a factor of 46. In the 1920s, American geologists rejected Alfred Wegener’s theory of continental drift with near unanimity. They were all wrong. The history of science is a history of error. Has the process of history ceased? Has human nature changed?
We are now asked to change the world’s economy on the basis of yet another scientific theory. The fifth assessment report of the IPCC has concluded that there is a 95 percent probability that humans are responsible for climate change. We are induced to accept this conclusion on the basis of naive faith in scientific authority. But this faith can only come from an ignorance of how science really works. Count me out.
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David Deming (ddeming@ou.edu) is a geophysicist and author of a three-volume history of science, Science and Technology in World History (McFarland, 2010, 2012).
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Excellent, as always, Willis!
As Willis has shown in any number of posts, CAGW models aren’t designed to reflect reality, but rather to prove the false premise that CO2 is Earth’s climatic control knob.
I especially enjoyed Willis’ post on his one-line equation that fit CAGW model projections (contrived from millions of lines of computer code) to within an R squared value of .98. Brilliant. I still chuckle when I think about that post…
A famous statistician once said, “Give me 4 parameters and I can fit an elephant, and if you give me 5, I can wiggle his trunk.”
At this stage, CAGW/IPCC are simply about keeping the white elephant’s trunk wiggling for as long as possible and to steal as much taxpayer money as possible before the giggle factor/angry mobs, make such nefarious practices untenable.
It feels like we’re at the beginning of the end of this insanity.
It took 30 years for science to prove the Piltdown Man Hoax was based on the jawbone of an ape. Let’s hope it won’t take another 30 years to prove CAGW was based on the jawbones of a bunch of asses.
It does not help the reputation of scientists when the following appears in the popular press: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/howaboutthat/10348927/Bad-luck-really-can-be-reversed-by-touching-wood-ritual-say-scientists.html
faded;
You utterly misunderstand the article. Holding a mental image of unwanted events makes them more likely. Rituals that “throw away” something help disperse the image, and hence the (self-caused) result.
Brad says:
October 1, 2013 at 11:29 am
… “Our leading politicians are no longer accessible by the public-at-large. Our emails and phone calls go to dead files, never to be read or heard. It is no longer possible to even speak with one in person, they are covered by their minions who do their bidding using our tax dollars.”
They are accessible. Join your Party branch, and get to work with policy resolutions. Get them passed by the Branch and sent up the line. Go to the various conferences and conventions and talk there. Meet the politicians face to face.
If you sit on your BTM and do not join a Party, yes, you will not see a politician. But whose fault is that?
Dr Deming: Thank you for an interesting article. You state: “At the end of the nineteenth century, geologists thought the Earth was less than 100 million years old.”. It may well be the case that some 19th C geologists were of this opinion. However I was under the impression that 19th C geologists such as Lyell, Haughton and Joly were only estimating a minimum age for the earth, not its full or maximum age. It was the physicist Kelvin who concluded by studying surface heat flow and the thermal conductivity of rocks that the maximum possible age of the earth was 40 million years (and who also, or so I have read, asserted that heavier-than-air flight was impossible). Kelvin turned out to be wrong by more than 2 orders of magnitude, because he assumed that the earth has no continuing internal source of heat production. Physicists, even very good ones such as Kelvin, and indeed scientists of all persuasions, can be wildly wrong on account of having made incorrect assumptions.
Dudley;
At every stage of the process you describe, agreement with the groupthink is checked for, and enforced. Those who make it to positions of influence have been thoroughly filtered and shaped, and no more reflect public input and wishes than would a hired PR agent. You sound like one of them.
Friends:
In hope of stopping the side-track about Latin plurals I offer the following.
There is a useful distinction between data and datum.
(a)
A set of data (e.g. comprising a time series) is singular information because it is a set.
(b)
A datum is one of the items in the set.
(c)
Part of the set is data because it is more than one piece of information. However, if that part of the set is selected as a sub-set (e.g. for comparison with another sub-set) then the sub-set is singular information.
Richard
rsc;
Your suggestion is one of the more useful datums in the debate. ;p LOL
Professor Brian Cox has a series running on the BBC at the moment chronicling some of the achievements of British science. He lists the scientific method and peer review amongst them, yet fails to notice the shortcomings that Dr. David Deming has pointed out.
It seems to me that is climate science the peer review process fails at the conclusions drawn. Even when the research is done, and done correctly many of the conclusions drawn just can’t be made from the evidence presented.
If I have a hypothesis that blue cars get better gas mileage than red cars and I measure the gas mileage on ten of each I will no doubt get a result. The average of ten cars will almost always differ from the average of another ten no matter how similar they are or their color. I cannot then conclude that red cars get better mileage because their average was lower. I can do the experiment and all the calculations correctly, and in a sense that experiment is science, but the moment I make conclusions my experiment can’t back up I am not doing science.
In a general sense this is where climate science appears to be. The moment we accept that the temperature going up or down is evidence of AGW we stopped doing science. The temperature was always going to go either up or down it was a 50-50 chance. It doesn’t matter how accurately the temperature is measured.
As in my mileage example the temperature is dependent on many things other than anthropogenic CO2 and the only way to get to a conclusion is to work out the other factors. Much of the work should just be reviewed as research that might be true but can’t be proved from what’s shown.
@ur momisugly Brian H – I was referring to the headline.
A nice one:
“A group of people offered billions of dollars to investigate climate change is unlikely to conclude that it is a benign, natural process unworthy of further attention.
For many scientists, the first order of the day is;
“Get the grant/sponsor” the IPCC is the proven pinnacle of this mantra.
‘Peer review is a highly unreliable process that produces nothing but opinion. A study conducted in 2010 concluded that reviewers agree “at a rate barely exceeding what would be expected by chance.” ‘
The closest analogy to Peer Review I know is ‘Prime Minister’s Question Time’ in the UK House of Commons.
The ‘Speaker’ is the Editor of the Journal, co-ordinating the bunfight and adjudicating on the allowability of individual utterances. They also call who is to ask questions (analagous to choosing the referees) and as a result, the ‘referee’s report’ aka the Question posed, may be gushing praise or a ‘you are a disgrace to the world’, although said within the constraints of Parliamentary language.
Anyone who has studied this process will see good, legitimate questions stonewalled or stymied, shouted down or sneered at. They will listen to puke-inducing planted questions more suitable in the professional courtesan’s bedroom than in the highest debating chamber of the land.
90% of what you get is froth, but from time to time, a real gem emerges, an exchange which defines a politician’s career emerges.
I had a submitted paper reviewed once: referee A said the paper should be published without revision; referee B said it was useless and should be rejected outright; referee C said ‘what about this, that and the other’? There was nothing unbelievably original in the submission, merely the reporting of an unexpected technical finding which could, potentially, have interesting mechanistic implications were the process understood further. Referee A was the Prime Minister’s rottweiler; Referee B was the Leader of the Opposition’s rottweiler; Referee C was an Honorable and Distinguished Back Bencher.
Much as the Press represents ‘the first version of history’, so scientific publications reflect ‘the first version of new scientific understanding’.
Thanks, Dr. Deming. Very good summation.
Science is fallible, it fails more often than not.
My Georgetown history professor, Carroll Quigley, whom I mentioned in an earlier post, taught a class named “Science, Christianity, and the Western Intellectual Tradition,” the main point of which was that all three are based on the same premise: “The truth unfolds through time through communal effort.” Although the IPCC claims that its work is based on science, it’s quite obvious to me that the IPCC is not concerned with “the truth” but with advancing a certain politco-economic agenda, and, moreover, to justify its own existence and thereby ensure continued funding and thus the jobs of its staff.
For those of you who may dispute that there is a “truth,” I ask that if there is no truth then how can there be error?
Andres Valencia says:
October 2, 2013 at 7:31 am
Science is fallible, it fails more often than not.
Too simplistic. Science is the bedrock of our modern civilization and certainly cannot in general be a failure. All science is subject to continuous revision and improvement and science is self-correcting with time [although wrong ideas can hang around for some time].
– – – – – – – –
David Deming,
Your essay has stimulated an important discussion.
How do you know that what you state (quoted above) is true if you apply your dictum that no one is totally objective? You self refute your own objectivity in your own view of science in that regard.
Also, reasoning properly requires no science, but science does require reasoning properly. Science is in that regard a derivative of the discipline of epistemology that is a traditional part of philosophy.
There is no special aspect of scientists per se apart from just being normal reasoning humans.
If there are humans that other humans consider intellectual (science is just a subset) authorities it is due to their normal human reasoning having high value to the others. It is merely division of intellectual labor in an open society.
There are forms to the capacity of normal human reasoning that if applied can potentially yield objective results; not guaranteed and it is not easy. Science is not the source of it nor the exclusive user of it. The capacity of normal human reasoning is innate to humans, but it must be consciously focused on to be applied. Those with greater focusing discipline have an advantage compared to those with less focusing discipline.
John
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lsvalgaard says:
October 1, 2013 at 7:51 pm
The beauty of English is it fluidity. There is no central body dictating what people MUST say.
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Right. Willis E. has said as much to other grammar-nazis.
rtj1211:
I agree with the message of your post at October 2, 2013 at 7:21 am
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2013/10/01/why-climate-science-is-fallible/#comment-1433804
and I like your analogy of peer review with PMQs.
However, for the benefit of non-Brits, I think it needs to be pointed out that Ministrial Questions – including PMQ – are intended to test the Minister and not his/her policies themselves. The testing of policies is mostly done On the Corridor.
Peer review should be the assessment of a paper to determine if it contains basic flaws which make it unworthy of publication. Sadly, some reviewers seem to think peer review and PMQs have the same intended purpose.
Richard
I think you made an error, and misunderstood the scientific method…. To err is an integral part of science. That is how we learn, by identifying what doesn’t work.
What is not science, is presenting something as fact, that is so patently absurd that every child in the world will recognise the absurdity.
Thought experiment: Go outside on a sunny day with no clouds and turn your face towards the Sun. Which radiation source heats your face the most?
a) The Sun?
b) The Earth, via greenhouse gasses?
Think about it first, then check the official IPCC answer found in this figure, from the latest AR5 report.
This is not an error, therefore it isn’t science.
I though it was a good article and really have no disagreement with its content … but I do have an opinion on its context …. and similar context within the postings.
As far as I’m concerned, philosophers and prophets are “two peas in a pod” with the only difference being that philosophers generate copious amounts of commentary and spend a lot of their time thinking up new verbiage to explain, define and/or divorce their prophecies from anything that has been previously philosophized ….. whereas the prophet simply states his prophecy in common verbiage which requires no explanation.
Stating that there is a ‘scientific method’ is akin to stating there is a “lawnmowing method”. Your method for mowing your lawn is probably not the best method for me mowing my lawn. But the end results are the same, both lawns get mowed.
Now if “scientific method” is defined as a “recommended procedure”, then fine. But to suggest, infer or claim that it is a “mandatory procedure” is utterly silly. The only exception to the aforesaid is that Teachers of Science should mandate said “scientific method” to their students to insure that they get started out on the right foot, otherwise there is likely to be “kaos in the classroom”. Likewise for students learning to mow a lawn.
The verb logic, logics or logical, be it inductive or deductive, is nothing more than intelligent choice-making wherein two (2) or more entities, parameters and/or criteria are involved and which is predicated on one’s nurtured knowledge of the subject in question and their ability to recall said knowledge and/or any nurtured knowledge than can or might be associated, correlated or helpful with said choice-making. Thus said, what is logical for the goose is not logical for the gander …. unless the gander has the equivalent learned knowledge and recall abilities.
But it is not easy for the goose to nurture older ganders with newer knowledge of a subject or with better recall abilities, thus the goose must employ the above said “scientific method” by presenting the gander with a “step by step” procedure/explanation for its logical choice/decision.
Cheers, The ranting and delusional denialist,
John Campbell, Kev-in-Uk, Gary Pearse, DirkH, David, Eeyore Rifkin, Doug Huffman, and Willis Eschenbach are all on the correct track (though I disagree about Goedel; his work on mathematical theory doesn’t transfer well to the real world).
The scientific method is well worked out, widely known, widely accepted… yet denied and perverted by many others.
And some people disagree about logic, reason and ratiocination, as well. I came across several people heatedly arguing over whethat reason is reasonable or acceptable. One insisted that it is not, another that it was, but on exploring a bit I found they were talking past/over each other, not engaged in a communication. Two of them excluded much that is quite reasonable from the realm of reason, for instance.
I’ve wondered more than once how Soros could have studied under Karl Popper and arrive at some of his beliefs. Consensus has no place in science. Persuasion, however, does.
Science “proves” nothing, Réaumur. It only leaves hypotheses open to disproof (as Bill Marsh says Einstein pointed out). Information is an economic good, and no one person can be an expert in everything, so we satisfice by accepting plausibility most of the time, on most of the subject matter in which we are not experts. If it is consistent with what we know in an area, that’s as far as we investigate, and leave the rest to those with specific interests, which leaves us open to being conned.
hoyawildcat, both are real, but only one is really science.
Volker Doormann, If “the basis of logic does not have a foundation”, then you’re misapplying Goedel, and denying that any genuine axiom — some foundation, or base, or a priori irrefutable point — exists. Existence is the axiom. If you don’t exist, if the subject-matter does not exist, then there can be no logic, no valid line of reasoning. You could make no argument.
noaaprogrammer, “sociology” doesn’t deserve the suffix. Like “climate science” there’s verly little science to it. After the initial dedicated reading, I got through my university sociology course by informally rating the prof’s favorite quotes from the field’s authorities, by their insanity. This way, I could reliably match up unattributed statements from them with the “sage” who spouted them based solely on how crazy they were. In this way, I saved that valuable memory space for physics, chemistry, computer science, and economics.
There is no cookbook even in math. It is a proven fact there is no general algorithmic method whatsoever to find mathematical proofs. However, given a purported proof, its status is algorithmically decidable indeed.
In a somewhat looser sense it is also true for natural sciences. Finding the right theory conforms to no cookbook the same way it is seen in math. The difference is that although here we can never give a final proof of it, but it is possible to design experiments that prove the theory wrong, should it be the case. Good theories have already survived many such attempts.
There is one pivotal point though. A theory describing a single run of a unique physical instance is not even a theory in physical sciences. That means there can be no theory of either terrestrial climate or cosmology. Theories always describe multiple runs of a wide class of physical instances, this is why it is possible to construct experiments at will to verify them.
In singular cases like these we can do no better than applying existing theories to the system considered. However, in case of climatology the very physical theory, covering the class terrestrial climate belongs to, that of non reproducible quasi stationary nonequilibrium thermodynamic systems is lacking.
It is not exceedingly hard to see that any attempt to apply a non existent theory is somewhat futile. Attempts called GCMs (General Circulation Models) of climate science fall into this very category.
Brian H says:
October 1, 2013 at 9:30 pm
” Gary Pearse says:
October 1, 2013 at 12:29 pm
…
You certainly can’t trust what the IPCC are doing, but don’t tar science with the same brush.
Oh, really? Check out http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2010/11/lies-damned-lies-and-medical-science/8269/
A physicist commenting on it said the situation was even worse in physics.”
Brian, you are making the same mistake as David Deming – the scammers are not doing science, even if they have horn-rimmed glasses and white lab coats.
lsvalgaard says:
October 2, 2013 at 7:36 am
Right, as usual. Since at least the time of David Hume, scientists and philosophers have seen fallibility in science as one of its great virtues. To say that science is fallible is not to say that it is false but that each of its statements is open to revision in light of human experience. Hume’s argument that science is fallible was a great achievement. Hume’s predecessors, chiefly Descartes, Leibniz, and Spinoza, all held that human knowledge of the world includes a whole raft of necessary truths, infallible truths. The argument for fallibility has to be renewed regularly. I think the last great such argument is from John Dewey around 1930 or so. Hegel, Marx, and their followers re-established necessary truth as part of science. A highly technical explanation of fallibility in science is found in Quine’s thesis that all the empirical evidence “underdetermines” even physical theory – or as Hume would say, the future can always surprise you.
Learning the history of science in a program where serious philosophy of science is taught is something really worth doing.
Jquip says:
October 1, 2013 at 4:59 pm
“Theo Goodwin: “There is science, a process, and there is Science, final products.”
So if the final product is a valid Scientific paper, but the process was to divine the universe by casting sheep knuckles, then ‘divination by sheep knuckles’ is ‘science.’ If not, why not?”
It has been quite a few centuries since casting sheep knuckles could yield a valid scientific paper. I do not see why you raise the topic.