[FRIAM] IS: Rhetoric in scientific arguments WAS: FW: Fractal discussion Landscape-bird songs

[Vladimyr Burachynsky]

Eric,

 

I doubt an idea before I ever apply for a grant. Then I deceptively claim to be trying to replicate an authorities claims. But the devil within me recalls that at least once maybe more often , I have noticed

that the authority’s prediction failed. That knowledge is my group’s secret until publication. Then it becomes everyone’s knowledge.

 

I have in my memory a perfect “Black Swan” event. I suppose that I have more faith in water birds than in statisticians. Perhaps we often hide behind obscure math to shield our superstitious insights.

Some times using the math first reveals an outcome that is used as a gloss to hide the unknown. For instance the Griffith’s Crack Theory  widely held in Classic Mechanics. Exactly what is the use of a singularity zone

when a crack propagates in wild directions? The material does not use it but then at that scale the material uses Quantum Mechanics but the engineer favours The Classic Mechanics. So indeed certain materials do emit light

from crack tips. At the edges of any discipline anomalies will define limits or boundaries for paradigms. Without doubt and secret devilish memories Science would not evolve so quickly.

 

At this point I am reminded of an eminent chemist , Polanyi? who received the Nobel Prize and afterward became a philosopher who suspected something like superstition, drives many scientists much like

Isaac Newton.

I think as civilized people we prefer to stick with conduct rules knowing perfectly well how to violate them and the consequences of doing so. 

vib

I guess we should never believe the whole of PR.

 

From: Friam [mailto:friam-bounces at redfish.com] On Behalf Of Eric Charles
Sent: March-02-17 1:04 PM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] IS: Rhetoric in scientific arguments WAS: FW: Fractal discussion Landscape-bird songs

 

Glen, 

To "Peirce-up" the discussion of doubt a touch. To doubt something is to be unable to act as-if-it-were-true without reservation. So, for example, you do not doubt Newtonian mechanics under a wide range of conditions (you are willing to act as if it is true under many circumstances), however, there are conditions under which you would be nervous acting as if they were true. Your doubt is not absolute, and the "caveats" you refer to, could be expressed as a description of the circumstances under which you start to get nervous. 

 

Your description of replication is good, but non-typical (particularly among the chemists, which are Peirce's favorite scientist). We now think of replication as part of the falsification process, but that is actually a weird way to think about (a symptom of the degenerate state of many current fields). The most natural reasons to replicate a research report is a) because the outcome is itself useful or b) because you intend to build upon it. For example, if someone publishes a novel synthesis for artificial rubber, I would probably try to replicate it because I need artificial rubber, or because I intended to start with that artificial rubber and try to synthesize something new. Under those conditions, anyone trying to replicate would be very frustrated by a failure (given some tolerance for first attempts). 

 

Nick, 

I think Glen is prodding, in his second part at an extremely important point, and one that I have been wrestling with quite a bit lately. It is quite unclear why "trusting the work of other scientists" - as currently practiced - is not simply another deference to authority. The current resurgence of assertions that people shouldn't argue with scientists (e.g., that we should care what an astrophysicists thinks about vaccines, or what a geneticist thinks about psychology) is bad, and "science-skeptics" are not wrong when they attach a negative valence to such examples. Let us ignore those flagrant examples, however. How do I determine how much weight to give to a report in a "top journal" in psychology? Does it matter that I know full well most articles in top journals turn out to have problems (as flashy reports of unexpected results are prone to do)? And if I am suspicious of that, what do I make of the opinion of a Harvard full professor of psychology vs. a bartender who has been helping people with their problem for 5 decades? Etc. etc. etc. I think there is a very deep issue here, which I'm not sure I've ever seen explained well. I think, in part, it is a challenge that was not as prevalent even 50 years ago, but that may just be imagined nostalgia. 

 

 

 

 

 





-----------
Eric P. Charles, Ph.D.
Supervisory Survey Statistician

U.S. Marine Corps

 

On Wed, Mar 1, 2017 at 4:13 PM, glen ☣ <gepropella at gmail.com> wrote:


Heh, your lack of social salve has left me unclear on whether I should respond or which parts to respond to. >8^D  So, I'll just respond to what I think is the most important point.

>  That implies that what you say below supports arguments from authority. [NST==>I don’t think we can EVER escape arguments from authority.  Science is locked in a matrix of trust.  Doubt in science is really important, but it has to be relatively rare, or we would never know which of a million doubts to take seriously.  <==nst]

I think you use "doubt" differently than I do.  Even if we replace "doubt" with "falsified", it's not a binary thing.  When I doubt something an authority says, I'm not refuting, denying, or rejecting it.  I'm simply expressing that the saying probably has caveats, some of which I might know about, some of which I might not.  The same is true of (critical rationalist) falsification.  Even though we know Newtonian physics isn't end-all, be-all True with a capital T.  It's satisficing in most circumstances.  To (When I) say it's been falsified simply means it has caveats.

And, in this sense of the two terms, doubt and falsification are _rampant_ in science.  When you try to replicate some other lab's experiment, you must doubt, say, the methods section in their paper, usually because you don't have the exact same equipment and the exact same people ... doubt is what promotes reproducibility to replicability. ... at least in this non-scientist's opinion.

>  I.e. we can't treat a lack of salve as an assertion of objectivity without implicitly asserting that every statement without such salve is fallacious. [NST==>Yep.  All statements are more or less fallacious.  So does that render all statements the same?  If I flip the coin once and it comes up heads, what evidence do I have that the coin is biased.   None.  If I flip it twice, a little.  If I get a hundred heads, the probability that the coin flips represent a population of fair coin-flips is finite, but vanishingly small.  I’ld bet on it, wouldn’t you?  All statements of certainly of that character.  <==nst]

No, not all fallacies are the same.  Different statements are fallacious in different ways.  And the argument from authority fallacy, in my opinion, is the worst one because it's opaque.  You can't learn from it.  At least with, say, assuming the conclusion, it encourages us to understand the relationship between premises and conclusion... it helps us grok deduction as well as the host of concepts surrounding languages, formal systems, algebras, etc.

Your inductive argument, by the way, isn't obviously an argument from authority (obvious to me, anyway -- see how annoying it is), particularly with (as someone recently phrased it) interpersonally assessable things like coin flipping.  Anyone with the usual complement of sensorimotor manifolds (!) can put in place the kernel and carry out the iteration.  The only authorities involved are whatever physical structures are required for coin flipping and counting.

But, more importantly, self-consistency (local coherence) is the governor of induction.  Can you imagine if "successor" were redefined at each iteration?  So, it helps make my larger point that it's irrelevant what you or I believe or state with authority.  What matters is whether the method(s) hang(s) together.

--
☣ glen


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