Performance poet and writer Hannah Chutzpah asked on Twitter:
What are the technical terms, in your field, for 'dunno'? In medicine there's 'ideopathic' [corrected the original, incorrect spelling] In archeology/anthropology there's 'ritual purposes' How do you professionally term 'we haven't got a clue'?
And the answers are a veritable riot!
As they say on Twitter, Thread.
And Fun.
The accepted practice is instead to adjust the model so that it continues to agree with the lack of empirical support.
This very Zen statement is a part of a commentary by theoretical particle physicist Sabine Hossenfelder-- in Nature, no less (so it must be fashionable, if not also true) -- who writes candidly about the crisis in her field (and its neighbours: astrophysics and cosmology): Science needs reason to be trusted [Caution: paywall]. She calls it a crisis of "overproduction" (i.e., abundance) of theories, but I like to think of it as a crisis of "producibility" of experimental data.
In recent years, trust in science has been severely challenged by the reproducibility crisis. This problem has predominantly fallen on the life sciences where, it turns out, many peer-reviewed findings can't be independently reproduced. Attempts to solve this have focused on improving the current measures for statistical reliability and their practical implementation. Changes like this were made to increase scientific objectivity or — more bluntly — to prevent scientists from lying to themselves and each other. They were made to re-establish trust.
The reproducibility crisis is a problem, but at least it's a problem that has been recognized and is being addressed. From where I sit, however, in a research area that can be roughly summarized as the foundations of physics — cosmology, physics beyond the standard model, the foundations of quantum mechanics — I have a front-row seat to a much bigger problem.
I work in theory development. Our task, loosely speaking, is to come up with new — somehow better — explanations for already existing observations, and then make predictions to test these ideas. We have no reproducibility crisis because we have no data to begin with ... [Bold emphasis added]
Here's something that will makes your jaw not just drop, but go into a tailspin:
In December 2015, the LHC collaborations CMS and ATLAS presented evidence for a deviation from standard-model physics at approximately 750 GeV resonant mass2, 3. The excess appeared in the two-photon decay channel and had a low statistical significance. It didn't look like anything anybody had ever predicted. By August 2016, new data had revealed that the excess was merely a statistical fluctuation. But before this happened, high-energy physicists produced more than 600 papers to explain the supposed signal. Many of these papers were published in the field's top journals. None of them describes reality.
Christian Catalini, Christian Fons-Rosen, and Patrick Gaulé in Vox.eu: Cheaper flights and scientific collaboration
Noah Smith in Noahpinion: Do economists have physics envy? (Part 2).
Maria Konnikova in New Yorker: Practice Doesn't Make Perfect.
Rhaina Cohen in The Atlantic: What Programming's Past Reveals About Today's Gender Pay Gap.
Gina Kolata in NY Times: Lost in Academia: So Many Research Scientists, So Few Openings as Professors.
As always, we go the extra mile to get you the juiciest of excerpts from the actual story:
Although the bank’s headquarters remained in Germany, power migrated from conservative Frankfurt to London, the investment-banking hub where the most lavish profits were generated. The assimilation of different banking cultures was not always successful. In the nineties, when hundreds of Americans went to work for Deutsche Bank in London, German managers had to place a sign in the entrance hall spelling out “Deutsche” phonetically, because many Americans called their employer “Douche Bank.”
[Bold emphasis added, in case any nanopolitan reader needed a confirmation].
Math with Bad Drawings: What Does Probability Mean in Your Profession? (cartoon)
Tim Harford: Multi-tasking: how to survive in the 21st century.
Sociological Images: Sociologist Michael Kimmel on why everyone needs feminism (video, 15 min)
Brad Plumer at Vox: A new study finds there are too many scientific studies.
Esther Inglis-Arkell in io9: The Romance That Led To A Legendary Science Burn:
Pauli was not just hurt by the fact that his marriage had come apart - he jokingly referred to being married only in a "loose way" - but by his bride's choice of man. Deppner had left him for a chemist, of all things, and not even a good one. Pauli loudly complained to his friends, "Had she taken a bullfighter I would have understood - with such a man I could not compete - but a chemist - such an average chemist!" [Bold emphasis added]
I heard this quote in Prof. George Whitesides's talk titled "Reinventing Chemistry" at IISc two years ago; it's nice to get the back story with names (if you are impatient, go to 28:45 in the video).
Apparently, mathematicians take a dim view of the use of computers in proving theorems. This blog post from the Heidelberg Laureates Forum gets a mathematician to articulate why:
Efim Zelmanov spoke up first, saying, “A proof is what is considered to be a proof by all mathematicians, so I’m pessimistic about machine-generated proofs.” He mentioned the four-color theorem, which was the first major proof to be solved using a computer, in 1976. One hundred twenty-four years after it was first proposed, Kenneth Appel and Wolfgang Haken cleverly reduced the problem to checking the properties of 1,936 maps by computer. The result was hundreds of pages of hand analysis combined with thousands of lines of computer code. Many mathematicians hated this, not accepting the proof because it was impossible to check by hand. Michael Atiyah chimed in with a similar perspective: “We aim to get understanding in mathematics,” he said. “If we have to rely on an unintelligible computer proof, it’s not satisfactory.”
Here's another story from 2004 on the proof of Kepler's Conjecture on "the most efficient way to pack oranges":
A leading mathematics journal has finally accepted that one of the longest-standing problems in the field -- the most efficient way to pack oranges -- has been conclusively solved.
That is, if you believe a computer.
The answer is what experts -- and grocers -- have long suspected: stacked as a pyramid. That allows each layer of oranges to sit lower, in the hollows of the layer below, and take up less space than if the oranges sat directly on top of each other.
While that appeared to be the correct answer, no one offered a convincing mathematical proof until 1998 -- and even then people were not entirely convinced.
For six years, mathematicians have pored over hundreds of pages of a paper by Dr. Thomas C. Hales, a professor of mathematics at the University of Pittsburgh.
But Dr. Hales's proof of the problem, known as the Kepler Conjecture, hinges on a complex series of computer calculations, too many and too tedious for mathematicians reviewing his paper to check by hand.
Believing it thus, at some level, requires faith that the computer performed the calculations flawlessly, without any programming bugs. For a field that trades in dispassionate logic and supposedly unambiguous truths and falsehoods, that is an uncomfortably gray in-between.
See also: Dana Mackenzie in The American Scientist: The Proof is in the Packing.
In his WSJ opinion piece, Wilson gives a blunt answer by way of a "professional secret": "Many of the most successful scientists in the world today are mathematically no more than semiliterate." He does make the rather unexceptionable point that "if your level of mathematical competence is low, plan to raise it," but also adds that "you can do outstanding scientific work with what you have." Of course, if your level of math is not all that high, he also suggests you avoid "most of physics and chemistry, as well as a few specialties in molecular biology."
His article has led to tons of responses: Paul Krugman agrees, but with a caveat: "at least in the areas I work in, you do need some mathematical intuition, even if you don’t necessarily need to know a lot of formal theorems."
A couple of other responses. In Science's Cult of Calculation, Jag Bhalla talks about the rivalry in science between "math-monks" vs. "pluralist reasoners". Terry McGlynn places Wilson's piece within the context of Tribalism in the sciences: empiricists vs. theoreticians.
The tribe of theoretical ecologists appears to have got very upset with Wilson's piece for reasons that lie within the internal politics of that field -- this post explains some of it, and has tons of links.
[Richard Muller] basically appears to have suffered from nothing more than characteristic physicist arrogance, the belief that people in lesser sciences just don’t know what they’re doing. (Economists experience this all the time, but we make up for it by being equally condescending to sociologists.)
That's from Paul Krugman's comment on "one prominent skeptic who actually believed that the data was being manipulated has reported in detail on his efforts to produce clean climate data. And guess what: his data overwhelmingly confirm what climate scientists have been saying."
Steven Blau weighs in on the matter over at Physics Today Blogs [Update: I think the real value in Blau's piece is in the link to an earlier article by Murray Gibson]. Here's Blau:
It hardly raises an eyebrow when someone proclaims that physicists are an arrogant lot. The topic recurs periodically at the Physics Today lunch table and even was the subject of a February 2003 Opinion piece that J. Murray Gibson wrote for the magazine. Gibson took the arrogance of physicists as a given and often helpful quality, but he argued that it had its negative consequences as well.
I think I see where the notion of the arrogant physicist comes from.
Don't forget to read the push-back in the comments!
Science of the Physical Universe 22: The Unity of Science: From the Big Bang to the Brontosaurus.
Empirical and Mathematical Reasoning 14: Fat Chance.
These are the examples used by Adrienne Lee, a history student at Harvard, to argue that [link via Christopher Shea at Brainiac]:
These ridiculously named classes are a manifestation of a general bias within the Core and General Education programs that all students who choose to concentrate in the humanities are both incapable of doing math and science and completely uninterested in those subjects.
Here's the contrast with titles of humanities courses:
Science and math concentrators often find humanities courses just as challenging or uninteresting, but at least they get treated like adults. “Western Ascendancy: The Mainsprings of Global Power from 1600 to the Present” sounds just as respectable and intellectually fulfilling as anything I could find in the history department. It isn’t called “The West: Why We’re Awesome” just to attract the attention non-history buffs.
* * *
I checked the General Ed course page at Harvard; here are a few more that fit this genre of course titles:
Science of the Physical Universe 27. Science and Cooking: From Haute Cuisine to Soft Matter Science.
*Science of Living Systems 24. From Neurons to Nations: The Science of Early Childhood Development and the Foundations of a Successful Society.
Science of the Physical Universe 28 (formerly Science A-50). Invisible Worlds.
Science of the Physical Universe 20. What is Life? From Quarks to Consciousness.
I'm still trying to figure out which is worse: "Fat Chance" (filed under Empirical and Mathematical Reasoning) or "Evolutionary Biology: Sex, Survival, and the Orgy of Species" (under Science of Living Systems).
Cosma Shalizi offers his take, which I have been looking forward to for quite sometime (over a year, actually). And it is Cosma at his best -- full of incisive arguments (with tons of links) as well as provocative insights. Here he is on the physicists' blind spot in econophysics:
If econophysics is dignified enough to have a tragic flaw, it is this. I have lost count of the number of times I have heard other statistical physicists insist, or explain, or just assume, that ecology, or evolution, or neuroscience, or, social networks, or, yes, economics, "is, after all, just another many-body problem", so of course it must yield to the insights of statistical mechanics. This is why our conquistador spirit leads us to make assaults on these disciplines, and not, say, classical philology. I don't even think that this is wrong. I think the problem is that we have a drastically impoverished notion of bodies, and how they might interact.
Here he is about neo-classical economics:
... [M]ainstream economics is clearly false. I don't say this just because perfectly competitive markets aren't the only economic institution in this world; the neo-classical framework now includes very sophisticated theories of imperfect competition, imperfect information and non-market institutions, and these developments are mainstream enough to result in Nobel Prizes (in, e.g., 1993, 1994 and 2001). The foundation on which the neo-classical framework is raised, though, is an idea about rational agents: rationality means maximizing expected utility, where expectations come from maintaining a coherent subjective probability distribution, updated through Bayes's rule; moreover, the utility function is strictly self-regarding. ... Alas, experimental psychology, and still more experimental economics, amply demonstrate that empirically it's just wrong. We are boundedly rational, and, for good or for ill, we give a damn about others. Moreover, there are very general reasons, having to do with the computational intractability of optimization problems, and the severe limitations on computable Bayesian learners, to think that no creature could ever be a "rational agent" in the neo-classical sense. Bounded rationality is the only kind we encounter, and the only kind we are going to encounter. ... But, as I said, all the rest of the neo-classical framework rests on this conception of individual decision-making; remove it and all the models are standing on air. So: neo-classical economics is false.
Two interesting pieces (and both are for free access). The first is a new feature called "Connections", an essay series for exploring connections -- hidden and not so hidden -- among disciplines. The first essay in the series, by Nigel Goldenfeld and Carl Woese, is about biology:
This is an extraordinary time for biology, because the perspective we have indicated places biology within a context that must necessarily engage other disciplines more strongly aware of the importance of collective phenomena. Questions suggested by the generic energy, information and gene flows to which we have alluded will probably require resolution in the spirit of statistical mechanics and dynamical systems theory. In time, the current approach of post-hoc modelling will be replaced by interplay between quantitative prediction and experimental test, nowadays more characteristic of the physical sciences.
The second is an exposé by Jim Giles on what a worried bunch of science journal publishers would stoop to. What are they worried about? Open access publishing. What did they do? Consult a public relations 'pit bull' whose earlier clients included Jeffrey Skilling of Enron (who is serving a 24-year jail term now) and ExxonMobil:
The consultant [Eric Dezenhall] advised them to focus on simple messages, such as "Public access equals government censorship". He hinted that the publishers should attempt to equate traditional publishing models with peer review, and "paint a picture of what the world would look like without peer-reviewed articles".
Dezenhall also recommended joining forces with groups that may be ideologically opposed to government-mandated projects such as PubMed Central, including organizations that have angered scientists. One suggestion was the Competitive Enterprise Institute, a conservative think-tank based in Washington DC, which has used oil-industry money to promote sceptical views on climate change. Dezenhall estimated his fee for the campaign at $300,000–500,000.
Two interesting things from the article. First, among the publishers that Eric Dezenhall advised is the American Chemical Society, which has been anti-open access right from the beginning. And second, here's a 'definition' of censorship according to its vice-president:
... On the censorship message, he [Brian Crawford, a senior vice-president at the American Chemical Society] adds: "When any government or funding agency houses and disseminates for public consumption only the work it itself funds, that constitutes a form of selection and self-promotion of that entity's interests."
Over at the excellent Open Access News blog, Peter Suber comments on this story, and covers some of the bloggers' reactions to this story.
I have already written about the not so happy consequences of physicists' forays into the economic realm ('econophysics'). The last several weeks has brought us several interesting run-ins between these fields. The latest episode started with Robin Hanson's grouse:
Consider how differently the public treats physics and economics. Physicists can say that this week they think the universe has eleven dimensions, three of which are purple, and two of which are twisted clockwise, and reporters will quote them unskeptically, saying "Isn't that cool!" But if economists say, as they have for centuries, that a minimum wage raises unemployment, reporters treat them skeptically and feel they need to find a contrary quote to "balance" their story.
He has already received several responses, including one from a physicist: Sean Carroll. If you have some free minutes, start from there and work through the links.
Remember I linked to Chris Hayes' article on what else one learns in an economics course? This led to several interesting discussions, one of which made this analogy:
... While [chemistry and physics are] historically separate disciplines, there's a sense in which chemistry can be thought of as a subset of physics -- we understand chemical reactions on a deep level because we understand the physics of how subatomic particles interact. There is knowledge that's a part of chemistry that wouldn't conventionally be thought of as part of physics, but it can be thought of as studying aggregated interactions that are themselves part of physics. To the extent that chemistry is supported by valid theory, the theory rests on our understanding of physics. [...]
... [I]t appears obvious to me that a solid theoretical underpinning for economics would have to come from psychology; the relationship between economics and psychology is precisely analogous to the relationship between chemistry and physics, in that the first is the study of aggregated behavior (in a particular context) of elements whose behavior is described by the second. And this is a problem for those claiming that important new knowlege is likely to come out of manipulation of mathematical models in economics, because psychology isn't currently in a state where it can provide the sort of solid predictions about human behavior that would be necessary to support those models. In factual situation X, if you ask an academic psychologist "What will person Y do?" the honest answer will be "Beats me, could do Z, could do something else, depends." But economic theory depends on claims that "In situation X (prices go down) people generally will do Z (buy more)," even though those claims aren't dependent on any solid theory of human behavior.
Finally, Mark Thoma has been grappling with wild claims emanating from the econophysics zone: here and here. This kind of 'attacks' from outside has made Mark defend his turf, examine what economists can learn from evolutionary theorists, and re-examine the methodological foundations. As you can guess, Mark is one of my favourite econ bloggers.
... of the Programming Language kind:
The remarkably wide range of programming languages would seem to offer something for everyone. We could celebrate diversity. We could let a thousand flowers bloom. What actually happens, more often, is that we launch a crusade to convert the infidels—or else exterminate them.
In 1975 Edsger W. Dijkstra, a major figure in the structured-programming movement, wrote a memo titled "How Do We Tell Truths that Might Hurt?" The "truths" were mostly Dijkstra's opinions of programming languages; how he told them was very bluntly. Fortran is "an infantile disorder," PL/I "a fatal disease," APL "a mistake, carried through to perfection." Students exposed to COBOL "are mentally mutilated beyond hope of regeneration," he said. "The use of COBOL cripples the mind; its teaching should, therefore, be regarded as a criminal offense." When the memo was published a few years later, defenders of COBOL and BASIC replied in kind, although none of them were quite able to match Dijkstra's acid rhetoric.
I posted a while ago about some of the interesting responses from people when they are introduced to anthropologists.
Commenters are having a riot on this post at Cosmic Variance and this one at Brian Weatherson's site. The topic? Strangers' responses when they meet physicists and philosophers, respectively.
This one by a commenter named 'Barry' is a jem:
Five or so years ago I was on a panel of prospective jurors being questioned by an attorney for the defendant:
Attorney: What is your profession?
Me: I am a philosopher
Attorney: Philosophy? Is that a "helping profession"
Me: Its more like a helpless profession
Judge (laughing): This is no place for jokes..your out.
My all time favourite story, however, was from Alex Tabarrok. The conversation is between Tabarrok and his masseuse:
"Has anyone told you that you are great today? I can tell that you have a lot of loving energy. You're a very giving person."
"Wow," I replied, "no one has ever said that. I'm an economist."
"Oh," she replied, pausing slightly, "I guess I was wrong."
Okay, they are not real wars. But, they are not love, either!
First, we have Eszter Hargittai of Crooked Timber firing the first shot with a complaint that physicists who work on the theory of social networks generally do not pay attention to the work of sociologists in the same field (a subset of social network theory is covered by Malcolm Gladwell's bestseller Tipping Point). Some of the work of the former, sometimes, ends up reproducing results that were discovered by sociologists ages ago. Henry Farrell, another Crooked Timber blogger, asked Cosma Shalizi, a physicist, for his perspective. (Cosma has an excellent blog Three toed sloth, and announced -- I think, for the first time! -- to the world a new way of looking at the US election results using beautiful maps; he is a man with an enormous depth of expertise in an enormously wide range of subjects). Now, you have a nice discussion about interdisciplinary and crossdisciplinary research, and the responsibilities of those who do such research. Much of the discussion is quite accessible to non-experts.
Then we have this tongue in cheek stuff from Brad DeLong about John Baez's attempt to state Einstein's general relativity equation in plain English.
