“The public has a distorted view of science because children are taught in school that science is a collection of firmly established truths. In fact, science is not a collection of truths. It is a continuing exploration of mysteries.”
- Freeman Dyson
“Science isn’t some objective reasonable force outside of politics. Scientists spend most of their careers chasing government grant funding, and fighting for appointments and promotions in government-funded university systems. Science follows politics, and nobody knows this as much as the disingenuous politicians who claim that their policies are subordinate to scientific findings.”
“You should, in science, believe logic and arguments, carefully drawn, and not authorities.”
- Richard Feynman
(HT: Shane Parrish of Farnam Street)
“Science is a way of thinking much more than it is a body of knowledge.”
- Carl Sagan
Another rebuke of the idea that there is such a thing as 'settled science.' More rebukes here.
“The existence of a limit to science is, however, made clear by its inability to answer childlike elementary questions having to do with first and last things – questions such as 'How did everything begin?' 'What are we all here for?' 'What is the point of living?'”
- Nobel Laureate Sir Peter Medawar
“The scientist explores the world of phenomena by successive approximations. He knows that his data are not precise and that his theories must always be tested. It is quite natural that he tends to develop healthy skepticism, suspended judgment, and disciplined imagination — not only about other people's ideas but also about his own.”
- Edwin Hubble
Adding this one to the list of similar quotes from scientists and thinkers that includes Albert Einstein (here and here), Richard Feynman and Karl Popper.
(NB: The italics indicate the latter part of the quote may have been added by others.)
“We should never forget that good science is skeptical science. One way in which science proceeds is by attempting to falsify hypotheses; and further, we can embrace any given hypothesis; and then only tentatively, only for as long as we are unable to falsify it.”- Dr. Samuel Shapiro, founder of BU's Slone Epidemiology Center
Dr. Shapiro is yet another addition to a long and impressive list of great thinkers who have made similar points about science: Albert Einstein (here and here), Richard Feynman, Karl Popper, Nassim Taleb and Michael Crichton.
From these quoteworthy giants one idea becomes clear: The idea of a "scientific consensus" or "settled science" is antithetical to science.
(HT: Chris Kresser)
Many people I know are either sleep sensitive or food sensitive, often in inverse proportions. For instance, I have gone without food for as long as five days and, while it wasn't fun, it was quite manageable. My wife's the opposite. Whenever we had newborns in the house, she was able to perform heroic feats of sleep deprivation. But if she misses a meal: Watch out!
For people who have no trouble with sleep deprivation, there tends to be a pervasive belief that sleep is a waste of time or some form of laziness. So, as a natural sleeper, I have been pleased to observe the building scientific evidence that proper sleep is critical to human health. The biggest recent revelation is that sleep allows the brain to clean itself of certain kinds of gunk — the kind of gunk that scientists believe build up and cause dementia and Alzheimer's — so those who don't get proper sleep are setting themselves up for cognitive impairment down the road.
How much you sleep is just one factor. It also seems to matter when you sleep. I first learned about this in the context of insomnia and the related problem of jet lag. Most people know that light and dark are critical to the sleep equation, but it seems natural light is a uniquely potent factor. And while it's obvious how daylight might impact our sleep quality and why, the impact it can have on our health is less obvious. Consider the following:
“Previous observational studies have shown that night owls are as much as twice as likely to suffer from depression as early risers, regardless of how long they sleep …
“In 2018, Vetter published a large, long term study of 32,000 nurses showing that ‘early risers’ were up to 27% less likely to develop depression over the course of four years …
“If someone who normally goes to bed at 1 a.m. goes to bed at midnight instead and sleeps the same duration, they could cut their risk by 23%; if they go to bed at 11 p.m., they could cut it by about 40%.”
When I came across this, I made an immediate connection with teenage sleep patterns. These days, many (plausibly) attribute depression among teenagers to social media, but could sleep be a significator factor as well? Teenagers love to stay up late and sleep in, pushing their sleep window in the opposite direction the above research would indicate is wise. Might doing so have the effect of increasing their chances of experiencing depression?
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Source: "Earlier sleep timing associated with lower depression risk," University of Colorado Boulder
“Jean-Manuel Rozan once spent an entire afternoon arguing about the stock market with Soros. Soros was vehemently bearish, and he had an elaborate theory to explain why — which turned out to be entirely wrong. The stock market boomed. Two years later, Rozan ran into Soros at a tennis tournament. ‘Do you remember our conversation?’ Rozan asked. ‘I recall it very well,’ Soros replied. ‘I changed my mind, and made an absolute fortune.’
“The truest thing about Soros seemed to be what his son Robert had once said: ‘My father will sit down and give you theories to explain why he does this or that. But I remember seeing it as a kid and thinking...at least half of this is bullshit. I mean, you know the reason he changes his position on the market or whatever is because his back starts killing him. It has nothing to do with reason. He literally goes into a spasm, and it’s this early warning sign.’”
- “Blowing Up,” Malcom Gladwell, The New Yorker, April 2002
The whole article from which this anecdote comes is worth reading, but this one story summarizes its central query: Do complex systems and analyses really create success in chaotic environments? Or is success ultimately random, and we create complex systems and theories to post-rationalize and feel secure about our future?
Feynman famously said that “science is the belief in the ignorance of experts.” In the real world, though, it seems the words “ignorance of” have been dropped from the definition. At least, that's the conclusion I often reach when reading about various scientific developments. Many times, I find one expert with influence has determined what scientists believed for decades.
A case in point is a recent Wired article about how the World Health Organization (WHO) went from declaring “FACT: #COVID19 is NOT airborne” in April 2020 (see above) to “placing the inhalation of aerosols at the top of its list of how the disease spreads” in May 2021. The problem appears to be a 60-year misunderstanding of something the first chief epidemiologist of the CDC, Alexander Langmuir, said about tuberculosis. His words seem to have led health scientists to believe particles must be 5 microns or smaller in order for any virus to be classified as “airborne.” (It turns out that even particles as large as 100 microns can spread through the air.)
The irony is that Langmuir's speech was an apology for his own blind belief in the experts that preceded him. In it, he confessed he had been wrong to dismiss the work of Harvard engineer William Firth Wells:
“Like his peers, Langmuir had been brought up in the Gospel of Personal Cleanliness, an obsession that made handwashing the bedrock of US public health policy. He seemed to view Wells’ ideas about airborne transmission as retrograde, seeing in them a slide back toward an ancient, irrational terror of bad air—the ‘miasma theory’ that had prevailed for centuries. Langmuir dismissed them as little more than ‘interesting theoretical points.’”
Langmuir's attitude toward Wells' ideas arguably set tuberculosis health policy back seven years. That was the amount of time that transpired between Wells' book about his findings (1955) and Langmuir's 'apology' speech (1962). Of course, that pales in comparison to the nearly 60 years that have transpired since that speech, which inadvertantly gave rise to the 5-micron myth.
We like to think science is a rigorous process of constant belief interrogation, but that isn’t even close to reality. It turns out scientists are just as lazy as the rest of humanity. They accept without question, assume without challenge and generally fall prey to all the same cognitive biases as the rest of us.
“As [Karl] Popper said, ‘In our infinite ignorance we are all equal.’ Even if someone claims expertise — and they might have a valid claim — there’s an infinite number of things they don’t know that could affect the things they do know. The student who’s not expert in anything can still come up with an idea that can challenge the foundations of the greatest expert. Like the child, the expert is ignorant about a whole bunch of things and could have errors. Someone who lacks that fine-tuned knowledge can still point out those errors and present a better idea.”- Brett Hall on the Naval Podcast
The student example is real. I remember watching a biography series on Einstein. He came up with his theory of relativity while a student at university, and it was derided and ridiculed by all the most prominent professors and scientists of the day. It went on to disrupt the foundations of those great experts and became foundational to science.
“I regard consensus science as an extremely pernicious development that ought to be stopped cold in its tracks. Historically, the claim of consensus has been the first refuge of scoundrels; it is a way to avoid debate by claiming that the matter is already settled. Whenever you hear the consensus of scientists agrees on something or other, reach for your wallet, because you're being had.
“Let’s be clear: the work of science has nothing whatever to do with consensus. Consensus is the business of politics. Science, on the contrary, requires only one investigator who happens to be right, which means that he or she has results that are verifiable by reference to the real world. In science consensus is irrelevant. What is relevant is reproducible results. The greatest scientists in history are great precisely because they broke with the consensus. There is no such thing as consensus science. If it’s consensus, it isn’t science. If it’s science, it isn’t consensus. Period.”
- Michael Crichton
(Source: "Aliens Cause Global Warming")
“If it disagrees with experiment, it's wrong. In that simple statement is the key to science. It doesn't make a difference how beautiful your guess is. It doesn't matter how smart you are, who made the guess or what his name is. If it disagrees with experiment, it's wrong. That's all there is to it.”
- Richard Feynman
(Source: "The Essence Of Science In 60 Seconds")
“The scientific theorist is not to be envied. For Nature, or more precisely experiment, is an inexorable and not very friendly judge of his work. It never says ‘Yes’ to a theory. In the most favorable cases it says ‘Maybe,’ and in the great majority of cases simply ‘No.’ If an experiment agrees with a theory it means for the latter ‘Maybe,’ and if it does not agree it means ‘No.’ Probably every theory will someday experience its ‘No’—most theories, soon after conception.”
- Albert Einstein
What properties must this cause of the universe possess? This cause must be itself uncaused because...an infinite series of causes is impossible. It is therefore the Uncaused First Cause. It must transcend space and time, since it created space and time. Therefore, it must be immaterial and non-physical. It must be unimaginably powerful, since it created all matter and energy.EARTH
Finally...this Uncaused First Cause must also be a personal being...endowed with freedom of the will. His creating the universe is a free act which is independent of any prior determining conditions. So his act of creating can be something spontaneous and new. Freedom of the will enables one to get an effect with a beginning from a permanent, timeless cause. Thus, we are brought not merely to a transcendent cause of the universe but to its Personal Creator.
…just the right size; just the right seasons dictated by just the right tilt of Earth’s axis; just the right magnetic field with just the right intensity; just the right-sized moon creating just the right tides and just the right continental drift; just the right ratio of oxygen to nitrogen; just the right ratios of carbon dioxide to water vapor—and on and on and on.This is related to another scientific concept known as the "Rare Earth hypothesis." According to Wikipedia:
In planetary astronomy and astrobiology, the Rare Earth hypothesis argues that the origin of life and the evolution of biological complexity such as sexually reproducing, multicellular organisms on Earth (and, subsequently, human intelligence) required an improbable combination of astrophysical and geological events and circumstances.This concept applies to the universe as well. As the Discovery Institute puts it in their introduction to "The Fine-Tuning Design Argument":
CELLS
- If the initial explosion of the big bang had differed in strength by as little as 1 part in 10^60, the universe would have either quickly collapsed back on itself, or expanded too rapidly for stars to form. In either case, life would be impossible... (an accuracy of one part in 10^60 can be compared to firing a bullet at a one-inch target on the other side of the observable universe, twenty billion light years away, and hitting the target.)
- Calculations indicate that if the strong nuclear force, the force that binds protons and neutrons together in an atom, had been stronger or weaker by as little as 5%, life would be impossible.
- Calculations...show that if gravity had been stronger or weaker by 1 part in 10 to the 40th power, then life-sustaining stars like the sun could not exist. This would most likely make life impossible.
- If the neutron were not about 1.001 times the mass of the proton, all protons would have decayed into neutrons or all neutrons would have decayed into protons, and thus life would not be possible.
- If the electromagnetic force were slightly stronger or weaker, life would be impossible, for a variety of different reasons.
If it could be demonstrated that any complex organ existed which could not possibly have been formed by numerous, successive, slight modifications, my theory would absolutely break down.Thanks to advances in science since Darwin's time, we now know that every living cell is "full of microscopic nanomachines made of molecules that are irreducibly complex," as Ballard put it. Alter or remove one part and the entire machine breaks down. This means cells could not have formed by the step-by-step evolutionary process Darwin imagined.
On the surface of the cell we would see millions of openings, like the portholes of a vast space ship, opening and closing to allow a continual stream of materials to flow in and out. If we were to enter one of these openings we would find ourselves in a world of supreme technology and bewildering complexity. We would see endless highly organized corridors and conduits branching in every direction away from the perimeter of the cell, some leading to the central memory bank in the nucleus and others to assembly plants and processing units. The nucleus itself would be a vast spherical chamber more than a kilometer in diameter, resembling a geodesic dome inside of which we would see, all neatly stacked together in ordered arrays, the miles of coiled chains of the DNA molecule . . . . We would notice that the simplest of the functional components of the cell, the protein molecules, were, astonishingly, complex pieces of molecular machinery . . . . Yet the life of the cell depends on the integrated activities of thousands, certainly tens, and probably hundreds of thousands of different protein molecules.DNA
The capacity of DNA to store information vastly exceeds that of any other known system; it is so efficient that all the information needed to specify an organism as complex as man weighs less than a few thousand millionths of a gram. The information necessary to specify the design of all the species of organisms which have ever existed on the planet…could be held in a teaspoon and there would still be room left for all the information in every book ever written.CONCLUSION
“All life is problem solving. All organisms are inventors and technicians, good or not so good, successful or not so successful, in solving technical problems.”
- Karl Popper
"In the United States, death certificates are the primary source of mortality statistics, and in most jurisdictions, death can be attributed to disasters only by medical examiners. Survey-based studies can therefore provide important complementary population-level metrics in the wake of natural disasters, despite inherent limitations associated with the nature of participant-reported data, recall bias, nonresponse bias, and survivor bias."
"George Washington researchers said they found that doctors in Puerto Rico at the time of the storm were not aware of new guidelines from the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, released the month after the hurricane, which recommend that doctors also consider a natural disaster’s indirect impacts in assessing how to tally deaths."
"To obtain our figure of 1,052, we compared the number of deaths for each day in 2017 with the average of the number of deaths for the same days in 2015 and 2016. The figures came from the Puerto Rican government, which provided us with tables showing the number of deaths per day and deaths broken down by cause. The 2017 numbers were preliminary, so we limited our analysis to September and October."
"In September and October of 2017, 197 people died of sepsis — a complication of severe infection. That was a 55 percent increase from the average for the same months in 2015 and 2016. Those changes could be explained by delayed medical treatment or poor conditions in homes and hospitals.
"The number of diabetes deaths in September and October 2017, at 666, was 46 percent higher than the average for the same period in the two previous years. Many people with diabetes had difficulty keeping insulin refrigerated, and some had trouble maintaining special diets.
"Deaths from chronic respiratory diseases and Alzheimer’s also appeared to be increased. As for suicide deaths, 49 people took their lives in September and October of 2017, whereas in the same months of 2015 and 2016, an average of 33 people died by suicide."
"Researchers visited more than 3,000 residences across the island and interviewed their occupants, asking whether anyone in their households had died, and whether the storm and its aftermath might have contributed. Residents reported that 38 people living in their households had died between Sept. 20, 2017, when Hurricane Maria struck, and the end of that year.
"That toll, converted into a mortality rate, was extrapolated to the larger population and compared with official statistics from the same period in 2016. Researchers arrived at an estimate of roughly 4,600."