In Which I Shockingly Agree With Sabine That Most Science Is Of Little Or No Value
Given Sabine’s penchant for posting overly shocked thumbnails for her video splash-screens, I present this equivalent dramatic image.
I like to tease Sabine Hossenfelder, especially when she chooses to inform us that she cannot make any choices, but I ought to say when I am with her. And here, except for one word, I am in enthusiastic agreement. She has a new video calling out bad, useless, superfluous time-serving science. Which is, in fact, most of modern science.
Most of physics she says, modern physics, that is, is useless. Or wrong. Or, to her, “pseudoscience”. I prefer bad or broken science, because even bad science is still science. It just isn’t any good, nor is it worthy of funding.
One of the tricks scientists us to fool us and, far worse, fool themselves, is to point to a swelling mass of research, a teeming steaming festering pile of accumulating flotsam and jetsam, and say “Critics! Look upon its size and despair!”
This is a special form of the Appeal to Authority Fallacy, which we might call the Everybody Loves Me Fallacy. Since scientists can point to long careers generously funded by your money, they conclude their theories must be right. All the other scientists love them, which is why they were so free with your money, giving to each other largess in the form of grants. The science is therefore good because money. Lots of it.
Even stronger, scientists use paper count as proof any area is worthy and right. Most are not so far gone as to say this is because of their own large paper count, but just look at the thousands upon thousands–and more coming!–of papers that agree with me! Therefore, we must be right.
Want an example? After reading it, I’ll reveal my new name for the Fallacy.
‘Shut out’: Journal fires editor after publishing research refuting ‘warming climate’
Marty Rowland is no longer a special editor at the American Journal of Economics and Sociology after he published a paper challenging mainstream climate change narratives.
The paper, titled ‘Carbon dioxide and a warming climate are not problems,’ faced immediate calls for retraction, its authors told The College Fix.
When anybody points to the naked scientist, as Rowland tried to here, he is shut out. Shunned. Ignored. Contumely is heaped upon him. He is sent beyond the gates where there is weeping and gnashing of teeth. Thus the another name for our Fallacy is The Scientific Method.
That’s what Sabine’s enemy tried to do with her. Stung by her critique that his paper was nonsense, one scientist tried to call her manager and get her to behave. Only she doesn’t have one. (Except for you dear readers, neither do I.)
We might call this a variant of the Peer Review Fallacy.
Or similar to, but not, the Science Is Self-Correcting Fallacy. The examples Sabine uses work better under this class of bad logic. Endless mathematical models about new particles, fields, multiverses, wiggly strings, and on and on, almost all using pristine proofs–you have a better chance finding a Trump supporter in a Womyns Studies Department than finding a math mistake in these papers–but none relevant to the world. Most won’t be “falsified” or otherwise self-corrected. Almost all will be forgotten. They only serve to bolster CVs, and to suck up grant money.
Cosmologist Will Kinney, whom Sabine points to, agrees: these “papers are mostly useless. Nobody, including the people writing the papers, has any realistic expectation that any of these models are correct. They’re just an exercise in empty mathematical world-building.”
It is not only physics, but all areas of science. Perhaps “climate change” is the worst offender. Endless (endless) papers showing how every good thing will be corrupted once “climate change” hits, while (miraculously) every bad thing will flourish. In medicine it’s the same. Take almost any substance, and we see any number of papers showing health fails by its presence, and illness thrives.
All fields are harmed by this desperate need to DO science. This happens because there are too many scientists. And too much money.
Addendum: Even in math! Huge fraud in publishing in Germany.
Kinney makes this point in reviewing Jesper Moller Grimstrup’s (great name) new book The Ant Mill: How theoretical high-energy physics descended into groupthink, tribalism and mass production of research.
The central metaphor of the title is the phenomenon among army ants of a group of ants becoming detached from the main colony and ending up stuck in a feedback loop of following their own pheromone trails in a circle, until they inevitably die.
Of course, we can replace “theoretical high-energy physics” with your favorite branch and this would largely hold.
Yes, even AI. Some of the heat is already dissipating, as ought to have been expected. (See these two articles on AI’s limitations: predictions, intelligence.) The good news here is that a lot of that hype was built using private, and not your, money. But then we recall much of our money has yet been pledged to it. I doubt there is any talking the administration out of this.
I can’t resist including a paper found by Scott Locklin, on so-called quantum computers (he is a long-time critic). The paper is “Replication of Quantum Factorisation Records with an 8-bit Home Computer, an Abacus, and a Dog” by Peter Gutmann and Stephan Neuhaus. This paper is not peer-reviewed, so it retains its humanity.
I quote only the opening of the Introduction, but if you have a minute, read all of it.
In 1994, mathematician Peter Shor proposed his quantum factorisation algorithm, now known as Shor’s Algorithm. In 2001, a group at IBM used it to factorise the number 15. Eleven years later this was extended to factorise the number 21 [3]. Another seven years later a factorisation of 35 was attempted but failed. Since then no new records have been set, although a number of announcements of such feats have cropped up from time to time alongside the more publicly-visible announcements of quantum supremacy every few months.
And even these factorizations relied on tricks, which they examine in detail. Roughly, the answers were pre-built into the “physics experiments”, their name for so-called quantum computers, that gave the results. They evinced no powers beyond a barking dog. Which they prove.
I could add to this list with evidence-based medicine, a lot of genetics, neo-Darwinism, every so-called soft science, and on and on, but that would take a book. It’s not that all science is bad. It’s that most of it is, and add scientism on top, the argument for cutting off public—not private; they can do what they please—funding strengthens.
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“All fields are harmed by this desperate need to DO science. This happens because there are too many scientists. And too much money.”
And how can it be otherwise—yeah, I know, stop the money. In my old department, in a top 20 research university, a newly hired tenure track faculty member would get some startup funding, then be released into the “wild” to do what—write grants and generate “overhead” for the university and department! This additional funding source was not trivial.
Even in those days, Federal “overhead” on grants was over 50% (IIRC). The grant money rolled in and the university got a cut, the dept got a cut, and even the faculty member got a cut (kickback) when the dept provided/paid for resources that the grant would not allow.
Since everyone was dependent upon such influx of funding, an untenured faculty member lacking in grantsmanship was sure to be cut loose at 5 years and replaced with another candidate/hire more attuned to the financial needs of the institution. ;-)
Toward the end—my end—the department got a new head. Hired because he was a premier grant achiever. Literally bringing federal grants with him in the millions! He addressed the faculty. The essence of his lecture was that every faculty member must write $300-400k worth of grant *applications* each year (in order to pay their salary). These of course were not all necessarily expected to be awarded, but he had an answer for that. As I remember, he said something to the effect that such grant submission was like throwing “spitballs” at the ceiling, eventually some would stick.
Additionally, he set a limit as to how small a grant application could be written for. In short, a grant of a few thousand dollars cost the department as much to process and maintain as one for a few hundred thousand dollars, so don’t waste your and the department’s resources. Oh, and before I forget, he subtly threatened the (already tenured) faculty by telling them that they currently averaged *one* teaching assignment (course/load) per *semester* and without such grant writing (and assumed awards), their teaching load might have to be raised to typical university standards—which was four courses per semester.
The silence in the room—as they say—was deafening. ;-)
"Why is faith in science failing," ask soyentists from atop their paper towers. New study concludes that it's because soyentists are super smart. It is added to the paper tower.