I haven’t seen how effective down-voting is on Ars, but in other places I’ve been, it can be a way for some people to exact revenge or mean-troll on opinions and/or people they don’t like and not necessarily acted on for the quality of a post. The up-votes can be a popularity contest not based on substance either. I’m glad to hear that it works somewhere, however.
I don’t know who threw the first stone but I do remember Apple engaging in name calling and other negativity from the very first time I heard about them in the very early 1980s. It’s a tad hypocritical to cast Apple as an innocent victim in the land of trolls.
The problem with the up-down voting system is easy to see on Slashdot: It emboldens the Slashdot community to ignore challenges to deeply-cherised beliefs – even when there is nothing at all wrong with the critique.
What I find intriguing is that nobody ever thinks to bring philosophy into the mix. The real problem here is that philosophy has been so marginalized by the professional scientists themselves – especially physicists – that people basically lack guides on how to reason in science. The solution to this is probably not as elusive as Popular Science would have us believe, for I think the truth here is that they know that if they built a rating system based upon actual philosophical principles, that mainstream science – especially astrophysics and cosmology – would become transparently problematic. That would nevertheless appear to solve multiple problems with one fix:
- It would bring philosophy of science back from the margins of discussion
- It would focus dialogue on the claims rather than the emotions
- It would educate the public on how to think critically about science
- It would act as a guide for the public on what unconventional ideas are worth paying attention to
The rating systems are crappy for the simple reason that the scientists do not want effective rating systems.
An observation based upon recent conversations. Yes, filtered through my biases.
I don’t want to veer too far into a discussion of the science itself, but I do want to make sure that you realize that you seem to be ignoring the critics …
Keep in mind that the Milky Way is a very large galaxy, and we’ve had plenty of time to observe its core in good detail. Guess what? No lensing …
http://www.extinctionshift.com/SignificantFindings08.htm
This is really quite straightforward, but guess what? It has received no mention within any of the articles they are throwing at you.
Also, I should note that it’s circular to point to lensing as evidence for dark matter, since most lensing inferences absolutely require dark matter to create the lens. This is rarely emphasized within the science journalism you are seeing, so it’s not really your fault that you failed to realize it.
We’ve also observed Stephen Crothers get kicked out of his PhD program for suggesting problems with the black hole mathematics. Now, he’s not exactly been as polite as he could have been on this topic, but it raises serious questions about what the consensus means.
That’s actually the problem – that you’re not being informed that there is a critic worth listening to on this subject. The astrophysical community goes very far out of its way to ignore and ridicule Halton Arp’s critique, but keep in mind that Arp had to leave the country in order to find telescope time to do this research – which, again, raises very serious questions about the source of the consensus on dark energy.
The truth is that we’ve seen a number of anomalies on these redshift inferences, and much of the public apparently doesn’t realize that there’s more than one way to make a redshift. If you blast charged particles at a neutral cloud of gas, for instance, at particular velocities you’ll eventually see redshifts from the resulting ionization (called critical ionization velocity), and it has nothing at all to do with Doppler shifting. Arp was a fairly famous astronomer before he suggested that the Big Bang theory might be nonsense. A number of galaxies are named after him to this day, and the person who kicked him off his telescope time here in the States had research which was challenged by Arp’s claim.
The fact is that engineers are tasked with making things, whereas scientists are tasked with explaining why those things work. This can lead to some very unusual scenarios. For instance, it might be a surprise, but IEEE – the world’s largest scientific institution – has a Transactions on Plasma Science which publishes papers on plasma cosmology. Among all nstitutions, IEEE is probably most responsible for semiconductors, computers, etc., and yet the plasma cosmology papers tend to have abandoned Relativity. So, we have a situation where IEEE and the Astrophysical Journal generally don’t agree on a whole host of issues. And it is IEEE – not the astrophysicists – which has the most engineers and lab coats creating actual products.
You will be stuck at this level of the debate until you read Jeff Schmidt’s critique of the physics PhD program. There’s much, much more going on than this behind the scenes, out of view of the general public.
It seems they should have at least tried a different commenting system. SInce I moved to Disqus (which boingboing used to use as well) pretty much all spam and stopped. Apparently Discourse, which Boingboing uses now, is also pretty good at blocking the spam. Since PopSci complained about spam that kind of suggests they didn’t try some of the better systems.
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Thanks for pointing out that book. It sounds interesting, and I ordered it on Amazon. I was not aware, for example, that there are departments where you don’t get to see your qual score. OTOH, I think the two years of nothing but homework is necessary, and though it is discipline imposed from outside, that’s what it takes to beat a monkey brain into a state where it’s capable of thinking in a way that allows it to think about aspects of the physical world that are far beyond our everyday experience. The way of thinking inherent in philosophy comes much more naturally to us than that in physics, but it applies much better to dealing with human problems than to the nature of physical reality.
You will note that all of the people you mention bring up string theory as an example of this, and none of them mention dark matter or black holes. String theory is the one major case in modern physics where I think your point has a lot of merit (though it sounds as if Witten might have actually dredged something useful out of it, really recently, I’m not really qualified to say how useful it is). If you had mentioned string theory as an example, rather than dark matter and black holes, I would not have immediately written you off as a crank, because a lot of scientists, myself included, have serious doubts about it. The relevant difference is that string theory hasn’t really produced any testable predictions, where a test could disprove it, which puts it on a very different footing than most of modern physics.
One thing that I also notice in the sources you quote is that, while they make, quite possibly reasonable, calls for reforming the institutions of theoretical physics, none of them even hint or suggest that what is required is more laymen being involved in the discussion, or that laymen are qualified to be a part of the discussion.
Since I, myself, am an applied physicist, my exposure to these debates in the theoretical world is limited. I can say, however, that a huge body of modern physics has been tested to the point where we can make ridiculously accurate predictions about a huge variety of phenomena. All of this stuff (QM, relativity, statistical physics, etc) was, at one point, highly theoretical and controversial. While the people you quote make some good points suggesting that the system and institution of science could work better, and I think it probably could work better, there is ample evidence that it works quite well in a lot of cases, and I can’t think of any social institution that can claim results as good.
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Popular Science has an evidence-based reason for shutting down its comment section
And, let’s face it. The main reason was climate change/impact denier trollies and astroturfers.
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The only person saying this is probably me, to be honest. What is transparently missing from science education is the Socratic Circle technique which many people have experienced in their English literature classes. We are not currently teaching students how to think critically about what they are memorizing. There is a fantastic lecture on YouTube by Eric Mazur titled “Confessions of a Converted Lecturer”. Long story short: When he tests students on the concepts rather than the problem-solving, he notices that there are students who can ace the problem sets, but who completely fail the concepts. What this strongly suggests is that we are rewarding thoughtless memorization in the sciences. The consequences are enormous. If you ask me, it’s creating an entire culture of scientism – hordes of people who don’t actually understand the science which they profess belief in.
There are good ideas on how to fix this out there. Most of them involve teaching concepts first, and problem-solving second. I went to an engineering school myself, and I can tell you firsthand that this was not done. But, if it had been, it would have made a big difference. The brain cannot easily question problem sets, but it can question conceptual relationships.
There is actually a lot of research out there (Modeling Instruction, Force Concept Inventory, Peer Instruction, Constructivism, Computer-Supported Collaborative Learning, etc) which suggests better ways to teach science than lectures, labs and problem sets. The real problem is that the universities are resisting changes – which is why we are about to see some disruption in the higher education market.
There have been a great number of surprises in recent years. The astrophysical and cosmological theories are undergoing changes on a weekly basis. What tends to happen is that we see some huge surprise. There are then very radical claims that this will require a dramatic alteration to the theory. A week goes by and minor tweaks are suggested to the models to accommodate the observation. And not long after, science articles are run with “Problem Solved!”. And the anomaly is then forgotten.
What generally never happens during this cyclical process is a re-examination of these anomalies from the perspective of competing worldviews. And so, what we basically get is a doubling down over and over on the original hypotheses. Sometimes, in order to make the original hypothesis work, scientific laws must be broken. For instance, neutron stars violate the principle of the “Island of Stability”. But, notice that you’ve never seen this mentioned within any of the mainstream press releases.
Check this out, from a critical paper by Tom Van Flandern titled “The Speed of Gravity – What the Experiments Say” …
The most amazing thing I was taught as a graduate student of celestial
mechanics at Yale in the 1960s was that all gravitational interactions
between bodies in all dynamical systems had to be taken as
instantaneous. This seemed unacceptable on two counts. In the first
place, it seemed to be a form of “action at a distance”. Perhaps no
one has so elegantly expressed the objection to such a concept better
than Sir Isaac Newton: “That one body may act upon another at a
distance through a vacuum, without the mediation of any thing else, by
and through which their action and force may be conveyed from one to
the other, is to me so great an absurdity, that I believe no man who
has in philosophical matters a competent faculty of thinking, can ever
fall into it” [ I]. But mediation requires propagation, and finite
bodies should be incapable of propagating at infinite speeds since
that would require infinite energy. So instantaneous gravity seemed
to have an element of magic to it.The second objection was that we had all been taught that Einstein’s
special relativity (SR), an experimentally well-established theory,
proved that nothing could propagate in forward time at a speed greater
than that of light in a vacuum. Indeed, as astronomers we were taught to
calculate orbits using instantaneous forces; then extract the position
of some body along its orbit at a time of interest, and calculate
where that position would appear as seen from Earth by allowing for
the finite propagation speed of light from there to here. It seemed
incongruous to allow for the finite speed of light from the body to
the Earth, but to take the effect of Earth’s gravity on that same body
as propagating from here to there instantaneously. Yet that was the
required procedure to get the correct answers.These objections were certainly not new when I raised them. They have
been raised and answered thousands of times in dozens of different
ways over the years since general relativity (GR) was set forth in
1916.
Notice that objections which are raised thousands of times are not necessarily written about in popular scientific articles, because most people have never even seen this objection.
The first step to thinking critically about science is to pay attention to the critics.
Mother Jones is the worst. All of their articles in relation to firearms are ridiculously biased. I wish there was a news source that objectively looked at issues instead of basing their beliefs off of ignorant political tribalism and filling in the gaps with flimsy statistics.
It sounds exactly like a microcosm of how we (the US, at least) have become much more polarized as a whole in the past couple of decades. I’ve been recently reading articles about how even during McCarthy’s witch-hunts, the left and right were not as isolated from each other as they are today.
As it becomes ever easier to surround yourself with like-minded opinions, our beliefs grow ever more entrenched, our vilification of the other side grows stronger, and our ability to believe that other points of view can be worth listening to grows weaker.
So when you read an article that challenges your beliefs, if you can immediately scroll down and find some yahoo on your “side” dismissing it out of hand then your brain can breathe a sigh of relief and take comfort in being surrounded by your like-minded opinions. Or even (as the study shows) if you scroll down and find the other side’s yahoo’s spouting some nonsense, you can re-affirm your belief that the other guys are idiots, and again ignore the article.
It’s only when we have the article and nothing else do we have to think about the contents (per the study), or, more likely, flip back to our favorite echo chamber and continue ignoring it.
Is this a good example? I’m pretty sure general relativity maintains that changes in gravitational fields propagate at the speed of light. Wikipedia seems to agree and argues that experiments (although depending on theory) support this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speed_of_gravity
Also, typically when we are speaking of atomic nuclei, we are just assuming that gravity is inconsequential; because it takes neutron star density in order for gravity to have an effect this is a pretty good approximation, but obviously people do believe in neutron stars, except those who think they might be strange matter or free quarks instead.
I think you’re absolutely right that the scientific community would do better to engage with serious critics. Behind the apparent objectivity of the Scientific Method is the same kind of politics and as in any other field of human endeavour.
However, the comments section of Popular Science is not the place for this kind of debate. If you’ve read the comments on just about anything relating to science on the internet, you’ll know that there is a vast and highly motivated group of people ready to jump on it with well-prepared screeds that are both utterly tangential and completely unsupported by any kind of evidence. Moderating these people is a Sisyphean task as every single deleted comment turns into a debate about censorship, or a debate about the scientific method itself, featuring ill-considered pet theories misusing the word “quantum” a lot.
I’m honestly relieved to see the tide turning on comments, finally. I predict more sites will go the same way, leaving comments to bloggers who can take a more distributed approach to moderating their own comments.
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Yes, this is what we should expect since wikipedia is an encyclopedia – which, even when they were in print, were fundamentally designed to summarize conventional scientific theory. The problem for this current decision by Popular Science becomes apparent when one reads on in the Van Flandern paper …
Even today in discussions of gravity in USENET newsgroups on the
Internet, the most frequently asked question and debated topic is
“What is the speed of gravity?’ It is only heard less often in the
classroom because many teachers and most textbooks head off the
question by hastily assuring students that gravitational waves
propagate at the speed of light, leaving the firm impression, whether
intended or not, that the question of gravity’s propagation speed has
already been answered.Yet, anyone with a computer and orbit computation or numerical
integration software can verify the consequences of inducing a delay
into gravitational interactions. The effect on computed orbits is usually
disastrous because conservation of angular momentum is destroyed.
My point here is not to dive too deeply into the science itself (the paper can be found on the Internet, and there are indeed many rebuttals). The point is really that regardless of what professional scientists are having people believe on this particular debate through scientific press releases, the textbook manufacturers and our physics education programs are specifically avoiding the instruction of this critical question. It’s the Usenet newsgroups where the critical question gets asked. Soooooo …
… What is the public to think when the scientific community demonstrates that it is so unwilling to even invite their students to ask critical questions, that they would prefer to simply sever two-way communications with the public? Many of us who have been diligently reading the latest education reform books have come to see the one-way lecture as part of the problem of science education, as it’s based upon the notion of filling an empty vessel with facts. The more modern instructional techniques like Modeling Instruction and Peer Instruction tend to add critical thinking into science education using two-way dialogue.
Look again at what the Popular Science article actually says:
A politically motivated, decades-long war on expertise has eroded the
popular consensus on a wide variety of scientifically validated
topics. Everything, from evolution to the origins of climate change,
is mistakenly up for grabs again. Scientific certainty is just another
thing for two people to “debate” on television. And because comments
sections tend to be a grotesque reflection of the media culture
surrounding them, the cynical work of undermining bedrock scientific
doctrine is now being done beneath our own stories, within a website
devoted to championing science.
In science, there is no timetable for when anything can be said to no longer be “up for grabs”. Settled science is, plain and clear, an oxymoron. Their intent seems to be to avoid helping public opinions which may undermine “bedrock scientific doctrine”. They don’t want two people to discuss scientific certainty on television, something they dismissivley term “debate” by including the term in quote marks as if to say, “this is not a valid debate; it is a mockery of what debate means”.
They’ve gone out of their way here to be very clear on what bothers them: It’s the idea of people disagreeing with “science”. Nevermind that within the PhD programs, ideology is now apparently an important aspect of selecting those who “think like a scientist”. And nevermind that the actual definition of a “professional” is one who is simply good at knowing what that ideology is which they went to great efforts to memorize.
In the process of defending mainstream Science, Popular Science appears to be taking up a position which pits them squarely against science education reform.
Hm. No cites on that page, and that makes me very very cautious. Does the book have citations? I notice it’s been out for a while. Have any recent publications in peer-reviewed journals discussing these ideas been made?
I was also able to find this:
http://www.scienceinthebible.net/author.htm
Same person?
If so, this would make me even more cautious. Books are rather easier to publish, given that they’re not always subject to peer review.
It might help to remind people that there seem to be big ideas being thrown out here: The idea of the long tail niches enabled by the Internet, and that of the crowd that has wisdom buried within it. Clay Shirky, Jeff Howe, Susain Cain, Lada Adamic, Michael Nielsen, Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Peter Gloor, Chris Anderson, James Surowiecki, Howard Rheingold … I’m pretty sure that every single one of those authors has written books that in some way deal with at least one of these two notions.
It’s not clear to me that the people who are so quick to throw this idea out are familiar with the idea’s success, to date. After all, it is this “long tail” which Amazon gets much of its profits from. That same long tail is what changed the music industry forever – a process which has already begun to destroy the notion of blockbuster Hollywood movies. One might even argue that it is the long tail that BoingBoing pulls much of its content from. Why would science be so different as to not have any value within its own long tail?
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It’s a pretty typical anti-Einstein crank. He claims gravitational lensing is actually an effect caused by stellar atmospheres, and that he’s the first to understand Galilean relativity. He seems more concerned with selling his book than letting the world know how this would work, however, so it’s hard to critique directly without access to his model. One can guess, however, that his model will fail to account for effects such as:
- The 43 extra arc seconds in Mercury’s precession
- Relativistic clock discrepancies as observed in the GPS system
- Gravitational redshift of light
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But clearly some communities have more constructive discussion than others. I’d certainly never argue that all comments be eradicated everywhere. However, when the discussion is so unproductive, the signal-to-noise ration is so low, it provides a disincentive to actually have the kind of discussion that would uncover this “hidden wisdom”. Not only that, it undermines the content of the articles and–at least in my opinion–damages the credibility of the site.
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Here’s the thing. I decided several years ago I wanted to understand quantum field theory, so, considering I was a bright individual with a MS in Math I figured I’d just learn it.
I picked up “Quantum Field Theory for Mathematicians” and that was too hard. So I picked up “Quantum Field Theory for Dummies” and that was too hard. I bought some intro books on quantum mechanics; I was able to work out the answers to the questions, but I didn’t feel like I really understood what I was doing. So, now I’m actually taking 8 credit hours of intro grad physics at the University, and while no class has kicked my butt as hard as these, I’m finally starting to get it. If I can keep up this pace (which is unrealistic, now that I know how hard it is to take that course load while working full time, too) I’ll get through the intro QFT classes in another two years.
So, there’s the problem. It takes years of study to even begin to understand fairly fundamental scientific theories, and yet people come along, not even knowing how much they don’t know, and demand their opinions be treated equally. But there’s no way to communicate literally years of difficult scientific training in a forum comment, which makes it very hard for people to distinguish good and bad ideas. It’s a fundamentally difficult problem, not the failings of a cabal.
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Disincentive for Popular Science, perhaps. But, let’s be clear: The problem is not, as Popular Science seems to think, the peoples’ desire to debate the science articles; the problem is two-fold: (1) the failure by our university system to teach people how to think critically about scientific theories; and (2) the failure of the comments board paradigm to elicit wisdom from the crowd. I mean, the notion of a blank page which people type text into should be assumed to support the existing theory in every case; the only wisdom people will be willing to spend the time to read will be slight annotations to the article. Any real idea in science takes a bit of explaining. What this means is that the current comments technology simply filters out those ideas which start from an alternative worldview (which would require a bit more explaining).
We now have graphical information technologies like deep zoom. I don’t quite get why we are not graphically mapping out these worldviews, models and concepts. We could use topic modeling to help the system automatically identify where to place conversations, and to flag to moderators conversations which stray from topic. We can use deep zooming to make good ideas and dialogue physically bigger than bad ideas.
It’s not that we cannot solve this problem. The technology is all there. The problem for the public is the culture of one-way communication which appears now rampant in our graduate programs, and which is apparently obstructing education reform in our science programs. We will not achieve unification in physics, by pure chance, with a university system which is more fundamentally designed to create ideologically-disciplined thinkers mostly destined for corporate jobs. The big questions in science will remain elusive to that sort of educational system.
The public has to make a choice of sorts: Do we really care about making our theories better? Because if we do, the first step is to teach students how to properly be critical of the existing theories. And that would require that grad students not be weeded out of the graduate programs for ideological disagreements.
