In the absence of a clear preference or plan, I often choose actions that maximize the number of remaining available options. I believe that means that I’m running some kind of regret minimization algorithm. Let me just state for the record that I consider this a terrible way to live.

I used to have these action figures connected to string that you could anchor to different points in a room and the figures would zip down the string in whatever super future fantasy my young mind wanted to cook up that day.

When I was younger, I came down with the flu and had a fever so high that I started hallucinating. Needless to say, those toys never came out of the closet after that.

Thankfully, I’ve never had a fever that high since my younger, action figure toy days. Though I’m still prone to short bouts of quasi conscious high fever, at least these days I don’t imagine the toys of my youth reanimating and attacking me, Lilliputian style. Instead I just feel like I’m being run over by a truck, repeatedly.

All I know is that, ethical or no, I will be avoiding those demos.

Protip: Never demo with live ammunition.

We are moving to a new apartment this weekend. That combined with some rather stressful events this week have delayed part three in my series on science. I wanted to hoist the following from the comments (from commenter Dad):

Scientists do more than just try to falsify theories, they also formulate new ones when they have falsified an old one. (In the process of falsification they may not succeed, essentially that’s verification.) They also spend a lot of time making sure their data, instruments, data analysis methods (statistics most importantly) etc. are collecting valid and correctly interpreting information so that falsification, verification (or new theory formulation) is based on true empirical evidence and sound methodology.

At least that’s how its supposed to work. Agree that its a human enterprise and often the actual doesn’t live up to the ideal, but that’s no reason to stop insisting on the ideal, is it? Once you start down that path its a slippery slope to no standards at all, and I don’t think we (humans) really want to go there.

I basically agree with this. Commenter Dad happens to be an engineer, which is really just a scientist who rolls up his or her sleeves and does some real work. The point of my series on science, is that Michael Crichton’s argument is subtly but dangerously different from this, and is ultimately an argument that is destructive to the difficult process of bringing scientific knowledge into the world.

Here’s what this had to say about me.

INTJ - The Scientists

The long-range thinking and individualistic type. They are especially good at looking at almost anything and figuring out a way of improving it - often with a highly creative and imaginative touch. They are intellectually curious and daring, but might be pshysically [sic] hesitant to try new things.

The Scientists enjoy theoretical work that allows them to use their strong minds and bold creativity. Since they tend to be so abstract and theoretical in their communication they often have a problem communcating their visions to other people and need to learn patience and use conrete examples. Since they are extremly good at concentrating they often have no trouble working alone.

Part two in my response to this.

The section of the speech on nuclear winter is the most convincing part of the argument. It is also involves a particular piece of history that I don’t know very well, so I am forced to take Michael Crichton’s retelling of the facts at face value. Even in this section though, I think we can draw out an important distinction that this speech blurs.

First, you should know that I don’t view science as a kind of pure Aristotelean endeavor. Science is a human process whose end result has very special properties. The core property is falsifiability. Michael Crichton observes:

Science … 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.

To restate: A scientific result is verifiable in some way that is independent of who does the verifying. This is true but incomplete. I’ll ask a simple question, where do these verifiable results come from?

Certainly they don’t appear fully fledged from the minds of scientists. They arise organically out of a process that’s designed to search for these kinds of verifiable truths. Even Michael Crichton references the messy process of science, if only to further blur the distinction between the ends and the means:

The greatest scientists in history are great precisely because they broke with the consensus.

So what is consensus to science? Certainly a verifiable result provides (trivial) consensus. But the kind of consensus referenced here applies to the process of doing science more than the product of doing science. Consensus forms naturally around hypotheses. Scientists tend to be interested in particular hypotheses as groups. Maybe the hypotheses being explored are relevant to some problem people as a whole are facing. Maybe the problem is a bottleneck in the theory that is preventing an entire field from moving forward. Maybe the problem isn’t any of those things, maybe it’s just a fad.

The point is that consensus forms around hypotheses as a part of the process of science, science as a human endeavor. This has always been the case (as the quote above from Michael Crichton backhandedly admits). It isn’t even a particularly grievous problem, because the end result of science has the verification property, so we often do not have to worry about whatever messy process actually produced a result. We can check it.

So when Michael Crichton says something like:

Let’s be clear: the work of science has nothing whatever to do with consensus.

Keep in mind that the process of science often has everything to do with consensus, even if the end result has nothing to do with consensus.

I’ve relaxed the comment settings. Some posts have been getting more comments than usual (the usual being none), and I don’t want my own lazy moderation to impede any potential discussions.

That and Akismet is actually a pretty capable comment filter. I’d be hypocritical not to trust in the power of artificial intelligence.

The first part of my response to this.

When did “skeptic” become a dirty word in science? When did a skeptic require quotation marks around it?

I’m going to interpret this rhetorical question as an invitation to skepticism. Let’s first consider the argument against SETI.

I’m going to cut through directly to the punchline.

The Drake equation cannot be tested and therefore SETI is not science. SETI is unquestionably a religion. Faith is defined as the firm belief in something for which there is no proof.

In fairness, I need to summarize the argument preceding these statements. Fortunately, XKCD has already done so:

Now let’s decompose the punchline into its component parts. The first sentence:

The Drake equation cannot be tested and therefore SETI is not science.

For those of you who don’t know, SETI stands for the Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence. The project involves listening to radio signals on radio telescopes, though the project has broadened somewhat to describe a constellation of different approaches, each of which is attempting to find evidence of extra terrestrial life. The “listening” usually involves pattern analysis over large swathes of radio frequency, usually with computers. Though this hasn’t led to the discovery of intelligence, it has led to some novel advancements in distributed computing technology.

Michael Crichton’s argument against the status of SETI as science makes sense if the hypothesis that motivates the SETI program, that noisy intelligent life exists in radio range of Earth, had anything more than a cursory relationship to the Drake equation. Fortunately for science, SETI, and us, but unfortunately for Michael Crichton’s argument, the relationship between the Drake equation and the SETI hypothesis is far more benign.

Actually, I should be more precise on this point, because it is an important one. Let’s examine two possible outcomes from SETI work. In the first, SETI discovers patterns in radio frequencies that exhibit, with little doubt, the existence of intelligence elsewhere in the universe. What are the implications for the Drake equation? Well, N > 2 instead of N > 1. And … everything else remains unchanged.

The discovery of intelligent life would be an astounding scientific discovery. It would also tell us next to nothing we don’t already know about the Drake equation. This should indicate just how useless the Drake equation is, even if SETI turns out to be spectacularly successful.

In the second case, SETI finds nothing. This is a more difficult case, because it could happen that intelligent life does exist in the universe, even if it is not noisy life within range and frequency of SETI telescopes and pattern recognition software. Then the narrow hypothesis under which SETI operates turns out to be false, but it is false in a very unsatisfying way. It is disproved by induction.

Disproved by induction.

I want to dwell on this point a bit, because I think it lies at the heart of a number of popular criticisms of science. The problem is that induction is not logically valid. Plato would not approve. Induction does not come to us from the world of perfect forms. In fact, induction is the cause of our separation from this world, living as we do beyond the Humian divide.

Let me make this clear: If you don’t allow for induction in science than you have to throw away everything except math.

So let’s accept that exhaustive search is sufficient to disprove a sufficiently narrow claim. What does a false SETI hypothesis say about the Drake equation? Nothing.

So, with this in mind, let’s return to the point of contention:

The Drake equation cannot be tested and therefore SETI is not science.

This statement has the logical form A (the Drake equation cannot be tested) then B (SETI is not science). As I’ve argued, A (the Drake equation cannot be tested) happens to be true, but B (SETI is not science) is not something we can conclude from the truth of A.

I’m close to running over some kind of self-imposed word limit. So I’ll stop here for now.

My Dad sent me the following link to a speech by Michael Crichton on the commingling of science and politics: http://www.michaelcrichton.net/speech-alienscauseglobalwarming.html. It is a well crafted speech that contains many arguments worth considering.

I’m going to spend a couple of posts eviscerating those arguments. Stay tuned.

You don’t want to walk off a cliff just to see what it feels like.

— Hod Lipson