Science vs. Pseudoscience

[Chaircat Meow]

13 minutes ago, A wilding said:

 

If he really thinks that, then he must be an idiot.

To paraphrase this argument: evolution does not explain "reliable faculties" (whatever exactly is meant by them). Therefore I am entitled to "disbelieve" (presumably this means consider to be disproved) the whole of the theory of evolution, never mind what other things it might explain.

The flaw in that argument is obvious, so a philosopher ought to see it instantly.

Let's hear it then. 

[Larry of the Lawn]

Newton's second law does not predict reliable faculties, so it would be irrational to believe in it.  

[Rippounet]

6 hours ago, A wilding said:

If he really thinks that, then he must be an idiot.

To paraphrase this argument: evolution does not explain "reliable faculties" (whatever exactly is meant by them). Therefore I am entitled to "disbelieve" (presumably this means consider to be disproved) the whole of the theory of evolution, never mind what other things it might explain.

The flaw in that argument is obvious, so a philosopher ought to see it instantly.

I don't think the problem lies with Plantinga.

[Seli]

14 hours ago, Chaircat Meow said:

This is once again pretty vague.

I suggested reasons what I guess we can semantic epiphenomenalism is likely true given the usual view of mind in the natural sciences. What we might call the usual view of mind in the natural sciences does not take how things seem to us as giving accurate descriptions of how our cognitive processes work but argues that our cognitive processes are causally determined by physical processes (neurons firing).

SE is the view that beliefs are by-products of biological processes (neurons firing) that themselves are not beliefs and that beliefs don't cause anything themselves. My belief you are wrong is some kind of conscious/mental happening I have, while my neurons are something else. The belief is a result of the neurons firing, but as an emergent mental property it won't cause anything (even though it may appear to). SE seems the most plausible view of things on the usual view of mind in the biological sciences....

 

You are aware you are essentially re-heating the old vitalism debate in the current too-complex-to-understand-completely frontier of chemistry? And you are aware what the result of that movement was in the end?

Just because we can only explore some rough-grained aspects of very complex self-organizing dynamic systems does not mean we need to invoke novel forces to explain the phenomena that result from those systems.

14 hours ago, Chaircat Meow said:

...

Your argument may go:

If E&NS does not generate reliable beliefs then we do not have reliable beliefs

It is the not the case that we do not have reliable beliefs

Therefore it is not the case E&NS does not generate true beliefs

And it is entirely question begging to say that we can only have reliable beliefs on E&NS, there is simply no reason to assume that. 

....

Objection, we don't know if we have reliable beliefs. We only know we have beliefs that are internally consistent in the way they interact with our environment. Any system that assumes we have true beliefs will first have to show those exist. 

[OldGimletEye]

On 9/22/2018 at 6:26 PM, Altherion said:

 as I mentioned above, with enough snapshots patterns start to emerge -- but it is very dangerous to make predictions based on its results.

Well see, when the shit hits the fan, you may not have much of a choice. And doing nothing is a choice.

If you're a RBC type you may very well feel that doing nothing is the best thing to do since you feel prices clear markets and people on average have correct price expectations and high unemployment is just people optimizing their labor supply and consumption decisions.

Of course it seems rather implausible that 25% unemployment is just due to sudden bout of laziness or a large groups of people deciding to a vacation all at once.  And if you think spontaneous vacations is rather an implausible scenario, you might think prices don't always adjust to clear markets and people don't always have correct price expectations.

And you just might want to look at some data* to see whose version of events is likely to be correct and act accordingly.

When the shit hits the fan, sitting there and saying "golly, anything could happen!" isn't going to likely cut it.

*And I'm well aware that empirical papers often do conflict. But one needs to be a little more careful and understand the potential issues with empirical papers, rather than mindlessly declaring it's all a bunch of vodoo.

[maarsen]

I have been reading this thread and trying to follow along. It seems to me that debating the difference between science and pseudoscience is  like asking how many angels can dance on the head of a pin. Pseudoscientists argue about the size of angels and pins while scientists say show me an angel. 

[Jo498]

3 hours ago, Seli said:

Objection, we don't know if we have reliable beliefs. We only know we have beliefs that are internally consistent in the way they interact with our environment. Any system that assumes we have true beliefs will first have to show those exist. 

Then everything collapses into skepticism and we don't need any further discussion. We simply bracket each and every bit of knowledge with a skeptical gloss (whatever we think to be the case could be entirely different, because it ain't necessarily so and we might be deceived, brains in the vat etc.). But such a general skeptical gloss is a) a cheap way out of epistemology and b) not the way any scientists think. In fact in my limited experience most scientists are staunch realists until challenged. When challenged, they typically collapse far too quickly into a pragmatist stance: it's all just working models etc. - (I don't want to spend billions of tax money on scientist toys like LHC if it is NOT about discovering deep truth about nature but just fiddling with working hypotheses and models) But even then they don't turn into Pyrrhonian Skeptics.

But the point is probably different. There is no problem with evolutionary theory as a theory of a restricted domain, i.e. the evolution of biological systems, including physiology of perception etc.

But an inconsistency arises if one takes ET as a theory of almost everything, including epistemology. Because epistemology is about how to arrive at true justified belief = knowledge. Now in evolution everything is mainly survival conducive, including beliefs and human rational faculties. But we need our rational faculties to be truth-conducive which is not at all guaranteed by their evolutionary history. It is doubtful if as some believe the evolutionary history is actually an argument against them leading to the truth, because if there is a difference between survival-conducive (false) beliefs and truth, evolution should favor the former. In fact, there are plenty of examples (found in many popular books) about us miscalculating risks etc. because it is much better to be safe than sorry. There are other things where untrained humans are systematically error-prone.

However, the fact that we can actually recognize such differences, e.g. that people make more/different mistakes when presented with logically equivalent problems in different guises, briefly that we can distinguish between correct logic and psychological tendencies (that lead to certain errors) shows that we can to some extent "step outside" our default position with the help of abstraction, logics, maths etc. Logics and maths are both pre-supposition of systematic rational thought and science and they are also far more general than any particular evolutionary developed wetware. Logical derivation and rational justification are simply a different level than physiological-natural causation (or evo history). And we cannot do without them (we can not even formulate arguments, let alone scientific theories) and we cannot deny the existence of such fields of a priori knowledge and "forms of thought" that transcend the biological implementation. From a "pluralist" perspective that takes sciences as restricted to certain domains, this is probably no problem at all. But it is at least very strange from a "naturalist/biologist" perspective that a) such a "realm" of general a priori knowledge exists at all and b) that some smart apes like humans have access to that knowledge.

[Seli]

35 minutes ago, Jo498 said:

Then everything collapses into skepticism and we don't need any further discussion. We simply bracket each and every bit of knowledge with a skeptical gloss (whatever we think to be the case could be entirely different, because it ain't necessarily so and we might be deceived, brains in the vat etc.). But such a general skeptical gloss is a) a cheap way out of epistemology and b) not the way any scientists think. In fact in my limited experience most scientists are staunch realists until challenged. When challenged, they typically collapse far too quickly into a pragmatist stance: it's all just working models etc. - (I don't want to spend billions of tax money on scientist toys like LHC if it is NOT about discovering deep truth about nature but just fiddling with working hypotheses and models) But even then they don't turn into Pyrrhonian Skeptics.

...

Of course for all intents and purposes the network of scientific models is a good description of reality; the best we have since it gives us the tools to survive in this world. But any working scientist will know that there are flaws and inconsistencies.  Science in my practical understanding isn't a search for a deeper truth, it is a search for a better understanding. Science hinges on the idea that our understanding of our universe is flawed, and that by podding and probing we can find places where our models break and discover and build better ones.

Scientists can permit themselves to be utterly pragmatic, since at the most practical level there is no competition out there.

35 minutes ago, Jo498 said:

...

However, the fact that we can actually recognize such differences, e.g. that people make more/different mistakes when presented with logically equivalent problems in different guises, briefly that we can distinguish between correct logic and psychological tendencies (that lead to certain errors) shows that we can to some extent "step outside" our default position with the help of abstraction, logics, maths etc. Logics and maths are both pre-supposition of systematic rational thought and science and they are also far more general than any particular evolutionary developed wetware. Logical derivation and rational justification are simply a different level than physiological-natural causation (or evo history). And we cannot do without them (we can not even formulate arguments, let alone scientific theories) and we cannot deny the existence of such fields of a priori knowledge and "forms of thought" that transcend the biological implementation. From a "pluralist" perspective that takes sciences as restricted to certain domains, this is probably no problem at all. But it is at least very strange from a "naturalist/biologist" perspective that a) such a "realm" of general a priori knowledge exists at all and b) that some smart apes like humans have access to that knowledge.

The drawback is of course that we know there are limits to mathematics and formal logic inherent to the way we have constructed them, and these limits as far as I know per Gödel are insurmountable.

Pluralism is all fine but in the end if we want to know how likely it is that our beliefs as pertaining to our universe are correct science seems to be the only way. It is the one mode of philosophy that has a strict feedback loop to complex reality.

[Rippounet]

20 hours ago, Chaircat Meow said:

If E&NS does not generate reliable beliefs then we do not have reliable beliefs

2 hours ago, Jo498 said:

But an inconsistency arises if one takes ET as a theory of almost everything, including epistemology.

It's pretty much that simple. Evolution isn't a philosophical or metaphysical theory, so it's "flawed" when you ty to read it as such.

In truth the issue is not with evolution at all and lies entirely within the field of philosophy, with how you approach stuff like naturalism, determinism, consciousness... etc.

[alostsister]

On 9/24/2018 at 6:12 PM, A wilding said:

 

Pseudoscience, by definition is not credible, while sadly being all too widely accepted. Conflating pseudoscience with the ideas thrown out by a list of great physicists is frankly insulting to them. They all understood the scientific method, and tried to come up with hypotheses that were falsifiable (even if most of them were theoretical physicists who left the experiments to other people).

My experience with Pseudoscience, as far as I am aware, is David Wilcock and Mike Dooley. Some of their hypotheses aren't quantifiable.  Tesla's weren't as quantifiable as he wanted at the time he lived. The idea of energy transference goes all the way back to ancient times and "Geomancy" with some ancient beliefs that the rocks in Stonehenge conducted and held energy and shared between them, much like the ancient Chinese belief in Feng Shui.

[A wilding]

1 hour ago, alostsister said:

My experience with Pseudoscience, as far as I am aware, is David Wilcock and Mike Dooley. Some of their hypotheses aren't quantifiable.  Tesla's weren't as quantifiable as he wanted at the time he lived. The idea of energy transference goes all the way back to ancient times and "Geomancy" with some ancient beliefs that the rocks in Stonehenge conducted and held energy and shared between them, much like the ancient Chinese belief in Feng Shui.

 

And your point is ... ?

[Chaircat Meow]

17 hours ago, larrytheimp said:

Newton's second law does not predict reliable faculties, so it would be irrational to believe in it.  

Nor does my belief William I won the battle of Hastings but this is not at all germane.

E&NS suggests we have unreliable faculties, and that's why there is a kind of incoherence in believing it. 

[A wilding]

16 minutes ago, Chaircat Meow said:

Nor does my belief William I won the battle of Hastings but this is not at all germane.

E&NS suggests we have unreliable faculties, and that's why there is a kind of incoherence in believing it. 

And that is just a failure to understand the scientific method.

Assume for the sake of argument that we have "reliable facilities". Assume further that evolution predicts we don't have them (though personally I think you would have a lot of difficulty coming up with a definition of "reliable facilities" for which both those assumptions are true).

Congratulations, you have found a limitation in evolution, an edge case where it breaks down. But that does not entitle you to discard the whole theory! The reaction of any scientist is to ask "so how do we modify the theory to take these new observations into account". Only someone with an agenda against it would do otherwise.

For example take Newtonian mechanics again. A century or so ago it was found that it breaks down when trying to deal with the very fast, the very large and the very small. Despite that we did not abandon it and return to a pre-industrial society. Instead we went on to develop relativity and quantum mechanics.

[Rippounet]

16 minutes ago, Chaircat Meow said:

E&NS suggests we have unreliable faculties,

It really suggests the very opposite.

[Altherion]

On 9/25/2018 at 5:34 AM, OldGimletEye said:

I get the feeling he might have been pulling our leg with his "anything can happenism".
In fact, I think he doesn't believe it.

"Anything can happen" was and is mostly wishful thinking of the kind one indulges in when faced with a set of options that are less than ideal. I'm pretty sure that whenever I mentioned it, I also mentioned that the "anything" isn't too likely to be good.

14 hours ago, OldGimletEye said:

Well see, when the shit hits the fan, you may not have much of a choice. And doing nothing is a choice. 

I sympathize and I agree with you that in most cases (i.e. when politics doesn't get too closely involved), the results from acting based on the information and models that are available are better than doing something random or doing nothing (though this is another thing we can never test). In fact, most of the pseudoscientific fields would make an argument along the same lines: this is hard and we're doing the best we can with the resources that are given to us. This may be true... but it doesn't make what they're doing science.

[DMC]

21 minutes ago, Altherion said:

but it doesn't make what they're doing science.

No, what makes what they're doing science is by doing science.  You mentioned the "pseudoscientists" didn't understand math a while back.  I'm curious, Obi-Wan, what statistical training do you have?  To get degrees in political science I've had to learn formal modeling - both game and decision theoretic models, a litany of econometric models that include the most recent multilevel variants, and SEM - even though nobody really uses it any more our outgoing chair insists (or insisted) on teaching it.  So what math, exactly, do I not understand as a lowly pseudoscientist?

[Altherion]

1 hour ago, DMC said:

No, what makes what they're doing science is by doing science.

This is not only tautological, but also improper English. Well done!

1 hour ago, DMC said:

You mentioned the "pseudoscientists" didn't understand math a while back.

I said some of them don't understand math, not all of them. The specific example I was thinking of was all of the groups that claimed Clinton's chance of winning the Presidential election in general and the election in several Midwestern states in particular was more than 99%. A lot of them (e.g.  macroeconomists) can do the math just fine... but getting the math right is merely necessary -- it's not sufficient for something to be scientific.

1 hour ago, DMC said:

I'm curious, Obi-Wan, what statistical training do you have?  To get degrees in political science I've had to learn formal modeling - both game and decision theoretic models, a litany of econometric models that include the most recent multilevel variants, and SEM - even though nobody really uses it any more our outgoing chair insists (or insisted) on teaching it.  So what math, exactly, do I not understand as a lowly pseudoscientist?

I can't read your mind and thus I don't know what math you do not understand. If you're curious about the kind of statistics I used back when I worked in physics, here are a couple of cheat sheets (one on Probability and one on Statistics). They're obviously meant to be short summaries and are neither comprehensive nor detailed, but they should give you a taste.

[DMC]

4 minutes ago, Altherion said:

This is not only tautological, but also improper English. Well done!

Thanks!  It's also true, which you sadly don't get.

5 minutes ago, Altherion said:

The specific example I was thinking of was all of the groups that claimed Clinton's chance of winning the Presidential election in general and the election in several Midwestern states in particular was more than 99%. A lot of them (e.g.  macroeconomists) can do the math just fine... but getting the math right is merely necessary -- it's not sufficient for something to be scientific.

Anyone that said Clinton had a 99% chance was wrong for the get-go.  There indeed was the Princeton model that cut off the tails and then gave you probabilities, which is entirely stupid and plainly against any of the regular procedures in the discipline.  Anyway, so if the math isn't wrong what's your beef again?  We don't predict enough?  Or we don't predict accurately enough?  Cuz if that's all it is, yeah I'm done.

[DMC]

24 minutes ago, Altherion said:

I can't read your mind and thus I don't know what math you do not understand. If you're curious about the kind of statistics I used back when I worked in physics, here are a couple of cheat sheets (one on Probability and one on Statistics). They're obviously meant to be short summaries and are neither comprehensive nor detailed, but they should give you a taste.

Heh.  Yeah, "taste" is the appropriate adjective.  The first link is encapsulated by the first week of Methods 2010, and the second the first couple of weeks of 2020.  Hashtag not impressed.  

ETA:  Like seriously dude, that second link goes over OLS and confidence intervals for a ridiculous amount of pages.  Basic regression is not that hard to learn.  Because one of my faculty members is a dick, I've done it by hand, and that doesn't take as long as reading all that shit.  Do you know probit and logit?  Or a GLM?  Or even a GLLAMM model?  How bout matching methods?  Which strategies would you prefer?

Point is, you don't know shit about what you're talking about.  So stop telling me I'm a pseudoscientist. 

[OldGimletEye]

4 hours ago, Altherion said:

"Anything can happen" was and is mostly wishful thinking of the kind one indulges in when faced with a set of options that are less than ideal. I'm pretty sure that whenever I mentioned it, I also mentioned that the "anything" isn't too likely to be good.

Hmm. It seems to me that many of your posts supporting Trump were in fact based on "anything could happenism". 

You had told us about your opposition to neo-liberalism and accordingly decided to cast your vote for Trump on the idea he'd do something about it. You had no real idea of what he would do, but that generally he'd just shake things up. "Anything could happenism" was the thrust of your arguments.

But, no reasonably astute observer would think that Trump would do something about it. Not after his absurd statements on things like Dodd-Frank and particularly because of the people he was hiring to give him advice.

Your justification that Trump would be detrimental to neo-liberalism was never based on anything concrete, but on the idea he'd just "shake things up" and then after that "anything could happen". Your arguments were completely out in left field and were never based on any remotely reasonable interpretation of events.

But, am starting to believe at this time you were never all that opposed to neo liberalism and your real beef was with so called "identity politics" and in that case you voted for the right guy.

To the extent you are against neo-liberalism, you better hold on to your ass because things are about to get quite neo-liberal around here,  particularly with the two conservative knuckleheads Kavanaugh and Gorsuch doing their bit to dismantle the latter half of the 20th century. That Trump would nominate two knuckle heads like that was completely predictable, except for maybe the willfully ignorant, blind, or obtuse.

6 hours ago, Altherion said:

I sympathize and I agree with you that in most cases (i.e. when politics doesn't get too closely involved), the results from acting based on the information and models that are available are better than doing something random or doing nothing (though this is another thing we can never test). In fact, most of the pseudoscientific fields would make an argument along the same lines: this is hard and we're doing the best we can with the resources that are given to us. This may be true... but it doesn't make what they're doing science.

Well this depends largely on what your idea of "science" is.

For me, its about building a model and rejecting the model if data or real world events seemingly make it false. Or at least selecting the model that seems to explain events better.
To a certain extent, I'm sympathetic to some your arguments. The fact of the matter is the field of macro has a lot of work to do to build better models. For instance, I'm not exactly happy with the standard New Keynesian model believing we need a better description of the price adjustment process than relying on the "Calvo Fairy", though it is certainly a hell of lot better at getting closer to the truth than the RBC model. Anyone that knows about the Volcker period at the  FED should know that.

And certainly, at this juncture, economics needs to do better in coming up with a general equilibrium story to link micro with macro and since it hasn't, I don't think doing "micro founded" models with optimizing agents are better than using aggregates to theorize. This is still a big theoretical gap. And yet, it doesn't mean we know nothing.

We know that
MV = Py

Is not an accurate description of the economy. And yet, certain sorts of people, even those that have Nobel Prizes and have prestigious jobs at fairly regarded universities were arguing just that. Eugene Fama for instance and most of the crew at the U of Chicago. I'm not sure why Fama went off the rails. Perhaps it was because he just decided to play team Republican, no matter what kind of hit his professional reputation would take. Or maybe he had been specializing in finance theory for so long he just forget everything he'd had ever learned in macro. But whatever the reason, I certainly understand why one wouldn't necessarily take an academics word on a topic as being true. And yet we don't sit here being utterly clueless. There are some things we know, even if there is still some details to be filled in.

I also don't have any real opposition to your warning that one empirical paper should be approached with caution. During the GFC, there were quite a few horseshit papers that got published. Ohanian and Cole's paper about the Great Depression, published during the onset of the GCF, was mostly pure horseshit. So was Alberto Alesina's paper about "expansionary austerity". And we found out that even Harvard professors could make an Excel spreadsheet error.

The truth is that piecing together this stuff is hard work. And even though it is hard work, it doesn't mean we sit here utterly clueless, though some people that should know better  act as if they are clueless.

The problem I have with your opening post, isn't so much the fact that it points out some legitimate stuff that can go wrong with empirical papers (though it misses some stuff), but instead it pretty much dismisses all empirical work or observation of real world events as utterly useless, which isn't true. In your quest to destroy "identity politics", which for whatever reason has made you extremely salty, you'd return all the social sciences to high philosophizing without ever looking at empirical data to understand what is likely to be true and not to be true.

The fact is we don't just have one paper describing how race impacts income or wealth inequality. There are several. And of course just looking at aggregate statistics without looking at high powered statistical studies should inform us that something is not quite right. And then of course we have about 300 years of racism in this country, which you'd probably have us ignore in your quest to destroy "identity politics". We have good reasons to believe that pernicious effects of that history is still taking its toll.

You claim to be against neo liberalism. But your arguments denying the effect of race on income/wealth inequality are quite neoliberal. Quite neo liberal indeed.Because according to you the magic of markets should have eliminated any impact of race on income/wealth because the market will always select the best and most worthy.

My advice to you would be 1) stop blowing smoke up everyone's asses and simply declare that your real issue is with "identity  politics" or 2) get a flamin' iota of clue what neoliberalism generally is.