The logic of science-14: The rational progress of science

(For other posts in this series, see here.)

Karl Popper’s model of falsification makes the scientific enterprise process seem extremely rational and logical. It also implies that science is progressing along the path to truth by successively eliminating false theories. Hence it should not be surprising that practicing scientists like it and still hold on to it as their model of how science works. In the previous post in this series, I discussed how Thomas Kuhn’s work cast serious doubt on the validity of Karl Popper’s falsification model of scientific progress, replacing it with a seemingly more subjective process in which scientists switched allegiance from an old theory to a new one based on many factors, some of them subjective, and that this transition had some of the elements of a gestalt switch. This conclusion was disturbing to many.
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The escalating war on the poor

The ruling class and their media lackeys do not even make an attempt anymore to hide their contempt for the poor and their desire to crush them completely. If they keep this up, who knows what will happen.

Part 1:

Part 2:

Partners in crime

Back in May, I wrote about the hopeful sign that the New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman was investigating the role of the big banks in the housing bubble, but cautioned that “The oligarchy is going to close ranks and pull out all the stops to defend itself and preserve its privileges and get away with a plea deal that involves just a slap on the wrist and fine.”

Well, the oligarchy seems to be doing just that. And who are their friends who are going to bat on their behalf to get the New York AG to accept a plea deal that is highly favorable to them? Why, the Obama administration. What a surprise!

Yves Smith explains what is going on in great detail and says:

It is high time to describe the Obama Administration by its proper name: corrupt… Team Obama bears all the hallmarks of being so close to banks and big corporations that it has lost all contact with and understanding of mainstream America… As far as the Administration is concerned, its goal is to give banks a talking point and prove to them that Team Obama is protecting their backs in a way that the chump public hopefully won’t notice.

“Don’t call my bluff”

Recently Democratic congresswoman Maxine Waters, speaking about the Tea Party, said: “They called our bluff and we blinked. We should have made them walk the plank.”

Similarly President Obama said to Eric Cantor during the debt ceiling discussions: “Eric, don’t call my bluff. I’m going to the American people on this.”

In both these cases, the speakers implied that they possessed the stronger hand so it does not make sense to say “Don’t call my bluff”. In such situations, you either call your opponents’ bluff or you want your opponent to think you are bluffing and call you on it. To say that you are bluffing and then warn them not to call you on it does not make any sense.

It seems like in both cases the speakers meant to say “Don’t think I am bluffing because I am not.” In other words, the people who are saying “Don’t call my bluff” should really be saying “I am calling your bluff.”

Debunking the cosmological argument for god

One of the curious features of modern religious apologists is how they try to use the latest scientific research to argue for the existence of god. Of course, science makes the traditional idea of a personal god who intervenes in the world utterly preposterous and few religious intellectuals outside the evangelical community argue in favor of it. So sophisticated religious apologists have resorted to arguing for the existence of a highly abstract form of god that has no practical consequence whatsoever but for some reason seems to meet some sort of emotional or psychological need. But in order to make their case, they have to cherry-pick scientific research and hope that their audience is not aware of the full science.

The latest attempt is in the area of cosmology. The following very nice video (via Skepchick) exposes how some Christian and Muslim apologists try to use the latest cosmology research in selective ways to make their case.

If the latest developments in cosmology comprise the best arguments for god, then you might expect that cosmologists might be the most religious of all scientists. And yet, as the above video shows, even the scientists quoted by the religious apologists are nonbelievers, suggesting that the cosmological arguments for god are a distortion of the actual science. This paper by cosmologist Sean Carroll titled Why (Almost All) Cosmologists are Atheists explains why.

He first addresses what it would take to require a god hypothesis to be taken seriously.

There are several possible ways in which this could happen. Most direct would be straightforward observation of miraculous events that would be most easily explained by invoking God. Since such events seem hard to come by, we need to be more subtle. Yet there are still at least two ways in which a theist worldview could be judged more compelling than a materialist one. First, we could find that our best materialist conception was somehow incomplete — there was some aspect of the universe which could not possibly be explained within a completely formal framework. This would be like a ”God of the gaps,” if there were good reason to believe that a certain kind of ”gap” were truly inexplicable by formal rules alone. Second, we could find that invoking the workings of God actually worked to simplify the description, by providing explanations for some of the observed patterns. An example would be an argument from design, if we could establish convincingly that certain aspects of the universe were designed rather than assembled by chance. Let’s examine each of these possibilities in turn.

He examines both these possibilities and weighs their merits using the normal ways that scientists use to compare theories and finds the god hypothesis wanting, arriving at the following conclusion:

Given what we know about the universe, there seems to be no reason to invoke God as part of this description. In the various ways in which God might have been judged to be a helpful hypothesis — such as explaining the initial conditions for the universe, or the particular set of fields and couplings discovered by particle physics — there are alternative explanations which do not require anything outside a completely formal, materialist description. I am therefore led to conclude that adding God would just make things more complicated, and this hypothesis should be rejected by scientific standards. It’s a venerable conclusion, brought up to date by modern cosmology; but the dialogue between people who feel differently will undoubtedly last a good while longer.

I for one am glad that people religious apologists are advancing these sophisticated cosmological arguments for god. While they may think they are rescuing religion from science, they are the ones, not atheist scientists, who are going to ultimately destroy religion because in order to salvage the idea of god, they have made it so abstract and remote that it will not appeal in the least to most religious people who want a father figure who listens to them when they talk and who will answer their requests at least some of the time. The idea of god persists because children are indoctrinated at an early age with the idea of a Santa Claus-like figure who will both look after them and punish them if they are bad. That basic childlike idea is what gives god its appeal. The cosmological god is unlikely to have much appeal to a child.

If the cosmological view of god gains ground, it will become the sole preserve of a few intellectuals who will comfort themselves with the idea that a disengaged god exists somewhere out of reach of science. But such a god is a far cry from the warm and fuzzy invisible friend that can command mass appeal.

The need to have a plan B

NPR had a story about people who get lost, stranded, and even die in Death Valley because their GPS devices led them astray. After repeated instances like this, a Death Valley Ranger investigated and discovered that the devices were using old maps with roads that had long since disappeared. People following the GPS devices ended up on dirt roads that led nowhere.

I have written before at how surprised I am that people put their faith implicitly in technology. I find it incredible that anyone would even go to a place like Death Valley without at least some backup plan in case the GPS failed. Apart from errors, what would they do if the device started obviously malfunctioning or stopped working?

Just recently I had to go to someone’s home. Their address was on Shaker Boulevard, which is a very long street with a wide grassy median with few crossover points, so I put their street number into Google Maps to get a rough idea of where the house was. I was surprised to find that the location given was two towns away from mine, since I was pretty sure that they lived in my own suburb. So I tried MapQuest and sure enough, it was very near my home. Google Maps had made an error. My habit of being skeptical and checking saved me from wasting time.

I also recently drove to a distant town for a wedding party and as is my practice before I left got directions from Google Maps or MapQuest and compared it with a physical map. But when I got to that town, construction had closed off many of the streets that I was supposed to go on. This did not bother me because I had a map and quickly found an alternate route to my hotel.

I don’t have GPS but was wondering what it would do in situations where its directions cannot be followed due to various reasons. For example, for people traveling in Death Valley, if they sense that the dirt road they are asked to go on is a mistake, what options do they have? Does anyone know?

The late blooming of Michael Steele

When Michael Steele was the head of the Republican National Committee, he ran a scandal-plagued operation and his attempts to put a good face on his party’s politics made him look like a buffoon.

Now that he is free of the institutional constraint of having to defend everything his party does, he turns out to be an astute, interesting, and engaging observer of the current political scene, as this interview on The Daily Show reveals, where he speaks quite frankly about the divisions within the party that have emerged as a result of the loss of control by establishment Republicans.

The protectors of Wall Street criminality

Matt Taibbi has a new article in the latest issue of Rolling Stone whose title Is the SEC Covering Up Wall Street Crimes? pretty much says it all.

It recounts the story of Darcy Flynn, a staff attorney at the SEC (the Securities and Exchange Commission that is supposed to regulate Wall Street) who blew the whistle about how the SEC has been systematically destroying documents about matters that it had investigated, thus destroying the chances of seeing patterns of criminal behavior.

Imagine a world in which a man who is repeatedly investigated for a string of serious crimes, but never prosecuted, has his slate wiped clean every time the cops fail to make a case. No more Lifetime channel specials where the murderer is unveiled after police stumble upon past intrigues in some old file – “Hey, chief, didja know this guy had two wives die falling down the stairs?” No more burglary sprees cracked when some sharp cop sees the same name pop up in one too many witness statements. This is a different world, one far friendlier to lawbreakers, where even the suspicion of wrongdoing gets wiped from the record.

That, it now appears, is exactly how the Securities and Exchange Commission has been treating the Wall Street criminals who cratered the global economy a few years back.

The article also relates how the SEC is particularly prone to the revolving door, where SEC regulators get lucrative jobs at the very firms that they are supposed to be regulating, and then come back and lobby their colleagues to drop investigations.

Cenk Uygur talks with Matt Taibbi about the revolving door following an earlier article by Taibbi.