Does Hindsight Devalue Science? Cullen Murphy, editor of The Atlantic, said that the social sciences turn up "no ideas or conclusions that can't be found in [any] encyclopedia of quotations... Day after day social scientists go out into the world. Day after day they discover that people's behavior is pretty much what you'd expect." . . Daphna Baratz exposed college students to pairs of supposed findings, one true ("In prosperous times people spend a larger portion of their income than during a recession") and one the truth's opposite. In both sides of the pair, students rated the supposed finding as what they "would have predicted". Perfectly standard hindsight bias. Which leads people to think they have no need for science, because they "could have predicted" that. (Just as you would expect, right?) Hindsight will lead us to systematically undervalue the surprisingness of scientific findings, especially the discoveries we understand - the ones that seem real to us, the ones...

Philip is back and posting again, though it's not clear where he's been. He's a bit excited about a new paper, 'Do electrons help to make the clouds?', (press release). A team at the Danish National Space Center has discovered how cosmic rays from exploding stars can help to make clouds in the atmosphere. The results support the theory that cosmic rays influence Earth’s climate. An essential role for remote stars in everyday weather on Earth has been revealed by an experiment at the Danish National Space Center in Copenhagen. It is already well-established that when cosmic rays, which are high-speed atomic particles originating in exploded stars far away in the Milky Way, penetrate Earth’s atmosphere they produce substantial amounts of ions and release free electrons. Now, results from the Danish experiment show that the released electrons significantly promote the formation of building blocks for cloud condensation nuclei on which water vapour condenses to make clouds. Hence, a causal...

... is wrong. I'm OK with that now. It's happened so many times this year I've gotten used to it. It was always a theoretical truth - in the fullness of time all our facts would be revealed as partial or mistaken - but it's been actualized so much recently that I had to adjust. What burns me isn't that I learned something new which over turned something old, it's that it could have happened long ago. [via A&L Daily] When Battisti and I had finished our study of the influence of the Gulf Stream, we were left with a certain sense of deflation: Pretty much everything we had found could have been concluded on the basis of results that were already available. Ngar-Cheung Lau of the National Atmospheric and Oceanic Administration's Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory (GFDL) and Princeton University had published in 1979 an observational study in which he quantitatively demonstrated the warming and cooling effects that large-scale...

Terence Kealey makes an interesting claim: SCIENCE POLICY across the globe is but a series of footnotes to Vannevar Bush’s 1945 book Science: The Endless Frontier. Before the Second World War the US Government spent little on applied science and nothing on pure science. In 1940 its total research budget was only $74 million, mainly for defence and agriculture, when the private sector was spending $265million, of which $55 million was for pure science. Yet by 1940 America had long been the richest country in the world, and its researchers, including Edison and the Wright brothers, had transformed the world — on private money. Meanwhile, Einstein flourished at Princeton’s Institute for Advanced Study, which had been privately endowed by the Bambergers with $25 million. But the Second World War thrust America into funding military science, and by 1945 Vannevar Bush, a brilliant scientific manager, was administering a federal research budget of $1.6 billion, supporting the Manhattan and other projects....

Self-punking, said another way, is Nightmare Science. [again, via Prometheus] What, then, are the nightmares of the scientific discourse or, more precisely, the environmental science discourse? Surely a major one is that, despite the claim of the scientific discourse to primacy in creating a valid understanding of the world, the reality is that the postmodernist critique is right, and science is no more than another normative discourse, of no greater ontological value than any other. Evaluating the potential for this nightmare science scenario is tricky, but a few observations are possible. To begin with, it is useful to recall perhaps the principal way science distinguishes itself from other discourses: the reliance on discovery of facts through observation, and validation of theory through test and falsification - in short, the scientific method. This procedure evolved in Western Europe in contrast to the medieval mechanism for establishing truth, which was reference to authority, in the form of the Church Fathers, Aristotle,...

And statistics. Hah! Until now, it has been assumed that biogenic methane is formed anaerobically, that is, via micro-organisms and in the absence of oxygen. In this way, acetate or hydrogen and carbon dioxide are transformed into methane; they themselves are created in the anaerobic decomposition of organic materials. The largest anoxic sources of methane are wetlands and rice fields, as well as the digestion of ruminants and termites, waste disposal sites, and the gas produced by sewage treatment plants. According to previous estimates, these sources make up two-thirds of the 600 million tonnes worldwide annual methane production. Scientists from the Max Planck Institute for Nuclear Physics have now discovered that plants themselves produce methane and emit it into the atmosphere, even in completely normal, oxygen-rich surroundings. The researchers made the surprising discovery during an investigation of which gases are emitted by dead and fresh leaves. Then, in the laboratory and in the wild, the scientists looked at the...

Philip Small posts on a theme that has fascinated me for some time. The current round of research into soil microbial life holds the door open onto insights that stagger the imagination. . . The following was reported earlier today in What's New in Science and Technology. Ironically, in the diversity of soil bacteria, the otherwise species-rich Amazon is a more like a desert, while the arid desert is a teeming microbial Amazon, researchers have found. Their first-ever continental-scale genetic survey of soil bacteria revealed that the primary factor that seems to govern the diversity of soil bacteria is soil pH. Thus, the acidic soils of topical forests harbor fewer bacterial species than the neutral soils of deserts. The researchers said that, since soil bacteria play a fundamental role in a vast array of ecological processes, their survey constitutes an initial step in a new research pathway to understanding that role. As exciting as these studies are, they are...

One of the themes here has been the falseness of the great man theory of progress and the falseness of systems of meritocracy and expertise - mandarins, elites and the like - and stratified, exclusionary institutions. Earlier posts about James Surowieki, Scott Page and Lu Hong among others grappled with the deficiencies of expertise as we commonly think of it, suggesting that there are ways to overcome them with group approaches. Another thread is critical of the blunders of supposed experts who seemed unaware of information and relationships that were common knowledge among practitioners, and an intellectually crippling dismissal of the accomplishments of ancient people and native societies. Though not explicitly dicussed there have been allusions to Philip Tetlock’s new book, “Expert Political Judgment: How Good Is It? How Can We Know?” It has been discussed on many blogs and I expect that you have already read a few reviews and comments about it. This Louis Menand review has...

Looking at the current state of world development and trends over the past few decades can give another perspective on the seeming confusions in the report from the InterAcademy Council, Inventing a Better Future: A Strategy for Building World Capacities in Science and Technology. (See previous post) Stronger S&T capacity in the developing nations is not a luxury but an absolute necessity if these nations are to participate as full partners in the world’s fast-forming, knowledge-based economy. There seems to be an assumption throughout the report that developing nations are not currently improving and that things must change, something must be done that is not already being done. As noted in the previous post the rate of publication of scientific papers in the developing world has risen dramatically according to the Institute for Scientific Information (ISI). Global hunger, poverty and inequality are also dropping. This article in The Economist, the most recent of many, discusses these trends. The dour...

This editorial in The Scientist by Richard Gallagher attempts to grapple with the implications of globalization for science. A report from the InterAcademy Council, Inventing a Better Future: A Strategy for Building World Capacities in Science and Technology is discussed. ... the report sums up the current situation thus: "Business-as-usual will leave an ever-growing gap between 'have' and 'have-not' nations .... The current disparity is likely to grow even wider as the industrialized nations continue to master the tools of science and invention, vastly outspend the developing nations in research and development (R&D), and even capture some of the developing nations' most precious human resources for their own use." While I wholeheartedly support the aims of the report, my pessimistic view is that "business as usual" will prevail. Here's why: Scientists themselves often lack a vision of global community. The recent advances from South Korea in human cloning,4 for example, far from drawing congratulations, attracted sullen comments,5 such as...

In an earlier post, The Unexamined Life, Jacob Levy's knowledge of research funding was questioned as part of a larger argument. Levy is also wrong in his understanding of science research funding. The national currency and The Federal Reserve are nothing like national science research funding because it is not and cannot be The science research funding. National funding of science research is the purely political branch of the science funding stream. It has nothing to do with "the value of getting good science and good research" since that is always available whether nations fund research or not. G. Paschal Zachary has an opinion piece about terrorism and technology (via Future Now) that quotes some funding statistics that are also relevant to Levy's misunderstanding of science funding. The figures speak for themselves. From the mid-1950s to the mid-1960s, the federal government provided two-thirds of all research-and-development spending in the United States, with industry providing the remaining third. The proportion...

Chris Mooney continues his silly political attacks on the current administration as "anti-science" noted earlier in Witch Hunts. He has a political bias and a book to sell but is not making useful commentary about science. I noted earlier that... Mooney carries on in the political tradition of the environmental "movement", using popular media to advance theses not supported by science. Mooney isn't unique or unusual in this, many are far worse, he's just a well known example for blog readers. His primary method is to claim "consensus" for his political views and attack opponents credentials while evading their arguments. It is, in other words, pure politics untainted by science. He selects his data points to support his politics and dismisses all else. There is no debate of evidence... Gullible and uninformed pundits such as Tyler Cowen regularly parrot Mooney's nonsense on their blogs. Chris is the guy who keeps us all honest when it comes to politics and...