"scienciness?"

[snoopy]

http://www.slate.com/articles/health_an ... gious.html

Interesting article. As an engineer, I feel like I hit this type of thing a lot: people who make scientific-sounding statements or arguments which are really quite undeveloped or quite biased. I've had people stare cross eyed at plots of what's quite literally noise and claim they can see their signal, people abuse "statistics" to buy off on product that fails spec, etc.

It bugs me when people pull out "science" as if it were a magic bullet or arbitrator to rule on hard questions and challenges, and interesting that people glob onto it in eerily religious ways.

[Jeff250]

Have you watched the new Bill Nye series that just hit Netflix? Most of what he does on the show is fine, but some of it is laughable. I haven't gotten through the season yet, but the most striking incident to me was his experiment comparing conventional medicine (science) against alternative medicine (pseudoscience) in treating heartburn. The experimental setup is that he has two flasks containing an ingredient that shows whether the contents of the flask is acidic, neutral, or basic via their color (red, green, or blue). Initially, they're green, because they contain water, and then he pours acid into each, and they turn red. So far he's educated the audience and dazzled their senses. But then into one flask, he pours the "conventional" medicine (milk of magnesia), and then into the other he pours the "alternative" medicine (it had multiple all-natural ingredients that I don't remember). Sure enough the one flask turns a bluish green and the other remains red.

The problem with this experiment is that even most conventional medicine would have no effect on the acidity of the flask in this experiment. The kind of conventional medicine that most people use because it's more effective works by inhibiting the production of acid by your stomach, and throwing it into a flask full of acid would have no effect. Other kinds of conventional medicine work by coating your stomach lining to protect it from your stomach acid's damage. Even if all you had access to was Tylenol, you could take that and get some relief at least from the pain, but that wouldn't have any effect on a flask.

I don't know if the alternative medicine he tested is actually useful or not for treating heartburn, and the problem that Bill Nye was trying to address, the lack of double blind studies demonstrating the efficacy of many alternative treatments, was real, he nevertheless stared into pseudoscience's abyss, and that abyss stared back into him.

[Ferno]

I'm watching that series Jeff. I can't read your reply because it contains spoilers.

[Top Gun]

http://www.slate.com/articles/health_an ... gious.html

Interesting article. As an engineer, I feel like I hit this type of thing a lot: people who make scientific-sounding statements or arguments which are really quite undeveloped or quite biased. I've had people stare cross eyed at plots of what's quite literally noise and claim they can see their signal, people abuse "statistics" to buy off on product that fails spec, etc.

It bugs me when people pull out "science" as if it were a magic bullet or arbitrator to rule on hard questions and challenges, and interesting that people glob onto it in eerily religious ways.

Ehhhh, I think that piece misses the point of the whole thing in many respects. It's most definitely true that there's a massive amount of public ignorance as to how the scientific process operates. It's also very true that media-driven clickbait headlines do the public a huge disservice (usually in the realm of tentative preliminary medical studies, because who doesn't like reading about whether drinking chocolate wine is good/bad for you?), and that social media entities like IFL Science do as much (if not more) to further public ignorance as to alleviate it. And it's not even a public relations problem alone, as scientific institutions themselves have inherent issues with methodology and reproducibility and worthiness of publication. But all of that being said, I don't believe that the majority of people who marched on Earth Day were merely there out of some self-congratulatory vaguely-defined "yay science!" sentiment. To use a local phrase, I think that most of them trust the process: they understand that science is the best framework of tools humanity has to gain knowledge of the universe we live in, and that these tools allow us, through all of the messy dead ends and false leads and missteps, to keep improving on that knowledge. In a world where elected officials regularly make statements that fall apart as demonstrably, provably false in the face of hard evidence, that process is something worth championing.

One final note: I posted this classic xkcd strip on Facebook the other day not just because it's a fun catch slogan (and it is, I own the T-shirt too!), but because I actually understand the scientific result being referenced. It happens to be one of the most beautifully precise confirmations of theoretical prediction with observed data in scientific history.

[Tunnelcat]

Interesting read about this very topic.

http://www.salon.com/2008/07/31/religion_science/

[Spidey]

I wanted to read more of that article, because I have been saying something to that effect for some time now...but that site sucks so bad it's not funny.

[snoopy]

To use a local phrase, I think that most of them trust the process: they understand that science is the best framework of tools humanity has to gain knowledge of the universe we live in, and that these tools allow us, through all of the messy dead ends and false leads and missteps, to keep improving on that knowledge.

But... What does Joel Embiid have to do with science?

[Top Gun]

The sheer amount of medical knowledge that's going to be poured into fixing his injuries every year?

[Tunnelcat]

I just watched the first episode of the NATGEO series "Genius". Pretty good show and well made. Even a young Einstein ran into the fixed and rigid science dogma concerning the field of physics and what was being taught in the German Universities in the late 1800's. They just couldn't accept his new radical theories of relativity and angrily kicked him out for even bringing up his unorthodox "new ideas".