Steve Jones’ Scientific Smackdown
June 9, 2011
This is a follow up to the post “Brian Cox’s Huw Weldon Lecture”.
It appears that Prof Cox’s increasingly bombastic dismissal of universes beyond his own conception brought attention from Britain’s scientific senior class and a public rebuke (if you know what to look and listen for).
I was listening to Radio Four’s BAFTA award winning Infinite Monkey Cage (Series 4, Part 1). Its an engaging piece of pop-sci co-hosted by the ubiquitous Prof Cox and Robin Ince (a British stand-up comedian). Its usually funny in a nerdy kind of way. But this time the guest, Prof Steve Jones, one of the UK’s scientific grandees shoved Prof Cox’s head down the toilet and flushed repeatedly.
Unlike Cox, Jones recognises the limits to science and science’s role in discovery of knowledge AND truths. His is a mature and humble perspective on humanity’s role in the universe. Based on current scientific knowledge he estimated (or quoted estimates) that ‘we’ understand to a good degree 1/10^120 of the universe. That is the inverse of ten to the power of 120 or 1/100,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 of all matter in the universe.
Put in that perspective modern physics, though undoubtedly a powerful AND truthful representation of the known universe, actually knows almost none of the universe and therefore remains in its own terms mainly composed of theories and partial evidence.
We only have to look at our understanding of how DNA operates or how a planet forms to see how close to home the unknown resides and in turn to appreciate our personal contexts. I don’t mean for this to suggest that scientific progress is not the most relevant or most successful mechanism that humanity has to better understand its own context, rather that science has a perspective that is per force both limited and directional (with time). In contrast the human mind has the power to reject time as an argument and work outside the historical context of scientific development. One only has to look at science fiction authors such as Verne, Wells or Clarke to see that value in expressing an imagined future, deeply unscientific though it is. If our minds can do away with a fundamental, universal variable with almost no effort and invent limitless and coherent internal universes, how can that be seen as any less powerful that the collective experience of scientific progress.
Anyway, if you get the chance to listen to this radio show listen for the negative space, the things unsaid and watch for the looks exchanged to find a young, brash, star-spangled scientist getting a lesson from the wise old wizard.
Developing the argument about arguments
June 14, 2010
I’ve put forward the proposition that different Kuhnian scientific paradigms have associated with them different modes of argument (Newtonian-causal, Einsteinian-relativistic, Quantum/complex-probabilistic). This shouldn’t be a big surprise and is almost a definition for a paradigm shift in itself.
What I would like to suggest is that in order to perform an argument for or against a specific piece of science the rhetorical tools that you employ must be of at least the same level as the science itself. So you cannot employ causal arguments in a debate about the aerodynamics of Formula One racing cars and hope to win, but you could employ causal arguments of momentum transfer when discussing the science of playing snooker. Likewise the basic chemistry of cooking has no use for relativistic rhetoric, but the evaluation of emotional response only really has meaning in relative terms. You could not hope to argue successfully that a weather system will or will not respond to your building of a new house in simple black and white terms, but you may be successful if you provide a probability factor that you will induce a rain shadow on your new garden by raising the roof-line by a meter.
So if we take this thesis one step further we have a ready made quality of debate-o-meter. All we need to do is look at the paradigmic position of the arguers with respect to the subject matter of the argument to give a gross overview of whether one or other will be able to defend his position. Those who use the correct tools for the subject being more likely to win the argument because the opponent has not understood that in order to argue a scientific position you must first understand where that position fits in the schema of scientific paradigms.
At this point I should just state that we can definitely use a scale of increasing effectiveness (causal-relativistic-probabilistic) because scientific discovery is cumulative and even scientific dead ends like phlogiston taught scientific method by error.
So next time you read or have a real debate about a subject that has science at its heart look at the paradigm that your argument belongs to against the paradigm that the science belongs to.
Thats it. A simple one today.
Fit the argument to the paradigm and you will have more success.
and
Later paradigms are more likely to win than early paradigms.
However this has an potentially vast implication regarding scientific communication, the use of experts, the role of education in democracies, all sorts of things. We may get to those eventually.
The Virtual Revolution – An Overview
February 21, 2010
Its been an interesting experience seeing the net through another’s eyes, or in the case of this short series of programmes – an number of other peoples eyes.
If you’ve read the other posts in this series you’ll know my views on the specific topics raised, but I thought that I’d just put a little piece together on what I thought of the work as a whole.
It wasn’t bad. It was wrong in places, naive in others, superficial in yet more, but as an accessible work summarising 20 years of the biggest shared technological endeavour of my lifetime it was OK. Seven out of ten.
It was remarkably short of forward looking content, but then it was a historical piece rather than a forecasting piece. It was also short on deeper analysis of what the technological trends say about us as people and as a species, but then we are only really now starting to find ways of looking at that. And on that point I’ll promote the Web Behaviour Test in order to maximise the data that they can gather.
It characterised me as a Web Leopard;
Fast-moving – Web Leopards like you are adept at getting information from the internet very quickly. Your speed is a trait you share with real-world leopards, which are among the fastest land animals.
Solitary – Leopards live alone, fending for themselves in isolated home ranges. Similarly, the Web Leopard likes to go it alone when looking for information, rather than rely on social networks, or other sites where the users create the content.
Specialised – Web Leopards are best suited to performing one task at a time rather than multitasking. The real-world leopard is similarly specialised, being perfectly adapted to silently tracking its prey before pouncing.
So now you know; I’m a fast-moving, predatory loner with a narrow view, big teeth and an attractive pelt. So much for the internet 
The Virtual Revolution – Part Four
February 21, 2010
Part Four – Homo Interneticus sees the good Doctor approaching some of the more interesting questions regarding the internet, though she still doesn’t really do any digging into the whole shared cognition/nature of reality connundrum which is one of my current favorites.
So just to go through some of the points raised;
Has Facebook change the nature of friendship ? It turns out that no, its just re-branded it.
Your friends and social group are still the same number and mostly the same people that they would have been without the software.
Which begs the question; why is it so successful if it offers no new reach to your social circle ?
Prof Robin Dunbar casually dropped the bomb that apart from the 150-ish people that you can claim as your clan/social circle/address book everyone else on your friends list is probably just a voyeur. So has Facebook replaced the soap opera as the acceptable face of curtain twitching ? Find your own surrogate family to watch out of interest, only now its not the Duckworths or the Fowlers. In the UK we’ve seen soap opera viewing figures decline by 50% over the last 10 years or so, it’d be interesting to know how much is direct replacement activity.
Update – No, not soap operas, reality TV shows. Those surplus friends are our own personalised Big Brothers.
We had Sherry Turkle (great name !) talking about the consumption of the private person as a result of the action of ubiquitous sharing of thought and activity, and about feeling obliged to openness in the networked society.
I’m not sure what to think about that comment. I’m not sure if that is simply a misunderstanding of the type of openness that the net engenders or an attempt to big up the profession of the psychologist (of which she is one) as professional listeners, or am I confusing them with psychiatrists ?
For myself I’m only open to the degree that I want to be. I feel no compunction about not answering personal questions if asked on the web. I don’t volunteer my deepest and darkest secrets. I treat this form of mediated interaction as I would a conversation in a pub, and assume that the interested will continue to read and the rest will slope off to the bar and find a more apposite conversation.
Information overload and associative vs linear data storage/retrieval was the next big topic. One that is close to my heart. Here the programme missed a big opportunity in not addressing one of the fastest moving sectors of quantitative neuroscience and its philosophical implications for fields as diverse as democracy & law and the nature of the mind. I’m not going to delve into all that right here right now, that’s for a later date. Suffice it to say that the Obama web campaign is small fry if a mathematical model of mind can be shared.
I’m going to follow up with a bit of reading around Vannevar Bush and Prof David Nichols because I don’t know their work.
In her summary the doctor passed two comments that I’ll paraphrase as;
At its best the internet may be an equivalent to the serendipity of the city – meaning that the melting pot of ideas and beliefs that has produced most of modern world’s innovation in science, technology, art and commerce is there to be had in a free and open web. I agree utterly and completely, its just a shame that in its efforts for global reach it has become fragmented and balkanised, as subsumed by commercial and political interests as any piece of prime real estate.
And second; the the web has the power to liberate humanity. I’m not sure what from though, presumably the commercial and political interests, but it might be more interesting if it were to free us from the constraints of our own inhibitions and provide an opportunity to evolve our thoughts past division and towards unity. The global mind as it was suggested.
The Openness Bug Revisited
June 15, 2009
I am reminded of the other meaning of openness – that of openness to new ideas, to new challenges and to play.
I don’t think that it is coincidence that some of the core ideas behind being creative use the same term as the discourse of truth. When was the last time that you played ? I don’t mean on a Nintendo playing Super Mario (yes I’m that old). I mean, really had unstructured fun with something or someone, where you tested boundaries in a naive way, where you threw an idea into the mix that was just plain silly, where you built something with no realistic use.
The last time that I remember was while struggling with a group project. We all had different points of view, everyone was compromising in order to retain group cohesion, we were all being pragmatic, but we were failing to reach the goal of producing an innovative exploration of systemic change in technical systems. We’d tried looking at theoretical analyses, historic studies, gap analysis, all sorts of approaches, but each came to a dead-end because one or more of us didn’t buy-in or because it was just plain dull.
So we started to play instead. Random ideas, quickly pitched ( a few seconds), silly things, we were laughing and having fun with it. We took one of the ideas, thinking ‘Well, we didn’t come up with anything great, but at least it’ll be fun’. Once we started working on it seriously it became more and more obvious that, in fact, the fun idea was actually quite a good one. We developed it and researched it to the point where we eventually found that a major international company had already sunk $10′s millions into developing the same idea to prototype. OK, we didn’t get there first but our hydrogen-powered fuel cell agricultural vehicle was born of openness to play and to new ideas.
