Scientific Method as Strasberg’s Method
March 3, 2010
We’ve been hearing a great deal about science in the media in the context of climate change and new energy sources lately, and the quality of some scientific work has been called into doubt, and there have been calls for an increased understanding of science to try and stop misrepresentation by the media, blah, blah, blah. This call for dialogue between the fields of arts and sciences is happening on more and more occasions as science gets more difficult and mass media becomes less patient. Anyone still remember CP Snow ? So why don’t we look at things a slightly different way ?
Science is media
That sounds a bit odd, but philosophically science is a mechanism by which we try to understand the physical reality that we inhabit and mass media (especially news journalism) is also a mechanism to help understand the world around us. Their methods are different but their core goals are the same – enhanced understanding of reality.
So lets look at some recent science through a media lens. In fact let’s get PoMo on its ass !
Marshall McLuhan in ‘The Medium is the Massage’ posits that you perform the message that you wish to communicate. It doesn’t matter if that is verbally, ethically, artistically, mathematically or physically, what you do and how you do it IS what you say. On the other side of the coin if your performance does not tie in with your message the audience undergoes cognitive dissonance and the message is garbled, contradictory and ineffective.
Strasberg’s Method Acting technique is a great example of this. The actor does everything in his power to become the character in order that his whole performance reflects the experience of that being, in so doing the words and the physical body perform as one and, hopefully, the role is played well. The actor doesn’t actually become the character, that would be impossible, but he will take on or construct every aspect of that character that he can discover.
So if we take the recent CRU email scandal (yes, scandal), we have a set of scientists who perform their science under the scientific method which involves openness, respect for others results and views, self-criticism, peer-review and data validation. Over the years they have told us ‘trust us, we’re the best, we do good science’, in effect we’re following the scientific method, and now we find out that their performance is not backed up by their method. We thought that we were seeing the real thing, or at least a good approximation of the real thing with the scientists suffering for their art, but we were sold a poor performance. A shallow frontage. Its like finding out that a character that Al Pacino plays never actually liked coffee but Pacino forced a re-write because he couldn’t go without his morning joe.
For the record and as a former scientist I find the actions of the CRU scientists abhorant, but human (I never lived up to my own view of what a scientist is, which is why no longer call myself one, though I still perform the role of scientific critic). For me the affair doesn’t detract from the credibility of climate science as a whole, but its disturbing that their performance was more Lee Majors than Lee Strasberg.
They need to get their method back.
Paradigms and popular discourse
February 6, 2010
In my previous post ‘End of Newtonian thinking, please !’ I made that case that the current scientific paradigm exemplified by a statistical view of the physical universe is not being reflected in everyday life. I’m going to explore that a little more deeply here.
Now that I’ve read around the topic a little I find that my view strongly reflects that of Thomas Kuhn, who’s position was that scientific endeavour can be represented by a series of paradigm shifts punctuating a continuum of scientific progress. For Kuhn the long phases of ‘normal’ development provided by a single dominant problem-solving paradigm allow scientists to test how far a particular mode of thought can be stretched before it breaks down, at which point we must assume that either progress slows or that paradigm is overturned by a new ‘revolutionary’ paradigm.
A classic example of this would be the acceptance of Einsteinian relativistic physics over Newtonian mechanics. Where Newtonian mechanics is a perfectly serviceable worldview for a set of problems, it breaks down when you start to apply it to problems that are outside, what I’ll call here, ‘everyday physics’ involved in stopping a car or building a house.
The Einsteinian revolution was quick in scientific terms. It only took a few decades to become the dominant scientific paradigm, but what I was trying to get across in my previous post was that in popular discourse it remains the dominant paradigm, when in actual fact science has moved on into the statistical worldview. We are not seeing the scientific paradigm being reflected in the dominant popular discourse.
I’ll leave science behind for a few moments to explain what I believe is currently happening at a very high level in popular discourse.
There is a trend within elites to strongly uptake the new statistical paradigm, I think that this is shown in the use of probabilistic modeling of financial markets and climate systems, evidence-based policy-making, and moves to democratise data access. These are all strongly rationalist moves based around complex systems that require non-deterministic analysis if the statistical paradigm is to be met.
I believe that there is a counter-point trend that is strongly deterministic in nature, and that adheres to the scientific paradigm of Newton’s mechanical universe. This is a hierarchical worldview that sees rationality in order and rejects complexity as a fundamental position. I see this position in ideology-based politics, rejection of the new mathematics of complex systems (whether that be climate science or quantitative financial analysis) and positions that advocate security over innovation or risk.
So I think we have a problem since the arguments deployed by adherents of either worldview will not cohere with the arguments of the other. They can’t since they are operating on either side of a scientific paradigm shift.
As populations age it is generally thought they tend to conservative positions (order, security, predictability), so I don’t think that it’d be much of a stretch to say that this issue is going to get worse in the short term, but I think that there may be things that we can do about it. You will have to indulge me for a moment while I explain how popular discourse could be shifted up the paradigm ladder in a novel and entertaining way.
To me the key is the TV game show. The most populist pursuit known to man. Sit down on a Saturday night and watch some bright lights and loud noises and lose the cares of a working week. Whatever your views on this kind of entertainment you can’t deny their success. They are on virtually every TV channel in the world.
In the 60s and 70s we saw simple question and answer game shows like Ask the Family and Mastermind. In the 80s and 90s we saw problem solving rise as a genre with The Crystal Maze, The Krypton Factor and 3-2-1, and now in the 00s we see the Big Brother phenomenon and the ‘talent’ show as dominant genres. It may seem a strange thing to say but I think that this represents a paradigm shift in popular discourse from Newtonian to a relativistic worldview (with a brief spell of meritocracy between the two).
That requires an explanation.
The simple mechanics of the Newtonian game show seems to me obvious; a problem is presented, it is solved or not solved and a reward or penalty is earned. There is a simple cause and effect relationship between the problem and the reward.
We’ll bypass the meritocratic game shows because I think that, while they may represent the turbulent revolutionary period when paradigms are shifting in the wider populist discourse (they coincide with Thatcherism and all the social and economic changes that it entailed), I don’t think that they themselves actually represent the new scientific paradigm. A new social paradigm maybe, but not the scientific paradigm that we are talking about here.
Into the noughties; Big Brother and its clones, and all the multitude of talent shows (the ‘Idols’, Britain’s Got Talent, Popstar, etc, etc). There is no absolute in these shows, no cause and effect. All individual success or failure is relative to the other participants in the shows. The mechanics have moved from Newtonian to relativistic.
The death of Big Brother and (soon to come) the whole reality show genre, and the popular subversion of the talent show genre (as shown by John Sergeant and Jedward) is starting to offer space for the next generation of game shows and I propose that their dominant rhetorical position should be from the statistical worldview. Populist discourse needs to catch up with scientific discourse if we are ever to have society moving in step. There will always be a lag between science in the fore and populist discourse in the rear, but the statistical worldview has been the dominant scientific paradigm for almost 80 years. That is too long a lag, populist discourse needs to catch up.
Bracketed Text
December 23, 2009
We had a view into the surreal world of UN negotiations last week at the COP15 climate talks in Copenhagen. It is rare to see texts as they are negotiated in this sort of international conference, the diplomats are usually more discrete and the games more cloak and dagger than they are played out in public.
This month we saw texts as they were negotiated and the phenomenon of ‘the bracketed text’ became common currency. What these texts refer to are points of negotiation, so in this case [1C][1.5C][2C] would refer to a level of temperature rise that would be acceptable under the terms of that version of the text.
To me what is interesting here is the negotiation of a future reality that bears little relation to a definite physical reality. There is political reality (that’d be 2C), there is scientific reality (that’d be 1.5C) and there is an ideological reality (1C). In and around the conference we saw world leaders, commentators and activists who subscribed to one or other of the realities presented in the text.
A binding agreement that attempted to achieve the 1C target would lead to a very different world to that of a 2C target. We don’t know what any of the three worlds would look like, so which real is real ?
What does it take to lead academic research ?
July 7, 2009
I’ve been fortunate enough to be in meetings with two of the directors of the UK’s scientific research councils recently and I was struck by some commonalities. I’d like to discuss one of them.
Generous skepticism
These were men (yes, both men) with powerful intellects, but who were willing to entertain thoughts from other perspectives. You might think that this goes without saying, they do after all have to be able to see merit in other’s work, even if they cannot see the explicit route to ‘success’. Success in the charter of both organisations includes economic impact, as well as scientific advance and the public good.
The reason why I bring this up is because I have a work history in business and am moving into academia for the next few years, and the leadership approaches are completely different. While there is talk of ‘the business case’ within academic circles what is actually being spoken of is how likely the research is to attract funding. ‘Sexy’ or timely topics are viewed by most academics, that I have met, with as much relish as the truly original mode of thought.
I’m not sure how I feel about that. I rather like the image of the tousle-haired professor, forgetting the world and engaging in a flight of fancy, before plunging back to earth with a new way to think that happens to be of great use in addressing issues in bus timetabling. All because they saw the way that raindrops fell on a window pane and decided to chase that thought.
Of course, in practical terms research is a collaborative effort with individual scientific endeavour accreting to the edge of the shell of knowledge, but I don’t think that the spawning of new fields of endevour should be ignored and this is where the generous skepticism comes in. As leaders with a remarkable degree of control over what research gets done and by whom, the directors of the UK research councils must, absolutely must, be able to detach their own views on what is an immediately valid topic for funding from what might be a promising avenue of interrogation. In other words, not be seduced by the apposite, but be able to think in a strategic manner even if the outcome is not defined. I was glad to see some of that quality in both men.
