How Expert Worship Is Ruining Science

The American Mind ^ | October 21, 2020 | Pasha Kamyshev

[E. Pluribus Unum]

“Science is the belief in the ignorance of experts.” —Richard Feynman

[Wuli]

All Utopias are chimeras.

[beethovenfan]

Einstein’s general theory of relativity has been proven over and over. Gravitational waves come directly out of the mathematics and have now been definitely observed for the first time, although it required very sophisticated equipment.

[redgolum]

Properly understood, Dark Matter means there is either a massive something we can’t see out there, or the theory is wrong. Not a big deal either way, but the problem is the worshippers are not able to explain it. If there is a massive amount of matter out there that is non reflected and/or transparent, that is kind of hard to understand. If the theory is wrong, then many grants and careers are wrong.

Neither should matter, but to state it gets you in trouble

[redgolum]

“Einstein’s general theory of relativity has been proven over and over.”

Nope. And you have just fallen for the point of the article. General Relativity does an excellent job of explaining a lot of things, but it is not “proven”. No honest physicist will call it a law.

Gravitational ways are suggested by GTF, and there is some evidence for them. But there was evidence of the aether theory as well (my favorite wrong theory by the way).

[alloysteel]

Scientists, if they are really dedicated to their application of the scientific method, are in perhaps even MORE disagreement among themselves than politicians.

Step 1: The Observation and Question
Step 2: The Hypothesis
Step 3: Experimentation and Data Collection
Step 4: Results and Data Analysis
Step 5: Conclusions

Any one of these steps remains open to question, and as the question is reframed, because additional observations were made, then the hypothesis must be restated to conform with the new observations. A new series of experimentation and collection of the results is then analyzed, and a new perhaps highly surprising conclusion emerges.

Real science is NEVER settled.

[Lonesome in Massachussets]

Excellent article. This guy sounds like Scott Adams.

[PIF]

It seems like the more we learn, the less we know...and the more apparent that we have forgotten most of human history going back 300,000 years

[CaptainMorgantown]

“The prospect of domination of the nation’s scholars by Federal employment, project allocation, and the power of money is ever present and is gravely to be regarded.

“Yet in holding scientific discovery in respect, as we should, we must also be alert to the equal and opposite danger that public policy could itself become the captive of a scientific-technological elite.”

-Dwight D. Eisenhower, 1961

Eisenhower’s farewell address is famous for his warning that the “military-industrial complex” presented a danger to representative government. However, Eisenhower also predicted and warned against the politicization of “science”.

[Hostage]

No, it hasn’t been ‘proven’. What you mean to say is that it hasn’t been disproven.

His theory is absolutely beautiful to the trained eye. It is mathematically solid and logically sound.

But it’s a theory, albeit beautiful and useful. To say it hasn’t been disproven
is part of the scientific community’s ‘healthy skepticism’ to all things, not as skepticism of the findings but rather healthy skepticism of ourselves and our abilities.

This has to do with the theory of incompleteness which confronted Albert leaving him puzzled as to why he couldn’t finish his Grand Unified Theory and which led to his very close friendship at Princeton with Kurt Friedrich Gödel who Albert adopted as his mentor as well as his friend. In theoretical computer science and AI, Gödel is considered the most important philosopher since Aristotle. Whereas Albert went ‘outward’, Kurt went ‘inward’ because everything ‘outward’ originates from the ‘inward’, from the mind.

Relativity may fail in the context of black holes. We don’t know. Conjectures can be made. But even should it fail in a certain setting, it doesn’t mean it’s no longer useful or that it should be abandoned. Usually, when a theory extends into settings where it doesn’t apply, we amend the theory, we adjust the mechanics to extend its applicability.

The reason we talk in this philosophical manner as in the above, is because we are limited, human intelligence and knowledge are limited. So we never say such and such is absolutely ‘true’, rather we say such and such is useful and applies, or seems to apply in general.

This language applies also to scientific laws and dogma.

[devere]

Great title for a long, vague, and unsatisfying article.

Vintage Feynman! Now there’s a man who used plain English.

[devere]

“Science is the belief in the ignorance of experts” Richard Feynman.

[thoughtomator]

> Gravitational waves are not fiction. They were predicted by Einstein and have now been observed.

This is a religious belief that is not supported by actual science.

[beethovenfan]

I think you should do some reading.

[beef]

From Eisenhower's Farewell Address (right after the military industrial complex part):

"Akin to, and largely responsible for the sweeping changes in our industrial-military posture, has been the technological revolution during recent decades.

In this revolution, research has become central; it also becomes more formalized, complex, and costly. A steadily increasing share is conducted for, by, or at the direction of, the Federal government.

Today, the solitary inventor, tinkering in his shop, has been over shadowed by task forces of scientists in laboratories and testing fields. In the same fashion, the free university, historically the fountainhead of free ideas and scientific discovery, has experienced a revolution in the conduct of research. Partly because of the huge costs involved, a government contract becomes virtually a substitute for intellectual curiosity. For every old blackboard there are now hundreds of new electronic computers.

The prospect of domination of the nation's scholars by Federal employment, project allocations, and the power of money is ever present and is gravely to be regarded.

Yet, in holding scientific research and discovery in respect, as we should, we must also be alert to the equal and opposite danger that public policy could itself become the captive of a scientific-technological elite." (emphasis mine)

[Harmless Teddy Bear]

Phrenology was settled science.

Until it was not.

The scientific method is the most exact way we have yet discovered to try to figure things out. Which means that we should always be questioning and looking at things in different ways. No one is an expert on everything, no one can even be an expert in one field, there is just too much information out there.

Experts are just people. They can get tunnel vision and are just as susceptible to peer pressure as anyone else. So they should be questioned. Questioning them is part of the scientific process. Unthinking worship is cultism.

[Hiddigeigei]

Well, the structure of DNA, RNA, and their biological mechanism in reproduction have been discovered since 1950. It sort of changed the science of biology (my field). However, recently, the basic tenet of science, don’t lie to yourself or others, has been forgotten by many scientists.

[thoughtomator]

I have done the reading.

And what I have found is an experiment that can’t be reproduced, and claimed to detect something at a threshold so sensitive that it could have picked up road noise or some other environmental disturbance.

If you think what they did there is science, you need to go back and review basic scientific method. If you can’t reproduce the experiment independently it is BY DEFINITION not science. And with that experiment design it will never be reproduced, guaranteed.