Overcoming Bias

Physicists Held To Lower Standard

In August I complained about vague LHC forecasts.  My oped based on that post just appeared in Symmetry, "A joint Fermilab/SLAC publication."  Its blurb: "Today's LHC forecasts are no easier to score than the typical horoscope."  It ends:

But geez - the LHC costs more than $10 billion of public money. Shouldn't we expect big-shot physicists who hope to crow to the public about LHC vindication to express their predictions in a more scoreable form? We don't accept less from weather, business, or sport forecasters; why accept less from physicists?

My implicit answer: we hold physicists to lower standards.  As I posted two years ago:

Consider how differently the public treats physics and economics.   Physicists can say that this week they think the universe has eleven dimensions, three of which are purple, and two of which are twisted clockwise, and reporters will quote them unskeptically, saying "Isn't that cool!"   But if economists say, as they have for centuries, that a minimum wage raises unemployment, reporters treat them skeptically and feel they need to find a contrary quote to "balance" their story.

That same Symmetry issue says:

Leon Lederman, a 1988 Nobel laureate and Fermilab physicist, plopped a folding table and two chairs on a busy New York City street corner and sat under colorful hand-scrawled signs offering to answer physics questions.  Even in a city of people too busy for impromptu sidewalk conversations, the sight was too tempting to resist. ... Soon about 20 people formed a line down the block. They asked Lederman about the strong force, time and space, fusion, and even time travel. Some asked follow-up questions to get a clearer understanding, while others just seemed thrilled at the chance to meet a Nobel Prize winner.

I'll bet none told Lederman he was wrong.  Imagine how a Nobel-winning economist would be received. 

Animal experimentation: morally acceptable, or just the way things always have been?

Following the announcement last week that Oxford University’s controversial Biomedical Sciences building is now complete and will be open for business in mid-2009, the ethical issues surrounding the use of animals for scientific experimentation have been revisited in the media—see, for example, here , here, and here.

The number of animals used per year in scientific experiments worldwide has been estimated at 200 million—well in excess of the population of Brazil and over three times that of the United Kingdom. If we take the importance of an ethical issue to depend in part on how many subjects it affects, then, the ethics of animal experimentation at the very least warrants consideration alongside some of the most important issues in this country today, and arguably exceeds them in importance. So, what is being done to address this issue?

In the media, much effort seems to be devoted to discrediting concerns about animal suffering and reassuring people that animals used in science are well cared for, and relatively little effort is spent engaging with the ethical issues. However, it seems likely that no amount of reassurance about primate play areas and germ-controlled environments in Oxford’s new research lab will allay existing concerns about the acceptability of, for example, inducing heart failure in mice or inducing Parkinson’s disease in monkeys—particularly since scientists are not currently required to report exactly how much suffering their experiments cause to animals. Given the suffering involved, are we really sure that experimenting on animals is ethically justifiable?

In attempting to answer this question, it is disturbing to note some inconsistencies in popular views of science. Consider, for example, that by far the most common argument in favour of animal experimentation is that it is an essential part of scientific progress. As Oxford's oft-quoted Professor Alastair Buchan reminds us, ‘You can’t make a head injury in a dish, you can’t create a stroke in a test tube, you can’t create a heart attack on a chip: it just doesn’t work’. Using animals, we are told, is essential if science is to progress. Since many people are apparently convinced by this argument, they must therefore believe that scientific progress is something worthwhile—that, at the very least, its value outweighs the suffering of experimental animals. And yet, at the same time, we are regularly confronted with the conflicting realisation that, far from viewing science as a highly valuable and worthwhile pursuit, the public is often disillusioned and exasperated with science. Recently, for example, people have expressed bafflement that scientists have spent time and money on seemingly trifling projects—such as working out the best way to swat a fly and discovering why knots form—and on telling us things that we already know: that getting rid of credit cards helps us spend less money, and that listening to very loud music can damage hearing. Why, when the public often seems to despair of science, do so many people appear to be convinced that scientific progress is so important that it justifies the suffering of millions of animals?

Behold Our Ancestors

A community of the bacteria Candidatus Desulforudis audaxviator has been discovered 2.8 kilometres beneath the surface of the Earth in fluid-filled cracks of the Mponeng goldmine in South Africa. Its 60C home is completely isolated from the rest of the world, and devoid of light and oxygen. ... 

99.9% of the DNA [there] belonged to one bacterium, a new species. The remaining DNA was contamination from the mine and the laboratory. ...  A community of a single species is almost unheard of in the microbial world. ... Deep-sea vent communities, for instance ... use oxygen ... produced by photosynthesising plankton at the surface. ....

Intelligent Design Honesty

The excellent and famous philosopher Thomas Nagel on teaching intelligent design:

When ... in response to the finding that the teaching of creationism in public schools was unconstitutional, the producers of creation science tried to argue that young earth creationism was consistent with the geological and paleontological evidence, ... their arguments were easily refuted. ... That is a good enough reason not to teach it to schoolchildren. ..

I agree with Philip Kitcher that the response of evolutionists to creation science and intelligent design should not be to rule them out as "not science." He argues that the objection should rather be that they are bad science, or dead science: scientific claims that have been decisively refuted by the evidence. ... However, the claim that ID is bad science or dead science may depend ... on the assumption that divine intervention in the natural order is not a serious possibility. ...

So far as I can see, the only way to make no assumptions of a religious nature would be to admit that the empirical evidence may suggest different conclusions depending on what religious belief one starts with, and that the evidence does not by itself settle which of those beliefs is correct, even though there are other religious beliefs, such as the literal truth of Genesis, that are easily refuted by the evidence. I do not see much hope that such an approach could be adopted, but it would combine intellectual responsibility with respect for the Establishment Clause. ...

'Anyone who thinks the Large Hadron Collider will destroy the world is a t**t.'

This week is Big Bang Week at the BBC, with various programmes devoted to the switch-on of CERN’s Large Hadron Collider (LHC) on Wednesday morning.  Many of these programmes are covered in this week’s issue of the Radio Times—the BBC’s listings magazine—which also features a short interview with Professor Brian Cox, chair of particle physics at the University of Manchester. Asked about concerns that the LHC could destroy the earth, he replies:

‘The nonsense you find on the web about “doomsday scenarios” is conspiracy theory rubbish generated by a small group of nutters, primarily on the other side of the Atlantic.  These people also think that the Theory of Relativity is a Jewish conspiracy and that America didn’t land on the Moon.  Both are more likely, by the way, than the LHC destroying the world.  I’m slightly irritated, because this non-story is symptomatic of a larger mistrust in science, particularly in the US, which includes things like intelligent design. [… A]nyone who thinks the LHC will destroy the world is a t**t.’ (Final word censored by Radio Times.) [1]

Who counts as a nutter and a t**t on this reckoning?  It is true that anyone who thinks there is a 100% chance that the LHC will definitely destroy the world is confused—but it’s probably also true that not many people really think this.  On the other hand, if anyone who thinks that it is worth taking seriously the (admittedly very slim) possibility that the LHC will destroy the world is a t**t, then there are many apparently very clever t**ts knocking about in our universities.  Among these are several of my colleagues: Nick Shackel has previously blogged about the risks of turning on the LHC, as has Toby Ord; and Rafaela Hillerbrand, Toby Ord, and Anders Sandberg recently presented on this topic at the recent Future of Humanity Institute-hosted conference on Global Catastrophic Risks. And, despite having chatted to each of these people about the LHC at some point or another, I’ve never heard any of them express sympathy for the view that the Theory or Relativity is a Jewish conspiracy or that nobody landed on the Moon.  So, are they t**ts or not?

Self-Indication Solves Time-Asymmetry

This seems a deep insight simple enough to explain in a blog post (and so I'm probably not the first to see it):  the self-indication approach to indexical uncertainty solves the time-asymmetry question in physics!  To explain this, I must first explain time-asymmetry and indexical uncertainty.

A deep question in physics is time asymmetry - why doesn't stuff happen as often "backwards" in time?  We have no idea about the tiny CP-violation in particle physics, but all the other time asymmetries are thought to arise from a very-low early-universe entropy.  The most popular explanation for this is inflation, especially eternal inflation, which says that any small space-time region satisfying certain conditions is connected to infinitely many large time-asymmetric regions much like what we see around us.  Alas, the chance that any small region satisfies these inflation conditions is extremely small.  As a recent paper puts it:

Initial conditions which give the big bang a thermodynamic arrow of time must necessarily be low entropy and therefore "rare." There is no way the initial conditions can be typical, or there would be no arrow of time, and this fact must apply to inflation and prevent it from representing "completely generic" initial conditions.  ... If you can regard the big bang as a fluctuation in a larger system it must be an exceedingly rare one to account for the observed thermodynamic arrow of time.

So the question of time-asymmetry reduces to this: why does the universe have enough independently variable small regions that at least one of them gives eternal inflation?  That is: why is the universe so big?

Our Comet Ancestors?

A few years ago PCW Davies persuasively argued that Earth life more likely started on Mars.  Last year, Napier and coauthors argued that comets are an even more likely source:

The recognition that life has an information content too vast to be assembled by random processes has led to many discussions of possible evolutionary routes, starting from a simpler self-replicating organic system and ultimately leading to the present-day protein- DNA-based life. ... The clay model ... uses the repeating lattice structures of clay particles and their catalytic properties of converting simple organic molecules in aqueous solution into complex biopolymers. ...

The volume of clay on the Earth is vastly surpassed by that in comets. A single comet of radius 10 km and 30% volume fraction of clay contains as much clay, to within a factor of around 10, as that of the early Earth. However, our Solar System is surrounded by about 10^11 comets forming the Oort cloud ...  Whereas the average persistence of shallow clay pools and hydrothermal vent concentrations of clay on the Earth can range from 1 to around 100 years, a cometary interior provides a stable, aqueous, organic-rich environment for around 10^6 years.  ... mechanisms for interstellar panspermia have recently been identified, and we may
have to multiply this number by the number of Oort cloud analogues in the Galaxy.

(See also comments.)  The entire paper is very short and qualitative - I'd have preferred quantitative discussion of rates of comet collisions with each other and with early Earth, to help us estimate how fast comet life could spread across comets, and how far it would have needed to spread to give it a decent chance of spreading to Earth. 

But my core reaction is to marvel at how little work like this gets done.  Figuring out the origins of life usually comes near the top of important scientific questions, yet in fact few resources go into this area.  One reason, I suspect, is that for now the best way to approach this subject is qualitative and integrative, while academia mainly rewards impressive displays of ways with words, math, and tech.  Does the topic also just seem silly?

The Comedy of Behaviorism

Followup to:  Humans in Funny Suits

"Let me see if I understand your thesis.  You think we shouldn't anthropomorphize people?"
        -- Sidney Morgenbesser to B. F. Skinner

Behaviorism was the doctrine that it was unscientific for a psychologist to ascribe emotions, beliefs, thoughts, to a human being.  After all, you can't directly observe anger or an intention to hit someone.  You can only observe the punch.  You may hear someone say "I'm angry!" but that's hearing a verbal behavior, not seeing anger.  Thoughts are not observable, therefore they are unscientific, therefore they do not exist.  Oh, you think you're thinking, but that's just a delusion - or it would be, if there were such things as delusions.

Touching Vs. Understanding

On the plane home last week I talked to a sharp Yale historian, and realized we devote far more resources to preserving historical sites, and to making history available via museums, than we do to funding professional historians to make sense of it all.  That reminded me of complaints that NASA spends far more on sending instruments into space to collect data than it does on funding scientists to analyze that data.  In both cases we collect far more data than ever gets carefully analyzed.

Now part of the explanation must be that the public can more easily see historical sites, museums, and space instruments than historians and data analysts.  But that doesn't seem to me a sufficient explanation - I suspect we are also just more interested in touching the past, and in touching space, than in understanding either.  We talk about understanding because that is a modern applause light, but really we just like to touch exotic things.  The more we can touch, the further is our reach, and the more important and powerful we must be.  I wonder how much more this explains.

Added: We have related desires to see art and sport events in person, up close, and to meet and touch celebrities in person. 

Funding Bias

From a Post article while I was traveling:

Wal-Mart and Toys R Us ... will stop selling plastic baby bottles, food containers and other products that contain [BPA]. ... One of the eyebrow-raising statistics about the BPA studies is the stark divergence in results, depending on who funded them.  More than 90 percent of the 100-plus government-funded studies performed by independent scientists found health effects from low doses of BPA, while none of the fewer than two dozen chemical-industry-funded studies did.  This striking difference in studies isn't unique to BPA. When a scientist is hired by a firm with a financial interest in the outcome, the likelihood that the result of that study will be favorable to that firm is dramatically increased. ...