No Implication Of Reasonableness

Very few scientists actually plunge into the murky waters of testing or challenging borderline or pseudo-scientific beliefs.  The chance of finding out something really interesting — except about human nature — seems small, and the amount of time required seems large.  I believe that scientists should spend more time in discussing these issues, but the fact that a given contention lacks vigorous scientific opposition in no way implies that scientists think it is reasonable.
—    Carl Sagan
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On This Day In:
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2020	The Most Dynamic Link
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2019	A Proud Assertion
2018	Ask #45 About Anything
2017	Playing Makes Sense
2016	And Fathers, Sons
2015	My Suspect Confidence
2014	Disguised Blessings
2013	Be
2012	The Only Way to Win
2011	Honest Writing

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Bees And Flowers

If you put a computer in front of children and remove all other adult restrictions, they will self-organize around it like bees around a flower.
—    Sugata Mitra
As quoted by:  Joshua Davis
From his article:  “Free Thinkers“
Appearing in:  Wired Magazine;  dtd:  November 2013
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On This Day In:
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2020	Too High For #45
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2019	Little Things…
2018	Have Thee Paid Yet?
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2017	Hopefully, I’m Good Company
2016	Maybe Not Most
2015	Differences That Matter
2014	But Sometimes It Takes A Village
2013	Laughter > Grief
2012	Pioneers
2011	It Is Free

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In Support Of Common Core

‘Tis education forms the common minds;
Just as the twig is bent, the tree’s inclined.
—    Alexander Pope
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On This Day In:
2022	Keep Playing
2021	The False Stereotype
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2020	Fate, Agency And Dumb Luck
2019	You Too Can Choose
2018	In Line
2017	Just Get It Right
2016	In Support Of Common Core
2015	Oscillation
2014	Truth Shift
2013	Real Heroes
2012	Controlling The Beast
2011	1,002

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A Life Of Science

Book Review:
Last night I completed the book:  “Genius – The Life and Science of Richard Feynman“, (1992©) written by James Gleick.  As I had already read four of Dr. Feynman’s anecdotal books, most of the main content was already known to me.  What was “new” and interesting was the placing of Dr. Feynman’s work in context with the rest of the world (in general) and physics (in particular).  This is not a particularly “scientific” book.  There are no formulas and what nuclear physics which is discussed is not explained in any great detail.  Lots of things – quarks, spin, muans, top, tensor, scalar, photons, etc – are named, but very little is “explained”.  Probably because to do so would require math skills which so much of the general reading public lacks (myself included).  Or it could just be that the words naming things don’t translate into other words which explain them clearly.  I feel the latter is just as likely as the former.
Essentially, Feynman made his name by working on the creation of the “bomb” (the Manhattan Project), while he was in his early twenties.  He received his Nobel Prize (for physics) in 1965 and then achieved “popular” fame when he was on the commission to review the Challenger Shuttle disaster in the 1980’s.  There, he famously demonstrated how / why the “O-rings” failed by taking a piece of a ring and placing it in ice water during one of the televised sessions.  He then pressed on the chilled rubber and when it failed to return to “normal” shape, he explained this was the cause for the subsequent catastrophic failure (“explosion”) of the shuttle.
The good Dr. is “humanized” by repeatedly reporting on his sexual escapades and his other personal peccadilloes.  One is left with the impression that although brilliant, he was not necessarily a good / nice person.  Having said that, my experience is that focused and driven individuals rarely are – good or nice.  They rarely have the time or feel the need to make the effort to be “normal” in everyday society.
Anyone interested in seeing Dr. Feynman can look him up on YouTube and his world famous “red book” series are still widely available as references for Physics.  I’m told (actually I’ve read) you can practically hear the joy of science in Dr. Feynman’s lecture notes.  You can also find the books on-line for free, if you care to download them.
Final Recommendation:  Gleick is a very good writer and this is a fascinating (if deep) book.  If you are looking to try to understand the role of Physics in the 20th century, this is an excellent primer.  It is also an interesting biography of a true scientific iconoclast.  As mentioned, it is not for the faint of heart, but I’d say anyone with a deep (loving) curiosity of the world would get something out of this book.  Highly recommended.  And, of course, a good number of quotes will follow in the coming days…
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On This Day In:
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2020	Explaining And Gilding
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2019	Lead To Action
2018	Listen And See
2017	The Big Illusion
2016	What Are You Thinking About?
2015	What The Framers Chose
2014	Lost Anything Lately?
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2013	Serve The World
2012	Acquaintance, n.
2011	On Why His Father Was A Great Teacher
	A Baker’s Dozen

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Long Range Exploration

I believe that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to earth.
No single space project in this period will be more exciting, more impressive, or more important for the long-range exploration of space;  and none will be so difficult or expensive to accomplish.
—    President John Kennedy’s Address to Congress
May 25, 1961
[And having succeeded, we’ve now been over 40 years since mankind stepped on the moon (13 December 1972).  I hope I’m around to see a permanent station on the moon and a landing on Mars (and safe return).    —    KMAB]
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All Aboard

Spaceship Earth was so extraordinarily well invented and designed that to our knowledge humans have been on board it for two million years not even knowing that they were on board a ship.
—     R. Buckminster Fuller
From his book:  “Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth” (1963)
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On This Day In:
2021	Chocolate
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2020	In Passing
	Look A Little Bit Closer
2019	Especially Mine
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2018	And Some Never Do
2017	When We Know We Are Loved
2016	Good Acts
2015	Will You Be Leaving Soon?
2014	Just Long Enough
2013	R.I.P. – Tom Laughlin
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2012	All Aboard
2011	Sail On, Sailor

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Social Inhibition

When, in the course of its evolution, as species of animals develop a weapon which may destroy a fellow member at one blow, then, in order to survive, it must develop, along with the weapon, a social inhibition to prevent a usage which could endanger the existence of the species.
—    Konrad Z. Lorenz
From his book:  “King Solomon’s Ring“
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On This Day In:
2021	Unnoticed Perfection
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2020	Maybe After A Couple Of Hundred Years I Think About It
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2019	Courage Facing Temptation
2018	I Can’t Laugh At #45
2017	Release, Harmonize, Illuminate
2016	One Trouble With Television
2015	I Am Lucky And I Am Grateful
2014	Future Envy
2013	We Do Not Want To Learn That
2012	Social Inhibition
2011	Studying Chinese Food
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2010	Rant, Pant, Deep Breath – Reality

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Enquiries

Let us enquire, to what end is nature?
—    Ralph Waldo Emerson
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On This Day In:
2021	What Will You Become?
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2020	Rules Of Morality
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2019	Good People On Both Sides?
2018	Schedule, Please
2017	No Hope For #DumbDonald
2016	Do Something
2015	What Are You Making Now?
2014	Like Fire Burning In My Heart
2013	Oh Yes He Can!
2012	Enquiries
2011	The Prize: Understanding
2010	Can You Tell My Scanner Works?
	Rebecca – The Early Years
	James – The Early Years
	Brothers By Another Mother

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When The Student Is Ready

There is a saying in the martial arts:  “When the student is ready, the teacher will appear.”  I believe the saying has a more general application to life and to continuous education.
A little while back I was reading Wired Magazine and stumbled upon an article titled:  “Trials and Errors: Why Science Is Failing Us“.   (The article was written by Jonah Lehrer and appears in the January 2012 issue.)
I found the article to be fascinating in itself, but also because it ties together with some of the other ideas I’ve been reading about in sports, science and philosophy:  namely, we want to achieve intimate knowledge (“Grok”) by breaking processes down into fundamental pieces.  In science research this is known as “reductionism”.  Anyway, Lehrer’s article seems very harmonic with some of the other things I’ve been reading, so I’m offering up an (extensive) excerpt here, instead of just a couple of sentences as a quote.  I highly recommend reading the entire article for more insight…
“…Because scientists understood the individual steps of the cholesterol pathway at such a precise level, they assumed they also understood how it worked as a whole.
This assumption — that understanding a system’s constituent parts means we also understand the causes within the system — is not limited to the pharmaceutical industry or even to biology.  It defines modern science. In general, we believe that the so-called problem of causation can be cured by more information, by our ceaseless accumulation of facts.  Scientists refer to this process as reductionism.  By breaking down a process, we can see how everything fits together; the complex mystery is distilled into a list of ingredients.  And so the question of cholesterol — what is its relationship to heart disease? — becomes a predictable loop of proteins tweaking proteins, acronyms altering one another.  Modern medicine is particularly reliant on this approach.  Every year, nearly $100 billion is invested in biomedical research in the US, all of it aimed at teasing apart the invisible bits of the body.  We assume that these new details will finally reveal the causes of illness, pinning our maladies on small molecules and errant snippets of DNA.  Once we find the cause, of course, we can begin working on a cure.
The problem with this assumption, however, is that causes are a strange kind of knowledge.  This was first pointed out by David Hume, the 18th-century Scottish philosopher.  Hume realized that, although people talk about causes as if they are real facts — tangible things that can be discovered — they’re actually not at all factual.  Instead, Hume said, every cause is just a slippery story, a catchy conjecture, a “lively conception produced by habit.”  When an apple falls from a tree, the cause is obvious:  gravity.  Hume’s skeptical insight was that we don’t see gravity — we see only an object tugged toward the earth.  We look at X and then at Y, and invent a story about what happened in between.  We can measure facts, but a cause is not a fact — it’s a fiction that helps us make sense of facts.
The truth is, our stories about causation are shadowed by all sorts of mental shortcuts.  Most of the time, these shortcuts work well enough.  They allow us to hit fastballs, discover the law of gravity, and design wondrous technologies.  However, when it comes to reasoning about complex systems — say, the human body — these shortcuts go from being slickly efficient to outright misleading.
…
There’s a fundamental mismatch between how the world works and how we think about the world.
The good news is that, in the centuries since Hume, scientists have mostly managed to work around this mismatch as they’ve continued to discover new cause-and-effect relationships at a blistering pace.  This success is largely a tribute to the power of statistical correlation, which has allowed researchers to pirouette around the problem of causation.  Though scientists constantly remind themselves that mere correlation is not causation, if a correlation is clear and consistent, then they typically assume a cause has been found—that there really is some invisible association between the measurements.
Researchers have developed an impressive system for testing these correlations.  For the most part, they rely on an abstract measure known as statistical significance, invented by English mathematician Ronald Fisher in the 1920s.  This test defines a “significant” result as any data point that would be produced by chance less than 5 percent of the time.  While a significant result is no guarantee of truth, it’s widely seen as an important indicator of good data, a clue that the correlation is not a coincidence.
But here’s the bad news:  The reliance on correlations has entered an age of diminishing returns.  At least two major factors contribute to this trend.  First, all of the easy causes have been found, which means that scientists are now forced to search for ever-subtler correlations, mining that mountain of facts for the tiniest of associations.  Is that a new cause?  Or just a statistical mistake?  The line is getting finer;  science is getting harder.   Second — and this is the biggy — searching for correlations is a terrible way of dealing with the primary subject of much modern research: those complex networks at the center of life.  While correlations help us track the relationship between independent measurements, such as the link between smoking and cancer, they are much less effective at making sense of systems in which the variables cannot be isolated.  Such situations require that we understand every interaction before we can reliably understand any of them.  Given the byzantine nature of biology, this can often be a daunting hurdle, requiring that researchers map not only the complete cholesterol pathway but also the ways in which it is plugged into other pathways.  (The neglect of these secondary and even tertiary interactions begins to explain the failure of torcetrapib, which had unintended effects on blood pressure.  It also helps explain the success of Lipitor, which seems to have a secondary effect of reducing inflammation.)  Unfortunately, we often shrug off this dizzying intricacy, searching instead for the simplest of correlations.  It’s the cognitive equivalent of bringing a knife to a gunfight.
…
David Hume referred to causality as “the cement of the universe.”  He was being ironic, since he knew that this so-called cement was a hallucination, a tale we tell ourselves to make sense of events and observations.  No matter how precisely we knew a given system, Hume realized, its underlying causes would always remain mysterious, shadowed by error bars and uncertainty.  Although the scientific process tries to makes sense of problems by isolating every variable — imagining a blood vessel, say, if HDL alone were raised — reality doesn’t work like that.  Instead, we live in a world in which everything is knotted together, an impregnable tangle of causes and effects.  Even when a system is dissected into its basic parts, those parts are still influenced by a whirligig of forces we can’t understand or haven’t considered or don’t think matter.  Hamlet was right: There really are more things in heaven and Earth than are dreamt of in our philosophy.
This doesn’t mean that nothing can be known or that every causal story is equally problematic.  Some explanations clearly work better than others, which is why, thanks largely to improvements in public health, the average lifespan in the developed world continues to increase. (According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, things like clean water and improved sanitation — and not necessarily advances in medical technology — accounted for at least 25 of the more than 30 years added to the lifespan of Americans during the 20th century.)  Although our reliance on statistical correlations has strict constraints — which limit modern research — those correlations have still managed to identify many essential risk factors, such as smoking and bad diets.
And yet, we must never forget that our causal beliefs are defined by their limitations.  For too long, we’ve pretended that the old problem of causality can be cured by our shiny new knowledge.  If only we devote more resources to research or dissect the system at a more fundamental level or search for ever more subtle correlations, we can discover how it all works.  But a cause is not a fact, and it never will be; the things we can see will always be bracketed by what we cannot.  And this is why, even when we know everything about everything, we’ll still be telling stories about why it happened.  It’s mystery all the way down.“
There is a lot in there to think about – and even more in the entire article…
One final observation, while reviewing the article for this blog entry, I really noticed how much easier it is to follow Lehrer’s writing across various individual topics in Wired and in his other periodic publications.  This article was significantly longer than most of his columns in Wired.  It was really interesting to go back through the stream of his columns and recognize how much I’d enjoyed those “snipets” in a completely different context in the past without ever recognizing (consciously) they were the same author or the same theme.  In this case, with the monthly delay removed, I could recognize the spectrum of application of his own studies / observations across multiple “decision making” themes.  Now, when I get my new issues in the mail (yes, I still use “snail mail”), I can look forward to his columns like they are letters / updates from an old friend…
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2019	Looks A Lot Like #45
2018	Trying To Stay Young
2017	Seems Reasonable To Me
2016	We Can Get Through This Together (In Time)
2015	How Long Is A Piece Of String?
2014	Heathen, n.
2013	Wisdom’s Folly
2012	When The Student Is Ready
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2011	The Complex Richness Of Life

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True New

Whenever a new discovery is reported to the scientific world, they say first, ‘It is probably not true.‘  Thereafter, when the truth of the new proposition has been demonstrated beyond question, they say, ‘Yes, it may be true, but it is not important.‘  Finally, when sufficient time has elapsed to fully evidence its importance, they say, ‘Yes, surely it is important, but it is no longer new.‘ “
—     Michel de Montaigne
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2020	Doctor’s Orders
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2019	Innocent
2018	Ripost
2017	Just Asking…
2016	And 4
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2015	More Prejudice
2014	Say What?
2013	Daring Errors
2012	Are You Comfortable?
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2011	True New
2010	A Job Well Started Is A Job Half Done
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