Negative Space: cargo cult science
- The (para)psychology of climate change research
- The “they meant well” circling of the wagons reminds me of a branch of scientific research popular when I was in college: parapsychology. Failure to create a falsifiable model ultimately led to an almost religious belief that even cheating proved the existence of psi.
- The 329th consecutive month of hot temperature adjustments
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The temperatures keep rising—as the measurements keep rising.
- Another victim of climate change: science reporting
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The needs of religious reporting are completely different from the needs of science reporting. Treating climate change as a religion is killing science reporting. If we’re not careful, it will kill science as well.
- Cargo cult climate science
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When your real-world evidence contradicts your theory, that isn’t a boon for deniers; that’s a boon for you, because, if you are a scientist, that is how your scientific knowledge advances. Real scientists are embarrassed when they ignore real-world evidence in favor of a mere theory.
- Cargo cult police science
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Why should Johnson County deputies Mark Burns and Edward Blake be expected to perform better science than the climate scientists they see celebrated in the news?
- Cargo Cult Science
- “When you have put a lot of ideas together to make an elaborate theory, you want to make sure, when explaining what it fits, that those things it fits are not just the things that gave you the idea for the theory; but that the finished theory makes something else come out right, in addition.”
Richard Feynman’s famous “cargo cult science”, adapted from the Caltech commencement address given in 1974. Rescued from Donald Simanek’s home page.
- The Church of Man
- Five hundred years after Copernicus, we still find it impossible to believe that the universe does not revolve around us.
- Climate priests cry wolf one more time?
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In science, if your theory’s predictions don’t happen, you need a new theory. In religion, if your beliefs predict something that doesn’t happen, you just keep moving that prediction further into the future.
- Coal in their stockings: climategate Christmas
- If unknown data tracks known bad data, it’s a good guess there’s something wrong with the unknowns as well.
- Did government funding help keep Flint’s water unsafe?
- When researchers rely on government funding to keep their jobs, it should come as no surprise that they aren’t eager to publish findings that reflect badly on those government agencies that fund them.
- Does government funding hold science back?
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Abundant government funding for research probably has the effect of dividing research into crazy and conventional, with little in between for innovative.
- Global warming vs. oiled dolphins
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Catastrophic anthropogenic global warming critics are more dangerous than oil execs who kill dolphins, and need to be buried deeper than two million year old bones. But this makes CAGW a non-science. Science requires criticism or it isn’t science. Science-oriented media outlets are doing CAGW scientists a disservice by protecting them from competing theories.
- I believe in Global Warming (and other conversion stories)
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Conversion stories aren’t meant to convert skeptics; they’re a bonding tale for the converted, a sign of a religion; science needs theories that make predictions about what happens when they’re right and how to falsify them if they’re wrong. Proof for human-caused global warming is always whatever happened last month or last year, never tomorrow. No application of the scientific method can ever disprove it because hindsight is 20/20.
- In memoriam: vaccinations killing pilots
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If pilots are dying at more than a hundred times the rate they’ve died in previous years, what does that mean for everything and everyone that relies on air travel and transportation?
- Religious upbringing study uses odd definition of altruism
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The religious upbringing altruism study is a failure because the researchers failed to define their moral terms. You can’t study altruism and judgmentalism unless you come up with a definition of the terms. Their definition appears to have been “willing to give money to social science researchers”.
- Rudyard Kipling: The Humility of the Plague Doctor
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Charts and graphs are not science. You can get charts and graphs with astrology and biorhythms. Computers can model scientific superstition just as well as they can model real theories. Bloodletting is superstition even if its done in the name of a computer model.
- The scientific creed
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If science is your religion, you have chosen the hardest religion of all. If science is your religion, you don’t prove yourself right. You prove yourself wrong.
- Should the government (and the CDC) fund research into gun violence?
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Government funded research has held back progress in reducing violence and preventing suicide.
