Fred on Science vs. Knowledge

I have shamelessly stolen most of Fred's Thoughts on science and its capabilities, and reprinted them here. But I have left off the last part, for which you will need to take the link, and give Fred a hit, in order to read. Please do that. Fred deserves the traffic.

Can Scientists Think?
Euclid Cannot Explain a Hamburger

June 5, 2015

On the Unz Review I find a piece by Razib Khan, Can a Religious Person be a Good Scientist? His answer, yes, is inarguable since, as he points out, many good scientists are religious (Newton, a Christian, by most accounts did pretty fair work.) But why should it be necessary to ask such a luminously foolish question?

Because we live in luminously foolish times. Mr. Khan cites, not approvingly, a scientist who wanted to have another dismissed from his position for being an evangelical Christian. Why? Well, you see, the manner of thinking of religious people renders them incapable of science.

This makes sense only in terms of bitter hostility to religion. Why can a Christian scientist not study, say, the possibilities of rotaxanes as bistable devices in molecular computers as well as can an atheist or agnostic?

While Christians can think about science, I wonder whether scientists, as scientists, can think about anything else. Are their mental capacities not grossly limited in comparison with those of other people?

It is a question of blinkers. They think inside a box containing only a part of reality.

Logical systems, such as those to which scientists are tightly wed, depend on assumptions and undefined primitives. Their conclusions cannot go beyond results derivable from their assumptions.

Consider plane geometry, a field encompassing the behavior of planes, lines, points, and angles. Like many branches of science and mathematics, it produces interesting and useful results. Yet it rests on things that cannot really be defined. (What is a point? “An infinitely localized whereness” perhaps?) It cannot explain things not contained in its premises. For example, it has nothing to say about mass, energy, volume, or chili dogs. Yet these things exist. If a plane geometer thinks only within the postultes of his field (which of course no plane gemoteter does), he cannot understand the greater part of reality.

The silences as a whole enjoy the same strengths and suffer the same limitations. They deal with matter, energy, space, and time, however hyphenated, and nothing else. These are undefined. (Dorm-room definition: “Space is what keeps everything from being in the same place. Time is what keeps everything from happening at once.”)

Science enjoys great prestige as it has led to great results, such as iPhones. Perhaps bccause of this scientists, for some reason thought to be smarter than the rest of humanity, are seen as oracles and almost as priests. Yet they have nothing to say, and can have nothing to say, about meaning, purpose, origins, destiny, consciousness, beauty, right and wrong, Good and Evil, death, love or loathing.

These are matters of some importance to normal people whose thinking is not crippled by strict adherence to the Laws of Motion. A scientist, as a scientist, must dismiss them as empty abstractions, simply ignore them, or provide unsatisfactory answers and quickly change the subject. A physicist may speak solemnly of the Big Bang, but it has no more explanatory power than Genesis. A child of six years will ask, “But where did God come from?” Or the Big Bang.

A man whose thinking has not been shackled by the restrictions of science can say, “This sunset is beautiful.” A scientist cannot not, not if he is thinking as a scientist. Beauty has no physical definition, the only kind allowable in the sciences. (I confess that in my ancient chemistry classes we accepted as the unit of beauty the millihelen, defined as “that amount of beauty necessary to launch one ship.”)

Trouble begins when one tries to stretch a system beyond its premises. Here we come to scientism, as distinct from science. A great many people, some of them scientists, want science to explain everything whatever. This of course is the function of a religion.

Scientism, like other varieties of political correctness, is de rigueur among much of the cognitive or approximately cognitive elite, and has been inculcated in the populace by endless repetition. The credo runs roughly Big Bang, stars form, planets, oceans, life, evolution, Manhattan. Acceptance—unexamined acceptance—of scientism is now regarded as evidence of right thinking. Most who accept it have no idea what they are accepting, but they know that it is the proper thing to do.

For much of the public, this is a sort of religion by Disney, the Force Be With You, with an origin of of the universe that, well, you know, the scientists understand it, and we are evolving upward and onward into like, better beings and all. And death? Let us speak of other things.

Here we come to Mr. Khan’s scientist who (as distinct from Mr. Khan) wants to remove Christians from the practice of science. A religion, however manqué, cannot brook any doubt whatever. A Christian cannot say, well, maybe Jesus was the son of God, but maybe Mary wasn’t a virgin after all. If he does, his faith no longer serves its function of providing certainty. Any doubt threatens the whole edifice.

So with scientism. Serious believers cannot abide heresy. The need to believe, to protect the edifice, is most commonly seen regarding the theory of evolution, any questioning of which results not in answers, but in fury.

The acolytes of scientism invariably see the enemy as Creationism, which they correctly if not consciously recognize as a competing religion. Thus the desire to remove believers in any religion from scientific posts. Thus the pathological outrage that arises if the schools of Kansas want to mention Biblical Creation. Why? Obviously doing so would not result in the burning of laboratories or crucifixion of chemists, and would be unlikely to discourage a kid from going into the sciences. This doesn’t matter. Heresy cannot be allowed.

Scientism is part of the curious culture-wide campaign to remove any trace of religion from public life. It is the equivalent of the Christian iconoclasm of the late Roman times: we must tear down the statues of those pagan gods. The purposes are identical.

Scientism requires a willful ignoring of undeniable aspects of reality, such as death. To a scientist, (again, thinking as a scientist), death means only the cessation of certain chemical processes. He says after the funeral, “John is gone,” but never, “Where has John gone?” But do not even atheists wake up at three a.m. and think, “Where are we? What is this all about?” And, ominously, “What comes next, if anything?” The atheist might reply, “Nothing”—but what if he is wrong? How does he know? Except to the religious, who don’t have the answers either, even to mention these questions seems slightly obscene.

Note that the premises of the sciences, if accepted other than provisionally for a paraticular investigation, lead to paradoxes, as for example the Aquarium Effect. Scientists view the universe as if it were an isolated system in a vast aquarium. They can look at it, poke at it with sticks and instruments, but they are apart from it. If they regard themselves as being within the system, problems arise.

For example, the brain is an electrochemical mechanism, all parts of which follow the laws of physics and chemistry. Successive states of a physical mechanism are completely determined by preceding states, just as they are in a computer. Physical systems cannot choose their behavior: a rock when dropped cannot decide to fall sideways. Our thoughts are therefore predestined. Are they then still thoughts?

Which leads to the obvious conclusion that one cannot simultaneously be part of a physical system and fully understand it. Like conjugate variables or something. But we are part of the universe.

Note that all science is physics. Chemistry is the physics of the interaction of atoms and molecules, biochemistry of particular classes of molecules. Consequently evolution is a subset of physics. (How is it not? Everything that happens in an organism from metabolism to mutation obeys the laws of physics. If this is not true, then physical behavior is affected by Something Outside of Physics—eeeeeeeeeek!)

Part of physics is the requirement of causality. Every physical event, which means every event, must have prior physical causes. Anything that doesn’t can’t happen. But do we really know this? A normal person can wonder. A scientist cannot.

To amuse ourselves, let us assume that something physically inexplicable actually happened. Let us suppose that the shade of Elvis appeared in my living room, sang Blue Moon over Kentucky, and disappeared in a flash of green light. Remember, for the moment we assume that it really happened. How could a scientist, or the science, handle this?

I could tell my friend the astrophysicist about it, but he would assume that I was joking, lying, or delusional. I could tell him that my neighbors heard it, but he would say that it was a recording. I could say that people walking in the street saw it though my window, but he would say that it was an Elvis impersonator. The event not being reproducible, I could not possibly convince him—even though it had actually happened.

Scientism appears at its most desperate in matters of evolution, where things clearly explicable in physical terms (astronomy, electronics, combustion) bump up against things not nearly so explicable (life, consciousness, motivations). Scientism always finds a way, however strained, to avoid the ravages of doubt. Conceding or even considering anything outside of that small scientific box would open up a Whole Lot of Doubt.

Pushback On The Hiatus Cancellation

Satellite Data Shows No Global Warming For Nearly 19 Years

Scientists with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration released a study Thursday claiming there’s no hiatus in global warming. But new satellite-derived temperature measurements show there’s been no global warming for 18 years and six months.

“For 222 months, since December 1996, there has been no global warming at all,” writes climate expert Lord Christopher Monckton, the third viscount Monckton of Brenchley

“This month’s [satellite] temperature – still unaffected by a slowly strengthening el Niño, which will eventually cause temporary warming – passes another six-month milestone, and establishes a new record length for the Pause: 18 years 6 months,” Monckton adds.

Monckton’s data comes as NOAA scientists release updated data purporting to show there’s actually been no hiatus in global warming. NOAA scientists made adjustments to temperature records to show more than twice as much warming as the old analysis at the global scale from 1998 to 2012.

“Newly corrected and updated global surface temperature data from NOAA’s [National Centers for Environmental Information] do not support the notion of a global warming ‘hiatus,’” wrote NOAA scientists in a new study.

The difference between Monckton’s data and NOAA’s data is that satellites measure the lowest few miles of the atmosphere, temperature measurements from government scientists rely on thousands of weather stations, buoys and ships across the world’s surface.

Both satellites and surface temperature readings, however, showed prolonged periods without statistically significant warming trends — 15 years for surface temperatures and more than 18 years for satellites.

Scientists have already pushed back against NOAA’s new study. The news site Mashable interviewed about a dozen climate scientists not involved in the study, and nearly all of them said “the study does not support the authors’ conclusion that the so-called warming pause never happened.”[See below]

“Instead, they said it simply proves that changing the start and end dates used for analyzing temperature trends has a big influence on those measurements, a fact that was already widely known,” Mashable reported.

“The main claim by the authors that they have uncovered a significant recent warming trend is dubious,” scientists with the libertarian Cato Institute wrote in an open letter on the NOAA study.

“The significance level they report on their findings (.10) is hardly normative, and the use of it should prompt members of the scientific community to question the reasoning behind the use of such a lax standard,” they wrote.

And there's this:

"Pushback from other researchers

Scientists who have investigated the warming hiatus or are otherwise involved in assessing climate change on various timescales said the study's key shortcoming is that it does what mainstream climate scientists have long criticized climate contrarians — often now referred to as "climate denialists" — of doing: cherry-picking start and end dates to arrive at a particular conclusion.

Gerald Meehl, a climate researcher at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) in Boulder, Colorado, told Mashable in an email that while he finds the new study laudable for improving temperature measurements, there are flaws in how the researchers interpreted the data. For example, Meehl said there is still a lower warming trend from 1998 to 2012, compared to the previous base period of 1950 to 1999, "thus there is still a hiatus defined in that way."

Meehl said adding two years to the time period by including 2013 and 2014, which was a record-warm year, makes the warming trend appear to be 38% larger than previous studies that did not include them.

"My conclusion is that even with the new data adjustments, there still was a nominal hiatus period that lasted until 2013 with a lower rate of global warming than the warming rate of the last 50 years of the 20th century," he said, "and a factor of two slower warming than the previous 20 years from the 1970s to 1990s."

Lisa Goddard, director of the International Research Institute for Climate and Society (IRI) at Columbia University, told Mashable that the study does not support the conclusion that global warming didn't slow down for a relatively short time period.

"It is clear that Karl et al. have put a lot of careful work into updating these global products," Goddard said in an email.

"However, they go too far when they conclude that there was no decadal-scale slowdown in the rate of warming globally.

"However, they go too far when they conclude that there was no decadal-scale slowdown in the rate of warming globally. This argument seems to rely on choosing the right period — such as including the recent record-breaking 2014."

Another senior climate researcher, Kevin Trenberth of NCAR, said the hiatus depends on your definition of the term. To him, global warming never stopped, as climate skeptics argue, because most of the extra heat from manmade greenhouse gases (e.g. carbon dioxide) was redirected deep into the oceans from 1998 to 2012. However, surface temperatures did warm more slowly during this time.

"I think the article does emphasize that the kind of variation is now much more within the realm of expectations from natural variability, but it is a bit misleading in trying to say there is no hiatus," he said in an email.

In response to such criticisms, Karl said even the 1998-to-2012 period that climate skeptics have long focused on looks twice as warm with the revised data set — at 0.086 degrees Celsius of warming, compared to the previously calculated rate of just 0.039 degrees Celsius.

Using the new data, the 1998-to-2014 period shows warming that is "significantly positive," Karl said, of 0.106 degrees Celsius, up from 0.059 degrees Celsius using an older data set for the same period.

In light of the new data, other researchers recommend discounting the short-term fluctuations in favor of focusing on longterm warming.

Michael Mann, director of the Earth System Science Center at Pennsylvania State University, said the study helps drive home the point that "global warming continues unabated, as we continue to burn fossil fuels and warm the planet."

"Cherry-picking a warm start date like 1998, as contrarians are fond of doing in an attempt to downplay global warming, was never scientifically defensible to start with, and this article once again confirms that," Mann said in an email.
Why focus on a 15-year period anyway?

Regardless of whether the hiatus was really a hiatus, two things are clear. First, that slowdown is over anyway, given the record-warm 2014 and indications that 2015 may be a repeat of that. Second, focusing on relatively short timescales may be distracting from longterm global warming; however, it is important, since governments and businesses make decisions on shorter timescales. Decade-to-decade fluctuations in warming can affect everything from the productivity of agriculture in India to the likelihood that a U.N. climate treaty will be enacted, as a record-warm year can put pressure on politicians to act.

The IRI's Goddard, who has published extensively on the challenge of improving predictions of climate on decadal timescales, said she is puzzled as to why the new study discounts the importance of such short-term climate zigs and zags.

"All one has to do is to look at the time series to appreciate that the climate varies on all timescales, even when averaged over the whole globe. Global temperatures do NOT present a monotonic time series in which each year is warmer than the year before," she said. "I think that societally, it is important to realize that there will be periods of slowdown, as well as periods of acceleration."
Moving toward 'more sane' observing networks

One uncomfortable truth in climate science is that even at a time when we can wear computers on our wrists, we still don't have a truly global, extremely reliable network of climate-observing stations, which will prevent the need for additional data corrections in the future.

The new study reveals yet again that surface-temperature data has many flaws, according to Peter Thorne, a climate researcher at Maynooth University in Ireland. In an interview, Thorne said critics of climate science are incorrect in charging that global warming is an artifact of urban heat islands and other influences on thermometers; but at the same time, our approach to taking the Earth's temperature needs to be rethought.

Thorne said more investments should go toward establishing redundant, carefully calibrated temperature-observing networks where data is currently sparse, such as the Arctic, much of Africa and especially the oceans.

"The uncertainty in the marine records is far greater than in the land records," he said. "If we put enough good quality, traceable, redundant observations around the globe, we can make sense of all the other observations that aren’t so good."

"There is no need to bequeath onto researchers in 50 years time a similar mess."

Climate Change Science: Lying Is A $45 Million Business?

Harvard, Syracuse Researchers Caught Lying to Boost Obama Climate Rules

E-mails obtained from the Environmental Protection Agency show that Harvard University, Syracuse University and two of their researchers appear to have falsely claimed a study supporting EPA’s upcoming global warming rules was conducted “independent(ly)” of the agency.

In early May, a study published in the journal Nature Climate Change purported to support a key EPA claim about its forthcoming global warming rules aimed at coal-fired power plants. The New York Times’ headline, “EPA Emissions Plan Will Save Thousands of Lives, Study Finds,” typified the media coverage.

Across the media, the authors were innocuously described as simply university-affiliated “researchers.” After all, the researchers had declared they had “no competing financial interests” in their study. Both universities had issued media releases heralding the study as the “first independent, peer-reviewed paper of its kind.”

Study co-author Charles Driscoll of Syracuse University told the Buffalo News, “I’m an academic, not a politician. I don’t have a dog in this fight.” The claim of independence was also emphatically asserted by study co-author Jonathan Buonocore of Harvard University. “The EPA, which did not participate in the study or interact with its authors, Buonocore says, roundly welcomed its findings.” [Emphasis added].

But a closer look at these claims of independence raises serious doubts.

An online search of EPA’s web site revealed that Syracuse’s Driscoll has previously involved as a principal investigator in studies that received over $3.6 million in research grants from EPA. Co-author Dallas Burtraw, a researcher at the think tank Resources for the Future, had been involved in previous EPA grants totaling almost $2 million. Harvard co-author Jonathan I. Levy had been involved in over $9.5 million worth of grants. Co-author Joel Schwartz, also of Harvard, had been previously involved in over $31 million worth of grants from EPA.

Are we to believe that a group of researchers who had previously received some $45 million in grants from EPA, no doubt hoping for more in the future, could possibly not have any dog in this fight? It’s probably not necessary to ask how this slipped past the incurious mainstream media.

How To "Settle" A "Science"

Don't get the "correct" answer? Change the data!

NOAA Fiddles With Climate Data To Erase The 15-Year Global Warming ‘Hiatus

"National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration scientists have found a solution to the 15-year “pause” in global warming: They “adjusted” the hiatus in warming out of the temperature record.

New climate data by NOAA scientists doubles the warming trend since the late 1990s by adjusting pre-hiatus temperatures downward and inflating temperatures in more recent years.

“Newly corrected and updated global surface temperature data from NOAA’s [National Centers for Environmental Information] do not support the notion of a global warming ‘hiatus,'” wrote NOAA scientists in their study presenting newly adjusted climate data.

To increase the rate in warming, NOAA scientists put more weight on certain ocean buoy arrays, adjusted ship-based temperature readings upward, and slightly raised land-based temperatures as well. Scientists said adjusted ship-based temperature data “had the largest impact on trends for the 2000-2014 time period, accounting for 0.030°C of the 0.064°C trend difference.” They added that the “buoy offset correction contributed 0.014°C… to the difference, and the additional weight given to the buoys because of their greater accuracy contributed 0.012°C."

Yessir. That's how settled science is done these days. Now if aeronautical engineers fudged their data to make it look better, would you ride in their aircraft? If civil engineers fudged their data, would you use their bridges? If anyone, ANYONE does that, why would anyone else believe them? EVER?

So how will they make the extra ice pack disappear, I wonder? Photoshop the satellite photos? Nothing is sacred in the wacky universe of climate mongering.

I wonder how much political pressure was asserted to get "more correct" data? I bet some day a whistle-blower will reveal the truth on his death bed...

Goad on Evolution

Evolution or Equality? (Pick One)

by Jim Goad

June 01, 2015

It is impossible to simultaneously understand the theory of evolution and to believe in blank-slate cognitive equality among human groups of different continental origins.

Both propositions—evolution and equality—cannot simultaneously be true. You have to pick one. Choose wisely, because you can’t have both.

Either evolution is a real and ongoing process that has rendered different groups with different mean aptitudes, or we’re all equal—and thus all measurable group disparities in things such as income and intelligence are due to unfairness, hatred, injustice, and flat-out stinking evil.

Yet against all logic and evidence and propelled purely by the smarmiest sort of saccharine emotionality that has ever been shit-sprayed out of human hearts, modern progressives insist that these two fundamentally contradictory belief systems are simultaneously true.

They insist that evolution is real and that only a dumb hillbilly would not believe in it. But they also insist that evolution had nothing to do with quantifiable disparities between groups in brain size and intelligence, and even if those dumb apelike hillbillies consistently score higher on intelligence tests than your average nonwhite hood rat, well, then, you’re dumb—and evil—for even noticing.

In other words, they want to have their Darwin Fish and eat it, too.

They want their Darwin Fish when it gives them the opportunity to take anyone who refuses to swallow the progressive worldview and mock them as a retrograde evolutionary missing link—a subhuman knuckle-dragging atavistic Neanderthal caveman on the wrong side of history who is about to face a much-needed culling and extinction, as if all that threadbare rhetoric wasn’t itself laced with Darwinian logic and a tacit admission that these phony egalitarians don’t really believe we’ve all evolved equally.

They want to eat their Darwin Fish—or, rather, they want to dispose of it and hide all evidence that it ever existed—when faced with the sheer preposterousness of what they’re proposing, which is that human evolution magically stopped and froze at that mystically indeterminate moment when everyone miraculously reached the cognitive finish line at the same time.

If, controlling for other factors as much as possible, Asians and Jews consistently score higher on intelligence tests than whites…who consistently score higher than Hispanics…who consistently score higher than blacks…well, either the tests are skewed or the results are skewed due to unfairness and hatred and oppression and the pervasiveness of this Ultimate Sin called “racism,” which somehow manages to stain everything despite the fact that race doesn’t even exist. Or they’ll go one step further and say that intelligence is merely a social construct, despite the strong correlation between a group’s mean intelligence and the number of things they’ve invented.

They don’t have any trouble admitting that evolution has rendered these “races” that don’t exist with observable physical differences. In fact, the most egregiously self-hating among them seem to bask in the idea of black physical superiority. They also gloat over the highly eugenic idea of eventual white extinction. When it comes to anything anti-white, they’re about as Darwinian as it gets.

But then they spin around and propose—in fact, they completely depend on—the utterly nonsensical idea that evolution played a decisive role in forming every human organ except the brain. And, perhaps in a slimy act of projection, they’ll call you the dumb one for rejecting their obviously dumb idea.

If one were to discard the popular narrative—an emotion-charged and childishly naive fable which dictates that Africans were peaceful yam-tilling communitarians who were overrun by bloodthirsty and malicious Europeans driven to acts of hatred by the fact that they sunburn easily—in favor of the idea that perhaps it was easier for Europeans to conquer Africa instead of the inverse because the Europeans were far more technologically advanced than the long-suffering tribes south of the Sahara, one is deemed to be not a dissenter, but a witch.

Despite their loud animus for traditional religion, modern progressive thinking is almost entirely based on feeling and superstition. It is concerned entirely with what is right and wrong, not what is true and false.

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Quote of the Day""

Orin Kerr, Volokh Conspiracy:

"AMERICA’S POLITICAL CLASS: “If I understand the history correctly, in the late 1990s, the President was impeached for lying about a sexual affair by a House of Representatives led by a man who was also then hiding a sexual affair, who was supposed to be replaced by another Congressman who stepped down when forced to reveal that he too was having a sexual affair, which led to the election of a new Speaker of the House who now has been indicted for lying about payments covering up his sexual contact with a boy.”"

Government by pervs on both sides.