I remember a number of times hearing
about “Room temperature superconductivity”, and then, some years
later, in small print, a retraction. The retraction never got the
headlines the original claim got, but, still, better science than
non-science, right? This is something that was, to use the phrase of
art, “FALSIFIABLE” , That is to say, it can be demonstrated to
be reproducible (which is NOT the same thing as proven), or it can be
demonstrated to be FALSE. You know the phrase “the exception
proves the rule”?
In this case “proves” means to
demonstrate the falsifiability of a hypothesis. In simple English,
an exception demonstrates that the “rule” is fucked, and that
further thought is needed. The word “Proof” is derived from the
Latin for “Test”. (If you're interested, the word in Spanish is
“prueba” and means “test”.)
Now let's move down a few doors from
the hard disciplines like chemistry, physics, biology, math,
geology, and engineering: where the unfriendly instructors expect
you to get the math straight, to the lighter, more user friendly
area of the model sciences, where the numbers dance to the tune of
the designer.
In these rooms we find the economists
(the “dismal science”, but it ain't, any more than boxing is the
“sweet science”, and that's because neither one is a science),
the political scientists, and the climate scientists. But they
aren't, really, because SCIENCE has a method. Generate a hypothesis,
conduct experiment to verify, make honest assessment, publish. These
soft sciences do not have a lab in which to carry out any
experiments, they cannot reproduce experiments, all they can do is
formulate models to predict future trends. All the attempts at
mathematical precision are so much hokum. The only thing that
matters in this case is Predictive Value, and in this they uniformly
fail.
Back in High School, I was taught that
the average of averages was statistically useless. I didn't know
then about Standard Deviations, Long Tails, and Strange Attractors.
Hell, I didn't even know about the Oxford comma, except that I used
it to make things clear.
But back to the topic. It comes as no
big surprise to me to find that something on the order of 70% of
“peer reviewed” papers in some journals are bieng retracted.
Professorial courtesy kinda thing. The bulk of them, so far as I can
figure, are in microbiology, which is not a topic that I follow
closely, nd is one that requires a certain amout of discrection on
the part of the person personing the microscope. (To say “maning”
would be sexist). A person tasked with monitoring {x} will look for
that. I call it the “green Impala” syndrome, from when in High
School the most common mommy-vehicle was a , you guessed it green
Impala. Must have been thousands of them. But that's what I was
looking for. I'm sure there were more Chevy Novas and Ford
Galexy500s. The thing is that you find what you're looking for.
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