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Elon Musk's 'Scientific Method' (rollingstone.com)
From a new wide-ranging interview of Elon Musk: An unfortunate fact of human nature is that when people make up their mind about something, they tend not to change it -- even when confronted with facts to the contrary. "It's very unscientific," Musk says. "There's this thing called physics, which is this scientific method that's really quite effective for figuring out the truth." The scientific method is a phrase Musk uses often when asked how he came up with an idea, solved a problem or chose to start a business. Here's how he defines it for his purposes, in mostly his own words:
1. Ask a question.
2. Gather as much evidence as possible about it.
3. Develop axioms based on the evidence, and try to assign a probability of truth to each one.
4. Draw a conclusion based on cogency in order to determine: Are these axioms correct, are they relevant, do they necessarily lead to this conclusion, and with what probability?
5. Attempt to disprove the conclusion. Seek refutation from others to further help break your conclusion.
6. If nobody can invalidate your conclusion, then you're probably right, but you're not certainly right.
1. Ask a question.
2. Gather as much evidence as possible about it.
3. Develop axioms based on the evidence, and try to assign a probability of truth to each one.
4. Draw a conclusion based on cogency in order to determine: Are these axioms correct, are they relevant, do they necessarily lead to this conclusion, and with what probability?
5. Attempt to disprove the conclusion. Seek refutation from others to further help break your conclusion.
6. If nobody can invalidate your conclusion, then you're probably right, but you're not certainly right.
We use "scientific consensus" now.
1. Ask a question.
2. Find a group of people who give the answer you want.
3. Misconstrue their statements to remove nuance and ambiguity
4. Package them all together into a "meta study"
5. Tell everyone "the science is settled".
More like:
1. Decide the answer you want.
2. Ask a leading question.
3. Find a comfortable echo chamber that gives you the answer you want.
4. Don't look at sources. If you do by accident, ignore their validity and nuance.
5. Shout "fake news" if you accidentally see facts that challenge your pre-decided views, especially when unedited and with all relevant context included.
Wrong on both. Scientific consensus is not science. Any scientist will tell you that.
Science proposes hypotheses and then proceeds to test them with experiments, observations, and analyses. A consensus, if any, occurs after such studies produce consistent conclusions. But the consensus is not the science. It is the collective opinion on the current state of knowledge.
The scientific method will become outdated only when another method is discovered that does a better job of capturing our knowledge of the natural world in a useful way. I'm not holding my breath for that to happen.
If it weren't for deadlines, nothing would be late.
This seems to be running fast and loose with the requirements of experimentation. One really needs to prove a hypothesis otherwise the effort is somewhat incomplete.
No, that is not the scientific method. You cannot prove a hypothesis. You can only disprove the null hypothesis.
What? Let me expand on that. Let's use an old example. Galileo at one time hypothesized, based on observations and thought, that gravity should cause two objects of different masses to accelerate at the same rate and go the same distance in the same time. But clearly, dropping a feather and a bowling ball shows that this cannot be true. Ahhh, if the hypothesis was true, then there must be a reason why feathers take so long to fall. Hypothesis: air resistance. Let's design an experiment to prove this. Well, you can't actually prove that air resistance is the cause. You can only disprove the null hypothesis, which in this case is "air resistance has nothing to do with the result." That one is easy to disprove. Simply remove air from a long tube and drop the objects without air. Since the feather and bowling ball now reach the bottom at close to the same time, the null hypothesis has been disproven. Air resistance does have an effect, and we now have support for the original hypothesis. But not proof. "Close to" or "as close as we can measure" is not "the same time." If our original hypothesis is true, then there must be some other cause for the difference. For more recent, more complicated things, scientific lifetimes are spent in both hypothesizing about the remaining causes or improving measurement techniques to make the measurement error so small that "close" starts to approach "same". (And there are lots of things we learn as we start to account for what we thought was "measurement error" and really wasn't.)
More complicated systems create more interactions, and experiments must be more carefully designed. For example, not too long ago some radio astronomers were seeing signals that looked too regular to be random. They removed all known hypothesized causes other than true alien signals. Did this prove the hypothesis that they were alien signals? Sorry, no. They finally found the cause: the microwave oven in the snack area in the building next door.
But Musk is not anywhere close to the scientific process, either. His step 3 is: "3. Develop axioms based on the evidence, and try to assign a probability of truth to each one."
What? An axiom is defined as " a self-evident truth that requires no proof." Some dictionaries include "cannot be proven" as part of the definition, with the example "For every two points P and Q there is a unique line that contains both P and Q".
So, creating axioms from evidence is not science. Creating HYPOTHESES is science. Hypotheses are statements that require, even beg for, attempts to be disproven. Axioms are what are used to build universes, like the five axioms of Euclidean geometry. You cannot prove any of the five, they are the assumed truths. In fact, there are two other geometric systems (elliptic and hyperbolic) that are based on changing the axiom regarding parallel lines that Euclidean geometry assumes.
If Musk assumes the truth he seeks to prove, then he's failing at science.
I can't disprove God exists, but to make the assumption that the entity does exist for this reason is lazy and dishonest.
No, it is neither lazy nor dishonest. You're trying to apply scientific method to religion, which is like comparing apples and oranges. You cannot prove God exists, and you cannot prove He does not. This puts the question well outside the scope of the scientific method. The only dishonesty would be trying to apply the scientific method to a question that we know cannot be answered that way.
"Enough that current modes of transit are inefficient and congested."
You obviously do not live in the LA Metro area or Inland Empire. The Metrolink trains are very under-utilized. Every time I see one pass, I can usually count on one hand the amount of heads I see in 5 train cars total.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
thejeffwhite claimed:
Currently, shipping goods to and from Hawaii on those Matson freighters takes a month each way.
You're talking through your hat.
In 1965, I traveled from L.A. to Honolulu on the Matson liner Lurline. It took 5 days.
If you're talking about the amount of time it takes for a given container to be offloaded from a freighter, cleared through customs, loaded onto a semi (or a train), and driven through the gates of the port facility, in addition to travel time from Hawaii to the West Coast, you're still probably wrong. (It depends on a bunch of things, including customs clearance.) If you're talking about strictly domestic goods - pineapples, say, or Kona coffee - you're definitely wrong, because those shipments aren't subject to customs inspection.
Your larger point - the use of "hyperloop" technology as a replacement for trans-oceanic surface shipment being somehow feasible, in addition to its use for transcontinental cargo transportation is also contra-factual. There are these things called "spreading zones" in both the mid-Atlantic and mid-Pacific oceans where crustal plates are separating. The magma from the mantle is quite close to the seafloor in these zones (which stretch north and south for thousands of miles) - far too close to make a hyperloop-style, airtight tunnel either practical or safe. In addition, particularly in the Pacific, there are both strike-slip and thrust faults that will cause the crust to shear catastrophically (which would neatly and disastrously sever an airtight tunnel in the process) and unpredictably, within no more than a few decades. That makes the risk to a hyperloop transportation system uninsurably high.
Such faults exist within continental borders, as well, but they largely can be avoided, with proper planning. It's still going to be problematic, for a variety of reasons, however, including acquistion of rights of passage across vast stretches of privately-owned, and city-, county-, and state-owned property to name only the first of them. (Slant-drilling precedents aside, you've got to know that lawyers are going to line up in brigades to sue over the issue, because profit. To them.)
I'm actually a fan of Elon. Tesla has thus far both proven the car-guy doomsayers wrong and sparked the general conversion of automobile manufacturing to electric vehicles that appears to be inevitable now. That's a Good Thing for everyone except fossil fuel shills. And SpaceX has completely upset the defense-contractor monopoly on launch vehicles, sparked a whole wave of private industry competition in the space launch sector, and breathed incredible new life into the prospect of large-scale space colonization and industrialization in the relatively-near future. For those things alone, future-oriented thinkers already owe him an enormous debt of gratitude - and he's clearly not even close to done, yet.
But what he's dubbed "hyperloop" technology faces geotectical, legal, financing, and insurance barriers (not to mention regulatory ones) of daunting dimensions. In fact, I'm certain that those considerations are why Elon has wisely decided to let someone else tackle actually implementing the conceptual technology he proposed.
Boring tunnels, by contrast, is a task area that's already pretty firmly taped down in all of those respects - and has been for donkey's years. Revisiting the technology involved, however, is still squarely within the wheelhouse of an innovator like Elon, and I applaud his efforts there ...
(Posting as AC so as not to undo existing upmods.)
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