Only bit of the plot that is confusing is that it twice references you as an android (remember, android hell is a real place), but in an interview the authors said that the character is human, with just reinforced ankle supports. I played it through a second time, and I can see how a person (just from the game) could make a case the main character is a person, but it just feels like a contradiction in the plot to me.
The game can be summarized as a "carnival shooter". Unlike a lot of FPSs, for the most part, enemies appear in windows and you shoot them like in carnival games. Like carnival games, the enemies keep reappearing. After the 5th time I head shot the same guy, I realized that the game will give you terrorists "as needed". Which is fine, except they spawn with grenades and RPGs, which kill you in one shot. About three times so far, I've been killed by a dead enemy respawning six inches behind me and shooting me in the back (which kills you in under a second when you don't have any cover).
As I'm a person that mentally "clears" areas in my head when I play FPSs, it's very irritating. It also doesn't make a lot of sense to see 20 terrorists come out of a broom closet, one after another.
The environment and set pieces are awesome though. A definite 4 star game, and definitely not a 5 star game.
See the response I gave a couple posts down on industry reports on kilowatt-hour costs. Even with capital costs, decommissioning, and disposal, it's still very cheap. It's also the only energy source that pays for its decommissioning while it operates.
Wait, you have to have top secret access to find out how much nuclear power costs per kilowatt? Oh, please. There is an energy industry you know, and ~20% of our energy comes from nuclear right now.
Though I've done the research myself, don't believe me. Fire up Google, search for "cost per kilowatt" or something like that, and come up with some numbers for yourself.
I actually keep some of the files I've found saved on my computer because I get these same incredulous responses whenever this topic comes up on Slashdot.
Costs per kilowatt-hour, based on industry reports: Coal: 3.14 cents direct cost, 10.3 cents with health and climate "costs" Nuclear: 2.16 cents in direct costs, 3.31 including decommissioning fees and waste disposal Natural Gas: 4.9 cents direct cost, 8.09 cents with health and climate "costs" Solar: 18.12 cents in direct costs Wind Power: 6-7 cents in direct costs Tidal: 6.5-10 cents in direct costs
Hmm, running HDTach on my system, I get 100MB/s average read speed, with a burst speed over 200MB/s. That's 200%-400% of the reported results for SSDs.
Of course, it's a RAID0 array with 2 reasonably fast drives in it, but it's still much much much cheaper than what SSDs are running these days.
Amazing -- every time I make this point on Slashdot, I get a swarm of deluded people flaming me. Now that there's an article on it, maybe people will begin to see that if they're really serious about things like Global Warming, switching from Coal to Nuclear power would be the only cost-efficient way to do it. All other sources of non-emitting power cost about ~3x as much per kilowatt. According to the DOE (http://www.eia.doe.gov/cneaf/electricity/page/co2_report/co2emiss.pdf) 40% of all CO2 generated in America is produced from electricity generation.
The stupid, stupid environmental prejudice against nuclear power has come back to bite us all on the ass. If we had all nuclear power plants now instead of majority coal plants, we'd have eliminated almost half the CO2 production from our country which is MUCH MUCH more than reductions mandated by agreements like the Kyoto protocols, which specify either minimal cuts (8% for Europe) or capping increases (Australia can go up by 8%).
If you're an environmentalist, you should be for nuclear power. Either shit or get off the pot -- if you just talk about "climate change" and then live in some sordid China Syndrome fear of nuclear power, you're not just an idiot, you're a hypocrite. If you're not an environmentalist, you should also be for nuclear power, since it's cheaper than all the alternative energy sources being pursued right now, and everyone likes low power costs.
Lol, apparently the message is that if you post that a board game that actually sucks, sucks, then you get modded down as a troll.
Take my advice people, and stay away from the game. I'm a board game geek and got this game and all the expansions, and returned it... only game in probably 10 years I've returned to the game store.
Uh, Carcassonne is not a great board game. If you had a "hand" of available tiles to play, it would be a lot more fun, but when you have to draw and play a tile in the same round, and there's often only one possible play... then it's not really that great a game.
Oddly enough, when I was flying back from Indiana last night, I was sitting next to a philosophy grad student. He put it this way -- the danger with science is when it becomes scientism, where science steps outside its normal boundaries and asserts authority over ethics, religion, philosophy, etc.
I worked for a number of years doing research, including bioengineering, mechanical engineering, electrical engineering, and computer science. The work that I did for the bioengineering department was actually on searching for better models of the biomechanics of the heart. We knew, rather precisely, how the mechanics worked at the small scale (ion channels, all that) and how it worked at the large scale (EKGs and all that) but it was the middle ground that was very difficult to do with any degree of precision. Simulating a single cell was a numerically intensive excercise -- simulating large numbers of cells had to be done with different approximation methods. A new approach that could better simulate a heart beat (more accurately or more quickly) would be worthy of a paper in this field.
From what I can understand of what you're saying, you consider this type of work to be emblematic of the work scientists do. Some might call it "engineering" (building a better mousetrap), but they're two sides to the same coin in my opinion.
The trouble is, it's difficult to say that the scientific method is being used in this circumstance. Certainly progress is being made, but progress can be made by a number of different methods, not just the scientific method. Did the people making the Luo-Rudy model of the heart start by stating a hypothesis? Testing it? Gathering evidence? Testing the hypothesis against the evidence? Of course not. They build a box that they'd run data through, and tried to get it to match the behavior of a real heart. Over the process of refinement over 10 years, Luo and Rudy came out with iteratively refined versions that worked "better" (for some definition of better).
This is science, but this isn't the scientific method. I've been trying to stick to examples where some version of the scientific method would actually be used, not the practice of science in general, which uses methods other than the scientific method to produce results.
The scientific method is best used when trying to discover the unknown, and the independent variable(s) can be identified. We then can set up an experiment and see what we can see. A good example would be the Michelson-Morley experiment. Boiled down, they wanted to investigate the properties of ether (hypothesis), so they set up an apparatus, tested the results, and the theory of ether was rejected as a result of it.
But this experiment is unusual in that it did actually follow the scientific method. As Kuhn points out, how the scientific method is usually practiced is that scientists gather data from experiments first, hypothesize second, and their hypotheses are thus always shown to be right. Hypothesis generation is the main weak point in the scientific method. If we had to build the scientific method from scratch these days, I'd surmise that it would look different from the classical view, and would be just as effective, if not more so, than the classical formulation of it.
There's three points I'd like to make in conclusion of this thread (which I've enjoyed, by the way -- the Philosophy of Science is a fun topic for me). It's obviously a huge topic, so I'd like to summarize what I'm trying to say:
Point One: There are many paths to learning facts, not just the scientific method. Point Two: Science as practiced (as opposed to an ideal practice of science) is flawed, but it works well enough that we use it. Point Three: The Scientific Method even in its ideal form could be better, and doesn't deserve the sort of religious fervor associated with it by many people these days.
Point One: I think you're lumping a whole bunch of things together there.
Quite true. The field of epistemology -- how do I know something to be true? -- encompasses a great many ways and means.
Different kinds of questions have different methods for appropriately answering them: Question 1: Did Sally kiss Harry? Answered by an observation or self-reporting followed by a chain of word-of-mouth. Question 2: Are Scrub Jays blue? Answered by an orthinologist going out and studying a number of Scrub Jays. Question 3: Are men taller than women? Answered by statistical methods. Question 4: Is 5 greater than 4? Answered by a rational claim without any empirical observations. Question 5: Does ice cream cause polio? Answered incorrectly by establishing correlation, Answered correctly by establishing causation. Question 6: Should people wear hats in church? Answered by religious debate from authority. Question 7: Is murder wrong? Answered by a variety of ethical or religious arguments. Some people claim that "murder is wrong" is not a fact at all, but an opinion. Others claim it is a fact. Question 8: Does adding fertilizer cause tomato plants to grow faster? Answered by every 8th grade science fair, using the traditional scientific method of hypothesis testing.
My point is that the scientific method, while indeed a powerful tool at arriving at truth, and useful in many situation, is not the only means of learning truth. Different questions have different ways that are appropriate for answering them. The scientific method is not the complete answer to epistemology. It has made *huge* advances possible, and was right to excise argument from authority from questions that can be tested, but it is not the answer to epistemology that Logical Positivists make it out to be.
In other words, the only reason to believe something is based on evidence, and things about which evidence can fundamentally not be collected are not worth thinking about. Logical Positivism has gone through various incarnations over the last century, but the most strident version says that that which cannot be scientifically proven (via verification or falsifiability) is not worth considering. Other versions accept different sets of facts. "My fiancee loves me" is resistant to being put in a test tube, but we could perhaps look at evidence for it, like taking her word for it, or perhaps looking at a cake she baked for me.
The trouble of course, is that it really is a slippery slope from there to reports of people seeing ghosts (the original point of this Slashdot article). How can we accept my fiancee's word that she loves me, but not accept the fact that her friend saw a ghost when she was young? We can't start from the assumption that ghosts don't exist, since then we're just assuming our conclusions. Hence the strident version of Logical Positivism -- that which cannot be shown scientifically is not of interest.
Point Two: The practice of Science will never match the ideal. What I'm saying is that the belief that every published result is even supposed to be correct is, in itself, a fundamental misunderstanding of the nature of the scientific method on your part. Like I said, bad science exists, and even good science can reach incorrect conclusions. The claim advocates of the scientific method would make is that incorrect results get
If they're observed rarely (like the Martian), you need to try to find a way to either observe them more frequently, or observe something other parameter that gives you the same information you need to constrain your model.
My point was that if you could talk to the Martian, he could provide you with data that I'd trust a lot more than guesses about the heights of Martians based on a single sample. Both stats and science have trouble dealing with singular events. Receiving the knowledge from an authority in this case would work quite well. But we're trained by our modern scientific sensibilities to consider argument from authority to be something of a heresy. But why? Wouldn't the Martian know the heights of his people better than we could guess based on a single sample?
Again, I'm not really doubting the usefulness of the scientific method. I simply think there are other methods by which we can gain information about the world as well.
The problem you're describing is the problem of scientific illiteracy in the public That's a major part of the problem -- the other is, as I mentioned, the fact that falsehoods are held to be true. The scientific is supposed to give us truth about the world, but the system must necessarily publish falsehoods.
What really makes the problem worse is the bottom-drawer bias in publications. In other words, studies which show no correlation, or no new information tend to get unpublished, whereas papers which discover "a new link between cancer and breathing!" tend to get published. So falsehood becomes fact, and millions of people stop wearing deodorant or taking antacids because they're afraid of getting Alzheimer's: http://www.mercola.com/1998/archive/aluminum_and_alzheimer_prevention.htm
Physicians make life/death decisions every day based on scientific models of human physiology, and medicine's failures are only very rarely due to the incorrectness of those models.
How do you know? Right now, there's probably a huge number of people in your hospital that have diabetes. Our model for the underlying cause of diabetes has been shaken up several times within the last few years. How do you know we're not killing thousands of Americans every year out of our ignorance or errors? I agree, we must do the best we can, but the best we can is still quite limited, especially when it comes to diabetes, cancer, Alzheimer's, and other diseases.
But what is the alternative to the scientific method? You can gain empirical knowledge (sorted from most- to least-reliable) through: testing, observation, tradition, and word of mouth. Most scientifically minded people are able to work with the first two comfortably, but feel uncomfortable when dealing with the last two. But sometimes the only way you have of learning a fact is through word of mouth. Sarry might have kissed Harry and told you about it -- but you can't put them into a double-blind controlled experiment and replicate the results.
I personally, feel more uncomfortable than most with the second category (observation, or epidemiological studies). Famously, a "scientific" report showed a link between ice cream and polio. But I am more comfortable than most with tradition (though I still don't put much stock at all in word of mouth). Where did aspirin come from? Tradition. And its efficacy has been upheld by the scientific method. Where do we find systems of relationships between people that have been shown to work in the long run? Tradition. And nowhere else, in fact.
Science has provided no evidence that there is another, therefore there is no reason to believe that another exists. I am not only a scientist, but a scientism-ist:) Logical Positivism's fundamental axioms state: 1) That anything that isn't falsifiable isn't scientific. And 2) Anything that isn't scientific isn't worthy of being thought about. But many of the most important things in life are not falsifiable, and rather impossible to put in a test tube. There's more to life than what can be known scientifically, and there are more ways to know facts than through the scientific method.
>>This isn't really a problem with the scientific method. Its a problem with human society.
The way we have always done science is always consensus based. "The literature says..." A natural consequence of this is that anything published that disagrees with the consensus has a hard time of it.
What if a natural explanation is found one day? What if it contradicts your faith? This isn't so implausible a question. Certainly the Buddhist belief that the world has eternally existed is troubled by the fact that, as best as we can tell, the universe did have an origin. Likewise, if that guy who theorized what the universe was like before the Big Bang was like (who did it out of a preconceived notion the universe has always existed, which casts doubts on his whole theory) turns out to be right, and we can somehow show the world is without beginning, then it goes worse for Christianity.
If incontrovertible evidence shows that Jesus was a fraud (it could happen, say an archeological dig turns up something), then I'd question the basis of my Christianity. I hope it doesn't happen, naturally, but Christians are taught that there is no contradiction between truths, which is why the whole "conflict between science and religion" does not exist as such.
I think a reasonable answer might be a sort of "Christianity for Atheists" as it were, but Modernist Christianity always seems pallid and wan compared to the traditional church. The fact that Christianity has been the most powerful force for good in human history says that it is something more than belief in Zeus or Invisible Unicorns, but I'm not convinced it's possible to retain the good without the core beliefs in Jesus and God.
Ugh, I wrote a long response and lost it. Essentially, as I said before, I agree the scientific method is very useful, but I disagree when you say that "I believe that science (in its ideal form) is not only the best method we've found so far, but the best method there could possibly be."
My criticism of the scientific method are: 1) Unique events can and do all the time (it's a consequence of the probabilistic nature of the universe). A unique event is simply one that we haven't observed before or since. Science can't deal with unique events, which are often the most interesting things to us. What is the standard deviation of the heights of Martians, if we have only met one Martian? Science can't answer that question -- but you could certainly ask the Martian to gain this knowledge.
2) The scientific method's reaction to inexplicable events is to reject the event, and the person reporting it. When Roentgen was working with these crazy new X-Ray things, he didn't publish his observations until he had established the cause and effect, so as not to risk his professional reputation. A method which can take an observation, find no explanation, and as a result reject the *observation* has a fundamental flaw.
3) Science should eliminate bias and politics. Studies performed by people who have a financial stake in the result must always be suspect, as stats can usually be massaged to show whatever it is you want them to show. A better model would be a sort of escrowing process where Intel or Merck or GM hands money to an escrow dealer (possibly the government, possibly a private entity) who then presents an unbiased question to a scientist in the field: "Are Intel CPUs faster at 3DMARK07 than AMD's?" "Does Vioxx reduce or induce heart attacks?" "What is the 0 to 60 time on the following cars...?" With the proviso that the results will be published regardless of if they are favorable to the original sponsor of the study. This would go a HUGE way to fixing the problems of the science of today.
4) You said: "The level of certainty science can provide is sufficient." Hormone Replacement Therapy was "scientifically" shown to reduce breast cancer risk. As a result, some 10,000 women have died of breast cancer from HRT. All scientific studies are uncertain to different degrees; as you stated, studies in physics are probably pretty reliable. But studies in medicine are overturned constantly. The level of certainty in medicine is really quite low.
5) This is also the problem of trust in science. The problem is not malice or fraud (though the case of the South Korean cloning guy shows this can happen) but that whereas you or I can understand that studies inherently have uncertainty in them, people go out there and make life or death decisions based on studies, thinking that something which is scientifically shown to be true means the same thing as something mathematically shown to be true.
6) The combination of (1-out-of-20 (p-value less than 0.05) or 1-out-of-100 (p-value less than 0.01) studies being due to random chance) x (a large number of studies per year) results in a huge number of conclusions being published *due solely to chance*. This should be caught (eventually) by reproduction of results, but...
7) Reproducing results (whether building on previous research as you say, or simply doing a new study on the same topic) is done haphazardly, and the result of a follow-up study that contradicts a previous one does *not* actually overturn it... if you have one study showing that eyeblink therapy stops PTSD, then a follow-up shows it doesn't, the literature will conclude "Studies are conflicted". Only topics which interest someone at NSF get the kind of treatment needed to conclusively establish something as true. Many interesting questions linger in the "studies conflict" category for years without any systematic approach to resolving the conflict. Reproduction of results is the cornerstone of the scientific method, but studies are expensive, so follow-up studies are often neglected
>>Science is a method, it requires no faith. In fact it is a method through which provides it's own falsifiable test of itself.
Slow down there, cowboy. Nothing proves itself -- you always start with a certain set of axioms.
While it is indeed one of the great tools for knowing things that we have, it is certainly not the only way things become known. We can learn certain things through reason alone (such as math), and many things can only be learned through word of mouth (Sally said that Harry said that...). Statistics is one of the fundamental answers to epistemology (how can I know something), but ultimately we only can learn things at certain (not very high) confidence levels. While a p-value of 0.05 or 0.01 might sound pretty impressive (and are the standard rules of thumb for statistical 'proofs'), they represent 1-out-of-20 and 1-out-of-100 studies' results being nothing more than the result of random chance. If you have, say, 10,000 papers published a year, 500 or 100 of them will be wrong.
Given how often scientific answers have indeed been found to be wrong, especially in epidemiological studies (which is a sort of scientific wishful thinking), it hardly proves itself to be true (which can't be done anyway). A better way of putting it is, "It's the best method we have of figuring out empirical truths about nature."
There are very major limits on science and the scientific method. Notably: 1) Singular events. Science can't handle singular events very well, or not at all. For example, suppose the people that claimed they had seen cold fusion back in '89 really did see Cold Fusion. Perhaps a gamma ray hit something at just the right time, or maybe it required high altitude, or something. But when researchers tried to duplicate it, they couldn't and so the guys were branded as frauds. Maybe they were, maybe they weren't... but they could actually have made an honest empirical observation, and then branded as frauds as a result of it.
2) Trust. The motto of the Royal Society is "Nullis in Verba" ("On the words of no one") In other words, don't believe what people say, but only trust in reproducible experiments. The trouble with this is, of course, that no one can come close to reproducing all of the empirical experiments needed for a full understanding of modern science, and so it always boils down to trusting what other people say. If a car full of scientists drove through a mountain pass and saw a white substance outside, they could send one of their members out to report if it was sand or snow... without accomplishing anything. The friend could be playing a practical joke on them, after all. All of them would need to go outside and make an empirical observation of the substance themselves in order to be satisfied. This is a very fundamental flaw in the system, which only works since malicious papers (as far as I know) are not inserted into the literature like viruses.
3) The old induction problem / uncertainty. Science is based on inductive reasoning, and inductive reasoning from empirical events can't actually prove anything. We can make certain claims, but not proofs in the sense that logical or mathematical statements can be proven true. "The sun will rise tomorrow" is a scientific claim, but it cannot be proven to be true. The fundamental problem is that what is true in the past might not be true in the future. Since certain things like universal constants are likely to stay the same (though some have theorized they have not in the past!), it can be answered by simply stipulating "If things stay like they are now..." but this is still not the same level of proof as people deal with in logic and math. All scientific knowledge, ultimately, is uncertain.
4) Heretics. The heretics of science have always received rough treatment. Most of the time it is deserved (there are a lot of nutcases out there), but sometimes people have followed the scientific method but had their papers rejected because the reviewers assume their preconceived conclusion. The guys
I cried playing FFVII when I realized how many people would never play FFVI and think FFVII was the best RPG ever.
That's the truth. The only sad thing about Aeris' death was the fact that I wasted so much damn time and gil building her up instead of another character.
BG2 pissed me off with Yoshimo for the same reason, actually.
The famed economic analysis's conclusion was not that good apples wind up costing more but that the distortion is so severe that good apples leave the market and are not available.
Slashdot Mirror
Portal is one of the best games ever.
Only bit of the plot that is confusing is that it twice references you as an android (remember, android hell is a real place), but in an interview the authors said that the character is human, with just reinforced ankle supports. I played it through a second time, and I can see how a person (just from the game) could make a case the main character is a person, but it just feels like a contradiction in the plot to me.
Energy from San Onofre Nuclear near my house retailed at 3.8 to 4.15 cents per kilowatt/hour from 1996 through 2003.
http://www.secinfo.com/d2kFm.b1.htm#1stPage Scroll down to page 5 out of 6.
Those numbers? From a New Jersey study supporting tidal power. Definitely not nuclear shills.
The game can be summarized as a "carnival shooter". Unlike a lot of FPSs, for the most part, enemies appear in windows and you shoot them like in carnival games. Like carnival games, the enemies keep reappearing. After the 5th time I head shot the same guy, I realized that the game will give you terrorists "as needed". Which is fine, except they spawn with grenades and RPGs, which kill you in one shot. About three times so far, I've been killed by a dead enemy respawning six inches behind me and shooting me in the back (which kills you in under a second when you don't have any cover).
As I'm a person that mentally "clears" areas in my head when I play FPSs, it's very irritating. It also doesn't make a lot of sense to see 20 terrorists come out of a broom closet, one after another.
The environment and set pieces are awesome though. A definite 4 star game, and definitely not a 5 star game.
See the response I gave a couple posts down on industry reports on kilowatt-hour costs. Even with capital costs, decommissioning, and disposal, it's still very cheap. It's also the only energy source that pays for its decommissioning while it operates.
Wait, you have to have top secret access to find out how much nuclear power costs per kilowatt? Oh, please. There is an energy industry you know, and ~20% of our energy comes from nuclear right now.
Though I've done the research myself, don't believe me. Fire up Google, search for "cost per kilowatt" or something like that, and come up with some numbers for yourself.
I actually keep some of the files I've found saved on my computer because I get these same incredulous responses whenever this topic comes up on Slashdot.
Costs per kilowatt-hour, based on industry reports:
Coal: 3.14 cents direct cost, 10.3 cents with health and climate "costs"
Nuclear: 2.16 cents in direct costs, 3.31 including decommissioning fees and waste disposal
Natural Gas: 4.9 cents direct cost, 8.09 cents with health and climate "costs"
Solar: 18.12 cents in direct costs
Wind Power: 6-7 cents in direct costs
Tidal: 6.5-10 cents in direct costs
Personally, I'm happy that people at nuclear plants have nothing to do.
Hmm, running HDTach on my system, I get 100MB/s average read speed, with a burst speed over 200MB/s. That's 200%-400% of the reported results for SSDs.
Of course, it's a RAID0 array with 2 reasonably fast drives in it, but it's still much much much cheaper than what SSDs are running these days.
he waste remains deadly for hundreds of thousands of years.
Guess how radioactive something is with a half-life of 100,000 years? Answer: Not very.
I'd really wish there was like a prerequisite of high school physics before people were allowed to start talking about the energy issue in America.
Amazing -- every time I make this point on Slashdot, I get a swarm of deluded people flaming me. Now that there's an article on it, maybe people will begin to see that if they're really serious about things like Global Warming, switching from Coal to Nuclear power would be the only cost-efficient way to do it. All other sources of non-emitting power cost about ~3x as much per kilowatt. According to the DOE (http://www.eia.doe.gov/cneaf/electricity/page/co2_report/co2emiss.pdf) 40% of all CO2 generated in America is produced from electricity generation.
The stupid, stupid environmental prejudice against nuclear power has come back to bite us all on the ass. If we had all nuclear power plants now instead of majority coal plants, we'd have eliminated almost half the CO2 production from our country which is MUCH MUCH more than reductions mandated by agreements like the Kyoto protocols, which specify either minimal cuts (8% for Europe) or capping increases (Australia can go up by 8%).
If you're an environmentalist, you should be for nuclear power. Either shit or get off the pot -- if you just talk about "climate change" and then live in some sordid China Syndrome fear of nuclear power, you're not just an idiot, you're a hypocrite. If you're not an environmentalist, you should also be for nuclear power, since it's cheaper than all the alternative energy sources being pursued right now, and everyone likes low power costs.
Lol, apparently the message is that if you post that a board game that actually sucks, sucks, then you get modded down as a troll.
Take my advice people, and stay away from the game. I'm a board game geek and got this game and all the expansions, and returned it... only game in probably 10 years I've returned to the game store.
Uh, Carcassonne is not a great board game. If you had a "hand" of available tiles to play, it would be a lot more fun, but when you have to draw and play a tile in the same round, and there's often only one possible play... then it's not really that great a game.
People movers?
The Roads must Roll!
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Roads_Must_Roll)
I'll I got to say is...
SHA right!
A very insightful post. Thanks for the thread.
Oddly enough, when I was flying back from Indiana last night, I was sitting next to a philosophy grad student. He put it this way -- the danger with science is when it becomes scientism, where science steps outside its normal boundaries and asserts authority over ethics, religion, philosophy, etc.
Yes, science works so much better when not constrained by "ethics".
Perhaps we can all build an underwater metropolis and retire there to do experiments on little sisters.
I worked for a number of years doing research, including bioengineering, mechanical engineering, electrical engineering, and computer science. The work that I did for the bioengineering department was actually on searching for better models of the biomechanics of the heart. We knew, rather precisely, how the mechanics worked at the small scale (ion channels, all that) and how it worked at the large scale (EKGs and all that) but it was the middle ground that was very difficult to do with any degree of precision. Simulating a single cell was a numerically intensive excercise -- simulating large numbers of cells had to be done with different approximation methods. A new approach that could better simulate a heart beat (more accurately or more quickly) would be worthy of a paper in this field.
From what I can understand of what you're saying, you consider this type of work to be emblematic of the work scientists do. Some might call it "engineering" (building a better mousetrap), but they're two sides to the same coin in my opinion.
The trouble is, it's difficult to say that the scientific method is being used in this circumstance. Certainly progress is being made, but progress can be made by a number of different methods, not just the scientific method. Did the people making the Luo-Rudy model of the heart start by stating a hypothesis? Testing it? Gathering evidence? Testing the hypothesis against the evidence? Of course not. They build a box that they'd run data through, and tried to get it to match the behavior of a real heart. Over the process of refinement over 10 years, Luo and Rudy came out with iteratively refined versions that worked "better" (for some definition of better).
This is science, but this isn't the scientific method. I've been trying to stick to examples where some version of the scientific method would actually be used, not the practice of science in general, which uses methods other than the scientific method to produce results.
The scientific method is best used when trying to discover the unknown, and the independent variable(s) can be identified. We then can set up an experiment and see what we can see. A good example would be the Michelson-Morley experiment. Boiled down, they wanted to investigate the properties of ether (hypothesis), so they set up an apparatus, tested the results, and the theory of ether was rejected as a result of it.
But this experiment is unusual in that it did actually follow the scientific method. As Kuhn points out, how the scientific method is usually practiced is that scientists gather data from experiments first, hypothesize second, and their hypotheses are thus always shown to be right. Hypothesis generation is the main weak point in the scientific method. If we had to build the scientific method from scratch these days, I'd surmise that it would look different from the classical view, and would be just as effective, if not more so, than the classical formulation of it.
There's three points I'd like to make in conclusion of this thread (which I've enjoyed, by the way -- the Philosophy of Science is a fun topic for me). It's obviously a huge topic, so I'd like to summarize what I'm trying to say:
Point One: There are many paths to learning facts, not just the scientific method.
Point Two: Science as practiced (as opposed to an ideal practice of science) is flawed, but it works well enough that we use it.
Point Three: The Scientific Method even in its ideal form could be better, and doesn't deserve the sort of religious fervor associated with it by many people these days.
Point One:
I think you're lumping a whole bunch of things together there.
Quite true. The field of epistemology -- how do I know something to be true? -- encompasses a great many ways and means.
Different kinds of questions have different methods for appropriately answering them:
Question 1: Did Sally kiss Harry? Answered by an observation or self-reporting followed by a chain of word-of-mouth.
Question 2: Are Scrub Jays blue? Answered by an orthinologist going out and studying a number of Scrub Jays.
Question 3: Are men taller than women? Answered by statistical methods.
Question 4: Is 5 greater than 4? Answered by a rational claim without any empirical observations.
Question 5: Does ice cream cause polio? Answered incorrectly by establishing correlation, Answered correctly by establishing causation.
Question 6: Should people wear hats in church? Answered by religious debate from authority.
Question 7: Is murder wrong? Answered by a variety of ethical or religious arguments. Some people claim that "murder is wrong" is not a fact at all, but an opinion. Others claim it is a fact.
Question 8: Does adding fertilizer cause tomato plants to grow faster? Answered by every 8th grade science fair, using the traditional scientific method of hypothesis testing.
My point is that the scientific method, while indeed a powerful tool at arriving at truth, and useful in many situation, is not the only means of learning truth. Different questions have different ways that are appropriate for answering them. The scientific method is not the complete answer to epistemology. It has made *huge* advances possible, and was right to excise argument from authority from questions that can be tested, but it is not the answer to epistemology that Logical Positivists make it out to be.
In other words, the only reason to believe something is based on evidence, and things about which evidence can fundamentally not be collected are not worth thinking about.
Logical Positivism has gone through various incarnations over the last century, but the most strident version says that that which cannot be scientifically proven (via verification or falsifiability) is not worth considering. Other versions accept different sets of facts. "My fiancee loves me" is resistant to being put in a test tube, but we could perhaps look at evidence for it, like taking her word for it, or perhaps looking at a cake she baked for me.
The trouble of course, is that it really is a slippery slope from there to reports of people seeing ghosts (the original point of this Slashdot article). How can we accept my fiancee's word that she loves me, but not accept the fact that her friend saw a ghost when she was young? We can't start from the assumption that ghosts don't exist, since then we're just assuming our conclusions. Hence the strident version of Logical Positivism -- that which cannot be shown scientifically is not of interest.
Point Two: The practice of Science will never match the ideal.
What I'm saying is that the belief that every published result is even supposed to be correct is, in itself, a fundamental misunderstanding of the nature of the scientific method on your part. Like I said, bad science exists, and even good science can reach incorrect conclusions. The claim advocates of the scientific method would make is that incorrect results get
If they're observed rarely (like the Martian), you need to try to find a way to either observe them more frequently, or observe something other parameter that gives you the same information you need to constrain your model.
:)
My point was that if you could talk to the Martian, he could provide you with data that I'd trust a lot more than guesses about the heights of Martians based on a single sample. Both stats and science have trouble dealing with singular events. Receiving the knowledge from an authority in this case would work quite well. But we're trained by our modern scientific sensibilities to consider argument from authority to be something of a heresy. But why? Wouldn't the Martian know the heights of his people better than we could guess based on a single sample?
Again, I'm not really doubting the usefulness of the scientific method. I simply think there are other methods by which we can gain information about the world as well.
The problem you're describing is the problem of scientific illiteracy in the public
That's a major part of the problem -- the other is, as I mentioned, the fact that falsehoods are held to be true. The scientific is supposed to give us truth about the world, but the system must necessarily publish falsehoods.
What really makes the problem worse is the bottom-drawer bias in publications. In other words, studies which show no correlation, or no new information tend to get unpublished, whereas papers which discover "a new link between cancer and breathing!" tend to get published. So falsehood becomes fact, and millions of people stop wearing deodorant or taking antacids because they're afraid of getting Alzheimer's:
http://www.mercola.com/1998/archive/aluminum_and_alzheimer_prevention.htm
Physicians make life/death decisions every day based on scientific models of human physiology, and medicine's failures are only very rarely due to the incorrectness of those models.
How do you know? Right now, there's probably a huge number of people in your hospital that have diabetes. Our model for the underlying cause of diabetes has been shaken up several times within the last few years. How do you know we're not killing thousands of Americans every year out of our ignorance or errors? I agree, we must do the best we can, but the best we can is still quite limited, especially when it comes to diabetes, cancer, Alzheimer's, and other diseases.
But what is the alternative to the scientific method? You can gain empirical knowledge (sorted from most- to least-reliable) through: testing, observation, tradition, and word of mouth. Most scientifically minded people are able to work with the first two comfortably, but feel uncomfortable when dealing with the last two. But sometimes the only way you have of learning a fact is through word of mouth. Sarry might have kissed Harry and told you about it -- but you can't put them into a double-blind controlled experiment and replicate the results.
I personally, feel more uncomfortable than most with the second category (observation, or epidemiological studies). Famously, a "scientific" report showed a link between ice cream and polio. But I am more comfortable than most with tradition (though I still don't put much stock at all in word of mouth). Where did aspirin come from? Tradition. And its efficacy has been upheld by the scientific method. Where do we find systems of relationships between people that have been shown to work in the long run? Tradition. And nowhere else, in fact.
Science has provided no evidence that there is another, therefore there is no reason to believe that another exists. I am not only a scientist, but a scientism-ist
Logical Positivism's fundamental axioms state: 1) That anything that isn't falsifiable isn't scientific. And 2) Anything that isn't scientific isn't worthy of being thought about. But many of the most important things in life are not falsifiable, and rather impossible to put in a test tube. There's more to life than what can be known scientifically, and there are more ways to know facts than through the scientific method.
>>This isn't really a problem with the scientific method. Its a problem with human society.
The way we have always done science is always consensus based. "The literature says..." A natural consequence of this is that anything published that disagrees with the consensus has a hard time of it.
What if a natural explanation is found one day? What if it contradicts your faith?
This isn't so implausible a question. Certainly the Buddhist belief that the world has eternally existed is troubled by the fact that, as best as we can tell, the universe did have an origin. Likewise, if that guy who theorized what the universe was like before the Big Bang was like (who did it out of a preconceived notion the universe has always existed, which casts doubts on his whole theory) turns out to be right, and we can somehow show the world is without beginning, then it goes worse for Christianity.
If incontrovertible evidence shows that Jesus was a fraud (it could happen, say an archeological dig turns up something), then I'd question the basis of my Christianity. I hope it doesn't happen, naturally, but Christians are taught that there is no contradiction between truths, which is why the whole "conflict between science and religion" does not exist as such.
I think a reasonable answer might be a sort of "Christianity for Atheists" as it were, but Modernist Christianity always seems pallid and wan compared to the traditional church. The fact that Christianity has been the most powerful force for good in human history says that it is something more than belief in Zeus or Invisible Unicorns, but I'm not convinced it's possible to retain the good without the core beliefs in Jesus and God.
Ugh, I wrote a long response and lost it. Essentially, as I said before, I agree the scientific method is very useful, but I disagree when you say that "I believe that science (in its ideal form) is not only the best method we've found so far, but the best method there could possibly be."
My criticism of the scientific method are:
1) Unique events can and do all the time (it's a consequence of the probabilistic nature of the universe). A unique event is simply one that we haven't observed before or since. Science can't deal with unique events, which are often the most interesting things to us. What is the standard deviation of the heights of Martians, if we have only met one Martian? Science can't answer that question -- but you could certainly ask the Martian to gain this knowledge.
2) The scientific method's reaction to inexplicable events is to reject the event, and the person reporting it. When Roentgen was working with these crazy new X-Ray things, he didn't publish his observations until he had established the cause and effect, so as not to risk his professional reputation. A method which can take an observation, find no explanation, and as a result reject the *observation* has a fundamental flaw.
3) Science should eliminate bias and politics. Studies performed by people who have a financial stake in the result must always be suspect, as stats can usually be massaged to show whatever it is you want them to show. A better model would be a sort of escrowing process where Intel or Merck or GM hands money to an escrow dealer (possibly the government, possibly a private entity) who then presents an unbiased question to a scientist in the field: "Are Intel CPUs faster at 3DMARK07 than AMD's?" "Does Vioxx reduce or induce heart attacks?" "What is the 0 to 60 time on the following cars...?" With the proviso that the results will be published regardless of if they are favorable to the original sponsor of the study. This would go a HUGE way to fixing the problems of the science of today.
4) You said: "The level of certainty science can provide is sufficient." Hormone Replacement Therapy was "scientifically" shown to reduce breast cancer risk. As a result, some 10,000 women have died of breast cancer from HRT. All scientific studies are uncertain to different degrees; as you stated, studies in physics are probably pretty reliable. But studies in medicine are overturned constantly. The level of certainty in medicine is really quite low.
5) This is also the problem of trust in science. The problem is not malice or fraud (though the case of the South Korean cloning guy shows this can happen) but that whereas you or I can understand that studies inherently have uncertainty in them, people go out there and make life or death decisions based on studies, thinking that something which is scientifically shown to be true means the same thing as something mathematically shown to be true.
6) The combination of (1-out-of-20 (p-value less than 0.05) or 1-out-of-100 (p-value less than 0.01) studies being due to random chance) x (a large number of studies per year) results in a huge number of conclusions being published *due solely to chance*. This should be caught (eventually) by reproduction of results, but...
7) Reproducing results (whether building on previous research as you say, or simply doing a new study on the same topic) is done haphazardly, and the result of a follow-up study that contradicts a previous one does *not* actually overturn it... if you have one study showing that eyeblink therapy stops PTSD, then a follow-up shows it doesn't, the literature will conclude "Studies are conflicted". Only topics which interest someone at NSF get the kind of treatment needed to conclusively establish something as true. Many interesting questions linger in the "studies conflict" category for years without any systematic approach to resolving the conflict. Reproduction of results is the cornerstone of the scientific method, but studies are expensive, so follow-up studies are often neglected
>>Science is a method, it requires no faith. In fact it is a method through which provides it's own falsifiable test of itself.
Slow down there, cowboy. Nothing proves itself -- you always start with a certain set of axioms.
While it is indeed one of the great tools for knowing things that we have, it is certainly not the only way things become known. We can learn certain things through reason alone (such as math), and many things can only be learned through word of mouth (Sally said that Harry said that...). Statistics is one of the fundamental answers to epistemology (how can I know something), but ultimately we only can learn things at certain (not very high) confidence levels. While a p-value of 0.05 or 0.01 might sound pretty impressive (and are the standard rules of thumb for statistical 'proofs'), they represent 1-out-of-20 and 1-out-of-100 studies' results being nothing more than the result of random chance. If you have, say, 10,000 papers published a year, 500 or 100 of them will be wrong.
Given how often scientific answers have indeed been found to be wrong, especially in epidemiological studies (which is a sort of scientific wishful thinking), it hardly proves itself to be true (which can't be done anyway). A better way of putting it is, "It's the best method we have of figuring out empirical truths about nature."
There are very major limits on science and the scientific method. Notably:
1) Singular events. Science can't handle singular events very well, or not at all. For example, suppose the people that claimed they had seen cold fusion back in '89 really did see Cold Fusion. Perhaps a gamma ray hit something at just the right time, or maybe it required high altitude, or something. But when researchers tried to duplicate it, they couldn't and so the guys were branded as frauds. Maybe they were, maybe they weren't... but they could actually have made an honest empirical observation, and then branded as frauds as a result of it.
2) Trust. The motto of the Royal Society is "Nullis in Verba" ("On the words of no one") In other words, don't believe what people say, but only trust in reproducible experiments. The trouble with this is, of course, that no one can come close to reproducing all of the empirical experiments needed for a full understanding of modern science, and so it always boils down to trusting what other people say. If a car full of scientists drove through a mountain pass and saw a white substance outside, they could send one of their members out to report if it was sand or snow... without accomplishing anything. The friend could be playing a practical joke on them, after all. All of them would need to go outside and make an empirical observation of the substance themselves in order to be satisfied. This is a very fundamental flaw in the system, which only works since malicious papers (as far as I know) are not inserted into the literature like viruses.
3) The old induction problem / uncertainty. Science is based on inductive reasoning, and inductive reasoning from empirical events can't actually prove anything. We can make certain claims, but not proofs in the sense that logical or mathematical statements can be proven true. "The sun will rise tomorrow" is a scientific claim, but it cannot be proven to be true. The fundamental problem is that what is true in the past might not be true in the future. Since certain things like universal constants are likely to stay the same (though some have theorized they have not in the past!), it can be answered by simply stipulating "If things stay like they are now..." but this is still not the same level of proof as people deal with in logic and math. All scientific knowledge, ultimately, is uncertain.
4) Heretics. The heretics of science have always received rough treatment. Most of the time it is deserved (there are a lot of nutcases out there), but sometimes people have followed the scientific method but had their papers rejected because the reviewers assume their preconceived conclusion. The guys
I cried playing FFVII when I realized how many people would never play FFVI and think FFVII was the best RPG ever.
That's the truth. The only sad thing about Aeris' death was the fact that I wasted so much damn time and gil building her up instead of another character.
BG2 pissed me off with Yoshimo for the same reason, actually.
The famed economic analysis's conclusion was not that good apples wind up costing more but that the distortion is so severe that good apples leave the market and are not available.
Bad apples chase out the good?