{"id":64,"date":"2014-12-05T23:08:44","date_gmt":"2014-12-05T23:08:44","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/aristotle2digital.blogwyrm.com\/?p=64"},"modified":"2016-09-30T14:13:09","modified_gmt":"2016-09-30T18:13:09","slug":"black-swan-science","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/aristotle2digital.blogwyrm.com\/?p=64","title":{"rendered":"Black Swan Science"},"content":{"rendered":"

We are now 55 years removed from the publication of Karl Popper<\/a>\u2019s Logic of Scientific Discovery<\/em> (1959), in which Popper argued that falsification is an essential character of science, and it seems that very few of us in society actually embrace this notion to understand how and why they should be skeptical of \u2018studies that show\u2026\u2019.<\/p>\n

Popper\u2019s argument goes something like this. Before the age of discovery, when explorers from Europe journeyed to the four corners of the globe, Europeans held the belief that all swans were white.\u00a0 This seemed to be a natural conclusion.\u00a0 After all, every swan that had been observed and reported had been white, and it was reasonable to assume that every swan that was, is, or will ever be, is white.\u00a0 On January 10, 1697, the Dutch explorer Willem de Vlamingh<\/a> found a habitat sporting a large number of black swans in and around the Swan River on the west coast of Australia.\u00a0 His observation put an end to any validity of the claim that \u2018all swans are white\u2019.<\/p>\n

In Popper\u2019s logical structure, de Vlamingh\u2019s observations falsified the hypothesis that an essential property of swans is their color. Using this example as a prototype, Popper then generalizes a guiding principle that no scientific theory can be proven, it can only be falsified.<\/p>\n

Now, I expect that most educated people in society would reply, if asked, that they are aware that a scientific theory can never be proven, only disproved, and that they accept this as an essential facet of the scientific enterprise.\u00a0 Some of the more knowledgeable may even point out the radical modifications required to Newtonian physics caused by the observations that eventually led to the birth of Quantum Mechanics and General Relativity.<\/p>\n

And yet, these very same people seem to blindly believe any \u2018fact\u2019 that comes to light, as long as its sales pitch starts with \u2018scientist have discovered\u2019.\u00a0 The media continually bombards us with stories of this kind, telling us about how a new study shows that eating this or that raises or lowers the risk of us contracting some horrible malady.\u00a0 That kids who play video games or watch too much TV (however \u2018too much\u2019 is defined) are being driven to greater levels of violence or obesity or whatever.\u00a0 Regardless of the subject matter, a vast component of our society is gullible and quite ready to believe as proven cause-and-effect any set of statistical correlations that a scientist may happen to discover in a set of data.<\/p>\n

Before I am accused of being unfair and overly critical, I do want to state that I recognize that real life is never as simple as the idealized situation portrayed in the black swan anecdote. For example, imagine ourselves as contemporaries of de Vlamingh who stay at home in Holland.\u00a0 After he arrives home, we happen to be at a meeting where he is presenting his black swan observations.\u00a0 Why should we just give up on the \u2018all swans are white\u2019 hypothesis solely on his say so?\u00a0 Perhaps the birds he observed are not actually swans but birds that look similar.\u00a0 Perhaps they were actually white, and a recent fire had covered them with soot. \u00a0But suppose he came back with the body of a black swan and all our tests and examinations indicate that the bird is indeed black and a swan.\u00a0 Does this mean that we have, with certainty, disproved the white swan hypothesis?\u00a0 \u00a0I think the answer is a qualified yes.\u00a0 That is to say, we can no longer cling to the notion that all swans are white even if we later narrow the definition of \u2018swan\u2019 so that the hypothesis again becomes acceptable.<\/p>\n

On the surface, it may seem that the preceding argument invalidates Popper\u2019s approach, and that this whole enterprise is self-contradictory.\u00a0 But some careful thought and identification of what is essential versus what is accidental in the scientific method assures us that we are on firm ground.<\/p>\n

The essential aspects of the scientific enterprise is that we can believe that the world is understandable and that logic and the scientific method work as tools to reach this understanding.\u00a0 These beliefs are meta-physical in that they rise above the accidents of any particular scientific hypothesis, theory, or test, and they are not \u2018provable\u2019 or \u2018disprovable\u2019.\u00a0 We simply identify them as essential aspects of the world and how we interact with it. The accidental aspects are all that remains.<\/p>\n

To try to illustrate this, let\u2019s return for the final time to these annoying black swans and to de Vlamingh, who caused so much trouble.\u00a0 The essential aspect in this historical narrative is that Europe held the belief in white swans based on a very large number of observations.\u00a0 To hold a belief about the world is to tacitly assume that the world is understandable and that reason is a tool to understand it.\u00a0 The accidentals of the narrative are that 1) prior to de Vlamingh\u2019s observations all swans were white and 2) after his observations that belief could no longer be held unchallenged or unmodified.\u00a0 The fact that we can argue whether the de Vlamingh\u2019s birds are really swans or really black or whatever is only a discussion about the accidentals of the bird and not the essentials of understanding the world.<\/p>\n

So what I am criticizing in society is not that people can be confused about how to draw conclusions from scientific data, nor am I criticizing them for drawing conclusions I would not.\u00a0 What I am criticizing is the acceptance of scientific conclusions without skepticism.\u00a0 I am criticizing misplaced faith, which focuses on the accidental observations of a given study, and loses sight of the essential unprovable nature of the scientific method.\u00a0 I worry about a society that uncritically accepts the term \u2018Settled Science\u2019 and turns its back on Black Swan Science.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

We are now 55 years removed from the publication of Karl Popper\u2019s Logic of Scientific Discovery (1959), in which Popper argued that falsification is an essential character of science, and… Read more ><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-64","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/aristotle2digital.blogwyrm.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/64","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/aristotle2digital.blogwyrm.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/aristotle2digital.blogwyrm.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/aristotle2digital.blogwyrm.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/aristotle2digital.blogwyrm.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=64"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/aristotle2digital.blogwyrm.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/64\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/aristotle2digital.blogwyrm.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=64"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/aristotle2digital.blogwyrm.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=64"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/aristotle2digital.blogwyrm.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=64"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}