Science is a life skill | Technobabble

Peo­ple like me keep telling oth­ers to be skep­ti­cal and think crit­i­cally about fac­tual claims over­heard on the inter­net, mass media and even from friends and rel­a­tives. And I actu­ally think peo­ple are start­ing to catch on. Prob­a­bly thanks to the num­ber of “not quite true” adver­tise­ment mes­sages peo­ple get exposed to on a daily basis. But how can one actu­ally be skep­ti­cal about impor­tant fac­tual claims when even rig­or­ous sci­en­tific results are so dizzy­ingly incom­pre­hen­si­ble? How can you tell the dif­fer­ence? How can you be con­fi­dent in your per­cep­tion of the facts? Some­times — at least to me — it feels like you’d need a Ph.D. in sev­eral fields of sci­ence to sat­isfy your skep­ti­cism of all the claims fly­ing around!

Let’s start on a light note, with a video…

This is a video put together by one of my favorite sci­en­tific youtu­bers. Although I’m unsure of his name, he calles his youtube chan­nel C0nc0rdance.

While to most peo­ple — espe­cially those with a sci­en­tific back­ground — this video may be painfully funny, I hope that at least some detect a rather fright­en­ing ele­ment illus­trated in this video. Let me elaborate…

As a sci­en­tist (and espe­cially as a physi­cist), when I look at this video, I under­stand most of the words that fall out of these people’s mouths — yes, even in the Star Trek scenes. And to me, the sen­tences sound no more sen­si­cal than: “Pork pie scis­sors affect the banana glands which embi­gens the heal­ing power of home­opa­thy”. Hav­ing a knowl­edge of the mean­ing of these words allows me to eas­ily dif­fer­en­ti­ate between tech­nob­a­b­ble and a log­i­cal expla­na­tion. I’m sure those of you who have a cer­tain knowl­edge of sci­en­tific terms also sym­pa­thize with that position.

But let’s imag­ine that I hadn’t done a degree in physics. Imag­ine I hadn’t kept up to date with cur­rent dis­cov­er­ies in sci­ence. How would I be able to tell what was sci­ence, and what was non-science (or nonsense)?

I doubt many of my read­ers find it dif­fi­cult to pin the tail to the crack­pot claims in that video… but per­haps there are some. To those of you I say, don’t be too hard on your­self. Some­times, crack­pot claims are much more sub­tle and harder to spot.

Let’s con­tinue with a harder example…

Con­sider the fol­low­ing two abstracts. The first was accepted in the APS Physics Jour­nal (1990), and the sec­ond was accepted in the World Multi-Conference on Sys­temics, Cyber­net­ics and Infor­mat­ics (2005).

The Chern-Simons Lagrangian has been stud­ied pre­vi­ously in (2+1)-dimensional space­time, where it is both gauge and Lorentz invari­ant. In 3+1 dimen­sions, this term cou­ples the dual elec­tro­mag­netic ten­sor to an exter­nal four-vector. If we take this four-vector to be fixed, the term is gauge invari­ant but not Lorentz invari­ant. In this paper, we exam­ine both the the­o­ret­i­cal con­se­quences of such a mod­i­fi­ca­tion and obser­va­tional lim­its we can put on its mag­ni­tude. The Chern-Simons term would rotate the plane of polar­iza­tion of radi­a­tion from dis­tant galax­ies, an effect which is not observed. From the obser­va­tions we deduce that the mag­ni­tude of the vec­tor is <1.7×10-42h0 GeV, where h0 is the Hub­ble con­stant in units of 100 km sec-1 Mpc-1.

And…

Many physi­cists would agree that, had it not been for con­ges­tion con­trol, the eval­u­a­tion of web browsers might never have occurred. In fact, few hack­ers world­wide would dis­agree with the essen­tial unification of voice-over-IP and pub­licpri­vate key pair. In order to solve this rid­dle, we confirm that SMPs can be made sto­chas­tic, cacheable, and interposable.

What if I were to tell you that one of these arti­cles is seri­ous research and one was, in fact, ran­domly gen­er­ated tech­nob­a­b­ble? Can you tell which is which?

The first abstract is from a physics arti­cle writ­ten by dis­tin­guished the­o­ret­i­cal physi­cist and blog­ger, Sean Car­roll. This is def­i­nitely seri­ous sci­en­tific research. The sec­ond abstract is ran­domly gen­er­ated. Seri­ously. It fooled some peo­ple well enough to get accepted into the WMSCI in 2005. You can read the full arti­cle here, and even make your own ran­domly gen­er­ated tech­nob­a­b­ble arti­cle here.

At a cer­tain point, the dif­fer­ence between tech­nob­a­b­ble and respectable sci­ence becomes dif­fi­cult to tell apart. Some ridicu­lous claims, in the right con­text, can become tempt­ingly believ­able. On the other side of the coin, even claims from dis­tin­guished sci­en­tists are some­times encoded in sci­en­tific lingo so much that even sci­en­tists in the same field find them dif­fi­cult to understand.

…it’s impos­si­ble to know every­thing, you say? (Well… not you, of course ) It’s futile to try to dis­sect all of the things peo­ple say out there. I’m going to let the sci­en­tists do their thing and I’ll do mine. It’s not like it’s going to affect my life.

I hear you. For a while, I was dis­cour­aged by that thought and there may be truth in it to a cer­tain extent. But, a defeatist approach to sci­en­tific knowl­edge won’t help you. And, the real­ity of the sit­u­a­tion is prob­a­bly closer to this:

Even a small aware­ness of sci­en­tific facts and meth­ods will present you with a huge advan­tage when it comes to siphon­ing out false claims and crack­pots from the jum­ble infor­ma­tion we jug­gle with on a daily basis.

If you think that a knowl­edge of sci­ence is sep­a­rate from “real life”, I would invite you to con­sider this. Exhibit A: Con­ser­va­pe­dia. A wealth of com­pletely false claims. Many of these claims, although rooted in false sci­en­tific claims, per­me­ate into the polit­i­cal arena. As peo­ple who live in a demo­c­ra­tic soci­ety, it mat­ters what we deduce to be fact or fiction.

But what’s to say that wikipedia is any more accu­rate? This is where sci­ence comes in. Not only is sci­ence a col­lec­tion of knowl­edge, it’s also a process. A way to fil­ter out fact from fiction.

Sci­ence is a life skill. Like cook­ing, or coop­er­at­ing with oth­ers, or read­ing a map. It’s not just a pro­fes­sion, it’s not just for nerds, it’s not just a divider (but it can be). Sci­ence is a world view… a use­ful one that cuts through a lot of harm­ful and mis­lead­ing bull. It doesn’t just affect sci­en­tists, it affects our soci­ety, pol­i­tics, our health …

I think I’m going to make this a bit of a series. In future posts we’ll look into what sci­ence really is, con­fir­ma­tion bias, and other neat things.