Biases and cascade effects in science

[jacob]

First, I'm not an expert in these things but I've read an interesting article in the Opinion Journal (related to Wall Street Journal) about Al Gore's Nobel Prize. The article is at OpinionJournal - It's Your Money

But although the article talks about global warming and if it exists, several clauses got my attention since they may be relevant also to our discussion here of science. It talks about biases and cascade effects of information. Here are a few quotes from this article (my emphasis):

How this honor [Nobel Prize - jacob] has befallen the former Veep could perhaps be explained by another Nobel, awarded in 2002 to Daniel Kahneman for work he and the late Amos Tversky did on "availability bias," roughly the human propensity to judge the validity of a proposition by how easily it comes to mind.
Their insight has been fruitful and multiplied: "Availability cascade" has been coined for the way a proposition can become irresistible simply by the media repeating it; "informational cascade" for the tendency to replace our beliefs with the crowd's beliefs; and "reputational cascade" for the rational incentive to do so.

It may seem strange that scientists would participate in such a phenomenon. It shouldn't. Scientists are human; they do not wait for proof; many devote their professional lives to seeking evidence for hypotheses (especially well-funded hypotheses) they've chosen to believe. Less surprising is the readiness of many prominent journalists to embrace the role of enforcer of an orthodoxy simply because it is the orthodoxy. For them, a consensus apparently suffices as proof of itself.

Wouldn't these cascade effects also affect scientists in the fields of parapsychology (both parapsychology researchers and skeptics)? And how would their effect be, in your opinion?

[Paul C. Anagnostopoulos]

I'm sure there isn't a human psychological foible that doesn't affect scientists at one time or another. Nothing says that a scientist should be particularly good at avoiding logical fallacies, either.

The trick with science is that everything is up for grabs and a young Turk is perfectly happy to blow off the current orthodoxy in search of fame and fortune. The old timers will rant and rave, but eventually they are gone and the new idea takes hold.

Have patience the old nonsense will be replaced with newer, hopefully less nonsensical, ideas.

~~ Paul

[Open Mind]

Originally Posted by Paul C. Anagnostopoulos

Have patience the old nonsense will be replaced with newer, hopefully less nonsensical, ideas.

I'm pleased to here that Paul, how much longer do we need to put up with
physicalism/materialism?

[Paul C. Anagnostopoulos]

Originally Posted by Open Mind

I'm pleased to here that Paul, how much longer do we need to put up with physicalism/materialism?

Until such time as

• You offer a coherent explanation of how your favorite metaphysic is different.
  
• You offer at least one hypothesis on how we might tell them apart.
  
• You cough up some evidence for the hypothesis.

Until then, why should a scientist care when he doesn't even know how to incorporate the ... the extra thing? Surely you don't want him to be content with a god-of-the-gaps explanation.



~~ Paul

[David Bailey]

Originally Posted by Paul C. Anagnostopoulos

Until such time as

• You offer a coherent explanation of how your favorite metaphysic is different.
  
• You offer at least one hypothesis on how we might tell them apart.
  
• You cough up some evidence for the hypothesis.

Until then, why should a scientist care when he doesn't even know how to incorporate the ... the extra thing? Surely you don't want him to be content with a god-of-the-gaps explanation.



~~ Paul

The trouble is that all new theories are god-of-the-gaps explanations, almost by definition. For a long time, General Relativity filled a gap comprised of a tiny deviation in the orbit of Mercury and a tiny shift in the position of a star whose light passed close to the sun.

Another problem is that evidence for a new hypothesis is usually disputed. It took ten years after the discovery of stomach-ulcer inducing bacteria before these were treated properly, even though there was a suitable antibiotic available off the shelf - and this was surely not such a radical scientific proposal.

David

[Paul C. Anagnostopoulos]

Originally Posted by David Bailey

The trouble is that all new theories are god-of-the-gaps explanations, almost by definition. For a long time, General Relativity filled a gap comprised of a tiny deviation in the orbit of Mercury and a tiny shift in the position of a star whose light passed close to the sun.

Let's see ... theory of general relativity published in 1916 ... Eddington does his light-bending experiments in 1919 ... wow, a whole three years.

Another problem is that evidence for a new hypothesis is usually disputed. It took ten years after the discovery of stomach-ulcer inducing bacteria before these were treated properly, even though there was a suitable antibiotic available off the shelf - and this was surely not such a radical scientific proposal.

Wow, ten years from discovery to technological implementation.

Yet, we've been talking about idealism vs. materialism for thousands of years. I despair that there will be any hypotheses to distinguish them in my lifetime, let alone supporting evidence for one of them.

This is kind of like psi. There is definitive evidence, many people say. Wake me up when the first bit of technology is developed from the new physics that we discover in support of psi.

~~ Paul

[WhiteTiger]

Why is it that there should even be hypotheses?

"He who controls the terms of acceptability controls the debate"

Who set up "science" as the one true arbiter of rectitude, and just when did this happen? I musta blinked.



Tiger

[Paul C. Anagnostopoulos]

Originally Posted by White Tiger

Why is it that there should even be hypotheses?

"He who controls the terms of acceptability controls the debate"

Who set up "science" as the one true arbiter of rectitude, and just when did this happen? I musta blinked.

Well, if you don't really care which metaphysic might be correct, then by all means, don't bother with hypotheses to distinguish them.

Are you proposing some alternate investigative methodology that we might use? Apparently logical argument isn't sufficient to choose the correct metaphysic, or else this conversation would have been over thousands of years ago.

I'm reminded of the joke about the cheapest department to run at a university.

~~ Paul

[WhiteTiger]

Originally Posted by Paul C. Anagnostopoulos

Apparently logical argument isn't sufficient to choose the correct metaphysic~

Hmmm... and how did we establish that there is "the correct" metaphysic? I seem to be blinking a lot.



Tiger

[Paul C. Anagnostopoulos]

Originally Posted by White Tiger

Hmmm... and how did we establish that there is "the correct" metaphysic? I seem to be blinking a lot.

I have no argument with you here. I very much doubt there is a correct one. But you have noticed philosophers going on about it for the past few thousand years, right?

On the other hand, you just said:

Who set up "science" as the one true arbiter of rectitude, and just when did this happen? I musta blinked.

Now why would you care about science being the one true arbiter if you think there is nothing to arbitrate?

~~ Paul