Frontiers of the Mind

New frontiers of the mind are before us, and if they are pioneered with the same vision, boldness, and drive with which we have waged this war [i.e., World War II] we can create a fuller and more fruitful employment and a fuller and more fruitful life.

– President Franklin D. Roosevelt, in a letter to his science advisor Vannevar Bush asking for recommendations that led to the creation of the National Science Foundation, 17 November 1944; the letter is reproduced in Vannevar Bush, “Science — The Endless Frontier: A Report to the President on a Program for Postwar Scientific Research”, July 1945, three months after Roosevelt’s death.

Science as Nuisance

From the beginning, the Bush White House has treated science as a nuisance and scientists as an interest group�one that, because it lies outside the governing conservative coalition, need not be indulged. That’s why the White House-sometimes in the service of political Christianism or ideological fetishism, more often in obeisance to baser interests like the petroleum, pharmaceutical, and defense industries-has altered, suppressed, or overriden scientific findings on global warming; missile defense; H.I.V./ AIDS; pollution from industrial farming and oil drilling; forest management and endangered species; environmental health, including lead and mercury poisoning in children and safety standards for drinking water; and non-abstinence methods of birth control and sexually-transmitted-disease prevention. It has grossly misled the public on the number of stem-cell lines available for research. It has appointed unqualified ideologues to scientific advisory committees and has forced out scientists who persist in pointing out inconvenient facts.

[Hendrik Hertzberg, "Mired", The New Yorker, 22 August 2005.]

Miller’s Skepticism

But science is more than the sum of its hypotheses, its observations, and its experiments. From the point of view of rationality, science is above all its method–essentially the critical method of searching for errors. It is the staunch devotion of science to this method that makes the difference.
[...^*]
It took Popper’s genius to realize that what is central to rationality is criticism, not justification or proof; and to scientific rationality, empirical criticism. To rescue science as a rational enterprise, perhaps the rational enterprise par excellence, there is accordingly no need to attribute to well-tested scientific hypotheses a security or reliability that they do not possess. Scientific hypotheses are not trustworthy or reliable, except in the sense of being, in some instances, true; and they are not in any interesting respect based on experience.

[David Miller, "Being an Absolute Skeptic", Science, 4 June 1999.]
———-
^*The bit that I excised between the parts I quoted was not uninteresting, it just didn’t seem to carry the flow of the idea that I wanted to note by quoting Miller. Here are the words represented by the elipsis belonging, in the original, to the first paragraph:

What is wrong with pseudoscience is the manner in which it handles its hypotheses, not normally the hypotheses themselves (though if they are designed to be unassailable and unfalsifiable, then unassailed and unfalsified they doubtless remain). But although a hypothesis that survives all criticism thrown at it is preferable to a hypothesis that dies, it does not become a better hypothesis through being tested. It may have been a better hypothesis from the outset, of course; it may be true. True hypotheses are what we seek.

What Gödel Didn’t Say

What is it about Gödel’s theorem that so captures the imagination? Probably that its oversimplified plain-English form–”There are true things which cannot be proved”–is naturally appealing to anyone with a remotely romantic sensibility. Call it “the curse of the slogan”: Any scientific result that can be approximated by an aphorism is ripe for misappropriation. The precise mathematical formulation that is Gödel’s theorem doesn’t really say “there are true things which cannot be proved” any more than Einstein’s theory means “everything is relative, dude, it just depends on your point of view.” And it certainly doesn’t say anything directly about the world outside mathematics, though the physicist Roger Penrose does use the incompleteness theorem in making his controversial case for the role of quantum mechanics in human consciousness. Yet, Gödel is routinely deployed by people with antirationalist agendas as a stick to whack any offending piece of science that happens by. A typical recent article, “Why Evolutionary Theories Are Unbelievable,” claims, “Basically, Gödel’s theorems prove the Doctrine of Original Sin, the need for the sacrament of penance, and that there is a future eternity.” If Gödel’s theorems could prove that, he’d be even more important than Einstein and Heisenberg!

[Jordan Ellenberg, "Does Gödel Matter? The romantic's favorite mathematician didn't prove what you think he did." Slate, 10 March 2005.]

Statistical Fluctuations

Abraham Pais, a physicist who wrote what is generally regarded as the definitive scientific biography of Einstein, said of his subject that there are two things at which he was “better than anyone before or after him; he knew how to invent invariance principles and how to make use of statistical fluctuations.” Invariance principles play a central role in the theory of relativity. Indeed, Einstein had wanted to call relativity the “theory of invariants”.
["Miraculous Visions: 100 Years of Einstein", The Economist, 29 December 2004.]

By way of explanation for the quotation: I came across it a few months ago and wanted to make note of it 1) because it’s quite true, and gives a remarkable insight into Einstein’s mode of thinking; and 2) because fluctuations loom large in my own way of looking at the physical world — because of my working experience in science — and because invariance principles are an interesting and important concept in physics. I’d like to discuss both of them sometime, but it will require far more presence of mind, and time, than I have to give it right now. So, I’ll preserve the quotation here and maybe get to it later.

NPC ID “Debate”

Bob Park, a physicist who writes the brief “What’s New” reports for the American Physical Society with a great deal of wit and withering obervation (archives here, subscribe here), apparently attended a recent press “event” at the National Press Club put on by the irrepressible [so-called] Design [so-called] Insitute:

EVOLUTION: DISCOVERY INSTITUTE FINDS A SCIENTIST TO DEBATE.
The National Press Club in Washington, DC is a good place to hold a press conference. If a group can make its message look like an important story, it can get national coverage. The message of the Seattle-based Discovery Institute is simple: “Intelligent Design is science.” That’s bull feathers of course, but that’s why they have PR people. Science is what scientists do, so they gotta look like scientists. Nothing can make you look more like a scientist than to debate one. Scam artists all use the “debate ploy”: perpetual-motion-machine inventors, magnet therapists, UFO conspiracy theorists, all of them. They win just by being on the same platform. So, the Discovery Institute paid for prominent biologist Will Provine, the Charles A. Alexander Professor of Biological Sciences at Cornell, to travel to Washington to debate one of the Discovery Institute’s “kept” PhDs, Stephen Meyer, at the National Press Club on Wednesday. It was sparsely attended. Most were earnest, well-scrubbed, clean-cut young believers, who smiled, nodded in agreement and applauded at all the right times. The debate was not widely advertized. I’m not sure they really wanted a lot of hot-shot reporters asking hard questions. The only reporter was from UPI, which is owned by the Rev. Sun Myung Moon and the Unification Church, a spiritual partner of the Discovery Institute. The next day I searched on Google for any coverage of the debate. The only story I could find was in the Washington Times, a newspaper owned by the Rev. Sun Myung Moon.

["What's New", by Robert Park, 22 April 2005.]

The Top 1%

Indulge me in just a couple quotations from Al Franken’s Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them.
First, for later use in writing about epidemic innumeracy and its threat to the public, this alarming but illustrative statistic (p. 302):

Are you in the top 1% of earners? 19% of Americans say “yes”!

(This may come originally from an essay called “For Richer”, by Paul Krugman, that appeared in the New York Times, 20 October 2002.)
Now, from p. 352, the chapter called “What is a Lie”?:

And all the lies, small and large, add up. They create a worldview in which the mainstream media is a liberal propaganda machine. In which Democrats are ruthless, manipulative power grabbers. And also sissies. Where if you’re poor, you should blame yourself, and for everything else, blame Clinton. Where Democrats feed a culture of victimhood, but where the real victims are decent, hardworking white males. The right-wing media’s lies create a world in which no one needs to feel any obligation to anybody else. It’s a worldview designed to comfort the comfortable and further afflict the afflicted.