Nice applicable Tolstoy quote

by UggBoy♥UggGirl [ PHOTO : WORLD : SENSE ]

The most difficult subjects can be explained to the most slow-witted man if he has not formed any idea of them already; but the simplest thing cannot be made clear to the most intelligent man if he is firmly persuaded that he knows already, without a shadow of doubt, what is laid before him.

Leo Tolstoy, 1894

This goes with the previous post.

Science is about building the best model for the world around us. Any model is heavily vetted and examined in order to make sure it comes closest to matching what we see in the real world. A good model not only helps explain the world we see but also offers useful predictions.

It is the best approximation.we have of the natural world.

These scientific models start with a mud hovel which is modified and added to as new data is created. Sometimes we realize that the new windows are completely worthless and need to be torn out.

Sometimes we see that the hovel is built in the wrong spot and needs to be torn down and rebuilt.

Eventually, the house begins to look pretty nice. Perhaps we find that the house is actually a wing of a larger mansion. The entire structure is now so strong that even if we find a window broken, we realize it is easier to fix the window than tear the whole structure down.

But a cracked foundation can require a major restructuring. Newtonian mechanics needed this when it met Einstein. But even there they saved most of the model with any real change.

A good scientist knows that new data might make the model – their mansion – incomplete or wrong They always have a shadow of a doubt.

But that doubt is greatest when the model is a simply mud hut. There is less doubt when it is a mansion because itt is such a good explanation for the world we see.

Great example of how science works to create better models

by ^riza^

Extra neutrino flavor could be bitter end to Standard Model
[Via Ars Technica]

Neutrinos have always caused the physics community a bit of grief. It took decades to go from the first hints of their existence to actually detecting their presence. Then, when studying solar neutrinos, scientists were stumped by an absence—far fewer showed up in the detectors than the Sun should be producing. This was eventually explained by what are called flavor oscillations, which cause neutrinos to shift among the three known types: electron, muon, and tau. Now, researchers are facing yet another enigma: antineutrinos undergo flavor oscillations at a different rate than their regular counterparts.

Flavor oscillations were big news when they were first discovered. The ability of a single neutrino to shift identity over the course of its travels implied that these particles have mass, something that was a bit unexpected. It was only this year that a detector in Italy provided a direct confirmation of a flavor oscillation taking place in a beam of neutrinos that originated at CERN, in Switzerland.

[More]

Science works by generating data that do or do not support a model that is being used to understand the world around us. The more data that the model explains the better it is. The best models explain all the data we can generate and thus represent the best view if the world around us. They may not be perfect nor complete but they are the best.

Scientists can then work on creating data that are natural consequences of what the model predicts, or to help identify which of several possibilities might result from the model’s use.

Here, we find scientists generating more and more data that goes against the very strong Standard Model, one that has worked for many, many years as an accurate construction of the world.

Scientists could retreat to Cargo Cult Worlds and ignore the new data. This is actually what Feynman originally talked about. Scientists are human too and some will simply say all the new data is wrong, the researchers are incompetent and the research is poorly done. They say it but do nothing to prove whether any of those conjectures are right.

But lots of other scientists want to examine the data and answer just those questions. Is the data wrong? Where the experiments done correctly? Are there experiments that can tell us what is correct? Can we gain a better approximation of the true nature of the world? That is what vetting by your peers accomplishes.

We see that here. New data does not fit the model. So either the model is mostly right and we just do not understand it enough. Or it is fundamentally wrong and we need to understand why. Scientists ant to understand in either case.

That is what science does. And it is not what anyone in a Cargo Cult World does. They do not investigate further, they do not try to clarify the results nor do they work to gain a better approximation of the underlying principles of the model. They do not want to understand.

Isaac Asimov wrote a great article called The Relativity of Wrong. As I wrote earlier this year, “The best models are the ones that can lead to better approximations of the truth.” People inhabiting Cargo Cult worlds fail to produce models that are useful, that lead to better views of the truth of the world around us.

Asimov also made a few astute observation that also serves to separate scientist/skeptic from denialist:

“The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds new discoveries, is not ‘Eureka!’ (I’ve found it!), but ‘That’s funny…”

and

“If knowledge can create problems, it is not through ignorance that we can solve them.”

The question few are looking at

by D’Arcy Norman

Democracy under strain
[Via Hot Topic]

I have recently often found myself thinking of a sentence in the late Stephen Schneider’s book Science as a Contact Sport, reviewed on Hot Topic a year ago. Towards the end of the book he reflected on the greed and short-term thinking which has led business interests to advance a campaign of confusion and doubt on the science of climate change, aimed at stalling action. It didn’t surprise him, but what worried him was that so many decent people are still taken in by it. Then came the sentence which reverberates almost daily for me:

What keeps me up at night is a disquieting thought: ‘Can democracy survive complexity?’

It is the run-up to the US mid-term elections which has ensured Schneider’s sentence nags so insistently. Candidate after candidate (mostly Republican) asseverates “I don’t believe in manmade global warming” or “I have not been convinced” or “I am sceptical about the science” or any of numerous similar positions which can be coupled with an assurance that he or she won’t back action to reduce emissions, and may even move aggressively to prevent it. As I read or, if I can bear it, listen, to these confident deniers, many of them articulate and well presented, I wonder where they find their assurance. Generally speaking they seem ignorant of the science. In fact their confidence seems in inverse proportion to their knowledge.

[More]

This is just a delaying tactic because science moves us towards a truer description of the world. These people simply want to slow that down. The big question is whether their delaying tactics will slow us down enough to make it ever more difficult to solve the problems we face?

How does a wide swath of people become convinced that scientists are lying and that politicians or corporations are telling the truth? Why do they recede into Cargo Cult Worlds?

Perhaps the inability to adapt and to deal with complexity holds part of the answer. People adapt to change with a well-defined process. The time it takes for people to traverse each step of the process determines how rapidly they can adapt to changes they see.

Some people move very rapidly through this process. Others get stuck and move very slowly. It may hard enough for these people, who actually may represent a majority of the population, to adapt to even one thing that might display complexity. They actually refuse to move forward, refusing to allow new data to move them through the process of change.

The hallmark of a Cargo Cult World is the active warding of their world from new information, especially data that contradicts their narrative.

But what happens when almost everything pushing at us today involves a high degree of complexity? The Great Recession, terrorism, climate change, healthcare, social safety nets, energy, etc. All require answers that rely on an understanding of the complex nature of the problem. This includes the interconnectedness of several of these.

What happens if most people are incapable of helping to find answers because they are simply unable to adapt? They inhabit Cargo Cult Worlds where only simple solutions are seen, all of them actually maladaptive for the real world.

“They hate us because they are jealous of our freedoms.” “The current recession was because the banks were forced to sell houses to poor people.” “Drill, Baby, Drill.” “The warmists are only trying to get grant money.” “Vaccines are deadly.”

All provide a simple mantra for something much more complex. They are like blind men – who refuse to even see that they are blind – all looking at the tail of the elephant and declaring that it represents the entire animal. So if they only grab the tail, they can control the movement of the elephant.

How do you pull people like that away from their Cargo Cult Worlds? It is not easy. Direct presentation of the facts usually has little effect. That is why they retreat into these fantasy worlds to begin with. They have to find ways to repudiate the facts. Follow almost any discussion with creationists and you see just how hard it is to get them to see facts or to understand how science attempts to provide an accurate description of the world around us.

The ability of people to rationalize their Cargo Cult World makes an appeal to factual information almost impossible.

One way is to help them gain a better understanding in one small area, show them that there are other heuristics to use and make the complex seem a little simpler. This may work with some. But their inability to easily deal with the multitude of connections in a complex problem makes it harder for them to see the whole picture. You can show them that the tail is really just a tail but they have a hard time seeing how the elephant’s legs are connected at all.

The thing to remember is that most of these people change their views or alter their Cargo Cult Worlds because everyone else they know changes or a community leader tells them to.

As so many community leaders for these people are actually telling them that their Cargo Cult World is actually correct, the latter is an unlikely option. And many stay within the echo chamber of their Cargo Cult community, making the former an unlikely option.

It will not be easy. But if we want democracy to survive complexity, we will have to find a way. And I hope we then have some time to actually effect a successful solution.

‘Hurricane’ in the Gulf of Alaska

Update
[Via Cliff Mass Weather Blog]

The heavy rains are still on track for Monday and early Tuesday for the Olympics and North Cascades, although the current runs are not quite as extreme.

The intense storm in the Gulf of Alaska is now forming–here is the wind field over the Pacific for 11 PM tomorrow. Just amazing. The white areas are higher than 55 kts sustained winds….essentially hurricane force. This IS a hurricane…but a midlatitude one. And keep in mind that strong winds, a long-lasting storm, and large fetch produce big waves.

And yes, the waves are forecast to be enormous…here is the prediction from the NOAA Wavewatch 3 model. The pinks are waves greater than 15 meters (49 feet). These waves are NOT heading here.

[More]

This time of year we get some really wild, unstable air. This weather pattern brought some very strong winds to the coast. Hurricane force winds are not too unusual.

Luckily, it looks like it did not move inland very far and we have a nice sunny day right now.

What does it mean to be “anti-vaccine”?

by alvi2047

What does it mean to be “anti-vaccine”?
[Via Respectful Insolence]

“Anti-vaccine.”

I regularly throw that word around — and, most of the time, with good reason. Many skeptics and defenders of SBM also throw that word around, again with good reason most of the time. There really is a shocking amount of anti-vaccine sentiment out there. But what does “anti-vaccine” really mean? What is “anti-vaccine”? Who is “anti-vaccine”? Why? What makes them “anti-vaccine”?

Believe it or not, for all the vociferousness with which I routinely go after anti-vaccine loons, I’m actually a relative newcomer to the task of taking on the anti-vaccine movement. Ten years ago, I was blissfully unaware that such a movement even existed; indeed, I doubt the concept would even have entered my brain that anyone would seriously question the safety and efficacy of vaccines, which are one of the safest and most efficacious preventative medical interventions humans have ever devised, arguably having saved more lives than any other medical intervention ever conceived. Even six years ago, although I had become aware of the existence of the anti-vaccine movement by that time, when I considered anti-vaccine loons at all, I considered them a small bunch of cranks so far into the woo that they weren’t really worth bothering with. Yes, I was a shruggie.

All of that changed not long after I started the first iteration of this blog back in December 2004. Approximately six months later, to be precise, is when everything changed. That was when someone as famous as Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. published an infamous screed simultaneously in Rolling Stone and Salon.com entitled Deadly Immunity that was so full of misinformation, pseudoscience, and conspiracy mongering that it altered the course of my blogging forever, beginning when I called it the “biggest, steamingest, drippiest turd” I had ever seen. Although I had already been becoming less and less of a “shruggie” about the anti-vaccine movement before RFK’s propaganda piece, “Deadly Immunity” resulted in a significant percentage of my blogging turning to discussions of the anti-vaccine movement and the scientifically-discredited myth that vaccines cause autism.

[More]

A wonderful deconstruction of the anti-vaccine movement. But it should also be required reading for anyone dealing with denialists of any stripe.

Those that inhabit Cargo Cult Worlds mostly use the same sorts of tricks, false rhetoric and rationalizations. That is because the same motive is behind each – to hold onto the false heuristics they use to explain the world around them.

As evidence mounts that their rule of thumb is wrong, people can either adapt and move on or they can retreat into a Cargo Cult World, where their rule of thumb still somehow works.

The key factor to recognize this is that inhabitants of Cargo Cult Worlds no longer want or respond to new data. They ‘know’ all that they need to and no longer really want to learn anything else. Facts are something to either cherry pick, ignore or spin. They simply do not want to gain a greater understanding of the real world. Most likely because it would shatter their carefully constructed rules of thumb.

Their inability to adapt is a trap and will lead to greater and greater disconnection with the real world as more and more conflicting data is created. Look at Young Earth Creationists as an example. Or the belief by some that a worldwide conspiracy of tens of thousands of scientists is really behind anthropogenic global warming.

The world is changing rapidly and those that can not abide Future Shock are reacting in non-adaptive and unproductive ways. Unfortunately, there seem to be enough of them to prevent the rest of us from actually producing successful efforts. Or at least slow us down substantially.

iPhone – profits are the bottom line

How the iPhone’s profits stack up
[Via Brainstorm Tech]

Source: Asymco

Here’s a new way of looking at the mobile phone space. In a set of three charts posted Tuesday at Asmyco.com, Horace Dediu looks at the absolute value of the global handset market in terms of units, sales and profits.

The chart above is the third of three, showing the growth of Apple’s (AAPL) share of the industry’s profits since the launch of the iPhone in Q2 2007. The numbers show Apple’s and Nokia’s (NOK) operating income in billions to give the chart a scale of reference.

[More]

Without the iPhone, the sector’s profits would have dropped precipitously in 2008 and would have barely recovered since then. In the time the rest of the group has contracted from the sector high in 2007, Apple has increased its handheld profits 17-fold.

That is what innovation can do in a sector full of slow moving elephants. If Android was not available, there would be no hope for them at all.