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Entry tags:	science

A bestiary of 'sciences' which did not live up to their early promise
The business of science is to come up with new ideas as to how the world works, or to otherwise refine our understanding of things, if we happen to have "good enough" ideas. Real Science is rigorously tested by experiment and test cases; that's the point of science; without the link to reality, you're just fooling yourself with circular reasoning. Fake science avoids tests; instead it creates heretics it labels as "stupid." The only real function fake sciences seem to perform is keeping the self-esteem of the practitioner artificially inflated.An unfortunate tendency of modern people is not being able to admit they did something wrong. Being an arrogant bastard who likes calling people on their shit, I'll perform the public service of letting them know they would better serve humanity were they to go do something else, like make burgers for the masses at Mickey-D's. Bad sciences usually have a lot in common with theology, which used to be considered a science. Generally, bad sciences have questionable axioms, are non-falsifiable and are generally unacquainted with the rigors of statistics, have goals which are not very rational and demonize critics rather than engaging them.




Psychology:
Over 100 years ago, a literary critic by the name of Sigmund Freud fooled a lot of people into thinking the application of greek fairy tales to one's private parts would help cure mental illness. He also thought snorting coke was a cure for all mental ills, and that jerking off made you insane. Psychology has pretty much never gotten better than this over the last 100 years. Psychiatrists still give out stupid, harmful drugs to make people feel better (if I want limp dick and a 'cure' for depression, I'd rather bolt a line of nose candy than suck down prozac any old day). Psychologists continue to prescribe all manner of sexual regimens, most of which it considered extremely psychologically harmful a few decades back (why psychologists think they should have anything to say on this subject is, well, one of the mysteries of psychology). Psychologists still primarily 'treat' people by talking to them about their feelings. The largest professional organization for psychologists in america still refuses to allow its members to test its assertions using statistics and the scientific method; a professional religion masquerading as science -and enforcing its religious nature. Psychologists are still generally insane people with all the capability for self-insight of a chimpanzee, and significantly less capability than Lancelot Link for reading others; people who must have some kind of "manual" for dealing with others, because they don't really understand people. If psychologists really understood people, they'd be glad handing salesmen, rather than semi-autistic ding dongs in dark rooms playing "wizard of oz." Most psychological "illness" is really just a lack of self control; most of which can be cured by putting the sufferer in a room with any member of the working classes who will tell them to stop being stupid and get over it. The basic idea that philosophy or talking to a friend can make you happier is probably a sound one, but the silly gobbledeygook the psychologists have come up with are worse than nothing. Better to send people to a bartender until the neuroscientists can come up with something better, if ever.

String theory (and quantum gravity in general):
One of the greatest scientific achievements of the Victorian era was the unification of light, electricity and magnetism into one theoretical framework (the finishing touches done by James Maxwell). This was the first and greatest "unified field theory." Unfortunately, scientists have been trying to do the same trick since then, and mostly, they have failed, because the universe doesn't seem to work that way. Oh sure, there was the electroweak theory, unifying one type of force associated with nuclear decay with Maxwell's laws of electromagnetism in a quantum mechanical regime. But it is an ugly beast, and unlike Maxwell's laws, it has zero practical application, despite its having been around for 45 odd years now. By contrast, 45 years after Maxwell's equations was 1910; by then we had widespread electrical power networks, radio and most of the familiar benefits of electricity we know of today. Einstein himself wasted the latter years of his life looking for a unified field theory. Yet, there are literally legions of physicists who haven't yet realized that, if Einstein couldn't do it, they're unlikely to be able to either. Most of these guys work on string theory; a theory which has been around since around 1970, and has dominated theoretical physics since the mid 1980s. Unlike any other branch of physics, it has yet to come up with a single testable experiment which would prove or disprove the idea. String theory represents the most long-lived speculation in the history of science. Most string theorists aren't doing anything remotely like science. They're doing math. The math is, in itself, true, and occasionally sort of interesting, but it doesn't purport to be math. It purports to tell us something about the physical world. These guys have never told us anything about the physical world using their noodle theories. All they have done is vacuum up funding and graduate students in physics departments. Chances are, what they are doing is in itself a stupid idea. Its goal, a quantum theory of gravity, may be as stupid an idea as a quantum theory of beef jerky or Japanese tentacle porn. As far as I can tell, none of these would-be Einsteins have ever bothered to think about that. Why should gravity be quantizable, hmmm? The only arguments I have heard are aesthetic ones, despite the fact that all attempts to do this sort of thing are insanely unaesthetic. The world is plenty weird without it being made of imaginary vibrating strings. Devoting your giant brains to mesoscopic physics or the second law of thermodynamics sounds a lot more interesting to me. But, alas, they're all so caught up in their self-important 'looking into the mind of god' trip, they don't notice most of the open questions are a lot more interesting and obvious than trivia about how to tie your brain into a knot.





Sociobiology:
People like Richard Dawkins take great delight in making up Darwinian Fairytales which 'explain' all kinds of human behavior and epiphenomena. The very self-same people also expend a great deal of energy explaining to us that a very obvious, in my opinion, universal epiphenominon of humanity, which is to say, religious belief, is an evolutionary maladaption in human beings. One is very tempted to point out that sociobiologists in general (and Dawkins in particular) are as irrational, silly, pig-headed and insane as the flat-earthers they're constantly asserting their superiority to. Sociobiology is as inane an unfalsifiable 'science' as Marxism, Freudianism or any of the other secular religions. Sociobiology has the same awe-inspiring predictive capability and explanatory power as 'scientific creationism' -which probably is why it is generally sociobiologists who are arguing with the Flat Earth Society. Like Velikovskian astronomy, it is more a collection of shaggy dog stories which give its adherents a false sense of intellectual superiority than a body of knowledge you can prove true or false. Most of what sociobiology purports to 'explain' is, simply, noise. A lot of the way people behave or form social systems has nothing to do with evolutionary pressures. Sorry, pinheads; just because biological beings can evolve doesn't mean that everything about them is a result of evolutionary process. Sociobiologists are almost endearing because they successfully mock other, even more unpleasant and harmful fake bodies of knowledge (creation science, literary critics, religious nuts, feminism, leftism in general). However, they're getting a bit above themselves and really need to be taken down a peg. Left uncheched, they'll soon be as bad as psychologists were in the 1950s, and they'll start hooking people up to line current and chopping up their frontal lobes for no apparent reason, like the shrinks did.





Climatology:
Climatology used to be a sleepy backwater of atmospheric sciences; it's been around since the 1930s at least. When a man became more ambitious than his colleagues who wanted to predict the weather a few days hence, he'd develop these giant models which (cue maniacal laughter) purported to explain all the weather in the world, forever! At least in some statistical fashion. Since we can't predict weather in any more than a statistical fashion for any longer than a few weeks, this doesn't work very well. Nor does it work well at explaining any of the obvious cyclical or long term features of climate, such as El Nino, the Atlantic Multidecadal Mode (the phenomenon which caused New Orleans to flood the other year), the Ice Ages, or, well, much of anything. Furthermore, climatologists can't even explain what happens to local climate when you alter the environment: if you want to amuse yourself making fun of a climatologist some time, ask one what ozone or nitrogen emissions from cars, or concrete versus dirt roads does to local city temperatures. Then ask him if there are any decent computer models of local city temperatures capable of predicting testable temperature (or wind, or cloud or anything) differentials versus outside the cities. I'll let you in on the answer: climatologists conveniently can't predict anything testable. The reason they can't do this is actually very basic. It's the same reason you can't predict where a superball will be if you bounce it around a stadium shaped cavity after a couple of bounces. The fact that many things we'd like to know are inherently unpredictable is only the most important fundamental scientific and philosophical discovery of the 20th century. It boggles my mind that there is an entire industry of jackasses who, despite, like, the very laws of mathematics, insist they can model a system as complex as the entire earth using their PC's, to the point where they can predict 1/4 degree changes in mean temperature (a mean with an enormous variance) based on 0.005% changes in atmospheric composition. But yet, through an unholy alliance between hysterical newspaper writers, hippies, grant agencies, and climatologists climatology has become the latest in a long line of eschatological cults for the self-loathing; this time with scientific trappings. Fundamentally, they fulfill the same social role as Ezekiel hectoring Israel with damnation for its sins. Modern apocalyptic climatologists, like string theorists, are mercifully completely decoupled from having to actually correlate their 'results' with anything observed in the earth's atmosphere; so long as they get a "hockey stick" at the end of things. The variance in atmospheric temperature is so huge, you won't be able to tell if they deserved tenure until after they're dead. Oh sure, you could complain that their models don't return basic climatological fact, like temperature differentials across altitude, but that would be, like, using science and critical reasoning. Like the psychologists and sociobiologists (and string theorists; go read the reviews of Lee Smolin's latest book), they're already fond of branding unbelievers sinful heretics.






Artificial Intelligence/Computer Science:
I remember reading Goedel, Escher, Bach, written back in the early 1980s. The guy who wrote it, a procrastinating physics grad student (Brother Lupo knows nothing of such people; nothing!), was convinced that ATN's were the secret to hard AI, and that we'd soon have brain in a can. ATNs, as it turned out, were not even capable of parsing latin (though they were OK at english). AI research pretty much wandered aimlessly through the fields since then. It hasn't helped us understand the way brains or consciousness works. In fact, the few occasional useful things in AI research are actually based on what neurologists tell us about how brains work. Even fairly straightforward problems reproducing very algorithmic things which people can do, like integrations on the complex plane, or translation between languages: AI has failed miserably, despite decades of research. Most of the interesting problems posed in the "early days" were later proved to be NP hard, aka, not computable on Von Neumann computers. Rather than thinking up more useful computer architectures, the "AI" crew went rooting around in the bargain basement sections of engineering; coming up with "new" ideas like the Kalman filter which have been in common use since the 1950s. Shit, computer scientists can't even develop programming languages which work properly, and they think things like relational databases are a good idea. Most people who use computers still think garbage like C++ is cutting edge (and, more horrifying -they're generally right). Autonomous vehicles, self programming, useful robots; nil, nil and nil, respectively. Sure, computers continue to get faster all the time, but that only makes computer scientists dumber. You can't blame computer scientists too much; the economics is too painful to watch. What kind of genius are you going to get to complete a Ph.D then compete for a crappy $50k a year tenure track research job when you can make $250k a year making cash out systems for webporn with only a high school education?