Cool Waters

Of course, the question then arises, how much of the
1900-1945 increase came from fewer bucket data, and more from engine intakes? Certainly not much of the 19th century data came from engine rooms. There are a lot of interesting lessons in the graph on Gelman’s blog showing data sources over time.

megan, sounds like a very labour intense way of dealing with that problem. A better method that is commonly used is to massively oversample (i.e. put far more gauges that you need to have a statistically sound sample size) and then use statistical methods to throw out any outliers. That way you set them all up once and can automatically filter out a good data set without having to investigate every anomalous reading or location. Faster and cheaper in most situations.

Dsquared wrote: Bruno Latour is French…

Are you sure that he’s not Freedom? If so, we should probably take him seriously.

Navies typically take bathythermograph readings down to great depths. Most often the sea surface temperature is isothermic down to certain depths in certain regions. At a point perhaps 20 to 1000 feet down the temperature gradient breaks sharply negative indicating a suddenly much colder temperature.

It would be interesting to see if warmer sea surface temperatures are accompanied by deeper isothermic layers. Someone must be correlating such data I suppose.

Clearly the context and methods used to measure things matter. Thanks heavens Bruno Latour discovered this, otherwise engineers and scientists might have wasted valuable time. Hats off to Bruno.

Kieran was too quick for me!

I may also have been reacting to dsquared’s bizarre post at 4.

10: with sickeningly inevitability, I find myself responding “ahhh stick it up your ass”.

Latour was a major target of Sokal & Bricmont and has always been one of the chief betes noires for that kind of annoying self-styled “rationalist” who believes themselves to be fighting the heroic fight for the very values of the Enlightenment by sneering at work that they visibly don’t understand (strangely, these types are often surprisingly absent when it comes to having a go at global warming denialists, Lancet hacks or anyone else who might fight back). People like Dawkins deserve to be mocked regularly and as offensively as possible for contributing to public ignorance about science by pretending that it can’t be studied as a sociological phenomenon, particularly if they have actually been appointed to jobs as Professor of the Public Understanding of Science.

As for the “funny” part of that, I guess we’ll just have to wait for the publication in the Reader’s Digest of the numerous humourous anecdotes you have no doubt submitted for consideration.

dsquared’s transformation into Bizarro Nick Cohen continues…

Ken, FYI dsquared made a pretty accurate parody summary of some of the more naive and ill-informed combatants on the side of “reason” in the tedious “science wars”. Evidently you’re not familiar with that stuff, to which I can only say “lucky you”.

I certainly wasn’t aware that Dawkins had said anything about Bruno Latour or drawn any conclusions about him based on nationality, but since this is “pretty accurate parody” it may be so. I thought this must have been one of those North London dinner party conversations so famed in song and story.

re: 17

I may be misremembering, I haven’t read the book since shortly after it came out, but I don’t remember sociology of science or STS being a particular target of theirs. There is a chapter on Latour, yes, but is he really one of their major targets?

he novelty here is the discovery of historical practices about record keeping and instruments during and shortly after the war.

At least, I hope that instrumental bias is not a unique discovery worthy of a Nature publication 20 years after the specific bias was reported in a meteorological paper.

T.P. Barnett, in a paper published in 1984,
explains that instrumental bias accounts for shifts in sea surface temperature data.

“The SST observations have been contaminated by a systematic conversion from bucket to injection measurements. The bias so introduced may constitute as much as 30 to 50% of the observed change in sea surface temperature since the turn of the century.” (AMS 122(2),303-312)

Latour, even with his irritating powerpoint prose style, would certainly have something useful to say about data comparisons over long time periods like the databases of global temperatures. Likewise, about meta analysis, where researchers combine data from disparate studies to come to a consensus conclusion.

Dsquared is a blogospheric monster of cruelty, the way he throws his enormous weight around, heedlessly leaving the crushed bodies of his victims behind him on the path.

Latour is rightly mocked by Sokal and Bricmont in Intellectual Impostures for his 1988 paper “A relativistic account of Einstein’s relativity” in which he demonstrates a complete failure to understand the theory of special relativity.

Dsquared is a blogospheric monster of cruelty

Is this the bucket measurement?

“Dsquared is a blogospheric monster of cruelty, the way he throws his enormous weight around, heedlessly leaving the crushed bodies of his victims behind him on the path.”

It’s not really the point whether anyone is really hurt by what he writes. The point is that there are standards of civility here and he notably deviates from them. In doing so, he’s being hypocritical and by association all the bloggers here are tainted by the hypocrisy. The writers can remove their standard, or insist that one of their own conform to it.

That’s one problem.

The other problem is simply that CT has been generally a nice respite from this sort of crap which so infests the rest of the blogosphere. It’s nice to come here and read this sort of post without having to deal with the typical sarcastic partisan sniping that turns everything into middle-school dominance games. Every topic doesn’t have to be an opportunity to ridicule and/or provoke someone.

I’ve been reading CT and commenting here since it begin, something like the sixth post. It’s still relatively high quality, but there’s less earnest, respectful discussion and more sniping than there used to be. And Davies, more than any other writer here, is all about the sniping. Also, it’s not just unpleasant, it’s banal.

“I frequently find Ellis’s hyper-rational tunnel vision highly offensive. This is the guy, if I remember correctly, who argued at DeLong’s site that Krugman destroyed his reputation by writing for the New York Times.”

Finally, wouldn’t you agree that sharing a page with the others who occupy the space at NYT where Krugman appears very well might ruin someone’s reputation? Brooks? Friedman? Dowd?

Yes, I think that the NYT editorial page, which is absolutely uninfluential in exactly the same way that I am, should be givenover entirely to the worst of the worst. Krugman should be replaced by Glenn Beck. Because, after all, as Marx and the astrologists have shown, history and politics are completely governed by inevitable occult forces, and human will influences nothing at all.

CT and DeLong have both improved greatly since the nests of the deadender trolls was cleaned out.

must … resist … temptation … to say

st..
sti…
stiii …

NO! GET BEHIND ME SATAN! I AM HENRY JEKYLL!

Well, one last bit…

“The particular statement you’re complaining about seems to me to be a wholly good-natured joke that you’re not getting.”

I’m aware of the context, I just don’t see how it had very much to do with this post. Other than provoking the people that Davies intended to provoke and, as we can see, did. His comment was obliquely related to the post. That is to say, it was an opportunity. And before I complained about it, there were already several comments and exchanges—or rather, feuding arguments—going on in response to it. It has hijacked the thread. It would have done so without my comment.

And I wouldn’t have said anything about #4 alone. It was the “ahhh stick it up your ass” of #17 which really sort of amazed me in its brazenness. #10 was the sort of response Davies knew he’d get from someone offended by his comment…and while it was insulting, at least it was subtle and gentile.

Not that I particularly agree with the school of thought that says you can act like an ass as long as you are sufficiently clever and subtle about it. But you have to admit, that’s the sort of thing that pretty much no one objects to around here. “Ahhh stick it up your ass”, though, tends to result in devoweling.

st ..
st (smack!)
stiiiiiiiiii ….

I certainly wasn’t aware that Dawkins had said anything about Bruno Latour or drawn any conclusions about him based on nationality

I just found a review by Dawkins of Sokal and Bricmont. It attacks “fashionable French ‘intellectuals'” and mentions Latour by name.

I don’t know Latour’s work so I can’t say firsthand whether Sokal and Bricmont are being fair to him, though I know the physicist David Mermin has defended parts of the article gdr mentions; IIRC he was inspired partly by his daughter explaining some of what Latour was up to (we went to college together which is why I remember that). Unfortunately I can’t find a free link to Mermin’s original Physics Today piece.

Thanks for that Matt. The bit of it that mentions Latour says “Sokal and Bricmont expose Bruno Latour’s confusion of relativity with relativism”. Wow – the full extent of Dawkins’ anti-intellectualism is only now being brought home to me…

We’re getting far afield

Well back to the post then. As one of the dumber commenters here I still don’t understand what Latour’s insight is supposed to be in reference to the subject matter above. That he collects stories similar to the ocean-cooling story is commendable, but that such errors exist is not surprising and pointing them out is not insight. Is it? I get harangued by my IT department about garbage in/garbage out alla time.

Ken, I didn’t say this earlier, but I found that link because it was the first Google hit for “Dawkins French philosophy.” And it contains an endorsement of a blanket attack on (a group of) French intellectuals in general and Latour in particular. Some other quotes:

“Suppose you are an intellectual impostor with nothing to say, but with strong ambitions to succeed in academic life….”

“This calls to mind Peter Medawar’s earlier characterization of a certain type of French intellectual style….”

“In particular, how shall we know whether the modish French ‘philosophy’, whose disciples and exponents have all but taken over large sections of American academic life, is genuinely profound or the vacuous rhetoric of mountebanks and charlatans?”

This is a wholesale dismissal of the French philosophers discussed, including Latour, in terms specifically directed at their Frenchness. So d-squared’s parody of Dawkins is eminently fair. And when you said “I certainly wasn’t aware that Dawkins had said anything about Bruno Latour or drawn any conclusions about him based on nationality,” it’s because you didn’t spend thirty seconds Googling. I don’t think you’re doing very well as a defender of intellectual standards here.

Nobody seems to be contesting that Latour’s work described here is worthwhile (well there’s comment 9, but that’s been taken care of); perhaps those who do dismiss Latour out of hand are making a mistake? I don’t know whether that includes Sokal and Bricmont (though the suggestion that they only criticize Latour’s article on relativity is false; they apparently spend pp. 92-99 attacking Science in Action); if someone is aware of a place where they discuss the merits of work like what’s mentioned in the post, I’d be interested in it. Even if Latour’s piece on relativity were entirely without merit, it wouldn’t mean that his other work could be dismissed; no one ignores all of E.O. Wilson’s or Noam Chomsky’s work just because they sometimes say something asinine.

I’ve only read ‘Laboratory Life’ (because people said that it is the empirical groundwork on which ‘Science in Action’ is based) and, while it isn’t nonsense, it doesn’t seem to say much which is particularly profound, or even interesting.

It reads fairly accurately as a description of labwork, which might be interesting to someone who doesn’t know about it, but, probably because it never asks _why_ various things are done, it comes across as pretty superficial (and a bit mock naive). If all we get from it is that science is done by people, and is thus unavoidably a social activity, then he hasn’t really added anything over and above the fundamental starting point of science studies.

Matt: in #45 you say “I just found a review by Dawkins of Sokal and Bricmont. It attacks “fashionable French ‘intellectuals’” and mentions Latour by name.”

But Bricmont himself is French – well, Francophone Belgian – and an intellectual (just not ‘fashionable’?). Dawkins doesn’t really attack French per se, does he?

Well, I cracked open my Gross & Levitt (Higher Superstition) to see what they had to say about Latour. I trust that this might be a useful proxy for why scientists have so little use for him; check pages 57-62 if so inclined. One very serious critique that they make, simply put, is that he just doesn’t understand the scientific subjects that he is studying. When discussing relativity theory, understanding (at some level) what is actually is based on and how it is derived actually matters.

The more basic argument is whether the cold, stubborn facts of the world as it is determine the outcome of scientific disputes. This would be the Sokal side of matters; Latour would emphasize instead the role of social networks and power in establishing dominant narratives. Here is his Third Rule of Method:

“Since the settlement of a controversy is the Cause of Nature’s representation, not the consequence, we can never use the outcome – Nature- to explain how and why a controversy has been settled.”

Now, when pressed, Latour would admit that, say, a flat and spherical earth aren’t just competing narratives. But it’s pretty easy to see how passages like the above could be read that way.

More to the point, the climate change issue is a perfect example of why the practical consequences of an approach like that of Latour can be so toxic. Creationists and Global Warming deniers rely heavily on the idea that the scientific consensus is determined solely by power and ideology. The subtle arguments of the academic left are now routinely employed as tools by reactionary forces, and this has made it far, far more difficult to recognize and correct severe environmental damage. By contrast, a public policy debate that is based on, say, whether human activity is actually changing the climate is more productive. The Latours of the world prefer to make it all about social constuction, ensuring that the public won’t accept a referee, such as the scientific method, as the ultimate arbiter of how things work.

This is a major reason why scientists like me have such visceral contempt for the pomo crowd: their word games and academic power trips have had real-life consequences.

Marc, try this metaphor. In biology, evolution has some severe constraints. Every multicellular thing that starts with a fertilised egg has to go through a complex development cycle, and it can only evolve in ways that are compatible with that development. The development cycle *constrains* evolution, and things like meiotic drive constrain it more.

Similarly, the social system has a veto on which scientific ideas can be explored, and which are not allowed. As an obvious example, consider the question of differences in intelligence among races. Negative results would be ignored while anything that looked like scientific evidence for differences between races would be used in bad ways. I’m not saying that such studies ought to be funded, I’m saying that we do look at presumed social utility when we consider funding for science. The Pomo people are right that we put constraints on what science can be done. Not that there’s no science left in science, but it does have some constraints.

More to the point, the climate change issue is a perfect example of why the practical consequences of an approach like that of Latour can be so toxic.”

See, you do it too. Surely you would prefer that this sort of research not be funded, because of its bad social consequences.

Creationists and Global Warming deniers rely heavily on the idea that the scientific consensus is determined solely by power and ideology. The subtle arguments of the academic left are now routinely employed as tools by reactionary forces, and this has made it far, far more difficult to recognize and correct severe environmental damage.

Do those arguments actually make much difference? These are people who oppose some scientific research because they fear the social consequences. Their influence dependss on the votes and the spending patterns of the fearful. Does it really matter what arguments they use? You’re either for them or you’re against them, independent of their particular reasoning to justify their fears.

The Latours of the world prefer to make it all about social constuction, ensuring that the public won’t accept a referee, such as the scientific method, as the ultimate arbiter of how things work.

What is the chance that “the public” would accept scientific method as a referee? “First you’ve got to let us do whatever scientific research we want to do, and then we will tell you what the social consequences of our research will be according to science.” Would creationists accept that? Would free-market economists accept it? Would racists or anti-racists? Anti-life or anti-choice? Before you can accept scientific method as an arbiter, you have to *believe* in scientific method. If we could restrict these choices to the believers, it wouldn’t be a problem.

I suspect any scientist who has had to deal with getting a grant would not object to the proposition that funding affects what gets studied. And many of those who have to contend with the popular media reporting their research seem to be quite vocal about the social process of science and society. What is the book The Mismeasure Of Man but an extended discussion of these ideas as applied to intelligence measurement, for example?

The Pomo people seem to say stuff that at heart is pretty trivial, but wrap it up in flowery obscurity and no small amount of condescension. Moreover, when it’s pointed out that to the extent there’s any “there” there, it’s basically making trivial points, they can then turn around and claim that means they’ve moved from resistance to acceptance, so were correct all along.

Nonetheless, I don’t think they spawned the wingnut tactics. Truth-is-what-power-says-it-is has a very long history, and needs no deep philosophy behind it.

I’m not sure why Latour gets so much stick for not understanding relativity.

It’s clear that no-one regards having read Latour – let alone made a serious attempt to understand what he’s saying as a serious impediment to weighing into a discussion of his views.

You really don’t have to read very much of his work , and certainly not much beyond the paper that Kieran was referring to here, to see that he’s not claiming that the non-social world is irrelevant to fixing the scientific facts.

And its not just ‘if he’s pushed’: one of the key points in actor-network theory, and something that comes up all over the place in books like ‘The Pasteurization of France’, is the idea that the material world (or eg the microbes) need to be regarded as actors too.

If there is anyone who holds a view according to ‘the scientific consensus is determined solely by power and ideology’, its probably someone like Barry Barnes or Harry Collins. And Collins turns out to know quite a lot about gravity waves (which is what he writes about).

I’m not a fan of Latour’s. But it would be nice if people could get their heads round the fact that a) not all sociologists of science – and not all French speakers – hold the same views.

Oh – and Bob at 55: I gather that Davies is American or Irish or something. So he obviously can’t be criticising Dawkins and Sokal who are both British, which is pretty much the same thing…

Here’s an example of social networks, etc. Poincare discovered about a century ago that the “three-body problem” is insoluble. This might be thought of as an early anticipation of chaos theory. One of the consequences is that the long-run behavior of a solar system is unpredictable if the solar system has more than two members. This is a pretty revolutionary conclusion, but it made little splash.

In later decades Onsager and Kolmogorov developed these ideas, and they became familiar within specialized areas of physics and math, but the repercussions in the area of general science were few. (Contrast the repercussions of relativity or quantum theory). Only in the sixties or so, with the rise of chaos theory and fractal geometry, did specialists in other fields start to pay attention.

If I am not mistaken, large areas of economics (specifically, Econ 101 taught to hundreds of thousands of students every year) still have not taken these results into accounts, and are teaching things that are almost certainly false. (The founder of fractal geometry, Benoit Mandelbrot, has tried, with only moderate success.)

So there’s been a century-long lag in recognizing the consequences of Poincare’s work. (One might also mention lags in recognizing the significance of evolution and of thermodynamics.)

It’s quite possible that the most aggressively mathematical scientistic of the social sciences is the one furthest behind the curve in this respect. It looks as though it will be another generation before economics is rewritten. (Diana Coyle and Rosser, Collander, and Holt in their books defending the economics profession both recognize that economics is very, very slow to change, and both emphasize that anyone trying to change the profession from within must present his or her ideas very, very tactfully — external criticisms are, of course, ignored right off the bat).

If that’s not social networks, I don’t know what it is. People are still teaching stuff that was disproven a century ago.

Responding to 59. It’s not so much the dedicated denialists with a political motive who are swayed by this stuff. However, my concern is more about the libertarian types (and a fair number of plain old independents without a particular ideology) who are receptive to denialist arguments that climate scientists are just another advocacy group looking out for their own interests. In this case, the arguments matter very much, because denialists cast the climate folks who do have some manner of objectivitiy, however subject to human error, as akin to any other political group trying to exercise power.

It’s not the Republicans who change the world, it’s the side that has the initiative. It was the Democratic party from the Great Depression and until the Civil Rights Act when they lost the Southern bloc – and the Republican party ever since. And it can change again, although nothing seems to indicate any incoming major re-alignment.

re: 63

I’m not sure if Collins would count as a crude social constructivist either. I’m definitely not an expert and it’s a while since I read much of this stuff at all, but I don’t think either the ‘Bath’ or ‘Edinburgh’ schools were engaged in the sort of crude constructivist talk that some of their less reflective critics sometimes paint them as being.

It’s not really good to be hysterical and delusional about anything, Bubba.

I will take this as a soft one over the plate and say OMG there you pomos go with yer obviousitudinousness again.

#64/ J Thomas – I’ve been very put off by what I’ve read of them, e.g. the journal issue in which the Sokal hoax appeared. The problem is that Sokal’s hoax showed that in at least one case, these people cannot distinguish between scholarship and deliberate utter gibberish. Right, right, I know, it doesn’t disprove that there’s real scholarship somewhere. But still, that’s a pretty powerful indictment of the field. It leads one to wonder how much else is also gibberish masquerading as profundity.

Absolutely. Pomo certainly didn’t invent gibberish masquerading as profundity. But, to connect back to dsquared’s objection at #4, there does seem to be a reasonable basis driving that sort of reaction by Martin Gardner fan types.

“The problem is that Sokal’s hoax showed that in at least one case, these people cannot distinguish between scholarship and deliberate utter gibberish. Right, right, I know, it doesn’t disprove that there’s real scholarship somewhere. But still, that’s a pretty powerful indictment of the field. It leads one to wonder how much else is also gibberish masquerading as profundity.”

The problem with this is that Sokal’s hoax didn’t show what you claim. The editor of the journal didn’t pretend to know anything about the physics Sokal wrote about. Because Sokal was a physicist, he trusted that Sokal knew what Sokal was writing about when Sokal was writing about physics.

And the irony is that Sokal, in attempting to write like a pomo, misused and misappropriated a number of terms and generally proved that he didn’t know that much about postmodernism. But the editor gave him a break because Sokal seemed to be making an informed argument about the nature of physics.

The whole episode was a clusterfuck.

I’m a person whose very unusual education fully straddled both the humanities and the sciences. I learned the history of science and the philosophy of science while actually doing a fair bit of science. And a fair bit of philosophy.

And the thing is, I find it very often the case that many non-scientists, when writing about the sciences, have woefully inadequate comprehension of the technical matters about which they are writing. And I find it very often the case that most scientists, when talking about science (both philosophically and as a human institution), are incredibly naive and very ideological, and often simply wrong. Scientists assume that by virtue of being scientists, they know something about science in a deep epistemological sense and in a sociological sense. They usually don’t. And they usually know very little history of science, for that matter, which is quite relevant to these topics.

Furthermore, every academic is very territorial.

So what happens in science studies, both those who practice them and those who argue against them, is that everyone is trespassing in everyone else’s specialty and quite often proving themselves ignorant of something important. This causes outrage, which results in hyperbole, reckless generalization, and mischaracterizations.

My argument with Davies’s comment was that he didn’t wait for someone to come along, drag this thread into this feud, and write provocative, over-generalized comments which put words in other peoples’ mouths. He went ahead and did it himself. And some people were offended and there was some argument.

But the discussion here in the last twenty or so comments proves that people could come here, discuss this, and do so in a productive, non-sarcastic and non-provocative manner. There have been some interesting links, some back and forth, even some rethinking of positions.

The Dawkin piece that was linked is an example of how both sides are right and wrong.

Dawkin’s ridicule of Lacan’s pseudomath is well-deserved, as is the mockery of Irigaray’s claim that the historical privilege of solid mechanics over fluid mechanics is sexist.

On the other hand, his criticism of Baudrillard is far-fetched. As someone who knows something about the math and science terms Baudrillard invokes, I think his statement is meaningful. There’s considerable amount of poetic license—but there’s no indication in that quote that Baudrillard is actually trying to make a rigorous argument involving chaos math and turbulence. His allusion to these things is not contrary to their nature.

Furthermore, I don’t see anything in Dawkins’s CV that provides him with the expertise to be pretending to authoritatively pass judgment on these writers within the context they are writing.

That said, it’s not as if I don’t often lose my patience with the ubiquitous glib invocations of QM, relativity, and Godel by people who clearly haven’t any real competence in these subjects—especially because it’s always the same, banal yet deeply mistaken popular misconceptions of these ideas and their implications, in service to predictable homilies involving relativism. And it’s not as if pomos aren’t some of the worst offenders.

But nobody’s sinless here, as far as I can tell. There’s a certain amount of knownothingism on both sides. I can’t understand how Latour could write extensively about relativity without actually studying it; nor can I understand how critics of Latour can write authoritatively about him without actually having read anything by him. Both sides think they “know enough” to pass judgment.

Jesus, now I have to agree with Keith.

You, learned fellows, always say that casual invocations of Godel’s incompleteness are “deeply mistaken popular misconceptions”, but is it really true? It seems simple enough for a layman to understand – not the proof, of course, but the general idea and implications. Isn’t it one of those cases when you, guys, are being territorial, making things sound more mysterious than they really are?

I’ve heard the argument “But the editor gave him a break because Sokal seemed to be making an informed argument about the nature of physics.”. But I’d maintain that argument does not refute the point “these people cannot distinguish between scholarship and deliberate utter gibberish.”. It’s a defense that they should not be expected to be able to distinguish. It’s almost a self-referential parody. In comes an article from An Authority, with the right buzzwords, and .. what? They published it because it was politically expedient, due to the social processes they operate under?

But I think the “both sides” approach misses the key dispute, of how much of the supposed scholoarship is meaningful and non-trivial. Note that has to be estimated to some extent, but there are estimation problems all the time regarding what to pay attention to.

Hmm. You make some good points, Seth, but even with them in mind, I do think that is to some degree a valid defense.

If I recall correctly, it was a special issue of the journal where they had solicited submissions from scientists and others where it was expected that the content might be highly technical. That is to say, this wasn’t the norm, it was an exceptional issue.

Furthermore, the academic culture and peer-review publishing just isn’t set up to deal with deliberate dishonesty. There is a presumption of honesty and good intentions that isn’t so much naive as it is a practical necessity. This is why those who falsify their results tend to get away with it. The answer to that problem isn’t to support rules and institutions that regularly look for dishonesty, because that is unrealistic. The solution is to reinforce the cultural ethos that makes dishonesty unthinkable. That’s why an absolute intolerance of plagiarism at the undergraduate level is so important, for example.

And Sokal violated that essential trust. Sokal violated a fundamental academic tenet—it doesn’t matter that it was to prove a point. Intentional plagiarism or falsified results would prove a point, too, if someone wanted to make one about the failures of peer-review, but that wouldn’t excuse someone for doing it and they would be, rightly, disciplined. Sokal should have been disciplined. He could have made his point, though with less intensity and media coverage, in a legitimate way without deliberately undermining the process. His stunt—and it was a stunt—was designed to cast a pall over an entire type of intellectual activity. His aim was so wide, it’s clearly ideological. And it succeeds only because it relies upon an assumption that the editors should have been looking for an attempt to do what Sokal did.

I say that because I believe that anyone, given the type of opportunity provides by the editors of that journal, could have succeeded in a hoax like this. Anyone can be conned.

“But I think the ‘both sides’ approach misses the key dispute, of how much of the supposed scholoarship is meaningful and non-trivial.”

Does it? Because I’d wager a lot of money that the amount of pomo literary theory and science studies and whatnot that relies upon highly technical scientific theories and facts is relatively a very small portion of the corpus. Yet, the critics are using it to tar the whole range of this type of intellectual activity.

Again, I feel like I’m caught in the middle of this. I entirely agree that the postmodernists have been notorious for basically appropriating every possible variety of human intellectual activity as being within their domain and then discussing any example authoritatively in unnecessarily obfuscated technical language. While I think they have produced some good work and some important insights, I think they exhibit a notoriously high ratio of handwaving among intellectuals.

The problem is, though, that what all these people are often doing—very much including the critics of pomo—is essentially ideologically motivated cultural criticism. They all have a worldview to sell, they all have vested interests. When someone has a worldview they’re trying to sell me, I’ve come to deeply distrust the specific arguments they use in order to do so because there’s almost always distortion.

“You, learned fellows, always say that casual invocations of Godel’s incompleteness are ‘deeply mistaken popular misconceptions’, but is it really true? It seems simple enough for a layman to understand – not the proof, of course, but the general idea and implications. Isn’t it one of those cases when you, guys, are being territorial, making things sound more mysterious than they really are?”

I certainly don’t think so. And I can’t really respond to your challenge until I know what you think the “general idea and implications” of Gödel Incompleteness are.

I mean, I can guess, given how you phrased that. It’s widely represented as being a proof that there is a limit to the formalization of knowledge, usually in the service of supporting the idea of the limits (and failings) of rationalism. Less expansively and more accurately, it’s often presented as being a generalized statement about the limitations of mathematics within the context of mathematics. But that’s an exageration—there’s no reason to believe that Gödel Incompleteness applies to anything other than the family of Gödel Statements.

People like to infer the conclusion that there are whole territories of true statements of all kinds that any given formal system cannot express. But there’s no good reason to infer this. It’s possible, but it’s not what Gödel proved. Gödel only proved something very specific. I don’t mean to downplay the importance of that—in the context of mathematics epistemology of the time, this was entirely unexpected and contrary to a basic assumption. Also, as I understand it, contemporary mathematicians tend to think of Gödel numbering as more far-reaching and essential than what it was used to prove.

God knows I really don’t want to go into the fundamental conflict of worldviews involved in all this—but pretty much it all comes down to a conflict between objectivism and subjectivism, right? Relativity is invoked to demonstrate epistemological relativism. So is Heisenberg Uncertainty. So is chaos theory and complexity theory,and of course Gödel Incompleteness. And in each of these cases, none of them actually support a wide-ranging relativism.

They are each examples of unexpected limits on knowledge within specialized contexts. And, as such, within the historical period in which they arose—which were very to moderately absolutist—they came as cultural shocks. This cumulative blow to absolutism slowly spread beyond the narrow technical subjects to which they applied, and began to influence the whole of science and even popular culture. In the process, each of these results have been grossly over-interpreted to support a fundamental shift in the consensual intellectual comprehension of the universe.

I’m not saying that, in general, this isn’t a good thing. The cultural absolutism this replaced was itself an over-interpretation of specific results that misled researchers and was at the core of (or used to support) a number of notorious cultural and political ideas. But I’m personally of the opinion that the pendulum has swung too far in the other direction. Yet that’s not really the point.

The point is worrying about the integrity of certain specific mistaken ideas that are commonly encountered in popular culture and, sadly, some areas of academics. Being wrong is being wrong, it’s not a good thing.

“If Godel’s theorems don’t technically imply inherent incompleteness of knowledge in the general sense, they certainly give a hint in that direction.”

Well, my intuition is that there is some inherent limits to rationalized knowledge and that intuition is based upon the cluster of math and science ideas that I mentioned, as well as some others. So in that sense, I agree with you.

(Note: I’m not a philosopher, nor do I intend to give the impression that I am. But my education and self-directed learning form a basis for this interest and were I a philosopher—and I seriously considered the possibility in the past—this is what I’d specialize in.)

But I think that isolating one particular idea, like Gödel Incompleteness, as sufficient support for this notion is unwarranted. And, typically, people don’t qualify this as you did—that Gödel Incompleteness hints at this idea—they present it as if it demonstrates it and this epistemological assertion is a statement of fact.

Again, it’s important to understand that Gödel Incompleteness doesn’t even assert a wide-ranging characteristic of mathematics, much less “knowledge”. Hofstadter and many others have written about it as if Gödel Incompleteness proves that there are mathematical statements other than the class of Gödel Statements which have the same character. But there’s no reason to assume that. It’s certainly possible, but Gödel Incompleteness doesn’t say this. It only says that one very specially crafted kind of statement has this property for any given formal system. To generalize beyond this in mathematics is a stretch, and to go even farther and apply it to all of rational thought is irresponsible.

Though, like I said, I agree with you that the many numerous similar results like this one in a number of domains of rational thought is very suggestive that there’s a general principle at work.

Gödel Incompleteness proves that there are mathematical statements other than the class of Gödel Statements which have the same character. But there’s no reason to assume that

There´s no reason not to.

And there is a reason (nowhere near conclusive…) for suspecting that certain propositions are undecidable simply in that they have resisted proof for so long.

When you see something out there you can’t explain – assume dark matter.

“Hofstadter and many others have written about it as if Gödel Incompleteness proves that there are mathematical statements other than the class of Gödel Statements which have the same character. But there’s no reason to assume that.” keith m ellis

I never looked seriously at Goedel. I had an undergraduate math class where it got asserted that Goedel’s theorm has been proven for every formal mathematical system as complicated as the natural numbers. That sounds pretty inclusive.

But when I checked wikipedia just now, they say there are systems that include the natural numbers as a subset that Goedel’s theorem doesn’t apply to. “The key fact is that these axiomatizations are not expressive enough to define the set of natural numbers or develop basic properties of the natural numbers.” So it isn’t as clear-cut as I thought.

But that’s an exageration—there’s no reason to believe that Gödel Incompleteness applies to anything other than the family of Gödel Statements

Yes there is. Quite apart from anything, what do you mean by “the class of Goedel statements”? If there were some property possessed by all and only all those true statements which weren’t theorems, then you could add an axiom stipulating that all statements of that class were theorems.

In any case, Greg Chaitin has proved (constructively, by example) that there are Diophantine equations which are undecidable in the Goedelian sense – and since the Incompleteness Theorem is equivalent to the insolubility of the Halting Problem, I think it’s pretty difficult to argue that it’s a theoretical curiosum of no practical importance.

Marc: all these tests are actually just establishing the presence of excess mass. “Dark matter” is still a placeholder concept and we don’t actually know anything about it at all.

@102
The tests Marc mentions do considerably more than just establish the presense of extra mass: they indicate that there is a type of matter which does not interact electromagnetically and is ~ 5x more abundent than baryonic matter.

@101
“Both ideas have taken root because they make sense in such a wide range of contexts…”
This is more true of dark matter than dark energy. I think it is important to stress the differences between them, especially for the public. Both the measurements and the theory behind dark energy are a lot more tenuous.

You keep referring to “excess mass” as if galaxy rotation curves were the only evidence for dark matter. Recent measurements of the Bullet cluster show that dark matter can be disassociated from baryonic matter. The relative heights of the 2nd and 3rd acoustic peaks in the CMB can not be explained by “excess mass.” We may not know everything we’d like about it, but we know a number of things that it is not (e.g. MACHOs, neutrinos, any but the most perverse MOND theories, etc.) and rather a bit about how it behaves.

I would say that every popular statement invoking Gödel Incompleteness I have ever heard has been wrong. Even Keith’s statement, made with clearly modest intent, is wrong in key respects. It’s an evocative result, but it’s meaning is fairly technical, and the rhetorical purposes it’s put to outside of mathematics are fairly banal. Yes, not everything can be figured out by pure thought.

To come back to the topic of the original post (too late!), has weighed in. Apparently the bucket issue was known for years. The latest IPCC report spent a section on discussing it. The Thomson contribution lies in helping to quantify the correction needed.

”
God knows I really don’t want to go into the fundamental conflict of worldviews involved in all this—but pretty much it all comes down to a conflict between objectivism and subjectivism, right? Relativity is invoked to demonstrate epistemological relativism. So is Heisenberg Uncertainty. So is chaos theory and complexity theory,and of course Gödel Incompleteness. And in each of these cases, none of them actually support a wide-ranging relativism.
”

This whole comment was very nicely put, Keith. I’d add just one thing which is that what is especially frustrating to people who know about these items technically is not simply that they are evoked as metaphors, but that they are evoked as metaphors INCORRECTLY.

For example Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle, correctly understood, is not a statement about EPISTEMOLOGY, it is a statement about ONTOLOGY. It is not saying we cannot know certain things about the universe, it is saying that the universe is not made of the constituents that it was thought to be made of.

(And for the cognoscenti:
yeah, Heisenberg and Bohr and the rest of that crowd thought they WERE making statements about epistemology. That doesn’t change the fact that they were wrong. It was the 1920s for gods sake, 80 years ago, and some of us have moved on since then, even if the average pop physics book and intro textbook has not.)

“I haven’t read the details about Sokal’s scam. But I can imagine similar things that I wouldn’t be impressed by. Say some pomo guy sends a paper to a psychology journal…he claims his results are significant at the 0.01 level and so on.”

The difference would be that in this example he is just lying, but lying about something no one else can know about (which would be fraud). Sokal was rather writing things that were just meaningless or obviously false (which would just be bad scholarship if he’d meant it). Perhaps a more relevant comparison is the claims made in something like Medical Hypotheses (not a peer reviewed journal) about what the scientific evidence shows (when normally it shows no such thing).

Here’s one that I think is supposed to be a piss take: “Is there an association between the use of heeled footwear and schizophrenia?”

And one that is more seriously intended: “If Schizophrenia is enantiomorphism, is light the morphogen?”

PJ, I had a disturbing thought.

You’re saying that Sokal’s research wasn’t like a paper with forged data, it was more like a paper with nonsensical logic. And so the editors should have caught it and rejected it.

Like the old joke about the biologist who trains an insect to jump on an auditory signal, and then pulls its legs off two at a time, and when the insect has no legs left it stop jumping. And the researcher concludes that insects have their ears in their legs.

But — how much should we give Sokal the benefit of the doubt? Would he stoop to writing a paper that actually did make sense in pomo terms, and then later publicly claim that it was entirely garbage? He was making a hostile attack, would he go that far?

If he did that, then a pomo editor could declare that the author of a work is not the final authority on what it means and it did in fact mean something that looked like it was worth publishing. But outside his own discipline that would get guffaws.

To test that, you’d have to learn enough about the pomo stuff to tell whether Sokal’s paper made sense in those terms, and then see whether you could make sense of it. A lot of work for a small reward.