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Why Do They Pound the Table?
A brilliant post from last year wondered why Harrison Ford was so angry about science. Discussions of science are not generally emotional events and are often perceived as boring. Math is not thrilling – it’s just math – it adds up or it does not. There’s nothing to believe in. So there’s no reason to convince anyone of anything. But those who promote climate change very often attempt to use emotions rather than simple scientific explanation.
When I saw this picture of Greta Thunberg, I was reminded of that post, and of this quote from Carl Sandberg: “If the facts are against you, argue the law. If the law is against you, argue the facts. If the law and the facts are against you, pound the table and yell like hell.”
It doesn’t bother me that the climate change promoters are wrong. I’m often wrong. What bothers me is that they clearly know they’re wrong. But they want power, so they pound the table.
Al Gore and Leonardo DiCaprio do not live like people who think that carbon emissions are important. Harrison Ford and Ms. Thunberg do not speak like someone who has the facts on their side. These are not honest mistakes. Ms. Thunberg is not an innocent kid sharing her uninformed opinions. This is being done not with innocence, but with malice. It’s not foolish, it’s vicious. This is scary stuff.
Published in General
A lot happened in that 72 hours, just as it did the last time Yellowstone had a super-eruption, but it did not wipe out all life, and it did not wipe out all dinosaurs in that time. While some species nearer the impact or in more delicate balance with their environments might have died off quickly, it was the catalyst for many more changes that took place over millions of years.
More than one such issue they have had.
Ah. I see. Ummm…
Actually, I don’t see. #Scientists must be a lot smarter than scientists. #Science sounds complicated.
Great point, by the way. I suspect that there are people who really believe that. Lord help us.
Caption contest! What is going through this policeman’s mind at this moment?
On the podcast, they asserted that it did happen in a 72-hour period in which glass balls formed and got inside all living things including the dinosaurs and they boiled from inside and died. (It was a gruesome event to hear described.) It encompassed the entire planet. The glass balls fell everywhere.
I kept trying to visualize what they were saying, and in my mind, I saw a tennis ball get hit by an asteroid. The area opposite the strike would feel the effects more slowly than anything in the strike zone. And that’s been the theory. The glass balls is the new addition to the theory, and those washed over the earth in a 72-hour period.
I’m not a geologist or a paleontologist.
I wish someone who was a lot smarter than I am would listen to the podcast.
I have no opinion on it as to its worth to the scientific community. I am not arguing with you. Just telling you what these scientists said on the podcast I listened to. :-)
I don’t think there’s any term for the pre-hypothesis stage. It would just be receiving information through the sense and maybe an intuit.
Just want to add something to this: I started out my editorial life working on science, math, engineering, and technology basic-level college textbooks. Most of these books were organized around the history of the advances in these fields. I spent so many years reading copy that said “They had this theory until X came along” that to me, “theory” is just that. It will be disproved by the next generation of scientists, to whom this theory will seem laughable. Consider the subject of geology. Our knowledge of geology advanced tremendously with the advent of actual highway “roadcuts.” Geology as a field of study really blossomed due to the public works projects across the world. :-) It’s really funny how life unfolds.
I see very little to be gained intellectually by growing attached to any current theory about anything.
Fact is just solidified opinion. Theory has many facts behind it.
Put another way, a hypothesis is a conjecture, an idea. To be a scientific theory, it has to be tested or proven with an awful lot of fact behind it. The theory of speciation through natural selection with variation is proven. It is happening to this day. It has happened in the past. We have overwhelming evidence for it. Now, could there also be other forces or processes at work? It’s possible, but none of those hypothesis have proof behind them. They are still hypotheses and nothing more.
And no, fact and theory are not on two sides of a line. Hypotheses can be proven by facts and become theories, or they can be disproven by facts, or they can be untestable. God, as I understand God, is a physically untestable hypothesis. Now, the definitions of God that others have claimed in the past (and in some cases present) are often falsifiable and fail. But that often comes down to definitions, and the falsifiable definition of God usually comes from unbelievers trying to understand something much greater than they are. As the old saying goes, “God created man in his image, and then man returned the favor.”
Testability of a hypothesis is important in science. If one can’t test it, it is neither proven nor disproven. Many hypotheses cannot be adequately tested at the time of their propounding, but have to wait for better scientific tools, such as the Hubble telescope for proof. Some of Einstein’s relativistic ideas took eighty years before they could even be tested. But again, it doesn’t become a theory until it has facts behind it and it has been tested. Part of being testable is that the hypothesis must be falsifiable.
Exactly. Think of all the science that you know to be true. Part of it is wrong. The trick is, you don’t know which part. So we should approach any scientific topic with some humility.
I teach medical students that they will not make big mistakes when they are uncertain about things. Really horrendous mistakes require certainty.
Greta Thunberg and her supporters should bear this in mind…
In my conversation with my kids, I said that my favorite formulation is “For the purposes of this discussion, we will assume A to be true.” I can accept that. In fact, it’s the way I think.
Scientists start with a hypothesis. After many, many iterations of testing and demonstrated repeatability (by colleagues not invested in the hypothesis being correct), a theory is developed. If a single piece of evidence disproves the hypothesis, the scientists have to modify the hypothesis and start over. Or, in some cases where there is a lot of conflicting evidence, throw out the hypothesis altogether.
The problem with non-scientists believing in #Science is the lack of intellectual humility. Good scientists understand that they’re not really “proving” anything, they’re just providing the best explanation so far. Certain “Laws” of science (thermodynamics) have been shown to be pretty reliable theories (thus, their elevated status), but even if they are discovered to lack explanatory power in some circumstances, the underlying hypothesis would need tweaked for the new phenomenon.
My problem with Darwinism is that parts of it seem tautological — “survival of the fittest.” Well, yeah. That’s not a great insight explaining speciation. “Spontaneous mutation” plus eons of time seems a little hand wavy for getting from single cells to complex species with sensory organs, etc. I’m not a “denier.” I just think the religious devotion to Darwinism is likely keeping people from coming up with better explanations for the complexity of life.
The hypothesis is the idea that might explain what is going on. In order to become a theory, it must be testable (falsifiable), it must accord with the existing data (facts), and it must pass the tests created trying to falsify it. In other words, a properly-verified hypothesis becomes a theory.
As time goes on and scientific instrumentation gets better, it may be that new data becomes available and the existing theories do not explain the new data. This has happened before. Someone then has to come up with a new hypothesis to explain the data. Einstein and other Twentieth Century scientists and philosophers refined the old Newtonian mechanics, which failed at the margins, meaning the very small and the very large. But you can still use the formulae derived by Newton for most of your everyday interactions with the world.
On the other hand, there were a lot of pseudo-scientific hypotheses that were accepted but not proven. Some of these were generally accepted by scientists in their time. Lamarckism is one example. Phrenology is another that gained more acclaim than it deserved. Hypotheses regarding race among humans also gained far too much traction, which led to defenses of race-based slavery and eugenics, which are haunting us to this day.
“I wonder how far this bike will go?”
It was a popular hypothesis for a long time, and still is. But a lot of mathematicians and computer science guys claim to have absolutely disproven it – not with fossils, but by just showing that the creation of a new species via natural selection of random genetic mutations is so incredibly unlikely that it’s essentially impossible.
Note that they don’t claim to understand where new species come from. But natural selection of random genetic mutations does not seem possible. So perhaps there’s another explanation. Something we haven’t thought of yet, perhaps?
In another 10 years, or 100 years, we may be wondering how such a hypothesis ever gained such traction. But things always look clearer in hindsight.
I probably shouldn’t even post this – I don’t want to argue about evolution here. My only point is that a lot of what we’re sure about is likely to be wrong. Some of it is probably right, but some of it is certainly wrong. And we should bear that in mind.
I understand and respect what you are saying here. I know that’s the thinking right now in the scientific community. But I believe they have made an enormous mistake in going in this direction. This has been a classic slippery slope.
I think they are very sloppy in their use of the word “theory.” I blame the scientific community for this. They need to be more exact. They usually are.
We need to take the flat-earthers story as a cautionary tale. The people who lived in that time believed that theory with all their heart. Everything they saw with their eyes confirmed it. Just as every time the day is hotter than usual, it confirms the climate change believers’ opinions.
Well, of course not. Growing attached is emotionalism. The question is, does the current theory explain the facts? If not, is there a better hypothesis out there that explains the currently-known facts better? If the answer to the questions is, “No and no,” a scientist will try to come up with a new hypothesis that explains the variance. If there is no new hypothesis, it becomes an engineering question. How well does the current theory serve us? What adjustments need to be made under what set of conditions?
That said, humans being humans, it usually takes a full generation to shift to a new paradigm, because the old believers have to die off before the new theory is generally-accepted.
Shoot? Don’t shoot?
Seriously, don’t look for the video version of that picture.
No, there is no line. Hypothesis is the “idea”, however conjured, about how some aspect of the world/universe works. Theory is the Hypothesis that survives and continues surviving the application of evidence and experimentation. Typically, evidence that is close to, but not quite consistent with, a specific hypothesis produces a revised hypothesis, in order to better explain reality.
The most common example of this is the replacement of Newton’s Three Laws of Motion with Einstein’s General Relativity. Some evidence of planetary motion didn’t fit Newton’s theory. Einstein conjured (intuited, imagined, whatever) a more complex theory that fit the new evidence, yet didn’t contradict the old evidence. Einstein’s theory stands today, against even the most modern evidence, yet remains a Theory. It is treated as fact by engineers and lay people, justifiably, but it is not “proven”.
No, you’re just scrambling the vocabulary. You aren’t unusual. You seem to be confused that theories are not–cannot be–proven true, which makes you conflate them with hypotheses. Theories are those hypotheses that are likely true, based on accumulated evidence.
Hypothesis is a claim about how reality works. Theory is a justified claim about how reality works.
At best, “fact” only applies to the evidence itself, and that can have varying levels of confidence, too.
A key concept in science is the use of experimentation to generate evidence for or against a hypothesis. In preparing an experiment, a professional will prepare a null hypothesis to go with the main hypothesis. Its purpose is to capture the evidence that rejects (“disproves”) the main hypothesis. Honest scientists construct experiments that, to the extent possible, could fairly disprove their idea. There are many techniques applied to experiments to make them as fair as possible. Google “design of experiments” for more depth. The best evidence for theories comes from experiments.
Some areas of scientific inquiry are not well suited to experiments, though. Like paleontology. We can’t run experiments in the past. And like many areas of medicine. We can’t (ethically) experiment willy-nilly on people, and animal testing is often insufficient to the situation. The best scientists can do in these areas is to collect as much evidence as possible, and try to fit the evidence to every-improving theories.
And, as proven by Gödel, not all that is true can be proven.
Beat me to it…
Not to mention the holes allow the vacuum of space to suck our air away at ground level . . .
How much am I getting paid for this?
No jury would actually convict me…
Oh, now I see! Thanks so much for explaining the complexities of climate science to me in such a coherent manner!
Get out of my way, you twit. I’m on a bike, not an SUV. That makes us buds, right?
Or is this about something other than climate change?
Writers and scientists can be very imprecise people. Even they will use “theory” at times when they mean “hypothesis.” But beyond that, science is done by humans. They jump to unfounded conclusions. They falsify data to prove their points. The thing about science is that in the end, it should be self-correcting. Sometimes it just takes a generation or more.
Well now we’re just exhausting fossil fuels and getting nowhere.
The problem is that there are no better scientific hypotheses. (Also, it isn’t strictly survival of the fittest, but rather that adaptations that fit a particular environmental niche at a particular time tend to produce more successful offspring, so Darwin’s finches became many species, because there was nothing exploiting certain environmental niches in those isalnds, so almost any* mutation was a beneficial adaptation to fill some niche.) Most of the complaints about natural selection come down to, “I don’t understand what use half a wing would be.” Yet, powered animal flight has arisen on four different occasions through history (insects, pterosaurs, birds, bats). Also, we have found that small mutations can have profound effects on form, and can become a characteristic selected for on a basis of sexual selection, rather than functional survival.
* Yes, this is an exaggeration, but not as big as AGW.
“No thanks. I’m married to a woman.”