I can be terse

PINKER: But that makes the wrong prediction: the harder the science, the greater the participation of women! We find exactly the opposite: it's the most subjective fields within academia — the social sciences, the humanities, the helping professions — that have the greatest representation of women. This follows exactly from the choices that women express in what gives them satisfaction in life. But it goes in the opposite direction to the prediction you made about the role of objective criteria in bringing about gender equity. Surely it's physics, and not, say, sociology, that has the more objective criteria for success.

There is a nice article on Dr. Elizabeth Spelker in the NYT. In it, I found a link to a debate in 2005 between Dr. Steven Pinker and Dr. Spelke, both at Harvard, which was triggered by the (in)famous remarks of Larry Summers, then president of Harvard, on women in Science.

The debate is very interesting. They do not really differ on the facts, but on the interpretations. There is a video, and copies of the slide presentations, plus the text of the discussion at the end. Watch, listen, read, and make up your own mind.

During a decade as head of global cancer research at Amgen, C. Glenn Begley identified 53 "landmark" publications -- papers in top journals, from reputable labs -- for his team to reproduce. Begley sought to double-check the findings before trying to build on them for drug development.

Result: 47 of the 53 could not be replicated. He described his findings in a commentary piece published on Wednesday in the journal Nature.

Seeing irreproducible or misleading results published as peer reviewed scientific results is extremely disheartening. Science absolutely depends upon honest disclosure of experimental results along with transparent discussion of any real or suspected problems. Scientific papers designed not to further understanding but simply to further careers ought to result in career destruction. This sort of  dishonest research work harms Science, harms society, and ultimately harms humanity. Richard Feynman said it best in his famous Cargo Cult Science commencement address at Caltech...

It's a kind of scientific integrity, a principle of scientific thought that corresponds to a kind of utter honesty--a kind of leaning over backwards. For example, if you're doing an experiment, you should report everything that you think might make it invalid--not only what you think is right about it: other causes that could possibly explain your results; and things you thought of that you've eliminated by some other experiment, and how they worked--to make sure the other fellow can tell they have been eliminated.

Details that could throw doubt on your interpretation must be given, if you know them. You must do the best you can--if you know anything at all wrong, or possibly wrong--to explain it. If you make a theory, for example, and advertise it, or put it out, then you must also put down all the facts that disagree with it, as well as those that agree with it. There is also a more subtle problem. When you have put a lot of ideas together to make an elaborate theory, you want to make sure, when explaining what it fits, that those things it fits are not just the things that gave you the idea for the theory; but that the finished theory makes something else come out right, in addition.

The reasons for the intense scepticism about OPERA are both general and specific.  The general reasons stem from the track record of experiments on the frontiers of science, which is pretty dismal.  This is not because experimentalists are careless or foolhardy (well, occasionally this happens) but because doing first-of-a-kind experiments, using new and clever methods and the latest technology, is extremely difficult, and prone to unforeseen problems.  And statistical flukes can always happen, too.  Everyone who has worked in high-energy physics for a while knows that the vast majority of exciting results, even from the best experimentalists, simply don’t hold up over time.  I made an informal list over the weekend of false alarms that have occurred during the nearly 30 years that I’ve been following or actually doing high-energy physics, and came up with nearly two dozen separate incidents — and I keep thinking of new ones.  [I may do some writing later this week about how some of these ``discoveries'' went awry.]  Meanwhile I can think of only three actual discoveries that survived, one of which (the top quark) was expected, one of which (neutrino oscillations) was pretty exciting but not unexpected, and only one of which really violated the prejudices of my field.  The last — the only real shocker to occur during my career — won this year’s Nobel Prize: the discovery that the universe’s expansion is accelerating instead of decelerating.

First, read the whole article by Dr. Strassler. I'll wait.

OK. Prof. Strassler is exactly correct; whenever interesting results come out in physics, it pays to be skeptical. This isn't because physicists want to protect the current paradigm, but a response born of long experience. Most interesting results have a good chance of being wrong. Nature always has the last say, and if an interesting result can be replicated, well, everyone wants to be part of a physics revolution. But if a result cannot be reproduced... it doesn't matter how beautiful the math or how much explanatory power a theory has, at the end of the day, we can only accept those explanations that match up with the behavior of Nature. Feynman said it best: "It doesn't matter how beautiful your theory is or how smart you are, if it doesn't agree with experiment, it is wrong."

Natural science has this wonderful property that an objective standard exists for judging the correctness of explanations. The behavior of Nature cannot be dismissed.

"It's a beautiful idea. It explains dark matter, it explains the Higgs boson, it explains some aspects of cosmology; but that doesn't mean it's right.

"It could be that this whole framework has some fundamental flaws and we have to start over again and figure out a new direction,"

This is how Science is supposed to work. Supersymmetry is a beautiful theory with lots of explanatory power. But if the predictions don't match with observational evidence, well, it is just pretty math.

Supersymmetry hasn't been completely ruled out, yet, but the versions that remain viable are more theoretically complex, and that is never good news. Nature usually sides with elegant ideas. Sadly, one of the elegant ideas to lose out will be String Theory, which requires Supersymmetry.

When someone says, "Science teaches such and such," he is using the word incorrectly. Science doesn't teach anything; experience teaches it. If they say to you, "Science has shown such and such," you might ask, "How does science show it? How did the scientists find out? How? What? Where?"

It should not be "science has shown" but "this experiment, this effect, has shown." And you have as much right as anyone else, upon hearing about the experiments--but be patient and listen to all the evidence--to judge whether a sensible conclusion has been arrived at.

Richard Feynman in a speech to the National Science Teachers Association in 1966.

As Farhad Manjoo notes in True Enough: Learning to Live in a Post-Fact Society, if we argue about what a fact means, we’re having a debate. If we argue about what the facts are, it’s agnotological Armageddon, where reality dies screaming.

New words! Always nice to have some new words at hand.

I disagree with the Manjoo quote above. It is not always obvious what the facts are, and reasonable people can and do disagree about the fact-ness of a large number of claims about Objective Reality. So "if we argue about what the facts are," it doesn't seem to me to be all that horrible. For example, is it a fact that an increase in the cosmic ray flux results in an increase in cloud formation? If having a discussion about such a claim means "we argue about what the facts are," well, bring on the agnotological Armageddon. All facts do not identify themselves by walking up and biting one's rear. A large part of Everyday Science is a debate about "what the facts are."

Once both sides agree that a claim is a fact, well, then "arguing about what the facts are" is silly. But getting to the point that we can have a debate about the meaning of facts? That's nontrivial.

When I asked Oxburgh if [Keith] Briffa [CRU academic] could reproduce his own results, he said in lots of cases he couldn't," Stringer told us. "That just isn't science. It's literature. If somebody can't reproduce their own results, and nobody else can, then what is that work doing in the scientific journals?

Real Science isn't a candidate for the Journal of Irreproducible Results.

At it's most fundamental level we can define science as two different activities: the collection of facts about the universe, and the attempt to create explanations of how those facts relate to each other. The scientific enterprise has been going on as long as humans have existed, but science as we now use the term dates from about the fifteenth century, which is where it finally got onto the right track, and also when it finally started developing procedures which work.

Time to repeat this classic explanation of three important words: conjecture, hypothesis, theory.