I was thinking "scientific" can be used as an adjective to describe the method by which a particular action is approached, meaning "using rigorous application of studied principles". Perhaps you can elaborate on the differences you see which disqualify it or more specifics on the particular definition you are using to evaluate computer science's participation as a science in your mind.

Like "selfishness" the phrase "self esteem" is not well understood in common culture. You wrote about "the self esteem monster". Ritualized praise for inferior performance does not build self esteem. I know that you know that. Nathaniel Branden's works are as deep and broad as Ayn Rand's and just as important to the ascendancy of reality, reason, and self interest over mysticism, altruism, and collectivism.

Your hyperbole about being rewarded for asserting that 2+3=7 does raise another, deeper, issue. The problem requires an objective solution, and all we have is one-liners and platitudes. I refer to whether and to what extent, you reward a learner for having the right method, but getting the wrong answer.

Feynman was adamant: The right answer is all that matters; and there are many ways to find it. He would not reward a child for the wrong answer. On the other hand, earlier this month I checked by hand the physics, algebra, and arithmetic of a 19th century scientist (John Leonard Riddell). In this case, he dropped a minus sign. It happens... How would you grade a child (university student) who calculated an Earth-Moon Lagrange Point and dropped a minus sign?

On another Objectiv-ish board, a mother with an Austism-spectrum child wrote about one particular story problem. "A spaceship can carry two aliens. If six aliens want to travel to Earth, how many spaceships do they need?" The kid wanted to know if they all have to travel in pairs... Just sayin'... Me, I'd praise the kid just for asking.

Finally, to open another discussion entirely, why do we have this emphasis on arithmetic and reading, science and history? Yes, they are important. However, I refer to the fact that schools are praised for dropping music and art in order to keep with "core" studies. Those are not "core" studies if you are a musician or artist. Why not make everyone take four years of high school music and art? Just asking...

Consider Steve Ditko is. He used his GI Bill to study comic book art under Jerry Robinson at the Cartoonist and Illustrators School. Float that idea here in the Gulch today. Remove the famous references and just ask: "Should schools offer career classes in cartoon art?" Imagine the outrage at the liberal progressive post modernist destruction of education...

I'm dubious that computer science is actually a science -- at least most of what is covered in a "computer science" curriculum. There are some math-like things such as the ability to prove an algorithm will complete, but in the real world we are more concerned with how long it's going to take. If it completes after 20 years we don't care.

Mostly what we study is probably best called "software engineering".

First, let me suggest the Retraction Watch blog as interesting reading on failed research. You will find many papers there from the physical and life sciences. Deeper, and perhaps only the most egregious example, you might want to read about Jan Hendrik Schön (see "Schoen Scandal"). He worked in physics for Bell Labs and was published in both Nature and Science.

In my comment above to jlc, I pointed to the positivist influence in physical science. It is why they pursue so many data points, eternally chasing one more example to build an inductive proof. And when a paradigm shift invalidates their inductions, they just start all over again, working within the new paradigm.

Science is in trouble, as it always has been. The Scylla and Charybdis of rationalism and realism were never navigated successfully. Even so, science is not as hopeless as many here seem to want to believe. An objective foundation will prove itself the cause of a renaissance in science. And that is being established. It is no accident that the works of Ayn Rand are popular with so many professionals in STEM.

Clearly, I did not understand at all what you meant by what you said. "We don't see Galileo, Newton, Faraday and Maxwell having behaved like this, do we?" I must ask: Having behaved like what?"

Your sleight toward this unnamed collective on behalf of four exemplars does not explain much: "The kind of errors they made and understanding they missed were not like the kinds of rationalistic theorizing and promotions being criticized today."

Only two paths to error exist: rationalism and realism. Either you fail to find empirical evidence for your (logically consistent) assertions or you fail to provide a logically consistent explanation for your (empirically verified) perceptions. Truth comes from the integration of the rational and the real, i.e., the objective.

Ultimately, of course, they are integrated: no dichotomy exists, except in our erroneous understandings, our misunderstandings. It is the difference between an accused criminal being "really" guilty and the prosecution being able to prove it. Obviously, reality is real: the accused committed the act or not. What we know, however, may be severely limited. And, as we know all too well, often the prosecution "proves" an innocent person "guilty." So, too, in science, we all often go astray, though with far less consequence.

As I recall having read, long after their experiment discredited the concept of the "luminiferous aether" Edward Morley continued to search for it, attempting to refine his instruments to remove the "error" of their famous experiment. Do you condemn him for that? Was he a hopeless "rationalist"?

When you dismiss everyone except four names you know, you prevent the study and understanding of important work in the past in many fields far beyond physics. "
The work of those who did that are virtually unknown today because their methods failed. " I never heard of Robert Hooke until I took a class in civil engineering (1978). But Hooke anticipated Newton's pronouncements with his own work in the same fields. Newton's "shoulders of giants" remark was meant as a thinly-veiled insult to Hooke, who was short of stature, as many were then and there. When I researched Newton's life and work for an award-winning biography, I came upon Hooke several times. If not for the insistence - and generosity - of Sir Edmund Halley, Newton would have been an interesting footnote in the history of science, a London savant, master of the Mint, Parliamentary representative from Cambridge, dabbler in optics, and a religious fanatic who narrowly escaped the laws against heresy.

Objectively, Newton's work would have been great, only that we would not know about it; and he would have been relegated to "those who are virtually unknown because their methods failed."

Always the bulldog... So, tell us, by what standard does one establish how and when to publish a new idea, or to retract it, and then retract the retraction? We do not want hopelessly rationalist dead-ends like "string theory" but it is also a fallacy to say that mathematics is "rationalist." Mathematics is as rooted in reality as timing the fall of a sphere from a tower, and can be no other way. So, Einstein's reflections on the mathematics, led to explaining the precession of Mercury and the prediction of the measurements made by Edddington, et al. in 1919. So maybe we just have not found the right empirical test of string theory. ... and how do you know?

How do you properly integrate the predictive truth of mathematics with the empirical evidence of our experiential world?

The answer to that requires a full course in epistemology, a study which itself is still under construction. Harriman's Logical Leap was a new addition to that body of knowledge. But it, too, is only an indication, not a cookbook.

Yes, exactly, that was my point to jlc. Not alone here, she prides herself in having majored in "real" science, not social science. But "real" science is plagued with positivism and the eternal harvesting of one more data point in pursuit of inductive truth.

As I have pointed out in the sociology classes I took while majoring in criminology, and finishing a masters in social science, we actually did study the scientific method, at every level, at least at the beginning of the semester. (In the world standard textbook by Sir Anthony Giddens (architect of "New Labor"), it is discussed twice, once at the outset and again with more detail at the end of the book.) Moreover, in sociology, we study the origins and development of the science, sometimes to our own dismay.

Many in sociology accept physics as the gold standard of science. They point out that in Social Forces and other journals, you can find many papers published today that cite Max Weber. No one in Physics Letters A-G or Physics Today cites James Clerk Maxwell in support of an argument. Conversely, few sociology papers cite research less than five years old. Physics is always about citing the latest research in your paper.

But that speaks exactly to the point. We do not bury our story of development, the false paths, the overturned assumptions, the backpedaling and even the curious, if not hypocritical, yet highly rewarding research of Marxists who set up a consumer polling business. (Read Paul Lazarsfeld in Wikipedia.)

I had a 200-level class, required not only for sociology, but also for social workers in Research Methods. Every week, we chose and criticized two peer reviewed papers of our own selection. "Can undergraduates meaningfully criticize peer-reviewed papers?" I asked. "Start with the math," the professor said. You don't get that in physics.

Social sciences obviously are plagued by many problems, fundamental conceptual problems. They appear as basic ideological problems. The reason that I did not pursue a master's in criminology was that there was nothing more to learn: race, gender, and capitalist oppression pretty much defined the sources of all of our problems. By choosing an open program in "social science" I put together an approved study of transnational white collar crime by taking graduate classes in criminology, U.S. foreign policy, economics, and geography.

But by then - as opposed to when I was first a freshman in 1967 - my understanding of Objectivism was better integrated.

Your description of school lab experiments is all too typical of emphasizing more or less duplicating a result with equipment, procedures and results given in advance, with no explanation of the original problems and creative solutions required to solve them, or the general principles invoked to get to them and rule out other hypostheses, let alone the false starts and what ruled them out. Assessment of the results was at most in the form of taking an average of an arbitrary number of trials and mechanistically computing a standard deviation.

Likewise, lectures and texts also omit the process by which scientific principles were attained. The most we got was so-and-so discovered this, with or without a crude one-liner about the experiment. To understand what the principles mean and how they were found you have to go back on your own and find the best conceptual explanations and histories you can to try to trace what happened.

Objectivity does not mean 'middle of the road' or 'moderate'.

Bad personal behavior towards others, even when it occurred, is not synonymous with lack of objectivity in scientific work. Neither is making mistakes or inability to understand. Early scientists had very difficult problems to solve that seem easy today only by today's expanded knowledge and experimental equipment. The kind of errors they made and understanding they missed were not like the kinds of rationalistic theorizing and promotions being criticized today. The work of those who did that are virtually unknown today because their methods failed. The great scientists like Galileo, Newton, Faraday and Maxwell succeeded.

Science is self correcting to the extent that those doing it remain objective. There is a reason why so much of it spreads rationalizations, and it's not just because they are being paid to do that.

As a follow-up, John Ioannidis has a new interview with David Sackett: "Evidence-Based Medicine has been Hijacked." See here:
http://www.jclinepi.com/article/S0895...
(The link to the PDF is at the right of that.)

From your first link, I note this core:
Ivan Oransky, producer of the blog Retraction Watch, which tracks retractions printed in journals, tells Quartz that ultimately, the alarm will lead to increased rigor.
“There’s going to be some short-term and maybe mid-term pain as all of this shakes out, but that’s how you move forward,” he says. “It’s like therapy—if you never get angry in therapy, you’re probably not pushing hard enough. If you never find mistakes, or failures to reproduce in your field, you’re probably not asking the right questions.”

Your vehement rejection of his conclusions was matched by that of the university that fired him. Like you, I agree, that several cross-checks are available to date recovered remains. Whatever new discoveries are to be made, our broad understanding of paleontology is internally consistent.

That said, just because a scientist is wrong does not justify firing someone after his work as been lauded and his career endorsed every step along the way.

Moreover, as for those cross-checks, long ago, Durk Pearson told me to subscribe to Industrial Research magazine. Mostly about the nitty-gritty of industrial chemistry, they had a contrarian columnist whose wild claims caused people to cancel their subscriptions. One of his columns said that because carbon-14 is continually produced in the upper atmosphere by collisions of cosmic rays with carbon-12, we cannot be sure that our steady-state assumption is correct: maybe the past more or less was made, as, for instance, when the magnetic poles shifted.

On that note, I recently read In Suspect Terrain by John McPhee. Although plate tectonics had a hard birth, today it is used to explain everything. McPhee's subject matter expert was Anita Harris. Again, what was once heresy is now orthodoxy, resistant to challenge.

Also, you did not answer my question about your acceptance of the inductive fallacy of positivism in mainstream science.

Yes, i read that, too. My understand was colored by the widely enthusiastic reviews his works receive among Christian fundamentalists. When I got to his self-identification as an agnostic, I set all of that aside to come back to later and re-assess by reading more of his blog. I still intend to do that. But thanks for underscoring all those points.

Indeed, on many levels.

Excellent and indeed.

Mike; I take exception to your statement: "And Ratcliffe is a Christian, also". His descriptions of himself on his personal blog decry that description or classification:
“In the context of the Lesson of Voelvlei, what emerges is this: To get a coherent mental reconstruction of external reality, we must use logic. There is no other way to consistently produce a proper result. We are simply not equipped—dare I say intended?—to deal with the world irrationally as a survival mechanism. It would be counter-productive and unnatural. Whatever we think, the only audit we have is comparison with external reality. No matter how convinced I might be that by simply flapping my arms I could fly like a bird, if I were to test my faith by jumping off the Empire State, gravity would win. If I can predict gravity’s victory, that’s logic."
“So yes, I am a chattering African ape (a notion which does not offend me in the slightest), and I babble on unashamedly in ape-talk, thinking and developing opinions in the fashion of the monkey that I am. For every yin, there is a yang. Intelligence is a mastery of logic and an appreciation of the aesthetic. Hedonism is tempered by ethics. Rational is shadowed by the irrational, and we, creatures of the little blue planet, must cope with that. It’s how well we harmonise with the laws of nature that will determine in the broadest terms the location of that seminal line drawn in the sands of time that separates success from failure. We won’t win by fighting it.(emphasis added)
And:
"My father was agnostic, and I was brought up without religious prejudice. That really was an advantage, because when I went into science I had no philosophical or theological baggage to worry about. It was great. Eventually, my journey took me into the infinite universe of astronomy, and what I came across, what I saw with my own eyes, absolutely blew me away." (emphasis added)
And in his introduction to his latest book 'Steven Hawking Smoked My Socks' he writes:
"I do not question Islam because I am Christian; I do not critique Christianity because I am a Jew; I do not deny Mayan Doomsday ideas because they conflict with my belief in Nostradamus; I do not challenge Greenpeace because I am a member of the National Rifle Association; and I do not attack the 9/11 conspiracy theories because I am Republican. In every case, I assess those belief systems using the objective scientific method, and in every case they are found wanting, and I remain in all cases an agnostic." (emphasis added)

I've seen nothing in his writings or self description to verify your description.

The assertion that 'finding soft tissue' can lead to a conclusion that 'therefor dinosaurs are only a few thousand years old' is preposterous. We can approximate the passage of time (using several methods) in organic material. The guy has a screw loose to jump from that observation to that conclusion - that does not represent science.

My major was bio; minor in chem (and physics...by accident), so my tests were a lot more functional. Here is a tube full of bacteria: Identify genus and species. Or. Here is a tube full of some substance - What is it?. These had pleasantly real answers.

Jan

Hello Mike M.
I understand the flaw of the original study. I was referring to the several books published by Branden regarding ego and self-esteem. Upon reading those books, I would have determined the same as the recent study, not because that was Branden's intent, but if one understands his work in my opinion, it would also negate the original study.
Also, I used this thread to tout Branden because he is one of my heroes, warts and all, and I found his work to be very valuable, especially as it substantiates much of Rand's work.
,

See my comments to jlc about induction. You will not get far in any physical ("hard") science class claiming that you only need one well-integrated example. Harriman's book is highly important. I have no shortage of criticisms of his presentation (on my blog here: http://necessaryfacts.blogspot.com/20... - warning: it is long. I did, however, recommend the book highly, especially to other criminologists (earlier and much shorter on my blog: http://necessaryfacts.blogspot.com/20... because of the revolution he brings to the scientific method.

Having had 30 years of higher education, including time as a community college instructor, with me before I went back to complete a BS and MA, my professors graded me on my presentation, not my conclusions. I did see other "conservatives" there treated unfairly. One great student dropped out after failing a class for ideological reasons. And none of the professors who gave me all those As leading to my summa cum laude matriculation would write letters of recommendation for me for graduate school. (I got in anyway.) So, I understand your point of view.

But you can run into the same troubles in the physical sciences, also. Again, consider Hilton Ratcliffe. He can say those things now that he is old and tenured and independent. Follow stories about him and you will find that his Christian faith attracts others who use his doubts about mainstream science for other purposes. (And Ratcliffe is a Christian, also.) Here is a story about a Christian paleontologist who was fired because he had another explanations for his objectively supported empirical discovery. http://losangeles.cbslocal.com/2014/0...

We might dismiss Christian fundamentalists from Patrick Henry University, but the deeper question needs to be addressed, because here-and-now, the physical sciences have their own mantras, liturgies, and cant. It may have been only that you were able to learn the creole of physical science.

Here is one example of that: Did you gather lots of data? Did you build a curve from a robust array of measurements? That is the fallacy of induction. What if you had offered David Harriman's "objectivist" theory that a single example is enough, if it is well-integrated to the foundation of truth? "Oh, no, professor, I just needed one example..." Right...

You are right, ewv, that this is just a consequence of something that operates throughout common culture. Bad science and bad cinema are both resultants from the lack of objective philosophy. Our "targets" (if that is the right word) need to be children, kids in middle school and high school science classes. And it has to be in a focused way, centered on the problem.

What I mean is that I read Atlas Shrugged in high school and took the Basic Principles class in the 12th grade. I read Anthem first, then The Fountainhead and then FNI and VOS before AS. But that did not provide me with an insightful application of objective epistemology in physics classes. We got rewarded for completing the lab in 90 minutes or two hours, from set-up to write-up. We knew the intended outcome. We got as close to the curve as possible and identified some sources of error. That's it. We never were asked how we would test this claim or that from our textbooks. We just cooked from the recipe.

The one chemistry class I had was like that. The one geology class I had was like that. And geology, in particular, is a science in constant upheaval. We never were asked for alternative explanations of the physical evidence in front of us.

Changing that deeply reinforced cultural pattern is a serious challenge.

That article led to this http://amstat.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf...

Your rant above about the corrupt practices of research in the the UK and Australia is easy to read and easy to agree with. However, it buries reports such as the one I cite here, from the ASA. That paper is being widely cited, "going viral" as we say now. I found out about it from reading Retraction Watch. They conducted their own interview with the authors. When I googled for it now, one of the top hits was to the Science story about the ASA press release.

We can wring our hands over these revelations, but the fact is that this is the self-correcting nature of science.

Not from you, ewv, but from others here, I perceive the same "flavor" or "tenor" of anti-scientific, anti-intellectual deconstruction that comes from the post-modernists. When I was completing my masters in social science in 2010, I had a criminology theory class that presented post-modernism. We read nonsense about crime being a torus and a strange attractor (citing Jacques Lacan). The post modernists say that the practice of science is just a social fraud to perpetuate oppression. You can find that thinking here, also.

Again, myself, as interesting - if not amusing - as these revelations are in the moment, the more important fact is that they reveal the true nature of science as depending on evidence and being tested by falsification.

Well said.