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Monday, January 17, 2011

Thought for the day

My wife reads The New Yorker. I would too if I "had the time." The only time I read the magazine is when she recommends something.
    For example, she most recently said I should read an article by Jonah Lehrer from the Annals of Science column for December 13: "The Truth Wears Off," about "the decline effect," a difficulty scientists often have trying to replicate experimental results. Here's an example of the effect:
In 1991, the Danish zoologist Anders Møller...made a remarkable discovery about sex, barn swallows, and symmetry...[F]emale barn swallows were far more likely to mate with male birds that had long, symmetrical feathers. This suggested that the picky females were using symmetry as a proxy for the quality of male genes. Møller’s paper, which was published in Nature, set off a frenzy of research....
    In the three years following, there were ten independent tests of the role of fluctuating asymmetry in sexual selection, and nine of them found a relationship between symmetry and male reproductive success...Before long, the theory was applied to humans....
    Then the theory started to fall apart. In 1994, there were fourteen [emphasis mine] published tests of symmetry and sexual selection, and only eight found a correlation. In 1995, there were eight papers on the subject, and only four got a positive result. By 1998, when there were twelve additional investigations of fluctuating asymmetry, only a third of them confirmed the theory. Worse still, even the studies that yielded some positive result showed a steadily declining effect size. Between 1992 and 1997, the average effect size shrank by eighty per cent.
    What people who have studied this problem have concluded is that researchers are like the rest of us. "We like proving ourselves right and hate being wrong."
The problem, of course, is that such dramatic findings are also the most likely to get published in prestigious journals, since the data are both statistically significant and entirely unexpected. Grants get written, follow-up studies are conducted....
    This suggests that the decline effect is actually a decline of illusion. While Karl Popper (1902-1994) imagined falsification occurring with a single, definitive experiment—Galileo (1564-1642) refuted Aristotelian mechanics in an afternoon—the process turns out to be much messier than that. Many scientific theories continue to be considered true even after failing numerous experimental tests....
The article concludes a couple of paragraphs later with today's rather profound thought:
Just because an idea is true doesn't mean it can be proved. And just because an idea can be proved doesn't mean it's true. When the experiments are done, we still have to choose what to believe.
To me, the thought is all the profounder for applying to ordinary, everyday ideas and beliefs as well as to science.

5 comments:

  1. How might Lehrer's profound thought apply to the "God idea"?

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  2. First, and obviously, people's idea of God is virtually unshakable, despite anyone else's challenge. I count myself among a very small group of people whose idea on the subject has changed. The fact that I challenged my own self is probably significant. My defenses would likely have gone up if I had been challenged by another person.
        Second, there's what we might call the William James Effect. An idea's usefulness derives as much from how it makes us feel as from its truth (if not moreso). And not just from how it makes us feel, but also from how it protects and sustains us. The belief, for example, that God will see me through my present difficulty might keep me going until I actually do get through it. On my view, of course, it's the self-deception that helped.
        Belief, for me, came down to a choice between (1) what I saw as almost certainly(*) the truth or (2) a comforting falsehood. For me, the choice was easy. I want steel-edge, not plushy.
    _______________
    * While not 100% provable, 95-99% of the evidence that I judge relevant to the God question seems to indicate that there isn't one.

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  3. Postscript to Neophyte: With respect to the virtual unshakability of one's idea of God, I'd like to share another reader's comment, apropos my December 3 post, "The long, distant cry":
        "Food for Thought
        "The deity we believe in later in life is by and large the one that sustained us for better or for worse in our formative years. Even when our beliefs don’t make sense or don’t feel right or don’t survive scientific rigor, we tend to blindly cling to them anyway. Only if we are able to step back, forget what we’ve been taught and what we think we know about our deity and then study the subject objectively will we be able to discover the truth...."

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  4. Note, Neophyte, when I quoted the other reader, I didn't include his final paragraph, which was:
        "Oops, I just noticed a misspelling. Please change 'deity' to 'diet' and reread."
     
    When I informed him of my abbreviated use of his little essay, he recommended that,
        "Since I was really writing about diet and substituted deity only to keep the interest of the intended reader, and since my brief essay seems to have broad appeal, perhaps the correct word to use is notions. Then the reader can insert the particular notion that is of interest to him."
     
    Thus:
        "[Whatever notion] we believe in later in life is by and large the one that sustained us for better or for worse in our formative years. Even when our beliefs don’t make sense or don’t feel right or don’t survive scientific rigor, we tend to blindly cling to them anyway. Only if we are able to step back, forget what we’ve been taught and what we think we know about [a notion] and then study the subject objectively will we be able to discover the truth...."

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  5. Apropos the essay on clinging to early notions, I copy here a comment from Motomynd on my post, "The long, distant cry":
     
        "The instinctive desire to survive, versus the urge to cringe desperately within a comfort zone against all logic, are at odds with each other. Yet they may rank right at the top of the list of traits most humans share with most animals.
        "If a barn catches fire, horses in a nearby open field will often run from their place of real safety back into their place of perceived sanctuary, and not notice until too late it is on fire. A deer spooked by dogs and hunters will run straight away at first, then it will circle back to its doom at the very point the chase began. Humans mock such ignorance, yet at many levels most of them devote their lives to it.
        "The 'deity' people believe in later in life, as your reader commented, may not make any more sense than a child hiding under a thin sheet because they fear monsters in the closet, but the belief at least allows them to cringe within the same comfort zone where they have spent (or wasted?) most of their lives. Of course, if you think about the 'Western' perspective on life, most people think it is better to save desperately for a short retirement restricted by age and infirmity than it is to live well when they are actually young and fit enough to enjoy life.
        "I unfortunately could not find the link to post here, but I recently read a piece by some vaunted thinker who was writing about animal versus human intelligence. He made the point that children are pushed so they can get into the best pre-school, then pushed harder to get into the best elementary school, then the best high or prep school, so they can get into the best college then the best doctorate program. All so they can afford the best nursing home.
        "'Badgers don’t do that,' the writer noted."
     
    As I said, the thought from Jonah Lehrer is profound.

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