Mike White

Politics matters…

… as depressing as that may be to hear. Some friends recently described their December trip to India, the first time they’ve visited in years. India’s economy is on fire, unleashing some tremendous pent-up economic demand. What was striking, my friends related, was how strongly India’s economic development is geared toward the future, towards not only catching up with wealthier, more developed nations, but also towards anticipating and meeting economic challenges that loom in the future. This is in stark contrast to the US, which seems, at best, focused on defending the status quo.

Ezra Klein of the Washington Post points us to a speech just given by John Kerry on this very topic. He asks:

Do [we] want a government too limited to have invented the Internet, now a vital part of our commerce and communications? A government too small to give America’s auto industry and all its workers a second chance to fight for their survival? Taxes too low to invest in the research that creates jobs and industries and fills the Treasury with the revenue that educates our children, cures disease, and defends our country?

Critically, Kerry points to our political ossification as our potential Achilles’ heel. While I’m disappointed that Kerry doesn’t offer specific solutions beyond “senators need to learn to work together,” this speech is a must-read for anyone interested in the role of science and tech in our societal health. (Follow the link to Klein’s blog for the whole thing.)

More below the fold to whet your appetite: Continue reading “Politics matters…”

Scientific Method in Decline?

Jonah Leher in The New Yorker about the slipperiness of the scientific method:

“The Truth Wears Off: Is There Something Wrong With The Scientific Method?”

The test of replicability, as it’s known, is the foundation of modern research. Replicability is how the community enforces itself. It’s a safeguard for the creep of subjectivity. Most of the time, scientists know what results they want, and that can influence the results they get. The premise of replicability is that the scientific community can correct for these flaws.

But now all sorts of well-established, multiply confirmed findings have started to look increasingly uncertain. It’s as if our facts were losing their truth: claims that have been enshrined in textbooks are suddenly unprovable. This phenomenon doesn’t yet have an official name, but it’s occurring across a wide range of fields, from psychology to ecology.

The piece, dressed up in a bit of mysticism, is essentially a description of some well known (but too rarely acknowledged) biases in science: Unconscious selection of favorable data; the tendency to publish only positive results, and the effects of randomness. Continue reading “Scientific Method in Decline?”

Sci-fi’s clumsy, mawkish Golden Age

Author Jonathan Lethem has an apt description of science fiction in the 40’s and 50’s (PDF):

At the time [Philip Dick] entered the field, science fiction was preoccupied with genuine scientific developments, space exploration boosterism, and a super- rational cognition. Where everyone else was writing about extrapolation and thinking hard about real possibilities, Dick was attuned to the unconscious, the irrational, the paranoiac, the impulsive. His stories had a wildly hallucinatory nature that he treated as if it were rational.

Now, the stories of the other science fiction writers were not as rational as they claim. They were quite in the grip of a fabulating imagination or wish fulfillment. They were writing fairy tales more than they acknowledge. But Dick engaged in the most direct and distinctive way with the undertow of terror and the irrational in contemporary technological society. That’s why science fiction was important to begin with, because it addressed the fact that we were living in a technocratic age when traditional arts, literary and otherwise, didn’t have much to say on this and didn’t find a lot of vocabulary for acknowledging the increasing rate of change and what it did to the experience of ordinary life. Science fiction in its clumsy, mawkish, embarrassing way was taking the bull by the horns.

This is along the lines of what I was getting at in my post on John Wyndham.
Continue reading “Sci-fi’s clumsy, mawkish Golden Age”

Krugman on the Santa Fe Institute

He captures my feelings nicely (except for that bit about being excited 20 years ago – 10 in my case):

Oh, and about ~~Roger~~ Doyne Farmer (sorry, Roger!) and Santa Fe and complexity and all that: I was one of the people who got all excited about the possibility of getting somewhere with very detailed agent-based models — but that was 20 years ago. And after all this time, it’s all still manifestos and promises of great things one of these days.