Science vs. "science" - and "engineering" too

I think if you see a cool post and wish to learn more, the wording needs to be careful to not sound like "citation needed" and more like "Ooooo, I really like this and wish to learn more!  Can you teach me, or maybe you have some favorite books or web sites?  I'm off to give google a workout on this topic!"

Paul Wheaton said:

"Ooooo, I really like this and wish to learn more!  Can you teach me, or maybe you have some favorite books or web sites?  I'm off to give google a workout on this topic!"

OK, I'll admit I probably come across a little blunter than that, but one of my angles is usually, "Do you have a source you trust for more info?" The very discussion taking place in this thread is one of the reasons I'm often looking for info that has hopefully been vetted by people more knowledgeable than myself.

I totally agree that if people are sharing their experiences, they should be supported and encouraged. I personally *really* appreciate it when people give enough detail that if I want to try to replicate what they've done, I have enough info to do so. That way permies can build a box full of real world "science" which is messy, situationally dependent, and resilient.

I think it is worth noting that when research is being conducted and theories are proposed, reproducible data from many sources is generally not supposed to be dismissed by the community, because of the following:

-It is generally our understanding of reality that is flawed and not reality that is flawed. So no matter how good "theories" are, they do not usually matter unless there is sufficient data backing it up.

-Observation is mostly what makes good proper science in its purest form. I appreciated what my physics professor said in response to a student's question about why something occurred: "We do not know why, and that's okay. We have plenty of empirical data that demonstrates a pattern we can reduce into a useable equation. All that really matters is we found something that we can do stuff with." It's this practicality that I love about good science and permaculture people!!!

-Many times all of the possible questions have not been asked, and many times the right question has not been asked. So, incorrect conclusions and assumptions are made.

And as a final note on my thoughts about this matter is that I blatantly disregard and dismiss many studies, because many laboratory experiments are removed and isolated from the greater whole, which forgoes the dynamic and complicated interactions that yield emergent properties. So, some of the "findings" in research are not applicable to the real-world, because they were not performed under real-world conditions that involve the greater whole of systems. Things usually behave differently when they are isolated than when they are grouped together. For example, I most certainly behave differently when I am isolated from others than when I am with other people.

Dave Burton wrote:"We do not know why, and that's okay. We have plenty of empirical data that demonstrates a pattern we can reduce into a usable equation. All that really matters is we found something that we can do stuff with."

I agree this is what it boils down to. And it is on this exact point that "conventional" and "alternative" medicine (for instance) come to loggerheads. Clinical trials may not be perfect -- and it happens sometimes that a drug gets FDA approval, only to be recalled as unsafe later -- but one advantage they have is that they provide the aforementioned empirical data that demonstrate a pattern we can use.

I hear the term "flawed science" thrown around in controversial areas. But my take on it is this:
Scientists are well aware of the dangers of flawed science, which is why research has certain practices structured into it intended to minimize the risk of flawed science. Peer review is essentially the last line of defense after everything else. Yes, flawed science does occasionally slip through (the persistent "8 glasses of water" advice comes to mind); but in my experience, most people use the term "flawed science" to mean "science that draws conclusions I don't like." If someone tells me that a given statement is "flawed science," I would reply by asking something along the lines of, can you tell me what the flaw in it is?

paul wheaton wrote:I think there is a big difference between "i came to my position thanks to these whitepapers" and "this whitepaper says you are wrong."

With one, we are sharing.  With the other, we are suggesting that somebody on permies is less than perfect (wrong).

Quite simple really.

Thank you for this, it's excellent! A light bulb moment for me! It's really that simple

People in scientific communities use many different versions of "this whitepaper says you are wrong." I've witnessed university professors getting as upset with each other as little children at playground and I have not been able to tell where the conversation went wrong. To me it sounded like normal scientific discussion that you see in scientific papers too: "Smith and Jones reported X. However, they had the following flaws in their methodology: [...] In this paper, we will present our results, which show Y."

The light bulb moment for me is that:

There is no need to mention what Smith and Jones got "wrong", AT ALL.  Just state my position, and give the examples and citates if I have them. I can mention the results of Smith and Jones, if necessary, but I don't have to comment on them.

As I was reading the "gardening by the moon" stuff, I see that I forgot to mention:  if somebody enjoys gardening by the moon, and shares their great results, then I vote that we allow that person and their friends to be happy.   Maybe the moon phase made a difference.   Maybe we won't have the scientific explanation for a hundred year.  Maybe there is already a scientific explanation.

If another person reads it and thinks that planting during a certain moon phase makes no difference, then they are perfectly welcome to do their gardening a different way.  Fair enough.   And if that person wants to go onto their blog or social media or whatever and say "bullshit" and "science therefore dumbfuck" they can.   Of course, I choose to not publish that.

I am sometimes the last person I would think qualified to discuss such things, but I think a lot of it comes down to social diplomacy. As Nina mentioned, you don't have to label what you see as mistakes in another's procedure as such, for example. You might mention specifically some perhaps unintended consequences of what they did that you think might have muddled things, but likely only in the event that you're asked why your procedure differs from previous work.

As to moon phase planting,  I agree. I don't know what the specific mechanism at work is, but I would suspect it has to do with the moon's gravitational influence. It might, for instance, take less energy for plants to draw water up from their root zones, or it may raise the water table slightly.

I would like to know,  but that's not really relevant to getting your point across without smashing someone's conversational or intellectual toes to do so. Winning such a conversation isn't winning if there's no discourse possible afterwards because everyone else took their toys and went home.

-CK

Going back to the original post, I have been following up on articles quoting "scientists ".  I realize that in the strict sense that is someone who studies science.   But when I think of the word I think of a Ph.D. who is trained in the area being researched and following basic research principles.  Yes, I know others can do research. I have published. Nevertheless, that is my image of a scientist. Not to bore anyone with all my findings, but two examples that I have read quoted as being scientists were a community college instructor with an MS and a Dr. commenting on COVID who turned out to be an Optometrist.

(source)

Some of my favorite scientists are open to the possibility that some scientists are fallible, and are subject to conscious/unconscious bias, to conflicts of interest, and to errors in protocols, understanding, and judgement.

Dr. Richard Horton, current editor of The Lancet wrote:“The case against science is straightforward: much of the scientific literature, perhaps half, may simply be untrue. Afflicted by studies with small sample sizes, tiny effects, invalid exploratory analyses, and flagrant conflicts of interest, together with an obsession for pursuing fashionable trends of dubious importance, science has taken a turn towards darkness.”

Dr. Marcia Angel, past editor of The New England Journal of Medicine wrote:“It is simply no longer possible to believe much of the clinical research that is published, or to rely on the judgment of trusted physicians or authoritative medical guidelines. I take no pleasure in this conclusion, which I reached slowly and reluctantly over my two decades as an editor of The New England Journal of Medicine.”

I have been studying the biochemistry of human nutrition for 4 decades. It's astonishing how much the science has changed in that time. I expect it to continue to change, just as dramatically as it has in the past.

I worked for 20 years as a research chemist. The horror stories that I could tell... Eventually, I left science behind, and turned to subsistence farming in a monastery as the thing furthest from that mentality. These days, I do plant breeding as a druid artist. I'm much happier that way.

https://dilbert.com/strip/2022-03-13

This is about twenty years ago... Cathy and I got in the car to head over to the home of some friends. It was maybe 20F outside -- well below freezing, but not really cold. Cathy had left a bottle of Diet Coke in the car and once we were settled, she picked it up, took the cap off, and it instantaneously froze solid. We both saw that it was liquid when she picked it up. It just happened that the man of the couple we were visiting was the chair of the mechanical engineering department at a local university and teaches thermodynamics every semester, so once we got over there and settled in a bit, we eagerly asked him about the phenomenon we'd just *observed*.  

It was so weird. He just told us that can't happen. He appealed to his credentials to assure us that what we saw happen, hadn't happened, because it couldn't happen. Even though we saw it. I'm friendly to the idea that someone can misunderstand their observation or make a mistake, but we both saw it happen. That would be a weird mistake. He even got a little snotty about it when we kept assuring him he was wrong. So after a while, I excused myself to their computer and poked around on the web to figure it out. I pretty quickly found out about Supercooling and left him the Wikipedia page to read. In this case, he was sort of gracious about admitting he was wrong, but a lot of people put in that situation feel backed into a corner, dig in their heels, and double down on their being wrong. That's one of the big reasons, I think that sharing your experiences works better than trying to "win" an argument.

The explanation for that is very simple and a long time ago such thigs were taught in high school chemistry and physics classes, actually I think we did that experiment in grade school.  Diet coke of course is mostly water. The scientific principles that apply are that liquid water will change to solid water (ice) if it gets cold enough, and it expands as it does so.  If the liquid water is sealed in a container and if that container is strong enough to withstand the increasing pressure without fracturing or stretching, the water will remain liquid even though its temperature is below freezing. When the pressure is released by removing the cap the water solidifies into ice, pretty much instantly. It's a bit distressing to me that a college professor of any discipline did not know such an elementary thing.

The opposite also applies. When water in a sealed container is heated above the boiling point, and if the container cannot handle the pressure, it will eventually explode. That's why you should give an overheated radiator time to cool it before opening it. I remember one time at a party we put a sealed beer can in the fire expecting it to rupture and squirt out beer, it didn't. Hours later after many other beer cans had been opened and their contents consumed we had completely forgotten about the full beer can laying there in coals nearly hot enough to melt empty ones.  Fortunately, we had mostly moved away from the fire, on the way to our tents when the stronger than expected beer can finally reached its limit. A little mushroom cloud of steam and ash reached twenty feet or more. Hot coals rained down, melting holes in tents and scorching little spots on cars.  The fire was completely extinguished. Injuries while fairly numerous were not serious. We looked the next day for the remains of the can but never found it.

Christopher Weeks wrote:double down

That is a tough habit to break!