the scientific method

Evidence-Based Technical Analysis: Applying the Scientific Method and Statistical Inference to Trading Signals
by David Aronson
Published 1 Nov 2006

The rules are evaluated for statistical significance using tests designed to cope with the problem of data-mining bias. Evidence-Based Technical Analysis: Applying the Scientific Method and Statistical Inference to Trading Signals by David R. Aronson Copyright © 2007 David R. Aronson PA RT I Methodological, Psychological, Philosophical, and Statistical Foundations Evidence-Based Technical Analysis: Applying the Scientific Method and Statistical Inference to Trading Signals by David R. Aronson Copyright © 2007 David R. Aronson CHAPTER 1 Objective Rules and Their Evaluation T his chapter introduces the notion of objective binary signaling rules and a methodology for their rigorous evaluation.

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Methods more rigorous than visual analysis and intuition are needed to find the exploitable order that may exist in financial market fluctuations. THE ANTIDOTE TO ILLUSORY KNOWLEDGE: THE SCIENTIFIC METHOD This chapter examined many ways we can be fooled into adopting erroneous knowledge. The best antidote ever invented for this problem is the scientific method, the subject of the next chapter. Evidence-Based Technical Analysis: Applying the Scientific Method and Statistical Inference to Trading Signals by David R. Aronson Copyright © 2007 David R. Aronson CHAPTER 3 The Scientific Method and Technical Analysis T A’s central problem is erroneous knowledge.

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Though some rules will be useful on a stand-alone basis, the complexity and randomness of financial markets make it likely that most TESTABLE NO Subjective YES RIGOROUS EVALUATION EBTA Objective NO Value Unknown EBTA YES Objective Valuable YES SIGNIFICANT FIGURE 3.16 Subsets of Technical Analysis. NO Objective No Value The Scientific Method and Technical Analysis 163 rules will add value when used in combination with other rules to form complex rules. Evidence-based technical analysis (EBTA) refers to subsets (3) and (4)—objective TA that has been back tested and subjected to statistical analysis. Given the preceding discussion, the categorization of TA is illustrated in Figure 3.16. The next three chapters discuss the application of statistical analysis to back-test results. Evidence-Based Technical Analysis: Applying the Scientific Method and Statistical Inference to Trading Signals by David R.

The Knowledge Machine: How Irrationality Created Modern Science
by Michael Strevens
Published 12 Oct 2020

You’ll find no more agreement among them than you do among working scientists. Indeed, the question of the scientific method is one of the most difficult, most contentious, most puzzling problems in modern thought. The consequence is an argument that has sometimes smoldered, sometimes blazed for well over a hundred years—the Great Method Debate. Subtle, powerful thinkers have attempted to describe the scientific method and come to quite opposing conclusions. More perplexing still, many who have inspected science closely have concluded that there is no such thing as the scientific method. To the question of what is new about modern science, of what changed in the Scientific Revolution, they answer “Nothing much”—or as the sociologist Steven Shapin has declared, “There was no such thing as the Scientific Revolution.”

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Science is so vital to the quality of our modern life that even if the scientific method turned out to be something rather boring and unremarkable—a superior kind of experimental technique, say—it would be imperative to find it and to frame it in a book. I would have no interest, however, in writing that book. What fascinates me is that science’s rules of engagement are so unexpected, so unintuitive, so odd. It is this peculiarity, I believe, that accounts for science’s late arrival. Even putting aside the fascinating question of science’s delay, the weirdness of the scientific method is an intellectual spectacle in itself.

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How is it that science, for all its protocols and procedures and statistical handbooks, remains so malleable, so subject in its deliverances to personal, social, financial interests? Do scientists knowingly and deliberately subvert or ignore the scientific method, saluting it in public but then in private doing whatever best suits their ends? Or is the scientific method itself a unicorn, a name for something that isn’t really there—leaving scientists to muddle through as best they can using the same rules of thumb that humans have relied on for millennia, subject to all the usual prejudices? Neither explanation, I think, is quite right.

Lost in Math: How Beauty Leads Physics Astray
by Sabine Hossenfelder
Published 11 Jun 2018

An unnatural number is called “fine-tuned.” • If we are starved of data and need a theory to decide where to look for new data, mistakes in theory development can lead to a dead end. • Some philosophers are proposing to weaken the scientific method so that scientists can select theories by criteria other than a theory’s ability to describe observation. • The questions of how to move on despite lack of data and whether to amend the scientific method are relevant beyond the foundations of physics. * Quick reminder: a 10 with a raised x is a 1 followed by x zeroes. So, for example, 102 = 100. † “Fine-tuning” has a slightly different meaning in cosmology.

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Bardeen’s achievements clearly weren’t based on the arguments from beauty and naturalness that this book is about. 41. Dawid R. 2013. String theory and the scientific method. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. 42. Kragh H. 2002. “The vortex atom: a Victorian theory of everything.” Centaurus 44:32–114; Kragh H. 2011. Higher speculations. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. 43. Ellis G, Silk J. 2014. “Scientific method: defend the integrity of physics.” Nature 516:321–323. 44. Dawid R. 2013. String theory and the scientific method. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, back flap. 45. Wagner CEM. 2005. “Lectures on supersymmetry (II).”

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I talk to friends and colleagues, see I’m not the only one confused, and set out to bring reason back to Earth. Chapter 2: What a Wonderful World In which I read a lot of books about dead people and find that everyone likes pretty ideas but that pretty ideas sometimes work badly. At a conference I begin to worry that physicists are about to discard the scientific method. Chapter 3: The State of the Union In which I sum up ten years of education in twenty pages and chat about the glory days of particle physics. Chapter 4: Cracks in the Foundations In which I meet with Nima Arkani-Hamed and do my best to accept that nature isn’t natural, everything we learn is awesome, and that nobody gives a fuck what I think.

Mastermind: How to Think Like Sherlock Holmes
by Maria Konnikova
Published 3 Jan 2013

Less, in that it is stripped of any accompanying emotion and conjecture—all elements that are deemed extraneous to clarity of thought—and made as objective as a nonscientific reality could ever be. The result: the crime as an object of strict scientific inquiry, to be approached by the principles of the scientific method. Its servant: the human mind. What Is the Scientific Method of Thought? When we think of the scientific method, we tend to think of an experimenter in his laboratory, probably holding a test tube and wearing a white coat, who follows a series of steps that runs something like this: make some observations about a phenomenon; create a hypothesis to explain those observations; design an experiment to test the hypothesis; run the experiment; see if the results match your expectations; rework your hypothesis if you must; lather, rinse, and repeat.

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Published in Great Britain in 2013 by Canongate Books Ltd, 14 High Street, Edinburgh EH1 1TE www.canongate.tv This digital edition first published in 2013 by Canongate Books Copyright © Maria Konnikova, 2013 The moral right of the author has been asserted Portions of this book appeared in a different form on the website Big Think (www.bigthink.com) and in Scientific American First published in the United States of America by Viking Penguin, a member of the Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10013, USA Photograph credits: Page here (bottom left): United States Government here (bottom right): Wikimichels (Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0) here (bottom left): Biophilia curiosus (Creative Commons Attribution 3.0) here (bottom right): Brandon Motz (Creative Commons Attribution 2.0) British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available on request from the British Library ISBN 978 0 85786 724 7 Export ISBN 978 0 85786 725 4 eISBN 978 0 85786 726 1 Typeset in Minion Pro Designed by Francesca Belanger To Geoff Choice of attention—to pay attention to this and ignore that—is to the inner life what choice of action is to the outer. In both cases man is responsible for his choice and must accept the consequences. As Ortega y Gasset said: “Tell me to what you pay attention, and I will tell you who you are.” —W. H. AUDEN CONTENTS Prelude PART ONE UNDERSTANDING (YOURSELF) CHAPTER ONE The Scientific Method of the Mind CHAPTER TWO The Brain Attic: What Is It and What’s in There? PART TWO FROM OBSERVATION TO IMAGINATION CHAPTER THREE Stocking the Brain Attic: The Power of Observation CHAPTER FOUR Exploring the Brain Attic: The Value of Creativity and Imagination PART THREE THE ART OF DEDUCTION CHAPTER FIVE Navigating the Brain Attic: Deduction from the Facts CHAPTER SIX Maintaining the Brain Attic: Education Never Stops PART FOUR THE SCIENCE AND ART OF SELF-KNOWLEDGE CHAPTER SEVEN The Dynamic Attic: Putting It All Together CHAPTER EIGHT We’re Only Human Postlude Acknowledgments Further Reading Index Prelude When I was little, my dad used to read us Sherlock Holmes stories before bed.

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So that you, too, can offhandedly mention that number of steps to dazzle a less-with-it companion. So, light that fire, curl up on that couch, and prepare once more to join Sherlock Holmes and Dr. John H. Watson on their adventures through the crime-filled streets of London—and into the deepest crevices of the human mind. PART ONE CHAPTER ONE The Scientific Method of the Mind Something sinister was happening to the farm animals of Great Wyrley. Sheep, cows, horses—one by one, they were falling dead in the middle of the night. The cause of death: a long, shallow cut to the stomach that caused a slow and painful bleeding. Farmers were outraged; the community, shocked.

The Ecotechnic Future: Envisioning a Post-Peak World
by John Michael Greer
Published 30 Sep 2009

As the age of cheap abundant energy comes to an end, and the reach of our sciences and technologies scales back to fit the realities of life in a world of hard ecological limits, the overblown ­fantasies 213 214 T he E cotechnic F u t u re that encouraged people to make science carry their ­cravings for transcendence are likely to give way. If the scientific method survives the social consequences of that loss of faith, it could still bring immense benefits to future societies. A useful comparison can be made between the scientific method and the greatest intellectual achievement of the civilization ancestral to ours, the logic devised by ancient Greek philosophers and systematized by Aristotle in the books of his Organon.5 By the time Roman civilization began to come apart, logic formed the core of the dominant intellectual movement of the ancient world: the schools of classical philosophy.

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When modern Western cultures first began to take shape, in turn, Aristotle’s logic was still on hand and its influence pervaded the new ethos of science; it’s hardly an accident that Francis Bacon titled his groundbreaking ­essay on scientific method Novum Organum, “the New Organon.” The scientific method could be handed to the future in the same way by some newer Organon. (For that matter, a readable translation of Aristotle’s own Organon would be well worth passing to future societies, which will probably find logic just as useful as the founders of our civilization did.) Science could also be passed on Science in a more immediately useful form, though, by teaching the scientific method to people who have good reason to practice it straight through the twilight years of the industrial age.

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Thomas Kuhn pointed out in his celebrated book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions that each branch of science rests on a set of paradigms that go unquestioned, and often unnoticed, except in those revolutionary periods when the gap between the paradigm and the evidence forces itself into view.9 What he did not discuss, and only a few of the sociologists of science have explored, is the extent to which those paradigms unfold from exactly that nonrational sphere of human life which science itself analyzes so ineffectively.10 The scientific method, after all, is simply a set of practical tools for studying nature. Many of the claims made in its name cannot be Science defended by scientific means. No controlled double-blind experiment proves, or could possibly prove, that truths revealed by science are more important than those uncovered by any other means, much less that the scientific method is the best hope for humanity’s future. The fact that many scientists have made these claims does not make them scientific.

Why People Believe Weird Things: Pseudoscience, Superstition, and Other Confusions of Our Time
by Michael Shermer
Published 1 Jan 1997

In other words, science is a specific way of analyzing information with the goal of testing claims. Defining the scientific method is not so simple, as philosopher of science and Nobel laureate Sir Peter Medawar observed: "Ask a scientist what he conceives the scientific method to be and he will adopt an expression that is at once solemn and shifty-eyed: solemn, because he feels he ought to declare an opinion; shifty-eyed, because he is wondering how to conceal the fact that he has no opinion to declare" (1969, p. 11). A sizable literature exists on the scientific method, but there is little consensus among authors. This does not mean that scientists do not know what they are doing.

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It is a process for systematically collecting and recording data about the physical world, then categorizing and studying the collected data in an effort to infer the principles of nature that best explain the observed phenomena." Next, the scientific method is discussed, beginning with the collection of "facts," the data of the world. "The grist for the mill of scientific inquiry is an ever increasing body of observations that give information about underlying 'facts.' Facts are the properties of natural phenomena. The scientific method involves the rigorous, methodical testing of principles that might present a naturalistic explanation for those facts" (p. 23). Based on well-established facts, testable hypotheses are formed.

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So in the spirit of healthy acceptance of criticism, it is worth examining a few of these critiques. Perhaps the most worthwhile criticism in terms of self-review came from the Toronto Globe and Mail (June 28, 1997). The reviewer brought up an important problem for all skeptics and scientists to ponder. After first observing that "rational reflection does not end with the tenets of the scientific method, themselves subject to various forms of weird belief now and then," he concludes: "Skepticism of the aggressively debunking sort sometimes has a tendency to become a cult of its own, a kind of fascistic scientism, even when it is undertaken for the best of rational motives." Excusing the exaggerated rhetoric (I have never encountered a fellow skeptic who would qualify as a cultist or a fascist), he does have a point that there are limitations to science (which I do not deny) and that occasionally skepticism has its witchhunts.

Pathfinders: The Golden Age of Arabic Science
by Jim Al-Khalili
Published 28 Sep 2010

The question is where we draw the line in the work of Jābir ibn Hayyān. This is where we appeal to the quite clear definition of the scientific method: it is the investigation of phenomena, acquiring of new knowledge, and correcting and integrating previous knowledge, based on the gathering of data through observation and measurement. Wherever it is being practised, that is where real science is being done. So was Jābir doing real science? Not quite. Some of the ingredients of the scientific method were not yet in place. But I am more than happy to refer to him as a scientist. What is more, he was the very first of the great scientists of the golden age, even though he did not live to see the creation of al-Ma’mūn’s great academy in Baghdad, the place where we see the golden age truly beginning.

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How important were the contributions of Persian culture, Greek philosophy and Indian mathematics? How and why did scientific scholarship flourish under the patronage of certain rulers? And, possibly most interestingly, why and when did this golden era come to an end? As a practising scientist and a humanist, I believe that what is referred to as the ‘scientific method’, and the knowledge that humanity has gained from rational science, gives us far more than just ‘one way of viewing the world’. Progress, through reason and rationality, is by definition a good thing; knowledge and enlightenment are always better than ignorance. Growing up in Iraq, I learnt at school about such great thinkers as Ibn Sīna (Avicenna), al-Kindi and Ibn al-Haytham (Alhazen), not as remote figures in history but as my intellectual ancestors.

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Similar theories appeared around the same time in China, where it was believed that there were five fundamental elements (earth, water, fire, metal and wood) and in India (earth, water, fire, air and space). The question is whether this combination of the philosophy of matter on the one hand and applied chemical processes on the other constitutes what we might define as real chemistry. I would say not; chemistry is a science and as such must satisfy the rigorous requirements of the scientific method. It is more appropriate to call these ancient practices and notions, going back many thousands of years, ‘protochemistry’;3 the pursuit of alchemy can be regarded as a subfield of this protochemistry. But what of this Muslim scholar to whom I claim we owe so much? Geber the Alchemist is without doubt one of the most fascinating and enigmatic figures in the history of Arabic science.

The World According to Physics
by Jim Al-Khalili
Published 10 Mar 2020

I have some answers to my questions now; others I am still searching for. Some people turn to religion or some other ideology or belief system to find answers to life’s mysteries. But for me, there is no substitute for the careful hypothesising, testing, and deducing of facts about the world that are the hallmark of the scientific method. The understanding we have gained through science—and physics in particular—of how the world is made up and how it works is, in my view, not just one of many equally valid ways of reaching the ‘truth’ about reality. It is the only reliable way we have. No doubt many people never fell in love with physics, as I did.

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We can also now say with confidence that what mysteries remain need not be attributed to the supernatural. They are phenomena we have yet to understand—and which we hopefully will understand one day through reason, rational enquiry, and, yes … physics. Contrary to what some people might argue, the scientific method is not just another way of looking at the world, nor is it just another cultural ideology or belief system. It is the way we learn about nature through trial and error, through experimentation and observation, through being prepared to replace ideas that turn out to be wrong or incomplete with better ones, and through seeing patterns in nature and beauty in the mathematical equations that describe these patterns.

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By observing bodies in orbit around Jupiter, he showed that not all celestial bodies revolve around us. The Earth isn’t at the centre of the cosmos, but is just another planet, like Jupiter, Venus, and Mars, orbiting the Sun. With that discovery, Galileo ushered in modern astronomy. But it wasn’t just a revolution in astronomy that Galileo would bring about. He also helped put the scientific method itself on a firmer foundation. Building on the work of the medieval Arab physicist Ibn al-Haytham, Galileo ‘mathematised’ physics itself. In developing mathematical relationships that describe, and indeed predict, the motions of bodies, he showed beyond doubt that, as he put it, the book of nature ‘is written in mathematical language.’3 At the opposite end of the scale to Galileo’s astronomical observations, a very different new world was opened up by Robert Hooke and Antonie van Leeuwenhoek with the microscope.

The end of history and the last man
by Francis Fukuyama
Published 28 Feb 2006

But a qualitative change occurred in the relationship of scientific knowledge to the historical process with the rise of modern natural science, that is, from the discovery of the scientific method by men like Descartes, Bacon, and Spinoza in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The possibility of mastering nature opened up by modern natural science was not a universal feature of all societies, but had to be invented at a certain point in history by certain Europeans. However, once having been invented, the scientific method became a universal possession of rational man, potentially accessible to everyone regardless of differences in culture or nationality. Discovery of the scientific method created a fundamental, non-cyclical division of historical time into periods before and after.

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If, however, our assumptions about the interrelationships between modern natural science and modern social organization are correct, then such “mixed” outcomes would not be viable for long: for without the destruction or rejection of the scientific method itself, modern natural science would eventually reproduce itself and force the recreation of many aspects of the modern, rational social world as well. So let us consider the question: Is it possible for mankind as a whole to reverse the directionality of history through the rejection or loss of the scientific method? This problem can be broken down into two parts: first, can modern natural science be deliberately rejected by existing societies; and second, can a global cataclysm result in the involuntary loss of modern natural science?

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There is no democracy without democrats, that is, without a specifically Democratic Man that desires and shapes democracy even as he is shaped by it. A Universal History based on the progressive unfolding of modern natural science can, moreover, make sense only of the past four hundred or so years of human history, dating from the discovery of the scientific method in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Yet neither the scientific method nor the liberation of human desire that drove subsequent efforts to conquer nature and bend it to human purposes sprang ex nihilo from the pens of Descartes or Bacon. A fuller Universal History, even one that based itself in large measure on modern natural science, would have to understand the pre-modern origins of science, and of the desire that lay behind the desire of Economic Man.

A Dominant Character
by Samanth Subramanian
Published 27 Apr 2020

Haldane Samanth Subramanian For Padma, the most patient recipient imaginable of a writer’s daily bulletins of torture Suffer. —The family motto of the Haldane clan Pathei-mathos (“We suffer into knowledge”). —Aeschylus, Agamemnon Contents Chapter 1: The Scientific Method Chapter 2: The Deep End Chapter 3: Synthesis Chapter 4: Red Haldane Chapter 5: The War at Home Chapter 6: India Chapter 7: Ten Thousand Years Acknowledgments Notes Selected Bibliography Illustration Credits Index A Dominant Character 1. The Scientific Method 1. THE LETTER ARRIVED UNSOLICITED, like thousands of others. A retired chemist in Surrey had taken up plant genetics and set himself an immodest task: to improve the yield of his plants by a process that could then be applied by any farmer anywhere in the world.

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The chemist’s results seemed striking, but Haldane needed more: fuller details of the techniques he used and the results he obtained. “You will realise that an account is useless unless it is so worded that others can repeat the work.” This forms the kernel of the scientific method: that researchers elsewhere be able to replicate experiments and derive identical results. Science is held up by principles, and these principles have to be inherent in every place, not just in an amateur horticulturist’s patch of Surrey earth. Haldane never shrank from exalting the scientific method, even in casual correspondence. “Science advances by successive improvements in former theories,” he wrote once to a man who sent him a hollow hypothesis about how thoroughbred racehorses inherited their coat colors.

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The papers modeled the processes of natural selection and estimated rates at which gene mutations develop and spread through a population. He was gaining the measure of life itself. The stringency of statistics delighted Haldane. Everyone should know more mathematics, he always thought. Numbers were so satisfyingly precise, equations so universal. How well they ministered to the scientific method! Had Haldane done just this and little else, he would have been an important scientist—not as revolutionary as Einstein, perhaps, and not associated for perpetuity like Watson and Crick with a single, shining discovery, but certainly among the few who altered their field beyond recognition, pushing it forward paper by paper.

What Technology Wants
by Kevin Kelly
Published 14 Jul 2010

Solutions could be archived and transmitted on durable paper. This vastly accelerated humanity’s evolution. The third transition is science, or rather, the structure of the scientific method. This is the invention that enables greater invention. Instead of depending on random hit or miss, or trial and error, the scientific method methodically explores the cosmos and systematically delivers novel ideas. It has accelerated discovery a thousandfold, if not a millionfold. The evolution of the scientific method is responsible for the exponential rise in progress we now enjoy. Without a doubt science has uncovered possibilities—and new ways of finding them—that neither biological nor cultural evolution could have invented alone.

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Libraries, catalogs, cross-referencing, dictionaries, concordances, and the publishing of minute observations all blossomed, producing a new level of informational ubiquity—to the extent that today we don’t even notice that printing covers our visual landscape. The scientific method followed printing as a more refined way to deal with the exploding amount of information humans were generating. Via peer-reviewed correspondence and, later, journals, science offered a method of extracting reliable information, testing it, and then linking it to a growing body of other tested, interlinked facts. This newly ordered information—what we call science—could then be used to restructure the organization of matter. It birthed new materials, new processes for making stuff, new tools, and new perspectives. When the scientific method was applied to craft, we invented mass production of interchangeable parts, the assembly line, efficiency, and specialization.

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By the 18th century, science had launched the Industrial Revolution, and progress was noticeable in the growing spread of cities, increasing longevity and literacy, and the acceleration of future discoveries. But there is a puzzle. The necessary ingredients of the scientific method are conceptual and fairly low tech: a way to record, catalog, and communicate written evidence and the time to experiment. Why didn’t the Greeks invent it? Or the Egyptians? A time traveler from today could journey back to that era and set up the scientific method in ancient Alexandria or Athens without much trouble. But would it catch on? Maybe not. Science is costly for an individual. Sharing results is of marginal benefit if you are chiefly seeking a better tool for today.

Safe Haven: Investing for Financial Storms
by Mark Spitznagel
Published 9 Aug 2021

It seemed too much of a compromise. He finds ways to furtively inflict his musical tastes on his coworkers (Mahler, mainly, with performances by von Karajan) and in the early days, as in a ritual, the conversations used to start and end with Karl Popper and central (Black Swan) asymmetries in the scientific method. There is this insistence that we are not in the business of trading, but partaking of an intellectual enterprise, that is, both applying proper inference and probability theory to the business world and, without any modesty, improving these fields according to feedback from markets. And there is all this German terminology, such as Gedankenexperiment.

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After all, according to the American physicist Richard Feynman, “Physics is like sex: sure, it may give some practical results, but that's not why we do it.” Well, practical results are precisely why we do what we do in investing and risk mitigation: to maximize the growth rate of wealth by lowering risk. And the best practices of the scientific method can actually help us with this. MODUS TOLLENS Aristotle is generally considered to be the earliest and foremost developer of the idea of deductive reasoning, or sullogismos. Deduction is “top‐down” logic, whereby general rules or premises are applied to particular cases or conclusions.

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But neither it, nor anything else for that matter, can ever be used to verify a hypothesis as true. When we pair our proposed hypothesis with a minor premise that is an observable fact, we have a well‐constructed test of that hypothesis. Modus tollens, then, is the logical principle of the empirical sciences, and the scientific method itself; it allows us to clarify our ideas and move them away from mere metaphysics. Scientific rigor demands that we be able to pose, experimentally test, and ultimately falsify theories or conjectures in this way. When, like sleuths, we disqualify false theories whenever we can, then step by step we approach the truth.

How to Invent Everything: A Survival Guide for the Stranded Time Traveler
by Ryan North
Published 17 Sep 2018

But it’s important to remember even science has its limitations and is not an oracle of truth. In fact, science is merely: provisional, contingent, and our best effort so far. Here is the bad news: the scientific method can produce knowledge that is wrong. Here is the good news: the scientific method is still our best technology for uncovering, verifying, and refining correct knowledge, because what the scientific method allows us to do is make wrong knowledge gradually more correct. Usually, this refinement results in progressively more accurate theories—classical physics leading to relativity, leading to quantum physics, which leads to metaquantum ultraphysics5—but it does sometimes result in entire theories being thrown out.

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This theory also predicted that a match in a sealed glass jar will eventually stop burning, but for different reasons: the oxygen in the jar is consumed and so the fire goes out, because oxygen fuels the chemical reaction that is fire. This is the more accurate theory of combustion that we still operate under today, but we could still be wrong. Or, more likely, we could still be more correct. Here’s how you produce knowledge using the scientific method. Figure 8: The scientific method, here rendered as a cool atomic-looking thing. An example: maybe you notice (as per step 1) that your corn didn’t grow well this year. For (2), you might ask, “Hey, what the heck, everyone, how come my corn didn’t grow well this year?” You might suspect the drought affected the corn’s growth (3), and so (4) decide to grow corn under controlled conditions, giving each plant different amounts of water but equal amounts of everything else you can think of (sunlight, fertilizer, etc.).

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That’s why scientists talk about the theory of gravity (even though gravity itself clearly exists and can cause you to fall down the stairs), theories of climate change (even though it’s obvious our environment is not the same one our parents enjoyed, or that you’re enjoying right now), or the theory of time travel (even though it’s a fact that you’re clearly trapped in the past for reasons that cannot have any legal liability assigned). Note that the scientific method requires you to keep an open mind and be willing—at any time—to discard a theory that no longer fits the facts. This is not an easy thing to do, and many scientists have failed at it. Einstein* himself hated how his own theory of relativity argued against his preferred idea of a fixed and stable universe, and for years tried in vain to find some solution that reconciled them both. But if you succeed at following the scientific method, you will be rewarded, because you will have produced knowledge that is reproducible: that anyone can check by doing the same experiment themselves.

The Fourth Age: Smart Robots, Conscious Computers, and the Future of Humanity
by Byron Reese
Published 23 Apr 2018

In 1620, Sir Francis Bacon published a book called Novum Organum (The New Method), which is regarded as the beginning of what we now call the scientific method. Bacon emphasized the firsthand study of nature along with careful observations and the recording of data. From that data, and only from that data, should one draw conclusions. While this isn’t exactly how we think of the scientific method today, Bacon was important because he proposed a way to systematize the acquisition of knowledge through observation. That’s a big idea, a world-changing idea. For up until this time, progress came in fits and starts, as the wheel was both literally and metaphorically reinvented again and again. With the scientific method, the data and conclusions that one person collects can later be used by others to advance knowledge further.

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Today’s scientific method is a set of agreed-upon techniques for acquiring knowledge, and then distributing that knowledge in such a way that others can corroborate and build on top of it. It applies only to objects or phenomena of which measurement can be made. Objective measurement is essential because it allows others to reproduce a researcher’s findings, or, as is often the case, to be unable to reproduce them. The scientific method required affordable printing to work properly, which is probably why it wasn’t developed earlier in human history, and why science advanced ever faster as the cost of printing fell. The ancients had many extraordinary technological breakthroughs, but since they lacked the technology and a process for publishing and disseminating information about them, they were quickly forgotten.

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In 1687, Newton, on whose shoulders we still stand, published Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica, which describes the laws of motion and gravitation. In just a few formulas, Newton showed that even the planets themselves obey straightforward, mechanistic laws. It would be an oversimplification to give all the credit for our rapid technological advance to the scientific method. That was simply the last piece of a complex puzzle. As I’ve already pointed out, we had to have, among other things, imagination, a sense of time, and writing. In addition, we needed much more; to that list we might well add a low-cost way to distribute knowledge, widespread literacy, the rule of law, nonconfiscatory taxation, individual liberty, and a culture that promoted risk taking.

This Will Make You Smarter: 150 New Scientific Concepts to Improve Your Thinking
by John Brockman
Published 14 Feb 2012

The people in this book lead some of the hottest fields; in these pages they are just giving you little wisps of what they are working on. But I hope you’ll be struck not only by how freewheeling they are willing to be, but also by the undertone of modesty. Several of the essays in this book emphasize that we see the world in deeply imperfect ways, and that our knowledge is partial. They have respect for the scientific method and the group enterprise precisely because the stock of our own individual reason is small. Amid all the charms to follow, that mixture of humility and daring is the most unusual and important. Preface: The Edge Question JOHN BROCKMAN Publisher and editor, Edge In 1981 I founded the Reality Club.

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The scientific concept that most people would do well to understand and exploit is the one that almost defines science itself: the controlled experiment. When they are required to make a decision, the instinctive response of most nonscientists is to introspect, or perhaps call a meeting. The scientific method dictates that wherever possible we should instead conduct a suitable controlled experiment. The superiority of the latter approach is demonstrated not only by the fact that science has uncovered so much about the world but also, and even more powerfully, by the fact that such a lot of it—the Copernican Principle, evolution by natural selection, general relativity, quantum mechanics—is so mind-bendingly counterintuitive.

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Due to the problems of costly distribution, most negative results have not been shared, thus limiting their potential to speed learning for others. But increasingly published negative results (which include experiments that succeed in showing no effects) are becoming another essential tool in the scientific method. Wrapped up in the idea of embracing failure is the related notion of breaking things to make them better—particularly complex things. Often the only way to improve a complex system is to probe its limits by forcing it to fail in various ways. Software, among the most complex things we make, is usually tested for quality by employing engineers to systematically find ways to crash it.

Adaptive Markets: Financial Evolution at the Speed of Thought
by Andrew W. Lo
Published 3 Apr 2017

This solution has two parts: first, we must find a superior narrative; and second, we need to adopt it. Fortunately, we have an excellent technique to find superior narratives at hand: the scientific method. However, there’s no single cut-and-dried recipe for the scientific method. A field biologist would find the methods of the macroeconomist bizarre, and vice versa—in fact, these differences drive much of the infighting between the sciences, and through the hallowed halls of academia. Nevertheless, for most forms of scientific inquiry, we can break the scientific method down into four phases. First, we gather the empirical evidence. (This is especially difficult in economics, which historically has had either too little data, as in macroeconomics, or overwhelming oceans of data, as in financial economics.)

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Unlike other ways of determining good narratives, for example, in a court of law, it’s very important in the scientific method that the hypothesis can be visibly proved wrong. And precisely because of the competitive nature of academic science, many people will try to do just that. If the hypothesis holds up under this onslaught, repeatedly verified in study after study, and continues to make good predictions, we can move the hypothesis from the status of a candidate narrative to that of a theory, which is as close as the scientific method will allow us to get to a fact, otherwise known as a good narrative. Once we come up with a good narrative, it still takes a certain degree of courage to adopt it.

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As a result, economists have to rely on complicated statistical tests, looking for clear theoretical signals amidst the noise of reality, and we’re often frustrated in our attempts. But sometimes, we get lucky and come across “natural experiments” in the raw data, where just one factor has changed in exactly the spot we happen to be interested in. Then we can use the scientific method directly, by comparing the baseline situation, the control group, versus the changed situation, the experimental group. Fama and company found such a natural experiment in the stock market, and it’s a particularly elegant one. FFJR looked at the impact of a stock split on the price of the stock.

The Data Revolution: Big Data, Open Data, Data Infrastructures and Their Consequences
by Rob Kitchin
Published 25 Aug 2014

In some academic domains there is little evidence of paradigms operating, notably in many social sciences, such as sociology and human geography where there is a diverse set of philosophical approaches employed (e.g., positivism, phenomenology, structuralism, poststructuralism, etc.), with these various theoretical camps providing competing views on how best to make sense of the world. In other domains, such as the sciences, there is more unity around a scientific method, underpinned by hypothesis testing to verify or falsify theories. That is not to say, however, that how the scientific method is conceived and deployed does not periodically shift, or that there are few competing theories with respect to explaining particular phenomena (theories about phenomena can differ while sharing the same wider approach to scientific endeavour). Jim Gray, for example (as detailed in Hey et al. 2009), charts the evolution of science through four paradigms, the fourth of which he argues is in its infancy but is the result of the unfolding data revolution (see Table 8.1).

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Such data-ist claims underpin much of the hype about big data within the business community, and they are generally expressed through an empiricist framing – that with enough volume, data can speak for themselves. Such empiricism is best embodied in the claims of Chris Anderson (2008), former editor-in-chief at Wired magazine, whose rallying call that big data signal ‘the end of theory’ struck a chord with many commentators. In a provocative piece, Anderson argues that ‘the data deluge makes the scientific method obsolete’; that the patterns and relationships contained within big data inherently produce meaningful and insightful knowledge about social, political and economic processes and complex phenomena. He argues: There is now a better way. Petabytes allow us to say: ‘Correlation is enough.’ We can stop looking for models.

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Likewise, Lazer et al. (2009: 10–11) call for collaboration between ‘computationally literate social scientists and socially literate computer scientists’ (2009: 10–11), and with respect to business, Minelli et al. (2013) contend that data science teams should be coupled with business process experts to leverage appropriate insights (see also Table 9.1). Data-driven science Rather than being rooted in empiricism, data-driven science seeks to hold to the tenets of the scientific method, but is more open to using a hybrid combination of abductive, inductive and deductive approaches to advance the understanding of a phenomenon. It differs from the traditional, experimental deductive design in that it seeks to generate hypotheses and insights ‘born from the data’ rather than ‘born from the theory’ (Kelling et al. 2009: 613).

May Contain Lies: How Stories, Statistics, and Studies Exploit Our Biases—And What We Can Do About It
by Alex Edmans
Published 13 May 2024

To see why, let’s look at one of the most fundamental techniques in statistics. It’s called Bayesian inference, and a simplified version is below. Does Information support Hypothesis? Depends on Is Information consistent with Hypothesis? vs Is Information consistent with Alternative Hypotheses? (plus another term) The scientific method involves starting with a hypothesis about the world – diet cures cancer, or a suspect is guilty – which we then test by gathering information. A correctly designed test enquires: Does the information support the hypothesis? In other words, does the information increase our belief that the hypothesis is true?

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Those actions could be causing the turnaround, not the guru’s five-point plan. In all these cases, it’s not hard to think of rival theories with a clear head. Yet we don’t always have a clear head – we accept our preferred explanation without pausing to consider whether something else could be behind the data. As Francis Bacon, one of the pioneers of the scientific method, noted: ‘The human understanding when it has once adopted an opinion . . . draws all things else to support and agree with it.’ Everything we’ve seen so far is one form of confirmation bias, which we’ll call naïve acceptance – believing claims we like, without checking the facts or asking if there are alternative explanations.

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.** Even this highly improbable sequence doesn’t prove that the wheel was biased – it could have been fair but just went on a very lucky streak. Or a very unlucky one, depending on where you placed your bets. The whole playbook – forming a hypothesis, gathering representative test and control samples, testing for statistical significance and only then reaching a conclusion – is the scientific method. But Isaacson used a quite different approach. Rather than starting with a hypothesis, he jumped to a conclusion. He identified a number of factors that he claimed were behind Jobs’s success, such as his adoption by the right parents, upbringing and focus. Chapter 1 is entitled ‘Childhood: abandoned and chosen’ and its first section is ‘The adoption’, so we’ll discuss the first factor, but the same concerns apply to the others.

In Our Own Image: Savior or Destroyer? The History and Future of Artificial Intelligence
by George Zarkadakis
Published 7 Mar 2016

The laws of nature With Galileo Galilei (1564–1642) in Italy and Francis Bacon (1561–1626) in England, Europe was ushered into the glorious era of scientific discovery by the late sixteenth century. Empiricism and the scientific method took over from mysticism. It was a historical watershed without precedence. Our species has been making observations of the natural world since prehistoric times. Effects were linked to causes. Causality in nature was evident, but not understood. Well into the early seventeenth century, natural phenomena were still attributed by many thinking people to supernatural causes. Divine providence was assumed to pull invisible strings behind every manifestation of nature. The scientific method provided an alternative, revolutionary way of understanding causality in nature.

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Australian philosopher David Chalmers has defined the hard problem of consciousness by distinguishing it from ‘easier’ problems that could be explained by examining brain functions: for example, memory, attention or language. These ‘easier’ problems are by no means easy. The HBP project is going to keep itself very busy trying to solve them by applying the scientific method. But Chalmers made the point that there is a certain problem that cannot be explained by a purely materialistic view of the brain. This is the problem of subjective experience, sometimes called qualia. Take, for instance, the ‘redness’ of red wine. The colour we call ‘red’ is an electromagnetic wave radiation with a wavelength between 620 and 740 nanometres.

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At the root of the hard problem that Chalmers, Nagel and others describe lies the Cartesian concept of subjectivity and its clash with the objective methods of reductionist science. Ever since Descartes separated the world of knowledge into two magisteria11 – science and religion – science evolved and triumphed by following a specific methodology called the scientific method, which we touched upon earlier. This method uses experiment as its main tool in posing questions and discovering truths about the material world. Experiments are objective, at least in principle. As we have seen, they are repeatable and can be verified by many independent experimenters. Their outcomes are therefore independent of their observers.12 To achieve this, experiments break down complex natural phenomena into smaller parts, on the assumption that if one is able to understand the parts one can also understand the whole, a process called reductionism.

The Blockchain Alternative: Rethinking Macroeconomic Policy and Economic Theory
by Kariappa Bheemaiah
Published 26 Feb 2017

As new ideas take hold, older beliefs are upgraded or discarded. Economics maybe an old discipline of study, but science shows us that we can still teach an old dog new tricks. Economic Entropy versus Economic Equilibrium Technology is generally studied as per the scientific method since science is the creative engine of technology. The scientific method was best described by the philosopher Karl Popper, who stated that any science should be scrutinized by decisive experimentation to determine a scientific law. As per this method, also known as Popperian falsifiability , the empirical truth of any scientific law cannot be verified beyond a shadow of a doubt and cannot be known with absolute certainty.

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As banks try to harness the power of the blockchain by creating private blockchains, we find ourselves witnessing the same execution of events as when private companies tried to create intranets instead of simply using the Internet. Whether you are a fan of the bitcoin or the blockchain or both, having a nuanced or biased view on the subject needs to be developed using the scientific method. This is a new technology that has been in existence for less than a decade. But what it represents is a change in our perception of trust along with a change in the organization of authority from traditional hierarchical systems to network-centric flat systems. It allows us to redefine how money and currency derive their actual value and forces us to think about the rebalancing of power on a global socioeconomic scale.

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So from an investigative perspective, it makes sense to explore the other extreme. Second, although Kashkari pushes for ending TBTF,14 his arguments are grounded in legislation and are challenged by others who base their statements on past laurels. Hence, Kashkari’s hypotheses need to be tested via the scientific method. Third, as it will be shown in the next sections of this chapter, the fragmentation is already underway, with and without the blessings of regulators. With these tasks in hindsight, we can now go about the challenge of understanding the fragmenting of an industry. To help us understand whether there are structural benefits to the fragmentation, we will need to see if this has occurred in the past in other sectors, as this provides us with some frame of reference.

The Lean Startup: How Today’s Entrepreneurs Use Continuous Innovation to Create Radically Successful Businesses
by Eric Ries
Published 13 Sep 2011

I call this the “just do it” school of entrepreneurship after Nike’s famous slogan.1 Unfortunately, if the plan is to see what happens, a team is guaranteed to succeed—at seeing what happens—but won’t necessarily gain validated learning. This is one of the most important lessons of the scientific method: if you cannot fail, you cannot learn. FROM ALCHEMY TO SCIENCE The Lean Startup methodology reconceives a startup’s efforts as experiments that test its strategy to see which parts are brilliant and which are crazy. A true experiment follows the scientific method. It begins with a clear hypothesis that makes predictions about what is supposed to happen. It then tests those predictions empirically. Just as scientific experimentation is informed by theory, startup experimentation is guided by the startup’s vision.

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The more pertinent questions are “Should this product be built?” and “Can we build a sustainable business around this set of products and services?” To answer those questions, we need a method for systematically breaking down a business plan into its component parts and testing each part empirically. In other words, we need the scientific method. In the Lean Startup model, every product, every feature, every marketing campaign—everything a startup does—is understood to be an experiment designed to achieve validated learning. This experimental approach works across industries and sectors, as we’ll see in Chapter 4. 4 EXPERIMENT I come across many startups that are struggling to answer the following questions: Which customer opinions should we listen to, if any?

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The purpose of Part One was to explore the importance of learning as the measure of progress for a startup. As I hope is evident by now, by focusing our energies on validated learning, we can avoid much of the waste that plagues startups today. As in lean manufacturing, learning where and when to invest energy results in saving time and money. To apply the scientific method to a startup, we need to identify which hypotheses to test. I call the riskiest elements of a startup’s plan, the parts on which everything depends, leap-of-faith assumptions. The two most important assumptions are the value hypothesis and the growth hypothesis. These give rise to tuning variables that control a startup’s engine of growth.

The Right Side of History
by Ben Shapiro
Published 11 Feb 2019

And that led him to the Pythagorean theorem, among other discoveries.15 Plato and Aristotle both believed in the notion of objective truth as well. But Plato and Aristotle disagreed with regard to what constituted objective truth: the Forms, or knowledge of the physical world. In the end, this disagreement would wind up creating the basis for the scientific method: deduction would present human beings with a scientific hypothesis; facts presented by empirical evidence would become the basis for judging that theory; the hypothesis would then be accepted or rejected or changed. Aristotle’s establishment of logical rigor with regard to empirical observation would provide the basis for all further scientific thought.

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The development of Western science was rooted in the notion that man’s task was to celebrate God through knowledge of His creation. Contrary to the propaganda of a postmodern atheist movement, nearly every great scientist up until the age of Darwinism was religious. The Scholastic movement produced the earliest roots of the scientific method, all the way up through the discovery by Nicolaus Copernicus (1473–1543) of a heliocentric solar system.24 Perhaps the greatest exponent of the Scholastic method was Roger Bacon (1219–1292), a Franciscan friar who devoted himself to understanding the natural world. Like Aquinas, Bacon was a devoted Aristotelian who suggested gathering facts before coming to conclusions.

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Bacon wanted to turn the pursuit of knowledge toward “the benefit and use of men . . . for the glory of the Creator and the relief of man’s estate.”9 In tones that remind us of those of today’s modern social scientists, Bacon also suggested the use of science to determine the best mode of governance and ethics.10 Unlike modern social scientists, however, Bacon took his cue for governance and ethics from the Judeo-Christian tradition. While Bacon upheld the importance of the scientific method and a belief in the pure value of innovation to better the material lives of human beings, Bacon was no atheist. He derided the notion of a Godless universe in harsh terms, suggesting that while “a little philosophy inclineth man’s mind to atheism, depth in philosophy bringeth men’s minds about to religion.”11 Bacon wrote this prayer in Novum Organum: “let none be alarmed at the objection of the arts and sciences becoming depraved to malevolent or luxurious purposes and the like, for the same can be said of every worldly good: talent, courage, strength, beauty, riches, light itself, and the rest.

How Medicine Works and When It Doesn't: Learning Who to Trust to Get and Stay Healthy
by F. Perry Wilson
Published 24 Jan 2023

In that circumstance, instead of allowing new data to adjust our understanding, we reject new data that doesn’t fit our understanding. Bayesian thinking forces us to grapple with new data, whether we like it or not. If this sounds a bit like the scientific method, it’s because it is. At least when the scientific method works correctly. (In later chapters, I’ll show you how the scientific method can go awry.) When it works, the scientific method is an iterative, stepwise process that inches us closer and closer to the truth about the world. Emanuel Rivers wrote his paper, and our beliefs about how to treat septic shock changed based on the data he showed us.

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It is frustrating—frightening, even—to realize you were wrong, but it is necessary. What happened to me (and to Fauci) was scientific progress. Science is the process of discovering truth, and it is imperfect. Individual studies may lead us down unproductive or even harmful paths, but the use of the scientific method has transformed Medicine from an esoteric, quasi-mystical art to its current form, which, to our predecessors, would appear miraculous. While flip-flopping on medical advice can have the effect of reducing public trust in doctors, we should be more concerned about a dogmatic adherence to a principle or idea.

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Is it my own bias manifesting “When you’re a hammer, all the world’s a nail”? Perhaps. But I hope not. Because Medicine isn’t politics. It isn’t faith. It isn’t tribal or partisan. It has been with us from the beginning—our deep ancestors trying, failing, and trying again to heal one another. It is the oldest form of compassion, the oldest form of empathy. The scientific method changed Medicine forever, making it more powerful, more perfect, and more valuable. But the gesture of a doctor placing a hand on the hand of a patient is the same now as it was fifty, five hundred, and five thousand years ago. It is no less powerful and no less sublime now than it was then.

Science...For Her!
by Megan Amram
Published 4 Nov 2014

This “I Wanna Dance with Somebody” singer should have been singing “I Wanna Die in Some Tubby!” Because she died in a bathtub! The Scientific Method * * * If you’re looking for a fun way to practice your chemistry, you’ve come on the right face! Use that one with boys! :) The only way to really grasp chemistry is to get hands-on. You’re not going to learn it just by reading about it or drinking a bottle of wine and kissing your gymnastics coach in the locker room. The scientific method is a process by which scientists try to test hypotheses. I’ve adapted some classic experiments to better fit a woman’s lifestyle.

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• Healthy Cookin’ • Paula Deen’s Health-Food Cookbook • Household Chemicals • Household-Chemical Cocktails • Acids & Bases & Tigers & Lions, Oh My! • Alcohols • Bad Adjectives to Use at a Wine Tasting • The Science of Chemistry ;) • Sexiest Molecules • Who Wore It Best? Molecules Edition • The Periodic Table of the Elements • Periodic Table Settings • The Period! Ick! Table • Carb-On Feel the Noise! • The Scientific Method • Classic Science Experiments . . . for Her! • Science . . . for Her . . . for Lesbos! • Quiz: Why Did You Decide to Become a Lesbian? • Bondage!!!! ;) • Gases, Gases, Everywhere, but Not a Drop to Stink! • Nuclear Chemistry • Most Embarrassing Moments: Meltdown Edition • Air Pollution • Most Romantic Places to See Smog • Famous Chemists • Marie Curie vs.

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Healthy Cookin’ Paula Deen’s Health-Food Cookbook A Lady on the Streets, but a Scientist Also on the Streets! Household Chemicals Acids & Bases & Tigers & Lions, Oh My! Alcohols The Science of Chemistry ;) Sexiest Molecules Who Wore It Best? The Periodic Table of the Elements The Period! Ick! Table Carb-On Feel the Noise! The Scientific Method Science . . . for Her . . . for Lesbos! Quiz: Why Did You Decide to Become a Lesbian? Bondage!!!! ;) Gases, Gases, Everywhere, but Not a Drop to Stink! Nuclear Chemistry Air Pollution Famous Chemists Chemistry Recap Introduction You’re back! OMG I’ve missed you so much, baby girl!!!

Denialism: How Irrational Thinking Hinders Scientific Progress, Harms the Planet, and Threatens Our Lives
by Michael Specter
Published 14 Apr 2009

INTRODUCTION Ten years ago, while walking through Harvard Yard, I saw a student wearing a button that said “Progressives against Scientism.” I had no idea what that meant, so I asked him. Sci entism, he explained, is the misguided belief that scientists can solve problems that nature can’t. He reeled off a series of technologies that demonstrated the destructiveness of what he called the “scientific method approach” to life: genetically modified foods, dams, nuclear power plants, and pharmaceuticals all made the list. We talked for a few minutes, then I thanked him and walked away. I didn’t understand how science might be responsible for the many scars humanity has inflicted upon the world, but students have odd intellectual infatuations, and I let it slip from my mind.

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But there was another, more important reason for my hesitation: I had assumed these nagging glimpses of irrationality were aberrations, tiny pockets of doubt. Authority may be flawed, and science often fails to fulfill its promises. Nonetheless, I was convinced that people would come around to realizing that the “scientific method approach”—the disciplined and dispassionate search for knowledge—has been the crowning intellectual achievement of humanity. I guess I was in my own kind of denial, because even as things got worse I kept assuring myself that reason would prevail and a book like this would not be necessary.

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Oprah Winfrey, for one, has often provided a forum for McCarthy on her show, but she intends to do more: in early 2009, Winfrey’s production company announced that it had hired McCarthy to host a syndicated talk show and write a blog, providing two new platforms from which she can preach her message of scientific illiteracy and fear. This antipathy toward the ideas of progress and scientific discovery represents a fundamental shift in the way we approach the world in the twenty-first century. More than at any time since Francis Bacon invented what we have come to regard as the scientific method (and Galileo began to put it to use), Americans fear science at least as fully as we embrace it. It is a sentiment that has turned our electrifying age of biological adventure into one of doubt and denial. There have always been people who are afraid of the future, of course—Luddites, ignorant of the possibilities of life on this planet and determined to remain that way.

The Twittering Machine
by Richard Seymour
Published 20 Aug 2019

As in the financial markets, volatility adds value. The more chaos, the better. IV. From print capitalism to platform capitalism, the apostles of ‘big data’ see in this story nothing but human progress. The triumph of data heralds the end of ideology, the end of theory and even the end of the scientific method, according to former editor-in-chief of Wired, Chris Anderson.9 From now on, they say, rather than conducting experiments or generating theories to understand our world, we can learn everything from mammoth data-sets. For those in need of a progressive-sounding pitch, the advantage of making markets massively more legible is that it spells an end to market mysticism.

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Google boss Eric Schmidt, exulting in the revolutionary potential of data, described it as ‘so powerful that nation-states will fight over how much data matters’.55 In an excitable piece for Wired, former editor Chris Anderson enthused that such a scale of data collection would soon render theory and even the scientific method obsolete: ‘with enough data, the numbers speak for themselves’.56 The bonus of big data is omniscience: ‘a full digital copy of our physical universe’, as scientists Carlo Ratti and Dirk Helbing put it.57 We will be able to see all of existence as a stream of electronic writing. And for a while, it was even possible to believe this, if one set aside just how much of the physical universe is unknown and potentially unknowable.

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Google, unwilling to concede that its own work implied a theory, simply developed a model for extrapolating from correlations established by the sheer bulk of data. They never tried to work out what the causal relationship was between search terms and the outbreak of flu, because that was a theoretical problem. Ironically, because they were only interested in what worked, their method stopped working. Big data is no substitute for the scientific method. Far from having the magical cure, the pioneers of data extraction and analysis have contributed to today’s degraded ecologies of information and research. VI. If our existing language could adequately account for the rapid degradation of information, we might know what a solution could look like.

Trick or Treatment: The Undeniable Facts About Alternative Medicine
by Edzard Ernst and Simon Singh
Published 17 Aug 2008

In order to address these questions properly, we have divided the book into six chapters. Chapter 1 provides an introduction to the scientific method. It explains how scientists, by experimenting and observing, can determine whether or not a particular therapy is effective. Every conclusion we reach in the rest of this book depends on the scientific method and on an unbiased analysis of the best medical research available. So, by first explaining how science works, we hope to increase your confidence in our subsequent conclusions. Chapter 2 shows how the scientific method can be applied to acupuncture, one of the most established, most tested and most widely used alternative therapies.

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Everything we know about the universe, from the components of an atom to the number of galaxies, is thanks to science, and every medical breakthrough, from the development of antiseptics to the eradication of smallpox, has been built upon scientific foundations. Of course, science is not perfect. Scientists will readily admit that they do not know everything, but nevertheless the scientific method is without doubt the best mechanism for getting to the truth. If you are a reader who is sceptical about the power of science, then we kindly request that you at least read Chapter 1. By the end of that first chapter, you should be sufficiently convinced about the value of scientific method that you will consider accepting the conclusions in the rest of the book.

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You might have an unwavering belief that all alternative medicine is rubbish, or you might adamantly hold the opposite view, that alternative medicine offers a panacea for all our aches, pains and diseases. In either case, this is not the book for you. There is no point in even reading the first chapter if you are not prepared to consider the possibility that the scientific method can act as the arbiter of truth. In fact, if you have already made up your mind about alternative medicine, then it would be sensible for you to return this book to the bookshop and ask for a refund. Why on Earth would you want to hear about the conclusions of thousands of research studies when you already have all the answers?

Kanban in Action
by Marcus Hammarberg and Joakim Sunden
Published 17 Mar 2014

For every little step the team took, they first were asked for the expected outcome. Then they were asked what they learned from what happened. That’s the scientific method at play: developing a hypothesis, making a prediction of what will happen, performing an experiment, observing the data, and reflecting on the difference between the prediction and what happened. 10.3.3. Why does this work? Kanban Kata puts a strong focus on learning in a structured manner. It consists of three katas, or routines, if you like, that build on the scientific method. The nice part about using the scientific method is that no result is bad; it’s only a result. You’ll use the outcome to learn and to improve your next hypothesis.

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Make process policies explicit— With explicit policies, you can start to have discussions around your process that are based on objective data instead of on what you think, feel, and have anecdotal evidence for. Implement feedback loops— This practice puts a focus on getting feedback from your process: for example, in what is called an operations review, which is a kind of retrospective for the process itself. Improve collaboratively, evolve experimentally (using models and the scientific method)—This practice encourages you to use models such as the Theory of Constraints or Lean to push your team toward further improvements. That’s three more practices added to the principles we’ve talked about so far. Note that this holds true for the Kanban Method of “incremental, evolutionary change for technology development/operations organizations,” and in that context the last three practices are important.

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Although it’s great to make this ... umm ... explicit, we feel that it’s part of the principle of visualization. Implement feedback loops—This is part of the “manage flow” step for us. In order to help the work to flow, feedback loops are essential and should be sought and implemented where needed. Improve collaboratively, evolve experimentally (using models and the scientific method)— We wholeheartedly agree on the importance of this. But this mindset is so deeply rooted in the Lean principles that underlie kanban that we don’t think it’s a principle of kanban per se, but rather the environment and ecosystem that kanban springs from. To further complicate things, David J.

The Invention of Air: A Story of Science, Faith, Revolution, and the Birth of America
by Steven Johnson
Published 26 Dec 2008

Western Europe began to emerge from an alcoholic haze that had lasted for centuries. Emerging from that centuries-long bender, armed with a belief in the scientific method and the conviction, inherited from Newtonian physics, that simple laws could be unearthed beneath complex behavior, the networked, caffeinated minds of the eighteenth century found themselves in a universe that was ripe for discovery. The everyday world was teeming with mysterious phenomena—air, fire, animals, plants, rocks, weather—that had never before been probed with the conceptual tools of the scientific method. This sense of terra incognita also helps explain why Priestley could be so innovative in so many different disciplines, and why Enlightenment culture in general spawned so many distinct paradigm shifts.

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Priestley was a key participant in one of these cultural-phase transitions, what was described self-consciously at the time, by Kant and others, as the Enlightenment, a term that embraces both the widening of political and religious possibility in eighteenth-century Europe and the extensive application of the scientific method to problems that had previously been shrouded in darkness. There were literally dozens of paradigm shifts in distinct fields during Priestley’s lifetime, watershed moments of sudden progress where new rules and frameworks of understanding emerged. Priestley alone was a transformative figure in four of them: chemistry, electricity, politics, and faith.

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We tend to talk about the history of ideas in terms of individual genius and broader cultural categories—the spirit of the age, the paradigm of research. But ideas happen in specific physical environments as well, environments that bring their own distinct pressures, opportunities, limitations, and happy accidents to the evolution of human understanding. Take Joseph Priestley out of Enlightenment culture, and deprive him of the scientific method, and his legendary streak no doubt disappears, or turns into something radically different. But take Priestley out of Meadow Lane, and deprive him of his hours at the brewery, and you would likely get a different story as well. Ideas are situated in another kind of environment as well: the information network.

Human + Machine: Reimagining Work in the Age of AI
by Paul R. Daugherty and H. James Wilson
Published 15 Jan 2018

The Augmented Researcher: How Science Works in the Age of AI First, we need to step back to understand some basic principles. The scientific method is perhaps the most well-understood, widely deployed process in the world. Over centuries, it has come to be defined as a series of discrete, reproducible steps. First, ask questions and make observations. Next, devise hypotheses. After that, design an experiment to test predictions based on the hypotheses. Then, of course, run tests and collect data. Finally, develop generalized theories. As a process, the scientific method can be visualized cyclically. All that data and those general theories lead to more observation and further research, getting the ball rolling all over again.

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All that data and those general theories lead to more observation and further research, getting the ball rolling all over again. Because the scientific method’s steps are so clear-cut, it’s no surprise that there are opportunities for artificial intelligence to change the shape of the process itself. While, so far, research institutions and companies involved in science have not fully overhauled the way science is done, some have successfully compressed or exploded particular scientific steps. The following sections look at AI disruptions at each stage of the scientific process—considering which tasks are best for people, which are best for machines, and how both work together.

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There, in their own records, was validation of a causal connection, hidden in plain sight. “It was the first time that I know of that machines discovered new medical knowledge,” says Hill. “Straight from the data. There was no human involved in this discovery.”7 GNS Healthcare is showing that it’s possible, when AI is injected into the hypothesis phase of the scientific method, to find previously hidden correlations and causations. Moreover, use of the technology can result in dramatic cost savings. In one recent success, GNS was able to reverse-engineer—without using a hypothesis or preexisting assumptions—PCSK9, a class of drug that reduces bad cholesterol in the bloodstream.

The Great Mental Models: General Thinking Concepts
by Shane Parrish
Published 22 Nov 2019

Essentially, they were looking for the foundational knowledge that would not change and that we could build everything else on, from our ethical systems to our social structures. First principles thinking doesn’t have to be quite so grand. When we do it, we aren’t necessarily looking for absolute truths. Millennia of epistemological inquiry have shown us that these are hard to come by, and the scientific method has demonstrated that knowledge can only be built when we are actively trying to falsify it (see Supporting Idea: Falsifiability). Rather, first principles thinking identifies the elements that are, in the context of any given situation, non-reducible. First principles do not provide a checklist of things that will always be true; our knowledge of first principles changes as we understand more.

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Its chief value is that it lets us do things in our heads we cannot do in real life, and so explore situations from more angles than we can physically examine and test for. Thought experiments are more than daydreaming. They require the same rigor as a traditional experiment in order to be useful. Much like the scientific method, a thought experiment generally has the following steps: Ask a question Conduct background research Construct hypothesis Test with (thought) experiments Analyze outcomes and draw conclusions Compare to hypothesis and adjust accordingly (new question, etc.) In the James/Allen experiment above, we started with a question: Who would win in a game of basketball?

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As popular—and generally useful—as counter- and semi-factuals are, they are also the areas of thought experiment with which we need to use the most caution. Why? Because history is what we call a chaotic system. A small change in the beginning conditions can cause a very different outcome down the line. This is where the rigor of the scientific method is indispensable if we want to draw conclusions that are actually useful. The Trolley Experiment Thought experiments are often used to explore ethical and moral issues. When you are dealing with questions of life and death it is obviously not recommended to kill a bunch of people in order to determine the most ethical course of action.

Super Thinking: The Big Book of Mental Models
by Gabriel Weinberg and Lauren McCann
Published 17 Jun 2019

That’s because as the company grows, what is required of its executives changes, moving initially from building a product (design, creation, etc.) to building a company (managing people, defining structure, etc.), to building a sustainable business (financial models, managing managers, etc.). In such a rapidly changing environment, you need a method for adapting quickly. Luckily, science gives us such a mental model for making sure we stay among the “fittest”: the scientific method. Formally, the scientific method is a rigorous cycle of making observations, formulating hypotheses, testing them, analyzing data, and developing new theories. But you can also apply it simply by embracing an experimental mindset. The most successful (and adaptive) people and organizations are constantly refining how they work and what they work on to be more effective.

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What type of exercise program can you really stick to? What can you change in your diet or daily routines to make you eat healthier? When a scientific mindset is applied continuously via experimentation, you will improve your chances of being the fittest (some pun intended). Natural selection and the scientific method are just the start. There are a host of natural laws that can help you understand the changes unfolding around you as well as how to adapt to them and even shape them. This chapter highlights many of these natural super models that can help you be more adaptive and manage change. DON’T FIGHT NATURE At some point you have likely heard someone paraphrase Isaac Newton’s first law of motion, often referred to as the law of inertia: “An object at rest stays at rest and an object in motion stays in motion with the same speed and in the same direction unless acted upon by an unbalanced force.”

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On the positive side, you can make better decisions with your life and career; on the negative side, you can be more resilient when setbacks and unfortunate events occur, and even help limit their negative effects. KEY TAKEAWAYS Adopt an experimental mindset, looking for opportunities to run experiments and apply the scientific method wherever possible. Respect inertia: create or join healthy flywheels; avoid strategy taxes and trying to enact change in high-inertia situations unless you have a tactical advantage such as discovery of a catalyst and a lot of potential energy. When enacting change, think deeply about how to reach critical mass and how you will navigate the technology adoption life cycle.

Immortality: The Quest to Live Forever and How It Drives Civilization
by Stephen Cave
Published 2 Apr 2012

Its practitioners developed life-extension techniques that are now, over two thousand years later, continuing to prosper: meditation, breathing exercises, the gentle gymnastics of tai chi and qigong, and the consumption of tea, ginseng and many other herbs and minerals. One of its core texts, known as The Yellow Emperor’s Inner Canon, remains the central source for Chinese traditional medicine. Until well into the Renaissance in Europe, there was no distinction between chemistry and alchemy or scientist and wizard. What we now see as the rigors of the scientific method, the antithesis of all superstition, emerged only slowly from the alchemical quest for immortality. Many of the great figures at the dawn of the scientific age, such as Robert Boyle and even Sir Isaac Newton, were steeped in alchemical teachings—Newton himself saw his contributions to alchemy as more important than his discoveries in physics.

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Usually this magic stuff is a gift from God or gods; it might be equated with the soul or spirit, like the Egyptian ka; and it separates absolutely the living from the nonliving—men from mud, birds from rocks. But the pioneering philosophers and early scientists of the Enlightenment challenged this view, arguing that living things were natural phenomena, obeying the same rules that governed all matter. By careful study, they argued, we could understand those rules. To the founders of the scientific method, from René Descartes to Nicolas de Condorcet, man was a machine. Therefore just as a good watchmaker could ensure that a watch continues to run perfectly, so the physicians would one day be able to keep humans in perfect working order indefinitely. By the time Condorcet was writing in the late eighteenth century, this link between science, progress and indefinitely extended lifespans was well established.

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Life expectancy in the France of his day, as in most of the rest of the world, was around thirty years. These people—your great-great-great-great-great-grandparents—lived in a world of grand cities and gunpowder, yet still their life expectancy was little better than that of cavemen. By the end of the nineteenth century, life expectancy had made the significant leap to over forty, as the scientific method began to be applied to questions of public hygiene and the practice of medicine. But then came the real breakthrough: if we fast-forward just a few more generations, children born at the end of the twentieth century in France, as in most of the Western world, could expect to live to over eighty years of age.

Code Complete (Developer Best Practices)
by Steve McConnell
Published 8 Jun 2004

Even better, the effective programmers who debug in one-twentieth the time used by the ineffective programmers aren't randomly guessing about how to fix the program. They're using the scientific method—that is, the process of discovery and demonstration necessary for scientific investigation. The Scientific Method of Debugging Here are the steps you go through when you use the classic scientific method: Gather data through repeatable experiments. Form a hypothesis that accounts for the relevant data. Design an experiment to prove or disprove the hypothesis. Prove or disprove the hypothesis. Repeat as needed. The scientific method has many parallels in debugging. Here's an effective approach for finding a defect: Stabilize the error.

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Determine how to prove or disprove the hypothesis, either by testing the program or by examining the code. Prove or disprove the hypothesis by using the procedure identified in 2(c). Fix the defect. Test the fix. Look for similar errors. The first step is similar to the scientific method's first step in that it relies on repeatability. The defect is easier to diagnose if you can stabilize it—that is, make it occur reliably. The second step uses the steps of the scientific method. You gather the test data that divulged the defect, analyze the data that has been produced, and form a hypothesis about the source of the error. You then design a test case or an inspection to evaluate the hypothesis, and you either declare success (regarding proving your hypothesis) or renew your efforts, as appropriate.

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General Approach to Debugging Do you use debugging as an opportunity to learn more about your program, mistakes, code quality, and problem-solving approach? Do you avoid the trial-and-error, superstitious approach to debugging? Do you assume that errors are your fault? Do you use the scientific method to stabilize intermittent errors? Do you use the scientific method to find defects? Rather than using the same approach every time, do you use several different techniques to find defects? Do you verify that the fix is correct? Do you use compiler warning messages, execution profiling, a test framework, scaffolding, and interactive debugging?

A Manual for Creating Atheists
by Peter Boghossian
Published 1 Nov 2013

“But if faith in God requires independent scientific confirmation, what about the colossal faith our new atheists place in science itself?” —John Haught, God and the New Atheism (2008, p. 45) “Whether they admit to it or not, scientists have faith. It is, obviously, a rational faith that stems from their trust in the scientific method to reveal natural truth. But it is faith nonetheless. Scientists have faith that, based upon past successes, the scientific method will uncover natural truths yet to be discovered. They conduct experiments and make observations without knowing if they will discover something truly new, but they trust that if anything has yet to be discovered in the natural world, science will discover it.

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In the latter case, there would thus be no basis for a reliable epistemological comparison. For example, let’s say people in society A prefer to use the Koran to come to knowledge and to understand reality, while people in society B prefer to use the scientific method. For the epistemological relativist these are just different ways to know the world. If a person uses the scientific method in an attempt to lawfully align his beliefs with reality, then he’d judge any other process—like using the Koran—to be not just inferior, but foolish. By extension, the same is true for the person who starts with the Koran. If one starts with the premises that the Koran is a perfect book and it is the best way to understand reality, then by this standard any other process will be judged to be inferior and misguided.

Fool Me Twice: Fighting the Assault on Science in America
by Shawn Lawrence Otto
Published 10 Oct 2011

The goal of science is to create descriptions of reality that are independent of us and our opinions or beliefs. We call these descriptions knowledge. 3. To create this knowledge, we use the scientific method, which is a collection of several techniques, including observation, hypothesizing, induction, experimentation, unique prediction, recording, and critical peer review. These techniques have evolved over time and will likely continue to evolve. 4. Like our senses, the scientific method is fallible and often leads us astray. But it is the best method we have come up with so far, and it has proven to be very powerful. The religious right took issue with these claims when they conflicted with dogma or a literal reading of the Bible.

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Inevitably this is uncomfortable, because the process compels us to give up, alter, or somehow intellectually sequester many comforting notions, notions that are often profoundly powerful because they are our most deeply rooted and awestruck explanations about the wonders of creation, the specialness of our identities, our history, and the possibility that our spirits may somehow live on after death. THE SCIENTIFIC METHOD How do we create knowledge? There is no one “scientific method”; rather, there is a collection of strategies that have proven effective in answering our questions about how things in nature really work. How do plants grow? What is stuff made of? How do viruses work? Why are montane voles promiscuous while prairie voles are loyal lifelong mates?

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Is life an unbroken chain of genetic code, running down through the generations, endlessly recombining in new forms? Is it software? When does it become an individual with rights? Where do we draw the legal line? The moral line? Can we draw a line at all? Is that the right way to be thinking about it? In each of the above cases, new knowledge was gained by applying the scientific method of making careful observations and recording the data, then testing and drawing conclusions based on the results instead of on assumptions or beliefs, and then publishing those for others to review and attempt to disprove if they can. The knowledge gained through this incredible process gives us new power over the physical world, the power to assist or prevent pregnancy, but it also forces us to reevaluate intuitive assumptions and to refine and in some cases redefine the meanings of words and values we thought we understood.

The Identity Trap: A Story of Ideas and Power in Our Time
by Yascha Mounk
Published 26 Sep 2023

If all claims can only be valid so long as they are justified by a rigorous scientific assessment, that must also be true for the standards that constitute the scientific method itself. But subjecting these standards to such a test proves impossible. While it is possible to test, say, the boiling point of water in an experimental manner by applying the scientific method, there is no empirical test for the rules that constitute the scientific method itself. See Lyotard, Postmodern Condition, 53–60. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT Deleuze now concluded: Michel Foucault, Language, Counter-memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews, trans.

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Obviously, there are many circumstances in which laypeople have good reason to defer to the judgment of trained experts. But the reason why science has historically made such great strides, and deserves deference within reasonable limits, is that the scientific method—with mechanisms like peer review and its radical skepticism toward received wisdom—is based on a notion of equality. For an excellent explanation of the scientific method, see Jonathan Rauch, The Constitution of Knowledge: A Defense of Truth (Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution Press, 2021). GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT commitment to political equality: The detractors of liberalism have often claimed that this commitment to individual rights elides the importance that religious beliefs and personal ties play in the lives of most people.

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“Simplifying to the extreme,” Lyotard wrote in a line that was to prove highly influential, “I define postmodern as incredulity towards metanarratives.” For many people who read Foucault and Lyotard, this incredulity toward metanarratives soon came to extend to the most basic building blocks with which we make sense of the world. Metanarratives give people a sense of the broader moral or political goals they should be aiming to realize. The scientific method—itself a metanarrative that must be distrusted, according to Lyotard—gives people a sense of the objective criteria by which they can assess the truth or the falsity of a statement. Those who come to believe that both are based on a big mistake are forced to reject the most fundamental assumptions that ground our practices and institutions, from the veracity of scientific findings to the value of democracy.

A Devil's Chaplain: Selected Writings
by Richard Dawkins
Published 1 Jan 2004

Medawar has become a sort of chief spokesman for ‘The Scientist’ in the modern world. He takes a less doleful view of the human predicament than is fashionable, believing that hands are for solving problems rather than for wringing. He regards the scientific method – in the right hands – as our most powerful tool for ‘finding out what is wrong with [the world] and then taking steps to put it right’. As for the scientific method itself, Medawar has a good deal to tell us, and he is well qualified to do so. Not that being a Nobel Prize-winner and a close associate of Karl Popper is in itself an indication that one will talk sense: far from it when you think of others in that category.

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This has never struck me as a particularly profound or wise remark,1 but it comes into its own in the special case where the little learning is in philosophy (as it often is). A scientist who has the temerity to utter the t-word (‘true’) is likely to encounter a form of philosophical heckling which goes something like this: There is no absolute truth. You are committing an act of personal faith when you claim that the scientific method, including mathematics and logic, is the privileged road to truth. Other cultures might believe that truth is to be found in a rabbit’s entrails, or the ravings of a prophet up a pole. It is only your personal faith in science that leads you to favour your brand of truth. That strand of half-baked philosophy goes by the name of cultural relativism.

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Those of us who have renounced one or another of the three ‘great’ monotheistic religions have, until now, moderated our language for reasons of politeness. Christians, Jews and Muslims are sincere in their beliefs and in what they find holy. We have respected that, even as we have disagreed with it. The late Douglas Adams put it with his customary good humour, in an impromptu speech in 199892 (slightly abridged): Now, the invention of the scientific method is, I’m sure we’ll all agree, the most powerful intellectual idea, the most powerful framework for thinking and investigating and understanding and challenging the world around us that there is, and it rests on the premise that any idea is there to be attacked. If it withstands the attack then it lives to fight another day, and if it doesn’t withstand the attack then down it goes.

Cynical Theories: How Activist Scholarship Made Everything About Race, Gender, and Identity―and Why This Harms Everybody
by Helen Pluckrose and James A. Lindsay
Published 14 Jul 2020

During the seventeenth century, medicine and anatomy, which had previously been modeled on the knowledge of the ancient Greeks, underwent a revolution and knowledge of the body advanced rapidly. The Scientific Revolution was the result of widespread questioning of received wisdom and the rapid proliferation of different kinds of knowledge production. The development of the scientific method in the nineteenth century was centered on skepticism and the need for increasingly rigorous testing and falsification. Beyond cynical “skepticism,” the postmodernists had concerns about the deaths of authenticity and meaning in modern society that also carried considerable weight, especially with French Theorists.

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Knowledge, truth, meaning, and morality are therefore, according to postmodernist thinking, culturally constructed and relative products of individual cultures, none of which possess the necessary tools or terms to evaluate the others. At the heart of the postmodern turn is a reaction to and rejection of modernism and modernity.18 According to Enlightenment thinking, objective reality can be known through more or less reliable methods. Knowledge about objective reality produced by the scientific method enabled us to build modernity and permits us to continue doing so. For postmodernism, by contrast, reality is ultimately the product of our socialization and lived experiences, as constructed by systems of language. The sociologist Steven Seidman, who coined the term “the postmodern turn,” recognized the profundity of this change in 1994: “A broad social and cultural shift is taking place in Western societies.

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Rather than seeing objective truth as something that exists and that can be provisionally known (or approximated) through processes such as experimentation, falsification, and defeasibility—as Enlightenment, modernist, and scientific thought would have it—postmodern approaches to knowledge inflate a small, almost banal kernel of truth—that we are limited in our ability to know and must express knowledge through language, concepts and categories—to insist that all claims to truth are value-laden constructs of culture. This is called cultural constructivism or social constructivism. The scientific method, in particular, is not seen as a better way of producing and legitimizing knowledge than any other, but as one cultural approach among many, as corrupted by biased reasoning as any other. Cultural constructivism is not the belief that reality is literally created by cultural beliefs—it doesn’t argue, for instance, that when we erroneously believed the Sun went around the Earth, our beliefs had any influence over the solar system and its dynamics.

The Pleasure of Finding Things Out: The Best Short Works of Richard P. Feynman
by Richard P. Feynman and Jeffrey Robbins
Published 1 Jan 1999

More about education, more about crime; the scores on the tests are going down and there’s more people in prison; young people are committing crimes, we just don’t understand it at all. It just isn’t working, to discover things about these things by using the scientific method in the type of imitation which they are using now. Now whether the scientific method would work in these fields if we knew how to do it, I don’t know. It’s particularly weak in this way. There may be some other method. For example, to listen to the ideas of the past and the experience of people for a long time might be a good idea.

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This is very, very important, so important that I would like to delay that aspect, and talk about that still further along in my speech. The question of doubt and uncertainty is what is necessary to begin; for if you already know the answer there is no need to gather any evidence about it. Well, being uncertain, the next thing is to look for evidence, and the scientific method is to begin with trials. But another way and a very important one that should not be neglected and that is very vital is to put together ideas to try to enforce a logical consistency among the various things that you know. It is a very valuable thing to try to connect this, what you know, with that, that you know, and try to find out if they are consistent.

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And, although you may gain some temporary fame and excitement, you will not gain a good reputation as a scientist if you haven’t tried to be very careful in this kind of work. And it’s this type of integrity, this kind of care not to fool yourself, that is missing to a large extent in much of the research in Cargo Cult Science. A great deal of their difficulty is, of course, the difficulty of the subject and the inapplicability of the scientific method to the subject. Nevertheless, it should be remarked that this is not the only difficulty. That’s why the planes don’t land–but they don’t land. We have learned a lot from experience about how to handle some of the ways we fool ourselves. One example: Millikan measured the charge on an electron by an experiment with falling oil drops and got an answer which we now know not to be quite right.

Doing Data Science: Straight Talk From the Frontline
by Cathy O'Neil and Rachel Schutt
Published 8 Oct 2013

Let’s revise or at least add an overlay to make clear that the data scientist needs to be involved in this process throughout, meaning they are involved in the actual coding as well as in the higher-level process, as shown in Figure 2-3. Figure 2-3. The data scientist is involved in every part of this process Connection to the Scientific Method We can think of the data science process as an extension of or variation of the scientific method: Ask a question. Do background research. Construct a hypothesis. Test your hypothesis by doing an experiment. Analyze your data and draw a conclusion. Communicate your results. In both the data science process and the scientific method, not every problem requires one to go through all the steps, but almost all problems can be solved with some combination of the stages.

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Also, while we’re asking fundamental questions like this, what’s the difference between a statistical model and a machine learning algorithm? Before we dive deeply into that, let’s add a bit of context with this deliberately provocative Wired magazine piece, “The End of Theory: The Data Deluge Makes the Scientific Method Obsolete,” published in 2008 by Chris Anderson, then editor-in-chief. Anderson equates massive amounts of data to complete information and argues no models are necessary and “correlation is enough”; e.g., that in the context of massive amounts of data, “they [Google] don’t have to settle for models at all.”

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Every design choice you make can be formulated as an hypothesis, against which you will use rigorous testing and experimentation to either validate or refute. This process, whereby one formulates a well-defined hypothesis and then tests it, might rise to the level of a science in certain cases. Specifically, the scientific method is adopted in data science as follows: You hold on to your existing best performer. Once you have a new idea to prototype, set up an experiment wherein the two best models compete. Rinse and repeat (while not overfitting). Classifiers This section focuses on the process of choosing a classifier.

Loonshots: How to Nurture the Crazy Ideas That Win Wars, Cure Diseases, and Transform Industries
by Safi Bahcall
Published 19 Mar 2019

The report outlined the architecture of a new national research system. Within days of its publication, Bush’s report was hailed across the major news outlets. The New York Times, however, questioned its conclusions and patiently explained the nature of science to Bush (and his 41 MD and PhD coauthors): “The scientific method is always the same, whether it deals with radar or disease. Dr. Bush’s report ignores this fact.” The Times concluded by suggesting a better model: “Soviet Russia has approached this task more realistically.” BusinessWeek, in any event, which approvingly described Bush as “a practical businessman as well as a scholar,” stated that Endless Frontier was “epoch-making” and “must-reading for American businessmen.”

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But for all human history up to that time, religious authorities or divine rulers or great-man philosophers decreed what was true and what was false. The idea that truth could be revealed to anyone was radical. Subversive. Its champions were often dismissed as unhinged. That idea, now known by its more modern name, the scientific method, is arguably the mother of all loonshots. The Chinese and Mughal emperors discovered the same lesson that surprised so many of their industrial descendants centuries later: missing loonshots can be fatal. LOONSHOT NURSERIES IN INDUSTRY AND HISTORY This book has been about creating conditions that encourage loonshots inside organizations.

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We’ll see why Western Europe became the flourishing loonshot nursery of its time—and what that means for nations today, who wish to avoid the fate of those ancient empires. Let’s start by taking a closer look at that mother of all loonshots. EIGHT MINUTES THAT CHANGED THE WORLD The path to the idea of laws of nature—and the scientific method for revealing those laws—mirrored, for good reason, the path to heliocentrism: the notion that the earth moves around the sun rather than the other way around. If divine rulers could be wrong about the most elementary questions of heaven and earth, then we needed a new way to define and seek truth.

The Geek Way: The Radical Mindset That Drives Extraordinary Results
by Andrew McAfee
Published 14 Nov 2023

If you ever want to start a long and loud debate in a room full of overeducated people, just say something like, “Hey, what is the scientific method, anyway?” I’m not even going to try to summarize that debate. Instead, I want to highlight one viewpoint that makes a great deal of sense to me, that addresses both of our questions, and that yields practical advice for companies and their leaders. It’s a viewpoint laid out by philosopher Michael Strevens in The Knowledge Machine. Geek companies run as if their founders got their hands on this book well before it was published and have been using it as a blueprint. Strevens studied the enormous literature about science and the scientific method, and came to a brilliantly simple conclusion—science is an eternal argument governed by an “iron rule of explanation”: 1.

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Ted Sarandos, Netflix’s chief of content since 2000 and co-CEO since 2020, estimated in 2015 that programming decisions at the company were “probably a seventy-thirty mix… Seventy is the data, and thirty is judgment. But the thirty needs to be on top, if that makes sense.” In other words, the company leads with the data, but always interprets and asks questions about it. As we’ll see in chapter 4, this interplay between cold, hard evidence and warm-blooded human beings is the heart of the scientific method. Speed—the geek habit of iterating rapidly to get feedback and incorporate it—has also long been standard practice at Netflix. As early as 2006, the company was rolling out a new version of its website every two weeks. As designer Joshua Porter put it after a visit that year, “The designers of Netflix.com have a smashing success on their hands, but we didn’t find them resting on their laurels.

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Instead, our press secretaries start writing memos to ourselves about how good we are at producing this kind of evidence: our hypotheses are surely correct, we’re amazing evidence gatherers, and we’re clearly going to win the race. These memos inspire us to do the hard work of coming up with evidence to support what we believe. The underappreciated part of the scientific method is that it’s a bias-reducing activity that doesn’t even try to reduce the individual biases of its participants. Instead, it harnesses these biases, making participants overconfident in their own ability to survive empirical testing of their ideas. This is virtuoso cognitive jiu-jitsu. The iron rule harnesses our deceit-detection capabilities, which are excellent as long as they’re aimed at someone else.

The Price of Tomorrow: Why Deflation Is the Key to an Abundant Future
by Jeff Booth
Published 14 Jan 2020

Religions of the world used the printing press to spread their beliefs, but it also set the stage for science-based reasoning. Authors could share their new ideas and have them tested and confirmed or refuted by others. The ability to do this, over time, developed into the scientific method. Although philosophers such as Aristotle (384–322 BCE) and Ibn al-Haytham (965–1040 CE) had used similar logic to describe the world around them, the process itself wasn’t generally accepted as such until the late nineteenth century. There is no one inventor of the scientific method. Like science itself, it continued to be refined thanks to the likes of Galileo, Bacon, Descartes, and Newton. The process involves 1) observation, including rigorous skepticism (to counter our cognitive biases); 2) formulating a hypothesis; 3) making a prediction that can be determined to be true or false; and 4) experiments and testing to determine the validity of the hypothesis.

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The process involves 1) observation, including rigorous skepticism (to counter our cognitive biases); 2) formulating a hypothesis; 3) making a prediction that can be determined to be true or false; and 4) experiments and testing to determine the validity of the hypothesis. The process continually repeats, allowing better and better hypotheses to be tested and confirmed. Perhaps the most compelling thing about science and the scientific method is that it is almost never “good enough.” It is designed to continually bring in more evidence to prove existing understanding wrong and to correct it further. Error correction is the basis of all intelligence. As Karl Popper (1902–1994), one of the great twentieth-century philosophers of science, said, “All of our knowledge grows only through the correcting of our mistakes.”43 Some of the biggest revolutions in science actually come from small refinements of existing theories.

Willful: How We Choose What We Do
by Richard Robb
Published 12 Nov 2019

Conviction in modern medicine goes together with an opposite constellation of beliefs: scientific evidence is the highest standard, and the system that generates this evidence and delivers therapies to patients can be trusted. And the third person, who believes events are in divine hands, might rely on the experience of previously answered prayers. She rejects the scientific method because she believes that God works in mysterious ways. The diversity of opinion in the world is astonishingly vast—far vaster than we would expect if everyone used beliefs merely as instruments to maximize results. Rather than formulating hypotheses, then checking them against empirical evidence to ensure we adopt only the most accurate ones, we pick beliefs that appeal to us.

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How Beliefs Are Formed The American philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce outlined four routes to adopting a belief: 1. A new belief X is consistent with the things one already knows. 2. An authority to which one has committed says that X is so. 3. X is the style of thing that one is inclined to believe. In Peirce’s words, X is “agreeable to reason.” 4. A new belief X, when subjected to the scientific method, corresponds to data in the world.3 Loosely speaking, beliefs formed according to the first three routes allow us to build a coherent identity. Acting on settled beliefs, even ones that run contrary to empirical evidence, is not irrational but for-itself. In Repetition, Kierkegaard asks, “What would life be if there were no repetition?

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But many did not: the richer the family head becomes, the less interested she is in digging into the technical details that a person on the spot needs to know and that earned the fortune in the first place. And the larger family offices grow, the more they adopt the controls typical of institutional investors. Applying Peirce’s rules, we can see why institutional investors hesitated to buy low-priced, complex, illiquid bonds. The fourth, purposeful rule—one applies the scientific method; the belief corresponds to data in the world—couldn’t justify these investments. There were no data on similar events because nothing like this had ever happened before. Many looked to the Great Depression for precedent, but conditions were so different back then (asset-backed securities hadn’t even been invented) that it couldn’t provide much guidance.

The Goal: A Process of Ongoing Improvement - 30th Anniversary Edition
by Eliyahu M. Goldratt
Published 1 Jun 2012

I’m a physician, not a surgeon, In other words, I’m a thinker, not a doer. I say that facetiously, but as a physician, it’s all about diagnosis. And the whole process of diagnosis, whether it’s a patient or an organization, is the application of the scientific method. Eli Goldratt says that his Theory of Constraints is simply the application of the scientific method. So it’s almost natural that an advisor to a mining company—in terms of diagnosing what’s wrong and what to do about it—could be a physician. In fact, some of the teaching materials that the Goldratt Institute uses refer to the medical model.

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The Theory of Constraints is about thinking processes, it’s a subset of logic. In other words, the scientific method. DW: Has any of this made you a better teacher of physicians? AV: Absolutely. Absolutely. I’ve told you that diagnosing a patient and diagnosing a business is the same thing. But a doctor learns to diagnose by watching other doctors. It’s not taught as a science. The processes of diagnosis are taught, but what might be called the philosophy of diagnosis is not taught as it is in the Theory of Constraints. The traditional approach is, watch what I do. The approach that I’ve since followed is, let’s look at how the scientific method works, then let’s see if we can apply this to a patient.

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And I myself supplied the answer: How does one go about revealing the intrinsic order? Lou asked it as if it is a rhetorical question, as if the obvious answer is that it is impossible. But scientists do reveal the intrinsic order of things . . . and Jonah is a scientist. Somewhere in the scientific method lies the answer for the needed management techniques. It is obvious. But what can I do? I cannot read a book in physics, I don’t know enough mathematics to get through even the first page. But maybe I don’t need it. Jonah stressed that he wasn’t asking me to develop the methods, just to determine clearly what they should be.

The Knowledge: How to Rebuild Our World From Scratch
by Lewis Dartnell
Published 15 Apr 2014

Inspired by Feynman, I’d argue that the best way to help survivors of the Fall is not to create a comprehensive record of all knowledge, but to provide a guide to the basics, adapted to their likely circumstances, as well as a blueprint of the techniques necessary to rediscover crucial understanding for themselves—the powerful knowledge-generation machinery that is the scientific method. The key to preserving civilization is to provide a condensed seed that will readily unpack to yield the entire expansive tree of knowledge, rather than attempting to document the colossal tree itself. Which fragments, to paraphrase T. S. Eliot, are best shored against our ruins? The value of such a book is potentially enormous.

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But at what point does a technologically progressing civilization reach a peak beyond which further advance brings diminishing returns? Perhaps a recovering civilization will reach equilibrium at a certain technological level, neither advancing further nor regressing, once it has achieved a stable economy, comfortable population size, and the ability to draw sustainably on natural resources. THE SCIENTIFIC METHOD This book is of course not a complete compendium of all the information you would need to rebuild your world from scratch. A great deal of material has necessarily been left out. We’ve mostly focused on inorganic chemistry, useful for making agricultural fertilizers or industrial reagents, rather than the synthesis or transformations of organic molecules.

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For thermometers capable of operating at temperatures beyond the boiling point of mercury, for use in a kiln or furnace, for example, you will need to exploit other physical phenomena. Your investigations of electricity, for instance, will reveal that the resistance of a wire often increases with temperature. THE SCIENTIFIC METHOD—CONTINUED This, then, is the fundamental process for devising reliable means for measurement of any attribute. As the recovering civilization discovers strange new phenomena of nature, new fields of scientific research emerge. Means of isolating the properties of these phenomena and translating them into something that can be reliably measured must be devised before they can begin to be understood and exploited for technological applications.

Bad Science
by Ben Goldacre
Published 1 Jan 2008

The next stop on our journey is inevitably going to be statistics, because this is one area that causes unique problems for the media. But first, we need to go on a brief diversion. 13 Why Clever People Believe Stupid Things The real purpose of the scientific method is to make sure nature hasn’t misled you into thinking you know something you actually don’t know. Robert Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance Why do we have statistics, why do we measure things, and why do we count? If the scientific method has any authority—or as I prefer to think of it, ‘value’—it is because it represents a systematic approach; but this is valuable only because the alternatives can be misleading.

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Blinding your patients to whether they had the active treatment or the placebo doesn’t cost money. Overall, doing research robustly and fairly does not necessarily require more money, it simply requires that you think before you start. The only people to blame for the flaws in these studies are the people who performed them. In some cases they will be people who turn their backs on the scientific method as a ‘flawed paradigm’; and yet it seems their great new paradigm is simply ‘unfair tests’. These patterns are reflected throughout the alternative therapy literature. In general, the studies which are flawed tend to be the ones that favour homeopathy, or any other alternative therapy; and the well-performed studies, where every controllable source of bias and error is excluded, tend to show that the treatments are no better than placebo.

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These ‘clinical trials’ seemed to be a few anecdotes about how incredibly well her patients felt after seeing her. No controls, no placebo, no attempt to quantify or measure improvements. So Garrow made a modest proposal in a fairly obscure medical newsletter. I am quoting it in its entirety, partly because it is a rather elegantly written exposition of the scientific method by an eminent academic authority on the science of nutrition, but mainly because I want you to see how politely he stated his case: I also am a clinical nutritionist, and I believe that many of the statements in this book are wrong. My hypothesis is that any benefits which Dr McKeith has observed in her patients who take her living food powder have nothing to do with their enzyme content.

Being Wrong: Adventures in the Margin of Error
by Kathryn Schulz
Published 7 Jun 2010

But we have another, competing idea of progress as well—one that rests not on the elimination of error but, surprisingly, on its perpetuation. This idea began to emerge during the Scientific Revolution, through that era’s hallmark development, the scientific method. It is a measure of the method’s success (and its simplicity, in theory if not in practice) that, some 400 years later, virtually every reader of this book will have learned it in junior high school. The gist of the scientific method is that observations lead to hypotheses (which must be testable), which are then subjected to experiments (whose results must be reproducible). If all goes well, the outcome is a theory, a logically consistent, empirically tested explanation for a natural phenomenon.

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error’s “grosser forms.” Sully, 186. Ralph Linton. Ralph Linton, “Error in Anthropology,” in Jastrow, ed., 298. that era’s hallmark development, the scientific method. Systematic methods for inquiring into the natural world have been around for ages: ancient Greek naturalists practiced a form of empiricism, and medieval Muslim scientists developed a method of inquiry that relied on experimentation to weigh competing hypotheses. But the scientific method as we understand it today was introduced to the world through the work of Francis Bacon in his 1620 Novum Organum, and René Descartes in his 1637 Discourse on the Method.

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If all goes well, the outcome is a theory, a logically consistent, empirically tested explanation for a natural phenomenon. As an ideal of intellectual inquiry and a strategy for the advancement of knowledge, the scientific method is essentially a monument to the utility of error. Most of us gravitate toward trying to verify our beliefs, to the extent that we bother investigating their validity at all. But scientists gravitate toward falsification; as a community if not as individuals, they seek to disprove their beliefs. Thus, the defining feature of a hypothesis is that it has the potential to be proven wrong (which is why it must be both testable and tested), and the defining feature of a theory is that it hasn’t been proven wrong yet.

The Master Algorithm: How the Quest for the Ultimate Learning Machine Will Remake Our World
by Pedro Domingos
Published 21 Sep 2015

While the first company’s experts write a thousand rules to predict what its customers want, the second company’s algorithms learn billions of rules, a whole set of them for each individual customer. It’s about as fair as spears against machine guns. Machine learning is a cool new technology, but that’s not why businesses embrace it. They embrace it because they have no choice. Supercharging the scientific method Machine learning is the scientific method on steroids. It follows the same process of generating, testing, and discarding or refining hypotheses. But while a scientist may spend his or her whole life coming up with and testing a few hundred hypotheses, a machine-learning system can do the same in a fraction of a second.

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Trusting in their powers of reasoning, the rationalists concocted theories of the universe that—to put it gently—did not stand the test of time, but they also invented fundamental mathematical techniques like calculus and analytical geometry. The empiricists were altogether more practical, and their influence is everywhere from the scientific method to the Constitution of the United States. David Hume was the greatest of the empiricists and the greatest English-speaking philosopher of all time. Thinkers like Adam Smith and Charles Darwin count him among their key influences. You could also say he’s the patron saint of the symbolists.

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So how do you decide whether to believe what a learner tells you? Simple: you don’t believe anything until you’ve verified it on data that the learner didn’t see. If the patterns the learner hypothesized also hold true on new data, you can be pretty confident that they’re real. Otherwise you know the learner overfit. This is just the scientific method applied to machine learning: it’s not enough for a new theory to explain past evidence because it’s easy to concoct a theory that does that; the theory must also make new predictions, and you only accept it after they’ve been experimentally verified. (And even then only provisionally, because future evidence could still falsify it.)

Smarter Than You Think: How Technology Is Changing Our Minds for the Better
by Clive Thompson
Published 11 Sep 2013

It’s dynamic, argumentative, collaborative, competitive, filled with flashes of crazy excitement and hours of drudgework, and driven by ego: our desire to be the one who figures it out, at least for now. Viewed this way, the scientific method is deeply relevant to everyday life, because it describes how to approach and solve problems. But in school, students are rarely asked to actually use the scientific method. Games, Steinkuehler says, are an ideal native environment for teaching the power of scientific rigor. If science seeks to uncover the invisible rules that govern the world around us, video games are simulated worlds with invisible rule sets just waiting to be uncovered.

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Like many video games, Lineage is quite numeric—each attack shows a number toting up the damage done. After carefully collecting all their data, the teenagers used Excel to build a mathematical model that explained how the boss worked. Then they’d use the model to predict which attacks would be most likely to beat him. That’s when it hit Steinkuehler: the kids were using the scientific method. They’d think of a hypothesis, like “This boss is really susceptible to fire spells.” They’d collect evidence to see if the hypothesis was correct. If it wasn’t, they’d improve it until their hypothesis accounted for the observed data. “My head was spinning,” she tells me. When she met up with one of the kids, she asked him, “Do you realize that what you’re doing is the essence of science?”

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That’s the scaling factor. This is, as the academic James Paul Gee describes it, “algebra talk.” Kids who normally couldn’t care less about science were conducting university-level analysis as part of their hobby. Steinkuehler now argues that video games are one of the best modern conduits to teach kids about the scientific method—why and how it works. As she points out, many kids hate science because it’s taught as a set of facts. Indeed, that’s how most adults see science: a bunch of guys in lab coats solemnly delivering information about How the World Works. But science isn’t about facts. It’s about the quest for facts—the process by which we hash through confusing thickets of ignorance.

The Signal and the Noise: Why So Many Predictions Fail-But Some Don't
by Nate Silver
Published 31 Aug 2012

Andrew Gelman and Cosma Tohilla Shalizi, “Philosophy and the Practice of Bayesian Statistics,” British Journal of Mathematical and Statistical Psychology, pp. 1–31, January 11, 2012. http://www.stat.columbia.edu/~gelman/research/published/philosophy.pdf. 63. Although there are several different formulations of the steps in the scientific method, this version is mostly drawn from “APPENDIX E: Introduction to the Scientific Method,” University of Rochester. http://teacher.pas.rochester.edu/phy_labs/appendixe/appendixe.html. 64. Thomas S. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, Kindle edition). 65. Jacob Cohen, “The Earth Is Round (p<.05),” American Psychologist, 49, 12 (December 1994), pp. 997–1003. http://ist-socrates.berkeley.edu/~maccoun/PP279_Cohen1.pdf. 66.

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IBM estimates that we are generating 2.5 quintillion bytes of data each day, more than 90 percent of which was created in the last two years.36 This exponential growth in information is sometimes seen as a cure-all, as computers were in the 1970s. Chris Anderson, the editor of Wired magazine, wrote in 2008 that the sheer volume of data would obviate the need for theory, and even the scientific method.37 This is an emphatically pro-science and pro-technology book, and I think of it as a very optimistic one. But it argues that these views are badly mistaken. The numbers have no way of speaking for themselves. We speak for them. We imbue them with meaning. Like Caesar, we may construe them in self-serving ways that are detached from their objective reality.

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Everyone can see the statistical patterns, and they are soon reflected in the betting line. The question is whether they represent signal or noise. Voulgaris forms hypotheses from his basketball knowledge so that he might tell the difference more quickly and more accurately. Voulgaris’s approach to betting basketball is one of the purer distillations of the scientific method that you’re likely to find (figure 8-7). He observes the world and asks questions: why are the Cleveland Cavaliers so frequently going over on the total? He then gathers information on the problem, and formulates a hypothesis: the Cavaliers are going over because Ricky Davis is in a contract year and is trying to play at a fast pace to improve his statistics.

Erwin Schrodinger and the Quantum Revolution
by John Gribbin
Published 1 Mar 2012

Of course, the person who is usually credited with developing the scientific method, and in particular with doing experiments with falling bodies, is Galileo Galilei (1564–1642)—although as it happens Galileo himself did not drop objects from the Leaning Tower of Pisa. He did experiments with balls rolling down inclined planes, and also interpreted the famous Leaning Tower experiment, actually carried out by a rival trying to disprove Galileo’s claim that a light object and a heavy object dropped at the same time would hit the ground together. Where, though, did Galileo learn the scientific method? He was certainly capable of working it out for himself; but if he needed any prodding in the right direction, he definitely got it.

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Right at the beginning of the seventeenth century, the English physician and scientist1 William Gilbert (1544–1603) published a treatise on magnetism, De magnete, in which he not only gave a description of magnetic phenomena that was unsurpassed for two hundred years, but extended the understanding derived from his laboratory studies to explain the Earth’s magnetic field—a significant step out into the cosmos at that time. Gilbert also spelled out the basis of what became the scientific method: testing hypotheses by experiment and observation, and rejecting any ideas which do not stand up to those tests. Bizarre though it may seem to us, even in Gilbert’s day it was still common for philosophers to try to settle arguments about what we would regard as scientific matters—such as whether a heavy object falls faster than a lighter object—literally by argument, rather than by doing experiments.

Big Data: A Revolution That Will Transform How We Live, Work, and Think
by Viktor Mayer-Schonberger and Kenneth Cukier
Published 5 Mar 2013

The quest for exactitude began in Europe in the middle of the thirteenth century, when astronomers and scholars took on the ever more precise quantification of time and space—“the measure of reality,” in the words of the historian Alfred Crosby. If one could measure a phenomenon, the implicit belief was, one could understand it. Later, measurement was tied to the scientific method of observation and explanation: the ability to quantify, record, and present reproducible results. “To measure is to know,” pronounced Lord Kelvin. It became a basis of authority. “Knowledge is power,” instructed Francis Bacon. In parallel, mathematicians, and what later became actuaries and accountants, developed methods that made possible the accurate collection, recording, and management of data.

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These hypotheses have often been derived from theories of the natural or the social sciences, which in turn help explain and/or predict the world around us. As we transition from a hypothesis-driven world to a data-driven world, we may be tempted to think that we also no longer need theories. In 2008 Wired magazine’s editor-in-chief Chris Anderson trumpeted that “the data deluge makes the scientific method obsolete.” In a cover story called “The Petabyte Age,” he proclaimed that it amounted to nothing short of “the end of theory.” The traditional process of scientific discovery—of a hypothesis that is tested against reality using a model of underlying causalities—is on its way out, Anderson argued, replaced by statistical analysis of pure correlations that is devoid of theory.

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Technical descriptions of the work are available through Rudin’s and her collaborators’ academic articles on their websites, in particular Cynthia Rudin et al., “Machine Learning for the New York City Power Grid,” IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence 34, no. 2 (2012), pp. 328–345 (http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/68634). [>] Messiness of the term “service box”—This list comes from Rudin et al., “21st-Century Data Miners Meet 19th-Century Electrical Cables.” Rudin quotation—From interview with Cukier, March 2012. [>] Anderson’s views—Chris Anderson, “The End of Theory: The Data Deluge Makes the Scientific Method Obsolete,” Wired, June 2008 (http://www.wired.com/science/discoveries/magazine/16-07/pb_theory/). [>] Anderson’s backpedal—National Public Radio, “Search and Destroy,” July 18, 2008 (http://www.onthemedia.org/2008/jul/18/search-and-destroy/transcript/). [>] On choices influencing our analysis—danah boyd and Kate Crawford.

Giving the Devil His Due: Reflections of a Scientific Humanist
by Michael Shermer
Published 8 Apr 2020

This is so, no matter what the outcome of the race and IQ debate, that is, no matter whether the evidence eventually dictates a genetically caused deficit of nil or 5 or 10 or 20 IQ points.” That principle – the freedom to participate in the dialogue that the philosopher Karl Popper called “conjecture and refutation” – is at the heart of both the scientific method and the political process.7 The reason we need critical feedback from others is that our brains come equipped with a set of cognitive heuristics – or rules of thumb, or shortcuts – that help us navigate through the buzzing blurring confusion of information coming in through our senses. These heuristics are also known as cognitive biases because they often distort our percepts to fit preconceived concepts, and they are part of a larger process called “motivated reasoning,” in which no matter what belief system is in place – religious, political, economic, or social – they shape how we interpret information that comes through our senses and motivate us to reason our way to finding the world to be precisely the way we wish it were.

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That process of generating new ideas and introducing them to your peers and the public where they can be skeptically scrutinized in the bright light of other minds is the only way to find out if you’ve come up with something true and important or if you’ve been immersed in self-deception. James Flynn hits the mark on this point when he writes, “I know of no alternative to the scientific method to maximize accumulation of truth about the physical world and the causes of human behavior. If scholars are to debate this issue, do we not want the best evidence possible – and this can only come from science.” What if it turns out that the primary cause of racial differences in IQ is the environment but, due to academic censorship of sensitive topics, the only people doing research in this area are those who believe that all such differences are to be found in our genes?

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What if it turns out that the primary cause of racial differences in IQ is the environment but, due to academic censorship of sensitive topics, the only people doing research in this area are those who believe that all such differences are to be found in our genes? Where is the environmental refutation to the genetic conjecture? “There will be bad science on both sides of the debate,” Flynn admits. But “The only antidote I know for that is to use the scientific method as scrupulously as possible.” By way of example, Flynn says he discovered his eponymous effect – the “Flynn Effect” that IQ points have been increasing on average about three points every ten years for almost a century9 – by reading Arthur Jensen’s research on IQ and “g” (the general intelligence factor), which no one else noticed because of their reluctance to give any credence to Jensen’s work as a result of his association with the genetic position on racial differences in IQ.

The Burning Answer: The Solar Revolution: A Quest for Sustainable Power
by Keith Barnham
Published 7 May 2015

It took two decades of dedicated effort by research students and research associates at Imperial, staff at QuantaSol and JDSU, and collaborators at Sheffield University, IMEM Parma, CIP Ipswich and IQE Europe to develop the cell, and the nanostructures, using the scientific method. To produce output power from sunlight with 42.5 per cent efficiency, each electron (and each positron) has to experience a mere five jumps between valence and conduction bands, three of which are assisted by photons. Developing that cell with the scientific method, a restricted amount of funding and no national solar cell laboratory to help was a challenge. By contrast, every electron involved in photosynthesis has ten jumps between far more complex systems than valence and conduction bands.

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Before examining the two options for converting carbon dioxide extracted from the air to produce solar fuels, I will give a simplified physicist’s overview of the very complicated chemistry that nature found to solve this problem. As far as we know, she found the solution by chance. With her example before us, and using the ingenuity of the scientific method rather than the random process of evolution, we can surely find a way to make direct air capture ‘economically viable’. What is photosynthesis? The best way to approach this extremely complex subject is by describing Joseph Priestley’s observations, which were fundamental to understanding photosynthesis.

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Then, hundreds of millions of years later, this oxygen was needed when the most advanced form of life started burning the fossilised remains of the plants, algae and bacteria which had decayed deep underground, with potentially disastrous consequences. What can we learn from photosynthesis? This very simplified overview of photosynthesis should still enable us to learn some important lessons. First, if nature found such a complicated way to extract carbon dioxide from the air and turn it into plant fuel by chance, application of the scientific method will surely find a simpler and quicker way. Second, the two approaches to artificial photosynthesis that we will meet have taken inspiration from nature, but mimic it to different extents. Third, photosynthesis in plants directly produces a solar fuel, a carbohydrate, which the leaf needs to grow.

The Visual Miscellaneum: A Colorful Guide to the World's Most Consequential Trivia
by David McCandless
Published 21 Oct 2014

So when someone “speaks the truth”, what they are saying is actually an assemblage of their cultural background, their schooling, and the thoughts and opinions they’ve absorbed from their environment. In a way, you could say that their culture is speaking them. For that reason, in postmodern times, it becomes more accurate and safer to assemble truth with the help of other people, rather than just decide it independently. A clear example of this is the scientific method. Any scientist can do an experiment and declare a discovery about the world. But teams of other scientists must verify or “peer-review” that truth before it’s safe to accept it. The truth here has been assembled by many people. The truth has become social. All the time, though, there is an understanding that even this final “truth” may well just be temporary or convenient, a place-holder to be changed or binned later on.

The Panic Virus: The True Story Behind the Vaccine-Autism Controversy
by Seth Mnookin
Published 3 Jan 2012

One tactic was to promote themselves as insurrectionist truth tellers doing battle with an establishment more concerned with defending its turf than with improving people’s lives. The success of such a gambit depended on the public’s misunderstanding of the approach scientists rely on to understand the world. The steps of the scientific method are the same whether you’re a sixth grader prepping for a science fair or a physicist proposing a new framework for the universe: Observations lead to hypotheses, hypotheses are tested by experimentation, results are analyzed, conclusions are submitted for publication, and the whole process undergoes peer review.

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(To be fair, for a typical twelve-year-old, “publication and peer review” usually means “write it up on a piece of poster board and appeal to your teacher for a good grade.”) It’s a formula so central to the very definition of science that it’s easy to assume it has been accepted as gospel throughout history. That, however, is not the case. The scientific method is actually a relatively new construct, the product of several millennia worth of arguments about the merits of purely hypothetical analysis versus the observation of the world outside ourselves. Aristotle, who believed the only way to truly understand the universe was through a set of abstract “first principles,” was a proponent of the first camp; the tenth-century Persian polymath Ibn-al Haytham, whose evidence-based experiments disproved Aristotle’s speculative theory of light and vision, showed the advantages of the second.

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Until the authors of a given theory have provided a detailed explanation of exactly how they got their results, they’re essentially telling the rest of the world to accept their conclusions on faith—which puts them back on the side of the ideologues who define “truth” as whatever they happen to believe at the moment. This emphasis on disproving what your colleagues had previously believed to be accurate can make listening in on scientific debates feel a little like eavesdropping on a newly divorced couple arguing over child visitation rights. The realities of the scientific method also present an uncomfortable challenge for anyone tasked with explaining to the public why this inherent open-endedness doesn’t negate the high degree of certainty that accompanies widely accepted conclusions. The combination of ambiguity and authority implicit in science is hard enough to understand if you are sitting across the table from a scientist; it is an exponentially more challenging point to convey when filtered through media outlets that eschew nuance and depth in favor of attention-grabbing declarations. 35 A Special Master is someone who has been granted the authority to carry out a course of action designated by a court.

The Book of Why: The New Science of Cause and Effect
by Judea Pearl and Dana Mackenzie
Published 1 Mar 2018

Second, Bayes assumed that L is determined mechanically by shooting a billiard ball from a greater distance, say L*. In this way he bestowed objectivity onto P(L) and transformed the problem into one where prior probabilities are estimable from data, as we see in the teahouse and cancer test examples. In many ways, Bayes’s rule is a distillation of the scientific method. The textbook description of the scientific method goes something like this: (1) formulate a hypothesis, (2) deduce a testable consequence of the hypothesis, (3) perform an experiment and collect evidence, and (4) update your belief in the hypothesis. Usually the textbooks deal with simple yes-or-no tests and updates; the evidence either confirms or refutes the hypothesis.

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Wright, to his great credit, understood the enormous stakes and stated in no uncertain terms, “In treating the model-free approach (3) as preferred alternative… Karlin et al. are urging not merely a change in method, but an abandonment of the purpose of path analysis and evaluation of the relative importance of varying causes. There can be no such analysis without a model. Their advice to anyone with an urge to make such an evaluation is to repress it and do something else.” Wright understood that he was defending the very essence of the scientific method and the interpretation of data. I would give the same advice today to big-data, model-free enthusiasts. Of course, it is okay to tease out all the information that the data can provide, but let’s ask how far this will get us. It will never get us beyond the first rung of the Ladder of Causation, and it will never answer even as simple a question as “What is the relative importance of various causes?”

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Lind established, as conclusively as anybody could at that time, that a diet of citrus fruit prevented sailors from developing this dread disease. By the early 1800s, scurvy had become a problem of the past for the British navy, as all its ships took to the seas with an adequate supply of citrus fruit. This is usually the point at which history books end the story, celebrating a great triumph of the scientific method. It seems very surprising, then, that this completely preventable disease made an unexpected comeback a century later, when British expeditions started to explore the polar regions. The British Arctic Expedition of 1875, the Jackson-Harmsworth Expedition to the Arctic in 1894, and most notably the two expeditions of Robert Falcon Scott to Antarctica in 1903 and 1911 all suffered greatly from scurvy.

The End of Theory: Financial Crises, the Failure of Economics, and the Sweep of Human Interaction
by Richard Bookstaber
Published 1 May 2017

He believed that if economics could not explain market crises and “detect and exhibit every kind of periodic fluctuation,” then it was not a complete theory.17 The inquiry into the causes of phenomena as complex as commercial crises could not approach the rigor or mathematical purity of a science unless Jevons purged this subject of all traces of human emotion, unless he assumed—even if he could not prove—that some physical cause was acting on events others might describe as socially driven. Without some observable natural phenomenon to serve as causal agent, commercial crises threatened to become uninterpretable, limiting the claim of economics to be a science. Because Jevons patterned his economic methods after the scientific methods used for studying the natural world, he looked for a natural phenomenon as the anchor for his study of otherwise unexplainable crises. This led him to theorize that sunspots were the culprit.18 He was determined to link sunspot periodicity to the periodicity of commercial crises. And Britain had certainly been subject to them, most recently the 1845–1850 railway mania bubble, which, like all bubbles, did not end well.

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You can do all sorts of gymnastics to find a set of stable preferences to encompass this, but I can point to any number of other context-driven preferences, and by the time you adjust to take all of them into account you have left economics in the dust; you have a model of the human psyche. If this dynamic is inevitable, then we have lost an essential part of what is necessary for economics to appeal to the scientific method. Economics operates as if we are like MGonz, like a “goddamn robot,” and it will present a reasonable view of our behavior and preferences if we live in such a contextless world. The fact of humanity is an impediment. That characteristic might not matter in the short term or in a stable world, but times of crisis are not such a world.

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Jevons accepted Walras as an ally and promised to spread the news of his Elements of Pure Economics, though in the end he did so only halfheartedly. 17. Jevons and Foxwell (1884), 4. 18. A treatment of Jevons’ interest in crises and his pursuit of sunspots as the explanation is in Poovey (2008), especially 275–83. 19. His reasoning in considering sunspots has a logical structure that echoes in the scientific methods of economics even today. He wrote (Jevons and Foxwell 1884, 194–95): It is a well-known principle of mechanics that the effects of a periodically varying cause are themselves periodic, and usually go through their phases in periods of time equal to those of the cause. There is no doubt that the energy poured upon the earth’s surface in the form of sunbeams is the principal agent in maintaining life here.

The Ghost Map: A Street, an Epidemic and the Hidden Power of Urban Networks.
by Steven Johnson
Published 18 Oct 2006

Latta’s approach differed from the modern treatment only in terms of quantity: liters of water are necessary to ensure a full recovery. Tragically, Latta’s insight was lost in the swarming mass of cholera cures that emerged in the subsequent decades. Despite all the technological advances of the Industrial Age, Victorian medicine was hardly a triumph of the scientific method. Reading through the newspapers and medical journals of the day, what stands out is not just the breadth of remedies proposed, but the breadth of people involved in the discussion: surgeons, nurses, patent medicine quacks, public-health authorities, armchair chemists, all writing the Times and the Globe (or buying classified advertising there) with news of the dependable cure they had concocted.

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The basic technique of population statistics—measuring the incidence of a given phenomenon (disease, crime, poverty) as a percentage of overall population size—had entered the mainstream of scientific and medical thought only in the previous two decades. Epidemiology as a science was still in its infancy, and many of its basic principles had yet to be established. At the same time, the scientific method rarely intersected with the development and testing of new treatments and medicines. When you read through that endless stream of quack cholera cures published in the daily papers, what strikes you most is not that they are all, almost without exception, based on anecdotal evidence. What’s striking is that they never apologize for this shortcoming.

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The first is to embrace—as a matter of philosophy and public policy—the insights of science, in particular the fields that descend from the great Darwinian revolution that began only a matter of years after Snow’s death: genetics, evolutionary theory, environmental science. Our safety depends on being able to predict the evolutionary path that viruses and bacteria will take in the coming decades, just as safety in Snow’s day depended on the rational application of the scientific method to public-health matters. Superstition, then and now, is not just a threat to the truth. It’s also a threat to national security. The second is to commit ourselves anew to the kinds of public-health systems that developed in the wake of the Broad Street outbreak, both in the developed world and the developing: clean water supplies, sanitary waste-removal and recycling systems, early vaccination programs, disease detection and mapping programs.

The Myth of Artificial Intelligence: Why Computers Can't Think the Way We Do
by Erik J. Larson
Published 5 Apr 2021

We are transitioning to something else, which will be smarter and better. Notice that the story is not testable; we just have to wait around and see. If the predicted year of true AI’s coming is false, too, another one can be forecast, a few decades into the future. AI in this sense is unfalsifiable and thus—according to the accepted rules of the scientific method—unscientific. Note that I’m not saying that true AI is impossible. As Stuart Russell and other AI researchers like to point out, twentieth-century scientists such as Ernest Rutherford thought that building an atomic bomb was impossible, but Leo Szilard figured out how nuclear chain reactions work—a mere twenty-four hours after Rutherford pronounced the idea dead.8 It’s a good reminder not to bet against science.

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In his later years, he wrote alone in his home, complaining that he was hungry and cold, too poor to afford fuel for the stove. His few friends worried about him and managed to get him a series of lectures at Harvard on the foundations of logic, in which he explained the types of logical inference with a framework that he thought undergirded the scientific method—a program for thinking clearly. Among the attendees was William James, the famous philosopher and early psychologist at Harvard, who later confessed he didn’t understand the lectures completely—that the mathematics attached to Peirce’s pictures and diagrams were beyond his ken. Apparently James wasn’t alone in this; the lectures went largely unnoticed and appeared in book form only decades later.

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Jonathan Stuart Ward and Adam Barker, “Undefined by Data: A Survey of Big Data Definitions,” School of Computer Science, the University of Saint Andrews, UK. Published in arXiv, 2013. 9. Viktor Mayer-Schönberger and Kenneth Cukier, Big Data: A Revolution That Will Transform How We Live, Work, and Think (New York: Eamon Dolan / Mariner Books, 2014), 6. 10. Chris Anderson, “The End of Theory: The Data Deluge Makes the Scientific Method Obsolete,” Wired, June 23, 2008. 11. Gil Press, “Big Data is Dead. Long Live Big Data AI,” Forbes, July 1, 2019. 12. These can all be recorded as answers to yes / no questions in a data structure (called a vector) containing “1” for YES and “0” for NO. Thus {1,1,1,0,0,1} is a feature vector to be supplied as input to a learning algorithm (the “learner”).

What's Your Future Worth?: Using Present Value to Make Better Decisions
by Peter Neuwirth
Published 2 Mar 2015

All econometric models, and much of the projections that economists (and those who would use Big Data to predict the future) make, are based on the philosophical principle of “induction,” specifically that the accumulation of empirical data will allow us to form better and better theories about how the world works and that these theories can then be used to make predictions to be tested by subsequent observations. It is the basis for the scientific method that we all learned about in school and many of us use regularly in our daily lives. In no way do I want to say that the scientific method is wrong or that induction is not a powerful and useful tool, but in my view when such a tool is available we must be careful not to try to overgeneralize its applicability and use it for purposes for which it was never intended.

Intertwingled: Information Changes Everything
by Peter Morville
Published 14 May 2014

We’d pick a road in the fork only to loop back around. But this process improved quality enormously. By creating a safe space-time in which actions and decisions aren’t binding, we defused self-justification for a while. Of course, we often lack the luxury of space-time. This limits collaboration and the scientific method. When thorny questions arise, folks love to suggest A/B testing. Sometimes that’s a great idea, but often the complexity and connectedness of the system make it unfeasible. It’s difficult to isolate variables, and we can’t always judge long term efficacy based upon the initial response. Users adapt to change over time.

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These are the questions we must ask. Not so long ago, our ways of knowing were different. Before the printing press, we relied heavily upon personal experience and our senses, using evidence and induction to find the truth. In time, we extended our senses with instruments and formalized trial-and-error as the scientific method. We added to our empirical ways with deduction, using reason and logic to mathematically prove the truth. To absorb second-hand knowledge, we had to do it in person. Cultural wisdom was embodied in rituals, habits, laws, and myths. Power, authority, and trust were centered in the community.

On the Future: Prospects for Humanity
by Martin J. Rees
Published 14 Oct 2018

One beaver says to the other: ‘I didn’t actually build it, but it’s based on my idea’. And I like to remind my theorist colleagues that the Swedish engineer Gideon Sundback, who invented the zipper, made a bigger intellectual leap than most of us ever will. Scientists are widely believed to follow a distinctive procedure that’s described as the scientific method. This belief should be laid to rest. It would be truer to say that scientists follow the same rational style of reasoning as lawyers or detectives in categorising phenomena and assessing evidence. A related (and indeed damaging) misperception is the widespread presumption that there is something especially ‘elite’ about the quality of their thought.

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Rees, “Cosmology and the Mulitverse, in Universe or Multiverse, ed. Bernard Carr (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007). 11.  John Polkinghorne, Science and Theology (London: SPCK/Fortress Press, 1995). CHAPTER 5. CONCLUSIONS   1.  E. O. Wilson, Letters to a Young Scientist (New York: Liveright, 2014).   2.  Karl Popper’s key work on the scientific method is The Logic of Scientific Discovery (London: Routledge, 1959)—a translation of the original German version published in 1934. In the intervening years, Popper enhanced his reputation with his deeply impressive contribution to political theory: The Open Society and Its Enemies.   3.  P. Medawar, The Hope of Progress (Garden City, NY: Anchor Press, 1973), 69.   4.  

The Bomber Mafia: A Dream, a Temptation, and the Longest Night of the Second World War
by Malcolm Gladwell
Published 26 Apr 2021

William von Eggers Doering’s quotations are from William von Eggers Doering, interview by James J. Bohning, Philadelphia, PA, and Cambridge, MA, November 1990 and May 1991, Center for Oral History, Science History Institute, available at https://oh.sciencehistory.org/oral-histories/doering-william-von-eggers. Louis Fieser’s quotations are from Louis F. Fieser, The Scientific Method: A Personal Account of Unusual Projects in War and in Peace (New York: Reinhold, 1964). For more information about the birth of napalm, see Robert M. Neer, Napalm: An American Biography (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2015). “After some considerable…for London”: Charles L. McNichols and Clayton D.

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Hershberg (not pictured) conducted experiments with combustible gels that led to the invention of napalm. Photo credit: HUP Fieser, Louis (25). Harvard University Archives The first napalm bomb test was conducted on July 4, 1942, behind Harvard Business School in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Photo credit: Photograph courtesy of Harvard University Archives/Louis Fieser, The Scientific Method To analyze the power of incendiary bombs, a perfect replica of a Japanese village was built at the Dugway Proving Ground, in Utah, in 1943. Photo credit: Courtesy of JapanAirRaids.org In January of 1945, Major General Curtis E. LeMay (left) replaced Brigadier General Haywood Hansell Jr.

The Empathic Civilization: The Race to Global Consciousness in a World in Crisis
by Jeremy Rifkin
Published 31 Dec 2009

Still, many of us have difficulty accepting the idea of reality as the collective understandings we create about the world around us by dint of the relationships we enter. That’s in large part because we were weaned on the “scientific method,” which informed us that objective reality exists and human beings are capable of knowing it by becoming detached observers—the exact opposite of the embodied approach to reality. Francis Bacon, the pre-Enlightenment English philosopher, wrote of a new way to understand and order reality in his master work, the Novum Organum. Bacon outlined what would later be called the scientific method. Impatient with the ancient Greek approach to science with its emphasis on the “why” of things, Bacon turned his attention to the “how” of things.

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In this sense, collaborative learning transforms the classroom into a laboratory for empathic expression which, in turn, enriches the educational process. TEACHING EMPATHIC SCIENCE If we were going to look for ground zero in the teaching of the conventional Enlightenment model of classroom education, it would be the inculcation of the scientific method—an approach to learning that has been nearly deified in the centuries that have followed the European Enlightenment. Children are introduced to the scientific method in middle school and informed that it is the only accurate process by which to gather knowledge and learn about the real world around us. Students are instructed that the best way to investigate phenomena and discover truths is by objective observation.

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Bacon’s method, which was heavily influenced by the new ideas about “perspective” that were revolutionizing art, is based on the idea that the only way to know reality is to remove oneself and create a neutral barrier so that a disembodied mind can observe and make value-free judgments about its workings. Bacon was convinced that the scientific method was a powerful new mental tool that would allow the human mind to “conquer and subdue” nature and “shake her to her foundations.” The goal of the new science, said Bacon, was to “establish and extend the power of dominion of the human race itself over the universe.”30 Bacon and the rationalist philosophers who followed him believed that nature is little more than a storehouse of valuable resources and that the only relationship that counted was the exercise of power over it.

Everything Is Obvious: *Once You Know the Answer
by Duncan J. Watts
Published 28 Mar 2011

In science, we accept that if we want to learn how the world works, we need to test our theories with careful observations and experiments, and then trust the data no matter what our intuition says. And as laborious as it can be, the scientific method is responsible for essentially all the gains in understanding the natural world that humanity has made over the past few centuries. But when it comes to the human world, where our unaided intuition is so much better than it is in physics, we rarely feel the need to use the scientific method. Why is it, for example, that most social groups are so homogeneous in terms of race, education level, and even gender? Why do some things become popular and not others?

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What is perhaps less appreciated about the history of science is that it is also filled with examples of initially simple and elegant formulations becoming increasingly more complex and inelegant as they struggle to bear the burden of empirical evidence. Arguably, in fact, it is the capacity of the scientific method to pursue explanatory power, even at the cost of theoretical elegance and parsimony, where its real strength lies. 17. For Berlin’s full analysis of the differences between science and history, and the impossibility of remaking the latter in the image of the former, see Berlin (1960). 18.

Calling Bullshit: The Art of Scepticism in a Data-Driven World
by Jevin D. West and Carl T. Bergstrom
Published 3 Aug 2020

University professors, including one of the authors of this book, discussed the paper in their courses. Startup companies based around data analytics inserted the Nature paper into their pitch decks. When you have Google-scale data, argued Wired editor Chris Anderson, “the numbers speak for themselves.” The scientific method was no longer necessary, he argued; the huge volumes of data would tell us everything we need to know. Data scientists didn’t need years of epidemiological training or clinicians to diagnose flu symptoms. They just need enough data to “nowcast”*12 the flu and inform the CDC where to deliver Tamiflu.

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If the Google Flu Trends algorithm had to predict flu cases for only the first two years, we would still be writing about its triumph. When asked to extend beyond this time period, it failed. Sound familiar? Yep, this is overfitting. The machine likely focused on irrelevant nuances of that time period. This is where the scientific method can help. It is designed to develop theory that hyper-focuses on the key elements driving the spread of the flu, while ignoring the inconsequential. Search terms might be good indicators of those key elements, but we need a theory to help us generalize beyond two years of predictions. Without theory, predictions based on data rely on mere correlations.

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“Monsanto Weedkiller Roundup Was ‘Substantial Factor’ in Causing Man’s Cancer, Jury Says.” The New York Times. March 19, 2019. CHAPTER 8: CALLING BULLSHIT ON BIG DATA “Advances in AI Are Used to Spot Signs of Sexuality.” The Economist. September 9, 2017. Anderson, Chris. “The End of Theory: The Data Deluge Makes the Scientific Method Obsolete.” Wired. June 23, 2008. Babbage, Charles. Passages from the Life of a Philosopher. London: Longman and Co., 1864. Bloudoff-Indelicato, Mollie. “Have Bad Handwriting? The U.S. Postal Service Has Your Back.” Smithsonian. December 23, 2015. Bradley, Tony. “Facebook AI Creates Its Own Language in Creepy Preview of Our Potential Future.”

Big Bang
by Simon Singh
Published 1 Jan 2004

The Big Bang model of the universe was developed over the last hundred years, and this was only possible because twentieth-century breakthroughs were built upon a foundation of astronomy constructed in previous centuries. In turn, these theories and observations of the sky were set within a scientific framework that had been assiduously crafted over two millennia. Going back even further, the scientific method as a path to objective truth about the material world could start to blossom only when the role of myths and folklore had begun to decline. All in all, the roots of the Big Bang model and the desire for a scientific theory of the universe can be traced right back to the decline of the ancient mythological view of the world.

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When the planet is far from the Sun the radius vector is much longer, but it has a slower speed so it covers a smaller section of the circumference in the same time. Kepler’s ellipses provided a complete and accurate vision of our Solar System. His conclusions were a triumph for science and the scientific method, the result of combining observation, theory and mathematics. He first published his breakthrough in 1609 in a huge treatise entitled Astronomia nova, which detailed eight years of meticulous work, including numerous lines of investigation that led only to dead ends. He asked the reader to bear with him: ‘If thou art bored with this wearisome method of calculation, take pity on me who had to go through with at least seventy repetitions of it, at a very great loss of time.’

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Lemaître was determined to discourage the Pope from making proclamations about cosmology, partly to halt the embarrassment that was being caused to supporters of the Big Bang, but also to avoid any potential difficulties for the Church. If the Pope—caught up as he was by his enthusiasm for the Big Bang model—were to endorse the scientific method and utilise it to support the Catholic Church, then this policy might rebound if new scientific discoveries contradicted Biblical teachings. Lemaître contacted Daniel O’Connell, director of the Vatican Observatory and the Pope’s science advisor, and suggested that together they try to persuade the Pope to keep quiet on cosmology.

The Invention of Science: A New History of the Scientific Revolution
by David Wootton
Published 7 Dec 2015

London: T Creede, 1605. Child, William. Wittgenstein. London: Routledge, 2011. Christianson, John Robert. On Tycho’s Island: Tycho Brahe, Science and Culture in the Sixteenth Century. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. Christie, Thony. ‘Nobody Invented the Scientific Method’. 29 August 2012. http://thonyc.wordpress.com/2012/08/29/nobody-invented-the-scientific-method/ (accessed 10 December 2014). Cicero, Marcus Tullius. De natura deorum: Academica. Ed. H Rackham. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1933. Cieslak-Golonka, Maria and Bruno Morten. ‘The Women Scientists of Bologna’. American Scientist 88 (2000): 68–73.

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The most striking example of this approach in action is Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer’s Leviathan and the Air-pump (1985), generally acknowledged as the most influential work in the discipline since Thomas Kuhn’s Structure of Scientific Revolutions.xlix The new history of science offered, in Steven Shapin’s phrase, a social history of truth.l Scientific method, it was now argued, kept changing, so that there was no such thing as the scientific method: a famous book by Paul Feyerabend was entitled Against Method,li its catchphrase ‘Anything goes’; it was followed by Farewell to Reason.78 Some philosophers and nearly all anthropologists agreed: standards of rationality were, they insisted, local and highly variable.79 But we must reject the Wittgensteinian notion that truth is simply consensus, a notion incompatible with an understanding of one of the fundamental things science does, which is to show that a consensus view must be abandoned when it is at odds with the evidence.lii The classic text here is Galileo’s ‘Letter to Christina of Lorraine’ (1615) in defence of Copernicanism.

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As Kuhn rightly put it, ‘Scientific development is like Darwinian evolution, a process driven from behind rather than pulled toward some fixed goal towards which it grows ever closer.’54 §9 The problem with the relativists is that they explain bad science and good science, phrenology and nuclear physics, in exactly the same way – advocates of ‘the strong programme’ explicitly insist on this equivalence.xxv The problem with the realists is that they assume there is nothing peculiar about the method and structure of science. According to them the scientific method is somehow natural, like walking, not artificial, like a watch. This book will look, I trust, realist to relativists and relativist to realists: that is how it is meant to look. It stands in the tradition of Kuhn’s 1991 lecture ‘The Trouble with the Historical Philosophy of Science’. There Kuhn criticized the relativists (who had taken much of their inspiration from his own work), saying that their mistake was taking the traditional view of scientific knowledge too much for granted.

Consider the Fork: A History of How We Cook and Eat
by Bee Wilson
Published 14 Sep 2012

People in this second group are more likely to think that what they are doing is scientific, the idea being that the more we can measure and pin cooking down, the more like science it will be. Both groups are probably deluding themselves. Artistic cooks do far more measuring than they admit. And cooking-by-numbers cooks are much less scientific than they pretend. Cooking by numbers is based on a subtle misunderstanding of the scientific method. The popular view of “science” is one of unswerving formulas and a set of final answers. In this reading, scientific cooking would be able to come up, once and for all, with the definitive formula for, say, bechamel sauce: how many grams of flour, butter, and milk, the exact temperature at which it should cook, the diameter of the pan, the precise number of seconds for which it should simmer and the number of revolutions of your whisk as it cooks: cooking by numbers.

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Nathan Myhrvold in Modernist Cuisine weighs everything, gram for gram, even water, yet advises that salt is “to taste.” Similarly, Heston Blumenthal measures the dry-matter content in his potatoes but does not measure the salt and pepper in his signature mashed potatoes. This underscores the point that no kitchen formula can ever be definitive. The scientific method is far more open-ended than is generally allowed. It is not a dogmatic set of numbers but a process of forming and testing conjectures based on experience using controlled experiments, which then throw up new conjectures. The process of cooking supper every night can certainly be understood in this light.

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By the second or third time, the numbers are less important because you have started to trust your own senses. After all, Rodgers remarks, you do not need to measure “the exact amount of sugar or milk you add to your coffee or tea.” Numbers, therefore, are crucial, but never the whole story. There is a world outside of measuring in the kitchen. Part of the scientific method is accepting that not everything is within the domain of science. I am fond enough of my measuring devices—there’s a quiet contentment in peering at that classic Pyrex measuring cup trying to see if stock for a pilaf has reached the 600 ml mark; or watching the dial swing around on a candy thermometer when making fudge; or using a tape measure to verify the diameter of biscotti dough.

Postcapitalism: A Guide to Our Future
by Paul Mason
Published 29 Jul 2015

We want to know why, during a million repetitions of their normal lifecycles, small variations can emerge and then, suddenly, massive change. Theories allow us to describe the reality we can’t see. And they allow us to predict. All forms of economics accept the need for theory. But the difficulty of finding one, and confronting its implications, led economics in the late nineteenth century to retreat from the scientific method. Q: Why can’t I ‘see’ value, surplus value and labour time? If they don’t show up in the accounts of companies, and professional economists don’t acknowledge them, aren’t they just a mental construct? A: A more sophisticated way of putting it would be to say, as the Cambridge economist Joan Robinson did in the 1960s, that the labour-theory is ‘metaphysical’ – a mental construct whose existence could never be disproved.

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The labour shortage also made technological innovation necessary. The new technologies that underpinned the rise of merchant capitalism were the ones that stimulated commerce (printing and accountancy), the creation of tradable wealth (mining, the compass and fast ships) and productivity (mathematics and the scientific method). Present throughout the whole process is something that looks incidental to the old system – money and credit – but which is destined to become the basis of the new system. Many laws and customs are actually shaped around ignoring money; in high feudalism credit is seen as sinful. So when money and credit burst through the boundaries and create a market system, it feels like a revolution.

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At key moments, though tentatively at first, the state switched from hindering the change to promoting it. There won’t be exact parallels in the transition to postcapitalism but the rough parallels are there. The thing that is corroding capitalism, barely rationalized by mainstream economics, is information. The equivalent of the printing press and the scientific method is information technology and its spillover into all other forms of technology, from genetics to healthcare to agriculture to the movies. The modern equivalent of the long stagnation of late feudalism is the stalled fifth Kondratieff cycle, where instead of rapidly automating work out of existence, we are reduced to creating bullshit jobs on low pay, and many economies are stagnating.

The Startup Way: Making Entrepreneurship a Fundamental Discipline of Every Enterprise
by Eric Ries
Published 15 Mar 2017

As we discussed in Chapter 3, every startup is first and foremost about vision. The goal of Lean Startup is to find the fastest possible path to realizing this vision. The specifics of how to arrive at the answers will, of course, look different for each project but will follow the same basic steps, employing the scientific method to systematically break down the plan into its component parts through rapid experimentation. LEAN STARTUP AT THE DEPARTMENT OF EDUCATION In August of 2013, President Obama announced that he was in search of a better way to hold colleges and universities accountable for their performance in serving students.

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Our goal as leaders should be: If a project fails, it’s on the project founder. The entrepreneur didn’t deliver the results. He or she allowed it to die — not some higher-up manager. Taking responsibility for that failure is harder in the short term, but failing with honor is a skill.9 And it takes advantage of the most important lesson of the scientific method: If you can’t fail, you can’t learn. Experimenting rapidly, teams learn for themselves what’s important, and the lessons teams learn—about customers, about the market, about themselves—are much more profound than they would be otherwise. And many failed projects—think back to Amazon’s Fire phone from Chapter 1—lay the foundation for future successes. 5.

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Business Model Generation: A Handbook for Visionaries, Game Changers and Challengers (Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, 2010). 10. fastcompany.com/​3068931/​why-this-ceo-appointed-an-employee-to-change-dumb-company-rules. CHAPTER 7 1. Also along for the ride, doing a lot of critical and difficult legwork were Aubrey Smith, Tony Campbell, Marilyn Gorman, and Steve Liguori. 2. playbook.cio.gov/. 3. inc.com/​steve-blank/​key-to-success-getting-out-of-building.html. 4. Students of the scientific method may be concerned that we are not teaching teams the importance of a falsifiable hypothesis. It’s true that I generally save this bit of theory for a more advanced session, but keep in mind that startup arrogance actually works in our favor here. The idea that every single person on the planet will love my product is the ultimate in easily falsified hypotheses. 5. davidgcohen.com/​2011/​08/​28/​the-mentor-manifesto/. 6.

Under the Knife: A History of Surgery in 28 Remarkable Operations
by Arnold van de Laar Laproscopic Surgeon
Published 1 Oct 2018

A diagnosis of ileus is more probable if a CT scan shows possible indications of the disease, but less probable if the patient displays no symptoms and even less probable if a surgeon sees no reason to operate. Then Karl Popper introduced the principle of falsifiability and the scientific method. He stated that the truth cannot be discovered. We can only develop a theory of the truth, and then only if we observe one crucial condition: the theory must be formulated in such a way that it can be refuted. This became the basis of all modern medical science. In daily clinical practice, the scientific method works as follows: a clear treatment plan is set in motion for a patient as quickly as possible, based on a working diagnosis. That working diagnosis is based on a falsifiable theory of reality.

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For example, that the patient had been suffering from diarrhoea for a week before the inflammation occurred, which makes the diagnosis less likely. What lies behind this mutual lack of understanding is a philosophical distinction between deduction and induction, two ways of discovering the truth through logic. Historically, the deductive is older than the inductive method, but both were replaced in the philosophy of science by the scientific method, developed by Karl Popper in 1934. During the Middle Ages, it was widely believed that human knowledge had already reached its zenith in the golden age of classical antiquity. Doctors and surgeons therefore based their work uncritically on the wisdom of the Greek philosopher Aristotle and the Roman gladiator physician Galen, two men who, with hindsight, did not stand out as providing their theses with a solid foundation in fact.

Stakeholder Capitalism: A Global Economy That Works for Progress, People and Planet
by Klaus Schwab
Published 7 Jan 2021

But before we try to make up for those errors in our economic development though, we must first ask: Is another development path already available? And to what extent can it be found in the East, in the rise of Asia? Notes 1 Kuznets was born in Pinsk, then part of the Russian Empire. Nowadays, Pinsk is part of Belarus. 2 “Political Arithmetic: Simon Kuznets and the Empirical Tradition in Economics”, Chapter 5: The Scientific Methods of Simon Kuznets, Robert William Fogel, Enid M. Fogel, Mark Guglielmo, Nathaniel Grotte, University of Chicago Press, p. 105, https://www.nber.org/system/files/chapters/c12917/c12917.pdf. 3 A direct quotation of Kuznets’ autobiography for the Nobel Prize committee. The Nobel Prize, “Simon Kuznets Biographical,” 1971, https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/economic-sciences/1971/kuznets/biographical/. 4 “GDP: A brief history,” Elizabeth Dickinson, Foreign Policy, January 2011, https://foreignpolicy.com/2011/01/03/gdp-a-brief-history/. 5 Ibidem. 6 “Beyond GDP: Economists Search for New Definition of Well-Being,” Der Spiegel, September 2009, https://www.spiegel.de/international/business/beyond-gdp-economists-search-for-new-definition-of-well-being-a-650532.html. 7 Phone interview with Diane Coyle by Peter Vanham, August 18, 2019. 8 Measured in constant 2010 US dollars. 9 World Bank, GDP Growth (annual %), 1961–2018, https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.MKTP.KD.ZG. 10 “What's a Global Recession,” Bob Davis, The Wall Street Journal, April 2009, https://blogs.wsj.com/economics/2009/04/22/whats-a-global-recession/. 11 United States Census Bureau, International Data Base, September 2018, https://www.census.gov/data-tools/demo/idb/informationGateway.php. 12 “World Economic Outlook,” International Monetary Fund, Updated July 2019, https://www.imf.org/en/Publications/WEO/Issues/2019/07/18/WEOupdateJuly2019. 13 “World Economic Outlook,” International Monetary Fund, April 2019, Appendix A https://www.imf.org/~/media/Files/Publications/WEO/2019/April/English/text.ashx?

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World Economic Forum, http://www3.weforum.org/docs/WEF_White_Paper_We_Will_Live_to_100.pdf. 34 “Labor Productivity and Costs,” Bureau of Labor Statistics, https://www.bls.gov/lpc/prodybar.htm. 35 “Decoupling of Wages from Productivity,” OECD, Economic Outlook, November 2018, https://www.oecd.org/economy/outlook/Decoupling-of-wages-from-productivity-november-2018-OECD-economic-outlook-chapter.pdf. 36 “Some Notes on the Scientific Methods of Simon Kuznets,” Robert Fogel, National Bureau of Economic Research, December 1987, https://www.nber.org/papers/w2461.pdf. 37 “Global Inequality is Declining—Largely Thanks to China and India,” Zsolt Darvas, Bruegel Institute, April 2018, https://bruegel.org/2018/04/global-income-inequality-is-declining-largely-thanks-to-china-and-india/. 38 “Upper-Middle-Income Countries,” World Bank, https://datahelpdesk.worldbank.org/knowledgebase/articles/906519-world-bank-country-and-lending-groups. 39 “China Lifts 740 Million Rural Poor Out of Poverty Since 1978,” Xinhua, September 2018, http://www.xinhuanet.com/english/2018-09/03/c_137441670.htm. 40 “Minneapolis Fed, “Income and Wealth Inequality in America, 1949–2016,” https://www.minneapolisfed.org/institute/working-papers-institute/iwp9.pdf. 41 “Piketty's Inequality Story in Six Charts,” John Cassidy, The New Yorker, March 2014, https://www.newyorker.com/news/john-cassidy/pikettys-inequality-story-in-six-charts. 42 “World Inequality Report, 2018,” https://wir2018.wid.world/files/download/wir2018-summary-english.pdf. 43 The Precariat: The New Dangerous Class, Guy Standing, 2011, https://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/the-precariat-9781849664561/. 44 Interview with Kalle Lasn by Peter Vanham, Vancouver, Canada, March 2012. 45 “World Inequality Report, 2018,” https://wir2018.wid.world/files/download/wir2018-summary-english.pdf. 46 “How Unequal Is Europe?

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DataSetCode=HEALTH_STAT. 57 “Global Social Mobility Index 2020: Why Economies Benefit from Fixing Inequality,” World Economic Forum, January 2020, https://www.weforum.org/reports/global-social-mobility-index-2020-why-economies-benefit-from-fixing-inequality. 58 “Fair Progress? Economic Mobility across Generations around the World, 2018,” The World Bank, https://www.worldbank.org/en/topic/poverty/publication/fair-progress-economic-mobility-across-generations-around-the-world. 59 “ibidem”. 60 “Some Notes on the Scientific Methods of Simon Kuznets,” Robert Fogel, NBER, December 1987, https://www.nber.org/papers/w2461.pdf. 61 These two sentences are adapted from “The World Economic Forum, A Partner in Shaping History, The First 40 Years, 1971-2010,” http://www3.weforum.org/docs/WEF_First40Years_Book_2010.pdf. 62 The Limits to Growth, p. 51, http://www.donellameadows.org/wp-content/userfiles/Limits-to-Growth-digital-scan-version.pdf. 63 Ibidem, p.53. 64 Ibidem, p.71. 65 “Earth Overshoot Day,” Global Footprint Network, https://www.overshootday.org/newsroom/press-release-july-2019-english/. 66 “Delayed Earth Overshoot Day Points to Opportunities to Build Future in Harmony with Our Finite Planet,” Global Footprint Network, August 2020, https://www.overshootday.org/newsroom/press-release-august-2020-english/. 67 “Statistical Review of World Energy 2019, Primary Energy,” BP, https://www.bp.com/en/global/corporate/energy-economics/statistical-review-of-world-energy/primary-energy.html. 68 “Fossil Fuels, Fossil Fuels in Electricity Production,” Our World in Data, https://ourworldindata.org/fossil-fuels. 69 “Statistical Review of World Energy 2019, Primary Energy,” BP, https://www.bp.com/en/global/corporate/energy-economics/statistical-review-of-world-energy/primary-energy.html. 70 “Global Resources Outlook 2019,” http://www.resourcepanel.org/reports/global-resources-outlook. 71 “Water Scarcity,” UN Water, 2018, https://www.unwater.org/water-facts/scarcity/. 72 “ibidem” 73 World Economic Forum, 2016: https://www.weforum.org/press/2016/01/more-plastic-than-fish-in-the-ocean-by-2050-report-offers-blueprint-for-change/. 74 “22 of World's 30 Most Polluted Cities are in India, Greenpeace Says,” The Guardian, March 2019. 75 AirVisual https://www.airvisual.com/world-most-polluted-cities. 76 “Soil Pollution: A Hidden Reality,” Rodríguez-Eugenio, N., McLaughlin, M., and Pennock, D., FAO, 2018, http://www.fao.org/3/I9183EN/i9183en.pdf. 77 “Extinctions Increasing at Unprecedented Pace, UN Study Warns,” Financial Times, May 2019, https://www.ft.com/content/a7a54680-6f28-11e9-bf5c-6eeb837566c5. 78 “ibidem”. 79 UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, 2018, https://www.ipcc.ch/site/assets/uploads/sites/2/2018/07/sr15_headline_statements.pdf. 80 “New Climate Predictions Assess Global Temperatures in Coming Five Years,” World Meteorological Organization, July 2020, https://public.wmo.int/en/media/press-release/new-climate-predictions-assess-global-temperatures-coming-five-years. 81 “Here Comes the Bad Season: July 2019 Is Likely to Be the Hottest Month Ever Measured,” The Atlantic, https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2019/07/july-2019-shaping-be-warmest-month-ever/594229/. 82 Telebasel, Sich entleerende Gletschertasche lässt Bach in Zermatt hochgehen, https://telebasel.ch/2019/06/11/erneut-ein-rekordheisser-hochsommer-verzeichnet/. 83 “Migration, Climate Change and the Environment, A Complex Nexus,” UN Migration Agency IOM, https://www.iom.int/complex-nexus#estimates. 84 “ibidem”. 85 “Burning Planet: Climate Fires and Political Flame Wars Rage,” World Economic Forum, January 2020, https://www.weforum.org/press/2020/01/burning-planet-climate-fires-and-political-flame-wars-rage. 86 “Our house is still on fire and you’re fuelling the flames, World Economic Forum Agenda, January 2020, https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2020/01/greta-speech-our-house-is-still-on-fire-davos-2020/. 3 The Rise of Asia The view from the Sham Chun River in Southern China offers a stark contrast.

Stakeholder Capitalism: A Global Economy That Works for Progress, People and Planet
by Klaus Schwab and Peter Vanham
Published 27 Jan 2021

But before we try to make up for those errors in our economic development though, we must first ask: Is another development path already available? And to what extent can it be found in the East, in the rise of Asia? Notes 1 Kuznets was born in Pinsk, then part of the Russian Empire. Nowadays, Pinsk is part of Belarus. 2 “Political Arithmetic: Simon Kuznets and the Empirical Tradition in Economics”, Chapter 5: The Scientific Methods of Simon Kuznets, Robert William Fogel, Enid M. Fogel, Mark Guglielmo, Nathaniel Grotte, University of Chicago Press, p. 105, https://www.nber.org/system/files/chapters/c12917/c12917.pdf. 3 A direct quotation of Kuznets’ autobiography for the Nobel Prize committee. The Nobel Prize, “Simon Kuznets Biographical,” 1971, https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/economic-sciences/1971/kuznets/biographical/. 4 “GDP: A brief history,” Elizabeth Dickinson, Foreign Policy, January 2011, https://foreignpolicy.com/2011/01/03/gdp-a-brief-history/. 5 Ibidem. 6 “Beyond GDP: Economists Search for New Definition of Well-Being,” Der Spiegel, September 2009, https://www.spiegel.de/international/business/beyond-gdp-economists-search-for-new-definition-of-well-being-a-650532.html. 7 Phone interview with Diane Coyle by Peter Vanham, August 18, 2019. 8 Measured in constant 2010 US dollars. 9 World Bank, GDP Growth (annual %), 1961–2018, https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.MKTP.KD.ZG. 10 “What's a Global Recession,” Bob Davis, The Wall Street Journal, April 2009, https://blogs.wsj.com/economics/2009/04/22/whats-a-global-recession/. 11 United States Census Bureau, International Data Base, September 2018, https://www.census.gov/data-tools/demo/idb/informationGateway.php. 12 “World Economic Outlook,” International Monetary Fund, Updated July 2019, https://www.imf.org/en/Publications/WEO/Issues/2019/07/18/WEOupdateJuly2019. 13 “World Economic Outlook,” International Monetary Fund, April 2019, Appendix A https://www.imf.org/~/media/Files/Publications/WEO/2019/April/English/text.ashx?

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World Economic Forum, http://www3.weforum.org/docs/WEF_White_Paper_We_Will_Live_to_100.pdf. 34 “Labor Productivity and Costs,” Bureau of Labor Statistics, https://www.bls.gov/lpc/prodybar.htm. 35 “Decoupling of Wages from Productivity,” OECD, Economic Outlook, November 2018, https://www.oecd.org/economy/outlook/Decoupling-of-wages-from-productivity-november-2018-OECD-economic-outlook-chapter.pdf. 36 “Some Notes on the Scientific Methods of Simon Kuznets,” Robert Fogel, National Bureau of Economic Research, December 1987, https://www.nber.org/papers/w2461.pdf. 37 “Global Inequality is Declining—Largely Thanks to China and India,” Zsolt Darvas, Bruegel Institute, April 2018, https://bruegel.org/2018/04/global-income-inequality-is-declining-largely-thanks-to-china-and-india/. 38 “Upper-Middle-Income Countries,” World Bank, https://datahelpdesk.worldbank.org/knowledgebase/articles/906519-world-bank-country-and-lending-groups. 39 “China Lifts 740 Million Rural Poor Out of Poverty Since 1978,” Xinhua, September 2018, http://www.xinhuanet.com/english/2018-09/03/c_137441670.htm. 40 “Minneapolis Fed, “Income and Wealth Inequality in America, 1949–2016,” https://www.minneapolisfed.org/institute/working-papers-institute/iwp9.pdf. 41 “Piketty's Inequality Story in Six Charts,” John Cassidy, The New Yorker, March 2014, https://www.newyorker.com/news/john-cassidy/pikettys-inequality-story-in-six-charts. 42 “World Inequality Report, 2018,” https://wir2018.wid.world/files/download/wir2018-summary-english.pdf. 43 The Precariat: The New Dangerous Class, Guy Standing, 2011, https://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/the-precariat-9781849664561/. 44 Interview with Kalle Lasn by Peter Vanham, Vancouver, Canada, March 2012. 45 “World Inequality Report, 2018,” https://wir2018.wid.world/files/download/wir2018-summary-english.pdf. 46 “How Unequal Is Europe?

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DataSetCode=HEALTH_STAT. 57 “Global Social Mobility Index 2020: Why Economies Benefit from Fixing Inequality,” World Economic Forum, January 2020, https://www.weforum.org/reports/global-social-mobility-index-2020-why-economies-benefit-from-fixing-inequality. 58 “Fair Progress? Economic Mobility across Generations around the World, 2018,” The World Bank, https://www.worldbank.org/en/topic/poverty/publication/fair-progress-economic-mobility-across-generations-around-the-world. 59 “ibidem”. 60 “Some Notes on the Scientific Methods of Simon Kuznets,” Robert Fogel, NBER, December 1987, https://www.nber.org/papers/w2461.pdf. 61 These two sentences are adapted from “The World Economic Forum, A Partner in Shaping History, The First 40 Years, 1971-2010,” http://www3.weforum.org/docs/WEF_First40Years_Book_2010.pdf. 62 The Limits to Growth, p. 51, http://www.donellameadows.org/wp-content/userfiles/Limits-to-Growth-digital-scan-version.pdf. 63 Ibidem, p.53. 64 Ibidem, p.71. 65 “Earth Overshoot Day,” Global Footprint Network, https://www.overshootday.org/newsroom/press-release-july-2019-english/. 66 “Delayed Earth Overshoot Day Points to Opportunities to Build Future in Harmony with Our Finite Planet,” Global Footprint Network, August 2020, https://www.overshootday.org/newsroom/press-release-august-2020-english/. 67 “Statistical Review of World Energy 2019, Primary Energy,” BP, https://www.bp.com/en/global/corporate/energy-economics/statistical-review-of-world-energy/primary-energy.html. 68 “Fossil Fuels, Fossil Fuels in Electricity Production,” Our World in Data, https://ourworldindata.org/fossil-fuels. 69 “Statistical Review of World Energy 2019, Primary Energy,” BP, https://www.bp.com/en/global/corporate/energy-economics/statistical-review-of-world-energy/primary-energy.html. 70 “Global Resources Outlook 2019,” http://www.resourcepanel.org/reports/global-resources-outlook. 71 “Water Scarcity,” UN Water, 2018, https://www.unwater.org/water-facts/scarcity/. 72 “ibidem” 73 World Economic Forum, 2016: https://www.weforum.org/press/2016/01/more-plastic-than-fish-in-the-ocean-by-2050-report-offers-blueprint-for-change/. 74 “22 of World's 30 Most Polluted Cities are in India, Greenpeace Says,” The Guardian, March 2019. 75 AirVisual https://www.airvisual.com/world-most-polluted-cities. 76 “Soil Pollution: A Hidden Reality,” Rodríguez-Eugenio, N., McLaughlin, M., and Pennock, D., FAO, 2018, http://www.fao.org/3/I9183EN/i9183en.pdf. 77 “Extinctions Increasing at Unprecedented Pace, UN Study Warns,” Financial Times, May 2019, https://www.ft.com/content/a7a54680-6f28-11e9-bf5c-6eeb837566c5. 78 “ibidem”. 79 UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, 2018, https://www.ipcc.ch/site/assets/uploads/sites/2/2018/07/sr15_headline_statements.pdf. 80 “New Climate Predictions Assess Global Temperatures in Coming Five Years,” World Meteorological Organization, July 2020, https://public.wmo.int/en/media/press-release/new-climate-predictions-assess-global-temperatures-coming-five-years. 81 “Here Comes the Bad Season: July 2019 Is Likely to Be the Hottest Month Ever Measured,” The Atlantic, https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2019/07/july-2019-shaping-be-warmest-month-ever/594229/. 82 Telebasel, Sich entleerende Gletschertasche lässt Bach in Zermatt hochgehen, https://telebasel.ch/2019/06/11/erneut-ein-rekordheisser-hochsommer-verzeichnet/. 83 “Migration, Climate Change and the Environment, A Complex Nexus,” UN Migration Agency IOM, https://www.iom.int/complex-nexus#estimates. 84 “ibidem”. 85 “Burning Planet: Climate Fires and Political Flame Wars Rage,” World Economic Forum, January 2020, https://www.weforum.org/press/2020/01/burning-planet-climate-fires-and-political-flame-wars-rage. 86 “Our house is still on fire and you’re fuelling the flames, World Economic Forum Agenda, January 2020, https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2020/01/greta-speech-our-house-is-still-on-fire-davos-2020/. 3 The Rise of Asia The view from the Sham Chun River in Southern China offers a stark contrast.

The Dictionary People: The Unsung Heroes Who Created the Oxford English Dictionary
by Sarah Ogilvie
Published 17 Oct 2023

When Elworthy’s grammar was published in 1877, Murray described it as ‘the first grammar of an English dialect of any scientific value’. The key word in this sentence is ‘English’ – Murray, never one to underestimate his own scholarship, had, of course, already published his own grammar of a Scottish dialect four years before Elworthy’s, in which he had admirably applied the scientific methods of Continental philology, the same methods which he brought to his work on the OED. The friendship had its benefits for Murray. A man of Elworthy’s stature and wealth would prove helpful, especially when it came to negotiating the conditions of his employment at Oxford University Press.

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Worcester had been Webster’s assistant on his American Dictionary of the English Language (1828) but, a superior philologist to Webster, he went off and wrote his own dictionary which was published two years later as the Comprehensive Pronouncing and Explanatory English Dictionary. Webster accused Worcester of plagiarism. A public slanging match ensued, which continued beyond Webster’s death in 1843 and only ended a little after the OED project began. Worcester applied the scientific method to his etymologies (which Webster did not), and wrote a revised and expanded version of his original dictionary entitled Dictionary of the English Language (1860). However, four years later, in 1864, Webster’s Unabridged was published and it marked an important moment in modern lexicography: no longer the idiosyncratic work of one man, this dictionary was the product of a collaborative team with Noah Porter as Chief Editor and the German scholar Carl A.

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Mahn’s etymologies adopted Worcester’s scientific approach, thereby producing a dictionary that displayed the best virtues of both. The Dictionary War was over, confirmed by the death of Worcester the following year (1865). In this context, Marsh invited members of the American public to help create a radical new dictionary of all English which applied the scientific method, was collaborative in its making, and was based on written evidence. They were asked to collect current words and especially to read books from the eighteenth century – because literature from earlier centuries was harder to get in America at the time. Marsh ended his appeal with the warning that Americans would be paid nothing for their help.

Numbers Rule Your World: The Hidden Influence of Probability and Statistics on Everything You Do
by Kaiser Fung
Published 25 Jan 2010

The problem of false alarms demonstrated that some group differences were not caused by test developers but by differential ability, elevating the need to untangle the two factors. Henceforth, the mere existence of a racial gap should not automatically implicate item writers in the creation of unfair tests. While the initial foray into the scientific method turned out bad science, it nevertheless produced some good data, paving the way to rampant technical progress. By 1987, Anrig could turn his back on the Golden Rule procedure because the team at ETS had achieved the breakthrough needed to unravel the two factors. Simply put, the key insight was to compare like with like.

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If Rosenthal chose to absorb a higher false-positive rate—as much as one in a hundred is typical—he could reduce the chance of a false negative, which is the failure to expose dishonest store owners. This explains why he could reject the no-fraud hypothesis for western Canada as well, even though the odds of 1 in 2.3 million were higher.) The Power of Being Impossible Statistical thinking is absolutely central to the scientific method, which requires theories to generate testable hypotheses. Statisticians have created a robust framework for judging whether there is sufficient evidence to support a given hypothesis. This framework is known as statistical testing, also called hypothesis testing or significance testing. See De Veaux’s textbook Stats: Data and Models for a typically fluent introduction to this vast subject.

The Internet of Us: Knowing More and Understanding Less in the Age of Big Data
by Michael P. Lynch
Published 21 Mar 2016

The same thing could be said for understanding—except even more so. And that’s important, because understanding is what keeps the “human” in what I earlier called the digital human. The End of Theory? In 2008, Chris Anderson, then editor of Wired, wrote a controversial and widely cited editorial called “The End of Theory: The Data Deluge Makes the Scientific Method Obsolete.” Anderson claimed that what we are now calling big data analytics was overthrowing traditional ways of doing science: This is a world where massive amounts of data and applied mathematics replace every other tool that might be brought to bear. Out with every theory of human behavior, from linguistics to sociology.

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S., 159–60 Bush, George W., advisor to, 86 calculators, 153 Caldarelli, Guido, 112 cameras, 89, 94 security, 91, 97 Cancer Ward (Solzhenitsyn), 185 capitalism, changes in, 140–41, 144 Cartesian coordinates, 175 Cartesian foundationalism, 126–29, 131 Catanzaro, Michele, 112 Cavell, Stanley, 10 CCTV, 91 CD-ROMs, 8 censorship, 42, 65, 66, 134, 144 self-, 97 Chabris, Christopher, 30 Chalmers, David, 115 chat rooms, 118 chess, 165 children: and hands-on experience, 174 understanding in, 177 China: iPhone production in, 77–78, 139 oppressive government policies of, 81 truth deleted from Internet in, 65, 66 Chuck, 167–68, 173 Church, power held by, 133–34 CIA, 100 data searched by, 99 Clark, Andy, 115 climate change, 56, 100, 124, 144, 185, 198 cloud: data storage on, 23 data trail on, 9 in information sharing, 4–5 coherentism, 130 see also fabric metaphor, for structure of beliefs Collaborative Commons, 140–41 educational model of, 151–52 as first world resource, 144 collective responsibility, 118–19 College Humor (website), 24 common point of view, 48 communication: isolation and, 41–42 neuromedia and, 113–14 of standards, 39–40 computers, xvii brains and, 19 games, 19–20, 191 reality simulated in, see SIMs self-awareness in, 116, 193 Concept of Mind, The (Ryle), 168 conclusions, jumping to, 29–30, 58 Condorcet Jury Theorum, 120–21 confirmation bias, 54–55, 56 defined, 51–52 Congress, U.S., NSA vs., 99 consequences, 172 conservatives, 43 context, in data analysis, 161 continuum hypothesis, defined, 197 “cookies,” tracking by, 90 Copernicus, Nicolaus, 34 corporate responsibility, 118 corporations, as “people,” 200 correlation analyses, 158–59 Coursera, 150 cover-ups, 83 creationism, 49 creativity: “impossible” aspect of, 176, 177 knowledge and, xvii, 6, 180 as personally relative, 176–77, 181–82 in reaching understanding, 15–16, 174–77, 181, 183 value and importance of, 183 credibility, 40, 46, 50, 119–20 and human rights, 147 criminal justice system, identification techniques in, 93–95 critical thinking: democratic institutional support for, 61–62 importance of, 125 knowledge through, 33–34 crowdsourcing, 136–37, 141–42 Cukier, Kenneth, 8, 158–59 culture: form of life as, 10, 17–18 video map of, 161–62 cyborging, 5–6, 191–92 Daedalus, 13 D’Agata, John, 79–80 Daily Kos, 43 Daisey, Mike, 77–80, 82 data, information vs., 12, 14 data analysis, data analytics, 9, 90, 91, 155–63 data maps, 160 data mining, 90–91 abuses of, 95–107 commercial use of, 97, 105–6 control and, 96 incidental collection in, 95–96, 99, 199 intention in, 96–98, 100 data storage, 91, 95–96, 99–100, 108 data trails, 9, 185 dating sites, 157 deception: justified, and relation to autonomy, 83 truth and, 75–83 decision making: autonomy in, 102–7 overruling in, 102 undermining in, 102–3 Deepwater Horizon oil spill, responsibility for, 118 dehumanization, 105 democratization: capitalism vs., 141–42 Internet as force for, 11, 49, 55–63, 125, 133–38, 148 of public policy, 121 Dennett, Daniel, 74 dependency relationships, in understanding, 165–67, 177, 182 dephysicalized objects, defined, 69 Descartes, René, 19–20, 34, 39, 126–27, 129, 162, 174–76, 177 Dewey, John, 151 Dianetics, 61 Dick, Philip K., 75 dictionaries, 21–22 digital form of life, xviii, 3–20 as abstract and depersonalized, 41–50 caveats about, 184–88 as a construction, 70–74, 83–86, 187 defined, 10 limitations of, 16 understanding in, 153–78 see also Internet of Us digital groups, 118–19 digital knowledge: caveats about, 184–88 dependence on, xvi–xviii, 5, 12, 21–26, 31, 36, 179 distribution of, 113 education and, 148–54 full and equal participation in, 146 as interconnective, 184–88 international access rates for, 135, 144–45 massive proliferation of, 8, 11–12, 32, 56, 128 network of, 111–32 as power, 9, 98–99, 186 ready accessibility of, 3–4, 23, 30, 42, 56, 113–16, 135–36, 141, 149, 153, 180 speed of, 23, 29–30, 42, 135 using alternative sources to, 21–23 see also Google-knowing dinosaurs, 66 discursive knowledge, 169 “divided line” graph of knowledge, 126 DNA identification techniques, 93–94 Dreyfus, Hubert, 168, 171 drugs: abilities changed by, 173 SIM life compared to, 77 Duke University, 152 earthquakes, emotional epicenters of, 160–61 eavesdropping, 101 Ebola, 16 economy, 111, 162 as digitally dependent, 7–8, 9 free-market, 145 full and equal participation in, 146 globalization of, 139, 142 of knowledge, 138–45 manufacturing in, 138–39 prediction markets in, 122–23 education: cheapening of, 152–53 crisis in, 149–50 as epistemic resource, 143, 145 information technology and, 148–54 old model of, 151–52 U.S. hegemony in, 149 education bubble, 149, 152 education systems, 35–36 edX, 150 Einstein, Albert, 175, 177 elections, 120–23 emails, 81 emotion, reasoning vs., 51–55 “End of Theory, The: The Data Deluge Makes the Scientific Method Obsolete” (Anderson), 156–57 Enlightenment, 33–34, 58–59 environment: interacting with, 174 receptive tracking of, 27–30, 131 “environmental luck,” 203 epilepsy, 168 epistêmê, 14, 170, 172 epistemic economy, 147–48 epistemic equality, 138–48, 150, 187 epistemic inclusivity, 135–36 epistemic inequality, 142–48, 201 epistemic injustice, 146–48, 201 epistemic principles, 14, 47, 50, 55, 57, 60 as democratic, 62, 135–36 epistemic resources, 143–45 epistemic trust, 195 epistemology, defined, see epistemic principles Epistemology and Cognition (Goldman), 194 Essay concerning Human Understanding, An (Locke), 35 ethical values: changes in, 53–54 democratic, 58 and fragmentation, 44 technology and, xvii, 6, 89–90 “eureka” moment, 176, 177 Eurocentrism, 162 Euthyphro (Plato), 165–66, 172 evangelicals, 47–49 evidence, in change of belief, 54–55 expectations: in changing of social constructs, 72–73 conclusions colored by, 29–30, 160 theoretical, 159 of truth, 79–80 experience: as foundation for knowledge, 127, 131 in hands-on movements, 173–74 illusion and reality in, 18–19 procedural knowledge in, 172–73 understanding through, 16, 173–74 experts, expertise: knowledge based on, 15, 35–38, 120, 139–40 outsourcing of, 141–42 in predicting, 122–23 in problem solving, 137 understanding and, 170–71 explanation, 165–67, 182 extended mind hypothesis, 115 fabric metaphor, for structure of beliefs, 129 Facebook, xvii, 8, 24, 43, 72, 124 hegemony of, 146 as simulacrum, 16 tracking by, 105 fact-checking, 46–47, 56, 85, 130 falsehoods, 77–83 “fast thinking” processes, 29–30 FBI, data searched by, 99 fiction, 79–80 fingerprints, 93 FISA, see Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act fishbowls, digital life compared to, 91 Fishburne, Laurence, 18–19 Flanagan, Owen, 73–74 Floridi, Luciano, 10, 69–71 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA; 1978), 88 court of, 99, 109 form of life: defined, 10 philosophy in, 17–18 Forms (Platonic), 126 foundationalism, Cartesian, 126–29, 131 Fox News, 43 fragmentation: of reason, 148 threat of, 4, 41–63 Freebase, 151 freedom of choice, autonomy of decision vs., 102 French Revolution, 58 Freud, Sigmund, 184 Fricker, Miranda, 146–48, 201 Galileo, 34, 68 Galton, Francis, 120 games, gaming, 20, 191 gatekeeping, 128, 134, 146 gender, 162 in marriage, 53–54, 72 in problem solving, 137 Georgetown University, 77–78 Gilbert, Margaret, 117–19, 200 Glass, Ira, 78 Glaucon, 54 Glauconian reasoning, 54–55, 56–58 global economy, 139, 142, 152 global warming, 56, 100, 124, 144, 185, 198 Goldberg, Sandy, 115 Goldman, Alvin, 194 Google, 5, 23, 30, 113, 128, 130, 135, 163, 174, 182, 203 business model of, 9 data collection and tracking by, 90, 155–56, 158, 161 as hypothetical “guy,” 24 monopolization by, 145–46 propaganda disseminated on, 66 in reinforcement of one’s own beliefs, 56 Google Complete, 155 Google Flu Trends, 158, 183 Google Glass, 149, 186 Google-knowing, xvi, 21–40, 25 defined, 23 limitations of, 174, 180 reliance on, 6–7, 23, 25–26, 30–31, 36, 113, 116, 153, 163, 179–80 Google Maps, 116 Google Street View, 23 Gordon, Lewis, 148 gorilla suit experiment, 30 government: autonomy limited by, 109 closed politics of, 144–45 data mining and analysis used by, 9, 90–91, 93, 104, 107 online manipulation used by, 81 purpose of, 38 transparency of, 137–38 Greece, classical philosophy of, 13, 47, 166–67, 171–72 Grimm, Stephen, 164 Guardian, 81 Gulf of Mexico, oil spill in, 118 H1N1 flu outbreak, tracking of, 158 Haidt, Jonathan, 51–54, 56, 57, 60, 196–97 Halpern, Sue, 106 Harvard Law Review, 89 Hazlett, Allan, 49 HBO GO, 145 Heidegger, Martin, 177 Hemingway, Mark, 46 Higher Order Thinking Skills (HOTS), 61 Hippocrates, 13 hive-mind, 4, 136 HM (patient), 168–69 Hobbes, Thomas, 38, 109 holiness, logical debate over, 166–67 homosexuality, changing attitudes toward, 53–54 Houla massacre, 83 Howe, Jeff, 136 Huffington Post, 43 human dignity: autonomy and, 58, 59–60 information technology as threat to, 187 interconnectedness and, 184–88 privacy and, 101–9 human rights, 54, 60 digital equality as, 142–48 protection of, 145 Hume, David, 48 hyperconnectivity, 184–88 identity: digital reshaping of, 73–74 manufactured online, 80–81 “scrubbing” of, 74 illegal searches, 93 illusion, distinguishing truth from, 67–74 incidental data collection, 95–96, 99 inclusivity, 135–37 income inequality, 142 inference, 29, 60, 172 information: accuracy and reliability of, 14, 27–30, 39–40, 44–45 collected pools of, 95–100, 107–9 distribution vs. creation of, 24 immediate, unlimited access to, 3–4, 23, 30, 42, 56, 113–16, 135–36, 141, 149, 153, 180 as interconnective, 184–88 vs. knowledge, 14 sorting and filtering of, 12, 26–29, 44–45, 127–28 information age, 111 information analysis, techniques of, 8–9 information cascades, 36, 66, 121 defined, 32 information coordination problem, 38–39, 56 information “glut,” 9–10, 44 information privacy, 94–100 and autonomy, 102–7 information sharing, coordination in, 4–5 information technology: costs of, 145 data trail in, 9 democratization through, 133–38, 148 devices and platforms of, xvii–xviii, 3, 7–8, 10, 41–43, 69, 70, 77–78, 90–91, 106–7, 144, 148–49, 156, 180, 185–87 disquieting questions about, 6 in education, 148–54 experience vs., 173–74 hypothetical loss of, 5 paradox of, 6, 12, 179 pool of data in, 95–100 surveillance and, 89–109 typified and dephysicalized objects in, 69 unequal distribution of, 144–45 see also Internet of Things information theory, 12 infosphere: defined, 10 feedback loop of social constructs in, 72–73 network of, 180 pollution of, 148 vastness of, 128 InnoCentive, 136–37, 141 institutions, cooperative, 60–61 intellectual labor, 139–40 International Telecommunications Union, 135 Internet: author’s experiment in circumventing, 21–24, 25, 35 in challenges to reasonableness, 41–63 changes wrought by, xv–xviii, 6–7, 10–11, 23, 180, 184–88 as a construction, 69 cost and profit debate over, 145 as epistemic resource, 143–45 expectations of, 80–83 as force for cohesion and democracy, 55–63 freedom both limited and enhanced by, 92–93 international rates of access to, 135, 144–45 monopolization and hegemony in, 145–46 as network, 111–13 “third wave” of, 7 see also World Wide Web; specific applications Internet of Everything, 184 Internet of Things: blurring of online and offline in, 71 defined, 7–8 integration of, 10 shared economy in, 140–41 threat from, 107, 153, 184–88 Internet of Us, digital form of life as, 10, 39, 73, 83–86, 106, 179–88 interracial marriage, 54 interrogation techniques, 105 In the Plex (Levy), 5–6 Intrade, 122–23, 136 intuition, 15, 51–53 iPhone, production of, 77–78, 80, 139, 144 IQ, 52 Iraq, 83 Iraq War, 137 ISIS, 128 isolation, polarization and, 42–43 I think, I exist, 127 James, William, 11 Jefferson, Thomas, 143 Jeppesen, Lars Bo, 137 joint commitments, defined, 117–18 journalism, truth and, 84 judgment, 51–55, 57 collective vs. individual, 117, 120–25 justice, 54 “just so” stories, 27–28 Kahneman, Daniel, 29, 51 Kant, Immanuel, 34, 58–60, 62, 85 Kitcher, Philip, 182 knowing-which, as term, 171 knowledge: in big data revolution, 87–190 changing structure of, 125–32 common, 117–19 defined and explained, xvii, 12–17 democratization of, 133–38 digital, see digital knowledge; Google-knowing distribution of, 134–35, 138, 141 diverse forms of, 130 economy of, 138–45 hyperconnectivity of, 184–88 individual vs. aggregate, 120–24 information vs., 14 Internet revolution in, xv–xviii minimal definition of, 14–15 as networked, 111–32 new aspects in old problems of, 1–86, 90 personal observation in, 33–35 political economy of, 133–54 as power, 9, 98–99, 133, 185–86 practical vs. theoretical, 169, 172 procedural, 167–74 recording and storage of, 127–28 reliability of sources of, 14, 27–31, 39–40, 44–45, 114–16 as a resource, 38–39 shared cognitive process in attainment of, 114–25 three forms of, 15–17 three simple points about, 14–17 truth and, 19, 126 understanding vs. other forms of, 6, 16–17, 90, 154, 155–73, 181 value and importance of, 12–13 knowledge-based education, 61 Kodak camera, 89 Koran, 48, 61 Kornblith, Hilary, 194 Krakauer, John, 169 Kuhn, Thomas, 159–60 Lakhani, Karim, 137 Larissa, Greece, 13, 15, 182 Leonhardt, David, 122–23 Levy, Steven, 5–6 liberals, 43 libraries, 22, 134, 153–54 of Alexandria, 8 digital form of life compared to, xvi, 17, 20, 44–45, 56, 63, 128 as epistemic resource, 145 Google treated as, 24 “Library of Babel” (Borges), 17 “Lies, Damned Lies, and ‘Fact-Checking’: The Liberal Media’s Latest Attempt to Control the Discourse” (Hemingway), 46 Lifespan of a Fact, The (D’Agata), 79 literacy, 35, 134 literal artifacts: defined, 69 social artifacts and, 71, 72 lobectomy, 168 Locke, John, 33–36, 39, 60, 67–70, 85, 127, 143 “Locke’s command,” 33–34 London Underground, mapping of, 112–13 machines, control by, 116 “mainstream” media, 32 censorship of, 66 majority rule, 120 manipulation: data mining and, 97, 104–6 of expectations, 80–82 persuasion and, 55, 57–58, 81–83, 86 manuals, 22 manufacturing, 138–39 maps, 21–22 marine chronometer, 137 marketing: bots in, 82 Glauconian, 58 targeted, 9, 90, 91, 105 marriage: changing attitudes toward, 53–54 civil vs. religious, 58–59 as social construct, 72 martial arts, 170 mass, as primary quality, 68 Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs), 150–53 mathematics, in data analysis, 160, 161 Matrix, The, 18–19, 75 Mayer-Schönberger, Viktor, 8, 158–59 measles vaccine, 7, 124 Mechanical Turk, 136, 141 media, 134 diversity in, 42 opinion affected by, 53 sensationalist, 77 memory: accessing of, 114, 115 in educational models, 152 loss of, 168–69 superceded by information technology, xv–xvi, 3, 4, 6, 94, 149 trust in, 28, 33 Meno, 13 merchandising, online vs. brick and mortar, 70 Mercier, Hugo, 54 metrics, 112 Milner, Brenda, 168–69 mirror drawing experiment, 169 misinformation, 6–7, 31–32 in support of moral truth, 78–80, 82 mob mentality, 32–33 MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses), 150–53 moral dumbfounding, 52 morality, moral values, xvii, 6, 44, 53–54, 195 “Moses Illusion,” 29–30 motor acuity, mastery of, 170–71, 173 motor skills, 167–74 Murray, Charles J., 147 music, as dephysicalized object, 69–70 Nagel, Thomas, 84 naming, identification by, 94 narrative license, truth and falsehood in, 78–79 National Endowment for the Humanities, 61 National Science Foundation, 61 Nature, 158, 161 Netflix, 69, 145 Net neutrality, defined, 145 netography, 112–13 of knowledge, 125–32 networked age, 111 networks, 111–32 collective knowledge of, 116–25, 180 knowledge reshaped and altered by, 125–32, 133, 140 in problem solving, 136 use of term, 111–12 neural system, 26 neural transplants, 3, 5 Neurath, Otto, 128–29 neuromedia, 3–5, 12, 17–19, 113–14, 132, 149, 168, 180–82, 184 limitations of, 174 as threat to education, 153–54 Newton, Isaac, 175 New Yorker, 25, 26 New York Times, 122, 174 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 111 Nobel laureates, 149 noble lie, 83, 86 nonfiction, 79–80 NPR, 78, 80 NSA: alleged privacy abuses by, 98–100, 138 data mining by, 9, 91, 95–96, 108, 167 proposed limitations on, 109 Ntrepid, 81 nuclear weapons technology, xvii nullius in verba (take nobody’s word for it), 34 Obama, Barack, 7, 100 administration, 109 objectivity, objective truth, 45, 74 as anchor for belief, 131 in constructed world, 83–86 as foundation for knowledge, 127 observation, 49, 60 affected by expectations, 159–60 behavior affected by, 91, 97 “oceanic feeling,” 184 “offlife,” 70 OkCupid, 157 “onlife,” 70 online identity creation, 73–74 online ranking, 119–21, 136 open access research sharing sites, 135–36 open society: closed politics vs., 144–45 values of, 41–43, 62 open source software, 135 Operation Earnest Voice, 81 Operation Ivy, ix opinion: knowledge vs., 13, 14, 126 in online ranking, 119–20 persuasion and, 50–51 truth as constructed by, 85–86 optical illusions, 67 Oracle of Delphi, 16–17, 171 Outcome-Based Education (OBE), 61–62 ownership, changing concept of, 73 ox, experiment on weight of, 120 Oxford, 168 Page, Larry, 5–6 Panopticon, 91, 92, 97 perception: acuity of, 173 distinguishing truth in, 67–74 expectations and, 159–60 misleading, 29–30, 67 as relative, 67–68 perceptual incongruity, 159–60 personal freedom, 101 persuasion, 50–51, 54–55, 56–58 by bots, 82 phone books, 22 phone data collection, 95, 108 photography: privacy and, 89, 93 sexually-explicit, 99 photo-sharing, manipulation in, 82–83 Plato, 13–14, 16–17, 54, 59, 83, 126, 165–67 polarization, 7 herd mentality in, 66 isolated tribes in, 43–46 politics, 162, 196 accessibility in, 23 activism in, 66, 67 bias in, 43–46 closed, 144–45 elections in, 120–23 of knowledge, 133–54 opposition to critical thinking in, 61–62 persuasion in, 57–58, 82–83 power in, 86, 133 prediction market in, 122–23 Politifact, 46 Popper, Karl, 41–43 Postman, L.

Logically Fallacious: The Ultimate Collection of Over 300 Logical Fallacies (Academic Edition)
by Bo Bennett
Published 29 May 2017

I thoroughly examine (i.e. rip apart) this argument at http://www.relationshipwithreason.com/articles/philosophy/14-pascal-s-wager-the-epitome-of-irrational-rationalism Least Plausible Hypothesis Description: Choosing more unreasonable explanations for phenomena over more defensible ones. In judging the validity of hypotheses or conclusions from an observation, the scientific method relies upon the Principle of Parsimony, also known as Occam’s Razor, which states, all things being equal, the simplest explanation of a phenomenon that requires the fewest assumptions is the preferred explanation until it can be disproved. This is very similar to the far-fetched hypothesis, but the hypotheses are generally more within reason (i.e. no leprechauns involved).

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Depak did expanded on his assertion here, relied on the argument by gibberish in order to make what sounded like scientific claims, which in fact, were not. According to everything we know about quantum physics, information cannot travel faster than light – otherwise it could create a time travel paradox. Exception: Making a scientific claim about quantum physics, using the scientific method, is not fallacious. Tip: Pick up an introductory book to quantum physics, it is not only a fascinating subject, but you will be well prepared to ask the right questions and expose this fallacy when used. Questionable Cause cum hoc ergo propter hoc (also known as: ignoring a common cause, neglecting a common cause, confusing correlation and causation, confusing cause and effect, false cause, third cause, juxtaposition [form of], reversing causality/wrong direction [form of]) Description: Concluding that one thing caused another, simply because they are regularly associated.

The Case Against Sugar
by Gary Taubes
Published 27 Dec 2016

This is a risk in any human endeavor. When Francis Bacon pioneered the scientific method almost four hundred years ago, he was hoping to create a methodology of critical or rational thinking that would minimize this all-too-human characteristic of avoiding evidence that disagrees with any preconceptions we might have formed.*1 Without rigorous tests, as many as necessary, beliefs and preconceptions will persevere because it’s always easier to believe that a single test has been flawed, or even a few of them, than it is to accept that our belief had been incorrect. The scientific method protects against this tendency; it does not eradicate it

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CHAPTER 9 WHAT THEY DIDN’T KNOW I wish there were some formal courses in medical school on Medical Ignorance; textbooks as well, although they would have to be very heavy volumes. LEWIS THOMAS, “Medicine as a Very Old Profession,” 1985 Over the past four hundred years, thinking on the scientific method has distilled the concept down to two words: “hypothesis” and “test.” If we want to establish reliable knowledge—that what we think is true really is—this is the process that must be followed. In the words of the philosopher of science Karl Popper, “The method of science is the method of bold conjectures and ingenious and severe attempts to refute them.”

Human Frontiers: The Future of Big Ideas in an Age of Small Thinking
by Michael Bhaskar
Published 2 Nov 2021

Consider the Scientific Revolution of Copernicus, Brahe and Kepler, the birth of modern science, arguably the most important moment in human existence since the Neolithic Revolution.11 At its heart were potent conceptual tools that introduced a self-sustaining process of ideation: the creation of concepts like ‘discovery’, ‘fact’, ‘experiment’, ‘law of nature’, ‘hypothesis’ and ‘theory’ established the mental architecture for what eventually became known as the scientific method.12 Without this framework, nothing else about modern science – and arguably the modern world – would make much sense. Important too was a set of intellectual tools like calculus, Cartesian graphs, algebra and probabilistic mathematics. But the revolution was also galvanised by novel instruments.

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Second, it shows how even at a comparatively early stage, AI has enormous potential to make significant, useful discoveries improbable with the old toolset. AI changes how we will think and imagine in future. Trillions of experiments can be run in days, for example, a fundamental gear shift in the scientific method. This kind of discovery doesn't require a prior theory or hypothesis, but arrives at conclusions through a vast process of trial and error, a kind of ‘radical empiricism’. It also applies to how we invent.28 Antibiotic resistance, for example, one of the biggest challenges in medicine, is being attacked with a similar strategy: there could be 1060 drug-like molecules, and finding the ones that work is a formidable challenge without AI.

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The Decline of Science in Corporate R&D’, NBER Working Paper No. w20902 Arora, Ashish, Belenzon, Sharon, Patacconi, Andrea, and Suh, Jungkyu (2020), ‘The Changing Structure of American Innovation: Some Cautionary Remarks for Economic Growth’, Innovation Policy and the Economy, Vol. 20 Asimov, Isaac (2016), Foundation (first published 1951), London: HarperVoyager Assael, Yannis, Sommerschield, Thea, and Prag, Jonathan (2019), ‘Restoring ancient text using deep learning: a case study on Greek epigraphy’, arXiv, 1910.06262 Azoulay, Pierre (2012), ‘Turn the scientific method on ourselves’, Nature, 484, pp. 31–2 Azoulay, Pierre, and Li, Danielle (2020), ‘Scientific Grant Funding’, NBER Working Paper 26889 Azoulay, Pierre, Graff Zivin, Joshua S., and Fons-Rosen, Christian (2019), ‘Does Science Advance One Funeral at a Time?’, American Economic Review, Vol. 109 No. 8, pp. 2889–2920 Azoulay, Pierre, Graff Zivin, Joshua S., and Manso, Gustavo (2011), ‘Incentives and creativity: evidence from the academic life sciences’, The RAND Journal of Economics, Vol. 42, No. 3 pp. 527–54 Bahcall, Safi (2019), Loonshots: How to Nurture the Crazy Ideas that Win Wars, Cure Diseases, and Transform Industries, New York: St Martin's Press Baker, Monya (2016), ‘1,500 scientists lift the lid on reproducibility’, Nature 533, 452–4 Banerjee, Abhijit V., and Esther Duflo (2019), Good Economics for Hard Times: Better Answers to Our Biggest Problems, London: Allen Lane Beck, Ulrich (1992), Risk Society: Towards a New Modernity, London: SAGE Belot, Henry (2018), ‘Nobel Prize winner Peter Doherty criticises national interest test on research funding’, ABC, accessed 31 October 2018, available at https://amp.abc.net.au/article/10450504 Berkes, Enrico and Gaetani, Ruben (2019), ‘The Geography of Unconventional Innovation’, Rotman School of Management Working Paper No. 3423143 Bessen, James E., Denk, Erich, Kim, Joowon, and Righi, Cesare (2020), ‘Declining Industrial Disruption’, Boston Univ.

Peak Everything: Waking Up to the Century of Declines
by Richard Heinberg and James Howard (frw) Kunstler
Published 1 Sep 2007

(Quantum physicist Wolfgang Pauli, who was known for his abhorrence of sloppy thinking, once famously commented that another scientist’s work was “not even wrong.”) Grammar and logic give us the basis for making comprehensible statements about the world; linking logic with empirical evidence helps us formulate true statements and recognize when statements are false. This, again, is a long-standing practice: millennia before the scientific method was codified, people relied on feedback between language and sensory data to develop an accurate understanding of the world. Are the salmon running yet? Let’s go look. However, not all possible statements could be checked empirically. If someone said, “These berries taste good,” that was at least a matter for investigation, even if everyone didn’t agree.

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Yet however strong the temptation to engage in it, magical thinking when tied to religion failed to provide much practical help in industry or commerce. As these limits came to be appreciated, and as industry and commerce expanded, philosophers and students of nature began to construct the formalized system of inquiry known as the scientific method. Here was a way to obtain verifiable knowledge of the physical world; better still, it was knowledge that could often be used to practical effect. The method came to hand at a propitious time: wealth was flowing to Europe from the rest of the world due to colonization and slavery; meanwhile the development of metallurgy and simple heat engines had proceeded to the point where the energy of fossil fuels could be put to widespread use.

World Without Mind: The Existential Threat of Big Tech
by Franklin Foer
Published 31 Aug 2017

Their machines assimilated all the lessons of past searches, using these learnings to more precisely deliver the desired results. For the entirety of human existence, the creation of knowledge was a slog of trial and error. Humans would dream up theories of how the world worked, then would examine the evidence to see whether their hypotheses survived or crashed upon their exposure to reality. Algorithms upend the scientific method—the patterns emerge from the data, from correlations, unguided by hypotheses. They remove humans from the whole process of inquiry. Writing in Wired, Chris Anderson argued: “We can stop looking for models. We can analyze the data without hypotheses about what it might show. We can throw the numbers into the biggest computing clusters the world has ever seen and let statistical algorithms find patterns where science cannot.”

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The essence of the algorithm is entirely uncomplicated: John MacCormick, Nine Algorithms That Changed the Future (Princeton University Press, 2012), 3–4. “We can stop looking for models. We can analyze the data without hypotheses”: Chris Anderson, “The End of Theory: The Data Deluge Makes the Scientific Method Obsolete,” Wired, June 23, 2008. Walmart’s algorithms found that people desperately buy strawberry Pop-Tarts: Constance L. Hays, “What Wal-Mart Knows About Customers’ Habits,” New York Times, November 14, 2004. Sweeney conducted a study that found that users with African American names: Latanya Sweeney, “Discrimination in Online Ad Delivery,” Communications of the ACM 56, no. 5 (May 2013): 44–54.

How We Got to Now: Six Innovations That Made the Modern World
by Steven Johnson
Published 28 Sep 2014

I should mention one additional element of the book’s focus: The “we” in this book, and in its title, is largely the “we” of North Americans and Europeans. The story of how China or Brazil got to now would be a different one, and every bit as interesting. But the European/North American story, while finite in its scope, is nonetheless of wider relevance because certain critical experiences—the rise of the scientific method, industrialization—happened in Europe first, and have now spread across the world. (Why they happened in Europe first is of course one of the most interesting questions of all, but it’s not one this book tries to answer.) Those enchanted objects of everyday life—those lightbulbs and lenses and audio recordings—are now a part of life just about everywhere on the planet; telling the story of the past thousand years from their perspective should be of interest no matter where you happen to live.

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Pamphlets and treatises from alleged heretics like Galileo could circulate ideas outside the censorious limits of the Church, ultimately undermining its authority; at the same time, the system of citation and reference that evolved in the decades after Gutenberg’s Bible became an essential tool in applying the scientific method. But Gutenberg’s creation advanced the march of science in another, less familiar way: it expanded possibilities of lens design, of glass itself. For the first time, the peculiar physical properties of silicon dioxide were not just being harnessed to let us see things that we could already see with our own eyes; we could now see things that transcended the natural limits of human vision.

The Rise of the Quants: Marschak, Sharpe, Black, Scholes and Merton
by Colin Read
Published 16 Jul 2012

Indeed, my appreciation for technical analysis came from my university studies toward a Bachelor of Science degree in physics, followed immediately by a PhD in economics. However, as I began to teach economics and finance, I realized that the analytic tools of physics that so pervaded modern economics have strayed too far from explaining this important dimension of human financial decision-making. To better understand the interplay between the scientific method, economics, human behavior, and public policy, I continued with my studies toward a Master of Accountancy in taxation, an MBA, and a Juris Doctor of Law. As I taught the economics of intertemporal choice, the role of money and financial instruments, and the structure of the banking and financial intermediaries, I recognized that my students had become increasingly fascinated with investment banking and Wall Street.

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First, the development of the mean and variance characterization of returns, then the use of William Sharpe’s CAPM to determine the risk-adjusted value of individual securities, and then, finally, the BlackScholes equation for the pricing of derivatives, in both the static form, and in the more dynamic context developed by Robert Merton, in just a couple of decades endowed personal finance with the tools necessary to create a science out of an art form. With the confidence, or sometimes perhaps with the false confidence, of the scientific method, finance developed rapidly. Soon, finance became a top industry, and even constituted one out of every three dollars of profit in the USA by 2006. The era of financial theory, and its integration into financial markets, had arrived. And the academic world took notice. Nobel Prizes are now granted to financial theory discoveries almost as often as to the rest 179 180 The Rise of the Quants of the study of economics.

Green Mars
by Kim Stanley Robinson
Published 23 Oct 1993

“The goal of your kind of science is the establishment of laws, of regularities, of exactness and certainty. You want things explained. You want to answer the whys, all the way back to the big bang. You’re a reductionist. Parsimony and elegance and economy are values for you, and if you can make things simpler that’s a real achievement, right?” “But that’s the scientific method itself,” Sax objected. “It’s not just me, it’s how nature itself works. Physics. You do it yourself.” “There are human values imbedded in physics.” “I’m not so sure.” He held out a hand to stop her for a second. “I’m not saying there are no values in science. But matter and energy do what they do.

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He needed a science of history, but unfortunately there was no such thing. History is Lamarckian, Arkady used to say, a notion that was ominously suggestive given the pseudospeciation caused by the unequal distribution of the gerontological treatments; but it was no real help. Psychology, sociology, anthropology, they were all suspect. The scientific method could not be applied to human beings in any way that yielded useful information. It was the fact-value problem stated in a different way; human reality could only be explained in terms of values. And values were very resistant to scientific analysis: Isolation of factors for study, falsifiable hypotheses, repeatable experiments— the entire apparatus as practiced in lab physics simply could not be brought to bear.

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It was a real science; it had discovered, there among the contingency and disorder, some valid general principles of evolution— development, adaptation, complexification, and many more specific principles as well, confirmed by the various subdisciplines. What he needed were similar principles influencing human history. The little reading he did in historiography was not encouraging; it was either a sad imitation of the scientific method, or art pure and simple. About every decade a new historical explanation revised all that had come before, but clearly revisionism held pleasures that had nothing to do with the actual justice of the case being made. Sociobiology and bioethics were more promising, but they tended to explain things best when working on evolutionary time scales, and he wanted something for the past hundred years, and the next hundred.

Warnings
by Richard A. Clarke
Published 10 Apr 2017

They have the self-confidence to be first but not the arrogance that would interfere with their understanding of the nuances of the data. *QUESTIONERS: Most Cassandras tend to disbelieve anything that has not been empirically derived and repeatedly tested. They also tend to doubt their own work initially, especially when it predicts disaster. This characteristic is more than just a belief in the scientific method. Rather, they challenge what is generally accepted until it is proven to their satisfaction. They are the philosophical descendants of Pyrrho of Elis, a philosopher in ancient Greece who accompanied Alexander the Great to India. There Pyrrho learned from Indian philosophers who challenged everything.

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Why would the IPCC not focus on the effects of melting polar ice? Hansen believes that “scientific reticence,” i.e., restraint in coming to a controversial conclusion, is hindering communication with the public about the dangers of global warming. Policy makers need to recognize that, he said. “Scientific reticence may be a consequence of the scientific method. Success in science depends on objective skepticism. Caution, if not reticence, has its merits.” He allowed that reticence at the IPCC “is probably a necessary characteristic, given that the IPCC document is produced as a consensus among most nations in the world and represents the views of thousands of scientists.”

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At least, as he observed, one government has acted by slightly opening its treasury, enough to map many of the possible asteroid threats. No government, however, has acted to give Earth a comprehensive defense system that can rapidly spring into action to deflect a large and threatening object, were one to be found. Morrison himself exhibits many of the traits of a Cassandra. He is a renowned expert, uses the scientific method, and is data driven. He was the first to see something and say something about it, loudly. Although a government employee, he influenced the system to get Congress to tell his agency what to do. He has not experienced the criticism of his colleagues as overtly as others. No one doubts that he’s right, but some have other priorities.

Strategy: A History
by Lawrence Freedman
Published 31 Oct 2013

The approach can be discerned from his definition of strategy as “all enemy movements out of the enemy’s cannon range or range of vision,” so that tactics covered what happened within that range.10 His observations on tactics were considered to have merit, but much to his chagrin his description of the “new war system” was ignored by Prussian generals. Whatever the scientific method might bring to the battlefield, when it came to deciding on the moment, form, and conduct of battle, much would depend on the general’s own judgment—perhaps more a matter of character, insight, and intuition than careful calculation and planning. When battle was joined, the theory could say little because of the many variables in play.

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In particular “a science like economics” could show the way to a “genuine analytical method.”7 The idea that the resolution of strategic problems depended on intellect and analysis rather than character and intuition fit in with the trend to subject all human decisions to the dictates of rationality and the application of science. It was given more urgency by the potentially catastrophic consequences of misjudgment in the nuclear age. The scientific method as a means of interpreting large amounts of disparate data had proved itself in Britain in the Second World War. It first made a mark when used to determine the best way to employ radar in air defense. As one of the key figures in the British program noted, the methodology used was closer to classical economics than physics, although economists were not directly engaged.8 During the course of the war, operations research—as the new field came to be known—made major strides in support of actual operations, including working out the safest arrangement for convoys in the face of submarine attack or choosing targets for air raids.9 Mathematicians and physicists made more of an impact in the United States, notably those who became involved in the Manhattan Project, the organization which had led to the production of the first atomic bomb.

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Dewey decided not to go to the 1904 Congress to which Weber had been invited and so the two did not meet (although he met James at Harvard). Weber would have been aware of Dewey’s work because of the overlap, at least in some core themes, with his own. They were on similar tracks in their appreciation of the scientific method, their focus on the relationship of thought to action, and their stress on the need to judge actions by consequence as much as intent. There were also crucial differences between the two. While Dewey did not take seriously attempts to separate fact from value, Weber insisted upon it. While Dewey saw democracy as inclusive and participatory, for Weber the value of democracy was as a means of electing a proper leader from a wide pool and ensuring a degree of accountability.

The Filter Bubble: What the Internet Is Hiding From You
by Eli Pariser
Published 11 May 2011

Karl Popper, one of the preeminent philosophers of science, made it his life’s mission to try to sort out the problem of induction, as it came to be known. While the optimistic thinkers of the late 1800s looked at the history of science and saw a journey toward truth, Popper preferred to focus on the wreckage along the side of the road—the abundance of failed theories and ideas that were perfectly consistent with the scientific method and yet horribly wrong. After all, the Ptolemaic universe, with the earth in the center and the sun and planets revolving around it, survived an awful lot of mathematical scrutiny and scientific observation. Popper posed his problem in a slightly different way: Just because you’ve only ever seen white swans doesn’t mean that all swans are white.

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hl=en. 201 better and better: Nikki Tait, “Google to translate European patent claims,” Financial Times, Nov. 29, 2010, accessed Feb. 9, 2010, www.ft.com/cms/s/0/02f71b76-fbce-11df-b79a-00144feab49a.html. 202 “what to do with them”: Danny Sullivan, phone interview with author, Sept. 10, 2010. 202 “flash crash”: Graham Bowley, “Stock Swing Still Baffles, with an Ominous Tone,” New York Times, Aug. 22, 2010, accessed Feb. 8, 2010, www.nytimes.com/2010/08/23/business/23flash.html. 202 provocative article in Wired: Chris Anderson, “The End of Theory: The Data Deluge Makes the Scientific Method Obsolete,” Wired, June 23, 2008, accessed Feb. 10, 2010, http://www.wired.com/science/discoveries/magazine/16-07/pb_theory. 203 greatest achievement of human technology: Hillis quoted in Jennifer Riskin, Genesis Redux: Essays in the History and Philosophy of Artificial Life (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), 200. 204 “advertiser-funded media”: Marisol LeBron, “ ‘Migracorridos’: Another Failed Anti-immigration Campaign,” North American Congress of Latin America, Mar. 17, 2009, accessed Dec. 17, 2010, https://nacla.org/node/5625. 205 characters using the companies’ products throughout: Mary McNamara, “Television Review: ‘The Jensen Project,’ ” Los Angeles Times, July 16, 2010, accessed Dec. 17, 2010, http://articles.latimes. com/2010/jul/16/entertainment/la-et-jensen-project-20100716. 205 product-placement hooks throughout: Jenni Miller, “Hansel and Gretel in 3D?

Billions & Billions: Thoughts on Life and Death at the Brink of the Millennium
by Carl Sagan
Published 11 May 1998

Suppose further that what is required to prevent or mitigate the catastrophe is expensive: expensive in fiscal and intellectual resources, but also in challenging our way of thinking—that is, politically expensive. At what point do the pol-icymakers have to take the scientific prophets seriously? There are ways to assess the validity of the modern prophecies—because in the methods of science, there is an error-correcting procedure, a set of rules that have repeatedly worked well, sometimes called the scientific method. There are a number of tenets (I've outlined some of them in my book The Demon-Haunted World): Arguments from authority carry little weight ("Because I said so" isn't good enough); quantitative prediction is an extremely good way to sift useful ideas from nonsense; the methods of analysis must yield other results fully consistent with what else we know about the Universe; vigorous debate is a healthy sign; the same conclusions have to be drawn independently by competent competing scientific groups for an idea to be taken seriously; and so on.

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No matter how stringent the protections of the people might be in constitutions or common law, there would always be a temptation, Jefferson thought, for the powerful, the wealthy, and the unscrupulous to undermine the ideal of government run by and for ordinary citizens. The antidote is vigorous support for the expression of unpopular views, widespread literacy, substantive debate, a common familiarity with critical thinking, and skepticism of pronouncements of those in authority—which are all also central to the scientific method. * After outlining traditional Christian views of women from patristic times to the Reformation, the Australian philosopher John Passmore (Man's Responsibility for Nature: Ecological Problems and Western Traditions [New York: Scrib-ner's, 1974]) concludes that Kinder, Kiiche, Kircher "as a description of the role of women is not an invention of Hitler's, but a typical Christian slogan." 252 • Billions and Billions THE REVELATIONS OF SCIENCE Every branch of science has made stunning advances in the twentieth century.

Dataclysm: Who We Are (When We Think No One's Looking)
by Christian Rudder
Published 8 Sep 2014

You know the shape only through aggregation. What’s more, reduction and repetition are fundamental to the long history of science, not just data science and not just computer science, but capital-S Science, the ageless human enterprise. Experiments are built upon reducing a process to a single, manageable facet. The scientific method needs a control, and you can’t get it without cutting complexity to the bald core and saying this, this, is what matters. Only once you’ve simplified the question can you test it over and over again. Whether at a lab bench or a laptop, most of the knowledge we possess was acquired like this, by reduction.

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Since it was the most recent result, that’s what ended up in the book. As interesting a tool as it is, the black box of Google’s autocomplete (and Google Trends, for that matter) is an example of one of the worst things about today’s data science—its opaqueness. Corroboration, so important to the scientific method, is difficult, because so much information is proprietary (and here OkCupid is as guilty as anyone). Even as most social media companies trumpet the hugeness and potential of their data, the bulk of it has stayed off-limits to the larger world. Data sets currently move through the research community like yeti—I have a bunch of interesting stuff but I can’t say from where; I heard someone at Temple has tons of Amazon reviews; I think L has a scrape of Facebook.

Fully Automated Luxury Communism
by Aaron Bastani
Published 10 Jun 2019

By the 1870s it was this relationship between knowledge and technology which drove what Drucker labelled the ‘Productivity Revolution’. The father of this revolution was Frederick Taylor, an American mechanical engineer and pioneer in scientific management. Until Taylor, whose professional life took off in the 1880s, the scientific method had never been applied to the study of work in order to maximise output. Yet within a few short decades this became a dogma – massively expanding productivity and improving the standard of living for the average worker. After the rise of ‘Taylorism’, at least according to Drucker, value became more about the continued refinement and application of information than about labour, land or capital.

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Besides the issue of war in both his homeland and abroad – relative constants prior to the twentieth century but particularly severe in the 1640s – his was also a world absent of modern medicine and where adult men rarely lived beyond forty. By the mid-1800s, however, that had changed as the application of the scientific method to healthcare and hygiene saw the mortality rate of infants and children sharply decline. Previously high fertility rates, combined with more children surviving to adulthood, inevitably meant unprecedented population growth among those countries at the forefront of the Second Disruption. The implications of this were profound.

Chasing My Cure: A Doctor's Race to Turn Hope Into Action; A Memoir
by David Fajgenbaum
Published 9 Sep 2019

I tried to put my health concerns aside and enjoy this precious time with my growing family. * * * — I’m an empiricist. I trust my eyes. That’s not exactly a bold statement coming from a doctor and researcher. Western medicine in the twenty-first century is all about evidence. It’s sort of a package deal: the white coat, the stethoscope, and the scientific method. When you’re in the healing business, what you really do is test, test some more, test some more, test some more, and—if you’re lucky—test a little bit more. You’re a professional results gatherer. Every once in a while, one of those results comes back hot: an effective treatment. A new drug.

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And her innate gravitational pull to help those in need meant that she worked long hours to turn simple numbers into meaningful insights that could save patients’ lives. Dustin Shilling, who had just completed his PhD in neuroscience, instilled a healthy skepticism of so-called breakthroughs. As an Alzheimer’s researcher, he had learned all too well about the importance of the scientific method and interrogating results before getting too excited. He pushed for, and contributed his time toward, developing large-scale studies with meticulously detailed designs. The kinds of studies that could stand up in a field as complicated as Alzheimer’s or Castleman disease. Jason Ruth, a PhD student studying cancer biology, was my friend before he was my colleague.

Cultish: The Language of Fanaticism
by Amanda Montell
Published 14 Jun 2021

If brainwashing were real, says Moore, “we would expect to see many more dangerous people running around, planning to carry out reprehensible schemes.” Simply put, you cannot force someone to believe something they absolutely do not on any level want to believe by using some set of evil techniques to “wash” their brain. Secondly, Moore argues, brainwashing presents an untestable hypothesis. For a theory to meet the standard criteria of the scientific method, it has to be controvertible; that is, it must be possible to prove the thing false. (For example, as soon as objects start traveling faster than the speed of light, we’ll know that Einstein got his Theory of Special Relativity wrong.) But you can’t prove that brainwashing doesn’t exist. The minute you say someone is “brainwashed,” the conversation ends there.

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As much as I’d like to take full intellectual credit for my exquisitely sensitive scam nose, I know that my disdain for pyramid schemes likely correlates to the fact that I am privileged enough to have no urgent need for their promises. Sociologists also say that higher education and training in the scientific method generally make people less gullible. And for better or for worse, so does being in a bad mood. In several experiments, researchers found that when someone is in a good mood, they become more innocent and unsuspecting, while feeling grumpy makes one better at sensing deception. Which has to be the most curmudgeonly superpower I’ve ever heard.

Brief Peeks Beyond: Critical Essays on Metaphysics, Neuroscience, Free Will, Skepticism and Culture
by Bernardo Kastrup
Published 28 May 2015

The Universe, thus, is God’s body. As such, nature is a perfectly valid subject of study for theology, in exactly the same way that the human nervous system is a perfectly valid subject of study for psychiatry. Coyne could counter all this by saying that we already have the natural sciences for studying nature, and that the scientific method is much better suited for this purpose. This is as strictly correct as it misses the point entirely: theology is an attempt to see past the mere images and make inferences about the subjective processes behind those images; it is an attempt to see past the ‘brain scan’ and infer how it ‘feels to feel’ love in a direct way; it is an attempt to see past the footprints and understand where the hiker wants to go, as well as why he wants to go there.

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There may be unanswered questions regarding abstract parallel universes and alternate realities, but we assume that most of the facets of concrete life have been explained by rational scientific theories, from the weather to health, to psychology, to social dynamics. We believe unquestioningly that the Faustian power of rationality, skepticism and the application of the scientific method have answered – or are on the cusp of answering – all questions of any practical relevance to our daily lives. But is that really so? What reasons do we actually have to believe it? Could it be that the apparent runaway success of science – and, more generally, of our rational faculties – is as much illusory as it is factual?

Transport for Humans: Are We Nearly There Yet?
by Pete Dyson and Rory Sutherland
Published 15 Jan 2021

Behavioural science fills in blind spots and adds colour to what existing maps leave out. It can add a diagnosis to existing reasoning, detecting potholes, dead ends and icebergs ahead, and creating new and alternative routes. This is true regardless of what happens in the world. Behavioural science has relied upon the scientific method (itself only five centuries old) to establish the facts about how people perceive, think, feel and behave. Only in the past decades has the wealth of evidence accumulated and been made accessible to solving real-world challenges. We see parallels here with the emergence of music theory and notation: both provide the fundamental truths, the agreed principles and a common language with which practitioners can exchange their ideas.

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This might come from a senior leader having studied psychology or it could simply come from a determination to put customer needs first. Invest in a team At one level, ‘thinking behaviourally’ is a good start, but using a science merely as a perspective is limiting and quite risky. The discipline is a specialism; it follows the scientific method of theory, hypothesis, research, implementation and evaluation. Thanks to universities, courses and specialist organizations, you can now find people who are trained in social sciences and practitioners who are fluent in behaviour change models and frameworks. They approach problems through a process of analysis and idea generation that takes the guesswork out of applying behavioural science.

Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry Into Values
by Robert M. Pirsig
Published 1 Jan 1974

The question is then asked: Does this eighteen-year-old person have a thought in his head? If so, where does it come from? How does he get it? Hume would have answered that the eighteen-year-old had no thoughts whatsoever, and in giving this answer would have defined himself as an empiricist, one who believes all knowledge is derived exclusively from the senses. The scientific method of experimentation is carefully controlled empiricism. Common sense today is empiricism, since an overwhelming majority would agree with Hume, even though in other cultures and other times a majority might have differed. The first problem of empiricism, if empiricism is believed, concerns the nature of “substance.”

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This is the driest country yet. I want to talk now about truth traps and muscle traps and then stop this Chautauqua for today. Truth traps are concerned with data that are apprehended and are within the boxcars of the train. For the most part these data are properly handled by conventional dualistic logic and the scientific method talked about earlier, back just after Miles City. But there’s one trap that isn’t the truth trap of yes-no logic. Yes and no-this or that-one or zero. On the basis of this elementary two-term discrimination, all human knowledge is built up. The demonstration of this is the computer memory which stores all its knowledge in the form of binary information.

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Aristotle attacked this belief, saying that the dialectic was only suitable for some purposes to enquire into men’s beliefs, to arrive at truths about eternal forms of things, known as Ideas, which were fixed and unchanging and constituted reality for Plato. Aristotle said there is also the method of science, or “physical” method, which observes physical facts and arrives at truths about substances, which undergo change. This duality of form and substance and the scientific method of arriving at facts about substances were central to Aristotle’s philosophy. Thus the dethronement of dialectic from what Socrates and Plato held it to be was absolutely essential for Aristotle, and “dialectic” was and still is a fulcrum word. Phćdrus guessed that Aristotle’s diminution of dialectic, from Plato’s sole method of arriving at truth to a “counterpart of rhetoric,” might be as infuriating to modern Platonists as it would have been to Plato.

People, Power, and Profits: Progressive Capitalism for an Age of Discontent
by Joseph E. Stiglitz
Published 22 Apr 2019

Universities also do not give equal weight to theories that the world is flat, to the phlogiston theories in chemistry, or to gold bugs in economics. There are some ideas that deservedly do not receive equal weight in higher education.34 It would be malpractice to teach outdated ideas that have been repeatedly disproved by the scientific method. So far, the universities have withstood the siege. But one can only imagine what will happen to America’s economy and our standing in the world were Trump and the others waging this war to succeed. Our position in the vanguard of innovation would quickly recede. Already, others are taking advantage of Trump’s anti-immigrant and anti-science stance: Canada and Australia, for instance, are actively trying to recruit talented students and create research institutions and laboratories to provide viable alternatives to those of Silicon Valley.

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We especially believe in equality of opportunity and justice, and in democracy—not the one dollar one vote system that we have become but the one person one vote system that we learned about in school. We believe in tolerance, letting others do as they please as long as they don’t harm others. We believe in science and technology, and the scientific method—keys to understanding the universe and the increase in our standards of living. We believe that we can use reason and deliberation, too, to figure out how to better arrange the affairs of society, to create better social and economic institutions that, in turn, have not only increased our material well-being, but created a society in which diverse individuals are better able to work together, to achieve far more than they could working alone.

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See Stephen Broadberry, Bruce Campbell, Alexander Klein, Mark Overton, and Bas van Leeuwen, British Economic Growth, 1270–1870 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015). 18.A critical aspect of the scientific process entails repeated verification of the results, and clarity about the scientific precision and certainty with which various results have been established. Science itself is thus a social enterprise: we know and believe what we do because of the collective efforts of thousands of individuals, all operating within the discipline provided by the scientific method. 19.Each of these concepts is complex and subtle, and the terms are often abused. Feudal lords might claim to invoke a rule of law as they abused the serfs that worked for them; so too for slave owners in the South, who used the “law” to force the return of escaped slaves. (See Eric Foner, Gateway to Freedom: The Hidden History of the Underground Railroad [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015]).

The Fabric of Reality
by David Deutsch
Published 31 Mar 2012

Although this doctrine is itself meaningless, according to its own criterion, it was nevertheless the prevailing theory of scientific knowledge during the first half of the twentieth century! Even today, instrumentalist and positivist ideas still have currency. One reason why they are superficially plausible is that, although prediction is not the purpose of science, it is part of the characteristic method of science. The scientific method involves postulating a new theory to explain some class of phenomena and then performing a crucial experimental test, an experiment for which the old theory predicts {6} one observable outcome and the new theory another. One then rejects the theory whose predictions turn out to be false. Thus the outcome of a crucial experimental test to decide between two theories does depend on the theories' predictions, and not directly on their explanations.

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When confronted with evidence of it, they are obliged to regard it as an 'anomaly', an experimental error, a fraud - anything at all that will allow them to hold the paradigm inviolate. Thus Kuhn believes that the scientific values of openness to criticism and tentativeness in accepting theories, and the scientific methods of experimental testing and the abandonment of prevailing theories when they are refuted, are largely myths that it would not be humanly possible to enact when dealing with any significant scientific issue. {321} Kuhn accepts that, for insignificant scientific issues, something like a scientific process (as I outlined in Chapter 3) does happen.

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Furthermore, we have seen that the existence of highly adapted replicators depends on the physical feasibility of virtual-reality generation and universality, which in turn can be understood as consequences of a deep principle, the Turing principle, that links physics and the theory of computation and makes no explicit reference to replicators, evolution or biology at all. An analogous gap exists in Popperian epistemology. Its critics wonder why the scientific method works, or what justifies our reliance on the best scientific theories. This leads them to hanker after a principle of induction or something of the sort (though, as {340} crypto-inductivists, they usually realize that such a principle would not explain or justify anything either). For Popperians to reply that there is no such thing as justification, or that it is never rational to rely on theories, is to provide no explanation.

Human Diversity: The Biology of Gender, Race, and Class
by Charles Murray
Published 28 Jan 2020

“Man, who will learn how to move rivers and mountains, how to build peoples’ palaces on the peaks of Mont Blanc and at the bottom of the Atlantic, will not only be able to add to his own life richness, brilliancy and intensity, but also a dynamic quality of the highest degree.”6 Elsewhere, the pioneers of the new discipline of sociology had less extreme ambitions, but they drew from the same optimism about the power of the scientific method applied to human behavior. “Our main objective,” Émile Durkheim wrote of sociology, “is to extend the scope of scientific rationalism to cover human behavior.” Causes and effects could be spelled out, he continued, and they in turn “can then be transformed into rules of action for the future.”7 The constraints of inborn human nature? “These individual natures are merely the indeterminate material that the social factor molds and transforms.”8 At the beginning of the twentieth century, the application of the scientific method to human malleability was extended to another new discipline, psychology.

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I find Mitchell’s skepticism convincing, but this aspect of the research is being conducted using methods that lend themselves to rigorous examination. The more ambitious claims of the enthusiasts are currently unwarranted, but if the enthusiasts are right they will eventually be able to make their case via the scientific method. The second issue is whether environmentally induced changes in methylation are passed on to the next generation. The scientifically interpretable evidence for this is mostly from work with C. elegans (a worm about one millimeter long) and D. melanogaster (the fruit fly), which seems a long way from proving that it happens in humans.

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But what is government itself, but the greatest of all reflections on human nature?”5 During the nineteenth century, unsentimental realism about human nature lost ground to a strange mix of idealism and rationalism that pursued extravagant goals. Karl Marx outdid all the rest with his grand theoretical application of the scientific method (as Marx saw it) to human malleability, blending history, sociology, economics, and politics into a utopian vision of what could be accomplished given the right economic and institutional structures. The Communists who came to power in Russia didn’t think it was just theory; they thought it would work miracles.

Too Big to Know: Rethinking Knowledge Now That the Facts Aren't the Facts, Experts Are Everywhere, and the Smartest Person in the Room Is the Room
by David Weinberger
Published 14 Jul 2011

Mary Poovey cites the invention in Italy of double-entry bookkeeping, which in the sixteenth century provided a process by which ledger entries could be proved accurate to anyone who, regardless of status, followed the proper procedure. 11 But most historians look to the seventeenth century, when the philosopher and statesman Francis Bacon, seeking to put knowledge on a more certain basis, invented the scientific method. Like Aristotle, he sought knowledge of universals.12 But he proposed getting to them through careful experiments on particulars. For example, when Bacon wanted to find out how much a liquid expands when it becomes a gas, he filled a one-ounce vial with alcohol, capped it with a bladder, heated the alcohol until the bladder filled, and then measured how much liquid was left.13 From this experiment on particulars, he was able to propose a theory that applied universally to heated liquids.

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Thousands of babies grew up listening to cloying New Age renditions of Mozart’s works because a statistically insignificant, nonrepresentative sample of college kids did marginally better at a narrowly defined task under poorly controlled circumstances. That’s how science too often is taken up by our culture. Of course, science itself doesn’t work this way. The scientific method enables us to test hypotheses by isolating the causes of effects through carefully controlled, repeatable experiments. That’s true for much of day-to-day science carried out in labs and workshops around the world. Even in scientific disciplines that are more theoretical or observational than experimental—evolutionary biology, for example—science has been a careful and conservative practice, patiently trying to tie facts together into theories that make sense of them.

Inferior: How Science Got Women Wrong-And the New Research That's Rewriting the Story
by Angela Saini
Published 29 May 2017

If biological differences exist, we can’t help but want to know. More than that, if we want to build a fairer society, we need to be able to understand these gaps and accommodate them. The problem is that answers in science aren’t everything they seem. When we turn to scientists for resolution, we assume they will be neutral. We think the scientific method can’t be biased or loaded against women. But we’re wrong. The puzzle of why there are so few women in the sciences is crucial to understanding why, not because it tells us something about what women are capable of but because it explains why science has failed to rid us of the gender stereotypes and dangerous myths we’ve been laboring under for centuries.

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“Darwin created a space where women could say that maybe the Garden of Eden didn’t happen. . .and this was huge. You cannot overestimate how important Adam and Eve were in terms of constraining and shaping people’s ideas about women.” Although not a scientist herself, through Darwin’s work Gamble realized just how devastating the scientific method could be. If humans were descended from lesser creatures, the same as all other life on earth, then it made no sense for women to be confined to the home or subservient to men. These obviously weren’t the rules in the rest of the animal kingdom. “It would be unnatural for women to sit around and be totally dependent on men,” Hamlin tells me.

On Intelligence
by Jeff Hawkins and Sandra Blakeslee
Published 1 Jan 2004

Many vision researchers ignore saccades and the rapidly changing patterns of vision. Working with anesthetized animals, they study how vision occurs when an unconscious animal fixates on a point. In doing so, they're taking away the time dimension. There's nothing wrong with that in principle; eliminating variables is a core element of the scientific method. But they're throwing away a central component of vision, what it actually consists of. Time needs a central place in a neuroscientific account of vision. With hearing, we're used to thinking about sound's temporal aspect. It is intuitively obvious to us that sounds, spoken language, and music change over time.

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Stereotyping is an inherent feature of the brain. The way to eliminate the harm caused by stereotypes is to teach our children to recognize false stereotypes, to be empathetic, and to be skeptical. We need to promote these critical-thinking skills in addition to instilling the best values we know. Skepticism, the heart of the scientific method, is the only way we know how to ferret out fact from fiction. * * * By now, I hope I have convinced you that mind is just a label of what the brain does. It isn't a separate thing that manipulates or coexists with the cells in the brain. Neurons are just cells. There is no mystical force that makes individual nerve cells or collections of nerve cells behave in ways that differ from what they would normally do.

The Armchair Economist: Economics and Everyday Life
by Steven E. Landsburg
Published 1 May 2012

He proposed retaining the economist to study what makes teams punt. 211 212 THE PITFALLS OF SCIENCE The commissioner summoned the economist, who went home with a large retainer check and a mandate to discover the causes of punting. Many hours later (he billed by the hour) the answer was at hand. Volumes of computer printouts left no doubt: Punting nearly always takes place on the fourth down. But the economist was trained in the scientific method and knew that describing the past is less impressive than predicting the future. So before contacting the commissioner, he put his model to the acid test. He attended several football games and predicted in advance that all punting would take place on fourth down. When his predictions proved accurate, he knew he had made a genuine scientific discovery.

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The naive environmentalism of my daughter's preschool is a force-fed potpourri of myth, superstition, and ritual that has 223 224 THE PITFALLS OF RELIGION much in common with the least reputable varieties of religious Fundamentalism. The antidote to bad religion is good science. The antidote to astrology is the scientific method, the antidote to naive creationism is evolutionary biology, and the antidote to naive environmentalism is economics. Economics is the science of competing preferences. Environmentalism goes beyond science when it elevates matters of preference to matters of morality. A proposal to pave a wilderness and put up a parking lot is an occasion for conflict between those who prefer wilderness and those who prefer convenient parking.

Thinking in Bets
by Annie Duke
Published 6 Feb 2018

We see that even judges and scientists succumb to these biases. We shouldn’t feel bad, whatever our situation, about admitting that we also need help. Second, groups with diverse viewpoints are the best protection against confirmatory thought. Peer review, the gold standard that epitomizes the open-mindedness and hypothesis testing of the scientific method, “offers much less protection against error when the community of peers is politically homogeneous.” In other words, the opinions of group members aren’t much help if it is a group of clones. Experimental studies cited in the BBS paper found that confirmation bias led reviewers “to work extra hard to find flaws with papers whose conclusions they dislike, and to be more permissive about methodological issues when they endorse the conclusions.”

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A betting market in which the traders were the exact same experts and those experts had money on the line predicted correctly 71% of the time. A lot of people were surprised to learn that the expert opinion expressed as a bet was more accurate than expert opinion expressed through peer review, since peer review is considered a rock-solid foundation of the scientific method. Of course, this result shouldn’t be surprising to readers of this book. We know that scientists are dedicated to truthseeking and take peer review seriously. Arguably, there is already an implied betting element in the scientific process, in that researchers and peer reviewers have a reputational stake in the quality of their review.

New Dark Age: Technology and the End of the Future
by James Bridle
Published 18 Jun 2018

Scannell, Alex Blanckley, Helen Boldon and Brian Warrington, ‘Diagnosing the decline in pharmaceutical R&D efficiency’, Nature Reviews Drug Discovery 11, 191–200 (March 2012). One of the places in which it has become increasingly evident that the reliance on vast amounts of data alone is harmful to the scientific method is in pharmacological research. Over the past sixty years, despite the huge growth of the pharmacological industry, and the concomitant investment in drug discovery, the rate at which new drugs are made available has actually fallen when compared to the amount of money spent on research – and it has fallen consistently and measurably.

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An arms race develops between writer and machine, with the latest plagiarism detectors employing neural networks to winkle out uncommon words and phrases that might point towards manipulation. But neither plagiarism nor outright fraud suffice to account for a larger crisis within science: replicability. Replication is a cornerstone of the scientific method: it requires that any experiment be repeatable by another group of independent researchers. But in reality, very few experiments are replicated – and the more that are, the more fail the test. At the University of Virginia’s Center for Open Science, an initiative called the Reproducibility Project has, since 2011, tried to replicate the findings of five landmark cancer studies: to take the same experimental setup, rerun the experiments, and get the same results.

Civilization: The West and the Rest
by Niall Ferguson
Published 28 Feb 2011

It comes in many variants – medieval English individualism, humanism and the Protestant ethic – and it has been sought everywhere from the wills of English farmers to the account books of Mediterranean merchants and the rules of etiquette of royal courts. In The Wealth and Poverty of Nations, David Landes made the cultural case by arguing that Western Europe led the world in developing autonomous intellectual inquiry, the scientific method of verification and the rationalization of research and its diffusion. Yet even he allowed that something more was required for that mode of operation to flourish: financial intermediaries and good government.26 The key, it becomes ever more apparent, lies with institutions. Institutions are, of course, in some sense the products of culture.

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That the struggle between radical Islam and Western civilization can be caricatured as ‘Jihad vs McWorld’ speaks volumes.91 In reality, the core values of Western civilization are directly threatened by the brand of Islam espoused by terrorists like Muktar Said Ibrahim, derived as it is from the teachings of the nineteenth-century Wahhabist Sayyid Jamal al-Din and the Muslim Brotherhood leaders Hassan al-Banna and Sayyid Qutb.92 The separation of church and state, the scientific method, the rule of law and the very idea of a free society – including relatively recent Western principles like the equality of the sexes and the legality of homosexual acts – all these things are openly repudiated by the Islamists. Estimates of the Muslim population of West European countries vary widely.

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A growing number of Resterners are sleeping, showering, dressing, working, playing, eating, drinking and travelling like Westerners.61 Moreover, as we have seen, Western civilization is more than just one thing; it is a package. It is about political pluralism (multiple states and multiple authorities) as well as capitalism; it is about the freedom of thought as well as the scientific method; it is about the rule of law and property rights as well as democracy. Even today, the West still has more of these institutional advantages than the Rest. The Chinese do not have political competition. The Iranians do not have freedom of conscience. They get to vote in Russia, but the rule of law there is a sham.

Fifty Degrees Below
by Kim Stanley Robinson
Published 25 Oct 2005

Their usual lunchtime special ran parallel to Route 66 east for a while, then back around the curve of the Potomac and west back to NSF. They ran at talking speed, which for this group meant about an eight-minute mile pace. A lot of the talking came from Edgardo, riffing on one thing or another. He liked to make connections; he liked to question things. He didn’t believe in anything. Even the scientific method was to him a kind of ad hoc survival attempt, a not-very–successful concoction of emergency coping mechanisms. Which belief did not, however, keep him from working maniacally on every project thrown his way, nor from partying late almost every night at various Latin venues. He was from Buenos Aires originally, and this, he said, explained everything about him.

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Social Science Experiment in Elective Politics (SSEEP) (notes by Edgardo Alfonso, for Diane Chang, the Vanderwal committee, and the National Science Board) The experiment is designed to ask, if the scientific community were to propose a platform of political goals based on scientific principles, how would it be formulated, and what would the platform say? In other words, what goals for improvement in society and government might follow logically from the aggregate of scientific findings and the application of the scientific method to the problem of change? The platform could conceivably take the form of the “Contract with America” adopted by the Republican Party before the 1994 election (a kind of list of Things To Do): “Contract with Humanity” “Contract with the Children” “Contract with the Generations to Come” commitment to inventing a sustainable culture (Permaculture, first iteration —what science is for) Some kind of underlying macro-goal or foundational axiom set might have to be synthesized from the particulars of scientific practice and the composite standard model of physical reality expressed by the various disciplines. 1) One axiom or goal might be some form of the “Greatest good for the greatest number” rubric.

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Take a problem, break it down into parts (analyze), quantify whatever parts you could, see if what you learned suggested anything about causes and effects; then see if this suggested anything about long-term plans, and tangible things to do. She did not believe in revolution of any kind, and only trusted the mass application of the scientific method to get any real-world results. “One step at a time,” she would say to her team in bioinformatics, or Nick’s math group at school, or the National Science Board; and she hoped that as long as chaos did not erupt worldwide, one step at a time would eventually get them to some tolerable state.

Them And Us: Politics, Greed And Inequality - Why We Need A Fair Society
by Will Hutton
Published 30 Sep 2010

According to Lipsey et al., only 23 true GPTs have ever been invented, and 15 of them have appeared in the last 550 years.10 Moreover, the pace is accelerating. Nine GPTs – the internal combustion engine, electricity, the motor vehicle, the airplane, mass production, the computer, lean production, the internet and biotechnology – have been developed over the last 125 years. The movement to a scientific culture and the adoption of the scientific method since the Enlightenment have allowed systematic formulation of the principles underlying GPTs and the creation of a common knowledge base that grows cumulatively – thereby opening the path for the creation of new GPTs. There is every reason to believe that the number will double again in the next 125 years, as technologies build on each other at an exponential rate.

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Before 1829, dissenters were all prohibited from joining Parliament, the military or the civil service. Wedgwood typified the new breed: ‘everything yields to experiment’, he said, as he restlessly integrated art, industry and the latest technological processes. Britain had become an open-access society in every way, celebrating Newton’s mechanics and the scientific method that produced it but also welcoming the influence of thinkers from outside the mainstream.4 The country was locked into a virtuous circle. The threat of ossification The contrast between Britain’s embrace of the new in the first half of the nineteenth century and the resistance elsewhere is striking.

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Gardner argues that there are five distinct sets of mental capabilities that are necessary for future progress. The first is what he dubs the ‘disciplined mind’ – the mind that can work with subject matter in any discipline to uncover laws, truths or insights via a systematic, disciplined process, be it the scientific method or a historian quarrying away in the archives to make empathetic sense of the past and the present. Gardner then makes the case for the ‘creative’, the ‘synthesising’, the ‘respectful’ and the ‘ethical’ mind. Synthesising minds are needed to marshal disparate information from the multiplicity of new sources, while creative minds challenge received wisdom and authority to make new breakthroughs.

Animal Spirits: The American Pursuit of Vitality From Camp Meeting to Wall Street
by Jackson Lears

A Science that has tried and failed is as satisfactory as a Science that succeeds. Truth simply consists in the perpetual quest after truth.” As Lovejoy recognized, this perspective was consistent with the conception of truth-as-process that James had dubbed “pragmatic.” It was also far more congruent with the trial-and-error nature of the scientific method than nineteenth-century scientists’ claims to certainty had been. Still, there was a certain vagueness around the edges of the élan vital (as there was around all celebrations of raw energy) that left it susceptible to appropriation for vile purposes, including those of militarists and fascists.

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Roszak’s sweeping condemnations of “scientists,” “science,” and “the scientific world view” left him vulnerable to charges of anti-intellectualism. He neglected to make clear that his real focus was on scientism—the belief that a reified “science” had answered (or was about to answer) all the questions we could possibly pose to the cosmos. This outlook, which is completely at odds with the scientific method, has always been more prominent among journalistic popularizers than among scientists themselves. Yet despite Roszak’s imprecise aim at “science,” he recognized that elevation of quantity over quality—like the technocratic worldview it enabled—depended on a dualistic Cartesian ontology. Though Roszak never referred to Descartes, he focused on “the myth of objective consciousness” as the intellectual foundation of technocracy.

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Like previous mainstream economists, Shiller and Akerlof turned Keynesianism into mere technique. In fact, Keynes’s ideas remained profoundly at odds with contemporary policy assumptions. Keynes would undoubtedly take issue with the consensus faith in quantitative expertise, which has been fed by popularizing journalists. Ignoring the experimental cast of mind at the heart of the scientific method, they have made a reified “science” the repository of absolute truth. Behind this enterprise lies the reductionist assumption that science has answered (or is about to answer) all ultimate questions with quantifiable precision. The determination to calculate the incalculable has accelerated, promoting “happiness studies” and other forms of survey research that purport to plumb the depths of subjective experience on the dubious basis of self-reporting.

Genius: The Life and Science of Richard Feynman
by James Gleick
Published 1 Jan 1992

They do not appreciate that the problem is not to demonstrate whether it’s possible or not but whether it’s going on or not.” How could one evaluate miracle cures or astrological forecasts or telekinetic victories at the roulette wheel? By subjecting them to the scientific method. Look for people who recovered from leukemia without having prayed. Place sheets of glass between the psychic and the roulette table. “If it’s not a miracle,” he said, “the scientific method will destroy it.” It was essential to understand coincidence and probability. It was noteworthy that flying-saucer lore involved a considerably greater variety of saucer than of creature: “orange balls of light, blue spheres which bounce on the floor, gray fogs which disappear, gossamer-like streams which evaporate into the air, thin, round flat things out of which objects come with funny shapes that are something like a human being.”

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Instead, professors and working physicists found Feynman’s three volumes reshaping their own conception of their subject. They were more than just authoritative. A physicist, citing one of many celebrated passages, would dryly pay homage to “Book II, Chapter 41, Verse 6.” Authoritative, too, were Feynman’s views of quantum mechanics, of the scientific method, of the relations between science and religion, of the role of beauty and uncertainty in the creation of knowledge. His comments on such subjects were mostly expressed offhand in technical contexts, but also in two slim models of science writing, again distilled from lectures: The Character of Physical Law and QED: The Strange Theory of Light and Matter.

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A year after that, the study of streptomycin as an antitubercular agent had become the most extensive research project ever devoted to a drug and a disease. Researchers were treating more than one thousand patients. In 1947 streptomycin was released to the public. Streptomycin’s discovery, like penicillin’s a few years earlier, had been delayed by medicine’s slow embrace of the scientific method. Physicians had just begun to comprehend the power of controlled experiments repeated thousands of times. The use of statistics to uncover any but the grossest phenomena remained alien. The doctor who first isolated the culture he named Streptomyces griseus, by cultivating some organisms swabbed from the throat of a chicken, had seen the same microbes in a soil sample in 1915 and had recognized even then that they had a tendency to kill disease-causing bacteria.

Mistakes Were Made (But Not by Me): Why We Justify Foolish Beliefs, Bad Decisions, and Hurtful Acts
by Carol Tavris and Elliot Aronson
Published 6 May 2007

For example, cognitive and behavioral methods are the psychological treatments of choice for panic attacks, depression, eating disorders, insomnia, chronic anger, and other emotional disorders. These methods are often as effective or more effective than medication.5 In contrast, most psychiatrists, who have medical degrees, learn about medicine and medication, but they rarely learn much about the scientific method or even about basic research in psychology. Throughout the twentieth century, they were generally practitioners of Freudian psychoanalysis or one of its offshoots; you needed an MD to be admitted to a psychoanalytic training institute. As the popularity of psychoanalysis declined and the biomedical model of disorder gained the upper hand, most psychiatrists began treating patients with medication rather than any form of talk therapy.

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An understanding of how to think scientifically may not aid therapists in the subjective process of helping a client who is searching for answers to existential questions. But it matters profoundly when therapists claim expertise and certainty in domains in which unverified clinical opinion can ruin lives. The scientific method consists of the use of procedures designed to show not that our predictions and hypotheses are right, but that they might be wrong. Scientific reasoning is useful to anyone in any job because it makes us face the possibility, even the dire reality, that we were mistaken. It forces us to confront our self-justifications and put them on public display for others to puncture.

The Greatest Story Ever Told--So Far
by Lawrence M. Krauss
Published 21 Mar 2017

Everything about our evolutionary history has primed our minds to be comfortable with concepts that helped us survive, such as the natural teleological tendency children have to assume objects exist to serve a goal, and the broader tendency to anthropomorphize, to assign agency to lifeless objects, because clearly it is better to mistake an inert object for a threat than a threat for an inert object. Evolution didn’t prepare our minds to appreciate long or short timescales or short or huge distances that we cannot experience directly. So it is no wonder that some of the remarkable discoveries of the scientific method, such as evolution and quantum mechanics, are nonintuitive at best, and can draw most of us well outside our myopic comfort zone. This is also what makes the greatest story ever told so worth telling. The best stories challenge us. They cause us to see ourselves differently, to realign our picture of ourselves and our place in the cosmos.

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He suggests that we can only do so by exploring the realities that underlie the world of our direct experience, rather than by exploring the illusions of a reality that we might want to exist. Only through rational examination of what is real, and not by faith alone, is rational action—or good—possible. Today, Plato’s vision of “pure thought” has been replaced by the scientific method, which, based on both reason and experiment, allows us to discover the underlying realities of the world. Rational action in public and private life now requires a basis in both reason and empirical investigation, and it often requires a departure from the solipsistic world of our direct experience.

Sun in a Bottle: The Strange History of Fusion and the Science of Wishful Thinking
by Charles Seife
Published 27 Oct 2009

The true power of science comes from its ability to withstand the wishful thinking of the humans who craft its stories. Individual scientists err. They deceive themselves—and they can deceive others. They might even lie or cheat in an attempt to win fame or glory or immortality. But the whole point of the scientific method is to try to insulate the scientific story from the whims and frailties of the scientists who write it. The mechanisms of science are, essentially, protection against wishful thinking. This protection takes many forms, but the strongest come from the scientific community itself. Published scientific research is peer reviewed and vetted by rivals to ensure that its authors have made no obvious mistakes.

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And if there’s a hint of incompetence or fraud, the community will howl for the blood of the malefactors. It can be brutal, but this is the way science protects itself from the dishonesty, the stupidity, or the human failures of an individual scientist. This is what makes science seem so inhuman. The scientific method has no sympathy for wishful thinking. This can be hard on even the most brilliant scientists. As they practice their craft, they are forced to renounce some of their beliefs, no matter how deeply held they might be. If they err—as they almost certainly will—they must admit that they have deceived themselves.

The Battery: How Portable Power Sparked a Technological Revolution
by Henry Schlesinger
Published 16 Mar 2010

Unlike the dubious work of alchemists or innovations by tradesmen, which were largely conducted in secret, Gilbert’s brand of science was freely shared and open to challenges. A better theory backed up by a credible experiment could displace even the most fundamental of Gilbert’s conclusions. The scientific method would even have a profound effect on alchemy. By the time De Magnete was published, the secretive endeavor, which uncomfortably merged the technical and the mystical, had already moved beyond its traditional wasted efforts of transmutation or eternal life toward legitimate medicine. Gilbert and the scientific revolution of the seventeenth century served to push it even further away from magic and mysticism toward experimentation and respectability.

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Given the participants, it was an odd debate. Galvani, the anatomist, had ventured into physics, while Volta, the physicist, was crossing over into anatomy. Cultured Europe, in which science was very much salonfähig, quickly began to line up on both sides of the issue. Volta, for his part, was a strict adherent to the scientific method. Using a methodology very much like Franklin’s disassembling of a Leyden jar, he discovered that electrical fluid generated in the frog experiment was a product of the sum of its parts rather than a single piece. In a series of experiments, he systematically substituted various components of Galvani’s original experiment and soon found the secret resided not in the frog, but in the two dissimilar metals.

Mindwise: Why We Misunderstand What Others Think, Believe, Feel, and Want
by Nicholas Epley
Published 11 Feb 2014

Only at the rare times when it is stretched beyond its limits, or is proven to be profoundly mistaken, does its existence come back into view. ON MY MIND My goal is to bring what I think is your brain’s greatest ability out of the shadows and into the light of scientific inspection. Like thousands of other psychologists at research universities around the world, I use the basic principles of the scientific method to understand why you think, act, and feel as you do. More specifically, I conduct experiments that test your sixth sense to learn exactly how, and how well, you reason about the thoughts, motives, attitudes, beliefs, and emotions of others. This ability is one of your brain’s greatest because it allows you to achieve one of the most important goals in any human life: connecting, deeply and honestly, with other human beings.

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The biggest gender differences are biological: men have penises and women have vaginas, and, yes, research confirms that most men throw a baseball faster and farther than most women.21 The gender differences that most strongly capture our imagination and define our genders, however, are psychological: women are communal, emotional, relational, and think mainly about others, whereas men are independent, logical, spatial, and think mainly about sex. Scientists also love to talk about psychological gender differences, in part because the scientific method—just like our senses—uses methods that detect differences between groups rather than similarities. Consider the largest single study of gender preferences ever conducted in psychology, a survey of 10,047 men and women (ages twenty to twenty-five) from 37 cultures. These men and women were asked to rate the importance of thirteen attributes in a romantic partner (from 0, meaning it’s unimportant, to 3, meaning it’s indispensable).

Rationality: From AI to Zombies
by Eliezer Yudkowsky
Published 11 Mar 2015

Once I broke ritual by that single misstep, the power did not linger, but vanished instantly; the heap of paperclips and the pile of dollar bills no longer went empty at the same time.” “You actually tried this?” asks Mark. “Yes,” I say, “I actually performed the experiment, to verify that the outcome matched my theoretical prediction. I have a sentimental fondness for the scientific method, even when it seems absurd. Besides, what if I’d been wrong?” “If it had worked,” says Mark, “you would have been guilty of counterfeiting! Imagine if everyone did that; the economy would collapse! Everyone would have billions of dollars of currency, yet there would be nothing for money to buy!”

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The Great Idea would unravel the mysteries of the universe, supersede the authority of the corrupt and error-ridden Establishment, confer nigh-magical powers upon its wielders, feed the hungry, heal the sick, make the whole world a better place, etc., etc., etc. The man was Francis Bacon, his Great Idea was the scientific method, and he was the only crackpot in all history to claim that level of benefit to humanity and turn out to be completely right. (Bacon didn’t singlehandedly invent science, of course, but he did contribute, and may have been the first to realize the power.) That’s the problem with deciding that you’ll never admire anything that much: Some ideas really are that good.

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Bayes’s Theorem shows that falsification is very strong evidence compared to confirmation, but falsification is still probabilistic in nature; it is not governed by fundamentally different rules from confirmation, as Popper argued. So we find that many phenomena in the cognitive sciences, plus the statistical methods used by scientists, plus the scientific method itself, are all turning out to be special cases of Bayes’s Theorem. Hence the Bayesian revolution. * * * Having introduced Bayes’s Theorem explicitly, we can explicitly discuss its components. We’ll start with P(A|X). If you ever find yourself getting confused about what’s A and what’s X in Bayes’s Theorem, start with P(A|X) on the left side of the equation; that’s the simplest part to interpret.

Code Simplicity
by Max Kanat-Alexander
Published 23 Mar 2012

It has to be put into categories, the various pieces have to be correctly related to each other in terms of importance, etc. A science must contain general truths or basic laws. A science must tell you how to do something in the physical universe. It must be somehow applicable in work or in life. Usually, a science is discovered and proven through the scientific method, which involves observation of the physical universe, making a theory about how the universe works, performing experiments to verify your theory, and showing that the same experiment works everywhere to demonstrate that the theory is a general truth and not just a coincidence or something that worked just for you.

A Short Guide to a Long Life
by David B. Agus
Published 7 Jan 2014

And even when I suggest something that comes with a price, such as paying for a DNA screening test, there’s often an inexpensive, if not totally free, alternative (see Rule 19), which can be even more informative and useful. When I went on the Dr. Oz Show in the fall of 2012, I was billed as the most controversial doctor in America. But I think I’m the absolute opposite. I won’t endorse anything that’s not backed by well-controlled clinical trials—studies that live up to the rigors of the scientific method. In that regard, I’m one of the most conservative of doctors in America. People tend to label certain things as aggressive or, conversely, mainstream. Many individuals think taking aspirin and statins on a daily basis is aggressive but taking vitamins is mainstream. But the data tell a totally different story, painting a picture in which aspirin and statins can significantly reduce your risk of death (what scientists call “all cause mortality”) while vitamins and supplements may raise your risk for a variety of illnesses, including cancer.

Beyond: Our Future in Space
by Chris Impey
Published 12 Apr 2015

The baby knew it was unlikely for the experimenter to draw mostly ducks, so the experimenter’s behavior indicated a preference for ducks. Babies aren’t doing experiments or crunching statistics in the self-conscious way that adults do, but they’re unconsciously processing information in a way that parallels the scientific method. The next level of development involves play. When children say, “Let’s pretend,” they conjure up alternative worlds and populate them with imaginary friends. As we all know, these imaginary worlds can be very elaborate. Such behavior is uniquely human. Jane Goodall only spotted a few examples of pretend play in many hours of observing the Gombe chimpanzees in Tanzania, while it would be trivial to note this behavior in any four-year-old.

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It seems chaotic, but suddenly the tendrils form spirals and complex geometric shapes. Then, just as suddenly, the patterns disappear. I stare, transfixed. 12 Journey to the Stars _______________________ Home Away from Home “Prediction is very difficult, especially about the future,” according to Danish physicist Niels Bohr.1 Prediction is a core part of the scientific method. At a grainy level, scientists predict the outcome of an experiment or a measurement. At a big-picture level, scientists learn about our world by extrapolating laws of nature or predicting how they will operate in unfamiliar situations. It’s easy to cherry-pick predictions that make the prognosticator look foolish in hindsight.

Data and the City
by Rob Kitchin,Tracey P. Lauriault,Gavin McArdle
Published 2 Aug 2017

A new science of cities should therefore contribute to our understanding of cities in addressing these kinds of questions as well. References Allwinkle, S. and Cruickshank, P. (2011) ‘Creating smart-er cities: an overview’, Journal of Urban Technology 18(2): 1–16. Anderson, C. (2008) ‘The end of theory: The data deluge makes the scientific method obsolete’, Wired magazine online, 23 June, available at: www.wired.com/2008/06/ pb-theory/. Auge, M. (1995) Non-places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity. London: Verso. Batty, M. (2013a) Urban Informatics and Big Data. A Report to the ESRC Expert Group. London: CASA, UCL, available from: www.spatialcomplexity.info/files/2015/07/ Urban-Informatics-and-Big-Data.pdf [accessed 24 November 2016].

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These kinds of integration are as important as the search for pattern in such data and as the big data revolution proceeds it is increasingly clear that the pronouncements on the end of theory, made so vociferously by commentators such as Anderson (2008), are not being borne out in any sense. The need to approach big data with clear theory has never been more important. References Anderson, C. (2008) ‘The end of theory: the data deluge makes the scientific method obsolete’, Wired Magazine 16-07, 23 June, available from: http://archive.wired.com/ science/discoveries/magazine/16-07/pb_theory [accessed 24 November 2016]. Batty, M. (2013) The New Science of Cities. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Batty, M. (2014) ‘Can it happen again? Planning support, Lee’s requiem and the rise of the smart cities movement’, Environment and Planning B: Planning and Design 41(3): 388–391.

Masters of Scale: Surprising Truths From the World's Most Successful Entrepreneurs
by Reid Hoffman , June Cohen and Deron Triff
Published 14 Oct 2021

This is what Eric dubbed the “Minimum Viable Product,” or MVP: the most bare-bones, least-polished version of a product that can be used to test a hypothesis. This catchy terminology was new at the time, but as Eric readily acknowledges, his test-and-learn theory is derived from the scientific method, which developed over centuries. “We’re not breaking any really new ground here,” he says, “but just applying those lessons to business.” It’s worth noting that Eric’s approach is not just about learning—it’s also about how you respond to what you’ve learned, achieving “perfection through iteration.” As with the scientific method, it involves assessing the results of your experiment and asking: Did it bear out my hypothesis? Or do I need to make adjustments?

The Intelligence Trap: Revolutionise Your Thinking and Make Wiser Decisions
by David Robson
Published 7 Mar 2019

He was so sure of the genetic nature of intelligence that he neglected to hunt for talented children in poorer neighbourhoods. And he must have known that meddling in his subjects’ lives would skew the results, but he often offered financial support and professional recommendations to his Termites, boosting their chances of success. He was neglecting the most basic (tacit) knowledge of the scientific method, which even the most inexperienced undergraduate should take for granted. This is not to mention his troubling political leanings. Terman’s interest in social engineering led him to join the Human Betterment Foundation – a group that called for the compulsory sterilisation of those showing undesirable qualities.58 Moreover, when reading Terman’s early papers, it is shocking how easily he dismissed the intellectual potential of African Americans and Hispanics, based on a mere handful of case-studies.

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31. 7 For an accessible description of this argument, see Stanovich, K.E. (2009), ‘Rational and Irrational Thought: The Thinking That IQ Tests Miss’, Scientific American Mind, 20(6), 34?9. 8 There is good evidence, for instance, that children naturally reject information if it contradicts ‘common sense’ theories of the world, and they need to learn the scientific method from the people they trust. So a child growing up in an environment that rejects science will naturally adopt those views, regardless of their intelligence. Bloom, P. and Weisberg, D.S. (2007), ‘Childhood Origins of Adult Resistance to Science’, Science, 316(5827), 996–7. 9 ‘Knowledge projection from an island of false beliefs might explain the phenomenon of otherwise intelligent people who get caught in a domain-specific web of falsity that, because of projection tendencies, they cannot escape.

Einstein's Unfinished Revolution: The Search for What Lies Beyond the Quantum
by Lee Smolin
Published 31 Mar 2019

When we speak of the picture of nature in the exact science of our age, we do not mean a picture of nature so much as a picture of our relationships with nature. . . . Science no longer confronts nature as an objective observer, but sees itself as an actor in this interplay between man and nature. The scientific method of analyzing, explaining and classifying has become conscious of its limitations, which arise out of the fact that by its intervention science alters and refashions the object of investigation. In other words, method and object can no longer be separated. . . . [T]he different intuitive pictures which we use to describe atomic systems, although fully adequate for given experiments, are nevertheless mutually exclusive.

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But if we don’t, I have no doubt our descendants will, so long as we keep the great adventure of science alive. EPILOGUE/REVOLUTIONS Note to Self The truth is out there. —THE X-FILES Never, never, never, never, never give up. —DAVID GROSS Einstein told us that we scientists are opportunists who are willing to break the rules and bend the scientific method to our purpose of discovering how nature works. Each scientist is like an entrepreneur, who has a certain amount of capital to invest; for a theoretical physicist that capital consists mainly of time and attention. The most important decisions we make are what problems we work on and which approaches we choose.

New Power: How Power Works in Our Hyperconnected World--And How to Make It Work for You
by Jeremy Heimans and Henry Timms
Published 2 Apr 2018

They came from a world with clear boundaries between “us” and “them,” where only the lab-coated and credentialed were equipped to solve the mysteries of the cosmos. As one leading scientist explained, the resistance to open innovation “is really intrinsic, the history of the scientific method goes against it…In our training, trying to solve problems in the scientific method was: I take in all this information, I synthesize it, I do analysis and I come to some conclusion and so to reach out to other people to solve it, it’s like cheating!” This group believed deeply in the value of expertise. Their own identities grew out of a tradition that venerated individual moments of genius.

We Are Data: Algorithms and the Making of Our Digital Selves
by John Cheney-Lippold
Published 1 May 2017

Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge, 1990); and Judith Butler, Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of Sex (New York: Routledge, 1993). 118. David Bamman, Jacob Eisenstein, and Tyler Schnoebelen, “Gender in Twitter: Styles, Stances, and Social Networks,” arXiv:1210.4567, 2012, 2. 119. Chris Anderson, “The End of Theory: The Data Deluge Makes the Scientific Method Obsolete,” Wired, June 23, 2008, www.wired.com. 120. Gartner, “Gartner Says Worldwide Enterprise IT Spending to Reach $2.7 Trillion in 2012,” October 2011, http://gartner.com. 121. David Ribes and Steven J. Jackson, “Data Bite Man: The Work of Sustaining Long-Term Study,” in Gitelman, “Raw Data” Is an Oxymoron, 147–166; Kate Crawford, “The Hidden Biases of Big Data,” Harvard Business Review Blog, April 1, 2013, http://blogs.hbr.org; Rob Kitchin, “Big Data and Human Geography: Opportunities, Challenges and Risks,” Dialogues in Human Geography 3, no. 3 (2013): 262–267. 122.

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Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” in Illuminations: Essays and Reflections (New York: Schocken, 1969), 222. 89. Ibid., 223. 90. Zeynep Tufekci, “Engineering the Public: Big Data, Surveillance and Computational Politics,” First Monday 19, no. 7 (2014), http://firstmonday.org. 91. Chris Anderson, “The End of Theory: Will the Data Deluge Make the Scientific Method Obsolete?,” Wired, June 23, 2008, http://archive.wired.com. 92. Kai Eriksson, “Foucault, Deleuze, and the Ontology of Networks,” European Legacy 10, no. 6 (2005): 599–600; Foucault, History of Sexuality, Volume 1, 92–93. Chapter 3. Subjectivity 1. Babycastles, “JULIAN ASSANGE—When Google Met WikiLeaks Book Release Party,” Facebook, 2014, www.facebook.com. 2.

Being You: A New Science of Consciousness
by Anil Seth
Published 29 Aug 2021

Since brains are physical systems with finite resources, and since some brains seem incapable of understanding some things, it seems inescapable that there must be some things which are the case, but which no human could ever understand. However, it is unjustifiably pessimistic to pre-emptively include consciousness within this uncharted domain of species-specific ignorance. One of the more beautiful things about the scientific method is that it is cumulative and incremental. Today, many of us can understand things that would have seemed entirely incomprehensible even in principle to our ancestors, maybe even to scientists and philosophers working just a few decades ago. Over time, mystery after mystery has yielded to the systematic application of reason and experiment.

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If your lawn is wet two mornings in a row, your best guess about the cause on the second day should be informed by your best guess on the first day, and so on as each new day comes along. Bayesian inference has been applied to great benefit in all sorts of contexts, from medical diagnosis to searching for missing nuclear submarines, with new applications emerging all the time. Even the scientific method itself can be understood as a Bayesian process, in which scientific hypotheses are updated by new evidence from experiments. Conceiving of science in this way is distinct from both the ‘paradigm shifts’ of Thomas Kuhn, in which entire scientific edifices are overturned as inconsistent evidence accumulates, and the ‘falsificationist’ views of Karl Popper, where hypotheses are raised and tested one by one, like balloons released into the sky and then shot down.

Chaos Engineering: System Resiliency in Practice
by Casey Rosenthal and Nora Jones
Published 27 Apr 2020

But in this case, even more direct appeal can be made to the basis of healthcare as a system. When empirical experimentation was chosen as the basis of Chaos Engineering, it was a direct appeal to Karl Popper’s concept of falsifiability, which provides the foundation for Western notions of science and the scientific method. The pinnacle of Popperian notions in practice is the clinical trial. In this sense, the phenomenal success of the Western healthcare system is built on Chaos Engineering. Modern medicine depends on double-blind experiments with human lives on the line. They just call it by a different name: the clinical trial.

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See Beyer et al., Site Reliability Engineering, Chapter 28. 7 Andrew Widdowson, “Disaster Role Playing,” in Betsy Beyer, Chris Jones, Jennifer Petoff, and Niall Murphy, eds., Site Reliability Engineering (Sebastopol, CA: O’Reilly, 2016), Chapter 14. 8 The Wikipedia definition is as follows: “Fuzzing or fuzz testing is an automated software testing technique that involves providing invalid, unexpected, or random data as inputs to a computer program,” https://oreil.ly/Erveu. 9 Two tools that have been open sourced by Google are libprotobuf-mutator and ClusterFuzz. 10 It is no coincidence that the Principles of Chaos reflect the scientific method—the universe being the original large-scale, distributed system. 11 There is a phenomenon at Google known as the “DiRT curse” where on the occasions that a particularly major test is canceled or postponed there will shortly be a real incident uncannily similar to the originally planned test.

We Are Electric: Inside the 200-Year Hunt for Our Body's Bioelectric Code, and What the Future Holds
by Sally Adee
Published 27 Feb 2023

The best available metaphor was plumbing: Rather than being comprised of a bunch of separate cells, scientists still saw a series of tubes. Except instead of animal spirits, it was now electricity that coursed through them. Thanks to better tools—like sensitive galvanometers and Volta’s battery—and Humboldt, du Bois-Reymond, and Helmholtz’s commitment to the rigors of the scientific method, the millennia-old mystery of animal spirits had finally been solved. Animal spirits, the things that carried the brain’s impulse and intent to the limbs to carry out, and carried back the sensations of the world outside, were electric. Animal spirits were animal electricity. But instead of calling it animal electricity, the new term was “nervous conduction.”

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The consequent advances were so swift, and so numerous, that science historians Marco Bresadola and Marco Piccolino call them “comparable to that of quantum mechanics in Max Planck’s day.”1 CHAPTER 3 The electrome and the bioelectric code: How to understand our body’s electrical language By the end of the nineteenth century, animal spirits had been rescued from millennia of airy philosophical conjecture and placed onto the firm ground of the scientific method. Alexander von Humboldt, Emil du Bois-Reymond, and Hermann von Helmholtz had vindicated the work for which Galvani had given his life: what are the animal spirits in our nerves, these things that animate our every sense and motion? They are electric. Yet even they could not have anticipated what their foundational tools and insights would set in motion over the next 150 years.

The Centrist Manifesto
by Charles Wheelan
Published 18 Apr 2013

This lack of action is particularly disturbing because there are ample other reasons besides global warming to wean us from our excessive dependence on fossil fuels. In fact, the climate change “debate” is a sad example of the triumph of a self-interested, faith-based argument over common sense and the scientific method. Our “human capital”—the reservoir of skills that we need to prosper in a modern economy—is stagnant. The U.S. high school dropout rate is about the same as it was thirty years ago, despite the fact that dropping out of high school is essentially an economic death warrant in the twenty-first-century economy.

Thinking with Data
by Max Shron
Published 15 Aug 2014

With the skeptical ideal in mind, it becomes easier to make a general argument, but it is also easier to make an argument to a specific audience. After making an argument for an ideal audience, it is easy to remove some parts and emphasize others to meet the needs of one or more particular audiences. Simplifying or expanding on certain things for an audience is fine, but lying is not. Something that good data work inherits from the scientific method is that it is bad form to cheat by preying on gullibility or ignorance. It is bad form, and in the long run it will cause the ruin of a business (or maybe a civilization). An argument moves from statements that the audience already believes to statements they do not yet believe. At the beginning, they already agree with some statements about the world.

The Meaning of It All
by Richard P. Feynman
Published 8 Jul 2012

They would then have to compare the success of the cure of these people with the average cure of people for whom such prayers were not made, and so forth. It’s an honest, straightforward way to do it, and there is nothing dishonest and nothing sacriligious about it, because if it’s a miracle, it will hold up. And if it’s not a miracle, the scientific method will destroy it. The people who study medicine and try to cure people are interested in every method that they can find. And they have developed clinical techniques in which (all these problems are very difficult) they are trying all kinds of medicines too, and the woman got better. She also had chicken pox just before she got better.

The End of Illness
by David B. Agus
Published 15 Oct 2012

The Rochester community is heavily populated with German and Norwegian Americans who tend to marry and procreate within their community, thus maintaining a steady gene pool. Hence, their ancestry’s genetics will be vastly different from that of a homogenous community elsewhere. The meaning of studies performed will be different depending on the group studied, even when the rigors of the scientific method are employed to generate a “randomized” group of participants. So the next time you read an eye-popping headline about a health-related study revealing something “new” (especially those that tend to be alarmist), look behind that headline to see where the study was done and who participated in it.

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But despite its role in many of the body’s vital functions, we must be careful about making broad statements about vitamin D and its link (“associations”) to various illnesses and disease. Despite thousands of studies, there’s not a lot of strong research showing consistent benefits from vitamin D supplementation; and here, semantics again comes into play. “Studies” should mean large, controlled, double-blind, randomized trials that honor the scientific method. That doesn’t always happen, especially with regard to vitamin D. Performing a true study on vitamin D’s potential benefit, which should theoretically result in reliable conclusions, is nearly impossible since vitamin D cannot be controlled in any given person. First, we have the stumbling block of dealing with a vitamin that can be obtained naturally from sunlight and certain foods such as wild salmon and fortified milk and cereals.

The Inevitable: Understanding the 12 Technological Forces That Will Shape Our Future
by Kevin Kelly
Published 6 Jun 2016

Constant flux means more than simply “things will be different.” It means processes—the engines of flux—are now more important than products. Our greatest invention in the past 200 years was not a particular gadget or tool but the invention of the scientific process itself. Once we invented the scientific method, we could immediately create thousands of other amazing things we could have never discovered any other way. This methodical process of constant change and improvement was a million times better than inventing any particular product, because the process generated a million new products over the centuries since we invented it.

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Dealing with alien intelligences will require similar skills, and a further broadening of ourselves. An embedded AI will change how we do science. Really intelligent instruments will speed and alter our measurements; really huge sets of constant real-time data will speed and alter our model making; really smart documents will speed and alter our acceptance of when we “know” something. The scientific method is a way of knowing, but it has been based on how humans know. Once we add a new kind of intelligence into this method, science will have to know, and progress, according to the criteria of new minds. At that point everything changes. AI could just as well stand for “alien intelligence.”

Is the Internet Changing the Way You Think?: The Net's Impact on Our Minds and Future
by John Brockman
Published 18 Jan 2011

The beneficiaries of the system in which making things public was a privileged activity—academics, politicians, reporters, doctors—will complain about the way the new abundance of public thought upends the old order, but those complaints are like keening at a wake: The change they are protesting is already in the past. The real action is elsewhere. The Internet’s primary effect on how we think will reveal itself only when it affects the cultural milieu of thought, not just the behavior of individual users. The members of the Invisible College did not live to see the full flowering of the scientific method, and we will not live to see what use humanity makes of a medium for sharing that is cheap, instant, and global (both in the sense of “comes from everyone” and in the sense of “goes everywhere”). We are, however, the people who are setting the earliest patterns for this medium. Our fate won’t matter much, but the norms we set will.

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When I reflect on how I go about my intellectual work these days, I see that the Internet has changed it dramatically, but what has changed is the execution process (and hence, on some occasions, the conclusions I reach or the way I present them), not the underlying thinking process. I would hope for humanity’s future that the same is true for all my fellow highly trained specialists. The scientific method for reaching conclusions has served us well for many generations, leading to a length and quality of life for most of us that was beyond the imagination of our ancestors. If that way of thinking were to be replaced by a blind “wisdom of the crowd” approach, which the Internet offers, then we are likely in for real trouble.

Mindware: Tools for Smart Thinking
by Richard E. Nisbett
Published 17 Aug 2015

What’s needed is what’s provided in this book—namely the ability to code events and objects in such a way that rough-and-ready versions of statistical principles can be applied to them. The book also presents the most important concepts of microeconomics and decision theory, the basic principles of the scientific method as they apply to solving everyday problems, the basic concepts of formal logic, the much less familiar principles of dialectical reasoning, and some of the most important concepts developed by philosophers who study how scientists as well as ordinary folks think (or should think). 4. The concepts in the book can be triangulated to understand a given problem from many perspectives.

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In contrast to deductive logic, inductive reasoning is a “bottom-up” type of reasoning. Observations are collected that suggest or support some conclusion. One type of inductive reasoning consists of observing facts and reaching a general conclusion about facts of their particular kind. This book is full of different types of inductive reasoning. The scientific method nearly always involves—in fact often is completely dependent on—inductive reasoning of one kind or another. All of the types of inductive reasoning in this book are inductively valid, but their conclusions are not deductively valid, merely probable. On the basis of observation and calculation we induce that the mean of the population of some events is X plus or minus Y standard deviations.

B Is for Bauhaus, Y Is for YouTube: Designing the Modern World From a to Z
by Deyan Sudjic
Published 17 Feb 2015

Clearly it was a law that left a mark on Sullivan’s most famous employee, Frank Lloyd Wright, and its traces are visible in the architect Louis Kahn’s mystical injunction to architects to ask of a brick what it wants to be, a perception that shaped his scheme for Bangladesh’s Parliament building and the Kimbell Art Museum in Texas. Using the metaphor of the machine, and the analogy of the scientific method, the modernists purported to eliminate the sentimental and the irrational from their work. They tried to make design as objective a process as possible. They created a language for design characterized by simplified forms and smooth surfaces that seemed to suggest mechanical production. The rhetorical message carried by design became as important as its substance.

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Putting modernity down to Walter Gropius’s Bauhaus manifesto from 1919, with its expressionist woodcut cover and its William Morris-influenced ideas about the unity of all the arts, design and architecture, or even to Adolf Loos’s writings in the Vienna newspapers in the years after 1900, is to miss the impact of the industrialization of the previous 200 years, of the enlightenment and the invention of the scientific method. Modernism was used in a derogatory sense as early as 1737, when Jonathan Swift branded those who abused contemporary language as ‘modernists’. The critic and architectural historian Joseph Rykwert takes an imaginative leap, claiming, convincingly, that ‘modern’, as it relates to design, is a concept that begins at least 250 years ago, with the separation of architecture from what were once called the other arts.

Rage Inside the Machine: The Prejudice of Algorithms, and How to Stop the Internet Making Bigots of Us All
by Robert Elliott Smith
Published 26 Jun 2019

He determined to travel to Tunisia, meet with the most learned scholars of the Muslim world, and persuade them to establish a Parliament of Faiths, where the relative merits of Christianity and Islam could be rationally debated, to what Llull saw as an obvious end. Though Francis Bacon wouldn’t formalize the scientific method until 300 years later, Llull’s idea of a rational argument over spirituality is an important scientific precursor. It is an idea whose appearance may have been particularly fomented by the monotheistic, Abrahamic tradition Ramon was steeped in. In earlier animist and polytheistic religions, many of the awful and inexplicable things that happened to people were laid at the door of capricious gods or spirits.

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In it, she critiques not only Darwin, but Herbert Spencer as well, highlighting that balance and cooperation were key features of evolution rather than just struggle and savage rivalry. In particular, she criticized Darwin for basing his theory on the ‘time-honored assumption that the male is the normal type of his species’. Blackwell believed both men employed a tainted version of the scientific method, one that embraced a solely masculine viewpoint, adding that while Spencer scientifically ‘subtracts from the female’, Darwin scientifically ‘adds to the male’. Blackwell’s radical theories were brought to light over a century later when feminist scientists, such as anthropologist Sarah Blaffer Hrdy, wrote in her 1999 book Mother Nature: For a handful of nineteeth-century women intellectuals, however, evolutionary theory was just too important to ignore.

The Man Who Solved the Market: How Jim Simons Launched the Quant Revolution
by Gregory Zuckerman
Published 5 Nov 2019

“Okay, go back to what you were doing,” Simons said. A bit later, as gold shot even higher, he phoned again: “It went up more, Elwyn!” Berlekamp was baffled. It was Simons who had pushed to develop a computerized trading system free of human involvement, and it was Simons who wanted to rely on the scientific method, testing overlooked anomalies rather than using crude charts or gut instinct. Berlekamp, Laufer, and the rest of the team had worked diligently to remove humans from the trading loop as much as possible. Now Simons was saying he had a good feeling about gold prices and wanted to tweak the system?

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In June 2019, Renaissance managed a combined $65 billion, making it one of the largest hedge-fund firms in the world, and sometimes represented as much as 5 percent of daily stock-market trading volume, not including high-frequency traders. The firm’s success is a useful reminder of the predictability of human behavior. Renaissance studies the past because it is reasonably confident investors will make similar decisions in the future. At the same time, staffers embrace the scientific method to combat cognitive and emotional biases, suggesting there’s value to this philosophical approach when tackling challenging problems of all kinds. They propose hypotheses and then test, measure, and adjust their theories, trying to let data, not intuition and instinct, guide them. “The approach is scientific,” Simons says.

Journey to the Edge of Reason: The Life of Kurt Gödel
by Stephen Budiansky
Published 10 May 2021

Discussion circles dedicated to every imaginable intellectual topic had been the rage in Vienna since before the First World War, many of them devoted to various brands of philosophical investigation. There were circles on Kant, on Kierkegaard, on Tolstoy, on phenomenology, on the philosophy of religion. But the new group was distinctive for its strongly analytical cast. “All members of the Circle had a background of scientific research,” said Karl Menger, “took the scientific method seriously, and in fact expected to obtain a consistent Weltbild—picture of the world—through what in the Circle was called die wissenschaftliche Weltauffassung,” the scientific worldview. The group was distinctive, too, for being one of the few places in the still very hierarchical world of Austrian higher education in which members of three generations, men and women, Austrians and foreign visitors, met and debated on equal terms.4 Café Josephinum, which Gödel lived above in 1927–28 By the time Gödel joined the circle, Schlick had begun leading the discussions, which took place in what Menger called “a rather dingy room” next to Schlick’s office on the ground floor of the Mathematics and Physics Institute.

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Gabriel conveniently absented himself during the trial, heading off to a “religious retreat” at a monastery in Innsbruck to avoid testifying. An utterly incompetent philosopher given to sententious and nebulous bloviations about “integral logic” and “synthesis of the whole,” Gabriel rejected the scientific method altogether as corrupting and destructive. In the ultimate irony, the chair he was appointed to was the very one once held by Schlick, now rededicated to the study of Catholic philosophy.67 Almost no attempt was made to bring back those who had been fired or fled. The University of Vienna judiciously decreed in 1946 that because Menger had resigned his position in 1938, he could not “in a strict sense” count as having been dismissed by the Nazi regime.68 As Gödel wrote his mother, That the Austrians today often do not want to give their colleagues abroad what is due them is probably true, and in part is motivated by material reasons.

Leonardo Da Vinci
by Walter Isaacson
Published 16 Oct 2017

They will say that because I have no book learning I cannot properly express what I desire to describe—but they do not know that my subjects require experience rather than the words of others.17 Thus was Leonardo spared from being trained to accept dusty Scholasticism or the medieval dogmas that had accumulated in the centuries since the decline of classical science and original thinking. His lack of reverence for authority and his willingness to challenge received wisdom would lead him to craft an empirical approach for understanding nature that foreshadowed the scientific method developed more than a century later by Bacon and Galileo. His method was rooted in experiment, curiosity, and the ability to marvel at phenomena that the rest of us rarely pause to ponder after we’ve outgrown our wonder years. To that was added an intense desire and ability to observe the wonders of nature.

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Leonardo broke with this tradition by basing his science primarily on observations, then discerning patterns, and then testing their validity through more observations and experiments. Dozens of times in his notebook he wrote some variation of the phrase “this can be proved by experiment” and then proceeded to describe a real-world demonstration of his thinking. Foreshadowing what would become the scientific method, he even prescribed how experiments must be repeated and varied to assure their validity: “Before you make a general rule of this case, test it two or three times and observe whether the tests produce the same effects.”7 He was aided by his ingenuity, which enabled him to devise all sorts of contraptions and clever methods for exploring a phenomenon.

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“Galileo, born 112 years after Leonardo, is usually credited with being the first to develop this kind of rigorous empirical approach and is often hailed as the father of modern science,” the historian Fritjof Capra wrote. “There can be no doubt that this honor would have been bestowed on Leonardo da Vinci had he published his scientific writings during his lifetime, or had his Notebooks been widely studied soon after his death.”12 That goes a step too far, I think. Leonardo did not invent the scientific method, nor did Aristotle or Alhazen or Galileo or any Bacon. But his uncanny abilities to engage in the dialogue between experience and theory made him a prime example of how acute observations, fanatic curiosity, experimental testing, a willingness to question dogma, and the ability to discern patterns across disciplines can lead to great leaps in human understanding.

Smart and Gets Things Done: Joel Spolsky's Concise Guide to Finding the Best Technical Talent
by Joel Spolsky
Published 1 Jun 2007

I wound up saying Hire even though he was a crappy candidate. You know what? Everybody else who interviewed him said No Hire. So: don’t listen to recruiters; don’t ask around about the person before you interview them; and never, ever talk to the other interviewers about the candidate until you’ve both made your decisions independently. That’s the scientific method. The introduction phase of the interview is intended to put the candidate at ease. I ask them if they had a nice flight. I spend about thirty seconds telling the person who I am and how the interview will work. I always reassure candidates that we are interested in how they go about solving problems, not the actual answer.

The Death of Truth: Notes on Falsehood in the Age of Trump
by Michiko Kakutani
Published 17 Jul 2018

For that matter, the normal machinery of policy making—and the normal process of analysis and review—were routinely circumvented by the Trump administration, which violated such norms with knee-jerk predictability. Many moves were the irrational result of a kind of reverse engineering: deciding on an outcome the White House or the Republican Congress wanted, then trying to come up with rationales or selling points afterward. This was the very opposite of the scientific method, whereby data is systematically gathered and assessed to formulate and test hypotheses—a method the administration clearly had contempt for, given its orders to CDC analysts to avoid using the terms “science-based” and “evidence-based.” And it was a reminder that in Orwell’s dystopia in 1984 there is no word for “science,” because “the empirical method of thought, on which all the scientific achievements of the past were founded,” represents an objective reality that threatens the power of Big Brother to determine what truth is.

Arriving Today: From Factory to Front Door -- Why Everything Has Changed About How and What We Buy
by Christopher Mims
Published 13 Sep 2021

The more complicated the products of a factory, the more that management fell to the workers themselves, since no one else knew better how to do their jobs. When Taylor entered the machine shop, a transition was underway in which managers of variable backgrounds were being replaced by engineers granted the responsibilities of management. Engineering itself was just becoming an accredited profession, and as the scientific method was applied to the products of engineering, so too were engineers primed to apply it to the management of the humans who worked with machines. In an age in which the use of interchangeable parts was not yet universal and the assembly line was just getting started—that is, the age before Ford’s system of mass production had taken over the world—it was often the case that every complicated machine was different from every other and had to be constructed by hand.

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But her talent for making what were then some of the most time-consuming tasks of everyday life more tractable demonstrated, more than anything else up to that point in time, the broad applicability of scientific management. Frederick Taylor codified and popularized the fruits of the efficiency movement, but it was Lillian Gilbreth who taught the world that it was possible to use careful observation and the scientific method to speed up just about anything. The irony of Gilbreth’s efforts to save housewives time was that as women working in the home became more capable, the standards of “good housekeeping” rose to match their enhanced abilities. Instead of saving America’s homemakers time, she unintentionally burdened them, and eventually all of us, with greater demands and more complex tasks.

Can It Happen Here?: Authoritarianism in America
by Cass R. Sunstein
Published 6 Mar 2018

It is not an exaggeration to say that without considering counterfactuals (or, as they are sometimes called, potential outcomes), statements about causality, and hence scientifically valid explanations, are impossible (Morgan and Winship 2014). It is for this reason that experiments are so important to the scientific method, because in an experiment you can systematically vary X (the “treatment”) and then directly observe the causal effect on Y. In much of social science, however, true experiments are impossible: the US can’t invade half of Iraq and not the other half to see which approach works out better; the Federal Reserve can’t set the interest rate at one level for a year and then rerun history with a different rate to measure the causal effect on inflation; and companies can’t hire two CEOs who get to run different instances of the same company to see who is more successful.

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In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the scientific world was undergoing transformative changes, in no small part because new instruments and methods were allowing scientists to observe and quantify phenomena that had previously been ephemeral. As is the case today with “big data” transforming once-sleepy areas of social science, public interest in the sciences was extremely high—scientists like Humphry Davy, a celebrated chemist, inventor of the Davy safety lamp, and fierce advocate of the scientific method, occupied almost celebrity status—but so was public skepticism. In effect, science was claiming for itself areas of human knowledge—like the size of the universe and the nature of the elements—that had for hundreds of years been the province of religion and poetry. The traditional arbiters of truth found their status increasingly challenged by a new breed of experts who brought with them methods—and a level of self-assurance in their answers—that the old guard naturally found deeply threatening.

Chasing the Moon: The People, the Politics, and the Promise That Launched America Into the Space Age
by Robert Stone and Alan Andres
Published 3 Jun 2019

As he read the news and talked with acquaintances, Ley was alarmed as things he had long opposed were gradually accepted as part of everyday life: a cult of loyalty and blind patriotism, militarism, anti-globalism, superstition, and pseudoscience. While Germany touted its reputation for excellence in the sciences, Ley observed how politics had begun to encroach on the scientific method, and positions formerly held by Jewish scientists were filled by less qualified opportunists. His friend Fritz Lang had already fled Germany, and Ley decided he had no other choice but to do the same. He would pretend to leave for a brief vacation in England but knew it likely he would not return home for years.

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Its curvy and cornerless exterior was a single concrete wall broken by a repetitive honeycomb pattern; inside, sunlight filtering through hundreds of stained-glass panels cast the towering interior in an eerie cobalt blue. Visitors described the environment as futuristic or otherworldly. But more often it was described as “cathedral-like.” The Hall of Science at the 1964 New York World’s Fair celebrated knowledge of the natural world, the scientific method, and their applications as the nation moved into a highly technological future. It was a secular cathedral dedicated to disciplines many in government, business, and academia believed would define the nation during the decades to come. Unlike the many corporate pavilions, which promoted Coca-Cola, General Motors, Ford, IBM, and other firms, the Hall of Science was one of the few structures to remain after the fair closed in 1965.

Infinite Powers: How Calculus Reveals the Secrets of the Universe
by Steven Strogatz
Published 31 Mar 2019

He wrote it in Italian rather than Latin so that it could be understood by anyone and arranged for it to be smuggled out to Holland, where it was published in 1638. Its radical insights helped launch the scientific revolution and brought humanity to the cusp of discovering the secret of the universe: that the great book of nature is written in calculus. Falling, Rolling, and the Law of Odd Numbers Galileo was the first practitioner of the scientific method. Rather than quoting authorities or philosophizing from an armchair, he interrogated nature through meticulous observations, ingenious experiments, and elegant mathematical models. His approach led him to many remarkable discoveries. One of the simplest and most surprising is this: The odd numbers 1, 3, 5, 7, and so forth are hiding in how things fall.

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See derivatives Raytheon Company, 263–64 reductionist thinking, 280 refraction, of light, 114–16, 114 religion and spirituality AlphaInfinity, 292–93, 294 Aristotle and, 60–61 calculus as God’s language, vii–viii, ix, xix, 295–97 cosmology and, 63–64 differential equations, 72 God. see God “God’s book,” 294 Newton’s influence on, 239 See also Church, the Renaissance, xix, 50, 59, 92 retrograde motion, 61–62, 61, 62 Riddle of the Wall, 8–9, 8, 21–25 Riemann, Bernhard, 290 rigid bodies, 278 rule of 72, 137 rule of logs, 132–33 Russell, Bertrand, 16 S Sanders, Bernie, 130–31 satellites, 76, 299–300 Saturn, 278 Schrödinger, Erwin, 22 science ideal conditions, 69–71 physics. see xPhysics planetary motion, 78–81 the scientific method, 66 scientific notation, 128–31 scientific revolution, 50, 63, 66, 87, 92, 124, 227, 272 second derivatives, 258 sectors, 83–84 self-regeneration property, 157–59 Shepard, Alan, 238 Shrek (movie), 50, 51, 53, 53 sine law of refraction, 115–117, 209 sine waves Chladni patterns, 259–60 day length example, 156–59 derivatives and, 256–59 heat flow, 250–52 overview of, 108–12, 109 string theory, 252–56 x-rays and, 267 slope changing rate of, 149–54 equation for, 147, 147, 207, 208 optimization problems, 104–5 problems concerning, 144–46 of a ramp, 142 Smith, Barnabas, 187 smooth curves, 153 Snell, Willebrord, 115 Snell’s law, 115–117, 209 Somayaji, Nilakantha, 193 soup example, 243–44 space-time, 248, 287–88, 299–300 speed, xx, 68, 141–42, 175 Spencer, Percy, 264, 328n262 spheres.

When China Rules the World: The End of the Western World and the Rise of the Middle Kingdom
by Martin Jacques
Published 12 Nov 2009

Chinese medicine, rather like the world’s cuisines, is a product of thousands of years of trial and error, of the everyday experience and resourcefulness of hundreds of millions of people and their interaction with their plant environment; Western medicine is a rigorous product of the scientific method and the invention and refining of chemicals. With the exception of those fundamentalists of the scientific method who believe that they enjoy a monopoly of true knowledge, there is a widespread and growing acceptance in the West that medicinal palliatives and cures derived from civilizational experience are a valid and important part of medicine, even if we do not understand, at least as yet, how the great majority of them actually work.

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Even the Renaissance and the Reformation, two great efflorescences of European life, were, as their names suggest, couched in terms of the past, despite the fact that they contained much that was forward-looking and novel.1 Scholars of Renaissance Europe believed that the learning of classical antiquity was being restored even while they were busy transforming the very manner in which people understood history.2 From the sixteenth century, this retrospective way of thinking gradually began to subside, not just in Europe but also in China, India, Japan and the Islamic world, though the process has been best chronicled in Europe. The growth of scientific knowledge, the expanding influence of the scientific method, the spread of secularism, and the burgeoning importance of the market and commerce slowly eroded the idea that the present and the future were little more than replays of the past. From the late eighteenth century, a fundamentally different outlook began to take root with the arrival of modernity.

The Grand Design
by Stephen Hawking and Leonard Mlodinow
Published 14 Jun 2010

The Ionian idea that the universe is not human-centered was a milestone in our understanding of the cosmos, but it was an idea that would be dropped and not picked up again, or commonly accepted, until Galileo, almost twenty centuries later. As insightful as some of their speculations about nature were, most of the ideas of the ancient Greeks would not pass muster as valid science in modern times. For one, because the Greeks had not invented the scientific method, their theories were not developed with the goal of experimental verification. So if one scholar claimed an atom moved in a straight line until it collided with a second atom and another scholar claimed it moved in a straight line until it bumped into a cyclops, there was no objective way to settle the argument.

Powerful: Teams, Leaders and the Culture of Freedom and Responsibility
by Patty McCord
Published 9 Jan 2018

We set a standard at Netflix that people should develop their opinions by probing into facts and by listening with an open mind to fact-based arguments they didn’t agree with. This flowed naturally from the fact that most of the early employees were mathematicians and engineers. They lived and breathed the scientific method, which is all about discovering facts and then adjusting one’s understanding of the problem and the way to solve it. As the company grew, we consciously cultivated that obsession with being fact driven and scientific—all around the company, not just in engineering. You don’t need a company founded on engineering in order to widely instill this ethic.

This Is Not a Drill: An Extinction Rebellion Handbook
by Extinction Rebellion
Published 12 Jun 2019

In our top-ten list of planetary threats, our statement included charts of global data on the oceans, forests, freshwater resources, vertebrate species and atmospheric carbon and temperature. We concluded that, with one exception, conditions have worsened since 1992. As retired NASA scientist James Hansen writes in Storms of My Grandchildren, scientists tend to be reticent in communicating the implications of their findings, a result perhaps of their adherence to the scientific method. ‘Caution has its merits,’ he wrote, ‘but we may live to rue our reticence if it serves to lock in future disasters.’ We scientists have been frustrated and even in despair over the many years of inaction, but we will continue to speak out, telling the truth about what we all need to do to protect life on planet Earth.

Literary Theory for Robots: How Computers Learned to Write
by Dennis Yi Tenen
Published 6 Feb 2024

Only a systematic exploration of the unknown could produce truly novel artistic forms. But novelty for novelty’s sake was also meaningless. His method, in addition, trivialized the very idea of novelty. Authors would now concentrate on ideals higher than mere innovation—­ideals like beauty, balance, and harmony. Armed with the scientific method, playwrights of the future could employ countless possible dramatic combinations, “ranged according to their probabilities,” Polti predicted. Further, rigorous experimentation was bound to change art in fantastical ways, by “analyzing orders, systems and groups of systems”—­as yet unseen methods for literary production would emerge—­“measured and classified with precision.”

The Most Powerful Idea in the World: A Story of Steam, Industry, and Invention
by William Rosen
Published 31 May 2010

Coke’s motivation was not, needless to say, a longing to see steam engines decorating the English countryside, but rather a desire to see it filled with English craftsmen. A high level of craftsmanship alone, however, wasn’t going to result in anything like Newcomen’s engine, much less Rocket; artisans can be—frequently are—ingenious without being innovative. Craftsmanship needed to be married to a new way of thinking, one not yet known as the “scientific” method. Luckily for history, a culture of observation, experimentation, and innovation was being cultivated in England at exactly the same moment that Coke was advocating for her artisans. Luckily for historians, its patron saint was not only Coke’s contemporary, but his professional, political, and even romantic rival.

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Afterward—particularly after he wrote Novum Organum, in 1622, in which he famously stated his belief that the compass, the printing press, and gunpowder had changed history more than any empire or religion—truth was something extracted from nature using the tools of observation and experiment. He didn’t, as is sometimes suggested, invent the scientific method; he had too feeble a handle on hypotheses, and especially mathematics, to do so. But what he did understand about the scientific enterprise was profoundly important for the wave of inventions that would inundate the world a century after his death. He knew that to be self-sustaining, both science and invention needed to be social enterprises, depending utterly on the free flow of information among investigators.

Beautiful Testing: Leading Professionals Reveal How They Improve Software (Theory in Practice)
by Adam Goucher and Tim Riley
Published 13 Oct 2009

Although we can find examples of this principle being applied in structured programming, object-oriented design (OOD), and design patterns, beauty and simplicity aren’t yet common considerations in bug management or QA test design. In this chapter we discuss how to manage bugs and measure test case effectiveness. We hope you will find this approach to be more beautiful, simple, and true than the more common haphazard QA approaches, which often stray from the scientific method and rely a bit too much on luck. 67 Bug Management The following sections explain bug management. The First Bug Found The Smithsonian National Museum of American History has part of an engineering notebook on display. The notebook’s terse handwritten notes bring to light some arcane details of the operation of Harvard University’s Mark II electromechanical computer.

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Tagged defect sets (tag clouds) 76 CHAPTER SIX Tagged Defect Sets (Tag Clouds): Why? Defect reports often contain multiple hypotheses describing theoretical root causes. But when a defect is closed, the validated root cause should be highlighted. If the developer and QA engineers have followed the scientific method, a closed defect should reference the following: • The code base the defect resides in • The hypothesized root cause • A description of the fix and/or a link to the source code patch • A test case proving that the root cause of the defect has indeed been fixed It is also useful to include test cases that disprove or eliminate alternative hypothesized root causes.

What's Left?: How Liberals Lost Their Way
by Nick Cohen
Published 15 Jul 2015

Each separate cultural group was playing its own ‘language game’, to use the phrase the postmodernists took from Wittgenstein, and only players in the game, whether feminists or Holocaust deniers, could determine whether what was being said was right or wrong. As epistemic relativism infected leftish intellectual life, all the old universal criteria, including human rights, the search for truth and the scientific method, became suspect instruments of elite oppression and Western cultural imperialism. Joseph de Maistre, an eighteenth-century reactionary philosopher, who hated the Enlightenment and its revolutions, dismissed the rights of man by saying: ‘There is no such thing in the world as man. In my life I have seen Frenchmen, Italians, Russians … But as for man, I declare I’ve never encountered him.’

…

Each wave of ultra-rightists asserted that the armies of the democracies will be no match for warriors ready to kill and be killed on the orders of a charismatic leader. Nationalist, fascist and Islamist alike believed that a ‘rootless, arrogant, greedy, decadent, frivolous cosmopolitanism’ drove the trading cities of the democracies. They all condemned Western thought for upholding the cold and specialized reasoning of the scientific method rather than the holistic mysteries of tribe and church. They all believed that the citizens of the democracies were bourgeois cowards; too selfishly fearful for their personal safety to risk a confrontation. The messianic worship of pure blood and the idolization of blood sacrifices are at the root of fascism, and it is an enormous mistake to ennoble the fascist critique of ‘corrupt’ and ‘hypocritical’ democracies by pretending it is just an extension of the ordinary arguments and confrontations of democratic debate.

The Black Box Society: The Secret Algorithms That Control Money and Information
by Frank Pasquale
Published 17 Nov 2014

One attorney at the Neighborhood Economic Development Advocacy Project (now the New Economy Project) called subprime lending a systematic “equity stripping” targeted at minorities— even if they were longtime homeowners.124 Subtle but persistent racism, arising out of implicit bias or other factors, may have influenced past terms of credit, and it’s much harder to keep up on a loan at 15 percent interest than one at 5 percent.125 Late payments will be more likely, and then will be fed into present credit scoring models as neutral, objective, nonracial indicia of reliability and creditworthiness.126 Far from liberating individuals to be judged on their character rather than their color, credit scores in scenarios like these launder past practices of discrimination into a black-boxed score, immune from scrutiny.127 Continuing unease about black box scoring reflects long-standing anxiety about misapplications of natural science methods to the social realm.128 A civil engineer might use data from a thousand bridges to estimate which one might next collapse; now fi nancial engineers scrutinize millions of transactions to predict consumer defaults. But unlike the engineer, whose studies do nothing to the bridges she examines, a credit scoring system increases the chance of a consumer defaulting once it labels him a risk and prices a loan accordingly. Moreover, the “science” of secret scoring does not adopt a key safeguard of the scientific method: publicly testable generalizations and observations.129 As long as the analytics are secret, they will remain an opaque and troubling form of social sorting. Bias can embed itself in other self-reinforcing cycles based on ostensibly “objective” data. Police in the past may have watched certain 42 THE BLACK BOX SOCIETY neighborhoods more closely than others.

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mod=googlenews _wsj; Christopher Ingraham, “Wal- Mart Has a Lower Acceptance Rate than Harvard,” Washington Post, Mar. 28, 2014, at http://www.washingtonpost .com /blogs / wonkblog /wp /2014 /03 /28 /wal -mart -has -a -lower -acceptance -rate -than -harvard /. 98. Barbara Ehrenreich, “Time Theft,” New Internationalist Magazine, November 2, 2002, http://www.newint.org/features/2002/11/01/women /. 99. O’Connell, “Test for Dwindling Retail Jobs Spawns a Culture of Cheating.” 100. Chris Anderson, “The End of Theory: The Data Deluge Makes the Scientific Method Obsolete,” Wired, June 23, 2008, http://www.wired.com /science/discoveries/magazine/16-07/pb_theory. 101. Ibid. 236 NOTES TO PAGES 37–40 102. Charles Tilly, Why?: What Happens When Persons Give Reasons (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008). 103. Omer Tene and Jules Polonetsky, “A Theory of Creepy: Technology, Privacy and Shifting Social Norms,” Yale Journal of Law and Technology 16 (2014): 59–102. 104.

Your Face Belongs to Us: A Secretive Startup's Quest to End Privacy as We Know It
by Kashmir Hill
Published 19 Sep 2023

Galton’s photo composites and mining of family trees were ostensibly attempts to measure the human mind and soul. But instead of providing scientific rigor to the study of human nature, he wrapped bias and prejudice in the trappings of high-minded analysis. * * * — GALTON WAS JUST one of many Victorians trying to bring the scientific method to the study of the human body. In France, a surly records clerk named Alphonse Bertillon was taking a different approach, seeking to discover what made individuals distinct, rather than the same, using methods that would come to be widely adopted by law enforcement agencies. Bertillon was tall and haughty, with large ears, a bushy beard, and fierce, dark eyes.

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GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT Bertillon was tall and haughty: The descriptions of Bertillon in this section come from several sources: Richard Farebrother and Julian Champkin, “Alphonse Bertillon and the Measure of Man: More Expert than Sherlock Holmes,” Significance 11, no. 2 (2014); Ida M. Tarbell, “Identification of Criminals: The Scientific Method in Use in France,” McClure’s Magazine 2, no. 4 (1894): 355–69; and a biography of Bertillon from “Visible Proofs: Forensic Views of the Body,” exhibition at the National Library of Medicine, closed on February 25, 2008, but archived online. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT France had stopped branding: It was outlawed in 1832, according to Dorothy and Thomas Hoobler, The Crimes of Paris: A True Story of Murder, Theft, and Detection (New York: Little, Brown, 2009).

Rationality: What It Is, Why It Seems Scarce, Why It Matters
by Steven Pinker
Published 14 Oct 2021

Or they think immigrants commit a lot of crime because they read in the news about an immigrant who robbed a store, but don’t think about the larger number of stores robbed by native-born citizens. Confirmation bias is a common diagnosis for human folly and a target for enhancing rationality. Francis Bacon (1561–1626), often credited with developing the scientific method, wrote of a man who was taken to a church and shown a painting of sailors who had escaped a shipwreck thanks to their holy vows. “Aye,” he remarked, “but where are they painted that were drowned after their vows?”27 He observed, “Such is the way of all superstitions, whether in astrology, dreams, omens, divine judgments, or the like; wherein men, having a delight in such vanities, mark the events where they are fulfilled, but where they fail, although this happened much oftener, neglect and pass them by.”28 Echoing a famous argument by the philosopher Karl Popper, most scientists today insist that the dividing line between science and pseudoscience is whether advocates of a hypothesis deliberately search for evidence that could falsify it and accept the hypothesis only if it survives.29 How can humans make it through the day with an inability to apply the most elementary rule of logic?

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But most experimenters think that they’ve already racked up some evidence for the effect, so they can get away with fewer participants, not appreciating that this strategy is a one-way path to the Journal of Irreproducible Results.12 A failure to appreciate how regression to the mean applies to striking discoveries led to a muddled 2010 New Yorker article called “The Truth Wears Off,” which posited a mystical “decline effect,” supposedly casting doubt on the scientific method.13 The Winner’s Curse applies to any unusually successful human venture, and our failure to compensate for singular moments of good fortune may be one of the reasons that life so often brings disappointment. What Is Causation? Before we lay out the bridge from correlation to causation, let’s spy on the opposite shore, causation itself.

Losing Earth: A Recent History
by Nathaniel Rich
Published 4 Aug 2018

If we vote correctly, eat vegan, and commute by bicycle, are we excused the occasional airplane ticket, the laptop, the elevators, year-round strawberries, trash collection, refrigerators, Wi-Fi, modern health care, and every other civilized activity that we take for granted? What is the appropriate calculus? How do we begin to make sense of our own complicity, however reluctant, in this nightmare? I know that I’m complicit; my hands drip crude. Hell is murky. In the United States of America, where a growing percentage of the public regards the scientific method as vaguely sacrilegious, if not blasphemous, spiritual leaders have been divided on the significance of climate change. But the most eloquent attempt to articulate a moral vision of the issue has come from Pope Francis, in his second encyclical, Laudato si’, “On Care for Our Common Home.” He borrows one of his central insights from Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew, the “Green Patriarch,” the spiritual leader of Orthodox Christians.

Reinventing Organizations: A Guide to Creating Organizations Inspired by the Next Stage of Human Consciousness
by Frederic Laloux and Ken Wilber
Published 9 Feb 2014

“Social Darwinism”—the notion of the survival of the fittest applied to all aspects of human existence as well—began to insidiously invade all the humanities, ethics, and politics of humans, including the two major new economic systems, capitalism and socialism. Scientific materialism—the idea that all phenomena in the universe (including consciousness, culture, and creativity) could be reduced to material atoms and their interactions, which could be known only by the scientific method—and the generally liberal politics that accompanied such beliefs, set the stage for the next three centuries. Until the 1960s, when not only the reign of scientific materialism was challenged (as being itself largely a cultural construction, not some deified access to universal truths), but also all of the remaining indignities of the Mythic-religious era (some of which were addressed by Modernism, and some of which were exacerbated by it)—indignities such as, overall, the oppression of women and other minorities, the toxic despoliation of nature and the environment, the lack of evenly applied civil rights, the general reign of materialism itself—all were aggressively attacked, and attempted to be remedied, by Postmodernism.

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Richard Buckminster Fuller Aristotle, the great Greek philosopher and scientist, proclaimed in a treatise written in 350 BC that women have fewer teeth than men.1 Today we know this is nonsense. But for almost 2,000 years, it was accepted wisdom in the Western World. Then one day, someone had the most revolutionary of ideas: let’s count! The scientific method—formulating a hypothesis and then testing it—is so deeply ingrained in our thinking that we find it hard to conceive that intelligent people would blindly trust authority and not put assumptions to the test. We could be forgiven for thinking that, perhaps, people simply weren’t that smart back then!

The Myth of the Rational Market: A History of Risk, Reward, and Delusion on Wall Street
by Justin Fox
Published 29 May 2009

But as his commodity trading indicated, Cootner never believed market movements were entirely random. “My model is perfectly compatible with much of what I interpret Wall Street chart reading to be all about,” he told a financial journalist in the mid-1960s. “Like the Indian folk doctors who discovered tranquilizers, the Wall Street witch doctors, without benefit of the scientific method, have produced something with their magic, even if they can’t tell you what it is or how it works.”16 As a scientist, Cootner figured he could beat the witch doctors. At one speech in the 1960s, a Wall Streeter introduced him with the standard anti-economist crack, “If you’re so smart, why aren’t you rich?”

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It was an awkward coexistence, and it was probably inevitable that one day a mathematically inclined graduate student in economics would apply the elegant formulas he was learning in micro class to the inelegant problems of the business cycle. It was also perhaps inevitable that this would happen at Carnegie Tech’s Graduate School of Industrial Administration, that pioneer in imposing the scientific method on matters of money and human behavior. Economics maverick Herbert Simon was the instigator, in a backward sort of way. He had argued, decades before Kahneman and Tversky, that because people don’t have unlimited time and brain-power to devote to decision making they take shortcuts and follow rules of thumb.

Year 501
by Noam Chomsky
Published 19 Jan 2016

Irrational Disdain As the US proceeded to “assume, out of self-interest, responsibility for the welfare of the world capitalist system” after World War II, it also extended the “experiments in pragmatism” that it had been conducting in its narrower domains to “accelerate the process of national growth and save much waste” (Gerald Haines, Ulysses Weatherby). One striking feature of the “scientific methods of development” designed for our wards is what Hans Schmidt calls the “irrational disdain for the agricultural experience of local peasants.” This was the source of “a series of disastrous failures” as US experts attempted to apply “the latest developments in scientific agriculture” to their Haitian testing area—as always, sincerely believing that they were doing good while (by the sheerest accident) benefiting US corporations.

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They are assigned to the category of crafts, not art. The fact that the artistic traditions extending over thousands of years are “women’s work,” may contribute to these dubious interpretations, Allen suggests.4 The “suspicious” will not fail to observe that, however ruinous to Liberia, the “scientific methods of development” offer many benefits to the western corporate sector, perhaps well beyond the usual beneficiaries, agribusiness and petrochemicals. As the variety of crops is reduced, and disease and blight become an increasing threat, genetic engineering may have to come to the rescue with artificially designed crops, offering the rising biotech industries alluring prospects for growth and profit Following standard doctrine, US experts advised Liberia to convert farmland to plantation cash crops (which, incidentally, also happens to benefit US corporations).

Braiding Sweetgrass
by Robin Wall Kimmerer

I took her out to our restored sweetgrass meadows and it was love at first sniff. It didn’t take her long to recognize Sweetgrass after that. It was as if the plant wanted her to find it. Together we designed experiments to compare the effects of the two harvesting methods the basket makers had explained. Laurie’s education so far was full of the scientific method, but I wanted her to live out a slightly different style of research. To me, an experiment is a kind of conversation with plants: I have a question for them, but since we don’t speak the same language, I can’t ask them directly and they won’t answer verbally. But plants can be eloquent in their physical responses and behaviors.

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They’ve been so conditioned to be skeptical of even the hardest of hard data that bending their minds toward theories that are verified without the expected graphs or equations is tough. Couple that with the unblinking assumption that science has cornered the market on truth and there’s not much room for discussion. Undeterred, we carried on. The basket makers had given us the prerequisites of the scientific method: observation, pattern, and a testable hypothesis. That sounded like science to me. So we began by setting up experimental plots in the meadows to ask the plants the question “Do these two different harvest methods contribute to decline?” And then we tried to detect their answer. We chose dense sweetgrass stands where the population had been restored rather than compromising native stands where pickers were active.

Where Bigfoot Walks: Crossing the Dark Divide
by Robert Michael Pyle
Published 31 Jul 2017

.” −− So while it is not true, as often asserted, that science has willfully ignored the phenomenon, far and away the greatest number of Bigfoot buffs have been nonacademics, if not antiacademics. It is common at Sasquatch gatherings to hear vicious derogations of the academy for “repressing” information or for blindly ignoring the obvious and thereby pulling the rug out from under the worthy ranks of the dedicated amateurs. These charges, however naive and lacking in empathy for the scientific method, are not without basis. Many tenured or tenure-hopeful scientists have pooh-poohed the topic without any critical attention to its substance. Grover Krantz and the BC Twenty can thus be seen as courageously bucking the tide, sometimes to their detriment. The amateurs (true lovers of the search) have no such tethers on their enthusiasm.

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“What a good poem inevitably hears, sees, and speaks,” wrote poet Jane Hirshfield, “is that point where perceived and perceiver join, where inner and outer worlds meet.” Then my walk in the nude was a poem, and a good one. I didn’t hear Bigfoot or see it; I was Bigfoot. The pumice and the moonlight met in me, and through me Bigfoot gave voice. An open mind neither rejects nor limits itself to the scientific method but considers it among the other tools for palping the universe. It doubts everything and accepts everyone. It is completely skeptical and wholly receptive, seldom wishy-washy but often unsettled. The open mind is not afraid to be made up, then, like a bed, to be thrashed, stripped, and made fresh all over again.

Work: A History of How We Spend Our Time
by James Suzman
Published 2 Sep 2020

He was born in the revolutionary summer of 1792, the same year that France’s Citizens’ Assembly abolished the monarchy and dragged King Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette from the Palace of Versailles to await their appointment with the guillotine. But Coriolis was a revolutionary of a different sort. He was one of the vanguard of men and women who had turned their back on theological dogma and instead embraced reason, the explanatory power of mathematics and the rigour of the scientific method to make sense of the world, and who as a result ushered in the industrial age after unlocking the transformative energy of fossil fuels. Coriolis is now best remembered for formulating the ‘Coriolis Effect’, without which meteorologists would have no sensible way of modelling the swirling forms of weather systems or the vagaries of ocean currents.

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The evidence is now so overwhelming that debate within the scientific community on the scale of human impact on our planet has shifted to asking whether the current geological era merits being redubbed the Anthropocene – the human era. In John Maynard Keynes’s economic utopia, there was no anthropogenic climate change. Nor was there ocean acidification or large-scale biodiversity loss. But if there were, it would almost certainly be under better control than it is now. His utopia was, after all, a place where the scientific method was respected, scientists were admired, and laypeople paid serious heed to their warnings. But more importantly, it was a place where meeting the energy-expensive ‘relative needs’ that animate our urge to consume had diminished to the point that people were no longer inclined to periodically upgrade and replace everything they owned simply to keep the wheels of commerce turning.

Science in the Soul: Selected Writings of a Passionate Rationalist
by Richard Dawkins
Published 15 Mar 2017

Here we see a patient, careful teasing out of the ‘why’ of faith and practice, showing the power of Darwinian natural selection as an explanatory tool, even – perhaps especially; certainly fittingly – when applied to belief systems that deny its efficacy. And one sentence sings out to me from this piece to epitomize the scientific method as practised by Dawkins, the demanding rigour of his approach to investigation: ‘I am much more wedded to the general idea that the question should be properly put than I am to any particular answer.’ From a carefully refined question to a brisk and definitive answer: the next piece (also originally a lecture) disposes of the contention that ‘belief’ in science is itself a form of religion by reasserting the foundations of evidence, honesty and verifiability on which scientific investigation is based.

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It’s always been a puzzle to me, and indeed something of an irritation, to read this or that interview or profile and find the writer saying something along the lines that ‘Richard Dawkins is of course a very clever man but has no sense of humour’ or ‘the trouble with atheists is, they have no sense of humour’. This is so blatantly wrong that it seems justifiable – and in harmony with the scientific method – to offer a little evidence. Exhibits A–G here, chosen to reflect Richard Dawkins’ own heroes of comic writing as well as his own considerable talent in its practice, range from pitch-perfect pastiche to prodigal inventiveness to the pithiest of ironies. All have in common the wit and linguistic agility that run through so much of the material in this book; here that seam of gold hits the surface.

The Human Cosmos: A Secret History of the Stars
by Jo Marchant
Published 15 Jan 2020

At the very birth of our species, it was the circling heavens that allowed people to first glean order from chaos, to derive a model of existence as an ever-repeating cycle in which light alternates with darkness, life alternates with death. We’ve since built on those foundations. Observing the Sun, Moon and stars informed practical abilities such as navigation, timekeeping and ultimately the scientific methods that have led to today’s sophisticated technology. Meanwhile, the patterns people saw in the sky—magical beasts, divine suns, or universal forces—fed spiritual beliefs and political structures, and ideas about the nature and meaning of reality. What happens, then, when we lose that view, when we experience Lagash’s eclipse in reverse?

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It was divided into five “quarters,” representing a primordial star as well as four surrounding stars associated with north, south, east, and west. [Reference: Clare Oxby, “A review of African ethno-astronomy,” La Ricerca Folklorica 40 (1999), 55-64.] * Bacon’s work in the seventeenth century was instrumental in the development of the scientific method. * This tradition emerged from a series of lectures, endowed by the physicist Robert Boyle, to consider the relationship between Christianity and the new science. The first series, given in 1692 by the theologian Richard Bentley, was called “A Confutation of Atheism from the Origin and Frame of the World.”

Ways of Being: Beyond Human Intelligence
by James Bridle
Published 6 Apr 2022

Tugging on the strings would have brought the food into the animals’ enclosure, but the gibbons had ignored them. In the 1967 experiment, the researchers hung the strings from the roof of the enclosure: immediately the gibbons grasped them, tugged, and got their snacks. In one swift motion, the gibbons suddenly became ‘intelligent’ – according, that is, to the narrow definition of the scientific method.7 Illustration from Benjamin B. Beck, ‘A Study of Problem Solving by Gibbons’, 1967. The 1967 experiment was designed to account for the fact that gibbons are brachiators. In their natural forest habitat, they spend almost all their time in the trees, and move around by swinging from branch to branch.

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It makes it hard for us to trust even our own experiences, whether that is the ecstatic experience of spirit encounters in the grip of psychedelics, or the uncanny sensation of communion in the eyes of other species. This is part of the genius of Gagliano’s experiments: the rigorous application of the scientific method, the careful weighting and testing of her Mimosa plants, and the reproducibility of her method means we don’t have to put all our trust in our subjective experience. What is required of us is to be open to changing our minds. Mimosa speaks, and the world changes. We are forced to account for a different reality than the one we knew.

The Future We Choose: Surviving the Climate Crisis
by Christiana Figueres and Tom Rivett-Carnac
Published 25 Feb 2020

A recent analysis by MIT shows that on Twitter lies spread on average six times faster than truth, and that truth never reaches the same level of penetration.22 Social media is an engine for the production and dissemination of lies. This fact has serious consequences for our society and in particular for our ability to come together to deal with complicated long-term threats like the climate crisis. In this “post-truth era,” the undermining of science now has currency. The fabric of the scientific method is fraying. Objectivity is under attack. Some political leaders have chosen to part company with objective reality. The rise of social media has afforded these leaders ample opportunity to obscure facts. This move toward subjectivity creates a breeding ground for oppression and tyranny. We all have an urgent responsibility to recognize and defend such an attack on truth because if it persists, our small window of opportunity to turn back the tide on the climate crisis will be lost forever.

The People vs Tech: How the Internet Is Killing Democracy (And How We Save It)
by Jamie Bartlett
Published 4 Apr 2018

Go is now firmly in the category of ‘games that humans will never win against machines again’. Most people in Silicon Valley agree that machine learning is the next big thing, although some are more optimistic than others. Tesla and SpaceX boss Elon Musk recently said that AI is like ‘summoning the demon’, while others have compared its significance to the ‘scientific method, on steroids’, the invention of penicillin and even electricity. Andrew Ng, former chief scientist at Baidu, reckons that there isn’t a single industry that won’t shortly be ‘transformed’. AIs are starting to outperform humans in a small-but-quietly-growing number of narrow tasks. Over the last year alone inroads have been made into things such as driving, bricklaying, fruit-picking, burger-flipping, banking, trading and automated stock-taking.

Masters of Mankind
by Noam Chomsky
Published 1 Sep 2014

We must search for truth but anticipate error, and always retain a tolerance for other perceptions and conclusions. We must not “ever despair of an adequate scientific method mitigating ideological conflicts in history, but must, on the other hand, recognize the limits of its power” (“Ideology and the Scientific Method,” 1953; Nature and Destiny, II, 220ff.). The same holds of “the struggle for justice,” which is “as profound a revelation of the possibilities and limits of historical existence as the quest for truth.” Here too, the Christian faith teaches us that “History moves towards the realization of the Kingdom [of God] but yet the judgment of God is upon every new realization,” upon “the evil, which taints all (human) achievements” (Nature and Destiny, II, 244, 286).

The Art of Corporate Success: The Story of Schlumberger
by Ken Auletta
Published 28 Sep 2015

The other was that the budding “New Left,” theoretically in favor of “workers’ control” and the free flow of information it implies, ardently championed a one-man control that, however charmingly eccentric, was ultimately tyrannical and mystifying. The dichotomy between rhetoric and reality, it could be said, has a protracted history in French political thought. Descartes, the 17th-century French philosopher, divorced his commitment to the scientific method from his commitment to Roman Catholicism, proclaiming his dualism with these memorable words: “I think, therefore I am.” Down through the years French politics—left or right—has developed a well-deserved reputation for hyperbole. Like many people on the French left, Riboud sees himself as having a kind of moral mission, and thus has a propensity for symbolic battles.

The Psychology of Money: Timeless Lessons on Wealth, Greed, and Happiness
by Morgan Housel
Published 7 Sep 2020

Elders in his Yemeni village proposed a folk remedy: shove the tip of a burning stick through his son’s chest to drain the sickness from his body. After the procedure, Hajaji told The New York Times: “When you have no money, and your son is sick, you’ll believe anything.”⁶⁴ Medicine predates useful medicine by thousands of years. Before the scientific method and the discovery of germs there was blood-letting, starvation therapy, cutting holes in your body to let the evils out, and other treatments that did nothing but hasten your demise. It seems crazy. But if you desperately need a solution and a good one isn’t known or readily available to you, the path of least resistance is toward Hajaji’s reasoning: willing to believe anything.

Eurowhiteness: Culture, Empire and Race in the European Project
by Hans Kundnani
Published 16 Aug 2023

A geopolitical Europe and the pan-European movement In the second half of the nineteenth century, the racial theories of Enlightenment thinkers like Kant were developed into what became known as “scientific” (or “biological”) racism.34 Natural scientists in Europe and the United States went further in classifying and categorising races, establishing hierarchies between them in which Europeans were at the top; importantly, though, there were often also hierarchies among Europeans and the emergence of a new, modern form of anti-Semitism based not so much on alleged religious practices as perceptions of economic power. Influenced by Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution, “social Darwinism” emerged—and with it, eugenics and ideas of “racial hygiene”. In its combination of the scientific method and racism, scientific racism fused the two strands of European thought after the Enlightenment. The emergence of scientific racism coincided with, and was used to justify, the next stage in European colonialism—the period of high imperialism. Since the beginning of the Age of Exploration, there had always been competition among European countries for colonies.

The Social Animal: The Hidden Sources of Love, Character, and Achievement
by David Brooks
Published 8 Mar 2011

The metaphor, “the world is a machine,” began to replace the metaphor, “the world is a living organism.” Society was often seen as a clock with millions of moving pieces, and God was the Divine Clock-maker, the author of an exquisitely rational universe. Great figures like Francis Bacon and René Descartes helped create a different way of thinking—the scientific method. Descartes aimed to begin human understanding anew. He would start from scratch and work logically and consciously through every proposition to see, step by step, what was true and certain. He would rebuild human understanding on a logical foundation. In this scientific age, the mind could not, Bacon urged, be “left to take its own course, but guided at every step.”

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He must proceed consciously and methodically, beginning with the simplest element of the problem and then proceeding step by step toward the complex. He must develop a scientific language that will avoid the vagueness and confusion of ordinary language. The aim of the whole method is to arrive at certain lawlike generalizations about human behavior—to arrive at certainty and truth. The scientific method brought rigor to where there had once been guesswork and intuition. In the realm of physics, chemistry, biology, and the other natural sciences, the results were awesome to behold. Inevitably, rationalist techniques were applied to the science of organizing society, so that progress in the social realm could be as impressive as progress in the scientific one.

The Pencil: A History of Design and Circumstance
by Henry Petroski
Published 2 Jan 1990

There are now a few pencils among the books and literary material in the Thoreau alcove in the library, but their method of manufacture seems to be more mysterious than that of any of Henry David Thoreau’s literary works. While it may be excusable that Thoreau’s pencil engineering is seldom emphasized relative to his other achievements, there is no excuse for ignoring engineering in our culture generally. Yet it is rare to find generalizations about engineering qua engineering that are the equivalent of the scientific method or to find universal insights about engineering that have the ring of Archimedes’ “Eureka!” Great engineers have seldom left articulate generalizations or insights in ink; they have usually only sketched them in pencil, to be fleshed out in state-of-the-art structures and machines. Yet even as the state of the art is constantly evolving and developing, there are deep underlying similarities in what the first engineers or those described by Vitruvius did and what today’s engineers still do.

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Conté could make a quantum leap in thinking about how to fashion a pencil lead out of graphite dust and clay because he was already familiar with the way those materials combined to produce excellent crucibles, broken fragments of which incidentally might act as marking stones, or so Conté might have noted in his tinkering in the laboratory. The laboratory is really the modern workshop. And modern engineering results when the scientific method is united with experience with the tools and products of craftsmen. While it would emerge more slowly in Britain and America, modern engineering, in spirit if not in name, would come to play a more and more active role in turning the craft tradition into modern technology, with its base of research and development.

Trend Following: How Great Traders Make Millions in Up or Down Markets
by Michael W. Covel
Published 19 Mar 2007

At the same time, however, Hite was adamant that the real key to using computers successfully was the thinking that went into the computer code. When someone asked why even go the computer route if people power is so important. Hite responded: “[B]ecause it works—it’s countable and replicable. I’m a great fan of the scientific method. And the other things are not scientific. If I give you the algorithms, you should be able to get the same results I did. That to me means a great deal.”35 Whales only get harpooned when they come to the surface, and turtles can only move forward when they stick their neck out, but investors face risk no matter what they do.

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In the real world, there are traders who do beat the market by a wide margin, and many of them are trend followers. After word 289 What accounts for the patience, discipline, and commitment to long-term success as a trend follower? It might ultimately be about making a profit, but it is also an understanding and keen appreciation for the scientific method. Just as scientists start with a hypothesis, trend followers start with a certain view of the world. Their divergent view sees the world in trends. Facing the reality of any market environment head on is the philosophical foundation of trend following. Yet, if the approach is that simple (and profitable), then why does trend following continue to be ignored or confused by so-called bright and market-wise people?

The Origins of the British
by Stephen Oppenheimer
Published 1 Jul 2007

Undetected borrowing distorts both kinds of language tree (comparative and lexico-statistical) and is probably the main underlying reason for structural differences between them. So, what to do? There are basic differences between the disciplines of archaeology and linguistics on the one hand, and sciences such as geology and biology on the other. In their attitude to the scientific method, some linguists seem to misunderstand the meaning of, or are unable to accept, uncertainty. They interpret the scientific method as implying authority, rigour and certainty, while scientists accept that, in many situations, comparisons have to be made using measurements that have some degree of error and theories of classification with a degree of uncertainty.

Endless Money: The Moral Hazards of Socialism
by William Baker and Addison Wiggin
Published 2 Nov 2009

To reverse the damage from reckless lending, we have showered money on risky banks, stunting competitive gains that would have been realized by smaller prudent institutions. The academic and investment community has intellectually bought into theories of interest rate manipulation based upon signals gleaned from the quicksand of near-term economic statistics. Although proven by the scientific methods of economics, somehow the chain of desired short-term outcomes generated through this central planning has a side effect of producing long waves of debt accumulation. While we were still in the long wave of debt accumulation relative to national income that stretched from the early 1950s to 2008, it was impossible for anyone to refute the case for such a system.

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In fact, it’s impossible, for if it did, all humans would be machines that never strayed far from a straight line, and there would neither have been business cycles nor hyperinflation and great depressions. Interestingly, the logic that flows from this is that under a monetary system anchored firmly by gold, man’s weaknesses are counteracted. Oddly, the scientific method so honored by economists is the enabler of outrageous and risky behavior. Entranced by mathematics and caught in the headlights of the coming credit implosion, Bernanke believed that papering over a debt problem with more loans and guarantees Spitting into the Wind 119 would be effective.

The Precipice: Existential Risk and the Future of Humanity
by Toby Ord
Published 24 Mar 2020

The next great transition was the Scientific Revolution.16 Early forms of science had been practiced since ancient times, and the seeds of empiricism can be found in the work of medieval scholars in the Islamic world and Europe.17 But it was only about 400 years ago that humanity developed the scientific method and saw scientific progress take off.18 This helped replace a reliance on received authorities with careful observation of the natural world, seeking simple and testable explanations for what we saw. The ability to test and discard bad explanations helped us break free from dogma, and allowed for the first time the systematic creation of knowledge about the workings of nature.

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The Roman Empire reached a similar size shortly after, with most people in the world living in one of these two civilizations. 15 Like agriculture, each was independently developed in multiple places across the world. 16 Other scholars sometimes include this revolution under the name of the Enlightenment, or bundle it together with the Industrial Revolution. 17 Important scholars include Ibn al-Haytham (c. 965–1040 CE), whose use of experimental methods in optics was a major influence on Robert Grosseteste and Roger Bacon in the thirteenth century. And the roots of the idea of unlimited incremental improvements in our understanding can be seen in Seneca’s Natural Questions, written in 65 CE (Seneca, 1972) (see p. 49). 18 Francis Bacon’s Novum Organum (1620) is the canonical exposition of the scientific method, and is a convenient dating for the Scientific Revolution. There is substantial debate over why earlier advances outside Europe did not lead to the sustained knowledge-creation we have seen since the seventeenth century. See, for example, Sivin (1982). 19 Because only a tiny proportion of organisms became fossil fuels, the energy within the entire global supply of fossil fuels is not millions of years’ worth of solar energy.

The Ape That Understood the Universe: How the Mind and Culture Evolve
by Steve Stewart-Williams
Published 12 Sep 2018

Scientists propose competing theories about the nature of the universe (variation), and then cull those theories that don’t match what they see in the world and in the lab (selection). Thus, Aristotelian physics was replaced by Newtonian physics, which in turn was replaced by Einsteinian relativity. At each step, the earlier theory was displaced from the population of scientific ideas when a new, upstart theory matched our observations more closely. In effect, the scientific method establishes a struggle for existence among theories, which results ultimately in the survival of the fittest theories: those that best explain the facts. The end result is that our theories evolve – step by slow step – toward greater and greater accuracy. One minute, we’re talking about God creating the world and all life in six days; the next, we’re talking about the Big Bangand evolution by natural selection, and trying to figure out how to reconcile relativity theory with quantum mechanics.

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Over the last several centuries, we’ve slowly pieced together cultural mechanisms that reliably favor truth over catchiness. These include critical thinking, careful observation, peer review, open discussion, independent replication, and the rejection of authority, tradition, and revelation as reliable sources of knowledge. Taken together, these habits and tactics constitute the scientific method. In a sense, science is a system of selectively breeding accurate memes. In the “wild,” there’s no guarantee that accurate memes will do better than inaccurate ones. But in the carefully controlled memetic ecosystem of science, we can and do breed memes for closer and closer correspondence to truth.

Economics Rules: The Rights and Wrongs of the Dismal Science
by Dani Rodrik
Published 12 Oct 2015

But the paradox is only an illusion. What is a paradox for one class of models is often readily comprehensible within another class of models. Scientific Progress, One Model at a Time Ask an economist what makes economics a science, and the reply is likely to be, “It’s a science because we work with the scientific method: we build hypotheses and then test them. When a theory fails the test, we discard it and either replace it or come up with an improved version. Ultimately, economics advances by developing theories that better explain the world.” This is a nice story, but it bears little relationship to what economists do in practice and how the field really makes progress.# For one thing, much of economists’ work departs significantly from the hypothetico-deductive mold according to which hypotheses are first formulated and then confronted with real-world evidence.

Trend Commandments: Trading for Exceptional Returns
by Michael W. Covel
Published 14 Jun 2011

If so, you need to figure it out, and fast. For example, trader Jim Simons (arguably a closeted trend trader—he does not identify as one), worth about $8.5 billion, has said that the advantage scientists brought to the trading table was not their computing or math skills, but their ability to think scientifically. That means the scientific method is in play: 1. Define the question/theory. 2. Gather information and resources (observe). 3. Form hypothesis. 4. Perform experiment and collect data. 5. Analyze data. 6. Interpret data and draw conclusions that serve as a starting point for new hypothesis. 7. Publish results. 8. Retest (frequently done by other scientists).

Keeping Up With the Quants: Your Guide to Understanding and Using Analytics
by Thomas H. Davenport and Jinho Kim
Published 10 Jun 2013

What kind of data are we likely to want to look for? How have variables been defined before? What types of analyses are we likely to perform? How could we tell the story in an interesting way that is likely to get results, and different from past stories? One of the key attributes of quantitative analysis (and of the scientific method more broadly) is that it draws on previous research and findings. For example, searching thorough the problem-related knowledge appearing in books, reports, and articles is very important in getting to the bottom of the problem. It may help to identify relevant variables and any association among the identified variables.

The Age of AI: And Our Human Future
by Henry A Kissinger , Eric Schmidt and Daniel Huttenlocher
Published 2 Nov 2021

The West amassed a repository of knowledge and experience from all corners of the world.3 Advances in technology and methodology, including better optical lenses and more accurate instruments of measurement, chemical manipulation, and the development of research and observation standards that came to be known as the scientific method, permitted scientists to more accurately observe the planets and stars, the behavior and composition of material substances, and the minutiae of microscopic life. Scientists were able to make iterative progress based on both personal observations and those of their peers: when a theory or prediction could be validated empirically, new facts were revealed that could serve as the jumping-off point for additional questions.

And Finally
by Henry Marsh

The early medical authorities understood the body and brain in terms of fluids – the four humours – of black and yellow bile, blood and phlegm. These fluid excretions were, after all, the only access doctors had to whatever might be going on inside their patients’ bodies. With the rise of the scientific method in the seventeenth century the brain started to be described in terms of the latest modern technology. Descartes explained the brain and nerves as a series of hydraulic mechanisms. Hydraulic technology was not new at that time – Archimedes and others had used it extensively in the ancient world – but what was new were the systematic investigations of hydraulics carried out by researchers such as Galileo, and the creation of complicated fountains in the fashionable palaces of the wealthy.

The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World
by Iain McGilchrist
Published 8 Oct 2012

Such a development seems to me as striking as the developments in mathematics and physics since the 1880s to which it is in some important respects a parallel. It’s hardly surprising that scientific method for a long time led to a vision of the universe – the Newtonian universe – which reflected the principles of the scientific method. But when it began to compel conclusions incompatible with the model assumed by its method, a ‘paradoxical’ universe, that was a more revealing finding. In the late nineteenth-century Georg Cantor struggled with the idea that there was a necessary uncertainty and incompleteness to the realm of mathematics.

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Scientism, the illicit extension of the methods and categories of science beyond their legitimate domain, is one such form, and the conception of the unity of the sciences and the methodological homogeneity of the natural sciences and of humanistic studies one such myth. It is the task of philosophy to defend us against such illusions of reason.80 Wittgenstein was sceptical of the scientific method for two main reasons: its tendency to ‘reduce’, and the deceptive clarity of its models. He referred to the ‘preoccupation with the method of science … reducing the explanation of natural phenomena to the smallest possible number of primitive natural laws’.81 Though ‘irresistibly tempted to ask and answer questions in the way science does … it can never be our job to reduce anything to anything.’

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Objectivity requires interpretation of what one finds, depends on imagination for its achievement.124 Detachment has a deeply ambiguous nature. The cool, detached stance of the scientific or bureaucratic mind ultimately may lead where we do not wish to follow. And the relationship implied by the left-hemisphere attention brought to bear through the scientific method, with its implied materialism, is not no relationship – merely a disengaged relationship, implying, incorrectly, that the observer does not have an impact on the observed (and is not altered by what he or she observes). The betweenness is not absent, just denied, and therefore of a particular – particularly ‘cold’ – kind.

Healing_Back_Pain__The_Mind.pdf
by Unknown

Anything which is outside mainstream medicine may be accepted as holistic, but more accurately described, the predominant idea is that one must treat the “whole person,” a wise concept that is generally neglected by contemporary medicine. But that should not give license to identify anything as holistic that defies medical convention. Perhaps holistic should be defined as that which includes consideration of both the emotional and structural aspects of health and illness. In accepting this definition one does not reject the scientific method. On the contrary, it becomes increasingly important to require proof and replication of results when one adds the very difficult emotional dimension to the medical equation. Therefore, this is not holistic medicine as it is popularly conceived. I hope it is an example of good medicine—accurate diagnosis and effective treatment, and good science—conclusions based on observation, verified by experience.

Side Hustle: From Idea to Income in 27 Days
by Chris Guillebeau
Published 18 Sep 2017

Anything better than that is even more validation of your winning idea, and even more money in the bank. FOLLOW THESE PRICING POINTERS TO THE BANK Pricing is both an art and a science. On Day 20, you’ll learn about A/B testing, where you can offer multiple prices and see how it affects conversion rates. That’s the scientific method—for a more creative one, consider these guidelines. 1. Whenever possible, design your hustle with recurring revenue in mind. Why sell something once when you can sell it over and over? Recurring revenue isn’t possible in every hustle, but it’s a worthwhile point of consideration when comparing different ideas.

How to Be Black
by Baratunde Thurston
Published 31 Jan 2012

Because my older sister had attended private or at least specialized schooling (Catholic school, magnet school, and an arts public school) my mother felt that I, too, should have the benefits of a non-public education. Thus began my tour of Washington-area private schools. The first was Georgetown Day School. All I remember from my visit is making some really shitty pottery in an art class. I’m sure they did other things at that school, like math and English and the scientific method, but I just remember that shitty piece of pottery. The second school I visited was called Green Acres, and it had three strikes against it. Strike One: the name. “Green Acres”??? That sounds like a rehab center for matrimonially challenged politicians. That name was just a bit too soft for a black kid from the city.

Models. Behaving. Badly.: Why Confusing Illusion With Reality Can Lead to Disaster, on Wall Street and in Life
by Emanuel Derman
Published 13 Oct 2011

There are few genuine theories in the realm of Thought, and none that is quantitatively accurate. There we rely mostly on metaphors and models. Financial value, situated more centrally within Thought than Extension, is therefore less inclined to yield to mathematics or science; there are no isolated social systems on which to carry out the repeated experiments the scientific method requires, and so it is hard to study the regularities that might reveal the putative laws that govern them. Given the success of mathematics in dealing with Extension, it has become tempting to treat Thought as though it were a kind of Extension too. Most models in the social sciences give in to what I like to call pragmamorphism,1 by which I mean the naive tendency to attribute the properties of things to human beings.

Why Liberalism Failed
by Patrick J. Deneen
Published 9 Jan 2018

The individual is to be liberated from all the partial and limiting affiliations that preceded the liberal state, if not by force then by constantly lowering the barriers to exit. The state claims to govern all groupings within the society: it is the final arbiter of legitimate and illegitimate groupings, and from its point of view, streamlining the relationship between the individual and the liberal state. In a reversal of the scientific method, what is advanced as a philosophical set of arguments is then instantiated in reality. The individual as a disembedded, self-interested economic actor didn’t exist in any actual state of nature but rather was the creation of an elaborate intervention by the incipient state in early modernity, at the beginnings of the liberal order.

The Participation Revolution: How to Ride the Waves of Change in a Terrifyingly Turbulent World
by Neil Gibb
Published 15 Feb 2018

Into action A call to action Manifesto An open-source tool kit “Tomorrow belongs to those who can hear it coming” David Bowie I. Introduction When things fall apart “You can’t stop the waves, but you can learn to surf” Jon Kabat-Zinn Galileo Galilei was a clever lad. He is often referred to as the founding father of modern physics, of modern astronomy, of the scientific method, and of science itself. Einstein was one of his many fans. Galileo was a geek, an engineer, a 16th-century hipster, and he could code. He was a pivotal figure in the great social and economic transformation that we now call the Renaissance. He was the inventor of one of the breakthrough technologies that enabled the discovery of the New World.

The omnivore's dilemma: a natural history of four meals
by Michael Pollan
Published 15 Dec 2006

For a book that devotes so many of its pages to the proper making of compost, An Agricultural Testament turns out to be an important work of philosophy as well as of agricultural science. Indeed, Howard's drawing Î 4 6 *THE O M N I V O R E ' S DILEMMA of lines of connection between so many seemingly discrete realms— from soil fertility to "the national health"; from the supreme importance of animal urine to the limitations of the scientific method—is his signal contribution, his method as well as his message. Even though Howard never uses the term organic, it is possible to tease out all the many meanings of the word—as a program for not just agricultural but social renovation—from his writings. To measure the current définition of organic against his genuinely holistic conception is to appreciate just how much it has shrunk.

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But providing a buffet of nutrients to plants is not the only thing humus does: It also serves as the glue that binds the minute mineral particles in soil together into airy crumbs and holds water in suspension so that rainfall remains available to plant roots instead of instantly seeping away. To reduce such a vast biological complexity to NPK represented the scientific method at its reductionist worst. Complex qualities are reduced to simple quantities; biology gives way to chemistry. As Howard was not the first to point out, that method can only deal with one or two variables at a time. The problem is that once science has reduced a complex phenomenon to a couple of variables, however important they may be, the natural tendency is to overlook everything else, to as- • 14 7 148* THE O M N I VO R E ' S D I L E M M A sume that what you can measure is all there is, or at least all that really matters.

The Beginning of Infinity: Explanations That Transform the World
by David Deutsch
Published 30 Jun 2011

The physicist Galileo Galilei was perhaps the first to understand the importance of experimental tests (which he called cimenti, meaning ‘trials by ordeal’) as distinct from other forms of experiment and observation, which can more easily be mistaken for ‘reading from the Book of Nature’. Testability is now generally accepted as the defining characteristic of the scientific method. Popper called it the ‘criterion of demarcation’ between science and non-science. Nevertheless, testability cannot have been the decisive factor in the scientific revolution either. Contrary to what is often said, testable predictions had always been quite common. Every traditional rule of thumb for making a flint blade or a camp fire is testable.

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Long before that, it was only genes that were encoding rules of thumb, and the knowledge in them, too, was about emergent phenomena. Thus emergence is another beginning of infinity: all knowledge-creation depends on, and physically consists of, emergent phenomena. Emergence is also responsible for the fact that discoveries can be made in successive steps, thus providing scope for the scientific method. The partial success of each theory in a sequence of improving theories is tantamount to the existence of a ‘layer’ of phenomena that each theory explains successfully – though, as it then turns out, partly mistakenly. Successive scientific explanations are occasionally dissimilar in the way they explain their predictions, even in the domain where the predictions themselves are similar or identical.

Fantasyland: How America Went Haywire: A 500-Year History
by Kurt Andersen
Published 4 Sep 2017

But it seems clear to me the deeper, broader, and more enduring influence of American Protestantism was the permission it gave to dream up new supernatural or otherwise untrue understandings of reality and believe them with passionate certainty. Science was being invented at the time. Like science, Protestantism was powered by skepticism of the established religious paradigms, which were to be revised or rejected—but unlike science, the old paradigms were to be replaced by new fixed truths. The scientific method is unceasingly skeptical, each truth understood as a partial, provisional best-we-can-do-for-the-moment understanding of reality. In their travesty of science, Protestant true believers scrutinized the natural world to deduce the underlying godly or satanic causes of every strange effect, from comets to hurricanes to Indian attacks to unusual illnesses and deaths.

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He didn’t just want science to take seriously “experiences of ecstasy, mystical union, other ‘dimensions,’ rapture, beauty, space-and-time transcendence.” He was explicitly dedicated to going there. A “perfectly scientific theory may be based on data that have no physical existence,” he insisted. The rules of the scientific method must be revised. To work as a psychologist in the new age, Tart argued, a researcher should be in the altered state of consciousness he’s studying, high or delusional or filled with the Holy Spirit “at the time of data collection” and during “data reduction and theorizing.” Tart’s new paradigm for research, he admitted, poses problems of “consensual validation,” given that “only observers in the same [altered state] are able to communicate adequately with each other.”

Scale: The Universal Laws of Growth, Innovation, Sustainability, and the Pace of Life in Organisms, Cities, Economies, and Companies
by Geoffrey West
Published 15 May 2017

Similarly, relativity together with quantum mechanics spawned atomic and nuclear bombs, which changed the entire dynamic of international politics and continue to hang over all of us as a constant, though often suppressed and sometimes unacknowledged, threat to our very existence. To varying degrees, all theories and models are incomplete. They need to be continually tested and challenged by increasingly accurate experiments and observational data over wider and wider domains and the theory modified or extended accordingly. This is an essential ingredient in the scientific method. Indeed, understanding the boundaries of their applicability, the limits to their predictive power, and the ongoing search for exceptions, violations, and failures has provoked even deeper questions and challenges, stimulating the continued progress of science and the unfolding of new ideas, techniques, and concepts.

…

The variables we choose to focus on and measure in order to obtain data are not arbitrary—they are guided by previous success and failure within the context of an evolving conceptual framework. Doing science is much more than a fishing expedition. With the advent of big data this classic view is being challenged. In a highly provocative article published in Wired magazine in 2008 titled “The End of Theory: The Data Deluge Makes the Scientific Method Obsolete,” its then editor, Chris Anderson, wrote: The new availability of huge amounts of data, along with the statistical tools to crunch these numbers, offers a whole new way of understanding the world. Correlation supersedes causation, and science can advance even without coherent models, unified theories, or really any mechanistic explanation at all . . . faced with massive data, this approach to science—hypothesize, model, test—is becoming obsolete. . . .

The Future of War
by Lawrence Freedman
Published 9 Oct 2017

From this theory may come new and unthought-of solutions to end wars and to guide international relations.14 In a book published in 2012 the political scientist John Vasquez cited Guetzkow as an inspiration in a collection of essays that sought to assess how far researchers had got with the application of ‘the scientific method to identify those factors that promote the outbreak of interstate war and those factors that promote peace’. Even after sixty years there was still some way to go, Vasquez conceded, but there was now some core knowledge for theories of peace and war to explain.15 In the introduction he explained how the scholarly movement to apply the scientific method was ‘one of the best hopes of humanity for solving the intellectual puzzle of war.’ This was because it replaced ‘the solitary efforts of past great thinkers,’ and here he mentioned Thucydides and Freud, with a ‘large number of researchers committed to using the best method of inquiry humanity has invented.’16 Better than mere ‘speculation or intellectual argument’ was to develop hypotheses that could be tested by a rigorous examination of evidence.

MacroWikinomics: Rebooting Business and the World
by Don Tapscott and Anthony D. Williams
Published 28 Sep 2010

Quoted in Damian Carrington, Suzanne Goldenberg, Juliette Jowit, Jonathan Watts, Alok Jha, James Randerson, David Smith, David Adam, and Tom Hennigan, “Global deal on climate change in 2010 ‘all but impossible,’” The Guardian (February 2, 2010). 17. http://www.ibm.com/ceostudy Chapter 2 1. Gutenberg was not the first to invent printing. Asian cultures had previously developed printing but it was not as sophisticated or flexible as Gutenberg’s wonder. 2. The ideas of Francis Bacon and Isaac Newton, which defined the scientific method, set the tone for much of what would follow in the century. Bacon and Newton believed that true science called for axiomatic proof to be fused with physical observation in a coherent system of verifiable predictions. For scientific theories and predictions to be verifiable, science needed to be open. 3.

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On top of all that, broad participation in projects like Galaxy Zoo helps boost the public’s general understanding of science, a nice side effect at a time when some degree of scientific literacy is required just to understand, let alone solve, some of our biggest public policy issues. 3. The ideas of Francis Bacon and Isaac Newton, which defined the scientific method, set the tone for much of what would follow in the century. Bacon and Newton believed that true science called for axiomatic proof to be fused with physical observation in a coherent system of verifiable predictions. For scientific theories and predictions to be verifiable, science needed to be open. 4.

Fantasyland
by Kurt Andersen
Published 5 Sep 2017

But it seems clear to me the deeper, broader, and more enduring influence of American Protestantism was the permission it gave to dream up new supernatural or otherwise untrue understandings of reality and believe them with passionate certainty. Science was being invented at the time. Like science, Protestantism was powered by skepticism of the established religious paradigms, which were to be revised or rejected—but unlike science, the old paradigms were to be replaced by new fixed truths. The scientific method is unceasingly skeptical, each truth understood as a partial, provisional best-we-can-do-for-the-moment understanding of reality. In their travesty of science, Protestant true believers scrutinized the natural world to deduce the underlying godly or satanic causes of every strange effect, from comets to hurricanes to Indian attacks to unusual illnesses and deaths.

…

He didn’t just want science to take seriously “experiences of ecstasy, mystical union, other ‘dimensions,’ rapture, beauty, space-and-time transcendence.” He was explicitly dedicated to going there. A “perfectly scientific theory may be based on data that have no physical existence,” he insisted. The rules of the scientific method must be revised. To work as a psychologist in the new age, Tart argued, a researcher should be in the altered state of consciousness he’s studying, high or delusional or filled with the Holy Spirit “at the time of data collection” and during “data reduction and theorizing.” Tart’s new paradigm for research, he admitted, poses problems of “consensual validation,” given that “only observers in the same [altered state] are able to communicate adequately with each other.”

Astounding: John W. Campbell, Isaac Asimov, Robert A. Heinlein, L. Ron Hubbard, and the Golden Age of Science Fiction
by Alec Nevala-Lee
Published 22 Oct 2018

Cybernetics was less an integral part of the theory than a form of branding, and he would ultimately remove nearly all of it. Campbell’s hand was visible in the book in other ways. He was responsible for several key sections, including a long footnote in which he used a computer analogy to explain how the analytic mind could be free of error, and he wrote an appendix on the scientific method, signing it “John W. Campbell, Jr., Nuclear Physicist,” and thanking the engineers of Bell Labs. Campbell also composed the appendix “Advice to the Pre-Clear,” of which Hubbard said years later, “You can tear that out. . . . I didn’t write it in the first place. Written by John W. ‘Astounding’ Campbell, Jr., who the older he gets the more astonishing he is.”

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Mailer complained that NASA had turned the greatest achievement in human history into a “monumentally boring” spectacle. Like Campbell, he was intrigued by the possibility of communication that didn’t involve the electromagnetic spectrum, and he said that the astronauts should have conducted experiments in telepathy on the moon. Asimov’s response was diplomatic. “When you apply the scientific method to the supernatural, then it automatically becomes natural.” Mailer replied by expounding on his theory of the “thanatosphere,” a layer of the atmosphere populated by the souls of the dead. In another talk, he noted that the public was starting to view space travel with indifference, rather than as a form of adventure—which may have been his most insightful remark.

Everyware: The Dawning Age of Ubiquitous Computing
by Adam Greenfield
Published 14 Sep 2006

Thesis 72 Even acknowledging their contingency, some explicit set of principles would be highly useful to developers and users both. Almost all of the available literature on ubiquitous computing is academic. That is, it emerges from the methods and viewpoints of applied science as it is practiced in the collective institution of higher education. As part of their immersion in the scientific method, academics are trained to be descriptive. A proper academic paper in the sciences is neither proscriptive nor prescriptive; it expresses no opinion about what should or should not happen. Much of the discourse around ubiquitous computing has to date been of the descriptive variety: This is a system we contemplate engineering; this is how far we were able to get with it; this is where our assumptions broke down.

Sweetness and Light: The Mysterious History of the Honeybee
by Hattie Ellis
Published 25 Apr 2006

It got to the point that the blind naturalist had total trust in Burnens: “I hesitated no longer to give him my entire confidence, feeling sure to see well when seeing through his eyes,” he wrote. Réaumur’s glass observation hives. By this stage, the relationship had evolved from master and servant to that of colleagues. Testing their theories with repeated experiments—the basis of the scientific method—the two men advanced together. Huber described their work in his book New Observations on Bees, printed in 1792. These two volumes are easy to understand today, even for the layperson, because the prose is the sum of two people talking to each other. Huber and Burnens made many discoveries, but the mystery that absorbed them most was the mating of the queen.

The Immortalization Commission: Science and the Strange Quest to Cheat Death
by John Gray
Published 11 Apr 2011

And it appeared to us that there was an important body of evidence – tending prima facie to establish the independence of soul or spirit – which modern science had simply left on one side with ignorant contempt; and that in so leaving it she had been untrue to her professed method, and had arrived prematurely at her negative conclusions. Sidgwick distinguished between science as a fixed body of knowledge and science as a method of inquiry. As pictured by materialism the universe had no human meaning; but the solution was not to reject science. It was to apply the scientific method, which could show materialism to be false. Like so many others, then and later, Sidgwick looked to science for salvation from science. If science had brought about the disenchantment of the world, only science could re-enchant it. The result of scientific inquiry seemed to be that humankind was alone.

Cognitive Surplus: Creativity and Generosity in a Connected Age
by Clay Shirky
Published 9 Jun 2010

It was a college because their relations were collegial—they operated with a sense of mutual interest in, and respect for, one another’s work. In their conversations, they would outline their research according to agreed-upon norms of clarity and transparency. Robert Boyle, one of the group’s members and sometimes called the father of modern chemistry, helped establish many of the norms underpinning the scientific method, especially how experiments were to be conducted. (The motto of the group was Nullis in Verba—“Believe nothing from mere words.”) When one of their number announced the result of an experiment, the others wanted to know not just what that result was but how the experiment had been conducted, so that the claims could be tested elsewhere.

Better Living Through Criticism: How to Think About Art, Pleasure, Beauty, and Truth
by A. O. Scott
Published 9 Feb 2016

We find it so easy to be wrong, and to recover from the shame of error, because we have trouble crediting the real difficulty of being right. The desire for a shortcut—whether in the form of an unshakable worldview or a set of nifty algorithms—feeds the suspicion that every assertion is a scam, and is therefore vulnerable to simple debunking. The essential modesty and rigor of the scientific method is widely and cheaply travestied and willfully misunderstood. The work of scientists consists to some degree of trying, over and over, to prove themselves wrong. A hypothesis is only valid if it has been exposed to repeated attempts at falsification, and once it has it wears the deceptively humble name of theory.

Thinking in Systems: A Primer
by Meadows. Donella and Diana Wright
Published 3 Dec 2008

That way you will be emotionally able to see the evidence that rules out an assumption that may become entangled with your own identity. Getting models out into the light of day, making them as rigorous as possible, testing them against the evidence, and being willing to scuttle them if they are no longer supported is nothing more than practicing the scientific method—something that is done too seldom even in science, and is done hardly at all in social science or management or government or everyday life. Honor, Respect, and Distribute Information You’ve seen how information holds systems together and how delayed, biased, scattered, or missing information can make feedback loops malfunction.

Competing on Analytics: The New Science of Winning
by Thomas H. Davenport and Jeanne G. Harris
Published 6 Mar 2007

A little blip in quality isn’t significant enough to adopt.16 Google’s methods for analytical operations are as rigorous as any firm’s, and the nature of the business makes a large amount of data available for analysis. Research and Development Analytics Research and development (R&D) has been perhaps the most analytical function within companies. It was the primary bastion of the scientific method within companies, featuring hypothesis testing, control groups, and statistical analysis. Of course, some of this highly analytical work still goes on within R&D functions, although much of the basic research in R&D has been supplanted by applied research (which can still use analytical methods) and the creation of extensions of existing products.

The Moral Case for Fossil Fuels
by Alex Epstein
Published 13 Nov 2014

Speaking from personal experience, it is incredibly difficult to get a straight answer about what is and isn’t known in the field, because so much of it is catastrophic speculation by people who seem more focused on a political goal than on clear, honest, big-picture communication. In 1996, Stanford climate scientist Stephen Schneider wrote an influential paper about the ethics of exaggerating the evidence for catastrophic climate change. On the one hand, as scientists we are ethically bound to the scientific method, in effect promising to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but—which means that we must include all the doubts, the caveats, the ifs, ands, and buts. On the other hand, we are not just scientists but human beings as well. And like most people we’d like to see the world a better place, which in this context translates into our working to reduce the risk of potentially disastrous climate change.

Revolting!: How the Establishment Are Undermining Democracy and What They're Afraid Of
by Mick Hume
Published 23 Feb 2017

Is screening for prostate cancer a help or a hindrance to men’s health? It depends which expert you listen to. Even on an issue such as climate change where, we are often informed, ‘the science is settled’, there are well-informed sceptics who disagree with the consensus and point out that the scientific method means everything should always be open to question. And what about the many occasions when the experts change their minds, and yesterday’s heretical fringe nonsense becomes today’s accepted wisdom, or vice versa? These flip-flops appear particularly common among the supposed experts on issues of public health, where the advice on what to eat and drink or how to care for our children seems to change as often as a baby’s nappy.

The Magic of Reality: How We Know What's Really True
by Richard Dawkins
Published 3 Oct 2011

And if the predictions come out right, we hope it means that the model probably represents the truth, or at least a part of the truth. Sometimes the predictions don’t come out right, and so scientists go back and adjust the model, or think up a new one, and then go on to test that. Either way, this process of proposing a model and then testing it – what we call the ‘scientific method’ – has a much better chance of getting at the way things really are than even the most imaginative and beautiful myth invented to explain what people didn’t – and often, at the time, couldn’t – understand. An early model of the atom was the so called ‘currant bun’ model proposed by the great English physicist J.

Foundation
by Isaac Asimov
Published 31 May 2004

It seems an uncommonly woundabout and hopelessly wigmawolish method of getting anywheahs. Look heah, now, I’ve got the wuhks of all the old mastahs—the gweat ahchaeologists of the past. I wigh them against each othah—balance the disagweements—analyze the conflicting statements—decide which is pwobably cowwect—and come to a conclusion. That is the scientific method. At least”—patronizingly—“as I see it. How insuffewably cwude it would be to go to Ahctuwus, oah to Sol, foah instance, and blundah about, when the old mastahs have covahed the gwound so much moah effectually than we could possibly hope to do.” Hardin murmured politely, “I see.” “Come, milord,” said Pirenne, “I think we had better be returning.”

House of Debt: How They (And You) Caused the Great Recession, and How We Can Prevent It From Happening Again
by Atif Mian and Amir Sufi
Published 11 May 2014

During the Great Recession, disagreement on causes overshadowed the facts that policy makers desperately needed to clean up the mess. We must distinguish whether there is something more to the link between household debt and severe recessions or if the alternatives above are true. The best way to test this is the scientific method: let’s take a close look at the data and see which theory is valid. That is the purpose of this book. To pin down exactly how household debt affects the economy, we zero in on the United States during the Great Recession. We have a major advantage over economists who lived through prior recessions thanks to the recent explosion in data availability and computing power.

Data-Ism: The Revolution Transforming Decision Making, Consumer Behavior, and Almost Everything Else
by Steve Lohr
Published 10 Mar 2015

So the feedback mechanism for information, he recalls, consisted of market surveys, customer support calls, and e-mail complaints. The smart-machine loop, Fadell explains, is dramatically more powerful, informed by immediate data on the product’s performance and users’ preferences. “It’s just like the scientific method, done in real time,” he says. Fadell talks of conducting A/B experiments, as Google and Facebook do, to test what customers like and don’t like. The only difference is that Nest is doing so with a product that bridges the physical and Internet realms. Not far from the Nest building, in his office at the venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins, Randy Komisar picked up on that same theme.

The Intelligent Asset Allocator: How to Build Your Portfolio to Maximize Returns and Minimize Risk
by William J. Bernstein
Published 12 Oct 2000

Then again, there is actually a third type of investor—the investment professional, who indeed knows that he or she doesn’t know, but whose livelihood depends upon appearing to know. It seems intuitively obvious that stock selection should be a skill like any other. With enough intelligence, training, experience, and effort, one should be able to beat the market. However, the primary strength of Western culture is its reliance on the scientific method. The short version of which is that any rational belief should be falsifiable—that is to say, testable. Consider baseball hitters. You say that there is such a thing as “hitting skill”? A trivial thing to ask, of course, but still easy to test. The batting analogy is useful because it forces us to think about the statistical nature of skill.

They Have a Word for It A Lighthearted Lexicon of Untranslatable Words & Phrases-Sarabande Books (2000)
by Howard Rheingold
Published 10 Mar 2020

In this pragmatic age, where practical assistance is usually more convincing than spiritual advancement, this word can easily be adapted to secular ends. Considering the fact that Niels Bohr's discovery of the atomic structure, Kekule's discovery of the shape of the benzene molecule, and Rene Life Is But a Dream 177 Descartes's discovery of the scientific method itself were all attributed by their discoverers to knowledge transmitted in dreams, there is ample reason to believe that systematic referral of aesthetic, scientific, interpersonal, and other secular problems to the unconscious sources of wisdom who speak through dreams might have very practical results.

A Time to Build: From Family and Community to Congress and the Campus, How Recommitting to Our Institutions Can Revive the American Dream
by Yuval Levin
Published 21 Jan 2020

That response took a form similar to (and plainly modeled on) scientific integrity, proposing an institutionalized commitment to a process of verification that aimed to distinguish fact from fiction. This, in turn, allowed for the development of a journalistic code of ethics, layers of something like peer review in the editorial process, and procedures for punishing, shaming, or ostracizing violators. As with the scientific method, this procedure made it possible for professionals within journalism to take pride in their humility—that is, to see as a strength the fact that they would only assert what they could reasonably prove. That ethic required both serious professional discipline and institutions capable of prioritizing professional standards over personal glory or political victory.

Protecting Pollinators
by Jodi Helmer
Published 15 Nov 2019

A bat named after Batman actor Christian Bale? A beetle named for John Lennon? A butterfly called Giacomo Puccini in honor of the composer of Madame Butterfly? Participation Pays Off Getting nonexperts involved in research combines science with education, allowing people to experience the scientific method firsthand. Citizen science has also been hailed for democratizing science, encouraging scientific literacy, and engaging the next generation of scientists. Although citizen scientists volunteer their time, the goal is not to acquire data on the cheap. Instead, scientists leverage diverse groups to access data across great spans of space and time; nonscientists provide novel perspectives on research and help scientists translate their findings into policies and action.

Built: The Hidden Stories Behind Our Structures
by Roma Agrawal
Published 8 Feb 2018

Engineers started to use these literally groundbreaking innovations to install foundations for bridges around the middle of the nineteenth century, and Washington Roebling was fascinated. He even considered using explosives in the confined space – a technique that, for obvious reasons, hadn’t been tried before. Emily began to assist her husband’s research, studying caissons alongside him, and using the scientific methods she had learned at the Georgetown Visitation Convent to understand bridge engineering. Little did she realise at the time, that the dangers of working in the highly pressured environment of a caisson would eventually lead to a catastrophic change in their lives, one from which Emily and her husband would both emerge very different people

The Metric Society: On the Quantification of the Social
by Steffen Mau
Published 12 Jun 2017

As such, they have an in-built tendency to colonize more and more areas, as long as a suitable data supply is available. The algorithmic analysis and evaluation of information constitutes a specific epistemic logic with its own stamp of authority: ‘That we are now turning to algorithms to identify what we need to know is as momentous as having relied on credentialed experts, the scientific method, common sense, or the word of God’ (Gillespie 2014: 168). Although algorithms often possess a veneer of objectivity due to their role as impersonal processors of quantitative data, these calculative practices are in fact anything but neutral methods of social datafication. Algorithms are inextricably linked to social forms of value ascription, producing and representing what is to be regarded as relevant or valuable (Lupton 2014).

Bulletproof Problem Solving
by Charles Conn and Robert McLean
Published 6 Mar 2019

Professor Stephen Roberts, a machine‐learning expert at Oxford, emphasizes the need to rigorously frame a question or hypothesis before embarking on complex analysis. He advises students not to commence machine‐learning analysis until such time as they have developed a clear idea of the structure of the model and testable hypotheses, the essence of the scientific method.1 In this chapter, we explain where and how to apply advanced analytical approaches, as well as some of their limitations. Even if you don't personally employ the analytic big guns, you are likely to be presented with analysis that comes from these approaches. Sequence Your Thinking The process we recommend for deciding when to use the big guns is a sequential one.

Money: The True Story of a Made-Up Thing
by Jacob Goldstein
Published 14 Aug 2020

But there are a couple things that are essential to the history of light. One is, basically, practical applications of science. The important breakthrough wasn’t that the Earth orbits the sun or how the force of gravity changes based on the distance between two objects; the breakthrough was discovering a system for making new discoveries, the scientific method. Not all of these discoveries had practical applications, but some did. Around 1850, a scientist named Abraham Gesner (he was a physician who had also studied geology) discovered a new technique for turning pitch or oil into a fuel he called kerosene. It was an extraordinary breakthrough—it was just so much better than every light source that had come before.

Stephen Hawking
by Leonard Mlodinow
Published 8 Sep 2020

“What used to be called ‘natural philosophy’ is dead, but not philosophy.” Natural philosophy was a precursor of the sciences, a branch of philosophy in which scholars attempted to understand nature through pure reason rather than reason plus experiment. It was rendered archaic by the development of the scientific method. Stephen knew all this, but I continued making my case. “I agree that today we can understand the universe better through science than philosophy,” I said. “But there is also the philosophy of life. There’s ethics. There’s logic. There’s the philosophy of individual disciplines such as mathematics and physics.

The AI-First Company
by Ash Fontana
Published 4 May 2021

Earning more in the latter case is a matter of, on the one side of the ledger, making sure to charge customers for custom feature development and, on the other side, completing that development in a short enough time to earn a 100 percent or more margin on an engineer’s effective hourly rate in order to at least cover her “all-in” cost to the company. Earning more in the former case is a more difficult task. The goal of figuring out what’s working is to make sure that they are indeed working on features that are likely to improve the global performance of the model. This seems challenging, but it just requires applying the scientific method. That is, form a hypothesis about what effort—adding a feature, adding some data, and so forth—will yield what result, be it improved accuracy, stability, and so on. Then perform the experiment and follow up diligently. For example, when trying to recognize the brand on a cereal box 98 percent of the time using supervised learning, experiment with training the model on labeled images of cereal boxes taken in low light or at an odd angle, then run the retrained model against real-world examples to see if accuracy improved across the board.

The Milky Way: An Autobiography of Our Galaxy
by Moiya McTier
Published 14 Aug 2022

Your astronomers are observing GN-z11 as it was only four hundred million years after the Big Bang. I will say this about those astronomers: they’ve done a lot with the little they were given. What is it you humans say? Make lemonade out of lemons? Well, in this scenario, all I did was show them a picture of a lemon tree and they figured out the rest. When—or if—you learned about the scientific method as a child, you likely learned that it requires experiments. But the truth, human, is that some sciences are observational in nature, not experimental. Your astronomers haven’t yet determined how to build miniature stars to experiment on. They can’t create groups of different galaxies and manipulate one to see how it affects their results.

Spike: The Virus vs The People - The Inside Story
by Jeremy Farrar and Anjana Ahuja
Published 15 Jan 2021

There was great science, which gave us vaccines; there was science that could have been better, like clinical trials, which mostly ended up being patchy and uncoordinated (with the notable exception of RECOVERY and Solidarity* trials); and there was bad science, including speculation, without evidence, that there would be no second Covid-19 wave. Even now, there are still people who sincerely believe that lockdowns do not bring down transmission and that vaccines do more harm than good. If citizens reject the scientific method, which is at the heart of everything we do and which has given us the means to exit this pandemic, then our future struggles against climate change, water scarcity and diseases will be that much tougher. We need to be more open and engaging about what we do, how the scientific process works, how scientific research and analysis influences policy making and how its benefits can be shared fairly.

The Great Influenza: The Story of the Deadliest Pandemic in History
by John M. Barry
Published 9 Feb 2004

Kuhn’s own theory recognizes that the propelling force behind the movement from one explanation to another comes from the methodology, from what we call the scientific method. But he takes as an axiom that those who ask questions constantly test existing hypotheses. In fact, with a methodology that probes and tests hypotheses—regardless of any paradigm—progress is inevitable. Without such a methodology, progress becomes merely coincendental. Yet the scientific method has not always been used by those who inquire into nature. Through most of known history, investigators trying to penetrate the natural world, penetrate what we call science, relied upon the mind alone, reason alone.

Cooking for Geeks
by Jeff Potter
Published 2 Aug 2010

When I was a Baby Buck, my father would take me into the pocket-knife factory on Saturday mornings and hand me off to a foreman so he could get some work done, and I’d make knives with a foreman. Did the background in chemistry, combined with your family’s history in knife making, complement each other? To some degree...but it was more of the scientific method and analytical techniques that you learn in a hard science, applying them to manufacturing. I looked at it from a different standpoint than a history major MBA would, or an English major MBA would. Coming from a real science, you take a different approach, an engineering approach. Can you give me an example?

…

Most people assume that knowing how things should be done is the best way, so they keep struggling within a very small circle, whereas I have a tendency to just try a much wider variety of things that may work and may not work. So when you get stuck on one of these problems even though you’re working in a wider circle, how do you go about getting unstuck? That’s an interesting question. Let me deviate from that slightly and then I’ll come back. Most people are familiar with the scientific method, which is holding everything exactly the same and changing this one thing. This reminds me of people trying to do one side of the Rubik’s Cube. Most of the good methods don’t involve getting any side. That’s the last thing you do. So people get stuck because they don’t want to toss in the towel on the progress they think they’ve made so far.

Site Reliability Engineering: How Google Runs Production Systems
by Betsy Beyer , Chris Jones , Jennifer Petoff and Niall Richard Murphy
Published 15 Apr 2016

Practical Alerting from Time-Series Data Written by Jamie Wilkinson Edited by Kavita Guliani May the queries flow, and the pager stay silent. Traditional SRE blessing Monitoring, the bottom layer of the Hierarchy of Production Needs, is fundamental to running a stable service. Monitoring enables service owners to make rational decisions about the impact of changes to the service, apply the scientific method to incident response, and of course ensure their reason for existence: to measure the service’s alignment with business goals (see Chapter 6). Regardless of whether or not a service enjoys SRE support, it should be run in a symbiotic relationship with its monitoring. But having been tasked with ultimate responsibility for Google Production, SREs develop a particularly intimate knowledge of the monitoring infrastructure that supports their service.

…

Teach your SREs about the diagnostic and debugging surfaces of your applications and have them practice drawing inferences from the information these surfaces reveal, so that such behavior becomes reflexive when dealing with future outages. Statistical and Comparative Thinkers: Stewards of the Scientific Method Under Pressure You can think of an SRE’s approach to incident response for large-scale systems as navigating through a massive decision tree unfolding in front of them. In the limited time window afforded by the demands of incident response, the SRE can take a few actions out of hundreds with the goal of mitigating the outage, either in the short term or the long term.

How Emotions Are Made: The New Science of the Mind and Brain
by Lisa Feldman Barrett
Published 6 Mar 2017

Centuries later, a radical revision of Buddhism recast the dharmas as human constructions dependent on concepts.29 From those initial skirmishes, the war has continued throughout recorded history. The eleventh-century scientist Ibn al-Haytham, who made seminal contributions to developing the scientific method, held the constructionist view that we perceive the world through judgment and inference. Medieval Christian theologians were essentialists, associating different cavities in the brain with distinct essences of memory, imagination, and intelligence. Philosophers in the seventeenth century, such as René Descartes and Baruch Spinoza, believed in emotion essences and catalogued them, while eighteenth-century philosophers like David Hume and Immanuel Kant argued more for construction and perception-based explanations for human experience.

…

Some of the most pressing questions about emotion remain unanswered, and important questions remain obscured, because many businesses and scientists continue practicing essentialism while the rest of us are figuring out how emotions are made.38 It’s hard to give up the classical view when it represents deeply held beliefs about what it means to be human. Nevertheless, the facts remain that no one has found even a single reliable, broadly replicable, objectively measurable essence of emotion. When mountains of contrary data don’t force people to give up their ideas, then they are no longer following the scientific method. They are following an ideology. And as an ideology, the classical view has wasted billions of research dollars and misdirected the course of scientific inquiry for over a hundred years. If people had followed evidence instead of ideology seventy years ago, when the Lost Chorus pretty solidly did away with emotion essences, who knows where we’d be today regarding treatments for mental illness or best practices for rearing our children.39 … Every scientific journey is a story.

Blueprint: The Evolutionary Origins of a Good Society
by Nicholas A. Christakis
Published 26 Mar 2019

This type of experiment—in which exposure to the drug is controlled by the scientists, thus minimizing the impact of extraneous factors—is the gold standard of scientific research. Science encompasses diverse practices, and the role of experiments remains paramount.10 Still, experimentation should not be conflated with the scientific method in general. The scientific method, widely practiced by scientists since the seventeenth century, refers to a way of studying the natural world; it is characterized by systematic observation, careful measurement, and, sometimes, actual experimentation, all of which is coupled with the formulation, testing, and revision of hypotheses.

This Is How They Tell Me the World Ends: The Cyberweapons Arms Race
by Nicole Perlroth
Published 9 Feb 2021

This is what Oleh Derevianko, the blond Ukrainian cybersecurity entrepreneur, told me one evening over vareniki dumplings in aspic, Ukrainian meat encased in some kind of fatty Jell-O. Derevianko’s firm had been on the front lines of the attacks. Over and over again, the forensics showed that the Russians were just experimenting. They were employing a cruel version of the scientific method: testing one capability here, one method there, honing their skills in Ukraine, demonstrating to their Russian overlords what could be done, earning their stripes. There was a reason that the NotPetya attack was so destructive, why it wiped 80 percent of Ukraine’s computers clean, Derevianko told me.

…

All discovered BlackEnergy and KillDisk on their systems, but the attackers had broke into each network using different techniques and methods, almost like they were tinkering. In one case, the attackers downloaded their tools over time—1:20 P.M. every day. In another, they downloaded them rapid-style. “They tried one technique here, one technique there,” Yasinsky told me. “This was the scientific method in action.” What Yasinsky couldn’t figure out was why the attackers would go to such lengths to attack media companies? Media companies had no particularly valuable intellectual property to speak of and little in the way of customer or financial data. The assembly-level mutations their attackers had used to install and hide their tools were as advanced as Yasinsky had ever seen.

Wonders of the Universe
by Brian Cox and Andrew Cohen
Published 12 Jul 2011

The desire to understand events beyond the terrestrial seems to be innate, because all the great civilisations of antiquity have shared it, developing stories of beginnings, origins and endings. It is only recently that we have discovered that this quest is also profoundly useful in a practical sense. When coupled with the scientific method, this quest has allowed us not only to better understand nature, but to manipulate and control it for the enrichment of our lives through technology. The well-spring of all that we take for granted, from medical science to intercontinental air travel, is our curiosity. THE VALUE OF WONDER The idea that a journey to the edge of the Universe is deeply relevant to our everyday lives lies at the heart of Wonders of the Universe.

Memory Machines: The Evolution of Hypertext
by Belinda Barnet
Published 14 Jul 2013

Ever the biologist, Eldredge has them arranged in taxonomic relationships of shape, style and date of manufacture. Much of the variety in cornet design is based on the way the pipe is wound. Late in 2002, Eldredge’s curiosity got the better of him. He decided to feed these specimens through the phylogenetic computer program he uses for his trilobites, to apply the ‘scientific method’ to technical evolution 4 Memory Machines for the first time. As usual, he asked the computer to come up with all the possible evolutionary trees and then make a ‘best guess’ based on the existing specimens. The results were astounding. Compared to the phylogenetic diagram for trilobites, the diagram for a technical artefact seemed much more ‘retroactive’: new designs could borrow ideas from the distant past.

Ever Since Darwin: Reflections in Natural History
by Stephen Jay Gould
Published 1 Jan 1977

Today, just ten years later, my own students would dismiss with even more derision anyone who denied the evident truth of continental drift—a prophetic madman is at least amusing; a superannuated fuddy-duddy is merely pitiful. Why has such a profound change occurred in the short space of a decade? Most scientists maintain—or at least argue for public consumption—that their profession marches toward truth by accumulating more and more data, under the guidance of an infallible procedure called “the scientific method.” If this were true, my question would have an easy answer. The facts, as known ten years ago, spoke against continental drift; since then, we have learned more and revised our opinions accordingly. I will argue, however, that this scenario is both inapplicable in general and utterly inaccurate in this case.

Whiplash: How to Survive Our Faster Future
by Joi Ito and Jeff Howe
Published 6 Dec 2016

Imagine: Charles Darwin first conceived of natural selection while reviewing the specimens he had collected as the HMS Beagle’s botanist, a post he had accepted when he was twenty-three years old. He then spent more than thirty years gathering data to back up his claim, an act so patient and cautious that it strikes the modern mind as otherworldly in its monklike devotion to the scientific method.15 But then, it was another world. Reliant on the libraries of the Athenaeum Club, the British Museum, and professional organizations like the Royal Society, as well as shipments of books that could take months to arrive from abroad, he could only access a tiny fraction of the information available to the modern scientist.

Life at the Speed of Light: From the Double Helix to the Dawn of Digital Life
by J. Craig Venter
Published 16 Oct 2013

Science 332, no. 6034 (June 3, 2011): pp. 1196–201. 10. George M. Church, Yuan Gao, and Sriram Kosuri. “Next-generation digital information storage in DNA.” Science 337, no. 6102 (September 28, 2012): p. 1628. 11. Accessible at http://edge.org/conversation/what-is-life. Chapter 2 1. Steven Benner. Life, the Universe . . . and the Scientific Method (Gainesville, FL: Foundation for Applied Molecular Evolution, 2009), p. 45. 2. Jacques Loeb. The Dynamics of Living Matter (New York: Columbia University Press, 1906). Accessible online at http://archive.org/stream/dynamicslivingm00loebgoog#page/n6/mode/2up. 3. Rebecca Lemov. World as Laboratory: Experiments with Mice, Mazes, and Men (New York: Hill and Wang, 2005). 4.

The Formula: How Algorithms Solve All Our Problems-And Create More
by Luke Dormehl
Published 4 Nov 2014

The Googlization of Everything (and Why We Should Worry) (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011). 19 MacCormick, John. Nine Algorithms That Changed the Future: The Ingenious Ideas That Drive Today’s Computers (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2012). 20 Anderson, Chris. “The End of Theory: The Data Deluge Makes the Scientific Method Obsolete.” Wired, June 23, 2008. wired.com/science/discoveries/magazine/16-07/pb_theory. 21 Doctorow, Cary. “How an Algorithm Came Up with Amazon’s ‘Keep Calm and Rape a Lot’ T-Shirt.” BoingBoing, March 2, 2013. boingboing.net/2013/03/02/how-an-algorithm-came-up-with.html. 22 “Google Sued over Bettina Wulff Search Results.”

Everything Under the Sun: Toward a Brighter Future on a Small Blue Planet
by Ian Hanington
Published 13 May 2012

We don’t know what carbon capture and storage will cost, when it will be commercially viable, or what it will do, other than perhaps give us a way to keep relying on finite and polluting sources of energy. 4. Science Holds a Mirror to Existence AS A SCIENTIST, I find all science and the scientific method fascinating. But it isn’t perfect. Science has probably led to as many destructive and dangerous inventions as useful ones. It won’t save us on its own. After all, science is value neutral; it won’t help us with questions regarding morality or ethics. But science is still one of the best tools we have for analyzing our place in the world and our options for living well.

A Curious Mind: The Secret to a Bigger Life
by Brian Grazer and Charles Fishman
Published 6 Apr 2014

My strongest sense of curiosity is what I call emotional curiosity: I want to understand what makes people tick; I want to see if I can connect a person’s attitude and personality with their work, with their challenges and accomplishments. I met with Jonas Salk, the scientist and physician who cured polio, a man who was a childhood hero of mine. It took me more than a year to get an audience with him. I wasn’t interested in the scientific method Salk used to figure out how to develop the polio vaccine. I wanted to know what it was like to help millions of people avoid a crippling disease that shadowed the childhoods of everyone when I was growing up. And he worked in a different era. He was renowned, admired, successful—but he received no financial windfall.

But What if We're Wrong? Thinking About the Present as if It Were the Past
by Chuck Klosterman
Published 6 Jun 2016

I suspect the human conception of infinity is akin to a dog’s conception of a clock. 34 Greene is not exaggerating: He said he’s had the same argument at least ten times with David Gross, the winner of the Nobel Prize for physics in 2004. “Because we can’t falsify the idea,” Gross writes of the multiverse, “it isn’t science.” In other words, because there’s no way for the multiverse theory to be proven untrue, it can’t be examined through the scientific method. 35 When I first met this guy (his name is Mike Mathog), the only thing I knew about him was how much he hated an absurdist joke I’d made in one of my early books, where I claimed the probability of everything was always 50-50 (“Either something will happen, or something will not”).

The Half-Life of Facts: Why Everything We Know Has an Expiration Date
by Samuel Arbesman
Published 31 Aug 2012

While the ancient philosophers worked to order their world, they were more than a little hit-or-miss. The world was ready for new types of knowledge by the late Middle Ages. As the Middle Ages and its accounting systems gave way to the Renaissance, which in turn laid the foundations for the Scientific Revolution, facts were given a new sort of prominence. As the scientific method was being codified, and our surroundings were subjected to experimental rigor the likes of which the world had never seen, facts were generated and overturned at an ever-increasing pace. Finally, the testable scientific fact had arrived. This is the critical insight of the Scientific Revolution: Science requires an idea to be refutable.

Heart: A History
by Sandeep Jauhar
Published 17 Sep 2018

Through the Middle Ages, his writings were scripture, immune to questioning. People focused on his conclusions, not the (often scant) observations upon which his conclusions were based. Though his reasoning was often spurious and analogical—water irrigating fields, a furnace heating pipes—the scientific method, careful measurement supporting or disproving falsifiable propositions, had not yet taken hold. When observations were made that did not concur with Galenism, they were marginalized and discounted. A more advanced understanding of the heart probably existed in Persia, where the physician Ibn al-Nafis wrote his Commentary on Anatomy in 1242.

Cogs and Monsters: What Economics Is, and What It Should Be
by Diane Coyle
Published 11 Oct 2021

This is not to despair of the project of turning economics as a whole into a more soundly-based empirical science. But we do not have nearly enough data. We do not interpret it with sufficient care. And we over-claim for our knowledge. Nor do we use evidence to inform theorising enough, either. The scientific method is a combination of deductive and inductive reasoning, a duet between theory and data. Biology became a science through decades of careful observation and data collection, permitting inductive reasoning, which combined with deductive thinking about the biological processes involved. In economics we do not seem to have the habit of that interplay between deduction and induction needed for scientific progress.

The Smartphone Society
by Nicole Aschoff

“Mamoudou Gassama: What the ‘Spider-Man’ of Paris Did Next.” Financial Times, January 25, 2019. Akuno, Kali, and Ajamu Nangwaya. Jackson Rising: The Struggle for Economic Democracy and Black Self-Determination in Jackson, Mississippi. Quebec: Daraja Press, 2017. Anderson, Chris. “The End of Theory: The Data Deluge Makes the Scientific Method Obsolete.” Wired, June 23, 2008. Anderson, Janna. “Future of the Internet IV.” Pew Research Center, February 19, 2010. Anderson, Jon Lee. “The Dangerous Absurdity of the Secret ‘Cuban Twitter.’” New Yorker, April 4, 2014. Angwin, Julia, Ariana Tobin, and Madeleine Varner. “Facebook (Still) Letting Housing Advertisers Exclude Users by Race.”

We Are Bellingcat: Global Crime, Online Sleuths, and the Bold Future of News
by Eliot Higgins
Published 2 Mar 2021

That murkiness would frighten away a traditional journalist, but the Bellingcat method is independent verification. We did not need to know about Chris Postal, only whether we could replicate the research. To us, an online claim is nothing more than a hypothesis, one validated only with backing evidence that others should be able to corroborate themselves. It’s akin to the scientific method applied to journalism. We checked whether this supposed match lined up with the roadside in Google Street View. I even sketched limbs of the trees in that Paris Match image and in the Google image to check if the foliage and growth structure looked the same. Yes, we had it. But the location was not Snizhne, it was Donetsk.

Dual Transformation: How to Reposition Today's Business While Creating the Future
by Scott D. Anthony and Mark W. Johnson
Published 27 Mar 2017

Fortunately, the past decade has concurrently seen an explosion of tools to help design and execute experiments and a rapid decline in the cost of these experiments. Books like Steve Blank’s Four Steps to the Epiphany, Eric Ries’s The Lean Startup, and coauthor Scott Anthony’s The First Mile provide practical toolkits to systematically de-risk an idea. The basic idea behind all these books is to apply the scientific method to strategic uncertainty. The First Mile uses two acronyms to explain the process. The first is DEFT, which stands for document, evaluate, focus, and test. First, document your idea thoroughly to make sure you have thought through all of its components. Evaluate it via multiple lenses to identify uncertainties and weak points.

GDP: The World’s Most Powerful Formula and Why It Must Now Change
by Ehsan Masood
Published 4 Mar 2021

Gus O’Donnell, Angus Deaton, Martine Durand, David Halpern, and Richard Layard, Wellbeing and Policy, Report of the Commission on Wellbeing and Policy (London: Legatum Institute, 2014), accessed October 2, 2015, http://li.com/docs/default-source/commission-on-wellbeing-and-policy/commission-on-wellbeing-and-policy-report---march-2014-pdf.pdf. 13. Madeline Drexler, A Splendid Isolation: Lessons on Happiness from the Kingdom of Bhutan (published by the author, May 2014). Nine $33 Trillion Man Chemistry has outgrown alchemy and astronomy has emerged from astrology. —Herman Daly on economics’s reluctance to embrace the scientific method (2013) In 1970, a few years before the great publishing sensation that was The Limits to Growth, one of its lead authors saw an opinion article in the New York Times written by Herman Daly, a then relatively unknown economist based at Louisiana State University.1 In the article, headlined “The Canary Has Fallen Silent,” Daly questioned why economies must continually grow and what the long-term consequences of growth without limits might be.

What's Wrong With Economics: A Primer for the Perplexed
by Robert Skidelsky
Published 3 Mar 2020

(i) Foley, Duncan (i), (ii) Foucault, Michel (i), (ii) Frankenstein (Shelley) (i) free trade advent of (i) critiques of (i) economic growth (i), (ii), (iii), (iv) free trade/protectionism clash (i), (ii) Friedman, Milton (i), (ii) Galbraith, John Kenneth (i), (ii), (iii), (iv) game theory (i), (ii) Georgescu-Roegen, Nicholas (i) German Historical School (i), (ii), (iii) globalization free trade doctrine (i) impact on absolute poverty rates (i) market-led (i), (ii) Gramsci, Antonio (i) Habermas, Jürgen (i) Hahn, Frank (i), (ii) Hayek, Friedrich (i), (ii) heterodox economics (i), (ii), (iii), (iv) Hicks, John (i), (ii) hierarchies of wants (i) Hirsch, Fred (i) history biases of (i) conservatism of (i) cycles in (i) within a different approach to understanding (i) of economic doctrines (i) within economic study (i) stages of development thesis (i) see also economic history history of economic thought methodological debates (i) paradigm persistence (i) the study of (i), (ii), (iii) see also economic history Hobsbawm, Eric (i) Hodgson, Geoffrey (i), (ii), (iii) holism (i), (ii), (iii) homo economicus ethical objections to (i) fictionality of (i) model of (i), (ii), (iii) as a product of capitalism (i) rational behaviour of (i), (ii) income redistribution/justice of distribution (i) individuals agency of (i) behaviour within groups (i) constancy of human nature belief (i), (ii), (iii), (iv) and the Enlightenment (i) fallacy of composition (i) human behaviour within economic models (i), (ii), (iii), (iv) institutions’s influence on (i) methodological individualism (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v), (vi) in methodology (i) in neoclassical economics (i), (ii), (iii) in pre-modern society (i) representative agent hypothesis (i), (ii) within social networks (i) as sole choosing units (i), (ii), (iii) uncertainty and human behaviour (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v), (vi) utility maximisation (i), (ii), (iii) see also behavioural economics; homo economicus industrialisation free trade in industrialising countries (i), (ii) Marxist thought on industrial societies (i), (ii), (iii), (iv) role of the state (i) sociological thought on (i) Institutional Economics (i), (ii), (iii) institutionalism neoclassical (i) overview of (i) institutions the church (i) defined (i) digital technology and (i) influence on the individual (i) the institutional order (i), (ii) non-market coordination (i) principal-agent problem (i) public choice theory (i) role in economic growth (i), (ii), (iii) self-interest within (i) the state as (i) utility maximisation by (i) see also firms; states Jevons, William Stanley (i), (ii) Johnson, Harry (i) Jones, Richard (i) Kahneman, Daniel (i) Kaldor, Nicholas (i) Kant, Immanuel (i) Keppler, Joseph (i) Keynes, John Maynard ethics in economics (i) moral basis for economics (i) ontology of economics in (i) on power (i) the qualities of an economist (i) in relation to equilibrium theory (i) on the role of economics (i) theory of probability (i) on uncertainty (i), (ii), (iii) Keynesian economics 1970s reaction against (i), (ii), (iii) for employment (i) equilibrium (i) Keynesian revolution (i), (ii) macroeconomic forecasting models (i), (ii), (iii) role of the individual (i) Knight, Frank (i) Kondratieff cycle (i) Krugman, Paul (i), (ii), (iii) Kuhn, Thomas (i), (ii), (iii) Kuznets, Simon (i), (ii) labour theory of value (i) Lagarde, Christine (i) Lakatos, Imre (i), (ii), (iii) laws, economic ceteris paribus warnings (i), (ii), (iii) critiques of (i) deductive theories (i) economic generalizations (i) inductive theories (i) modelling and (i) orthodox economics theories (i) stadial theory (i) see also models Lawson, Tony (i), (ii) Leontief, Wassily (i) Leslie, Cliffe (i) liberalism liberal/collectivist cycles (i) liberal power (i) liberal theory of the state (i) liberalisation policies in developing economies (i), (ii) List, Friedrich (i), (ii), (iii) Lo, Andrew (i) Locke, John (i), (ii), (iii) Lucas, Robert (i), (ii) Lukes, Steven (i) macroeconomic theory Keynesian macroeconomic forecasting (i), (ii), (iii) macroeconomic models (i), (ii) as micro-founded (i), (ii) Maddison, Angus (i) Maine, Henry (i) mainstream economics see neoclassical economics Malthus, Thomas (i), (ii), (iii) marginalist revolution (i), (ii), (iii), (iv) market economies (i) markets auction markets (i) competitive market systems (i) consumer sovereignty (i), (ii), (iii) expanded world of business (i) general equilibrium (GE) in (i), (ii), (iii) the invisible hand of (i), (ii) market imperfections (i) market maximisation (i) market-led globalization (i), (ii) market/society relationship (i) monopolies in (i) monopolistic competition (i) monopsony power (i) oligopolies (i) origins of trade (i) pre-modern markets (i), (ii), (iii) role of institutions (i) self-regulating markets (i) state intervention in (i), (ii) transaction cost theory (i), (ii) uncertainty and (i), (ii) see also trade Marshall, Alfred (i), (ii), (iii), (iv) Marx, Karl class analysis (i), (ii) Frankenstein as a metaphor for capitalism (i) labour theory of value (i) the moral cost of progress (i) need for social bonds (i) power relations (i) in relation to equilibrium theory (i) Marxism on bourgeois economics (i) on equilibrium theory (i) hegemonic power concept (i) on industrial society (i), (ii), (iii), (iv) theory of class power (i), (ii), (iii) theory of exploitation (i) mass consumption (i) maths mathematical language (i), (ii) mathematical modelling (i) role in economics (i), (ii) McCloskey, Deirdre (i), (ii) means choice of means (i) as data (i) opportunity costs (i) scarcity of (i), (ii), (iii) scarcity of time and (i) wealth and (i) means-end problem (i), (ii), (iii) Menger’s Hierarchy of Wants (i) methodological holism (i) methodological individualism (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v), (vi) methodology classical economics (i) homo economicus function within (i) human nature and (i) the individual in (i) marginal revolution (i) methodological debates (i) methodological persistence (i) of neoclassical economics (i) paradigm persistence (i) paradigm shifts (i), (ii) pluralism within (i) protective belts in research (i) relationship with sociology (i) the scientific method (i) the social in (i) the study of (i), (ii) subjective value theory (i) utility maximisation as (i), (ii), (iii) microeconomics (i), (ii), (iii) Mill, John Stuart (i), (ii), (iii) Miller Atlas of Brazil (i) models agent-based modelling (i) complex system modelling (i) econometric testing (i), (ii) within economic study (i), (ii) to establish laws (i) establishing the facts (i), (ii) fallibility of (i) falsification of theories (i), (ii) freezing technique (i), (ii) frictions (i) human behaviour within (i), (ii), (iii), (iv) logic and mathematical proof (i) macroeconomic models (i), (ii) Malthusian population problem (i), (ii) mathematical modelling (i) method for (i) of monopolies (i) network analysis (i) open and closed systems (i), (ii), (iii), (iv) Phillips Curve (i) platonic modelling (i) Popper’s verification principle (i) predictability (i), (ii) a priori modelling (i), (ii) in relation to reality (i) rhetoric and (i) shocks, notion of (i) the study of (i) system dynamics (i) testing hypotheses (i) time-series analysis (i) see also homo economicus; laws, economic money within economic study (i) efficiency of choice and (i) as a means to an end (i), (ii) theory of money (i) for well-being (i), (ii) see also wealth monopolies (i) morality anomie (i) contracts and (i), (ii) just price doctrine (i) moral agency (i) moral behaviour (i) moral restraint for limiting population growth (i) morally efficient behaviour (i), (ii), (iii) of ownership (i) in relation to strategic rationality (i) see also ethics Nakamura, Emi (i) natural resources (i), (ii) neoclassical economics authority of (i), (ii) the individual and (i), (ii), (iii) institutionalism (i) methodology (i) overview of (i) parody of the state (i) within the political landscape (i) role of social relationships (i) New Institutional Economics (i) North, Douglass (i) Nozick, Robert (i) oligopolies (i) Olson, Mancur (i) ontology in Keynesian economics (i) lack of institutional mapping in (i) in relation to epistemology (i), (ii) open systems (i) opportunity costs (i) paradigm persistence (i) Pareto, Vilfredo (i) Parker, William (i) Phillips Curve (i) philosophy (i), (ii), (iii) physics concept of gravity (i), (ii) the laws of physics and economics (i) Pigou, Arthur (i) pluralism as alternative to heterodoxy (i) within economic methodology (i) in economic theory (i) parable of the blind men and the elephant (i), (ii), (iii) Polanyi, Karl (i), (ii), (iii), (iv) political economy (i), (ii), (iii), (iv) political science (i), (ii) Popper, Karl (i), (ii) positional goods (i) post-modernism (i) power advertising as a form of (i) agenda power (i), (ii) blunt/hard power (i) defined (i) disinterested power (i) economic theory and (i) in economics (i), (ii), (iii), (iv) economics/business relationship (i) forms of (i) hegemonic/ideological power (i) inducements (i) legitimacy of (i) liberal power (i) Machiavellian power (i), (ii) Marxist critiques of bourgeoise economics (i) Marxist theory of class power (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v) of monopolies (i) monopolistic competition (i) monopsony power (i) oligopolies (i) as a positional good (i) relationship with ideas (i), (ii) Prebisch, Raúl (i) pre-modern society just price doctrine (i) markets in (i), (ii), (iii) sociology on (i), (ii), (iii) principal-agent problem (i) probability cardinal probabilities (i) Keynes’s theory of probability (i) in neoclassical epistemology (i) uncertainty as (i) production possibility frontier (PPF) (i) property ownership enclosure of the commons (i), (ii), (iii) exploitation of labour (i) justice of property rights (i) Lockean thought (i), (ii) protectionism (i), (ii), (iii), (iv) psychology biases of (i) within a different approach to understanding (i) in economic studies (i) see also homo economicus public choice theory (i) rational expectation theory (i), (ii) rationality communicative rationality (i) decision-making process (i) deviations from in behavioural economics (i), (ii) efficiency of choice (i) future conditions of uncertainty (i), (ii) neoclassical model of (i), (ii) rational behaviour of homo economicus (i), (ii) rational belief/true belief distinction (i) rational vs irrational human behaviour (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v) strategic rationality (i) Rawls, John (i), (ii) Raworth, Kate (i) religion (i), (ii) representative agent hypothesis (i), (ii) research dominance of orthodox economics in (i) external interests and influences (i), (ii) intellectual independence of (i) paradigm persistence (i) protective belts in (i) rhetoric (i) Ricardo, David (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v), (vi) risk defined (i) risk-taking and profit (i), (ii), (iii) risk/uncertainty distinction (i) Robbins, Lionel definition of economics (i), (ii), (iii) on economic history (i) ethics and economics (i), (ii), (iii) on psychology (i) scarcity perspective (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v), (vi) on scientific generalizations (i) the state of well-being (i) Robinson, Joan (i), (ii) Roscoe, Philip (i) Routh, Guy (i) Samuelson, Paul (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v) Sargent, Thomas (i), (ii) Say, J.B.

Escape From Model Land: How Mathematical Models Can Lead Us Astray and What We Can Do About It
by Erica Thompson
Published 6 Dec 2022

When asked why a certain decision is made, the chain of responsibility may lead back to a mathematical model that said this outcome would probably be better than another outcome. ‘We were following the science’ is a common refrain: in the best case this results in high-impact decisions with no owner at all, and in the worst case any failures will be weaponised against science and the scientific method itself. If economic models fail to encompass even the possibility of a financial crisis, is nobody responsible for it? Who will put their name to modelled projections? In my view, institutions such as the IPCC should be able to bridge this accountability gap by offering an expert bird’s-eye perspective from outside Model Land.

The Great Wave: The Era of Radical Disruption and the Rise of the Outsider
by Michiko Kakutani
Published 20 Feb 2024

In the case of the Black Death (the bubonic plague outbreak, between 1347 and 1351, which, it’s estimated, killed one-third of the population of Europe), the science writer John Kelly argues it “played a major role in the birth of public health,” resulting in new quarantine and hospital protocols. More important, he says, it led to changes that “helped to set the stage for what today is called the scientific method”—namely, “a greater emphasis on practical, clinically oriented medicine” that reflected the growing influence of the surgeon and empirical observation. In his 2005 book, The Great Mortality, Kelly wrote that the Black Death created severe labor shortages, which led to a “burst of technological innovation” including improved water mills and windmills, a new, more efficient kind of plow, and two simple inventions that increased agricultural productivity: “Someone figured out that one easy (and cheap) way to get a horse to pull more was to redistribute weight away from its windpipe, so when it moved forward it wouldn’t choke.

Piracy : The Intellectual Property Wars from Gutenberg to Gates
by Adrian Johns
Published 5 Jan 2010

In the intellectual progress that they trace, the issue of patenting turns out to have been central. Briefly, he first projected a book to be called Science, directed squarely against the “planning of science” movement. This he pursued for three years, in 1940–43, only to abandon it and move on to another work provisionally called The Scientific Method in Society. This in turn gave way to The Autonomy of Science, which advanced a sweeping threestage view of the history of science extending back centuries. Elements of this then reappeared in what might seem a radically different text, on Economic Planning. Finally, Polanyi turned the book on planning into a volume named Full Employment in Theory and Practice.

…

Like most of them, it affected the technoelitist libertarianism and the language of exploration that had been such a feature of phreaking. It even affected the same lexical tics, in particular the ubiquitous ph. Above all, Legion of Doom hackers and likeminded digerati appropriated wholesale the phreaks’ presumptuous claim – itself descended from interwar radio culture – that as practitioners of the scientific method they should be supported, not restrained. A muchreissued posting of 1986 variously titled “Conscience of a Hacker” or “The Hacker’s Manifesto” declared all this explicitly. It was the work of a Legion of Doom hacker named The Mentor. Hackers were firstly explorers of a telephone system, it claimed – a system that ought to be cheap for all, but had been hijacked by “profiteering gluttons.”

Money Changes Everything: How Finance Made Civilization Possible
by William N. Goetzmann
Published 11 Apr 2016

So Lin demonstrates that chance alone could not explain the difference. A number of brilliant scholars have taken a crack at solving what has become known as “the Needham Puzzle.” Lin explains it by introduction of the scientific method of experimentation in the West, which, in effect served to systematically speed up, organize, and make optimal use of random processes of discovery. In his view, it was the development of the scientific method that made the difference. Another is the sustained success of Chinese civilization itself. The financial solutions described in Part II of this book make it clear that China had successfully solved myriad complex problems involving planning, resource allocation, and risk mitigation.

The Patterning Instinct: A Cultural History of Humanity's Search for Meaning
by Jeremy Lent
Published 22 May 2017

Nature was to be “put in constraint,” and the aim of the scientist was to “hound her in her wanderings.” With echoes of the witch trials, sexual innuendo lurked in the background: “Neither ought a man to make scruple of entering and penetrating into these holes and corners, when the inquisition of truth is his whole object.” The scientific method, Bacon declared, “may in very truth dissect nature” to discover “the secrets still locked in [her] bosom” so that she can then be “forced out of her natural state and squeezed and molded.”3 The images Bacon used to galvanize the spirit of scientific discovery helped to create a new metaphor of humanity's relationship with the natural world unlike any that had come before: CONQUERING NATURE.

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He interpreted Matthew's famous statement, “Seek, and ye shall find; knock, and it shall be opened unto you,” as an invitation for humankind to seek the Truth about the natural world through rational investigation.24 Across the English Channel, similar views were expressed by Adelard of Bath, who asserted that reason could solve all inquiries “since we must assume that all nature is based on a sure and logical foundation.” Oxford University, established in 1214, spawned a scientific movement credited with laying the foundations of the modern practice of science. One key figure, Robert Grosseteste, developed the parameters for what is known today as the scientific method. His student, Roger Bacon, considered by some the first true scientist, viewed mathematics as the language of nature and believed that the science of optics would offer a way to understand the mind of the creator.25 The new approach of using reason to understand the natural world gained such prestige that theologians were enticed into viewing their own field as a branch of science.

Digital Barbarism: A Writer's Manifesto
by Mark Helprin
Published 19 Apr 2009

Many things are involved, among which, very importantly, is academic orthodoxy: not politics of any sort as they now thoroughly intrude upon a university both unwilling and unable to resist their commanding influence, but the academic modus operandi, which is in itself valuable, necessary, and good, assuming it does not, like the scientific method, overreach like Germans seeking Lebensraum and force itself into places where for various reasons it does not belong. Whence the collaborative impulse and worship of collective effort that has so completely saturated American education? Marxism and the like simply do not have the power to sustain it.

Endless Forms Most Beautiful: The New Science of Evo Devo
by Sean B. Carroll
Published 10 Apr 2005

But while some denominations have explicitly accepted the reality of biological evolution, fundamentalists who insist upon a literal reading of the Bible (referred to here as “creationists”) remain firmly opposed to evolutionary science and actively promote legislation aimed at crippling the teaching of evolution in public schools. Goethe also said, “Nothing is worse than active ignorance,” and it is the agenda of these lost souls that the scientific and educational communities must thwart. I want to be very clear here in my position. I believe that the teaching of evolution and science is best served by promoting the scientific method and scientific knowledge and not by attacking religious views. The latter is a futile, counterproductive battle. However, I also believe, as many denominations have also concluded, that religion is better served by promoting and evolving its respective teachings and theologies, and not by attacking science, which is definitely a losing strategy.

The Vanishing Middle Class: Prejudice and Power in a Dual Economy
by Peter Temin
Published 17 Mar 2017

Fields, Karen E., and Barbara J. Fields. 2012. Racecraft: The Soul of Inequality in American Life. New York: Verso. Fitzsimmons, Emma G., and David W. Chen. 2015. “Aging Infrastructure Plagues Nation’s Busiest Rail Corridor.” New York Times, July 26. Fogel, Robert W. 1987. “Some Notes on the Scientific Methods of Simon Kuznets.” NBER Working Paper No. 2461, December. Foner, Eric. 1988. Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution, 1863–77. New York: Harper and Row. Forsberg, Mary E. 2010. “A Hudson Tunnel That Goes One Way.” New York Times, October 27. Fortner, Michael Javen. 2015. “The Real Roots of the ’70s Drug Laws.”

The Golden Ratio: The Story of Phi, the World's Most Astonishing Number
by Mario Livio
Published 23 Sep 2003

Kepler took the Pythagorean idea of a cosmos that can be explained by mathematics a huge step forward. He developed an actual mathematical model for the universe, which on one hand was based on existing observational measurements and on the other was falsifiable by observations that could be made subsequently. These are precisely the ingredients required by the “scientific method”—the organized approach to explaining observed facts with a model of nature. An idealized scientific method begins with the collection of facts, a model is then proposed, and the model's predictions are tested through experiments or further observations. This process is sometimes summed up by the sequence: induction, deduction, verification.

The Autonomous Revolution: Reclaiming the Future We’ve Sold to Machines
by William Davidow and Michael Malone
Published 18 Feb 2020

Desertification played a role in the collapse of the Harappan Civilization in the Indus Valley around 1300 BCE, and environmental degradation has been one of the biggest drivers of mass migrations.1 Paleoclimatologist Douglas Kennett has theorized that drought led to the decline of Mayan civilization.2 Christianity, Islam, democracy, Communism, the Enlightenment, free-market capitalism, and the scientific method are all examples of structural transformations that were driven by ideas and beliefs. That said, there is no shortage of evidence that technology is a great driver of new thought systems and vice versa. While the Protestant Reformation sprang from the minds of men such as Martin Luther and John Calvin, it was catalyzed by the generalized use of printing, which made it possible for vernacular Bibles and tracts to be widely disseminated.

A Thousand Brains: A New Theory of Intelligence
by Jeff Hawkins
Published 15 Nov 2021

That method is to actively seek evidence that contradicts our beliefs. Finding evidence that supports our beliefs is helpful, but not definitive. Finding contrary evidence, however, is proof that the model in our head is not right and needs to be modified. Actively looking for evidence to disprove our beliefs is the scientific method. It is the only approach we know of that can get us closer to the truth. Today, in the beginning of the twenty-first century, false beliefs are rampant in the minds of billions of people. This is understandable for mysteries that have not yet been solved. For example, it is understandable that people believed in a flat Earth five hundred years ago, because the spherical nature of the planet was not widely understood, and there was little to no evidence that the Earth was not flat.

The Authoritarian Moment: How the Left Weaponized America's Institutions Against Dissent
by Ben Shapiro
Published 26 Jul 2021

“LISTEN TO THE EXPERTS” The Ultracrepidarian Problem crops up regularly in the realm of policy making, when scientists determine that they are not merely responsible for identifying data-driven problems and providing data-driven answers, but for answering all of humanity’s questions. The Ultracrepidarian Problem is nothing new in the realm of science. Indeed, it is an integral part of Scientism, the philosophy that morality can come from science itself—that all society requires is the management of experts in the scientific method to reach full human flourishing. Scientism says that it can answer ethical questions without resort to God; all that is required is a bit of data, and a properly trained scientist. The history of Scientism is long and bleak—it contains support for eugenics, genocide, and massively misguided social engineering—but the popularity of Scientism hasn’t waned.

The Gene Machine
by Venki Ramakrishnan

Yet, as described in the book, others who made key contributions were, by the three-recipient limitation of the prize, left out of this recognition despite the importance of their insights. The book provides a readable account of the author’s experiences and views on these matters that must be taken in the spirit of a memoir rather than an objective historical essay. Students of science and of the scientific method will find this story to be a fresh take on the process of discovery and the sometimes tortuous trail that leads to new knowledge. In the end, it is a fascinating contribution to the scientific literature and one that will be valued as both a description of fact and a dissection of the emotional side of a scientist’s approach and eventual achievement.

Quackery: A Brief History of the Worst Ways to Cure Everything
by Lydia Kang and Nate Pedersen
Published 16 Oct 2017

Though the term is usually defined as the practice and promotion of intentionally fraudulent medical treatments, it also includes situations when people are touting what they truly believe works. Perhaps they’re ignoring­—­or challenging—scientific fact. Or perhaps they lived centuries ago, before the scientific method entered civilization’s consciousness. Through a modern-day lens, these treatments can seem absolutely absurd. Weasel nuts as a contraceptive? Bloodletting to help cure blood loss? Burning hot irons to fix the lovelorn? Yep. But behind every misguided treatment—from Ottomans eating clay to keep the plague away to Victorian gents sitting in a mercury steam room for their syphilis to epilepsy sufferers sipping gladiator blood in ancient Rome—is the incredible power of the human desire to live.

The Slow Fix: Solve Problems, Work Smarter, and Live Better in a World Addicted to Speed
by Carl Honore
Published 29 Jan 2013

Like Edwards, many of the best Renaissance thinkers were blessed with a jack-of-all-trades erudition. When he wasn’t revolutionizing astronomy, Copernicus practised medicine and law. Kepler based his theory of planetary motion on the ebb and flow of musical harmony. Better known in his day as a lawyer, statesman, writer and courtier, Francis Bacon helped to pioneer the scientific method. A theologian named Robert Boyle laid the foundations of modern chemistry. Leonardo da Vinci, the poster boy for polymaths, was a gifted painter, sculptor, musician, anatomist and writer, as well as a startlingly prolific inventor. Ranging across the disciplines did not end with the Renaissance.

The Runaway Species: How Human Creativity Remakes the World
by David Eagleman and Anthony Brandt
Published 30 Sep 2017

When it was made into a movie in the 1930s, the alleged affair was turned into a heterosexual one, due to the demands of the time. Several decades later, the same director, William Wyler, remade the movie: the moral prohibitions had been lifted and the original Hellman story was restored. As with plays and movies, scientific progress is also shaped by the moment in history. Many elements of the scientific method that we regard as indispensable today – experimentation, publication of results, detailed description of methods, replication, review of ideas by a community of peers – emerged in late-seventeenth-century England in the aftermath of the country’s civil war. Before then natural science was not investigated through experiment but rather through individual revelation and theoretical speculation.

The Hidden Half: How the World Conceals Its Secrets
by Michael Blastland
Published 3 Apr 2019

When I talk about the replication crisis to people who’ve not come across it, they express two main doubts: 1. How is it possible for so many honest researchers to think they’ve seen something that might not be there? 2. Surely the problem can’t be that common or that bad? The first doubt about how in practice an experiment can reach a fragile conclusion, despite commitment to the scientific method, is answered with another story that begins to show some of the practical limitations of finding out even apparently simple things, in this case about the approximate benefit of owning a cow. How hard can that be? At around 5.30 a.m., just as the sun comes up, Rajeev Gupta begins his day’s work by feeding his 60 Murrah buffaloes and 33 Jersey cows before milking, which starts at about 8 a.m. and takes about four hours.

AIQ: How People and Machines Are Smarter Together
by Nick Polson and James Scott
Published 14 May 2018

See, e.g., Tom Simonite, “The Recipe for the Perfect Robot Surgeon,” MIT Technology Review, October 14, 2016, https://www.technologyreview.com/s/602595/the-recipe-for-the-perfect-robot-surgeon/. 51.  David Szondy, “IBM’s Watson Adapted to Teach Medical Students and Aid Diagnosis,” New Atlas, October 21, 2013, http://newatlas.com/ibm-supercomputer-watsonpath/29415/. CHAPTER 7   1.  Chris Anderson, “The End of Theory: The Data Deluge Makes the Scientific Method Obsolete,” Wired, June 23, 2008, https://www.wired.com/2008/06/pb-theory/.   2.  C. R. Cardwell et al., “Exposure to Oral Bisphosphonates and Risk of Esophageal Cancer,” JAMA 304, no. 6 (August 11, 2010): 657–63.   3.  J. Green et al., “Oral Bisphosphonates and Risk of Cancer of Oesophagus, Stomach, and Colorectum: Case-Control Analysis Within a UK Primary Care Cohort,” BMJ 2010;341:c4444.   4.  

Less Is More: How Degrowth Will Save the World
by Jason Hickel
Published 12 Aug 2020

Those who sought to advance capitalism had to find a way not only to strip humans from the land, but to destroy the animist ideas that enjoyed such prominence – to strip the earth of its spirit and render it instead a mere stock of ‘natural resources’ for humans to exploit. * They found their first answer in Francis Bacon (1561–1626), the Englishman celebrated as the ‘father of modern science’. Bacon’s legacy is eulogised in school textbooks today, and for good reason: he made significant contributions to the scientific method. But there is a rather sinister side to his story that has largely fallen out of public consciousness. Bacon actively sought to destroy the idea of a living world, and to replace it with a new ethic that not only sanctioned but celebrated the exploitation of nature. To this end, he took the ancient theory of nature-as-female and transformed her from a nurturing mother into what he called a ‘common harlot’.

Conflicted: How Productive Disagreements Lead to Better Outcomes
by Ian Leslie
Published 23 Feb 2021

But even among scientists, bias can get out of hand. * * * Four hundred years ago, Francis Bacon warned against what we now call confirmation bias: ‘The human understanding when it has once adopted an opinion . . . draws all things else to support and agree with it.’ In order to solve this problem Bacon formulated what became known as the scientific method. He instructed scholars to test their theories against real-world observation, so that they could ‘analyse nature by proper rejection and exclusion’. Following Bacon, science developed into a discipline, and a community with a division of cognitive labour. Scientists publish research on the topics they care about and try to build a case for their theory.

The Demon in the Machine: How Hidden Webs of Information Are Finally Solving the Mystery of Life
by Paul Davies
Published 31 Jan 2019

Anthony Aguirre, Brendan Foster and Zeeya Merali (eds.), Wandering towards a Goal: How Can Mindless Mathematical Laws Give Rise to Aims and Intention? (Springer, 2018) Philip Ball, ‘How life (and death) spring from disorder’, Quanta, 25 January 2017; https://www.quantamagazine.org/the-computational-foundation-of-life-20170126/ Steven Benner, Life, the Universe and the Scientific Method (The FfAME Press, 2009) Paul Davies and Niels Gregersen (eds.), Information and the Nature of Reality: From Physics to Metaphysics (Cambridge University Press, 2010) Nick Lane, The Vital Question: Energy, Evolution and the Origins of Complex Life (Norton, 2015) Ilya Prigogine and Isabelle Stengers, Order out of Chaos (Heinemann, 1984) Erwin Schrödinger, What is Life?

Rule of the Robots: How Artificial Intelligence Will Transform Everything
by Martin Ford
Published 13 Sep 2021

None of this implies that artificial intelligence will be a panacea for turbocharging innovation or that we should expect results to consistently be achieved on an accelerated time frame. Science is, after all, fundamentally about experimentation, and conducting and evaluating the outcomes of experiments takes time. In some cases, the scientific method can indeed be accelerated, perhaps through the use of laboratory robots or even by performing some experiments at high speed in simulated environments. In fields like medicine and biology, however, experiments often must be conducted within living organisms, and here, the potential for dramatically speeding up the process is quite limited.

The Pyramid Principle: Logic in Writing and Thinking
by Barbara Minto
Published 2 Jan 2010

In reasoning to the third, the scientist follows the classical scientific method: 'i Hypothesize a structure that could explain the result I Devise an experiment that will confirm or exclude the hypothesis ~ Carry out the experin1ent to get a clear yes-or-no answer <! Recycle the procedure, making sub-hypotheses or sequential hypotheses to define the possibilities that remain, and so on. 1 The hallmarks of the scientific method are generating hypotheses and devising experiments. Both activities demand high levels of visual thinking. Generating Hypotheses Scientific hypotheses are not drawn out of the air, but are directly suggested by examining the structural elements of the situation that produced the problem. For example, if your problem is that you want to find a way to permit people to commu- 213 nicate over long distances without shouting, then you will be thinking specifically about ways to modify the voice or amplify the ear; and your hypotheses will reflect the possibilities you envision.

The Authoritarians
by Robert Altemeyer
Published 2 Jan 2007

The only reports of my research on authoritarian leaders are 1) a chapter entitled, “The Other ‘Authoritarian Personality’” in Volume 30 (1998) of a series of books called Advances in Experimental Social Psychology, edited by Mark Zanna and published by Academic Press, and 2) an article in the Journal of Social Psychology, edited by Keith Davis, in 2004 entitled “Highly Dominating, Highly Authoritarian Personalities” (Volume 144, pages 421-447). Back to introduction [3] I hope you’ll agree that the studies were fair and square. It’s your call, of course, and everybody else’s. That’s the beauty of the scientific method. If another researcher--and there are hundreds of them--thinks I only got the results I did because of the particular way I set things up, phrased things, and so on, she can repeat my experiment her way, find out, and let everybody know what happened. It’s the wonderful way science polices and corrects itself.

The Origins of Political Order: From Prehuman Times to the French Revolution
by Francis Fukuyama
Published 11 Apr 2011

The emergence of a modern state is a necessary condition for intensive economic development, but it is not a sufficient one. Other institutions needed to be in place for capitalism to emerge. The capitalist revolution in the West was preceded by a cognitive revolution in early modern times that created the scientific method, modern universities, technological innovations that produced new wealth from scientific observations, and a system of property rights that incentivized people to innovate in the first place. Qin China was in many ways an intellectually fertile place, but its major scholarly traditions tended to be backward looking and incapable of the abstraction needed by modern natural science.

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Property was entailed by myriad rights and duties imposed by agnatic lineages, which up through the Chinese Republic in the twentieth century still recognized the rights of families to restrict the alienation of land.8 It is not clear, moreover, that even the best-specified modern property rights would be sufficient in themselves to raise productivity substantially, or to create the modern capitalist economic world out of a Malthusian society. Before the introduction of other institutions necessary to sustain continuous technological advance (such as the scientific method, universities, human capital, research laboratories, a cultural milieu that encouraged risk and experimentation, and so forth), there were limits to the kinds of productivity gains that good property rights on their own could induce, and thus no assumption that continuous technological advances would occur.9 Thus the economists’ emphasis on modern property rights and contract enforcement under a rule of law may be misplaced in two respects.

Is God a Mathematician?
by Mario Livio
Published 6 Jan 2009

Remarkably, Hamming concluded his article with an admission that “all of the explanations I have given when added together simply are not enough to explain what I set out to account for” (namely, the unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics). So, should we close by conceding that the effectiveness of mathematics remains as mysterious as it was when we started? Before giving up, let us try to distill the essence of Wigner’s puzzle by examining what is known as the scientific method. Scientists first learn facts about nature through a series of experiments and observations. Those facts are initially used to develop some sort of qualitative models of the phenomena (e.g., the Earth attracts apples; colliding subatomic particles can produce other particles; the universe is expanding; and so on).

Richard Dawkins: How a Scientist Changed the Way We Think
by Alan Grafen; Mark Ridley
Published 1 Jan 2006

I have been very pleased to be associated with him in writing letters and articles opposing the reported teaching of creationism in at least one new school. Like him I believe that science has a proper integrity which needs to be fought for and preserved. This means that letting evidence decide, allowing evidence to modify or refute even one’s most cherished notion, is fundamental; as is the scientific method of rigorous testing of hypotheses by experiment. I also have other reasons for being antagonistic to creationism. It involves an unhistorical, uncritical approach to the biblical texts. It misunderstands what those texts set out to do and as a result they belittle God and bring Christianity into disrepute.

Wonderland: How Play Made the Modern World
by Steven Johnson
Published 15 Nov 2016

We invented a whole host of institutions and conventions that would ultimately turn out to be extremely useful in improving our health: diets and cookbooks shaped by a complex understanding of bodily systems, chemical compounds designed to treat illness and prescribed using standardized systems of measurement, printing presses and pharmacists that could disseminate those prescriptions. These were all significant innovations, not easily established. But as it happened, they arrived before the invention of the scientific method, randomized double-blind control drug trials, and other regulatory mechanisms that separated the genuine healers from the charlatans. On some basic level, the medical properties of the spices were pure fantasy. But that fantasy, for all its absurdities, established a regimen of health and improvement that has carried on into modern life with better success.

Cold: Adventures in the World's Frozen Places
by Bill Streever
Published 21 Jul 2009

Drebbel worked a hundred years before Fahrenheit and forty-five years before Robert Boyle’s extensive work on cold, heat, and pressure. This was a time when controlled experiments and open communication about those experiments were not expected, when curiosity was by no means a virtue, when Francis Bacon was still formulating and promoting what would come to be called the scientific method. Neither the scientists nor their audiences were interested in sharing knowledge. The interest was in entertaining and being entertained, in amazing and being amazed. Flash forward nearly four centuries. A verger shows a group of tourists around the abbey. I tag along asking questions. The verger is olive-skinned, wearing a black robe, his voice musical and his words and sentences made by combining clearly clipped syllables.

Comedy Writing Secrets
by Mel Helitzer and Mark Shatz
Published 14 Sep 2005

Other group activities with a humorous spin include: • developing a class Web page with students' jokes, tongue twisters, riddles, funny anecdotes, and nonsense poems and songs • drawing an event or theory as a comic strip, comic book, or group mural • holding mock trials for notorious historical figures • acting out the functions of different body parts • creating a POW bulletin board or scrapbook with homonyms, euphemisms, double entendres, and Tom Swifties Even junk food can lend itself to the educational process: The T.WI.N.K.I.E.S. Project (www.twinkiesproject.com) teaches the scientific method via experiments with Twinkies. The experiments consist mostly of abusing Twinkies in extreme situations (dropping them from a skyscraper, bombarding them with radiation). Written in F u n Creative writing exercises allow for more opportunities to introduce humor into the classroom and can make a mundane assignment fresh and fun.

The Narcissist Next Door
by Jeffrey Kluger
Published 25 Aug 2014

The idea intrigued me, and the only way to test it was to run the experiment. I had an available subject, and looking around, I realized that I had the necessary equipment: the toy boat lying on the floor within easy reach. The whole thing was really nothing more than a rudimentary exercise of the scientific method—not a bad concept for someone so young to stumble across, even if I was about to execute it in a decidedly criminal way. I picked up the boat, hefted it once and found it suitable, then raised it above my head and advanced wordlessly on the unsuspecting man. He had been looking away, but finally he turned his attention toward me and realized what I was up to.

The Impulse Society: America in the Age of Instant Gratification
by Paul Roberts
Published 1 Sep 2014

Because it’s uncomfortable, it’s upsetting.”10 A case in point: in the 1960s, the fraction of Americans who cared whether their children married someone from the “other” political party was less than one in twenty. Today, one in three Democrats and one in two Republicans regard “interparty marriage” as taboo.11 The rift in our political culture now runs so deep that we can no longer agree even on such basic notions as the legitimacy of the scientific method or the immorality of false campaign ads. Even the idea that there is one universal truth is now in dispute. “Disagreements in our culture are now not just over values and not just over the facts, they’re over how we even conceive of facts, how we come to consider what knowledge is a fact,” says Michael Lynch, the University of Connecticut professor of philosophy we met in chapter 5.

Most Likely to Succeed: Preparing Our Kids for the Innovation Era
by Tony Wagner and Ted Dintersmith
Published 17 Aug 2015

Students learn very little, if anything, about important recent discoveries, or even neglect entire sciences, such as ecology, which have more importance for our future survival as a species than any of the required sciences. Secondly, students aren’t learning what should be at the heart of science classes: how to think like a scientist and apply the scientific method. * * * William Wallace has a PhD in Biochemistry and ran his own lab in neuroscience research for twelve years. When he came to teach at Georgetown Day School in Washington, DC, he had taught AP biology for fourteen years, but he was very disappointed by how little real science students were learning.

Wait: The Art and Science of Delay
by Frank Partnoy
Published 15 Jan 2012

According to journalist Laurie Abraham, “What Gottman did wasn’t really a prediction of the future but a formula built after the couples’ outcomes were already known. This isn’t to say that developing such formulas isn’t a valuable—indeed, a critical—first step in being able to make a prediction. The next step, however—one absolutely required by the scientific method—is to apply your equation to a fresh sample to see whether it actually works. That is especially necessary with small data slices (such as 57 couples), because patterns that appear important are more likely to be mere flukes. But Gottman never did that.” Laurie Abraham, “Can You Really Predict the Success of a Marriage in 15 Minutes?”

Floating City: A Rogue Sociologist Lost and Found in New York's Underground Economy
by Sudhir Venkatesh
Published 11 Sep 2013

At the same time, I knew I was hired because my research spoke to social issues like race, inequality, and the fate of our cities, subjects that fell squarely into Columbia’s legacy of encouraging the public intellectual tradition. In this regard, I had already been schooled by working with Professor William Julius Wilson in Chicago. As my graduate adviser, Wilson always insisted that the scientific method alone was incapable of swaying the opinion of policy makers or the public. You also had to write well. You had to tell a story. Wilson would do it with epochal books like The Declining Significance of Race and The Truly Disadvantaged, in which his vivid and passionate writing reached beyond the academic community and changed the way his generation looked at poverty.

Death of the Liberal Class
by Chris Hedges
Published 14 May 2010

Preachers and lay people may say, “In a church, through rituals and traditions, black-robed priests proclaim the revelations of God, helping us learn the beliefs and wisdom that can lead to our salvation.” Scientists and many lay people say, “In a laboratory, under controlled conditions, following the rituals of the scientific method, white-robed scientists proclaim the new theories and discoveries of Science, helping us to gain the understanding and the knowledge that can lead us both toward a good life, and Progress.” During the twentieth century, the churches lost even more of their fundamental contributions. Psychologists took over the role of hearing confessions and forgiving sins—for both the laity and the ministers.

Gang Leader for a Day: A Rogue Sociologist Takes to the Streets
by Sudhir Venkatesh
Published 13 Aug 2010

Wilson gave me a box of old questionnaires. I should experiment, he said, by borrowing some of their questions and developing new ones as needed. Sociologists liked to use survey questions that their peers had already used, I learned, in order to produce comparable results. This was a key part of the scientific method in sociology. I thanked Wilson and went to the library to begin looking over the questionnaires he’d given me. I quickly realized I had no idea how to interview anyone. Washington Park, situated just across Cottage Grove Avenue from the U of C, is one of Chicago’s stateliest parks. Designed in the 1870s by Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux, it has a beautiful swimming pool, indoor and outdoor basketball courts, dazzling flower gardens, and long, winding paths that crisscross its nearly four hundred acres.

Ecovillages: Lessons for Sustainable Community
by Karen T. Litfin
Published 16 Dec 2013

Since most people in the world identify as members of one religion or another, how does the Great Unfoldment fit with those religions? Christianity in particular the dominant faith in my own country, has a long-standing quarrel with evolutionary science. Likewise, “tapping nature’s intelligence” might sound like New Age baloney to a scientific ear. What happens to the scientific method in the new story? Finally, integrating nature and spirit sounds like a great ideal but what does it mean in practice? As with all of my questions, I found illuminating answers across the metaphysical spectrum. Los Angeles Eco-Village is a fairly secular ecovillage – so much so that a proposal to hold hands in silence before community meals was defeated by a handful of atheists who saw it as a religious ritual.

Zeitgeist
by Bruce Sterling
Published 1 Nov 2000

“What’s wrong with videocams?” “Haven’t you noticed yet?” She shrugged. “I know that videocams don’t like me. I break ’em all the time. I even break cameras sometimes.” “That’s because of two important things, babe. Surveillance and documentation. It’s all about mechanical objectivity, proper observation, the scientific method, reproducible results, and all of that scary crap. If we’re going to find your grandpa, we can’t be pinned down like that, not even one little bit. We’ve got to be looser and farther away from the consensus narrative than you’ve ever gotten before. You understand me? I know this is kind of hard to understand.”

What Algorithms Want: Imagination in the Age of Computing
by Ed Finn
Published 10 Mar 2017

The pragmatic definition lays bare the essential politics of the algorithm, its transparent complicity in the ideology of instrumental reason that digital culture scholar David Golumbia calls out in his critique of computation.11 Of course this is what algorithms do: they are methods, inheriting the inductive tradition of the scientific method and engineering from Archimedes to Vannevar Bush. They solve problems that have been identified as such by the engineers and entrepreneurs who develop and optimize the code. But such implementations are never just code: a method for solving a problem inevitably involves all sorts of technical and intellectual inferences, interventions, and filters.

Hothouse Kids: The Dilemma of the Gifted Child
by Alissa Quart
Published 16 Aug 2006

Terman endlessly defended the gifted population against the popular assumption of the time that these kids were effete freaks. He believed they had great potential for so-called normal lives, but normal plus. Terman and others like him seem driven by an almost metaphysical wish: an aspiration not merely to sort children’s minds, but to become seers by way of the scientific method, to peer into the essence of individual minds. From relatively early on, IQ tests were seen as biased against minorities. Testing’s checkered history revolves around three things. The first is the whole proposition that intelligence tests alone measure “true” intellectual capacity. The second is the way the tests were developed, designed with a bias against minorities.

Straight Talk on Trade: Ideas for a Sane World Economy
by Dani Rodrik
Published 8 Oct 2017

Models that emphasize expectations are sometimes best for analyzing inflation and unemployment levels; at other times, models with Keynesian elements will do a superior job. Jorge Luis Borges, the Argentine writer, once wrote a short story—a single paragraph in fact—that is perhaps the best guide to the scientific method.10 In it, he described a distant land where cartography—the science of making maps—was taken to ridiculous extremes. A map of a province was so detailed that it was the size of an entire city. The map of the empire occupied an entire province. In time, the cartographers became even more ambitious: they drew a map that was an exact, one-to-one replica of the whole empire.

Climate Change
by Joseph Romm
Published 3 Dec 2015

The signatories note, “These are not equivalent statements” and the two terms should not be conflated. “Proper skepticism promotes scientific inquiry, critical investigation, and the use of reason in examining controversial and extraordinary claims,” the letter reads. “It is foundational to the scientific method. Denial, on the other hand, is the a priori rejection of ideas without objective consideration.” The scientists and journalists point out that Inhofe’s assertion that global warming is “the greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people” is a very extraordinary claim of a “vast alleged conspiracy.”

Possible Minds: Twenty-Five Ways of Looking at AI
by John Brockman
Published 19 Feb 2019

In this essay, he reminds us that AIs, above all, should be regarded—and treated—as tools and not as humanoid colleagues. He has been interested in information theory since his graduate school days at Oxford. In fact, he told me that early in his career he was keenly interested in writing a book about Wiener’s cybernetic ideas. As a thinker who embraces the scientific method, one of his charms is his willingness to be wrong. Of a recent piece titled “What Is Information?” he has announced, “I stand by it, but it’s under revision. I’m already moving beyond it and realizing there’s a better way of tackling some of these issues.” He will most likely remain cool and collected on the subject of AI research, although he has acknowledged, often, that his own ideas evolve—as anyone’s ideas should.

A World Without Email: Reimagining Work in an Age of Communication Overload
by Cal Newport
Published 2 Mar 2021

“Print put forward a definition of intelligence that gave priority to the objective, rational use of the mind,” he writes, “and at the same time encouraged forms of public discourse with serious, logically ordered content.”16 It was this new way of thinking—not just newly available information—that suddenly made intellectual innovations such as Enlightenment philosophy and the scientific method natural next steps. Gutenberg, in other words, thought he was setting information free, but in reality, he was changing fundamentally what information we treated as important. A more modern example of technological determinism is the introduction of the Like button to Facebook. As revealed by contemporaneous blog posts written by the design team, the original purpose of this feature was to clean up the comments below users’ posts.

Power, for All: How It Really Works and Why It's Everyone's Business
by Julie Battilana and Tiziana Casciaro
Published 30 Aug 2021

Larsen et al., “New Ice Core Evidence for a Volcanic Cause of the A.D. 536 Dust Veil,” Geophysical Research Letters 35, no. 4 (2008). 8 Greg Williams, “Disrupting Poverty: How Barefoot College Is Empowering Women through Peer-to-Peer Learning and Technology,” Wired UK, March 7, 2011, https://www.wired.co.uk/article/disrupting-poverty. 9 Meagan Fallone, in discussion with the authors, December 2020. 10 René Descartes, A Discourse on Method, trans. John Veitch (London: J. M. Dent, 1912), 49. 11 The scientific method uses observations and rigorous testing of falsifiable hypotheses to acquire knowledge about the world. 12 Meghan Bartels, “How Do You Stop a Hypothetical Asteroid From Hitting Earth? NASA’s On It,” Space.com, May 2, 2019, https://www.space.com/asteroid-threat-simulation-nasa-deflection-idea.html. 13 Keenan Mayo and Peter Newcomb, “The Birth of the World Wide Web: An Oral History of the Internet,” Vanity Fair, July 2008, https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2008/07/internet200807. 14 Naím, The End of Power; Heimans and Timms, New Power. 15 Joshua Gans and Andrew Leigh, Innovation + Equality: How to Create a Future that is More Star Trek Than Terminator (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2019): 7. 16 Jean Luc Chabert, A History of Algorithms: From the Pebble to the Microchip (Berlin: Springer, 1999): 7. 17 “Coding,” Explained, Vox Media (Netflix, 2019). 18 Pedro Domingos, The Master Algorithm: How the Quest for the Ultimate Learning Machine Will Remake Our World (New York: Basic Books, 2015), 1. 19 “Coding,” Vox Media; Ajay Agrawal, Joshua Gans, and Avi Goldfarb, Prediction Machines: The Simple Economics of Artificial Intelligence (Boston, MA: Harvard Business Review Press, 2018). 20 Sara Reardon, “Rise of Robot Radiologists,” Nature (London) 576, no. 7787 (2019): S54–58. 21 For an analysis of the opportunities and challenges in this domain, see Miriam Mutebi et al., “Innovative Use of MHealth and Clinical Technology for Oncology Clinical Trials in Africa,” JCO Global Oncology, no. 6 (2020): 948–53. 22 Susan Wharton Gates, Vanessa Gail Perry, and Peter M.

Coders at Work
by Peter Seibel
Published 22 Jun 2009

What's ten times more productive when one person works ten times the hours and thinks about it nonstop and the other person just does it at his job? Seibel: You just mentioned taking a scientist's approach to debugging. Do you consider yourself a scientist, an engineer, an artist, or a craftsman? Fitzpatrick: Either scientist or engineer. Probably more engineer. I would say scientist was second, but only in the sense of the scientific method of changing one thing at a time and how you diagnose problems. Engineer for the design aspect of things. I definitely have friends who call themselves artists or craftsmen. I've never thought of myself as that. Seibel: On the other hand, there's a lot of engineering envy in software. You hear the jokes about, “If people built skyscrapers the way we build software, the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.”

…

And it's a very physical feeling I have about stuff that's also really spatial—how things work together and how things that might be different could be the same and how that would make a better architecture. I remember one of the early talks I had to give about Smalltalk; I said, “What we do in this group is like the scientific method, which is you make an observation, you come up with a theory to explain it, and you perform an experiment to verify it.” And that's very much what we did in the successive generations of Smalltalk. We had a theory for how to make something work. We built a system that worked that way. We used it for a while and we found out, “Oh, it'd be good if we did this and this and this differently,” and we built a new one.

The Art of Scalability: Scalable Web Architecture, Processes, and Organizations for the Modern Enterprise
by Martin L. Abbott and Michael T. Fisher
Published 1 Dec 2009

The approach to scaling must be crafted around the ecosystem created by the intersection of the current technology platform, the characteristics of the organization, and the maturity and appropriateness of the existing processes. Consistent with this use of art, our book focuses on providing skills and lessons regarding approaches rather than improperly teaching that a one-size-fits-all approach will solve any need. This is not to say that we don’t advocate the application of the scientific method in nearly any approach, because we absolutely do. Art here is a nod to the notion that you simply cannot take a cookie cutter approach for any potential system and expect to meet with success. Who Needs Scalability? Any company that continues to grow ultimately will need to figure out how to scale its systems, organizations, and processes.

…

—Sun Tzu We started this book with a discussion of how scalability is a combination of art and science. The art aspect of scaling is seen in the interactions between platforms, organizations, and processes, which impact any structured approach in a company. The science of scalability is embodied within the method by which we measure our efforts and in the application of the scientific method. A particular company’s approach to scaling must be crafted around the ecosystem fashioned by the intersection of the technology platform, the uniqueness of the organization, and the maturity and capabilities of the existing processes. Because a one-size-fits-all implementation or answer does not exist, we have focused this book on providing skills and lessons regarding approaches.

Ayn Rand and the World She Made
by Anne C. Heller
Published 27 Oct 2009

“She spoke about him with more respect than I can recall her ever speaking about anybody,” said a friend who knew Rand in the 1950s. There was one area of conflict between the girl and her father: He opposed her chosen course of study at the university. Without asking her to give up writing, he wanted her to apply her math training and love of the scientific method to a more remunerative occupation, such as engineering. This would have been an unusual profession for an early-twentieth-century Jewish father to urge on any daughter other than Rand, who was to make it Kira’s frustrated calling in We the Living. Having grown up in the Russian Pale, he was more aware than Anna or the children of the crucial role that work and money played in protecting against the onslaughts of anti-Semitism.

…

They briefly considered “contextual absolutism” and “contextualism” but gave them up for lack of sex appeal. They settled on the only slightly spicier name “Objectivism,” which they intended as an homage to the immutability of objective reality and the competence of perception and reason to grasp and understand it. It also conveyed an urgent emphasis on the scientific method, Rand thought; she had become especially concerned with countering the influence of John Dewey and his followers’ subjectivist theories of education. She was probably unaware that such ideas partly derived from Oliver Wendell Holmes’s eloquent responses to the unintended consequences of the abolitionist movement and the Civil War.

Future Files: A Brief History of the Next 50 Years
by Richard Watson
Published 1 Jan 2008

It may seem simplistic to some people that my source material is news and media organizations, but I am a great believer in simplicity — as I am in the power of the encapsulating anecdote. Moreover, this methodology of content analysis (or environmental scanning as it’s sometimes called) is not dissimilar to the scientific method, consisting as it does of observing what is happening in a dispassionate manner and looking for simple patterns that have some robustness. In other words, getting your sieve full of information is only the beginning. Next you have to shake the sieve rigorously until the insignificant details fall away.

The Road Ahead
by Bill Gates , Nathan Myhrvold and Peter Rinearson
Published 15 Nov 1995

Gates, I am a poet who has Dyslexia, which basically means I can not spell worth a damn, and I would never have any hope of getting my poetry or my novels published if not for this computer Spellcheck. I may fail as a writer, but thanks to you I will succeed or fail because of my talent, or a lack of talent, and not because of my disability" We are watching something historic happen, and it will affect the world seismically, rocking us the same way the discovery of the scientific method, the invention of printing, and the arrival of the Industrial Age did. If the information highway is able to increase the understanding citizens of one country have about their neighboring countries, and thereby reduce international tensions, that, in and of itself, could be sufficient to justify the cost of implementation.

Heart of the Machine: Our Future in a World of Artificial Emotional Intelligence
by Richard Yonck
Published 7 Mar 2017

In another study of 509 people, including law enforcement personnel such as members of the US Secret Service, Central Intelligence Agency, Federal Bureau of Investigation, National Security Agency, and Drug Enforcement Agency, only the Secret Service performed significantly better than chance at detecting if a subject was lying. Even then, the Secret Service observers had only a 64 percent success rate. Small wonder then that the world has a long history of seeking out reliable methods of deception detection. Skipping ahead past ducking stools and witch burnings, it wasn’t until the late nineteenth century that the scientific method began to be applied to the question of whether or not someone was telling a lie. A number of discoveries and inventions dealing with human autonomic responses were made around that time that were eventually combined into an early version of the modern lie detector. The lie detector, or polygraph (meaning “many writings”), was invented in 1921 by John A.

Early Retirement Extreme
by Jacob Lund Fisker
Published 30 Sep 2010

Perhaps now more than ever there's a need for people who understand and are able to connect different interdisciplinary topics, lest we end up in a Tower of Babel situation where specialists and experts no longer understand each other. The ability to connect disparate fields or items in complex ways and reach new creative solutions creates paradigm shifts. It was the universal ideal that led to the discovery of the scientific method, the rediscovery of democracy, and the settling of a new continent, all of which created the world we see today (see Succession and the cycle of change). It's also the universal ideal that spurs the occasional renegade to discover something completely different like the general theory of relativity, string theory, or chaos theory.

Singularity Rising: Surviving and Thriving in a Smarter, Richer, and More Dangerous World
by James D. Miller
Published 14 Jun 2012

Extrapolation would work best if the upgraded beings didn’t have incompatible preferences (e.g., if we didn’t end up with a billion people insisting that everyone be Christian and another billion insisting that we all be Muslim). But I think that much of our religious disagreement results from irrationalities and incomplete information. For example, while Christians in the seventeenth century disagreed over whether Earth was at the center of the universe, telescopes, better math, and an improved understanding of the scientific method eventually resolved the conflict. Dilbert creator Scott Adams insightfully wrote that most disagreements have four basic causes:104 1.People have different information. 2.People have different selfish interests. 3.People have different superstitions. 4.People have different skills for comparing.

How to Create a Mind: The Secret of Human Thought Revealed
by Ray Kurzweil
Published 13 Nov 2012

Before we proceed to parse this question further, it is important to reflect on the most significant distinction relating to it: What is it that we can ascertain from science, versus what remains truly a matter of philosophy? One view is that philosophy is a kind of halfway house for questions that have not yet yielded to the scientific method. According to this perspective, once science advances sufficiently to resolve a particular set of questions, philosophers can then move on to other concerns, until such time that science resolves them also. This view is endemic where the issue of consciousness is concerned, and specifically the question “What and who is conscious?”

Superforecasting: The Art and Science of Prediction
by Philip Tetlock and Dan Gardner
Published 14 Sep 2015

In 1976 I was a clueless twenty-two-year-old Canadian who, like countless others, was about to make choices that would shape the rest of my life. I had just graduated from the University of British Columbia. I thought I might accept a Commonwealth scholarship to study the humanities at Oxford. My adviser, Peter Suedfeld, thought that was a terrible idea. Go to the United States and commit to the scientific method, he said. I took his advice, but only hesitantly. My decision could have gone the other way. And if I had left for Oxford and a career in the humanities, I can easily guess what I would have said about the research outlined in this book, and the next steps it will take. Numbers are fine and useful things, I would say in that alternate universe, but we must be careful not to be smitten with them.

How to Read a Paper: The Basics of Evidence-Based Medicine
by Trisha Greenhalgh
Published 18 Nov 2010

Being human, they have usually set out to demonstrate a difference between the two arms of their study. But the way scientists do this is to say ‘let’s assume there's no difference; now let's try to disprove that theory'. If you adhere to the teachings of Popper, this hypotheticodeductive approach (setting up falsifiable hypotheses that you then proceed to test) is the very essence of the scientific method [4]. If you have not discovered what the authors' research question was by the time you are halfway through the methods section, you may find it in the first paragraph of the discussion. Remember, however, that not all research studies (even good ones) are set up to test a single definitive hypothesis.

Forty Signs of Rain
by Kim Stanley Robinson
Published 29 May 2004

Besides which, it won’t work.” People laughed shortly at this extra measure of disdain, which was palpable, and to those who didn’t know Thornton, a little surprising. But Frank had seen Stuart Thornton on panels before. He was the kind of scientist who habitually displayed an ultrapure devotion to the scientific method, in the form of a relentless skepticism about everything. No study was designed tightly enough, no data were clean enough. To Frank it seemed obvious that it was really a kind of insecurity, part of the gestural set of a beta male convincing the group he was tough enough to be an alpha male, and maybe already was.

Five Billion Years of Solitude: The Search for Life Among the Stars
by Lee Billings
Published 2 Oct 2013

Thales was the scion of a noble Phoenician family, and in his youth spent time in Egypt, where he learned geometry and studied ancient astronomical records. He was known throughout the ancient world for predicting a total solar eclipse that occurred over Central Anatolia on May 28, 585 B.C., but his greatest legacy is what we now call the “scientific method.” Thales rejected the supernatural, teaching instead that rational thought and experimentation were the proper approach to making sense of the world. Thales believed everything in existence to be composed of one or more primeval substances and controlled by interacting forces—a belief that, in its essence, would be shared by any of today’s particle physicists.

The World Beyond Your Head: On Becoming an Individual in an Age of Distraction
by Matthew B. Crawford
Published 29 Mar 2015

He draws a parallel between science and craft that I take to be stronger than a mere analogy—rather, they are two expressions of the same mode of apprehending the world: by grappling with real things. Writing after the war, he pointed out: While the articulate contents of science are successfully taught all over the world in hundreds of new universities, the unspecifiable art of scientific research has not yet penetrated to many of these. The regions of Europe in which the scientific method first originated 400 years ago are scientifically still more fruitful today [1958], in spite of their impoverishment, than several overseas areas where much more money is available for scientific research. Without the opportunity offered to young scientists to serve an apprenticeship in Europe, and without the migration of European scientists to the new countries, research centres overseas could hardly ever have made much headway.9 LIBERAL EDUCATION AS APPRENTICESHIP It would be a gross misreading to take this as an expression of “Eurocentrism.”

Among Chimpanzees
by Nancy J. Merrick

Robert Hinde, of Cambridge University, who helped redesign the methods with which data were collected at Gombe and who helped her earn her PhD. Jane proved herself a capable scientist and resisted pressure from a faction of the scientific community to treat the chimps as subjects by assigning them numbers rather than names.2 She revels to this day in having let common sense triumph over the scientific method taken to the extreme. Dr. David Hamburg was a second powerful influence on Jane’s life during this period. A psychiatrist interested in the biological basis of human aggression, he believed the chimps provided a natural model. When Gombe was struggling financially, he helped secure financial support to keep it open.

People of the Lie: The Hope for Healing Human Evil
by M Scott Peck
Published 1 Jan 1983

And when they are behaving with love, Satan is completely ignorant of the ground rules Interestingly, particularly in view of the purpose of this book, Satan also does not understand science. Science is an anti-narcissistic phenomenon. It assumes a profound human tendency to self-deception, employs the scientific method to counteract it, and holds truth higher than any personal desire. Deceiver of itself as of others, Satan cannot understand why any beings would not want to deceive themselves. Enamored with its own will and hater of the light of truth, it basically finds human science incomprehensible. Satan’s weaknesses should not encourage us to overlook its strength.

Nervous States: Democracy and the Decline of Reason
by William Davies
Published 26 Feb 2019

It has become a cliché to celebrate the rugged individualism, cold rationality, and truth-seeking courage of the scientific pioneers. But in our current age, when intelligence and calculation are performed faster and more accurately by machines than by people, an alternative ideal is needed. Perhaps the great virtue of the scientific method is not that it is smart (which is now an attribute of phones, cities, and fridges) but that it is slow and careful. Maybe it is not more intelligence that we need right now, but less speed and more care, both in our thinking and our feeling. After all, emotions (including anger) can be eminently reasonable, if they are granted the time to be articulated and heard.

100 Years of Identity Crisis: Culture War Over Socialisation
by Frank Furedi
Published 6 Sep 2021

Dewey wrote of ‘the technique of social and moral engineering’, which relied on the natural sciences acquiring a normative content.458 He hoped that in this way the ethical value of science would form the foundation for human moral conduct. Moral life comes to resemble the pursuit of science. ‘It is rendered flexible, vital, growing’, argued Dewey.459 Thus, moral reasoning turns into a species of scientific inquiry that can be tested, modified and re-engineered. For Dewey, the scientific method is the moral method used for investigation of the ‘engineering of mind’. For Dewey, the reconstruction of morality was conterminous with science acquiring a status previously accorded to religion. Decades later, one of Dewey’s disciples, the philosopher Richard Rorty, declared that his goal was to revive Deweyan ‘social engineering’, conceived as the ‘substitute for traditional religion’.460 The search for the ‘science of rational control’ invariably led progressive social engineers to the conclusion that ‘science, guided by expert minds, would enable the control of social phenomena, primarily by adjusting people to their changing environment’.461 This was to be achieved by drawing on the resources provided by psychology, a science that held out the promise of adjusting people to adopt the ethos of social engineering.

The Last Stargazers: The Enduring Story of Astronomy's Vanishing Explorers
by Emily Levesque
Published 3 Aug 2020

About thirty minutes later, the urgency dropped with his follow-up email: “Never mind. Am a horse’s ass. Mercury is at that position.” • • • Astronomy, like any other field, loves its false alarm stories: the microwave ovens mistaken for radio bursts, the planets misidentified as dying stars. They serve as excellent hands-on proofs of the scientific method for young observers, teaching us how to be skeptical and how to “think horses, not zebras” when hoofbeats show up in our data. In a field of science where we can convincingly prove that two colliding stars, supported by principles of quantum physics, can produce flashes of gamma rays and compression waves in the fabric of spacetime, it’s important to keep our sense of skepticism well calibrated.

Godforsaken Sea
by Derek Lundy
Published 15 Feb 1998

And most noticeably, yacht designers, like all computer users, can try out ideas, backtrack, tweak a variable here and there, and make changes easily. There’s a flexibility in the whole routine that allows for instant feedback on the consequences for speed, stability, or looks of any alteration in any part of the boat’s complicated structure. There is a lot of data. The result? A boat—a Vendée Globe rocket, say—as a product of the scientific method, a Cartesian construct by way of the microprocessor chip. Well, not quite. The machine still has a soul. For several reasons, the technique of designing a sailboat remains an uncertain and indeterminate affair. This is sometimes the case because a boat may have to be a number of contradictory things at the same time: a dormitory for ten people, yet small enough that it’s cheap to make and buy; a fast sailer, yet with sails a small, ham-handed crew can deal with; low and handsome in profile, but with headroom for a basketball player.

The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming
by David Wallace-Wells
Published 19 Feb 2019

But one way we might manage to navigate that path without crumbling collectively in despair is, perversely, to normalize climate suffering at the same pace we accelerate it, as we have so much human pain over centuries, so that we are always coming to terms with what is just ahead of us, decrying what lies beyond that, and forgetting all that we had ever said about the absolute moral unacceptability of the conditions of the world we are passing through in the present tense, and blithely. IV The Anthropic Principle What if we’re wrong? Perversely, decades of climate denial and disinformation have made global warming not merely an ecological crisis but an incredibly high-stakes wager on the legitimacy and validity of science and the scientific method itself. It is a bet that science can win only by losing. And in this test of the climate we have a sample size of just one. No one wants to see disaster coming, but those who look, do. Climate science has arrived at this terrifying conclusion not casually, and not with glee, but by systematically ruling out every alternative explanation for observed warming—even though that observed warming is more or less precisely what would be expected given only the rudimentary understanding of the greenhouse effect advanced by John Tyndall and Eunice Foote in the 1850s, when America was reaching its first industrial peak.

Cataloging the World: Paul Otlet and the Birth of the Information Age
by Alex Wright
Published 6 Jun 2014

For years, the camera had proved a popular attraction for Edinburgh residents and visitors alike.1 Geddes purchased the tower in hopes of using the camera as a popular draw for a more ambitious experiment: a first of its kind “sociological laboratory.” Though originally trained as a biologist, he 108 T he I nde x M u se u m had taken a keen interest in the emerging field of sociology, where he applied the principles of the scientific method to the study of human societies, promoting the importance of careful observation in exploring the interplay between people, their work, and the places in which they lived. Eventually he would make important contributions to the field of urban planning, advocating a human-centered approach to building that stood in stark contrast to the centralized urban grid planning that had gained so much traction in cities like New York.

The Revolt of the Public and the Crisis of Authority in the New Millennium
by Martin Gurri
Published 13 Nov 2018

This was true in Hitler’s Germany and Stalin’s Russia no less than in democratic countries.[92] The power of government over research has inevitably introduced political considerations. President Richard Nixon, for example, declared a “war on cancer.” Today research on HIV/AIDS and climate change take political pride of place. The pressure generated by public expectation of specific outcomes has complicated the conduct of honest science. Much has been claimed for the scientific method, but the only method to which all scientists subscribe is the peer review process. It too has been under strain. Peer review presupposes the existence of independent-minded experts who evaluate manageable data sets. Often, in the age of the Fifth Wave, neither condition applies. Scientists today work in teams, and the subject matter can be so specialized that only a handful of individuals will be able to understand and review the literature.

The Road to Conscious Machines
by Michael Wooldridge
Published 2 Nov 2018

. –– Cardiogram company website4 Anybody with even the vaguest interest in politics and economics will recognize that the provision of healthcare is one of the most important global financial problems for private citizens and for governments. On the one hand, improvements in healthcare provision over the past two centuries are probably the most important single achievement of the scientific method in the industrialized world: in 1800, life expectancy for someone in Europe would have been less than 50 years;5 someone born in Europe today could reasonably expect to live late into their seventies. Maternal deaths in childbirth are now a rarity in the developed world. These dramatic changes are in part the result of a better understanding of hygiene.

Chaos Kings: How Wall Street Traders Make Billions in the New Age of Crisis
by Scott Patterson
Published 5 Jun 2023

He made his apocalyptic pronouncements in a calm, steady voice, occasionally gesticulating toward the crowd with a sweep of his hand. Financial markets, and the world itself, were far more volatile than many believed, as giant institutions toppled like dominoes. His concern with Black Swans, he said, extended beyond financial markets to the scientific method itself. Wild, unforeseen, chaotic moves happen all the time. But the financial geniuses on Wall Street can’t see them. Their sophisticated models are backward looking, and they rely on the bell curve. The fact is, Black Swans can wipe out entire portfolios—or entire banks—in the blink of an eye.

The Wine-Dark Sea Within: A Turbulent History of Blood
by Dhun Sethna
Published 6 Jun 2022

And to science they turned for such knowledge of the hazardous future as can be gained by mortals. In Homer’s time, it was believed that such information might be sought among the dead. At Circe’s instigation, Odysseus reached toward the mist-shrouded land of Hades at the world’s edge to divine his own fate. In later times, thinking about the world in the Greek way became the scientific method. And it comes as no wonder that the sciences have rarely existed in the West except among peoples who came under the influence of the Greek mind. WRINKLES IN BLOOD FLOW We must collect the facts and the things to which the facts happen. —Aristotle eight A Different Drumbeat If you want to get on in life, my boy, lace up your boots and get out to Alexandria ad Aegyptum (Alexandria by Egypt).

Sickening: How Big Pharma Broke American Health Care and How We Can Repair It
by John Abramson
Published 15 Dec 2022

Let’s assume Pfizer was telling the truth about its motive for doing clinical studies. Such studies would be designed to maximize the likelihood of producing data that emphasize the benefits and minimize the risks of the company’s drugs. But, you may be thinking, science is objective, so what difference does it make who the sponsor is? Doesn’t the rigor of the scientific method ensure that, except in rare instances of fraud, research results have been honestly and completely presented?* The answer: not necessarily. Understanding how this works requires a more granular look at the process by which the mountains of data that are collected in each clinical trial are winnowed down to the brief results and conclusions presented as scientific evidence in the medical journals that doctors read.

The Price of Life: In Search of What We're Worth and Who Decides
by Jenny Kleeman
Published 13 Mar 2024

But if that’s the case, then there’s a danger that EA makes philanthropy sound like hard work, something that can only be done properly at the hands of the very clever. ‘I think this is going to grow and be an ethical revolution,’ Will says, as the final seconds of our remaining minutes tick away. ‘If you look at the scientific method, that was just the domain of a bunch of crackpots who sometimes got burned at the stake for several centuries, and then that caught on pretty well. I think the same can happen with taking the scientific mindset and applying it to doing good.’ He smiles. ‘Most moral progress has gone via ideas that at one time would get you laughed out of the room.’

Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress
by Steven Pinker
Published 13 Feb 2018

(Hume’s analysis of the nature of causality, to take just one example, took off from his insights about the psychology of causality, and Kant was, among other things, a prescient cognitive psychologist.)16 Today most philosophers (at least in the analytic or Anglo-American tradition) subscribe to naturalism, the position that “reality is exhausted by nature, containing nothing ‘supernatural,’ and that the scientific method should be used to investigate all areas of reality, including the ‘human spirit.’”17 Science, in the modern conception, is of a piece with philosophy and with reason itself. What, then, distinguishes science from other exercises of reason? It certainly isn’t “the scientific method,” a term that is taught to schoolchildren but that never passes the lips of a scientist. Scientists use whichever methods help them understand the world: drudgelike tabulation of data, experimental derring-do, flights of theoretical fancy, elegant mathematical modeling, kludgy computer simulation, sweeping verbal narrative.18 All the methods are pressed into the service of two ideals, and it is these ideals that advocates of science want to export to the rest of intellectual life.

Machine Learning for Hackers
by Drew Conway and John Myles White
Published 10 Feb 2012

Cross-validation, at its core, simply refers to this ability of ours to simulate testing our model on future data by ignoring part of our historical data during the model-fitting process. Note If you went through the cases in Chapters 3 and 4, you’ll remember that we did exactly this then. In each case we split our data to train and test our classification and ranking models. Arguably, it’s simply an instantiation of the scientific method that we were all taught as children: (1) formulate a hypothesis, (2) gather data, and (3) test it. There’s just a bit of sleight of hand because we don’t formulate a hypothesis based on existing data and then go out and gather more data. Instead, we ignore part of our data while formulating our hypotheses, so that we can magically rediscover that missing data when it comes time to test our predictions.

Moneyball
by Michael Lewis
Published 1 Jan 2003

The research and development department in the Oakland front office liberated them from this prejudice, and allowed them to demonstrate their true worth. A baseball team, of all things, was at the center of a story about the possibilities—and the limits—of reason in human affairs. Baseball—of all things—was an example of how an unscientific culture responds, or fails to respond, to the scientific method. As I say, I fell in love with a story. The story is about professional baseball and the people who play it. At its center is a man whose life was turned upside down by professional baseball, and who, miraculously, found a way to return the favor. In an effort to learn more about that man, and the revolution he was inspiring, I spent a few days with J.

The Case for Israel
by Alan Dershowitz
Published 31 Jul 2003

As Husseini wrote in his memoirs, Our fundamental condition for cooperating with Germany was a free hand to eradicate every last Jew from Palestine and the Arab world. I asked Hitler for an explicit undertaking to allow us to solve the Jewish problem in a manner befitting our national and racial aspirations and according to the scientific methods innovated by Germany in the handling of its Jews. The answer I got was: “The Jews are yours.”7 The mufti was apparently planning to return to Palestine in the event of a German victory and to construct a death camp modeled after Auschwitz, near Nablus. Husseini incited his pro-Nazi followers with the words “Arise, o sons of Arabia.

Predictive Analytics: The Power to Predict Who Will Click, Buy, Lie, or Die
by Eric Siegel
Published 19 Feb 2013

In the context of healthcare, crime, and terrorism, it can save lives. In the context of advertising, using predictions is more efficient, and could conceivably save both trees (for direct mail and catalogs) and the time and attention of the recipient. In politics, it seems to reward those candidates who respect the scientific method (some might disagree, but I see that as a positive). However, as Siegel points out—early in the book, which is admirable—these approaches can also be used in somewhat harmful ways. “With great power comes great responsibility,” he notes in quoting Spider-Man. The implication is that we must be careful as a society about how we use predictive models, or we may be restricted from using and benefiting from them.

Visit Sunny Chernobyl: And Other Adventures in the World's Most Polluted Places
by Andrew Blackwell
Published 22 May 2012

Kelsey, who had done her Berkeley thesis on marine debris, piped up before I did, pointing out that it was consistency that mattered, not a higher number per se. Nikki made an impassioned counterargument, centered on what a rare opportunity it was to be here in the Gyre. Then Art and Henry joined in, and Kaniela, and in this way, aboard the brigantine Kaisei, near latitude 34°36′ North and longitude 143°21′ West, at approximately 1930 hours, the scientific method was reinvented from the waterline up. Had there only been a high school science class present, it would have been one of the purest, most spontaneous moments of experiential education ever to unfold. Empiric consistency won the day. The two-member debris watch was reratified, and the scientific community resumed its celebrations.

Coding Freedom: The Ethics and Aesthetics of Hacking
by E. Gabriella Coleman
Published 25 Nov 2012

Early in their relationship with this technology, most hackers developed a strong pragmatic and utilitarian commitment to free software. But the underlying philosophy underwent change as more developers started to attach and make their own meanings. Access to source code and the model of open development represented by Linux, they said, was a superior technical methodology. Many likened it to the scientific method as an ideal. They saw it as under assault, corrupted by abuse of intellectual property law by corporations and, worse, universities that had started to patent inventions liberally in the 1980s. Others emphasized the pedagogical freedom that F/OSS provided them. “I realized,” a developer named Wolfgang wrote me over email, “that I could delve through that code and learn things that I could never learn from a high school teacher.

The Hacker Crackdown
by Bruce Sterling
Published 15 Mar 1992

"See what happens when you drop a 'silver box' tone or two down your local exchange or through different long distance service carriers," advises 2600 contributor "Mr. Upsetter" in "How To Build a Signal Box." "If you experiment systematically and keep good records, you will surely discover something interesting." This is, of course, the scientific method, generally regarded as a praiseworthy activity and one of the flowers of modern civilization. One can indeed learn a great deal with this sort of structured intellectual activity. Telco employees regard this mode of "exploration" as akin to flinging sticks of dynamite into their pond to see what lives on the bottom. 2600 has been published consistently since 1984.

Phishing for Phools: The Economics of Manipulation and Deception
by George A. Akerlof , Robert J. Shiller and Stanley B Resor Professor Of Economics Robert J Shiller
Published 21 Sep 2015

We will comment on both of these, reflecting on the lessons from Vioxx. An appendix to this chapter will describe how Big Pharma also phishes for the prices they receive. Obtaining FDA Approval The public and the doctors, and possibly also the FDA, were taken by surprise largely because of their overconfidence in the “scientific method” of randomized trials. Just as Radam sold Microbe Killer on the basis of the science of the late nineteenth century, Vioxx was sold with the confidence that it represented the best from modern science, with checks on its validity by trials such as VIGOR. But an important concept in statistics shows why randomized controlled testing will often fail, and especially why it failed with VIGOR.

The Boy Who Could Change the World: The Writings of Aaron Swartz
by Aaron Swartz and Lawrence Lessig
Published 5 Jan 2016

Math is a whole world of abstract beauty, full of puzzles to test your mind. Science is not the memorization of uninteresting facts, as 12 years of science classes may lead you to believe. Science is merely a process of asking questions and searching answers, along with the combined knowledge accumulated from this search. The process is called the scientific method, and the best science teacher I ever had simply explained it to us and let us explore the world. Her room was filled with toys and puzzles to solve, and things to experiment with. She would often warn us of teachers she once had who had few hands-on activities and simply asked us to read through a textbook.

Joel on Software
by Joel Spolsky
Published 1 Aug 2004

I wound up saying Hire even though he was a crappy candidate. You know what? Everybody else who interviewed him said No Hire. So, don't listen to recruiters, don't ask around about the person before you interview them, and never, ever talk to the other interviewers about the candidate until you've both made your decisions independently. That's the scientific method. 1. Introduction The introduction phase of the interview is intended to put the candidates at ease. I ask them if they had a nice flight. I spend about 30 seconds telling them who I am and how the interview will work. I always reassure candidates that we are interested in how they go about solving problems, not the actual answer. 2.

The Map That Changed the World
by Simon Winchester
Published 1 Jan 2001

His findings were to prove vitally important in triggering the collision that was eventually to take place between the religious beliefs that were in the ascendant at the time and the scientific reasoning that would provide the spur for the intellectual activities of a century later. Science was the key—along with the scientific method, with all its underpinnings of observation, deduction, and rational thought. The consequence, once the theories of Charles Darwin in particular had begun to sink in, was a profound modification of the way in which people thought of nature, of society, and of themselves. Which makes it all the more appropriate, given the impact his ideas would have, that it was into a time of suddenly accelerating scientific achievement and technological application that William Smith was born.

An Optimist's Tour of the Future
by Mark Stevenson
Published 4 Dec 2010

It might seem odd, therefore, that both are seen as key figures in the history of reason. But both Socrates and Bacon were very good at asking useful questions. In fact, Socrates is largely credited with coming up with a way of asking questions, ‘the Socratic method,’ which itself is at the core of the ‘scientific method,’ popularised by Bacon during the Enlightenment – a period of European history when ‘evidence’ and ‘faith’ had an almighty bun fight and the balance of power between church, state and citizen was questioned as philosophers and scientists challenged the prevailing orthodoxy of religious authority.

Some Remarks
by Neal Stephenson
Published 6 Aug 2012

I distinctly remember looking at the kernels in the palm of my hand and noting that they had been washed with paint or ink of two or three different colors, and, though the color code was not explained to us (not, at least, before the expiration of my attention span), I caught the spoor of the Scientific Method, and guessed that different batches had been exposed to greater or lesser amounts of radiation. In any case, we were directed to take these seeds home and plant them and water them. In a few weeks’ time, we would bring the results to a meeting where two prizes would be handed out: one for the tallest, healthiest corn plant, the other for the weirdest mutation.

Smart Mobs: The Next Social Revolution
by Howard Rheingold
Published 24 Dec 2011

But they include also, and perhaps ultimately more importantly, the gradual smartening up and interconnection of the many everyday objects which populate our homes and offices.” 74 Clark’s notions support the conjecture that smart mobs in computation-pervaded environments could enable some people to transform the way they think and the way civilization operates, the way some people used printing presses, literacy, the scientific method, and new social contracts to transform feudalism into modernism. Enlightenment rationality has its limits, but the reason it is called “the Enlightenment” is that the changes enabled by the systematic use of reason, aided by mathematics and literacy, represented a step toward a more democratic and humane world.

Life Is Simple: How Occam's Razor Set Science Free and Shapes the Universe
by Johnjoe McFadden
Published 27 Sep 2021

When he was only twenty-two, he published a small treatise on a new kind of weighing balance that earned him, in 1589, the position of chair of mathematics at Pisa. Remarkably, many of his lecture notes survive from this period. Although written in his own hand, it appears that, rather than composing his own notes, he plagiarised those written by another academic, a scholar called Paulus Vallius who taught logic and the scientific method at the Collegio Romano in Rome. From these notes we can see that Galileo taught mathematics and physics in the scholastic Aristotelian tradition and was aware of the nominalist philosophers including the Merton Calculators and William of Occam, whom he refers to several times.3 In 1592, he obtained a position at the more prestigious University of Padua, where he lectured on mathematics, mechanics and astronomy.

The Constitution of Knowledge: A Defense of Truth
by Jonathan Rauch
Published 21 Jun 2021

“Younger people have tuned in, too,” reported the New York Times.78 Trust in scientists, which had never collapsed as trust in journalists had done, also rose. By 2019 almost 90 percent of the public said they had a great deal or a fair amount of confidence in scientists to act in the public interest, and almost two-thirds said that the scientific method generally produces accurate conclusions, according to polling by the Pew Research Center.79 What one saw, then, was the reality-based community scrambling and struggling, innovating and improvising, to adapt to troll epistemology. With success? Yes. Falling short? Also yes. How well troll epistemology could thrive without a troll-in-chief in the White House was an open question.

Trillions: How a Band of Wall Street Renegades Invented the Index Fund and Changed Finance Forever
by Robin Wigglesworth
Published 11 Oct 2021

Fouse resolved to work for someone who valued innovation, and picked up the phone to call McQuown, whom he had met through the CRSP conventions for heretical investment thinkers. He even sent McQuown a long memo explaining why Wells Fargo should hire him, describing himself as “keenly analytical, innovative, independent of thought, dedicated to the scientific method, outspoken, and somewhat impatient with ignorance.” McQuown snapped him up, and Fouse was promptly made head of stock market research in Wells Fargo’s financial analysis department, working under Vertin, who finally had his bridge between the new and the old. At this stage, Vertin’s shift was far along, but there were still plenty of office politics skirmishes.

The Einstein of Money: The Life and Timeless Financial Wisdom of Benjamin Graham
by Joe Carlen
Published 14 Apr 2012

As Buffett said, “There are no undervalued stocks, these theorists argue, because there are smart security analysts who utilize all available information to ensure unfailingly appropriate prices.”57 Of course, the fact that a particular investment approach would outperform the market by a significant margin certainly calls the universality of EMT into question and strengthens the validity of Graham's core premise that there are superior long-term rewards for identifying and purchasing securities that are underpriced relative to their intrinsic value. As a market commentator wrote in 2010 regarding a more current perspective on “The Superinvestors of Graham and Doddsville,” “Overall Warren Buffett beats Eugene Fama and the Efficient Market Hypothesis crowd by 5–2.”58 Or, in the language of the scientific method, the data is clearly in favor of the “Graham and Dodd” hypothesis (of superior returns through capitalizing upon high price-value discrepancies), not the EMT. Indeed, the performance of the gold miner equipped with a powerful sensor system is consistently better than the miner who's just taking random stabs in the ground.

Who We Are and How We Got Here: Ancient DNA and the New Science of the Human Past
by David Reich
Published 22 Mar 2018

Palop created languages, one for each group, and scattered the groups across the earth.1 This origins story was documented by an anthropologist working to understand Suruí culture, and, like origins stories the world over, it is viewed by scholars as fictional, of interest because of what it reveals about a society. But we scientists too have origins stories. We like to think these are superior because they are tested by the scientific method against a range of evidence. But some humility is in order. In 2012, I led a study that claimed that all Native Americans from Mesoamerica southward—including the Suruí—derived all of their ancestry from a single population, one that moved south of the ice sheets sometime after fifteen thousand years ago.2 I was so confident of this theory, which fit with the consensus derived from archaeology, that I used the term “First American” to signal that the lineage we had highlighted was a founding lineage.

Age of Anger: A History of the Present
by Pankaj Mishra
Published 26 Jan 2017

They produced no single doctrine; their views could range from soberly comparativist (Montesquieu) to Voltaire’s militant resolves to crush the ‘infamous thing’ (the Catholic Church) and the technicism of Diderot’s and D’Alembert’s Encyclopédie. But the future belonged to them and their determination to hold nothing sacred in the political and social world, to examine all phenomena in the light of reason, and regard everything as susceptible to change and manipulation through human will and power. The philosophes hoped to apply the scientific method discovered in the previous century to phenomena beyond the natural world, to government, economics, ethics, law, society and even the inner life. As D’Alembert put it, ‘philosophy is the experimental physics of the soul’. Nicolas de Condorcet hoped that science would ensure ‘the indefinite perfectability of the human species’.

The Secret Lives of Buildings: From the Ruins of the Parthenon to the Vegas Strip in Thirteen Stories
by Edward Hollis
Published 10 Nov 2009

Robinson and Warren had been appalled by the Christians that they found living in the land of Christ, sunk in Byzantine rituals and superstitions. The imperial powers hoped to save these Christians from their error and convert them to the more rational precepts of Protestantism. Impressing the locals with the scientific methods of history, archaeology, and geography would, the missionaries assumed, replace their childish cosmologies with a modern worldview. The British weren’t too enamored of the religious practices of the other natives of the Holy Land either. They observed how the Jews used to stand before a ruined wall in the middle of Jerusalem, weeping and rocking with grief; and with amused detachment, they called it the Wailing Wall.

Freedom
by Daniel Suarez
Published 17 Dec 2009

It's easier than trying to explain the cultural significance of midwinter celebrations to a three-year-old. If false magic or a white lie about the god-monster in the mountain will get people to stop killing one another and learn, then the truth can wait. When the time is right, it can be replaced with a reverence for the scientific method." "And this is why Sobol created the Daemon?" She shook her head. "No, this is why they call it the shamanic interface. Because it resembles sorcery--and might as well be to low-tech people. But unlike sorcery, it exists and conveys real power." Riley raised her hands in front of her. "Now let's teach you how to use it."

Ask Me About My Uterus: A Quest to Make Doctors Believe in Women's Pain
by Abby Norman
Published 6 Mar 2018

The years I’d spent doing so had not been out of interest; I’d been trying to solve a problem. It had been work. If I’d wanted to devote my life to these subjects out of passion, I would have been a biology major, not a dancer. It was only because I had an underlying aptitude for science and a deep respect for the scientific method that medicine as a discipline was something I could assimilate. And after years of working on it, I certainly found aspects of it that I enjoyed. I had to—otherwise it would have been very difficult to stay motivated to forge ahead. But just because I think negative-stranded RNA viruses are fascinating doesn’t mean I’m a hypochondriac.

A World Without Work: Technology, Automation, and How We Should Respond
by Daniel Susskind
Published 14 Jan 2020

Economists tend to agree with one another that this growth was propelled by sustained technological progress, though not on the reasons why it started just where and when it did—in Western Europe, toward the end of the eighteenth century.3 One reason may be geographical: certain countries had bountiful resources, a hospitable climate, and easily traversable coastlines and rivers for trade. Another may be cultural: people in different communities, shaped by very different intellectual histories and religions, had different attitudes toward the scientific method, finance, hard work, and each other (the level of “trust” in a society is said to be important). The most common explanation of all, though, is institutional: certain states protected property rights and enforced the rule of law in a way that encouraged risk taking, hustle, and innovation, while others did not.

A Small Farm Future: Making the Case for a Society Built Around Local Economies, Self-Provisioning, Agricultural Diversity and a Shared Earth
by Chris Smaje
Published 14 Aug 2020

The route to unlocking the mysteries of the transcendent changed from spiritual introspection to practical enquiry into the vastness of space-time or the minuteness of atomic and cellular architectures. I don’t mean to minimise the differences between modern science and premodern religion. But it’s worth emphasising a continuity. As a mode of enquiry, science in the form of the scientific method has sharpened the self-critical pursuit of transcendent religious knowledge by flawed and ignorant humans into an edifice of progressive knowledge which has been so spectacularly successful that, ironically, we’ve returned to a way of being not so different from an ancient world of spirits, where everyday objects like mobile phones, virtual assistants and robotic machinery work in mysterious and uncanny ways beyond the comprehension of most of us.

Woke, Inc: Inside Corporate America's Social Justice Scam
by Vivek Ramaswamy
Published 16 Aug 2021

As The Washington Post describes it, DiAngelo believes that whites are “an undifferentiated racist collective, socialized to ‘fundamentally hate blackness’ and to institutionalize that prejudice in politics and culture.”2 DiAngelo’s rise is emblematic of the increased adoption of a previously fringe school of thought that has now spread across corporate America through mandated Diversity trainings and has even made its way into exhibits at the Smithsonian.3 DiAngelo and her devotees seem to believe that things like the scientific method, use of written word, punctuality, and hard work are “hallmarks of whiteness” and that it perpetuates white supremacy for employers and teachers to valorize them. In DiAngelo’s telling, the idea of meritocracy is a white supremacist myth meant to justify existing racial hierarchies as the product of hard work.

The Future of Fusion Energy
by Jason Parisi and Justin Ball
Published 18 Dec 2018

In 1945, the nuclear sword mainly cut militarily. In 2017, its use is much more balanced. As our mastery of fusion energy systems improves, the balance could tip even further. Regardless, the history of humanity’s relationship with science is fraught with complexity. From agriculture to germ theory, computing to quantum mechanics, the scientific method does not filter for benevolence. Rather, human nature shapes knowledge into a wide spectrum of applications. Science may set the paint palette, the canvas texture, the brush thickness, but humans will determine how and what to paint. While nuclear physics is not the only field of knowledge with a dark side, its applications are among the most consequential.

News and How to Use It: What to Believe in a Fake News World
by Alan Rusbridger
Published 26 Nov 2020

British health ministers repeatedly denied the possible risk of transmission of the cattle-borne illness BSE (bovine spongiform encephalopathy) to humans, but ate their words when it caused a public health crisis and collapse of beef sales in the 1990s – as well as a major crisis of public trust. In the worst cases, of course, experts can hide the truth and intentionally harm the public for personal gain, as Exxon’s scientists did when they understood human-made climate change in the 1980s. Experts may even defend the idea of experts getting things wrong. Isn’t that what the scientific method is all about: hypothesise, be wrong, try again? It does take a leap of faith to trust experts to tell the truth. But the question of honest wrongness is more complex. The public tends to be highly averse to risks related to unknown unknowns: the gulf between public and scientific support for GMOs, for example, is a result of public concern for future disasters that scientists can’t predict, while scientists and policymakers are often content with evaluating known unknowns.

The Heat Will Kill You First: Life and Death on a Scorched Planet
by Jeff Goodell
Published 10 Jul 2023

It was first called the Avenue des Tuileries and was lined with elm and horse chestnut trees that cut through fields and market gardens. Later, in 1709, it was renamed the Champs-Élysées and extended, and it became a popular spot for picnics by the end of the century. It was an urban manifestation of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century thinkers like Descartes and Galileo, who were founders of the scientific method. French formal gardens took on geometric designs, featuring a central perspective, with open views over long distances, and were designed following new mathematical and optical tools. “In this respect, the Champs-Élysées can be regarded as one of the ‘zero milestones’ of Western modernity,” one French urban historian writes.

You've Been Played: How Corporations, Governments, and Schools Use Games to Control Us All
by Adrian Hon
Published 14 Sep 2022

These misrepresentations come at a time when behavioural science itself has been in the midst of a “replication crisis,” along with fields like economics and medicine.6 Influential findings like the results of the marshmallow test, which showed that children’s ability to delay gratification predicted their future academic achievement, have failed to be replicated after repeated retesting.7 In other words, a lot of what’s published in scientific journals has turned out to be completely wrong. In response to this crisis, scientists are adopting better practices, such as using better statistical methods, more diligently retracting bad papers, and preregistering studies to avoid cherry-picking results. But even well-constructed studies can turn out to be wrong; the scientific method is a process, not a way of guaranteeing truth. Ignorance of how science works is no excuse when you’re using its imprimatur to draw customers in, especially when it comes to health and fitness. Designers should resist placing too much (or, frankly, any) faith in studies with weird new ways to boost intelligence or lose weight—at least until they’ve been thoroughly replicated.

How to Talk to a Science Denier: Conversations With Flat Earthers, Climate Deniers, and Others Who Defy Reason
by Lee McIntyre
Published 14 Sep 2021

What is the benefit of believing in Flat Earth? Because it’s the truth! And it’s consistent with the Bible. What about the scientific proofs of a round Earth? They are all flawed, which is what the rest of the conference was about. To spend two days attending seminars with titles such as “Globebusters,” “Flat Earth with the Scientific Method,” “Flat Earth Activism,” “NASA and Other Space Lies,” “14+ Ways the Bible Says Flat Earth,” and “Talking to Your Family and Friends about Flat Earth” is in some ways to spend two days in an asylum. The arguments were absurd yet intricate and not easily run to ground, especially if one buys into the Flat Earther’s insistence on immediate first-person sensory proof.

A Hunter-Gatherer's Guide to the 21st Century: Evolution and the Challenges of Modern Life
by Heather Heying and Bret Weinstein
Published 14 Sep 2021

Trade-offs being ubiquitous, a focus on memorized details, then, will likely come at the expense of a focus on the big picture. School can also be useful in teaching both science and art, a task made easier if the assumption is that children have latent scientific and artistic tendencies already. While people don’t intuit the formalization of the scientific method, children are inclined to observe pattern, to postulate reasons for the pattern, and to try to figure out if they’re right. All people are inclined to be verificationists, to look for verifying evidence of their own correctness, rather than to look for falsifying evidence that, if it doesn’t show up, makes their precious idea look more and more likely.

Our Moon: How Earth's Celestial Companion Transformed the Planet, Guided Evolution, and Made Us Who We Are
by Rebecca Boyle
Published 16 Jan 2024

* * * *40 To a certain extent, anyway. *41 Ptolemy used all these Sun-Moon-Earth alignments to figure out the Moon’s parallax. This just means a displacement in its apparent position in the sky. *42 The Franciscan friar Roger Bacon (namesake of the later Francis Bacon, progenitor of the scientific method) is one person who tried something different in the Middle Ages, attempting to discern truth from nature instead. For this brave effort, the elder Bacon was imprisoned in 1277 and his books were banned. *43 He wasn’t aware of Aristarchus, who had promulgated a similar theory more than a millennium and a half earlier, because the writings of that Greek philosopher had not yet been reintroduced

Security Analysis
by Benjamin Graham and David Dodd
Published 1 Jan 1962

It took Graham 20 years—which is to say, a complete cycle from the bull market of the Roaring Twenties through the dark, nearly ruinous days of the early 1930s—to refine his investment philosophy into a discipline that was as rigorous as the Euclidean theorems he had studied in college. An Analytical Discipline This analytical approach is evident from the first chapter; indeed, it is the cornerstone of Part I, in which Graham and Dodd set forth the fundamentals. They promise to use “established principles and sound logic,” or what the authors term “the scientific method,” and yet they recognize that, as with law or medicine, investing is not hard science but a discipline in which both skill and chance play a role. Security Analysis is their prescription for maximizing the influence of the former and minimizing that of the latter. If you want to trust your portfolio to luck, this is not the book for you.

…

Chapter 1 THE SCOPE AND LIMITATIONS OF SECURITY ANALYSIS. THE CONCEPT OF INTRINSIC VALUE Copyright © 2009 by The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc. Click here for terms of use. ANALYSIS CONNOTES the careful study of available facts with the attempt to draw conclusions therefrom based on established principles and sound logic. It is part of the scientific method. But in applying analysis to the field of securities we encounter the serious obstacle that investment is by nature not an exact science. The same is true, however, of law and medicine, for here also both individual skill (art) and chance are important factors in determining success or failure.

Understanding Sponsored Search: Core Elements of Keyword Advertising
by Jim Jansen
Published 25 Jul 2011

Although the analyst always wants to maximize all three of these criteria simultaneously, it cannot be done. This is one fundamental dilemma of the analysis process. The very things that increase one of these three features will reduce one or both of the others. Credibility, Validity, and Reliability The elementary steps of the scientific method are: • • • • Construct a hypothesis Test the hypothesis Analysis the data Report the findings. You basically follow the same steps in SSA. Trace data from sponsored-search logs should be examined during analysis with the same criteria used for all research data. These criteria are credibility, validity, and reliability.

The Moral Landscape: How Science Can Determine Human Values
by Sam Harris
Published 5 Oct 2010

The scientific community’s reluctance to take a stand on moral issues has come at a price. It has made science appear divorced, in principle, from the most important questions of human life. From the point of view of popular culture, science often seems like little more than a hatchery for technology. While most educated people will concede that the scientific method has delivered centuries of fresh embarrassment to religion on matters of fact, it is now an article of almost unquestioned certainty, both inside and outside scientific circles, that science has nothing to say about what constitutes a good life. Religious thinkers in all faiths, and on both ends of the political spectrum, are united on precisely this point; the defense one most often hears for belief in God is not that there is compelling evidence for His existence, but that faith in Him is the only reliable source of meaning and moral guidance.

Darwin Among the Machines
by George Dyson
Published 28 Mar 2012

“The little insectoid units themselves carried on these operations consciously, though without understanding their significance; but the mind of the swarm had lost the power of attending to them. Its concern was almost wholly with such activities as called for unified conscious control.”33 Until we understand our own consciousness, there is no way to agree on what, if anything, constitutes consciousness among machines. The subject leads us into nonfalsifiable hypotheses, where the scientific method comes to an end. Three results are possible, given any supposedly conscious machine. Either the machine says, “Yes, I am conscious,” or it says, “No, I am not conscious,” or it says nothing at all. Which are we to believe? All we can do at this point is use our imaginations. And in this Olaf Stapledon was sixty years ahead.

Space Chronicles: Facing the Ultimate Frontier
by Neil Degrasse Tyson and Avis Lang
Published 27 Feb 2012

They forever changed the nature of discovery and the paths taken to achieve it; no longer would common sense be accepted as an effective tool of intellectual investigation. Our unaided five senses were shown to be not only insufficient but untrustworthy. To understand the world required trustworthy measurements—which might not agree with one’s preconceptions—derived from experiments conducted with care and precision. The scientific method of hypothesis, unbiased testing, and retesting would rise to significance and continue unabated thenceforth, unavoidably shutting out the ill-equipped layperson from modern research and discovery. Incentives to Discovery Travel was the method of choice for most historic explorers because technology had not yet progressed to permit discovery by other means.

Nerds on Wall Street: Math, Machines and Wired Markets
by David J. Leinweber
Published 31 Dec 2008

It takes forever to distinguish luck from skill with 100 percent certainty, so definitive claims in this regard must be viewed with caution. But these A Gentle Intr oduction to Computerized Investing 131 approaches are not weird black-box ideas. They are based on a few very fundamental ideas: • Market inefficiencies are out there. Use the scientific method to systematically evaluate potential market inefficiencies on an ongoing basis. Look at stocks individually and in groups. • All the stocks, all the time. Search for these inefficiencies in all the stocks, all the time. The progress in computer technology is one of the wonders of history. IBM’s Deep Blue used an analogous relentless approach to chess. • Keep what you find.

10% Human: How Your Body's Microbes Hold the Key to Health and Happiness
by Alanna Collen
Published 4 May 2015

In cases of mania or severe melancholy, surgical removal of the colon was often prescribed – known as a ‘short-circuit’ procedure. Despite a frighteningly high death rate, and a huge impact on quality of life, this radical intervention was deemed worthwhile by the doctors of the day. Far be it from me to critique the degree of adherence to the scientific method of a Nobel prize-winner, but Metchnikoff’s dabblings in intestinal microbiology, in this book at least, barely met reasonable standards of repeatability, comparison against a control, or concerns of causation. His scientific coming-of-age coincided with a period of history in which medical scientists were overcome with excitement about the research avenues opened up by Louis Pasteur’s germ theory.

Digital Wars: Apple, Google, Microsoft and the Battle for the Internet
by Charles Arthur
Published 3 Mar 2012

The mechanics of running a gigantic search engine that essentially contains a constantly updated copy of the internet mean that decisions have to be based around what will be most effective with the largest number of people. If a 5-pixel border can be shown to lead to more clicks than a 3-pixel one, then there is no room for discussion, because Page and Brin built their company around, and its ethos flows from, empiricism. Google borrowed its process from a method of ranking scientific papers, but imported the scientific method wholesale as a mode of problem solving. Microsoft, meanwhile, also deals with huge numbers of people, through its main products – Windows and Office. But, as they are desktop software, they can be tweaked and added to endlessly, which has led over the years to a kitchen-sink approach in which no feature has been left out of either, especially not if a few key business users have demanded it.

Black Box Thinking: Why Most People Never Learn From Their Mistakes--But Some Do
by Matthew Syed
Published 3 Nov 2015

As Karl Popper put it: “If we started with Adam [i.e., with the relatively small amount of knowledge of early mankind], we wouldn’t get any further than Adam did.”8 But theories that claim to furnish knowledge of the world, that claim to have never failed, held in place by authority alone, are a different matter. It is these ideas, and the underlying belief that they are sacrosanct, that is so destructive. The scientific method is about pushing out the frontiers of our knowledge through a willingness to embrace error. Think back to Galileo’s disproof of Aristotle’s theory about heavier objects falling faster than lighter ones (perhaps apocryphally he did this by dropping balls from the Leaning Tower of Pisa).

The Confidence Game: The Psychology of the Con and Why We Fall for It Every Time
by Maria Konnikova
Published 28 Jan 2016

It’s imagistic. It’s personally convincing. It’s emotional. And it’s strong. In fact, Bruner argues, it’s responsible for far more than its logical, systematic counterpart. It’s the basis of myth and history, ritual and social relations. “Popper proposed that falsifiability is the cornerstone of the scientific method,” Bruner told the American Psychological Association at their annual meeting in Toronto in the summer of 1984. “But believability is the hallmark of the well-formed narrative.” Even science constructs narratives all the time. There is no scientific method without the narrative thread that holds the whole enterprise together.

Trading Risk: Enhanced Profitability Through Risk Control
by Kenneth L. Grant
Published 1 Sep 2004

Many of these concepts were well established long before that fateful day when I ventured into the field of risk management; but at least from where I stand, the process of applying them cohesively to the practice of portfolio management has been painfully slow to take hold. Most of my work over the years has thus involved the application of simple statistical principals to a practical risk-taking setting. Throughout the evolution of these efforts, I have attempted, at least nominally, to apply the scientific method (OGHET—Observe, Generalize, Hypothesize, Experiment, Theorize—to those who remember their school days) and would summarize the conclusions that I have drawn in the process in the following manner: • There is a bona fide science that underlies the activities of trading, investment, and portfolio management. 6 TRADING RISK • The various components of this science can be isolated and evaluated in terms of their impact on financial performance. • Using an extremely simple set of statistical and arithmetic tools, it is possible to evaluate which elements of a given portfolio management process are working efficiently and which are not. • In turn, by making these quantitative comparisons across periods of time and intervals of varying success, it is possible to gain insights into the specific elements of the process that are underperforming in periods of performance difficulty versus those that are working when things are going right. • Although it is not always possible to correct problems without generating other inefficiencies in the portfolio management process, it is extremely useful to understand these undercurrents, such that traders can harness their strengths and minimize their weaknesses in the most effective manner available. • The methodology is also very useful in determining which types of market conditions work most directly in portfolio managers’ favor and which work against them.

Deep Medicine: How Artificial Intelligence Can Make Healthcare Human Again
by Eric Topol
Published 1 Jan 2019

There are many science apprentice functions that AI can help with, including conducting far better literature searches (as with Iris.ai and Semantic Scholar), designing or running experiments (as with Zymergen and Transcriptic), interpreting data (like Nutonian, which produces a mathematical theory based in data ingestion), and writing the paper (with Citeomatic, which finds missing citations in the manuscript draft).77 In cellular and molecular biology, the manual labor of plating cells and counting colonies can be preempted. Accuracy and efficiency of executing certain experiments have been enhanced. Some researchers have embraced AI for its data-driven approach to “designing” (many have questioned this term since it involves human intuition) the next set of experiments. The concept of “accelerating the scientific method” has already been validated by many of the advances I’ve summarized and so many more in the pipeline.78 But it’s fair to say there are plenty of constraints for the types of lab-related work that can even be partially automated by AI tools. Apprenticeship opportunities will continue to emerge throughout all disciplines of science.

To the Edges of the Earth: 1909, the Race for the Three Poles, and the Climax of the Age of Exploration
by Edward J. Larson
Published 13 Mar 2018

When the first attempt failed at 100 feet due to faulty drilling methods, David signed on to lead a second effort in 1897. His expertise as a geologist coupled with his experience drilling shafts for the New South Wales Geological Survey made him a perfect candidate to finish the job. Though unmentioned at the time, David also welcomed the chance to defend science and the scientific method from religiously motivated critics. The son of a Welsh minister and a direct descendant of James Ussher, the seventeenth-century Anglican bishop best known for calculating the date of creation from the timeline provided in Genesis, David had a religious upbringing. Then, in what his authoritative biographer depicted as “a real crisis of faith” while a science student at Oxford, he rejected biblical Christianity in favor of a spiritual sense of a guiding providence.45 With the Funafuti drilling project, he could lend support to scientific progress over religious traditionalism while leading a potentially significant and exciting expedition.

The Plague Year: America in the Time of Covid
by Lawrence Wright
Published 7 Jun 2021

Michelangelo, da Vinci, Palladio, Brunelleschi, Boccaccio, Petrarch, Machiavelli, and Dante Alighieri became foundation stones of European thought. Italian explorers, including Christopher Columbus, Giovanni da Verrazano, and Amerigo Vespucci, changed the map of the world. Galileo established the scientific method. The Italian Renaissance was the greatest efflorescence of science and art in Western civilization. I believe we are at another inflection point, when society will make a radical adjustment, for good or ill. History offers mixed lessons. The Plague of Athens, in 430 BC, led to a prolonged period of lawlessness and immorality.

Succeeding With AI: How to Make AI Work for Your Business
by Veljko Krunic
Published 29 Mar 2020

Stealing machine learning models via prediction APIs. arXiv. 2016 Sep;arXiv:1609.02943 [cs.CR]. Marcus G. Deep learning: A critical appraisal. arXiv. 2018 Jan;arXiv:1801.00631 [cs.AI]. APPENDIX 152 153 154 155 156 157 158 159 160 161 162 163 164 165 166 167 168 C Bibliography 253 Anderson C. The end of theory: The data deluge makes the scientific method obsolete. WIRED. 2008 Jun 23 [cited 2018 Jul 2]. Available from: https:// www.wired.com/2008/06/pb-theory/ Wikimedia Foundation. AlphaGo versus Lee Sedol. Wikipedia. [Cited 2018 Jun 21.] Available from: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=AlphaGo_versus _Lee_Sedol&oldid=846917953 DeepMind.

The Costs of Connection: How Data Is Colonizing Human Life and Appropriating It for Capitalism
by Nick Couldry and Ulises A. Mejias
Published 19 Aug 2019

Science, Technology, & Human Values 41, no. 1 (2016): 93–117. Ananny, Mike, and Kate Crawford. “Seeing Without Knowing: Limitations of the Transparency Ideal and Its Application to Algorithmic Accountability.” New Media & Society 20, no. 3 (2018): 973–89. Anderson, Chris. “The End of Theory: The Data Deluge Makes the Scientific Method Obsolete.” Wired, June 23, 2008. Andrejevic, Mark. Infoglut. London: Routledge, 2013. Andrejevic, Mark, Alison Hearn, and Helen Kennedy. “Cultural Studies of Data Mining: Introduction.” European Journal of Cultural Studies 19, nos. 4–5 (2015): 379–94. Angwin, Julia, and Terry Parris. “Facebook Lets Advertisers Exclude Users by Race.”

Life on the Rocks: Building a Future for Coral Reefs
by Juli Berwald
Published 4 Apr 2022

Asking the people involved in those struggles for advice, the coral scientists heard the same thing over and over: Don’t be cautious. Either the mood in the room shifted or my own mood shifted—maybe both. This wasn’t a typical science meeting at all. Scientists are generally conservative by nature. The scientific method demands the accumulation of information before drawing conclusions. These scientists were saying, “Not in this case. There’s no time for that.” Tom flipped through slides of coral farms: orchards of PVC pipes hung with coral fragments, metal stands studded with coral branches. He spoke of coral restoration scientists developing corals that could withstand repeated exposure to warming temperatures.

Hacking Capitalism
by Söderberg, Johan; Söderberg, Johan;

Herbert Marcuse is iconic for formulating a pessimistic, leftist position on technology. His reproach was not directed against any technology in particular but against technological rationality as such. In Marcuse’s view, the master-servant perspective is embedded in the instrumentality of the scientific method. It mirrors the domination of humans in the capitalist, patriarchal society. These remarks ought to caution us against an overly optimistic assessment of current trends within the FOSS movement. In the second half of the chapter, it will be argued that the seizure of the means of production is no longer a philosopher’s stone that could dissolve capitalism once and for all.

Spineless: The Science of Jellyfish and the Art of Growing a Backbone
by Juli Berwald
Published 14 May 2017

He strode across the room and ripped my notebook from under my pen, folded it closed, and set it on the far side of the U-shaped table. “Seriously?” I asked. “I can’t take notes?” “No,” he growled. “This isn’t published yet.” “All right,” I replied, and leaned back in my chair to just listen. — Models are at the heart of science because they define the scientific method. Every hypothesis is really just a model of something in the world. And despite their simplifications and assumptions, computer models are one of the most effective tools we have for making predictions about the future. That’s why many scientists use them so much. Historically, jellyfish have been considered an ecological dead end, meaning they weren’t important to the cycling of the ecosystem.

The Wrecking Crew: How Conservatives Rule
by Thomas Frank
Published 5 Aug 2008

OIRA and the Council on Competitiveness worked by shooting down regulations at the terminus of the process, after agencies had labored over their proposed rules for years; the Data Quality Act exposed the regulatory process to interception and attack at every point. And, yes, attack is the correct word. Although technically the law merely provides for the familiar give-and-take of the scientific method, it has in fact been used almost exclusively to slow things down and screw things up; studies of global warming, action on dangerous herbicides, and warnings against eating too much sugar have all been crushed in the regulatory logjam. According to one reporter, Tozzi, the author of the law, has been “gumming up the regulatory works,” dreaming of finding a way “to induce regulatory sclerosis.”

The Long Boom: A Vision for the Coming Age of Prosperity
by Peter Schwartz , Peter Leyden and Joel Hyatt
Published 18 Oct 2000

The Net has become the means of unifying this network of techies. It is the tool through which these people self-organize. There has long been a code of honor on the Internet to share ideas for the greater good. When the Internet was little more than an academic medium, this code of honor simply continued the tradition of the scientific method. In science, those who make a discovery are obligated to share the results and to explain clearly how they arrived at their conclusions, so that the entire scientific community can subject The GREAT EwftbleR 29 the discovery to rigorous analysis. If the discovery passes that scrutiny, it becomes common intellectual property, and everyone gets to reap the benefits.

The Happiness Hypothesis: Finding Modern Truth in Ancient Wisdom
by Jonathan Haidt
Published 26 Dec 2005

One of the most important ideas in positive psychology is what Lyubomirsky, Sheldon, Schkade, and Seligman call the "happiness formula:" H = S + C + V T h e level of happiness that you actually experience (H) is determined by your biological set point (S) plus the conditions of your life ( C ) plus the voluntary activities (V) you do.34 T h e challenge for positive psychology is to use the scientific method to find out exactly what kinds of C a n d V can push H up to the top of your potential range. T h e extreme biological version of the happiness hypothesis says that H = S, and that C and V don't matter. But we have to give Buddha and Epictetus credit for V b e c a u s e Buddha prescribed the "eightfold noble path" (including meditation and mindfulness), and Epictetus urged methods of thought to cultivate indifference (apatheia) to externals.

Smarter Faster Better: The Secrets of Being Productive in Life and Business
by Charles Duhigg
Published 8 Mar 2016

Then someone would propose a new theory or experiment and the process would start all over again. “When you track every call and keep notes and talk about what just happened with the person in the next cubicle, you start paying attention differently,” Fludd told me. “You learn to pick up on things.” To the consultants, this was an example of someone using the scientific method to isolate and test variables. “Charlotte’s peers would generally change multiple things at once,” wrote Niko Cantor, one of the consultants, in a review of his findings. “Charlotte would only change one thing at a time. Therefore she understood the causality better.” But something else was going on, as well.

Nexus
by Ramez Naam
Published 16 Dec 2012

"The methods of science are statistical, quantitative, reproducible, reductionist, and, as much as possible, objective." He paused. "The methods of meditation, on the other hand, are qualitative, subjective, reproducible often only through hard work disciplining and quieting the mind, and yet equally profound." Drugs are faster, Kade thought. Mental tools. "I have a deep respect for the scientific method," Rama said. "Decades ago, the fourteenth Dalai Lama was asked: 'What if neuroscience proves that Buddhism is in some way incorrect?' "'Well,' he replied, 'in that case we would need to change Buddhism.'" The crowd laughed. Rama X smiled. "What I would ask you to consider is the complementary idea.

Stock Market Wizards: Interviews With America's Top Stock Traders
by Jack D. Schwager
Published 1 Jan 2001

We take great care to avoid the methodological pitfalls associated with "overfitting the data." Although we use a number of different mathematical techniques to establish the robustness and predictive value of our strategies, one of our most powerful tools is the straightforward application of the scientific method. Rather than blindly searching through the data for patterns—an approach whose methodological dangers are widely appreciated within, for example, the natural science and medical research communities—we typically start by formulating a hypothesis based on some sort of structural theory or qualitative understanding of the market, and then test that hypothesis to see whether it is supported by the data.

I Think You'll Find It's a Bit More Complicated Than That
by Ben Goldacre
Published 22 Oct 2014

The results were as you might imagine: each group found extensive methodological holes in the evidence they disagreed with, but ignored the very same holes in the evidence that reinforced their views. Some people go even further than this, when presented with unwelcome data, and decide that science itself is broken. Politicians will cheerfully explain that the scientific method simply cannot be used to determine the outcomes of a drugs policy. Alternative therapists will explain that their pill is special, among all pills, and you simply cannot find out if it works by using a trial. How deep do these views go, and how far do they generalise? In a study now published in the Journal of Applied Social Psychology, Professor Geoffrey Munro took around a hundred students and told them they were participating in research about ‘judging the quality of scientific information’.

Capital Ideas: The Improbable Origins of Modern Wall Street
by Peter L. Bernstein
Published 19 Jun 2005

McQuown in turn had found Fouse, “a real interesting character—I always got a kick out of him.” In a long memorandum dated May 5, 1970, Fouse presents the case for himself to McQuown. He begins by asserting that he has a reputation for being “keenly analytical, innovative, independent of thought, dedicated to the scientific method, outspoken, and somewhat impatient with ignorance.” He then lists his views of the investment management business, reflecting both the theoretical sophistication he had acquired and his realistic sense of what the security markets are all about. He emphasizes the difference between earning an above-market return by taking above-average risks and winning at the expense of other players who lose more than the winners win because “the costs of trading make the contest less than a zero-sum game.”

Come as You Are: The Surprising New Science That Will Transform Your Sex Life
by Emily Nagoski Ph.d.
Published 3 Mar 2015

And there are deep historical realities behind that feeling; somewhere in the three hundred years between figuring out that female orgasm isn’t necessary for conception and figuring out female orgasm isn’t an evolutionary adaptation, scientists began saying things about how female orgasm and the clitoris were “of no utility.”18 Vestigial, like the appendix. So if the phrase “not an adaptation” sounds to you like “not important,” well . . . yeah. That could easily be what science used to think. What can I say? Science is made of people, and people can be stupid. Fortunately, the scientific method is specifically designed to help us overcome our stupid! And so science is moving forward, and the rest of us should move with it. In the twenty-first century, only some kind of woman-hating asshat would think that just because it doesn’t help make babies, women’s orgasm isn’t important. Lloyd, only half kidding, suggests we call the byproduct hypothesis the “fantastic bonus” account of women’s orgasm.

Multicultural Cities: Toronto, New York, and Los Angeles
by Mohammed Abdul Qadeer
Published 10 Mar 2016

The modernist bias of planning, its “enlightenment epistemology,” rational-positivist approach, and scientific analytics have been held to be a barrier keeping out the voices and stories of minorities, women, and other citizens.13 Leonie Sandercock calls the current approach a “heroic model of modernist planning” in which rationality, comprehensiveness, the scientific method, and faith in planners’ ability to know what is good for people generally and political neutrality come together.14 3. Another theme that courses through academic writings concerns planners’ and their political masters’ lack of sensitivity to cultural rights.15 It is expressed either directly as a drawback of the planning system, or indirectly as exhortations for planners to be sensitive to racial-cultural differences.

What to Think About Machines That Think: Today's Leading Thinkers on the Age of Machine Intelligence
by John Brockman
Published 5 Oct 2015

But we have no such information, so we must assign probabilities accordingly. (This type of reasoning has been articulated by astrophysicists J. Richard Gott and Alexander Vilenkin, among many others.) The assumption that we may consider ourselves randomly chosen is sometimes questioned, but in fact it lies at the heart of the scientific method. In physics and other sciences, theories almost never predict definite outcomes. Instead, we compute a probability distribution from the theory. Consider a hydrogen atom: the probability of finding the electron a mile from the proton is not exactly zero, just very, very small. Yet when we find an electron, we don’t seriously entertain the possibility that it’s part of a remote hydrogen atom.

From the Ruins of Empire: The Intellectuals Who Remade Asia
by Pankaj Mishra
Published 3 Sep 2012

‘As I have grown older … I have come to feel that Western progress during the last three hundred years has only led to selfishness, slaughter, corruption and shamelessness.’69 Putting the learning of the past in the service of China’s nascent modernity, the neo-traditionalists were encouraged by such disillusioned Western philosophers as Bertrand Russell, who, after a wildly successful lecture tour of China in the post May-Fourth era, asserted: ‘The distinctive merit of our civilization, I should say, is the scientific method; the distinctive merit of the Chinese is a just conception of life.’70 Russell was appalled by both Soviet communism and Europe’s destructive war. Beguiled by traditional China, he claimed that ‘those who value wisdom or beauty, or even the simple enjoyment of life, will find more of these things in China than in the distraught and turbulent West’.71 Even Sun Yat-sen, disenchanted by lack of support from the West, had begun to speak out against Western materialism and economic imperialism, upholding Chinese tradition as a basis for nationalism.

It's Better Than It Looks: Reasons for Optimism in an Age of Fear
by Gregg Easterbrook
Published 20 Feb 2018

Just a generation ago, the US Republican Party supported science-based conservation: Ronald Reagan backed the CFC ban, and the elder President George Bush endorsed 1990 legislation to reduce air pollution. By the year of Donald Trump’s presidential candidacy, Republicans had begun to shun conservation and the scientific method, while in the hyperpartisan politics of the moment, for advocates of every variety, “sound science” came to mean “whatever supports our donors’ agenda.” Trump would call climate change a hoax “created by and for the Chinese.” This harebrained galimatias helped him win the White House. In 2017, China reduced greenhouse emissions by canceling construction of more than one hundred coal-fired power stations, leaving unclear why the Chinese government would fall for its own hoax.

Lost Connections: Uncovering the Real Causes of Depression – and the Unexpected Solutions
by Johann Hari
Published 1 Jan 2018

There is a different science studying them, and they largely do have a different set of causes to depression or what most people regard as generalized anxiety problems. It was a fight Throughout this book I draw on two different kinds of experiences I have accumulated over the years. The first is that I was given a rigorous training in the social sciences when I studied at Cambridge University. The social sciences are where you apply the scientific method not to what’s happening in a test tube or a particle collider, but to how you and I live every day—to social life. It’s the scientific study of how people live. It ranges from psychology to sociology to anthropology. This training meant, I hope, that I knew how to sift the evidence I was going to have to pore over, and to see what was legit.

Why We Sleep: Unlocking the Power of Sleep and Dreams
by Matthew Walker
Published 2 Oct 2017

Science could never prove him wrong, which is why Freud continues to cast a long shadow on dream research to this day. But by the very same token, we could never prove the theory right. A theory that cannot be discerned true or false in this way will always be abandoned by science, and that is precisely what happened to Freud and his psychoanalytic practices. As a concrete example, consider the scientific method of carbon dating, used to determine the age of an organic object like a fossil. To validate the method, scientists would have the same fossil analyzed by several different carbon-dating machines that operated on the same underlying principle. If the method was scientifically robust, these independent machines should all return the same value of the fossil’s age.

Building Habitats on the Moon: Engineering Approaches to Lunar Settlements
by Haym Benaroya
Published 12 Jan 2018

Mendell pointed to the historical interest by humans in discovery, citing space as the ultimate opportunity for discoveries of all kinds. ( 7 ) He noted the rapidity of change in today’s world; change that has come to signify progress. Generally, progress has been tied either to technology and science , or to abilities derived from their expansion. The scientific method and process of inquiry is seen to be the best approach we have to understand nature, and to create the technology upon which humanity depends for its survival and satisfaction. According to Bacon, knowledge is power. Figure 2.3.This painting was used as a visual at an April 1988 conference in Houston titled ‘Lunar Bases and Space Strategies of the 21st Century’.

Targeted: The Cambridge Analytica Whistleblower's Inside Story of How Big Data, Trump, and Facebook Broke Democracy and How It Can Happen Again
by Brittany Kaiser
Published 21 Oct 2019

Some saw her as an evil genius, an image she abhorred.13 In an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal in 2018, Bekah wrote that her “natural reluctance to speak with reporters has left me vulnerable to the media’s sensational fantasies.” She described herself as someone committed to research and the scientific method; to small and localized government; and, among other things, to “fighting entrenched corruption on both sides of the aisle.”14 In New York City in June 2015, Alexander introduced me to Bekah at her office on the twenty-seventh floor of the Newscorp Building near dusk. He kindly told Bekah that I was the “new genius in the crew,” that I had already quite a bit of success at SCL, and that I’d be heading up all Cambridge’s business development from then on.

Apollo's Arrow: The Profound and Enduring Impact of Coronavirus on the Way We Live
by Nicholas A. Christakis
Published 27 Oct 2020

In fact, Americans are evenly divided on whether scientific experts make better policy decisions than other people, with 45 percent saying they do and 48 percent saying they do not (7 percent say their decisions are usually worse than other people’s). But there is a partisan divide here, too, with 54 percent of Democrats saying scientists’ policy decisions are usually better and just 34 percent of Republicans feeling this way. And despite the overall confidence in science, many Americans also express suspicion: 63 percent say the scientific method “generally produces accurate conclusions,” but 35 percent think it “can be used to produce any conclusion the researcher wants.” These unfortunate features of American culture, coupled with a centuries-old history of embracing visionaries, charlatans, and quacks, intersected with the especially politically polarized environment of 2020, making a bad situation worse.109 A national survey conducted in April 2020 evaluated partisan divides across a range of public health behaviors recommended by experts.

Software Design for Flexibility
by Chris Hanson and Gerald Sussman
Published 17 Feb 2021

We don't know the answers to these questions, but if it is possible, we want to be able to capture the methods by a kind of perturbational program, built as an overlay on the base program. Dependencies mitigate inconsistency Dependency annotations on data give us a powerful tool for organizing human-like computations. For example, all humans harbor mutually inconsistent beliefs: an intelligent person may be committed to the scientific method yet have a strong attachment to some superstitious or ritual practices; a person may have a strong belief in the sanctity of all human life, yet also believe that capital punishment is sometimes justified. If we were really logicians this kind of inconsistency would be fatal: if we really were to simultaneously believe both propositions P and NOT P, then we would have to believe all propositions!

That Used to Be Us
by Thomas L. Friedman and Michael Mandelbaum
Published 1 Sep 2011

And I said, ‘Well, we probably disagree on that, but if you like I could tell you what my views are and why I believe in it.’ And he said, ‘No, I’m happy with my opinions.’ Great guy, salt of the earth, but just not interested.” Skepticism of expert opinion is always appropriate: It is in fact at the heart of the scientific method. Indeed, a measure of skepticism about all opinions, especially one’s own, is healthy. But in the ever more complicated world we are living in, the professional judgments of experts are, in the end, indispensable. The details of technical and scientific fields lie beyond the easy comprehension of almost all nonspecialists.

The Rise and Fall of the Third Chimpanzee
by Jared Diamond
Published 2 Jan 1991

The strategies include wooing unmated females for 'divorce insurance', as long as one feels unsure of one's wife's fidelity; guarding one's fertile spouse; feeding her copiously and copulating with her often, to induce her to remain faithful in one's absence; and coveting one's neighbour's spouse at a time when she is fertile and one's own spouse is no longer fertile. However, not even these applications of the scientific method in all its power sufficed to clarify what, if anything, female birds gain from EMS. One possible answer is that female herons weighing desertion of their mates may use EMS to shop around for a new mate. Another is that some unmated female gulls in colonies with a deficit of males may get fertilized by PMS, and then try to rear the chicks with the help of another, similar female.

The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test
by Tom Wolfe
Published 1 Jan 1968

This was a year after he started working with Timothy Leary. She had met Alpert a couple of years before and he had been 100 percent the serious young clinical psychologist—legions of rats and cats in cages with their brainstems, corpora callosa and optic chiasmas sliced, spliced, diced, iced in the name of the Scientific Method. Now Alpert was sitting on the floor in Perry Lane in the old boho Lotus hunker-down and exegeting very seriously about a baby crawling blindly about the room. Blindly? What do you mean, blindly? That baby is a very sentient creature . .. That baby sees the world with a completeness that you and I will never know again.

Googled: The End of the World as We Know It
by Ken Auletta
Published 1 Jan 2009

The title of the report, “Google Version 2.0: The Calculating Predator,” telegraphs Arnold’s stark conclusion:Analyzing “the Google” in a deliberate and focused way, we find that while Google may have started out to “do no evil,” it has, to some, morphed from a friendly search engine into something more ominous. Googzilla, fueled by technical prowess, is now on the move. Where is it moving? The gruff Arnold, who responded to a phone call but refused to speak on the record to anyone who was not paying him, in his book often drops the scientific method in favor of a more fevered tone. Conjuring a monster, he repeatedly refers to the company as “Googzilla,” and writes that “Google stalks a market ... then strikes quickly and in a cold-blooded way.” Behind Google’s free food and volleyball games he sniffs a public relations scheme to “misdirect attention.

The White Man's Burden: Why the West's Efforts to Aid the Rest Have Done So Much Ill and So Little Good
by William Easterly
Published 1 Mar 2006

Then hold the aid agencies accountable for their results by having truly independent evaluation of their efforts. Perhaps the aid agencies should each set aside a portion of their budgets (such as the part now wasted on self-evaluation) to contribute to an international independent evaluation group made up of staff trained in the scientific method from the rich and poor countries, who will evaluate random samples of each aid agency’s efforts. Evaluation will involve randomized controlled trials where feasible, less pure statistical analysis if not, and will at least be truly independent, even when randomized trials and statistical analysis are not feasible.

The Personal MBA: A World-Class Business Education in a Single Volume
by Josh Kaufman
Published 2 Feb 2011

I’ve Tested many different approaches, Testing many different variables. This is what works best for me, so I’ve made it a Habit. Will this be my method forever? I doubt it—I’ll eventually find other methods that work even better. My Experimentation never stops. Testing is the act of trying something new—a way of applying the scientific method and the Iteration Cycle to your own life. The most happy and productive people I know all have something in common: they’re always trying new things to see what works. You can’t make positive discoveries that make your life better if you never try anything new. Testing doesn’t have to be complicated.

Endurance: A Year in Space, a Lifetime of Discovery
by Scott Kelly and Margaret Lazarus Dean
Published 14 Aug 2017

It’s true that I’m not a scientist and that research was never my main motivation for going to space. But even if the science wasn’t what drove me to become an astronaut, I have a profound respect for the pursuit of scientific knowledge and I take my part in that seriously. After all, I would argue, testing that sample from the furnace was an example of using the scientific method to gain knowledge. Another uniquely Russian spaceflight practice was the creation of custom-molded seat liners for each crew member. The first time I served as a backup crew member, I went to Zvezda, the company that makes the Soyuz seats and Sokol suits, as well as the spacesuits the cosmonauts wear on spacewalks and ejection seats for Russian military aircraft.

When Nietzsche Wept: A Novel of Obsession
by Irvin D. Yalom
Published 21 Mar 2011

Nietzsche, apparently realizing he had to develop some of his other pieces, turned his attention back to the center of the board. “I have been called many things—philosopher, psychologist, pagan, agitator, antichrist. I have even been called some unflattering things. But I prefer to call myself a scientist, because the cornerstone of my philosophic method, as of the scientific method, is disbelief. I always maintain the most rigorous possible skepticism, and I am skeptical now. I cannot accept your recommendation for psychic exploration on the basis of medical authority.” “But, Professor Nietzsche, we are entirely in agreement. The only authority to be followed is reason, and my recommendation is supported by reason.

The Unpersuadables: Adventures With the Enemies of Science
by Will Storr
Published 1 Jan 2013

When Lord Monckton’s audience, with their right wing brains, heard him talk of climate conspiracy, he realised that they always knew instinctively, ‘that something was going on in this climate story that they didn’t like the smell of. They just couldn’t quite work out what it was …’ Stories work against truth. They operate with the machinery of prejudice and distortion. Their purpose is not fact but propaganda. The scientific method is the tool that humans have developed to break the dominion of the narrative. It has been designed specifically to dissolve anecdote, to strip out emotion and to leave only unpolluted data. It is a new kind of language, a modern sorcery, and it has gifted our species incredible powers. We can eradicate plagues, extend our lives by decades, build rockets and fly through space.

Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience
by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
Published 1 Jul 2008

On that level, amateur scholarship can hold its own, and can be even more effective than its professional counterpart. But the moment that amateurs lose sight of this goal, and use knowledge mainly to bolster their egos or to achieve a material advantage, then they become caricatures of the scholar. Without training in the discipline of skepticism and reciprocal criticism that underlies the scientific method, laypersons who venture into the fields of knowledge with prejudiced goals can become more ruthless, more egregiously unconcerned with truth, than even the most corrupt scholar. THE CHALLENGE OF LIFELONG LEARNING The aim of this chapter has been to review the ways in which mental activity can produce enjoyment.

The Science of Fear: How the Culture of Fear Manipulates Your Brain
by Daniel Gardner
Published 23 Jun 2009

The competing demands of being accurate and being heard can be particularly hard on scientists. Stephen Schneider—a Stanford climatologist and an early proponent of the hypothesis that human activity was changing climate—spoke about this with admirable clarity in an interview with Discover magazine. “On the one hand, as scientists we are ethically bound to the scientific method, in effect promising to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but—which means that we must include all the doubts, the caveats, the ifs, ands, and buts. On the other hand, we are not just scientists but human beings, as well. And like most people we’d like to see the world a better place, which in this context translates into our working to reduce the risk of disastrous climate change.

The Difference Engine
by William Gibson and Bruce Sterling
Published 31 Aug 1990

"Lord Byron can't be dead!" Brian burst out. "We're standing in stinking mud, believing a stinking lie!" "Quiet!" Mallory commanded. "We'll simply have to suspend any judgment on this matter until we have firm evidence!" "Ned's right," nodded Tom. "The Prime Minister would have wanted it that way! That's the scientific method. That was what Lord Byron always taught us . . . " A thick, tarred rope, its end knotted in a fat noose, came snaking down the wall. The anarchist lieutenant -- the dainty man with the paisley kerchiefs -- posed one bent leg atop the wall, with his elbow on his knee and his chin in his hand.

How I Became a Quant: Insights From 25 of Wall Street's Elite
by Richard R. Lindsey and Barry Schachter
Published 30 Jun 2007

My career in finance has concentrated on investing. The art of investing is evolving into the science of investing, and I have been fortunate to participate in some of the revolutionary changes that have underpinned that evolution. Quantitatively trained finance academics, and scientists switching into finance have brought the power of the scientific method to bear on investing. Analysis, process, and structure are replacing assertions, hunches, and whim. Personal investment insights are still centrally important. But managers increasingly capture and apply those insights systematically. I’d like to describe some of these some of these intellectual developments in the context of my own career path from academic physics at Princeton, Harvard, and Berkeley to the practice of quantitative finance at BARRA and Barclays Global Investors.

The Patient Will See You Now: The Future of Medicine Is in Your Hands
by Eric Topol
Published 6 Jan 2015

template=printpicart. 8. A. Pandey, K. Abdullah, and M. H. Drazner, “Impact of Vice President Cheney on Public Interest in Left Ventricular Assist Devices and Heart Transplantation,” American Journal of Cardiology 113 (2014): 1529–1531. 9. C. Anderson, “The End of Theory: The Data Deluge Makes the Scientific Method Obsolete,” Wired, June 23, 2008, http://archive.wired.com/science/discoveries/magazine/16-07/pb_theory. 10. D. Butler, “Web Data Predict Flu,” Nature 456 (2008): 287–288. 11. S. Cook et al., “Assessing Google Flu Trends Performance in the United States During the 2009 Influenza Virus A (H1N1) Pandemic,” PLoS One 6, no. 8 (2011): e23610. 12.

Mapping Mars: Science, Imagination and the Birth of a World
by Oliver Morton
Published 15 Feb 2003

In his memoir of the Grand Canyon, the Survey’s first publication, he wrote in self-justification: I have in many places departed from the severe ascetic style which has become conventional in scientific monographs. Perhaps an apology is called for. Under ordinary circumstances the ascetic discipline is necessary. Give the imagination an inch and it is apt to take an ell, and the fundamental requirement of the scientific method—accuracy of statement—is imperiled. But in the Grand Canyon district there is no such danger. The stimulants which are demoralizing elsewhere are necessary here to exalt the mind sufficiently to comprehend the sublimity of the subjects. Their sublimity has in fact been hitherto underrated.

The Attention Merchants: The Epic Scramble to Get Inside Our Heads
by Tim Wu
Published 14 May 2016

CHAPTER 6 NOT WITH A BANG BUT WITH A WHIMPER In 1926, Stuart Chase and Frederick Schlink met in a Greenwich Village speakeasy and over the conversation found that they agreed about many things. Chase was an accountant and former investigator at the Federal Trade Commission; Schlink, a standards engineer, had worked in the National Laboratories. Although following markedly different professions, both men were near zealots for the scientific method and its power to expose truths that might be contrary to popular opinion. They also shared, above all, an implacable contempt for the advertising industry, and what they regarded as the massive fraud it was perpetrating on the American public.1 The two would later use the following parable to capture their view of the inherent tension between truth and advertising: Two men are discussing the merits of a famous brand of oil.

The Contrarian: Peter Thiel and Silicon Valley's Pursuit of Power
by Max Chafkin
Published 14 Sep 2021

They had their own language—many identified as “rationalists”—and their own literary canon. It included Tolkien and Rand, of course, along with arcane texts that venerated technology, among them Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality, a 600,000-word fan fiction epic that adapted J. K. Rowling’s wizard story by imagining that Harry incorporates the scientific method into his magic. Another favorite: The Last Ringbearer, which was part of the ever-growing corpus of Lord of the Rings fan fiction, and which seemed apt for the founder of Palantir. In the book, which was first published in Russia in 1999 and then translated into English on the web in 2010, Tolkien’s good guys—Gandalf and the elves—are warmongers who try to destroy Mordor because its peaceful progress threatens their feudal rule.

The God Delusion
by Richard Dawkins
Published 12 Sep 2006

On page after page as I read McGrath, I found myself scribbling ‘teapot’ in the margin. Again invoking T. H. Huxley, McGrath says, ‘Fed up with both theists and atheists making hopelessly dogmatic statements on the basis of inadequate empirical evidence, Huxley declared that the God question could not be settled on the basis of the scientific method.’ McGrath goes on to quote Stephen Jay Gould in similar vein: ‘To say it for all my colleagues and for the umpteenth millionth time (from college bull sessions to learned treatises): science simply cannot (by its legitimate methods) adjudicate the issue of God’s possible superintendence of nature.

A World on the Wing: The Global Odyssey of Migratory Birds
by Scott Weidensaul
Published 29 Mar 2021

“They always say, ‘We used to think, but now we know.’ ” If I remember correctly, she was ticked off over some flip-flopping research about diet and health, maybe the endless eggs-are-good/eggs-are-bad debate, but I have to admit, she had a point. Science is a process, one where ideas are proposed, tested, and discarded if new evidence demands it. Any good researcher (if they’re being true to the scientific method) ought to say, “We used to think, but now we think.” Of course, human nature doesn’t work that way. Even scientists tend to look for certainty, and often put their trust in the latest, sexiest research to be published, tacitly assuming it’s the final word on a subject. In the past four decades, the field of migratory bird conservation has experienced several we-used-to-think epiphanies.

CIOs at Work
by Ed Yourdon
Published 19 Jul 2011

And then, about five years later, he went back to Columbia to earn a bachelor’s degree in physics and then on to Toronto to get a master’s as well. I envy the broad background he got along the way. Rubinow: And I respect that as well. People come up and say to me, clearly you don’t use this chemistry you studied. On the contrary, I developed disciplined problem solving based on the scientific method. It applies to the sciences, but is also applies to so many different things in my job and so, no, it is useful every day. Yourdon: Yes, scientific method problems solving. Rubinow: And you know the processes—the logic, philosophies, analytics—are valuable. Yourdon: Let me turn that around and ask you, is there one common piece of advice for people who want a career path to the CIO?

Schismatrix Plus
by Bruce Sterling
Published 1 Jan 1995

The wrinkles of her face were very slightly wrong, not matching the muscles beneath the skin. “You’re young,” he said. “You only look old.” “Then we share one fraud. For you, that’s only one of many.” “Ross told me you were dependable,” he said. “Why risk your situation by annoying me?” “We want the truth.” He stared. “How ambitious. Try the scientific method. And in the meantime, let’s talk sense.” The young woman smoothed her medical tunic with wrinkled hands. “Pretend I’m a theatre audience, Dr. Mavrides. Tell me about your ideology.” “I don’t have one.” “What about the Investor Peace? All those Détentiste plays? Did you think you would heal the Schism with this Investor fraud?”

Exploding the Phone: The Untold Story of the Teenagers and Outlaws Who Hacked Ma Bell
by Phil Lapsley
Published 5 Feb 2013

Then he’d try it out. He’d perform an experiment. “Had that not worked I would have either had to make another theory or see why that wouldn’t work,” he says. Not simply trial and error but guided trial and error. Although Jojo didn’t know it at the time, the adults had a name for this. They called it the scientific method. Years later, Nobel Prize–winning physicist Richard Feynman would write, “The principle of science, the definition, almost, is the following: the test of all knowledge is experiment.” For Joe the telephone was much more than just an intellectual playground. It was a warm electronic bosom, a source of comfort.

Guns, germs, and steel: the fates of human societies
by Jared M. Diamond
Published 15 Jul 2005

In physics the chief method for gaining knowledge is the laboratory experiment, by which one manipulates the parameter whose effect is in question, executes parallel control experiments with that parameter held constant, holds other parameters constant throughout, replicates both the experimental manipulation and the control experiment, and obtains quan- titative data. This strategy, which also works well in chemistry and molec- ular biology, is so identified with science in the minds of many people that experimentation is often held to be the essence of the scientific method. But laboratory experimentation can obviously play little or no role in many of the historical sciences. One cannot interrupt galaxy formation, start and stop hurricanes and ice ages, experimentally exterminate grizzly bears in a few national parks, or rerun the course of dinosaur evolution.

The Sovereign Individual: How to Survive and Thrive During the Collapse of the Welfare State
by James Dale Davidson and William Rees-Mogg
Published 3 Feb 1997

Thus all things raise the thoughts to the eternal..."32 A symbolic mode of thinking not only complemented a hierarchic structure of society; it also suited illiteracy. Ideas conveyed by symbols in wood-cuts were accessible to an illiterate population. By contrast, the advent of printing in the modern period led to the development of causal connections, employing the scientific method, for a literate population. A PARALLEL FOR TODAY Medieval society, seemingly so stable and secure in its beliefs in the middle of the fifteenth century, was rapidly transformed. Its predominant institution, the Church, saw its monopoly challenged and shattered. Authority that had been unquestioned for centuries was suddenly in dispute.

The Hero With a Thousand Faces
by Joseph Campbell
Published 14 Apr 2004

For Him, by Him, the world was made. "O Mohammed," God said, "hadst thou not been, I would not have created the sky." • 3 • The Hero Today All of which is far indeed from the contemporary view; for the democratic ideal of the self-determining individual, the invention of the power-driven machine, and the development of the scientific method of research, have so transformed human life that the long-inherited, timeless universe of symbols has collapsed. In the fateful, epoch-announcing words of Nietzsche's Zarathustra: "Dead are all the gods.'" One knows the tale; it has been told a thousand ways. It is the hero-cycle of the modern age, the wonder-story of mankind's coming to maturity.

Small Wars, Big Data: The Information Revolution in Modern Conflict
by Eli Berman , Joseph H. Felter , Jacob N. Shapiro and Vestal Mcintyre
Published 12 May 2018

Second, when refuting evidence arrives—from our research or that of others—the inferential effects are readily apparent: sections either emerge polished or they get removed completely. Our Book: The Incremental Accumulation of Small Facts While the setting is more exotic, the micro-empirical approach we’ve sketched implements the scientific method that most people learn in high school. In our setting rather than drawing on a large body of prior scientific research, you build a theory based on subject-matter knowledge and repeated interaction with experts and practitioners. Sometimes you lay this theory out through careful verbal elaboration, and at other times you use a game theoretic model to make sure you’re being precise enough to avoid mistakes and misunderstandings.

The Case Against Education: Why the Education System Is a Waste of Time and Money
by Bryan Caplan
Published 16 Jan 2018

Totally ignoring the need for comparison groups and control of third variables, subjects responded to the “diet” example with statements such as “It can’t hurt to eat well.”51 The point is not merely that college students are bad at reasoning about everyday events. The point is that college students are bad at reasoning about everyday events despite years of coursework in science and math. Believers in “learning how to learn” should expect students who study science to absorb the scientific method, then habitually use that fruitful method to analyze the world. This scarcely occurs. By and large, college science teaches students what to think about topics on the syllabus, not how to think about the world. Counterexamples do exist, but compared to teachers’ high hopes, effects are modest, narrow, and often only in one direction.

How to Change Your Mind: What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression, and Transcendence
by Michael Pollan
Published 30 Apr 2018

(This aspiration seems eventually to infect everyone who works with psychedelics, touching scientists, too, including ones as different in temperament as Timothy Leary and Roland Griffiths.) But psychological research proceeds person by person and experiment by experiment; there is no real-world model for using a drug to change all of society as Hubbard and Huxley determined to do, with the result that the scientific method began to feel to them, as it later would to Leary, like a straitjacket. In the wake of his first LSD experience, Huxley wrote to Osmond suggesting that “who, having once come to the realization of the primordial fact of unity in love, would ever want to return to experimentation on the psychic level?

Money: 5,000 Years of Debt and Power
by Michel Aglietta
Published 23 Oct 2018

The relationship of social belonging known as value was institutionally established.2 Nowhere did it come from previously constituted markets. However, it did allow for markets to flourish, thus conforming to the monetary theory of value. The private developed in the interstices of the public, on the basis of the public system of valorisation. Contrary to the assumptions of many economists ignorant of history – and thus of the scientific method in the social sciences – it was not the public realm, of which money was a part, that took form amid the incompleteness of market relations. The first known units of account were the shekel in Mesopotamia and the shat in Egypt. These units of account were present in Mesopotamia as early as 3000 BC, on tablets covered in inscriptions allowing for accounting.

Model Thinker: What You Need to Know to Make Data Work for You
by Scott E. Page
Published 27 Nov 2018

Essence of Decision: Explaining the Cuban Missile Crisis. New York: Little, Brown. Alvaredo, Facundo, Anthony B. Atkinson, Thomas Piketty, and Emmanuel Saez. 2013. “The World Top Incomes Database.” https://www.inet.ox.ac.uk/projects/view/149. Anderson, Chris. 2008a. “The End of Theory: The Data Deluge Makes the Scientific Method Obsolete.” Wired 16, no. 7. Anderson, Chris. 2008b. The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business Is Selling Less of More. New York: Hachette. Anderson, Phillip. 1972. “More Is Different.” Science 177, no. 4047: 393–396. Arrow, Kenneth. 1963. Social Choice and Individual Values. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.

Coffeeland: One Man's Dark Empire and the Making of Our Favorite Drug
by Augustine Sedgewick
Published 6 Apr 2020

[that] supports . . . the appropriate powers of the system, whips up the flagging energies, enhances the endurance”—though it was “in no sense a food.”36 Prescott’s accomplishment was to broaden the “viewpoint” on coffee until what had been negatives—especially coffee’s dubious relation to food, calories, and energy—began to look like positives. Central to Prescott’s insight was the work of H. L. Hollingworth, a professor at Columbia Teachers College, who in 1911 had led the way in remaking the scientific method in the service of American business. The business was Coca-Cola, which had been sued by Harvey Washington Wiley, head of the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Bureau of Chemistry and the chief author of the Pure Food and Drug Act. Wiley had no problem with coffee—in fact he promoted it as “America’s National Beverage”—but he thought parents would be outraged if they knew that their children were consuming caffeine when they drank a bottle of Coca-Cola.

Lifespan: Why We Age—and Why We Don't Have To
by David A. Sinclair and Matthew D. Laplante
Published 9 Sep 2019

When chimps use sticks to probe termite nests, birds drop rocks on mollusks to break their shells, or monkeys bathe in warm volcanic pools in Japan, it’s all natural. Humans just happen to be a species that excels at acquiring and passing on learned skills. In the past two hundred years, we have invented and utilized a process called the scientific method, which has accelerated the advancement of learning. In this way of thinking, then, culture and technology are both “natural.” Innovations that permit us to feed more people, to reduce disease, and, yes, to extend our healthy lives are natural. Cars and planes. Laptop computers and mobile phones.

Betrayal of Trust: The Collapse of Global Public Health
by Laurie Garrett
Published 15 Feb 2000

She worked, however, not in Russia but in the United States and won’t return anytime soon for anything more than a visit, she said. She was Russia’s loss, and America’s gain. “The concept that you need data to determine the efficiencies and efficacies of your practices—it’s not a concept that’s in use. Medical school training does not include the scientific method: hypothesis, study, data-driven solution. You never see denominators in reports…. Everything was a ‘science’ in the Soviet view—history was a science, politics was a science, philosophy was a science. Any academician can be called a scientist. And the stuff that gets published is horrifying!”

…

… If you allow our death-fighters—we can assure you they are competent—the money to wipe out such and such and such deaths that cost us billions to maintain, within a generation there will no longer be this drain upon the wealth of our nation.140 IV There is no reason to doubt, of course, the ability of the scientific method to solve each of the specific problems of disease by discovering causes and remedial procedures. Whether concerned with particular dangers to be overcome or with specific requirements to be satisfied, all the separate problems of human health can and will eventually find their solution. But solving problems of disease is not the same thing as creating health and happiness.

Rewired: The Post-Cyberpunk Anthology
by James Patrick Kelly and John Kessel
Published 30 Sep 2007

Sterling to Kessel, 4 September 1993: “The reason that your alienation is your strength — and I agree that it is — is that alienation is just a phase-shift away from transcendence. That the crippling inability to believe anything is just a phase-shift away from the admirably cosmopolitan determination not to believe anything. That bleak cosmic futility is the flipside of the freedom and power of the scientific method, the sense that you’re standing on your own ontological feet and can walk without crutches now. All these supposed oppositions are really only ambiguities. And the alienation that causes you to retreat to the firm but lonely citadel of your own personality is one small phase-change away from a wild charge outside the fortress to amaze and scatter the besiegers and loot their baggage train.

Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right
by Jane Mayer
Published 19 Jan 2016

To add credibility to their side, the tobacco companies funded a network of official-sounding institutes and smokers’ rights groups. This strategy soon characterized the global warming denial movement, too. There was in fact some uncertainty about global warming, as there is about virtually every scientific hypothesis. Probability, rather than absolute certainty, is the nature of the scientific method. But as Dr. James Baker, former head of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, said in 2005, “There’s a better scientific consensus on this than on any issue I know—except maybe Newton’s second law of [thermo]dynamics.” Nonetheless, in 1998, the American Petroleum Institute, along with several top oil industry executives and conservative think tank officials, colluded on a secret plan to spend $2 million to confuse the press and the public about this growing scientific consensus.

Trust: The Social Virtue and the Creation of Prosperity
by Francis Fukuyama
Published 1 Jan 1995

The work of Joseph Needham and others has shown that the Chinese level of technology in the year 1500 was higher than that prevailing in Europe.4 What China did not have, however, and what Europe subsequently developed, was a scientific method that permitted the progressive conquest of nature through empirical observation and experiment. The scientific method itself was made possible by a cast of mind that sought to understand higher-level causality through abstract reasoning about underlying physical principles, something alien to the polytheistic religious cultures of Asia.5 It is understandable that the Chinese societies that were the first to industrialize and prosper were those that fell under the control or influence of Western powers like Britain or the United States, including Hong Kong, Singapore, and Taiwan.

The Tylenol Mafia
by Scott Bartz
Published 21 Sep 2011

That was probably the worst deal a suspect in a high-profile murder case could ever make. Polygraphs, because they fail to conform to the Frye doctrine, were inadmissible in a court of law in 1982. The Frye doctrine states that in determining whether to admit scientific expert evidence, the court must examine whether the scientific method has attained “general acceptance” within the relevant scientific community. Polygraphy is widely rejected by the scientific community, which classifies it as “junk science.” According to polygraph expert, Michael Lawrence Langan, M.D., the accuracy of polygraphic lie detection is slightly above that of chance.

The Rise and Fall of Modern Medicine
by M. D. James le Fanu M. D.
Published 1 Jan 1999

James Le Fanu’s massive book, bulging with juicy medical history and anecdotes, will set your heart palpitating and your blood pressure rising from the start. It is an absolute must-read for all people interested in medical matters, and particularly for those (like me) whom Le Fanu dubs The Worried Well, i.e. the ones who are “well” but “worried” we might not be . . . By reading Le Fanu’s book we will be made aware of the thrilling power of the scientific method and the manner in which it pushes the boundaries of knowledge, to thank our lucky stars for the leaps forward in medicine and to acknowledge the enormous limitations imposed by the inscrutable mysteries of biology’ VAL HENNESSY in the Daily Mail ‘Recently writing a history of medicine from the Stone Age to New Age, I deeply regretted that there was no up-to-the-minute account of modern medicine which I could pillage.

The Unwinding: An Inner History of the New America
by George Packer
Published 4 Mar 2014

There was Eliezer Yudkowsky, an artificial-intelligence researcher who had cofounded the Singularity Institute—an autodidact who never went past eighth grade, he was the author of a thousand-page online fanfic called Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality, which recast the original story in an attempt to explain Harry’s wizardry through the scientific method. And there was Patri Friedman, the founder of the Seasteading Institute. An elfin man with cropped black hair and a thin line of beard, he was dressed in the eccentrically antic manner of Raskolnikov. He lived in Mountain View in an “intentional community” as a free-love libertarian, about which he regularly blogged and tweeted: “Polyamory/competitive govt parallel: more choice/competition yields more challenge, change, growth.

To Save Everything, Click Here: The Folly of Technological Solutionism
by Evgeny Morozov
Published 15 Nov 2013

If it doesn’t, we’ll try something else,” says Eric Schmidt in an effort to bolster the legitimacy of Google’s products—who would be crazy enough to oppose the march of science and suggest that perhaps some of those products need to be modified?—and present Google’s curiosity and ability to try things as just an extension of the scientific method. But science, of course, does have a moral code, which would be apparent to anyone who’s ever tried to conduct experiments involving humans. Many such experiments would need to be approved by various human subject panels and institutional research boards. Scientists don’t just spontaneously “try things”; they are forced to think through the social and political consequences of their work, often well before entering the lab.

Red Plenty
by Francis Spufford
Published 1 Jan 2007

You had to be unignorably brilliant, now, as a Jew, to be promoted as far as your ordinarily diligent and distinguished ethnically Russian colleagues – which left behind it the peculiar sting of a prize confiscated after it had once been given, of an acceptance turning conditional when you’d believed it was permanent. Gradually, something unexpected was begining to happen. These frustrations, small and large, had started to draw the scientists’ attention to a difference between the kind of educated they were, and the kind the vydvizhentsy engineers running the Party were. The scientific method itself taught lessons, and so, in fact, did reading all that compulsory Tolstoy. When they reflected on the idiocy of anti-Semitism in the country that defeated Nazi Germany, when they heard of Khrushchev’s red-faced rage over the Academy rejecting one of Lysenko’s stooges, they started to suspect that truth and power might not be so united; that what was enthroned in Russia, after all, might be stupidity.

The Barbell Prescription: Strength Training for Life After 40
by Jonathon Sullivan and Andy Baker
Published 2 Dec 2016

Always return to the idea that strength programming is an evolution. This means that progress is generally sustained through “tweaks” and gradual modifications rather than completely overhauling your entire program every six weeks. Treat your training like a science experiment. The introduction of too many variables at once violates the basic structure of the scientific method. Learn all of the methods and protocols and then apply them one at a time at the appropriate moments in your progression. This is the only way to find out what works for you and what does not. While the basic principles of programming are pretty much the same for everyone, each person’s progression will chart a unique course.

We the Corporations: How American Businesses Won Their Civil Rights
by Adam Winkler
Published 27 Feb 2018

Offered at a face value of 12 pounds, 10 shillings, the shares attracted more than 700 “adventurers,” as they were then called. Anything but persecuted dissenters, the stockholders included 96 knights, 21 lords, and numerous doctors, ministers, lawyers, and merchants. Sir Francis Bacon, the philosopher who popularized the scientific method, held shares, as did eventually Sir Thomas Hobbes, the father of modern political philosophy. A bit like the similarly named venture capitalists of the future, these investors were willing to gamble on a highly risky startup.7 The largest stockholder was Sir Thomas West, an English nobleman whose lineage could be traced back to a signer of the Magna Carta, adopted in 1215 as England’s first constitution limiting the power of the Crown.

The Code Breaker: Jennifer Doudna, Gene Editing, and the Future of the Human Race
by Walter Isaacson
Published 9 Mar 2021

At the height of the coronavirus crisis, Doudna was asked to write a piece for The Economist on the social transformations being wrought. “Like many other aspects of life these days, science and its practice seem to be undergoing rapid and perhaps permanent changes,” she wrote. “This will be for the better.”2 The public, she predicted, will have more understanding of biology and the scientific method. Elected officials will better appreciate the value of funding basic science. And there will be enduring changes in how scientists collaborate, compete, and communicate. Before the pandemic, communication and collaboration between academic researchers had become constrained. Universities created large legal teams dedicated to staking a claim to each new discovery, no matter how small, and guarding against any sharing of information that might jeopardize a patent application.

Alpha Trader
by Brent Donnelly
Published 11 May 2021

If gold goes down every day from 9 a.m. to 10 a.m., maybe that is the window when gold producers sell? If you can logically explain why a pattern works, it is much more likely to be non-random and persistent. 3. Analyze the data. 4. Accept or dismiss the pattern. Anyone who took a science class as a kid should recognize this as a shortform version of the scientific method. Most patterns you analyze will be worthless. You will dismiss them and move on. On the other hand, the few patterns you find that are non-random can be incredibly valuable to your future trading. Every time you notice a pattern, reduce it to something you can test and then get to work. You don’t need sophisticated quantitative skills to do basic backtesting of simple theories.

Deep Utopia: Life and Meaning in a Solved World
by Nick Bostrom
Published 26 Mar 2024

Our market-based economic system, for instance, offers a common unit of exchange, in which the value of a wide array of things can be measured on a single scale. Machines and machine-like artificial systems (such as formal institutions) constitute, shape, or intermediate an expanding portion of our lifeworld. More and more of the world is being grasped by application of materialistic principles, the scientific method, and various kinds of analytic or quantitative reasoning, which gain power from being able to draw from an ever-increasing store of facts and data, which is made increasingly accessible to us in any situation. Fairness norms dictate that individuals be treated on the basis of formal qualifications, measured work performance, or adherence to clear rules, rather than on the basis of personal ties, sympathies, obligations, pedigree, looks, accents, or how pure their spirits are.

The Diamond Age
by Neal Stephenson
Published 2 May 2000

"Information technology has freed cultures from the necessity of owning particular bits of land in order to propagate; now we can live anywhere. The Common Economic Protocol specifies how this is to be arranged. "Some cultures are prosperous; some are not. Some value rational discourse and the scientific method; some do not. Some encourage freedom of expression, and some discourage it. The only thing they have in common is that if they do not propagate, they will be swallowed up by others. All they have built up will be torn down; all they have accomplished will be forgotten; all they have learned and written will be scattered to the wind.

From eternity to here: the quest for the ultimate theory of time
by Sean M. Carroll
Published 15 Jan 2010

Under such circumstances, among the things that randomly fluctuated into existence are all of the pieces of information we traditionally use to justify our understanding of the laws of physics, or for that matter all of the mental states (or written-down arguments) we traditionally use to justify mathematics and logic and the scientific method. Such assumptions, in other words, give us absolutely no reason to believe we have justified anything, including those assumptions themselves. David Albert has referred to such a conundrum as cognitive instability—the condition we face when a set of assumptions undermines the reasons we might have used to justify those very assumptions.147 It is a kind of helplessness that can’t be escaped without reaching beyond the present moment.

Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed
by James C. Scott
Published 8 Feb 1999

A polycropping trial of twenty or more years, as Stephen Marglin has suggested, might well reach conclusions that are quite different from those derived from a trial that lasts a season or two.88 It is not at all implausible that the process of open pollination and selection by farmers, as opposed to hybridization, might have developed cultivars roughly equal in yield to the best hybrids and superior to them in many other respects, including profitability. 89 The paper profits of scientific, monocropped forests, we now realize, were achieved at considerable cost to the long-term health and productivity of the forest. One would have supposed that since most farms are family enterprises, there would have been more studies of cropping and firm economics that took as their analytical unit of time the entire family cycle of one generation.90 Nothing in the logic of the scientific method itself seems to require that a short-run perspective prevail; rather, such a perspective seems to be a response to institutional and perhaps commercial pressures. On the other hand, the need to isolate a few variables while assuming everything else constant and the bracketing of interaction effects that lie outside the experimental model are very definitely inscribed in scientific method.

The Big Fat Surprise: Why Butter, Meat and Cheese Belong in a Healthy Diet
by Nina Teicholz
Published 12 May 2014

A large number of psychological studies have shown that people respond to scientific or technical evidence in ways that justify their preexisting beliefs. “Selection bias,” as it’s called, is the danger of becoming overly attached to one’s own hypothesis or belief system. Resisting these “idols of the mind,” as the great seventeenth-century theorist Francis Bacon dubbed them, is exactly what the scientific method tries to do. A scientist must always try to disprove his or her own hypothesis. Or, as one of the great science philosophers of the twentieth century, Karl Popper, described, “The method of science is the method of bold conjectures and ingenious and severe attempts to refute them.”V In seeing how these early studies from Roseto, Pennsylvania to North Dakota were overlooked or dismissed out of hand, it’s hard, as a student of the history of the diet-heart hypothesis, not to conclude that selection bias has consistently been practiced for decades.

The Architecture of Open Source Applications
by Amy Brown and Greg Wilson
Published 24 May 2011

In addition, we provide a preference that allows a user to delay the persistence of any upgrade until the workflow is modified or executed; if a user just views that version, there is no need to persist the upgrade. 23.4.6. Sharing and Publishing Provenance-Rich Results While reproducibility is the cornerstone of the scientific method, current publications that describe computational experiments often fail to provide enough information to enable the results to be repeated or generalized. Recently, there has been a renewed interest in the publication of reproducible results. A major roadblock to the more widespread adoption of this practice is the fact that it is hard to create a bundle that includes all of the components (e.g., data, code, parameter settings) needed to reproduce a result as well as verify that result.

Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste: How Neoliberalism Survived the Financial Meltdown
by Philip Mirowski
Published 24 Jun 2013

So much for the bracing regimen of a background in the natural sciences. If anything, responses to disparagements of the contemporary profession that tended to pontificate upon the nature of “science” were even more baffling than the original calls for deliverance through natural science in the first place. Economists were poorly placed to lecture others on the scientific method; although they trafficked in mathematical models, statistics, and even “experimentation,” their practices and standards barely resembled those found in physics or biology or astronomy. Fundamental constants or structural invariants were notable by their absence. Indeed, one would be hard pressed to find an experimental refutation of any orthodox neoclassical proposition in the last four decades, so appeals to Karl Popper were more ceremonial than substantial.

This Is Service Design Doing: Applying Service Design Thinking in the Real World: A Practitioners' Handbook
by Marc Stickdorn , Markus Edgar Hormess , Adam Lawrence and Jakob Schneider
Published 12 Jan 2018

One way to address this is to embrace their ideas, but then – as soon as possible – adapt your plan to push them into a prototype and test them with real users. The stakeholders then see their concepts fail with their own eyes (or succeed, but then it was you and your team that needed that validation). 64 Build-measure-learn cycles can be traced back at least as far as Galileo and the dawn of the scientific method, with incarnations like the Deming cycle from the 1950s or the more recent Lean Startup. See Moen, R. (2009). “Foundation and History of the PDSA Cycle,” Ries, E. (2011) and The Lean Startup: How Today’s Entrepreneurs Use Continuous Innovation to Create Radically Successful Businesses. Crown Books. 65 The points here are presented from a service design perspective.

Deep Nutrition: Why Your Genes Need Traditional Food
by Catherine Shanahan M. D.
Published 2 Jan 2017

To the Price-Pottenger Nutrition Foundation for making the extensive works of Weston A. Price and Dr. Francis Pottenger publicly available. To my brother Dan Shanahan for cartoons. To Mark Sisson and Brad Kearns for fostering a vibrant and thoughtful community. And to all the scientists and researchers who still believe in the scientific method. Resources CARB COUNTING TOOL: SIMPLY COUNTING CARBS Milk Group 10 ounces of milk 1 cup of soy milk 10 ounces of buttermilk 16 ounces of plain whole milk yogurt Carbs in Yogurt Flavored yogurt contains added sugars, averaging 35 grams per cup. Plain yogurt will contain fewer net carbs than what is listed here if it tastes very sour, indicating bacteria have fermented the sugar, and in so doing created more nutrition for you.

The Bill Gates Problem: Reckoning With the Myth of the Good Billionaire
by Tim Schwab
Published 13 Nov 2023

One former IHME employee told me the Gates Foundation freely calls in bespoke charts and graphs for Bill Gates’s presentations, prompting entire teams of IHME researchers to drop everything else in service to their benefactor. “It really did feel like we were consultants for the Gates Foundation, and the scientific methods we used were often in service of getting the results we wanted … or the story he [Murray] thought the Gates Foundation wanted,” the source told me. “There are thousands of hours cumulatively spent each year just on one-off requests from Bill Gates that trickle through from the Gates Foundation.”

Flight of the WASP
by Michael Gross

Evolution became a target of ridicule, satire, and condemnation, and racial conclusions were inevitably drawn. Any connection to wild animals was a threat to the highly cultivated, civilized self-image of white Europeans.42 So Fairfield Osborn couldn’t bring himself to consider the notion that humans had descended from apes.43 Geology had introduced the scientific method into the study of human origins. The first fossil accepted as an early human was discovered in 1856 by lime quarry workers at the Feldhofer Cave in the Neander Valley, near Dusseldorf, Germany. Named Neanderthal (or Homo neanderthalensis), it sparked a debate that coincided with the 1859 release of Darwin’s On the Origin of Species over whether it was a modern human or a member of a distinct species.

The Idea of Decline in Western History
by Arthur Herman
Published 8 Jan 1997

It becomes a trap that, like Max Weber’s iron cage, man’s own rational nature has built for him.23 The Enlightenment brought this self-destructive Western culture of control up to its modern tempo. It gave the West’s new dominant class, the bourgeoisie, a rationale or “myth” for the self-conscious pursuit of power, called the scientific method.24 Everything is reduced to “equivalence,” number, and system. It produces modern social science’s emphasis on facts and empirical research, and liberal democracy’s quantitative principle of one man—one vote. Underneath them all, however, is instrumental reason’s dream of absolute power over the Other.

Statistics in a Nutshell
by Sarah Boslaugh
Published 10 Nov 2012

Given that a p = 0.05 result represents a 1 in 20 chance of making a Type I error, and because thousands of studies are published each year in the scientific literature alone, many “facts” must surely be open to question. This is when independent repeatability and reliability are critical to the integrity of the scientific method. The relationship between the population of interest and the sample obtained must be clearly understood. It’s not acceptable to make inferences about the entire human population based on a sample of highly educated, healthy, middle-class college students from one college. Hypotheses must relate to the effect of specific independent (predictor) variables on dependent (outcome) variables.

Drink: A Cultural History of Alcohol
by Iain Gately
Published 30 Jun 2008

Alexander (356-323 BC), known to history as the Great, conqueror of most of the world known to antiquity, took after Philip in his fondness for wine. Indeed, his drinking habits, and their contribution to his early death, were the subject of scrutiny and controversy for centuries after the event. Alexander’s tutor was the philosopher Aristotle, who is recognized as the founding father of the scientific method, and who produced a treatise on the nature of alcohol and its place in society. Unfortunately only a few fragments of this work survive to tell us what Aristotle thought of drink. These show that he came tantalizingly close to discovering distillation, although he succeeded only in turning wine into flavored water, rather than spirits: “If the wine be moderately boiled, then when it is drunk, it is less apt to intoxicate; for as some of its power has been boiled away, it has become weaker.”

NeuroTribes: The Legacy of Autism and the Future of Neurodiversity
by Steve Silberman
Published 24 Aug 2015

His tireless explorations ranged across an entire university’s worth of disciplines, encompassing chemistry, math, physics, astronomy, metallurgy, meteorology, pharmacy, and a few fields that he pioneered on his own. In an age when data-mining the Lord’s creation was not yet regarded as a legitimate profession but more like an enlightened hobby, he defined the scope, conduct, and ambition of the scientific method for centuries to come. The first surviving account of his work in the lab, a sheaf of papers dated 1764, details his study of arsenic and its metamorphosis into an off-white powder called “arsenical salt,” now known as potassium arsenate. Like most of his peers, Cavendish mistakenly believed that the hidden agent of this transformation was phlogiston, an element akin to fire.

The Organized Mind: Thinking Straight in the Age of Information Overload
by Daniel J. Levitin
Published 18 Aug 2014

This is what happened to Steve Jobs—he rejected surgery to follow an alternative regime of acupuncture, dietary supplements, and juices that he later realized didn’t work and that delayed the conventional treatment that experts say would probably have prolonged his life. Thousands of people die in the United States every year from diseases that were preventable or curable with “Western medicine.” The scientific method has brought civilization further in the last two hundred years than all other methods over the previous ten thousand years. Medical researchers understand that patients’ lives are at stake in their experiments—often, even before a clinical trial is completed, scientists will see a clear benefit and call off the trial early in order to make the medicine available sooner rather than make patients wait, some of whom are so sick that waiting is not an option.

Whiteshift: Populism, Immigration and the Future of White Majorities
by Eric Kaufmann
Published 24 Oct 2018

This elevates the laudable goal of formulating policies to reduce racial inequality into what Scott Atran, an anthropologist, terms a ‘sacred value.’53 Within a community of believers, sacred beliefs such as ‘Jesus died for our sins on the cross’ or ‘Western society is racist’ are not open to question. They are deemed to lie beyond what may be legitimately exposed to the scientific method or empirical falsification. McWhorter writes that this religion comes complete with a high priesthood, in the form of revered authors such as Ta-Nehisi Coates, to which genuflection rather than criticism is due. Coates’s analysis is not really up for dissection and discussion, but is a call whose appropriate response is ‘Amen’.

The Story of Philosophy
by Will Durant
Published 23 Jul 2012

Now “if a man will begin with certainties, he shall end in doubts; but if he will be content to begin in doubts he shall end in certainties” (alas, it is not quite inevitable). Here is a note common in the youth of modern philosophy, part of its declaration of independence; Descartes too would presently talk of the necessity of “methodic doubt” as the cobweb-clearing pre-requisite of honest thought. Bacon proceeds to give an admirable description of the scientific method of inquiry. “There remains simple experience; which, if taken as it comes, is called accident” (“empirical”), “if sought for, experiment . . . . The true method of experience first lights the candle” (hypothesis), “and then by means of the candle shows the way” (arranges and delimits the experiment); “commencing as it does with experience duly ordered and digested, not bungling nor erratic, and from it educing axioms, and from established axioms again new experiments.”92 (We have here—as again in a later passage93 which speaks of the results of initial experiments as a “first vintage” to guide further research—an explicit, though perhaps inadequate, recognition of that need for hypothesis, experiment and deduction which some of Bacon’s critics suppose him to have entirely overlooked.)

Challenger: A True Story of Heroism and Disaster on the Edge of Space
by Adam Higginbotham
Published 14 May 2024

But before anything could approach that point, hundreds of engineers involved in the program at every level—at the contractors across the country and within NASA’s offices in Washington, DC; Houston; Huntsville; and at Cape Canaveral—had to agree on what constituted acceptable risk for the mission. The Flight Readiness Review meetings were designed to hammer out this consensus upon the anvil of the scientific method, using data and engineering logic to exclude disagreement, emotion, and faulty analysis from the launch decision chain. The meetings were intended to be adversarial, and the questioning could be harsh: the contractors had to submit packages of charts in advance, showing their risk assessments and their recommendations for launch, before delivering an oral presentation at the meeting.

The Children of the Sky
by Vernor Vinge
Published 11 Oct 2011

Flenser’s castle had been a fearsome place, a legend across the continent. Flenser—the unreformed Flenser—had had extraordinary plans for the Tinish race. Before the humans arrived, this world had not even discovered gunpowder, and the printing press was the big new thing. From that, Flenser had been busy building both a totalitarian state and something like the scientific method. There were rumors that his monster packs still lurked in the Old Castle. Ravna knew that wasn’t true, though Flenser-Tyrathect still did have his supporters, spies who shadowed Woodcarver’s own secret agents. The sun was sliding into the north, the shadows now extending all the way across the street.

Understanding Power
by Noam Chomsky
Published 26 Jul 2010

They in fact said in their publications things like, “We have about five or six years to save the private enterprise system.” 74 Well, one thing they did was to launch a huge propaganda program in the United States, aimed at reversing these attitudes. 75 It was actually called at the time part of “the everlasting battle for the minds of men,” who have to be “indoctrinated in the capitalist story”; that’s a standard straight quote from the P.R. literature. 76 So in the early 1950s, the Advertising Council [an organization begun during World War II and funded by the business community to assist the government with propaganda services at home] was spending huge amounts of money to propagandize for what they called “the American way.” 77 The public relations budget for the National Association of Manufacturers I think went up by about a factor of twenty. 78 About a third of the textbooks in schools were simply provided by business. 79 They had 20 million people a week watching propaganda films about worker-management unity, after the Taft-Hartley Act of 1947 allowed propaganda to be shown to basically captive audiences in companies. 80 They continued on with the “scientific methods of strikebreaking” that had been developed in the late 1930s: devoting huge resources into propaganda instead of goon-squads and breaking knees. 81 And it was all tied up with the “anti-Communist” crusade at the time—that’s the true meaning of what’s referred to as “McCarthyism,” which started well before Joseph McCarthy got involved and was really launched by business and liberal members of the Democratic Party and so on. 82 It was a way of using fear and jingoism to try to undermine labor rights and functioning democracy.

Empire of Guns
by Priya Satia
Published 10 Apr 2018

Founded in the fifteenth century, it was loosely administered, embracing private gun foundries and publicly supported armories and administrative offices at the Tower, gun wharves at Woolwich and elsewhere, and research-and-development facilities at the Minories and at Vauxhall, in Lambeth. It had old ties with British science. At the end of the sixteenth century, the master of the Ordnance Office was the Earl of Essex, friend and patron of Francis Bacon, the English philosopher typically hailed as the father of empiricism and the scientific method. Bacon would have been familiar with the office’s complex of manufacturing and innovation. Its facilities, with their mechanicians and workmen—jobs that often passed within families to succeeding generations—provided stable niches for unobtrusive experimental projects that might someday produce a militarily useful gadget.

Seeking SRE: Conversations About Running Production Systems at Scale
by David N. Blank-Edelman
Published 16 Sep 2018

Get the organization into an iterative rhythm of forming hypotheses (e.g, “If we could stop/start x, it would reduce/increase y by z amount”), testing alternatives (e.g., process, tooling, or org changes), and evaluating the result. If the result moves you toward the target condition, implement whatever was tested and continue with other experiments. If you see the Scientific Method in this, you are correct. Repeat the experimentation until you’ve reached the next target condition. During step 4 of this process, be sure you revisit step 2 often to make sure everyone still grasps the current condition. Also, make sure that you are reviewing the specification of the next target condition often to ensure that everyone stays aligned.

The True and Only Heaven: Progress and Its Critics
by Christopher Lasch
Published 16 Sep 1991

"Contending factions in a social struggle require morale," as he put it in Moral Man and Immoral Society (1932); "and morale is created by the right dogmas, symbols and emotionally potent oversimplifications." Industrial workers would never win "freedom" if they followed liberals' advice to rely on "intelligence" alone. Nor would Negroes achieve justice in this manner. Liberals like Dewey mistakenly put their faith in moral suasion, education, and the scientific method. They imagined that "with a little more time, a little more adequate moral and social pedagogy and a generally higher development of human intelligence, our social problems will approach solution." But science could not provide the nerve and will that enabled "disinherited groups" to resist injustice.

Political Order and Political Decay: From the Industrial Revolution to the Globalization of Democracy
by Francis Fukuyama
Published 29 Sep 2014

This expansion, in turn, was driven by a host of political and institutional factors: the establishment of secure property rights, the rise of modern states, the invention of double-entry bookkeeping and the modern corporation, and new technologies of communications and transportation. The Industrial Revolution in turn rested on the systematic application of the scientific method and its incorporation into an institutional structure of universities and research organizations, which could then be translated into technological innovations.4 FIGURE 2. Real Income per Person in England, 1200–2000 SOURCE: Gregory Clark, A Farewell to Alms The sudden shift to a higher level of growth had a huge effect on societies via an expanding division of labor.

Darwin's Dangerous Idea: Evolution and the Meanings of Life
by Daniel C. Dennett
Published 15 Jan 1995

One reader of an early draft of this chapter complained at this point, saying that by treating the hypothesis of God as just one more scientific hypothesis, to be evaluated by the standards of science in particular and rational thought in general, Dawkins and I are ignoring the very widespread claim by believers in God that their faith is quite beyond reason, not a matter to which such mundane methods of testing applies. It is not just unsympathetic, he claimed, but strictly unwarranted for me simply to assume that the scientific method continues to apply with full force in this domain of faith. {154} Very well, let's consider the objection. I doubt that the defender of religion will find it attractive, once we explore it carefully. The philosopher Ronald de Sousa once memorably described philosophical theology as "intellectual tennis without a net," and I readily allow that I have indeed been assuming without comment or question up to now that the net of rational judgment was up.

This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. The Climate
by Naomi Klein
Published 15 Sep 2014

As conference speaker Larry Bell succinctly puts it in his book Climate of Corruption, climate change “has little to do with the state of the environment and much to do with shackling capitalism and transforming the American way of life in the interests of global wealth redistribution.”7 Yes, there is a pretense that the delegates’ rejection of climate science is rooted in serious disagreement about the data. And the organizers go to some lengths to mimic credible scientific conferences, calling the gathering “Restoring the Scientific Method” and even choosing a name, the International Conference on Climate Change, that produces an organizational acronym, ICCC, just one letter off from that of the world’s leading authority on climate change, the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), a collaboration of thousands of scientists and 195 governments.

The Transhumanist Reader
by Max More and Natasha Vita-More
Published 4 Mar 2013

Kass dodges this by describing those cases in which our attitudes have not changed as “crucial” – but he conspicuously omits any discussion of what makes these cases crucial, leaving as his only criterion the circular observation that they have not changed. If our moral instinct is self-defining, how can it change? I think the answer is clear, though perhaps surprising: we apply the scientific method to it. Our non-acceptance of homosexuality was progressively seen to be inconsistent with other, even more deeply held, aspects of our sense of right and wrong, such as the right to do what one likes that does not harm others; this bears a rather clear similarity to the emergence of relativity and the quantum theory from the increasingly awkward internal inconsistency of classical physics with respect to (for example) whether light is made of waves or particles.

Merchants of Truth: The Business of News and the Fight for Facts
by Jill Abramson
Published 5 Feb 2019

Importance now lagged behind popularity. Until Chartbeat the news media world had largely insulated itself from the changes it feared might be based on cold, hard numbers. Haile saw an opportunity to create a company that would challenge journalists’ narrow-minded but deep-seated view that the scientific method had no place in the newsroom. To the contrary, he posited, there were data out there (if they could be winnowed properly) that stood to utterly overhaul the editorial process—for the better—so that the inevitably scattershot enterprise of covering the news of the world without knowing who was following it could become more efficient.

Good Calories, Bad Calories: Challenging the Conventional Wisdom on Diet, Weight Control, and Disease
by Gary Taubes
Published 25 Sep 2007

The press’s favoring of articles that implied Keys’s hypothesis was right helped convince the public; their belief in turn would be used to argue that the time had come to advise cholesterol-lowering diets for everyone, thus further reinforcing the belief that this advice must be scientifically defensible. Believing that your hypothesis must be correct before all the evidence is gathered encourages you to interpret the evidence selectively. This is human nature. It is also precisely what the scientific method tries to avoid. It does so by requiring that scientists not just test their hypotheses, but try to prove them false. “The method of science is the method of bold conjectures and ingenious and severe attempts to refute them,” said Karl Popper, the dean of the philosophy of science. Popper also noted that an infinite number of possible wrong conjectures exist for every one that happens to be right.

The Stack: On Software and Sovereignty
by Benjamin H. Bratton
Published 19 Feb 2016

Concurrently, Max Weber would identify a tendency toward depersonalized rationalization through the formulation of people into interchangeable bureaucratic components as a key sociological feature of industrial capitalism. Paul Lazarsfeld's audience studies for the Princeton Radio Project (which momentarily included Theodor Adorno on the team) was among many midcentury attempts to apply the scientific method to the deduction of typical patterns in consumer thought and behavior used as templates for the formulation of products and propagandas. Information about audiences and Users would be used to inspire and validate the authorship of representative fictional personas that stand for those people by typifying them as ad hoc archetypes.9 Later, the requirements of software and interaction design came to rely on the specification of diverse groups of multiple hypothetical Users, each with different needs, all put into overlapping fictional worlds where optimum click paths could be modeled, categorized, and used to perfect possible GUI solutions.10 Whereas Joe and Josephine were absolutely generic, extranormal people, the complexities of designing dynamic interfacial systems means that any thing must be usable for people with heterogeneous aptitudes and intentions.

The Golden Passport: Harvard Business School, the Limits of Capitalism, and the Moral Failure of the MBA Elite
by Duff McDonald
Published 24 Apr 2017

Their professors and MBAs look on firms, as do their all-powerful CEOs, as money mills that funnel money to top managers, stockholders, and other investors, and they have fashioned the management control and reporting instruments, accordingly, even if . . . that toolkit leads to underperformance and perhaps to the eventual extinction of the firm, primarily at the expense of non-management employees and workers.”13 “To their credit, HBS never fully bought into the scientific method that emerged in the 1960s at places like Carnegie Mellon,” says Locke, echoing Spender. “They always had this case method. But HBS didn’t try to do anything about what I call the institutionalization of managerialism. Why? Because that was where it got institutionalized, the whole idea of creating a class of people to run the world.

The Power Makers
by Maury Klein
Published 26 May 2008

Apart from their immediate significance, these laws of inverse squares marked the beginning of quantitative work in electricity and magnetism. Coulomb did not take the next step of speculating that the two forces might in fact be one and the same; that insight would not appear for many more decades. However, he brought to physics the importance of mathematical measurement as part of the scientific method. In this respect he pointed the way to the crucial contributions of James Clerk Maxwell in the next century.25 By 1800 these men and others too numerous to mention had advanced electricity from a curiosity of nature to a growing field of scientific study. Yet no one knew what it was—the two-fluids-versus-one-fluid debate still raged— and no practical application had come from the work other than the lightning rod.

I Am Charlotte Simmons: A Novel
by Tom Wolfe
Published 9 Nov 2004

Did you by any chance think the assignment was to disprove the theory of evolution in fifteen to twenty pages?" The irony cut her to the quick. "No, sir." She could barely make her voice rise above a gasp. "The assignment," he continued, "was to assess the theory with regard to the conventional requirements of the scientific method. Perhaps you remember our discussing the fact that in science, no theory merits consideration unless you can provide a set of contraindications, which, if true, would prove it wrong." "Yes, sir," mumbled Charlotte. "From this standpoint," said Mr. Starling, "evolution has to be considered as a special case.

Nourishing Traditions: The Cookbook That Challenges Politically Correct Nutrition and The...
by Sally Fallon , Pat Connolly and Mary G. Enig, Phd.
Published 14 May 1995

With its system of facial diagnosis and treatment based upon correspondences of specific foods to various organs and conditions, it has many similarities to the medieval doctrine of the four humors, which has recently enjoyed something of a resurgence in Europe. Such intuitive and noninvasive methods can be very useful to the medical practitioner, especially when combined with more orthodox diagnostic techniques that are grounded in the scientific method. According to the macrobiotic system, sugar is the most yin food, followed by fruit juices, honey, tropical fruits, acid fruits, dairy products and vegetables of the nightshade family; pork is the most yang food, followed by beef, game, poultry, eggs and fish. Vegetables and legumes are slightly yin while grains are slightly yang.

Blue Mars
by Kim Stanley Robinson
Published 23 Oct 2010

As Sax wandered on, half listening to the conversations he passed, he was struck again by the apolitical nature of most scientists and technicians. There was something about politics they were allergic to, and he felt it as well, he had to admit it. Politics was irreducibly subjective and compromised, a process that went entirely against the grain of the scientific method. Was that true? These feelings and prejudices were subjective themselves. One could try to regard politics as a kind of science— a long series of experiments in communal living, say, with all the data consistently contaminated. Thus people hypothesized a system of governance, lived under it, examined how they felt about it, then changed the system and tried again.

Europe: A History
by Norman Davies
Published 1 Jan 1996

The philosophy of the Enlightenment was primarily concerned with epistemology, that is, the theory of knowledge—or how we know what we know. Here, the basis for debate was supplied by three Britons: the Englishman John Locke (1632–1704), the Irishman Bishop George Berkeley (1685–1753), and the Scotsman David Hume (1711–76), sometime secretary of the British Embassy in Paris. As empiricists, they all accepted that the scientific method of observation and deduction should be applied to human affairs, and hence the precept of their contemporary, Alexander Pope: Know then thyself, presume not God to scan, The proper study of mankind is Man.4 Locke’s famous Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690) advanced the proposition that the human mind is blank at birth—a tabula rasa.

…

The social sciences—psychology, economics, sociology, political science— exerted a profound effect on all the older disciplines. Perhaps the most fruitful alternatives to the arid trends of the time, however, were supplied by the Austrian-born Karl Popper (1902–94). Popper’s Logic of Scientific Discovery (1934) overturned reigning assumptions about the scientific method. He argued, after Einstein’s example, that no knowledge was absolute or permanent, and that hypotheses were best established by searching for proof of their wrong-headedness. His Poverty of Historicism (1957) demolished the pretensions of social science to formulate laws governing historical development.

Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach
by Stuart Russell and Peter Norvig
Published 14 Jul 2019

Human brain power has not changed much in thousands of years, whereas supercomputers have improved from megaFLOPs in the 1960s to gigaFLOPs in the 1980s, teraFLOPs in the 1990s, petaFLOPs in 2008, and exaFLOPs in 2018 (1 exaFLOP = 1018 floating point operations per second). 1.2.5Psychology •How do humans and animals think and act? The origins of scientific psychology are usually traced to the work of the German physicist Hermann von Helmholtz (1821–1894) and his student Wilhelm Wundt (1832–1920). Helmholtz applied the scientific method to the study of human vision, and his Handbook of Physiological Optics has been described as “the single most important treatise on the physics and physiology of human vision” (Nalwa, 1993, p.15). In 1879, Wundt opened the first laboratory of experimental psychology, at the University of Leipzig.

…

These are just a few examples of artificial intelligence systems that exist today. Not magic or science fiction—but rather science, engineering, and mathematics, to which this book provides an introduction. 1.5 Risks and Benefits of AI Francis Bacon, a philosopher credited with creating the scientific method, noted in The Wisdom of the Ancients (1609) that the “mechanical arts are of ambiguous use, serving as well for hurt as for remedy.” As AI plays an increasingly important role in the economic, social, scientific, medical, financial, and military spheres, we would do well to consider the hurts and remedies—in modern parlance, the risks and benefits—that it can bring.

Seveneves
by Neal Stephenson
Published 19 May 2015

It was purely an intellectual curiosity and not at all a factor in real people’s lives: a thing Kath Two had heard of, like rabies or Watergate, and she was fascinated to find it stirring in her own mind here of all places. But that was only a passing notion. Presently her Survey mind kicked in and subsumed all under the scientific method. Here they were at a TerReForm outpost. Many thousands of these existed. Some were huddles of tents presaging more permanent works. Some, like this one, had been around for decades, others for centuries. Some were now abandoned, having served their purpose, and others had become nuclei of RIZes, campuses for gimmicky schools, prison camps, or scientific foundations.

Theory and Practice of Group Psychotherapy
by Irvin D. Yalom and Molyn Leszcz
Published 1 Jan 1967

Their texts are as well written, their optimism as unbridled, and their reported results as impressive as those of contemporary practitioners. Question: why have other health-care fields left treatment of psychological disturbance so far behind? Answer: because they have applied the principles of the scientific method. Without a rigorous research base, the psychotherapists of today who are enthusiastic about current treatments are tragically similar to the hydrotherapists and lobotomists of yesteryear. As long as we do not test basic principles and treatment outcomes with scientific rigor, our field remains at the mercy of passing fads and fashions.

The Fountainhead
by Ayn Rand
Published 1 Jan 1943

He hired a sensitive poet to cover baseball games. He hired an art expert to handle financial news. He got a socialist to defend factory owners and a conservative to champion labor. He forced an atheist to write on the glories of religion. He made a disciplined scientist proclaim the superiority of mystical intuition over the scientific method. He gave a great symphony conductor a munificent yearly income, for no work at all, on the sole condition that he never conduct an orchestra again. Some of these men had refused, at first. But they surrendered when they found themselves on the edge of bankruptcy through a series of untraceable circumstances within a few years.

The Pursuit of Power: Europe, 1815-1914
by Richard J. Evans
Published 31 Aug 2016

Positivism, the doctrine developed by Auguste Comte in the 1840s, and made available in English in his major work A General View of Positivism, (1865), held that scientific observation was the only legitimate basis for action. A priori beliefs had to be jettisoned; only what could be seen and verified was true. If the scientific method was applied to every discipline, then all the facts would be known about everything. History, for example, should, in the view of Lord Acton, Regius Professor of Modern History at Cambridge University from 1895 to 1902, satisfy ‘the scientific demand for completeness and certainty’. It was widely thought that history had been established as a science by Leopold von Ranke, and history professors everywhere emphasized the application of standard methods of source criticism in order to establish the authenticity of the documents on which historians now began to base their work.

The Food Lab: Better Home Cooking Through Science
by J. Kenji López-Alt
Published 20 Sep 2015

It’s not about lab coats and safety goggles, and it’s definitely not about trying to make yourself sound fancy. Science is not an end in and of itself, but a path. It’s a method to help you discover the underlying order of the world around you and to use those discoveries to help you predict how things will behave in the future. The scientific method is based on making observations, keeping track of those observations, coming up with hypotheses to explain those observations, and then performing tests designed to disprove those hypotheses. If, despite your hardest, most sincere efforts, you can’t manage to disprove the hypotheses, then you can say with a pretty good deal of certainty that your hypotheses are true.

Ashes to Ashes: America's Hundred-Year Cigarette War, the Public Health, and the Unabashed Triumph of Philip Morris
by Richard Kluger
Published 1 Jan 1996

It had neither money nor power to challenge the tobacco interests, and its chairman, former advertising executive Emerson Foote, a convert to the embryonic anticigarette cause, was more well-meaning than effectual. Barron’s, the pro-business financial weekly, used the first anniversary of the Surgeon General’s report as the occasion to charge that Surgeon General Terry had “made a mockery of the scientific method” and to belittle Foote as a mere ex-huckster and turncoat fanatic. The only national organization effectively involved in combating the smoking peril, the American Cancer Society, pointedly declined to invest its high standing in the Interagency Council. Lane W. Adams, for twenty-three years the executive director of the ACS, conceded in retrospect that the cancer society was not then prepared to subordinate its leadership role.

Pandora's Star
by Peter F. Hamilton
Published 2 Mar 2004

The amount of produce that could be grown by a motile doubled within a decade. Seeing the possibility of the concept, the immotiles began to experiment, studying how the plants grew, what soils were best. MorningLightMountain itself was the one who worked out cross-pollination as a method of increasing yield and breeding new varieties. It was the start of the scientific method, and all that implied. MorningLightMountain amalgamated its twenty-ninth immotile a decade after it began sowing crops. Twenty years later, a thousand years after it had begun its original singleton life, the number of connected units in the group reached forty, an unheard-of rate of expansion.

The Coming Plague: Newly Emerging Diseases in a World Out of Balance
by Laurie Garrett
Published 31 Oct 1994

They all have severe weight loss—the most severe we have ever seen in this hospital in adults.” Kidenya, Tkimalenka, and the hospital’s stout surgeon, Clint Nyamuryekunge, scoured medical records for clues. A recent graduate of Muhimbili Medical School, Nyamuryekunge was convinced that the puzzle could be solved using the scientific method. As bombastic and aggressive as Kidenya was discreet, Nyamuryekunge argued that all they needed was a good pool of plague patients to compare with a group of normal venereal disease patients. Kidenya contacted the directors of other hospitals in the Kagera region—a difficult procedure in an area with no telephone service.

The Making of the Atomic Bomb
by Richard Rhodes
Published 17 Sep 2012

“Make it seem inevitable,” Louis Pasteur used to advise his students when they prepared to write up their discoveries. But it was. To wish that it might have been ignored or suppressed is barbarous. “Knowledge,” Niels Bohr once noted, “is itself the basis for civilization.” You cannot have the one without the other; the one depends upon the other. Nor can you have only benevolent knowledge; the scientific method doesn’t filter for benevolence. Knowledge has consequences, not always intended, not always comfortable, not always welcome. The earth revolves around the sun, not the sun around the earth. “It is a profound and necessary truth,” Robert Oppenheimer would say, “that the deep things in science are not found because they are useful; they are found because it was possible to find them.”

Reamde
by Neal Stephenson
Published 19 Sep 2011

Possibly because of devastating experiences earlier in her life, she was some kind of a psychopath, a born killer; the comfortable circumstances under which she’d been living until a week ago had made it possible for this to go unnoticed, but now stress was bringing it out. She considered hypothesis 3 to be quite unlikely, since she didn’t feel the least bit psychopathic, but included it in the list out of respect for the scientific method. One thing had certainly changed, though: she had fought back and she had eliminated one of these guys. What was to say she couldn’t do it again? The answer came to her immediately: after they had landed, Jones had been about to kill her. She had saved her life only by offering herself as a hostage: a resource by which something might be extorted from Uncle Richard.

Quicksilver
by Neal Stephenson
Published 9 Sep 2004

It started to come out in the twentieth century that Newton had devoted more of his time and energy to alchemy during his career than he had devoted to mathematical physics. That’s a fact that is obvious enough if you look at his papers — he made no particular effort to conceal this. But it was sort of suppressed a little bit during the Enlightenment and Victorian era, when people didn’t know what to make of it. They wanted to view Newton as this paragon of the scientific method, and it was difficult to fit alchemy into that structure. The view of more modern scholarship is that alchemy was all over the place. Robert Boyle was heavily involved into it; John Locke was involved in it; Newton of course; and quite a few of these other people. They didn’t really observe a clean distinction between alchemy and what we now think of as the modern practice of science.

The Codebreakers: The Comprehensive History of Secret Communication From Ancient Times to the Internet
by David Kahn
Published 1 Feb 1963

The statements of cryptanalysis, whose denial would not be self-contradictory, are synthetic. It might even be said that cryptography deals with noumena, cryptanalysis with phenomena. The empirical nature of cryptanalysis appears in its operations. These consist of the four steps of what is commonly called the “scientific method,” which scientists apply in attacking problems in the natural sciences. They are: analysis (such as counting the letters), hypothesis (x might be e), prediction (if x is e, then some plaintext possibilities should emerge), and verification (they do) or refutation (they don’t, so x is probably not e), either case starting a new chain of reasoning.