A book in my library The Seven Secrets of How to Think Like a Rocket Scientist rings true in our time of SAR-COV-2 pandemic when I encounter not only blatant science deniers, along with the climate deniers but just the standard disinformation.
With a hard science background, I remember a life-changing experience.
In the mid-1970s the state of the art in computing on our experiment was our PDP-15. A wonderful 18-bit machine. Ours had an analog-to-digital converter that tool signals from the experiment and converted that to digital data. From there that time-series data were input to a Fast Fourier Transform algorithm written in FOCAL. The FFT took the digital samples from the A2D converter, which sampled analog signals from the experiment and produce the signal's spectrum so we could see the physical aspects of what was going on.
With that data, assessments could be made about experimental data matching the theoretical conjectures. I was an experimentalist and had office mates who were theorists. My claim to fame in those days was the development of the FFT.
But before the automaton of the signal processing, we used a Tektronix Oscilloscope and a Polaroid camera to take picture of the events happening on the experiment.
With a hand full of pictures, we'd trot down to the Principle Investigator's office, who was Nobel Laurate, and show him of findings. His first words would also be nice work boys (there were rarely women in our domain in 1975), go back and get me first more. When we returned with 5 more polaroids, he'd say nice work, now take everything apart and run it all again and being me back five more. With that down and back to his office, he'd say really good work, now write up how to assemble all the list of equipment and sensors, and I'll send that to a colleague in Maryland, and he'll see if he can repeat your work.
When those pictures came back positive for the event he'd say more good work, now write up your letter to Physics Review Letters and if the readers don't crap all over your conjecture come back to my office, you may be on to something. But before you do that, bring in your theorist buddies and have them explain WHY you should be seeing what you're now seeing, and having been confirmed others are seeing it as well.
When I Hear Anyone Make Any Statement About Anything Beyond the Butt Simple Obvious
When I hear statements about anything from particle physics, to agile software development, to Covid Vaccines, to landing on Mars - that 1970's laboratory training comes to mind with the simplest of all questions...
You Got Any Evidence for Your Claim, Evidence That Someone Else, Beside You Can Confirm?
It doesn't have to be double-blind peer-reviewed, but can you produce any tangible evidentiary materials (which is the fancy science and contractual term) that support the claim? being made? No?, then STFU!
Our world is full of unsubstantiated claims about all kinds of things. Missing principles on which to make those claims. Missing data to support the claim to some reasonable statistical confidence. By the way, the number of samples needed to produce an 80% confidence. Clopper-Pearson is the first place to start to answer that question.
So when you anything about anything ask yourself - any evidence? Then ask is this evidence credible? Then what level of credibility is it?
This is applicable to software development methods, business process improvement methods, financial forecasting, weather forecasting all the way to Deep Inelastic Scattering of Neutrinos at the Stanford Linear Accelerator.
Evidence Talks, BS Walks
Here are some useful BS detectors resources, but start with Carl Sagan's Baloney Detection Kit, from his book The Demon-Haunted World. which should mandatory reading for every teenager and adult in the nation, since we're now in the conspiracy theory-based world.
- "Deeper into Bullshit," G. A. Cohen
- "How to Improve the use of Metrics," Tibor Braun, Nature, Vol 465, 17, June 2010
- "On Bullshit," Harry Frankfurt, Princeton University Press, 2005
- "On the reception and detection of pseudo-profound bullshit," Gordon Pennycook, James Allan Cheyne, Nathaniel Barr, and Derek J. Kowhlet, Judgement and Decision Making, Vol. 10, No. 6, November 2015, pp. 549-563
- "Storks Deliver Babies (p=0.008)," Robert Matthews, Teaching Statistics, Volume 22, Number 2, Summer 2000.
- Logically Fallacious: The Ultimate Collection of Over 300 Logical Fallacies, Bo Bennett, Archieboy Holdings, LLC, April 2015.
- Extraordinary Popular Delusions, Charles Mackay, Dover Publications, 2016.
- DIB Guide: Detecting Agile BS
