Cosmic Ray Mitigation

I do enjoy a good pun.

I have mentioned previously that I am opposed to manned space exploration as it now exists, but am absolutely in favor of continued research (of a reasonable magnitude relative to that in other areas, as robotic exploration is advancing quickly) since my objections are of a practical nature. This is especially true because often there are unintended applications of such study. It occurred to me this morning that perhaps one of the most significant crossover discoveries might come from one possible technique to mitigate the effects of long term cosmic ray exposure: cure cancer. Even this manned space travel skeptic would have a tough time arguing against that.

The Supreme Consensus

The first U.S. penny touted science

I've posted about how to increase the influence of science in government previously but it was a complete overhaul of our entire democracy, so wanted to explore less drastic alternatives. Modeled on the supreme court, scientists would be appointed to assess the validity of laws, which would be required to cite research. If such research weren't available metrics and studies to gauge the impact of laws would need to be outlined, along with the necessary funding to implement them. An important detail is that this is not necessarily an all or nothing judgement in many cases, as proper risk management requires partial measures be taken in the face of insufficient evidence in order to serve as a hedge. This could be quite far-reaching. For example, a farm bill could be ruled unscientific because it does nothing to address climate change impacts. Inaction is not a way to circumvent reality.

Of course having a small number of experts opens itself up to the same personal failings the Supreme Court suffers from. A better method would be to utilize all those qualified in the relevant fields, possibly weighted by expertise, to provide a broader base. An approach the Supreme Court itself could benefit from and one that was at the core of my previous posting.

Science Defamation

Defamation laws cover intentional, malicious falsehoods spread against an individual or institution. I would like to see this concept widened to include scientific consensuses (where there is a well established one, of course). I frequently run across intentional misrepresentations of the degree of debate in the scientific community on many issues, such as global warming, evolution, vaccination, alternative medicine, and abstinence only. The malicious requirement would protect those bringing up valid new hypotheses and instead target attempts to warp the very meaning of scientific evidence. That sort of behavior should be unacceptable from a public figure. A celebrity or lawmaker spouting disproven theories about vaccines should hold the same place in free speech law as shouting fire in a crowded theatre; it's leading to entirely preventable deaths.

Laypeople Cannot Decide for Themselves

The belief that a layperson can examine the scientific evidence and decide for himself is very common and completely wrongheaded. A layperson simply does not have the body of experience to correctly interpret evidence in technical fields consistently. I heard an interview with Stephen Barrett, a retired doctor who now runs the medical fallacy tracking website Quackwatch, who has many examples of people coming to the wrong conclusion using this approach. The right method is to find

credible experts to evaluate evidence for you. This is why a consensus of trained professionals should carry weight. The lone decrier can be right, but almost always isn't. With complex issues, the trend is that over time, the evidence grows stronger if there is a real phenomenon. Take ghosts as a counter example: more than a hundred years of people looking and the state of the evidence is essentially unchanged. Finding one crank scientist who believes in them doesn't count for a whole lot.

I wonder if it is arrogance or simply ignorance that lies behind this notion. Well, first off the layperson is not examining the evidence. Take medical research as an example. To look at the raw studies (just getting the data would be a lot of work) he would need a very good working knowledge of statistics to evaluate the results as well as an understanding of the relevant medicine to judge the assumptions of the experimental structure. A layperson cannot possess all this knowledge by definition. If he did, he'd be an expert. That means that a layperson claiming to be judging the evidence is actually using other people's interpretations of that evidence. If he's not aware of that it's ignorance: check. Once you're at that stage, who you choose to interpret facts for you becomes critically important. Depending on your level of knowledge, you may not have the skill set to even make that decision with any certainty. It is of course true that minority opinions among a body of experts can prove ultimately correct, but the overwhelming majority of the time they won't. For a layperson to think that he can spot those few times more accurately than the trained professionals who specialize in that field is absurd. It makes an assumption that the layperson's largely uninformed opinion is more valuable, allowing him to dismiss the judgements of others. Since arrogance is all about thinking that your abilities trump those of others you have never met (therefore being a form of bigotry), I would argue it fits in this case as well. Arrogance: check.

What about the implications of all this? Does it mean that a layperson is never really entitled to an opinion of their own about technical matters? I guess it depends how you define "technical". If you define it as a complex field that requires a lot of cumulative knowledge, the I guess I'd have to say "yes", a layperson can never have a valid independent opinion. The key phrases I've used in this posting are "for himself", "of their own", and "independent". One option is to simply defer to the opinion of the trained community that studies that subject. You can have a very valid opinion as to the state of consensus within that community, but that is something that's comparatively easy to evaluate. Alternately, the layperson could undertake the study required to become an expert. That would give him an equal voice, however, not a definitive one. The next best thing would be for a layperson to run his interpretations past actual experts in the field. When a layperson rejects the judgments of those significantly more knowledgeable in his area of interest is when there's a problem.

The Evolution of Lines

Good evening, ladies and gentlemen...

Bang Goes the Theory had a segment using the repeated freehand tracing of a single line to illustrate some of the basic mechanisms of evolution. It lacked any selective pressure, so I whipped up a program to add some. I started with ten perfectly straight lines, each of which had ten offspring with a small chance of containing replication errors (1% to shift each pixel one place right or left). From that pool of one hundred, I then chose the ten that most resembled my target shape and repeated the process. To keep it simple, I didn't require the line be continuous (in fact, it's not technically a line as there's only one pixel for each vertical position on the image). I used the sum of the horizontal distance squared for each pixel from it's target x value as a measure of fitness. You may recognize the final shape, which took 2,200 generations to settle upon. Its efficiency could be increased dramatically as the algorithm employed was crude.

This is a lot less involved (asexual reproduction for a start) than many genetic algorithms I've written, but it's much less abstract.