Nat Eng Updates it's advice on Studland to answer criticisms

[JumbleDuck]

Science has always been in trouble. But it's a process, so you keep hammering away at it. And hope you are on the right side of the argument (eventually).

True, but it's particularly bad nowadays because the financial imperative to publish means that all sorts of rubbish makes it into print. The problem is worst in the pseudosciences like psychology which have a hard enough time with concept of "data" in the first place.

 

[dgadee]

True, but it's particularly bad nowadays because the financial imperative to publish means that all sorts of rubbish makes it into print. The problem is worst in the pseudosciences like psychology which have a hard enough time with concept of "data" in the first place.

You should read artificial intelligence publications from the 1980s to now. That's one source of rubbish.

 

[Tranona]

True, but it's particularly bad nowadays because the financial imperative to publish means that all sorts of rubbish makes it into print. The problem is worst in the pseudosciences like psychology which have a hard enough time with concept of "data" in the first place.

When I retired I cleared out all my files of articles that underpinned my studies. Although I was a late starter (first degree at 36!) the majority of the seminal works were from the 50s through to the 70s - a golden era for serious management research - bit like boats really! Re reading some of them brought home to me the sheer quality of thought compared with the stuff my research students were exposed to and had to use to ensure their research and subsequent articles got published even in the lowliest of journals. The depressing thing is that the teaching side is now dominated by people who got there because they have profited from that system but tend to lack any connection with the real world.

I have a few of the influential books from the period in the bookshelf above to remind me of those days although don't want to depress myself by opening them, or is it because I might find them not so impressive from 30 years' distance.

 

[AntarcticPilot]

Science has always been in trouble. But it's a process, so you keep hammering away at it. And hope you are on the right side of the argument (eventually).

In the long run, it's self-correcting. As Einstein is said to have said, if it's wrong, then your plane don't fly! But the history of science is littered with incorrect hypotheses that were dead-ends. Aether theory, Neptunism, phlogiston, and many more. I wouldn't be surprised to hear that dark matter and/or dark energy turn out the same way, but at the moment they're the best explanation of observations. Human nature being what it is, we sometimes have to wait for a new generation to come along - look at the history of the translation of Linear B! But in the end, incorrect science is disproved, because it becomes increasingly obvious that it doesn't fit later observations.

 

[dom]

That brings back happy (and not so happy) memories of what constitutes good data in research in the social sciences and particularly management. There were those who longed for data to be in numerical form as it was then deemed "hard" and "impartial" because it could be analysed and tested statistically. The difficulty with much of the research that NE prefers is that reliable hard data is difficult or impossible to obtain so is reliant on softer kinds of data which by their very nature are difficult to validate and therefore much more open to selectivity.

So NGM's crap observations of both anchor damage and seahorse activity are accepted but Marlyspyke's photographic evidence (supported observations from many knowledgeable individuals) even though supported by some "hard" numerical data is not. Why? because it does not support the preferred narrative.

That's the nub of it - the interface between natural and social sciences. The question here, while deceptively simple, is complicated by none of the protagonists being passive scientific observers, rather active participants in the Studland ecosystem: seahorse protectors, anchoring vessels, and the UK Government which has set itself ambitious carbon goals.

Many soft correlations can be observed in this complex tapestry, opening the temptation for each party to opportunistically infer causalities using systems of generalisation, heuristics, moral concepts, political goals, etc. At heart almost nobody is truly interested in the science, with almost everyone tempted to cherry-pick the arguments that suit their cause. And deep down everyone knows these are the rules.

This is of course a well-known problem in social sciences and finance, where conscious and subconscious cognitive manipulative processes enable the participant/observer‘s interpretation of the subjective reality to progressively differ from an unbiased interpretation of the objective facts. As a consequence of which, in this case, while the dependent variable here is seagrass, nobody can even agree what the independent variables should be, let alone on how to dispassionately determine the underlying correlations, causations, and serial correlations required to underpin a proper scientific analysis.

This is why OldHarry and MarlynSpyke have such done a great job in flushing Nature England out of the woodwork by forcing the debate back onto harder scientific grounds.

For NE know well that if they are seen to be ‘making it up’, large corporate interests including mining, fossil fuels, steel, cement, etc., will leap at the chance of playing the ‘make believe’ science game. And so, we see NE rubbing their chin, recognising the inherent complexities and biases here, and what seems like signaling a tactical retreat back to the more defendable lines of hard science.

Whatever the political outcome in Studland, OldHarry and MarlynSpyke have done an amazing job and should be commended for that.

 

[DJE]

Those carbon goals either are or will become strong drivers of the conservation industry. Stopping carbon emissions is hard; direct air capture of carbon is hard; offsetting of carbon emissions is much easier. So there will be a lot of pressure to make the offsetting numbers look better in any way they can. "Look we've banned anchoring so the seagrass must now be increasing so we can offset some of our carbon emissions." Regardless of the actual effect on carbon dioxide concentration in the atmosphere.

 

[JumbleDuck]

I wouldn't be surprised to hear that dark matter and/or dark energy turn out the same way, but at the moment they're the best explanation of observations.

The trouble is that they aren't much explanation at all: "There is some stuff and energy around which we can't see and can't detect because it doesn't interact with the normal universe except sometimes when t intereacts just enough to stop our sums going wrong" all sounds a bit epicylic to me.[1] But hey, I'm not a cosmologist and they seem as sure about it as any science discipline does up to the paradigm shift ...

[1] And to be fair, the epicyclists did discover Fourier series by mistake.

 

[penfold]

The trouble is that they aren't much explanation at all: "There is some stuff and energy around which we can't see and can't detect because it doesn't interact with the normal universe except sometimes when t intereacts just enough to stop our sums going wrong" all sounds a bit epicylic to me.[1] But hey, I'm not a cosmologist and they seem as sure about it as any science discipline does up to the paradigm shift ...

[1] And to be fair, the epicyclists did discover Fourier series by mistake.

LNT theory of health physics has survived 8 decades despite evidence Muller fudged the lot because he was fanatically against nuclear weapons; this has real everyday consequences, makes nuclear power and industrial/medical applications of isotopes much more expensive than need be. That's science which can be objectively measured, not astrophysics/cosmology where theory often leads measurement by decades.

 

[penfold]

Now we have beer commercials about the bloody seagrass.