Science can be saved by returning to its classical roots Irreducible by Federico Faggin Reviewed
Physicist and microchip inventor Federico Faggin is an open unabashed enthusiastic panpsychist. Any number of such people are found in the sandal-shod organic trail-mix crowd, the sort who willingly live in Ithaca, NY.
Faggin displays no shades of this in his Irreducible: Consciousness, Life, Computers, And Human Nature. His take is rooted in physics, by route of a profound spiritual experience. It was in thinking how to reconcile this experience with physics that he came to his theory.
You see a drug commercial on TV and are impressed by the cavorting of the actors. You want to cavort. So you go to the doctor and ask him if Profitol is right for you. You ask him the chance the pill will let you cavort. He won’t tell you. He can’t tell you.
What he can tell you is that he read about an experiment using the pill, and that if the “null hypothesis” comparing that pill to another pill was true, the probability of seeing data that was not seen in the experiment was pretty low.
A Simple Argument Proving You Must Not Trust Standard Scientific Evidence. 🧵
"New research shows..." No more wee Ps!
Here is pictorial proof of why you must distrust “research shows” science:
What a z-value is isn’t important for us. The +/-2 is because (for those who don’t know) z-values greater or equal to this, in absolute value, are awarded the magical distinction of significance. That is possession of a wee P; a p-value less than the magic number.
The magic number is known by every practicing scientist,.
Once you can announce a wee P, fame and glory, in the scientific sense, are yours. And they are easy to get, easy to create. It’s child’s play to edge your models up those cliffs and into the Land of Mystical |z|≥1.96.
Everything, Science says, will kill you or ill you. Or cure you. Why? Partly because government funding drives too much science. But more because of a lingering pagan belief in probability as cause.🧵
Pop open a spreadsheet and enter everything you have ever ate, when, and what quantities. Include all chemicals in the ingredients, and their amounts. Be specific: this is Science.
Do this for every event ever in your life. Same with every malady, disease, concern, or death.
All do this and send me the data. Next we'll do standard statistics on this data.
The number of “significant” correlations we will uncover with your sicknesses, or deaths, to the items in the data will be wondrous to behold.
The Enormous Rotten Egg Of Government-Funded Science Has Turned Men Weak
Recall first that stereotypes are almost always true, though their ascribed causes can be wrong.🧵
A passage from The Enormous Egg, showing manly arguments in science, a then-common trope.
Scientists then often were portrayed as genius eccentrics, solving problems by magic. Eccentric but saintly, like in The Day the Earth Stood Still, where scientist assembles top minds to hear space warning.