Language Corrections

Essentially PC [Politic Correctness] is a correction from language that developed in an oppressive context and achieved mainstream usage, Doublespeak must be corrected in order to understand what is really being said. Both concepts can be said to use euphemism as their mechanism, but there's an important distinction. PC uses value neutral terms to replace inherently and unfairly derogatory ones. Doublespeak uses ironic terms to hide their motives and cynically cast them as the opposite. If I speak of sex workers rather than "whores" it is not because I am trying to hide any truth about them. It is that the "acceptable" term holds no deeper truth and only insult. If I speak of "creative bookkeeping" rather than theft, I am trying to hide or minimize guilt. @absurdistwords

The Razor

Generations of writers opined vaguely that 'simple hypotheses are more plausible' without giving any logical reason for it. We suggest that this should be turned around: we should say rather that 'more plausible hypotheses tend to be simpler'. An hypothesis that we consider simpler is one that has fewer equally plausible alternatives. (p.606)

Actual scientific practice does not really obey Ockham's razor, either in its previous 'simplicity' form or in our revised 'plausibility' form. As so many of us have deplored, the attractive new hypothesis or model, which accounts for the facts in such a neat, plausible way that you want to believe it at once, is usually pooh-poohed by the official Establishment in favor of some drab, complicated, uninteresting one; or, if necessary, in favor of no alternative at all. The progress of science is carried forward mostly by the few fundamental dissenting innovators, such as Copernicus, Galileo, Newton, Laplace, Darwin, Mendel, Pasteur, Boltzmann, Einstein, Wegener, Jeffreys – all of whom had to undergo this initial rejection and attack. In the cases of Galileo, Laplace, and Darwin, these attacks continued for more than a century after their deaths. This is not because their new hypotheses were faulty – quite the contrary – but because this is part of the sociology of science (and, indeed, of all scholarship). In any field, the Establishment is seldom in pursuit of the truth, because it is composed of those who sincerely believe that they are already in possession of it. Progress is delayed also by another aspect of this. Scholars who failed to heed the teachings of William of Ockham about issues amenable to reason and issues amenable only to faith, were – and still are – doomed to a lifetime of generating nonsense. (p.613) Probability Theory, The Logic of Science, E.T.Jaynes

Reifying Ghosts

Belief in the existence of 'stochastic processes' in the real world; i.e. that the property of being 'stochastic' rather than 'deterministic' is a real physical property of a process, that exists independently of human information, is another example of the mind projection fallacy: attributing one's own ignorance to Nature instead. The current literature of probability theory is full of claims to the effect that a 'Gaussian random process' is fully determined by its first and second moments. If it were made clear that this is only the defining property for an abstract mathematical model, there could be no objection to this; but it is always presented in verbiage that implies that one is describing an objectively true property of a real physical process. To one who believes such a thing literally, there could be no motivation to investigate the causes more deeply than noting the first and second moments, and so the real processes at work might never be discovered. (p.506) Probability Theory, The Logic of Science, E.T.Jaynes

scientific discovery is not a one-step process

To counter this universal tendency of the untrained mind to see causal relations and trends where none exist, responsible science requires a very skeptical attitude, which demands cogent evidence for an effect; particularly one which has captured the popular imagination. Thus we can easily understand and sympathize with the orthodox conservatism in accepting new effects. There is another side to this; skepticism can be carried too far. The orthodox bias against a real effect does help to hold irresponsibility in check, but today it is also preventing recognition of effects that are real and important. 

The history of science offers many examples of important discoveries that had their origin in the perception of someone who saw a small unexpected thing in his data, that an orthodox significance test would have dismissed as a random error. Jeffreys (1939, p. 321) notes that there has never been a time in the history of gravitational theory when an orthodox significance test, which takes no note of alternatives, would not have rejected Newton's law and left us with no law at all. Nevertheless, Newton's law did lead to constant improvements in the accuracy of our accounting of the motions of the moon and planets for centuries, and it was only when an alternative (Einstein's law) had been stated fully enough to make very accurate known predictions of its own that a rational person could have thought of abandoning Newton's law. The discovery of argon by Lord Rayleigh and of cosmic rays by Victor Hess are examples that come to mind immediately. Of course, they did not jump to sweeping conclusions from a single observation, as do the disaster-mongers; rather, they used the single surprising observation to motivate a careful investigation that culminated in overwhelming evidence for the new phenomenon. 

It is fortunate that physicists and astronomers do not, in practice, use orthodox significance tests; their own innate common sense is a safer and more powerful reasoning tool. In other fields we must wonder how many important discoveries, particularly in medicine, have been prevented by editorial policies which refuse to publish that necessary first evidence for some effect, because the one data set that the researcher was able to obtain did not quite achieve an arbitrarily imposed significance level in an orthodox test. This could well defeat the whole purpose of scientific publication; for the cumulative evidence of three or four such data sets might have yielded overwhelming evidence for the effect. Yet this evidence may never be found unless the first data set can manage to get published. How can editors recognize that scientific discovery is not a one-step process, but a many step one, without thereby releasing a new avalanche of irresponsible, sensational publicity seekers? The problem is genuinely difficult, and we do not pretend to know the full answer. (p.504ff) Probability Theory, The Logic of Science, E.T.Jaynes

Perennial Madness

Man is surely mad. He cannot make a worm; yet he makes Gods by the dozen -- Montaigne