EPA dismisses half of its scientific advisers on key board
washingtonpost.com
washingtonpost.com
Some of us HN readers, call ourselves Computer Scientists, some Software Engineers, some are other type of scientists. I believe that for many HN readers, science is a core component of who we are, professionally, and of what we do, or at the very least, we understand the vital importance of rigor in science.
We should collectively be extremely concerned that the EPA administration appears to be attacking the scientific method and replacing it with what I fear will become pseudoscience.
It is difficult for me to understand why this article has not received more attention and prominence on HN. Surely this is important to many of HN readers, even if it's not a technical article?
My main point stands, even if my appeal to Computer Scientists was wrong.
Computer science is science.
The essence of science is the scientific method - using experiments to zone in on the truth.
http://www.iep.utm.edu/pop-sci/
"Partially in response to worries such as these, the logical empiricists’ later work abandons the verifiability criterion of meaning and instead emphasizes the importance of the empirical confirmation of scientific theories. Popper, however, argues that verification and confirmation played no role in formulating a satisfactory criterion of demarcation. Instead, Popper proposes that scientific theories are characterized by being bold in two related ways. First, scientific theories regularly disagree with accepted views of the world based on common sense or previous theoretical commitments. To an uneducated observer, for example, it may seem obvious that Earth is stationary, while the sun moves rapidly around it. However, Copernicus posited that Earth in fact revolved around the sun. In a similar way, it does not seem as though a tree and a human share a common ancestor, but this is what Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection claims. As Popper notes, however, this sort of boldness is not unique to scientific theories, since most mythological and metaphysical theories also make bold, counterintuitive claims about the nature of reality. For example, the accounts of world creation provided by various religions would count as bold in this sense, but this does not mean that they thereby count as scientific theories.
With this in mind, he goes on argue that scientific theories are distinguished from non-scientific theories by a second sort of boldness: they make testable claims that future observations might reveal to be false. This boldness thus amounts to a willingness to take a risk of being wrong. On Popper’s view, scientists investigating a theory make repeated, honest attempts to falsify the theory, whereas adherents of pseudoscientific or metaphysical theories routinely take measures to make the observed reality fit the predictions of the theory. Popper describes his proposal as follows:@
Thus my proposal was, and is, that it is this second boldness, together with the readiness to look for tests and refutations, which distinguished “empirical” science from non-science, and especially from pre-scientific myths and metaphysics. (1974, pp. 980-981)
In other places, Popper calls attention to the fact that scientific theories are characterized by possessing potential falsifiers—that is, that they make claims about the world that might be discovered to be false. If these claims are, in fact, found to be false, then the theory as a whole is said to be falsified. Non-scientific theories, by contrast, do not have any such potential falsifiers—there is literally no possible observation that could serve to falsify these theories."
From this perspective you are confusing "scientific" with "empirical".
Although I don't quite understand what your objection is. It seems to me that the main difference is between "empirical" science and non-science, so "empirical" is kind-of superfluous (as there is no science that isn't empirical).
Still, I'd argue that science is more than just empirical, as it needs to be sound/coherent as well, not just based on empirical evidence but actively trying to analyse an ddisprove that evidence - e.g. we can hardly say that traditional medicine (or even alternative medicine) isn't empirical, but it's hardly scientific (in fact, the same could be said for much of actual medicine as proper experiments are rarely performed and replicated even more rarely).
Not disputing your statements about proof methods and use of empirical evidence, just pointing out that the term "science" can and indeed commonly is applied to mathematical disciplines in the academy.
(though on a related note, many a science student should pay much more attention to philosophy than they do)
"I hypothesize the performance problem is in X. I predict if I add instrumentation Y and Z, it will show X is wasting several milliseconds per frame. My testing..."
"I hypothesize a blue background will be liked more by our users. I predict using a blue background will increase our retention rate. My testing..."
"I hypothesize the following invariants will hold about the code I've just written. I predict if I write these unit tests..."
"I hypothesize game mechanic X will be lots of fun. I predict if we build this prototype, ..."
For being "pure math", we're sure using the scientific method a lot. And measuring the real world. And decision-making based on empirical evidence. If your argument is there isn't enough science in computer science education, I might agree.
But then there are questions like "what's the impact on static vs dynamic typing on bug rates and productivity?" - in our current state, this is not computer math. It's not even on the mathy side of computer science right now - it is closer to being computer philosophy. We lack the experiments (can't control the other variables for A/B testing programming languages without perhaps actually writing bespoke programming languages for that very purpose!), and we've had a relatively short time to build our models of the computing universe... we're perhaps still building out the math necessary to create all those models...
Science uses the scientific method to model the universe. The experiments serve the purpose of clarifying that model and uncovering new information.
I feel programming is more like building a bridge. An engineer uses his knowledge of physics and (much more importantly) a wealth of field knowledge and best practices to design the bridge. As a programmer, I have tasks much like building bridges, only they are apps. I don't discover new algorithms through experimentation. I implement algorithms that are already well understood. If there is a problem in my code and I run performance tests, the tests do not clarify hitherto unknown phenomena regarding the nature of computers. They simply highlight human errors or bottlenecks caused by well understood characteristics of the underlying computer system.
If this is considered science, then basically anything that involves trial and error, be it snowboarding or checkers, is science.
Of course I admit it may depend on what you do (programming is a broad field). There are those, for example, that invent algorithms and such, though it seems to me those computer scientists are more mathematicians than scientists.
The one area of my work I have felt was scientific was AB testing, which is a kind of consumer science.
I feel their job is very different than most CS researchers that seem to me more like mathematicians, or industry programmers which are more like engineers.
There isn't yet a concensus as to whether mathematics is a science or not.
You may not think so, but it is currently a point of contention.
The arrogance dripping from this statement is hard to not consider insulting, when such "confused" individuals include those such as Stephen Hawking, and Godel struggled with it for some time.
> what they really have is a disagreement about what "science" is.
No, the difficulty lies in defining the philosophy of mathematics. It's a tool underpinning nature, so despite its abstraction, does it explain the natural world? Proofs are most certainly empirical in nature.
The upshot is, better people than you or I say there is not yet an answer.
Which means you are not scientists. You might be very positive towards it but I've met a lot of the above and seen some very anti-science rhetoric from them.
> 1970 was a year of tremendous environmental action by Nixon and Congress.The President signed the National Environmental Policy Act on January 2nd, delivered a call to make "the 1970s a historic period when, by conscious choice, [we] transform our land into what we want it to become" in his State of the Union Address, and ended the year with the creation of an independent agency to regulate the environment.
https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2010/12/galle...
Nixon has a bad reputation, obviously, but he was arguably quite enlightened about environmental and social issues. He might have championed a national minimum income, if he hadn't crashed and burned.
Unfortunately, in the case of climate, we'll never be able to compensate for the dismantling of the EPA. NGOs can't regulate.
This could make a low-staffed EPA significantly more effective, because then it would only have to pick and choose regulations to implement/try to pass.
No biggie, we'll have to re-discus them to death once again and while this battle of attrition works another round, it's more profit for them, and irreparable damage for the whole darn world.
At some stage we will have to implement retroactive reparations, this game is so obvious it borders deliberate affront
Pruitt will surround himself with yes-men, and that is super scary when it comes to science. Essentially, all science that does not fit the administration's agenda will be rejected. This is just one of the precursors.
As an independent, I question how this situation is much different from years past. It's just a different set of yes-men.
> EPA spokesman J.P. Freire said in an email that “no one has been fired or terminated,” and that Pruitt had simply decided to bring in fresh advisers"
> “We’re not going to rubber-stamp the last administration’s appointees. Instead, they should participate in the same open competitive process as the rest of the applicant pool,” Freire said. “This approach is what was always intended for the Board
> Courtney Flint ... said ... that she was also surprised to learn that her term would not be renewed, “particularly since I was told that such a renewal was expected.”
> “In the broader view, I suppose it is the prerogative of this administration to set the goals of federal agencies and to appoint members to advisory boards,” she added.
> Conservatives have complained about EPA’s approach to science, including the input it receives from outside scientific bodies
> “They’re going to have to start dealing with science and not rigged science”
> “The EPA routinely stacks this board with friendly scientists who receive millions of dollars in grants from the federal government,” Smith said at the time. “The conflict of interest here is clear.”
Even if you believe that the conservatives are trying to pack EPA with "climate change deniers", you should be glad that their research is now going to reach a wider audience and therefore can be subject to more crictism.
This seems like a good move for science
The reasoning behind the budget cut, said the document, reflects 'an anticipated lower number of peer reviews.'"
Doesn't sound like a "good move for science" to me.
By the way, was that a euphemism for commerce-backed science? Like the science done for cosmetics companies and the tobacco industry?
It doesn't feel like they're talking about foreign Universities.
Rigged science? What rigged science?
> "“The EPA routinely stacks this board with friendly scientists who receive millions of dollars in grants from the federal government,” Smith said at the time. “The conflict of interest here is clear.”"
This coming from Lamar Smith?
> This seems like a good move for science
You must be joking. Or you think that science is what Lamar Smith thinks it is science, get ride of any fact, and put conclusions and then look at anything that can be a proof for those conclusions.
What they are doing is not science
I think they have the right idea; everone knows following the market is a moral imperative, that smoking is attractive and you are #healthyatanysize.
Obviously those leacherous government scientists should be put out of a job. They are harming commerce and therewith the proletariat. They gotta go!
Unless you're suggestion that scientists - as humans = can fall prey to the same corruption and motivations that anyone else can. If that is the case, are you suggesting that government-backed scientists are above human motivations?
I find it hard to understand the conflict of interest with government-backed science. Scientist A gets a grant to do research, spends it on research and reasonable salaries for PhD's, and goes on to join the EPA board. So what?
It only becomes a conflict of interest if they then start allocating funds to their friends or to themselves, but that's almost too obvious. What does them having previously received grants have to do with anything? Why would they then be more corruptable than private sector scientists?
At least in the case of government-backed science, the research goals are generally aligned with government interests. I don't see how that's sinister in the general case.
On the other hand, it seems much easier to find dark motives in research conducted by corporations. For instance, why would you publish research that is bad for your company?
What am I missing here?
Personally, I prefer science to be aligned with finding truth and understanding, not with any particular group's interests.
The point I was making was that there is no reason to stir up hysteria just because you heard the words 'Republican' and 'EPA' in the same sentence
Unfortunately, that range lies outside what mainstream climate science has been telling us for decades.
But, are you confident enough in their willingness to continue unbiased scientific research into climate change that you would bet money on it? I am very interested in a friendly (but financially significant) wager now. :)
https://www.skepticalscience.com/solar-activity-sunspots-glo...
Second of all, the failure to renew the terms of the current members, who were led to believe they would get a second term, and labeling them as "Obama appointees" rather than examining their merits as scientists, looks more like a pogrom than a rational adjustment.
And inviting the terminated scientists to reapply is a transparent ploy. I wonder, were they all to reapply, how many of them would be rehired, and what reasons would be given should they be unsuccessful?
My take is, none of them will be rehired, because if they were wanted, the EPA would simply have renewed their contracts.
And if anything, the science is more likely now to be "rigged" than it may have been (and I doubt it was) before.
Let's be objective here: which group of people in the USA have stood mostly for science, and which group against it (hint: "intelligent design" proponents and climate change deniers).
Two healthy political parties provide countervailing powers which limit what the other can do. Without this protection, fascist themes become more prevalent and more difficult to stop.
Destruction and creation are asymmetrical with respect to the time and effort required to do either, and that's not even looking at immaterial stuff such as international reputations and treaties.