At 3:35 PM 12/13/1996, Blanc Weber wrote:
Can you trust anecdotal evidence?
Are the statisticians lying, are the marketeers just keeping you entranced; do covert agencies send electromagnet currents through your body, are blatant, secret plots against your privacy in place?
Stay tuned for the latest update from . . .
P s y c h o P u n k s ! *
Yikes - now we need a discussion on teleology & epistemology.
.. Blanc * (just kidding. It's Friday afternoon)
It's not the Cypherpunks that are crazy - it's the world! ;-) Perhaps an example will be persuasive. Richard Feynman had some interesting things to say about the history of measured charge of the electron. If you look at a graph of the "official" value over time you will find that it drifts downwards to the correct value, or at any rate the value which is universally accepted today. If the charge on the electron has been constant this century - and that seems safe - you would have expected the results of each successive study to be scattered around the actual value. Instead, they start out a little below Milliken's original value and steadily move downward. The most likely explanation is that the experimenters did not want to seem too far out in their results and fudged them. (This is Feynman's explanation.) The charge of the electron is verifiable "hard" science to a degree the social sciences cannot even dream of approaching, and yet we find that the "professionals" were fudging their results. Not just one or two, but a whole flock of them working independently. The charge of the electron is hard for people to get worked up over. It has no political relevance. There is no real reason to boost its value. The social sciences, however, are political in the extreme. Aside from issues of anticipated future earnings (or even employment), many social scientists have strong political beliefs which motivate their work. Given that their studies are often not reproduced - one study can take many years to complete - and that they contradict each other when they are reproduced, I do not feel unlimited confidence in their conclusions. Red Rackham