Is This for Real?

[Huge Cajones Remailer]

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