ozarque ([info]ozarque) wrote,
@ 2007-09-12 10:31:00
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Writing science fiction; getting stuck on an off-the-wall science question; afternote, continued...
I've been looking at that afternote below, and I want to clarify a sentence that I'm afraid may have a snarky look/sound/feel/vibe to it.

I said: "Reading your posts over and over again, I am beginning to suspect that for many of you the word 'science' (and the phrase 'hard science') mean something other than what those two items mean to me."

What I mean by that is not that I'm questioning your scientific expertise, knowledge, credentials, or anything of that kind. I mean only that I suspect that for me the items "science" and "hard science" mean something far simpler, and far less sophisticated, and far more basic, than they do to you.


The last time I remember having this much trouble communicating was way back in the 60s when I was trying to teach a group of assorted middle-aged male university professors how to sing and play the blues...

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[info]karenkay
2007-09-12 03:35 pm UTC (link)
The last time I remember having this much trouble communicating was way back in the 60s when I was trying to teach a group of assorted middle-aged male university professors how to sing and play the blues...

I SO would have loved to have been a fly on that wall!

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Communications
[info]thetimesink
2007-09-12 04:04 pm UTC (link)
<snort> (Happy sound whilst spilling coffee keyboard)

I suspect your self-selected audience here is thoroughly contaminated with people who read a great deal, have rather eclectic tastes in that reading, have a quite varied world view, and who are able to suspend disbelief rather easily given the proper setting. All good things... (Well, except when you are looking for a discrete answer.)

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What's the story you want to tell?
[info]agoodwinsmith
2007-09-12 04:17 pm UTC (link)
I think, too, that some of the problem is that there were some good suggestions offered for dealing with the background prayer issue - at least good enough believability in the story (and in real life, too, I think), without positing unethical treatment of children (isolation of clones, etc). That means that the short story has to make a statement about the results of the experiments - does prayer work or doesn't it? That may not be the story you want to tell, since it leads you into areas that are currently not verified, and so definitive statements are thus assumed to be personal statements of faith by the author.

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[info]wordslinger
2007-09-12 05:02 pm UTC (link)
Actually, I can think of a couple of ways to set up your experiment:

* set it up with androids or artificial life.
* the prayers don't necessarily have to be for a human. Or by humans. Remember the prayer wheels of Tibet?
* depending on how dark you wanted to make it, it could be prayers for embryos.
* the study group could be a cloister or monastary, with the object one of their members... perhaps a cloister/monastary with a vow of silence and no contact with the outer world.

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[info]randomblade
2007-09-12 05:35 pm UTC (link)
Dan Hind’s book - The Threat to Reason: How the Enlightenment Was Hijacked and How We Can Reclaim It



"Science, not theology, has become the arena in which we must fight for the victory of Enlightenment, since it is through their claims to rationality and scientific understanding that our guardians bind us in obedience to the established order".

I agree that the foundations of science are being undermined by the attitude the modern world takes to it. It is too frequently called on as the end of an argument, an 'fact' appeal to the latest research as conclusive and unquestionably so, rather than an open-ended endeavour based on radical scepticism.

Thoughts?

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[info]dsgood
2007-09-12 07:28 pm UTC (link)
Strictly speaking, I would define hard science fiction as the kind which Hal Clement wrote, and some others have sometimes written. Solidly based in real science except for some handwaving to allow stuff backed by future science (invented for the story.) The writer has worked out the equations, and if the science is wrong the writer has egg on his/her/[intersexual]/[decline to state]/[other] face.

However, the term has been used to mean (among other things): "It was the right look and feel," "It has spaceships in it and the author is a conservative." "Any magic in it is called something else" (psi in older stories, usually nanotechnology in more recent stories.)

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[info]eclectic338
2007-09-12 08:48 pm UTC (link)
I think you're right, that the definitions of "science" and "hard science" have changed over the years. With the growth of quantum physics knowledge, each year "science" is getting harder to distinguish from mysticism.

Have you watched "What the Bleep Do We Know?" movie? That might give you some ideas for how the definitions of "science" has changed over the years.

I'd find yourself a quantum physics expert and have them fix your problem for you.

But the simplist way I see is to say that background prayer is a lot like background ratiation, it effects everybody the same. Have your control group (not prayed for) as the ones that record the effects of background prayer. And with statistics you can play a lot of fun games... the control group got better by X-amount, so X-amount-of-getting-better is considered baseline, and compare your test subjects to that baseline. I'd also mention that you checked with your test subjects friends, family and church to make sure that nobody else is praying for them specifically, because the effect of "focused prayer" is the key ingredient that you're looking at, and I think you're set.

Jackie

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[info]perlmonger
2007-09-12 09:31 pm UTC (link)
I was trying to teach a group of assorted middle-aged male university professors how to sing and play the blues...

Nice windmill you had yourself there, Ms Elgin ;)

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[info]dteleki
2007-09-13 12:23 am UTC (link)
I suspect that for me the items "science" and "hard science" mean something far simpler, and far less sophisticated, and far more basic, than they do to you.

A wild guess by me, with no real evidence to support it, but I'm hoping it's helpful to YOU....perhaps for you they mean something far smaller and cheaper than they do for me.

I can easily imagine a linguist conducting 200 interviews with informants over a 2 year period, and coming up with some really significant publishable results, and not just one single paper either, and not just on one single topic. That's two person-years of labor; and the expense is basically two person-years of expense (plus office space and such), call it $100,000-$150,000 perhaps.

By contrast, clinical trials routinely have thousands of subjects, and major longitudinal studies may have tens of thousands of subjects and last for decades. I remember reading about what was described as the largest-ever study of nutrition, which stretched over several years and included nearly 50,000 subjects. I also remember reading that it costs close to a Billion dollars to bring a major new drug to market, AFTER it has been developed, and most of that cost pays for clinical trials to convince the FDA that the drug actually does some good for the condition that it's supposed to treat and doesn't have any show-stopper side-effects. The studies have to be so huge, because the possible good and bad effects that they are studying are fairly small and easily drowned out by the background noise in smaller studies; and even then, some effects don't show up until after the drug goes on sale and becomes used by hundreds of thousands of people. I'm thinking here of the heart attacks from Vioxx and the headaches from aspartame.

So when you thought up a story idea about an experiment with 200 hospital patients, I'm guessing that you thought of that as a very ambitious project. Whereas, for many purposes, something that size would be far too tiny to prove anything conclusive.

trying to teach a group of assorted middle-aged male university professors how to sing and play the blues

Aside from the wondrous spectacle that that conjures up before me... I can't help wondering, what possessed them to want to learn to do that? And in the event that they didn't actually want to learn that, how were they obliged to try?

* * * * *

I've also been thinking a lot about "prayer shields" and "prayer static generators". I don't think we'll even need nanotech to do it. For example, the Wikipedia article about prayer wheels claims that electrically-powered prayer wheels are considered just as effective as hand-powered ones, and are enhanced if appropriate religious music or video play when they spin. So I'm thinking, how many copies of a prayer can I fit onto a CD label if I print the prayer in 4-point type? Will the prayers be readable under a magnifying glass? A CD rotates at anywhere from 200 to 500 revolutions per minute.

Step 2: a Micro SD flash memory card with 2 gigabytes now costs about $40 at Best Buy; it can hold literally millions of copies of a prayer, I can fill it up right from my own computer, then I can epoxy 2 of them on opposite sides of a CD (for balance) and let it spin! While chants are playing from the CD through the earbuds, prayers are spinning round and round at a rate of hundreds of millions per minute! And all of this is with ultra-cheap, consumer-grade gadgets that anyone can buy today, nothing futuristic about ANY of it.

Step 3: an ordinary double-layered recordable DVD has a capacity of about 8.5 gigabytes; maybe I should just fill it up with prayer data, millions and millions of copies of it. That way, the DVD is working as designed, and I don't even bother fooling around with epoxy and memory chips.

This is fun!

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(Anonymous)
2007-09-13 09:43 am UTC (link)
(bemusedoutsider)

;; The studies have to be so huge, because the possible good and bad effects that they are studying are fairly small and easily drowned out by the background noise in smaller studies ;;

It would be difficult and unethical, but I wonder if a clever insider could cookoo piggyback his prayer study into an on-going medical study, praying for some of the patient groups but not others. That way the testing and basic calculation would be paid for by someone else.

If the prayer were distributed carefully, it might fall within the level of 'noise' that the main test could discount, thus not skewing the main test.

Still there would be the problem of recruiting enough prayer-makers. My impression from reading actual prayer requests is that the requesters think that it takes at least several prayer-makers to help one prayee. That is, that 10 people praying for Smith will do more good for Smith than if those same 10 were praying for 'everyone with with cancer disease' or 'everyone in the hospital' etc etc.

(Gosh, it feels impious to me to even fictionize about other people doing something like this. I can't imagine any believers thinking a real God would go along with such a test; more likely to treat it like the Tower of Babel.)

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[info]dteleki
2007-09-13 11:14 pm UTC (link)
The "cookoo piggybacking" might not have to be hidden or devious or unethical. For example, the large longitudinal nutrition study that I mentioned elsewhere was actually a rearrangement of the data for a longitudinal breast cancer study. Half the subjects had high risk factors for breast cancer, the other half didn't (and all of them were female). Because diet was suspected to be a factor in breast cancer, half of each group followed (or claimed to follow) a specific believed-to-be-healthy diet, whereas the other half ate whatever they were going to eat anyway. The result was that in the high-risk group, the healthy-diet subjects had significantly lower mortality than the unchanged-diet group; and the same was true in the low-risk group also. The conclusion reached being that the supposedly "healthy" diet really was better for you, either way.

This particular study obviously didn't say anything directly about diet for males. I don't remember if it found any connection between diet and breast cancer specifically.

What's important for our purposes here is that the longitudinal "breast cancer study" and the longitudinal "diet study" were in fact the same study, just with the data re-sorted and re-grouped. Even if the high-breast-cancer-risk subjects had been eliminated from the analysis, the total quantity of subjects was so large that the low-risk group alone qualified as a very large study all by itself.

If a study has an extremely large quantity of subjects, all sorts of filtering and sorting and grouping of this kind can be done; and if some subgroup is focused on, then provided the selection procedure doesn't introduce some sort of bias (and that's a VERY big "provided"), even a subgroup that is a smallish fraction of the total has a large enough quantity of subjects in it to qualify as a largish study all by itself. I'm thinking of a "beeper" study of EXACTLY what people spend their time doing all day, and how often they experience psychological "flow"; where a subset of the data was rearranged into a study of how much TV people watch, and whether they feel happier during their entire lives as a result. I'm also thinking of a clinical trial for a prospective heart medicine, that turned out to have no real effect for anybody except that it was helpful for (I think it was) black males; the researchers said that they had no idea why this was happening, and that they suspected that "black male" was really just a proxy for some other factor, but that the study was large enough to contain enough black males for the results to be statistically significant.

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[info]babalon_it
2007-09-13 06:47 am UTC (link)
For me, science comes down to two questions:
is it disprovable, and is it replicable.

If it's not disprovable (i.e., an experiment could be set up which, if the results go a certain way, disproves the theory), then it's not science, it's religion, or opinion, or poetry, or ...

If it's not replicable, (i.e., given the same equipment, method, etc, another experimenter can get the same results), then it's not science, it's coincidence. Possibly very kewl coincidence, but coincidence nonetheless.

That's what I would mean when I say science. "Hard science" is another can of worms... ;-)

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[info]nancylebov
2007-09-16 02:47 pm UTC (link)
The last time I remember having this much trouble communicating was way back in the 60s when I was trying to teach a group of assorted middle-aged male university professors how to sing and play the blues...

I hope that someday you'll tell that story.

Why Most Published Research Findings Are False. This is more technical than I can manage, but I'm hoping that posting it here will inspire less technical explanations of the points in it.

What follows is mostly about good stuff which may be of interest rather than something directly connected to your project.

Mention of prayer reminds me of Let Every Breath by Vasiliev. It's about the breathwork developed by Russian Orthodox monks and picked up by the Soviets for their elite soldiers and athletes. The general idea is to cultivate excellent breathing under easy conditions and then work on maintaining it under more and more challenges (mostly callesthenics, but Steve Barnes at DarKush recommends using thinking about your major goals as a breathing challenge. I've found it's quite useful (even without the goals or exertion) for breaking up depressive inertia.)

Anyway, the connection to prayer is that _Let Every Breath_ recommends praying in order to be able to do more callesthenics. I wonder why God would care whether a person can squeeze out another push-up. My tentative theory is that it's like the unbendable arm--it's a way of giving up excess, misdirected effort. Why people people default to doing things the hard way and why they generally need strong imagery to do better are mysteries to me.

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Response to nancylebov...
[info]ozarque
2007-09-16 06:04 pm UTC (link)
Thank you for posting the links, and for your comment.

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