What Is Bad Science?

Doer

Doer

Well-Known Member
It's not always so easy to tell. Some folks say the DDT ban was the result of bad science.

One example is called the barn side or six-shooter mistake. If I take a pair of six-guns and fire 12 times at a barn, I can go up with my chalk, (with no one looking) and draw a circle around the best group. "Yep, good shootin!"

Real world example is cancer clusters. Take an area, neighborhood, town, whatever.
Place a red dot where there is a cancer patient. Now try to correlate that with
fire plugs...What?? Why??

How about PCB filled electrical transformers? Oh, yeah! Different from fire plugs right? Wrong.

If you take transformers and draw circles around them and see cancer clusters associated with the transformers, that is the broad side of a barn. Same with fire plugs.

Any science of observation and record keeping is only as good or bad as the records.
Bad science, is looking at the records and drawing inferences that haven't been tested and stating them as scientific correlations.

Any other examples come to mind?
 
researchkitty

researchkitty

Well-Known Member
Your confusing science with idiots.

An idiot would look at a barn, circle a shot, and say good shot.

Nobody would look at observations in science once and say "Thats fact!". Science is about REPEATING observations and independent verification of those observations.

What you are describing is idiotic, nothing more.

Most of the time a good scientist looks at the data, and if there are surprises in the data, they will check OTHER data of the same substance to ensure that their data isnt bad. ;) THAT is science!
 
researchkitty

researchkitty

Well-Known Member
Doer said:
So, like art, no bad science?
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You totally misunderstood the post.

Art is art. Expression of anything you want.

Science is science. Understanding the actual true physical reality of everything.

Apples are apples.

Oranges are oranges.

An artist pretending to know science and represent as such is equal to most of the science posts we see on rollitup, though. :)

Bad science usually comes from people who just jump the gun, look at bad data, or follow the wrong path. Or from people who claim to know things about their field, and dont. (e.g., Finshaggy and Black holes, this amounts to trying to teach an average person something technically detailed and the person not even wanting to listen or trying to hear other arguments. Scientists are never closed minded like that, we listen to ALL arguments).
 
Heisenberg

Heisenberg

Well-Known Member
Doer said:
So, like art, no bad science? There are plenty of logical pitfalls. And this is a textbook
example, I gave. Real world. Not idiots, or combative forum mates. Just sub-conscious bias. Not practicing mis-conduct. Simply seeing a mis-conclusion. A self fulfilling vision. No one is perfect, right?

http://www.philosophicalsociety.com/Logical Fallacies.htm
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Science is aware of these mistakes and attempts to control for them, if it doesn't, then it's not science. Bad milk is still milk, bad science is not really science.
 
C

chris75

Member
First thing that came to mind:


http://www.badscience.net/


Anyone else read the book? I don't remember much of it as it was quite a few years ago, though I do remember finding it a very well written and quite often hilarious explanation of the more modern examples of "bad science" (e.g. MMR scare, homeopathy, and many other completely ludicrous theories being paraded as 'science'). Apart from some statistics, it's more than easily readable by the layman, thus good to recommend to open-minded friends and family who seem to lean towards believing in pseudo-scientific nonsense on a regular basis. Also definitely an entertaining and worthwhile read for those of us with some scientific education.
 
Brick Top

Brick Top

New Member
Doer said:
Any other examples come to mind?
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Holding a preconceived belief, not a thought or a question or a theory, but an actual belief and then setting out to prove it. Invariably you shape facts to prove what you want to prove rather than to compile facts and then in a totally non-biased way analyze them and see what proof is there to be found.
 
Mr Neutron

Mr Neutron

Well-Known Member
Brick Top said:
Holding a preconceived belief, not a thought or a question or a theory, but an actual belief and then setting out to prove it. Invariably you shape facts to prove what you want to prove rather than to compile facts and then in a totally non-biased way analyze them and see what proof is there to be found.
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This is how I feel about the Big Bang Theory. Every time I hear it mentioned, it is referenced more as accepted fact than theory.
Just like the earth centered universe, the flat earth, the unbreakable sound barrier and many more erroneous beliefs from the past... the BBT is the mantra of the religion of modern science. The religion of main stream science has replaced "God" or a spiritual belief with a theory about the origin of the universe and quite often disregard any conflicting arguments.
 
researchkitty

researchkitty

Well-Known Member
I dont know Mr Neutron..... The Big Bang Theory didnt just arise out of some guys wet dream..... It arose from observational evidence, in fact! Previous to the "BBT", scientists thought that the Universe was in a "Solid State" where galaxies created new matter as they moved further away. Since Hubble (you know, the guy they named the telescope after) showed that the Universe was not in a solid state, but expanding, if its expanding, it has to have started from something small, right?

There's also the Cosmic Background Radiation, which is everywhere at about 3 degrees in temperature. That's the static you see on analog televisions when a television station isnt on the channel you are watching. Since the CMB is "everywhere" around the Universe, that also suggests pretty strongly that our modern view on cosmology is accurate enough that we're at the very least in the right direction, if not pretty spot on. The WMAP data is very very easy to read! :)

Many less people argue the big bang "theory" these days because of so much observational evidence in so many different fields that suggest the very same thing.........

Sorry for typos, posting on a stupid smartphone. :)
 
Mr Neutron

Mr Neutron

Well-Known Member
The earth centered universe and the flat earth ideas were supported by the leading minds of the time, were they not?
Explain to me how...
1) if the universe is expanding and all galaxies are moving away from each other, why are galaxies colliding?
2) if the Big Bang happened just shy of 14 billion years ago, why is the radius of the known universe somewhere around 46 billion light years? is everything traveling at more than 3 times the speed of light?
On another note, what if the observational data that supports the BBT is flawed? In other words, what if the "red shift" is not evidence of perpetual expansion but caused by something else?
Observational research is dependent upon the validity of the data. If the observations are incorrect because of circumstances unknown, then the conclusions drawn from said data is also flawed.
 
researchkitty

researchkitty

Well-Known Member
Mr Neutron said:
The earth centered universe and the flat earth ideas were supported by the leading minds of the time, were they not?
Explain to me how...
1) if the universe is expanding and all galaxies are moving away from each other, why are galaxies colliding?
2) if the Big Bang happened just shy of 14 billion years ago, why is the radius of the known universe somewhere around 46 billion light years? is everything traveling at more than 3 times the speed of light?
On another note, what if the observational data that supports the BBT is flawed? In other words, what if the "red shift" is not evidence of perpetual expansion but caused by something else?
Observational research is dependent upon the validity of the data. If the observations are incorrect because of circumstances unknown, then the conclusions drawn from said data is also flawed.
Click to expand...
1.) Galaxies are colliding because each galaxy has gravitational weight to it, so they are attracted together. That's why we have the Sloan Wall of galaxies, that's why we have Superclusters and Clusters as well.

2.) Its because nobody explained the math for you very well....... If light is emitted in all directions, light that travels one year for us to see also travels one year in the other directions, too. :) The radius of the Universe expressed in light years (distance) is not the same as the age of the Universe which is not measured in light years (distance) but years (time). Head to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Observable_universe and scroll down to "Size" for the nitty gritty.

You asked what if the data we observe is wrong, well, then its wrong. We'd change to the newest best theory, all the time. The reason we didnt see things until the 20th century is because we needed to invent telescopes first to be able to see things better. :-) Our instruments, which have helped further the telescope evidence from decades ago, have also greatly improved, and those have further validated existing theories and better improved our accuracy, too.


Keep in mind, the Solid State Theory and all others before it were based on human eyeballs as the only observational device to figure things out. Todays modern theories are from actual instruments that measure and record things for us a lot better than human eyes. :) The Big Bang Theory comes out of evidence, rather than thinking.


:)
 
S

snowmanexpress

Well-Known Member
Mr Neutron said:
1) if the universe is expanding and all galaxies are moving away from each other, why are galaxies colliding?
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I believe it is due to the trajectory of any given mass after the "explosion", or maybe it was an "implosion" of this "big bang"? I dunno which way it 'sploded. In or out. Not to exclude gravity pull or possibly push from nearby mass as well I would propose.

All that dark matter talk is neat to read.
 
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