Meandering Science

I'm aware that it's been a while since I've posted, but I've admittedly not felt like it and the past few weeks have been rather busy. Now I'm home, and I suppose I could write something, though I have no particular direction planned for this post, so it may be a touch tortuous.

I'll begin abstractly with something that's been in my mind recently. Science is not really in the business of proving anything. Does that seem like an unreasonable statement? It shouldn't, really. When we use the scientific method, we are attempting to disprove something. That's the purpose of a null hypothesis. You attempt disprove the opposite of your own hypothesis to make your hypothesis more likely.

But what do I mean by disprove? It's difficult to really completely eliminate a possibility. Something can, however, be made to seen very unlikely from the standpoint of probability. Usually that probability is a confidence interval of 95% or 99.7%, which cover two and three standard deviations respectively.

Anyway, all that to say that I can't help but think that science in its purest form has been tainted by both the media and politics. You see things like "now that global warming has been proven, ..." and are left wondering where that came from. There's currently uproar about certain dietary substances not doing what they say they do. I suppose that many people don't understand that dietary substances are regulated to the same standards as drugs and the claims on the packaging are suspect. The most recent example that comes to mind is Cherios. Apparently, they don't really help as much as advertised. Go figure. It's not like the box ever sited specific credible scholastic studies, just the support of the American Heart Association.

Concerning dietary supplements, probably just a change in system of regulation would fix all the bad science there. It will be uphill and probably not happen soon enough, but eventually sense will pull through. Science in politics is probably far more of a problem. Politicians like to back their opinions with research into matters. However, how much real research goes into those findings. Not enough, apparently, as that standards have to keep being changed and projects are usually far from accurate. Urban planning would be much better otherwise. Automobile emissions requirements have changed considerably and continuously for years because of it. Clearly we've never known the whole story. So why are we making laws based on incomplete data. Often different parties can find evidence to contradict each other based on different studies.

To me, it all comes down to the ideology of the absurdists. We don't really have enough time to make critical decisions. Still, that's no excuse for jumping to conclusions or acting rashly. It would be nice to be able to cut though all the clutter and junk science out there and have definite answers, but the uncomfortable truth is that we're not certain about much in our world.