5 ms·

Pick up an old engineering book at some point, something from mid 1800's or early 1900's and you'll quickly realize that the trust people put on science isn't w

by vasco 2y ago

Pick up an old engineering book at some point, something from mid 1800's or early 1900's and you'll quickly realize that the trust people put on science isn't what it should be. The scientific method works over a long period of time, but to blindly trust a peer review study that just came out, any study, is almost as much faith as religion, specially if you're not a high level researcher in the same field and have spent a good amount of time reading their methodology yourself. If you go to the social sciences then the amount of crock that gets published is incredible. As a quick example, any book about electricity from the early 1900's will include quite serious sections about the positive effects of electromagnetic radiation (or "EM field therapies"), teach you about different frequencies and modulations for different illnesses and how doctors are applying them. Today these devices are peddled by scammers of the same ilk as the ones that align your shakras with the right stone on your forehead.

momoschili 2y ago
Going to need some citations here since the texts that I'm familiar with from that time period are "A Treatise on Electricity and Magnetism" by Maxwell (mid-late 1800s) and "A History of the Theories of Aether and Electricity" by E. T. Whittaker, neither of which mentions anything of the sort. I suspect you are choosing from texts that at the time likely would not have been considered academic or standard.
- jvanderbot 2y ago
  Your points of memory are not counterpoints. Those are the ones that lived - and are not indicative of the general quality of science during those times. Obvious survivor bias. The fact that you can recall those reinforces the point that the value is determined by how long it is useful and remembered, not the fact that it was published.
  - momoschili 2y ago
    Indeed, but you are clearly missing the historical context as these were two highly celebrated and referenced texts of the time period by leading scientists. However, it appears that the leading scientific minds (of which Maxwell and Whittaker are) did not include these uses in their texts. I do not dispute that science can be wrong (in fact it is almost always 'wrong' in the end) nor do I dispute that there could have been published research in those applications. I would argue that these applications were likely fringe at best within the scientific community by the mid 1800s. There are of course incredible scientists that went down disappointing paths (eg Shockley, Dyson, Pauling) in terms of their research output later on, though one must remember that typically this occurs outside their original field of expertise. If you read my comment you will see that I am asking for the references to the claims the previous author made. I simply provided my own references which werew written at the time and are representative of the times that do not corroborate the tall tale of the previous author. If you have any references to support their claim I would be interested in perusing them.
    - jvanderbot 2y ago
      And what's to say that other highly celebrated and highly referenced texts from that time were not based on bad science or were outright frauds? Your memory of them? Picking the winners as examples is not good sampling.
      - deleted 2y ago
        [deleted]
      - momoschili 2y ago
        The originator explicitly said that 'any engineering book' would contain these references, thus it would seem that this was at least a widespread belief among physicists and engineers at the time. Do you have any example? Again, you and the original poster seem to have this understanding that scientists and engineers from the mid 1800s to early 1900s are not to be trusted. I think that this assertion should be backed by considerable evidence, and that burden is of course mostly on you I don't dispute that there were doctors applying electricity and/or magnetism to the body in an "un"-rigorous manner, but is there documentation that suggests that the scientists at the time had come to the conclusion that it worked? Also notably, Whittaker's work was a 'loser'. I chose it specifically for this purpose. I had read parts of it previously because it was a 'loser' as he chose to dispute Einstein's contributions to special relativity.
        jvanderbot 2y ago
        We've gotten into the territory of just repeating ourselves, so I don't want to do that. I will say that > Again, you and the original poster seem to have this understanding that scientists and engineers from the mid 1800s to early 1900s are not to be trusted. Is not correct as far as I believe. Instead, we're saying that there's no reason to believe any study until it has stood the test of time. The longer it remains impactful the better. I am building from this statement: > The scientific method works over a long period of time, but to blindly trust a peer review study that just came out, any study, is almost as much faith as religion, specially if you're not a high level researcher in the same field and have spent a good amount of time reading their methodology yourself. Saying that textbooks from Maxwell's era had misunderstandings and bad information is not saying they are inept, it's saying that that is how it works, it always has and always will be that way. That's it, really. The fact that good science came from it is to be expected, and the fact that bad science existed is also not to be suprising. I think you interpreted the statement about the 1900s textbooks being wrong as a slander against the entire era, which is not how I read it, and certainly not what I meant to imply by any of my comments.
- Maxatar 2y ago
  Because those two texts are the two among literally thousands of scientific publications that have survived the test of time, which is exactly the point being made. This might seem crazy to hear now, but when Maxwell first published A Dynamical Theory of the Electromagnetic Field in 1865, no one cared, it received very little attention at the time. It was decades later in 1888 with the work of Hertz that Maxwell's equations started to gain significance within the scientific community.
  - momoschili 2y ago
    It seems convenient that the evidence to corroborate the claim can't be found yes? I think you will also find that the publications of the 1800-1900s are quite well preserved.
    - deleted 2y ago
      [deleted]
    - vasco 2y ago
      > It seems convenient that the evidence to corroborate the claim can't be found yes? You posted this less than 15 minutes after my comment, friend.
- crystal_revenge 2y ago
  Here's a more recent (1950) example that I think makes parent's point quite well: > I assume that the reader is familiar with the idea of extra-sensory perception, and the meaning of the four items of it, viz. telepathy, clairvoyance, precognition and psycho-kinesis. These disturbing phenomena seem to deny all our usual scientific ideas. How we should like to discredit them! Unfortunately the statistical evidence, at least for telepathy, is overwhelming. It is very difficult to rearrange one's ideas so as to fit these new facts in. Once one has accepted them it does not seem a very big step to believe in ghosts and bogies. The idea that our bodies move simply according to the known laws of physics, together with some others not yet discovered but somewhat similar, would be one of the first to go. Anyone on this site who doesn't know what this is from should feel a bit of shame in the current era of hype around machine intelligence, so I'll leave it as an exercise to the reader if you aren't already familiar with this paper.
  - mmooss 2y ago
    What is the source?
  - momoschili 2y ago
    Alan Turing was an incredible computer scientist and mathematician. Unfortunately he is out of his area of expertise in physics and human biology/neuroscience (? not sure where telepathy would be if it was to be rigorously studied). This is akin to Freeman Dyson on global warming. That scientists can have strange ideas is something nobody can dispute. That those strange ideas enter into scientific legitimacy is another story entirely.
    - crystal_revenge 2y ago
      The point is that I don't believe Turing's ideas were widely considered strange at the time. The point is more that, even under conditions of honest actions, it's very easy for educated, smart, and sincere thinkers to take for fact something that with time we believe is wildly not fact. Science even at it's most sincere should always be approached with thoughtful skepticism. The phrase that I hear touted often these days "trust the science", is in essence not how science should be thought of.
- vasco 2y ago
  Sure, check out Audel's Electric guide, 1927 print, volume 10, for example. This is a series of books intended for practitioners at the time, in wide circulation in the USA. The "Electric Therapeuthics" section changed a lot with each edition so it's even interesting to compare across older versions if you can find multiple. I didn't want to reference specific old niche books but if you're willing to ebay it, I guess you can check. My point was more general than just electric engineering though.
  - momoschili 2y ago
    Awesome thanks for providing a reference!
  - throwup238 2y ago
    The Internet Archive has a copy: https://archive.org/details/audels-electric-library-vol-10/page/n657/mode/2up https://archive.org/details/audels-electric-library-vol-10/p... The electro-therapeutics chapter starts on page 658
- yeahwhatever10 2y ago
  It's called survivorship bias.
dekhn 2y ago
We use EM radiation for illnesses and doctors apply them. It's one of the most important diagnostic and treatment options we have. I think what you're referring to is invalid therapies ("woo" or snake oil or just plain ignorance/greed) but it's hard to distinguish those from legitimate therapies at times.
- tredre3 2y ago
  > We use EM radiation for illnesses and doctors apply them. Do you have examples of usage as a treatment? I can only think of rTMS (whose effectiveness is contentious).
  - momoschili 2y ago
    The most boring example is x-rays. Slightly less boring are the radiation therapies for cancer. What is maybe the most applicable that is widely accepted is electric therapy for people recovering from ACL surgeries.
  - dekhn 2y ago
    Gamma knife? Basically the entire field of radiotherapy? TMS is magnetic, not EM (the coil generates a magnetic field, which induces localized currents in the body being treated)
    - fsckboy 2y ago
      >TMS is magnetic, not EM (the coil generates a magnetic field, which induces localized currents in the body ME? the coil generates an M which induces localized E in the body as shown by localized currents? (which produce some more M, but only just enough)
      - dekhn 2y ago
        I can't parse what you are saying, but there's a difference between EM radiation and a magnetic field (and the resulting locally induced currents). Think in terms of an MRI machine: it puts you in a giant magnet (causing the various nuclear spins to align with the field) and then sends a bunch of EM radiation (radiofrequency). The former is a magnetic field, not EM radiation.
luckydata 2y ago
the best example is psychology. the entire field needs to be scrapped and started over, nothing you read on any of those papers can be trusted, it's just heaping piles of bad research dressed with a thin veil of statistical respectability.
- NemoNobody 2y ago
  This will be the second time it's been entirely scrapped and restarted ;)
- mcmoor 2y ago
  I treat the field like medicine in 19th century. Nice motive, but unless someone drag me to operating room because I've just been shot, I won't have any surgery.
NemoNobody 2y ago
Is absolutely as much faith as religion. Just the basic assumption that the universe didn't come from anything is as baseless as that it does.
- cwalv 2y ago
  > Just the basic assumption that the universe didn't come from anything That's not a scientific assertion though. It's just what many people would say many/most scientists believe
eightysixfour 2y ago
Science is eventually consistent. Scientists, individual papers, and the dogma at any given time may not be. It just takes a long time.
- low_tech_love 2y ago
  Exactly, but the problem is that everyone has to be the first to publish about something and then every paper after that which deals with the same thing is relegated to second-level venues (or lower). So whatever is the first word about something becomes the accepted and is super hard to contest.
mmooss 2y ago
Why do you need to go back 100-170 years, if it's an issue? Aren't there more recent examples?
dangitman 2y ago
[dead]
jeffybefffy519 2y ago
This proves southpark was right, science is just another form of religion.
hyperG 2y ago
The default state of the human brain almost seems to be a form of anti-science, blind faith in what you already believe, especially if you stand to gain personally from what you believe being true. What is most incredible to me is even knowing and believing the above, I fall prey to this all the time.

by vasco 2y ago

momoschili 2y ago

Going to need some citations here since the texts that I'm familiar with from that time period are "A Treatise on Electricity and Magnetism" by Maxwell (mid-late 1800s) and "A History of the Theories of Aether and Electricity" by E. T. Whittaker, neither of which mentions anything of the sort. I suspect you are choosing from texts that at the time likely would not have been considered academic or standard.

jvanderbot 2y ago
Your points of memory are not counterpoints. Those are the ones that lived - and are not indicative of the general quality of science during those times. Obvious survivor bias. The fact that you can recall those reinforces the point that the value is determined by how long it is useful and remembered, not the fact that it was published.
- momoschili 2y ago
  Indeed, but you are clearly missing the historical context as these were two highly celebrated and referenced texts of the time period by leading scientists. However, it appears that the leading scientific minds (of which Maxwell and Whittaker are) did not include these uses in their texts. I do not dispute that science can be wrong (in fact it is almost always 'wrong' in the end) nor do I dispute that there could have been published research in those applications. I would argue that these applications were likely fringe at best within the scientific community by the mid 1800s. There are of course incredible scientists that went down disappointing paths (eg Shockley, Dyson, Pauling) in terms of their research output later on, though one must remember that typically this occurs outside their original field of expertise. If you read my comment you will see that I am asking for the references to the claims the previous author made. I simply provided my own references which werew written at the time and are representative of the times that do not corroborate the tall tale of the previous author. If you have any references to support their claim I would be interested in perusing them.
  - jvanderbot 2y ago
    And what's to say that other highly celebrated and highly referenced texts from that time were not based on bad science or were outright frauds? Your memory of them? Picking the winners as examples is not good sampling.
    - deleted 2y ago
      [deleted]
    - momoschili 2y ago
      The originator explicitly said that 'any engineering book' would contain these references, thus it would seem that this was at least a widespread belief among physicists and engineers at the time. Do you have any example? Again, you and the original poster seem to have this understanding that scientists and engineers from the mid 1800s to early 1900s are not to be trusted. I think that this assertion should be backed by considerable evidence, and that burden is of course mostly on you I don't dispute that there were doctors applying electricity and/or magnetism to the body in an "un"-rigorous manner, but is there documentation that suggests that the scientists at the time had come to the conclusion that it worked? Also notably, Whittaker's work was a 'loser'. I chose it specifically for this purpose. I had read parts of it previously because it was a 'loser' as he chose to dispute Einstein's contributions to special relativity.
      - jvanderbot 2y ago
        We've gotten into the territory of just repeating ourselves, so I don't want to do that. I will say that > Again, you and the original poster seem to have this understanding that scientists and engineers from the mid 1800s to early 1900s are not to be trusted. Is not correct as far as I believe. Instead, we're saying that there's no reason to believe any study until it has stood the test of time. The longer it remains impactful the better. I am building from this statement: > The scientific method works over a long period of time, but to blindly trust a peer review study that just came out, any study, is almost as much faith as religion, specially if you're not a high level researcher in the same field and have spent a good amount of time reading their methodology yourself. Saying that textbooks from Maxwell's era had misunderstandings and bad information is not saying they are inept, it's saying that that is how it works, it always has and always will be that way. That's it, really. The fact that good science came from it is to be expected, and the fact that bad science existed is also not to be suprising. I think you interpreted the statement about the 1900s textbooks being wrong as a slander against the entire era, which is not how I read it, and certainly not what I meant to imply by any of my comments.
Maxatar 2y ago
Because those two texts are the two among literally thousands of scientific publications that have survived the test of time, which is exactly the point being made. This might seem crazy to hear now, but when Maxwell first published A Dynamical Theory of the Electromagnetic Field in 1865, no one cared, it received very little attention at the time. It was decades later in 1888 with the work of Hertz that Maxwell's equations started to gain significance within the scientific community.
- momoschili 2y ago
  It seems convenient that the evidence to corroborate the claim can't be found yes? I think you will also find that the publications of the 1800-1900s are quite well preserved.
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
  - vasco 2y ago
    > It seems convenient that the evidence to corroborate the claim can't be found yes? You posted this less than 15 minutes after my comment, friend.
crystal_revenge 2y ago
Here's a more recent (1950) example that I think makes parent's point quite well: > I assume that the reader is familiar with the idea of extra-sensory perception, and the meaning of the four items of it, viz. telepathy, clairvoyance, precognition and psycho-kinesis. These disturbing phenomena seem to deny all our usual scientific ideas. How we should like to discredit them! Unfortunately the statistical evidence, at least for telepathy, is overwhelming. It is very difficult to rearrange one's ideas so as to fit these new facts in. Once one has accepted them it does not seem a very big step to believe in ghosts and bogies. The idea that our bodies move simply according to the known laws of physics, together with some others not yet discovered but somewhat similar, would be one of the first to go. Anyone on this site who doesn't know what this is from should feel a bit of shame in the current era of hype around machine intelligence, so I'll leave it as an exercise to the reader if you aren't already familiar with this paper.
- mmooss 2y ago
  What is the source?
- momoschili 2y ago
  Alan Turing was an incredible computer scientist and mathematician. Unfortunately he is out of his area of expertise in physics and human biology/neuroscience (? not sure where telepathy would be if it was to be rigorously studied). This is akin to Freeman Dyson on global warming. That scientists can have strange ideas is something nobody can dispute. That those strange ideas enter into scientific legitimacy is another story entirely.
  - crystal_revenge 2y ago
    The point is that I don't believe Turing's ideas were widely considered strange at the time. The point is more that, even under conditions of honest actions, it's very easy for educated, smart, and sincere thinkers to take for fact something that with time we believe is wildly not fact. Science even at it's most sincere should always be approached with thoughtful skepticism. The phrase that I hear touted often these days "trust the science", is in essence not how science should be thought of.
vasco 2y ago
Sure, check out Audel's Electric guide, 1927 print, volume 10, for example. This is a series of books intended for practitioners at the time, in wide circulation in the USA. The "Electric Therapeuthics" section changed a lot with each edition so it's even interesting to compare across older versions if you can find multiple. I didn't want to reference specific old niche books but if you're willing to ebay it, I guess you can check. My point was more general than just electric engineering though.
- momoschili 2y ago
  Awesome thanks for providing a reference!
- throwup238 2y ago
  The Internet Archive has a copy: https://archive.org/details/audels-electric-library-vol-10/page/n657/mode/2up https://archive.org/details/audels-electric-library-vol-10/p... The electro-therapeutics chapter starts on page 658
yeahwhatever10 2y ago
It's called survivorship bias.

dekhn 2y ago

We use EM radiation for illnesses and doctors apply them. It's one of the most important diagnostic and treatment options we have. I think what you're referring to is invalid therapies ("woo" or snake oil or just plain ignorance/greed) but it's hard to distinguish those from legitimate therapies at times.

tredre3 2y ago
> We use EM radiation for illnesses and doctors apply them. Do you have examples of usage as a treatment? I can only think of rTMS (whose effectiveness is contentious).
- momoschili 2y ago
  The most boring example is x-rays. Slightly less boring are the radiation therapies for cancer. What is maybe the most applicable that is widely accepted is electric therapy for people recovering from ACL surgeries.
- dekhn 2y ago
  Gamma knife? Basically the entire field of radiotherapy? TMS is magnetic, not EM (the coil generates a magnetic field, which induces localized currents in the body being treated)
  - fsckboy 2y ago
    >TMS is magnetic, not EM (the coil generates a magnetic field, which induces localized currents in the body ME? the coil generates an M which induces localized E in the body as shown by localized currents? (which produce some more M, but only just enough)
    - dekhn 2y ago
      I can't parse what you are saying, but there's a difference between EM radiation and a magnetic field (and the resulting locally induced currents). Think in terms of an MRI machine: it puts you in a giant magnet (causing the various nuclear spins to align with the field) and then sends a bunch of EM radiation (radiofrequency). The former is a magnetic field, not EM radiation.

luckydata 2y ago

the best example is psychology. the entire field needs to be scrapped and started over, nothing you read on any of those papers can be trusted, it's just heaping piles of bad research dressed with a thin veil of statistical respectability.

NemoNobody 2y ago
This will be the second time it's been entirely scrapped and restarted ;)
mcmoor 2y ago
I treat the field like medicine in 19th century. Nice motive, but unless someone drag me to operating room because I've just been shot, I won't have any surgery.

NemoNobody 2y ago

Is absolutely as much faith as religion. Just the basic assumption that the universe didn't come from anything is as baseless as that it does.

cwalv 2y ago
> Just the basic assumption that the universe didn't come from anything That's not a scientific assertion though. It's just what many people would say many/most scientists believe

eightysixfour 2y ago

Science is eventually consistent. Scientists, individual papers, and the dogma at any given time may not be. It just takes a long time.

low_tech_love 2y ago
Exactly, but the problem is that everyone has to be the first to publish about something and then every paper after that which deals with the same thing is relegated to second-level venues (or lower). So whatever is the first word about something becomes the accepted and is super hard to contest.

mmooss 2y ago

Why do you need to go back 100-170 years, if it's an issue? Aren't there more recent examples?

dangitman 2y ago

[dead]

jeffybefffy519 2y ago

This proves southpark was right, science is just another form of religion.

hyperG 2y ago

The default state of the human brain almost seems to be a form of anti-science, blind faith in what you already believe, especially if you stand to gain personally from what you believe being true. What is most incredible to me is even knowing and believing the above, I fall prey to this all the time.