http://www.internationalskeptics.com/fo ... stcount=47
Hotblack: This thread over on reddit provides a rather amusing discussion of the veto between MM and somebody actually knowledgeable.
[I can't post the url of the thread, but MM has posted the link a few times over at the thunderdolts forum]
Let me do that again for you in case anyone would like to read the actual thread:
https://www.reddit.com/r/Astronomy/comm ... idence_of/
The thread demolishes MM's recent "idea" that the LIGO veto was due to wicked scientists lying to protect their massive paychecks .
Ya know, when the very first comment about the thread is essentially a strawman, you gotta wonder if anything in the rest of the post is likely to be true. FYI, I didn't accuse them of lying to protect any "massive paychecks", if anything I accused them of lying to avoid having to deal with the 'safety" issue in any quantified manner, and to avoid any unpleasant conversations about the *purpose* of that veto during the peer review process. Period.
In the thread, MM in fact concedes that the veto is clearly not relevant,
No, I said it was not critically relevant to any the three *other* major problems in their methodology. The lack of an accurate account of events in the published paper does however undermine their scientific credibility and the lack of an explanation the specific purpose of that veto, and how it assigns 'confidence'" also undermines their scientific credibility. They simply *misrepresented* the historical record in the published paper and hid all the relevant facts from the peer reviewers. They clearly gave us a whitewashed account of veto events and they misrepresented the historical record in the published paper. I didn't claim that behavior was not relevant, I just noted that it has little or no effect on any of the three key methodology problems with that paper.
but that the real crime is that the paper does not detail the chain of events to his liking (as somebody who has never published in a real publication,
If you'd bothered to click on the ORCID link in that PDF, you'd know that statement is simply not true. Then again, I doubt you even care about being truthful. Attacking the messenger is always the easy low road. It just shows that you don't have any real counter arguments to any of the points I raised, and you're therefore reduced to trying to play 'kill the messenger". Do I smell desperation?
I imagine he is unfamiliar with paper length requirements and how the review process would likely remove mention of a genuinely irrelevant technical detail).
It's a *discovery in physics* paper for crying out loud, not just "any old paper"! It's not even just *one* paper, it's *many* of them. They'd surely have been given enough latitude to have included at *least* the LIGO magazine (or any accurate) account of events in the paper if they weren't so intent from hiding those facts from the peer reviewers while it was being peer reviewed. I suspect however that this was not done because it would have led to all those uncomfortable questions that I asked of LIGO and ThickTarget, and for which no response was ever given.
Why was that specific veto added in the first place, and what was it designed to filter out in the first place? Nobody wants to answer those questions because it would reveal too much about the probable cause of the veto, and you guys don't want anyone to know that there might be another environmental explanation for the same event. Best to instead give the peer reviewers and the public the snow job account of events and pretend everything is now "safe".
The very story short of the veto is simply that the team defines a property they call safety which is determined for all the various LIGO experiment data channels:
Quote:
"The safety of a veto is a measure of the likelihood that the veto criteria would accidentally remove a true gravitational wave signal.
How about a quantified explanation as to the odds that it removed an *untrue* signal, and removed the real environmental influence that it was designed to "veto" in the first place?
Veto safety is measured using hardware injection tests, where a signal is injected into h(t) by inducing motion of the optics [25, 26, 29]. If any auxiliary channels witness a corresponding response to a number of injected signals greater than expected by chance, these channels are considered unsafe and are not used in the denition of any applied veto. "
The LIGO magazine states:
Quote:
At 11:23:20 UTC, an analyst follow-up deter-mined which auxiliary channels were associated with iDQ’s decision. It became clear that these were un-calibrated versions of h(t) which had not been flagged as “unsafe” and were only added to the set of available low latency channels after the start of ER8. Based on the safety of the channels, the Data Quality Veto label was removed within 2.5 hours and analyses proceeded after re-starting by hand.
So the aux channel which triggered the veto was one of the uncalibrared versions of strain. These were not marked as unsafe when they were added at the last minute to the list of aux channels. Unsafe refers to a channel which responds to motion in the mirrors and could therefore swallow a real event, strain is of course unsafe because that's what measures the displacement mirror. Unsafe channels are not allowed to trigger a veto by definition. The veto was false due to the error of not flagging uncalibrated h(t) as unsafe.
That doesn't give anyone outside of LIGO any of the necessary information. We have no idea why the veto was created in the first place, why it was added to ER8 to start with, what it was designed to veto out to begin with, how it achieved a "high confidence' rejection of this exact signal, or any quantified definition of safety as it relates to *this specific* veto event. We've *never* seen any of that important information.
That is pretty much the whole story, the rest is just the impotent ramblings of MM.
Sure, and these aren't the droids you're looking for either. Give me a break.
This specific veto was installed for a *reason*, a *reason* that LIGO will not specify or explain to the public or to the peer reviewers. It's purpose was *never* explained, it's high confidence rejection was never explained, and no quantified definition of 'safety' related to their manual override was ever provided!
The thread is a pretty entertaining read. Beyond the veto issues, it reveals again how trying to understand science when one has almost zero mathematical knowledge
Yawn. More pure personal attack nonsense. You guys are utterly pathetic. You simply cannot handle an honest scientific debate so you simply *cheat* all the time by attacking the messenger and taking the conversation *off topic*. How frigging sad and how transparent of a motive.
leads to a range of amusing misunderstandings and, well combined with such obnoxious behaviour, pure comedy.
The "obnoxious behavior" is directly related to your side *attacking the messenger* rather than attacking the points that were raised in my paper. The need to bash *people* rather than attack the points raised is obnoxious.
The best bits are in particular:
1) MM simply cannot get the idea of standard deviation, and persists in stating that a sigma value expresses the probability of causation. Again and again he demands the authors use a sigma value to show the likelihood of x causing y.
No, I simply pointed out that the sigma calculation is utterly and totally devoid of addressing the cause, and it's not even capable of ruling out *all possible* environmental influences because all *other* vetoed timelines (besides the signal in question) were removed from the data set before the calculation was even made. It's a completely *unrelated* sigma calculation that means exactly *nothing* in terms of supporting the claim as to cause made by LIGO. It's a purely 'trumped up" sigma number that is totally irrelevant in terms of the claim being made.
At best case it might suggest that the signal was a 'real' event, but in no way does it suggest a cause. Furthermore, the veto of this specific signal suggests that it's probably related to a specific 'environmental' influence which the LIGO team did not want to discuss.
2) Stunning displays of zero knowledge of EM physics.
This criticism comes from the folks that think that "magnetic reconnection' is a plasma optional process, and who haven't been able to produce that non-zero rate of reconnection formula I asked for *over five years ago*! This comment comes from the folks that think that "pseudoscience" is real physics. This comment from the folks that need 95 percent placeholder terms for human ignorance because they lack a basic understanding of scattering processes in plasma, and any concept of how circuit theory is applied to plasma in space! This comment comes from the folks that let RC run around claiming that electrical discharges are "impossible" in plasma! Holy cow.
It is painfully explained to him that dipole radiation (mentioned in a paper MM cites) would not detectable through the interstellar medium.
The EM radiation from such an event wouldn't absolutely not be limited to low energy EM emissions in the first place, so that whole argument is pure nonsense. You still have no logical explanation as to why this supposedly 'celestial" event was never observed by anyone, anywhere, in any external hardware of any type. You've never bothered to address the blatant confirmation bias problem either.
What ThickTarget had to admit is that the sigma calculation is scientifically irrelevant, and they can't even logically differentiate between an ordinary "blip transient" observed by both detectors since day one, and a celestial event.
He simply *ran* (and so will you) from the whole confirmation bias problem of *requiring* that every *other* potential cause of the signal be "eliminated" from consideration due to a lack of external confirmation, while simply giving all celestial origin claims a free pass. You have to avoid even discussing the fact that they don't even have a categorization potential for "unknown cause", which simply highlights the highly biased nature of their method, and the fact that they've made celestial origin claims the "default" choice.
Specifically *what evidence* do you have to support LIGO's claim as to the *cause* of this signal, and how did you statically rule out ordinary "blip transient" events as the real culprit?
Now watch them all scatter and run.........
