Are the planets growing?

[Aardwolf]

* In EE the continents should have broken up into small pieces, or islands, instead of vast continents. Suspended steel cables over 40 miles long would break from their own weight. Likewise, rock more than 50 miles wide or so [horizontally] would tend to break apart.

I dont see any reason for this to happen at all. Once the increasing material in the earth has breached a weaker part of the crust it would continue towards that relief point. Once the main rifts were established these would continue to expell material as they continue to be naturally thinner and weaker than the continental crust. The only further continental rifting could potentially be caused by splitting at or near the edges of land, due to the flattening of the curvature of the earth. The same process that causes the crumpling of the crust into mountain ranges.

[notnewton]

Aardwolf:

re: Lower Gravity.
This is a complicated issue with few sources. It is easy to truncate 300 million years (first life fapparently ormed 500MYA) and assume we know all about it. Those pre- to-dinos also survived for multiple millions of years. Then their large numbers disappeared very rapidly, and the dinos went from nothing to large numbers very rapidly. Something happened at that transition point and shouldn't be cast aside without study. Yes there were important large dragonflies but I don't have plotted their exact timeline. Plotting these flora and fauna timelines is necessary and I have not seen a complete enough relevant study, prior to the dino's time. It is not clear what level of gravity was required for giganticism nor smaller size. Some of Erickson's work might say the Synapsids may have been at a gravity near ours (let's say 100%), and that Dino's may have begun at perhaps 72%. Hurrell's work would give dino's starting at 25% - 50%. So non concensus, even among 2. Give me an e-mail and I'll send you what articles are not available. There are some text graphics I could not find a way to turn into a pdf and insert here. I'd prefer a simpler straight line answer, like everyone else would, but if I just choose to ignore other contradictory evidence avail to me, I'm just as bad as the standard scientists bias that I abhor.

[Aardwolf]

Aardwolf:

re: Lower Gravity.
This is a complicated issue with few sources. It is easy to truncate 300 million years (first life fapparently ormed 500MYA) and assume we know all about it. Those pre- to-dinos also survived for multiple millions of years. Then their large numbers disappeared very rapidly, and the dinos went from nothing to large numbers very rapidly. Something happened at that transition point and shouldn't be cast aside without study. Yes there were important large dragonflies but I don't have plotted their exact timeline. Plotting these flora and fauna timelines is necessary and I have not seen a complete enough relevant study, prior to the dino's time. It is not clear what level of gravity was required for giganticism nor smaller size. Some of Erickson's work might say the Synapsids may have been at a gravity near ours (let's say 100%), and that Dino's may have begun at perhaps 72%. Hurrell's work would give dino's starting at 25% - 50%. So non concensus, even among 2. Give me an e-mail and I'll send you what articles are not available. There are some text graphics I could not find a way to turn into a pdf and insert here. I'd prefer a simpler straight line answer, like everyone else would, but if I just choose to ignore other contradictory evidence avail to me, I'm just as bad as the standard scientists bias that I abhor.

Meganeura are dated form 300 mya in the Carboniferous period, the same period Synapsids were also dated from so were subject to the same gravity. Do you think a 450g dragonfly could fly in our gravity let alone successfully hunt and carry away its prey with its flimsy gossamer-like wings.

http://www.associatedcontent.com/articl ... tml?cat=58

Most articles like this state that there large size is possible because of higher oxygen content. This may be true but they never explain how it could fly at our strength of gravity. It just isn't plausible. They go on to mention that modern dragonflies are the best fliers in the insect world and can fly at 70mp, but then state that this is unlikely the meganeura could do this because of its size. That comment is nonsense because these are virtually identical to modern dragonflies so evolution obviously found a good design which has lasted 300 million years. It just scaled down. There's no reason to believe this didn't operate exactly as it's equivalent does now, otherwise it would have evolved into something different. As a predator it also needed to hunt quite large creatures so it needed to be fast and maneuvarable. For everything to fit you just need to reduce gravity and these discrepancies dissapear. This thing flew in lower gravity. It's without question but no-one mentions it because they don't like the answer. They would be labelled as crackpots and we can thank "science" for that.

[notnewton]

Aardwolff:

That the Meganeura flew in lower gravity is my conclusion also. But I have not put together a complete insects, flora, and animal fossil chart that answers the Synapsid issue described. Even this article did not give much of a total timeline. So I hold off.

Two interesting points is that Mardfar's work focuses on the heart pumping systems of plants and animals, and insects have an open fluid system without veins that thus requires a smaller size unless gravity is less, to reduce atmospheric pressure. So he sees lower gravity necessary to supply oxygen to the insects extremities. The "heart" of an insect is located near the brain so it gets a continuous source of blood while the extremities can thus suffer.

Erickson came to the very interesting conclusion concerning as to the origin of flight (birds). In a low gravity situation with large edible dragonfly food flying around, and you had the graceful 2 legged hopping dino's, how would the dino's get the dragonfly? They would hop upwards. Picture now the Michael Jordan advantage - air time. Feathers originated - perhaps for warmth. Some dino's used their arms with feathers to increase their air time to multiply their capability to catch the dragonflies. I simplified the scenario but you get the point.
So no conceptual argument with me.

[Aardwolf]

Aardwolff:

That the Meganeura flew in lower gravity is my conclusion also. But I have not put together a complete insects, flora, and animal fossil chart that answers the Synapsid issue described. Even this article did not give much of a total timeline. So I hold off.

Two interesting points is that Mardfar's work focuses on the heart pumping systems of plants and animals, and insects have an open fluid system without veins that thus requires a smaller size unless gravity is less, to reduce atmospheric pressure. So he sees lower gravity necessary to supply oxygen to the insects extremities. The "heart" of an insect is located near the brain so it gets a continuous source of blood while the extremities can thus suffer.

Erickson came to the very interesting conclusion concerning as to the origin of flight (birds). In a low gravity situation with large edible dragonfly food flying around, and you had the graceful 2 legged hopping dino's, how would the dino's get the dragonfly? They would hop upwards. Picture now the Michael Jordan advantage - air time. Feathers originated - perhaps for warmth. Some dino's used their arms with feathers to increase their air time to multiply their capability to catch the dragonflies. I simplified the scenario but you get the point.
So no conceptual argument with me.

I dont follow why you need a complete timeline before considering the meganeura issue. Any research of this insect will reveal it to be from 300 mya.

Also, gravity defines an upper limit. Just because it appears that an animal would have evolved in a higher gravity, therefore there must have been a higher gravity at the time, makes no sense. If in 300 million years from now someone discovered a fossil of a Rhinocerous beetle, by your reasoning they could deduce that gravity must have been expontially greater in our time period. Assuming gravity is the same now and then, and it had become extinct so they cannot observe its behaviour, they would argue that the creature can carry 1000 times its own weight which would be ridiculous and surely unnecessary...

[allynh]

When I wrote my version 2.0 it was the summation of what I'd learned up to that point. I then went back and started to read through everything again; all the threads, the links, the books, (I'm still going through the science essays that Florian posted--scary stuff.) and then wrote my version 3.0. I'm now going to start back at the beginning again to see what I understand.

Before I'd even started my review, I saw a thread discussing a concept that I'd completely missed.

Hidden History Of The Human Race
http://www.thunderbolts.info/wp/forum/phpB ... =10&t=3378

I have always seen the occasional article about megastructures found under the water, but until now it never occurred to me that they implied a vast civilization wiped out when sea levels rose and flooded the coasts. I mean that literally. I always looked at each site as unique, unconnected to anything else. The concept that a land area equal to Europe and China combined was wiped out 12k years ago never occurred to me. That blindness on my part is scary. What else have I missed along the way.

In the book Stephen J. Gould and Immanuel Velikovsky the essays by Irving Wolfe are what make the book worth buying. He talks about that blindness, the inability to see what is right in front of you; and how some people fight tooth & nail to ensure that blindness remains in place. That's why I write down a version of what I "think I know" then go back and see what I missed.

- It's all about the Zen concept of coming to anything with a Beginner's Mind. You can't learn something new if your mind is full of absolute facts.

The NYTimes Book Review just posted a review on two books about "being wrong".

To Err Is Human. And How! And Why.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/11/books ... ?ref=books

BEING WRONG
Adventures in the Margin of Error
By Kathryn Schulz

WRONG
Why Experts Keep Failing Us — And How to Know When Not to Trust Them
By David H. Freedman

Ms. Schulz notes how many of our beliefs are accidents of fate, hinging on things like our places of birth. She is pro argument, pro talking it out. She quotes the comedian Penn Jillette as saying, “One of the quickest ways to find out if you are wrong is to state what you believe.”

I have included the excerpts from each book to make people think for a moment. That's two more books I need to buy and read along the way, before I write version 4.0.

As always, read the links and make up your own mind.

[allynh]

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/11/books ... ?ref=books

June 10, 2010
‘Being Wrong’
By KATHRYN SCHULZ
Chapter 1: Wrongology

It infuriates me to be wrong when I know I’m right.
—Molière

Why is it so fun to be right? As pleasures go, it is, after all, a second order one at best. Unlike many of life’s other delights — chocolate, surfing, kissing — it does not enjoy any mainline access to our biochemistry: to our appetites, our adrenal glands, our limbic systems, our swoony hearts. And yet, the thrill of being right is undeniable, universal, and (perhaps most oddly) almost entirely undiscriminating. We can’t enjoy kissing just anyone, but we can relish being right about almost anything. The stakes don’t seem to matter much; it’s more important to bet on the right foreign policy than the right racehorse, but we are perfectly capable of gloating over either one. Nor does subject matter; we can be equally pleased about correctly identifing an orange-crowned warbler or the sexual orientation of our coworker. Stranger still, we can enjoy being right even about disagreeable things: the downturn in the stock market, say, or the demise of a friend’s relationship, or the fact that, at our spouse’s insistence, we just spent fifteen minutes schlepping our suitcase in exactly the opposite direction from our hotel.

Like most pleasurable experiences, rightness is not ours to enjoy all the time. Sometimes we are the one who loses the bet (or the hotel). And sometimes, too, we are plagued by doubt about the correct answer or course of action — an anxiety that, itself, reflects the urgency of our desire to be right. Still, on the whole, our indiscriminate enjoyment of being right is matched by an almost equally indiscriminate feeling that we are right. Occasionally, this feeling spills into the foreground, as when we argue or evangelize, make predictions or place bets. Most often, though, it is just psychological backdrop. A whole lot of us go through life assuming that we are basically right, basically all the time, about basically everything: about our political and intellectual convictions, our religious and moral beliefs, our assessment of other people, our memories, our grasp of facts. As absurd as it sounds when we stop to think about it, our steady state seems to be one of unconsciously assuming that we are very close to omniscient.

To be fair, this serene faith in our own rightness is often warranted. Most of us navigate day-to-day life fairly well, after all, which suggests that we are routinely right about a great many things. And sometimes we are not just routinely right but spectacularly right: right about the existence of atoms (postulated by ancient thinkers thousands of years before the emergence of modern chemistry); right about the healing properties of aspirin (recognized since at least 3000 BC); right to track down that woman who smiled at you in the cafe (now your wife of twenty years). Taken together, these moments of rightness represent both the high-water marks of human endeavor and the source of countless small joys. They affirm our sense of being smart, competent, trustworthy, and in tune with our environment. More important, they keep us alive. Individually and collectively, our very existence depends on our ability to reach accurate conclusions about the world around us. In short, the experience of being right is imperative for our survival, gratifying for our ego, and, overall, one of life’s cheapest and keenest satisfactions.

This book is about the opposite of all that. It is about being wrong: about how we as a culture think about error, and how we as individuals cope when our convictions collapse out from under us. If we relish being right and regard it as our natural state, you can imagine how we feel about being wrong. For one thing, we tend to view it as rare and bizarre — an inexplicable aberration in the normal order of things. For another, it leaves us feeling idiotic and ashamed. Like the term paper returned to us covered in red ink, being wrong makes us cringe and slouch down in our seat; it makes our heart sink and our dander rise. At best we regard it as a nuisance, at worst a nightmare, but in either case — and quite unlike the gleeful little rush of being right — we experience our errors as deflating and embarrassing.

And that’s just for starters. In our collective imagination, error is associated not just with shame and stupidity but also with ignorance, indolence, psychopathology, and moral degeneracy. This set of associations was nicely summed up by the Italian cognitive scientist Massimo Piattelli-Palmarini, who noted that we err because of (among other things) “inattention, distraction, lack of interest, poor preparation, genuine stupidity, timidity, braggadocio, emotional imbalance, . . . ideological, racial, social or chauvinistic prejudices, as well as aggressive or prevaricatory instincts.” In this rather despairing view — and it is the common one — our errors are evidence of our gravest social, intellectual, and moral failings.

Of all the things we are wrong about, this idea of error might well top the list. It is our meta-mistake: we are wrong about what it means to be wrong. Far from being a sign of intellectual inferiority, the capacity to err is crucial to human cognition. Far from being a moral flaw, it is inextricable from some of our most humane and honorable qualities: empathy, optimism, imagination, conviction, and courage. And far from being a mark of indifference or intolerance, wrongness is a vital part of how we learn and change. Thanks to error, we can revise our understanding of ourselves and amend our ideas about the world.

Given this centrality to our intellectual and emotional development, error shouldn’t be an embarrassment, and cannot be an aberration. On the contrary. As Benjamin Franklin observed in the quote that heads this book, wrongness is a window into normal human nature — into our imaginative minds, our boundless faculties, our extravagant souls. This book is staked on the soundness of that observation: that however disorienting, difficult, or humbling our mistakes might be, it is ultimately wrongness, not rightness, that can teach us who we are.

Continues...

From “Being Wrong: Adventures in the Margin of Error” by Kathryn Schulz. Excerpt courtesy of Ecco, the publisher.

[allynh]

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/11/books ... ?ref=books

June 10, 2010
‘Wrong’
By DAVID H. FREEDMAN
Introduction

Success consists of going from failure to failure without loss of enthusiasm.
— Winston Churchill

I’m sitting in a coffee shop in a pediatric hospital in Boston, hard by a nine-foot-tall bronze teddy bear, with a man who is going to perform a surprising trick. I’m thinking of an article recently published in a prestigious medical journal, an article that reports the results of a research study, and he will tell me whether or not the study is likely to turn out to be right or wrong. It’s the sort of study that your doctor might read about, and that you might learn about from a newspaper, website, or morning TV news show. It may well be that the results of this study will change your life — they might convince you to start eating or avoiding certain foods to lower your risk of heart disease, or to take a certain drug to help you beat cancer, or to learn whether or not you are carrying a gene linked to vulnerability to a mental illness. But this man won’t need to hear any of the particulars of the study to perform his feat. All he needs to know is that it was a study published in a top journal.

His prediction: it’s wrong. It’s a prediction that strikes at the foundation of expertise and our trust in it.

The man is John Ioannidis, a doctor and researcher whose specialty is calculating the chances that studies’ results are false. For someone dedicated to spotlighting the inadequacies of his colleagues’ lifework, Ioannidis is pleasant, polite, and soft-spoken, even if he discreetly radiates the fidgety energy of someone who habitually packs too much into his day. He looks young for a man heading into his midforties, with a slight build, a wavy mop of fine, dark hair, and a thin mustache. Also a bit surprising about Ioannidis is that he is highly regarded by his peers. Communities usually find ways to marginalize those who expose their flaws, but the world of medical research, in which extraordinary talent and effort are prerequisites for attaining even the lowest rungs of recognition, has kept Ioannidis in demand via the field’s standard trappings of success: prestigious appointments, including one at the world-class Tufts–New England Medical Center and another at the University of Ioannina Medical School in his native Greece; frequent citations by colleagues of his work, some of which has been published in the field’s top journals; and a stream of invitations to speak at conferences, where he is generally a big draw.

There’s no standard career path to becoming a deconstructor of wrongness, and Ioannidis took a roundabout route to it. Born in 1965 in the United States to parents who were both physicians, he was raised in Athens, where he showed unusual aptitude in mathematics and snagged Greece’s top student math prize. By the end of college, he seemed on track for a career as a mathematician. But he had come to feel the family pull of medicine and, not wanting to turn his back on math, decided to combine the two and become a medical mathematician. “I didn’t know exactly what such a thing might be,” he says, “but I felt sure there was some important component of medicine that was mathematical.” He graduated first in his class at the University of Athens Medical School, then shipped off to Harvard for his residency in internal medicine, followed by a research and clinical appointment at Tufts in infectious diseases. The math had to this point remained in the background, but in 1993, while at Tufts, he saw his chance to even

things up a bit. There was growing interest in the new field of “evidence-based medicine” — that is, trying to equip physicians to do not merely what they had been taught to assume would help patients but what had been rigorously proven in studies would help patients. “Amazingly, most medical treatment simply isn’t backed up by good, quantitative evidence,” says Ioannidis — news that would likely come as a surprise to most patients. Distilling this sort of knowledge out of a chaos of patient data often requires more statistical-analysis firepower than clinical researchers bear, providing an opening for Ioannidis to make a mark.

Carrying his new interest to joint appointments at the National Institutes of Health and Johns Hopkins in the mid-1990s, Ioannidis began to look for interesting patterns in those medical-journal studies that explore how patients fare with certain treatments. Such studies are essentially the coin of the realm when it comes to communicating solid evidence of treatment effectiveness to physicians. A good doctor, it is presumed, scans the journals for the results of these studies to see what works and what doesn’t on which patients, and how well and with what risks, modifying her practices accordingly. Does it make sense to prescribe an antibiotic to a child with an ear infection? Should middle-aged men with no signs of heart disease be told to take a small, daily dose of aspirin? Do the potential benefits of a particular surgical intervention outweigh the risks? Studies presumably provide the answers. In examining hundreds of these studies, Ioannidis did indeed spot a pattern — a disturbing one. When a study was published, often it was only a matter of months, and at most a few years, before other studies came out to either fully refute the findings or declare that the results were “exaggerated” in the sense that later papers revealed significantly lesser benefits to the treatment under study. Results that held up were outweighed two-to-one by results destined to be labeled “never mind.”

What was going on here? The whole point of carrying out a study was to rigorously examine a question using tools and techniques that would yield solid data, allowing a careful and conclusive analysis that would replace the conjecture, assumptions, and sloppy assessments that had preceded it. The data were supposed to be the path to truth. And yet these studies, and most types of studies Ioannidis looked at, were far more often than not driving to wrong answers. They exhibited the sort of wrongness rate you would associate more with fad-diet tips, celebrity gossip, or political punditry than with state-of-the-art medical research.

The two-out-of-three wrongness rate Ioannidis found is worse than it sounds. He had been examining only the less than one-tenth of one percent of published medical research that makes it to the most prestigious medical journals. In other words, in determining that two-thirds of published medical research is wrong, Ioannidis is offering what can easily be seen as an extremely optimistic assessment. Throw in the presumably less careful work from lesser journals, and take into account the way the results end up being spun and misinterpreted by university and industrial PR departments and by journalists, and it’s clear that whatever it was about expert wrongness that Ioannidis had stumbled on in these journals, the wrongness rate would only worsen from there.

Ioannidis felt he was confronting a mystery that spoke to the very foundation of medical wisdom. How can the research community claim to know what it’s doing, and to be making significant progress, if it can’t bring out studies in its top journals that correctly prove anything, or lead to better patient care? It was as if he had set out to improve the battle effectiveness of a navy and immediately discovered that most of its boats didn’t float. Nor did the problems appear to be unique to medicine: looking at other branches of science, including chemistry, physics, and psychology, he found much the same. “The facts suggest that for many, if not the majority, of fields, the majority of published studies are likely to be wrong,” he says. Probably, he adds, “the vast majority.”

Medical and other scientific expertise aren’t exactly the bottom of the barrel when it comes to expert wisdom. Yes, much-heralded drugs get yanked off the market, we get conflicting advice about what to eat, and toxic chemicals make their way into our homes. But you don’t have to dig far in pretty much any other field to see similar, or worse, arrays of screwups. I could fill this entire book, and several more, with examples of expertise gone wrong — not only in medicine but in physics, finance, child raising, the government, sports, entertainment, and on and on. (Just for fun, I’ve stuck a small sampling in Appendix 1.) The fact is, expert wisdom usually turns out to be at best highly contested and ephemeral, and at worst flat-out wrong.

Of course, compiling anecdotes and quoting experts about expertise doesn’t prove that experts usually mislead us. Actually, proving expert wrongness isn’t really the point of this book. I’ve found that most people don’t need much convincing that experts are usually wrong. How could we not suspect that to be the case? We constantly hear experts contradict one another and even themselves on a vast range of issues, whether they’re spouting off on diets, hurricane preparedness, the secrets to being a great manager, the stock market, cholesterol-lowering drugs, getting kids to sleep through the night, the inevitability of presidential candidates, the direction of home values, the key to strong marriages, vitamins, the benefits of alcohol or aspirin or fish, the existence of weapons of mass destruction, and so on. As the world watched its financial institutions and economies teetering and in some cases collapsing in 2008 and 2009, many found it maddening that the great majority of financial experts, from those who advise heads of state to those who advise working stiffs, not only failed to foresee the trouble but in many cases specifically took to the airwaves to counsel that there wasn’t much to worry about, and in general failed to have anything consistent and helpful to say about the problems. We can all agree that there is a growing obesity epidemic, but it sometimes seems as if no two experts agree on what works when it comes to losing the excess weight. And those of us who hope to see our children’s schools improve can choose between experts who say that the curricula need to be less rigid and test-oriented, and experts who say precisely the opposite. If anything, we live in a time of acute frustration with experts, even as many of us remain dependent on them and continue to heed their advice.

Putting trust in experts who are probably wrong is only part of the problem. The other side of the coin is that many people have all but given up on getting good advice from experts. The total effect of all the contradicting and shifting pronouncements is to make expert conclusions at times sound like so much blather — a background noise of modern life. I think by now most of us have at some point caught ourselves thinking, or at least have heard from people around us, something along these lines: Experts! One day they say vitamin X / coffee / wine / drug Y / a big mortgage / baby learning videos / Six Sigma / multitasking / clean homes / arguing / investment Z is a good thing, and the next they say it’s a bad thing. Why bother paying attention? I might as well just do what I feel like doing. Do we really want to just give up on expertise in this way? Even if experts usually fail to give us the clear, reliable guidance we need, there are still situations, as we’ll see, where failing to follow their advice can be self-defeating and even deadly.

So I’m not going to spend much time trying to convince you that experts are often, and possibly usually, wrong. Instead, this book is about why expertise goes wrong and how we may be able to do a better job of seeking out more trustworthy expert advice. To that end, we’re going to look at how experts — including scientists, business gurus, and our other highly trusted sources of wisdom — fall prey to a range of measurement errors, how they come to have deep biases that lead them into gamesmanship and even outright dishonesty, and how interactions among them tend to worsen rather than correct for these problems. We’re also going to examine the ways in which the media sort through the flow of dubious expert pronouncements and further distort them, as well as how we ourselves are drawn to the worst of this shoddy output, and how we end up being even more misled on the Internet. Finally, we’ll try to extract from everything we’ve discovered a set of rough guidelines that can help to separate the most suspect expert advice from the stuff that has a better chance of holding up.

As I said, most people are quite comfortable with the notion that there’s a real problem with experts. But some — mostly experts — do in fact take objection to that claim. Here are the three objections I encountered the most often, along with quick responses.

(1) If experts are so wrong, why are we so much better off now than we were fifty or a hundred years ago? One distinguished professor put it to me this way in an e-mail note: “Our life expectancy has almost doubled in the past seventy-five years, and that’s because of experts.” Actually, the vast majority of that gain came earlier in the twentieth century from a very few sharp improvements, and especially from the antismoking movement. As for all of the drugs, diagnostic tools, surgical techniques, medical devices, lists of foods to eat and avoid, and impressive breakthrough procedures and technologies that fill medical journals and trickle down into media reports, consider this: between 1978 and 2001, according to one highly regarded study, U.S. life spans increased fewer than three years on average — when the drop in smoking rates slowed around 1990, so did life-expectancy gains. It’s hard to claim we’re floating on an ocean of marvelously effective advice from a range of experts when we’ve been skirting the edges of a new depression, the divorce rate is around 50 percent, energy prices occasionally skyrocket, obesity rates are climbing, children’s test scores are declining, we’re forced to worry about terrorist and even nuclear attacks, 118 million prescriptions for antidepressants are written annually in the United States, chunks of our food supply periodically become tainted, and, well, you get the idea. Perhaps a reasonable model for expert advice is one I might call “punctuated wrongness” — that is, experts usually mislead us, but every once in a while they come up with truly helpful advice.

(2) Sure, experts have been mostly wrong in the past, but now they’re on top of things. In mid-2008 experts were standing in line to talk about the extensive, foolproof controls protecting our banks and other financial institutions that weren’t in place in the late 1920s — just before those institutions started collapsing. Cancer experts shake their heads today over the ways in which generations of predecessors wasted decades hunting down the mythical environmental or viral roots of most cancers, before pronouncing as a sure thing the more recent theory of how cancer is caused by mutations in a small number of genes — a theory that, as we’ll see, has yielded almost no benefits to patients after two decades. Most everyone missed what was happening to our climate, or even spoke of a global cooling crisis, until we came to today’s absolutely certain understanding of global warming and its man-made causes — well, we’ll see how that turns out. How could we have been so foolish before? And what sort of fool would question today’s experts’ beliefs? In any case, the claim that we’ve come from wrong ideas to right ideas suggests that there’s a consensus of experts today on what the right ideas are. But there is often nothing close to such a consensus. When experts’ beliefs clash, somebody has to be wrong — hardly a sign of an imminent convergence on truth.

And, finally, (3) So what if experts are usually wrong? That’s the nature of expert knowledge — it progresses slowly as it feels its way through difficult questions. Well, sure, we live in a complex world without easy answers, so we might well expect to see our experts make plenty of missteps as they steadily chip away at the truth. I’m not saying that experts don’t make any progress, or that they ought to have figured it all out long ago. I’m suggesting three things: we ought to be fully aware of how large a percentage of expert advice is flawed; we should find out if there are perhaps much more disconcerting reasons why experts so frequently get off track other than “that’s just the nature of the beast”; and we ought to take the trouble to see if we can come up with clues that will help distinguish better expert advice from fishier stuff. And, by the way, if experts are so comfortable with the notion that their efforts ought to be expected to spit out mostly wrong answers, why don’t they work a little harder to get this useful piece of information across to us when they’re interviewed on morning news shows or in newspaper articles, and not just when they’re confronted with their errors?

Given that I’ve already started throwing the term “expert” around left and right, I suppose I ought to make sure you know what I mean by the word. Academics study “expertise” in pianists, athletes, burglars, birds, infants, computers, trial witnesses, and captains of industry, to name just a few examples. But when I say “expert,” I’m mostly thinking of someone whom the mass media might quote as a credible authority on some topic — the sorts of people we’re usually referring to when we say things like “According to experts . . .” These are what I would call “mass” or “public” experts, people in a position to render opinions or findings that a large number of us might hear about and choose to take into account in making decisions that could affect our lives. Scientists are an especially important example, but I’m also interested in, for example, business, parenting, and sports experts who gain some public recognition for their experience and insight. I’ll also have some things to say about pop gurus, celebrity advice givers, and media pundits, as well as about what I call “local” experts — everyday practitioners such as non-research-oriented doctors, stockbrokers, and auto mechanics.

I’ve heard it said, half kiddingly, that meteorologists are the only people who get paid to be wrong. I would argue that in that sense most of our experts are paid to be wrong, and are probably wrong a much higher percentage of the time than are meteorologists. I’m going to show that although the process of wringing useful insights and advice from complex subjects may indeed be an inherently slow and erratic one, there are many other, less benign reasons why experts go astray. In fact, we’ll see that expert pronouncements are pushed toward wrongness so strongly that in the end it’s harder, I think, to explain why they’re sometimes right. But that doesn’t mean we’re hopelessly mired in this swamp of bad advice. With a decent compass, we can find our way out. Let’s start by exploring some of the muck.

From “Wrong: Why Experts Keep Failing Us — And How to Know When Not to Trust Them” by David H. Freedman. Excerpt courtesy of Little, Brown and Company, the publisher.

[notnewton]

Allyn:
Excellent post. Thanks for the wrongness links. I consider this the scientific Age of Irresponsibility. As we would all have expected the CEO of BP to make certain all along the way that his organization "Get it Right", so should we expect the head of science departments and individual scientists to "Get it Right." Getting it right in a manufacturing product requires a continuous look at problems, and a continuous nervousness that the assumptions put in place are correct, and to consider the worst case scenario and determine what to do if something goes wrong. That's not what is done in the world. The Best and Brightest super brains, are among the least capable of questioning themselves.

I view the topics of EE vs PT and fossil fuel vs Abiotic (somehow) Oil, etc, being of two ongoing studies 1) A continual review of the scientific facts and assumptions, and 2) The Psychology of humans to not listen, to be blindly wrong, and to not care. And so your wrongness arguments fit well under #2.

Man advances from only 2 primary processes (in my simplified mind) A) Freedom of Speech, and B) Experimentation. Hegel also simplified the world, Thesis, Antithesis, . . . Synthesis. Then that apparent "final answer" starts the cycle afresh with an endless addition of "antithesis" that will continue well beyond our mortal years.

[Lloyd]

* You guys are wasting space discussing conventional dates for the fossil record and rock strata. Several TPODs and many posts in this forum have pointed out the flaws of these dating methods and conclude that they are way wrong and virtually useless. Most or all of the so-called millions or billions year old datings should actually be thousands of year old datings in all probability. Most of the rock strata were deposited elecrically in one or at most several brief time spans, along with the probably simultaneous Great Flood deposits, probably within 5,000 years ago. Dinosaurs are found to have existed a few thousand years ago too. There are dinosaur bones in Alaska that are not even fossilized, or only partly fossilized. There is at least one pictograph in the U.S. southwest of a living plant-eating dinosaur and there are legends of humans witnessing dinosaurs.

[remelic]

* You guys are wasting space discussing conventional dates for the fossil record and rock strata. Several TPODs and many posts in this forum have pointed out the flaws of these dating methods and conclude that they are way wrong and virtually useless. Most or all of the so-called millions or billions year old datings should actually be thousands of year old datings in all probability. Most of the rock strata were deposited elecrically in one or at most several brief time spans, along with the probably simultaneous Great Flood deposits, probably within 5,000 years ago. Dinosaurs are found to have existed a few thousand years ago too. There are dinosaur bones in Alaska that are not even fossilized, or only partly fossilized. There is at least one pictograph in the U.S. southwest of a living plant-eating dinosaur and there are legends of humans witnessing dinosaurs.

I agree. I plainly explained all this in one smooth stroke using only EU a few post ago but this debate continues without true sight. What does argueing for 5000 words about how mainstream is wrong, have to do with how the Earth is growing?

Just state your facts, points, theories....and debate with your tools of accepted EU principles.

[notnewton]

LOW GRAVITY NEWS

I previously reported that there were only 3 good low gravity articles/sites available and listed on my site
( http://www.eearthk.com) under Readings, but that two of them had become inactive. I retained access to those articles because I had copied them, knowing that often what is on the Net doesn't always stay on the Net.

Last night I received good news from Ramin Mardfar from Iran that his site was back up. The link on my site is slightly wrong now and needs correcting, but Ramin's work is now available at: http://www.geocities.ws/ramin1102000/bookpage.html

[allynh]

Another nice picture illustrating the Earth Moon system.

As pointed out at Expanding Earth Knowledge Company, the Earth orbit, and the Moon orbit are always "convex" to the Sun. The relationship gets distorted due to scale and shows both being "concave" in places.

Lunar phase
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lunar_phase

That still blows my mind.

[webolife]

Allynh, just remember that the barycenter of the moon-earth system is only a couple dozen kilometers off the earth's centroid. The diagram above is rather misleading showing the barycenter midway between the two "planets". Or swing a child around by the arms, and notice how your own body swings around as well. Not exactly sure how this trespasses into the growing planets concept, except that one needs to have a clear picture of both what is happening internally and externally to the earth in order to provide some kind of sensible mechanism for growth. I can't buy the electricity->mass transformational scenario yet. Nor the lower gravity requirement for dinosaurs. The very fact of their bone sturdiness/structure is explained by their having to survive in the current gravity.

[Journeyman]

I've been reading Paul LaViolette's Origin of the Cosmos & it's a fascinating read. In it he explores the General Systems Theory ideas about origin, including the idea that the extant Reality we perceive is the result of a continuous creation process whereby two 'flows' or perhaps substrates interact to cause self-realised creation. He uses examples from everyday (and not-so-everyday) life to demonstrate that, like EU, we can see these processes around us.

Where it fits to here is that these processes are ongoing - the Universe IS getting larger as new matter is coming into being. These processes occur in preference in and around already created matter & energy, which helps explain the large scale structure of the Universe we see. Such processes in galactic centres also generate massive surges of expulsion, leading LaViolette in the direction of his Superwave ideas, but to me, providing a source for Halton Arp's 'new' matter which displays high RedShift (RS) values that decline as it interacts with the surrounding medium.

LaViolette's source is an active Aether rather than the mechanistic 'dead' ether required by orthodox cosmology with particles separated from energy & the underlying substrate. The theory accounts also for the differences between matter & energy & even provides a rationale for what we currently think of as strings.

And even more fascinatingly, he provides evidence that the Ancients knew all this & incorporated the concepts into such systems as Astrology, the Tarot & many of the Creation Myths that have come down through the ages.

So there may be a very good reason to suppose not only the Earth but all bodies are increasing in mass, and it's a reason which gets rid of the ever-increasing expansion of the Universe as well as the Big Bang & the impossible 'magic' forces required to make that hypothesis produce the Universe we see.