A number of mixed items today, mostly with the theme that Experts are often too sure of themselves.
- The organization GRASP,
among many others, until yesterday warned of the “imminent extinction
faced by gorillas” and other primates (not humans). NASA, an
organization of experts, has a page
called “Gorillas in the Midst of Extinction.” They used sophisticated,
powerful, high technology satellites to count gorillas “giving
scientists and conservationists” a way to count gorillas. The phrase
“scientists and conservationists” must mean there is a difference
between the two types of creatures. Anyway, the previously (?)
communist magazine New Scientist recently had an article
called “Ebola pushes gorillas towards extinction” (in the late 1990s
there were several books published warning of the same fate for homo sapiens sapiens).
And then yesterday came a report
by a group that unexpectedly came upon a troop of about 125,000
gorillas in the Congo, which more than doubled the previous estimate of
the number of gorillas alive. Jillian Miller, the director of the
conservation group Gorilla Organization, shockingly admitted (quoted in today’s New York Post),
“I think the lesson for conservationists today is that, yes, the world
is full of surprises. There’s a lot of uncharted territory.” I wonder
if she’ll still feel the same way during the next round of fund
raising.
-
“Bubble fusion” researcher Rusi Taleyarkhan’s
research was burst at Purdue this past week. This is the guy who
claimed in 2002 he could induce fusion using the force of collapsing
tiny bubbles (the learned word for bursting bubbles is cavitation).
The claim was always silly, which is fine, because there are more than
enough silly ideas that pass for “research” in academia. The press and
others originally bought the idea, however, and surely there will be
some people who will always believe, just like there are still some who
tout cold fusion. But the claim was too silly for some, who were
angered by Taleyarkhan, and they sought to punish him.
This week’s Science magazine has an article
(subscription required) on how Purdue is castigating Taleyarkhan. They
suspected he fudged his data, but couldn’t prove it, so like the feds
with Al Capone, they got him on a technicality, a move that I hope they
are not proud of. Turns out that Taleyarkhan wanted a second author on
a paper so that the paper would appear stronger: supposedly, more
authors means less likelihood of cheating. So he showed the paper to a
graduate student who made changes and recommendations, and then
Taleyarkhan put the grad student’s name on the paper. Bingo! Research
misconduct! cried the judges. Well, maybe, but if so, then roughly
98.3% of all academics are guilty of the same crime. People often, for
a host of reasons, politics, fear, friendship, tit for tat, habit, and
on and on, put names of people on papers even though those people had
little or nothing to do with the work. Ah well. Poor Taleyarkhan.
- For fun, we have a list of the Top 30 Failed Technology Predictions from the List Universe.
Here’s #2, from Mr Bill Gates, a well known rich person who lives near
Seattle: “We will never make a 32 bit operating system.” And #8 from
Lord Kelvin, who was a mathematician and physicist, and president of
the British Royal Society, 1895: “Heavier-than-air flying machines are
impossible.”
Ho ho ho, we say to ourselves when we read these prognostications.
How stupid can they be! We experience mirth. But that is exactly the wrong
emotion. You might despise Bill Gates, but he is an incredibly bright
person, an expert among experts in his field. Kelvin, who you probably
haven’t heard of, was one of the smartest people who ever lived (not at
the top of the list, to be sure, but ahead of all of us). These, and
the other people with quotes on the List Universe page, were masters, yet they made remarkably huge mistakes.
You must also remember that when these men, superior in perception to their peers, made these predictions, there were not
hosts of others saying the opposite. Most people believed the
predictions, and with good reason. These experts had often been right
before. What we should take away from this list is an increased
skepticism, a belief that experts are not nearly right as often as
they’d like us to think they are. Doubt, therefore, is the proper
emotion.
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