Complex Numbers

The Truth is Out There

I'm not the only one who riffs off of articles I find online. Meta-riff today!

https://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2020/03/03/nee-ned-zb-6tnn-deibedh-siefi...

NEE NED ZB 6TNN DEIBEDH SIEFI EBEEE SSIEI ESEE SEEE!!

I've been following this guy, PZ Myers, for a while now, and while I don't always agree, I appreciate his point of view. Except about movies. Guy has no taste in movies, except occasionally and by accident. Fortunately, this isn't about movies, but science, and Myers is a scientist, not a movie producer.

Wired tries to defend SETI and UFOlogy. They argue that there are 3 branches of inquiry — exobiology, the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, and the study of UFOs — and each has their place in our battery of methods.

For reference, here's the article he links:

https://www.wired.com/story/what-scientists-can-learn-from-alien-hunters/

I've been by the place in the article's header photo. It also gained notoriety last year, as it was mentioned as a gathering place for the Assault on Area 51, or whatever it was called, that internet hoax that blew up. Simpler times...

Anyway, it's worth reading the original Wired article, even if it's not up to Myers' standards.

Speaking of which...

There’s a continuum of legitimacy [the Wired article argues], and it’s entirely arbitrary that we place UFOs in pseudoscience, and don’t fund SETI, and think exobiology is valid and interesting. That is a good point, except that I think there is a solid criterion that is rooted in how we do science.

Arbitrary, maybe, but if you can defend something, is it truly arbitrary? To give an example, it's entirely arbitrary that we start the year on January 1, which in turn is about 10 days after the winter solstice. There's no defense of that other than "it's the way we've done it for centuries," which is no defense at all. With science, on the other hand, you can set boundaries and then see where shit falls with regards to the boundaries.

Here’s the deal: early in our training, we’re taught to keep an open mind — you use hypotheses to guide a line of research, but we must be prepared to find unexpected results and alternative explanations. We’re adapted to thinking, “My experiment to test my hypothesis should find X, but if it finds Y we’ll have to modify the hypothesis, and if the answer is Z, well, back to the drawing board, but gosh, that would be exciting.”Here’s the deal: early in our training, we’re taught to keep an open mind — you use hypotheses to guide a line of research, but we must be prepared to find unexpected results and alternative explanations. We’re adapted to thinking, “My experiment to test my hypothesis should find X, but if it finds Y we’ll have to modify the hypothesis, and if the answer is Z, well, back to the drawing board, but gosh, that would be exciting.”

In case you're wondering how science is meant to work, well, that sums it up well.

Myers goes on to explain the difference between exobiology, SETI, and UFOlogy, as they relate to science.

It’s as simple as asking, “What will we learn from doing the observation/experiment?” SETI’s answer is nothing, unless we find a one in a trillion possibility, then it’s the jackpot. UFOlogy’s answer is that they already know little green men exist, so we just have to photograph thrown pie plates until we’ve persuaded the establishment. Neither is good science.

I haven't had much experience with SETI, but I was always under the impression that whenever they found something interesting but not clear evidence of ETI, the data could be used by astronomers. Seems to me that there's been at least one case of that. So I wouldn't call their negative results, or lack of results, entirely useless.

Both SETI and UFOlogy are strongly susceptible to apophenia as well. They are trying to fit complex data to a prior expectation, so there’s a tendency to impose patterns on noise. Here’s a classic example: NASA has observed complex sand dune formations on Mars.

Thanks, Myers, you made me look up a word for the first time in years. Apophenia: the tendency to mistakenly perceive connections and meaning between unrelated things. I tend to think of writing as a kind of imposed apophenia (without, I admit, using that word); when I write, I look for metaphorical connections. But I don't labor under the delusion that these connections have significance outside of what I'm writing.

The sand dunes he mentions here lead to the title of Myers' post. To me, it's a bit like looking for patterns in a Jackson Pollack painting. We're pattern-seeking animals; when we see a pattern, we try to interpret it, to make sense out of it, when sometimes it's just a meaningless pattern. Might as well look for meaning in the coastline of Great Britain. Sure, if you squint just right, maybe you can see something else, but it's coincidental. The only "meaning" involves land formation and shoreline erosion, or, in the case of Mars, natural wind sculpting.

In fiction, everything has a meaning. That's why we like fiction. This isn't the case for observed phenomena.

Right. So someone, probably as a bit of lark, tried to interpret them as dots and dashes, and then translated them into Morse code (why ancient Martians would have used a code devised by a 19th century American is left as an exercise for the reader).

Because Samuel Morse didn't die; he was transported bodily to Mars, along with John Carter, only Morse was too geeky for Burroughs to have written about. Duh. What? You can't disprove that.

That’s the problem with SETI, though. The universe produces patterns all the time, and human brains strain to impose interpretable derivations on them — SETI will milk that for all the news and attention they can get, even if it is ultimately meaningless.

Meanwhile, UFOlogists already know that the aliens are living on Mars, and have trained Bigfoots raking the dunes to send secret messages to the fleet hovering invisibly in our atmosphere, and you ignore it at your peril, you fools.

Is it Bigfoots or Bigfeet? When I see one, I'll be sure to ask him. Or her.

So my point here is the difference between being open-minded, and being certain. As I pointed out in my last entry, we can't be absolutely certain about anything, even if we think we are. The open-minded person may have ideas, and then looks for ways to refute the ideas. That, ideally, is how science is supposed to work. Whereas having a conclusion already set in one's mind and then looking for evidence to support it (and usually ignoring or downplaying evidence to the contrary), well, that doesn't get anyone anywhere, except in their own minds.

Now, I've said this before, but it bears repeating: the universe is a big place, and I would be very surprised if there wasn't other machine-building life out there... somewhere. But I'm not certain of it, and I haven't seen any evidence to support it. Consequently, I don't think SETI is utterly useless. But the odds, I think, favor the existence of non-sentient life at least in our galactic neighborhood, and so I'd have to put my money on the exobiologists to get there first.