Why is there so much crackpot physics?

[theprestige]

The Register today has a somewhat interesting/amusing article about bafflegab. Anyone up for a game of "BS or not"?

-Fully leverage internal and external partnerships to collaboratively discover targets;
-Collectively foster an environment that encourages and rewards diversity, empowerment, innovation, risk-taking and agility;
-Update current procedures to incorporate knowledge gained;
-Enable better, more efficient management of the mission and business by establishing new, modifying current, and eliminating inefficient, business processes;
-Reveal potential improvements to resource allocation for portfolio effectiveness;
-Counterpoint the surrealism of the underlying metaphor.

It's all BS

The thing is, all of the quotes in the Register article, I can actually translate into meaningful actions. They're really just wordy versions of practical ideas. Taken in order:

-Do a better job of working with our partner agencies to discover targets.

-Work together to encourage our people to consider alternatives, make decisions, find solutions, take risks, and adapt quickly.

-Update current procedures to incorporate knowledge gained [This actually just the original wording; it could be re-worded, but is already perfectly cromulent as-is.]

-Improve overall project management by adopting new and better practices, improving existing good practices, and abandoning existing bad practices.

-Find better ways to allocate resources among our projects.

-Counterpoint the surrealism of the underlying metaphor.

I'll come back to that last one in a moment.

Overall, these seem like pretty good high-level instructions for things that managers should be thinking about and acting on, within their domains. I think an organization could do a lot worse than emphasize the principles on that list. I think an organization could do a lot worse than express those principles the way they're expressed on that list. In my own work, I can think of dozens of ways that those principles can be clearly applied, and many concrete actions I can take to apply them. Contrast with BurntSynapse's bafflegab, which so far appears completely invulnerable to attempts at concrete interpretation or practical application.

As for that last item, "[c]ounterpoint the surrealism of the underlying metaphor": This one seems to be missing any meaningful context. Since the rest of the list strikes me as perfectly cromulent, I'm comfortable assuming this one is also cromulent in context.

I'd guess it summarizes an ongoing discussion, and that the audience of the document is expected to be familiar with the current state of that discussion and its idiom. E.g., say there is a problem of analysts becoming dissociated from the reality and real-world implications of their work, because of the way they receive and interact with the information they analyze. That problem could conceivably be summarized as "surrealism of the underlying metaphor". And management actions taken to keep the analysts grounded in reality, and mindful of the real-world implications of their work, could conceivably be summarized as "counterpoint [etc.]". Not really the terminology I might use, but organizations are allowed to evolve their own jargon and terms of art. This is not the same as bafflegab, even though it may be equally inscrutable at first glance.

What reveals BurntSynapse's writing as bafflegab is not its initial inaccessiblity, but rather his unwillingness and/or inability to effect an accessible translation when asked to do so.

 

[Cuddles]

I really, really hope you're joking and not seriously trying to defend those quotes.

 

[ben m]

Mill's methods ... Schwarz Criteria ...

"Mill's methods?" Like, John Stuart Mill thinking about elementary inference 150 years ago? Wow.

You think "Mill's Methods", applied to some data (what data?) about "transformative research", will reveal some new correlation between "research transformativeness" and Factor X---enabling future funding-agencies to Fund Things That Have Factor X?

And you think that idea is so uncontroversial that you can bury it in a bullet-point ("Tabulate data from HPS experts; Analyze HPS for insights using Mills/Bayes; Coffee break; Write training materials on new HPS insights") in a management plan?

We will know whether this bullet-point actually produces something only when we see the bullet point actually produce something. It's sort of like transformative research, itself.

In any area of empirical application, we can't say which driver will die in a crash or be saved by wearing a seatbelt, although the odds favor belting. We can't say which child will eventually get lung cancer but statistically, second hand smoke is bad for kids, generally.

We know what fraction of drivers die in seatbelt/non-seatbelt crashes because we have relevant data. We have data showing that the past X miles of road travel (travel that's explicitly known to resemble the next X miles) have led to Y crashes and Z fatalities. We know that a future puff-of-smoke will be bad for a future lung, because we have data from past smoke-exposed lungs that very closely resemble future lungs.

We have only seen a tiny number of identifiable "revolutions". Every such revolution occurred in a dramatically different world, context, knowledge-base, etc. than the previous one. Indeed, every revolution occurs among people who know about and hope to emulate the previous ones. It's less like "predict seat-belt benefits" and more like "predict the most popular film genres of 2025-2030."

There are a couple of problems with this objection. First is that your objection implies resource allocation percentages are not independent of resourcing level.

I was entirely serious. I don't think your methods would give the NSF any convincing reason to change resource allocation percentages. Seriously, this is a common outcome from advisory panels---"You asked us to think about allocation, but the existing allocation is pretty good, as far as we can tell without being able to see the future. We don't have a miraculous improved allocation plan. (More money would be good though!)"---and since you haven't given them a tool for changing that, I don't think they'll change that.

Rather, by adjusting the nonsense details of your nonsense analysis, you could tell the NSF to make any utterly random change in their allocations. Remember those Bayesian weights (Schwartz criteria?) that, as far as I can imagine, you'll be making up out of thin air? Tweak those weights (from one arbitrary number to another, who cares?) and your recommendations could swing from "Move all funding into the high-risk, high-reward tail!" to "These long-tail proposals are less likely to pay off than waiting for serendipitous discoveries from main-line work!"

During my attendance at and participation in TR support discussions with directorate heads and two NSB chairs over the course of many years, materials of this type were developed and are now part of the standard PRP member packet. I therefore doubt conversations anything like that to occur anytime soon in Arlington, absent fairly serious changes in priorities, IMO.

That's quite a revelation from the guy with 160 posts unwilling to state whether he had recommendations and what they were. Huh. Apparently you do have recommendations and you've written them down in a document somewhere, and some poor souls are actually made to read it, right here in the real world. But you didn't think to mention that here. Why not?

I don't know what PRP stands for.

 

[theprestige]

I really, really hope you're joking and not seriously trying to defend those quotes.

I honestly think those quotes, while problematic, are defensible in a way that BurntSynapse's bafflegab is not. I've offered a sincere defense of them, in the context of his contributions to this thread.

My feeling is that bafflegab is essentially a form of lying. My reading of the quotes in the Register is that their authors are trying to tell the truth, even if they are doing a poor job of it.

Put it another way: I really, really hope you're joking and not seriously trying to imply that an organization should not say, and should not strive to, in so many words, "pdate current procedures to incorporate knowledge gained".

 

[theprestige]

That's quite a revelation from the guy with 160 posts unwilling to state whether he had recommendations and what they were. Huh. Apparently you do have recommendations and you've written them down in a document somewhere, and some poor souls are actually made to read it, right here in the real world. But you didn't think to mention that here. Why not?

I think what he's trying to say is that he can't show you his workings, because he's already done them.

Where the rest of us might see the perfect opportunity to present a real-world example, together with its outcome, he apparently sees an insurmountable obstacle to further communication on the subject.

 

[Cuddles]

I honestly think those quotes, while problematic, are defensible in a way that BurntSynapse's bafflegab is not. I've offered a sincere defense of them, in the context of his contributions to this thread.

So you completely missed the point that two of them were, in fact, BurntSynapse's bafflegab, while one was a deliberately nonsensical bit of word salad from The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy? You were actually being serious when you said this:

I'd guess it summarizes an ongoing discussion, and that the audience of the document is expected to be familiar with the current state of that discussion and its idiom. E.g., say there is a problem of analysts becoming dissociated from the reality and real-world implications of their work, because of the way they receive and interact with the information they analyze. That problem could conceivably be summarized as "surrealism of the underlying metaphor". And management actions taken to keep the analysts grounded in reality, and mindful of the real-world implications of their work, could conceivably be summarized as "counterpoint [etc.]". Not really the terminology I might use, but organizations are allowed to evolve their own jargon and terms of art. This is not the same as bafflegab, even though it may be equally inscrutable at first glance.

in response to praise for Vogon poetry?

If so, I can only suggest that you may not be the best person to offer a defence of bafflegab.

 

[theprestige]

So you completely missed the point that two of them were, in fact, BurntSynapse's bafflegab, while one was a deliberately nonsensical bit of word salad from The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy? You were actually being serious when you said this:

in response to praise for Vogon poetry?

If so, I can only suggest that you may not be the best person to offer a defence of bafflegab.

Hah! You're right. I withdraw my defense of that last one*. I plead guilty to not reading all the way to the end of the Register article.

I still think the rest are eminently defensible, and not actually good examples of bafflegab.

*Though I did acknowledge that it seemed unreasonable, and I did indicate that I was guessing as to what context might give it a reasonable interpretation. I still think that there are information-age contexts in which it would be a reasonable thing to say. See also the debate about drone strikes and the video-gamefication of warfare. My mistake stems partly from working in a field where user interfaces to information systems are sometimes referred to as "metaphors", and a certain amount surreality is an occupational hazard for me. And I still think you're wrong about the rest of it.

 

[ben m]

"Why is there so much management bafflegab" should be its own thread.

I don't object to a bit of bafflegab if it translates into real-world content. For example, you can imagine a presentation with content like this:

• Intro slide title: "Why are our O-ring assemblies failing?"
• Engineers suspect chemical attack, or debris in O-ring grooves; study under way
• Line workers report lack of clear instructions on cleaning
• Action: Wait for engineering report on failure causes. May include new cleaning constraints?
• Action: Update current procedures to incorporate knowledge gained
• Action: retrain assembly line workers

And later in the same presentation:

• Action: Update current procedures to incorporate knowledge gained
• Need to hire tech writer/editor
• Existing procedure was written by Barb Smith (transferred to JPL)
• In process: contacted JPL to ask about Smith availability (awaiting reply)
• Writing needs to start by Dec 11 to avoid schedule impact. Needs: subcontract complete, engineering input, meeting w/ line workers.
• Input needed: does Assembly want to see draft procedures or wait for final?

It's not bafflegab if it has some practical meaning. It's bafflegab if it obscures the lack of meaning. For example, if you were assigned a project, and you went through the motions of working on it but didn't really get anywhere, but are required to give a presentation anyway. You bulk up the presentation of nothing; you take your brain-dead, insight-free, checklist-following actions and plump them up in fancier language to make them sound like work. That's where bafflegab comes from.

"Update procedures" is bafflegab if it means, "Uh, the final slide looked a little thin with three bullets so I put an actiony-sounding one in the middle." It's not bafflegab if it means "I will present some of the work I have done on exactly how we will update procedures."

 

[BurntSynapse]

"Mill's methods?" Like, John Stuart Mill thinking about elementary inference 150 years ago?

That's exactly the man, and I was referring to his 5 methods of induction around establishing causation. This topic seems as active as ever. The most recent work I read on this was "Causation and Counterfactuals", which is probably way out of date now. I assume Nancy Nersessian and her level of geniuses will always be far more current and robust in their field than I'll ever be, so I try to just stay relatively current with their top-line findings on scientific creativity and revolutions.

You think "Mill's Methods", applied to some data (what data?) about "transformative research", will reveal some new correlation between "research transformativeness" and Factor X---enabling future funding-agencies to Fund Things That Have Factor X?

Perhaps it might, but I don't think either of us would consider such early attempts to be particularly useful today, except as a historical analysis. The only intent in presenting Mill's Method was to illustrate support for your objection from a leading light in epistemology of science.

And you think that idea is so uncontroversial

Controversial, truthful, beautiful..."in the eye of the beholder" works for a lot of things, like whether a theory is revolutionary or transformative, (see below).

We will know whether this bullet-point actually produces something only when we see the bullet point actually produce something. It's sort of like transformative research, itself.

Agreed.

We have only seen a tiny number of identifiable "revolutions".

I'd say this depends on who you mean by "we". Every interview I did with PRP leaders and members about examples of TR got citations of stuff I didn't think was especially revolutionary because I had no detailed & elaborate cognitive frame governing my understanding of that specialty. This means there exist few opportunities for the kind of violation that defines revolutionary concepts. In areas of information and management sciences however, it is easy for people like me to cite the Gantt Chart or Agile PM as revolutionary tools & techniques.

I spoke with a group where mathematics of particle turbulence in fluids with varying viscosities was widely and enthusiastically cited as being a major revolution. Another was evolution of galactic super-clusters. None of these had any special significance to me or the other groups...but in each case the specialists in that field were very excited about it, and I take them at their word.

Everyone I spoke with exhibited this, so I tend to suspect it is our lack of expertise as individuals in multiple fields that accounts for the apparent scarcity of transformative ideas.

I was entirely serious. I don't think your methods would give the NSF any convincing reason to change resource allocation percentages.

As I've said, I'm not really trying to convince anyone here, just develop defenses or changes in response to good criticism.

That's quite a revelation from the guy with 160 posts unwilling to state whether he had recommendations and what they were...But you didn't think to mention that here. Why not?

Although I never had any real unwillingness, that history never struck me as helpful to gaining strengthening my argument, and seemed off topic until your presentation of a hypothetical situation which already resolved.

I wouldn't assume you were "unwilling" to bring up that particular hypothetical however, but I entirely understand dishonest and/or nefarious motives being ascribed for the failure of not citing this earlier.

I don't know what PRP stands for.

Proposal Review Panel (at the National Science Foundation), they assess the transformative potential of incoming research proposals as part of the overall review process.

 

[Cuddles]

I still think the rest are eminently defensible, and not actually good examples of bafflegab.

So despite having previously said this:

I honestly think those quotes, while problematic, are defensible in a way that BurntSynapse's bafflegab is not.

And despite me having pointed out this:

So you completely missed the point that two of them were, in fact, BurntSynapse's bafflegab

You still want to defend all those statements?

I think I've actually proven the point quite well here. We have a list of statements variously taken from BurtSynapse's "recommendations", management of the NSA's IT department, and a deliberately nonsensical piece of fiction and no-one can tell any difference between them.

It's not bafflegab if it has some practical meaning. It's bafflegab if it obscures the lack of meaning. For example, if you were assigned a project, and you went through the motions of working on it but didn't really get anywhere, but are required to give a presentation anyway. You bulk up the presentation of nothing; you take your brain-dead, insight-free, checklist-following actions and plump them up in fancier language to make them sound like work. That's where bafflegab comes from.

That's actually exactly why I picked that particular phrase out of BS's posts. I can't find the post now, but I think it was one of yours where you pointed out that it's not useful or interesting to state things that are obvious or already known. In a list of four recommendations, "Actually use the first two" does not merit being the third recommendation. In a list of recommendations, it's not in any way useful or meaningful for one of the recommendations to be that you recommend your recommendations. It's therefore a perfect example of bafflegab - at least a quarter of his list is nothing more than meaningless filler that says nothing more than "Please pay attention to the rest of this list".

 

[Hellbound]

It's therefore a perfect example of bafflegab - at least a quarter of his list is nothing more than meaningless filler that says nothing more than "Please pay attention to the rest of this list".

Well, you know they say we learn by repitition. And repitition increases learning.

 

[catsmate]

"Why is there so much management bafflegab" should be its own thread.

Hell yes.

For example, if you were assigned a project, and you went through the motions of working on it but didn't really get anywhere, but are required to give a presentation anyway. You bulk up the presentation of nothing; you take your brain-dead, insight-free, checklist-following actions and plump them up in fancier language to make them sound like work. That's where bafflegab comes from.

Been there, done that, have the thumbdrive full of .PPTXs to show it.

 

[theprestige]

So despite having previously said this:

And despite me having pointed out this:

You still want to defend all those statements?

Pretty much, yep

I think I've actually proven the point quite well here. We have a list of statements variously taken from BurtSynapse's "recommendations", management of the NSA's IT department, and a deliberately nonsensical piece of fiction and no-one can tell any difference between them.

That's pretty dishonest--I called out the deliberately nonsensical piece of fiction as noticeably different from the start. I was feeling pretty bad about not reading your original post carefully and completely, but I think we're about even, now.

That's actually exactly why I picked that particular phrase out of BS's posts. I can't find the post now, but I think it was one of yours where you pointed out that it's not useful or interesting to state things that are obvious or already known.

Repetition, emphasis, and belaboring the point are all similar to each other, and different from bafflegab. You make a point of finding a reasonable recommendation, and then complain when someone actually steps forward to defend its reasonableness?

 

[Cuddles]

Pretty much, yep

Well I guess if you're not even going to pretend to try for consistency, we don't really have much to discuss here. I'm terribly sorry you're embarrassed that you were fooled into a desperate defence of bafflegab. The best defence would probably be to stop trying to dig yourself deeper.

 

[Hellbound]

Just to try and throw a white flag out between you two, I think you both have a point.

On the one hand, I think theprestige is correct in that many of these statements can have a valid meaning, depending on the context.

On the other hand, I have to agree with Cuddles that they are bafflegab.

To explain, the problem with those statements is their vagueness. They don't really say anything in and of themselves. Their menaing comes entirely from either the context (i.e.-"incorporating the knowledge gained into future processes" would make sense if you'd just spent the first half of your presentation detailing that gained knowledge) or from the meaning the reader imparts to it (of which a perfect example is theprestige's treatment of the final entry in the list above).

These statements are like many used in various forms of woo, where the meaning is, at best, ambiguous and variable. It's almost like interpreting the Bible. And that's what makes these type of statements survive in business. If that bafflegab, and supporting documents that likewise say nothing definate while sounding authoritive, are all that are produced, then you can defend your "recommendations" no matter which way things work out in the end. For anyone coming into a company/project from the outside (i.e.-a temporary position), this is the gold standard.

In any case, it's the vagueness that's the problem. theprestige is right that in some instances, they can be meaningful statements...although it won't be in and off themselves, but because of the supporting clarifying statements found in the context in which they are given. Yet Cuddles is also correct in that in and of themselves, without that context, their meaning is so vague as to be useless.

 

[Cuddles]

On the one hand, I think theprestige is correct in that many of these statements can have a valid meaning, depending on the context.

But that's exactly what ben m and I both already said.

 

[Hellbound]

But that's exactly what ben m and I both already said.

Eh, sorry, I sort of lost that in the last bit of exchange. Ignore the man behind the curtain

ETA: You know what, I just going to pretend the actual argument was more like the one in my head. I sound so much smarter that way

(In seriousness, sorry. I thought I'd found a sort of common ground between your two views, and sincerely missed that you'd brought up the same point earlier. I still have vain hopes it might help, though, because it seems almost like you and prestige are talking past each other a bit...as he seems to be saying the statements can be defensible, and is assuming the context is there. IN other words, it seems to me like you two are disagreeing more on the initial premises, rather than the actual arguments.

Of course, I'm mostly an idiot, so I have a feeling I'm not getting myself any closer to ground level. Did it get darker down here?)

 

[Sam H]

Why IS there so much crackpot physics?

I blame it on the physicists and other scientists themselves. Here are some examples:

• 
  The infamous physicist Fritjof Capra equates Eastern mysticism with modern physics. He turns the very methodology of science on its head by introducing a "third stage" beyond observation and theory. This stage requires physicists to communicate their theories to the public. Since this is impossible AND verbal communication of the mystical experiences is also claimed to be impossible, they must be of the same nature!

• 
  The Nobel Laureate Brian Josephson has a website full of balderdash about parapsychology, alternative medicine, E-cat nuclear physics, mind-matter connection, ...

• 
  The Nobel Laureate Robert Laughlin writes the book, A Different Universe, in which he attacks all cherished theories of physics like relativity, nuclear physics, the standard model, etc. "from the bottom down." All discoveries in science, he claims, are accidental; he does not allow mathematics in physics, because it is a means of the "mastery of the universe." According to Laughlin, the special theory of relativity (STR) could have been discovered in a month by an unsuspecting experimentalist when equipped with an accelerator - never mind that the very construction of an accelerator is based indispensably on STR! It is like saying that an unsuspecting electrical engineer would have discovered Maxwell's equations in a month once equipped with an antenna!

This kind of crackpottery is sponsored by Nobel Laureates like Phil Anderson (physics) and Roald Hoffmann (chemistry), who have their own "controversial" ideas and are very vocal - in contrast to the silent majority of physicists and chemists who are busy discovering.

I have yet to see some REAL challenge of such nonsense which exposes all the folly and absurd syllogisms contained in ALL of these crackpot ideas.

 

[lpetrich]

I blame it on the physicists and other scientists themselves. ...

(some mainstream scientists who have indulged in crackpottery...)

How would that indicate that they are to blame?

As far as I can tell, most physics crackpottery comes from outside the scientific community.

 

[ben m]

According to Laughlin, the special theory of relativity (STR) could have been discovered in a month by an unsuspecting experimentalist when equipped with an accelerator - never mind that the very construction of an accelerator is based indispensably on STR!

Laughlin is perfectly correct on this point. Physicists with knowledge of Maxwell's Equations were able to come up with the idea of accelerating and steering particles with fields, and indeed a Crookes Tube is basically a simple linear accelerator.

It's possible to build and analyze Crookes tubes using Newton's Laws. An electron of charge q goes pops off the anode, feels a force F = qE + qv x B, and accelerates (F = ma) in a direction determined by the force. That all works just fine as long as v << c. As it so happens, Crookes et. al. only had access to voltages in the 10kV range, so v << c is all they ever got. IF higher-voltage power supplies had been available, they would have started seeing deviations from F=ma, and that could have been an experimental discovery of SR.