Science, Knowledge, Bias

Response to http://metacrock.blogspot.com/2011/08/science-is-not-only-form-of-knowledge.html

Did it ever occur to you that perhaps people are just being "pedantic" when they object to your strawmen? You also never defined what you mean by "Knowledge". But in general terms, knowledge is an extremely fuzzy concept that has really never been nailed down by philosophy. It's a placeholder concept, we don't know what it is but we know it when we see it.

Even justified knowledge can (and has been) proven false. For example: CLEARLY the sun goes around the earth, I can see it moving, I don't feel like I'm moving. I can form this into a series of hypotheses that I test and all are born out by the facts. Therefore, I can form a justified belief that the sun goes around the Earth. What's wrong here is that I don't have ALL the facts. I didn't do a very good job and I missed some obvious difficulties. If you want to see an example of this at work in reality check out my post on it: http://iconoclasm2000.blogspot.com/2011/06/response-galileo-rout-galileo-rout.html Where I give a long list of observables that must ALL be satisfied by our theory and the geocentric theory absolutely fails a number of tests. Tests I may not have been aware of initially.

This is the hurdle you must overcome with any epistemic theory and this is the REASON the scientific methodology exists as it does today.

To put it more succinctly, Science is our best methodology for removing sources of error and bias from our conclusions.

Another look at Bias and Prayer

I ran across this story today which I hadn't heard about before so I did some investigation and thought I would share my findings because it shows how Confirmation Bias leads to false conclusions.

Back in November 2007 Georgia (the whole southeast) had been experiencing a severe drought for some 18 months. So Georgia Gov. Sonny Perdue announced he would hold a public prayer to ask god for relief from the drought because, as we all know, "The only solution is rain, and the only place we get that is from a higher power," said Perdue spokesman Bert Brantley.

So the first question here (which apparently didn't occur to many in the media), is how many people, how many farmers prayed during that year for rain already over that year?  Keep in mind that those thousands upon thousands of prayers went unanswered.

Now read the very last line of this report about the upcoming event:

Now in Georgia, there is a little rain predicted, but not enough to end a drought.

"There is a little rain predicted," well now, isn't that convenient. Let's schedule a public prayer right around the time SCIENCE is already predicting precipitation. And if it so much as sprinkles on that day? Thank GOD we prayed.  I'm disgusted by this kind of duplicity honestly.  They wait 18 months to make a big deal out of a prayer meeting when meteorologists just happen to be predicting precipitation.  I'm also a little ashamed that people fall prey to such simplistic manipulation.

And then people (see this YouTube video) take ONE instance out of what could be tens of thousands and count that as a rousing success DESPITE the fact that the drought continued to worsen and lingered on through 2008, it got much WORSE in many locations after Nov 2007 and it was relieved only in late 2008 and 2009 for some regions.  This is a perfect example of Confirmation Bias

http://web.me.com/atlwx/wxhistory/files/20070501-drought.html

Drought conditions persisted and actually continued to worsen during December. This was especially true during the first half of the month when unseasonably warm, dry weather prevailed across the region

Lake Lanier in northeast Georgia and the main water supply for the Atlanta metropolitan area, dropped to its lowest level in history on December 28, 2007

Tell ya what, next time there is a drought, wait 6 years before praying and see if it corrects itself without the prayer and only then pray when meteorologists are predicting the weather to be the absolute worst, not when they are finally predicting some rain.

A detailed analysis of the 2006-2008 Drought: http://www.gawrc.org/2011paper_pdfs/7.3.4Kim.pdf

See also: http://ga.water.usgs.gov/