In April, I wrote about a little debate some coworkers and I were having about whether politics could be studied scientifically, and whether that approach was valid (I said it could be, and that it was one among many valid approaches). One argument tendered in opposition was that we simply don’t have enough information to even make a successful politico-scientific model, let alone to test whether it works or not. Any attempt to construct such a model, or to delineate variables and units of measurement, would be in vain.
I think that is incorrect, because in science, the cool thing is that fail = win. What I mean is that science is all about testing something, getting results, and developing a conclusion based on those results. If your model sucks and your experiment fails as a result, you’ve learned something. You rebuild, you try something else, and you chalk your first try up on the list of things that don’t work. Launch and iterate, my friends. It’s the Google way, and we’ve done alright so far.
Stories are just as much about what’s written as what is not written. Pictures are just as much about what is captured as what is not captured. Science is just as much about what works as it is about what does not work. There is another debate in the research community about whether it is worth publishing failed experiments in academic journals. Of course it’s worth it! People learn most from failure! Of course maybe more space should be reserved for the epic wins, but there is just as much to be gleaned from the details of an epic fail.
That is why I am so stoked about the Energy Department’s announcement that they are going to fund a bunch of cutting-edge research experiments, some of which currently exist only in conceptual form. Says the leader of the new initative, Dr. Arum Majumdar:
“We don’t know which ones are going to work, but we’ll try them,” he said, “and if many of them fail but one works, that’s great, we’ve solved the problem.”
Exactly. And for the projects that are funded but ultimately do not prove feasible or scalable, we’ll still have a win on our hands. We will have explored and ruled out approaches based on data instead of instinct, and we will also have encouraged researchers and entrepreneurs to take risks and to think outside to box. That’s America, baby.
Image used and modified under a Creative Commons license courtesy of willandbeyond.
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You should see this new site with thousands of science project kits and books. Just go to the Science Projects Store at http://www.scienceprojects-1.com. This is a huge science project resource site.
Also practical it isn't really a question of opinion. If you find a model that works good enough to solve a problem it will be used.
This of course is true for politics like anything else. PR in politics is a good example of that. Quite strong opinions was raised against it in Sweden going back several years when it got a bit more common. But of course it is still used and I can't see anything bad coming from that.
Even more so if studying politics scientifically can give a model with practical insights (and why wouldn't it?) it is best done so in published science instead of say more closed such.
In this area it is also the cause that politics is just one example of human cooperation studied in several similar fields which makes the area more open several roads to results without large investment.
Also practical it isn't really a question of opinion. If you find a model that works good enough to solve a problem it will be used.
This of course is true for politics like anything else. PR in politics is a good example of that. Quite strong opinions was raised against it in Sweden going back several years when it got a bit more common. But of course it is still used and I can't see anything bad coming from that.
Even more so if studying politics scientifically can give a model with practical insights (and why wouldn't it?) it is best done so in published science instead of say more closed such.
In this area it is also the cause that politics is just one example of human cooperation studied in several similar fields which makes the area more open several roads to results without large investment.
Science has proven itself over centuries to be the most productive vehicles for knowledge generation. Knowing what brings about this spectacular success can help us to increase the success of all knowledge generation efforts regardless of which branch of science we use. The approach is also very suitable for quality assurance of scientific work, especially in cases where cross-disciplinary approaches are used together in order to solve complex problems. We have studied the commonalities and differences between the various branches of science in depth and identified the features that enable the high success rate of science in generating interesting and useful new knowledge.
Philosopher Phil Dowe takes a new look at the relationship between science and religion in Galileo, Darwin, and Hawking: The Interplay of Science, Reason, and Religion. Dowe follows in the tradition of Augustine in claiming that science and religion need to be allowed to interact, but goes further by claiming that the challenges the fields present to each other help each field to grow.