Science... Again?

In response to Acoustics Research is Insufficient by Jeff Dening on the flute forums:

My day job is tangential to research, and I appreciate the effort you've gone into trying to explain this so that it is easier to understand/appreciate by the community here. Thank you!

I think the central thesis can be summarised as "confusing the map for the territory".

Science provides a guide into the natural world, but as all guides go, they have specific assumptions (implicit and explicit), and are particularly narrow in what they test, and the definitions they use for certain things.

Science never delivers "truth" with the kind of absolute certainty that people yearn, yet they keep trying to make science say something it really doesn't.

Here was where I wanted to say that people with a wrong map will just shrug and then adapt to the territory they observe, but we've heard of people who just blindly follow their GPSr and drive off half-finished bridges, so... 🤷

That said, the stakes are a tad lower in music (bruised egos and busted wallets notwithstanding), but this phenomenon of misinterpretation of what science does and does not say is a real problem elsewhere in society.

The other thing that I would add is that I am certain that there are definitely very good, well-controlled science going on fo the acoustics of flute. However, it is the makers themselves who have that -- after all, to know the behaviour of a change in one of their parameters for their flute means that they can fine-tune and control the quality of their instruments (part of R&D). But good luck trying to get hold of that information -- it _is_ a trade secret after all.

Maybe having an article written by a respected member of the community might make it more palatable for folks to grok things.

To me, this is an actual problem. Science education back in my day had the following progression (from primary all the way to junior college):

1. List of ``scientific'' facts;
2. List of equations primarily centred around Netwonian Physics;
3. Baby's first quantum mechanics theory equations (photoelectric effect);
4. Special relativity (Lorentz factor corrections)(?).

Now, to be fair, I have a strong physics slant because after secondary school, I didn't touch chemistry nor biology as a whole. But even then, the kind of ``science'' that we learnt was still focused on remembering what was the orthodox (or ``right'') model/equation to use to solve the often classical physics-based problems.

Inequalities hardly play a role. Not as ``certain'' as the way regular equations can yield numbers (first time that an infinite number of solutions can appear). Field equations are a no-no---matrix and tensor math was not part of the syllabus.

But more importantly, to keep within what can be effectively ``taught'', the developmental process from one model to the next was not as heavily emphasised as the ability to read a story problem, pick the right set of equations, and run the algebra to the end.

While it looks like this is a sign of ``good'' education (everyone can cite the four kinematics equations [of classical physics]; huzzah!), I think that it is a central reason why we have this misinformation crisis that is still ongoing.

When science does not have the ``and a new model came up because they found that the existing one couldn't explain everything'' part emphasised, there is a tendency for people to doggedly believe that science is infallible, or more precisely, the scientific ``facts'' that they learnt back in school some twenty or more years ago was the most correct, while being unsystematically suspicious of all the ``new'' science that is showing up that contradicted their previous assumptions.

Spoiler alert: almost all new science must contradict some aspect of the previous assumptions as that is how the old models (and facts derived from said models) are shown to be incomplete (i.e. wrong outside of the original circumstances, but are starting to become important), or downright wrong (i.e. replication attempts failed, or when data fraud is detected).

Math education is a little less susceptible to that, because at the junior college level, proofs are introduced into the picture. And I don't mean the ``trigonometric proof'' style of pattern matching and transformation in between equations---I mean using an actual proof technique, like mathematical induction. But it still fails in some way because these things came about really late in the math pedagogy---most people operating in society are probably stuck with secondary school math (i.e. differential calculus) at the very most.

Tangents aside, all that unwavering faith that the science [``fact''] that one knows is troubling---that's not the mentality of someone who understands that science is merely the current best known approximation of reality, and is not the final word the way the Bible is for spiritual matters.

And that's the battlecry: ``Defund the ${scientific-foundation-of-the-week} because ${pet-peeve-of-the-week} contradicts ${older-scientific-"facts"} and is therefore wrong!''

Frankly, this is just one of those days where maybe having a benevolent dictator instead of giving people the voice is felt as the right thing to do.

Damn. The weekend barely started, and I'm already tired as hell.

Till the next update.