Boustrophedon wrote: ↑Fri May 01, 2020 11:40 pm
So if it turns out to be true then it's beautification but if it turns out not to be true it's fraud? How far from the truth was Cyril Burt?
Warning: I once wrote an article on Cyril Burt.
How far from the truth was Cyril Burt? tl:dr As far as you can get in the opposite direction. He invented data that contributed to harm, both to his field and to social structures in the UK.
OK. First of all, I don't think science is about 'truth'. I'm not sure humans could ever even understand the 'truth' about the Universe. What I think science does is to produce 'conditional statements of probability that are useful'. (Useful doesn't just mean it generates electricity, or profits). The currently accepted paradigm in any field will have changed in the past, and may well change in the future. The process by which the current paradigm is arrived at, is essential: it goes to the usefulness of the current version, and the likelihood that it can be replaced by something even more useful.
By making up his separated twin studies, and lying about it in his papers, Burt constructed an apparently convincing narrative that still haunts our society today, and incidentally contributes to social inequality. And he always intended to. In his very first paper, he tested the idea that intelligence is inherited, by comparing the intelligence of children to that of their parents, and observing a strong correlation. Except he didn't. He measure the intelligence of a rather small number of children, and correlated it, not with the measured intelligence of their parents,
but with the intelligence he inferred from their social status.. In other words, an honest account of the experiment could just as well have come to the opposite conclusion: that intelligence as measured by tests in children is a function of their family's social position. He devoted almost all his career to continuing to fantasise about the strong inheritance of intelligence, and to make up data to convince others. (Oh yeah, he also believed in telepathy, and spirit voices from beyond the grave).
Don, I don't know if you were thinking, 'he wasn't far from the truth, because intelligence
is largely inherited'. But what if that paradigm changes? What if correlations between twins and children and parents are due, not to the genetics of inheritance, but to the influence of the uterine environment? In other words, epigenetic, rather than genetic? That would be useful to know. But it seems absurd to think of Burt the Fraud having been somehow 'close to the truth' and then becoming more distant from the truth again as our understanding improved.
In moving beyond the current paradigm, understanding the ways in which the current paradigm has been constructed are essential. You need to know where the wonderfully convincing world of Newtonian mechanics, and classical physics, which had been 'proved' to be 'true' by a million everyday observations, could be overthrown. In that careful review of the past evidence, looking for the crack from which quantum physics is going to emerge, faked data is a disaster, because it may make it necessary to repeat observations, and you don't even know which experiments to repeat.
The more binary we make an outcome, the more likely any charlatan is to 'be correct'. Is Trump 'wise', if some of his policies have un-predicted benefits? No. The process by which a decision is made is a key part of the value of the decision. Fake data always corrupts the process.
Sorry. But I did warn you...
When you make outcomes binary, then the lies of a dishonest scientist might randomly fall within the current paradigm.