Marcomony For Dummies book
Saturday, December 26, 2015
Marcomony in the Physical sciences
Sunday, December 20, 2015
Chain of evidence in historical science
Saturday, December 19, 2015
Does the evolutionary synthesis have primary utility?
Friday, December 18, 2015
Marconomic Analysis of Cometary Science
Thursday, December 17, 2015
Marconomic analysis of Geogenesis
Saturday, December 5, 2015
Marcomony as a track back to primary utility of a scientific idea
In a similar way, this currency is often sufficient in non-experimental sciences whose value is primarily in their utility for making predictions: nobody really wants to waste time looking for oil and gas deposits where they are not, and nobody wants less accurate weather forecasts.
However, the utility of mapping the real world more accurately is not the only utility inherent in an idea. Ideas also have value for their effect on the minds of men: their utility in supporting economic, social, or moral schemes. Here the value of ideas in the ‘marketplace of ideas’ will vary enormously, depending on who is buying and selling. An idea which has great moral value to a Muslim will be of much less value to an atheist, and a model which has great social utility to a libertarian may have no value to a statist. An idea which will be prized by an entrepreneur who can make a great deal of money of it will not have that value to an ivory tower academic.
This secondary utility coexists with the primary utility of an idea in the marketplace of ideas, and where the idea does not readily allow predictions to be made, or makes predictions of little practical value, this secondary utility will be dominant. This secondary utility runs rampant over the actual scientific value in the marketplace of ideas whenever the ideas are anything to do with the environment, anything to do with sex or race, anything where there is big money involved, and – frighteningly – even off in the depths of space with our friendly tweeting comet.
Now, what we need is not an unfettered market of ideas – because idea space is unthinkably vast, and is forever throwing up new monsters; nor a stern admonition that we should disregard secondary utility – because we badly need ideas with social, moral, and economic utility, even if we cannot agree on their market value; but some agreed-upon means to restrain the rampant dominance of secondary utility. There are three ways to do this that I can see, in order of importance:
These three rules of thumb are regulators of the self-interest that otherwise applies in the lawless market of ideas where secondary utility reigns. They provide some limits, however imprecise and inadequate, to the latitude of the human imagination to propose models that are congenial with their designs.
Thus, parsimony is a fairly arbitrary and subjective way to judge an idea via secondary utility. Self-consistency and other-consistency is a broad enough brush also, as usually, one can think of a myriad of ideas to explain the one phenomenon, that can be other-consistent and self-consistent. Consensus usually narrows this down to one or two alternatives. When there are two alternatives, this is a natural dichotomy which is usually the case where parsimony is explicitly invoked to pick one. The consensus path to narrowing down that far also implicitly uses parsimony, as humans are loath to have too many viable options like balls in the air when juggling.
Marcomony accepts that primary utility is too narrow a target to ignore secondary utility even in "science". However, the permanent setting of a bar (based on secondary utility) for an institution (science) that advertises itself as only dealing with repeatable observational evidence is entirely unsatisfactory. There needs to be a track back from narratives that have relied on parsimony for their secondary utility to look at alternative razors, that also satisfy consistency parameters 1 and 2. The track back is to compare alternative razors, perhaps a multitude, to see if primary utility is better served. A balance in the burden of proof between the incumbent razor and alternative razors is mandatory. No bar of proof is to be placed on the alternative that is not placed on the incumbent.
Friday, November 20, 2015
Example 1: Applying Marcomony to AGW
Step 1) Identify repeatable observations relevant to the paradigm. The observations that are repeatable involve primarily to look at other planets. Venus was found to have a runaway greenhouse effect as a scientifically tight argument that explains the far higher than predicted surface temperature of Venus. Applying that tight science to Earth and Mars gets a reasonable baseline for how the greenhouse effect has been relevant in Earth's and Mars' history, and how it may pan out in the future if greenhouse gases breach certain thresholds. Although this has identified how temperatures can be radically different on these planets, it is still an open question of degree of importance of closeness to the sun (among other factors) in comparison to greenhouse effects. Also, the same physics that is invoked to predict weather is extended into plausible climate predictions.
Step 2) Identify axioms specific to the day to day working of the science as it is practiced. One that I found was an implicit premise that the Anthropogenic "signal" that is the climactic effect attributable to human emissions can be empirically measured independently of transient weather effects and "noise" climactic effects. Another is that this signal is reversible only by the reversal of the causal anthropogenic emissions rather than compensatory deliberate human intervention that attacks the climactic signal directly. A third axiom is of the null hypothesis that neutral or nil human emissions would or could not result in civilisation threatening climate change either from other causes that would be no different with human activity, or that may have been mediated by human activity (eg. If global warming reduced the impact of a naturally occurring ice age)
Marcomony does not dwell on the reasonableness or otherwise of the identified axioms. The primary purpose of identifying them is to judge them on the ability of those axioms to be verified empirically, whether there is an implied shift in the burden of proof in their favour, and how much the whole paradigm relies on these axioms to come to scientific conclusions.
Step 3) Marconomic analysis of the axioms. 1st identified axiom: Whether a piece of data, such as global temperature average or one of the many other thermal energy measures employed can be empirically verified as an anthropogenic signal. Empirical verification can only really happen with predictions being fulfilled in the timescales of decades. This is clearly a work in progress. As far as the burden of proof goes, it has clearly shifted. Other signals, such as solar "signals" have a considerable bar to jump compared to the anthropogenic signal which, within Climate science peer and informal circles, is statutory in the sense that peer reviewed articles do not have to justify stating that there is an anthropogenic signal.