I wouldn't confuse being ignorant as being irreverent. Don't assign yourself that much importance. You are basically a fraud. Your "irreverence" comes from being reactive at a visceral level, but not having the intellectual apparatus and humility to deal with it.
It feels like the 90s science wars are here again! (And yes, I noticed the title...)
The technical descriptions here are a little bit beyond my paygrade and I truly don't have any strong professional opinions about null-hypothesis testing beyond what I read about the debates between experts (like this one!). But I think you were right to stick to your defense of the "[The Higgs Boson] has zero bearing on my existence" statement but wrong to say that this was about alternative confirmations (which puts the argument squarely back into epistemological territory).
Your original post's wording was "no bearing outside the insular world of particle physics" (which was perfect) and the way I would rephrase your point is that *"there are zero policy implications to the discovery of the Higgs Boson"* (beyond maybe the fact that the LIGO physicists might get another billion dollars for research, which is a drop in the bucket and I'm fine with it). Cranmer pretty much admits this because he alludes to how these particles are key components of atoms, etc. etc. -- all fine by me but again, zero policy implications.
I think the "policy implications" takes it back to our discussion of Sarewitz. What Sarewitz would say however is that if the Higgs-Boson had *any* policy implications, the nature of the bureaucracy the physicists would have had to erect would have been different; they would probably still have confirmed the Higgs Boson but it would have occurred through a different process and I suspect that this would have also shaped the statistical techniques they would have used as well (and I would have tried to produce an example here but can't think of anything right now).
I happen to think that bureaucracies are one of the most important things human beings ever invented and physicists should be proud of the collaborative structures they have created for consensus building just as programmers and computer scientists should be proud of the governance structures they have created for open-source! (Open-source communities used to be free-wheeling groups of people whose growth turned them into very sophisticated bureaucracies that managed to reach consensus.) All bureaucracies and probably our biggest achievement as the human race! We should be very proud of them while, of course, trying to keep tweaking them for various purposes.
One could, if one wanted to, make a Cartwrightian case for the reality of the Higgs boson in terms of the regularities the Standard Model predicts as a consequence of the Higgs mechanism. (Nancy Cartwright accepts the reality of regularities but not the universality of laws.) I would go even further and say that the same logic would apply to other kinds of symmetry breaking. Of course, that would all depend on whether one would be willing to accept all the steps in the corresponding causal derivation chains.
I only occasionally read your blog, so I wanted to drop in say that I really appreciated this follow-up. I couldn't quite make out your specific argument through the irreverence in the first one, but I feel I grasp it well now.
I take this sentence to be the key argument: "The compelling evidence of the Higgs is the consensus, not the statistics."
But I wonder, could you make that argument about any scientific statement? If you aren't an expert in a given subfield, aren't you always going to rely on the consensus of the experts? It seems to me like the only difference here is that the scale and complexity of the Higgs discovery creates more ambiguity that needs to be resolved.
But in that case, why wouldn't you still say that statistics was a major driver in the discovery? Why would consensus/bureaucracy be mutually exclusive with "statistics"?
For one, I've always appreciated the philosophical and musical references in your titles, including this one!
The only intertextual jokes worth making have a tiny TAM. Carry on.
I wouldn't confuse being ignorant as being irreverent. Don't assign yourself that much importance. You are basically a fraud. Your "irreverence" comes from being reactive at a visceral level, but not having the intellectual apparatus and humility to deal with it.
LIGO member here. Your statements about the first GW detection statistics are basically just incorrect.
There was exactly one group (Creswell+) which made any critical claim about the statistical basis.
Their claims were not criticisms the actual statistical methods that the collaboration used to claim detection of a GW.
They were based on misinterpreting a single portion of a plot which was not intended to, and did not, present a statistical case for detection.
So, indeed they uncovered a minor, and easily fixable, problem with this one plot, but the detection claim was fully independent of the plot anyway.
In fact the LHC showed us the desert of the real!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Desert_(particle_physics)#Evidence
It feels like the 90s science wars are here again! (And yes, I noticed the title...)
The technical descriptions here are a little bit beyond my paygrade and I truly don't have any strong professional opinions about null-hypothesis testing beyond what I read about the debates between experts (like this one!). But I think you were right to stick to your defense of the "[The Higgs Boson] has zero bearing on my existence" statement but wrong to say that this was about alternative confirmations (which puts the argument squarely back into epistemological territory).
Your original post's wording was "no bearing outside the insular world of particle physics" (which was perfect) and the way I would rephrase your point is that *"there are zero policy implications to the discovery of the Higgs Boson"* (beyond maybe the fact that the LIGO physicists might get another billion dollars for research, which is a drop in the bucket and I'm fine with it). Cranmer pretty much admits this because he alludes to how these particles are key components of atoms, etc. etc. -- all fine by me but again, zero policy implications.
I think the "policy implications" takes it back to our discussion of Sarewitz. What Sarewitz would say however is that if the Higgs-Boson had *any* policy implications, the nature of the bureaucracy the physicists would have had to erect would have been different; they would probably still have confirmed the Higgs Boson but it would have occurred through a different process and I suspect that this would have also shaped the statistical techniques they would have used as well (and I would have tried to produce an example here but can't think of anything right now).
I happen to think that bureaucracies are one of the most important things human beings ever invented and physicists should be proud of the collaborative structures they have created for consensus building just as programmers and computer scientists should be proud of the governance structures they have created for open-source! (Open-source communities used to be free-wheeling groups of people whose growth turned them into very sophisticated bureaucracies that managed to reach consensus.) All bureaucracies and probably our biggest achievement as the human race! We should be very proud of them while, of course, trying to keep tweaking them for various purposes.
“The Shape of Stats to Come” Can I scream?
One could, if one wanted to, make a Cartwrightian case for the reality of the Higgs boson in terms of the regularities the Standard Model predicts as a consequence of the Higgs mechanism. (Nancy Cartwright accepts the reality of regularities but not the universality of laws.) I would go even further and say that the same logic would apply to other kinds of symmetry breaking. Of course, that would all depend on whether one would be willing to accept all the steps in the corresponding causal derivation chains.
I only occasionally read your blog, so I wanted to drop in say that I really appreciated this follow-up. I couldn't quite make out your specific argument through the irreverence in the first one, but I feel I grasp it well now.
I take this sentence to be the key argument: "The compelling evidence of the Higgs is the consensus, not the statistics."
But I wonder, could you make that argument about any scientific statement? If you aren't an expert in a given subfield, aren't you always going to rely on the consensus of the experts? It seems to me like the only difference here is that the scale and complexity of the Higgs discovery creates more ambiguity that needs to be resolved.
But in that case, why wouldn't you still say that statistics was a major driver in the discovery? Why would consensus/bureaucracy be mutually exclusive with "statistics"?