Meetings *Are* the Work
25th February 2023
The challenge of judging isn’t specific to the bluff-and-misdirect world of poker; “true enough to act on” is shaky even in the places where we expect it to be solid. For example, the science we’re taught in school has shared standards for validity; concepts like statistical significance and confidence intervals are complicated, but in a reassuringly mathy way.
As you keep going with science, though, you find that “truth” is very much not a solid concept. The ongoing (and frankly terrifying) replication crisis in psychology, medicine, and social sciences highlights just how shaky the foundations are. This challenge is multiplied for cross-disciplinary studies, which wrestle with whole different ways of deciding what is true enough to act on from the incompatible ways of knowing.
The trouble with most of what passes for ‘science’ these days, is that it isn’t.
A fundamental principle of Real Science is that correlation does not imply causation. Things that happen together are not connected just because they happen together a lot, not even if the happen together all the time; you must actually be able to identify the chain of events in order to call it causation.
Thus we see that a lot of modern ‘science’ is just correlation being considered to indicate causation just because things happen together a lot–which is like flipping a coin 100 times, getting 80 heads, and claiming that your odds of getting heads while flipping a coin is therefore 80%. Yes, correlation is important; there is no causation without correlation. But correlation by itself is not enough, no matter how strong.
Correspondingly, studies based on statistics are just opinion, not science. There may be a causal chain there; the more things happen together, the stronger the prospect that they are causally connected; but until the actual causal links can be identified, it remains opinion, not science.
I may have to write a book on this, once I can use both hands again….