#not even wrong

Good morning !!!

Well, at least that second sentence sounds like sensible advice!

I’m fascinated by the “not even wrong” type of fallacy. 

Where people display a fundamental misunderstanding of the thing they’re debating. Like the guy who said Einstein would not get into UCLA because he wouldn’t have done enough “diversity” goodwill. It’s like the writer had no idea that Einstein lectured at HBCUs (obviously) but it veers off into “not even wrong” territory because the writer seems to not understand that Einstein was Jewish and seeking freedom from oppression in the United States, only to find more oppression.

A less abstract example of Not Even Wrong is the croco-duck. The Croco-duck is a....nightmarish* Creationist argument against evolution that was unleashed upon Reality Based Communities by Ray Comfort and Kirk Cameron. The argument is that iif evolution is so real then why are there no croco-ducks. 

They don’t understand what evolution actually is. The question they’re attempting to answer was never asked. Therefore, the croco-duck is not even wrong. It’s less than wrong. It cannot be correct but it cannot be wrong either because that’s not even what evolution is about.

There are not croco-ducks because ducks and crocodiles are very distantly related with the most recent ancestor being alive 245 million years ago (it’s the  Archosaurus you hear so much about when looking at the evolutionary relationship between birds and dinosaurs) .Since Creationists believe in the young earth it doesn’t fit. But it fits into Reality because reality.

The croco-duck is very bizarre and a lot of people view it and it’s “supporters” as confirmation of psychological problems within the Creationist camp.

It’s just a plain old logic fail.

First some mathematics items:

Igor Shafarevich, one of the great figures of twentieth century algebraic geometry and algebraic number theory, died this past weekend at the age of 93. Besides his many contributions to mathematics research, he was also a remarkably lucid expositor. His two volume Basic Algebraic Geometry is a wonderful introduction to that subject, his survey volume Basic Notions of Algebra emphasizes the connections to geometry, and his volume on number theory (with Borevich) struck the AMS reviewer as “delectable”.

Shafarevich was also known for his religiously-motivated nationalistic views which to many were distressingly anti-Semitic. In the spirit of respect for the recently deceased, I’ll just link to a quite interesting recent discussion (very sympathetic to Shafarevich) of the issue by David Mumford here (and ruthlessly delete attempts to argue about this in the comment section).

The AMS Notices has a set of articles in honor of Andrew Wiles and his work, which include some great explanations of the mathematics, as well as a long in-depth interview.

For another detailed interview with a mathematician, see Quanta magazine for a piece by Siobhan Roberts about Sylvia Serfaty of the Courant Institute.

On the physics front, there’s:

For his contribution to the Why Trust a Theory? conference (see here and here), Helge Kragh has a new paper which examines the question of whether history of science can help evaluate recent claims about the need to change the way theories are assessed. He sees in the unsuccessful “vortex theory” of the late nineteenth century an analog of string theory, with many of the same claims and justifications for lack of success. He quotes as a typical example of the enthusiasm of the time:

I feel that we are so close with vortex theory that – in my moments of greatest optimism – I imagine that any day, the final form of the theory might drop out of the sky and land in someone’s lap. But more realistically, I feel that we are now in the process of constructing a much deeper theory of anything we have had before and that … when I am too old to have any useful thoughts on the subject, younger physicists will have to decide whether we have in fact found the final theory!

but then explains that this is actually a quote from Witten, with “string” replaced by “vortex”.

Scientifc American this month has an article (also available here) about the problems with the theory of inflation. The authors end by pointing out the dangers to science of multiverse inflationary scenarios (which they call the “multimess”):

Some scientists accept that inflation is untestable but refuse to abandon it. They have proposed that, instead, science must change by discarding one of its defining properties: empirical testability. This notion has triggered a roller coaster of discussions about the nature of science and its possible redefinition, promoting the idea of some kind of nonempirical science.

A common misconception is that experiments can be used to falsify a theory. In practice, a failing theory gets increasingly immunized against experiment by attempts to patch it. The theory becomes more highly tuned and arcane to fit new observations until it reaches a state where its explanatory power diminishes to the point that it is no longer pursued. The explanatory power of a theory is measured by the set of possibilities it excludes. More immunization means less exclusion and less power. A theory like the multimess does not exclude anything and, hence, has zero power. Declaring an empty theory as the unquestioned standard view requires some sort of assurance outside of science. Short of a professed oracle, the only alternative is to invoke authorities. History teaches us that this is the wrong road to take.

Nautilus has an article by Juan Collar about the increasing skepticism about Wimps as dark matter candidates, and the interest in alternatives.