# Science & Logic

## “A megateam of reproducibility-minded scientists” look to lowering the p-value

. ¶ Having discussed the “p-values overstate the evidence against the null fallacy” many times over the past few years, I leave it to my readers to disinter the issues (pro and con), and appraise the assumptions, in the most recent rehearsal of the well-known Bayesian argument. There’s nothing wrong with a more demanding p-value–if you’re so inclined to embrace rigid, dichotomous standards without context-dependent interpretations, especially if larger sample sizes are required to compensate the loss of power– but lowering the p-value won’t solve the problems that vex people (biasing selection effects), and is likely to introduce new ones.  Kelly Servick, a reporter from Science, gives the ingredients of the main argument given by “a megateam of reproducibility-minded scientists” in an article out today: ¶ To explain to a broader audience how weak the .05 statistical threshold really is, Johnson joined with 71 collaborators on the new paper (which partly reprises an argument Johnson made for stricter p-values in a 2013 paper). Among the authors are some big names in the study of scientific reproducibility, including psychologist Brian Nosek of the University of Virginia in Charlottesville, who led a replication effort of high-profile psychology studies through the nonprofit Center for Open Science, and epidemiologist John Ioannidis of Stanford University in Palo Alto, California, known for pointing out systemic flaws in biomedical research. ¶ The authors set up a scenario where the odds are one to 10 that any given hypothesis researchers are testing is inherently true—that a drug really has... -

### The Meaning of the Wave Function: In Search of the Ontology of Quantum Mechanics

2017.07.15 : View this Review Online | View Recent NDPR Reviews ¶ Shan Gao, The Meaning of the Wave Function: In Search of the Ontology of Quantum Mechanics, Cambridge University Press, 2017, 189pp., $140, ISBN: 9781107124356. ¶ Reviewed by Mario Hubert, University of Lausanne What is the meaning of the wave-function? After almost 100 years since the inception of quantum mechanics, is it still possible to say something new on what the wave-function is supposed to be? Yes, it is. And Shan Gao managed to do so with his newest book. Here we learn what contemporary physicists and philosophers think about the wave-function; we learn about the de Broglie-Bohm theory, the GRW collapse theory, the gravity-induced collapse theory by Roger Penrose, and the famous... - Read More @ Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews ##### Proof Theory and Philosophy This is my next book-length writing project. I am writing a book which aims to do these things: Be a useable textbook in philosophical logic, accessible to someone who’s done only an intro course in logic, covering at least some model theory and proof theory of propositional logic, and... - Read More @ Consequently.org ##### The Memory Hole How can we forget anything that we have paid attention to? Is that making an event in consciousness that has occurred dependent on personal omission? In the view of Bergson everything remains 'out there' requiring only retrieval by a focussing of the brain. Using a holographic analogy Dr. Stephen Robbins... - Read More @ Ombhurbhuva #### Recent Sites Posting In Science ## All Posts in Science The Memory Hole How can we forget anything that we have paid attention to? Is that making an event in consciousness that has occurred dependent on personal omission? In the view of Bergson everything remains 'out there' requiring only retrieval by a focussing of the brain. Using a holographic analogy Dr. Stephen Robbins writes of a reconstructive wave which requires a similar wavelength to the original conscious event. The idea of the brain scanning the contents of the... Ombhurbhuva - Proof Theory and Philosophy This is my next book-length writing project. I am writing a book which aims to do these things: Be a useable textbook in philosophical logic, accessible to someone who’s done only an intro course in logic, covering at least some model theory and proof theory of propositional logic, and maybe predicate logic. Be a user-friendly, pedagogically useful and philosophically motivated presentation of cut-elimination, normalisation and conservative extension, both (a) why they’re important to meaning theory... Consequently.org - “A megateam of reproducibility-minded scientists” look to lowering the p-value . Having discussed the “p-values overstate the evidence against the null fallacy” many times over the past few years, I leave it to my readers to disinter the issues (pro and con), and appraise the assumptions, in the most recent rehearsal of the well-known Bayesian argument. There’s nothing wrong with a more demanding p-value–if you’re so inclined to embrace rigid, dichotomous standards without context-dependent interpretations, especially if larger sample sizes are required to compensate the... Error Statistics - PHIL20030: Meaning, Possibility and Paradox PHIL20030: Meaning, Possibility and Paradox is a University of Melbourne undergraduate subject. The idea that the meaning of a sentence depends on the meanings of its parts is fundamental to the way we understand logic, language and the mind. In this subject, we look at the different ways that this idea has been applied in logic throughout the 20th Century and into the present day. In the first part of the subject, our focus is... Consequently.org - PHIL40013: Uncertainty, Vagueness and Disagreement PHIL40013: Uncertainty, Vagueness and Paradox is a University of Melbourne honours seminar subject for fourth-year students. Our aim in the Honours program is to introduce students to current work in research in philosophical logic. Assertions and denials take a stand on something. In 2017, we’re covering the connections between proof theory and philosophy. Here’s the reading list, if you’re interested in following along. Introduction and Overview, Background Introduction to Inferentialism Robert Brandom, Articulating Reasons: an... Consequently.org - Ethics Discussion at PEA Soup: Robert Cowan’s “Rossian Conceptual Intuitionism,” with a critical précis by Philip Stratton-Lake Welcome to what we expect will be a very interesting and productive discussion of Robert Cowan‘s “Rossian Conceptual Intuitionism.” The article was published in the most recent issue of Ethics and is available through open access here. Philip Stratton-Lake has kindly agreed to contribute a critical précis, and it appears immediately below. Please join in the discussion! Chike Jeffers In his excellent paper Robert Cowan offers an alternative to a perceptualist version of Rossian intuitionism which he calls Rossian Conceptualist Intuitionism... PEA Soup - Comments on Dewar's paper on Ramsey sentences Dewar has written a rich and enthusing paper on Ramsey sentences and Newman's problem. This is a topic I've worked on for my Master and PhD dissertation, but the paper is a bit technical, and as I am not very familiar with the formalism used, it took me two or three careful reads to understand what the author was trying to do. Now it seems to me that the author attempts to formalise in model... Modal Empiricism - Quantum teleportation is even weirder than you think Philip Ball in Nature: A BBC headline last week, ‘First object teleported to Earth’s orbit’, has to be one of the most fantastical you’ll see this year. For once, it seems the future that science fiction promised has arrived! Or has it? The article was talking about reports by Chinese scientists that they had transmitted the quantum state of a photon on Earth to another photon on a satellite in low Earth orbit, some 1,400 kilometres away1.... 3 Quarks Daily - Which is the quantifier? A note on another of those bits of really elementary logic you don’t (re)think about from one year to the next – except when you are writing an introductory text! This time, the question is which is the quantifier, ‘’ or ‘’, ‘’ or ‘’? Really exciting, eh? Those among textbook writers calling the quantifier-symbols ’, ‘’ by themselves the quantifiers include Barwise/Etchemendy (I’m not sure how rigorously they stick to this, though). Tennant also calls e.g. ‘’ a quantifier, and refers to ‘’ as a quantifier prefix. Those... Logic Matters - Upadesa Sahasri: Route to Idealism through Mental Modifications (Vritti) ﻿74. To this, the disciple replied, The delusion, Sir, is gone by your grace; but I have doubts about the changeless nature which, you say, pertains to me. Teacher: What doubts? Disciple: Sound etc., do not exist independently as they are non-conscious. But they come into existence when there arise in the mind modifications resembling sound and so on. It is impossible that these modifications should have an independent existence as they are exclusive of... Ombhurbhuva - centenary of a Darwin-challenging classic Steven Rose at The Guardian: Asked to name the most significant book about biology ever written in English, most biologists would opt for Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species. How about the second most significant book? After 1917, when it was published, the answer would unhesitatingly have been D’Arcy Thompson’s On Growth and Form. Eclipsed since the 1950s by the domination of DNA, its time may have come round once more. This year’s centenary was celebrated in editorials,... 3 Quarks Daily - Justification at a distance According to a popular picture, some beliefs are justified by "seemings": under certain conditions, if it seems to you that P, then you are justified to believe that P, without the assistance of other beliefs. So seemings provide a kind of foundation for belief, albeit a fallible kind of foundation. But most of our beliefs are not justified by seemings (or by beliefs which are justified by seemings, etc.). I once learned that Luanda is... Wo's Weblog - Conditionals in Closed Set Logic Over the last couple of days on Twitter, I was involved in a thread, kicked off by Dan Piponi, discussing closed set logic—the natural dual of intuitionistic logic in which the law of the excluded middle holds but the law of non-contradiction fails, and which has models in the closed sets of any topological space, as opposed to the open sets, which model intuitionistic logic. $$\def\ydash{\succ}$$This logic also has a nice sequent calculus in which... Consequently.org - The Argument from Irreducible Complexity Bacterial flagellaWhen I was a student, well over a decade ago now, intelligent design was all the rage. It was the latest religiously-inspired threat to Darwinism (though it tried to hide its religious origins). It argued that Darwinism could never account for certain forms of adaptation that we see in the natural world.What made intelligent design different from its forebears was its seeming scientific sophistication. Proponents of intelligent design were often well-qualified scientists and mathematicians,... Philosophical Disquisitions - A Test for Consciousness? Riccardo Manzotti and Tim Parks at the NYRB: Will we ever really know what, or even where, consciousness is? Is there any way to get at it scientifically, conclusively? Week by week we hear claims from neuroscientists that would appear to confirm the prevailing “internalist” view of consciousness. If the brain creates a representation in our heads of the world around us through the firing of neurons, the argument goes, then we can identify neural activity that... 3 Quarks Daily - quote of the day "Essence becomes matter in that matter's reflection is determined by relating itself to essence as much as it does to the formless indeterminate. Matter, therefore, is the simple identity, void of distinction, that essence which is, with the determination that it is, the other of form. Hence it is the proper base or substrate of form, since it constitutes the immanent reflection of the After Nature - RELIGIOSUS INVICTUS OR DECONVERTUS INTERRUPTUS: Bruno Latour’s religious conflations See storify here: https://storify.com/TerenceBlake/religiosus-invictus-or-deconvertus-interruptus-bru Agent Swarm - The Meaning of the Wave Function: In Search of the Ontology of Quantum Mechanics 2017.07.15 : View this Review Online | View Recent NDPR Reviews Shan Gao, The Meaning of the Wave Function: In Search of the Ontology of Quantum Mechanics, Cambridge University Press, 2017, 189pp.,$140, ISBN: 9781107124356. Reviewed by Mario Hubert, University of Lausanne What is the meaning of the wave-function? After almost 100 years since the inception of quantum mechanics, is it still possible to say something new on what the wave-function is supposed to be?... Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews -

How the neutrino went from ghost particle to vital physics tool – a tale of bombs, espionage and subtle flavours David Kaiser in Aeon: Every fraction of a second, invisible particles called neutrinos whiz past the vans and Winnebagos on Highway 169 headed toward McKinley Park in northeastern Minnesota, just shy of the Canadian border. Having begun their journey at Fermilab, an imposing physics laboratory outside Chicago, some of those speeding neutrinos smack into 5-ton slabs of steel within an underground mine in the town of Soudan, Minnesota (population: 446), sending sparks of charged particles... 3 Quarks Daily -

Theoretical Terms in Science [Revised entry by Holger Andreas on July 20, 2017. Changes to: Main text, Bibliography] A simple explanation of theoreticity says that a term is theoretical if and only if it refers to nonobservational entities. Paradigmatic examples of such entities are electrons, neutrinos, gravitational forces, genes etc. There is yet another explanation of theoreticity: a theoretical term is one whose meaning becomes determined through the axioms of a scientific theory. The meaning of the term 'force',... Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy -