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The “PhD Effect” and scientific prediction

Uncategorized May 29th, 2009

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Randi’s Theory of PhDs

One of my personal inspirations to look at the Universe through scientific eyes is not a scientist at all, but a conjurer, escape artist and illusionist called James “The Amazing” Randi.

Randi (as he is frequently called) is now semi-retired from show business, but is fully engaged in making speeches and writing books on the paranormal, upon hucksters and scam–artists, on fake psychics like Uri Geller and Sylvia Browne and all sorts of flim-flam that causes gullible people to be separated from their money. He does this through his own charitable Foundation, the James Randi Educational Foundation, based in Fort Lauderdale, Florida.

Now many people are beguiled into thinking that Randi is some mere conjurer. He most certainly is much more than that. Randi is a genius of first rank and a highly original thinker whose persistence has infuriated many counsels of the “great and the good” including that most precious of elites, the PhD scientists of academe.

It’s not that Randi is against PhDs or the people that have PhDs. He is a blessed and trusted friend to many people who possess those qualifications and more. He was a great friend of Isaac Asimov, Carl Sagan and Richard Feynman.

Its simply that in his long observation of PhD scientists that some of them are peculiarly blind to their own deficiencies as observers, thinkers or even experimenters, and can be fooled by simple trickery or deluded by chance or human error into believing the most preposterous of nonsenses.

Randi has his own theory as to why PhDs are more credulous than they would admit. He refers to it as the “PhD Effect” and whimsically relates that he notices at the PhD ceremony the Presiding Professor always wears gloves to handle the PhD certificates and wonders why this should be – and then Randi proffers the suggestion that it must be because the certificates contain a substance that transfers itself instantaneously to the new PhD holder through the skin, one of whose results is that the newly minted PhD cannot utter either of the following two phrases “I was wrong” and “I don’t know”.

NOAA predicts the next Solar Cycle…again

With that in mind, let us turn our attention to the Sun, and in particular to predictions about the future size and timing of the next solar cycle, Solar Cycle 24, made by a panel of PhD solar scientists led by NOAA, as seen at this link

May 29, 2009: An international panel of experts led by NOAA and sponsored by NASA has released a new prediction for the next solar cycle. Solar Cycle 24 will peak, they say, in May 2013 with a below-average number of sunspots.

“If our prediction is correct, Solar Cycle 24 will have a peak sunspot number of 90, the lowest of any cycle since 1928 when Solar Cycle 16 peaked at 78,” says panel chairman Doug Biesecker of the NOAA Space Weather Prediction Center.

It is tempting to describe such a cycle as “weak” or “mild,” but that could give the wrong impression.

“Even a below-average cycle is capable of producing severe space weather,” points out Biesecker. “The great geomagnetic storm of 1859, for instance, occurred during a solar cycle of about the same size we’re predicting for 2013.”

That sounds authoritative. But what about the last time the panel made a prediction?

The latest forecast revises an earlier prediction issued in 2007. At that time, a sharply divided panel believed solar minimum would come in March 2008 followed by either a strong solar maximum in 2011 or a weak solar maximum in 2012. Competing models gave different answers, and researchers were eager for the sun to reveal which was correct.

This is yet another blow to the notion of “consensus science”. Last time (only two years ago) the panel was divided as to the strength of the maximum and the start of the next solar cycle, based on a lot of competing models which “predicted” the next solar cycle.

But here’s the kicker: all of them were wrong. No “ensemble” forecast, combining all of the models, would have saved them. They were all wrong.

Now let us return to Randi’s forbidden phrases of PhDs when reading the next paragraph:

“It turns out that none of our models were totally correct,” says Dean Pesnell of the Goddard Space Flight Center, NASA’s lead representative on the panel. “The sun is behaving in an unexpected and very interesting way.”

Let the power of Randi translate that for you:

“We were wrong” says Dean Pesnell of the Goddard Space Flight Center, NASA’s lead representative on the panel. “We don’t know what’s going on“

That, I submit, would have been far more accurate and informative a statement than what was actually offered by the NOAA panel, which continues to give false assurances as to its predictive performance which are at odds with its recent history. But will those phrases actually be passed through any of their lips? I don’t think so, somehow.

On my other blog “Solar Science” I’m going to review the dismal failure of anyone and everyone to predict the deep solar minimum we are now in.

But the take home message from me is that predicting the future of chaotic systems is a continuing delusion of human society, and the people who will not be believed will be those who fail to embrace those predictions nor give unjustified credence or recognition to the people who make them.

Eventually someone will be proven right by Solar Cycle 24, but there are so many predictions extant that it could easily be by chance.