Tuesday, June 7, 2016

The Greater Meaning of Deflategate for Science Today



The climateaudit site has a post on the "Deflategate controversy is due to scientist error" (about the claim that the Patriots football team was deflating their footballs to give themselves an edge in games). My response to Stephen McIntyre:

"Information for Colt balls reconcile almost exactly, but there is a discrepancy of about 0.38 psi for Patriot balls. This discrepancy is almost exactly equal to the bias of referee Anderson’s Logo Gauge (orange) – a coincidence that should alarm any analyst of this data."

It is the single greatest and most widespread error in all of modern science, across all fields, that "coincidence" is never questioned as an "explanation" when an unlikely finding is encountered that is contrary to expectations, or to the supposedly "settled science". Even your own calling it a "coincidence" buys into that science-wide error, though you are quick to realize a proper analysis would have homed in on it and realized it is too unlikely a finding to have been due to the mere chance the numbers would fall out as they do. Modern scientists have become increasingly insensitive to judging the probability of highly unlikely findings, and questioning them to find the real cause in each case. This has led to a crisis of incompetence across all the physical sciences, especially the earth and life sciences, which my research (finding and conclusively verifying what can only be called "the great design of the 'gods'"--the next paradigm in science) shows all need to be re-thought, wholesale.

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