Day: 14 June 2020

Quite a short update today I'm afraid. It was my youngest son's 12th birthday yesterday and being with him and making sure he's having a nice time have kept me busy. Longer one tomorrow, I hope. Moral Relativism and the Collapse of the Rule of Law A riot policeman faces a group of rioters in London in 2011 This is a blog post I wrote for the Telegraph in the immediate aftermath of the riots that engulfed many of England’s cities for four days in the summer of 2011. It was published on 11th August 2011. I thought I'd post it today, given the disturbances we witnessed in London yesterday. Towards the beginning of Lord of the Flies, William Golding’s masterpiece about a group of teenage boys marooned on a desert island, a scene takes place in which the most vicious of the boys, Roger, throws stones at a younger boy whose sandcastle he’s just knocked down: Roger gathered a handful of stones and began to throw them. Yet there was a space round Henry, perhaps six yards in diameter, into which he dare not throw. Here, invisible yet strong, was the taboo of the old life. Round the squatting child was the protection of parents and school and policemen and the law. Roger’s arm was conditioned by a civilization ...

by Rudolph Kalveks Scarcely a day goes by without a new and apparently contradictory announcement by some epidemiologist regarding the outlook for the COVID-19 coronavirus (“Coronavirus”). But what lies behind their models and to what extent should their pronouncements be taken at face value? It is well known to all experienced data analysts, whether in science or in economics, that given a sufficient number of model parameters to play with, one can achieve a spectacular fit to historic data, only to find that model projections bear no relation to subsequent events. The philosopher of science, Willard Van Orman Quine, coined the phrase “Underdetermination of Theory”, which applies in the situation where different theories are consistent with the same body of evidence. Models are inherently underdetermined and it is easy for their assumptions to take on a life of their own and to start predicting phenomena that are pure model artefacts rather than being representative of the physical system being studied. Given observational data in science, great care needs to be taken to distinguish the signal from the noise. This is easiest when there are prior grounds for expecting a certain type of signal and when the signal can be described with a few parameters. Gravitational physicists working with the LIGO interferometer apply such principles when detecting gravitational waves from merging ...