Scientific Method as a whole as a non-lean process

I was somewhat harsh on the "Scientific Method" in my last post, and think that justifies some clarification.

The methods that scientists use to work can be evaluated at multiple scales, and as with many things, the answer you get varies with scale.

On a one-on-one basis, the use of solid reasoning, backed by data, and reviewed by peers has a great deal going for it over arguments based on authority, emotion, sloppy or incorrect reasoning, and anecdote.

But, viewed from afar as an industrial process, the enterprise of "Science" doesn't seem to have updated its methods or approaches for many years. When I protest that it took 30 years for Science (big S) to recognize that genes operated collaboratively, some supporters of the current version of the Scientific Method might reply "See, it worked!"

Approaching this from the Toyota Production System or "lean" viewpoint, I have to agree that it worked, but ask if it really needed to take 30 years -- couldn't we have accomplished that in, say, 3 years?

Typically a response to that suggestion would be a combination of horror at the suggestion, along with a confident assertion that "it goes as fast as it goes, and nothing can be done about it."

Well, hmm. Let's take that as an unproven hypothesis and look at it, well, scientifically.

I remember when General Motors took 6 weeks to convert its assembly line from one model to another, and was trying to figure out if it could be reduced to, say, 5.5 weeks. Skeptics assured everyone it couldn't be done. Then someone looked at Toyota to see how long they took, and found it was something like 8 hours.

Again, hmm. Are we to believe that intellectual progress can theoretically be made regarding all aspects of life with one exception -- progress at improving the "Scientific Method" ? Or is it possible that the Scientific Method itself could use improvement for a new century?

I sense emotional stirring of defensive arguments such as "Sure, and the US Constitution could use improvement but it costs so much to open that debate and has such a risk that it could be made worse, that we don't want to even go there!" Or, as someone in class said "The line between Germany and France is arbitrary, but so much blood was spilt getting it where it is that it's better to just leave it be."

All that is fine, if we're the only game in town. However, as with General Motors, what if there were actual competition that wasn't hampered by these reluctances to change? What if some other nameless country managed to crack this "lean barrier" (like the sound barrier), and, while keeping Science dynamically stable, still got the response time and agility up by 50% as they practiced it? Then would the arguments suddenly shift or look less credible?

Peer review as practiced, extremely heavily weighted to the old guard, and tenure at Universities, worked ok when it was ok to take 30 years to "see" something. But I think everyone agrees that the rate of change of the world is accelerating, and there comes a point, sooner or later, when 30 years is "not good enough." It's not good enough because the huge inertial moment of the Scientific Method As Practiced (SMAP), while great at removing high-frequency noise, is now also removing significant signals as well.

This comes home to roost regarding treatment of situations involving feedback loops in general, and goal-seeking feedback loops in particular. Most of the history of Science has been based on linear, isolatable, open-loop causal pathways, and that worked fine for building most equipment up through 1950 or so. It didn't seem to have any power at all to understand areas such as interpersonal relationships, the economy, spiraling tensions leading to war, or biological systems, but those were considered squishy or "soft sciences" and their importance denigrated by "real scientists."

But, now that all those basic linear machines have been developed, thank you, times have changed. The world has gotten much smaller, much denser, and much more than ever is living in the "built environment". We are trying to fly in our own wake, and most of what we see as huge problems on the horizon are of our own making. Next year, more than half of the world's population will live in cities, not urban areas.

Everything affects everything else. Nothing can be isolated and studied in isolation. All the critical processes have not just one feedback loop, but many, at many levels, or are literally dense with feedback loops. All that violates the core key principle of the General Linear Model, which means that all statistics based on the GLM (which is 95% of what's used today) is null and void and not applicable as it stands, without modification to deal with feedback effects.

How powerful can those be? Well, how different is a tornado or hurricane from a calm day? That's how powerful they can be. Meanwhile, most of our national policies continue to be based on linear thinking, so we hear people arguing over whether "prices drive wages" or "wages drive prices" as if the obvious feedback loop was not imaginable.

And that's a problem.

In many ways, it's made worse by Religion (as a social force) continually pointing out that Science is failing to deal with many socially important issues on which Religion has an opinion. As a result, now Science risks losing face and admitting that Religion was right on something, which is abhorrent to many.

But meanwhile, Science, as an institution, in the USA, is slowly losing ground and losing funding to precisely the forces that deal with issues that Science ... well... er ... um... hasn't gotten around to dealing with yet -- but hold on, in another 358 years or so, at the current rate, Science will have something to say about that.

Unfortunately for that argument, Science, at the current rate, probably has less than 358 years left of social acceptance for it and funding for it -- and maybe it is less than 40 years, or even less than 4 years in an extreme but imaginable case of exactly the wrong person winning the Presidency and leading the charge against the forces of Darkness and Evil among us.

So, in addition to arguments of economic effectiveness of the Science industry, there are arguments about the survival at all of what's left of it. Most large companies in the USA seem to have abandoned long term research entirely, and even boast about it.

But if Science falls to this new cycle of the Luddite axe, it will be largely Science's own fault and own sin of omission and inaction that led to it. For way too many people, life is getting worse, not better. Too many scientific and technological "miracles" turn out to be "catastrophes" in disguise when seen in their actual social context. One instant example is the introduction of the electric water pump to India -- which in the very short run resulted in a great increase in food production and population, while exhausting the aquifer, and now the final state of man is worse than the first.

It's not OK for Science to say "We did our part - everyone else screwed up!" Maybe if inventions were created with an understanding of context, we'd have fewer devices created in isolation being applied in destructive ways. Maybe, at this point in time, it's more important for the best and brightest brains on the planet to stop messing with subatomic bozos (or bosons), and turn to coming to grips with the fact that the ship we're all on is listing somewhat to one side at an increasing rate.

I don't know what to do about this problem but it seems important. With 1 Gigahertz processors in everyone's briefcase, don't we have enough collective computing power to address some of these more important questions like better ways to collectively understand complex situations and discuss them and find solutions?

"Not my job!" say many. Yep, at least that's right. It won't be your job much longer at the rate Science is sinking in social relevance and importance while it's busy in its stateroom admiring its new outfit and feeling all proud.

It's time to take a serious look again at the Scientific Method in the large, and ask what we could do to improve its functioning by a factor of 10 or 100, using the new technology we have, particularly for addressing complex feedback scenarios which is where it's all breaking down out here in the cold.

More energy will only make it worse, moving us closer to catastrophic warming. More water will only make it worse, as the primary use of water is to wash toxins from point A into the ocean, killing the ocean. More food will only make it worse. Antibiotics are soon to make things worse. Any "pointwise" solution turns out to not be a solution at all.

Enough with the local, pointwise, isolated "solutions." We need some system-wide actual solutions! If Science can't deliver those, then get off the playing field so the rest of us have room to work.

W.