Re:Signs of the Times
by whatshisface on Wednesday January 08, 2020 @08:39AM
(#21991283)
The allegations are that the black hole image could have turned out to be anything, given different starting assumptions about what it would look like. The exact nature of this variation, along with the degree to which the other possibilities would be plausible, is up for debate. Unfortunately that debate is very technical and not suited for general-audience blog posts.
The author of the post ignores all the work that went into validating that the methods they used give reasonably consistent results, including simulation studies and multiple blind analyses to make sure that they weren't just making the image they wanted to see.
This is discussed in the Caltech talk which is embedded in the post. It seems the author cherrypicked all the quotes that sound bad and ignored the parts that disagree with her narrative.
The reason the article is annoying is that there could be some very interesting criticisms based on what was written. "P-hacking" and related statistical fudging is a valid concern, but you need technical details. The skepticism towards black holes because of skepticism towards singularities is an interesting idea. As such, it just seems like naysayer fluff.
Re:Signs of the Times
by raverbashing on Wednesday January 08, 2020 @08:56AM
(#21991407)
Yeah this article is clickbait
I would paraphrase that "saying" about teaching as thus: "those who can't do, nitpick"
The TED talk was for a different algorithmic technique.
Couple that with assertions like "An image with a hole or without a hole looks the same in the amplitude domain." and I see that this article has as much credibility as climate deniers.
Same thing with the Ligo "naysayers" who tried to disprove the experiments without knowing the basics of signal processing using FFT, etc
The author is making it sound like the work is just p-hacking when it's /very clearly/ not.
This single paragraph in the Method section explains it best:
> "Reconstructing an image using bispectrum measurements is an ill-posed problem, and as such there are an infinite number of possible images that explain the data [28]. The challenge is to find an explanation that respects our prior assumptions about the “visual” universe while still satisfying the observed data."
This is literally all of physics! You can say that Newtonian physics is 'just curve fitting' just the same.
I don't know enough about the philosophy of science to make a further argument here but clearly the author does not either.