Doubts over a ‘possible sign of life’ on Venus

https://www.sciencenews.org/article/venus-phosphine-possible-sign-life-doubts-how-science-works

by pseudolus • 6 years ago

177 128 6 years ago

piptastic• 6 years ago

I thought this article did a good job of explaining the potential problems with the original findings.

scarmig8• 6 years ago

Greaves and colleagues used a twelfth-order polynomial, or an equation with twelve terms (plus a constant, the +b in the equation), to describe the noise in their ALMA data.

Hah. Wish that had been more emphasized in the original popular reports.

sfvisser• 6 years ago

Reminds me of Von Neumann's "With four parameters I can fit an elephant, and with five I can make him wiggle his trunk."

scarmig8• 6 years ago

I was playing with a formulation like "with twelve parameters I can change lead into gold," but I like Von Neumann's whimsy a lot more.

flobosg3• 6 years ago

That was actually implemented in a paper:

https://fermatslibrary.com/s/drawing-an-elephant-with-four-c...

1-more• 6 years ago

There's a perpetual quest in strength sports to create an equation that lets you compare the relative strength levels of athletes in different weight classes. In weightlifting the Sinclair formula uses allometric scaling to try to roughly answer the question "if we scaled this lifter to the size of the overall world record holder, how much would we expect them to lift?" That's a decent approach. However for a long time powerlifting used the Wilks formula which was, you guessed it, a 5th order polynomial. Hilariously, there are discontinuities in the formulas. If a man bulks up to a bodyweight approaching 283.034 kg, his Wilks score approaches infinity. Same for a woman at about 208.391kg. But if that's your strategy then don't overshoot as the limit from the right is negative infinity.

Sinclair: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sinclair_Coefficients

Wilks: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wilks_Coefficient

discontinuities for men in Wolfram Alpha https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=discontinuities+in+y%3...

discontinuities for women https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=discontinuities+in+y%3...

benibela• 6 years ago

GPT-3: I need 17 billion parameters to create text

beervirus• 6 years ago

Yeah that seems pretty questionable. Why would noise follow a polynomial at all, much less a 12th order one?

blackbear_• 6 years ago

It was actually discussed quite openly and in detail in the original paper [1].

[1] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41550-020-1174-4

imvetri• 6 years ago

We can't complain about things being wrong. We can't correct things that are wrong.

But we can educate others that we are the sign of life and we are the life. Take a breath, and cherish that.

At one point, it wouldn't matter if there is life outside our galaxy or life outside our solar system or outside our planet or outside us.

Only thing that will matter is there is life within us and our focus will shift there.

bigbubba4• 6 years ago

Is this GPT-3 text? It's incomprehensible.

SubiculumCode4• 6 years ago

This is quickly turning to the new form of insult in enlightened compsci forums.

marketingPro2• 6 years ago

Not sure if HN understands what science is, because I caught reddit saying a scientist's opinion was science.

Science is science when an author can be removed from a study and the experiment can be repeated. A 12 year old or science hater should be able to reproduce the results if it's science.

Things that aren't science-

Authority- A PhD/medical doctor/a scientist, these are human opinions, not science. They can cite studies to be scientific.
Art
Tradition

There's value in non scientific disciplines, but they have their own burdens to be aware of.

rriepe• 6 years ago

Science has become an ironic religion for people who believe there's such a thing as a non-religious human.

scarmig8• 6 years ago

There's a segment of the population that sees scientists as materialist, secular replacements for priests and mystics, instead of sophisticated monkeys trying their best to make sense of a messy, confusing world.

As a side note, I'd push back against the idea that replicability is the key ingredient of science: it's neither necessary nor sufficient to discover scientifically "true" knowledge, though it's definitely a nice to have. Plenty of important measurements have been made confirming theories we see as true today (or true enough) that turn out to have been irreproducible, plagued by experimenter bias, or even outright fraudulent. But it's a particular research programme, embedded in a social context, that generates knowledge, not a single reproducible experiment.

fastball4• 6 years ago

Maybe that is because there is a segment of "scientists" (read: people who publish in "scientific" journals) that are just materialist, secular replacements for priests and mystics.

Can you give an example of something that isn't reproducible but was still true?

pushrax2• 6 years ago

My take on science is defined by the scientific method:

- we want to be able to understand and predict things

- we can come up with various explanations that might be able to do this

- if our explanation fails to predict an observation, it is wrong and we need to update or replace it

If you're doing that, you're doing science.

clairity3• 6 years ago

you see this sort of (religious) appeal to authority prevalently on topics like mask wearing, with phrases like “based on science” and “science tells us...” to justify largely politically-based beliefs, in many cases citing administrators or doctors (who are generally not first and foremost scientists) as ‘evidence’ (npr & nyt literally does this every day).

science has told us so far that masks might help at the margins, but hasn’t proven it, which indicates it probably shouldn’t be counted on as a primary mitigative measure, but the public signaling value is just too irresistible for the believers (transmission principally happens in private where social norms oppose mitigative measures).

KKPMW• 6 years ago

But it's a particular research programme, embedded in a social context, that generates knowledge, not a single reproducible experiment.

Somewhat disagree. That particular research programme must still have reproducible experiment as a unit. A million irreproducible experiments will generate exactly zero knowledge.

ars• 6 years ago

Simulation is also not science. It can help narrow the search space, but you can not draw conclusions from it, because what comes out of a simulation depends on what you put it.

And if you knew what needs to be put in, you would not need the simulation in the first place.

Note that a simulation is not the same as a model. A model is tested and refined based on real world data, until the model returns the same results.

bigbubba4• 6 years ago

Simulation is "not science" in the same way that microscopes are "not science". These are tools that may be used by scientists, but are not themselves 'science'.

klyrs• 6 years ago

A 12 year old or science hater should be able to reproduce the results if it's science.

Well, that's going to be pretty limiting. A 12yo isn't going to have the budget to build their own LHC -- reproducibility is certainly an important goal, but "a 12yo or science hater" is an unreasonable place to set the bar.

awb• 6 years ago

The original "signs of life discovered on Venus" announcement was discussed a couple months ago here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24463423

Numerous comments about the promoter's non-scientific background, the sensationalism of the original announcement and skepticism over the findings. Please note that the scientists themselves weren't sensationalizing their findings, but others were.

As this article points out: it was a "big, if true" story that had numerous red flags from the start.

canjobear2• 6 years ago

Interestingly in the old comment thread, and the other ones I read at the time, there was lots of discussion about how the phosphine might have originated non-biologically, but no one suggesting a problem in the data analysis. Now it looks like that is what happened.

It also means just about no one read the real paper...a twelfth-order polynomial would certainly be a red flag for me.

Interesting moral here for interpreting science: surprising results don't usually have interesting explanations. It's usually a bug.

garmaine7• 6 years ago

Lots of people said that the data analysis might fall apart upon looking closely, as has happened many times before.

malwarebytess• 6 years ago

Don't have the funeral yet.

lrem• 6 years ago

It might have been read by people without the proper background. Even though I can grok the math, upon reading this I would go "oh, interesting what they resort to in this field".

fizixer2• 6 years ago

... scientists themselves weren't sensationalizing their findings ...

Yeah right.

They were saying things like "please prove us wrong" while doing interview rounds, and (I'm sure) celebrating, loving and looking forward to more and more limelight, so strictly speaking they were not "sensationalizing their findings".

In a related story, OJ and Casey Anthony did not kill anyone.

Hnrobert42• 6 years ago

Somewhat like the scientists you are criticizing, you ascribe a lot of meaning to little data. Support for your claims that they were celebrating and reveling in fame are very thin. I would like to see more evidence before we criticize not just their work but also them as people.

fleischhauf• 6 years ago

If you read the paper they are very very careful with their claims. Also please prove us wrong is the default position in science, thats what peer review is all about. I dont see a problem with that.

raxxorrax• 6 years ago

One strategy is to write an equation that describes the wiggles

Don't telescopes have some lens coatings that could dampen certain wavelengths? Or some form of giant sun glasses?

I don't understand how you would approach removing noise basically. A 12th order polynomical can fit many, many curves with really good detail already. But what signal were they trying to interpolate?

flobosg3• 6 years ago

The controversial claims made a decade ago about the discovery of arsenic-based life come to mind:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GFAJ-1

bigbubba4• 6 years ago

I recently met somebody who read and believed the initial headlines for that story but never heard any updates. I think science reporting has some serious problems and no clear way to hold anybody accountable for it.

goatlover• 6 years ago

Media reporting in general has that problem.

Conlectus• 6 years ago

As a data point, I was (until just now) one of those people.

nitwit005• 6 years ago

If there was a news site that purely had follow up to old stories, I'd subscribe. The media only provides it for things like trials that people continue paying attention to.

One reason people stall investigations is they know the press will forget after a few months.

BlueTemplar4• 6 years ago

Huh, so did I...

flobosg3• 6 years ago

In my case I knew of the aftermath because I work on the field and followed the reports of science writers such as Ed Yong and Carl Zimmer as well as the blog of Rosie Redfield, one of the microbiologists that took part in the testing and posterior refutation of the published results.

dekhn8• 6 years ago

NASA had already reduced its credibility in the biological community when it promoted this: https://www.nasa.gov/topics/universe/features/astrobiology_t...

which turned out to be so completely wrong it's ridiculous:

https://www.nature.com/news/arsenic-life-bacterium-prefers-p...

Coupled with NASA's constant touting of crappy life science aboard ISS, I've more or less just tuned them out (with a prior probability of 0.01).

gadders• 6 years ago

There was also that other time they maybe found life on Mars: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pHhZQWAtWyQ in 1996

garmaine7• 6 years ago

That’s actually not a good example, because the follow up analysis actually confirms the initial result. ALH84001 is actually some pretty good evidence for fossilized Martian life.

What happened though was that they went public early with too little information, because they were worried about being scooped in the media. When they got asked questions that they didn’t have answers to, the result started to look like it was on shaky grounds. The opinion was formed that it was a bad result. After that it was pretty hard to get anyone to pay attention after that. Follow-on results pretty much confirmed the original result though.

(Astrobiology was my field ~10 years ago.)

RcouF1uZ4gsC• 6 years ago

This article is way too sanguine about this. Scientists putting forth a hypothesis, getting peer reviewed, getting published, and then having others fail to replicate their findings is absolutely a normal part of science.

However, touting very surprising, very unsure results using the megaphone of media, is not science. It is clickbait. It is BS. And it is intensely damaging to science.

What happens is there is a selection effect. The most surprising findings are the ones that are most likely to be touted by the media. However, the most surprising results are the most likely to be wrong. So over time, you end up with the result that much of the "science" touted by the mainstream media ends up being wrong.

And we cannot just blame this phenomenon on the media. Many times it is the institutions that are supporting the research that are contacting the media and putting out press releases and getting on twitter with very clickbaity summaries of the research.

It is great for the scientist. It makes them famous for a day. And as with most stories, the original story gets a lot more play than the correction.

However, it is very damaging to our society. The regular person sees science as a stream of exciting results that are later proven wrong. All the while people are shouting, "This is fine, because this is how science works." And it damages trust.

Imagine if you went to your doctor for a routine blood test and the doctor came back and said, "You have an elevated white blood cell count. This could mean you have cancer." Then a couple of days later, you got called back in to be told, "Well actually, the count was increased because you likely had a cold. But this is how medicine works. One test can suggest something, but different tests can give a different explanation."

If this scenario happened on a regular basis, your confidence in medicine would really be messed up.

If we present science as this ever changing, always being proven wrong entity, then how can we ask people to depend on "science" and make potentially very expensive and inconvenient adjustments to their lives such as with COVID or climate change?

kodyo• 6 years ago

Politicizing scientific results is more damaging than publicly falsifying them. I'd worry more about that. Once something is politicized, it's harder for the red/blue teamers to incorporate new data that shows it to be false.

pessimizer• 6 years ago

They can't, and won't. They'll choose to believe what they want to believe. Who can blame them when horseshit is constantly being published and publicized, often by supposedly reputable journals. It was the Lancet that started anti-vax.

SubiculumCode4• 6 years ago

I now promise myself I will never read the comments on an HN Science article going forward. The sheer number of individuals here who presume scientists are idiots, that the decisions they make are dumb or ill- motivated demonstrates the sheer hubris and lack of humility of a large portion of HN commenters.

I guarantee you that scientists are as smart and capable as the best of the non-scientist HN population, and were the story roles reversed, that scientists on the whole would be more humble about the limits of their knowledge about programming practice and design, etc. They would not revel in the "idiocy" of your bugs, security lapses, or petty spy-based mobile apps. Well maybe the last.

Have some humility. Stop building up fragile egos by tearing others down, pretending that you wouldn't make similar "mistakes" or produce designs with similar weaknesses or limits. Edit 1:Yes I'll defend my tribe. Each down-vote is a badge.

dekhn8• 6 years ago

I spent a couple decades as a scientist. I was modestly successful, published only work that I believe was truly defensible, and never over sold any of my results. I've asked to have my name removed from a paper that was submitted when I noticed it was revised to include lies after I had written it.

I believe you are wrong in saying that scientists aren't idiots: they make colossal errors, obvious ones, all the time! Frankly, I think most successful (in terms of adulation and $$$) scientists are ones who learned how to play the games scientists play, and publish known incorrect work, or unknowingly publish overly strong estimates of their confidence, because they've mastered the incentive system, not because they're not idiots.

I see very little true humility amongst scientists- nearly every successful one I've met was aggresively egotistical.

That said, after another 10-15 years of being a SWE, I've come to the conclusion most SWEs are idiots, too- too focused on clever algorithms and microoptimizations.

SubiculumCode4• 6 years ago

We are all idiots to some degree, scientists are no exception. But I firmly disagree with your assessment of the state of science and scientists. Improvements to be made? Certainly.

feoren• 6 years ago

They fit a TWELFTH-ORDER polynomial to the noise data. Twelfth! If you're ever fitting a twelfth-order polynomial to any data, ever, you need to seriously re-examine your underlying assumptions. I would go so far as to say that anyone fitting a 12th order polynomial to observational data is an idiot, at least when it comes to statistics.

SubiculumCode4• 6 years ago

Twelth order polynomials do seem extreme, but without being an expert in the context they used it, I cannot determine its appropriateness.

As an extreme, let us suppose that we know that there are 6 sources of noise spread out over the x-axis, and that the power of the noise will decrease x units away from each source. In that case, you might suspect that noise function needs a 12th order polynomial to fit the undulation pattern, just to get the necessary number of humps.

aaron695• 6 years ago

The sheer number of individuals here who presume scientists are idiots

The general population are idiots. The amount of scientists studying is huge compared to 40 years ago. It has to be full of idiots.

We are not talking mistakes. We are talking fundamental structural flaws. The fact people in the scientific community defend themselves with rhetoric show they are idiots.

If scientists weren't such idiots they would attack the tech community and how useless it is. But it's scientists who support the AI lies for instance. They are a big part of the problem in tech.

skc• 6 years ago

I bet the people that sensationalize this sort of thing would generate just as much excitement if they led with a huge disclaimer.

dash22• 6 years ago

I think "show just how science works" has become a bit of a meme for "we need to roll back this mistaken/over-ambitious claim".

I googled for some evidence:

Our climate data was wrong, which shows how science works: https://scripps.ucsd.edu/news/research-highlight-pointing-ou...

Re the replication crisis: "Negative opinions about psychology as a science already exist. We have the opportunity to show how science works by directly investigating and addressing the problems." https://www.psychologicalscience.org/observer/champions-of-p...

I didn't find any others, but if you doubt my thesis, that's just the magic of science at work!

kenjackson• 6 years ago

I think "show just how science works" has become a bit of a meme for "we need to roll back this mistaken/over-ambitious claim".

You say this as if it's a small feat. The willingness to rollback a claim you made, ambitious or mundane, is surprisingly difficult for people to do. Most of science is about making claims based on the best evidence that you have with some level of confidence.

Where we run into problems, just look in the news, is when claims become invariant, regardless of new data, methods, theories.

dnautics4• 6 years ago

You're arguing past GP. It's one thing to be mistaken for subtle or deep reasons and say "this is how science works". It's another to be sloppy and say "this is how science works". I'm not even saying scientists shouldn't ever be sloppy, you should definitely start sloppy and there's also a sense in which if observations are reproducible across sloppy setups it's more robust - but also, maybe one should not take out a headline-grabbing presser based on sloppy or shaky work.

And it's hard to argue that the social structure of contemporary scientific discovery doesn't incentives this sort of sloppiness.

Valgrim• 6 years ago

Regarding the climate data: Climate change is definitely happening. The problem is that the current model for sea ice growth is wrong because we're missing something (hypotheses need to be tested: maybe the salinity of water is dropping at the surface, maybe there's a change in water currents), but sea ice grow and melt every year. The ice shelves, however, are melting at a record pace.

dnautics4• 6 years ago

"Climate change is definitely happening"

This is such a non statement. Climate always changes. The correct statement is "the earth is definitely warming".

bananamerica2• 6 years ago

Isn’t the ability to “roll back this mistaken/over-ambitious claim” a core feature of the scientific process?

redis_mlc• 6 years ago

Oh look. Another HN UFO and aliens thread.

People often ask what HN was like in the good old days. I don't remember drivel like this in the first 5 years.

I think the underlying reason for these types of threads is that HNers want to virtue signal that they're interested in science, but too lazy to do the actual study and work to understand and contribute. Pro tip: just follow the Twitter NASA channel. You'll get pretty pictures, with no real effort.

An analogy is when the Linux kernel team started a kernel newbie project, and got nothing but white space patches. So the project had to be abandoned because of low quality and the burden of wasting time for, you know, actual kernel contributors.

Doubts over a ‘possible sign of life’ on Venus

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