Some thoughts on the debt crisis

First, I think the consequences for US science, were the US to default and possibly even if Congress and the President reach a deal, will be negative. In macro terms, I see Federal R&D on a downward glide slope that may well turn into a dive.

Second, I think the combination of the US debt crisis and the European sovereign debt melt down are potentially devastating to the entire global science enterprise. Asia is not yet at the point where the massive western science infrastructure is not needed to push ahead.

Third, with regards to the US, the solutions being put forward by both sides are so constrained by the size of the entitlement problem, there is no scenario that I can see where we don’t eat our seed corn.

To give loyal readers a sense of what the future might look like, we might look to the example of Soviet science after the collapse of the USSR in 1989. Not good.

Great Interactive Chart: Who Holds the Federal Debt

It’s here. Courtesy of Congressional Quarterly. Hat Tip to the Economist on-line.

C.P. Snow’s Two Cultures Revisited

I was sitting down with a colleague this morning–he’s a biochemist and I’m a neuroscientist–and the question came up of how hypotheses can be properly falsified in the social sciences and especially computational social science. This, to me, is an incredibly important question for the future of the social sciences, because, if you accept Karl Popper‘s requirement that scientific questions by definition, must contain falsifiable hypotheses, then social science can’t just be observational and inductive.

Now I’ve been familiar with Popperian-based social science since my training days in Ann Arbor (e.g. much of survey research is of this type). My problem is a deeper one. Given the complexity of human social relations, and our difficulty making measurements (of say the type we make in chemistry), how sure are we that the result of an experiment on social human beings can say anything definitive about an underlying hypothesis (much less falsify it).

Here I explicitly ignore trivial examples such as: all heads of state throughout history have been male (false).

Rather, I’m after the really non-trivial social science questions. The following is an example: human settlements (such as cities) follow a power law as far as population is concerned.

Even more importantly, as we create models for social systems in silico, we can conduct experiments on the models with Popperian rigor, but what really can we say about the relationship between a falsifiable hypothesis for a computational social science model and its corresponding hypothesis in the world of social human affairs?

Recently the new field of social neuroscience has opened up, led by John Cacioppo at the University of Chicago among others. Here at least, is the germ of an answer to my problem. Functional MRI measurements of human brains as they interact fulfills Popper’s requirements–within the caution that the fMRI BOLD signal is mismatched to both the spatial and temporal dimensions of the neural code (think neurons and action potentials to a first approximation).

The field of experimental economics, as pioneered by Vernon Smith, similarly, fulfills Popper.

Interestingly, the field of computational neuroscience requires a “validation” cycle with bench top neuroscience to be taken seriously: model results must be compared to bench top science. When the model and the bench top results don’t agree, we go with the bench top data and change the model.

Should there be a similar requirement for computational social science models?

Singapore’s water problem

May have been solved. From the Economist, the link is here. If this works as well as advertised, it could play a major role world-wide because increasingly, fresh water supplies drive politics.

Marc Hauser and Harvard agree to go separate ways….

In this morning’s Chronicle of Higher Education on-line, here.

Money quote:

As for those who doubt Harvard’s findings, the former research assistant said “I know what I saw,” and “I agree with a lot of other people who looked at it and saw the same thing,” adding that it was “beyond the scope of some innocent kind of action.”

DOD budget, the macro picture: steep descent

Thomas Ricks at Foreign Policy here. Hat tip Andrew Sullivan’s Daily Beast blog.

This is important for several reasons:

1) My guess is that in any prioritization, support for basic research (what’s termed 6-1 in DOD parlance) will be cut the earliest and the most…

2) With the US still involved in Iraq and Afghanistan, it’s easy to imagine that the USN carrier groups would be cut back, which has enormous implications for the protection of global trade (there is no comparable blue water navy).

3) I can’t see how the US would be willing to project boots on the ground, under pretty much any scenario short of complete mobilization. That will be part of the geopolitical calculus of every other nation and non-state actor around the globe.

Back from vacation

Yes, even this blog takes time off occasionally. For me, that involved a quick trip to the Eastern Shore. The image is just another sunset off a cove near St. Michaels. That water is crawling with lots of blue crabs and oysters–so it all fits with the theme of marine biology (meep meep).

But now we’re back, and just in time for DC’s muggiest and hottest days. We get through these, with the AC running, and it’s all down hill.

The FT calls it "American Roulette"….

That’s the headline in the paper edition. The on-line article is here. Behind the firewall, the Chronicle of Higher Education weighs in with what a default would mean for colleges here.

For public universities like Mason, the problem is likely to be in what happens with on-going sponsored research, Pell grants and to a lesser extent the George Mason University Foundation portfolio.

On August 2 (D-Day as default), I’ll be on my way to the MBL in Woods Hole for my annual stint. Sometimes the best way to get perspective on what goes on here in Washington is to get away from it.