Chapter VIII: Dispassionate | The Philosophy Of Science by Steven Gussman [1st Edition]

        “My parents died years ago.  I was very close to them.  I still miss them terribly.  I know I

        always will.  I long to believe that their essence, their personalities, what I loved so much about

        them, are – really and truly – still in existence somewhere... I know how much I want to believe

        that my parents have just abandoned the husks of their bodies, like insects or snakes molting,

        and gone somewhere else.  I understand that those very feelings might make me easy prey even

        for an unclever con, or for normal people unfamiliar with their unconscious minds, or for those

        suffering from dissociative psychiatric disorder.  Reluctantly, I rouse some reserves of

        skepticism.”

        – Carl Sagan^I

        “The question is not whether we like the conclusion that emerges out of a train of reasoning, but
        whether the conclusion follows from the premise or starting point and whether that premise is
        true.”
        – Carl Sagan^II

        Dispassion is not exactly as it sounds; passion is a really important quality in in anyone who wants to do anything well.  Of course one also needs to have certain skills, abilities, and overall competence, and one needs to train; but passion, really caring deeply about what one is doing, is always present in people who actually make real contributions to the world.  It's very rare that someone cynically makes a serious contribution to the world (such as a scientific discovery, or a great work of art).  Passion really is the motivator that separates the true scientist (for whom the philosophy of science is a way of life to strive-toward, a world-view that they bring with them always) from a nominal scientist who does what they do because they like the idea of having the identity or prestige of being a “scientist”, or because they just have a job to make money as a “scientist” (all of which grows out of a slighter interest and understanding in it).  This scientific ethic is an important difference between the real discoverers, as opposed to the work-a-day scientists-for-hire.^III

        One should be passionately dispassionate.^IV  One needs to be both passionately interested in discovering the truth, and therefore profoundly dispassionate in one's analysis of the evidence, such that one doesn't give into biases.  If you want something to be true, astronomer and philosopher of science Carl Sagan was fond of saying that you should be even more skeptical of it for that very reason!^V  Technically, it isn't that one should actually be more skeptical or even apply more scrutiny, but that one should try to apply more scrutiny in an attempt to correct for the innate tendency for people to apply less scrutiny (or double standards) to their favored ideas (whether favored because of political biases, or because it is a pet hypothesis of their own design—as every great scientist would love to have discovered a law or fact of nature).^VI  Is is the sign of a great scientist when one tries to falsify one's own ideas (this is not a process that should only be left to others).^VII  A scientist who has hypothesized has already invested, and so should not spend all of one's time disproportionately trying to verify^VIII one's own idea—cherry picking and finding only favorable evidence for one's own position, like a lawyer rather than a scientist.^IX  A good scientist wants to know if he is, in reality, correct or incorrect.  The idea of living a life in blissful ignorance, merely thinking oneself the discoverer of a law or fact when one really is not, and in which future people will know that you were not right due to their own continued performance of the scientific method, should haunt the scientist.  The scientist must be really passionate about knowing what is true or not, first and foremost, that is, the scientist must be curious.^X

        Since we are all teachers of the next generation (in whatever we do), leaders by example, one should be careful to demonstrate the scientific ethic and embody the scientific method for others (telling people to, “do as I say, not as I do,” can only go so far).  Scientists should demonstrate epistemological humility^XI to the coming generations of young scientists—this means publicly and shamelessly showing when one is wrong, whether because oneself noticed their error, or because someone else did, or because the preponderance of evidence has shifted over time as further research has been produced.  While swaying scientific journals may be difficult, one can personally mark their own fight against publication bias—the tendency to fail to publish null results (studies whose empirical outcomes are inconclusive) and negative results (studies whose empirical evidence falsifies the author's hypothesis).  The culture among many who think smart people have to always be right, or save face when wrong, is counter to the scientific ethic.  Most new ideas are wrong!^XII  As Sagan said, “... [Ptolemy's] Earth-centered universe held sway for 1,500 years, a reminder that intellectual capacity is no guarantee against being dead wrong.”^XIII  Nobel-Prize winning physical chemist Linus Pauling is quoted as having said that the process of discovery is in part a numbers game; that to make a discovery, “... you just have a lot of ideas and then throw away the bad ones... [using] some sort of principle of selection, some feeling based on experience, perhaps, as to what the ideas are that are apt to be good.”^XIV  It is a badge of honor to have written a paper on one's own original hypothesis, before writing another which falsifies it!  In that spirit, allow me to now all-but-falsify an idea of my own.

        Here is a less recent example: some half-a-decade back, I had an idea for explaining the matter-antimatter asymmetry believed to be observed in the cosmos (it is thought that there is far more matter than anti-matter in existence even though physical theory generally suggests there should be equal amounts and / or that it should have all annihilated into light).^XV  The idea was predicated on physicist Steven Hawking's main contribution to science: Hawking radiation.  In a rare mixed-use of the general theory of relativity (gravity) and the standard model of particle physics (quantum physics), Hawking discovered that there is entropy, and therefore a temperature, associated with black holes and that it would therefore appear that these black holes are radiating (or losing) energy despite their reputation.^XVI  The standard model of particle physics predicts that otherwise-empty space contains quantum fluctuations in which matter-anti-matter particle pairs pop into existence before colliding (due to the electromagnetic force acting on their opposite charges) and annihilating into photons of light.^XVII  The idea behind Hawking radiation is that when this process occurs near the event horizon of a black hole (the boundary in space-time past which not even light may escape back out), sometimes one of the two particles is sucked in while the other is ejected out: this is essentially the single-particle loss of black-hole mass (this radiation is thought to eventually completely shrink and evaporate the black hole over very long cosmological time-scales).^XVIII  My hypothesis was that, perhaps the black hole preferentially sucks in the anti-matter particle from the pair, hiding it from view and ejecting a matter particle back out into the universe: from this vantage point, black holes are something like energy-matter conversion factories.  One issue is that this isn't on its own an explanation of the problem, but really a shifting of the asymmetry (as one must now ask “why does the black hole preferentially take the anti-particle over the particle?”).  Frankly I don't currently have the raw, hardcore physical expertise to do a deep analytical dive on such a problem—but fortunately, the first step is always less intense than that, and it is merely to see if there is a there, there, at all.  The hypothesis makes a brute prediction about where the anti-matter will be, and while one cannot observe the inside of a black hole, one may notice other predictions of this hypothesis that admit to a rather simple test.  If one thinks about it, the argument from the symmetry of known physical law that predicts there should be equal amounts matter and anti-matter (or otherwise all light) coupled with the Hawking radiation mechanism I propose instantly predicts that half of the universe's mass (whatever that is) must be inside of black holes, if that is why we see almost no anti-matter (as it is supposedly hiding inside of black holes).  So as a back-of-the-envelope calculation testing the basic viability of this toy model, one must simply estimate the ordinary-matter-mass of the observable universe (that is, the energy content of the universe ignoring dark energy and dark matter) and the number of black holes (and how much mass those account for) and see if they are about equivalent.^XIX  So, I looked up what is thought about the average black hole mass and how many black holes are thought to exist: as I remember it, I came up with a number something like 10% of the mass of the universe being contained in black-holes, not an order-of-magnitude match.  Unfortunately, the couple of times that I have spent all-nighters venturing down this path have tended to replicate falsification of the hypothesis.  I will now demonstrate a fresh attempt.  The energy-density of outer space is P_U = 9.9 × 10^-27 kg/m^3XX and the radius of the observable universe is R = 46.5 Gly × 10⁹ ly/Gly × 365 days/y × 24 hours/day × 60 min/hour × 60 s/min × 3 × 10⁸ m/ls = 4.4 × 10²⁶ m.^XXI  The volume of a sphere is V_Sphere = (4/3)πR³, and so the volume of the visible universe is V_U = (4/3)π(4.4 × 10²⁶ m)³ = 3.6 × 10⁸⁰ m³.^XXII  Density is mass per unit volume, or P_U = M_U/V_U, which can be algebraically rearranged to solve for the mass: M_U = P_U × V_U = (9.9 × 10^-27 kg/m³)(3.6 × 10⁸⁰ m³) = 3.6 × 10⁵⁴ kg.  But most of the energy in the universe is in the forms of dark energy and dark matter, with “ordinary” matter and anti-matter making up only 4.9%, thus the mass of ordinary matter in the observable universe is about M_U' = 3.6 × 10⁵⁴ kg × 0.049 = 1.7 × 10⁵³ kg.^XXIII  That is, the mass of ordinary matter in the visible universe would seem to be about 1.7E53 kilograms.  Until recently, there were generally two known mass-categories of black-holes: stellar-mass black holes reportedly range from 3M_☉ - 10M_☉ while super-massive black holes range on the order of 1,000,000M_☉ - 1,000,000,000M_☉.^XXIV  The former grouping is such a small range, that we can probably safely take the mid-point of the range and say that M_{Stellar BH} = 7M_☉.  Super-massive black holes have such a range that taking the mid-point of the range (or even the arithmetic mean) is likely to vastly bias towards the higher-end of the spectrum, regardless of the real-world distribution.  This will require an actual data-set so that we can do a statistical analysis of the mass-distribution of known supper-massive black holes.  One can find a list of the 137 most massive black holes on Wikipedia.^XXV  Though this list of course biases towards the larger end of the distribution (indeed, our observations themselves likely do as well, since it is easier to detect more massive black-holes), we have allegedly only measured the masses of 150 super-massive black holes,^XXVI suggesting that the catalogue of 137 is actually quite complete.  This data-set ranges from (4.3 × 10⁶)M_☉ (in the case of our own Milky Way galaxy's central Sagittarius A*) all the way up to 10¹¹M_☉.  Again, just as naively taking the midpoint from the previous range gives (5E8)M_☉, the midpoint of this range is the even larger (5E10)M_☉.  But in this case, we have an actual data-set with individual values making up a whole distribution.  When grouped by order-of-magnitude, one produces the following bar graph:^XXVII

The mean, median, and mode order-of-magnitude is 10⁹M_☉—the order of magnitude in-between our two more naive mid-points, as it turns out.^XXVIII  So it is probably safe to take this to be the average mass of a super-massive black hole; M_{Super-Massive} = 10⁹M_☉.  It is estimated that there exist somewhereabouts 500,000,000,000 galaxies in the visible universe each with one super-massive black hole in its center, and containing around 100,000,000 stellar-mass black holes.^XXIX  Therefore, we can estimate the black-hole-mass of the visible universe with a simple equation: M_{BH Total} = (500,000,000,000 galaxies × 1 super-massive black hole × 10⁹ solar masses × 2 × 10³⁰ kg) + (500,000,000,000 galaxies × 100,000,000 stellar-mass black holes × 7 solar-masses × 2 × 10³⁰ kg) = 1E51 kg + 7E50 kg = 2E51 kg.  Now we simply compare our visible-universe mass to the total black-hole mass:

                                M_U = 2 × 10⁵³ kg

                                M_{BH Total} = 2 × 10⁵¹ kg

It would appear that M_U and M_{BH Total} are not comparable—the prediction was that M_{BH Total} should be half the mass of M_U, instead, it is two orders of magnitude smaller (~1% of M_U).  Even if the older estimate of 2,000,000,000,000 galaxies was used,^XXX this would only bump it up to ~4%, a far cry from 50%.  So we conclude that black holes do not contain half of the universe's matter (excluding dark energy and dark matter), and so the locus of the matter-anti-matter asymmetry cannot be at the event horizons of black holes preferring to pull in positrons over electrons.

        What would need to be true for this hypothesis to be resurrected from our provisional falsification?  Either the number of black holes, or the masses of black holes (or some combination of the two) would need to have their estimates updated such that they are two orders of magnitude larger.  All that said, recent evidence for intermediate-mass black holes (which I alluded to earlier) and potentially more nearby black-holes may lead us to understand there are more black holes (or otherwise more mass accounted for by black holes) in the universe than previously thought, which could resurrect the idea if newer estimates bring the two figures into agreement (meaning they increase the estimate by two orders of magnitude).  These intermediate-mass black holes sit between 100M_☉ and 1,000M_☉,^XXXI so we'll say 500M_☉ × 2E30 kg = 1E33 kg.  It is not known how many of these exist, but we can calculate here how many would be needed to fill the discrepancy in this hypothesis (the other 49% of the universe's ordinary mass): 0.49MU = 0.49(2E53 kg) = 1E53 kg.  The number of intermediate-mass black holes needed would then be given by N = 0.49M_U / M_{Intermediate BH} = (1E53 kg) / (1E33 kg) = 10²⁰ intermediate-mass black holes, perhaps unrealistically more than the 5E11 super-massives and 5E19 stellar-massives (one would expect these intermediates to number in-between the other two).  While these possibilities would reverse falsification of the hypothesis, this would not on its own demonstrate that it is true, it would merely be a passing of the first and simplest predictive test (which might actually be explained some other way).
        On the bright side, when this happens, one saves a lot of time one could waste getting into the more technical weeds on a problem that is not viable from the onset.^XXXII  I have already done this calculation couple of times on totally different occasions because it pops back in my head and I just can't avoid scratching that itch.  And that's okay if you want to go give something a second go, think about it again, and to re-convince yourself one way or the other.  But do not fool yourself into belief; err on the side of falsification, provisionally—set a high bar for yourself to get over.

        All of this having been said, in recent years it's become extremely popular for scholars including social scientists and those in the humanities to push the idea that humans are perfectly biased, and cannot (and do not) overcome these biases.  As mentioned earlier, even social psychologist Jonathan Haidt, on the more scientific side, supports this view that scientists form even their scientific beliefs based on emotions and intuitions, and merely use their intellect like a lawyer defending a client.^XXXIII  Many others take this to an absurd extreme without ever turning it inward on themselves, nor attempting to overcome their own biases, instead focusing on claiming researchers who take positions they don't like are irreparably biased.^XXXIV  Contemporary psychologists have a tendency to cite psychological studies which suggest that most scientists today do in fact act more like lawyers than scientists (although it is difficult to see why this should be surprising, nor why the explanation should be that science is impossible, rather than that most of our scholars are mediocre).  Yet the “findings” of bias from social psychology are totally unsurprising—of course the scientific ethic is not the norm, even among career scientists.  Only someone who believes another modern myth, that of “the scientific community” over the “lone genius”, would be surprised to learn that getting one's PhD in biology does not instantly make them Charles Darwin (a centuries-rare genius)!  Meanwhile, a bureaucracy dedicated to scientific research and staffed by run-of-the-mill PhDs has never made a large, paradigm-shifting scientific discovery of the kind Copernicus, Galileo, Kepler, Newton, or Einstein has!  The scientific method is not something anyone is born with: it is a centuries-hard-won philosophy that takes lifelong dedication to live up to.  It is not a job, nor an identity, and the true heirs to it are not those who take the beaten track.  All of this is a mistake for scientists to play into: it is clearly the purpose of the scientific method to remove biases and error, leaving behind an objective epistemology to discover the world, and some people clearly are able to do this, however imperfectly: Newton, Darwin, and Einstein really were men of this world, not prophets from myths.  We have inherited so much knowledge from dispassionate men of the past that continues to bare true: we use the technology developed out of these discoveries so often that we take them for granted.  Lawyers and feelers are not responsible for the modern world.  That psychologists are treating captial-P-R Peer Review like a first approximation of the scientific endeavor, rather than lower-case-P-R peer review being the second step after good scientists manage to embody the scientific ethic for themselves is an inversion of the scientific ethic;^XXXV it is tantamount to the claim that we're all hopelessly biased.^XXXVI  The great scientists always attempts to take what philosopher Thomas Nagel called,“the view from nowhere,” to the best of his ability, and then hope that others keep him in check.  Again, we already know this works because we can apply induction to induction, and we can see that we made scientific progress in the past by the work of great scientists who achieved the scientific ethic (not largely from biased hacks fighting it out until the truth landed somewhere in-between them).  The species was not born with the scientific knowledge anyone of us happens to have acquired, and so we should not take for granted what Newton and Darwin achieved in their day.  They had to dispassionately take the view from nowhere to discover the world.  Nothing is standing in the way of our doing the same thing in our time, except for the belief that we can't.

Footnotes:

0. The Philosophy Of Science table of contents can be found, here (footnotephysicist.blogspot.com/2022/04/table-of-contents-philosophy-of-science.html).

I. See The Demon Haunted World by Sagan (pp. 203-204).

II. See The Demon Haunted World by Sagan (pp. 210). I have often said that Sagan's “The Fine Art Of Baloney Detection” chapter should be required reading for high-school students, see The Demon Haunted World by Sagan (pp. 201-218).

III. See the “The Scientific Ethic” chapter.

IV. “Passionately dispassionate” is the tagline of my blog, The Footnote Physicist (https://footnotephysicist.blogspot.com/).

V. See the quotations at the opening of this chapter in The Demon Haunted World by Sagan (pp. 203-204, 210).

VI. See the “Scrutiny And Skepticism” chapter.

VII. See The Demon Haunted World by Sagan (pp. 210).

VIII. See "Bret And Heather 34th DarkHorse Podcast Livestream: Portland & Covid: What The Hell?" by Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying (DarkHorse) (2020) (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B-U95sRfCKU&t) (0:44 - 8:47); “Bret And Heather 36th DarkHorse Podcast Livestream: Doing The Math On Sensemaking” by Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying (DarkHorse) (2020) (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sg4hKX4obnk) (0:45 - 12:23); and evolutionary biologist Bret Weinstein's (@BretWeinstein) September 16^th, 2021 tweet: https://twitter.com/bretweinstein/status/1306319420382277632.

IX. Social psychologist Jonathan Haidt is associated with the view that even scientists ultimately tend to do so, requiring the mutual canceling-out of everyone's different biases. See The Coddling Of The American: How Good Intentions And Bad Ideas Are Setting Up A Generation For Failure by Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt (Penguin Press) (2018) (pp. 35, 109, 263, 271). I believe this is an important secondary effect in the scientific process, but that primarily, the great scientists really can and and do overcome confirmation bias to make discoveries. Haidt's disconfirmation process of the group would work even better if the individuals were better educated and behaved in their own philosophy each step of the way.

X. See “Why Smart People Are Vulnerable To Putting Tribe Before Truth: Science Literacy Is Important, But Without The Parallel Trait Of 'Science Curiosity,' It Can Lead Us Astray” by Dan M. Kahan (Scientific American) (2018) (https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/why-smart-people-are-vulnerable-to-putting-tribe-before-truth/). I appear to have learned about this work by way of a tweet by evolutionary biologist Steve-Stewart Williams (@SteveStuWill), whom I retweeted on 12/4/18 (https://twitter.com/schwinn3/status/1069887485105332224?s=20&t=J_1GboO3zyz6O1jeKdI2q).

XI. I believe I was introduced to the term “epistemic humility” by evolutionary behavioral economist Gad Saad, though Saad claims the term is ancient in his October 31^st, 2018 tweet: https://twitter.com/GadSaad/status/1057747842033434629?s=20&t=N0iq7iRfFPwpxGqXifCxYQ. I tend to use the term “epistemological” rather than “epistemic”.

XII. This idea, sometimes called the conservative principle or the principle of precaution, is related to physicist Ludwig Boltzmann's mechanism for the second law of thermodynamics, that of increasing entropy (or disorder) over time: because there are so many more ways for a system to be disordered, by chance, these states are increasingly expected over time (look forward to the “Physics” chapter of the “Ontology” volume). Likewise, because there is only one true reality, but perhaps infinitely many possible hypotheses, most new ideas are expected to be incorrect, the correct explanation like finding a needle in a haystack. Clinical Psychologist Jordan Peterson makes a similar argument (along with facets I do not agree with), see “Jordan Peterson - Can you interpret the world an infinite number of ways?” uploaded to YouTube by user Rational Philosophy (2017) (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yuXpc12_mIw). For more on entropy and the second law of thermodynamics, see Enlightenment Now by Pinker (pp. 15-19, 25-26).

XIII. See Cosmos by Sagan (pp. 14).

XIV. See “How To Have Good Ideas” by Linus Pauling (Oregon State University / NOVA) (1977) (https://scarc.library.oregonstate.edu/coll/pauling/bond/audio/1977v.66-ideas.html).

XV. Look forward to the “Physics” chapter in the forthcoming “Ontology” volume. See also “The Matter-Antimatter Asymmetry Problem” (CERN) (https://home.cern/science/physics/matter-antimatter-asymmetry-problem).

XVI. For more on Hawking radiation, see the “Black Holes Ain't So Black” chapter in A Brief History Of Time by Stephen Hawking (Bantam Books) (1988 / 1998) (pp. 103-117); The Nature Of Space And Time by Stephen Hawking and Roger Penrose (Princeton University Press) (1996) (pp. 41-44); Brief Answers To The Big Questions by Stephen Hawking (Bantam Books) (2018) (pp. xvi, 14-15, 113, 115-116); and the “The Quantum World And Hawking Radiation” chapter in On Gravity: A Brief Tour Of A Weighty Subject by A. Zee (Princeton University Press) (2018) (pp. 115-122).

XVII. See “The Matter-Antimatter Asymmetry Problem” (https://home.cern/science/physics/matter-antimatter-asymmetry-problem).

XVIII. See Brief Answers To The Big Questions by Hawking (pp. 115-116) and The Nature Of Space And Time by Hawking and Penrose (pp. 41).

XIX. See the “Approximation” chapter.

XX. See the “Observable Universe” entry on Wikipedia (Wikipedia) (accessed Oct. 2022) (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Observable_universe) which further cites “What Is Our Universe Made Of?” by Britt Griswold and Edward J. Wollack (NASA) (2014) (https://map.gsfc.nasa.gov/universe/uni_matter.html) (though I have not yet read this article).

XXI. See “Observable Universe” (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Observable_universe) which further cites Extra Dimensions In Space And Time by Itzhak Bars and John Terning (Springer) (2009) (pp. 27) (though I am not familiar with this work).

XXII. See “Observable Universe” (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Observable_universe) which further cites Wolfram|Alpha (https://www.wolframalpha.com/).

XXIII. See “Observable Universe” (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Observable_universe) where the similar value 1.5 × 10⁵³ kg is calculated. The single apostrophe (') is sometimes appended to a variable name to show that it is distinct from (but highly related to) the naked variable name. In this case M_U is the total energy content of the observable universe and M_U' is only the ordinary-mass content.

XXIV. See “A New Kind Of Black Hole” edited by Susan Watanabe (NASA) (2007) (https://www.nasa.gov/vision/universe/starsgalaxies/Black_Hole.html#:~:text=A%20typical%20stellar%2Dclass%20of,to%20billions%20of%20solar%20masses). The “M_☉” symbol stands for the solar-mass unit (that is, the mass of our sun), which is 2E30 kg, see the “Solar Mass” entry on Wikipedia (accessed Oct. 2022) (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_mass).

XXV. See the “List Of Most Massive Black Holes” entry on Wikipedia (accessed 2022) (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_most_massive_black_holes).

XXVI. See “Supermassive Black Hole” (Swineburne University) (2022) (https://astronomy.swin.edu.au/cosmos/s/supermassive+black+hole#:~:text=As%20of%202022%2C%20there%20are,own%20galaxy%2C%20the%20Milky%20Way.).

XXVII. Note that the caret (^) here is meant to denote exponentially raising a value to that power (normally superscript) such that 1E5 = 10⁵ = 10^5 all mean the same thing.

XXVIII. For more on statistical analysis, see the “Statistics, Probabilities, and Games” and “Mathematics” chapters.

XXIX. See “How Many Black Holes Are There?” by Roeland P. van der Marel (STScI) (https://www.stsci.edu/~marel/black_holes/encyc_mod3_q7.html) and “Observable Universe” (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Observable_universe) which further cites "Anomalous Flux In The Cosmic Optical Background Detected With New Horizons Observations" by Tod R. Lauer et al. (The Astrophysical Journal Letters) (2022) (https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3847/2041-8213/ac573d); “NOIRLab Scientist Finds The Universe To Be Brighter Than Expected” by Tod R. Lauer (NSF / NOIRLab) (2021) (https://noirlab.edu/public/announcements/ann21001/); and “New Horizons Observations Of The Cosmic Optical Background” by Tod R. Lauer et al. (The Astrophysical Journal) (2021) (https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3847/1538-4357/abc881) (though I have not read any of these Lauer works).

XXX. See “Observable Universe” (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Observable_universe) which further cites "The Evolution of Galaxy Number Density At z < 8 And Its Implications" by Christopher J. Conselice et al. (The Astrophysical Journal) (2016) (https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3847/0004-637X/830/2/83) and "Two Trillion Galaxies, at the Very Least" by Henry Fountain (The New York Times) (2016) (https://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/18/science/two-trillion-galaxies-at-the-very-least.html) (though I have not read these works).

XXXI. See “A New Kind Of Black Hole” by Watanabe (https://www.nasa.gov/vision/universe/starsgalaxies/Black_Hole.html#:~:text=A%20typical%20stellar%2Dclass%20of,to%20billions%20of%20solar%20masses).

XXXII. In addition, an astrophysicist has claimed the ontology of Hawking radiation that Hawking provided—virtual particles being ripped apart at the event horizon—was a misinterpretation in the first place, though I am not presently sure how to evaluate these alternatives, see “Yes, Stephen Hawking Lied To Us All About How Black Holes Decay” by Ethan Siegel (Forbes) (2020) (https://www.forbes.com/sites/startswithabang/2020/07/09/yes-stephen-hawking-lied-to-us-all-about-how-black-holes-decay/?sh=7c489f604e63). Incidentally, the virtual-particle interpretation of Hawking Radiation was one of the few claims which had me take quantum physics a little more seriously in terms of ontology (even though it did not overall convince me of the reality of “quantum weirdness” as it's currently described). Hawking was the first person I had heard make an ontological quantum argument like this, in which the uncertainty principle is implicated in a mechanism that creates a real signature in the world in the form of Hawking radiation, which had then passed empirical tests. To be fair the empirical claims of standard microscopic quantum experiments are still quantum in nature, but far less traditionally mechanical (they even call some of these particles “virtual” particles, though Hawking radiation would seem to show them to be real).

XXXIII. See The Coddling Of The American by Lukianoff and Haidt (pp. 35, 109, 263, 271).

XXXIV. Psychologist Gerd Gigerenzer calls this the bias bias, a label I first heard from social psychologist Lee Jussim, see the “Bias Bias” entry in “The Orwelexicon: Neologisms for Bias and Dysfunctions in Psychology, Academia, and the Wider Society (DSM 666)” by Lee Jussim (PsychRabble) (2020) (https://psychrabble.medium.com/an-orwelexicon-for-bias-and-dysfunction-in-academia-neologisms-for-the-insufficiently-woke-a3e5bfc2953) and Lee Jussim's (@PsychRabble) June 27^th, 2021 tweet: https://twitter.com/PsychRabble/status/1409302747732754436).

XXXV. For more on the difference between institutionalized “Peer Review” and the more important (and always ongoing) “peer review”, see “Bret and Heather 6th Live Stream: Death and Peer Review - DarkHorse Podcast” by Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying (DarkHorse) (2020) (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zc6nOphi0yE) (33:41- 37:54) and “Bret Weinstein on "The Portal" (w/ host Eric Weinstein), Ep. #019 - The Prediction and the DISC.” by Eric Weinstein and Bret Weinstein (The Portal) (2020) (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JLb5hZLw44s&t=1319s) (1:32:28 – 1:34:21) (though I had already listened to this podcast, I was helped in finding this reference by skimming “Discovering A Drug Testing Flaw, The Issues With Peer Review, Academic Pettiness, And More – Bret Weinstein On The Portal, Hosted By Eric Weinstein” by Alex Wiec, Podcast Notes, 2020, https://podcastnotes.org/portal-with-eric-weinstein/bret-eric-weinstein-portal-lab-mice-telomeres/). I was under the impression that B. Weinstein and Heying coined the “capital P-R Peer Review / lower-case-P-R peer review” distinction in a large discussion of the concept on their podcast, but I cannot seem to find this, so perhaps it is mine. For more on this topic, see the “peer review” chapter.

XXXVI. And anyway, Kahan et al. have shown that what they call “scientific curiosity” (and which I call being passionately dispassionate, that is, being emotionally attached to truth-seeking) is the actual tie-breaker in an individual's ability to reason objectively, see “Why Smart People Are Vulnerable To Putting Tribe Before Truth: Science Literacy Is Important, But Without The Parallel Trait Of 'Science Curiosity,' It Can Lead Us Astray” by Kahan (https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/why-smart-people-are-vulnerable-to-putting-tribe-before-truth/).