The Truth about the Starting Strength Method

[George Christiansen]

No one is throwing out babies. No one's against science. But science isn't a magical process, it's only a tool. There's a whole lot of pretentious, self-congratulatory mythology surrounding it that is unearned and which isn't helpful in actually testing and being skeptical or advancing any sort of knowledge. Rather, it is exactly the sort of thing that encourages mindless acceptance and undermines the scientific process and progress. Often it's scientists using that sort of emotional appeal - no matter that it is unscientific - often it is from enthusiastic write ups from those on the fringes or outside the process.

I would like to note that this is the moment when I fell for Stef. I understand it'll never go anywhere, but that doesn't make it any less real.

[Marenghi]

Instead we have mountains of publications containing studies of varying quality, with the unprocessed data nearly always unavailable, and the methods incomplete enough that replication - testing - is very difficult to undertake.

You probably already know John Ioannidis´ work in that field. If not, check it out, may interest you.

[mdillon]

Science is fitting what you think the world is with experimental results. The thinking part often takes the form of mathematics, but not always. The experimental parts has been described by Fisher (The design of experiments).

Anyone can be a "scientist": you just have to apply the scientific process: fitting what you think the world is with experimental results.

I agree with you but I think a more simple way to say is it that science is interpreting observations. That doesn't always have to involve experiments; however, experiments can provide a set of observations that are easier to interpret.

[Matthew_888]

I agree with you but I think a more simple way to say is it that science is interpreting observations. That doesn't always have to involve experiments; however, experiments can provide a set of observations that are easier to interpret.

The critical property of an experiment is that it is reproducible, else it is not an experiment.
Observations are results of some processes that are not always reproducible.
Reproducibility lays the ground of trust: not only in the people but also in nature.
It kills magical thinking in general and scientism in particular since it makes observations independent of the scientist who made them.
Observations only are not enough since it leaves out the process (how some inputs are transformed into outputs) as a black box.
Great current example, deep learning: sometimes, self driving cars crash and no one knows why and how to correct the problem because deep learning creates only black boxes (as of today).
I am quite sure that no airplane company would accept such none sense: a crash has to lead to a correction examining a causal path to be avoided next time.

So: "observation" is too wide a concept.

"interpreting" is legit as understood in its logical definition: assigning meaning to concepts... but I think that this definition is not accepted wildly and restricted to the "academically educated". I think it can be
replaced by: "fitting what you think the world is". "thinking what the world is" seems to me sufficiently self evident. "Fitting" introduces the idea that a distance exist in between what is thought and what is out there (the map is not the territory), the contact points being the experimental results. This critical idea implies that science is, by definition, always wrong and has predictive power. It also introduces ideas of humility (a less wrong map probably exists) and agnosticism (the map is not the territory: do not believe in the map else it's narcissism, hubris and ultimately non sense).

I really dislike the "is" (is/is not dichotomy is too limiting...) but a trade-off I am ready to make depending on who are the interlocutors.

So here you go: "Science is fitting what you think the world is with experimental results." and from there it can be refined until the idea is understood to the point that interpreting observations can be considered.
Glad to hear your critics!

PS: lots of PhD students do not even have a clue of what science is... I've even heard: "religion of progress". Major physics institution... I think SS can spread this very important idea very effectively... it's not so hard considering the state of "education"...

[Sean Herbison]

(guys that actually do things not equations jockey playing with "string theory" and others untestable stupidities)

Untestable? Untestable right now, maybe. Lots of things are untestable at first. Then, eventually, we find a way to test them. Then, eventually, they're useful (maybe).

In 25 years of medical study and practice, I have never encountered an intervention that, when successfully administered, achieved the desired result every single time....until now.

Would having someone ride a bike for progressively longer times (or progressively faster) not improve their cardiorespiratory ability every time? This assumes that they're the appropriate population (not already beyond that training level or too obese to move, for example), but that applies to strength training too. Not to knock the Starting Strength method, as I (obviously) think it works and works well, but in the broader context of interventions as a whole, I feel like there are other things that could work every single time. Am I missing a reason they wouldn't?

Every time I read one of Rip"s articles on this topic I'm reminded of the Greek myth of the oracle who was cursed to speak the truth and have no one believe.

Little bit weird.

No it's not, John. Rip is Cassandra, and you can't tell me otherwise.

E.g. a "moment arm" like "red" are things that are not measurable (they have no dimensions: kg, joul, watt, coulomb, seconds, etc.

Am I misunderstanding this? I feel like a moment arm is indeed measurable and does have the dimension of length, measurable in meters.

Here is an experiment that almost everyone can do: what weights more on a scale, 1kg of feathers or 1kg of lead?

If you answered: "The scale would say it's the same, dumbass."

Well, you would be wrong and the reasons why would be interesting to understand as they are in part of the same nature as "testable, reliable science = engineering".

Would you though? How pedantic are we being? Because this seems like a pedantic difference, but we can be a lot more pedantic. For instance, you didn't specify that we're weighing them in an atmosphere. If we're in a vacuum, there's no air buoyancy, and they would indeed weigh the same.

Hard to think about the color "blue" if you do not have a word for it...

Not really, especially if you've seen it before. I'm looking at a color right now that I don't have a word for, and I can certainly think about it later easily enough. I could roughly describe it using other colors (greyish, greenish, blueish color), but I don't have an actual word for it. What is hard is conveying the sense of that color to someone else.

Given the context, I am saying that defining science as 'the belief in the ignorance of experts' is inferior to defining science as 'the process of going up from experiments to models and down from models to experiments'
(and yes, you use 'X is blablabla' to introduce a definition... else you say it's incomplete. An implicit definition does not make sense.)

Yes, "X is blablabla" can be used to introduce a definition, but it doesn't have to be. "Sean Herbison is tall." That's true, but not a definition of me. "Science is a process by which we understand the world." That's also true, but again, not a definition, just a statement.

Major parts of Newtonian physics has been supplanted by quantum physics and the string theory guys are possibly going to supplant that. The original theory that evolution works from simple to complex has been supplanted.

"The first theory was wrong , but new one....this one....is the ticket!

But it is interesting to note that in the examples you provide, the original theories are not actually "wrong"....they're incomplete.

Well, technically Newtonian physics is wrong. It gives answers that are very close to correct (or at least what our current, possible right or possible just more accurate, model says is correct), at least for experiences that would occur on a scale we're able to more or less easily deal with. But very close is not correct, and if you are not correct, you are technically wrong. It doesn't mean it's not useful, and it doesn't mean the things it describes don't exist, but it isn't actually correct.

For an oversimplified example, if I use Newtonian physics equations and come up with an answer that a car is moving at 60.000000 miles per hour, but using quantum physics equations gives me an answer of 60.000003 miles per hour, the Newtonian model (and likely the quantum model, once we get something more accurate) is shown to be wrong. 99.999etc% of the time it won't matter, but it's still wrong.

Pedantic? Yes, but I didn't start it.

I am simply saying that the scientific method is not necessarily perfect, if for no other reason than the limitations of those practicing it, but that doesn't take away from it being the best option we have for many things right now.

This is like saying Algebra is not perfect. You would be confusing algebra with mathematicians.

Is it? I feel like with algebra, you can reasonably expect to eliminate human errors (maybe not on any given human working an equation, but as a whole), as it is made up of equivalencies, and you're either right or wrong. I don't think you can expect that from the scientific method. Assuming a good enough piece of software, you can have a computer run through a huge amount of algebra and say "right" or "wrong" to everything you've written, while it's not really right or wrong to, for instance propose a certain hypothesis. The hypothesis itself can certainly be right or wrong, but not the process of proposing it. This isn't to say there aren't stupid hypotheses to propose, but not wrong.

[George Christiansen]

That doesn't always have to involve experiments; however, experiments can provide a set of observations that are easier to interpret.

I don't really see how something without predictive power can call itself science and I don't see how you really prove a theory's predictive power without some form of experiments.

I guess in some cases you can just wait to see if your predictions show up in real time, but that would not provide as many "experiments" to show the theory true.

[Jonathon Sullivan]

I don't really see how something without predictive power can call itself science and I don't see how you really prove a theory's predictive power without some form of experiments.

Predictive power, yes, I agree. This brings us to the occasionally fuzzy distinction between observation and experiment. The theory of relativity makes certain predictions that can't be verified by setting up an actual "experiment" in the usual sense of the word, but such predictions have been verified by cosmological observations. You can argue that setting up the observation (with Hubble or LIGO or whatever) constitutes the "experiment," but I think you know what I'm getting at here. We can't actually set up a cosmic-scale gravitational lens or neutron star merger. But we can predict them and observe, and I do think that's science.

And then there's another issue: a line of scientific inquiry might make predictions that are testable in principle, but not in practice. Quantum gravity predicts a gravity boson (the graviton) and string theory predicts infinitesmal vibrating fundamental entities, but neither strings nor gravitons are, as far as I am aware, observable with any technology we could even hope to possess for millenia, if ever. So...are these lines of inquiry "science?" I'm inclined to say they are, but I understand that things are fuzzy at this level, and I understand the objections of those who say, for example, that string theory is more philosophy than science, at least for now.

And so now we're really off-topic.

[George Christiansen]

Predictive power, yes, I agree. This brings us to the occasionally fuzzy distinction between observation and experiment. The theory of relativity makes certain predictions that can't be verified by setting up an actual "experiment" in the usual sense of the word, but such predictions have been verified by cosmological observations. You can argue that setting up the observation (with Hubble or LIGO or whatever) constitutes the "experiment," but I think you know what I'm getting at here. We can't actually set up a cosmic-scale gravitational lens or neutron star merger. But we can predict them and observe, and I do think that's science.

And then there's another issue: a line of scientific inquiry might make predictions that are testable in principle, but not in practice. Quantum gravity predicts a gravity boson (the graviton) and string theory predicts infinitesmal vibrating fundamental entities, but neither strings nor gravitons are, as far as I am aware, observable with any technology we could even hope to possess for millenia, if ever. So...are these lines of inquiry "science?" I'm inclined to say they are, but I understand that things are fuzzy at this level, and I understand the objections of those who say, for example, that string theory is more philosophy than science, at least for now.

And so now we're really off-topic.

Agreed. I probably should have written something more like "correct" where I put "science", except that still doesn't allow for the times utterly shoddy methods fail to prevent a "correct" theory even if it isn't proven "correct" by the methods used.

This is the semantical problem of using science to mean the collection of theories, which range from horseshit to undeniable by sane people and using it to mean the method of pursuing knowledge within particular spheres.

[Chris Lippke]

But we can predict them and observe, and I do think that's science.

And really, we're forced to deal with the phenomenon's effects - even in the absence of "experiments" - and must consider/compensate for those effects in useful (profitable) things like GPS, and I think that's engineering!

And so now we're really off-topic.

I got you, Sully!
martian.jpg

[Barry Charles]

Predictive power, yes, I agree. This brings us to the occasionally fuzzy distinction between observation and experiment. The theory of relativity makes certain predictions that can't be verified by setting up an actual "experiment" in the usual sense of the word, but such predictions have been verified by cosmological observations. You can argue that setting up the observation (with Hubble or LIGO or whatever) constitutes the "experiment," but I think you know what I'm getting at here. We can't actually set up a cosmic-scale gravitational lens or neutron star merger. But we can predict them and observe, and I do think that's science.

And then there's another issue: a line of scientific inquiry might make predictions that are testable in principle, but not in practice. Quantum gravity predicts a gravity boson (the graviton) and string theory predicts infinitesmal vibrating fundamental entities, but neither strings nor gravitons are, as far as I am aware, observable with any technology we could even hope to possess for millenia, if ever. So...are these lines of inquiry "science?" I'm inclined to say they are, but I understand that things are fuzzy at this level, and I understand the objections of those who say, for example, that string theory is more philosophy than science, at least for now.

And so now we're really off-topic.

And not to be a nit-picky dick wad, but special and general relativity HAVE been experimentally tested. The GPS system (GPS and Relativity) is a good example of how theory, experiments and observations come together. I only know this because I used to work with the physicist that did the original corrections for GPS.

But otherwise, points well made. Also, I can read and understand your posts. Not so much for some of the others which I can not comprehend - so much for my 30+ year career as a paid scientist.