Quantifying controller preference reliability under uncertainty in a rotary inverted pendulum benchmark - Nature

MainReliable and trustworthy science communication requires measured claims that accurately reflect empirical evidence1,2. In academic publications, this ideal translates into reporting research questions, methods, results and implications in a way that avoids distortion and misleading readers3,4. Yet scientific articles are not purely objective accounts of facts. Researchers retain considerable discretion in how they operationalize constructs and rhetorically frame their findings5,6,7, providing flexibility that also opens the door to misinterpretation. An important case of what we call ‘Narrative License’ occurs when scholars claim or imply that correlational findings are causal without conducting the appropriate tests8. In such cases, readers seeking evidence-based solutions9 may find themselves persuaded of causal claims that are not based on causal evidence. Conflating correlation with causation can yield serious real-world consequences when such claims inform policy, medicine, or communication. For example, in political science, influential work argued that civil wars were driven not by poverty or ethnic grievances but by structural opportunities for insurgency10,11.

Note from William Dembski: Darwinism: Scientific Inference or Philosophical Preference?, co-edited by Steve Meyer, Jon Buell, and myself, has just been released through Inkwell Press using its amazing book production technology (https://inkwell.net — I encourage authors to try it!). This book is available at Amazon: hardback, paperback, and ebook. With a new preface (see below) by Meyer and myself, it reprints the proceedings of the classic symposium on ID versus Darwinism from the early 1990s. (Tidbit: To earn some extra cash, I typeset the original 1994 printing of Darwinism: Science or Philosophy? as a first-year student at Princeton Theological Seminary.) At Southern Methodist University in March 1992, scientists and philosophers gathered to examine the conceptual basis of Darwinian evolution. Titled Darwinism: Scientific Inference or Philosophical Preference? this symposium became a landmark exchange between Phillip E. Johnson and Michael Ruse, as well as between respective supporters of intelligent design and Darwinian naturalism.

If I had to describe myself as one type of hunter or fisherman it would start with bird hunter, and more specifically dove hunter. It is what I grew up doing. My dad was not a great fisherman, and we did not have a boat or any ponds to fish. When I was young, we did not have friends with places to deer hunt, and to that point did not even have a rifle of any caliber in the house.