Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Isaac Asimov: The Relativity of Wrong (1989)

chem.tufts.edu

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

121–130 of 141 posts

Re: Isaac Asimov: The Relativity of Wrong (1989)

#121

Post by JackFr »

eli_gottlieb wrote: post #119
JackFr wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not silly -- it's the whole point. Suicide bombers see a different purpose to their lives than (presumably) you and I do. By their own measure they are not doing badly, they are doing quite well. Or consider Richard Dawkin's famous criticisms of Mother Theresa. Mother Theresa unashamedly put religion ahead material comfort among the poor she ministered too. To say she was wrong in so doing is not a statement of…

>Suicide bombers see a different purpose to their lives than (presumably) you and I do. By their own measure they are not doing badly, they are doing quite well. And objectively, suicide bombers are dead, which puts them far behind those of us who remain alive -- at least, by any sensible measure. Of course, when you unravel the story behind the average suicide bomber, you usually find that they were shamed or pressu…

> at least, by any sensible measure

That's pure question begging.

Re: Isaac Asimov: The Relativity of Wrong (1989)

#122

Post by JackFr »

nitrogen wrote: post #60
JackFr wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The issue is that many people trying to convince me about science are woefully unaware of their own assumptions and are typically ignorant of some basic philosophy. In particular, I accept that the scientific method is a reliable path to knowledge, that is, it reliably leads to a true understanding of true things. However it does not follow that the scientific method is the only way to knowledge. It also does not fol…

However it does not follow that the scientific method is the only way to knowledge. It also does not follow that all true knowledge, or even a fraction of it can be acquired through the scientific method. We would have to agree on the definition of "true knowledge" to come to a complete understanding of each other's positions, but I'll take a stab at justifying my opinion that science is the only possible source for…

Ultimately, your 'justification' is just an assertion that if it doesn't come via the scientific method, either its not true or its not science.

I wouldn't call the idea that "Knowledge is good", wisdom is better than ignorance, and freedom is better than slavery, etc. counterevidence. But I believe they are true things which I cannot prove via any sort of experiment, in particular because 'good' and 'better' are of necessity subjective.

Re: Isaac Asimov: The Relativity of Wrong (1989)

#123

Post by JackFr »

gizi wrote: post #41
JoeAltmaier wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I hear this a lot: morality is above science. I don't believe it for a moment. Just look at those that believe in ignorance over wisdom, or death over life - they do very, very badly. Empirically these moral codes are useful and effective. That's science right there.

Science is a method, producing statements about facts. A type of behaviour is not a fact (e.g. "killing someone"). It is statement. Therefore morality produces statements about statements. How could a method dealing with statements about facts ever be in competition with a method dealing with statements about statements? That is impossible. In other words, by comparing morality and science, you are comparing apples a…

Put simply science is necessarily about 'is', and cannot be about 'should'.

(When confronted with that, a typical rejoinder is that there is no 'should' -- life, consciousness, agency, will is all an illusion, all is meaningless and it reduces to physics in the end. The problem with that view though is that you have to throw out truth and knowledge too then)

Re: Isaac Asimov: The Relativity of Wrong (1989)

#124

Post by nitrogen »

JackFr wrote: post #122
nitrogen wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

However it does not follow that the scientific method is the only way to knowledge. It also does not follow that all true knowledge, or even a fraction of it can be acquired through the scientific method. We would have to agree on the definition of "true knowledge" to come to a complete understanding of each other's positions, but I'll take a stab at justifying my opinion that science is the only possible source for…

Ultimately, your 'justification' is just an assertion that if it doesn't come via the scientific method, either its not true or its not science. I wouldn't call the idea that "Knowledge is good", wisdom is better than ignorance, and freedom is better than slavery, etc. counterevidence. But I believe they are true things which I cannot prove via any sort of experiment, in particular because 'good' and 'better' are of…

I don't think you can dismiss my line of reasoning by saying "ultimately" and then saying something I didn't say at all.

It seems that we indeed cannot agree on a useful shared definition of "true". The laws of physics are ultimately indifferent to our notions of truth, and yet our notions of truth are instantiated as emergent phenomena within physics.

Re: Isaac Asimov: The Relativity of Wrong (1989)

#125

Post by rdc12 »

foldr wrote: post #95
coldtea wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> That seems false as applied to most of my examples. If the Big Bang theory turns out to be true, then that doesn't mean that steady state theories were "incomplete", it just means that they were wrong. They still seem incomplete (and not "wrong" to me). They served their purpose and were good approximations for calculations we did and observations we had all those years. > Similarly, if it turns out that eating lot…

>They served their purpose and were good approximations for calculations we did and observations we had all those years. In other words they were empirically more-or-less correct. That's what I was talking about in my first paragraph. >Only if "previous dietary advice" was only all about fat, and only if it consisted of just saying "fat makes you fat". I don't see the point of picking over the details of the example.…

This is the same as the example Asimov gave thou, plate tectonics being that the surface of the earth moves at imperceptible rate. That only over great time does this have any impact on the positioning of land masses.

Instead of it being moving at a rate of zero (or static), it is moving at some tiny amount above zero.

Re: Isaac Asimov: The Relativity of Wrong (1989)

#126

Post by justifier »

justifier wrote: post #70

this is one of my greatest gripes with academics pedantry directed ridicule this same essay could have been written exactly as is but with the tone of 'you are so right, here are some examples' but instead he chose to try to make a fan feel like an asshole.. this is my biggest problem with degrasse tyson.. he goes out of his way to make himself a public figure in science but uses the information he has accumulated to…

'academics' is an abysmal choice of words, alas.. hn locks the state of statements

the base generalisation was a direct analogue to isacc's referenced educational hierarchy:

    I knew very few English Lit majors who are equipped to teach me science
i have known great members of academia, i suppose i would replace the word with 'exclusionary pedants'

Re: Isaac Asimov: The Relativity of Wrong (1989)

#128

Post by foldr »

pdonis wrote: post #118
foldr wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Where is the radical change? You mentioned one of the radical changes: the change from a continuous model to an atomic one. I mentioned another radical change in my post (Rutherford). As for the claim that matter is close to being continuous, I am not a physicist, but I was under the impression that this was false. I.e., speaking naively, there is far more "empty space" than there is "stuff". I realize that QM make…

> As for the claim that matter is close to being continuous, I am not a physicist, but I was under the impression that this was false. We only know this because we have precise enough measurements to detect atoms and their internal structure. Atoms are about a billion times smaller than ordinary macroscopic objects, so it's a very good approximation to treat a cup of water, for example, as a continuous fluid, rather…

>so it's a very good approximation to treat a cup of water, for example, as a continuous fluid, rather than a bunch of atoms.

It's a good approximation empirically. I've said a few times now that scientific progress is indeed quite conservative in empirical terms. However, we know now that water is very unlike a continuous fluid in terms of its actual constitution.

> So "atoms are mostly empty space" is wrong, by the definition you've been trying to use, just like "matter is continuous" is wrong.

Yes I know, that's why I mentioned that QM makes things more complicated. However, it's still roughly true that atoms are mostly empty space, in the sense that they are very far from being of uniform density.

>Google "eternal inflation".

If you're referring to theories which attempt to extend eternal inflation in to the past, then these are attempted variations on steady-state theories. See e.g. this paper: http://arxiv.org/abs/astro-ph/0111191 . It gives a useful overview of the history. (As to whether its specific result is correct, I make no judgment.)

>The problem you are having here is that you continue to think that we humans can get something absolutely right

I'm not sure where you're getting that from. I suppose that we can get some things absolutely right (e.g. some mathematical truths), but that's not central to anything I've said.

What puzzles me is why you're trawling through all these examples trying to show that scientists have never really been wrong about anything. Is it really your view that there has never been a period in scientific history when the scientific consensus on a given topic was simply mistaken?

Re: Isaac Asimov: The Relativity of Wrong (1989)

#129

Post by pdonis »

foldr wrote: post #128
pdonis wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> As for the claim that matter is close to being continuous, I am not a physicist, but I was under the impression that this was false. We only know this because we have precise enough measurements to detect atoms and their internal structure. Atoms are about a billion times smaller than ordinary macroscopic objects, so it's a very good approximation to treat a cup of water, for example, as a continuous fluid, rather…

>so it's a very good approximation to treat a cup of water, for example, as a continuous fluid, rather than a bunch of atoms. It's a good approximation empirically . I've said a few times now that scientific progress is indeed quite conservative in empirical terms. However, we know now that water is very unlike a continuous fluid in terms of its actual constitution. > So "atoms are mostly empty space" is wrong, by th…

> It's a good approximation empirically.

But that's the whole point: if a theory is a good approximation empirically, then how can you say it's "flat out wrong"? Doesn't that obfuscate the very important distinction between ideas that are good approximations, but not quite right, vs. ideas that aren't even good approximations? (See below for more on this.)

> Is it really your view that there has never been a period in scientific history when the scientific consensus on a given topic was simply mistaken?

In the sense in which you are using the term "simply mistaken", I think there have been such views, but I think they're a lot rarer than you appear to think. (At least if we restrict ourselves to views that can be taken as "scientific" in some sense.)

An example of a view which I think was indeed simply mistaken is the phlogiston theory of combustion. It was simply mistaken because it made no predictions whatsoever; it was not empirical. And when a better theory of combustion was found, there was no sense in which the phlogiston theory could be viewed as an approximation to it.

Re: Isaac Asimov: The Relativity of Wrong (1989)

#130

Post by coldtea »

hyperpape wrote: post #115
coldtea wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The scientific consensus used to be that the Earth's crust was not formed of separate moving plates. The current scientific consensus is exactly the opposite. If you have a concept of wrong according to which it's possible for neither of P and ¬P to be wrong, then I'm not sure where we can go from there. That's the whole point of Asimov's article - the relativity of wrong. The example he gives for this is not at al…

I think you're going too far here, both in saying something that sounds incorrect, and in reading things into the essay that I don't see there. There's no need to say that P and ¬P are ever both (somewhat) true, only that evaluating a scientific theory isn't just a matter of finding some single consequence of it to say "this prediction is false: REJECT" (a sort of crude Popperian picture). Instead, the theory should…

>I think you're going too far here, both in saying something that sounds incorrect, and in reading things into the essay that I don't see there.

How so? Isn't the article's "earth is flat" / "earth is round" (the opposite), both being degrees of wrong (and thus true), a P and ¬P thing?

>Instead, the theory should be tested on its overall explanatory power, ability to predict, etc, etc.

Exactly. And, what the article says is that both P (flat) and ¬P (non-flat: round) had the best explanatory performance each at their time.

Post reply on HN