The Risk of Discovery

As you say dismissing alchemy is probably a bad thing too.

Alchemy was the search for the ability to transform matter (particularly Pb->Au). I rather think that nuclear fusion/fission are still consider worthy fields and that creation/discovery of an alchemist's stone - a way to convert readily between different forms of matter - would still be considered a worthy development.

I agree too with your synopsis. Physics is like the part of reality we've tamed, everything that is yet to be discovered, that's of interest to physicists, likely lies outside our laws, corollaries, and axioms as they now stand.

To me such ideas as the naive assumption that we know the limits of knowledge go hand in hand with the faith of atheism. But I digress.

A couple of years ago, I went to a museum exhibition of DaVinci's notebooks.

I was completely unprepared for what was my primary reaction: that DaVinci just documented every idea in his head, and that some of them just happened to pan out. But for some reason, we credit him for the small percentage of ideas that just happened to work, and ignore all the wrong ideas. To me, he didn't seem like a genius, he seemed very much like a broken clock that just happened to be right twice a day.

There's a certain survivor bias in these sorts of discussions, where we identify great contributors as taking huge risks, and so forth and so on. This is true, but we also maybe tend to give them too much credit because we ignore all their failures. We tell ourselves that's why perseverence is so important, but then turn around and make fun of people or even become angry at them for wasting our time when so many things don't turn out. The difference between perseverence and shotgun approaches to pursuing knowledge seems arbitrary to me lots of times.

If you followed every one of DaVinci's ideas, for example, you'd be screwed, because he was so wrong about so many things. Today, he'd probably be seen as a crackpot because it would be so difficult to know when his idea was right and when it was wrong. The value of his ideas lies as much in his audience, the people who realized what of his ideas was correct, as much as, if not more, than in DaVinci himself.

I guess I've grown really disillusioned with advancements in science, because so much of it involves a sort of mythmaking that seems fairy-tale to me. To me, the reality seems more distributed, involving small contributions, gradually changing over time, with a lot of randomness involved.

I don't mean to come across as saying we shouldn't encourage experimentation and tinkering, or that it shouldn't be valued. In fact, I'd argue the opposite. But at the same time something seems off about our incentive structures--the way we give credit seems off.

Think of it this way: we do science because at some level, what's correct and what's not is an empirical idea. You could have 10 very reasonable explanations and 9 of them will be wrong "just because." In many cases, being intelligent has nothing to do with why the 9 are wrong, otherwise all we'd need would be philosophy and math. So why do we pretend that the 1 person who was correct was correct because they are a genius? It seems like you can't have geniuses and a need for science at the same time.

I love this insight. I have often experienced in my life seeing someone come up with something really useful in the midst of spouting complete rubbish. Oddly it is about 50/50 internal and external, where half the time they stop in the middle of what they are saying and realize they have a really good idea, and half the time someone else stops them and says "hey, that could really work." or something like that. The common theme can best be described as "fearless thinking" or perhaps unconstrained thinking.

I suspect that the personality trait most closely associated with creativity like this is a lack of fear of embarrassment. When someone tells me something I have suggested is wrong I respond by asking questions to understand how they understand the topic so that I can learn from them. When you tell someone who has vested their self image in being right that they are wrong they take it personally and respond dismissively. They fight to have their point of view validated rather than understand a counter point of view. But this makes them unwilling to share partially understood topics because it could expose them to being 'wrong' in public.

Other times people self censor their own thinking. I get so frustrated when someone says "Well I thought that might be a solution to the problem but assumed it would be too expensive." That is an example of someone who had a creative idea, self censored it, and it had to come out through someone else in order to reach the collective consciousness of the group. I try really hard to have people not self censor but it is so ingrained sometimes.

And all of that then feeds back into the genius/hero narrative where the narrative of a person includes only their noteworthy accomplishments and so the perception is that people like that only do noteworthy things, and then they are impossible to live up to.

Dare to ask stupid questions, it could make you the smartest person in the room.

Ptolemy is likewise revered by astronomers as one of their founding fathers but they conveniently ignore the fact that in astrological circles he occupies a similar position due to his seminal work, the Tetrabiblos. Scientists can become very selective when dealing with alternatives to their world view.

What is also discounted now even, when we are supposed to be smart and all learned, is that religion not only has played a fundamental role in why we, the west and roughly central-European based cultures are where they are that cannot or is foolish to discount. There is a particular reason why other non-central European cultures have brought us basically every single human achievement and every single good and positive thing around you that separates you from a brutish and savage life, which other societies simply have not been capable of developing on their own. Not recognizing that only leaves as single alternative view point that it is somehow inherent to genetics and "race" which is a far more dark perspective than acknowledging the role of society and culture and, yes, religion and the particular values it bears in the advancement of society.

When, e.g., your value system is founded on the notion that you reincarnate and have many/infinite attempts at doing good and that "good" is of a certain characteristic, then your life and choices and values and priorities are driven by that frame of mind and world view. If you are driven by the murderous and pedophilic values of islam that demands total domination through lying and killing and the murder of anyone that does not submit to islam then your values are going to form your perspective on the world that is a kind of parasitic and rapacious.

I find it rather odd that the tech industry of all sectors and disciplines would not seem to understand that the parameters and the system define and confine the behavior and outputs. You can put the most pure and perfect data into a shitty system that is broken in so many different ways and it won't output or produce anything of value or might even produce things that are dangerous.

We really are underestimating the value or not only risk and failure by dismissing it altogether and assuming and taking things for granted, but we are dismissing the humanistic and spiritualistic aspect that has played a role in human development and advancement for eons and is probably the core driver of what separated humans from animals in so many different ways.