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Illusions of understanding in the sciences

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Re: Illusions of understanding in the sciences

#41

Post by jknoepfler »

verisimi wrote: post #35
zyxzevn wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is when certain (mental) models are important to a community or science specialization. When these models fail, the community will often enforce the model and censor the opposing facts. I have encountered several such conflicts. Scientists are still humans. Individual people may be curious and be open to some questioning. But thy find it difficult to discuss such things in the open. It is like a religious…

> It is like a religious dogma. It is religious dogma.

In what way, exactly? It's one thing to assert an analogy between two things, and quite another to assert an identity.

The specific example given was divergent models of colliding magnetic field lines.

How are the models religious?

How are the models dogmatic?

The example under discussion suggests neither in the literal sense.

Re: Illusions of understanding in the sciences

#42

Post by verisimi »

jknoepfler wrote: post #41
verisimi wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It is like a religious dogma. It is religious dogma.

In what way, exactly? It's one thing to assert an analogy between two things, and quite another to assert an identity. The specific example given was divergent models of colliding magnetic field lines. How are the models religious? How are the models dogmatic? The example under discussion suggests neither in the literal sense.

The previous poster said:

> When these models fail, the community will often enforce the model and censor the opposing facts. I have encountered several such conflicts.

Censoring opposing fact to enforce the wrong model is religious dogma. Or maybe just dogma. Religious or scientific.

At any rate, it's the antithesis of what the scientific method is. The reality is that scientists in general pay lip service to the scientific method, without forgetting where their paychecks come from (government, military or corporations).

Re: Illusions of understanding in the sciences

#43

Post by rjsw »

atoav wrote: post #18
jdw64 wrote: post #4

Looking at the paper, the core message is 'that even scientists harbor the illusion of understanding more than they actually do'. In reality, science operates much like a mental model. The paper argues that just because a model predicts future values more accurately, it doesn't mean the model explains the actual causal structure. Yet, the fact that outcomes fall within the predicted range reinforces the illusion that…

Yes, but isn't since exactly about those models? If you want to calculate how much that steel truss is going to bend when loaded, you need basic mechanics. Sure you could go deeper and think about what actually happens to the metallic structure on an atomic level, you could think about the whole thing in relativistic terms, etc. But this is not going to give you a better bridge. More accurate theories are important o…

In reality, CAD systems don't provide data structures that let you describe the behaviour of materials, I feel this sends a hint to designers that they don't need to consider those aspects. I did build this into STEP from the start but CAD vendors and users didn't want to implement it, am currently trying to fix this.

When we use computers for everything, the functionality provided by particular software packages can end up constraining how we think about a problem space.

Re: Illusions of understanding in the sciences

#44

Post by [deleted] »

jdw64 wrote: post #4

Looking at the paper, the core message is 'that even scientists harbor the illusion of understanding more than they actually do'. In reality, science operates much like a mental model. The paper argues that just because a model predicts future values more accurately, it doesn't mean the model explains the actual causal structure. Yet, the fact that outcomes fall within the predicted range reinforces the illusion that…

[deleted]

Re: Illusions of understanding in the sciences

#45

Post by raincom »

lelanthran wrote: post #39
jdw64 wrote: post #4

Looking at the paper, the core message is 'that even scientists harbor the illusion of understanding more than they actually do'. In reality, science operates much like a mental model. The paper argues that just because a model predicts future values more accurately, it doesn't mean the model explains the actual causal structure. Yet, the fact that outcomes fall within the predicted range reinforces the illusion that…

> The paper argues that just because a model predicts future values more accurately, it doesn't mean the model explains the actual causal structure. Yes. Celestial navigation was based on a universe which spun around the earth, which is wrong, but it worked for navigation.

That's instrumentalism in philosophy of sciences. As long as a theory is useful and results in good predictions, without worrying about whether a theory is true or not.

Re: Illusions of understanding in the sciences

#46

Post by chermi »

More predictive power is always a good goal, full stop. This is orthogonal to whether the model producing prediction helps with "understanding" directly. Predictability encodes understanding in a strict information theoretic sense, regardless of our ability as humans to access that understanding.

Re: Illusions of understanding in the sciences

#47

Post by antonvs »

jcranmer wrote: post #40
lelanthran wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The paper argues that just because a model predicts future values more accurately, it doesn't mean the model explains the actual causal structure. Yes. Celestial navigation was based on a universe which spun around the earth, which is wrong, but it worked for navigation.

Celestial navigation is still based on a geocentric coordinate system. Modern astronomical ephemerides use the Tychonic model--the sun is modeled as revolving around the Earth, the other planets as revolving around the sun. Mathematically, in a two-body system, there's no actual difference between saying body A orbits body B or saying body B orbits body A, so in some sense, it's not even wrong .

> Mathematically, in a two-body system, there's no actual difference between saying body A orbits body B or saying body B orbits body A, so in some sense, it's not even wrong.

This isn't what the geocentric model claimed, though. It went beyond just a choice of reference frame, which as you say, you can do in math, or physics.

For a start, the geocentric model claimed a physically preferred reference frame, which already directly contradicts the coordinate relativism you described. In that sense, it was wrong.

Beyond that, it proposed a mathematical model based on epicycles, a model which was eventually falsified due to many failures to match observation. In that sense, it was also wrong.

These points also contradict your other claim:

> Modern astronomical ephemerides use the Tychonic model--the sun is modeled as revolving around the Earth, the other planets as revolving around the sun.

This is misleading at best. The ephemerides you mention are based on modern Newtonian many-body physics, but they do a coordinate transform on the results to express them in a way that's convenient for Earth-bound observers.

This is not "using the Tychonic model" in any meaningful sense. It's using a correct coordinate transform that is equivalent to the overall coordinate system that Tycho tried to use, but failed to get right. It doesn't rely on any aspects of Tycho's model, because that model was largely invalid, and would not produce correct results.

Re: Illusions of understanding in the sciences

#48

Post by brnaftr361 »

SubiculumCode wrote: post #37
brnaftr361 wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Y'know it's funny how, at least in my experience, education worked. We're handed a bunch of simplified models then build on them. The consequence being that the landscape is very narrowly revealed. This itself is a consequence of the architecture, at least in the US we don't really specialize until college/university. Nobody really comprehends the depth of things until then, and troublingly enough we don't understand…

Yes. It would be nice if teachers/textbooks would admitt what they don't know. Textbooks that present facts about the world don't inspire curiosity.

Yeah, while going through college I had that exact thought, I wonder if in many fields we're at a tipping point where we should be conveying what we don't know more than what we do.

Re: Illusions of understanding in the sciences

#49

Post by ordu »

chermi wrote: post #46

More predictive power is always a good goal, full stop. This is orthogonal to whether the model producing prediction helps with "understanding" directly. Predictability encodes understanding in a strict information theoretic sense, regardless of our ability as humans to access that understanding.

> More predictive power is always a good goal

But in some cases it is not good enough. If you look for a better explanation and chose gradient descent as your strategy, then you'll come to a local maximum eventually, but not for another explanation.

Arguably, it is hard to look for better explanation if the current one doesn't have a backtrack of failed predictions. One of the possible ways out of this situation is to search for the predictions that fail.

But what I want to say is explanations are not just for prediction. They are needed to build a mental model that then can drive the research. And new model can be built (theoretically) from the first principles. I can't find clean examples for it though. If we look at Einstein for example, he started with a failure to predict. But what he came up at first was Special Relativity which failed utterly with the gravity. Einstein spent like 10 years rewriting gravity to make it work with SR? Failed predictions of his new shiny theory didn't stop him, and it is considered to be good.

> Predictability encodes understanding in a strict information theoretic sense, regardless of our ability as humans to access that understanding.

But it doesn't necessary implies the possibility to move forward. I'm not sure if an analogy with compressed data is a good one, but you don't work with compressed data, you unpack it, and maybe unpack some more and convert to a very inefficient format with regard to the disk space used.

Compressed theory is good to apply it as is, but to refine it you should probably prefer something else.

Re: Illusions of understanding in the sciences

#50

Post by zigzag312 »

chermi wrote: post #46

More predictive power is always a good goal, full stop. This is orthogonal to whether the model producing prediction helps with "understanding" directly. Predictability encodes understanding in a strict information theoretic sense, regardless of our ability as humans to access that understanding.

It's not arguing that predictive power is bad. Just that people often mistakenly believe some phenomenon is understood more deeply than it really is, because a model can fit data and generate accurate predictions.
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