Against Method • Hacker News Board

Re: Against Method

#51

Post by blululu » Thu, Dec 22, 2022, 7:03 PM UTC

hammock wrote: post #39

stdbrouw wrote: post #13

To understand Feyerabend, you have to understand the project of 20th-century philosophy of science, which was to figure out the secret sauce, the one true scientific method, so that it could then be more rigorously applied and policed in various sciences and well-maybe-sort-of-sciences, and serve to separate science from pseudoscience such as psychoanalysis. In that context, Feyerabend was perceived as a total loon f…

It’s funny because those with a mindset - probably mostly unconscious and deeply engrained - that science (or scientism) is the one true method will feel “trolled” by these ideas and that feeling is apparent in the comments… When really the intention comes from a different place and requires a slightly more open mind to grok

It's important to understand this in the context of the cultural and political fights of the American academy as well. Feyerabend's position is very reasonable, but the straw-man treatment went both ways. It also played to the biases of people who felt that they were/are being marginalized by the evolution of the academy into a more scientific/technical institution. (For most of History, Stanford's number one major was History. This is one no longer the case and the degree has lost a lot of its former prestige). These factions routinely took his work to then argue that all science is irrational or baseless or incorrect as if it were a logical either or proposition. This is also absurd and not really what Feyerabend was going for, but the debate is maybe not really about method as much as it is about the political concerns of academics.

Re: Against Method

#52

Post by heisenzombie » Thu, Dec 22, 2022, 7:34 PM UTC

Related reading which I found very interesting is this in-progress essay/book:

https://metarationality.com/

It’s mostly a kind of applied epistemology. It also asks the question “how do we move past postmodernism?”. It accepts that tools like the scientific method have obvious limits and are not foolproof recipes for knowledge. This is what Feyerabend argues, and I pretty much agree with him.

However, it rejects the postmodern idea (post-Feyerabend) that this makes rationality useless or wrong. The idea that all truth is subjective or that truth is not a useful concept. Instead he argues for embedding the tools of rationality into a larger framework that he calls “meta-rationality”.

I think there is not really anything “new” in this analysis — he is in some ways just describing how applied rationality already works in practice. I have nonetheless personally found the ideas very clarifying.

Re: Against Method

#53

Post by OkayPhysicist » Thu, Dec 22, 2022, 7:35 PM UTC

analog31 wrote: post #47

culi wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right or the replication crisis. Which people often forget affected far more than just the field of Psychology. It's a problem throughout most of western science in general. And a big problem imo. Because studies are expensive and replicating those studies is nearly just as expensive. What happens when our idealized scientific process is literally just unachievable because we don't have the resources to carry it out

A puzzle seems to be why some scientific fields fare better than others, in the face of the replication crisis. Why do we take Maxwell's Equations seriously? It means that replication, while important, is not the be-all and end-all of science research. There must be something else.

Physics (especially classical physics) has the advantage of dealing with things that are both extremely repeatable and consistent, and are just about omnipresent. When a physics model is flawed, you start piling up edge cases that violate our current understanding of physics, until someone comes up with a model that explains most of them while not violating the relatively decent predictive power of the previous models (which obviously have predictive power, since they've been being used to predict things successfully for a while).

For example, Newton laid out classical mechanics. Which very adequately modeled most things moving around in scales we could observe. Except Mercury's orbit was a little fucky. Now, one new model could be that "Classical mechanics works everywhere but on Mercury, where they have different physics", but eventually relativity was postulated, and calculated to predict Mercury's orbit to within our ability to observe it. Rinse, repeat, for things like QM, orbital mechanics, etc, etc.

Heck, there's a pile of inconsistencies in our current models. Neutrinos have mass, the universe's expansion is accelerating, and where's all the antimatter?

Re: Against Method

#54

Post by heisenzombie » Thu, Dec 22, 2022, 7:41 PM UTC

analog31 wrote: post #45

stdbrouw wrote: post #13

To understand Feyerabend, you have to understand the project of 20th-century philosophy of science, which was to figure out the secret sauce, the one true scientific method, so that it could then be more rigorously applied and policed in various sciences and well-maybe-sort-of-sciences, and serve to separate science from pseudoscience such as psychoanalysis. In that context, Feyerabend was perceived as a total loon f…

I'm a physicist, and read AM. It didn't overturn my own thinking about how to do science, but helped me understand my discomfort when non-scientists try to assert "the scientific method." Imposing a rigid methodology on science, that doesn't reflect the reality of how science is done, can be used as a weapon against science. Over the years I grew uncomfortable with the fact that I could not track down any of his refe…

Hard agree. People are surprised when I, as a physicist, am so riled up by things like “trust science!” T-shirts and the general science-washing (a-la green-washing) of products, politics, etc.

I think this is part and parcel of the same “cargo-cult” appropriation of “science” that results in what you’re saying, and represents a real threat to science.

Re: Against Method

#55

Post by lootsauce » Thu, Dec 22, 2022, 7:59 PM UTC

dantheman wrote: post #36

stdbrouw wrote: post #13

To understand Feyerabend, you have to understand the project of 20th-century philosophy of science, which was to figure out the secret sauce, the one true scientific method, so that it could then be more rigorously applied and policed in various sciences and well-maybe-sort-of-sciences, and serve to separate science from pseudoscience such as psychoanalysis. In that context, Feyerabend was perceived as a total loon f…

Completely agree, but a second point is incommensurability of ways of knowing. There's 'science', 'morality', etc. Not all decision are scientific, even if they require scientific knowledge as a factor. Here he aligns with Focualt when discussing power and the urge to use science, or Hayekian scientism, to say there is one true way and the decision should be X.

It's waaay worse than that. My understanding of the point of incommensurability is not the obvious morality is different from science but it goes back to Kuhn in the Structure of Scientific Revolutions where he argues scientists speaking literally the same words with different paradigms of understanding that science will suffer from the inability to communicate effectively because the differing paradigms lead to different meanings and ways of interpretation.

Re: Against Method

#56

Post by lootsauce » Thu, Dec 22, 2022, 8:08 PM UTC

culi wrote: post #49

I think ultimately the biggest problem science has is the type of thinking that fuel's things like "Occam's razor". It's the same reason why things like Euclid's 5th Postulate (the Parallel postulate) puzzled so many mathematicians for so many years. It wasn't till the 19th century that non-Euclidean geometries were finally considered, but it seems pretty obvious in hindsight given how rare flat 2d planes actually ar…

YES! "Science is ultimately cultural and there's no way around that." I think that many people recoil at this idea and just don't want to believe this, but it is the truth. To those individuals I would say do not confuse the map with the territory or perhaps they map making and surveying they also are not the territory.

Re: Against Method

#57

Post by gumby » Thu, Dec 22, 2022, 8:34 PM UTC

redavni wrote: post #42

gumby wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Even in cases where people obviously should use controls, such as clinical trials, they frequently don’t. This is not true in my experience (I have designed and run pharmaceutical clinical trials in humans). Can you give some examples? Some treatment trials do compare the existing standard of care vs the new one rather than placebo against proposed treatment, but those are certainly controlled studies too. I do kno…

It is endemic in statistical studies based on medical data. They reach a conclusion that is statistically supported but never do the work to verify it.

A statistical study is not a clinical trial, which was the term used by the GP poster.

Re: Against Method

#58

Post by jfengel » Thu, Dec 22, 2022, 9:09 PM UTC

stdbrouw wrote: post #13

To understand Feyerabend, you have to understand the project of 20th-century philosophy of science, which was to figure out the secret sauce, the one true scientific method, so that it could then be more rigorously applied and policed in various sciences and well-maybe-sort-of-sciences, and serve to separate science from pseudoscience such as psychoanalysis. In that context, Feyerabend was perceived as a total loon f…

The fuss is that by refusing to solve the Demarcation Problem, a lot of non-science has to be treated as science. Feyerabend points out that there's ultimately no difference between scientific "hypothesis revision" and pseudoscientific "moving the goalposts".

The astronomers hate being lumped in with the astrologers, and with good reason. Feyerabend points out that it's maddeningly hard to be rigorous about exactly what that reason is. When the astronomers claim "the scientific method", this book shows them that they're wrong, but without suggesting a really good alternative.

Giving $10 billion to the astrologers (the price of the JWST) is not an option. It would be nice to have a method to say why. Ultimately, that's the real controversy: not epistemology, but money.

Re: Against Method

#59

Post by [deleted] » Thu, Dec 22, 2022, 9:13 PM UTC

thebooktocome wrote: post #16

stdbrouw wrote: post #13

To understand Feyerabend, you have to understand the project of 20th-century philosophy of science, which was to figure out the secret sauce, the one true scientific method, so that it could then be more rigorously applied and policed in various sciences and well-maybe-sort-of-sciences, and serve to separate science from pseudoscience such as psychoanalysis. In that context, Feyerabend was perceived as a total loon f…

> He often gets lumped together with continental thinkers and post-modernists like Foucault that he has nothing to do with. He has a lot to do with them. One of the themes in Derrida’s “The Truth in Painting” revolves around the maxim, “there is no passe-partout (a master key that opens all locks).” Foucault’s “Madness and Civilization” is partially about the lack of a single axis of “Reason”, which would presumably…

[deleted]

Re: Against Method

#60

Post by jfengel » Thu, Dec 22, 2022, 9:25 PM UTC

heisenzombie wrote: post #54

analog31 wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm a physicist, and read AM. It didn't overturn my own thinking about how to do science, but helped me understand my discomfort when non-scientists try to assert "the scientific method." Imposing a rigid methodology on science, that doesn't reflect the reality of how science is done, can be used as a weapon against science. Over the years I grew uncomfortable with the fact that I could not track down any of his refe…

Hard agree. People are surprised when I, as a physicist, am so riled up by things like “trust science!” T-shirts and the general science-washing (a-la green-washing) of products, politics, etc. I think this is part and parcel of the same “cargo-cult” appropriation of “science” that results in what you’re saying, and represents a real threat to science.

I would say that "trust science!" tee-shirts aren't really about Feyerabend's epistemological anarchy. You could frame it that way, but that would be philosophy-washing (to coin a term).

Against Method points out that there's no rigorous method for pursuing the difference between truth and non-truth, but at least accepts that there is something like "truth" out there and that it's better than falsehoods.

When people put on "trust science!" shirts, they're not arguing about whether we should continue working on homeopathy. They're saying that people are promoting deliberate falsehoods, things that they know or should know are wrong, because they are indifferent to the difference between truth and lies.

Homeopaths at least want to be right. There are surely some charlatans, but at least some of the kooky nutbags selling homeopathic remedies believe in it. Against Method makes it impossible to argue that they cannot possibly ever succeed, if they keep revising their hypothesis, even though we "know" that they won't.

The opponents of those who "trust science", by contrast, just don't care if they're right. They care only that they've won some kind of victory in a culture war. They don't apply epistemic anarchy to all sciences, only ones that they view as ideological opponents.

That isn't the only threat to science, to be sure. Science and scientists make genuine mistakes. But again, that's not really important to those who are rejecting science for cultural reasons, not philosophical ones. That challenge makes dealing with the others even harder.