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Isaac Asimov: The Relativity of Wrong (1989)

chem.tufts.edu

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

#81

Post by jleyank »

pdonis wrote: post #69
JoeAltmaier wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I leave other examples to the reader. Hint: point at anything near you. It was the result of science. As for honoring the religious who supported science. I say, to the degree they pursued religion, they shortchanged their scientific accomplishments. Consider what else Newton might have done, had he abandoned his alchemy and astrology.

> point at anything near you. It was the result of science. The result of some particular branches of science where we do, in fact, have reliable knowledge and the ability to make accurate predictions. But that is very, very different from "science" in general. There are many more fields that are called "sciences" but do not have anything like that kind of reliable knowledge or predictive power. So it's not enough to…

As others have said "If it's not testable it's not science".

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

#82

Post by voronoff »

RodericDay wrote: post #61
nitrogen wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not an argument from authority, just a statement of the implied Bayesian priors. One who gives greater weight to scientific papers than to religious pronouncements is entirely rational in doing so. That is the entire well-argued thesis of the Relativity of Wrong essay we are discussing.

Unthinking faith in "the institution of science", particularly the denial that it can be co-opted for certain policy goals, and influenced by funding, and lack the foresight to control for important environmental variables, has and will continue to lead into stuff like eugenics, craniology, and austerity. I'm still reeling from "Its rational and reasonable to be uncritical of scientific results"- smh.

He's right. It's an low cost way to be mostly right. There are much worse tradeoffs to be made.

Assuming that science news corresponds to scientific results will get one in trouble though.

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

#83

Post by andyidsinga »

jleyank wrote: post #25

Nature "is". Science is an attempt to explain why Nature is the way it is. Collect data, make a prediction, test it, revise the prediction, rinse, repeat. Granted, there are belief systems aplenty in scientific work (string theory?) but as Kuhn has written, sometimes Nature laughs and forces a change. And Asimov's "level of error" discussion is valid. Newtonian physics, while "wrong" is perfectly useful when aiming s…

I loved loved loved the part about the curvature per mile.

Last weekend I was cutting the top of a door on a diagonal that had to match the sloped roof-line of a new doorway I'm putting in on my second floor.

When I calculated the slope, I incorrectly rounded up to too few decimal points ..such that over the length of the door (~ 31 inches) the error caused the slope to be off about 1/2 inch -- which, had I cut the door, would have looked horrible.

This problem really perplexed me (because I'm an idiot!) ...until I saw the answer staring me right in the face on my calculator - the many values to the right of the decimal. Of course, leaving those there fixed the issue, and I got a nice accurate slope over the width of the door :)

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

#84

Post by marcosdumay »

tpeo wrote: post #51
gizi wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Science id defined by its method: to set up experiments in order to look for counterexamples for a theorem. It is pretty much impossible to set up experiments in economics. While I agree that sociology and anthropology do not satisfy the definition of science, economics does not either. Where are the experiments? Without experiments, no science.

Do astronomers perform experiments? This is the example used in methodological discussions of economics. I don't know if astronomers do actually perform experiments on some limited scale, but it seems that classicaly they relied on "luck" to test predictions e. g. testing general relativity through observations of eclipses. In social sciences, there is a somewhat similar thing called "natural experiment", which is th…

It helps that astronomy is a branch of physics. In a sense, astronomers do perform experiments, on different conditions but with the same theory. (By the way, that's what bothers me most about cosmology, it seems to not agree with any small scale experiment performed.)

Well, certainly, natural experiments can lead to knowledge. But that's a much slower and more dangerous path, artificial experiments are better in every sense, except that they are mostly not available for economics. Anyway, I don't think the use of natural experiments are the bottleneck currently holding economics back.

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

#85

Post by voronoff »

Alex3917 wrote: post #7
aout wrote: post #2

Surely everybody knows an "English Lit expert" but even after reading this exquisite requiem to believers I still find it impossibly hard to argue with these people. It always feels like they are trying to make the last stand of humanitarian values against the dictat of science. In all their glorious "everything science says will be as wrong as religion and you my friend are blindly following it" it seems they can't…

> It always feels like they are trying to make the last stand of humanitarian values against the dictat of science. Except for that in reality the legitimacy of science becomes more and more tenuous with each passing year. In the past 40+ years there have been few if any major advances in the scientific process that have seen wide adoption, despite the innumerable problems that have come to light. And not only have t…

Computerized statistics and online journals/digitized libraries are ENORMOUS advancements in the scientific process.

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

#86

Post by andyidsinga »

JackFr wrote: post #21
aout wrote: post #2

Surely everybody knows an "English Lit expert" but even after reading this exquisite requiem to believers I still find it impossibly hard to argue with these people. It always feels like they are trying to make the last stand of humanitarian values against the dictat of science. In all their glorious "everything science says will be as wrong as religion and you my friend are blindly following it" it seems they can't…

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…

> it does not follow that the scientific method is the only way to knowledge

there's something to that. It seems to me its partially because we often make "doing science" a mental / virtual exercise. A process that is done with data and in the realm of one's head.

But doing science should includes all of our senses.

The idea of gemba comes to mind ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gemba ): > The idea is that to be customer-driven, one must go to the customer's genba to understand his problems and opportunities, using all one's senses to gather and process data.

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

#87

Post by foldr »

andyidsinga wrote: post #80
foldr wrote: post #68

This is amusing, but the key terms in Asimov's argument are ambiguous, and he's taking a very selective look at the history of science. The position that science edges gradually towards theories that are "more right" (or "less wrong") is roughly correct in the sense that science tends to be empirically conservative. That is, when scientists replace theory A with theory B, it's generally the case that theory B account…

It seems as though asimov agrees with you in the last paragraph: >Naturally, the theories we now have might be considered wrong in the simplistic sense of my English Lit correspondent, but in a much truer and subtler sense, they need only be considered incomplete.

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. Similarly, if it turns out that eating lots of fat doesn't make you fat, that doesn't mean that previous dietary advice was merely "incomplete".

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

#88

Post by foldr »

ThrustVectoring wrote: post #58
gizi wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Game Theory explicitly talks about behavior in a rigorous way. That should be enough of a counterexample. Science can talk about specific events ("John stabbed Joe with a knife"), it can talk about how people categorize them ("the stabbing had features X, Y, and Z that the typical mind categorizes at "murder"), and it can talk about how typical minds perceive and judge events it has categorized. Morality is little mo…

>"most people think killing people is bad" can be reduced, with great difficulty, into statements about human behaviors and brain activity.

I doubt it, but in any case, the important point is that you can't do the same thing for "Killing people is bad." It's an important distinction. Most people think that homosexuality is bad, but we wouldn't want to conclude that it therefore is.

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

#89

Post by coldtea »

foldr wrote: post #68

This is amusing, but the key terms in Asimov's argument are ambiguous, and he's taking a very selective look at the history of science. The position that science edges gradually towards theories that are "more right" (or "less wrong") is roughly correct in the sense that science tends to be empirically conservative. That is, when scientists replace theory A with theory B, it's generally the case that theory B account…

>As Scott Adams points out in an article that someone else linked to here, the science of diet and exercise is a case in point.

That's because most of it in the form it reaches people is not actually a "science", but mostly pop culture and BS from mass media.

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

#90

Post by Locke1689 »

foldr wrote: post #87
andyidsinga wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It seems as though asimov agrees with you in the last paragraph: >Naturally, the theories we now have might be considered wrong in the simplistic sense of my English Lit correspondent, but in a much truer and subtler sense, they need only be considered incomplete.

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. Similarly, if it turns out that eating lots of fat doesn't make you fat, that doesn't mean that previous dietary advice was merely "incomplete".

It is incomplete in the sense that a theory can only be measured against others by its predictive power and simplicity. You're creating a metric of "success" that Asimov doesn't believe exists -- that a theory has an essential quality which is measurable in any way other than its predictive success.
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