[HN Gopher] The Machine Stops: Science and Its Limits
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The Machine Stops: Science and Its Limits
Author : Hooke
Score : 23 points
Date : 2021-02-23 05:30 UTC (17 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (lareviewofbooks.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (lareviewofbooks.org)
| cjohansson wrote:
| The scientific revolution has indirectly produced a lot of bad
| things like nuclear wars, climate change, trash islands and more.
| I just get tired of ideological driven over-positive scientism
| which made me stop reading
| ssivark wrote:
| The scientific approach to knowledge (everything we know so far)
| is fundamentally limited in its ability to understand complex
| systems. Physics & co. are the low hanging fruit
| (tautologically)... modular systems so it's very _easy to isolate
| the system or control for external influences_ (so experiments
| are repeatable, and knowledge is generalizable), then nice linear
| /quadratic system models which are amenable to tractable
| mathematical modeling, etc.
|
| If (for eg) I wanted similar (analogous to how well we understand
| mechanics) understanding of the health implications of going
| vegan, or dropping fertility (ref: post on HN front page
| currently) where would one even begin to research that question?
| Even assuming one can unilaterally bring to bear all of
| humanity's collective resources on this problem, the scientific
| method is not powerful enough to generate timeless generalizable
| truths for this problem. It's very possible that the ideal diet
| might easily change when we're talking about humans living in a
| Martian colony, or a century into the future with different
| climate, or living in a different continent different from their
| native ethnicity.
|
| Questions of that nature/complexity cannot strictly be answered
| "scientifically". We continue with traditions (as a baseline) and
| occasionally experiment with tweaks and gather empirical evidence
| when we can, to iteratively improve our dietary practices (as our
| food technology improves).
| robotresearcher wrote:
| Diet is imperfectly understood and it's very complicated. But
| we can make all sorts of reliable predictions that enable diet
| technology. From limes to prevent sailor's rickets to glucose
| control for diabetics, these are commonplace.
|
| The fact that something is complex and not completely figured
| out does not mean the scientific method does not apply, or
| negate all the useful things science has already had to say
| about it. Weather reports are useful, despite being imperfect.
|
| Your questions about diet are scientific questions. The answer
| "we don't know yet", and "here's a known-flawed approximation
| in case that's useful" are scientific answers.
| swimfar wrote:
| The story referenced in this article, "The Machine Stops", by
| E.M. Forester is a pretty short read (25 pages). For people who
| like going into books/movies with no knowledge of plot summary,
| you can read it online before reading the article. (Or read it
| afterwards if it sounds interesting.)
|
| https://www.cs.ucdavis.edu/~koehl/Teaching/ECS188/PDF_files/...
| ssivark wrote:
| Stepping away from science (research) for a minute, I think a far
| more silent "machine" that we implicitly depend on is the idea of
| _industrial organization_ (a subtle blend of economics &
| technology) -- industrial knowledge production (research),
| industrial engineering/technology from knowledge, industrial
| commercialization (startups, etc) -- where "scaling" specialized
| entities becomes the paradigm, and hardly anyone understands the
| systemic complexity, or do much for themselves.
|
| The lacunae in this model are far more subtle, and it is
| difficult to gauge when or how this might break down.
| Animats wrote:
| The author sees a problem, but his comments on it are off.
|
| _Strevens's Machine, the engine of modern science, runs on a
| single principle, a kind of speech code that he dubs "the iron
| rule of explanation."_
|
| No. That's wrong. As Fred Hoyle once wrote, "Science is
| prediction, not explanation". This is key. Successful prediction
| means you got something right. That's objectively testable.
| Explanation is not testable in that way.
|
| If you can't predict, you can't make an engineering technology.
| Electronics exists because physics is predictable.
|
| The frustration is that the hard sciences have been so successful
| that most repeatable phenomena have been figured out. Now what?
| Physics is stuck trying to figure out cosmology, where you can't
| experiment, layers below the subatomic level such as
| superstrings, where you can't experiment, and how gravity
| interacts with other forces, where you can't experiment. Real
| progress is being made at very low energy levels down near
| absolute zero, though, where experiments are possible.
|
| The "soft sciences", psychology, sociology, and economics, seem
| to be unable to make reliable predictions. Even getting
| repeatable experiments is tough. Are they even sciences? Maybe
| psychology should be shipped off to the medical school, economics
| to the business school, and sociology to the school of public
| administration.
| bluenose69 wrote:
| You're right: predicting is the key goal, not "explaining". A
| similarly unhelpful word (which comes up a lot in proposals) is
| "understand". Often, "to understand X" often means little more
| than "to not be surprised by X". At one point, people explained
| and understood in terms of mystical thinking that we now regard
| as quaint and wrong-headed. A more robust approach is to
| predict, and then to check those predictions against new, or at
| least independent, observations.
| yiyus wrote:
| These terms just mean different things. Very often, it's
| relatively easy to find a phenomenological model capable of
| performing quite good predictions. But, in order to find a
| physical model that can be broadly applied, we need to
| understand what is going on at a fundamental level.
|
| At least in my field (mechanical and materials engineering),
| understanding means explaining in basis to well established
| fundamental laws, a prediction is not enough.
| mturmon wrote:
| I also pulled up when reading that quote (and "explanation" is
| the name Strevens chose). But the next sentences show precisely
| what he means by "explanation" --
|
| >> ...scientists [] resolve their differences of opinion by
| conducting empirical tests rather than by shouting or fighting
| or philosophizing or moralizing or marrying or calling on a
| higher power....
|
| His usage of "empirical tests" lines up with what you (and
| others) call "prediction".
|
| Summary: I don't think you're in disagreement with the book.
|
| As a comparative, this review [1] notes "Strevens argues that
| modern science owes its success to the relinquishing of deep
| philosophical understanding in favor of the shallow power to
| predict empirical observations. [...]"
|
| [1] https://blogs.sciencemag.org/books/2020/12/28/the-
| knowledge-...
| sandworm101 wrote:
| >> seem to be unable to make reliable predictions.
|
| String theory?
|
| Perhaps science is those explanations confirmed by accurate
| prediction.
| tMcGrath wrote:
| I'm not sure that's all there is to it - at least some
| scientists are in it for the explanation: they want to know
| more about something. In this case the prediction is just a
| useful check that their proposed explanation is compatible with
| reality.
|
| Of course, this isn't typically why science gets funded - we
| want the engineering applications that are enabled by our
| ability to calculate - but a version of science that's all
| prediction, no explanation seems very unappealing (not to
| mention sterile for further investigation).
| pdonis wrote:
| _> at least some scientists are in it for the explanation_
|
| What the scientists are in it for is one thing. But what
| confidence non-scientist members of the public should have in
| claims made by scientists is another. The latter is what
| prediction is for: the better the predictive track record of
| the scientific claims, the higher the confidence they
| deserve.
| AndrewKemendo wrote:
| We've run out of the ability to measure easily.
|
| As you indicated, the "human scale" things that we can
| experiment with to make predictions have been "plucked."
|
| Now we have to make increasingly more complex tools (LHC
| etc...) for physical things we can't experience directly and
| our ethics prevents us from experimenting with those "soft"
| things.
| MikeDelta wrote:
| For thousands of years mankind has found explanations for the
| world around us and the sky above us: the sun was eating the
| moon every morning, the stars are little holes in the black
| canvas of the night sky, the universe revolves around the
| earth.
|
| It is only when we found scientific explanations, like those of
| Galileo, we were able to predict and understand correlations.
|
| Makes me wonder if the Mayans knew about the stars and the
| planets, even though they could very well predict the sky above
| them.
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