[HN Gopher] Against Method
___________________________________________________________________
Against Method
Author : ScottStevenson
Score : 119 points
Date : 2022-12-22 13:28 UTC (9 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (en.wikipedia.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (en.wikipedia.org)
| cowfish wrote:
| I think I remember Imre Lakatos (another 20th century philosopher
| of science) saying that one application of philosophy of science
| is to determine which 'research programs' should (continue to) be
| funded.
|
| Later in life, after becoming a software engineer, it occurred to
| me that point of view has some resemblance to managers trying to
| determine whether a software engineer or a team of engineers are
| doing good work. If you apply a method too rigorously, you'll end
| up rewarding the wrong people.
|
| It's been ages since I read these philosophers but in my mind
| Feyerabend's position sort of boiled down to 'at the forefront of
| any specialization only the experts are able to judge which
| investigations are worth pursuing further'. With the corollary
| that experts sometimes disagree among themselves.
|
| In the field of software engineering I've encountered several
| cases where new engineers are onboarded and they promptly decide
| that the codebase is unmaintainable and should be rewritten from
| scratch. I usually don't give up on legacy code so easily, but
| there was one project where I did genuinely held the opinion that
| rewriting it would have been more efficient than refactoring. It
| occurred to me, though, that when a software engineer says a
| particular piece of codebase is crap, there usually is no good
| way for outsiders to tell whether that's true or not.
|
| Incidentally, Feyerabend's Against Method originated out of a
| challenge by Lakatos to copublish a book in which they debate
| various ideas. That's a useful thing to keep in mind when reading
| Against Method. Later someone did publish a book titled For And
| Against Method [1], in which writings of both Lakatos and
| Feyerabend are juxtaposed.
|
| [1]
| https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/F/bo362971...
| stdbrouw wrote:
| 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 for proposing that there
| is no such thing as a universal one-size-fits-all scientific
| method:
|
| > Our sophistication increases with every choice we make, and so
| do our standards. Standards compete just as theories compete and
| we choose the standards most appropriate to the historical
| situation in which the choice occurs. [...] It forces our mind to
| make imaginative choices and thus makes it grow.
|
| He often gets lumped together with continental thinkers and post-
| modernists like Foucault that he has nothing to do with.
|
| Against Method is a very short and simple book and I suspect that
| if you'd get a physicist, a chemist, a linguist, an engineer, a
| mathematician, an economist and so on to read it, they'd all be
| extremely underwhelmed and would just say "yeah, sounds about
| right, what's all the fuss about and why is this even considered
| interesting or provocative?"
|
| I also don't understand the other comments who say it's full of
| sophistry. There's a couple of "discussion" chapters at the end
| that maybe you will like or maybe you won't, but the bulk of the
| book is a thorough analysis of famous theories and experiments in
| physics such as those of Galileo, which he handles with much more
| attention to detail than the idealized versions you get from
| Popper and the like. He has a completely fascinating account of
| why the church didn't like Galileo, which had as much to do with
| his orneriness as with his science.
| jfengel wrote:
| 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.
| analog31 wrote:
| 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 references, e.g., to Aristotle. I
| don't remember the specific cases any more, but still it was a
| bit unnerving.
| heisenzombie wrote:
| 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.
| jfengel wrote:
| 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.
| SatvikBeri wrote:
| Yeah. A big part of Against Method just examines proposals for
| universal scientific methods, and points out cases where they
| would have failed. Galileo was the major example but IIRC there
| were several others.
| thebooktocome wrote:
| > 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 be the antonym
| of a similarly univocal "Madness".
| [deleted]
| dantheman wrote:
| 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.
| lootsauce wrote:
| 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.
| hammock wrote:
| 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
| didericis wrote:
| There's a more practical and tragic reason to desire a "one
| true method".
|
| Imagine spending your whole life working under method X. You
| study its precepts, gain practical knowledge, go out into the
| field and test your assumptions. Your desire is to end human
| suffering using method X, and build a better world where good
| triumphs over evil and everyone can pursue their bliss.
|
| But you must sacrifice in order for method X to work. The
| precepts demand you honor the gods. If you are an Aztec, you
| end up with pyramids covered in blood and tens of thousands
| dead, but are still woefully unprepared for disease and
| Europeans, your people suffer immensely and are virtually
| extinguished, and you die realizing your method was wrong and
| your sacrifices were in vain.
|
| You can avoid that with a meta method that helps you select
| proper methods.
|
| The amount of human suffering that can be avoided if people
| are able to distinguish the effectiveness of method X from
| method Y is extreme. That is where the hard earned victories
| of modernity come from. Science is the preeminent comparative
| meta method that identifies which methods are most effective
| at alleviating human suffering and people are right to uphold
| it (and to distinguish it from scientism/confusion with
| scientific bureaucracy)
|
| There is no universal, rule based, propositional method of
| betterment, but to give up on the idea of any method being
| objectively better than another is to give up on the idea of
| meta negotiation and the pursuit of universal peace and
| prosperity. The pursuit is worthwhile, even if it may not be
| fully achieved in billions or trillions of years and may be
| more of an art than a system of computation.
| blululu wrote:
| 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.
| libraryofbabel wrote:
| The book's great value is in dissolving rigid views of "the"
| scientific method. Feyerabend's simple challenge is: if you
| claim you have a model of the scientific method, I can always
| find a historical example of someone (Galileo, Einstein, etc.)
| needing to break the rules of that method to make scientific
| progress. That's it.
|
| I think it could have been written in a less provocative and
| eccentric way. Feyerabend had a certain rhetorical style that
| tends to get some folks unnecessarily riled up. Rewrite the
| core argument in a plain and simple way and I agree most
| working scientists wouldn't have a whole lot to object to
| (remember Feyerabend was writing against _other Philosophers_
| ). Some working scientists have been inspired by the book,
| though. Here's a great quote from physicist Lee Smolin:
|
| > What Feyerabend's book said to me was: Look, kid, stop
| dreaming! Science is not philosophers sitting in clouds. It is
| a human activity, as complex and problematic as any other.
| There is no single method to science and no single criterion
| for who is a good scientist. Good science is whatever works at
| a particular moment of history to advance our knowledge. And
| don't bother me with how to define progress -- define it any
| way you like and this is still true.
|
| > From Feyerabend, I learned that progress sometimes requires
| deep philosophical thinking, but most often it does not. It is
| mostly furthered by opportunistic people who cut corners,
| exaggerating what they know and have accomplished. Galileo was
| one of these; many of his arguments were wrong, and his
| opponents -- the well-educated, philosophically reflective
| Jesuit astronomers of the time -- easily punched holes in his
| thinking. Nevertheless, he was right and they were wrong.
|
| > What I also learned from Feyerabend is that no a priori
| argument can tell us what will work in all circumstances. What
| works to advance science at one moment will be wrong at
| another. And I learned one more thing from his stories of
| Galileo: You have to fight for what you believe.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| On top of it there is the awful truth that the 'scientific
| method' is not really practiced.
|
| In junior high school I remember getting taught about the
| scientific method, particularly the use of controls. I wrote 5
| papers and didn't use a control in any of them (it wouldn't
| have been appropriate.).
|
| Even in cases where people obviously should use controls, such
| as clinical trials, they frequently don't. There was that paper
| where they measured vitamin C levels of COVID-19 patients but
| didn't compare it to a baseline of people who were not sick,
| which is problematic in many ways.
|
| When they do meta-analysis by the Cochrane methodology they
| usually throw out at least half of the studies at the beginning
| because of glaring methodological flaws. Practically it is not
| much better than anarchy in terms of what gets funded and
| published.
| cryptonector wrote:
| - Incorrect use of statistics tools.
|
| - Cherry-picking of data.
|
| - Flawed or missing controls.
|
| - Lack of replication, and in the few cases where it's
| attempted, failure to replicate.
|
| - Non-publication of failures.
|
| - Publish-or-perish providing huge incentives to publish
| junk.
|
| - Peer review being an old boys club that enforces the party
| line.
|
| - All funding coming from few sources that tacitly use their
| funding power to fund only those that toe the party line.
|
| - So much basic science having been done by now that the
| remaining science to do is generally expensive to do, thus
| inviting the above funding / control problem.
|
| - Dogmatism.
|
| - Media attention.
|
| These are the problems that plague science today. Some of
| these have been there for a long time, like dogmatism. There
| are people alive today who were taught that the continents
| don't move, and that noticing that South America and Africa
| fit together and concluding that they must have moved is
| nonsense of the highest order. There are people alive today
| whose treatment for Polio was not physical therapy but
| immobilization. The list of dogma, old and new, is long. The
| malign ways in which some lords of science fiefdoms defend
| their dogmas have not gone away in spite of Popper's method.
| gumby wrote:
| > 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 know of cases where a control is _impossible_ , such as
| some surgical procedures, though even then sometimes sham
| surgery is performed (this is controversial). Those are
| singly-blinded controls as the surgeon knows.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| Definitely you want to use controls if you want regulators
| to take your work seriously. A lot of stuff gets found on
| pubmed that isn't meant for regulators and it doesn't.
| redavni wrote:
| 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.
| gumby wrote:
| A statistical study is not a clinical trial, which was
| the term used by the GP poster.
| ethanbond wrote:
| Doesn't the question of controls basically boil down to: it's
| hard to know things without them, but they're often hard to
| create anyway, ergo it's hard to know things in general - now
| welcome to the nastiness of real science?
| culi wrote:
| 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
| analog31 wrote:
| 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.
| OkayPhysicist wrote:
| 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?
| analog31 wrote:
| Very good points. I think another is that we can develop
| theories that relate different experimental cases, so
| that a "replication" doesn't have to be precisely the
| same study, but different studies in a sense replicate
| different but overlapping views of the theory.
| lisper wrote:
| > the 'scientific method' is not really practiced
|
| There is a big difference between "often not practiced" and
| "not really practiced [ever]". The former is true, the latter
| is not.
| culi wrote:
| I would also highly recommend _The Tyranny of Science_ by him
|
| See this review for a decent overview of it:
|
| https://ndpr.nd.edu/reviews/the-tyranny-of-science/
| oa335 wrote:
| This summary reminds my of Jerome Ravetz's advocacy of "Post-
| Normal Science", to fix the current problems in scientific
| discourse. https://youtu.be/qVLpbtkqERY
| r3trohack3r wrote:
| This resonates well, and has parallels to business orgs and
| startup culture:
| https://www.slideshare.net/reed2001/culture-1798664 (slide #48)
|
| Procedure is created as the percentage of high functioning
| workers decreases relative to the amount of work output necessary
| for the system to survive.
|
| These procedures are for sure stifling. I recently read "From
| Atomos to Atom" and one of the things that stood out to me was
| the approach most philosophers who made substantial progress on
| the atom took: everything is false. To make progress, they
| started from a position of assuming everything humans knew about
| this domain was incorrect; they then systematically proved _to
| themselves_ why each step in human thinking was correct.
|
| I'm starting to wonder if there are two distinct concepts that
| we've conflated in the term "Science."
|
| One science refers to humanity's collective constructs, the
| things we catalogue and teach and reconcile the world with in
| mass. This is a deeply social philosophy that is based on trust
| and not personal rigor. The scale of our collective constructs is
| too massive for any one person to tear apart and prove to
| themselves, so we substitute trust for rigor - we trust that
| someone else has been rigorous in generating these constructs.
|
| The other science refers to practicing the generation of those
| constructs. This is a deeply personal philosophy in which there
| is no trust. It dictates our personal relationship and
| understanding of the world we inhabit. Here, science is something
| we personally practice in developing that understanding. We trust
| nothing, validate everything, and build up our own understanding
| in the domain.
|
| With both, the defining trait is that reality is the final
| arbiter of truth.
|
| To tie it back into business org and startup culture, not
| everyone in science is working towards paradigm shifts. The
| processes we have in place for indexing, compiling, and
| reconciling the constructs of science are likely sufficient. But
| they're likely insufficient for generating a paradigm shift.
|
| That being said, I find it unlikely that you'd have to tell
| someone working towards a paradigm shift that they should shun
| procedure. Many seem to share the trait of insatiable curiosity,
| where they're going to build a construct against reality
| regardless of protocol.
| humanistbot wrote:
| > The author argues that science should become an anarchic
| enterprise, not a nomic (customary) one;[1] in the context of the
| work, the term "anarchy" refers to epistemological anarchy, which
| does not remain within one single prescriptive scientific method
| on the grounds that any such method would restrict scientific
| progress.
|
| So sometimes we can have randomized controlled trials to really
| understand the effectiveness of drugs, but we can't RCT climate
| change or the big bang, so we have to use simulations and models.
| That doesn't seem like "anything goes", more like a response to
| that one guy in my econ class who always ranted that if it wasn't
| backed by a RCT, all theories are BS.
| nequo wrote:
| > that one guy in my econ class who always ranted that if it
| wasn't backed by a RCT, all theories are BS.
|
| The converse may be true though. If it is not backed by a
| theory, an RCT is BS.
| eutectic wrote:
| There are many effective medicines for which the mechanism is
| unclear or disputed. Should we stop using them?
| operator-name wrote:
| You can use things for which there is weak or conflicting
| evidence for, just as you can take a sauna just becuase it
| makes you feel good. But take them as what they are and
| accept that doing so does not follow a strict
| interpretation of the scientific method.
| heisenzombie wrote:
| 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.
| aredox wrote:
| An interesting book for pointing out that actual scientific
| progress sometimes doesn't follow strict methodology (see e.g.
| Mendel's approximations). Alas, like most writing from the
| 60's/70's, it overstates its case through heavy sophistry that
| may go well with polemists and (pseudo-science) hacks, but not in
| real life.
| tgv wrote:
| Sophistry unfortunately didn't die in the 70s, but it's not a
| bad book, IIRC. It's ages ago that I read it, but it does take
| a very formal, undergrad-philosophy-of-science model as the one
| and true model, which everybody religiously adheres to.
| Pedantic might be a better predicate. Which is odd, now that I
| think about it, because you can't really be pedantic without
| believing you know the truth.
| mistermann wrote:
| One can certainly be accused or perceived as being pedantic
| without thinking oneself to know the truth though, or
| _actually_ being pedantic.
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semiotics
| cscheid wrote:
| Yeah, I mostly agree.
|
| I would put it slightly differently, and I honestly don't know
| if I'm being kinder or not. I'd say that in this book,
| Feyerabend is being a troll. He's out to get a reaction out of
| you more than to argue in great faith. In my view it's actually
| to the detriment of his point.
|
| I'm still happy I read it, but I think it's one of those
| finicky, "meso-scale" ideas that's useful, but doesn't apply at
| very small or very large scales. It's also interesting that it
| came out a good decade after moral particularism came out, and
| it feels to me that his principle is "simply" methodological
| particularism.
| auggierose wrote:
| Does anyone have a link to the original 1975 version, preferably
| a digital one? In the foreword to the new edition it says that
| the publisher now provides it online, but it seems to have
| vanished since then.
| Rzor wrote:
| >vanished
|
| You weren't kidding. I managed to find a part of "Analyses of
| Theories and Methods of Physics and Psychology (1970)" where I
| think his first iteration of Against Method was published as a
| paper (113 pages).
|
| https://pixeldrain.com/u/mRL52iYs (50MB, PDF, with preview)
|
| https://gofile.io/d/rDASZh (50MB, PDF, with preview)
|
| https://1fichier.com/?2i8f0l8ns1gi3v6yf7ea (50MB, PDF, no
| preview)
| auggierose wrote:
| Yes, there is a link to the 1970 paper on the Wiki page as
| well, but I think it is different from the 1975 version.
| [deleted]
| jdmtheNth wrote:
| How does his argument work with the current belief that
| objectivity and the scientific method is white supremacist
| oppression? Does his argument support the "alternate ways of
| knowing" that are being pushed as "indigenous science"?
| bannedbybros wrote:
| [dead]
| affgrff2 wrote:
| Please help me understand. Who currently believes this and more
| meta, which people believe that people believe this and who in
| reality are those groups?
| jdmtheNth wrote:
| https://www.thc.texas.gov/public/upload/preserve/museums/fil.
| .. - page 7 for objectivity
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RMepYJhI7HU - for non-readers
|
| https://www.utm.utoronto.ca/biology/graduate/intersection-
| sc...
|
| https://www.canada.ca/en/environment-climate-
| change/services...
|
| https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-01312-4
| affgrff2 wrote:
| Thanks, I think I understand your question better now. I
| guess Feyerabend's point is not that there are multiple
| valid opinions about the world but rather multiple adequate
| ways on finding (maybe universal) truth about the world.
| The frameworks you are referencing however seem to
| emphasize that there is no such thing as objective truth
| (and that claiming so might even be promoting white
| supremacy or racism). So I don't see how it would support
| it.
| kirkules wrote:
| I have not seen this view expressed in this way except by
| people who do not support it. Do you remember or know any
| examples I could check out?
| _dain_ wrote:
| https://nitter.1d4.us/realchrisrufo/status/15791203845193072.
| ..
| qsort wrote:
| This is just a bad take which was artificially pushed for pseudo-
| political reasons.
|
| That we have no hard and fast rules for what is good science does
| not mean that anything goes. This is like saying that because
| it's impossible to write perfectly safe C++ programs, then we
| should just use raw pointers. Imprecise methods that work with a
| certain probability still have value.
|
| Leaps of logic like that are popular even more generally and they
| leave me speachless.
| civopsec wrote:
| > This is like saying that because it's impossible to write
| perfectly safe C++ programs, then we should just use raw
| pointers.
|
| Anything goes does not imply a proscription like that.
| mistermann wrote:
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stream_of_consciousness
| culi wrote:
| 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 are in nature
|
| The common metaphor given for Occam's razor is a field with some
| random dots plotted. Those points are "evidence" and drawing a
| shape around them is a "theory" or hypothesis. Then a shape that
| encapsulates those dots is said to be the most preferred theory
| when compared to something like a rabbit or some other arbitrary
| shape
|
| But there is an inherent assumption there about what the plane
| looks like. It's entirely possible that the geometry on which
| those points of evidence lie actually lends itself to where
| drawing a rabbit around all those points actually IS the
| "simplest" assumption
|
| The are known knowns, known unknowns, and unknown unknowns. But
| there's a fourth category: ideology. The unknown knowns
|
| In my view, it's this 4th category that ultimately dooms science.
| Science is ultimately cultural and there's no way around that.
| Our institutional science is always looking at analyzing
| outwardly: gathering more and more data; but just as important is
| analyzing inwardly. Being self-critical about our invisible
| assumptions.
|
| We can never fully absolve ourselves of unknown knowns, but I do
| believe in a "more perfect" mission. One in which we always
| accept we're imperfect but working towards a closer vision. But
| to work towards this, we need to not only analyze the dots, but
| also the geometries on which we place those dots
| lootsauce wrote:
| 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.
| azangru wrote:
| I keep thinking how modern philosophers of science, who talked
| about how science is done, would have a field day outlining
| recent social changes in sciences, with various shifting
| incentives, pressures from various media, strings attached to
| sources of financing, and competing interests.
| Gimpei wrote:
| I struggle with Feyerabend a bit. First, a big part of that book
| is case studies and the problem with case studies is that they
| are not representative of the underlying population. It's very
| easy to simply cherry pick examples that advance your thesis,
| whereas what we really care about is population averages.
|
| Second, let's assume there is no method for arriving at truth.
| Well then how do we verify that some discovery is actually a
| discovery? Presumably if there was a way to do this, we could
| incorporate it into our method, thus undermining Feyerabend's
| thesis. Well it turns out that his answer to this is to say that
| evaluation should consist entirely in the contribution of the
| discovery to happiness and flourishing. This could be useful at a
| general level, but seems useless when it comes to judging between
| theories and research paths within science.
| kijin wrote:
| Feyerabend may or may not have been right about physics or
| astronomy, but he sure as hell sounds like he knew what
| software engineering would be like.
|
| Should programs be written in a procedural, object-oriented, or
| functional style? Just how much should you care about
| scalability when you're building your MVP? What's the best way
| to write tests for a program that makes API calls to servers
| you don't control? Rails or Next.js? Emacs or vi?
|
| There's no tried and true method for determining the answer to
| any of the above. Most people will say "it depends." Depends on
| what? How do you tell if you made the right choice? Very often,
| you can only tell afterward when your company gets a bazillion
| users and your servers start crashing left and right. Even
| then, the answer is fairly subjective and boils down to whether
| your team, shareholders, and users are happy.
| stephc_int13 wrote:
| This is probably wrong, interesting and useful.
|
| Useful to train for critical thinking.
|
| Nothing should be considered sacred, it's OK to be wrong when
| exploring new ideas.
| cies wrote:
| [flagged]
| Symmetry wrote:
| I've recently liked the metaphor of science as a four stroke
| engine.
|
| Unstructured observations -> hypotheses -> structured
| observations (experiments) -> confirmed hypotheses.
|
| I think that unstructured observations of new phenomenon doesn't
| get enough credit in general, thought some fields seem to be all
| phenomenology and little theorizing. But in most it's hard to
| write grants for unstructured observation of a phenomenon and you
| have to pretend to be doing some specific experiment to get the
| experience necessary to be putting forward real hypotheses.
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