[HN Gopher] The Relativity of Wrong (1989)
___________________________________________________________________
The Relativity of Wrong (1989)
Author : tate
Score : 117 points
Date : 2023-09-12 13:45 UTC (9 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (hermiene.net)
(TXT) w3m dump (hermiene.net)
| PrimeMcFly wrote:
| It's amazing the amount of people who dismiss current findings by
| claiming we were wrong in the past, so nothing can be trusted.
| alexvitkov wrote:
| I'm dumb and ignorant, therefore we all are.
| irrational wrote:
| Well, yes, but some more than others.
| scns wrote:
| Well. For me, Immanuel Kants' (1724-1804) "Ding an sich" (The
| thing in itself) lays the groundwork for modern science. My
| translation would be: "Since our senses are so easily fooled,
| we will never grasp the thing in itself." IMAO a reasonable
| scientist says: "We can only say what is least likely wrong."
| Can you win elections with sentences like these?
| somat wrote:
| It is an over reaction, but it is true. in both fields.
|
| Scientific: scientific knowledge on a subject is never solved.
| it merely approaches the solution. it was wrong in the past, it
| is less wrong today, but still wrong.
|
| Cultural: The cultural truths of today were wrong in the past
| and will be wrong in the future.
|
| I think the correct take away is not so much "nothing can be
| trusted" as it is "trust, but verify"
| feoren wrote:
| There is no parallel between scientific knowledge and
| whatever you're calling "cultural truths". To the extent that
| there is lasting progress in culture, it is through art,
| music, and literature, not through "truth". Truth is the
| realm of science alone. Yadda-yadda genital mutilation: that
| is not culture, it's ignorant cruelty, and science can indeed
| show that, by showing that it causes health problems, causes
| pain even in babies, brings none of the claimed benefits,
| etc. Most of the old-hat cultural-relativism arguments come
| down to plain-old scientific ignorance, just as if there were
| cultures out there that still believed the Earth is flat.
| Those are not "cultural truths", they are scientific
| ignorance.
|
| > "trust, but verify"
|
| We're talking about the collective knowledge and
| understanding of all of humanity. How are you going to verify
| for yourself the value of the Planck constant and the exact
| curvature of the Earth and the exact age of the Universe? Are
| you going to build your own $50-billion particle accelerator
| to verify the existence and strength of the Higgs field?
| Through decades of study you may get to the point where you
| can indeed verify _one_ of the millions of foundational
| truths that we build further knowledge upon.
|
| "Trust, but verify" doesn't belong here. You should not
| "trust", nor can you possibly "verify". It's more like
| "understand". These truths must fit together cohesively, or
| if they don't, it should be glaring unsolved problem (e.g.
| gravity vs. quantum mechanics). Test new ideas against the
| rest of the theory to relentlessly look for contradictions or
| poor fits. Develop your mental model. You never need to
| really "trust"; everything has a wrongness error-bar around
| it. The wrongness error-bar of the shape of the Earth is very
| small; it includes subtle corrections due to slight
| variations in the gravitational field and the pull of other
| bodies, but it does not include a flat Earth.
| karaterobot wrote:
| > that is not culture, it's ignorant cruelty
|
| Being ignorant and cruel does not make something separate
| from culture. Many things in culture are ignorant and
| cruel. Being demonstrably unhealthy and without benefit is
| also tangential to being part of culture. Even science is
| not separate from culture: science has a culture, with its
| own biases, as has been shown many times.
|
| > Truth is the realm of science alone.
|
| That's interesting. Mathematicians might say truth is the
| realm of mathematics alone. Philosophers might say they
| claim it, or nobody does. I think you just have to define
| what you mean by truth (is it eternal and unchanging?), and
| once you do that, you open the doors to a lot of other
| reasonable claimants. This is not an argument for
| relativism, this is me saying there are different kinds of
| truth, not that there is no such thing as truth, or that
| there is no such thing as falsity.
| feoren wrote:
| [dead]
| nemo wrote:
| >Truth is the realm of science alone.
|
| This statement isn't a scientifically based statement nor
| could it be one since science can't measure the truth-value
| of epistemological claims - your claim can't be true by
| your own standard.
| feoren wrote:
| HN comments are small and my comments are limited by the
| amount of procrastination my day is able to endure.
| "Truth is the realm of science alone" is a lot of things
| significantly abbreviated into a pithy and over-
| simplified HN comment. You could levy the same criticism
| at almost everything anyone ever says on an internet
| forum, including "scientifically based statement"
| (whatever that means) and "science can't measure the
| truth-value of epistemological claims".
|
| I'm asserting that the only _useful_ definition of the
| word "truth", and the core of the definition that almost
| everyone is actually grasping at when they talk about
| "truth", is the particular kind of truth that science
| seeks, and any other definition of "truth" inevitably
| leads to statements that would be "true" under that
| definition but clearly nonsensical. Basically if you want
| "truth" to act "truthy" in all the ways we expect "truth"
| to behave, then your definition of "truth" is exactly the
| one that is sought by science and nothing else (here I am
| including mathematics as a branch of science, even though
| it's probably better to think of it the other way
| around).
|
| Here's my definition of truth: the body of statements
| which are self-consistent with some set of pre-selected
| axioms. A false statement is one which is inconsistent
| with those axioms. Plenty of statements are neither (e.g.
| "this statement is false").
|
| You claim this is not a "scientifically based statement",
| but really it's just a definition, plus an assertion that
| other definitions are not useful. The latter is actually
| falsifiable: show me a useful definition of "truth" that
| doesn't reduce to this definition. Of course I haven't
| given you the exact criteria for doing this nor evidence
| that my assertion is correct, but this is an HN comment;
| what do you really expect?
|
| > science can't measure the truth-value of
| epistemological claims
|
| I don't see why that should be true. I can claim to have
| certain knowledge and science can test me on those
| claims. If your definition of "epistemological claims"
| only includes those philosophy-ejaculate sentences that
| cannot be tested by science, then your definition is
| useless and boring.
| Workaccount2 wrote:
| [flagged]
| ilyt wrote:
| I think people just yearn for certainties and unchangeable
| anchors in reality, which is why the beliefs that something is
| designed made by one constant being or force of nature are so
| prevalent.
|
| "You told me this is reality and now it changed, why I should
| believe in it again?"
|
| Schools don't get into people's heads how science works enough,
| and how it is less "discovering the truth" and more "narrowing
| the uncertainty on how stuff works"
| LeifCarrotson wrote:
| Absolutely!
|
| > _" You told me this is reality and now it changed, why I
| should believe in it again?"_
|
| Because that's not what "belief" ought to mean. When you were
| told that scientific thing in the past, you should have been
| told that it was believed to be that way using this flawed
| collection of evidence, analyzed and synthesized by imperfect
| intelligences, which should have lead to that postulate about
| reality holding an asterisk with whatever degree of
| confidence it deserved.
|
| If that uncertainty is something you can't accept, maybe
| science (and reality) is not for you. Try mathematics
| instead.
| rom1v wrote:
| On a related note, sometimes someone may be wrong because he
| knows more about the subject (but not enough).
|
| A canonical example could be about the "leap year" rules.
|
| For context, the Earth makes a full rotation around the Sun in
| about 365.2425 days, so we use leap years to compensate:
|
| - add 1 day every 4 years (365 + 1/4 = 365.25)
|
| - but not every 100 years (365.25 - 1/100 = 365.24)
|
| - but add a day anyway every 400 years (365.24 + 1/400 =
| 365.2425)
|
| Suppose most people only know the first part (1 additional day
| every 4 years). If we ask "is 2000 a leap year?", they would
| answer "Of course, 2000 is a multiple of 4". And they would get
| the correct result.
|
| Now, suppose someone started to study the "subject" (here, there
| is nothing to study, this is a trivial example for illustration),
| and is aware of the second rule (but not the third one). He would
| say "Ahah, no, 2000 is not a leap year, because it is a multiple
| of 100". But he would get the wrong answer.
|
| My impression is that this kind of mistakes happens often while
| learning a subject: by studying, we encounter exceptions or
| surprising facts, that we may apply too broadly (to the point we
| make absurd claims, but that appear absurd for the wrong
| reasons).
| fossuser wrote:
| This can come up in other interesting ways.
|
| There are human behaviors that appear to be entirely selected
| for (and then kept around via culture) [0].
|
| In this case a population may do something like have pregnant
| women avoid eating sharks which are otherwise a normal part of
| their diet. They don't know why they don't eat the sharks, they
| just don't. It turns out the sharks contain something that
| causes birth defects. Commonly people think someone must have
| realized this and then that original knowledge was forgotten,
| but it's quite likely it was never known and the behavior was
| entirely selected (pregnant women that didn't eat the sharks
| more successfully reproduced).
|
| When you press the women to answer why they don't know, if
| forced to answer they make something up (it'll give my baby
| shark skin).
|
| You could imagine someone thinking that's stupid and then
| eating the sharks and getting a baby with birth defects.
|
| I think this explains a lot about why superstitious belief is
| so common in humans and animals.
|
| Reason is obviously selectively advantageous, but a little
| reason incorrectly or over confidently applied can also be
| harmful, most people are bad at individual reasoning (endless
| conspiracy theories) and are often better off with consensus.
|
| For every contrarian that unlocks massive value by being
| contrarian _and_ correct there are ten cranks that just hold
| false beliefs that potentially harm themselves and others.
|
| [0]: https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/06/04/book-review-the-
| secret...
| sopooneo wrote:
| This follows a pattern I've noticed where an expert's approach
| may seem similar to a pure novice's. With only the intermediate
| practitioner seeming to follow any rules.
| ajuc wrote:
| This is so common there's a meme template :)
|
| https://pbs.twimg.com/media/FffvEX5UAAAysZC?format=jpg&name=.
| ..
| cfiggers wrote:
| First you learn the conventional wisdom.
|
| Then, you learn that the conventional wisdom is wrong.
|
| Finally, you learn that you didn't actually learn the
| conventional wisdom the first time around, typically by
| rediscovering it yourself.
| ndsipa_pomu wrote:
| A simpler example may be that a person with one clock knows the
| time, but a person with two clocks is never quite sure.
| mrob wrote:
| It's a popular phrase, but it doesn't make sense if you think
| about it. The person with two clocks can average the time of
| both of them and get a result they can be more confident in
| than the person with only one.
| ndsipa_pomu wrote:
| That only works if both clocks are wrong in opposite
| directions and so confidence wouldn't be appropriate.
| Taking the average might work if you've got a whole bunch
| of clocks and they show a distribution such as a bell curve
| - that's what's required to become more confident than the
| single clock owner.
| mrob wrote:
| I'm assuming the error of every clock has the same
| probability distribution. I think this is a reasonable
| assumption, because the phrase only mentions the number
| of clocks. In this case, the more clocks you average the
| lower your expected error.
| ndsipa_pomu wrote:
| But with just two clocks, the distribution isn't evident.
| They could both be running fast and thus the average
| would be worse than the clock showing the earlier time.
| You'd have no way of knowing without consulting more
| clocks.
|
| Also, with clocks you should be measuring the rate at
| which they measure time. Typically clocks can run fast or
| slow which means that the time shown is a function of how
| long they've been running since they were last correct.
| mrob wrote:
| It's possible for the person with the single clock to get
| lucky and have a more accurate time than the average, but
| the original quote says "knows the time". Using the
| traditional definition of knowledge as "justified true
| belief", somebody with a lucky clock does not truly know
| the time. Their belief is true, but not justified. It's
| really the person with multiple clocks who has more
| accurate knowledge of the time. The more clocks they
| average the more justification they have for their
| belief.
| ndsipa_pomu wrote:
| The single clock owner doesn't have to be especially
| lucky. Imagine if they had a clock that was two minutes
| fast and the dual clock owner had one that was merely a
| minute fast and the other was ten minutes slow. The
| average would be less accurate, despite owning the most
| accurate clock. Two clocks just don't work for
| statistical analysis (three clocks are unlikely to help
| either).
|
| Also, the single clock owner is justified in believing
| that they have the correct time as there's nothing to
| suggest that they could be wrong. Two clocks introduces
| doubt where there was none before.
|
| Rather than using "justified" true belief, humans tend to
| go for the easier option and would be more likely to go
| to the person with just one clock, until they find
| someone with enough clocks and clout to point out the
| likely correct time.
| watwut wrote:
| I have many clocks and typically I am sure about the time. I
| keep them in sync or know which one is off.
| dang wrote:
| Sorry for the offtopicness but could you please email
| hn@ycombinator.com?
|
| I don't mean to pester you but there's an important issue
| with your account that we need you to know about.
| ndsipa_pomu wrote:
| How do you keep them in sync? I bet you're using an
| established time source.
| AnimalMuppet wrote:
| Walk around with a wristwatch. Even if the watch isn't
| synced to something authoritative, you can still use it
| to get all the clocks the same as each other (and the
| watch).
| ndsipa_pomu wrote:
| What if the watch runs fast - how do you synchronise the
| other clocks to an untrustworthy watch? For extra points,
| assume that the clocks are all in different rooms so you
| can only see one at a time and it takes an unknown number
| of seconds to go from one room to another.
| AnimalMuppet wrote:
| The easy answer is that the watch doesn't run _that_
| fast. If it runs, say, 10 seconds fast a day (which is a
| lot), then if walking from one room to the other takes a
| minute, the watch is off by... 0.007 seconds. I 'm not
| going to be setting the clock that accurately.
|
| But if the clock just runs _consistently_ fast (and if I
| know how fast it runs), then I can use the watch to
| measure how long it took to walk from one clock to the
| other, and from that I can compute the correct time to
| set the second clock to.
| ndsipa_pomu wrote:
| How could you know how fast it runs without comparing to
| an accurate time source? Maybe it's running slow and you
| don't even realise it.
| AnimalMuppet wrote:
| Well, I can compare it to all the clocks.
|
| But, you know, if I have no accurate source of time, why
| do I bother having a watch and N clocks?
| ndsipa_pomu wrote:
| You're a clock collector?
| EGreg wrote:
| Far more broadly, think of logic as just a low-dimensional
| approximation of something complex.
|
| Humans deal with logic and are taught "i before e except after
| c" etc. But even with describing human languages that may be
| inadequate.
|
| What AI does is it essentially makes a model by which you can
| search a latent space quickly -- both to clasify input and to
| generate output.
|
| You can throw the recorded motions of the planets and stars at
| it and it might find physical laws that have 80 variables while
| humans want to deal only with simplified versions like Kepler's
| laws of motion.
|
| In the vacuum of space those laws may be enough but when it
| comes to the complexity of chemistry, biology, genetics,
| politica, etc. the AI might have way better model that we can
| never understand. Like for dietary recommendations. Would
| people follow them?
|
| And what if they are wrong in some other ways? Like how humans
| beat AlphaGo through its blind spot or how you can fool face
| recognition by wearing a hoodie etc.
| [deleted]
| hsod wrote:
| I think this is pretty much what the term "midwit" refers to
| karaterobot wrote:
| The bimodal variation of this is the famous (?) quote about the
| U.S. civil war, which goes something like: in elementary
| school, you learn the Civil War was about slavery. In high
| school, you learn it was about economics. In college, you learn
| it was actually about slavery.
| yllautcaj wrote:
| "A little knowledge is a dangerous thing."
| robgibbons wrote:
| From "A Little Learning," by Alexander Pope
|
| A little learning is a dangerous thing; Drink deep, or taste
| not the Pierian spring: There shallow draughts intoxicate the
| brain, And drinking largely sobers us again.
| ilyt wrote:
| In IT we call those people "power users", the absolute bane of
| tech support.
| gorlilla wrote:
| In power-user-land we call IT glorified gatekeepers.
|
| Neither would be entirely accurate and not every of either is
| always one of either and either can be both at the same or
| different times..
| banannaise wrote:
| The true expert realizes what question is being asked, and
| grabs a calendar.
|
| Two people, equally knowledgeable and given the same problem,
| will not necessarily come up with the same solution. Leap years
| are not a mathematical fact; they are an engineering solution
| to a mathematical challenge. An expert looking at orbits is
| unlikely to decide that we must specifically add an extra day
| to February; you only know that we use this solution by
| deriving it from calendars.
| behnamoh wrote:
| Also applies to creativity.
|
| - Knowledge = little ==> little creativity to add something new
|
| - Knowledge = mid ==> great creativity
|
| - Knowledge = high ==> little creativity to add something new
| onemoresoop wrote:
| Could you please expand on this?
| The_Colonel wrote:
| State of the art is that X is impossible. An expert knows
| that, and therefore does not pursue it.
|
| A non-expert doesn't know X is impossible, pursues it and
| solves it.
|
| I don't have any specific example, though.
| anon____ wrote:
| There's a famous story that's a good example here, I
| think: George Dantzig solved two open problems in
| statistical theory, which he had mistaken for homework
| after arriving late to a lecture at university.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Dantzig
|
| > In 1939, a misunderstanding brought about surprising
| results. Near the beginning of a class, Professor Neyman
| wrote two problems on the blackboard. Dantzig arrived
| late and assumed that they were a homework assignment.
| According to Dantzig, they "seemed to be a little harder
| than usual", but a few days later he handed in completed
| solutions for both problems, still believing that they
| were an assignment that was overdue. Six weeks later, an
| excited Neyman eagerly told him that the "homework"
| problems he had solved were two of the most famous
| unsolved problems in statistics. He had prepared one of
| Dantzig's solutions for publication in a mathematical
| journal. This story began to spread and was used as a
| motivational lesson demonstrating the power of positive
| thinking. Over time, some facts were altered, but the
| basic story persisted in the form of an urban legend and
| as an introductory scene in the movie Good Will Hunting.
| abridges6523 wrote:
| Love that story.
| onemoresoop wrote:
| I think I get it. Applying lateral or novel thinking to a
| problem unfamiliar...
| ilyt wrote:
| I feel like that's mostly anecdotal. Nobody remembers the
| "mid knowledge people that did nothing interesting"
| nuancebydefault wrote:
| (0) is a great book that explains very neatly why even long
| disproved models of physics were right, only less right then
| newer models.
|
| (0) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reality_Is_Not_What_It_Seems
| bell-cot wrote:
| I get the sense that Dr. Asimov was too little of a "people
| person" to usefully discuss the all-too-common human urge to tell
| others that _you_ are right, and _they_ are wrong. Or positive
| ways to handle that urge.
|
| OTOH, he may have been quite aware that "read more Asimov, and be
| more smug about being right more often" was a major motive for
| people buying his non-fiction writing.
| mcstafford wrote:
| > Those people who think they know everything are a great
| annoyance to those of us who do. -- Isaac Asimov
|
| Useful discussion is an interesting scope for someone with the
| broad, in-depth knowledge of a vast array of subjects he
| demonstrates in the linked essay.
| the_af wrote:
| Asimov was a people person though. He wasn't a nerd in the
| typical sense; he went to parties, conventions, meetings,
| mingled with people, belonged to multiple clubs, etc.
|
| From Wikipedia:
|
| > _" Asimov was an able public speaker and was regularly hired
| to give talks about science. He was a frequent participant at
| science fiction conventions, where he was friendly and
| approachable. He patiently answered tens of thousands of
| questions and other mail with postcards and was pleased to give
| autographs."_
|
| I think that, in driving home a valid point, this essay gives
| the wrong impression of Asimov as someone who would scold his
| readers.
| jaclaz wrote:
| This:
|
| http://www.asimovonline.com/oldsite/future_of_humanity.html
|
| is a transcript of a 1974 talk/lecture that shows how fun and
| modest he was, while still delivering a lot of interesting
| points to ponder.
| davinci123 wrote:
| Every VC and founder needs to read this post - there are no
| absolute rights or wrongs. So, whatever worked for Google will
| not work for Instacart.. whatever thesis of investing worked in
| the last decade will not work in the next decade.. Start from
| first principles!
| htoowintshein wrote:
| [flagged]
| mcguire wrote:
| " _Virtually all that we know today, however, would remain
| untouched and when I say I am glad that I live in a century when
| the Universe is essentially understood, I think I am justified._
| "
|
| I think most people at most times would have agreed with that.
|
| But the difference would be in the meaning of "the Universe"; the
| "basic rules of gravity" would hardly be the important part to
| most peoples at most times.
|
| Oh, and...
|
| " _I received a letter from a reader the other day. It was
| handwritten in crabbed penmanship so that it was very difficult
| to read....however low on the social scale..._ "
|
| Nice.
|
| "*I received a letter from a reader the other day. It was
| handwritten in crabbed penmanship so that it was very difficult
| to read.
| htoowintshein wrote:
| [flagged]
| hirundo wrote:
| Socrates then, by a series of ignorant-sounding questions, forced
| the others into such a melange of self-contradictions that they
| would finally break down and admit they didn't know what they
| were talking about. It is the mark of the marvelous
| toleration of the Athenians that they let this continue for
| decades and that it wasn't till Socrates turned seventy that they
| broke down and forced him to drink poison.
|
| It's seldom pleasant to be (accurately) instructed in your own
| ignorance, particularly by someone pretending not to know
| anything. Asimov's theory that Socrates' death was a result of
| his habit of patronizing everyone rather than the actual charges
| is plausible.
| tacitusarc wrote:
| There can be a balance here. Often I'll have a viewpoint and
| when I hear a different one, I won't immediately say I
| disagree. Instead I'll ask questions to discover where the gap
| in our understanding lies. Then, it may be helpful to share
| that I have additional knowledge (I'd I do), or to learn
| something I was missing, or to recognize we value different
| things and move on. Immediate disagreement is often far less
| productive.
| sopooneo wrote:
| Methods for coming to understanding between parties acting in
| good faith really fascinates me. One thing I've noticed is
| the fundamental crux often lies with some assumption each
| party finds so fundamental that they wouldn't bother to state
| it, and don't even necessary realize they hold the view *.
|
| As a gross example, my wife told me the other day of a buyer
| of some CraigsList item that called to say she couldn't find
| our address. They went back and forth each getting more and
| more flummoxed by the other's statement of what streets were
| where. Finally it was discovered that the caller was in
| Cambridge, Ontario, having misnavigated CraigsList, while we
| were in Cambridge, MA.
|
| It is mistakes so fundamental as these that are hard to
| discover. One help I've often found is to bring in a fresh
| third party.
|
| * _Saying to "state your assumptions" seems futile to me.
| There are too many. The sun will rise, time will continue to
| tick by at the same rate, your friend didn't change his name
| yesterday, Coke still sells soft drinks._
| ndsipa_pomu wrote:
| As a counterpoint, people acting in bad faith can continue
| asking questions. It's usually known as "sealioning"
|
| https://wondermark.com/c/1k62/
| the_af wrote:
| Also, in internet arguments, there's nothing more infuriating
| than the other person appointing themselves as some kind of
| modern-day Socrates and "teaching" you.
| PrimeMcFly wrote:
| Forgive me, if I may be so kind as to ask, but what makes you
| think such people are trying to "teach" you?
| paulluuk wrote:
| Hm, that's an interesting question. What makes you want to
| ask this?
| mlsu wrote:
| Like many people, I took a college course that talked all about
| Socrates and we read the Apologia and stuff.
|
| I had assumed that it was basically all fiction. That there was
| some guy who kept being annoying by asking questions, so much
| so that he was put to death, it's just a little too cute to be
| historical fact.
|
| And that all of us discussing this stuff as if it actually
| happened is actually just an exercise in reiterating the
| truthiness of the underlying idea; that if we said it was
| fiction at the start, we'd be doing lit analysis, rather than
| philosophy.
|
| Right?
| rck wrote:
| No, there's pretty good evidence that Socrates did exist,
| though there is debate about what he actually believed and
| taught, since in Plato's later dialogues the character of
| Socrates typically was advancing Plato's position. See here:
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socratic_problem
| mlsu wrote:
| I don't necessarily mean that Socrates is a totally
| fictional character. Just that basically everything we know
| about his "character" is made up.
|
| Like, he did exist, but the Socrates that we know doesn't
| talk like that, didn't have those ideas, wasn't that
| clever, didn't do any of the stuff described, wasn't put to
| death in such a fashion, etc. Those were all just made up
| as a way for Plato to forward his ideas; because in those
| days you couldn't just dryly talk about ideas, you needed
| to have characters and a story and so on.
| olddustytrail wrote:
| If you're going to assume that, then why not assume that
| Plato was equally made up and just a story?
| beebmam wrote:
| Asimov is such a poignant writer, I can't help but smile when I
| read him.
| uranusjr wrote:
| I'm glad he decided to invent an English Literature
| correspondent to pick on, and also the 1990s was a better
| society than one that votes to poison a disliked person.
| zafka wrote:
| It is also funny that he gave this character the name of one
| of his editors, who he actually disassociated from when said
| editor started going a bit off the rails.
| [deleted]
| neerajk wrote:
| New life goal: "There is very little that is new to me; I wish my
| corresponders would realize this."
|
| Second life goal: To have corresponders
| the_af wrote:
| Asimov had a humorous style of writing. Of course when he wrote
| "there is very little that is new to me" he was aware of how
| arrogant that sounded; he's playing this for laughs. He could
| also be quite self-deprecating.
| [deleted]
| avgcorrection wrote:
| I guess all models are wrong but some of them are useful. And
| more useful than others--
|
| > In the first sentence, he told me he was majoring in English
| Literature, but felt he needed to teach me science. (I sighed a
| bit, for I knew very few English Lit majors who are equipped to
| teach me science, but I am very aware of the vast state of my
| ignorance and I am prepared to learn as much as I can from
| anyone, however low on the social scale, so I read on.)
|
| I couldn't imagine writing the parenthetical.
| adasdasdas wrote:
| The real response to the guy is, "so what". Who cares if we used
| to be wrong, that's how empiricism works, we posit falsifiable
| claims until they're proven wrong.
| dang wrote:
| Related:
|
| _The Relativity of Wrong (1989)_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29811788 - Jan 2022 (5
| comments)
|
| _The Relativity of Wrong (1989)_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24055125 - Aug 2020 (2
| comments)
|
| _The Relativity of Wrong (1989)_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17818069 - Aug 2018 (11
| comments)
|
| _The Relativity of Wrong (1989)_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13082585 - Dec 2016 (16
| comments)
|
| _The Relativity of Wrong by Isaac Asimov (1989)_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11654774 - May 2016 (60
| comments)
|
| _Isaac Asimov: The Relativity of Wrong (1989)_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9629797 - May 2015 (138
| comments)
|
| _Isaac Asimov - The Relativity of Wrong (1989)_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1147968 - Feb 2010 (32
| comments)
| foldr wrote:
| Funny, if you like this particular variety of snark. But there's
| a huge bait and switch in the argument. The English major doubts
| that we have "finally got the basis of the Universe straight" (in
| Asimov's words). But Asmimov's primary example of the "relativity
| of wrong" is the shape of the Earth, which is a particular fact
| about a particular object. Being charitable, almost no-one (not
| even the kind of English Lit majors that HN loves to hate!)
| doubts that we can learn facts about the shape and size of
| particular objects. It doesn't necessarily follow from this that
| we should be optimistic about the fundamental correctness of our
| best theories in the physical sciences. As the English Lit major
| was no doubt aware, there were plenty of people at the turn of
| the 20th century who thought that physics was basically finished
| and that there was nothing left to do except add more decimal
| places to the results.
| moefh wrote:
| I don't think that's quite right. Another example given by
| Asimov is Newton's equations, which are obviously not facts
| about a particular object. We still today accept them as right
| (in the right contexts), teach them in universities, and use
| them when they're useful.
|
| I think Asimov's point is that if someone in Newton's time said
| "I'm glad to live in a time when we finally understand
| everything there is to know about the motion of cannon balls",
| they'd be justified: even though technically there were
| relativistic corrections to be made, they're pretty much
| irrelevant for the stated purposes (understanding how
| cannonballs move). And so in the same way he thinks he's
| justified in saying that in the 20th century we finally
| understood the basics of the Universe, even though we still
| don't know (in his words):
|
| > the nature of the big bang and the creation of the Universe,
| the properties at the center of black holes, some subtle points
| about the evolution of galaxies and supernovas, and so on
| foldr wrote:
| I don't think the cannon ball example quite works because
| 18th century fluid dynamics wasn't up to the job. (People
| weren't firing cannon balls in a vacuum.)
|
| Apart from that, I take your point, but I don't find Asimov's
| attempt to argue that Einstein's theory is just a minor
| correction to Newton's very convincing. If this were really
| the case it would make it a bit of a mystery why Einstein was
| a big deal. The two theories make very similar predictions in
| a wide range of circumstances, but they're very different
| conceptually. Asimov is similarly breezy about quantum
| mechanics, but physicists at the time didn't seem to see
| quantum mechanics as just a very minor adjustment to
| classical physics.
| XorNot wrote:
| Except you don't need fluid dynamics for cannon ball
| trajectory over sufficiently short distances, or with the
| constraints on barrel quality and reproducibility of the
| time.
|
| The same is true of quantum mechanics: physicists were
| excited about it, but it went going to make existing
| experimental results and predictions incorrect in context.
|
| The Bohr model of the atom is completely "wrong" but it's
| still useful enough to foundational in understanding
| nuclear magnetic resonance analysis.
| foldr wrote:
| Yes, scientific progress tends to be empirically
| conservative. But people outside science (like the Eng
| Lit major) are often less interested in specific
| predictions than in the overall picture of reality
| painted by our current best scientific theories. This
| picture does change quite radically from time to time.
| The history of different models of the atom (going back
| to the radically incorrect 'plum pudding' model) is a
| good example. To point this out is not to attack science.
| Indeed, science would be far less interesting and
| exciting if its entire history was nothing but a sequence
| of small and incremental refinements.
| mistermann wrote:
| Very much agree...and furthermore:
|
| > It doesn't necessarily follow from this that we should be
| optimistic about the fundamental correctness of our best
| theories in the physical sciences.
|
| The disagreement was over _the universe_ , so my first question
| is: does "the universe" include humans, or not (and: _who
| decides the fact of the matter_ )? Because all one has to do is
| watch the news to realize we certainly don't have _everything_
| fully figured out....I often wonder if our (from my vantage
| point anyways) belief that we "pretty much"[1] do may
| exacerbate this.
|
| [1] Colloquial language, figures of speech, etc are a fantastic
| _and endless_ source of delusion, that typically cannot be
| realized.
| LucasLanglois wrote:
| Interestingly, this highlights that despite popular belief, the
| scientific process is not about being right or wrong but rather
| what's powerful.
|
| A theory is promoted because it is powerful in explaining
| observations and providing tools for humanity until it is
| improved by the next one. You can build a gun with gravitation
| but you need relativity for a rocket.
| pixl97 wrote:
| > the scientific process is not about being right or wrong but
| rather what's powerful.
|
| Ugh, this is something that bothers me all to hell and back
| about the non-scientific minded.
|
| "Your science was wrong about (this minute detail), therefore
| whatever completely made up bullshit I thought up without any
| supporting evidence is totally valid"
| feoren wrote:
| All models are wrong; some models are useful.
| jgeada wrote:
| Quoting from the article "Newton's theory of gravitation, while
| incomplete over vast distances and enormous speeds, is
| perfectly suitable for the Solar System. Halley's Comet appears
| punctually as Newton's theory of gravitation and laws of motion
| predict. All of rocketry is based on Newton, and Voyager II
| reached Uranus within a second of the predicted time. None of
| these things were outlawed by relativity."
|
| We need relativity to correct the atomic clocks on GPS
| satellites so as to maintain positional accuracy to a few feet,
| but getting the satellites up there needed only Newtonian
| mechanics.
| justrealist wrote:
| The impressive thing about Asimov -- incidental to the quality of
| the writing -- is he probably sat down and blasted that out in an
| hour top-to-bottom with no edits. Volumetrically one of the most
| impressive authors in history.
| iainmerrick wrote:
| There's a funny story in one of his essays where he's talking
| to Heinlein about this strange habit other writers have of
| endlessly redrafting.
|
| "I just write down the first draft, read it through from start
| to finish and write up the second draft, and that's it," Asimov
| says.
|
| "What's the second draft for?" Heinlein says.
| the_af wrote:
| This seems in contrast to Borges, who was never done with
| corrections and redrafting, going as far as to buy back an
| edition of a book already in print so that he could make
| additional corrections (or so the story goes...).
|
| Anyway, I'm a fan of Asimov.
| mikhailfranco wrote:
| I'm a fan of Borges.
| lainga wrote:
| One supposes Borges was able to arrive at the final copy by
| alternately holding up the first and second drafts in any
| predefined pattern he wanted...
| knodi123 wrote:
| see also: George Lucas "fixing" the star wars movies and
| making the originals impossible to find.
| olddustytrail wrote:
| Have you ever seen the first draft of Star Wars? It's
| pretty bad.
| jimmaswell wrote:
| It made the point in the first few paragraphs and the rest was
| a long winded beating of a dead horse. It could have done with
| more editing.
| kr0bat wrote:
| Going from discussing the curvature of the Earth to the
| finite speed of light wasn't to dunk on the student, it was
| to demonstrate the increasing relative correctness of our
| universal theories.
| jimmaswell wrote:
| I suppose I would've been more engaged if I didn't already
| know all of these historical anecdotes. As it is I quickly
| began skimming.
| irrational wrote:
| Not me. I'd like a lot more. Particularly I'd like this part
| fleshed out:
|
| > This particular thesis was addressed to me a quarter of a
| century ago by John Campbell, who specialized in irritating
| me.
|
| I only know of Campbell from "A Hero With a Thousand Faces".
| I'd love to read more about how Campbell specialized in
| irritating Asimov.
| arkadyark wrote:
| You might be thinking of Joseph Campbell, not John Campbell
| (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_W._Campbell)
| irrational wrote:
| Thank you for clarifying my mistake!
| nemo wrote:
| The author of "A Hero With a Thousand Faces" is Joseph
| Campbell. I think he might be talking about John W.
| Campbell who was a fellow sci-fi author.
| irrational wrote:
| Thank you for clarifying my mistake!
| the_af wrote:
| > _I'd love to read more about how Campbell specialized in
| irritating Asimov_
|
| Campbell (John, not Joseph; you got the wrong Campbell)
| specialized in irritating lots of people.
|
| First, he was one of Scientology's early advocates
| (Dianetics, actually), and all kinds of pseudoscientific
| ideas. Even other scifi authors thought this weird.
|
| His pseudoscientific ideas obviously clashed with Asimov's
| atheist and rational mindset about the world.
|
| Campbell also bought into bizarre scifi/racist/supremacist
| theories which were not well received by his fellow
| authors. He was very pushy and meddlesome as an editor --
| that alone wasn't unusual in scifi & pulp magazines of the
| time -- but he was also obsessed about specific and weird
| directions that he insisted most stories he published must
| follow.
|
| For example, Philip K. Dick didn't really like Campbell's
| insistence that most scifi stories must feature telepaths,
| and also that telepaths must be benevolent and superior and
| take over humanity. PKD thought this reminded him too much
| of Nazi "master race" theories, and didn't like Campbell as
| a result.
|
| The one good thing in Campbell's record: he wrote "Who Goes
| There", the original story then turned into the "Thing"
| movies. The story is quite good, too!
| irrational wrote:
| Thank you for clarifying my mistake!
| mcguire wrote:
| This is a very common thing in writers from the 1920s to the
| 60s---they made their living selling articles to magazines that
| paid a fraction of a cent per word. If they wanted to eat, they
| had to hammer something out as fast as physically possible.
| [deleted]
| fnovd wrote:
| As much as I enjoy Asimov, I have to say that he is wrong. The
| gap between what we know and what is true might have decreased
| immensely, but it is still infinite. Any quantifiable increase is
| 0 in relation to infinity. Asimov's counter-argument that we are
| quantifiably less wrong than we were in the past simply does not
| overcome this core issue. If there is an infinite amount of
| knowledge separating what we know from what is true, then we can
| learn an infinite amount of things and still have an infinite
| amount of things left to learn.
|
| To feel justified in thinking the universe is "essentially"
| understood is to be OK with one's concept of the "essential
| nature" of the universe to be inherently divergent from a future
| concept, which according to Asimov's own argument is going to be
| more correct than our own.
|
| To me, it reads as a bitterness towards mortality, a sort of sour
| grapes: the insights we will have about the universe at some
| future time must not be very interesting compared to what we know
| now, because I won't be around to know them.
|
| edit: I guess I shouldn't be surprised that Asimov's perspective
| is shared here. It's very easy to understand the essential nature
| of the universe when you define the universe as the parts you
| understand.
|
| I don't think human beings in 1000 years will look at our current
| understanding as special in any way. As transformative as our era
| is, it will be dwarfed by the scale of transformation in future
| eras. It's just the most transformative era _so far_. That 's
| temporal bias, nothing more.
| ndsipa_pomu wrote:
| I think your use of infinity isn't particularly helpful here as
| it leads to the contradiction that knowing more doesn't lessen
| the knowledge gap, whereas it does appear to do so.
|
| Maybe, a better interpretation would be that as we learn and
| understand more, we approach the limits of knowledge. Now it
| may take an infinite amount of knowledge to actually reach the
| limits of knowledge (c.f. an infinite series can approach a
| finite value, but takes forever to get there), but it can still
| be shown that we are getting nearer.
|
| The other aspect is that as we understand more, we appreciate
| that there's even more to understand, but that can be thought
| of as our precision increasing and looking at the available
| knowledge in greater detail.
| fnovd wrote:
| There is no contradiction because there is no limit of
| knowledge.
|
| The limit of y = e^x is infinity. You can keep increasing x
| and y will increase exponentially. So you plot the function,
| let's say with the x axis going up to 10 and the y axis going
| up to e^10. The graph shows very clearly that, while there
| was progress before, we have even _more_ progress _now_.
| Exponentially more, even! What came before is dwarfed by what
| we have now; if you look at the range of y for x values 9-10
| you can see how little of a difference all those others
| values (1-8) had between one another, compared to the changes
| we have now. The rate of change is so high that we 're
| basically in an era of semi-complete knowledge. We must be at
| some kind of inflection point, this is truly a unique era of
| understanding.
|
| Then you repeat. Set the x axis to 100, and the y axis up to
| e^100. Oh wait, it's the same graph. That's because it's
| always the same graph. It's scale-invariant. The slope at
| every point is always whatever y is.
|
| We're always at right at the limit of explaining the
| "essential nature" of the universe because the "essential
| nature" of the universe can only be (to us) what we can
| understand it to be. We chose e^10 as the limit of the y-axis
| in our first exercise because that's all the knowledge we
| knew about. We chose e^100 as the limit of the y-axis in our
| second exercise because that, too, was all the knowledge we
| knew about. Choosing these random values as the limits of our
| function (i.e. the limit of the "essential nature of the
| universe") leaks information into the visualization that will
| always paint a picture showing that we're at the most
| transformative time there ever was.
|
| When we do it that way, we will always come to the same
| _wrong_ conclusion. We will always dwarf what came before and
| be dwarfed by what comes after. To think that we're actually
| living in an inflection point is hubris, it's wishful
| thinking, it's the sour grapes of mortality.
| ndsipa_pomu wrote:
| > There is no contradiction because there is no limit of
| knowledge.
|
| I don't think we know enough to be able to state that
| definitively. It's feasible that the universe behaves
| mathematically (it seems to so far) and thus possible to
| gain a thorough understanding of the underlying principles,
| if not the specific facts (c.f. with understanding how to
| produce integers yet not "knowing" all the integers).
|
| Even if the universe doesn't have underlying rules to be
| discovered, there's still a limit to number of
| configurations available to particles etc. within our
| visible universe. Although that number might appear to be
| infinite to us, it's actually drastically closer to zero
| than to infinity.
|
| So, if there is indeed some finite limit, then using y =
| e^x would be the wrong function as that doesn't approach a
| finite value.
| fnovd wrote:
| This leads to a more fundamental question: What is the
| universe?
|
| Is the optimal move in an a given chess board considered
| knowledge? If so, can't we create entirely new sets of
| knowledge from the emergent properties of an arbitrary
| set of rules called a "game"? If we can create an
| infinite set of arbitrary combinations of rules and
| states (games), then knowledge should be infinite. Maybe
| not all knowledge is scientifically applicable, but we
| have learned a great deal about science and engineering
| from studying chess. In fact, we are starting to learn
| more about _learning_ as a process and not as some
| magical thing that human beings can do, just from
| studying the best way to make decisions in this totally-
| contrived and scientifically-useless game.
|
| Taking this a step further, let's look at the animal
| kingdom. If learning about the intricacies of the mating
| habits of birds can help an arbitrary bird increase its
| impact on the future gene pool, is that knowledge not
| worth something to the bird? To bird society? Are the
| things we learn about ourselves knowledge? They certainly
| have utility. Is there any limit to what we can learn
| about ourselves, about the stochastic process of life? Is
| life not part of the universe?
|
| Is computer science even knowledge? It seems if we're
| more directly concerned with the physical nature of the
| universe, we ought not to care about what the system of a
| computer actually does; we only need to care about what
| it is, about its physical structure. Except, that's not
| actually how we pursue knowledge or science at all.
|
| In my view, Asimov's sentiment can be reduced to a
| complete tautology: we're at the point where we know
| almost everything there is to know about the things we
| think we can know.
| ndsipa_pomu wrote:
| There aren't an infinite number of chess positions, moves
| or even games, so that's not a good example. It's
| possible to come up with a number game that could have
| infinite possibilities, but that doesn't mean that the
| universe could even contain some of the options within
| our visibility. Our current state of knowledge about the
| universe strongly suggests that there's a finite limit to
| the available knowledge (I.e. between the Planck scale
| and the visible horizon due to the speed of light).
|
| A googolplex looks to be the first number we've found
| that is too big to be contained in our universe.
| fnovd wrote:
| You're right--chess is a decidedly finite game. Even so,
| we have not "solved" this simple, finite game--not even
| close! If we're not close to solving such a trivial game,
| how can we be close to the limit of the knowledge of the
| universe?
|
| A googolplex is "too big to be contained" in our universe
| yet here we are talking about it. We can perform
| operations on this number, compare it to other numbers,
| and even come up with mathematical proofs showing that
| it's too big to exist. There are an infinite amount of
| numbers larger than a googolplex and we could have an
| infinite amount of conversations about them. The material
| limit of the universe does not limit our ability to
| create information, to learn things.
|
| There isn't enough space in the universe for an infinite
| series, either, yet we can (and do) still use them, we
| reason about them, we learn from them. We can even reduce
| some infinite series to a finite number. The material
| bounds of the universe are not a limit of knowledge.
| ndsipa_pomu wrote:
| I think you're mistaking the map for the territory. A
| googolplex is a representation of a number, but not the
| number itself, although it's simple enough that we can
| get away with using the representation as it's obvious
| what the form of the number would be. However a number
| such as tree(3) is unimaginably bigger, but more
| crucially, we don't know anything about the form of the
| number beyond its size and we can't sensibly use it in
| calculations.
|
| Now both of those numbers are finite and we could try to
| figure out how many numbers we could "describe" such as
| tree(3), but that would be limited by the number of
| symbols (i.e numbers, operators, letters and words) that
| could be used (i.e we would have less than a googolplex
| different numbers that could be represented using maths,
| language and thought). That's still going to be a finite
| number.
| jgeada wrote:
| I think you missed the entire point of the essay. You should
| actually read it.
|
| Science is incremental, revolutions in science mostly just
| adjust the edges of our knowledge, at more and more extreme
| corner cases (extreme high energies, extreme high/low
| temperatures, etc). No, we absolutely don't know it all, but as
| always, new knowledge and theories will only affect those
| edges, and refine the predictions for the nth+1 decimal place.
|
| By and by, the science that directly affects our daily lives
| has remained stable and most progress has been in the
| engineering to put all this knowledge to practical and
| efficient use.
| mistermann wrote:
| I like how in English one can make it appear if one is
| skilfully and logically dismissing an argument without
| actually even trying to. I don't presume that this was your
| intent, but the phenomenon is quite interesting and I quite
| confidently believe _dangerous_ (in that it contributes to
| some degree to inaccurate models in the minds of those who
| ingest such text, and those models are what drive action,
| much of which is harmful...which is easy to see in {choose
| your outgroup}, but far less easy to see in one 's ingroup).
| glitchc wrote:
| Well, we can start by asserting that we do not know everything.
| We can assert this from the contra positive: If we did know
| everything, then we would have an acceptable solution to all of
| our problems. Since we do not, it stands to reason that we
| don't know everything.
|
| Once we accept that the assertion is valid, then it raises the
| likelihood that our understanding of the world is incomplete in
| some way. And furthermore is incomplete to different degrees
| along multiple dimensions of knowledge. Whether incomplete or
| wrong is a word choice, it doesn't change what's missing. So
| with each new discovery, our understanding improves, our
| wrongness decreases.
| kubanczyk wrote:
| > The gap between what we know and what is true might have
| decreased immensely, but it is still infinite.
|
| The other two commenters have taken different approaches to
| infinity, but it seems that your argument doesn't hold even for
| a plain-as-in-real-numbers infinity.
|
| Being satisfied with finite knowledge gains, I have no hope to
| achieve 1% of infinity (or any other fraction of infinity).
|
| The universe is infinite in size, another assumption. If I'd
| fly on vacation to Tenerife, a quantifiable shift of my
| position by mere thousands of miles would be "zero in relation
| to infinity". Yet, it's not unimportant for my rest. Talking
| about infinity doesn't automatically cancel all the finite
| measurements and bring them to zero.
| cnity wrote:
| One way to see Asimov's "infinity of wrongness" is perhaps as a
| fractal. You could view the bulbs in the mandelbrot as being a
| kind of knowledge, and the "main bulb" occupying the majority
| of the area belonging to the set as the set of truths known
| about our universe. The mandelbrot set is infinite in
| complexity, however its area is finite and bounded!
|
| Or as ironing out the wrinkles on a great big t-shirt, where
| each wrinkle is sub-wrinkled with smaller wrinkles and so on.
| We've "ironed out" the biggest wrinkles, there are infinitely
| more but they are much smaller. We're perhaps over half-way
| ironed, in a quantitative sense.
| fnovd wrote:
| I disagree fundamentally. You may as well ask me to imagine
| Earth as a disc, with multiple rotating spotlights shining
| down on it and a giant ice wall around the edges. I
| understand what the image is trying to convey, I simply do
| not agree that this is the shape of the thing I experience.
| nathan_compton wrote:
| One might plausibly assert that while the particulars of the
| universe may be infinite, the fundamental rules which govern
| the universe are finite and thus at least in principle entirely
| knowable. While I don't think the 20th century makes an air
| tight case for the latter, I think it isn't an unreasonable
| conclusion to draw from 20th Century Physics either.
| ndsipa_pomu wrote:
| It's surprising that we find ourselves in a universe which
| does appear to obey certain laws. There's a whole bunch of
| assumptions made to help us understand how things work and it
| turns out they're mostly correct. i.e. It's more astounding
| that we CAN understand the universe and how well maths can
| act as a model/language to understand it.
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2023-09-12 23:02 UTC)