[HN Gopher] Alexandre Grothendieck, The New Universal Church (19...
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Alexandre Grothendieck, The New Universal Church (1971) [pdf]
Author : vinnyvichy
Score : 66 points
Date : 2024-07-26 02:31 UTC (20 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (publish.uwo.ca)
(TXT) w3m dump (publish.uwo.ca)
| vinnyvichy wrote:
| Translated by JS Bell of the Inequalities fame
| da-bacon wrote:
| Edited
|
| Wait this is a different John Bell
| (https://publish.uwo.ca/~jbell/) than the Bell Inequalities
| (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Stewart_Bell). But
| strangely that John Bell has also worked on quantum foundations
| (looks like quantum logic and contextuality).
| graemep wrote:
| This is something I have noticed and that frustrates me a great
| deal. Science is treated as received wisdom handed down by the
| authorities.
|
| I have made great efforts to avoid that in my children's
| education. A hint for people in the UK - look at science GCSEs
| other than the usual physics, chemistry biology trio. My daughter
| did astronomy and it was far better as it had a lot of
| explanation of historical cosmology and what the evidence has
| been for various theories.
| strikelaserclaw wrote:
| this makes sense as schools mostly exist just to create an
| educated workforce to can run the machine. Even science is big
| business these days, just keep cranking out papers of dubious
| value and reproducibility
| nbulka wrote:
| Can you BELIEVE people once thought the beginning of everything
| was 6,000 years ago? Thank goodness every sane person is
| unequivocally certain that it was actually 14 billion years now!
| bmacho wrote:
| Funny thing that this a misconception (popularized by Hawking).
| The Big Bang is not "the beginning of everything" (as Hawking
| used to say), just an event in the past, that we are fairly
| certain that it happened, and when it happened.
| nbulka wrote:
| Certain?
| swayvil wrote:
| I see your point. It implies that the way we see and think is
| bound to this mass of people that we are in the midst of. Like
| a pebble in the midst of an avalanche.
|
| How could you unbind yourself? For better seeing etc.
| Koshkin wrote:
| Well, the difference is that "6000" is not science, while "14
| billion" is. And no, there is no need to "believe in science"
| (although many indeed do); the idea that "scientific fact" (let
| alone a hypothesis) is something that is "unequivocally
| certain" is certainly wrong.
| nbulka wrote:
| 6,000 was the guess of technology 200 years ago. They had
| their reasons. Today 14 billion is the technology of our
| time. We have our reasons. My point is that technological
| progression seems to support the idea that 14 billion will
| seem like a silly number 200 years from now, in a similar
| way.
| wffurr wrote:
| This would have been a lot better with a "steelman" version of
| the "scientism credo" rather than the exaggerated form presented.
| I found it pretty alienating to try to read this, even though I
| probably agree with the thesis on the whole.
| nbulka wrote:
| That would be interesting! I'd love for someone to tackle that.
| jkingsbery wrote:
| Yes, the case would be stronger with specific examples.
| However, I did not find it alienating, as examples of these 6
| myths readily come to mind. We see people appeal to expertise
| all the time, rather than using their expertise to explain.
| There are lots of examples of people trying to "solve"
| economics problems rather than, as Thomas Sowell puts it,
| realizing that there are no solutions but only trade-offs.
| BalinKing wrote:
| As I understood the essay, Grothendieck's argument is precisely
| that the exaggerated form _is_ what many believe. So I 'm not
| sure a steelman would make sense here, given that his point is
| to argue against a specific set of widespread beliefs.
| empath75 wrote:
| The steel-man version of "scientism" wouldn't be scientism, it
| would just be a straight-forward explanation of the scientific
| method and empiricism that acknowledges its limits.
| superb-owl wrote:
| I've been working on translating and summarizing some of
| Grothendieck's esoteric writing from his later years.
| It's...pretty bananas. But some fascinating stuff--clearly
| brilliant and a little crazy.
|
| https://github.com/superb-owl/grothendieck
| vcdimension wrote:
| When I click on any of the pdf's it says: Error rendering
| embedded code, Invalid PDF
| OliverJones wrote:
| In my time as a biochem undergrad and grad student, I had to
| memorize and regurgitate the Krebs cycle no less than four times.
| None of those romps through it addressed the question of how TF
| did those scientists figure it out.
|
| There's the science of Karl Popper, where no statement can be
| considered scientific unless it is possible to devise an
| experiment to disprove it. And there's the science of education,
| where we memorize and regurgitate stuff.
|
| Those two are stunningly different from each other. Yet, it's not
| possible to get to the mysterious work of actually doing Popper-
| level science without memorizing what went before. The critiques
| of this paper still ring true half a century on. I wish more
| students of science from primary school on up would pester their
| teachers and each other with the question, "how do you know?"
| jessriedel wrote:
| I sort of agree, but compared to just learning the Krebs cycle
| it takes _orders of magnitude_ more time to understand either
| (a) the actual historical discovery /justification or (b) a
| modern streamlined justification that would allow one in
| principle to reconstruct it. It's already very challenging to
| teach biology students as much as they need to know without
| justifications. For them to be able to justify all they know
| would dramatically reduce how much they could be taught. And
| indeed, the _desire_ by teachers that their students should
| know the justifications has often led to the actual history
| being so grossly compressed and caricaturized that it 's
| downright _misleading_ -- worse than not knowing.
|
| It seems the best we can hope for is to mostly just learn the
| known facts and, separately, the _abstract_ way in which
| scientific theories are justified, augmented by a close
| analysis and understanding of a few case studies. Even that if
| of course rarely achieved in education.
|
| Incidentally, folks in this thread may be interested in "Proofs
| and Refutations" by Imre Lakatos, where it's shown how this
| same issue is (surprisingly) found to exist almost as badly in
| academic mathematics, despite math being thought of as one of
| the few places where the experts learn how to the edifice is
| built from the ground up.
| alan-crowe wrote:
| Grothendieck starts by asserting that the experimental-deductive
| method has been spectacularly successful for four hundred years.
| His article never gets round to revisiting this. He never notices
| the bi-modal quality of the successes. Some truly spectacular
| successes, quite a lot of knowledge that hints weakly, and a
| rather empty middle ground.
|
| Think about gyroscopes. Newton invents classical mechanics, with
| no specific rules for rotating objects. You get a top
| mathematician, Euler, to work out the implications for rotating
| objects. The implications are weird and implausible. But it turns
| out that they are spot on. People invent gyroscopes and exploit
| the truly spectacular success of the experimental-deductive
| method.
|
| Another example could be James Clerk-Maxwell building on the work
| of Faraday and Ampere to come up with Maxwell's Equations. The
| equations predict electro-magnetic radiation, so Hertz goes
| looking and, yes, it is really there!
|
| I want a name for this kind of truly spectacular success. I'll
| build on the gyroscope example and call it _Gyro-gnosis_.
|
| But think instead of Hook's law. Spring force is proportional to
| extension. Kind of. It is useful enough if you don't pull too
| hard on your spring, but it is not fundamental. Or think of
| animal testing in medicine. There is some theory. All life on
| Earth today is based on DNA. We know the branching of the tree of
| life; mice are mammals, so mouse research should link up with
| human health, sometimes, a little bit. But theory and experiment
| combine to give us hints rather than wisdom.
|
| I want a name for this kind of weak knowledge that so often leads
| to disappointment. Stealing the T from Theory, taking the whole
| of hint, and the end of wisdom, I'm going to write _Thintdom_.
|
| By page six, Grothendieck is on to his manifesto "Fighting
| Scientism". We are certainly in trouble, due to thintdom being
| granted the prestige of gyrognosis. But if you want to push back,
| you have to drive a wedge between thintdom and gyrognosis. Since
| gyrognosis is truly spectacularly successful, fighting against it
| is just banging your head against a brick wall. One needs to
| separate out the weaker forms of knowledge so that one can
| criticize thintdom without its proponent being able to use
| gyrognosis as a shield. If you let thintdom and gyrognosis be
| joined together as empiricism, your criticism cannot be made to
| stick because the parts of empiricism that work well, work far to
| well to be criticized.
|
| It is now commonplace to notice the depth of the technology
| stack, from applications, down through compilers, assemblers, the
| block diagram level of hardware, the register level, the logic
| gate level, the transistor level, circuits with parasitic
| inductance and capacitance, doping and migration, statistical
| effects,... When you build up the way, some of the lower level
| features are preserved, such as conservation of momentum. And
| some of the lower level features help with understanding the
| higher levels. But medicine offers a clear warning that Nature's
| stack is too deep. Four hundred years of "success" have taught us
| what that leads to. Sometimes you get gyrognosis. Sometimes you
| get thintdom.
|
| By the end of his piece Grothendieck is pining his hopes on
| "inner class contradiction" within the scientific caste. Maybe. I
| think the most promising starting point is to push back against
| linguist poverty. We have only one word, _empiricism_ for, err,
| empiricism, so the four hundred year old empirical lesson that
| the successes of empiricism are bimodal goes unnoticed.
| romwell wrote:
| I have been really hoping that these myths would not be as
| prevalent today as they are.
|
| Personally, I've been greatly influenced by Feynman's great
| autobiography _Surely you must be joking, Mr. Feynman!_ [1].
|
| In it, the Noble-prize winning Scientist conveys a worldview that
| has none of the _scientism_ derided by Grothendieck in this
| essay. It is a vaccine against scientism, if you may - and a
| triumph of curiosity, common and uncommon sense.
|
| Feynman also coined[2] the description of physics (which I use to
| describe mathematics as well), that annihilates the high-priest
| narrative of "reason" as the driving force:
|
| _Physics is like sex: sure, it may give some practical results,
| but that 's not why we do it_
|
| In the end, we do things _because they feel good_ and _because
| they feel right_.
|
| Mathematics more so than anything else; we are guided by a sense
| of _beauty_ and what 's _interesting_. It 's an art of story-
| telling and surprise.
|
| Much of science is motivated by emotion and little else: the
| _curiosity_ to untangle the patterns of how things work, drive to
| be _the first_ to solve the mystery, the mission of doing _the
| right thing_.
|
| Without those, science doesn't science. Feynman gave one
| straightforward example: the military wasn't telling some of the
| lower-ranking researchers of the Manhattan project _what_ they
| were working on, and _why_. They were lagging behind. Once they
| were told, at Feynman 's insistence, that they were a part of a
| project to build a bomb that would end the war, they exceeded all
| expectations.
|
| Because with that, their work gained a _purpose_ , and gave
| _hope_.
|
| In the end, how we _feel_ about things is everything. Scientists
| are just those people who feel good when they find out how things
| work, just like engineers are those people who feel good when
| they _make_ things work (or make things that work).
|
| [1]
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surely_You%27re_Joking,_Mr._Fe...!
|
| [2] Disputed, but it's definitely in his character:
| https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Richard_Feynman
| gwbas1c wrote:
| Science can only prove what can be observed, because the
| scientific method relies on observation.
|
| There are some things that we can make very accurate guesses on:
| IE, evolution. No one observed evolution over millennia, yet
| there is an abundance of observable evidence that makes the
| theory of evolution generally accepted as fact.
|
| But there are things that we can not observe, and can only make
| educated guesses at. Today that's multiverse theory. In the past,
| it was the theory of relativity.
|
| ---
|
| My point is that to call science a religion (Scienceism) is to
| fundamentally misunderstand the limits of observation, and the
| purpose of religion. Science will never tell us why we're here,
| is there a god, does it love us, is the human soul immortal, do
| all dogs go to heaven, ect. At best it can only explain religion
| from anthropomorphic principles.
|
| And that's okay.
|
| The problem comes when scientists think that observed fact (or
| generally accepted fact) negates religion, or when religious
| people think science is a replacement for religion.
| bazoom42 wrote:
| If you want to argue something is a religion, you need to define
| "religion". Often it is defined vaguely enough that anything can
| be called a religion. But if the word can be applied to
| everything it is meningless.
| jessriedel wrote:
| This is _not_ an essay about whether science "is" a religion,
| or how "religiony" it is.
|
| He's just arguing that the way science is treated by the
| general public has many specific negative features, and that
| many of these are held in common with religion. And he's quite
| clear about what those aspects here.
| nbulka wrote:
| something that makes metaphysical claims. Like the age of the
| universe, and a universal telos or lack thereof.
| ants_everywhere wrote:
| This is a pretty confused piece of writing and totally falls
| apart on myth 4:
|
| > Only the opinion of the experts in a given field has any
| bearing on any question in this field.
|
| This has nothing to do with science and is really a point about
| the division of labor/economics.
|
| The rejection of experts has been a hallmark of scientific and
| mathematical thinking since ancient times, most famously in
| Socrates. But the thread continues throughout all of human
| history.
|
| I like Grothendieck's work a lot, and I know he had
| unconventional politics. But this reads like one of the many
| Marx-influenced attempts from that period to discredit the idea
| of truth.
| fraggle_ wrote:
| It falls apart since the beginning: the science definition
| given does not match the real world process of building
| scientific knowledge.
| zvolsky wrote:
| Whenever this topic comes up, I'm reminded of this brilliant
| answer by Nelson Alexander
|
| > First, I would say that many supporters of science are too
| proselytizing, too reluctant to admit the ambiguities and
| necessary limits of science. This merely harms their own case by
| opening them up the same skeptical attacks so easily employed
| against religion. ... see
| https://philosophy.stackexchange.com/a/29763
|
| and a comment on that answer by Martin Argerami:
|
| > +1. A few months ago a person of the ones you mention in your
| first paragraph posted on FB, as a blow against religion, that
| religion was so unreasonable that parents had to train their kids
| since youth in order to believe. And I remember thinking at the
| time about all the years of training needed to get any non-
| superficial commanding of science.
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