[HN Gopher] What Comes After Science?
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What Comes After Science?
Author : porteclefs
Score : 22 points
Date : 2025-11-14 14:32 UTC (8 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.science.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.science.org)
| tech_ken wrote:
| > With the emergence of AI in science, we are witnessing the
| prelude to a curious inversion - our human ability to
| instrumentally control nature is beginning to outpace human
| understanding of nature, and in some instances, appears possible
| without understanding at all.
|
| A while ago I read "Against Method" by Paul Feyerabend and
| there's a section that really stuck with me, where he talks about
| the "myth" of Galileo. His point is that Galileo serves as sort
| of the mythological prototype of a scientist, and that by picking
| at the loose ends of the myth one can identify some contradictory
| elements of the popular conception of "scientific method". One of
| his main points of contention is Galileo's faith in the
| telescope, his novel implementation of bleeding edge optics
| technology. Feyerebend argues that Galileo invented the telescope
| as primarily a _military_ invention, it revolutionized the
| capabilities of artillery guns (and specifically naval
| artillary). Having secured his finances with some wealthy
| patrons, he then began to hunt for nobler uses of his new tool,
| and landed on astronomy.
|
| Feyerabend's point (and what I'm slowly working up to) is that
| applying this new (and untested) military tool to what was a very
| ancient and venerable domain of inquiry was actually kind of
| scandalous. Up until that point all human knowledge of astronomy
| had been generated by direct observation of the phenomenon; by
| introducing this new tool between the human and the stars Galileo
| was creating a layer of separation which had never been there
| before, and this was the source of much of the contemporary
| controversy that led to his original censure. It was one thing to
| base your cosmology on what could be detected by the human eye,
| but it seemed very "wrong" (especially to the church) to insert
| an unfeeling lump of metal and glass into what had before been a
| very "pure" interaction, which was totally comprehensible to the
| typical educated human.
|
| I feel like this article is expressing a very similar fear, and I
| furthermore think that it's kind of "missing the point" in the
| same way. Human comprehension is frequently augmented by
| technologly; no human can truly "understand" a gravitational wave
| experientially. At best we understand the n-th order 'signs' that
| the phenomenon imprints on the tools we construct. I'd argue that
| LLMs play a similar role in their application in math, for
| example. It's about widening our sensor array, more than it is
| delegating the knowledge work to a robot apprentice.
| mjamesaustin wrote:
| Fascinating point, and one I think can definitely apply here.
|
| Though there is a key difference - Galileo could see through
| his telescope the same way, every time. He also understood what
| the telescope did to deliver his increased knowledge.
|
| Compare this with LLMs, which provide different answers every
| time, and whose internal mechanisms are poorly understood. It
| presents another level of uncertainty which further reduces our
| agency.
| spongebobstoes wrote:
| LLMs can be deterministic machines, you just need to control
| the random seeds and run it on the same hardware to avoid
| numerics differences.
|
| Gradient descent is not a total black box, although it works
| so well as to be unintuitive. There is ongoing
| "interpretability" research too, with several key results
| already.
| nahuel0x wrote:
| Deterministic doesn't necessarily mean that can be
| understood by an human mind. You can think about a process
| entirely deterministic but so complex and with so many
| moving parts (and probably chaotic) that a humble human
| cannot comprehend.
| tech_ken wrote:
| > Though there is a key difference - Galileo could see
| through his telescope the same way, every time.
|
| Actually this is a really critical error- a core point of
| contention at the time was that he _didn 't_ see the same
| thing every time. Small variations in the lens quality,
| weather conditions, and user error all contributed to the
| discovery of what we now call "instrument noise" (not to
| mention natural variation in the astronomical system which we
| just couldn't detect with the naked eye, for example the
| rings of Saturn). Indeed this point was so critical that it
| led to the invention of least-squares curve fitting (which,
| ironically, is how we got to where we are today). OLS allowed
| us to "tame" the parts of the system that we couldn't
| comprehend, but it was emphatically _not_ a given that
| telescopes had inter-measurement reliability when they first
| debuted.
| graemep wrote:
| I have been meaning to read Feyerband for a while but never
| did. I think Against Method sounds like a good starting point.
|
| Did Feyerband also not argue that Galileo's claim that
| Copernicus's theory was proved was false given it was not the
| best supported hypothesis by the evidence available at the
| time.
|
| I very much agree with your last paragraph. Telescopes are
| comprehensible.
| tech_ken wrote:
| > Did Feyerband also not argue that Galileo's claim that
| Copernicus's theory was proved was false
|
| My reading of AM was that it's less about what's "true" or
| "false" and more about how the actual structure of the
| scientific argument compares to what's claimed about it. The
| (rough) point (as I understand it) is that Galileo's
| scientific "findings" were motivated by human desires for
| wealth and success (what we might call historically
| contingent or "poltical" factors) as much as they were by
| "following the hard evidence".
|
| > Telescopes are comprehensible.
|
| "Comprehensible" is a relative measure, I think.
| Incomprehensible things become comprehensible with time and
| familiarity.
| pnathan wrote:
| There was an attitude at a University about 20 years ago when I
| was an undergrad, around, hmm, stochastic learning algorithms.
| And the attitude was, "we don't care why or how it works - we
| want to make the outcome happen".
|
| I found it intellectually reprehensible then, and now.
| timoth3y wrote:
| > "we don't care why or how it works - we want to make the
| outcome happen".
|
| That's the primary difference between science and engineering.
|
| In science, understating how it works is critical, and doing
| something with that understanding is optional. In engineering
| getting the desired outcome is critical, and understanding why
| it works is optional.
| Razengan wrote:
| Blindness?
| nancyminusone wrote:
| To be pedantic, engineering.
| amelius wrote:
| Philosophy
| gmuslera wrote:
| By some perspective, what made us unique was our ability to have
| a hint on the future, pattern recognition, superstition, religion
| and then science gave us a grasp of the outcome of what happens
| in a future, usually after an action by ourselves. Things are of
| bad luck, or a sin, or should not be done because some negative
| outcome. So, following that line of thinking, what will come next
| are better predictive capabilities, taking more out of guessing
| or "this is random" and more deterministic. Think in
| psichohistory telling what will happen with cultures and
| civilizations for centuries giving the current state of things.
|
| Anyway, the "we have AI, so will be soon no more things to
| discover" is similar to what was thought at the end of the XIX
| century that everything was discovered and only increasing
| precision was left. At the very least, we have a lot of learning
| about ourselves and how we understand reality, in the light of
| what AI could uncover with different methods than the traditional
| ones.
| adgh wrote:
| > With the emergence of AI in science, we are witnessing the
| prelude to a curious inversion - our human ability to
| instrumentally control nature is beginning to outpace human
| understanding of nature, and in some instances, appears possible
| without understanding at all.
|
| This is not entirely new. For example, we had working (if
| inefficient) steam engines and pumps long before the development
| of thermodynamics. We had beer and cheese long before
| microbiology.
| metalman wrote:
| I think it's probably best to wait until we get to science, and
| then figure out an after.
| tim333 wrote:
| I guess after AI figures out how many r's there are in Strawberry
| it'll move on to quantum gravity.
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