I wonder if this is where the writers of The Big Bang Theory came up with this conversation:
Stuart: Oh, Sheldon, I'm afraid you couldn't be more wrong.
Sheldon: More wrong? Wrong is an absolute state and not subject to gradation.
Stuart: Of course it is. It's a little wrong to say a tomato is a vegetable, it's very wrong to say it's a suspension bridge.
Jun8 · 1h ago
"The young man then quoted with approval what Socrates had said on learning that the Delphic oracle had proclaimed him the wisest man in Greece. "If I am the wisest man," said Socrates, "it is because I alone know that I know nothing."
This is a common misquote with similar frequency to perhaps "Play it again, Sam." In his Apology (not meaning apology, from apo-logia, speaking for oneself, i.e. defense) Socrates says:
"Although I do not suppose that either of us knows anything really beautiful and good, I am better off than he is – for he knows nothing, and thinks he knows. I neither know nor think I know" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_know_that_I_know_nothing?utm...).
The context is that Socrates was puzzled by the Delphic Oracle's declaration that he is the wisest man. The man mentioned is an unnamed politician who was known to be wise.
timerol · 3h ago
"All models are wrong. Some models are useful." is the way that I have heard this thesis quipped. I suppose "All models are wrong. Some models are more wrong than others." would fit Asimov's points better, but I've never actually heard that one
procaryote · 1h ago
Also, some models aren't even wrong, because they fail to make testable predictions
The map-territory relation is possibly a better fit?
More specifically how Alfred Korzybski put it: "The map is not the territory".
The map will never be the territory, and we are just looking for better maps.
lapcat · 2h ago
This wonderful essay explicitly criticizes one genre of philosophy popular in academic English literature departments, but I think it also implicitly undermines another genre popular in academic English-speaking philosophy departments. The latter frequently propound something like the so-called correspondence theory of truth, yet they also treat truth and falsity as absolutes, mutually exclusive. There's no room for approximation and degrees of accuracy.
> The basic trouble, you see, is that people think that "right" and "wrong" are absolute; that everything that isn't perfectly and completely right is totally and equally wrong. However, I don't think that's so. It seems to me that right and wrong are fuzzy concepts
> Theories are not so much wrong as incomplete.
accidentallfact · 1h ago
It isn't only about the degree of wrongness, but its type:
1. Vacuous, which provide no useful insight beyond what is obviously deducible. Such as "nearsightedness is caused by the wrong shape of the eye".
2. Vanity, which provide useless elaboration of something that is very well understood in a much simpler form, with no realistic hope of any future insight. Such as most of linguistics.
3. Pointless. Explain something that is difficult to get to know,
because it matters so little. While technically correct, the actual facts matter so little that they result in no realistic improvement of any kind, and no decisions are changed as the result of the new knowledge. Such as the age of Earth.
4. Theoretically wrong, those that the article is talking about. Even though theoretically wrong, the are so nearly equivalent to the actual truth, that the difference doesn't matter in practice.
5. Practically wrong. Those that "sound good" so that people stick to them, in spite of massive evidence to the contrary. Such as that obesity is caused by overeating, in spite of the near universal failure in practice, in the last instance of Ozempic making people look like walking corpses, rather than anything like a healthy body. This is the kind of errors meant by those who write to people like Asimov.
csours · 51m ago
I firmly believe, more and more each day, that the human mind does not seek truth or correctness, it primarily seeks satisfaction.
The context for satisfaction is different for every individual human. Some parts of the context are shared (to various degrees). These 'shared contexts' we might call rationality, or science, or society, or religion.
Another part of the problem is that satisfaction is recursive.
We may evaluate something based on:
1. Correctness
2. Completeness
3. Satisfaction
This is obviously self-referential because if something is incorrect or incomplete, then it is also unsatisfying.
For instance, if you are only aware of Electromagnetism, then Maxwell's equations are correct, complete, and satisfying. And then some jerk discovers neutrons.
Anyway, this whole comment may fit into your first three points; or it may help someone understand a failure to communicate.
Hunpeter · 1h ago
You have made an interesting point but I think your arguments would have more force if you exercised some restraint in categorically stating your opinions about what is wrong and in what way as facts, basically.
Anyway, while I agree on these other types of "wrong" being important, I don't know about calling 1-3. wrong, per se. Also, I'm curious what part of linguistics you consider to belong under the "vanity" label, and why it would be apt to call "pointless" facts (like the age of the Earth) wrong.
procaryote · 1h ago
Obesity is caused by overeating though, at the very least in the same sense that nearsightedness is caused by the wrong shape of the eye.
raincole · 1h ago
> obviously deducible. Such as "nearsightedness is caused by the wrong shape of the eye"
Not obvious at all. According to Wikipedia it was discovered in 17th century. About only half century earlier than the discovery of bacteria.
IAmBroom · 45m ago
While far-sightedness can be caused by shape, OR loss of elasticity in the lens as one ages.
pearlsontheroad · 3h ago
"...when I say I am glad that I live in a century when the Universe is essentially understood, I think I am justified."
Funny how we don't even fully understand what happens when we crack our joints but are certain about how the Universe "essentially" works.
nathan_compton · 3h ago
Well, let me ask you: when your joints crack do you think the process involves something other than physics at its most basic level?
You may take it from my posing the question that I think its obvious that joint cracking is determined by physics, and I do tend to think this, but I think a compelling argument can at least be made that joint cracking might not actually be fundamentally determined by physics.
jstanley · 2h ago
Replace the word "physics" with "God" and see if it sounds substantially different.
The whole argument in your linked article rubs me the wrong way.
I think I speak for a lot of people when I say that the two ways "because science" or "because God" might stop my curiosity is because 1) I'm looking for a good master's thesis topic (a problem well in my past, thank God) or 2) my immediate survival is dependent on much more immediate problems than the underlying physical phenomena that cause e.g. a lightbulb to work.
I think there's a certain set of people who, in the absence of more pressing concerns, drop everything upon experiencing a new phenomenon, in a quest to understand it. That certainly describes parts of my life. But the writer takes as axiomatic that most people don't drop everything to study whatever event because they were told that it had been explained, and not, you know, because their landlord doesn't accept white papers on the fundamental properties of reality in lieu of rent.
I think embedded in the statement "because science" is the connotation that ignorance of the underlying phenomenon is not itself dangerous to the people experiencing it. If I observed a bright light literally burning people, and I ask "how is that light burning people?", the person who knows more but simply says "its physics" shares some culpability with me if I just accept that answer incuriously and then get burnt by the light.
But if people aren't getting burnt, is it intellectual laziness to grunt "good enough" on my way to more pressing matters? Perhaps. This whole essay reads to me as a way to judge and find wanting the kind of person whose apparent curiosity stopped at how to do their job. The point of the essay (although it took a lot of curiosity on my part to tease it out) is apparently to say "don't let the fact that it is known stop you from finding out yourself", but it ended up sounding like "if you're taking anything as received knowledge, you're abdicating your responsibility as a thinking entity".
glenstein · 2h ago
> but I think a compelling argument can at least be made that joint cracking might not actually be fundamentally determined by physics.
Wait, what? I was nodding along with you for making a great point about how this doesn't threaten our confidence in the venture of physicalist explanation of the natural world (sidebar, I think we actually do know quite a bit about what happens when joints crack), but I had a record scratch here. I think I agree with your upshot but I wouldn't agree that a compelling argument, tentative or otherwise, can be made for a non physical explanation.
MangoToupe · 3h ago
We don't even know if the laws of physics are constant. In fact, it is literally unknowable.
> a compelling argument can at least be made
Absolutely! But it takes a good deal of hubris to call this knowledge.
glenstein · 2h ago
Apologies in advance if I'm missing your point (I might be!) but... If it turns out that the laws are not constant, our present understanding would be retained as a special case of a broader theory and the local predictive capabilities would still be real in their scope. And leveraging a "we don't know" to cash out as affirmative skepticism tries to make the absence of data do more than it can.
As you noted, the degree of uncertainty we're currently wrestling with is also what we would see if it was true that the laws were constant. Kind of like an anthropic principle but on behalf of the constancy of the universe's laws.
This may all be restating what you said in a different way, but for me the important upshot is that I don't come out of it with an attitude that our current physical understanding is a tenuous house of cards and that I need to watch my step because, who knows, the strong nuclear force could change at any moment.
jibal · 2h ago
It takes a good deal of hubris to deny it.
sophacles · 2h ago
We don't even know if the gods are real... in fact it is literally unknowable.
An yet... you're claiming to know what the gods like and don't like. Strange.
andreareina · 3h ago
The way that Sean Carroll says it is something along the lines of, the fundamental physics governing everyday life are understood. That is to say, we can solve for what an electron, proton, etc (or a collection of maybe a few dozen) are going to do in a particular experiment. The second and third generations of charged particles are excluded from the definition of everyday life, as are any other hypothesized particles because they require higher energy levels than are relevant. Explaining how the brain works is excluded as not being fundamental, though in principle a sufficiently advanced computer would be able to simulate it.
glenstein · 2h ago
Exactly, that's where my mind went too. I think people are tempted by a well-meaning skepticism to think that it's high minded to be skeptical of affirmative claims of knowledge, but it ends up throwing a very hard won model of everyday physics out the window.
I saw a very frustrating live "debate" between Dr Blitz (monikor of a really cool science communicator and irl PhD physicist) and a flat earther, where the flat earther essentially borrowed these arguments (eg observations aren't really predictive or generalizable or able to count in favor of specific theories, confirmed theories have no special status etc) to dismiss the evidentiary support of the earth being round. It's an intellectual car crash masquerading as a respectable position on scientific foundations.
ta2112 · 3h ago
> 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.
Savage.
lcuff · 56m ago
A philosophy professor I had when I was an undergrad, asked the question "Why did Socrates deliver the Apology in such a way that was clearly unapologetic and designed to annoy the Athenians"? His answer was that he thought Socrates was old and wanted to go out with a bang. I thought his answer had merit, and also that it was an answer I, at 19, would never have come up with. At 70, I go "oh, yeah, baby".
glitchc · 3h ago
Sounds like he finally pissed off the wrong guy.
wavemode · 1h ago
This is an article where I agree with its statements yet disagree with its spirit. Everything written is true, but has to be put in context - the writer he's responding to was challenging these specific claims:
> what I meant was that we now know the basic rules governing the Universe ... We also know the basic rules governing the subatomic particles and their interrelationships ... What's more, we have found that the galaxies and clusters of galaxies are the basic units of the physical Universe ...
I don't think there's anything wrong with making casual statements of this sort, but I also don't think there's anything wrong with pointing out (in response) that these statements are philosophically unrigorous. I mean, what makes something a "basic rule", and how can you tell that we have apprehended all such rules in existence?
the_af · 43m ago
I don't think this is right.
The English Lit professor was effectively arguing we cannot know anything; that any certainty is bound to be as false as any debunked theories of the past; that people of the past were also sure of their silly notions and look where they are now; etc.
This is what Asimov is essentially rejecting (in a humorous manner; it's important to know Asimov's claims that he's "never wrong" were to be taken with humor. He was quite the comedian).
Essentially, Asimov is saying to the professor:
- You are wrong in believing nothing can be known.
- You are not saying anything new or unknown to people of science. We've thought of this and have ways of testing our ideas and of evaluating their relative merits.
- Even if two theories are wrong, it's misleading to conclude "everything is equally wrong, therefore assertions about the universe are reckless", because there are degrees of wrongness, and some knowledge that is wrong is nevertheless more useful than other knowledge that is also wrong.
We can never know if this English Lit professor ever existed or is just a rhetorical device by Asimov, but we do know one thing for certain:
He/she was wrong. The wrong kind of wrong, too!
moomin · 25m ago
So is this essay the source of “Less Wrong”?
MontyCarloHall · 2h ago
>In his discussions of such matters as "What is justice?" or "What is virtue?" he took the attitude that he knew nothing and had to be instructed by others. By pretending ignorance, Socrates lured others into propounding their views on such abstractions. Socrates then, by a series of ignorant-sounding questions, forced the others into such a mélange of self-contradictions that they would finally break down and admit they didn't know what they were talking about.
See also: Jordan Peterson et al. Our tendency to favor logical correctness over empirical correctness is one of our most dangerous cognitive biases. It's very easy to convince people to believe arguments that are perfectly logically consistent in their own self-constructed reality but have no bearing on empirical reality, over arguments that conform to empirical reality but may not have perfect logical consistency. Empirical reality is messy and it's difficult to construct a perfectly consistent set of axioms around it; constructed reality is neat and thus trivial to construct sets of perfectly consistent axioms around it.
nathan_compton · 3h ago
All I can say about this as a dude with a doctorate in physics and an interest in foundations is: I guess, dude, if this is how you want to live your life.
It isn't that I agree with the person who wrote Asimov the letter (in fact, based on his description, I frankly wonder if the letter writer wasn't my father). Its just that there is something subtly wrong with Asimov's view of the progress of scientific knowledge.
At least its extremely instrumentalist. If we think of knowledge as a sort of temporary mental state which lives between setting up a physical state and making a measurement, then, yes, knowledge has progressed in exactly the way that Asimov is saying. And that is nothing to sneeze at.
But like consider quantum mechanics. People still cannot make heads or tails of what the ontology of quantum mechanics is, despite some compelling stories. And that makes perfect sense since QM is not compatible with special or general relativity! So its dumb to try and make sense of what QM tells us about what is. So why not try to understand what the ontology of QFT is? This seems reasonable, since QFT is capable of making correct predictions (at least in the scattering regime) and is invariant. But no one on earth can write down a coherent mathematical theory of QFT, so interpretation is even more difficult than QM. And this is yet to even try to tackle with conceptual gap between GR and QM/QFT, where we genuinely are perplexed but at least have good reason to think that the final interpretation of QM or spacetime has to have something to do with the way that the two theories interact.
From this point of view as our ability to connect experiment with outcome has increased our ability to actually say what it is we are even talking about outside of the purely instrumental has decreased since the 19th Century. Back then we though we knew that there were atoms or electrons or whatever. Light waves or photons. Now, I would argue very strenuously, we genuinely have no understanding at all of what those things are outside of a set of purely instrumental definitions which leave a lot to be desired.
My personal understanding here is that really there are no electrons, photons, quantum fields, masses, gravity. There is just the single substance of the universe which we have learned to manipulate and predict with ever improving precision (in limited cases). Maybe that is knowledge? Doesn't always feel like it.
kitchi · 3h ago
As another dude with a doctorate in Physics, I have to disagree with you (at least somewhat).
> From this point of view as our ability to connect experiment with outcome has increased our ability to actually say what it is we are even talking about outside of the purely instrumental has decreased since the 19th Century. Back then we though we knew that there were atoms or electrons or whatever. Light waves or photons. Now, I would argue very strenuously, we genuinely have no understanding at all of what those things are outside of a set of purely instrumental definitions which leave a lot to be desired.
I disagree with this entirely. The existence of QFT, and our knowledge of the inconsistency between say GR and the quantum realm does not negate the idea of photons and electrons as real, measurable quantities. The fact that we have GR does not negate the fact that we still use Newtonian gravity in regimes where it is sufficiently accurate.
All the new knowledge we have learned still is (and absolutely must be) consistent with our old knowledge that has been proven correct in the regimes that they were proven correct.
This is effectively what Asimov is saying (as I understand anyway) - the knowledge that the Earth is a sphere does not invalidate the assumption that the Earth is flat approximately and locally.
I would also argue that the only things we can "know" are what you call the instrumental definitions. We only know what we measure. The rest is interpretation, and self-consistent understanding.
String theory can tell me that we have several dimensions etc but until we have a way to measure and check it remains a conceptual framework to make predictions, rather than a description of how things really are.
GR is much closer to a description. It told us about the precession of mercury, it told us to account for time dilation so we can use GPS satellites. It also predicted black holes, which were conceptually consistent but it's only been in the last ~ 5 years that we have the closest thing yet to experimental verification with the Event Horizon Telescope and gravitational wave measurements. If another theory comes along and explains all of GR with a different explanation for black holes, we will need still more accurate measurements to discriminate between the two theories. Knowledge is only as accurate as we can measure.
glenstein · 2h ago
I agree much more with your approach.
The way I've heard it best described is these notions of electrons and photons etc will still be retained as a special case of whatever theory supersedes them, which is critical, because that's at the heart of the "relativity of wrong" argument.
Some take the prospect of a future revision of theories to mean our present state of knowledge is no different than any prior failed theory, which I think is an urgently, catastrophically wrong, catastrophically confused way to regard the history of scientific knowledge.
the_af · 50m ago
Your answer here puzzles me.
It seems as if you intended it to disagree with Asimov, while in practice you actually agree with him and disagree with the English Lit professor?
nineplay · 1h ago
When my daughter was in middle school we were discussing some concept she learned in Biology that wasn't precisely wrong but wasn't right in all use cases. I told her that a model didn't have to be true to be useful. She said "that's a good way of thinking about it" and since that is such a rare complement from a teenager I have remembered it ever since.
I think it's true though. I think a good science teacher can say from the outset that we don't know it all and science is always growing and changing.
lionkor · 4h ago
This was a very fun read. Any other recommendations similar to this?
gradschool · 2h ago
Lockhart's Lament
glenstein · 2h ago
For a second I thought this was an invocation of one of those informal "laws" (like a Murphys Law or Sturgeons Law), describing the feeling of finding one great thing and lamenting that there's no more like it.
So the hope of it being your discovery of a rich genre turns into the lament that it's one of one (how I feel about the Three Body Problem). But no, it's a real book. And looks like a great suggestion from what I can tell on wiki.
business_liveit · 4h ago
Yes, This was a very very very fun read.........
jebarker · 3h ago
He’s not wrong
helle253 · 3h ago
If nothing else, I'm glad one of the great agrees with me that Socrates was a twat.
My wife and I always argue about that, she loves Socrates and I find him utterly insufferable. Plato didn't do him any favors.
lapcat · 2h ago
In fairness, I don't think Socrates went around Athens quizzing people chosen randomly on the street. He was having conversations with the wealthy and/or powerful who were also arrogant and considered themselves wise. Making fools of these people is of course what got him into big trouble eventually.
IAmBroom · 41m ago
Which doesn't mean he wasn't an insufferable douche.
The Relativity of Wrong (1989) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37481166 - Sept 2023 (124 comments)
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)
Stuart: Oh, Sheldon, I'm afraid you couldn't be more wrong.
Sheldon: More wrong? Wrong is an absolute state and not subject to gradation.
Stuart: Of course it is. It's a little wrong to say a tomato is a vegetable, it's very wrong to say it's a suspension bridge.
This is a common misquote with similar frequency to perhaps "Play it again, Sam." In his Apology (not meaning apology, from apo-logia, speaking for oneself, i.e. defense) Socrates says:
"... ἔοικα γοῦν τούτου γε σμικρῷ τινι αὐτῷ τούτῳ σοφώτερος εἶναι, ὅτι ἃ μὴ οἶδα οὐδὲ οἴομαι εἰδέναι."
"Although I do not suppose that either of us knows anything really beautiful and good, I am better off than he is – for he knows nothing, and thinks he knows. I neither know nor think I know" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_know_that_I_know_nothing?utm...).
The context is that Socrates was puzzled by the Delphic Oracle's declaration that he is the wisest man. The man mentioned is an unnamed politician who was known to be wise.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Not_even_wrong
More specifically how Alfred Korzybski put it: "The map is not the territory".
The map will never be the territory, and we are just looking for better maps.
> The basic trouble, you see, is that people think that "right" and "wrong" are absolute; that everything that isn't perfectly and completely right is totally and equally wrong. However, I don't think that's so. It seems to me that right and wrong are fuzzy concepts
> Theories are not so much wrong as incomplete.
1. Vacuous, which provide no useful insight beyond what is obviously deducible. Such as "nearsightedness is caused by the wrong shape of the eye".
2. Vanity, which provide useless elaboration of something that is very well understood in a much simpler form, with no realistic hope of any future insight. Such as most of linguistics.
3. Pointless. Explain something that is difficult to get to know, because it matters so little. While technically correct, the actual facts matter so little that they result in no realistic improvement of any kind, and no decisions are changed as the result of the new knowledge. Such as the age of Earth.
4. Theoretically wrong, those that the article is talking about. Even though theoretically wrong, the are so nearly equivalent to the actual truth, that the difference doesn't matter in practice.
5. Practically wrong. Those that "sound good" so that people stick to them, in spite of massive evidence to the contrary. Such as that obesity is caused by overeating, in spite of the near universal failure in practice, in the last instance of Ozempic making people look like walking corpses, rather than anything like a healthy body. This is the kind of errors meant by those who write to people like Asimov.
The context for satisfaction is different for every individual human. Some parts of the context are shared (to various degrees). These 'shared contexts' we might call rationality, or science, or society, or religion.
Another part of the problem is that satisfaction is recursive.
We may evaluate something based on:
This is obviously self-referential because if something is incorrect or incomplete, then it is also unsatisfying.For instance, if you are only aware of Electromagnetism, then Maxwell's equations are correct, complete, and satisfying. And then some jerk discovers neutrons.
Anyway, this whole comment may fit into your first three points; or it may help someone understand a failure to communicate.
Anyway, while I agree on these other types of "wrong" being important, I don't know about calling 1-3. wrong, per se. Also, I'm curious what part of linguistics you consider to belong under the "vanity" label, and why it would be apt to call "pointless" facts (like the age of the Earth) wrong.
Not obvious at all. According to Wikipedia it was discovered in 17th century. About only half century earlier than the discovery of bacteria.
Funny how we don't even fully understand what happens when we crack our joints but are certain about how the Universe "essentially" works.
You may take it from my posing the question that I think its obvious that joint cracking is determined by physics, and I do tend to think this, but I think a compelling argument can at least be made that joint cracking might not actually be fundamentally determined by physics.
See also https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/L22jhyY9ocXQNLqyE/science-as...
I think I speak for a lot of people when I say that the two ways "because science" or "because God" might stop my curiosity is because 1) I'm looking for a good master's thesis topic (a problem well in my past, thank God) or 2) my immediate survival is dependent on much more immediate problems than the underlying physical phenomena that cause e.g. a lightbulb to work.
I think there's a certain set of people who, in the absence of more pressing concerns, drop everything upon experiencing a new phenomenon, in a quest to understand it. That certainly describes parts of my life. But the writer takes as axiomatic that most people don't drop everything to study whatever event because they were told that it had been explained, and not, you know, because their landlord doesn't accept white papers on the fundamental properties of reality in lieu of rent.
I think embedded in the statement "because science" is the connotation that ignorance of the underlying phenomenon is not itself dangerous to the people experiencing it. If I observed a bright light literally burning people, and I ask "how is that light burning people?", the person who knows more but simply says "its physics" shares some culpability with me if I just accept that answer incuriously and then get burnt by the light.
But if people aren't getting burnt, is it intellectual laziness to grunt "good enough" on my way to more pressing matters? Perhaps. This whole essay reads to me as a way to judge and find wanting the kind of person whose apparent curiosity stopped at how to do their job. The point of the essay (although it took a lot of curiosity on my part to tease it out) is apparently to say "don't let the fact that it is known stop you from finding out yourself", but it ended up sounding like "if you're taking anything as received knowledge, you're abdicating your responsibility as a thinking entity".
Wait, what? I was nodding along with you for making a great point about how this doesn't threaten our confidence in the venture of physicalist explanation of the natural world (sidebar, I think we actually do know quite a bit about what happens when joints crack), but I had a record scratch here. I think I agree with your upshot but I wouldn't agree that a compelling argument, tentative or otherwise, can be made for a non physical explanation.
> a compelling argument can at least be made
Absolutely! But it takes a good deal of hubris to call this knowledge.
As you noted, the degree of uncertainty we're currently wrestling with is also what we would see if it was true that the laws were constant. Kind of like an anthropic principle but on behalf of the constancy of the universe's laws.
This may all be restating what you said in a different way, but for me the important upshot is that I don't come out of it with an attitude that our current physical understanding is a tenuous house of cards and that I need to watch my step because, who knows, the strong nuclear force could change at any moment.
An yet... you're claiming to know what the gods like and don't like. Strange.
I saw a very frustrating live "debate" between Dr Blitz (monikor of a really cool science communicator and irl PhD physicist) and a flat earther, where the flat earther essentially borrowed these arguments (eg observations aren't really predictive or generalizable or able to count in favor of specific theories, confirmed theories have no special status etc) to dismiss the evidentiary support of the earth being round. It's an intellectual car crash masquerading as a respectable position on scientific foundations.
Savage.
> what I meant was that we now know the basic rules governing the Universe ... We also know the basic rules governing the subatomic particles and their interrelationships ... What's more, we have found that the galaxies and clusters of galaxies are the basic units of the physical Universe ...
I don't think there's anything wrong with making casual statements of this sort, but I also don't think there's anything wrong with pointing out (in response) that these statements are philosophically unrigorous. I mean, what makes something a "basic rule", and how can you tell that we have apprehended all such rules in existence?
The English Lit professor was effectively arguing we cannot know anything; that any certainty is bound to be as false as any debunked theories of the past; that people of the past were also sure of their silly notions and look where they are now; etc.
This is what Asimov is essentially rejecting (in a humorous manner; it's important to know Asimov's claims that he's "never wrong" were to be taken with humor. He was quite the comedian).
Essentially, Asimov is saying to the professor:
- You are wrong in believing nothing can be known.
- You are not saying anything new or unknown to people of science. We've thought of this and have ways of testing our ideas and of evaluating their relative merits.
- Even if two theories are wrong, it's misleading to conclude "everything is equally wrong, therefore assertions about the universe are reckless", because there are degrees of wrongness, and some knowledge that is wrong is nevertheless more useful than other knowledge that is also wrong.
We can never know if this English Lit professor ever existed or is just a rhetorical device by Asimov, but we do know one thing for certain:
He/she was wrong. The wrong kind of wrong, too!
See also: Jordan Peterson et al. Our tendency to favor logical correctness over empirical correctness is one of our most dangerous cognitive biases. It's very easy to convince people to believe arguments that are perfectly logically consistent in their own self-constructed reality but have no bearing on empirical reality, over arguments that conform to empirical reality but may not have perfect logical consistency. Empirical reality is messy and it's difficult to construct a perfectly consistent set of axioms around it; constructed reality is neat and thus trivial to construct sets of perfectly consistent axioms around it.
It isn't that I agree with the person who wrote Asimov the letter (in fact, based on his description, I frankly wonder if the letter writer wasn't my father). Its just that there is something subtly wrong with Asimov's view of the progress of scientific knowledge.
At least its extremely instrumentalist. If we think of knowledge as a sort of temporary mental state which lives between setting up a physical state and making a measurement, then, yes, knowledge has progressed in exactly the way that Asimov is saying. And that is nothing to sneeze at.
But like consider quantum mechanics. People still cannot make heads or tails of what the ontology of quantum mechanics is, despite some compelling stories. And that makes perfect sense since QM is not compatible with special or general relativity! So its dumb to try and make sense of what QM tells us about what is. So why not try to understand what the ontology of QFT is? This seems reasonable, since QFT is capable of making correct predictions (at least in the scattering regime) and is invariant. But no one on earth can write down a coherent mathematical theory of QFT, so interpretation is even more difficult than QM. And this is yet to even try to tackle with conceptual gap between GR and QM/QFT, where we genuinely are perplexed but at least have good reason to think that the final interpretation of QM or spacetime has to have something to do with the way that the two theories interact.
From this point of view as our ability to connect experiment with outcome has increased our ability to actually say what it is we are even talking about outside of the purely instrumental has decreased since the 19th Century. Back then we though we knew that there were atoms or electrons or whatever. Light waves or photons. Now, I would argue very strenuously, we genuinely have no understanding at all of what those things are outside of a set of purely instrumental definitions which leave a lot to be desired.
My personal understanding here is that really there are no electrons, photons, quantum fields, masses, gravity. There is just the single substance of the universe which we have learned to manipulate and predict with ever improving precision (in limited cases). Maybe that is knowledge? Doesn't always feel like it.
> From this point of view as our ability to connect experiment with outcome has increased our ability to actually say what it is we are even talking about outside of the purely instrumental has decreased since the 19th Century. Back then we though we knew that there were atoms or electrons or whatever. Light waves or photons. Now, I would argue very strenuously, we genuinely have no understanding at all of what those things are outside of a set of purely instrumental definitions which leave a lot to be desired.
I disagree with this entirely. The existence of QFT, and our knowledge of the inconsistency between say GR and the quantum realm does not negate the idea of photons and electrons as real, measurable quantities. The fact that we have GR does not negate the fact that we still use Newtonian gravity in regimes where it is sufficiently accurate.
All the new knowledge we have learned still is (and absolutely must be) consistent with our old knowledge that has been proven correct in the regimes that they were proven correct.
This is effectively what Asimov is saying (as I understand anyway) - the knowledge that the Earth is a sphere does not invalidate the assumption that the Earth is flat approximately and locally.
I would also argue that the only things we can "know" are what you call the instrumental definitions. We only know what we measure. The rest is interpretation, and self-consistent understanding.
String theory can tell me that we have several dimensions etc but until we have a way to measure and check it remains a conceptual framework to make predictions, rather than a description of how things really are.
GR is much closer to a description. It told us about the precession of mercury, it told us to account for time dilation so we can use GPS satellites. It also predicted black holes, which were conceptually consistent but it's only been in the last ~ 5 years that we have the closest thing yet to experimental verification with the Event Horizon Telescope and gravitational wave measurements. If another theory comes along and explains all of GR with a different explanation for black holes, we will need still more accurate measurements to discriminate between the two theories. Knowledge is only as accurate as we can measure.
The way I've heard it best described is these notions of electrons and photons etc will still be retained as a special case of whatever theory supersedes them, which is critical, because that's at the heart of the "relativity of wrong" argument.
Some take the prospect of a future revision of theories to mean our present state of knowledge is no different than any prior failed theory, which I think is an urgently, catastrophically wrong, catastrophically confused way to regard the history of scientific knowledge.
It seems as if you intended it to disagree with Asimov, while in practice you actually agree with him and disagree with the English Lit professor?
I think it's true though. I think a good science teacher can say from the outset that we don't know it all and science is always growing and changing.
So the hope of it being your discovery of a rich genre turns into the lament that it's one of one (how I feel about the Three Body Problem). But no, it's a real book. And looks like a great suggestion from what I can tell on wiki.
My wife and I always argue about that, she loves Socrates and I find him utterly insufferable. Plato didn't do him any favors.