Against Method
en.wikipedia.org
en.wikipedia.org
Peter Lipton was my advisor for an undergraduate thesis in HPS at Cambridge, sadly he died quite young
[1] http://www.amazon.com/Inference-Explanation-International-Li...
I have found the History and Philosophy of Science, to be s great preparation for a career as a developer, unfortunately the US CIS trends to disagree making visa/green-card stuff harder than it should have been
[1] http://www.amazon.com/Killing-Time-Autobiography-Paul-Feyera...
I felt like his entire deal was supremely boring. Take anything interesting, whether a scientific theory, a poem, a piece of music or a religious text. The interestingness of any of these things comes from there being layers of meaning and a structure one has to spend time learning.
If someone's only activity is putting together a straw version of science and knocking it down, again and again and again, there's nothing interesting (even if the rationalism isn't entirely "straw" in the sense that some philosophers of science have pretty rigid schemas, the process of merely saying "no that wrong" remains dull).
People compared Thomas Kuhn's work to Feyerabend and I think that's a disservice to Kuhn. Kuhn's work, correct or incorrect, involved a broad effort to draw a picture of what actually scientists actually does. Feyerabend's work seemed to me to be little more than a sort of act of petty vengeance, endless effort to tell STEM people "ha, you're not so smart after all".
Indeed, it seems to mainly be that. The funny thing was that back in Berkeley circa 1982, philosophy professors had about the level of prestige as chemistry professors, possibly a significant amount more. Chemistry indeed had a bigger building but philosophers seemed to get more invites to the cool parties.
Which is to say that Feyerabend's critique of science was something that resonates with the people wanting to critique this society's values, wanting to critique a society which values what science can accomplish more than say, the activity of carefully contemplating and observing life. But the problem is this approach is really poor and confused place to begin such a critique. We should be directly saying that things that don't advance technology should be valued rather than engaging in "attacking the prestige of science". But of course this kind of irrationalism-as-radicalism has only continued in today world of "call-out culture" and such.
One might call Feyerabend a very early troll of science but with all the weaknesses of trolling-pretending-to-be-politics.
There's obviously the issue that Kuhn applied to Kuhn is somewhat problematic.
There is probably no deterministic "for(;;) { do X }" formula for learning in complex real-world domains. You could make an anthropic argument here: if there were, life and intelligence would not exist since whatever thermodynamically-favored auto-catalytic processes life does could be replaced by non-living systems of lower entropy and higher probability. The existence of life as the chaotic, ever-changing, evolving system that it is is itself evidence for the non-closed-form nature of evolutionary learning.
I've thought for some time that the slow down in "fundamental invention" that some have observed since roughly the late 1960s to early 1970s is the result of "scientific fundamentalism" and Skepticism. Look into the backgrounds and thoughts of people like Einstein, Tesla, Engelbart, Turing, Edison, or Schrodinger, and you generally will not find them to be fundamentalist-positivist Skeptics.
It seems like the general intellectual trend from roughly 1970 until maybe 2010 or so was the rise of fundamentalism of every kind, both religious and secular... maybe due to an emotional desire for the comfort of absolute certainty in the face of rapid dislocating change.
There also seems to be an economic drive to commoditize humans. If learning can be completely systematized, then science can be rendered into an assembly line process that can be run by bureaucracies, scaled as needed, and in which individual workers can be treated as a 'human resource' commodity. Bureaucracies cannot deal with multi-modality, unpredictable and eccentric 'genius,' etc., so to admit that these things are required for the progress of science is to admit that bureaucracies are inherently limited.
Of course this being startup central, we all know this. If learning could be systematized and bureaucratized, there would be no startups. Big companies, VC funds, and banks would just execute whatever deterministic steps are required to yield progress and maintain 100% ownership of everything.
PS: Abstractly, gradient descent seems to get you stuck in a local optima, but fractals for example are not 'safe' places. Look to close at the head of a pin and there be dragons.
The danger is in fundamentalism -- in the elevation of a single method or philosophy of science to an absolute One True Way and the (always attendant) purging and blacklisting of anyone who doesn't follow it.
It seems to me that a lot of people, especially CS and math types, are really deeply uncomfortable with the sort of multi-modality I'm talking about. Studying biology deeply made me really comfortable with it. It's really very rational too. If you understand learning, search, combinatorics, and evolutionary theory, the absolute requirement for multi-modality is easy to grasp... even intuitive to visualize. One would not traverse a desert with snowshoes, an ocean with boots, or a mountain with a road bike. Fitness landscapes are also varied and demand a varying set of strategies to cope with different types of terrain. We need an epistemological toolbox with all kinds of different tools in it.
At it's core science is really 3 things. Experiment, book keeping, and continuing after the old guard dies off. That does not mean it's fast, but give it 500 years and phrenology looks like a poor joke.
This seems to lump several different things together. Could you give us an example of this sort of character?
I can only find the following article online, which is critical of Keller's conclusions. I'd say Feyerabend is more philosophically sophisticated than McClintock.
http://www.americanscientist.org/bookshelf/pub/demythologizi...
The idea that you can get some more robust idea of truth from fuzzier learning approach is interesting but doesn't have any relationship to Feyerabend and little relation to science as such.
I've seen people who can pull this off, and it results in profoundly interesting debates. But most people can't. For most people their beliefs equal their identity and their sense of self, and other beliefs are a threat.
The epicycle models that dominated cosmology's explanations of orbits comes to mind, if only because it's a good example that is obvious enough in hindsight as to be uncontroversial. Epicycles carry such strong descriptive power that it does make sense to add more epicycles if you're merely trying to explain your data. But because epicycles don't require information from gravitation, it feels like crackpottery to introduce such information even if it results in a simple model.
Another example that's more obviously structural is building set theory without any notion of self-reflective statements. Russell's paradox undid the first iteration of set theory despite that system being quite descriptive.
If you built a whole system of thought on a powerful, incorrect statement, you're fooling yourself but it's understandable.
I can't evaluate it well enough to say if it's true, but some crackpots are coming up with models of black whole phenomena without event horizons, based on a similar problem as epicycles might of had. That's all I'll say because I think I've exhausted the controversy I can put into one post. :)
I think the drive to commoditize everything is probably the bigger issue than a "scientific fundamentalism". There are plenty of crank scientists, and always have been! If it were just a matter of generating sufficiently many sufficiently non-mainstream theories to achieve a paradigm leap in a whole field, you would expect that sufficient production of cranks would produce geniuses by chance.
> the fitness landscape being explored by science is "well behaved" and can be traversed using a simple stepwise or gradient descent function
This is false! Non-obvious I know, but it was experimentally shown and holds for a wide class of high dimensional landscapes. It was well explained here (he talks about several novel ideas/insights actually, worth watching):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7KCWcx-YIRI
> There is probably no deterministic "for(;;) { do X }" formula for learning in complex real-world domains
This is true in a rather straightforward manner when limited to mathematics, from the halting problem (and some mild computational assumptions about the universe): if no finite algorithm can solve arbitrary instances of the halting problem, clearly no finite algorithm can solve arbitrary problems (that includes algorithms that try to "self-improve", of course).
I think this bit of scientific realism is indeed very important to those in the field.
> There also seems to be an economic drive to commoditize humans. If learning can be completely systematized, then science can be rendered into an assembly line process...
I tend to think of the opposite; the more we're able to replace humans with machines the more power we get to the whatever we want. We just have to make sure this surplus power is made widely available.
It's a little hand-wavy for HN and the conclusions can be contrived, but Idea Channel overall is an interesting entry point to a lot of serious topics.
So instead of enjoying the fact that they ask a potentially interesting question and pull out at least some relevant facts, I get worked up at all the trollish handwaving and have given up on it entirely.
For those of us who enjoy both having talking heads in our video window and interesting thoughts: Is there some YouTube or other channel that is similarly well-informed as John Green's "crash course" videos, but with a bit more of the "deconstructing pop culture" theme that underlies Idea Channel's questions (but less handwavy and contrived)?
"Sometimes science is more art than science, Morty. A lot of people don't get that."
On a related note, Lakatos is fairly underrated. Everyone knows Popper but Lakatos extended his ideas beautifully.
But it would still be anarchic (without the laws of human psychology and social interactions at least). However, it would be an algorithm, and thus, in its broadest sense, a method.
I think most scientist would agree that science involves method, indeed most science involve multiple, nested methods.
But I think most scientists would be very skeptical of any claim to have fully codified a single scientific method, much less a theory of all creative endeavors.
So your link seems like bending the stick way too far the other way.
It also seems to get more complex over time.
He also famously got into a heated debate with Wittgenstein over the nature of philosophical inquiry. So heated, that Wittgenstein almost beat Poppers ass with a fire poker, or so the story goes[1].
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Kuhn
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Structure_of_Scientific_Re...
The account of how science does work is still being debated. Perhaps Kuhn disavowed his account later, but that doesn't matter with respect to the most important parts of the book.
A great introduction may be found at [0], if one is already well versed in Bayes theorom, then an excerpt [1] should be enough.
[0]: http://www.yudkowsky.net/rational/bayes
[1]: http://www.soest.hawaii.edu/oceanography/researchers/francoi...
http://www.amazon.com/Out-Of-Error-Critical-Rationalism/dp/0...
An another comment pointed out, this is extremely obvious from the bayesian point of view.
To me, "scientific" means "uses scientific method", which in turn is a set of tools that are pretty successful in understanding universe. Scientific method is certainly not fixed set of tools - for example, computer simulation became very useful only recently.
Maybe doing whatever string theorists are doing will become useful in the future, and as such their method will become part of scientific method; but since we aren't really sure if string theory itself is true, we can't consider their methodology to be useful (or useless) and so part of scientific method.
For me looking into String Theory's status as scientific/not-scientific is a good way to learn that the Popperian view of falsifiable==scientific is a bit too simplistsic and that classifying things as scientific/not-scientific may not even be a productive activity. It's just not that simple.
In the meantime it's generally best to listen to scientists talk about it to get a feel for its standing: https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/28pzc1/string_t...
A good quote from that thread which may answer your question: "Anyways, my point is that String Theory is not just some whacky idea "what if everything was strings" that exists in a vacuum, but is rather a very natural and conservative extension of Quantum Field Theory to a more general and less arbitrary framework."
And here's a blog post (series of posts) linked from that discussion which may also help: http://profmattstrassler.com/2013/09/23/quantum-field-theory...
His defenders, of course, would claim that that naive falsificationism is a misreading of him.
Following Gentzen, Dummett, Prawitz and Martin-Löf, verificationism serves as the backbone to modern intuitionistic and constructive meaning theory.
At any time, anyone, could posit any kind of idea, like "the Moon is made of cheese", and the whole scientific method boils down to basically everyone else demanding "prove it."
The fact that at times people might be afraid or uninterested in testing ideas which seem far-fetched or unpopular in their community, is another thing entirely.