How We Got from Doc Brown to Walter White | Hacker News Reader

How We Got from Doc Brown to Walter White

nautil.us

46 pointspmcpinto23 comments

Walter White is not really about him being a scientist, but about him being a grown-up, trained professional.

Or maybe that's just supporting the point of the article, that scientists in fiction are not lab-coated magicians anymore, but just one of many breeds of white collar workers. But strictly speaking, I still would think of Walter White as a former scientist at best, because as a school teacher who clearly does not do research. Just like being trained in computer science does not make you a scientist, working in computer science research does.

The show's been around for awhile now, but there's a spoiler which takes suspense out of a major scene in the first paragraph....

To me what most of these portrayals lack is how mundane real scientists are. Completely brilliant in one area and boring, ignorant, and ill-informed in others - just like anyone else. Neil Degrasse Tyson (just one popular science figure today) is as likely to have a valid opinion on politics or history as Joe Montana - but you wouldn't think it.

There's a very real appeal to authority inherent in it, but as long as you can appeal to a scientist - you're alright. What's slightly terrifying to me is the worship of "science" and it being used to justify every Reddit thread, when in reality we're training the public to worship scientism.

Doesn't Big Bang Theory run on the same network as Two Broke Girls after football games? It's popularity might not have much to do with science...

> What's slightly terrifying to me is the worship of "science" and it being used to justify every Reddit thread,

You see a lot of it on HN too.

Someone will make a mostly bullshit claim, and then when asked to support it will provide a link to a newspaper report of a single study.

Or people will respond to links to well run meta analysis with contrarian anecdote.

People have considered celebrity opinions as mattering more than lay opinions. Why would an actor good at reading lines written for him by others have any insight into economics, international relations, education, or really anything other than acting?

But hey, we had Sally Fields testify before Congress about farm issues because she'd played a farmer in a movie. The absurdity of it was mind boggling.

"With the rise of Technopoly, one of those thought-worlds disappears. Technopoly eliminates alternatives to itself in precisely the way Aldous Huxley outlined in Brave New World. It does not make them illegal. It does not make them immoral. It does not even make them unpopular. It makes them invisible and therefore irrelevant. And it does so by redefining what we mean by religion, by art, by family, by politics, by history, by truth, by privacy, by intelligence, so that our definitions fit its new requirements. Technopoly, in other words, is totalitarian technocracy." Neil Postman Technopoly

NDT's political views could be informed by science though. One party clearly does deny science and from purely that perspective one could make an informed decision. Furthermore, knowing that someone is intelligent likely to reason about politics does influence me to put more weight in what they say than otherwise. Of course one should also examine the arguments themselves but one can be a little more certain they are well thought out and worth examining if they come from certain sources.

> NDT's political views could be informed by science though.

Sure, but those political views probably shouldn't be given extra weight just because he's a scientist unless they're directly related to his field.

As an example, he's had some misfires on biology: https://twitter.com/neiltyson/status/708427052433678336

    > shouldn't be given extra
    > weight just because he's
    > a scientist

Don't they get him over the (admittedly fairly low) bar of "able to think rationaly"?

Only within topics where he has developed a sense of self-critique. It's commonplace for people to have a strong ability to be able to work through a situation rationally when it's not also tied to something in their emotions. And when someone has developed expertise they also have a common understanding with other experts. So NDT can speak with some authority on some science topics that he has directly studied. That does not make him a political scientist or philosopher, though, or even a competent student outside of his field.

> Don't they get him over the (admittedly fairly low) bar of "able to think rationaly"

Not necessarily. http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Nobel_disease

The thing is, scientists really do have a greater chance of having an informed opinion of politics, or history, or any other subject than do actors or football players because to be a scientist you have to know how to evaluate claims based on evidence. That doesn't mean that their opinions are 100% correct of course, but yes, being trained in the skill of thinking makes their opinions more valuable than those whose skills are in looking good or running fast. "Scientism" is a meaningless word because every question that can be answered is part of science in the broad sense (which includes history and social science in addition to laboratory science).

Very few people have even remotely informed opinions on politics or history. Both fields are rife with propaganda.

While you can trust his scholarship to 11 nines, you have to be careful with Chomsky's conclusions. He's extremely good at framing the questions, so it's not like you have to disagree much. I just disagree with his understanding of simple venality, and a little public choice theory would explain much of what he misses.

> "Scientism" is a meaningless word

What do you mean by this? People prematurely assuming that science has a good explanation for something it doesn't has a long and storied history.

Scientists saying women couldn't vote because blood flowing to their ovaries fled the brain causing poor decisions, saying that black people had lower IQs because they had smaller craniums, that the Irish were a totally different inferior race than whites, etc. And people latching onto their authority as justification.

Most recently, many outlets have discussed the Clinton campaign's over-reliance on "data" and "science-like" methods, via their ADA "algorithm" and a refusal to go for grassroots tactics and instead trusting analysis of millenials or w/e.

"Scientism" is alive and well. People who think more numbers == more truth, even without putting those numbers and their underlying generating assumptions to any scrutiny, are very very plentiful.

But science is literally the only way we have of explaining anything. Yes, many 19th century opinions are now known as incorrect. But how do we know that? Because later science showed that ovaries don't work that way and so on. And while Clinton's campaign was unsuccessful, arguing the merits of various strategies that could have been taken is clearly a form of social science, not an alternative to science. If "scientism" is a real thing there have to be answerable questions that not addressable by science.

> If "scientism" is a real thing there have to be answerable questions that not addressable by science.

No. The existence of scientism doesn't imply that some questions don't have scientific answers, any more than fanboyism implies nobody has any true talent.

Scientism merely means that some people are extremely persuaded by "sciency" things, even if they lack the rigor and reproducibility of actual science.

So, if I'm wearing a business suit and present an economic theory based on the history of people's behavior, you're skeptical. However, if I wear a professor's cardigan and present the exact same theory with some equations and graphs instead (generated using the historical assumptions), you suddenly think it's very believable and impervious to challenge.

That's what scientism is. It's confusing the appearance of science, the language of science, for the essence of science (reproducibility, verifiability, empirical predicates, etc).

Edit: Additionally, people who are hardcore fans of science as drivers of change usually ignore the reality that science came around to a political opinion, rather than the other way around. People protested the idea that they were inferior, got the political environment changed, and in this new environment, "new facts" came to light that came to challenge old conclusions.

If bad science based on bad observations leads to bad policy that then creates more bad observations, you can easily end up with a self-fulfilling prophecy.

I think the suit story is cribbed from "The Little Prince", and you seem to arguing about something other than the universality or non-universality of the scientific method.

It seems like you misunderstand what scientism is, and lash out by calling people explaining it to you wrong.

I have never read the little prince. It's a pretty straightforward made up example.

You seem to be using a very broad definition of 'science'. What do you mean by the term? Do we know mathematical truths via science, or is that a different realm of knowledge? Are philosophical arguments categorizable as science? What about questions that are in theory testable, but the test involves huge numbers of complex interfering factors and decades of time (like many questions of political and social policy) - are they usefully labeled as scientific questions, or do we gain something by recognizing them as requiring some other mode of knowledge than just empirical observations?

> answerable questions not addressable by science

So what does 'answerable' mean? There's no such thing as proof, rigorously speaking, outside of math and other formal systems, and not always within them. The answers that the best hard science provides are strong, but not provably certain, and the spectrum of certainty extends a long way down from there - at what level of certainty does an answer stop being an answer? I think there are many important questions that don't admit hard scientific answers, and for which 'science' as I understand the term isn't the most useful mode of knowledge for finding the 'answers' that are most likely to be fruitful.

Science is a process in which conclusions are made from evidence. It does not deal in proof and scientific conclusions change when new evidence is available. Obviously a historian uses this process as much as physicist. Mathematics in itself is not science, but it can be used as a tool for science if the assumptions in the mathematical models are based on evidence. An answerable question is one in which evidence can actually be used to test whether one answer is better than another.

Historians do not do science. Your definition of science seems is so broad it's meaningless.

Do paleontologists do science in your opinion? Or archeologists? They also are using evidence to answer questions of the past. What makes historians different? What is meaningful about the broad definition of science is it separates the people using evidence from those just using "gut feeling" (or mystic intuition or whatever they want to call it).

> The thing is, scientists really do have a greater chance of having an informed opinion of politics, or history, or any other subject than do actors or football players because to be a scientist you have to know how to evaluate claims based on evidence.

That doesn't mean they are more likely to have an informed opinion, at best it means that if their opinion is informed to start with, it's more likely that they have applied information well.

And even that's dubious outside of their specialty, because the issues with data collection and the tools to deal with them vary considerably between different areas of science.

We got to Walter White because that was the design goal of "Breaking Bad" - to turn Mr Chips into Scarface. The mechanism in use was, IMO, a partial ( and perhaps oscillating/varying) reductio ad absurbum on the very idea of heroes and villains in narrative.

Eastwood's played the antihero for decades now. It's not new.

But it's Science! ( ala Thomas Dolby's "She Blinded Me With Science"). Sort-of yawn. That way lies ex deux machina and Merlin figures...

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