Comment by raverbashing | Hacker News Reader

Comment by raverbashing | Hacker News Reader

The limit to scientific understanding could maybe be described as this:

You're looking for explanations in the format P(x1,x2,x3...)->R where P is a "function" (the modeling of your theory), x1, x2 etc are measurable factors and R is a result

Now, you can't measure all the factors, but you can have a good set of them that explains a result closely.

Hence the question is, are there phenomena for which you can measure all the x's that give a good prediction for your result? (or even having good proxies for the x's) And that's not even going into the problem of establishing the theory in the first place

In physics you can repeat experiments multiple times, few experiments are unethical and you can have very exact measurements.

Now compare this with medicine. Also compare the difference between general predictions for a whole population to doing precise predictions for one specific individual. How many x's do you thing would affect risk of cancer/risk of cardiac disease or just the risk of a weird mutation that changes risks slightly (and that medicine hasn't even heard about it)

There's your limit

I'm not a PhD, but I always like to think of this explanation when trying to understand how progress happens. In bumps.

http://matt.might.net/articles/phd-school-in-pictures/

Likely the False Narrative myth at work in a similar fashion to attributing a narrative structure to the universe for example.

As a counterpoint, Foucault's Order of Things offers up a historical “archaeology” of the sciences congruent with power structures.

It's gonna take me bit to parse this...

Basically what foolrush is saying is that humans have a desire to understand their world through stories, which leads us to invent believable stories even if they don't line up with reality.

The suggestion is also made that Foucault had a different explanation for how scientific advancements are made, and that explanation suggests that the progress is guided by the society the scientists find themselves in.

Personally, I don't believe either is completely accurate. Whilst I agree that storytelling is a fundamental part of the human condition, which can lead us to jump to false conclusions, in general scientific knowledge is often built up iteratively, we build on what we already think we understand to explore what we don't. Society may influence which frontiers we're most likely to explore, but you can't decide on the impact of new discoveries, and what other new frontiers they unlock.

Thank you for the analysis. I suppose I need to read some Foucalt to form an opinion. My only exposure to him is his tangential relationship to Foucalt's Pendulum by Umberto Eco, which I read years ago.

While most heavy rationalists insist that Foucault is full of rubbish, it is pretty easy to see how his vantage has a significant degree of merit, even if one entirely ignores the transmission of ideology.

If we look to "science" today, we can see that it relies heavily on funding. In fact, so much so that "science" can't move without it in some instances. So where we have markets and capitalism, we can see that the thrust of science is driven by such; some "science" is crafted, other "science" is utterly ignored or starved. So even in a superficial way, we can begin to take note as to how our perception of what "science" is has a contextual element from within the society it is birthed from.

Foucault's primary gist, if you can survive reading his work in English, is that the very ontologies are fundamentally flexible and yield to the ideological underpinnings of a given time. One must historicize to see "science" clearly, and indeed he does just this in the work. Others have written since then, including discussions of the recent creation of "science" as we know it today, which isn't nearly as ancient as some would have others believe[1].

It can be an incredibly difficult tome to wade through, but one that comes with significant reward if you manage to parse the work.

[1] https://dangerology.wordpress.com/2013/09/13/steven-pinker-i...

Without trying to sound dismissive of someone I admittedly I haven't read - this just seems really obvious to me.

The trite example I listed _is_ obvious, yet as obvious as it is, some folks insist that “science” is this free thinking process.

Foucault of course is much more expansive than my trivial example, covering the notion of institutions as ideological enforcement, among other things.

No fool on Hacker News can summarize his work in a reply, and one would be heavily encouraged to read it. It cuts right to the core of epistemology itself.

Apologies if I misunderstood the example. I will be reading some of his work. It sounds like I may be in agreement with his premise. Thanks for pointing him out to me.

I was an unruly youth when I first was fed him.

In hindsight, I truly believe that not only were his theories several generations ahead of their time, but also likely a critical body of work regarding epistemology that would relate to developments in AI etc.

I'm intrigued! Thanks for spreading the wealth!

Okay, haven't read any Foucalt yet, but just thinking more through it myself, it seems self-evident to me that there is no separation of self from the society that self finds itself within. Much like mind/body dualism makes zero sense to me, there can be no truly conscience self to understand and pursue science without some semblance of societal structures.

Of course the society steers science, and vice versa.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com