The Defeat of Reason | Hacker News Reader

The Defeat of Reason

bostonreview.net

93 pointswalterbell60 comments

Eh.

The author claims that positivism has been debunked “by philosophers”. Certainly there are semantic arguments to be had if one wishes, but the broad outlines of positivism are widely accepted by scientists and engineers.

Also, the authors’ discussion of the wave/particle description leaves a lot to be desired.

And the article hardly explains how reason has been defeated. It barely mentions the propaganda machine (Fox, Limbaugh, etc.) that played the biggest role in impugning the idea of truth.

Positivism was actually debunked by mathematics, not philosophy. In fact, this is why Platonism is accepted in mathematics and formalism scoffed at.

Take a look at Godel's incompleteness theorems - they hold that it's impossible to provide a proof for everything (formalization of "this statement is not provable", which is arguably both true and not true, results in a proof that the statement is true but not provably so).

A system containing first-order arithmetic cannot be both consistent and complete because it cannot prove its own correctness itself, as it will result in the paradox mentioned above - it must resort to a higher-order system to do so (metamathematics). Thus, one can never have a firm axiomatic system from which to deduce all non-empirically-derivable aspects of reality, and as a result, logical positivism doesn't work.

I think philosophy proved this before mathematics. See e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regress_argument, the same argument from over two thousand years ago.

But positivism claims knowledge comes only from a posterior knowledge not a priori. So it does not require completeness in any formal system, just consistency.

And even if a deductive system is inconsistent in an interesting way, observation (a posterior knowledge) will catch it and force us to devise another system.

Many of the fruits of positivism are accepted by scientists and engineers, but I think Maudlin is correct in saying that the analytic school has (rightfully) shied away from the central positivist claim (i.e., that "any two observably equivalent theories are one and the same theory"/"a theory says no more than its observable consequences"). We've carried Popper and a few other positivists into the 21st century, but in a form that most would probably be unhappy with.

I agree about the wave/particle description, though. I've read Maudlin before in the context of the philosophy of time, and he is frequently critiqued in that domain for giving inadequate consideration to quantum-theoretic discoveries.

> We've carried Popper and a few other positivists

Popper was not a positivist. From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Positivism:

However, the claim that Popper was a positivist is a common misunderstanding that Popper himself termed the "Popper legend."[57] In fact, he developed his beliefs in stark opposition to and as a criticism of positivism and held that scientific theories talk about how the world really is, not, as positivists claim, about phenomena or observations experienced by scientists.

Popper might not have considered himself a capital-P positivist for metaphysical reasons (and because of his skepticism towards logical positivism in particular), but his general approach to the philosophy of science is both compatible with and is taught as an example of the school.

There are all kinds of disagreements between Popper and the capital-P positivists (verification vs. falsification being the biggest one), but they don't preclude the inclusion of Popper in the broader positivist movement in the philosophy of science.

Popper was very concerned with explaining the actual underlying reality and what criteria contribute to better explanations - things like being more rigid. To me that seems quite against the main idea of _p_ositivism.

Popper even takes that stance that theory is prior to evidence - you start with the best explanation and even without new evidence or predictions, you move on to better explanations as they are discovered.

Since you are making this claim against his own words and without being backed up by respected sources, in what sense is he a _p_ositivist?

"Science must begin with myths, and with the criticism of myths; neither with the collection of observations, nor with the invention of experiments, but with the critical discussion of myths, and of magical techniques and practices. The scientific tradition is distinguished from the pre-scientific tradition in having two layers. Like the latter, it passes on its theories; but it also passes on a critical attitude towards them. The theories are passed on, not as dogmas, but rather with the challenge to discuss them and improve upon them." Karl Popper, 'Conjectures and Refutations'

Layman's hopefully-dumb question here: if a theory has no observable consequences, then what is it even saying? (or doing, or etc)

If it isn't falsifiable, then it isn't scientific.

I'm cribbing that from reading the Wikipedia page on Logical Positivism, specifically the criticism of positivism by Popper.

> but the broad outlines of positivism are widely accepted by scientists and engineers.

I don't think anyone doubts that a positivist framework is useful for science and engineering, but why should it hold elsewhere? Scientists and engineers are also stereotypically bad at social skills and politics. Perhaps because a different, non-positivist epistemological framework is required to thrive in other fields?

I don't think anyone doubts that a positivist framework is useful for science and engineering, but why should it hold elsewhere?

It should hold everywhere another framework has not proven to be more effective.

Scientists and engineers are also stereotypically bad at social skills and politics. Perhaps because a different, non-positivist epistemological framework is required to thrive in other fields?

I don't think excessive positivism is a problem with politics today, do you?

You're mixing spheres here; social vs science.

As to why logical positivism is not successful in fields in science and engineering -- I would say that in general it is not possible to say that "any two observably equivalent theories are one and the same theory"

In particular, outside of science and engineering, it not possible to get a sufficient precision on what is "observably equivalent".

Actually, sufficient precision is usually not possible within science and engineering either.

Scientists and engineers are also stereotypically bad at social skills and politics.

That is a narrative whose sole purpose is to disenfranchise and disempower the STEM community.

The refutation is that the principle of verification upon which positivism rests is not empirical or tautological, which are requirements for meaningful statements. As such, the principle is neither verifiable nor meaningful.

My understanding is that the logical positivists were unable to satisfactorily answer this critique, and so it failed as a movement in philosophy.

Scientists aren't expected to be well versed in philosophy, so it's not a surprise if some or a lot of them naively hold on to philosophical views that have been heavily critiqued. Most of us probably hold such views, just like a lot of us have scientifically naive or invalid views.

You comment: "Eh. [...] the broad outlines of positivism are widely accepted by scientists and engineers."

The article says just that:

> Logical positivism has been killed many times over by philosophers. But no matter how many stakes are driven through its heart, it arises unbidden in the minds of scientists.

You claim "the article hardly explains how reason has been defeated."

The article mentions Kuhn's and Bohr's anti-rationalism (which together with Feyerabend's anti-epistemology was surely influential for the postmodernism of Focault, Derrida, etc.), and traces it back to Kant.

> the anti-rationalism sprouting from Kuhn. For Kuhn’s legacy lives on, not in philosophy (where he is widely derided for his excesses) but in other parts of academia and in popular culture.

> As appropriated and mangled by Bohr and Kuhn, Kant—despite his own embrace of science and reason—becomes the agent of the anti-Enlightenment, the post-truth Age of Spin and Branding we live in.

Positivism was "defeated" by this paper:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Two_Dogmas_of_Empiricism

However, most contemporary approaches to ontology are similar to positivism in application if not in presentation.

No positivism philosophically isnt practiced by scientists as that would mean they didnt believe in falsification principle.

>"And the article hardly explains how reason has been defeated. It barely mentions the propaganda machine (Fox, Limbaugh, etc.) that played the biggest role in impugning the idea of truth."

I saw the is the other day, authored by democratic party advisers/pollsters:

>"Rather than having expert thinkers come up with the right solution to a problem, the process of trial and error creates multiple experiments that attempt to solve the problem and uses objective empirical results to determine the best solution. With this approach, more trials - and errors – produce better results.

[...]

This is the type of problem solving approach Millennials have used almost since birth. They use it every day on social networks to decide what movie to go to, at which restaurant to eat, and even for which candidates to vote. Rather than insisting on solving challenges using the inherited, but inevitably limited wisdom of experts, Millennials would prefer to share their ideas and let the group find the right answer through their combined experiences. Given how far astray critical thinking has often taken us, maybe it’s time to embrace the Millennial Generation’s approach and see if it leads to even better results than the preferred methods of older generations." http://static1.1.sqspcdn.com/static/f/930173/12774430/130837...

So they recommend we should just do AB testing rather than use critical thinking to examine the consequences of our actions. This is the NHST mind virus that destroys everything it touches spreading beyond research.

The idea of trying multiple things and seeing what works is a good one, and doesn’t imply NHST logic.

Doesn’t sound like that’s what your quote is talking about though: they describe sharing ideas and “letting the group find the right answer.” Sounds like mob rule to me...

The quote does seem to explain why I now see many engineers turning first to blog posts rather than official documentation for projects, ignoring the experience of more senior team members, and diving into half-baked designs rather than thinking in advance about possible pitfalls.

So maybe overapplied Agile is also a generational phenomenon [or maybe there's just a meta-eternal-September when prior generations realize it's eternal Septembers all the way down and every generation makes the same mistakes]

As a Millenial, I'd really like to know who got paid actual money to write that stupid fucking article, so I can take their job and their funding and do something useful with it. Bloody hell!

> Also, the authors’ discussion of the wave/particle description leaves a lot to be desired.

Par for the course. A classical wave (think wet) is a large-scale pattern that emerges from the local interactions of many separate particles. A quantum ‘wave’ is some fundamental magical thing that just happens to look a lot like a large-scale pattern that emerges from the local interactions of many separate particles, but isn't (except in the Everett version).

> but isn't (except in the Everett version)

Not even in the Everett version. When we make a measurement to discover the large-scale patterns, we have to invoke the Born Rule and see just one outcome of the quantum wave. The other worlds of the Everett Interpretation are simply 'magical'.

>People are gullible. Humans can be duped by liars and conned by frauds; manipulated by rhetoric and beguiled by self-regard; browbeaten, cajoled, seduced, intimidated, flattered, wheedled, inveigled, and ensnared. In this respect, humans are unique in the animal kingdom.

a lot of this could be mitigated through better awareness and early education. Unfortunately "how to think" or "how to reason" about logic is not something most of us learn from their parents or from the education system (even though it would be trivial to do so).

If you know your Kahneman, Tversky (and others) and learn and understand Cognitive Biases the advantage is huge. It's like Neo in the Matrix when he picks the bullets from the air :-)

But it needs to be applied continuously using practical applications (not just by reading 2 papers). People don't have to be an expert on psychology, game theory & risk but at least should expose themselves to the basics (preferably at an early age).

If you want to get beyond the basics then read also D Hofstaedter, D Dennet, K Popper, B Russell, NNTaleb. I wish I would have come across this when I was 10 yro not in my 30ies.

> If you know your Kahneman, Tversky (and others) and learn and understand Cognitive Biases the advantage is huge. It's like Neo in the Matrix when he picks the bullets from the air :-)

I don't doubt that this helps you, but given the replication crisis in Psychology take these sources with a grain of salt and not as absolute truths, but rather context-bound.

I read "The Dragons of Eden" by Dr Sagan in my early teens. Frankly, that + further studies into logic, consciousness & human nature has led to my feeling like a Martian living in the US.

Do you mean that as a reference to Stranger in a Strange Land?

No. I considered that phrase but rejected it due to the book's connotations.

That has not been my experience, I'm afraid. The impression I keep getting is that (with due respect to "the power of the context" http://www.vpri.org/pdf/m2004001_power.pdf) teaching someone about fallacies automatically makes them about 15 IQ stupider. In general there's a lot to be said for this oversimplified mental model: "exposing a human being to moral or logical education just leads him to spin out more alluring and more effectively deceptive rationalisations for the stupid and despicable things he was going to do anyway".

That's a great way to put it. That's not to say that reason cannot be learned, but that it isn't a subject in itself, there is no such thing as a 'critical thinking' curriculum. You learn critical thinking by thinking.

There are courses that try to teach applied rationality. I don't know how successful they are.

The point of learning about fallacies, logic and reason is not to stop people doing something they were already committed to doing and have incorporated into their identity. The point is to stop them from picking up new ideas that don't hold logical water, before they've created any emotional commitment to them.

https://existentialcomics.com/comic/9

If this were so simple then we wouldn't have had a problem in the first place. It is not enough to recognize your own biases. For example, one problem is that science has become so specialized, broad and expensive that believing in science means trusting scientists. If a physicist tells you something about the properties of a neutrino, how can you know if she's telling you the truth? You don't have the equipment to do an experiment, and when she claims she's done the experiment at the particle accelerator where she works, you have no way to know if she's lying to you about the results. But it's not just a matter of equipment, but the breadth of modern systems of facts. Even mathematics has become broad enough that no one person can know all of mathematics, and trusting that all theorems of mathematics are, indeed, theorems, requires trusting mathematicians. Ultimately, believing in facts today requires trusting a certain social system. If trust in social systems is eroded (as it is especially among some Americans) then so is acceptance of facts. Conversely, acceptance of facts requires trust in the social system that claims to discover them.

This erosion is anecdotally real to me among some friends and family. A pattern I’ve noticed: when people are physically far removed from the people doing this scientific research, they trust the science less.

Think of it as Scientists Without Borders, but for places in the USA / pick your developed nation.

What if more people employed in scientific research lived in places where little scientific research traditionally happened? I’m talking towns without big research universities, and without companies doing much scientific work. Encourage scientists whose work can be done remotely to move there.

One massive upside: cost of living is much lower. An NIH grant goes a lot further to house, clothe, and feed a researcher anywhere in Iowa - whether in the same city as a large university or a small rural town - than it does in most populated parts of California.

By getting employed scientists living in communities that typically do not have many scientists, they become neighbors and have the spontaneous conversations with people in the community - at cookouts, at town events - which can help restore trust and understanding of science by having direct knowledge of someone doing that work every day.

Someone typically trusts their neighbor they’ve lived beside for 15 years more than the new neighbor who just moved in, and there’s likely no easy shortcut to rebuilding that trust, although it can be broken by institutions with a vested interest in breaking trust.

Get fast internet everywhere and encourage people who can move to get jobs there, and two parts of the challenges of making this a reality are gone. The ease of meeting and networking with new people when living in a place that’s more densely populated with scientists still wouldn’t quite be solved, though...

The government has tried this (Ames national lab, LIGO), but by and large good scientists would prefer not to live in State University Town X (at least among my sample of friends)

This is true and I don't know why your comment is grey.

Why don't all the software developers move out of SF?

One of my friends moved from New York to West Virginia, and got a lot of funny looks from her New York friends. She ended up meeting more interesting people there than she'd met in New York. I went to visit, and also ran across more interesting people there than I have in New York.

Urbanites can be pretty provincial in their own ways.

I always thought the term 'provincial' was backward - urbanites have been embedded in their support infrastructure - their city - all their lives. They are inordinately proud of how they are integrated into it seamlessly. I call it 'dependent'. I've been to the city; I've also lived significant amounts of time (decades) outside it. Without all that infrastructure. Who is more 'provincial'? Who less capable of moving confidently through challenging environments?

I think this is an excellent point (and idea).

The issues that are actively disputed are not esoteric matters - a great many non-specialists can, and do, understand the issues that are most often challenged in evolution, climatology and medicine, so long as one does not assume a vast yet undetectable conspiracy to falsify data. You are right in saying that there are difficult problems here, but it is probably beyond the capabilities of either science or philosophy to solve them. You can lead a man to reason, but you can't make him think.

But that's the point: thinking alone is no longer sufficient; trust is necessary. How do you know evolution is true (if you haven't yourself done experiments)? Things like Price's equation alone aren't enough, because you have no idea whether they model reality well. And how do you know that Fermat's last theorem is a theorem? Have you checked the proof?

The answer is that you trust experts. This is not "reason" but a certain model of society which you have, that you (and I) believe to be true, but it is not one that is necessarily true in every imaginable society. Some people believe that the society we live in is not as you or I imagine it to be, but an altogether different one.

It may be the case that their model of (a conspiratorial) society is inconsistent with certain definitive observations we can make (e.g., the state of technology), but even this claim is one that is not easy for non-experts to verify, and you must still trust the experts who tell you this is the case. It is not reason that leads you (at least these days) to believe in science, but faith. I am not claiming that this faith is contentually similar to religious faith, but it is epistemologically similar, i.e. it is justified by similar personal experiences that has little to do with "reason."

Fermat's last theorem is an example of my point, in that the people who actively oppose the scientific position are not basing their opposition on a rejection of Fermat's last theorem, or of anything else that can only be understood by a tiny minority of specialists. For the most part, those who oppose the application of science in certain areas of public policy are not doing so on the basis of an epistemological question over how science reached its current position, they do so on the basis of not liking the outcome.

Excellent point! I've been a deeply religious Evangelical until my early twenties, and I find it interesting how large the gap is between the rather conspiratorial world view I used to have, and the one I've spent most of the rest of my life having (academic/secular/urban/liberal).

I feel a big part of the problem is that my 'new' world just truly doesn't get the extent of this difference, so any attempts to bridge this gap, however well-meaning, fail and unfortunately often lead to easy dismissal, or hostility/frustration.

An additional problem is that despite the fact that I've rejected this Evangelical world view, I feel there are so many aspects of it that would be extremely helpful to many of the problems that people in my current world face. I wish I knew how to get both sides to properly get to know each other, so to speak, because it would benefit everyone.

> The two books under consideration here bring the paradox home, each in its own way. Adam Becker’s What Is Real? chronicles the tragic side of a crowning achievement of reason, quantum physics. The documentarian Errol Morris gives us The Ashtray, a semi-autobiographical tale of the supremely influential The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962) by Thomas S. Kuhn. Both are spellbinding intellectual adventures into the limits, fragility, and infirmity of human reason.

The author claims we're currently in an age which doesn't accept an objective reality outside our own desires, and ties this to fights in physics (and earlier in philosophy) whose echoes are still being felt.

Quantum mechanics may have defeated the notion that reason applied to intuition is not the way to enlightenment, but it appears to be a powerful demonstration of what can be achieved when reason is applied instead strictly to observables. Unfortunately, if Adam Becker is correct, this may have led more to a rejection of reason than to a critical examination of intuitions.

But the uncertainty principle says there's a limit to what observables we have access to.

That might not be the universe of your intuitions, but it is apparently the one we have.

A remarkable review, this. (It's so rare to see Lakatos quoted!)

One of my favorite reflections out of this period belongs to Werner Heisenberg:

What we observe is not nature itself, but nature exposed to our method of questioning.

If we have a dilemma (two theories), it's 'Not nature itself' at fault.

While classical locality is not possible, quantum nonlocality is interestingly local and not. Causality is local but correlation is not.

Nonlocality where both are nonlocal would be conseptually easier to understand.

Humans are the only animals who can be fooled? I pretend to throw tennis balls to watch dogs run across the yard for my own amusement all the time!

The author doesn't even make an attempt to defend what on the face of it seems like a pretty ludicrous assertion. I know this isn't the central thesis, but, not off to a great start

> All that was left was to ask nature herself. In a series of sophisticated experiments, the answer has been established: Bell’s inequality is violated. The world is not local. No future innovation in physics can make it local again.

This is a Copernican revolution.

From Maudlin's telling of the story, in which "Einstein won—and would continue to win—all the logical battles", you would never guess that Bell actually refuted the claims made in the EPR paper.

Forgive me for saying so, but this whole premise seems like bullshit.

>logical positivism has been killed many times over by philosophers.

Clearly the author, or the philosophers, do not understand what the word "killed" means.

Eh.

I thought this Article is about Reason ML.

Author seems to be a heavy user of thesaurus.com.

reason is not defeated and to the extent it would be it would apply to _anyone_ of us. Not just the trailer trash, the trump supporters, the religious people etc. but all of us.

There is no system of thinking that allow us to be right and so what we are really left with are perspectives. In other words reason do not lead to truth but to perspectives that allow us to better navigate reality.

This entire discussion further verifies for me that state of being inside an illusion or Maya, where some things like relativity make sense whilst at a deeper level everything else doesn't.

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