The Relativity of Wrong (1989) | Hacker News Reader

The Relativity of Wrong (1989)

chem.tufts.edu

65 pointscoffeeandjunk11 comments

I remember reading about this topic in philosophy class, namely, the Pessimistic Induction [1]. I've wondered if a similar argument could be made for moral progress. Certainly, many people are quick to make similarly skeptical arguments which point out that people in the past had different moral views than we do now, and no less confidence that they were right. If we were to survey the history of moral conventions, would we find that it converges in the same way as our scientific theories? (Does the arc of history bend toward justice?)

[1] https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/scientific-realism/#PessI...

The linked article is an article written by Asimov. The main idea is an allegory about how even though the Earth isn't flat, and the Earth isn't spherical, it is less wrong to say that the Earth is a sphere than to say that it is flat. The point it that it is exciting to be alive now, in a time when physics is becoming so much more "right" about so many things so quickly.

Although I'm not sure if it exists, I would enjoy a brief description of ways in which physics is more "right" now than in 1989, when this was written.

Specifically, he says the key period was 1900-1930.

I guess something like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_scientific_discove... can be helpful, but I think none of the discoveries in the last 30 years are quite as world-changing as general relativity, atoms, quantum physics, or galaxies.

Plate tectonics is a candidate to go on that list, and it was controversial until good undersea maps were available circa 1970. That is 50 years ago, not 30.

The discovery of the accelerating expansion of the universe (1998) is a pretty big one.

I RECEIVED a letter the other day. It was handwritten in crabbed penmanship so that it was very difficult to read. Nevertheless, I tried to make it out just in case it might prove to be important. In the first sentence, the writer told me he was majoring in English literature, but felt he needed to teach me science. (I sighed a bit, for I knew very few English Lit majors who are equipped to teach me science, but I am very aware of the vast state of my ignorance and I am prepared to learn as much as I can from anyone, so I read on.)

Here Asimov reveals the scientist's secret weapons:

- The source of an idea doesn't matter, only the idea itself.

- It's ok, even expected, to not know everything.

I think it's worth noting, too, that science is very skeptical of itself. To my knowledge, there's only 3 accepted laws: those of thermodynamics.

Science is not about necessarily finding the perfect explanation, but finding a more perfect explanation. Always speculating, testing, refining, building on the shoulders of the giants that have come before us. I doubt within my lifetime, or even in anyone's lifetime, that we will truly have a Grand Universal Theory that fits 100% of the time. But, I have no doubt that we'll keeping making steps to a more perfect explanation. Sometimes it will be small steps, others huge leaps, but there will be progress, but no completion; at least that's my current thought.

One possible confusion is the words used. "Right" and "wrong" have moral overtones. Asimov is using them to just mean "correct" and "incorrect".

True. But I presume that Asimov is answering the letter using the language of the same. Translating "wrong" to "incorrect" does not add anything, better to take the issue head on using the same language.

Better still would be to use "accuracy". But that presumes the audience is ready to understand the nature of the issue in a scientific and logical way. We want to get there, but we cannot start there.

Accuracy is a good choice of word. It doesn't come with the baggage of being a binary classification.

The terminology I jump to is "approximation error", where error is some quantified measurement of (in)accuracy. But using the word "error" might lead one to think of e.g. "having erred" or "being in error", which is unhelpful.

There's a quote from Box I like: "all models are wrong, some models are useful".

I guess this might be rephrased less snappily as "no model is completely accurate, but some models are useful".

Replace "model" with "theory", "belief" as desired.

That said, some models or theories fall into the category of being "not even wrong", i.e. to be so incoherent or unfalsifiable that it isn't even theoretically possible to measure how accurate they are.

Pauli: "Das ist nicht nur nicht richtig; es ist nicht einmal falsch!"

I agree with the English Lit major. No education is complete without a healthy lack of respect for the same. "Healthy" being the key word.

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