Keep Science Irrational

Look, elegance and beauty can be used at the search stage, when looking for a better model describing reality:

  - Can I make this equation simpler?
  - Can I make this model more general?
  - Can I make the formulas easier to deal with (and so the theory more useful)?

These are all valid search paths when developing the theory. But the ultimate test is how well the theory matches the experiment.

In fact, programmers know this very well. We avoid spaghetti or giant-ball-of-mud code, we try to express our ideas clearly so we can be more certain that the program works as expected, and it does what it's supposed to do. We use elegance and beauty as a guide when writing and improving out code. However, the ultimate test is whether the program works as expected or not.

No matter how elegant a wrong program is, it is still wrong. Wrong but elegant code can be an intermediate step to the final correct code, but it's not the final goal.

The same with the scientific method. You can guide your research with elegance in mind. (At the end of the day, simpler more elegant models are nicer to work with when developing your theory and when applying it in practice!) But the ultimate test is the experiment. And also, if your theory is elegant but untestable (unfalsifiable), the theory is not scientific. It might be completely wrong.

As useful as it is, even as a search heuristic elegance might be misleading. Prof. Sabine Hossenfelder ( https://backreaction.blogspot.com/ ) wrote a book on how the search for beauty and mathematical elegance led modern fundamental Physics to its currently rather unfruitful state.

The author managed to write an article on the problems of scientific method without even mentioning Paul Feyerabend's "anything goes". He didn't mention either the fantastic "Lost in Math" by Sabine Hossenfelder, in which this precise problem is fully addressed in a manner that uninformed people can grasp. No mention of Karl Popper and the philosophy behind why on Earth do we use data to begin with.

This article is, to say the least, incomplete.

I consider Feyerabend's Against Method to be one of the most important books I've ever read. The article primarily addresses beauty as an important feature of science (and it probably is, as Tupolev said, "an ugly plane won't fly") but one can go much farther.

Not only is beauty valid in science, anything that advances science is. Epistemological anarchy is what we should strive for, because everything else inhibits science. In a sense the irony is directly visible in the modern scientific attitude. Empirical data and experimentation are supposed to reign supreme, the only thing that is verboten is experimentation with the scientific doctrine itself, which is supposed to be taken almost on faith, full of complex rituals that everyone needs to abide by.

The mainstream story about Galileo often implies that it was the sinister church at odds with the enlightened scientist. But the reality is much different. It wasn't just the church, but actually also establishment science at the time that was very unconvinced. Galileo's heliocentric worldview could not account for his own empirical observations. (Diffraction was not yet known, so he estimated that observed stars were closer by a factor that was off by a thousand, prompting everyone else to ask why, if his theories are true, observed stars don't change drastically in size if the earth indeed moves around the sun. He didn't really help his case by essentially writing what you could today call trollish treatises in which he was just mocking everyone for their criticism.

But as it turns out in the end he was right, despite what (even relatively sound) science had to say. It shows that science is fundamentally uneven, that ignoring existing 'truths' for the purpose of radical shifts, even for dumb reasons, might advance science.

I feel like a bit of a dick pointing this out, but I think everyone should realize this magazine (as well as Nautil.us by the way) is funded by the Templeton Foundation, which has quite a strong focus on religion (eh, sorry, "the intersection of religion and science"). On the one hand I feel it shouldn't really matter and we can all judge an article by its contents, but on the other hand some of the articles that show up here are really just a religious wolf in a scientific sheep's clothing, and I don't think many here would give them more than 2 seconds of their day if they knew this upfront.

The article is really weird. First it alleges that we scientists only use "beauty" when talking about theory, but not in scientific publications. That claim by itself is dubious at best, even his examples about the standard model or LIGO contradict it, all the theory that was done before the experiments (and the following experiments) where in a way motivated by "beauty" and they could be published, i.e. it was not like nothing was published until we had experimental evidence. String theory is another counter example (although somewhat more controversial).

He then makes the claim that using experimental facts be the only judge of a usefulness of a theory is somehow detrimental (without actually making an argument).

Finally at the end of the article he directly contradicts this claim using his LIGO example.

So I'm a bit lost what the author wants to tell us. Yes theoretical beauty is a motivator for pursuing experimental evidence. Unlike in previous centuries where theory was often trying to explain known experimental phenomena, it is often theory now that directs experimental science.

In the end however, if a scientific theory is useful for science, is based on if it can accurately predict reality (as measured in experiments), otherwise it might be very elegant math, but not science. To make an counterpoint, nobody would argue we should accept a scientific theory that directly contradicts experiments, even if it was extremely elegant.

I read a handful of paragraphs, but this article is doing the annoying thing where it's deliberately concealing the meat of its argument from you.

The argument has something to do with science 'rejecting beauty', or something? It's not super clear what the point is, or what reasoning supports the point.

I find that most of the time, authors that do this are doing so knowing that their argument isn't actually very strong, so confusing the reader is a better strategy than straightforwardly convincing them.

Rationality has an upper bound that gets hit when dealing with certain types of problems, while irrationality causes progress with those same types of problems.

That won Herbert Simon his Nobel Prize - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herbert_A._Simon Worth reading about his work (esp as more and more people wrangle with issues way past the bounds of a 6 inch chimp brain)

As we better understand the spectrum of personality types in the population and the problem types, we better understand who needs to be propped up for their irrationality and who does for their rationality.

Misunderstanding this is the reason for a whole lot of resource and energy wastage.

It's a weird article. It's a matter of priorities, a theory can be as beautiful as anything you have seen, but if it does not have any predictive power, then for "hard" science (i.e. physics, chemistry, biology, etc.) its value is almost zero. "Almost" because interesting ideas sometimes can be developed in unexpected directions and even in different fields.

And "beauty" and "elegance" are certainly important, they just come after an ability to predict. Even if this ability is yet unclear, scientific community is open to investigation of promising "elegant" ideas (e.g. see history of the string theory). In the worst case scenario we get an interesting branch of mathematics.

I prefer to look at it at from the following angle: at extreme we have simply collection of experimental records. By accumulating those records we describe reality in the most straightforward way. "Laws" are the way to compress those observations. As an input of this algorithm we have experimental conditions, and as output experimental results. As a byproduct of this compression we get an ability to predict with a certain confidence what will happen in future experiments. "Beauty", "elegance", "compactness", "unity" are subjective ways to measure quality of this compression. Quality can be measured using different metrics: size of the algorithm (i.e. number of laws and constants in them), information loss (i.e. its precision), computational efficiency (i.e. an ability to compute prediction). This way we can view Newton laws as an efficient lossy algorithm, while quantum mechanics are near lossless, but more complex and computationally difficult.

Like most aeon articles, it looks like it's trying to slightly push his readers to believe idiotic things without flat out saying it.

I'll keep trusting science backed by data.