Parable of Alien Chess
lukesmith.xyz
lukesmith.xyz
On the other hand, the present article seems to me to get some important things wrong. For one, it's not the case that overall white and black win 50% of the time each. More importantly though, if somebody is interested in investigating chess, they will supposedly understand that it's some activity that other (somewhat) intelligent beings are undertaking.
Even if everything seems like a blur, an alien scientist should not be content with dismissing it as uninteresting randomness. More so, if somebody actually starts investigating seriously, they will immediately obtain useful results about the game, results that should almost certainly provide useful predictions about the game outcome (at least better than "it's all random").
I might find, however, some agreement with the spirit of the article. It seems to me that, even though the author doesn't articulate it properly, the idea is that scientists should pursue more fringe theories even if immediate confirmation is lacking. I think there's quite a bit of value in this, as long as your predictions are always checked against reality.
He addresses that (first-move advantage from white moving first) in the parenthesis after that same sentence:
"After extensive experimentation, they realize this: 50% of the time, the white player wins and 50% of the time, the black player wins (we'll ignore draws and any first-move advantage for the example). "
The author cannot have it both ways: either the aliens cannot distinguish the game from an equal-odds random process, or they can.
Really hard to parse the meaning. ¿White wins 50% of the time if we ignore that occasions where white wins because it has the first move? But white always has the first move.
It is difficult to relate to an analogy which is so divergent from the basic facts.
Changing the weights of your random number generator doesn't lead to a better understanding of how chess works.
It's also very clearly a problem that it ignores player skill, time control and all sorts of other factors that would be basic to any kind of model claiming to have power in predicting chess outcomes.
This was exactly the point the author was trying to convey. The simplest model of chess with the fewest assumptions is that it is just a random number generator with no dependence on any factors, but this is a bad model, and the "fringe" alien who assumes there is some deeper, hidden structure to the game is correct to do so.
If it helps, consider the alien's sport of glorfball. We've never seen a game played, but we know that approximately 50% of the time the Aberdorfs win, and approximately 50% of the time the Gloophbahorps win. Based on this data, is it reasonable to conclude that glorfball is nothing but a game of chance?
The author proposes a deliberately terrible model presumably in the hope that he is illuminating a wider point. Sadly I don't think he's doing that.
I have seen notable academics say the same thing. The problem is that the incentives set up in modern academia are strongly against doing anything outside of the mainstream.
Fair enough. His fault for trying to argue using an analogy I guess. It never works.
To me the idea of treating the chess game as a random process somehow felt like an anti-realist position [1]. I'm not sure how this kind of thinking is currently perceived by philosophers of science, it's possible it's an outdated view.
There is nothing unrealistic about random processes, and if the aliens take chess to be one, they are simply mistaken on account of their inability to get sufficient information to falsify this view.
There is a pretty well-known historical example in the opposition by Ernst Mach and the logical positivists to Boltzmann's work. I hope it is safe to say that the simplistic philosophical notions behind that opposition are now outdated and superseded.
This sociological intuition should drive further inquiry into the mechanics of the game.
> if they are limited to that extent, then they are not going to determine that it is a game of rules, no matter what their philosophy and no matter how much they suspect that it is
Indeed, in that case the aliens are forever stuck. However, IRL you probably can't be absolutely sure that you're forever stuck, so in this case the 'philosophical' attitude might matter. An anti-realist might say - to hell with it, no worth trying, we'll never get better predictions out of more complex theories. A realist however, might pursue a theory not because it makes more accurate predictions, but because he/she has an idea that the theory is truly closer to the truth than the idea of a random coin toss. This intuition might take you through a dark period towards a higher reward (see moving from a local maximum to a valley, towards a yet unforeseeable global maximum).
PS:
flubert has a nice excerpt from Jaynes' Probability Theory: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25648965
I think you are probably on to something when you suggest this article was influenced by Feynmann's analogy, but I am pretty sure that Feynmann was not suggesting the straw man that this article attacks.
10.8 Mechanics under the clouds
Since tossing of small objects is nearly the first activity of every child, it would be observed very early that they do not always fall with the same side up, and that all one’s efforts to control the outcome are in vain. The natural hypothesis would be that it is the volition of the object tossed, not the volition of the tosser, that determines the outcome;indeed, that is the hypothesis that small children make when questioned about this.
Then it would be a major discovery, once coins had been fabricated, that they tend to show both sides about equally often; and the equality appears to get better as the number of tosses increases. The equality of heads and tails would be seen as a fundamental law of physics; symmetric objects have a symmetric volition in falling (as, indeed, Cramer and Feller seem to have thought). Of course, physicists continued discovering new particles and calculation techniques – just as an astronomer can discover a new planet and a new algorithm to calculate its orbit, without any advance in his basic understanding of celestial mechanics.
With this beginning, we could develop the mathematical theory of object tossing, dis-covering the binomial distribution, the absence of time correlations, the limit theorems, the combinatorial frequency laws for tossing of several coins at once, the extension to more complicated symmetric objects like dice, etc. All the experimental confirmations of the theory would consist of more and more tossing experiments, measuring the frequencies in more and more elaborate scenarios. From such experiments, nothing would ever be found that called into question the existence of that volition of the object tossed; they only enable one to confirm that volition and measure it more and more accurately.
Then, suppose that someone was so foolish as to suggest that the motion of a tossed object is determined, not by its own volition, but by laws like those of Newtonian mechanics,governed by its initial position and velocity. He would be met with scorn and derision; for in all the existing experiments there is not the slightest evidence for any such influence. The Establishment would proclaim that, since all the observable facts are accounted for by the volition theory, it is philosophically naıve and a sign of professional incompetence to assume or search for anything deeper. In this respect, the elementary physics textbooks would read just like our present quantum theory textbooks.
Indeed, anyone trying to test the mechanical theory would have no success; however carefully he tossed the coin (not knowing what we know) it would persist in showing head and tails about equally often. To find any evidence for a causal instead of a statistical theory would require control over the initial conditions of launching, orders of magnitude more precise than anyone can achieve by hand tossing. We would continue almost indefinitely,satisfied with laws of physical probability and denying the existence of causes for individual tosses external to the object tossed – just as quantum theory does today – because those probability laws account correctly for everything that we can observe reproducibly with the technology we are using.
After thousands of years of triumph of the statistical theory, someone finally makes a machine which tosses coins in absolutely still air, with very precise control of the exact initial conditions. Magically, the coin starts giving unequal numbers of heads and tails; the frequency of heads is being controlled partially by the machine. With development of more and more precise machines, one finally reaches a degree of control where the outcome of the toss can be predicted with 100% accuracy. Belief in ‘physical probabilities’ expressing a volition of the coin is recognized finally as an unfounded superstition. The existence of an underlying mechanical theory is proved beyond question; and the long success of the previous statistical theory is seen as due only to the lack of control over the initial conditions of the tossing.
Because of recent spectacular advances in the technology of experimentation, with increasingly detailed control over the initial states of individual atoms (see, for example,Rempe, Walter and Klein, 1987), we think that the stage is going to be set, before very many more years have passed, for the same thing to happen in quantum theory; a century from now the true causes of microphenomena will be known to every schoolboy and, to paraphrase Seneca, they will be incredulous that such clear truths could have escaped usthroughout the 20th (and into the 21st) century"
http://www.med.mcgill.ca/epidemiology/hanley/bios601/Gaussia...
You may be closer to the source of inspiration, although I feel that Feynman may have been part of it too. Maybe it was a combination of the two :)
I like that Jaynes' alegory highlights really how difficult it may be IRL to move from a simplistic theory to the next level of depth.
If this is a matter of which model to use then fair enough, you may wish to use a more exact model than the 50-50 model; but the author is not arguing about which model to use, they are arguing about which model to pursue building upon.
Building upon any model of interest is not a dead end (because it is being built upon!). Even if the underlying principles of the model of interest need to be changed to accomplish something else in the future, it is still useful to develop the model. Approximate truths can also have deep meaning and are sometimes even more generalizable to multiple areas of reality than exact answers. Approximations are no less true than trying to be exact, they are just saying a different thing. Neither is inferior to the other, or at least if exactness really is better than approximation, this is not a good argument for it.
Another commenter pointed out that some models need to be thrown out in order to make room for the new (e.g. the earth-centric view of the solar system had to go at some point), and I think that's valid and hard to argue against; and it seems to align with what the author is saying. But the work done upon the old models was certainly not worth nothing. For one thing, the work done upon the old models is what made the new work possible. I think perhaps the author's issue is that they do not acknowledge that the 50-50 model of chess has value.
p.s. to the author if they read the comments: I actually enjoyed reading your thoughts even if I disagree with them.
I severely doubt anyone who isn't already primed to agree with the conclusions would read this and find it convincing
(I don't find the idea that science needs ways to escape local maxima particularly controversial, but this article is terrible, and made worse by the unnecessary antagonism)
Analogies don't work if you deliberately make assumptions that are inconsistent with what they are trying to convey.
We could rephrase the analogy such that the aliens are listening to a specific broadcast from earth from 1000 light years away. Some percentage of the time the broadcast is "White won", the rest of the time the broadcast is "White lost." Is it reasonable to assume that it's a game of pure chance just because you don't have a good method of predicting the outcome?
Seriously, a model that can predict things better than a coin flip will be more scientific. Even if it utilizes something that is somewhat hypothetical / not immediately observable. Say, Newtonian mechanics talks about forces - but forces is a totally made up concept, their nature is (for the most part) not explained within the Newtonian mechanics framework at all, but it's a good model.
Also, many models of reality that are "inferior" to the "real models" are still very helpful and useful in science. Many numerical methods scientists are happy to use, say finite differences, discretize continuous equations. This transformation makes the model strictly speaking worse. But this is fine, since it allows to produce calculations that match and predict experiments. Even in Physics, people start using ML / neural networks to approximate complex calculations. Not because a neural network is a better more descriptive model of the reality (of course it's not), but because it calculates the answer close enough to the real one.
Crank ideas are crank not because they use use some made up concepts that cannot be experimentally seen. They are crank, because they ignore mainstream development, staying blissfully unaware of the subtleties and details the mainstream theories have already considered and resolved.
So the main fault of crank theories is the ignorance of their creators, who are either not willing or not able to correctly contextualize their work within the previously existing knowledge. If you want to do science, you have to do your homework: 1) explore and learn what is known already, 2) develop it further or propose an alternative, 3) contextualize your work within the existing knowledge about the subject. Skipping steps 1 and 3 is dishonest.
Of course while it’s good to search for alternative models/theories/explanations, unless you can provide something with better with more predictive power than the existing/widely accepted ones, it’s a good idea to hold the critique.
EDIT: To clarify: by less predictive power I mean that it neither explains new effects or predicts new unknown ones, nor explains known phenomena or generates existing theories as special examples. I didn’t mean theories such as for example string theory, that has little predictive power at the moment, but has current theories as special cases and holds the promise of explaining things that current theories cannot. /EDIT
Physicists are “stuck” with existing theories not because they like them, but because they work so well it’s hard to invent something that even works equally well (not to mention something that works better). There a lot of smart that are brave in thinking and propose wild explanations. Yet, in most cases they don’t stand up the test of time.
Einstein couldn’t deal with randomness of Quantum Mechanics, put forward a hidden variable theory and it was (and still is) seriously considered, but he (and many others) weren’t able to put forward better-working theory. We stick to QM despite its weirdness/randomness because it works extremely well, not because we like it or think things must be this way and require no further study/“it is the most efficient and parsimonious possible model“.
If hard sticking to Ockham’s razor was true, Quantum loop Gravity, String Theory and many other theories wouldn’t be intensively studied for past 50 years. Or development and studying interpretations of quantum mechanics (which btw yielded results in Quantum Information Theory).
It’s just that constructing something correct and new IS really hard.
Yes, but hundred years ago we were "stuck" with another worldview that was explaining everything fine, and i assume ther was a big resistance from estabilishment to addopt new ideas. But then old scientist died, and resistance got weaker. So we might look back at today after 100 yaers and see similar situation. No one says that ideas of 100 yaers ago were all wrong, just not so true as current.
While worldviews can be overturned and paradigms can be shifted, it is (significantly) harder than it was before. We simply know more now, and have a better understanding of our limits. So whatever new framework that has to supercede our current framework has more ground to cover than it did even in the recent past. This is exacerbated by the fact that in physics in that most everything outside the early universe and black holes (which aren't easily accessible experimentally) seems to conform to our current framework -- there is both more to fit in and less data to work with.
Likewise quantum mechanics doesn’t replace General Relativity. It compliments it.
It doesn't replace, rather complements it.
Occam's razor AND semantics.
Edit: maybe you were joking? in which case sorry (it missed the mark)
Hum... The old scientists that (very vocally on that case) resisted change were the same that uncovered the problems with the old models and laid out the first theories on how to fix those problems. Those things are way more complex than simple quotes and labels can communicate.
New models got adopted when after a lot of work people created some that worked better. Not a moment before. Those better models didn't get resistance from the established physicists.
Part of the authors premise is that a more correct theory could have less predictive power out thr gate and might not be pursued as a result.
Think on it in a different way, most of the very revolutionary theories, those that changed how we see the world, were relatively more simple, they were generally simple enough that one fringe could develop them to a point where they shined so brightly as to be next to irrefutable. Things like how the earth might be round, and circle the sun.
We can't expect the same to be true for more advanced fields, we can't say "yeah, this "new/underdeveloped" idea does seem reasonable, but it does not solve everything as well as our existing theory that we've been iterating on for decades, so let's not waste time on that".
Intresting trivia: heliocentrism didn't show "shining brightly as to be next to irrefutable" - it was a fringe idea that could not be confirmed through observation at the time, required some pretty wild (for the time) assumptions - such as stars being very, very far away, to explain why there's no visible parallax from Earth's movements - and went against existing understanding of physics in general (such as, Earth is very big and heavy and bulky, so it's not obvious how could it be moving in circles very fast). Also, IIRC, the predictions made by heliocentric model were less accurate than geocentric ones.
It took astronomical observations with early telescopes to provide data points favoring a mixed geo/heliocentric model, and then further observations, work of Kepler and Newton's theory of gravity for heliocentric model to finally start making sense.
This does serve as an example backing TFA's thesis: some accepted theories, like (then) geocentric model, may be just local maxima - theoretical dead ends. A potential better theory will initially look bad in comparison, it needs work to develop past the accepted one.
> work of Kepler
Yes. One problem of the early Copernican heliocentric model was that it stated that the orbits of planets around the sun were perfect circles. It wasn't until Kepler showed that a) the orbits were actually elliptical and b) the planets speeded up when they approached the sun and slowed down as they moved away that the actual movements of the planets could be more accurately predicted. Until this time, the older earth-centric models with all of the epicycles were 'better', even though totally unrelated to reality.
Obviously it's different for Mercury and Venus, whose orbits are inside ours. They instead switch between being visible in the morning or the evening.
All very complicated for those ancient astronomers!
The so-called "wave function collapse" isn't really part of QM, it's duct tape that we have applied to stick together the QM with "Classical Physics" and our pre-existing assumptions about human consciousness. I don't think we should consider it "real" or "true".
Without the wave function collapse, there is no randomness in QM.
You can't just wave away the collapse mechanism, what do you make of the double alit experiment? isn't the target "real" enough?
That's why the wave function "collapses": Because it collides with the non-quantum target.
It's a useful approximation, but of course in reality, there is no such thing as a non-quantum thing.
And if you evolve the target's wave function with the wave function of the particle, then there is no stochastic collapse.
But would that not also imply that we should be able to measure the quantum world with quantum devices? Say we have a quantum property that is extremely close to p=0.5. If we could invent a device to replicate that property perfectly and measure it repetitively we could then estimate ever more accurate boundaries for the "true" value of p, no?
It's either inherent randomness or just a deep hole in the whole thing (similar to the alien chess thought experiment problem). Personally I choose to believe that the theory is just incomplete because nobody can even define what a "measurement" really is, meaning in which cases what we do is a "measurement" and in which cases it is not a "measurement". I also think that this is what people like Feynman refer to when they say things like "nobody understands QM", it's actually "nobody understands the wave function collapse", the rest is just maths.
The measurement is the theoretical duct tape between the "quantum world" and the "classical world".
But there is no such thing as a "classical world", it's just a useful approximation.
And therefore, there is also no such thing as a "measurement", it's also an approximation.
(Maybe not even an approximation, but maybe more like a projection...)
Bell's inequalities show that there isn't a local state that can be there.
On the other hand nobody has any clue what the quantum measurement / wave function collapse actually is. There are theories/interpretations but no truly satisfying answers in the same way as for example Newton's equations were a satisfying answer to the elliptical movement of planets, even though we later found out in the 20th century that F ~ 1/r^2 was actually an approximation.
We simply don't know, and we have no idea when shall we know.
Isn't that the observer becoming entangled with the measured system?
The definitions I have found always invoke the presence of a "classical system"/"observer".
But that just kicks the can down the road, because there is no well-defined definition of a "classical system" either.
(It would help tremendously if we ever measured quantum states that weren't "collapsed", but as we've never done this so far it makes most of the stochastic collapse stuff hard to justify, even if it seems intuitively like the right approach).
My layman feeling wrt. QM, and Copenhagen school in particular, is that we're searching for too computationally simple mental models. Most other areas of physics - like GR, SR, thermodynamics - can get away with aggregating matter into points, perfect spheres, etc. because they're working in macro scale, but QM is trying to deal with the smallest bits of our reality. Now the boundary between QM and "classical physics" is one where your quantum system will interact with 10^{double digit} amount of other quantum-relevant bits. I have a feeling that searching for what constitutes "a measurement" in such scenario is missing the point, and even talking about the macro system being entangled with the test system is pretty much skipping over all the interesting bits.
Edit: To give one example of an approach that I think is promising: We start by describing the observer and environment through a density matrix (a probability distribution over possible wave functions) and introduce an interaction with a quantum system (e.g. a spin). Given a reasonable interaction, you can show that the entanglement in the combined state (observer, environment and spin) leads to the system approaching a state that is a probability distribution of entangled states where each probability corresponds to the Born rule. Interestingly in this case the probabilities emerge from our lack of knowledge about the microstate of the observer/environment, so it’s actually thermodynamic uncertainty.
I am not particularly a many-world proponent, but I do not think it is fair to level this accusation as an issue for many worlds without bringing up that every other interpretation has the same "flaw".
Although its really cool I don't think Gleason helps you tie any particular interpretation to the Born rule, since you still have to make a jump to tie your measurement outcome to a POM/POVM element.
As far as your last sentence goes, this is sort of what I was trying to argue in my comment above. The "part that is difficult" that you identify as being unresolved by MWI is also completely unresolved by pilot wave theory, or qbism or consistent histories or any other interpretation (as far as I am aware).
QM is a model of "what we can observe from the world" based on "what we can observe from the world".
QM is a model of "accessible" information.
What laymen usually wants is to understand how the world evolve.
What QM physicists tell them is there exist some inaccessible information, but using accessible information we have, we know how to predict all the accessible information (albeit stochastic-ally).
The typical example to help computer scientists to understand is the seed of a pseudo-random generator in an online casino. The players will never be able to access the seed, therefore the best they can do is make decision based on the value of the generated random numbers they observe and their probabilities.
Bell inequalities are a consequence of this modelisation. They are a refurbishing of Boole's inequalities, a theorem about probability which only bound those who use probability.
The usual fallacy forward is telling QM is a non-local theory, classical local theory can't violate Bell inequalities, Bell inequalities violations are observed in the real world, therefore the world is not local...
If you can prove conclusively there's no randomness and no collapse and no need for either, a Nobel Prize awaits. If you can't - most likely - one opinion is as (in)valid as any other for now.
There's also been the - likely incorrect - belief that different models are too hard to distinguish experimentally.
So there's been a process of continuous refinement of existing theories which are known to be incomplete, and no concerted and sustained attempt to solve foundational philosophical problems - which is the level that Einstein, Newton, and other pioneers operated at.
An alternative explanation for quantum foundations being in limbo is that it is extremely difficult to come up with alternatives that offer a possibility of verification.
Update: writing this reminded me of [1], in which a simple experiment by Shahriar Afshar, that arguably challenged one tenet of the Copenhagen interpretation, provoked a disturbingly over-the-top response, which supports your position on how work on quantum fundamentals is opposed (though, personally, I doubt it succeeds in challenging the Copenhagen interpretation. Interestingly, the opponents of Afshar's interpretation do not all agree on why they think it is wrong.)
[1] https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg19325915-400-quantum-...
* “Chess results are not 50-50” - I don’t think the exact numbers are that important. What’s important is that in the 50-50 model or x-y model the Aliens assume these values to be just a consistent result of an RNG.
* “Chess is not random / the players are intelligent / the aliens could investigate who plays against who” - In the parable the Aliens don’t have direct access these variables, just like we might not have the access to some variables in QM experiments and we (and They) could mistake something hard to observe for random (i.e. if the rule is “if there’s an even number of atoms in a 1m radius, do A, if it’s odd, do B” the outcome would be 50-50 and would seem random even if it’s not)
* “Theories that are more complicated, predict less or make worse approximations are worth less than simple theories that predict more / better” (in other words Science is about models and approximations, not about truth or “Shut up and calculate”) - I think the author simply disagrees but he also shows why non-mainstream models are worth pursuing and developing - so that we are not stuck in a local maximum with a worse model than the one we could have.
Something else concerns me: I don’t know much about QM but if I understand correctly, Bell’s inequality tells us that there are no “hidden variables” and that QM is indeed random.
I’d be grateful for any references to articles on this topic that can be understood by non-experts.
If all you have is data on whether black or white won, then, assuming the 50-50 outcome probabilities, this is a fine model. There is nothing to be gained by anything else.
Where I disagree with the author I guess is to suggest that some other statistically inferior model would be better because, if you had a richer set of observations, it would be shown to be true. To me that scenario is irrelevant at some level, because it's a different scenario (I don't agree with the author's assertion that first move information would somehow decrease predictive information -- it might not improve it, but I doubt it would decrease it).
If you had information on player identities even, you might be able to model ability or something like that, and use that to improve your predictions. But then that relies on the bit of information about which players are which, beyond black and white.
The philosopher Quine argued that models cannot be decontextualized from the observations they are explaining, and I think that is particularly relevant in this case. At some level it doesn't matter whether the Aliens' models are true or not, because they have no information in the scenario that they could use to do anything with.
The 50-50 model (per the author) isn't incorrect, it's just a (assumedly) correct model for the game of chess when all you know is which color won the game. If you were playing chess, and your pairings were random and you couldn't see the board or what pieces were available or where they could go, etc the game would seem very similar to what the aliens were observing. A more "truthful" model is only relevant or useful in the context where there is more data to make it useful.
Is there an area of study that looks at how people discuss things? Including, but not limited to misunderstanding/miscommunication dealing with things analogies, thought experiments, and the like? So that you could make predictions. For example, since "story A" used analogies "B and C", then we'd expect ~50% of the commentators on said article will fixate on B, since that is their favorite topic, and they never tire of discussing B, even if it is purely incidental the point of the article. So you could potentially tailor your article help minimize misunderstandings. Micro-sociology or maybe some sort of specific behavioral psychology?
>I’d be grateful for any references to articles on this topic that can be understood by non-experts.
I liked:
https://bayes.wustl.edu/etj/articles/cmystery.pdf
"...From his reply to EPR, we find that Bohr's position was like this: 'You may decide of you own free will, which experiment to do. If you do experiment E1 you will get Result R1. If you do E2 you will get R2. Since it is fundamentally impossible to do both on the same system, and the present theory correctly predicts the results of either, how can you say that the theory is incomplete? What more can one ask of a theory?'
While it is easy to understand and agree with this on the epistemological level, the answer that I and many others would give is that we expect a physical theory to do more than merely predict experimental results in the manner of an empirical equation; we want to come down to Einstein's ontological level and understand what is happening when an atom emits light, when a spin enters a Stern-Gerlach magnet, etc. The Copenhagen theory, having no answer to any question of the form: 'What is really happening when - - -?', forbids us to ask such questions and tries to persuade us that it is philosophically naive to want to know what is happening. But I do want to know, and I do not think this is naive; and so for me QM is not a physical theory at all, only and empty mathematical shell in which a future theory may, perhaps, be built."
...and...
"The Chaotic Ball: An Intuitive Analogy for EPR Experiments"
https://arxiv.org/abs/quant-ph/9611037
...but that probably only raises more questions, rather than providing answers.
Anyone who can muster their willpower for thirty seconds, can make a desperate effort to lift more weight than they usually could. But what if the weight that needs lifting is a truck? Then desperate efforts won't suffice; you'll have to do something out of the ordinary to succeed. You may have to do something that you weren't taught to do in school. Something that others aren't expecting you to do, and might not understand. You may have to go outside your comfortable routine, take on difficulties you don't have an existing mental program for handling, and bypass the System.
[...]
Are they really under the impression that humanity can survive if every single person does everything the ordinary, normal, default way?
It comes across as science/intellectual shaming.
> Possibly illiterate dilettantes on the internet might see and bring to attention legitimate theoretical flaws.
And if the flaws are legitimate, no matter how much work a scientist has done, then he has to take these into account now. Science is incremental and self-correcting. Is it a flaw if someone points out something wrong?
> All the years you spend in graduate school counting angels on pinheads in your respective theoretical framework is mostly a waste of time.
What is the point of saying this? There are dead ends to science and some of these dead ends may seem like wastes of time but it’s all about incremental knowledge and discoveries. If something revolutionary comes along that disproves years of work, then that for science is a success.
> Most of the scientific work is not meaningful outside of the theoretical framework that gave rise to it.
What does this mean? Isn’t this “theoretical framework” based on our observations? Sure there is this chance that it might be wrong but if most of our data and observations show that this is true, then it is until proven otherwise.
If someone tells you that the earth might be flat and what we can see with our eyes and what we currently know might not be true, is that sufficient evidence to make you think, “oh the earth might be flat after all”?
As for "isn't this theoretical framework based on our observations"? Well, yes and no; as Einstein famously once noted, "it's the theory that decides what can be observed.". Obviously the reverse is also partly true and the whole thing is an iterative process, but in a sense Luke's article seems to be about the same thing as Einstein's quote: that it is fruitful to challenge the framework every now and then, rather than accept it as religion.
Specifics aside, I don't think that's an unreasonable mindset to have in science. (or other fields for that matter - a similar mantra exists in medicine: "always dare to challenge the existing diagnosis" -- exactly because people rarely think to do it)
This is about priming people to buy into some propaganda system, for instance one constructed for political purposes, and reject their existing assumptions. The weird swerve at the end is the payload.
The reason to do this is, if you're knowingly maintaining a propaganda system that works towards some known purpose, and you want people to fall into it more readily. This doesn't discount the validity of the initial concepts: local maxima are real, and our ability to thoroughly understand things is limited.
But we remain functional through pretending we can indeed understand things, and there's usefulness in that. Generally, axioms are brought into question when specific details don't line up with our theory.
In a vacuum, 'abandon all theories!' is a fine position to have. In reality, 'abandon all theories!' is a set-up for getting fed a pile of information that benefits somebody else, because you become a willingly useful idiot ready to be programmed by anyone.
Running into somebody like this, I find the initial 'abandon all theories!' attitude to be refreshing. I even agree with some of it. If the NEXT THING he tells me is all about how Pepe's face is on the Moon outlined in craters, I've learned to be extremely suspicious of what the guy is really selling. Because even if he is himself sincere… there is somebody up the chain pursuing 'Nigerian spam' techniques and finding out by this who's credulous enough to be used for their own purposes.
And that's what I get from the 'going off the rails at the end'. The point of the article is to hook the truly credulous, and the writer may or may not be in on that.
Also dying, and new generations coming along is in the interest of science. quite ironically the development of eternal life would kill scientific progress, which might be the great filter after all.
Eternal life can always be abandoned if we find out it doesn't work.
A theory that is more complex and fits the data worse is a less good theory because it is easier to get stuck in. If I have two new theories with this property, how do I choose between them? Imagining a situation where the less predictive theory is closer to the underlying reality does not change this - the fact that it is closer to the underlying reality is irrelevant until and unless we have measurements that allow us to distinguish those cases, at which point, we will have evidence for the (now) more predictive theory.
This article is actually arguing for a system that would result in more dogmatic acceptance and less critical testing.
But if you were to forego predictive power and seek understanding, you'd eventually see that objects fundamentally fall at the same rate, and a confounding factor of air resistance was the reason for the observed discrepency. With this deeper understanding, you can make models of gravity and fluid dynamics which are not just more accurate for the specific cases you measured, but also extensible to other cases like the orbits of planets.
1. The author underestimates the rate of competing ideas coming out of 'learned' scientists.
2. The author overestimates the possibility of an 'internet dilettante' without good knowledge of prior art coming up with something useful.
To me it's a bit like me playing chess with a Grandmaster. Sure, I know how the chess pieces move, I know basic tactics and strategy. But I have never studied a chess theory book, never learned any openings. What's the chance of me coming up with a chess theory novelty that provides a better model of the game and lets me win the Grandmaster? It's not none. But due to my lack of knowledge of prior art the chance is pretty thin.
Of course, if you start out with a contrived example where there's a large amount of unobservable simple structure, then it looks like postulating unobserved structures is good. I could give a contrary example where it's impossible to do better than random and draw the opposite lesson.
Beyond that, under logical positivism there isn't a notion of truth as the author applies it. To critique LP by saying it doesn't get at the truth is kind of missing the point.
> Possibly illiterate dilettantes on the internet...
At least this one point is correct.
What can the aliens know or deduce?
- The number of pieces
- The pieces are divided into 2 different colors (white and black)
- The pieces are split by color and placed at opposite (vertical) ends of the board.
- There is the same number of pieces in each color
- The pieces are arranged into 2 vertical rows and 8 horizontal columns
- Opening moves cluster at 2 different lengths, towards the opposite side of the board.
- The longer opening move length is typically ~2x the short opening move length.
- The opening move vector is always towards the opposite end of the board (not horizontal)
- The opening move is always white
- White wins slightly more often
- They are given the duration and outcome of each game (win, loss, or tie)
- ? When games end quickly, first-move advantage shrinks
- ? Sometimes a series of games end more quicker than usual (they observe a blitz tourney)
- ? Win P() is slightly different for each of the 8 (x2) possible opening moves
- ? Everything here: https://old.chesstempo.com/images/en/openingExp.png
What else?
Also, a note regarding the statement in the article that the alternative model "is less predictive over iterated games than the coin flip model". I don't think this is technically possible. If the model was selecting the winner at a statistically worse rate than 50% chance, you could just flip the sign of the prediction, and do that much better than chance.
Here's my interpretation of what they see pre- and post- opening move...
If you analyse 5000 board configurations you can deduce with a high certainty that there are 64 fields the pieces can be on.
The pressing question is then why can some pieces move only diagonally or only in one direction or any.
In the case of chess, going after the why question is pointless, but obviously that wouldn't satisfy any scientist: It works because someone decided that it should work like this.
Could it work with different rules? The alien scientist then probably opt for a positive answer calling for a multiverse of chess rules :)
If they could view entire matches, it seems a trivial task to acquire a complete understanding of the underlying game, no?
Knowing only the first move would limit understanding heavily, that's true.
More than once have I seen a nice chess set in a home, set up completely wrong. They’ll be close! Their model isn’t too far off from standard, but just so (K & Q reversed, B & N reversed, &c). I presume the owners were quite content. Honestly, I don’t even know if most people would notice, so why point it out (is my model even the “preferred” one)?
For physics though, we have it down right. Do the experiment, did it work?.. it's already the correct method. No need to improve there.
However, in order to reach a good accuracy, a great deal of fine-tuning and tweaking is required. E.g. high energy physics. The standard model has something like 18 free parameters.
A new theory, which could be "more correct" and provide, in the long term, better predictions, might require time and manpower for this fine-tuning and tweaking to occur.
However, as it did not provide better accuracy of prediction in its initial stages, is said to be not worth pursuing or even directly pseudoscience or quackery.
This used to not be the case because, 100 years ago, relatively simple theories workable by 1-3 solo scientists provided a large enough breakthrough in prediction power to be seriously considered.
It may be the case however that nowadays, with the amazing level of precision measurement we are able to achieve, we've optimized ourselves into a corner.
We've fitter our quite-a-lot-of-degrees-of-freedom theories into a local maximum so hard that finding a theory that predicts better is, at least, impractical.
And through this process we've blinded ourselves from any new and disruptive ideas.
Again, look at the standard model. It's got so many damn dials to tweak that no wonder it fits reality so well. And if it ever doesn't, we can just shove supersymmetry in there.
We need to be able to dedicate resources to theories that do not provide better predictions, but that provide new perspectives. A moderate amount of resources. But calling those scientists quacks does no good.
You are talking as if this isn't the case already, for instance: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Physics_beyond_the_Standard_Mo...
I don't think that the usefulness of alternative viewpoints is contested by anyone, the problematic part of the article is the vague, ill-informed critique of 'scientific rigor'.
What other way is there to judge models than to compare them with experimental results? Grounding theories to experiments is literally the only thing that separates science from crackpottery.
It's also pretty weird for the article to criticize "logical positivism", when the most common contemporary views on the topic of philosophy of science (e.g. Popper, Kuhn, Putnam) don't actually agree with logical positivism.
I'd only add that, in my opinion, the vehement rejection of non-mainstream ideas is actually more common in non-professional circles. While a physicist may find interesting considering a new idea, a physics enthusiast, in my personal experience, is much more likely to acuse of pseudoscience and crackpottery. It's sort of a validating and gregarious warm and fuzzy feeling. Look at those people with their clearly energy-conservation-violating nonsense. Hey, I've done it before.
There's not really a need to come up with these alternatives when we know string theory is powerful enough to do it, and only has one free parameter. That is, unless you can come up with a theory that had no free parameters.
These theories are fundamentally math models, and I don't find it likely that we'll determine that p = np by finding just the right np problem and exploring that on its own.
In the theory department, we're fine with what we've got. What we're missing is new experiements that can actually challenge our models. We've got a couple things to push on, sure { black hole singularities, dark matter, dark energy, wave function collapse, quantum gravity } but we don't have the tools to manipulate and observe them like we do for electromagnetism or chromodynamics
edit: to expand, the landscape problem is more about finding the right parameters for compactification (folding up the geometry) that produce the universe we all know and love, or at least a realistic one. This makes them similar to free parameters.
I'm not aware of any 'postmodern' thinker who has expounded this philosophy.
Or more shortly using predictive ability as the sole criteria can lead to less correct results then alternatives.
If my description is correct I would say that the advantage of using prediction as the sole criteria is that it avoids the burden of making arbitrary selections. I understand the appeal of the choosing a course because it's more elegant or beautiful but if you were getting on a plane and were told that was the guiding light of the designer - or worse the engineers - how happy would you be?
But this is empirically false. It fails to explain that, for example, some players consistently beat other players, or at least have a much higher than 50% winrate.
If chess really did consistently just have a 50% outcome, then it really would be equivalent to an overcomplicated coinflip. So I don't find this parable at all convincing, and remain a logical positivist.
I think a better approach on encountering a flawed analogy is to attempt to improve it, come up with a better one, or address the underlying claim directly, but saying "this analogy is unclear to me the end" isn't going to get you very far in life.
That's a bizarre attitude. Thought experiments were a major and important tool in developing the theory of relativity, precisely because they were taken seriously and done rigorously; contradictions weren't waved away as "just a tool to facilitate discussion".
> I think a better approach on encountering a flawed analogy is to attempt to improve it, come up with a better one, or address the underlying claim directly, but saying "this analogy is unclear to me the end" isn't going to get you very far in life.
On the contrary, being willing to call out nonsense has served me very well. There is no "underlying claim" here; the story is what's meant to carry the claim, and if the story doesn't work (and it doesn't) the whole thing falls apart (and it does). It's nonsense, top-to-bottom.
This isn't a formal physical theory, just a heuristic for evaluating lines of investigation. Richard Feynman gave a good explanation of the principle, which he said he found helpful in his work.
It‘s an interesting way of being “wrong”.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First-move_advantage_in_chess
Maybe they only know that the win chance for white is between 0.4 and 0.6.
Is one player happier than the other right now?
How long will it take to make the next move?
How long will the game last?
There's lots and lots of observable things other than who wins that the coin flip model does a worse job at. Thus, the example makes just as good an argument that making better predictions is still what makes a model better.
The missing question is "what are you using the model for?"
Are you trying to learn chess? Understand human psychology? Predict the outcomes of chess games? The same model isn't going to be the best for all of them. Like, the super GM level stockfish is going to suck at predicting beginner chess games
Whether one model is better than another is all about the purpose it's trying to serve, and how well it does that.
Further, for some random chess tournament, I'm guessing the win ratio for black/white is close to 50/50 (perhaps white is a bit ahead for having first mover advantage - which is stipulated as ignored in the article)
It turns out the result of the game has lots to do with the player, and Little to do with the color, which makes the alien first model simple, accurate, and completely wrong.
And discovering that relationship between players and winning is important and valuable! But trying to understand how the pieces move before you've even understood that this is a game of skill is putting the cart before the horse, and gives you a model that really is less useful than the coin-flip model.
Sure. But again, trying to understand chess without having that understanding would be putting the cart before the horse.
> Even then, if they've previously seen humans at a casino, they might reasonably deduce that chess is no more a game of skill than craps is.
That would be a reasonable starting assumption, but they'd eventually notice contradictions: the fact that some players consistently had advantages over others, more experienced players generally beat less experienced players, commentary and analysis of board positions is considered worthwhile...
If you actually did that, you'd start creating complicated hidden variable theories to explain every random coin flip you could see, despite the overwhelming majority of them actually being random coin flips.
> The author's thesis is that assuming a complex explanation for a black box's behavior is reasonable because that's the only way that leads to experiments to probe the contents of the box.
The thesis only holds if it's actually common to have a complex hidden detail inside a black box that is nevertheless somehow completely impossible to infer from the outside. And what I'm saying is that that's actually absurd; in cases where there are meaningful details to be found out, it will be apparent from the outside that there is detail in there, at least the overwhelming majority of the time.
You complain that the author's logic will lead to creating complicated hidden variable theories but that's exactly what the author is advocating. While there will always be some ever more convoluted model to explain results, any given model is testable, whereas assuming there is nothing to model is not testable.
Citation needed. The author is trying to claim that this kind of extremely opaque black box system is common (at least, common enough that we should take the possibility seriously), but their only argument is a made-up example that falls apart under the slightest scrutiny.
> While there will always be some ever more convoluted model to explain results, any given model is testable, whereas assuming there is nothing to model is not testable.
The claim that Russell's Teapot exists in any given orbit is testable, whereas assuming Russell's Teapot doesn't exist anywhere is not testable.
He could have referred to the NFL or something, maybe that would have helped. The point was to set up the aliens to have a gross approximation of outcome determination that is both accurate and wrong.
The aliens could have decided to use home vs. away teams as their "coin flip" and stopped investigating once they found out that home teams win a bit more, for example, and the "crazy" alien in the parable could suggest that examining only the first play of the game is a better answer. The "crazy" alien would be told to stop because the first play isn't more predictive, but the fact that the alien is looking at gameplay is more "right".
Heh, I think the author's example is fine if the reader gives it a charitable interpretation. The disservice is from all the overly pedantic people who want to argue about chess instead of the philosophy of science.
I suspect that the real breakthrough would come when the alien physicist designs a very sensitive instrument that can observe exotic wavelengths of light at high resolution, and thereby show that the board is not uniform, but is divided into regions that have 1 of 2 states: i.e. black and white squares.
Quantum Mechanics, sure, but you could also apply this to Climate Science if you wanted to start a fight...
Where the parable falls short, and a mistake often made, is to confuse one's own inability to come up with discriminating experiments, for an absolute truth about the universe's resistance to observation.
What would it mean for aliens to not ever be able to measure chess' inner properties? it would mean that aliens could never read human texts, or talk with humans, as any of those would instantly lead them to the truth. Which in turn means aliens can't see light, or hear sounds, or interact with things which would allow them to do so. Going further, we end up at the conclusion that either these aliens exist in a completely separate universe from chess (and everything around it), or they CAN observe it (they just haven't tried hard enough).
This post is confused, in that it first states aliens can't see chess, but later they can. If their sensors ARE able to measure chess, the scientific process will eventually weed out the worse models for the better ones and they will understand it. If they aren't, then they will be left with the statistical random model, and that is indeed the best explanation, as all guesses toward the complicated intricacies of the game are equally likely and cannot be differentiated.
In the end, the post's theory boils down to one idea: "there is sometimes an underlying truth that is not observable", and it is a really weak one. Like the flying tea pot, it can not be disproven or proven. "Underlying Truths" that do not affect the universe in any way and cannot be measured, might as well not exist, and we should not attempt to model them. Everything else can and will be explained, in time.
I'm not sure I see a paradox, or lesson here, other than it is important to understand what the scientific process of model, hypothesis and measurement can and can't do.
--
the same argument is often made for magic, or spirituality, or any other thing people say is 'unexplainable' (which can often be translated to "something I don't want to think too hard about")
We used to think many things were magic (light, magnets, the world), until someone smarter than us came up with a really smart experiment which let us shine light into boxes we thought were black (bell's inequality theorem is a fine example).
The lesson from history is, if we look hard enough, we eventually get closer to the truth, every time.
The first half of the article is clealy about quantum mechanics, although it doesn't name it explicitly. The author seems to be arguing that there is something specific really going on below the quantum level, regardless of whether we can measure it, and scientists refuse to acknowledge that only because of philosphical dogma (logical positivism). They seemed to think we only use probabilities to reflect our uncertainty, and ought to come up with a more fundamental theory that avoids that uncertainty.
But the two slit experiment shows that there is no more fundamental theory (at least not in that sense). If two paths have probability of 0.5, then it's not the case that only one or the other took place, we just don't know which is which. Instead, they both took place in some sense, to the extent that they interact with each other; that's not possible if there was one true path that we just couldn't deduce. It's maybe better to think of 0.5 as a weighting rather than a probability.
It's very disappointing to see this on HN
Here is a more concrete example I have been considering recently: The principal of least action can be derived from Newton's force laws. Alternatively, Newton's force laws can be derived from the principal of least action. Therefore, you could choose to make either "law" the more fundamental one and consider the other to be an emergent phenomena. Might this also apply to, e.g. the principals of thermodynamics? Might it be that all of the laws of physics are actually just an emergent phenomena that can be derived directly from the information theoretic properties of the laws of thermodynamics and entropy?
But then, why even stop there? We choose/discover these examples because our tiny, mediocre brains can only understand the universe from that point of view, whereas the actual universe we live in is unimaginably vast and complex. But might there be a way, for example, of deriving the laws of physics from some narrative principal (e.g. "we live in the best of all possible worlds... therefore by some chain of reasoning: F = ma!"). Maybe that chain of reasoning is only comprehensible to an artificial intelligence which we have yet to invent, involving us inhabiting some element of a vast fractal structure subject to some sort of anthropic principal?
And in general, it is worth considering the concept that not all things which are "true" are objectively measurable - those are just the things that are easiest to prove are true. To give an example of something which you know is true but which is, almost by definition, subjective: the existence of your own consciousness! It is impossible to prove, objectively, that you're not just some simulation that is running in a computer that's about to run out of memory and segfault... that you yourself are "real".
That's not to say that any of the above is actually true... but it might be true. Our recent focus on "provability" and "objectivity" has been used to argue that such things are in fact false, or just not worth considering or thinking about. There is sometimes an arrogance when there should be humility. Just because something might be exponentially difficult to prove, the sheer difficulty in proving it does not mean that it is not true.... There may be things which are true which we will never have the resources to discover. I think it's all worth considering.
In this sense, a belief in logical positivism has the same psychological basis as a belief in a conspiracy theory.
And we will call this AI Deep Thought and it will finally provide answer to Life, the Universe and Everything ...
Sorry I could not resist myself.
But Your whole obsevation is spot on - so many people here is missing forest for the trees - arguing about pointless details. I would even dare to say that they are sitting in local minimum of all possible discussions that could be derrived from this article.
> Nitpicking is more excusable for women to do. That's ultimately because men talk to others
> exchange important information, while women only talk to others for social negotiation and
> to test the social standing of others.