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Comment by mudrockbestgirl | Hacker News Reader

> We collectively changed our mind because younger geologists adopted the continental drift theory.

I like this quote by Max Planck, which applies not only to science but also politics and technology:

> a new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it

As for the original argument in the article, the problem is where to draw the boundary. If you want to e.g. get to the bleeding edge of Physics research you can't question everything people have discovered along the way or you wouldn't get anywhere in your lifetime. Believing in experts is not necessarily bug, it's also a feature. Because that's how we transmit knowledge across generations in an efficient way. The hard part is not the questioning, it's figuring out what's worth questioning and what's not.

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> We collectively changed our mind because younger geologists adopted the continental drift theory.

That's one way to look at it I suppose, but it's not the whole story. Alex du Toit was a big proponent of continental drift, he published "Our wandering continents" in 1937 at the age of 59. Otto Ampferer was 66 when he published "Thoughts on the motion picture of the Atlantic region" in 1941. It just took a lot of time for the theoretical concepts and hard data to come together, and by the time that happened in the lat 50s and early 60s many of the originators and early exponents of the idea had already died long before of old age.

Yes it can take time to change people's minds, sure, but many of the people doing the important work of mind-changing were no spring chickens themselves. The idea that it was all young hippies in the 60s fighting against old fuddy duddies is simplistic, there were plenty of fuddy duddies fighting the good fight, and had been for many decades.

This has also been studied with evolution in the 19th C., and its exactly the opposite. The older generation believed it first, before the younger.

This quote is used, without evidence, and it never made any sense. People who know more, and are incentivised to act on their knowledge, often change their minds.

Expertise is a contrary force to partisanship. (And as far as people cite Kuhn: he was wrong. He did not set out to disprove his views, if he did, he'd find plenty of examples to the contrary).

And there is quantum mechanics, where the greatest critics were also the greatest supporters and the ones that created most of it.

It's also easy to see that the "older generation dying out" is completely obvious, and happens anyway, no matter what amount of mind-changing is going on. As minds change, some young and some not, the older minds go away, so that by the time the new idea is accepted, yes, most of those accepting it were young at the time the idea was first presented. Naturally.

It is all worth questioning.

The hard job of the experts is determining the minimal experiments to show people that will convince them of far reaching theories. For me that is the true measure of expertise in an educator.

Your good physics instructors will have you go through the photoelectric effect, the Millikin drop experiment, electron/beta ray diffraction experiments (possibly a few other). Maybe you build a transistor. You will see the necessity of quantum mechanics to explain your experience. Generally, at that point, you might question other quantum effects, but you are confident if you do the more complex experiements, you will see the necessity. You will probably have learned what those experiments are as well.

Black holes are another story. I recall still encountering astrophysicists that wouldn't be convinced of the necessity of their existence. Special relativity you can get to accept via the Michelson-Morley experiment or similar experiments proving the constancy of the speed of light. From there you can sort of accept a need for a relativistic theory of gravity. But the evidence for GR starts to come from complex astrophysical measurements that you cannot really replicate and need to trust the (processed) data. The gravitational wave signatures can be convincing if you already know the math... but too many people feel that a simpler theory is just around the corner--a simpler theory without the singularities. Dark matter and dark energy face similar (but with their own variations of) skepticism.

>It is all worth questioning

Only if you are happy to spend your life never doing anything but questioning what's already there

The corpus of knowledge of any one field takes more than a lifetime to properly validate by yourself, and lots of them cannot be validated at all because you don't have infinite funds

Alas mankind dropped the ball in regards to dealing with anti-senescence, so picking your battles should be self-evident

What you focus your research on is always a big personal gamble. Be it questioning something that seems evident or walking along beaten paths that still might turn out to be wrong. But as long as you stick to the scientific method you will at least generate a result so that future researchers wont waste their time on the same approach.

In the end evidence hopefully prevails on the societal level. It might just take some time.

> minimal experiments to show people that will convince them of far reaching theories. For me that is the true measure of expertise in an educator.

For me, some of the best lectures I had in grad school were the ones that basically said “we know X because of this experiment”. And then went into the details of the experiment and the results. It’s simultaneously exciting and scary to learn how easy and simple many experiments are.

To this day though, the thing that really surprises[1] me is how timing affects a field.

For example, in my field (molecular biology), the technique of geometric amplification of DNA by PCR was widely available before I was in undergrad. This was a tool we took for granted. However, for my undergrad advisor, it was still a new-ish technique that was exciting.

In grad school, Sanger sequencing machines were widely available, so we could directly sequence DNA quickly and easily. But the lab I was in still had the equipment and ability to run large sequencing gels to sequence DNA manually.

By the time I was done with grad school, high throughput sequencing (NGS) and the human genome were completed. New students now take both of these things for granted. Knowing the full (ish) sequence of an organisms genome makes many experiments significantly easier (or even possible!). CRISPR/cas9 technology is the same - a tool that has come of age within the past decade or so. But these are resources and techniques that new students can just accept as available. They aren’t magic and novel to them… they are just another tool to be used to answer their questions.

[1] surprises isn’t quite the right word… impresses? Actually… encourages or amazes might be the better word to use. I find this flow of progress amazing to watch.

> Your good physics instructors will have you...

Absolutely. Learn by doing.

I have no idea what's happening in K-12 class rooms today. But I was fortunate to have had 3 or 4 teachers who had us actually do stuff.

I'm not sure if LGBT rights is an example or a counterexample for this phenomenon. A lot of countries made huge strides in that area in the last 0-3 decades, which wouldn't have happened if nothing about all the old people (which are overwhelmingly in power) changed, especially because over the same period politicians became older (so the age cohort in power stayed roughly the same in lots of places). However, when you do look at polls by age group it seems to me like the changes in old adults are rather modest, while young people overwhelmingly support.

> I'm not sure if LGBT rights is an example or a counterexample for this phenomenon. A lot of countries made huge strides in that area in the last 0-3 decades, which wouldn't have happened if nothing about all the old people (which are overwhelmingly in power) changed

Older people may be in government/business power, but one could argue that LGBT rights rose because those people aged out of the majority/worker culture group. Even if the age group in power is old and possibly even disagrees with the view, placating the masses must be done one way or the other, and codifying LGBT rights is an absurdly cheap way to do so, considering the other political topics.

I think this anomaly might be indication that LGBT rights issue actually have great support from the people in power because they don't really care but it's convenient topic to draw away minds from income equality.

It's not like the society made a great strides in how we imagine Santa Clause when Coca Cola pushed the current vision of him. Or it was not a great stride when people started talking about personal carbon footprint promoted by BP to draw away the blame from corporations.

It might be just a coincidence that LGBT rights issue rose to prominence right after Occupy Wallstreet was squashed with nearly military force. Or it might not be.

Are those two events connected? They both happened in the same decade and received some press. That's all I can come up with. And both things you mention -- LGBT rights and class consciousness -- have been around for a while.

https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/media-great...

These arew for racism, but similar hockeysticks with the exact same timing exist for other social justice topics. Media, as one, started harping on identity politics and never let their foot off the gas.

Isn’t that because of the BLM movement? I’m not seeing how any of these events are connected.

2010: Fuck the banks

Occupy gets sunk.

201x: Rainbow floats sponsored by J.P. Morgan, Angela Davis talks sponsored by Shell Corp.

If you're just saying that rainbow capitalism is in alignment with capitalists' interests, and anti-capitalism movements are not, then that makes sense.

Yes. Social justice movements are perfect channels for champagne socialism. The activists get to fight and fight and fight and the problem never goes away. They get to feel like they're such good people and have no need to concern themselves with whether their methods work. (Their allegiance is to their methods first, ostensible causes decidedly second)

I don’t know if it’s fair to say that revolutionary wealth redistribution movements, like Occupy, are failing because everybody is distracted with social justice movements. The Left is a coalition for social justice and also for wealth redistribution, to varying degrees. That’s why I’m saying that I’m not seeing a direct connection where a success in one area subtracts from progress in another.

It might be even easier to see & understand this phenomenon by looking at the history of rights for women and black people. These also took generational turnover, and attitudes among the older generations changed more slowly, and we’re still not even done yet. I can see this right now pretty clearly between my adult family/friends and our children, where the adults are still getting used to and learning how to talk about gay rights, are squeamish and sharing cringy talking points about transgender rights, meanwhile the kids are all fully on-board with equal rights for all and just have no problems with non-binary gender or sexuality. It’s funny after multiple rounds of this happening over multiple centuries that we still have trouble actually standing by our motto of liberty and justice for all.

These are, yes, examples of cultural belief changing slowly and happening less because people changed their minds and more because younger people came to a new conclusion. I’m curious what you meant about it maybe being a counter-example, what did you mean there?

Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions makes a similar point and is a must-read for anyone interested in this topic.

This book is so important to the conversation. Kuhn goes into detail on how everyone believed in Phlogiston until the adherents died and only then did the science progress into modern thermodynamics. He gives example after example of this pattern. He coined the phrase "paradigm shift" in the book to describe the pattern.

I think the great mistake every current generation of scientists makes is that they believe that this generation is fundamentally "right" and cannot undergo any further revolutions - at least on domains they "know" about. All other domains are up for grabs of course, and silly dogmatic them for believing otherwise!

Only when someone goes against the "scientific consensus" does any progress get made in any field. It's too bad we are humans with egos and cannot let go of ideas that we hold too close to our hearts. Perhaps it's an evolutionary trait that we are so short lived? Without such short lives dogma might win the day!

I think there is also often an incentive problem. Could someone have monetized their disbelief in phlogiston? A lot of modern science is often largely inconsequential outside the business of science, so you need to monetize within the community, which makes "attacks" on what is common knowledge probably not very worthwhile.

> Only when someone goes against the "scientific consensus" does any progress get made in any field.

That's a fundamental misunderstanding of Kuhn's model.

Progress gets made when scientists do normal science within the prevailing paradigm. That's the activity that turns fancy theories into something useful. Over time, scientists encounter issues that cannot be resolved within the paradigm. When a paradigm shift occurs, science takes many steps backwards and several steps sideways to deal with such issues.

Except, these are not steps backwards or sideways. They are forward steps.

That's because science is on a n>3-dimensional non-euclidian plane.

It is very important and extremely apropos to the world today, in which urgent structural progress is held back by fleeting and trivial minority interests.

At the heart of the matter is power.

Nobody has to wait for the incumbent generation to die off because they are right, but because they are powerful.

They select what's on the syllabus

They get to grade your college work and fail you

They get to reject or admit you to the research group

They hold the grant money

They review your papers

The great myth of science is that it's a rarefied battle for truth. Sure, but it's also a battle between people - and real people can be small-minded, petty, vain, prejudiced, greedy, insecure, and spiteful, and they will put their personal needs ahead of truth.

Science does itself a disservice because it considers itself separate and above human psychology and politics. Some of the best reforms we could make to scientific research are not around money, publishing or peer review, but around appointments. Character matters. In the longer, mature game, one good and moral scientist who is definitely half-right is worth three assholes who seem perfectly correct.

On which chapters ? If I might ask

I would just read the entire book. It's only about 260 pages. If you want a summary, here are some decent articles:

- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Structure_of_Scientific_Re...

- https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/thomas-kuhn/

- https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/incommensurability/

- https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/scientific-revolutions/

A new scientific truth triumphs via the death of the ego attachments to the less precise truth. Sometimes that requires bodily death.

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