Hacker News Reader

I don't understand how this is meant to be a reply to the review article. At any rate, Smith's book is really good, but (obviously) written as an academic analysis. Stylistically maybe a little overkill for the layperson in this forum, but there are people with wide-ranging interests here who might dig it.

That’s a very incomplete view of science and knowledge in general.

On the one hand, there are scientific fields where most of the work is indeed about observing and describing, and where hypotheses are often not challenged by experimentation but by the arrival of new data and alternative explanations.

But in the other hand, scientific knowledge in that traditional sense is not the only valid kind.

It is likely that the chief competitive advantage of human beings is not our individual skill for rational thought, but our collective capacity for transmitting and evolving cultural knowledge over centuries and millennia. Our cultural legacy is so ancient that it has influenced how our bodies evolved, but also so vast that it is easy to lose sight of it altogether.

We tend to see rational and cultural forms of knowledge as being in conflict with each other, but I have come to understand that as an oversimplified and often misleading point of view.

I stand by what I wrote.

Science started when the scientific method started. The scientific method is a process for distinguishing facts from bullshit. The explosion in technology and science sprung from that. Endless age-old ideas crumbled away when the scientific method was applied to them.

Collecting and describing and organizing data is not science, although it enables science.

Further observations, of course, can be used to test and thereby support or disprove a hypothesis. The history of astronomy is a delightful exercise in hypotheses followed by more observations that separated truth from bullshit.

The exponential growth in knowledge output and technological advancement started before the formalization of the scientific method though.

There's a variety of factors contributing to this, to name some:

- Social mobility as a result of the Black Death

- Excess agricultural output, leading to population growth and specialization

- Wealth extracted from the Americas leading to a new class of Idles

- Certain inventions, like the printing press, massively increasing knowledge retention and spread.

Even more egregiously, this is a distinctly English view - neither the French nor the Germans have such a narrow view of science and at least until the late 1800s both had a higher scientific output than the English. This narrow view of science is ok if there is a positively-connotated word to describe the process of knowledge advancement, in English I guess that would be academia, although that is too narrow still. Without engineering and mathematics, science would have started to stagnate centuries ago - or never been formalized in the first place.

I can’t agree with this. You may be describing the formalization of science, but science was occurring well beyond the bound of the scientific method.

Ancient science generally gets broken down into mathematics, astronomy, medicine, and material. If we skip right to medicine and material, there was a huge amount of recorded “knowledge” of chemicals that either functioned as medicine or manufacturing, dating back 5k years. The people absolutely knew “these combinations worked” but still didn’t completely distinguish chemistry from magic and ritual and God.

There’s still science occurring there. Some combination of knowledge being applied and passed down through generations. There is precursor to our scientific method happening in parts, and it was still science.

Mathematics is not science, it's a tool used by science. Knowing combinations that work is not science, either, when it does not come with an explanation as to why it works that is able to successfully predict other combinations that work.

Magic, ritual and God are not science because they have no predictive value.

Precursors to science are not science. Just like hydrogen and oxygen are precursors to water, but are not water.

> It is likely that the chief competitive advantage of human beings is not our individual skill for rational thought, but our collective capacity for transmitting and evolving cultural knowledge over centuries and millennia.

What is that based on? Plenty of cultural knowledge (what is that?) has been plainly wrong and destructive. Humanity has advanced when we've focused on rational thought, especially since the Enlightenment. Astrology and hate are cultural knowledge; astronomy and universal human rights are rational thought.

> We tend to see rational and cultural forms of knowledge as being in conflict with each other, but I have come to understand that as an oversimplified and often misleading point of view.

You said it and then called it oversimplfied. I agree that it's oversimplified.

Universal human rights are not rational thought, they are values. You don't think your way into your values.

I agree they are values, but they are also the product of lots of rational thought. Look at all the Enlightenment thinkers who produced it.

I know people get carried away with Internet memes, but now we are rejecting rational thought? What will your basis for decisions be? Just follow the herd?

Nobody is rejecting rational thought. Most of your values are innate and most of the rest is socialization. This is not an "internet meme", it's the consensus view since approximately the time of Plato.

Rational thought is like mathematics: it makes no difference between the real world and hypothetical worlds. If you feed garbage in, you get garbage out. Like communism, Holodomor, and the Great Leap Forward. Those are good examples of what the humanity has achieved with rational thought.

If anything, modern science is less about rationalism and more about empiricism than what came before. It's less about thinking and more about doing; less about explaining and more about ruling out explanations.

> Like communism, Holodomor, and the Great Leap Forward. Those are good examples of what the humanity has achieved with rational thought.

I could list a bunch of crappy software and say that's what humanity achieves with computers. It's laughable to say that the list above represents our achievements with rational thought.

How do you make decisions without rational thought? What do you use instead?

I like your point, but most of it does not seem in tension with gp. Given that, your opening line was pretty hostile and dismissive.

Defining “science” precisely and narrowly is not a dismissal of other forms of knowledge.

But pretending that centuries-old cultural knowledge conforms to a well-defined modern method doesn’t achieve much, other than lending further credibility to the method.

A hypothesis is not necessarily an explanation. There are fields of science where you "shut up and calculate" to get the prediction rather than try to interpret and explain.

In the process of “shut up and calculate” (SUAC) you often come upon much deeper insights about the involved processes and quantities than you ever could with wordy and “understandable” explanations. Of course simple, explainable models are great, but they have limited ability to describe the world, which is much more complicated. I don’t see how successfully handling this complexity (and getting the successful predictions) could take away from understanding.

It’s not like those SUAC disciplines don’t have simple explainable models. In my opinion It’s just that in order to describe phenomena really accurately or if the described phenomena are complicated enough the only way to get reliable and improvable predictions is via complicated SUAC-type calculations.

My point is not that there are no insights coming from SUAC, but rather that explanations are not a required thing of science, because predictions work without them, and the accuracy of predictions, and making new predictions makes science move forward, whether with explanations or without.