Wronger Than Wrong
en.wikipedia.org
en.wikipedia.org
My favorite example is probably whenever there's articles about sitting being bad for your health. You tend to get a couple of contrarians replying, "Well standing more may sound like good advice but standing can cause lower back pain, so it's not so simple!" However, that reply completely loses grasp of the relative scale of the two things, inviting you to consider the inconveniences of lower back pain as being on the same level as heart disease.
I think the more serious examples of Wronger Than Wrong relate to authoritarian states. A year ago when the Russian invasion started, some people suggested the Russian crackdown on dissent was unremarkable, and compared it to the United States during the Iraq war. And it's not wrong, in that they might fit into a similar category, but it represents a complete failure to assess the relative scale of those two things.
Your example describe a poor trade-off discussion.
The wiki article describes a “spectrum of wrongness”, on which you can sort wrong things.
My 5c at least. But maybe I’m wronger!
With the sitting example, the ideal case is perfect health. The trade-offs have different distances from the ideal case. You are correct that those distances are not strictly distances of wrongness, but they are nevertheless something you can be "Wronger Than Wrong" about if you treat them the same.
This always seems to me more like "anti-science journalism" because while it superficially celebrates "science", it also strongly discourages the reader from trying to make sense of it.
My pet conspiracy theory is that some groups (i.e. religious groups and panpsychism folks) are very invested in the idea that human consciousness exists separate from the physical universe - or at the very least is a fundamental force that cannot be explained by any other physical phenomenon.
Connected with this is the religious notion that humans are sort of the "main characters" of the universe and the rest of it is made specifically for them.
Quantum theory introduced some technical terms which were very unfortunately named and gave the impression that the theory would support that view - when in reality it was just a misunderstanding. Those groups took this apparent backing of "science" and ran with it - and have little interest in the general public understanding enough of physics to realise the mistake.
That's what the Templeton Foundation is doing.
Similarly, Block Universe ideas are rejected by many people on the grounds of "but what about free will?".
Here's an idea: Go ask ChatGPT to decide something, to use its free will, and then weep that it can do it despite being an entirely static array of numbers.
And consider the case that in fact they could use actual random numbers. Would it make a difference?
Only as a default. Temperature can be turned to 0 and other token selection settings changed from the defaults to create deterministic output from a given prompt.
Do you have a reference for that? The Many Worlds interpretation was initially rejected by John Wheeler, Everett's Ph.D. advisor, under the influence of Neils Bohr, but I've never read anywhere that the motivation of the two was in any way religious.
The book What is Real? by Adam Becker has a good account of this history.
Didn't know about block universes so far, but as for the general idea of a deterministic universe, I never quite got why people see it so much as a contradiction to free will.
When we experience free will in our lives, I think what that mostly entails is that we have thoughts and make decisions based on our experience of the world - plus our own knowledge, memories, attitudes, feelings etc. Our thoughts and actions are influenced by a great deal of what happened in the past, but we don't access the past directly: All we have is our memory of past events. And memories, knowledge, attitudes etc are all part of the brain - and therefore part of the current world state.
So as long as the entirety of your thinking and decision-making is only based on your memories, this seems perfectly compatible with a deterministic universe to me. It also doesn't restrict free will in any practically meaningful way: All it says is that if given the exact same "brain state", you'd decide in the same way - but it's practically impossible to have the same brain state twice. If you can remember having made a choice in the past, then your brain is already in a different state than it was back then, so it's perfectly possible to choose differently the second time without violating determinism.
On the other hand, if you could somehow reset your brain exactly back to a previous state, this would imply forgetting everything that had happened since that time - and then it's not a big surprise that you'd choose the same way as you did the first time.
(And I think if you use that definition of "free will" then in principle even LLMs could have it: They have their own "brain state" with "memories" encoded as the model weights, the prompt and all the tokens emitted previously in the conversation.)
There is a second, orthogonal discussion about free will, which asks how much influence biological and subconscious factors have on thinking. I think the famous "your neurons triggered long before you 'decided' to push the button" experiment belongs to that category. I found that discussion always much more reasonable, but also a lot less clear-cut: There is a much larger spectrum of possible outcomes than the binary "full free will/no free will" of the "deterministic universe" discussion.
I am not a particle physicist, but the explanations of quantum mechanics and particle physics here have been sufficiently detailed to let me get past the hand-wavy, paradox laden pop-sci descriptions you see elsewhere.
https://arstechnica.com/science/2020/03/modern-hunter-gather...
Running != walking.
If opinion A is wrong, and opinion B is wronger, and elevating B over A is most wrong, the correct action aligns with the (wrong) stance of "protect A at all costs."
For a programming example - I've been in jobs that enforced the "single return value" rule over functions. For older versions of C or other languages, this makes sense. The shop mostly used C#, which uses exceptions, which means that the benefit of the single return wasn't there, because any line potentially exits the function. The rule then prevents exit early and similar, more effective techniques.
The people setting the rule had learned that Djikstra style structured programming was better for writing business software than the older, goto using, more imperative style. The rule to make sure you were doing A and not B had lasted well into the discovery of C.
Might be worth checking into!
You're the one who has taken the stance that people who say "standing is bad for your back" are universally failing to account for the relative scale of the two considerations. I think it's likely that you're making a number of errors yourself when coming to that conclusion, and I would appreciate it if you would share them.
Some of that is because the sitting articles often misunderstand the research, and even if the article doesn't a lot of readers here misunderstand the article taking it to mean that as soon as your butt hits the chair you start taking serious damage.
It is prolonged sitting that is bad. Stand up and move around occasionally and sitting is fine.
As far as standing goes, standing too long has more risks than just lower back pain. For people who already have some ischemic heart disease it increases the progression of carotid atherosclerosis, and in increase the risk of varicose veins.
Here's a nice summary from ergonomics researchers of the risks of sitting too long and standing too long [1]. Here's what they recommend:
> Sit to do computer work. Sit using a height-adjustable, downward titling keyboard tray for the best work posture, then every 20 minutes stand for 8 minutes AND MOVE for 2 minutes. The absolute time isn’t critical but about every 20-30 minutes take a posture break and stand and move for a couple of minutes. Simply standing is insufficient. Movement is important to get blood circulation through the muscles. And movement is FREE! Research shows that you don’t need to do vigorous exercise (e.g. jumping jacks) to get the benefits, just walking around is sufficient. So build in a pattern of creating greater movement variety in the workplace (e.g. walk to a printer, water fountain, stand for a meeting, take the stairs, walk around the floor, park a bit further away from the building each day).
Sometimes it feels like 90% of the general populace doesn't understand the difference and it's easier just to throw your hands in the air and cut contact off with the person than to try to explain to them this concept.
Luckily, once you make friends with the 10% club, your life starts to feel great.
It is not a great tool for understanding what is "wrong" with people, or for communicating with people who are wrong. Flat earthers are not wrong because of science, they are wrong because of society. That is, most flat earthers turn away from our shared perception of the world because of some trauma in their lives. They have lost trust in something that they felt was solid.
You may think that you believe in science because you are a logical person, but you really believe in science because people you respect believe in science. Science also has the benefit of actually working, which is nice, but many things can LOOK like they are working (epicycles of the planets, flat earth, miasma theory of disease). You can make scienticious (sic) sounding observations about all of these things.
The point is that when you want to understand why people are wrong, you need to think about motivation and deeply held beliefs, not proof. Scientific proof is obviously very useful, but before you use that, you have to get them to come closer to you.
Imagine a person standing on a hill. If they are shoved and fall down, they roll down the hill. Using the strongest arguments feels like the most effective thing to do. Strong arguments do move people, but you don't get to choose the direction they move.
For example, I once reviewed a paper submitted to one of the big two science journals by a famous author at the top of their field. The self-reported statistics made it clear that the data was 95% noise. Although I and other reviewers torpedoed the paper, it was still published at top end paper with the statistics removed.
Nothing like watching the sausage being made to understand why some choose to be vegan. Like soylent green, science is made of people.
The third group is the smallest, but it is not vanishingly small, and addressing your audience as if they "only think they practice science for logical reasons" is itself a social appeal. If you are describing yourself, say so. Don't engage in unfounded anti-intellectualism.
A dilemma: A scientist reasons socially when choosing an area of research. They choose research that will get funded, published, and cited. Or a scientist eschews popular research in favor of something that they think is important, which is irrational on it's face, as that means they won't get funding, published, or cited.
The point is that social reasoning is not irrational. Rational thought always takes place in a frame of reference.
I do not reject rational skepticism. It's an extremely useful tool. It's very good at finding facts. It's very good at convincing the majority of people who reason the same way as you do, and have the same basic foundation of knowledge as you do. It just does not work when it comes to people who do not share that same frame of reference.
Outside of formal math, all we have are models, so there will often (always?) be an ordering of "less wrong" on model-based knowledge.
So "wronger than wrong" is putting a heavy spin on the truth. More wrong models might still be useful.
I'm of the _opinion_ that this is the only way of knowledge itself: less wrong as time spent on understanding approaches infinity. Math and models are between language and tools, the fundamental essence is the same though.
Also, any predictive ability should ever be a side-effect, the core of inquiry is explanation. This is why a good-enough explanation of seasons on Earth is perfectly applicable to any other planet (in any solar system). And this is why ML models like AlphaGo are not helpful (you can't learn anything from them, including "how to be a better Go player").
In other words I stand with Deutsch, Popper and Everett on the interpretation of reality.
Why do you think you are arguing against the concept? "Wronger than wrong" argues against believing everything is "equally wrong", which is precisely what your comment is also arguing against.
In other words, you agree with Asimov that equating all thing as equally wrong is "wronger than wrong", since there will always (or often) be an ordering of "less wrong".
Wikipedia: "It was described by Michael Shermer as Asimov's axiom.[1] The mistake was discussed in Isaac Asimov's book of essays The Relativity of Wrong[2] as well as in a 1989 article[3] of the same name in the Fall 1989 issue of the Skeptical Inquirer:
When people thought the Earth was flat, they were wrong. When people thought the Earth was spherical, they were wrong. But if you think that thinking the Earth is spherical is just as wrong as thinking the Earth is flat, then your view is wronger than both of them put together.
The cited article: "Not even wrong. What could be worse? Being wronger than wrong, or what I call Asimov's axiom, well stated in his book The Relativity of Wrong (Doubleday, 1988): "When people thought the earth was flat, they were wrong. When people thought the earth was spherical, they were wrong. But if you think that thinking the earth is spherical is just as wrong as thinking the earth is flat, then your view is wronger than both of them put together."
Asimov's axiom holds that science is cumulative and progressive, building on the mistakes of the past, and that even though scientists are often wrong, their wrongness attenuates with continued data collection and theory building. Satellite measurements, for instance, have shown precisely how the earth's shape differs from a perfect sphere."
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/wronger-than-wron...
"But if you believe that thinking science is unbiased is just as wrong as thinking that science is socially constructed, then your view is not even wronger than wrong."
All models have a validity-property, validity is a property that describes how well the model manages to model the thing that it is modeling.
The less validity a model has, the more "wrong" it is.
A description of the earth as flat, seamingly has a lower validity than a description as the earth as a perfect sphere. But ultimately it depends on how one measures validity.
For simplicity and brevity sake, let's say that there are two possible options that someone is weighing, having ruled out all the other competing options.
The first option is Christianity. The second option is atheism grounded in scientific inquiry. You can call the second option empiricism or naturalism if you like.
According to the first option, it is through faith with all your heart, soul, and mind that one is saved and that truth is found. Testing God, is explicitly forbidden.
According to the second option, it is by testing falsifiable premises that the truth is found. The answer to unknowns is to admit that they're unknown, at least for now. Thomas Aquinas and the first mover argument is implicitly denied as an area of inquiry.
Many proponents of the second option say "Well look! The distance of the light of the stars proves that the universe is billions of years old!" And proponents of the first option can respond in any number of ways ranging from testing the assumptions of modern scientific understanding of light (that it's speed is symmetrical from A to B and from B to A, despite already being relative in other ways) to pointing out Bible verses about how the Lord stretched out the heavens or cursed all of creation (and hence, possibly even history or time), many even apply the same type reasoning as the atheists when questioned about what caused anything to be and simply say "it's a mystery."
Where I'm going with this is that conversations about what is wrong and how wrong it is depend so heavily on the very first thing you put your faith in and I believe this is something too many people shrug at. Basic, foundational theological or philosophical questions like "can a mind know a truth?" shouldn't be swept under the rug. They're more foundational than questions like "what caused the big bang?"
I think whether they are foundational or not is irrelevant. What matters is the effect pondering questions like these can have on people. Both kinds can have material consequences - theological/philosopical questioning can affect social behaviours and have wide-ranging societal effects, empirical questioning can result in new technologies which can do the same
The basis of your belief is rooted in what you put your faith in. By the rest of your comment, it seems (apparent) consequentialism is your guiding light, but without giving the grounds as why it should be, I can't properly rebut your argument other than to highlight the missing justification.
You're wrong about consequentialism being my "guiding light" though - I'd still argue if I thought arguing would be fun ... but it wouldn't be (at least for me), so I decline
Rationalwiki article [0] about the topic has a nice epigraph ”It’s a little wrong to say a tomato is a vegetable, it’s very wrong to say it’s a suspension bridge. —Stuart Bloom, The Big Bang Theory"
though I won't be totaly surprised suddenly learning about a cargo (tomato/bridge) cult ...
Yet it is one! Consider, how it defies classification by society, and instead, prefers to be classified as it choses. As it needs to be!
Thus, the tomato can be a bridge of understanding, to those who identify differently than their birth.
And beyond this, the tomato is a 'new world' plant. Its plucky ability to waltz in, and disrupt local cuisine, to supplant old world recipes, is a perfect bridge to understand the goal of most startups.
And religiously, the tomato, when first discovered, was thought by some to be the devil's food. The X markings inside a tomato, were thought to be warnings from god, for they resembled a cross.
So the tomato can be an example of rational vs religious thought, a way to bridge an understanding as to how our ancestors thought.
A physical bridge only takes you to physical places, but the tomato is a bridge to enlightenment.
It is more a bridge, than a bridge!!
You cannot believe in a religious worldview and commonsense facts about the world. They are logically inconsistent. On the epistemic point, you're right, but you have to give up commonsense beliefs or coherence if you go the religion route. Deductive logic should not be swept under the rug.
These two statements are logically inconsistent. You're assuming or implying that the only "way" to believe is by deriving your beliefs from facts using logic.
In actual fact reasoning and belief are more nuanced and less consistent that that. It's completely possible to simultaneously hold contradictory beliefs or to use incompatible mental models. It may predispose you to certain other reasoning errors, but then so does holding the belief that all of your beliefs are logically derived.
The fact that most significant scientific discoveries were made by people with religious beliefs should give you serious pause when proposing this, honestly. How do you reconcile that incompatibility. In fact even still, taken as a demographic, researchers are much less religious than the general population but still much more religious than we would be able to tolerate if the practice of science was completely incompatible with a religious belief.
The fact that people can compartmentalize different inconsistent mental models really has no bearing on whether any given proposition is true or not. Humans are complex and prone to believing in superstition.
Science is a way to get to the truth. It has no concept of money or grant makers, or academic institutions.
The social process of science is more complicated and yes, academia has developed some perverse incentives to keep the publishing mill running, regardless of scientific insights.
But that has nothing to do with the article. I'd recommend that you actually go and read the relativity of wrong, it's not that long and most of it is just as accurate today as it was then.
Academia is the science. You can not separate those two. Not after last three years.
I get the idea and process, read Asimov, have PhD etc...
While the theoretical scientific method itself may be a way to get to actual truth, the published science - knowledge that will be known, preserved and built upon - is a result of academic process, not some ultimate truth-seeking. In a practical sense science is the social process of science even if there is innate ontological difference.