Hacker News Reader

Comment by delichon | Hacker News Reader

Ptolemy was wrong. But he was wrong with a large pile of actual measurements of celestial bodies, and a falsifiable theory. That made him wrong in the positive sense of wrong in the phrase "not even wrong", where wrong is just the first step of the ladder.

I wish I could say the same about Freud, but that ladder is distressingly horizontal.

View on HN

There is a strong analogy in software engineering here. Often the first implementation is "wrong" in the sense that it doesn't resolve the inherent tensions in the system. But that doesn't make it useless - in fact, it's quite useful because it actually showed you what is important. Plus, the people who attempt the initial solution to a problem deserve special honor, even if their work is eventually tossed away, specifically because they revealed these system tensions. The common dictum to "write a prototype and throw it away" is largely based on this insight.

What I'm saying is that Ptolemy, Aristotle, etc did a great service to humanity by taking a stab at hard problems, even if their solutions were convincing but wrong. Whether they knew it or not they were the primordial programmers writing a throw-away prototype upon which all future progress was based.

I work on healthcare at Alphabet, and in late 2016 I set out to build a flexible DICOMweb STOW-RS receiver in the form of a GCP API - the first time anyone had done that at Alphabet. (I've worked on the same project across Verily and Google). In the process I researched and built a bunch of little prototypes built in a variety of ways, and for example had to rule out building it as an App Engine API - because DICOMweb uploads can potentially be gigabytes in size, and App Engine didn't support handling a POST as a stream as it arrived.

At any rate, along the way over the course of 9 months or so I found a technology stack that supported all my requirements and ran into a bunch of roadblocks. Lots of things related to how internal bits of GCP APIs are handled - the internal libraries had documentation indicating that streaming APIs were supported, and that each chunk of the request would be passed from the API proxy/backend multiplexer to the actual API server as they arrived. This worked for streaming responses, but not for streaming requests, and so I had to add that functionality to the API proxy. That was a huge pain - really hairy c++ code using fibers with multiple layers of request processing wrappers. But I worked thru that and got it landed into the google-wide binary, and never worried about it again.

I got this project to the level I needed it to support the precise requirements for the (regulated medical device) system I was working on. Around this time the GCP Cloud Healthcare group was getting started, and they built a new system using a fair number of bits of my implementation, which they'd eventually replace completely. But my first system saved them most of a year or work, resulting in the CHC feature set rapidly leapfrogging what I'd built.

A similar idea about the importance of planning as a way to improve your understanding of a problem was expressed by Dwight D. Eisenhower, said in a speech while he was in office as the US President in 1957 [1].

Reflecting on his experience in the Second World War, he said: "Plans are worthless, but planning is everything. There is a very great distinction because when you are planning for an emergency you must start with this one thing: the very definition of “emergency” is that it is unexpected, therefore it is not going to happen the way you are planning."

[1] https://quoteinvestigator.com/2017/11/18/planning/

Your software engineering example made this click for me. I think what we might be talking about is the method of abduction [0][fn]

[fn] not kidnapping, but a logical (procedural) method like induction or deduction

[0] https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/abduction/

I think the right phrase here is not 'not even wrong' but 'wrong but for the right reasons' or 'all models are wrong, but some models are useful (possibly by being less wrong'

Ptolemy was not "wrong". His model worked quite well within the margin of his measuring tools.

And, in fact, Ptolemy was more "right" than heliocentric circles (as opposed to ellipses).

You have to have both elliptical orbits and inverse square law forces to predict better than Ptolemy.

It wasn't until the telescope allowed seeing Venusian phases that geocentricity was actively disproven.

> "Not even wrong" is a phrase often used to describe pseudoscience or bad science. It describes an argument or explanation that purports to be scientific but uses faulty reasoning or speculative premises, which can be neither affirmed nor denied and thus cannot be discussed rigorously and scientifically. The phrase "not even wrong" is synonymous with "unfalsifiable".[0][1]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Not_even_wrong

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/science/2005/sep/19/ideas.g2

I'm not sure "not even wrong" actually means the same thing as "unfalsifiable" like Wikipedia claims? I thought "not even wrong" means the asker is so confused that their question doesn't make sense. As I understand it, "ghosts exist" (or even "the universe is infinite") may well be impossible to falsify, but it doesn't signal any sort of confusion on the part of the asker. But if the statement was "ghosts exist because the universe is infinite", then I thought that would fall into the "not even wrong" bucket.

I understand “not even wrong” to be synonymous with unfalsifiable in the sense that the statement being described as such is not a truth claim, or is otherwise not a valid formal statement or claim, such that the scientific method is not able to be deployed to consider its validity.

> In religion, a truth claim is an assertion that the belief system holds to be true; however, from the existence of an assertion that the belief system holds to be true, it does not follow that the assertion is true. For example, a truth claim in Judaism is that only one God exists. Conflicting truth claims between different religions can be a cause of religious conflict. The theory of truth claims has been advanced by John Hick.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Truth_claim

Hmm. I always thought "not even wrong" meant "correct, but answering the wrong question" or more generally "correct but irrelevantly so".

I think that your example is something I would consider “beside the point,” whereas the flavor of “not even wrong” to me seems to describe a statement or claim that has truthiness[0] rather than a truth value[1].

A statement which is not even wrong is one that can’t or isn’t expressed properly as a logical assertion or argument but rather asserted without evidence or in such a way that it is made to seem inherently or intuitively obvious. Such a statement isn't argued for or against properly or logically, or isn’t otherwise properly expressed or derived, or a statement or claim which falls short of making a concrete point or argument which can be dismissed or validated on the basis of evidence or logical argument.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Truthiness

> Truthiness is the belief or assertion that a particular statement is true based on the intuition or perceptions of some individual or individuals, without regard to evidence, logic, intellectual examination, or facts. Truthiness can range from ignorant assertions of falsehoods to deliberate duplicity or propaganda intended to sway opinions.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Truth_value

> In logic and mathematics, a truth value, sometimes called a logical value, is a value indicating the relation of a proposition to truth, which in classical logic has only two possible values (true or false).

Trying to apply falsifiable theory to Freud (or to psychoanalysis) is wrong in itself, as a matter of fact thinking about Freud and psychoanalysis in the realm of scientifically right or wrong is, well, scientifically wrong.

In that case, how should we think about it? Genuinely curious.

He (Freud) had some very good insights, almost genius-like, for example the part with Eros and Thanatos. With that said, I don't think there's a best way to approach his works, I do know though that treating them as science would do no-one any good.

As for psychoanalysis as a whole, it's definitely not my preferred cup of tea but I do believe those people that say that it has genuinely helped them, in which case all the power to them and to psychoanalysis. Maybe treat it through a functionalist prism? (just an idea) Similar to meditation, let's say (similar as in there's no scientific "basis" behind it but I also do believe that meditation helps some people, similar to psychoanalysis).

Of course, that would not solve the issue with "what should we do with the psychoanalysis crooks?", the same issue that probably gets asked when it comes to meditation crooks, meaning grifters trying to live off psychoanalysis/meditation/any similar movement. I don't know what the best answer for that would be, maybe some sort of community-based validation/word of mouth thingie?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com