Isaac Asimov: The Relativity of Wrong (1989)
chem.tufts.edu
chem.tufts.edu
Science is an attempt to explain why Nature is the way it is. Collect data, make a prediction, test it, revise the prediction, rinse, repeat. Granted, there are belief systems aplenty in scientific work (string theory?) but as Kuhn has written, sometimes Nature laughs and forces a change.
And Asimov's "level of error" discussion is valid. Newtonian physics, while "wrong" is perfectly useful when aiming spacecraft away from the sun. Box: "All models are wrong. Some models are useful". And Feynman's talked about this as well.
Last weekend I was cutting the top of a door on a diagonal that had to match the sloped roof-line of a new doorway I'm putting in on my second floor.
When I calculated the slope, I incorrectly rounded up to too few decimal points ..such that over the length of the door (~ 31 inches) the error caused the slope to be off about 1/2 inch -- which, had I cut the door, would have looked horrible.
This problem really perplexed me (because I'm an idiot!) ...until I saw the answer staring me right in the face on my calculator - the many values to the right of the decimal. Of course, leaving those there fixed the issue, and I got a nice accurate slope over the width of the door :)
Of course, there are many areas where we do expect progress to be conservative. So for example, we are not going to discover that DNA does not actually exist, or that the Earth is larger than the Sun. But on some issues it is reasonable to assume that the scientific consensus is quite likely to undergo radical revision. As Scott Adams points out in an article that someone else linked to here, the science of diet and exercise is a case in point.
So to my mind, it all depends on the particular issues that Asimov's lazy caricature had in mind. If the "Eng Lit major" was expressing skepticism about, say, the age of the Earth, or the atomic theory of matter, then Asimov's response would be a fair one. If they had something else in mind, then perhaps not.
>Naturally, the theories we now have might be considered wrong in the simplistic sense of my English Lit correspondent, but in a much truer and subtler sense, they need only be considered incomplete.
Right. My entire claim is that right and wrong do not exist, only successful or unsuccessful.
As to the question of whether pragmatist theories of truth are viable, that is a separate one, but I tend to think that the standard objections are quite decisive.
I think you're going to have a very tough time defending this claim. You might have better luck, though, with a claim that ends up doing much the same work for the subject under discussion: right and wrong do exist, and every theory we humans have come up with so far is wrong by that purist standard. But some human theories are less wrong than others, and it's the "degree of wrongness" that matters, practically speaking.
And you're treating "right" and "wrong" as absolutes, with no in between, which is exactly what Asimov was saying you shouldn't do.
You could apply the same logic you're using for plate tectonics to the shape of the Earth, which is Asimov's main example. If the Earth is a sphere, then it's not flat. If it's an oblate spheroid, then it's not a sphere. If it's slightly pear-shaped, then it isn't an oblate spheroid. So every previous scientific theory about the Earth's shape was just wrong.
The problem with this, as Asimov points out, is that just putting theories into the buckets "right" or "wrong" doesn't tell you how far off they are, predictively, which is what's important. The Earth is not flat--but it's almost flat. It curves about 8 inches per mile; 8 inches per mile is not zero, but it might be indistinguishable from zero if you don't have very good measuring instruments. (And similarly for the increasingly more accurate measurements that have given us more precise knowledge of the exact irregular shape of the Earth.) So treating the Earth is flat is wrong, but it's not very far wrong. It is, however, more wrong than treating the Earth as a sphere, since the error involved is smaller in the latter case.
Similarly, the continents are not motionless, but they're almost motionless. So treating them as motionless is wrong, but it's not very far wrong. You have to have accurate measurements to distinguish the actual motion of the continents from no motion at all. And you have to have even more accurate measurements and more comprehensive data to know that the cause of the motion is that the continents are sitting on plates that are floating in magma.
> the scientists who denied it well into the 20th century were just flat our wrong.
They were wrong, but they were still a lot less wrong than, for example, the Flat Earth Society. Which is Asimov's point.
Of course you can always find a germ of truth in a theory if you try hard enough, just as you can find a germ of truth in the book of Genesis if you're determined to defend it. I don't see the point, though. Why bother constructing a false Whig history of scientific progress when the real history is impressive enough?
Really? The original conception (or at least the commonly accepted one--even some ancient Greeks hit on the idea of atoms) was that matter was continuous, and it is pretty close to being continuous. Then we started to make observations that indicated that matter was made of atoms. Then we began to get data that indicated that atoms were made of smaller parts. Where is the radical change?
> Another example would be the question of whether the universe has a beginning in time. There really isn't any middle ground there.
Sure there is. What if the concept of "a beginning in time" isn't well-defined, because "time" is not a fundamental property? It's quite possible that both viewpoints--the universe had a beginning in time, and the universe didn't--are useful approximations to something deeper.
You mentioned one of the radical changes: the change from a continuous model to an atomic one. I mentioned another radical change in my post (Rutherford).
As for the claim that matter is close to being continuous, I am not a physicist, but I was under the impression that this was false. I.e., speaking naively, there is far more "empty space" than there is "stuff". I realize that QM makes it difficult to give precise content to that kind of statement, but something like that appears to be true.
> It's quite possible that both viewpoints--the universe had a beginning in time, and the universe didn't--are useful approximations to something deeper.
I can't really answer speculation. However, your only reason for making this speculation, so far as I can see, is your desire to deny that any scientific theory has ever been flat out wrong.
We only know this because we have precise enough measurements to detect atoms and their internal structure. Atoms are about a billion times smaller than ordinary macroscopic objects, so it's a very good approximation to treat a cup of water, for example, as a continuous fluid, rather than a bunch of atoms.
> speaking naively, there is far more "empty space" than there is "stuff".
Only on a very naive definition of "empty space". Pop science books and articles often say that "atoms are mostly empty space", but that's because they are thinking of the electrons as little pointlike objects, which they're not. So "atoms are mostly empty space" is wrong, by the definition you've been trying to use, just like "matter is continuous" is wrong.
And before you object that I'm saying "electrons are little pointlike objects" is flat out wrong, electrons are close to being little pointlike objects; you have to make very precise measurements (like the ones that have mapped out the structure of atomic orbitals) to see the quantum "smearing out" of electrons. But in many other contexts, electrons do behave like little pointlike objects.
> I can't really answer speculation.
It isn't just my speculation; it's a serious theoretical proposal in cosmology. Google "eternal inflation".
> your only reason for making this speculation, so far as I can see, is your desire to deny that any scientific theory has ever been flat out wrong.
Quite the contrary; cosmologists consider such proposals seriously because neither simplistic model--"the universe had a beginning in time" or "the universe did not have a beginning in time" as flat statements with no wiggle room--works well.
The problem you are having here is that you continue to think that we humans can get something absolutely right. But every single one of your "absolutely right" statements turns out to have hidden qualifications when we dig deeper. And your "flat out wrong" statements turn out to be workable approximations in many contexts.
It's a good approximation empirically. I've said a few times now that scientific progress is indeed quite conservative in empirical terms. However, we know now that water is very unlike a continuous fluid in terms of its actual constitution.
> So "atoms are mostly empty space" is wrong, by the definition you've been trying to use, just like "matter is continuous" is wrong.
Yes I know, that's why I mentioned that QM makes things more complicated. However, it's still roughly true that atoms are mostly empty space, in the sense that they are very far from being of uniform density.
>Google "eternal inflation".
If you're referring to theories which attempt to extend eternal inflation in to the past, then these are attempted variations on steady-state theories. See e.g. this paper: http://arxiv.org/abs/astro-ph/0111191 . It gives a useful overview of the history. (As to whether its specific result is correct, I make no judgment.)
>The problem you are having here is that you continue to think that we humans can get something absolutely right
I'm not sure where you're getting that from. I suppose that we can get some things absolutely right (e.g. some mathematical truths), but that's not central to anything I've said.
What puzzles me is why you're trawling through all these examples trying to show that scientists have never really been wrong about anything. Is it really your view that there has never been a period in scientific history when the scientific consensus on a given topic was simply mistaken?
But that's the whole point: if a theory is a good approximation empirically, then how can you say it's "flat out wrong"? Doesn't that obfuscate the very important distinction between ideas that are good approximations, but not quite right, vs. ideas that aren't even good approximations? (See below for more on this.)
> Is it really your view that there has never been a period in scientific history when the scientific consensus on a given topic was simply mistaken?
In the sense in which you are using the term "simply mistaken", I think there have been such views, but I think they're a lot rarer than you appear to think. (At least if we restrict ourselves to views that can be taken as "scientific" in some sense.)
An example of a view which I think was indeed simply mistaken is the phlogiston theory of combustion. It was simply mistaken because it made no predictions whatsoever; it was not empirical. And when a better theory of combustion was found, there was no sense in which the phlogiston theory could be viewed as an approximation to it.
No, it just adds an additional distinction between idea that are good approximations but not quite right and ideas that are good approximations but completely wrong.
Once again, if an idea is a good approximation, how can it be "completely wrong"? That seems like a contradiction.
A very clear example of such a hypothesis would be one concerning identity. E.g., who was it who committed the murder? The hypothesis that Joe Smith did it might make lots and lots of correct predictions and yet still be completely wrong (because it was actually someone else).
You're assuming that we know "how things actually are". If we know that, how do we know it? If your answer is "because we have a theory that makes correct predictions", how do you know our best current theory gets everything correct? It has to be literally "everything" in order to justify your statement that we know "how things actually are"; anything less than perfection from our current theories does not justify your claim.
It should be obvious that we do not know that our current theories are perfectly correct. All we really know is that they get more predictions correct than our previous theories. But that still leaves room for our best current theories to make incorrect predictions--we just don't know which ones they are (yet). And if they make any incorrect predictions, then there could be some other theory that makes more correct predictions, but models "how things actually are" very differently from our current theories. After all, that has already happened, when we came up with our best current theories. If it happened once, it can happen again. And if it happens again, then all your claims about "how things actually are" are, by your own definition, wrong.
No, I'm only assuming that we sometimes know how things actually aren't. In other words, we can sometimes be pretty sure that a particular theory is wrong even if we have no confidence that our current best theory is correct.
They still seem incomplete (and not "wrong" to me). They served their purpose and were good approximations for calculations we did and observations we had all those years.
>Similarly, if it turns out that eating lots of fat doesn't make you fat, that doesn't mean that previous dietary advice was merely "incomplete".
Only if "previous dietary advice" was only all about fat, and only if it consisted of just saying "fat makes you fat".
In other words they were empirically more-or-less correct. That's what I was talking about in my first paragraph.
>Only if "previous dietary advice" was only all about fat, and only if it consisted of just saying "fat makes you fat".
I don't see the point of picking over the details of the example. Take plate tectonics. The scientific consensus used to be that the Earth's crust was not formed of separate moving plates. The current scientific consensus is exactly the opposite. If you have a concept of wrong according to which it's possible for neither of P and ¬P to be wrong, then I'm not sure where we can go from there.
That's the whole point of Asimov's article - the relativity of wrong. The example he gives for this is not at all different from yours (earth being flat and earth being non-flat are also opposite propositions). So it's not like the "plate tectonics" examples changes anything in his argument.
The argument is that P and ¬P can both be useful if the first could explain a phenomenon to the best degree available at a time, and the second to an even better degree available at a later time. In that sense P and ¬P are degrees of wrongness and truthness.
His is the argument that "wrong" depends on utility, as there's usually no absolute match with the objective status universe (ding an sich), so we just have approximations with different degrees of wrongness.
There's no need to say that P and ¬P are ever both (somewhat) true, only that evaluating a scientific theory isn't just a matter of finding some single consequence of it to say "this prediction is false: REJECT" (a sort of crude Popperian picture). Instead, the theory should be tested on its overall explanatory power, ability to predict, etc, etc. For each statement the theory implies, that statement is either true or false. But considering two theories, each of which implies some falsehood, we may wish to say that one is still less wrong.
I also didn't notice the sort of Kantian picture you allude to in the essay.
How so? Isn't the article's "earth is flat" / "earth is round" (the opposite), both being degrees of wrong (and thus true), a P and ¬P thing?
>Instead, the theory should be tested on its overall explanatory power, ability to predict, etc, etc.
Exactly. And, what the article says is that both P (flat) and ¬P (non-flat: round) had the best explanatory performance each at their time.
Instead of it being moving at a rate of zero (or static), it is moving at some tiny amount above zero.
Steady state turned out to be wrong, but it was far less wrong than, say, the theory that the frost from Niflheim and the flames from Muspelheim met in Ginnungagap, melted the ice, and the drops formed Ymir the hermaphrodite giant whose sweat produced more giants, and who was nourished by the milk of Audhumbla the cow (who was also formed from the melting frost), whose licking of salt-licks in the ice uncovered Buri, the first of the Aesir, who had a son named Bor, who married Bestla the giant, who gave birth to their half-breed son Odin and his brothers Vili and Ve, who slew Ymir and constructed the world from his corpse.
Asimov's key point was that right and wrong are not absolutes. There are degrees of rightness and wrongness.
I am not denying that there are degrees of rightness and wrongness, by the way. That isn't Asimov's key point; it's just a banal observation that anyone would agree with. His key point (which I somewhat disagree with) is that the history of science can be viewed as a steady progression from "less right" to "more right" theories. Of course there has been a great deal of scientific progress, but sometimes scientists do just get things wrong.
That's because most of it in the form it reaches people is not actually a "science", but mostly pop culture and BS from mass media.
...because it's really just "a word from our sponsors".
It uses the language and status of science for marketing and persuasion, without providing any of the rigour or repeatability.
Unfortunately this poisons the well for real science, because non-scientists decide that scientists don't really know anything useful and it's all just a matter of opinion anyway.
In all their glorious "everything science says will be as wrong as religion and you my friend are blindly following it" it seems they can't understand the basic principle of science advancing toward some kind of truth yet admitting it is -still- wrong.
I don't know if trying to convince someone who doesn't trust science - and to some extent, logical thinking - with mathematics really works. Sure it convinces me but does it matter?
See also Scott Adams' musings on the subject: http://blog.dilbert.com/post/109880240641/sciences-biggest-f...
The funny thing is Isaac Asimov and most of the science fiction writers have their books filled with traditional philosophical problems and literary figures, they just sugar-coat them with enough speculative science and avoid naming the concepts by name to avoid scaring their public.
The article linked is great, but let's not use it to reinforce senseless clichés.
You seem to grasp the concept of critical thinking and I believe that's why you would object. To me talking about science implies critical thinking. Somebody having an argument with you about science without acknowledging the certainty of being wrong is not talking about science but pseudo-science. And so you end up discussing with a fanatic, which is not a discussion.
I'm not saying that English Lit experts are everywhere but I feel like they just do not trust "science lovers" to be capable of critical thinking.
edit: It's like you're asking "how to convince science fanatics that they can be wrong" and I'm asking "how to convince English Lit experts that I know science can be wrong but still think it matters"
But I don't think it's about assigning blame. He's attempting to describe a situation and how it came about. If all the public sees is the media's irresponsible reporting on journal articles, then for current purposes it doesn't much matter if scientists themselves are trying to correct the media. The public will read the newspaper, the newspaper says science says X, and X turns out to be false. Then they read the newspaper telling them science says Y, and they won't believe Y.
Look - I'm an engineer. I use a sort-of Bayesian reasoning: I started from what I learned as a child and then kept adjusting probabilities. You (plural "you") wouldn't be surprised if I told you I believe most politicians are liars. Well, I got to "most scientists are wrong" the same way. Sure, I didn't actually talk to most scientists, or even heard about them; those I did hear about, though, are at best misguided.
In any case, my original argument wasn't about the scientists; my argument was: most people treat science as a religion. They feel very superior to the religious people who are accepting everything they are told uncritically and then turn around and accept everything that is prefixed with "science says". Ten years ago, I used to make fun of people for believing the Earth revolves around the Sun - I have yet to find a single one who could do better than "that's what scientists say". That is arguably worse than those who accepted the Ptolemaic model - for one thing, they could at least see that the Sun was rising and setting.
(I can rant on this subject for hours but I don't think this is the proper forum.)
We had a subject in my lab yesterday that after the experiment had a "heated" debate where he put physics vs religion with one of the volunteers who was religious. While I was in the control room tinkering with the software, I listened in on their conversation and could hear the smugness of the subject as he used science as a tool to try and "convert" the volunteer. I thought the volunteer handled the conversation quite well, but it seemed like quite the inquisition from the "scientist"…
There are plenty of scientists who are fucking idiots.
Yet to uphold what people consider science today, you use one example. As if the vast majority of scientists had anything to do with the development of the cell phone (and use the word testament which has a non zero religious connotations), and give no lip service to how many religious people throughout the times have supported scientific endeavors…
As for honoring the religious who supported science. I say, to the degree they pursued religion, they shortchanged their scientific accomplishments. Consider what else Newton might have done, had he abandoned his alchemy and astrology.
"Science (from Latin scientia, meaning "knowledge"[2]) is a systematic enterprise that builds and organizes knowledge in the form of testable explanations and predictions about the universe."
From such definition, if I could point at every person and say it was the result of systematic enterprise that builds and organizes knowledge in the form of a testable explanations and predictions about the universe, it wouldn't be a stretch for one to think that such seems to be in favor of an omniscient being :P
Consider that there was probably some function of Newtons alchamey and astrology experience that allowed him to put forth other ideas that we are willing accept from testable hypothesis… or that had their been no Newton, the phenomena that he described, would have still existed, yet people at that time would continued to have no testable understanding of it.
The result of some particular branches of science where we do, in fact, have reliable knowledge and the ability to make accurate predictions.
But that is very, very different from "science" in general. There are many more fields that are called "sciences" but do not have anything like that kind of reliable knowledge or predictive power. So it's not enough to just say "science"; you have to specify the field, so we know which category it falls into.
I posit that if one doesn't have time to research the subject themself, one shouldn't form opinion about such subjects beyond that they now know such subjects exist. But I suppose asking that of human beings is too much :P
The rise of a civilization based on technology and information is a towering testament to the successes of science. Lets not fool ourselves.
If you don't have time to research the subject yourself, it means you don't care about the answer anyway. So why should you take any side? Why not just accept that you don't know?
The point is that what is "less wrong" is the understanding we build up by extending the range of our data and our ability to predict what new data that we haven't yet observed will look like. It's not anything we build up by "consensus". So a lay person, trying to figure out what to "blindly follow", should not be looking at "consensus"; they should be looking at what data we have, how reliable it is, what does it cover, and how well we can predict what we will see when we get further data. As you can see, I put "blindly follow" in quotes because you can't do all this blindly; you can't just ask what the "consensus" is. You have to actually look at the content.
Edit: also, I was referring initially to the arguments from other comments, not to Asimov specifically.
This is probably true, at least in fields where we have a reasonably developed science, but you realize, I trust, that it's not a very high bar. :-)
The critical difference between treating science as a religion, and treating religion as a religion, is that the science people have a good chance of being right.
Its rational and reasonable to be uncritical of scientific results - the scientist has already been critical for you. That's kind of the whole point.
The rest of us will do very, very well to believe the results of science. Because its the only game in town that's actually trying to get it right.
_Its [sic] rational and reasonable to be uncritical of scientific results_
I do not believe that this person is sarcastic; I say that because I have talked to hundreds of people with the same opinion. People actually believe this. My authority is better than yours so you uncritically accepting your authority is wrong, me uncritically accepting mine is not only right but obviously so.
Ignoring the absurdity of the statement, and the mind-numbing appeal to authority - this also shows a lack of knowledge of history. When people used Aristotle as an authority 500 years ago, they did it using this same rationale: Aristotle had already done all the thinking, who are you to claim to know better?
This is just painful.
I'm still reeling from "Its rational and reasonable to be uncritical of scientific results"- smh.
Given the available time and energy (or lack thereof) for most of us to examine every scientific result in detail, it can even be more rational (as in best allocation of personal resources) to accept some scientific results uncritically than to study them in detail. I'll note that I would argue for tentative acceptance, with growing confidence over time myself, but the original statement isn't wrong. It's just being interpreted through different vocabularies.
P.S. This next part is not a response to you specifically, just a general comment. I'm really disappointed by the polarizing tone of this thread, the uncharitable readings of others comments, the implications of guilt by association, and the emotionally motivated downvote brigades. HN used to be better; we've discussed this essay before and it wasn't nearly so bad. So I'm disappointed, and I'm disappointed in myself for participating, but feel I must because of how much I like the essay and how important it is for people to understand the concept of the relative wrongness of science.
Assuming that science news corresponds to scientific results will get one in trouble though.
"The foremost scientific authority claims that the Earth is flat. There is no need to be critical of this scientific finding. All opposing viewpoints must be shunned, and proponents of those contrarian ideas ridiculed and ruined."
http://www.brainpickings.org/2014/04/24/jacob-bronowski-asce...
Beware of dogma.
My particular peeve is engineers who kowtow to economics, putting it in a much higher pedestal than sociology or anthropology, because it is "mathy". The implicit assumptions are usually along the lines of "the assumptions seem obvious enough, and look at all those formulae in the transformations thereof!"
I'm not going to defend sociology specifically because I don't know the field or it's state, but in every science (e.g. chemistry), you make a model for some restricted case to fit some data and you make assumptions on the scope of the model. Otherwise you couldn't say pretty much anything about anything: "We tested that proton and that one has a mass of X units. We can't say anything about this proton, thogh." -- the evidence piles up that the model has widespread vality. In the same sense, we can make assumptions on the scope of models. Of course, I imagine we have no hope for the time being of uniting the basic physical laws to that of sociology, simply because we don't have the power to understand the human brain just yet. I don't think refraining from modelling behavior is useful, and it will probably even help us better model the brain and generalize it's behavior towards "better" intelligence (AI).
This is the example used in methodological discussions of economics. I don't know if astronomers do actually perform experiments on some limited scale, but it seems that classicaly they relied on "luck" to test predictions e. g. testing general relativity through observations of eclipses. In social sciences, there is a somewhat similar thing called "natural experiment", which is the main test for the validity of predictions. In both cases, the researcher takes a more passive role in testing his predictions.
This can be dauting to researchers, but overall it's for the best. There are indeed experiments in economics, specially in game theory. But the majority of possible experiments would cross the boundary of what is morally acceptable, and well into morally abhorrent e. g. randomly restricting a sample's access to education to estimate it's effects on wages.
Well, certainly, natural experiments can lead to knowledge. But that's a much slower and more dangerous path, artificial experiments are better in every sense, except that they are mostly not available for economics. Anyway, I don't think the use of natural experiments are the bottleneck currently holding economics back.
It seems like the worst offenders are in biology/pharmacology/genetics/biochemistry. I'm not trained in any of those fields, but it seems pretty obvious that organic life should be orders of magnitudes more complex than mechanics, materials science, aeronautics, or any of the other man-made scientific fields. They are also comparatively young subjects. We don't really understand enough about how all the pieces fit together, or even what all the pieces are, in biological processes to make much in the way of definitive statements.
But seriously, if I hear another nightly news story about how food X prevents cancer based on a study of a dozen people or the current consensus on whether eggs are good or bad for you...
However, your point is valid in that knowledge of, say, digital engineering is easier to understand and investigate as the systems are simpler. Those who are successful in the tech field should keep this in mind when they talk of disrupting fields involving wet-ware.
Wait... what? If the Earth didn't go around the Sun, why would we have seasons based on the angle of the Sun to the ground? Why would that angle continually cycle throughout the year? And what about the movements of the planets in the night sky, relative to Earth?
Sure, you could have a god who designed perversely complex features into the world for no causally sensible reason, but really, the simplest explanation for our available geological and astronomical data is that the Earth orbits the Sun.
Except for that in reality the legitimacy of science becomes more and more tenuous with each passing year. In the past 40+ years there have been few if any major advances in the scientific process that have seen wide adoption, despite the innumerable problems that have come to light. And not only have there been no major improvements, but things have actually gotten significantly worse thanks to the corporatization and gamification of academia, the increasing use of proprietary technologies and source code, etc.
In particular, I accept that the scientific method is a reliable path to knowledge, that is, it reliably leads to a true understanding of true things. However it does not follow that the scientific method is the only way to knowledge. It also does not follow that all true knowledge, or even a fraction of it can be acquired through the scientific method.
Other unvoiced assumptions speak to one's life's purpose. The old quote from Emil Faber, 'Knowledge is good', is certainly not a scientific conclusion, or a testable hypothesis. Valuing wisdom over ignorance and indeed freedom over slavery and life over death speaks to a purpose in life which is necessarily ungrounded in any science. I certainly do value all of those things, but it is not a belief anyone achieved through falsifiable hypotheses.
Suicide bombers see a different purpose to their lives than (presumably) you and I do. By their own measure they are not doing badly, they are doing quite well.
Or consider Richard Dawkin's famous criticisms of Mother Theresa. Mother Theresa unashamedly put religion ahead material comfort among the poor she ministered too. To say she was wrong in so doing is not a statement of fact. It is a statement of ones personal values.
Also, you are conflating one person's opinion with science.
On the subject of cultural differences in morality, these can be surveyed empirically and considered within a framework of natural selection (both biological and cultural). One can choose to derive any moral framework they wish, but scientifically speaking, the moral frameworks that survive are those that can yield the greatest memetic survival advantage of the framework itself.
And in the end, it's all just physics anyway.
And objectively, suicide bombers are dead, which puts them far behind those of us who remain alive -- at least, by any sensible measure. Of course, when you unravel the story behind the average suicide bomber, you usually find that they were shamed or pressured into the deed, and in fact, have not accomplished, in committing a suicide bombing, all their own noble goals in life.
They are actually sad, pathetic people exploited by powerful clerics to be turned into little more than explosive puppets.
That's pure question begging.
And yet the only argument I seem to get in favor of the worldview that (I believe) you and I largely share is "C'mon. Don't be silly.", which might be rhetorically effective, but is not evidence based.
The important difference is that I am willing to accept that I believe it without proof. You see and the parent seem to need to claim it's 'scientific' and 'rational' to embrace a worldview which values life, freedom, knowledge, etc.
Clearer?
Furthermore, all human behavior can be linked to activity in the brain, which can be studied by neuroscience. Finally, empirical surveys of human behaviors and moral opinions exist.
Therefore, morality is within the purview of science.
Science can talk about specific events ("John stabbed Joe with a knife"), it can talk about how people categorize them ("the stabbing had features X, Y, and Z that the typical mind categorizes at "murder"), and it can talk about how typical minds perceive and judge events it has categorized.
Morality is little more than an abstraction that human brains use to make social value judgements that help them fulfill their complicated set of values. If you can understand the values people have and the way these judgements help fulfill them, you've basically aced morality.
I'm not saying it's easy. I know several brilliant people working on this, and they're still getting surprises and uncovering edge cases. What I'm getting at is that statements like "most people think killing people is bad" can be reduced, with great difficulty, into statements about human behaviors and brain activity.
I think the hangup people have is the mistaken idea that analyzing morality devalues it. But that's not the case. It does allow us to identify and discard obsolete morals (witness the sweeping acceptance of gay marriage), but those that survive are stronger for it.
I doubt it, but in any case, the important point is that you can't do the same thing for "Killing people is bad." It's an important distinction. Most people think that homosexuality is bad, but we wouldn't want to conclude that it therefore is.
Suppose Alice gets in an argument with Bob, and stabs him. Is Alice worse off having done that? Is Bob? What is the impact on Bob's family, friends, and co-workers? Is society better off having a policy of arresting people in Alice's situation? And imprisoning them? Or socially disapproving of such action? When you learn that Alice stabbed Bob, how do you feel about it?
This is vaguely the lines which you'd take to talk about human morality in terms of behavior and mental states. This is not an exhaustive breakdown, and there's some parts that "morality" still claims afterwards. The point is that there's only so many things that people can mean by putting moral judgement on something, and there's nothing left when you've addressed them all. Addressing the pieces is usually done by going to human behavior and experiences.
Circling back to people thinking homosexuality is bad - we can make moral judgements about moral judgements. Statements like "'Thinking homosexuality is morally wrong' causes a great deal of pain for the people I care about."
Minor quibble: at one point, scientists believed that you couldn't prove whether or not two particles were identical in every respect. "I don't think that it's possible to prove X" isn't a proof that it's impossible to prove X. I'd rephrase that quote as "I don't know what a proof of X would look like."
If you answer all the subquestions, then whether it's right or wrong doesn't matter. Let's take a much simpler, analogous question to illustrate the process:
"If a tree falls in a forest, and nobody is around to hear it, does it make a sound?"
The controversial part of this is what people mean by "makes a sound". It's easier to break down here because there are only two senses of the it - vibrations in the air versus the qualitative experience of hearing. Once you've answered that it makes vibrations in the air but doesn't cause a hearing experience, whether or not it "makes a sound" doesn't tell you anything about what to expect.
Similarly, if you figure out what people mean by something being "right" or "wrong", you can use those pieces to cause the things that "rightness" and "wrongness" cause without caring about the overall judgement.
It may matter to a person who has a conscience.
It's far easier to say that these are two different worlds of truth; one is more quantitative, the other is more qualitative, and the two are intertwined, building truth upon each other. Science does not meaningfully connect with the human race without a profound understanding and application of the humanities. Humanities do not meaningfully derive human truths without a profound understanding of the reality of existence.
The two are so important to each other that it's a wonder they have always resulted in such dichotomous opposing arguments throughout history. It is stupid, even; a human folly of ignorance and small-mindedness, only effectively resolved through a deep and liberal education of both types of knowledge at once. They are paradoxically opposing and yet deeply intertwined, and it would improve both areas of knowledge to have a deeper understanding of—and especially respect for—the other.
There need not be a well-formed simple logical statement to tell us this is true.
(When confronted with that, a typical rejoinder is that there is no 'should' -- life, consciousness, agency, will is all an illusion, all is meaningless and it reduces to physics in the end. The problem with that view though is that you have to throw out truth and knowledge too then)
Really, the whole dichotomous argument between the two is absolutely ridiculous. We need fewer people on the sides and more who are truly bridges.
"We waited until the blast had passed, walked out of the shelter and then it was extremely solemn. We knew the world would not be the same. A few people laughed, a few people cried. Most people were silent. I remembered the line from the Hindu scripture, the Bhagavad Gita: Vishnu is trying to persuade the prince that he should do his duty, and to impress him he takes on his multiarmed form and says, 'Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.'"
We would have to agree on the definition of "true knowledge" to come to a complete understanding of each other's positions, but I'll take a stab at justifying my opinion that science is the only possible source for all "true knowledge". I'll define "true" as empirically tested and repeatable by others, and "knowledge" as statements about something tangible (e.g. brains), or about intangible concepts embodied within tangible things (e.g. brains thinking about ideas).
One needn't fully accept these definitions for the argument to hold, if one accepts that personal experience is a source of personal knowledge. Basically, if we consider all the claimed sources of knowledge, and consider which "way" of knowing applies in the most places, gains the most new knowledge over time, and has the best track record for producing societal advancements of knowledge and technology, the only "way of knowing" left standing is science.
You also mention "life purpose" and "knowledge is good" as counterevidence to science. But scientifically speaking, there is no objective purpose or objective good. There is only natural selection favoring the evolution of a desire for knowledge. That desire can be studied scientifically via neurology and related disciplines.
I wouldn't call the idea that "Knowledge is good", wisdom is better than ignorance, and freedom is better than slavery, etc. counterevidence. But I believe they are true things which I cannot prove via any sort of experiment, in particular because 'good' and 'better' are of necessity subjective.
It seems that we indeed cannot agree on a useful shared definition of "true". The laws of physics are ultimately indifferent to our notions of truth, and yet our notions of truth are instantiated as emergent phenomena within physics.
there's something to that. It seems to me its partially because we often make "doing science" a mental / virtual exercise. A process that is done with data and in the realm of one's head.
But doing science should includes all of our senses.
The idea of gemba comes to mind ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gemba ): > The idea is that to be customer-driven, one must go to the customer's genba to understand his problems and opportunities, using all one's senses to gather and process data.
Furthermore, a scientist well versed in the humanities almost to the point of spirituality will have a much easier time translating knowledge between the logical and the human. Both are intertwined, and both contain mountains of truth, and each is made better by the other.
Loren Eiseley was one such scientist.
Some good writings of his can be found here: http://www.american-buddha.com/eiseley.toc.htm
http://www.news.com.au/entertainment/tv/fake-wonder-cream-ex...
Note that these were scientific studies, made by scientific labs. This is not the media misreporting.
pedantry directed ridicule
this same essay could have been written exactly as is but with the tone of 'you are so right, here are some examples' but instead he chose to try to make a fan feel like an asshole..
this is my biggest problem with degrasse tyson.. he goes out of his way to make himself a public figure in science but uses the information he has accumulated to make people think they know so much less than he
a perfect example was when he visited the daily show, twice, and complained, jokingly, that the earth was spinning backward in the opening graphic
that graphic was made by some artist and now tyson is using his acquired information to ridicule the individual's effort
if you are knowledgeable then use that knowledge to lift people up
how can we have a graphic of the earth spinning backwards?
perhaps the camera has a capture rate that makes the earth appear to spin backwards, like car tires in films..
or maybe you could talk about geosynchronous orbit and angular momentum and really make people think you know more than them all the while lending excuse for why the earth is spinning backwards..
isaac, you got called out on some stupid thing you said out of a myriad of other entertaining things you have said, have some grace.. or at least a sense of humour
When I send someone a pithy email/comment on a subject and they respond like asimov did -- its pretty cool to me, even though to an observer it may appear somewhat dickish.
i recognise the strengths in being able to determine if the kid 'had it coming' but still isaac was in the position of power here, and to me it reads like he was embarrassed to be called out by someone he feels unworthy of correcting him
i've developed the style over time, i think it somehow informed from growing up behind a glowing screen
myself, i find i read single sentences quicker than walls of text and just prefer the equanimity of lowercase
again, i apologise.. i suppose some may call it 'crabbed penmanship'
the base generalisation was a direct analogue to isacc's referenced educational hierarchy:
I knew very few English Lit majors who are equipped to teach me science
It is only because the difference between the
rate of change in a static universe and the
rate of change in an evolutionary one is that
between zero and very nearly zero that the
creationists can continue propagating their
folly.
We're aware of things like the three-toed horse, and we know they used to exist. But that's just a small difference on an animal that still exists, and other than that whole thing with the toes, it's still pretty much the same thing. We've seen lots of animals disappear, but nothing replacing them.
Maybe insects are a ripe branch of animals that will bear some fruit, since their life cycles are so short, but otherwise, for the most part, modern theory points out that not only will none of us see a new, radically different class of creatures emerge within our own lifetimes, but not even within the projected limits of our modern civilizations and their effective capacity to record history will we be likely to observe such an event.
So, neither since the start of our recorded history, nor until after the history we do manage to record starts to disappear beyond the possibility of rediscoverable recognition by the next order of civilization which may arrise, shall a truly different creature spring forth from the free-for-all of biological propagation.
In other words, we've never actually experienced a period where a certain life form did not exist and then emerged from some other thing, and we'll probably never get a chance to see such a thing happen, not in 5 million years, and even if we do spot a new previously undiscovered animal, and it turns out to be an example of the emergence of a new and distinctly different animal, even if it makes it into the history books, and the animal is hardy enough to persist in nature, our history books won't last forever, and after we're gone, the next civilized culture (human or oherwise) might not find them, and learn to read them before they disintegrate into unrecognizable ash and dust. But we know it's there. We're sure evolution isn't just a theory.
And so too, are we faced with a scenario, whereby even if hypothetical civilized lizard people of the dinosaur era had been there to witness a new class of rodents spring forth, the records of their culture that we do find might not include that one passage. And so too, with civilized trilobite scholars, if they were there to see the original sharks and amphibians emerge, and wrote it down, we'd probably never find that chapter in the trilobite bible where they realized what they had just seen.
That's a tough idea to pitch to people, and in casual conversations at dinner parties, it's devestatingly easy to stymie people who try to explain it.