House of Eratosthenes

Someone commented here recently, offering up the idea that something called “science” is advanced when scientists get it wrong. Scientist A comes up with a wrong-idea that will ultimately be debunked, Scientist B sets up the tests that do the debunking, the credit should wholly or partially go to Scientist A for coming up with the question.

How fascinating. “We don’t need to take an umbrella, it’s not raining outside.” “Okay, well I just looked, and it’s fucking pouring.” “Ha ha! I am to be credited for increasing our knowledge about the weather!” Huh? You may call that first guy a scientist, I call him a jerk.

I’ll certainly concede that the acquisition of knowledge must begin with an admission of ignorance. Problem is, formulating a wrong idea is not the same thing as an admission of ignorance. Even if the wrong idea explicitly includes such an admission — and, these days, unfortunately most expressed wrong ideas leave that part out — admission of ignorance, or even uncertainty, falls short of commanding a monopoly of this admission. The formulation of “Scientist A gets all the credit” presumes that Scientist B was not equally ready to admit this ignorance. I find that to be laughable because, hey, this is the guy who made the time and then sat down to do the work.

WORK. Seems to me, the cultural divide is there. There is an idea, and then there is implementation; when the people who do the one are different from the people who do the other, a cultural divide must result. And that is true of most things people bother to do, in any industrial society. There are the people with ideas and there are the people who carry them out.

The divide is carved into the surface of human consciousness, and then deepened, by deficiencies in any “lessons learned” mechanism. This would be some sort of messaging system that would let the idea-people know that implementation has revealed the idea to be in need of revision. This late in the game, humanity seems to be going through the chapter in which we’re learning, for the first time, such a feedback system is necessary. I say “seems.” There’s no way that can be true, because it is so very, very late. But if we have ancestral knowledge about this, we’re not showing it. The idea-people are coming up with bad ideas, and they’re not ready or willing to find out about the flaws in their ideas revealed by implementation.

These days, as I write algorithms for my applications and libraries, I manage to get most of it done in restaurants and coffee shops. My laptop doesn’t have a compiler on it. I’ve found I’m more productive that way. With the compiler available, after a bit of effort one starts to space out, lose track of where the code-writing session is exactly, and eventually throw the switch to sort through the error messages. This encourages sloppy thinking and laziness.

The disadvantage to the coffee shop approach, of course, is the temporary separation from reality. But, it does keep you alert and focused. The “idea guy” in your head is allowed to completely take over, but only within a limited term of time. I’ve actually been doing this for about a decade straight, now, and it works well. Within an hour or two, or four or six if there are errands that have to be run afterward, there will be a Come-To-Jesus meeting where you sync everything up and then hit compile.

Some of my commit-log entries actually have some comments like, “Well, this ought to screw everything up but good. Have fun.”

It’s a bit of an unorthodox habit. Lots of software engineers do similar quirky things to keep things running right. (One guy I knew had a canister of stuffed piggy-heads for juggling, and he’d juggle them while the compiler was running.) Well — this one has made me feel a little bit sorry for the bureaucrats who “know” their ideas are the right ones. The ones who give humankind all these “gifts”…like the healthcare.gov website launch.

My coffee-shop-coding is not a perfect technique. It doesn’t necessarily lead to good ideas. All it does is help a little bit, by keeping me humble, and this is only an anecdote. But the reverse certainly does work: To come up with a thoroughly awful idea, a real stink-bomb, you’ve got to have a dedicated intellectual type. Someone who lives in the realm of ideas, and never, ever leaves it. Never gets that feedback about how things panned out, or whether they panned out, and never wants it. The type who lives his entire life according to narrative.

Six percent say ObamaCare is working great.

For the results to come out that well, you have to have absolute certainty about what they’re going to be, before there are any. You can’t maintain any sort of healthy uncertainty about them and hope to produce this sort of “success.” Only the no-feedback people, the no-question types, the “it’ll work awesomely because it’s my idea” people can get it done like this.

If they weren’t such cocks about, well, everything, I’d perhaps grant them a bit of the benefit of the doubt — the “error” part is almost as important as the “trial” part.

But their problem, like the problem with liberalism generally, is that they’ve fetishized imperfection. I’ve never heard a liberal say “hmmm, I’ll have to think about that” to any matter of consequence, much less “I don’t know” and certainly never “I was wrong.”

They’ve always got the answer immediately to hand, whether or not they actually have any basis for saying so other than “I’ve been questioned by someone I perceive as my political enemy.” Then they dig in like coke-fueled honey badgers on steroids, because one must never, ever, ever admit to the possibility of being wrong in front of an opponent. They’ve circular-reasoned their way into complete stasis — my enemies are Dumb, therefore they can never be correct about anything, therefore if the facts seem to support their argument, the facts are wrong. It’s a wonderful swillogism, and it guarantees they’ll never learn anything. Even when they’re waiting ten months for the delivery room thanks to ObamaCare, it’ll still be working out great.
- Severian | 02/28/2014 @ 10:22
mkfreeberg: You may call that first guy a scientist, I call him a jerk.

That’s funny. In the example provided, Einstein was the “first guy”. And his very deep thought realized in the EPR thought-experiment did help move the science forward—even though he was wrong.

I have not failed. I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work. — Thomas Edison
- Zachriel | 02/28/2014 @ 13:58
Had the latter experimentation been done without Einstein’s prior incorrect speculation, science would have moved forward.

Had Einstein formulated his incorrect theory, and the latter experimentation not been done, science would not have moved forward.

That pretty much settles the question.
- mkfreeberg | 02/28/2014 @ 20:23
mkfreeberg: Had the latter experimentation been done without Einstein’s prior incorrect speculation, science would have moved forward.

EPR was a thought-experiment.
- Zachriel | 03/01/2014 @ 07:02
And your error there is in thinking it never would have come to pass, without this chain of cause-and-effect onto which y’all have latched. I suppose y’all have no residual traces of uncertainty about any of it, eh. Einstein goofed, and thanks to that, science moved forward. The folks who did the latter experimentation simply never could’ve come up with it on their own.

Kinda like, I never would have thought of exercising without this to help me along:

- mkfreeberg | 03/01/2014 @ 07:06
mkfreeberg: And your error there is in thinking it never would have come to pass, without this chain of cause-and-effect onto which y’all have latched.

And Relativity would have eventually come to pass too.

There was a line from EPR to Bell’s Theorem a generation later, and experimental results confirming Bell’s Theorem today. In other words, framing the question was an important step forward. The thought-experiment provided the groundwork for resolving the quantum conundrum.
- Zachriel | 03/01/2014 @ 07:16
We can carry the conundrum into something more easily understood: I think the program is locking up because a conditional loop is failing to trigger its condition, but after a few minutes of debugging I discover it’s actually exhausting a memory resource.

Did I bring the product closer to its scheduled ship-date by forming my incorrect idea of why it’s failing to execute, or by doing my job and figuring out what’s really going on?
- mkfreeberg | 03/01/2014 @ 07:32
mkfreeberg: Did I bring the product closer to its scheduled ship-date by forming my incorrect idea of why it’s failing to execute, or by doing my job and figuring out what’s really going on?

Indeed, yes. Eliminating possible problems is one means of finding a solution to a bug. Showing that copper does not make a good filament is important knowledge for someone trying to invent the light bulb.

I have not failed. I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work. — Thomas Edison
- Zachriel | 03/01/2014 @ 08:33
Your error there, then, is to conflate the posing of a question with the answering of it. Or to be more precise about it, with the process of partially finding an answer, by eliminating possible answers. Edison did not come closer to his working design by coming up with other designs that didn’t work. He came closer to his working design by testing those inferior designs, and finding out they weren’t satisfactory. In other words, learning.

Now, getting back to my point. Had Edison come up with a “bad” design and done his test on it, finding out that this design wasn’t going to work — but his test was flawed in some way — then, that particular experiment would not have advanced him toward his goal. In fact, the potential such a mistake might have had for consuming his valuable effort and time, to no good end, would have been considerable. So, yes. To work scientifically and progress toward an answer that’s useful and adds to practical understanding, you have to do it right. If there’s a flaw, the flaw has the potential to contaminate other good work that, by itself, would have been flawless.

Just like calculating Pi to fifty places beyond the decimal point, and screwing up digit #8 or so. Everything past that is just garbage. You have to do it right or else you’re not increasing the understanding, therefore, not really doing science.
- mkfreeberg | 03/01/2014 @ 11:21
mkfreeberg: Your error there, then, is to conflate the posing of a question with the answering of it.

Einstein thought he had found an argument to undermine quantum weirdness. Instead, it led to further theoretical work that undermined his own stubborn belief in determinism.

mkfreeberg: Had Edison come up with a “bad” design and done his test on it, finding out that this design wasn’t going to work — but his test was flawed in some way — then, that particular experiment would not have advanced him toward his goal.

Sure. But that wasn’t what you had said above, which that Scientist A, A for Albert Einstein, “comes up with a wrong-idea that will ultimately be debunked” that he’s a “jerk”, even though the wrong idea led to important research in the field. Furthermore, Scientist T, T for Thomas Edison, came up with 10,000 wrong ideas, so he must be a “jerk” squared. Science is often a trial-and-error process. And that means mistakes are often an important part of the search for answers.

This impacts your discussion of how scientists or methodology has to be perfect for science to progress. But this isn’t so. It can’t be so, because no human endeavor is perfect. So how can science progress with imperfect beings using imperfect methods?
- Zachriel | 03/01/2014 @ 13:17
If you want to say “We’re being like Edison and Einstein, learning even from our wrong ideas” and be taken seriously, you have to first admit your idea was wrong and second take a sober look at where it might have gone wrong. Harry Reid’s recent remarks are an indication that he at least isn’t willing to do the first, let along the second. And I think he’s representative of the people responsible for this cluster orgy.
- Rich Fader | 03/01/2014 @ 15:19
…even though the wrong idea led to important research in the field.

Y’all don’t know that. That’s just a bit of Barack Obama “you-didn’t-build-that” chicanery, which is inherently unscientific. Y’all are also confusing the act of asking a question with the act of (partially) answering it.

It’s like saying a divorced wife owes her abusive ex-husband something, since if he never abused her she never would have taken steps to move out and go to school to earn herself a livelihood. So let’s agree on this: Y’all’s idea makes sense, if and only if we conflate questions with their answers, which is an act of conflating two different things as the same. Which we know is wrong.
- mkfreeberg | 03/01/2014 @ 19:21
Rich Fader: If you want to say “We’re being like Edison and Einstein, learning even from our wrong ideas” and be taken seriously, you have to first admit your idea was wrong and second take a sober look at where it might have gone wrong.

Einstein never admitted he was wrong. Nevertheless, EPR spurred intense theoretical efforts. Scientists and their methods are imperfect, yet science still progresses.

This impacts your discussion of how scientists or methodology has to be perfect for science to progress. But this isn’t so. It can’t be so, because no human endeavor is perfect. Do you understand how science can progress with imperfect beings using imperfect methods?
- Zachriel | 03/01/2014 @ 20:06
This was directed to mkfreeberg:

This impacts your discussion of how scientists or methodology has to be perfect for science to progress. But this isn’t so. It can’t be so, because no human endeavor is perfect. Do you understand how science can progress with imperfect beings using imperfect methods?
- Zachriel | 03/01/2014 @ 20:07
This impacts your discussion of how scientists or methodology has to be perfect for science to progress. But this isn’t so. It can’t be so, because no human endeavor is perfect.

If the scientific endeavor is flawed, it is no longer scientific. That doesn’t mean the scientist himself has to be perfect; it means he has to avoid assuming things without basis.

Thinking unscientifically, an observer on a ferry can “know” the ferry is stationary and it is the dock that is moving away. For those who have been through the experience, the first couple times it happens it’s very convincing.

That’s why we have science. It is not a brand name or a closed-membership club. It’s a process.
- mkfreeberg | 03/01/2014 @ 20:34
mkfreeberg: If the scientific endeavor is flawed, it is no longer scientific.

That’s what we thought you said.

mkfreeberg: That doesn’t mean the scientist himself has to be perfect; it means he has to avoid assuming things without basis.

Avoiding biases is admirable, but can never be perfect.

The fact that we live at the bottom of a deep gravity well, on the surface of a gas covered planet going around a nuclear fireball 90 million miles away and think this to be normal is obviously some indication of how skewed our perspective tends to be. — Douglas Adams

If your science requires perfect avoidance in assuming things without basis, then your science will never progress, because such a circumstance never exists.
- Zachriel | 03/02/2014 @ 06:42
m: That doesn’t mean the scientist himself has to be perfect; it means he has to avoid assuming things without basis.

z: Avoiding biases is admirable, but can never be perfect.

And, this is where we’ve been circling. The “evidence” says the boat is stationary and the dock is moving, but to conclude that without experimenting would be unscientific. To apply experimentation that is ineffective, would be going through the motions of science but would in reality be just as unscientific.

Y’all’s position is: Heck, that’s alright because nobody can be perfect.

Well, perhaps the ranks of “scientists” will one day be so saturated with the millennial crowd that y’all’s viewpoint will become the ScientificConsensus^TM. Perhaps it’s happened already.

Either way, if & when that Rubicon has been crossed, science will cease to be testable knowledge of nature, an effort to expand that knowledge, or a method to engage such an effort. The word can’t retain its meaning if it is expanded to include questionable efforts that are not to be questioned, because gosh darn it, the guy who put together this report worked really, really, really hard on it and nobody’s perfect. “Peer review” would also have to lose meaning. So I’m assuming the boat is stationary just because I’m standing on it — what of it? Quit picking on me, nobody’s perfect, and besides I worked really hard on this paper that says the dock is moving.
- mkfreeberg | 03/02/2014 @ 07:12
mkfreeberg: And, this is where we’ve been circling.

You’re claiming that if the scientific endeavor is flawed, it is no longer scientific. We’re saying that’s preposterous. Of course the scientific endeavor is flawed.

mkfreeberg: Heck, that’s alright because nobody can be perfect.

No, that’s not our position. You’re using black-and-white thinking along the lines of if it isn’t perfect, then it’s worthless. In fact, there is a continuum. We attempt to eliminate biases in science, but it’s never possible to eliminate all biases. The way we eliminate biases is by independent confirmation, other observers, other methodologies.

mkfreeberg: The word can’t retain its meaning if it is expanded to include questionable efforts that are not to be questioned

All results can be questioned in science, because the scientific endeavor is necessarily flawed. Perhaps now you can understand how imperfect beings using imperfect means in an imperfect endeavor in a vast universe of mystery can reach some reasonable, albeit tentative, understanding.
- Zachriel | 03/02/2014 @ 08:33
It does seem to be a Millennial thing, doesn’t it? “Science” has become the opposite of Orwell’s famous definition of fascism — “something not desirable.” We like it, therefore it’s “science;” “experiments” are what “scientists” do; therefore, “experiments” are always good, even when useless or flat-out wrong.

You can swillogize your way to any of the kids’ positions just by busting out the Goodthink dictionary. In the previous thread, for instance, they’re insisting that “[i]t’s rather obvious that discrimination had led to social instability,” which, despite being a major stealth modification of their prior claim, is flat-out wrong — it’s not allowing discrimination that often leads to the worst social instability. Ask all the zillion little mini-groups in Eastern Europe that have caused so much fun since 1914 — they weren’t allowed to peacefully discriminate by having their own states, so they did it violently. Heck, ask Spike Lee, who’s all up in arms that NYC won’t let his old neighborhood kick out the white hipsters that are ruining the place. And you can’t argue with Spike, because that’s raciss.

Have you given any more thought to ObtuseBot 5000? A simple routine that sorts words into “Goodthink” and “Badthink” would cover most of it. You could set up a MySpace or Facebook account for it, and watch the “likes” roll in. And you could ban these useless dipshits. Win-win, homie.
- Severian | 03/02/2014 @ 08:36
Severian: [i]t’s rather obvious that discrimination had led to social instability,” which, despite being a major stealth modification of their prior claim, is flat-out wrong

Really? You’re saying that discrimination in the south was not a primary motivating factor in the social instability during the civil rights era?
- Zachriel | 03/02/2014 @ 08:40
How long had The South been discriminating, prior to the “civil rights era”? A month or two? Or longer than that?
- mkfreeberg | 03/02/2014 @ 08:56
mkfreeberg: How long had The South been discriminating, prior to the “civil rights era”?

About three hundred years. There was also pervasive discrimination outside the South. There had been social instability due to slavery, but the South was rather ruthless in suppressing it. It finally led to a bloody civil war.
- Zachriel | 03/02/2014 @ 09:07
About three hundred years.

Mkay, then. Discrimination in the South probably didn’t cause social instability during the Civil Rights era. If it had a causative effect on it, there must have been something else going on.
- mkfreeberg | 03/02/2014 @ 09:08
mkfreeberg: Discrimination in the South probably didn’t cause social instability during the Civil Rights era.

http://thinkprogress.org/wp-content/uploads/2010/05/lunch-counter.jpg

http://static.guim.co.uk/sys-images/Guardian/About/General/2013/5/6/1367846464418/Civil-rights-protestors-a-010.jpg
- Zachriel | 03/02/2014 @ 09:10
Ooooh, a picture! Now… can you use your words like the big kids do?
- Severian | 03/02/2014 @ 09:28

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