Posts Tagged ‘Christopher Wren’
“The pursuit of science is a grand adventure, driven by curiosity, fueled by passion, and guided by reason”*…
Adam Mastroianni on how science advances (and how it’s held back), with a provocative set of suggestions for how it might be accelerated…
There are two kinds of problems in the world: strong-link problems and weak-link problems.
Weak-link problems are problems where the overall quality depends on how good the worst stuff is. You fix weak-link problems by making the weakest links stronger, or by eliminating them entirely.
Food safety, for example, is a weak-link problem. You don’t want to eat anything that will kill you. That’s why it makes sense for the Food and Drug Administration to inspect processing plants, to set standards, and to ban dangerous foods…
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Weak-link problems are everywhere. A car engine is a weak-link problem: it doesn’t matter how great your spark plugs are if your transmission is busted. Nuclear proliferation is a weak-link problem: it would be great if, say, France locked up their nukes even tighter, but the real danger is some rogue nation blowing up the world. Putting on too-tight pants is a weak-link problem: they’re gonna split at the seams.
It’s easy to assume that all problems are like this, but they’re not. Some problems are strong-link problems: overall quality depends on how good the best stuff is, and the bad stuff barely matters. Like music, for instance. You listen to the stuff you like the most and ignore the rest. When your favorite band releases a new album, you go “yippee!” When a band you’ve never heard of and wouldn’t like anyway releases a new album, you go…nothing at all, you don’t even know it’s happened. At worst, bad music makes it a little harder for you to find good music, or it annoys you by being played on the radio in the grocery store while you’re trying to buy your beetle-free asparagus…
Strong-link problems are everywhere; they’re just harder to spot. Winning the Olympics is a strong-link problem: all that matters is how good your country’s best athletes are. Friendships are a strong-link problem: you wouldn’t trade your ride-or-dies for better acquaintances. Venture capital is a strong-link problem: it’s fine to invest in a bunch of startups that go bust as long as one of them goes to a billion…
In the long run, the best stuff is basically all that matters, and the bad stuff doesn’t matter at all. The history of science is littered with the skulls of dead theories. No more phlogiston nor phlegm, no more luminiferous ether, no more geocentrism, no more measuring someone’s character by the bumps on their head, no more barnacles magically turning into geese, no more invisible rays shooting out of people’s eyes, no more plum pudding…
Our current scientific beliefs are not a random mix of the dumbest and smartest ideas from all of human history, and that’s because the smarter ideas stuck around while the dumber ones kind of went nowhere, on average—the hallmark of a strong-link problem. That doesn’t mean better ideas win immediately. Worse ideas can soak up resources and waste our time, and frauds can mislead us temporarily. It can take longer than a human lifetime to figure out which ideas are better, and sometimes progress only happens when old scientists die. But when a theory does a better job of explaining the world, it tends to stick around.
(Science being a strong-link problem doesn’t mean that science is currently strong. I think we’re still living in the Dark Ages, just less dark than before.)
Here’s the crazy thing: most people treat science like it’s a weak-link problem.
Peer reviewing publications and grant proposals, for example, is a massive weak-link intervention. We spend ~15,000 collective years of effort every year trying to prevent bad research from being published. We force scientists to spend huge chunks of time filling out grant applications—most of which will be unsuccessful—because we want to make sure we aren’t wasting our money…
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I think there are two reasons why scientists act like science is a weak-link problem.
The first reason is fear. Competition for academic jobs, grants, and space in prestigious journals is more cutthroat than ever. When a single member of a grant panel, hiring committee, or editorial board can tank your career, you better stick to low-risk ideas. That’s fine when we’re trying to keep beetles out of asparagus, but it’s not fine when we’re trying to discover fundamental truths about the world…
The second reason is status. I’ve talked to a lot of folks since I published The rise and fall of peer review and got a lot of comments, and I’ve realized that when scientists tell me, “We need to prevent bad research from being published!” they often mean, “We need to prevent people from gaining academic status that they don’t deserve!” That is, to them, the problem with bad research isn’t really that it distorts the scientific record. The problem with bad research is that it’s cheating.
I get that. It’s maddening to watch someone get ahead using shady tactics, and it might seem like the solution is to tighten the rules so we catch more of the cheaters. But that’s weak-link thinking. The real solution is to care less about the hierarchy…
Here’s our reward for a generation of weak-link thinking.
The US government spends ~10x more on science today than it did in 1956, adjusted for inflation. We’ve got loads more scientists, and they publish way more papers. And yet science is less disruptive than ever, scientific productivity has been falling for decades, and scientists rate the discoveries of decades ago as worthier than the discoveries of today. (Reminder, if you want to blame this on ideas getting harder to find, I will fight you.)…
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Whether we realize it or not, we’re always making calls like this. Whenever we demand certificates, credentials, inspections, professionalism, standards, and regulations, we are saying: “this is a weak-link problem; we must prevent the bad!”
Whenever we demand laissez-faire, the cutting of red tape, the letting of a thousand flowers bloom, we are saying: “this is a strong-link problem; we must promote the good!”
When we get this right, we fill the world with good things and rid the world of bad things. When we don’t, we end up stunting science for a generation. Or we end up eating a lot of asparagus beetles…
“Science is a strong-link problem,” from @a_m_mastroianni in @science_seeds.
* James Clerk Maxwell
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As we ponder the process of progress, we might spare a thought for Sir Christopher Wren; he died on this date in 1723. A mathematician and astronomer (who co-founded and later served as president of the Royal Society), he is better remembered as one of the most highly acclaimed English architects in history; he was given responsibility for rebuilding 52 churches in the City of London after the Great Fire in 1666, including what is regarded as his masterpiece, St. Paul’s Cathedral, on Ludgate Hill.
Wren, whose scientific work ranged broadly– e.g., he invented a “weather clock” similar to a modern barometer, new engraving methods, and helped develop a blood transfusion technique– was admired by Isaac Newton, as Newton noted in the Principia.
“I was reading the dictionary. I thought it was a poem about everything.”*…
That seminal semanticist Samuel Johnson suggested, “dictionaries are like watches, the worst is better than none and the best cannot be expected to go quite true.” From “unabridged” to “slanguage,” Madeline Kripke’s library of lexicons is a logophile’s heaven (or hell)…
Madeline Kripke’s first dictionary was a copy of Webster’s Collegiate that her parents gave her when she was a fifth grader in Omaha in the early 1950s. By the time of her death in 2020, at age 76, she had amassed a collection of dictionaries that occupied every flat surface of her two-bedroom Manhattan apartment—and overflowed into several warehouse spaces. Many believe that this chaotic, personal library is the world’s largest compendium of words and their usage.
“We don’t really know how many books it is,” says Michael Adams, a lexicographer and chair of the English department at Indiana University Bloomington. More than 1,500 boxes, with vague labels such as “Kripke documents” or “Kripke: 17 books,” arrived at the school’s Lilly Library on two tractor-trailers in late 2021. The delivery was accompanied by a nearly 2,000-page catalog detailing some 6,000 volumes. But that’s only a fraction of the total. In summer 2023, the library hired a group of students to simply open each box and list its contents. By the fall, their count stood at about 9,700. “And they’ve got a long way to go,” says Adams. “20,000 sounds like a pretty good estimate.”
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“This is my favorite wall,” Madeline Kripke told Narratively reporter Daniel Kreiger when he visited her West Village apartment in 2013. She shined a flashlight on glass-fronted shelves jammed with dictionaries full of the slanguage and cryptolect of small and likely overlooked communities. Kreiger listed some of the groups represented at that time, among them cowboys and flappers, mariners and gamblers, soldiers, circus workers, and thieves.
Among the first tomes Adams pulled from the boxes was a well-known example of the slang genre: The Canting Academy. This 17th-century dictionary by Richard Head is a guide to “cant,” the jargon of London’s criminal class or, as the subtitle to the second edition puts it, “The Mysterious and Villainous Practices Of that wicked Crew, commonly known by the Names of Hectors, Treppaners, Gults, &c.” (Adams wonders if a first edition is also hidden in the banker’s boxes.) With The Canting Academy, one can learn to translate the cant of the “priggs” (“all sorts of thieves”) to English: “lour” to “money,” “pannam” to “bread,” “lage” to “water.” Most of the language is indecipherable without this key, but Adams notes some usages that are common today. “To plant” something is, in centuries-old cant or modern-day English, “to lay, place, or hide.”
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Much of what Adams has unpacked has a far less storied (and pricey) past, but, he says, the quirky and unexpected volumes in Kripke’s collection might be the most valuable to future lexicographers and historians. A bright red pamphlet with a doodle of heart on the cover might seem disposable, but it is an artifact of a particular place and time, Adams says. “Dictionaries are made by people, so they’re not just language books,” he says, “they’re culture books.”
Printed in 1962 as a marketing tool for a CBS sitcom, that slim pamphlet featuring a big heart around the faces of two 20-something actors is Dobie Gillis: Teenage Slanguage Dictionary, filled with “teen-age antics and terms.” It’s the type of thing that might have been stuffed into a cereal box or inserted in a teen magazine, says Adams. “I’m pretty sure that most people threw the copy they had away, and so this one is a fairly rare item that says something important about the representation of teen language and culture in the 1950s and 1960s.” Thanks to Kripke’s copy we know that this, at least according to the marketers behind The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis, was the era of the “keen teen” (“well-liked person”), the “cream puff” (“conceited person”), the “meatball” (“a dull guy”), and the “mathematician” (“teen who can put two and two together and get SEX”).
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Kripke—“the mistress of slang,” in the words of one colleague—dedicated decades of her life to curating this collection of words, including countless ones we might like to forget. When she passed away without a will, the fate of her overwhelming library, plus a trove of documents on the history of dictionary making, was uncertain. Auctioning it off in lots could have brought the highest bids, but Kripke’s family worked in conjunction with the lexicographic community to preserve what Adams calls “her legacy.” That it was ultimately purchased in total by Indiana University Bloomington, a state university that committed to making the works accessible to the public, seems in keeping with the way Kripke herself viewed the collection, as a resource for the curious.
“You would go to see her in her Village apartment, and it was filled from top to bottom and side to side with books,” Adams says. It would have taken some digging but, “she would have the book that you need to see out for you and always some other specimens, too.”…
“The Low Down on the Greatest Dictionary Collection in the World,” in @atlasobscura.
* Steven Wright
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As we look it up, we might recall that it was on this date in 1660, at Gresham College in London, that twelve men, including Christopher Wren, Robert Boyle, John Wilkins, and Sir Robert Moray decided to found a “Colledge for the Promoting of Physico-Mathematicall Experimentall Learning” to promote “experimental philosophy” (which became science-as-we-know-it). Six months later, Robert Hooke‘s first publication, a pamphlet on capillary action, was read to the group.
The Society subsequently petitioned King Charles II to recognize it and to make a royal grant of incorporation. The Royal Charter, which was passed in July, 1662 created the Royal Society of London.
In 1665, the society introduced the world’s first journal exclusively devoted to science in 1665, Philosophical Transactions (and in so doing originated the peer review process now widespread in scientific journals). Its founding editor was Henry Oldenburg, the society’s first secretary. It remains the oldest and longest-running scientific journal in the world.
“The difference between the poet and the mathematician is that the poet tries to get his head into the heavens while the mathematician tries to get the heavens into his head”*…
74. People once believed that the number of grains of sand is limitless. However, Archimedes argued in The Sand Reckoner that the number of grains of sand is not infinite. He gave a method for calculating the highest number of grains of sand that can fit into the universe– approximately 1063…
100 other titillating tidbits at “101 Mathematical Trivia.”
* G.K. Chesterton
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As we count our blessings, we might spare a thought for Sir Christopher Wren; he died on this date in 1723. A mathematician and astronomer, he became one of the most highly acclaimed English architects in history when he was was accorded responsibility for rebuilding 52 churches in the City of London after the Great Fire in 1666, including what is regarded as his masterpiece, St. Paul’s Cathedral, on Ludgate Hill.
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