Posts Tagged ‘Karl Popper’
“The trouble with most folks isn’t so much their ignorance as knowing so many things that ain’t so”*…
From Kai Brach, in his nifty newsletter Dense Discovery, an appreciation of an Isaac Asimov essay from 1988: “The Relativity of Wrong” (a lovely riff on a point also taken up by Karl Popper)…
… it’s a welcome dose of nuance in this era of absolutist thinking. When knowingness tricks our brains into certainty, Asimov’s wonderfully nerdy piece demonstrates that right and wrong are far less binary than we may think.
The piece begins with Asimov addressing a young English literature student who’d written to scold him for his scientific arrogance. The student argues that every generation thinks they’ve got it sorted, and every generation gets proven wrong. Therefore, our current knowledge is just as flawed as flat-earth theory. But Asimov won’t have it:
“When people thought the Earth was flat, they were wrong. When people thought the Earth was spherical, they were wrong. But if you think that thinking the Earth is spherical is just as wrong as thinking the Earth is flat, then your view is wronger than both of them put together.”
He then makes his point clear through a series of delightful examples. Like spelling:
“How do you spell ‘sugar’? Suppose Alice spells it p-q-z-z-f and Genevieve spells it s-h-u-g-e-r. Both are wrong, but is there any doubt that Alice is wronger than Genevieve? For that matter, I think it is possible to argue that Genevieve’s spelling is superior to the ‘right’ one. Or suppose you spell ‘sugar’: s-u-c-r-o-s-e, or C₁₂H₂₂O₁₁. Strictly speaking, you are wrong each time, but you’re displaying a certain knowledge of the subject beyond conventional spelling.”
The same logic applies to mathematics: “Suppose you said: 2 + 2 = an integer. You’d be right, wouldn’t you? Or suppose you said: 2 + 2 = an even integer. You’d be righter. Or suppose you said: 2 + 2 = 3.999. Wouldn’t you be nearly right?”
The flat-earth idea is a great (and again timely?) case study for Asimov’s theory. The notion that the earth was flat wasn’t the product of ancient stupidity but reasonable observation given the tools available. The earth’s actual curvature is roughly 0.000126 per mile – practically indistinguishable from zero without sophisticated instruments.
“So although the flat-Earth theory is only slightly wrong and is a credit to its inventors, all things considered, it is wrong enough to be discarded in favour of the spherical-Earth theory.”
What he’s really arguing for is intellectual humility. Scientific theories don’t flip-flop wildly from flat earth to cubic earth to doughnut-shaped earth. Instead:
“What actually happens is that once scientists get hold of a good concept they gradually refine and extend it with greater and greater subtlety as their instruments of measurement improve. Theories are not so much wrong as incomplete.”
We seem to live in a world of zero-sum thinking, where nuance often gets steamrolled by the satisfying simplicity of being right. I want to remember Asimov’s framework the next time I’m certain someone else is wrong – that most disagreements aren’t between absolute truth and utter falsehood, but between different degrees of incompleteness…
On the dangers of “knowingness” and absolutism: Isaac Asimov’s “The Relativity of Wrong,” from @densediscovery.bsky.social.
Asimov’s essay is here.
See also: “There is nothing new to be discovered in physics now. All that remains is more and more precise measurement” and “The importance of experimental proof, on the other hand, does not mean that without new experimental data we cannot make advances.”
(Image above: source)
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As we rethink, we might recall that this date in 1957 was “E Day,” the introduction of the Edsel automobile. Name for Edsel Ford, son of company founder Henry Ford, Edsels were developed in an effort to give Ford a fourth brand (beyond Ford, Mercury, and Lincoln) to gain additional market share from Chrysler and General Motors. It was the first new brand introduction by an American automaker since the 1939 launch of Mercury and 1956 launch of Continental (which ended and merged into Lincoln after 1957).
Introduced in a recession that catastrophically affected sales of medium-priced cars, Edsels were considered overhyped, unattractive, distinguished by a vertical grille said to resemble a horse collar, and low quality.
No automobile has been so widely anticipated nor so quickly rejected as the Ford Edsel (with the possible recent exception of the Tesla Cybertruck). Within two months of its highly publicized launch, the Edsel became a rolling joke– and has stood as a metphor for disastrous product launch failures since.
Recognizing this (and following a loss of over $250 million [equivalent to $2.66 billion in 2024 dollars] on development, manufacturing, and marketing on the model line), Ford quietly discontinued the Edsel brand before 1960.
“Brains exist because the distribution of resources necessary for survival and the hazards that threaten survival vary in space and time”*…
And, it seems, they not only evolve, but in ways and with a frequency we’ve only just begun to appreciate. It’s long been noted that evolution seems to have a thing for “carcinization”– crabs have evolved separately at least five times. (Oh, and apparently also for anteaters…) Recent findings hint that evolution might have the same sort of jones for the brain. Amy Maxmen reports…
Our brains, perched atop a network of nerve cells that ascend the length of our bodies, are thought to have arisen once in an animal hundreds of millions of years ago and then evolved over time. However, new findings suggest instead that brains and nervous systems originated multiple times from scratch.
The findings, published today in Nature, highlight an ancient and gelatinous marine predator called a comb jelly [pictured at top]. Unlike pulsating jellyfish, comb jellies swim by “rowing” their many hair-like cilia, which are arranged in rows called combs. They possess rudimentary brains and sophisticated nervous systems replete with elongated cells that communicate through synapses much like our own. Some comb jellies show mirror-like bilateral symmetry, as do we. And like most animals, their muscles derive from a middle tissue layer, which does not exist in jellyfish or sponges, another ancient type of aquatic creature.
So it’s little wonder that biologists have long placed the comb jelly group close to worms, flies, and humans on the evolutionary tree of life; sponges emerge at the base, meaning that this group appeared first. In this traditional view, complex body parts like the brain and muscles arose gradually, and only once, since those parts look similar across related animals, and the chances of that same evolutionary process being repeated seems slim.
But this scenario was shaken by a report in Science last year, which suggested that the comb jelly group emerged before jellyfish and even the brainless, muscle-less sponges, more than 550 million years ago.
Some biologists doubted the rearrangement because it implied two equally uncomfortable possibilities: that the ancestor of all living animals had true muscles and a rudimentary brain, and then sponges and jellyfish lost those parts without a trace; or that the great animal ancestor was simple, and comb jellies evolved separately from all the other animals, yet ended up with rather similar nervous systems, muscles, and bilateral symmetry. When paleontologist Graham Budd heard the news last year, he said, “It is effectively saying animals evolved twice. Frankly, I’m not ready to believe it.”
Without a time machine, it’s impossible to know what our great ancestor looked like. However, today’s report adds more support to the notion that she was simple and comb jellies independently evolved their complex body parts. Leonid Moroz, a neurobiologist at the University of Florida’s Whitney Laboratory for Marine Bioscience, and his colleagues confirm comb jellies’ position below sponges at the base of the evolutionary tree with an analysis of genetic sequences from 11 comb jelly species…
… In an essay for Nautilus called “Evolution, You’re Drunk,” I described how hypotheses entrenched in the notion that evolution leads toward increasing complexity have recently begun to teeter. Now Moroz’s study adds another shove. It seconds the finding that simple sponges, long placed at the base of the evolutionary tree, actually evolved after the sophisticated comb jelly group arose. The story of how complexity evolves is more complex than scientists realized.
Furthermore, the brain—the epitome of complexity—seems to have sprouted up at least twice over evolutionary time. This clashes with the traditional notion that complex, multifaceted features come about in a very specific way, and each emerges just one time. “What everyone has said about complexity is wrong,” Moroz says. “It can happen more than once.”
Finding that comb jellies independently arrived at similar ends as other animals might also have surprised the late paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould, who famously doubted that animals would look the same today if the world were to begin again—if we could replay “the tape of life.”
Is such convergence in design a coincidence? Probably not, guesses Andreas Hejnol, an evolutionary developmental biologist at the Sars International Centre for Marine Molecular Biology in Norway. “If you need a fast communication system, it helps to have extended cells that communicate through chemicals,” he says. In other words, the structure of the nervous system reflects its function. So if intelligent life exists elsewhere in the universe, it’s not too far a stretch to think it could possess a brain comprised of trillions of neurons. Hejnol asks, “How else could it be?”…
The mysterious mechanism of evolution: “Evolution May Be Drunk, But It’s Serious About Making Brains,” from @amymaxmen.bsky.social in @nautil.us.
* John M. Allman, Evolving Brains
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As we contemplate the changing comprehension of cerebra, we might send thoughtful birthday greetings to Sir Karl Raimund Popper; he was born on this date in 1902. One of the greatest philosophers of science of the 20th century, Popper is best known for his rejection of the classical inductivist views on the scientific method, in favor of empirical falsification: a theory in the empirical sciences can never be proven, but it can be falsified, meaning that it can and should be scrutinized by decisive experiments. (Or more simply put, whereas classical inductive approaches considered hypotheses false until proven true, Popper reversed the logic: conclusions drawn from an empirical finding are true until proven false.)
Popper was also a powerful critic of historicism in political thought, and (in books like The Open Society and Its Enemies and The Poverty of Historicism) an enemy of authoritarianism and totalitarianism (in which role he was a mentor to George Soros).
“Few people have the imagination for reality”*…
Experiments that test physics and philosophy as “a single whole,” Amanda Gefter suggests, may be our only route to surefire knowledge about the universe…
Metaphysics is the branch of philosophy that deals in the deep scaffolding of the world: the nature of space, time, causation and existence, the foundations of reality itself. It’s generally considered untestable, since metaphysical assumptions underlie all our efforts to conduct tests and interpret results. Those assumptions usually go unspoken.
Most of the time, that’s fine. Intuitions we have about the way the world works rarely conflict with our everyday experience. At speeds far slower than the speed of light or at scales far larger than the quantum one, we can, for instance, assume that objects have definite features independent of our measurements, that we all share a universal space and time, that a fact for one of us is a fact for all. As long as our philosophy works, it lurks undetected in the background, leading us to mistakenly believe that science is something separable from metaphysics.
But at the uncharted edges of experience — at high speeds and tiny scales — those intuitions cease to serve us, making it impossible for us to do science without confronting our philosophical assumptions head-on. Suddenly we find ourselves in a place where science and philosophy can no longer be neatly distinguished. A place, according to the physicist Eric Cavalcanti, called “experimental metaphysics.”
Cavalcanti is carrying the torch of a tradition that stretches back through a long line of rebellious thinkers who have resisted the usual dividing lines between physics and philosophy. In experimental metaphysics, the tools of science can be used to test our philosophical worldviews, which in turn can be used to better understand science. Cavalcanti, a 46-year-old native of Brazil who is a professor at Griffith University in Brisbane, Australia, and his colleagues have published the strongest result attained in experimental metaphysics yet, a theorem that places strict and surprising constraints on the nature of reality. They’re now designing clever, if controversial, experiments to test our assumptions not only about physics, but about the mind.
While we might expect the injection of philosophy into science to result in something less scientific, in fact, says Cavalcanti, the opposite is true. “In some sense, the knowledge that we obtain through experimental metaphysics is more secure and more scientific,” he said, because it vets not only our scientific hypotheses but the premises that usually lie hidden beneath…
Gefter traces the history of this integrative train of thought (Kant, Duhem, Poincaré, Popper, Einstein, Bell), its potential for helping understand quantum theory… and the prospect of harnessing AI to run the necessary experiments– seemingly comlex and intensive beyond the scope of currenT experimental techniques…
Cavalcanti… is holding out hope. We may never be able to run the experiment on a human, he says, but why not an artificial intelligence algorithm? In his newest work, along with the physicist Howard Wiseman and the mathematician Eleanor Rieffel, he argues that the friend could be an AI algorithm running on a large quantum computer, performing a simulated experiment in a simulated lab. “At some point,” Cavalcanti contends, “we’ll have artificial intelligence that will be essentially indistinguishable from humans as far as cognitive abilities are concerned,” and we’ll be able to test his inequality once and for all.
But that’s not an uncontroversial assumption. Some philosophers of mind believe in the possibility of strong AI, but certainly not all. Thinkers in what’s known as embodied cognition, for instance, argue against the notion of a disembodied mind, while the enactive approach to cognition grants minds only to living creatures.
All of which leaves physics in an awkward position. We can’t know whether nature violates Cavalcanti’s [theorem] — we can’t know, that is, whether objectivity itself is on the metaphysical chopping block — until we can define what counts as an observer, and figuring that out involves physics, cognitive science and philosophy. The radical space of experimental metaphysics expands to entwine all three of them. To paraphrase Gonseth, perhaps they form a single whole…
“‘Metaphysical Experiments’ Probe Our Hidden Assumptions About Reality,” in @QuantaMagazine.
* Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
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As we examine edges, we might send thoughtful birthday greetings to Rudolf Schottlaender; he was born on this date in 1900. A philosopher who studied with Edmund Husserl, Martin Heidegger, Nicolai Hartmann, and Karl Jaspers, Schottlaender survived the Nazi regime and the persecution of the Jews, hiding in Berlin. After the war, as his democratic and humanist proclivities kept him from posts in philosophy faculties, he distinguished himself as a classical philologist and translator (e.g., new translations of Sophocles which were very effective on the stage, and an edition of Petrarch).
But he continued to publish philosophical and political essays and articles, which he predominantly published in the West and in which he saw himself as a mediator between the systems. Because of his positions critical to East Germany, he was put under close surveillance by the Ministry for State Security (Ministerium für Staatssicherheit or Stasi)– and inspired leading minds of the developing opposition in East Germany.
“Over the long term, symbiosis is more useful than parasitism. More fun, too.”*…
There are many more varieties of minerals on earth than previously believed– and about half of them formed as parts or byproducts of living things…
The impact of Earth’s geology on life is easy to see, with organisms adapting to environments as different as deserts, mountains, forests, and oceans. The full impact of life on geology, however, can be easy to miss.
A comprehensive new survey of our planet’s minerals now corrects that omission. Among its findings is evidence that about half of all mineral diversity is the direct or indirect result of living things and their byproducts. It’s a discovery that could provide valuable insights to scientists piecing together Earth’s complex geological history—and also to those searching for evidence of life beyond this world.
In a pair of papers published on July 1, 2022 in American Mineralogist, researchers Robert Hazen, Shaunna Morrison and their collaborators outline a new taxonomic system for classifying minerals, one that places importance on precisely how minerals form, not just how they look. In so doing, their system acknowledges how Earth’s geological development and the evolution of life influence each other.
Their new taxonomy, based on an algorithmic analysis of thousands of scientific papers, recognizes more than 10,500 different types of minerals. That’s almost twice as many as the roughly 5,800 mineral “species” in the classic taxonomy of the International Mineralogical Association, which focuses strictly on a mineral’s crystalline structure and chemical makeup.
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Morrison and Hazen also identified 57 processes that individually or in combination created all known minerals. These processes included various types of weathering, chemical precipitations, metamorphic transformation inside the mantle, lightning strikes, radiation, oxidation, massive impacts during Earth’s formation, and even condensations in interstellar space before the planet formed. They confirmed that the biggest single factor in mineral diversity on Earth is water, which through a variety of chemical and physical processes helps to generate more than 80 percent of minerals.
But they also found that life is a key player: One-third of all mineral kinds form exclusively as parts or byproducts of living things—such as bits of bones, teeth, coral, and kidney stones (which are all rich in mineral content) or feces, wood, microbial mats, and other organic materials that over geologic time can absorb elements from their surroundings and transform into something more like rock. Thousands of minerals are shaped by life’s activity in other ways, such as germanium compounds that form in industrial coal fires. Including substances created through interactions with byproducts of life, such as the oxygen produced in photosynthesis, life’s fingerprints are on about half of all minerals.
But they also found that life is a key player: One-third of all mineral kinds form exclusively as parts or byproducts of living things—such as bits of bones, teeth, coral, and kidney stones (which are all rich in mineral content) or feces, wood, microbial mats, and other organic materials that over geologic time can absorb elements from their surroundings and transform into something more like rock. Thousands of minerals are shaped by life’s activity in other ways, such as germanium compounds that form in industrial coal fires. Including substances created through interactions with byproducts of life, such as the oxygen produced in photosynthesis, life’s fingerprints are on about half of all minerals.
Historically, scientists “have artificially drawn a line between what is geochemistry and what is biochemistry,” said Nita Sahai, a biomineralization specialist at the University of Akron in Ohio who was not involved in the new research. In reality, the boundary between animal, vegetable, and mineral is much more fluid.
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A new origins-based system for classifying minerals reveals the huge geochemical imprint that life has left on Earth. It could help us identify other worlds with life too: “Life Helps Make Almost Half of All Minerals on Earth,” from @jojofoshosho0 in @QuantaMagazine.
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As we muse on minerals, we might send systemic birthday greetings to Thomas Samuel Kuhn; he was born on this date in 1922. A physicist, historian, and philosopher of science, Kuhn believed that scientific knowledge didn’t advance in a linear, continuous way, but via periodic “paradigm shifts.” Karl Popper had approached the same territory in his development of the principle of “falsification” (to paraphrase, a theory isn’t false until it’s proven true; it’s true until it’s proven false). But while Popper worked as a logician, Kuhn worked as a historian. His 1962 book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions made his case; and while he had– and has— his detractors, Kuhn’s work has been deeply influential in both academic and popular circles (indeed, the phrase “paradigm shift” has become an English-language staple).
“What man sees depends both upon what he looks at and also upon what his previous visual-conception experience has taught him to see.”
Thomas S. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions
“An architect should live as little in cities as a painter. Send him to our hills, and let him study there what nature understands by a buttress, and what by a dome.”*…
We’ve misunderstood an important part of the history of urbanism– jungle cities. Patrick Roberts suggests that they have much to teach us…
Visions of “lost cities” in the jungle have consumed western imaginations since Europeans first visited the tropics of Asia, Africa and the Americas. From the Lost City of Z to El Dorado, a thirst for finding ancient civilisations and their treasures in perilous tropical forest settings has driven innumerable ill-fated expeditions. This obsession has seeped into western societies’ popular ideas of tropical forest cities, with overgrown ruins acting as the backdrop for fear, discovery and life-threatening challenges in countless films, novels and video games.
Throughout these depictions runs the idea that all ancient cities and states in tropical forests were doomed to fail. That the most resilient occupants of tropical forests are small villages of poison dart-blowing hunter-gatherers. And that vicious vines and towering trees – or, in the case of The Jungle Book, a boisterous army of monkeys – will inevitably claw any significant human achievement back into the suffocating green whence it came. This idea has been boosted by books and films that focus on the collapse of particularly enigmatic societies such as the Classic Maya. The decaying stone walls, the empty grand structures and the deserted streets of these tropical urban leftovers act as a tragic warning that our own way of life is not as secure as we would like to assume.
For a long time, western scholars took a similar view of the potential of tropical forests to sustain ancient cities. On the one hand, intensive agriculture, seen as necessary to fuel the growth of cities and powerful social elites, has been considered impossible on the wet, acidic, nutrient-poor soils of tropical forests. On the other, where the rubble of cities cannot be denied, in the drier tropics of North and Central America, south Asia and south-east Asia, ecological catastrophe has been seen as inevitable. Deforestation to make way for massive buildings and growing populations, an expansion of agriculture across marginal soils, as well as natural disasters such as mudslides, flooding and drought, must have made tropical cities a big challenge at best, and a fool’s gambit at worst.
Overhauling these stereotypes has been difficult. For one thing, the kind of large, multiyear field explorations usually undertaken on the sites of ancient cities are especially hard in tropical forests. Dense vegetation, mosquito-borne disease, poisonous plants and animals and torrential rain have made it arduous to find and excavate past urban centres. Where organic materials, rather than stone, might have been used as a construction material, the task becomes even more taxing. As a result, research into past tropical urbanism has lagged behind similar research in Mesopotamia and Egypt and the sweeping river valleys of east Asia.
Yet many tropical forest societies found immensely successful methods of food production, in even the most challenging of circumstances, which could sustain impressively large populations and social structures. The past two decades of archaeological exploration, applying the latest science from the land and the air, have stripped away canopies to provide new, more favourable assessments.
Not only did societies such as the Classic Maya and the Khmer empire of Cambodia flourish, but pre-colonial tropical cities were actually some of the most extensive urban landscapes anywhere in the pre-industrial world – far outstripping ancient Rome, Constantinople/Istanbul and the ancient cities of China.
Ancient tropical cities could be remarkably resilient, sometimes surviving many centuries longer than colonial- and industrial-period urban networks in similar environments. Although they could face immense obstacles, and often had to reinvent themselves to beat changing climates and their own exploitation of the surrounding landscape, they also developed completely new forms of what a city could be, and perhaps should be.
Extensive, interspersed with nature and combining food production with social and political function, these ancient cities are now catching the eyes of 21st-century urban planners trying to come to grips with tropical forests as sites of some of the fastest-growing human populations around the world today…
They may be vine-smothered ruins today, but the lost cities of the ancient tropics still have a lot to teach us about how to live alongside nature. Dr. Roberts (@palaeotropics) explains: “The real urban jungle: how ancient societies reimagined what cities could be,” adapted from his new book, Jungle: How Tropical Forests Shaped the World – and Us.
* John Ruskin
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As we acclimate, we might send thoughtful birthday greetings to Sir Karl Raimund Popper; he was born on this date in 1902. One of the greatest philosophers of science of the 20th century, Popper is best known for his rejection of the classical inductivist views on the scientific method, in favor of empirical falsification: a theory in the empirical sciences can never be proven, but it can be falsified, meaning that it can and should be scrutinized by decisive experiments. (Or more simply put, whereas classical inductive approaches considered hypotheses false until proven true, Popper reversed the logic: conclusions drawn from an empirical finding are true until proven false.)
Popper was also a powerful critic of historicism in political thought, and (in books like The Open Society and Its Enemies and The Poverty of Historicism) an enemy of authoritarianism and totalitarianism (in which role he was a mentor to George Soros).
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