9 ms·

Imre Lakatos and the philosophy of bad science

51 points by Hooke 6y ago

guscost 6y ago
This is one of my favorite subjects, and I love the idea of negative and positive heuristics. On the other hand, has anyone ever seen this happen? > But, according to Lakatos, when the time comes, a revolution is driven by logic and method, not irrational mob psychology: ‘the Kuhnian “Gestalt-switch” can be performed without removing one’s Popperian spectacles’. Even the consensus adoption of General Relativity took decades (long enough for an entire generation of older scientists to die), and the author provides no other examples to back up his claim that "results were mixed" in the history of science. I'd love to hear some counterexamples.
- guscost 6y ago
  By the way, I'm working on a long and meticulous essay/rant which argues that we're reaping the whirlwind of Kuhnian post-modernism with the COVID-19 situation, and the consequences will be absolutely devastating for science in the long term. If anyone knows a magazine publisher who would go for such a controversial and possibly-wrong piece, they would be welcome to distribute it for free (and exclusively for one month). Contact my username at the normal place.
- pdonis 6y ago
  > has anyone ever seen this happen? My take on this, largely from reading Kuhn, is that the picture of "scientific revolutions" that philosophers have doesn't really apply to anything that has happened in any particular field of science since that field became a science. That's not an accident: it's because the examples the philosophers were actually thinking of in a particular field happened before that field became a science. For example, when Kuhn talks about paradigm shifts in physics, what he's actually thinking of is the shift from Aristotelian to Galilean/Newtonian physics. That was a truly revolutionary shift, but it was a different kind of shift from, say, the shift from Newtonian physics to relativity, or from classical physics to quantum physics. Steven Weinberg, in a review of Kuhn's book published years ago in the New York Review of Books, notes that, in the latter cases (i.e., in any transition to new paradigms in physics since physics really became a science), the old theory lives on as a special case or particular approximation within the new theory. Newtonian physics still gets used extensively today, because it's a valid approximation to relativity when gravity is weak and speeds are slow compared to the speed of light, and classical physics still gets used extensively today because it's a valid approximation to quantum mechanics when there are a large number of degrees of freedom and quantum interference effects are negligible. By contrast, nobody does Aristotelian physics today, nor has anybody done it since Newtonian physics took over. Aristotelian physics is not a special case or an approximation to any physical theory we have today; it's a totally different theory of physics that simply is not useful any more, because we've found a much better and more accurate way of modeling the world. So comparing Aristotelian to modern physics is much, much more of a "gestalt switch" or "paradigm shift" than trying to compare Newtonian physics with relativity, or classical physics with quantum physics. And that kind of shift is what Kuhn was actually describing. Lakatos seems to recognize that there are limitations to Kuhn's approach, but I don't think he really grasps the degree to which all modern science is one thing, and all fits together, and the sort of "revolution" that took us from Aristotelian to modern physics simply doesn't happen once a field becomes a science.
  - guscost 6y ago
    Modern science is absolutely not a single paradigm. QM has been in conflict with GR since its invention. Lambda-CDM is in conflict with MOND and other cosmological paradigms. String theory is a paradigm. And that's just talking about theoretical physics. I appreciate your argument, and yes if there have been no paradigm shifts in the past few centuries that would neatly resolve the problem. But I can't possibly agree, and regardless I would still love to find a counterexample where something which anyone considers a paradigm shift happened in a non-political manner. For a great example outside of physics, I can't imagine how anyone could read the story of plate tectonics and not understand it to be exactly what Kuhn was talking about: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plate_tectonics#Development_of_the_theory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plate_tectonics#Development_of...
    - pdonis 6y ago
      > Modern science is absolutely not a single paradigm. I think you're confusing "paradigm" with "model". See below. > QM has been in conflict with GR since its invention. "Conflict" in the sense that neither one can possibly be a final fundamental theory, yes. But whatever final fundamental theory we come up with is going to have our current QM and our current GR as special cases/approximations in the relevant regimes. In terms of any such final fundamental theory, current QM and current GR would simply be particular models built for particular applications. So current QM and current GR are not different or conflicting "paradigms" in the sense that Aristotelian and Newtonian physics are. They're just our best current models. > Lambda-CDM is in conflict with MOND and other cosmological paradigms. These aren't paradigms, they're models. Both of them accept the same underlying framework for model building. They just make different claims about which models are more accurate. > String theory is a paradigm. String theorists like to make it seem that way, but it's really not any different from any other quantum field theory in the fundamentals. It's just QFT using strings instead of point particles. The original justification for it as a fundamental theory candidate was that gravity just pops out (since the simplest closed string mode looks like a massless spin-2 particle at low energies, and that's the graviton), so it seemed to be an easy way to get a quantum theory of gravity that would reduce to GR in the classical limit. (I think it's fair to say that the jury is still out on whether this promise has been realized.)
pfdietz 6y ago
I've wondered if this same approach can be taken to technology projects, rather than pure science. We can see examples of long term efforts that degenerate in a way very similar to what happens to a degenerating scientific program.
- guscost 6y ago
  You're gonna love incompleteness if you can grok it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gödel%27s_incompleteness_theorems https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gödel%27s_incompleteness_theor...
  - pfdietz 6y ago
    Yes, yes, I know all about that theorem. How does it have any relevance to what I or this thread were talking about? Maybe because it stopped Hilbert's program?
    - guscost 6y ago
      Kuhn's philosophy is a direct descendant of incompleteness. In a sense, all of postmodernism is too.
      - pfdietz 6y ago
        Ok, I don't see that at all.
        guscost 6y ago
        I don't think you grok it yet ;) Hint: Every scientific theory is built on top of a formal system.
        pfdietz 6y ago
        It has jack shit to do with the social aspects of what scientists actually do, though. And I am sure the vast majority of scientists do not care at all about the formal foundations of mathematics.
everybodyknows 6y ago
Misposted: Title of the Aeon article is "How science fails". Which makes more sense than "... the philosophy of bad science" -- since how can bad science be said to possess any philosophy at all?
- jfengel 6y ago
  Philosophers consider the problem of distinguishing good science from bad to be not solved. That's what the article is about. For more, see https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demarcation_problem https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demarcation_problem
- dang 6y ago
  It's the HTML doc title, which is a legitimate source for an HN submission. https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=by%3Adang%20html%20doc%20title&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
knolax 6y ago
> The average scientist’s acquaintance with philosophy tends to be of the passing variety. This is a great pity. This is not a "deep pity" but proof that modern society has progressed beyond the sophistry of the humanities.
- DapperZoom 6y ago
  A knowledge of the historic and philosophical background gives that kind of independence from prejudices of his generation from which most scientists are suffering. -- Albert Einstein
  - knolax 6y ago
    The fact that a random unbacked claim in the form of a quote is the top reply proves my point. The best argument the humanities mode of thinking can come up with is an appeal to authority.
- yters 6y ago
  The thinkers who founded all branches of modern science were very well read in the classics and significant philosophers in their own right. They were also predominantly and deeply religious. But, I guess only people well read in the humanities would know that.
- 7402 6y ago
  Or, as usually attributed to Feynman, "Philosophy of science is about as useful to scientists as ornithology is to birds"
  - guscost 6y ago
    And yet ornithologists understand birds much better than birds understand themselves.
rjrodger 6y ago
I wrote my final year thesis on Lakatos’s book “Proofs and Refutations”[0]. It’s a short, mind-blowing book that answers the question: “Is mathematics discovered or invented?” You may think the abstract structures that you learn about are fixed fundamental truths, but just read Lakatos’s account of the multi-decade debugging of the Euler characteristic for polyhedra and you will realise that maths is both created and discovered. How do ya like them apples for yer epistemology! Another example would be limits vs infinitesimals - which is the “true” foundation of calculus? [1] Or have you ever struggled with the Axiom of Choice? [0]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proofs_and_Refutations https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proofs_and_Refutations [1]: And the correct answer, as all you Coventry City fans will know, is: trick question
- coolgeek 6y ago
  So, first off, Model Theory teaches us that there are an infinite number of ways to represent calculus (or any other branch of mathematics). So there is no 'true' way. There are only ways that we have discovered and used. Second, I don't know anything about the debugging of the Euler characteristic, but I suggest that the issue here is better characterized as taking decades to discover the correct representation. Sort of like Edison finding 1000 lightbulb ideas that didn't work, before finding one that did. (Don't take that analogy too far... I'm not suggesting that physical things are discovered in the same way that mathematical things are discovered. (But I'm also not suggesting that they are not.))
  - rjrodger 6y ago
    And the interesting question is, for each of those conceptions, did we call it into being, or was it “there already” in some sense. Consider the case where aliens on the other side of the universe got there first (we consider only possibilities, not probabilities!). With respect to the debugging of the Euler characteristic, one might ask what truth value formulations during those decades of debugging had, from the perspective of those on the ground at the time. Are we so sure in our present age that there no bugs in Andrew Wiles’s work? Even if you use automated machine proofs (Mathematica and friends) you still can’t be sure that stray cosmic rays don’t flip a bit every damn time. Fun times.

51 points by Hooke 6y ago

This is one of my favorite subjects, and I love the idea of negative and positive heuristics. On the other hand, has anyone ever seen this happen? > But, according to Lakatos, when the time comes, a revolution is driven by logic and method, not irrational mob psychology: ‘the Kuhnian “Gestalt-switch” can be performed without removing one’s Popperian spectacles’. Even the consensus adoption of General Relativity took decades (long enough for an entire generation of older scientists to die), and the author provides no other examples to back up his claim that "results were mixed" in the history of science. I'd love to hear some counterexamples.

guscost 6y ago
By the way, I'm working on a long and meticulous essay/rant which argues that we're reaping the whirlwind of Kuhnian post-modernism with the COVID-19 situation, and the consequences will be absolutely devastating for science in the long term. If anyone knows a magazine publisher who would go for such a controversial and possibly-wrong piece, they would be welcome to distribute it for free (and exclusively for one month). Contact my username at the normal place.
pdonis 6y ago
> has anyone ever seen this happen? My take on this, largely from reading Kuhn, is that the picture of "scientific revolutions" that philosophers have doesn't really apply to anything that has happened in any particular field of science since that field became a science. That's not an accident: it's because the examples the philosophers were actually thinking of in a particular field happened before that field became a science. For example, when Kuhn talks about paradigm shifts in physics, what he's actually thinking of is the shift from Aristotelian to Galilean/Newtonian physics. That was a truly revolutionary shift, but it was a different kind of shift from, say, the shift from Newtonian physics to relativity, or from classical physics to quantum physics. Steven Weinberg, in a review of Kuhn's book published years ago in the New York Review of Books, notes that, in the latter cases (i.e., in any transition to new paradigms in physics since physics really became a science), the old theory lives on as a special case or particular approximation within the new theory. Newtonian physics still gets used extensively today, because it's a valid approximation to relativity when gravity is weak and speeds are slow compared to the speed of light, and classical physics still gets used extensively today because it's a valid approximation to quantum mechanics when there are a large number of degrees of freedom and quantum interference effects are negligible. By contrast, nobody does Aristotelian physics today, nor has anybody done it since Newtonian physics took over. Aristotelian physics is not a special case or an approximation to any physical theory we have today; it's a totally different theory of physics that simply is not useful any more, because we've found a much better and more accurate way of modeling the world. So comparing Aristotelian to modern physics is much, much more of a "gestalt switch" or "paradigm shift" than trying to compare Newtonian physics with relativity, or classical physics with quantum physics. And that kind of shift is what Kuhn was actually describing. Lakatos seems to recognize that there are limitations to Kuhn's approach, but I don't think he really grasps the degree to which all modern science is one thing, and all fits together, and the sort of "revolution" that took us from Aristotelian to modern physics simply doesn't happen once a field becomes a science.
- guscost 6y ago
  Modern science is absolutely not a single paradigm. QM has been in conflict with GR since its invention. Lambda-CDM is in conflict with MOND and other cosmological paradigms. String theory is a paradigm. And that's just talking about theoretical physics. I appreciate your argument, and yes if there have been no paradigm shifts in the past few centuries that would neatly resolve the problem. But I can't possibly agree, and regardless I would still love to find a counterexample where something which anyone considers a paradigm shift happened in a non-political manner. For a great example outside of physics, I can't imagine how anyone could read the story of plate tectonics and not understand it to be exactly what Kuhn was talking about: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plate_tectonics#Development_of_the_theory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plate_tectonics#Development_of...
  - pdonis 6y ago
    > Modern science is absolutely not a single paradigm. I think you're confusing "paradigm" with "model". See below. > QM has been in conflict with GR since its invention. "Conflict" in the sense that neither one can possibly be a final fundamental theory, yes. But whatever final fundamental theory we come up with is going to have our current QM and our current GR as special cases/approximations in the relevant regimes. In terms of any such final fundamental theory, current QM and current GR would simply be particular models built for particular applications. So current QM and current GR are not different or conflicting "paradigms" in the sense that Aristotelian and Newtonian physics are. They're just our best current models. > Lambda-CDM is in conflict with MOND and other cosmological paradigms. These aren't paradigms, they're models. Both of them accept the same underlying framework for model building. They just make different claims about which models are more accurate. > String theory is a paradigm. String theorists like to make it seem that way, but it's really not any different from any other quantum field theory in the fundamentals. It's just QFT using strings instead of point particles. The original justification for it as a fundamental theory candidate was that gravity just pops out (since the simplest closed string mode looks like a massless spin-2 particle at low energies, and that's the graviton), so it seemed to be an easy way to get a quantum theory of gravity that would reduce to GR in the classical limit. (I think it's fair to say that the jury is still out on whether this promise has been realized.)

pfdietz 6y ago

I've wondered if this same approach can be taken to technology projects, rather than pure science. We can see examples of long term efforts that degenerate in a way very similar to what happens to a degenerating scientific program.

guscost 6y ago
You're gonna love incompleteness if you can grok it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gödel%27s_incompleteness_theorems https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gödel%27s_incompleteness_theor...
- pfdietz 6y ago
  Yes, yes, I know all about that theorem. How does it have any relevance to what I or this thread were talking about? Maybe because it stopped Hilbert's program?
  - guscost 6y ago
    Kuhn's philosophy is a direct descendant of incompleteness. In a sense, all of postmodernism is too.
    - pfdietz 6y ago
      Ok, I don't see that at all.
      - guscost 6y ago
        I don't think you grok it yet ;) Hint: Every scientific theory is built on top of a formal system.
        pfdietz 6y ago
        It has jack shit to do with the social aspects of what scientists actually do, though. And I am sure the vast majority of scientists do not care at all about the formal foundations of mathematics.

everybodyknows 6y ago

Misposted: Title of the Aeon article is "How science fails". Which makes more sense than "... the philosophy of bad science" -- since how can bad science be said to possess any philosophy at all?

jfengel 6y ago
Philosophers consider the problem of distinguishing good science from bad to be not solved. That's what the article is about. For more, see https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demarcation_problem https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demarcation_problem
dang 6y ago
It's the HTML doc title, which is a legitimate source for an HN submission. https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=by%3Adang%20html%20doc%20title&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

knolax 6y ago

> The average scientist’s acquaintance with philosophy tends to be of the passing variety. This is a great pity. This is not a "deep pity" but proof that modern society has progressed beyond the sophistry of the humanities.

DapperZoom 6y ago
A knowledge of the historic and philosophical background gives that kind of independence from prejudices of his generation from which most scientists are suffering. -- Albert Einstein
- knolax 6y ago
  The fact that a random unbacked claim in the form of a quote is the top reply proves my point. The best argument the humanities mode of thinking can come up with is an appeal to authority.
yters 6y ago
The thinkers who founded all branches of modern science were very well read in the classics and significant philosophers in their own right. They were also predominantly and deeply religious. But, I guess only people well read in the humanities would know that.
7402 6y ago
Or, as usually attributed to Feynman, "Philosophy of science is about as useful to scientists as ornithology is to birds"
- guscost 6y ago
  And yet ornithologists understand birds much better than birds understand themselves.

rjrodger 6y ago

I wrote my final year thesis on Lakatos’s book “Proofs and Refutations”[0]. It’s a short, mind-blowing book that answers the question: “Is mathematics discovered or invented?” You may think the abstract structures that you learn about are fixed fundamental truths, but just read Lakatos’s account of the multi-decade debugging of the Euler characteristic for polyhedra and you will realise that maths is both created and discovered. How do ya like them apples for yer epistemology! Another example would be limits vs infinitesimals - which is the “true” foundation of calculus? [1] Or have you ever struggled with the Axiom of Choice? [0]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proofs_and_Refutations https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proofs_and_Refutations [1]: And the correct answer, as all you Coventry City fans will know, is: trick question

coolgeek 6y ago
So, first off, Model Theory teaches us that there are an infinite number of ways to represent calculus (or any other branch of mathematics). So there is no 'true' way. There are only ways that we have discovered and used. Second, I don't know anything about the debugging of the Euler characteristic, but I suggest that the issue here is better characterized as taking decades to discover the correct representation. Sort of like Edison finding 1000 lightbulb ideas that didn't work, before finding one that did. (Don't take that analogy too far... I'm not suggesting that physical things are discovered in the same way that mathematical things are discovered. (But I'm also not suggesting that they are not.))
- rjrodger 6y ago
  And the interesting question is, for each of those conceptions, did we call it into being, or was it “there already” in some sense. Consider the case where aliens on the other side of the universe got there first (we consider only possibilities, not probabilities!). With respect to the debugging of the Euler characteristic, one might ask what truth value formulations during those decades of debugging had, from the perspective of those on the ground at the time. Are we so sure in our present age that there no bugs in Andrew Wiles’s work? Even if you use automated machine proofs (Mathematica and friends) you still can’t be sure that stray cosmic rays don’t flip a bit every damn time. Fun times.