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A law that doesn't make predictions isn't a law. A law that is not falsifiable isn't a law. It is an unscientific belief. It's truly incredible to me that peop

A law that doesn't make predictions isn't a law. A law that is not falsifiable isn't a law. It is an unscientific belief. It's truly incredible to me that people, like the person in this video, can speak with such confidence about how, for example from this video, "if we look at an org chart for an organization, and we look at the structure of the products that it produces, we would expect them to basically just be collapses of each other [i.e. a homomorphism]". Also known as https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conway%27s_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conway%27s_law A sincere person in search of truth asks questions like the following when they encounter a claim: - can we think of circumstances where this law is not true? - can we test this claim to show that it is true? - can a test be devised which would falsify this claim? - if this claim is true, what are the mechanisms of action for the claim? - if this claim is true, are there any contradictions that would arise with other things we know are true? Using the same metaphor used in this video, if the currently recognized law of gravitation (General Relativity) made predictions which were different than what is observed, then that law is wrong. And a scientist would adjust their law to reality and be more than willing to point out the gaps of explanation in our law of gravitation (which they do). If we're serious about Computer Science (and Software Engineering) being a field in pursuit of truth, we should be as rigorous and critical as other fields of science and engineering when it comes to making claims.

ukj 5y ago
Please spare us from truth-seeking and leave that to the philosophers. In science/engineering we care about instrumentalism, not truth. All models are wrong. Some are useful.
- Ygg2 5y ago
  > Please spare us from truth-seeking and leave that to the philosophers. What? Parent is litteraly saying don't trust a model that has no predictive power. You're saying leave model evaluation to philosophers. Last time we did that we did that we had theory of four elements and phlogiston.
  - ukj 5y ago
    No. I am saying leave truth/truthfulness to philosophers. Every model has predictive power. Even the God model. It predicts something existing; rather than nothing. Of course, it is a worthless prediction but it is a prediction.
    - Ygg2 5y ago
      > No. I am saying leave truth/truthfulness to philosophers. I think you mean scientists. I.e., construct an experiment validate, etc. God model the least possible predictive power imaginable. Also, according to philosophers, God must exist because it's a perfect being. And a perfect being must exist because it is perfect. They are like people left in a sensory deprivation tank hallucinating random patterns into a sensible picture.
      - ukj 5y ago
        No. I mean precisely what I said. Science does not pursue truth. Philosophy does. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instrumentalism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instrumentalism
        Ygg2 5y ago
        Philosophy divorced from experiment just devolves into navel gazing and batshit insanity.
        ukj 5y ago
        And empiricism divorced from philosophical reflection fails to understand its own limits/biases. It is still navel gazing batshit insanity, but if it works well enough nobody questions why it doesn’t work better.
- beebmam 5y ago
  So let me try to understand what you're saying here, and correct me if I'm wrong. Is this a mischaracterization of a subset of your claim: "Scientists do not care if their models are truthful, but they do care that their models are useful."?
  - jchw 5y ago
    Well, kind of. Models are inherently not absolute truths. Otherwise, they wouldn’t be models.
  - hcrean 5y ago
    Or is there just a correlation between truthfulness and usefulness of a model...
    - ukj 5y ago
      No. “False” models can still make accurate and useful predictions. The Ptolemaic/geocentric models still work, even if the mathematics are a bit unwieldy.
      - bombcar 5y ago
        They work well enough that navigation can still be done by them (apparently the tables/math is easier than the “correct” ones).
  - ukj 5y ago
    Yes. Something to that effect. Truth is a philosophical notion. It is not the concern of science. I am aligned with model-dependent realism; or epistemic constructivism or thereabouts. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Model-dependent_realism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Model-dependent_realism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constructivism_(philosophy_of_science) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constructivism_(philosophy_of_...
    - beebmam 5y ago
      On a scale of 0 to 100, where 0 is no confidence and 100 is 100% certainty, how confident are you in your belief of this philosophy of Constructivism?
- krona 5y ago
  Truth is just that which corresponds to or is a reflection of reality. Anyone who thinks otherwise is thinking too hard. The true nature of reality might be unknowable, but science is a means to move towards it.
- Dudeman112 5y ago
  And that's how you know someone got way too drunk on other people's ruminations without first hand experience. Of course scientists care about their models being close to/matching reality. Have you ever spent any amount of time in an university's lab? Approximately everyone I've met in my alma mater cared about their models being close to reality (or as truthy as they can be).
  - ukj 5y ago
    And that’s how you know somebody has only second-hand experience of science - having never reflected upon, or examined the (very human) limits of the knowledge they have been given by others. What scientific procedure would you use to establish whether one working scientific model “matches” reality; while another working model doesn’t? Nobody has direct access to reality outside of their own theoretical paradigm of understanding. It isn’t just me saying such “crazy” things… https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Model-dependent_realism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Model-dependent_realism
    - Dudeman112 5y ago
      >What scientific procedure would you use to establish whether one working scientific model “matches” reality; while another working model doesn’t? See what model1 gives as a prediction for input X. See what model2 gives as a prediction for input X. Input X in the world and compare what actually happened. The models that more closely predict the observations are more likely to reflect reality (aka being closer to the truth). You don't have direct access to reality. And yet if someone thinks F = ma isn't closer to the truth than F = ma^4 (for the usual symbols and approximations and blah blah, assume I'm aware Einstein existed) then they got way too drunk on other people's philosophies. Most scientists I met and worked with care if their models are close to reality/truth. Epistemological uncertainty does not mean every model is equally untruthful.
      - ukj 5y ago
        You haven’t really tackled the strongest interpretation of my question head on. If two different models/theories are observationally equivalent; if two (or more) different curves can be fitted to the same dataset which model is “more true”? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Observational_equivalence https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Observational_equivalence https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/scientific-underdetermination/ https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/scientific-underdetermina... And how do you go from “F=ma for the usual symbols…” to solving the symbol-grounding problem? Symbols are epistemic entities, not ontological entities. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Symbol_grounding_problem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Symbol_grounding_problem The model works. That is all there is to be said about it. If you begin asking questions such as “is the model true or not? Do the terms in the equation correspond to real world entities?” you are no longer doing science, you are doing philosophy.
- nmaleki 5y ago
  > All models are wrong. Some are useful. While this may hold true in almost every case. Just as truth is not absolute, neither is "wrongness". Furthermore, there exists some model which is neither right nor wrong[1] [1] https://publications.recursion.is https://publications.recursion.is "When all contradictions are resolved what will be left is - an unprovable truth"
  - ukj 5y ago
    Why have you chosen a system with a non-contradiction axiom? Why didn’t you choose dialetheism? Seems like an arbitrary choice… Could it be that you are culturally biased in the orthodoxy of Western philosophy dating all the way back to Aristotle? https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/dialetheism/ https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/dialetheism/
    - nmaleki 5y ago
      https://recursion.is https://recursion.is has a running list of quotes, one of those quotes is "True and False" - this is the central idea behind dialetheism and is an integral part to the Recursion Convergence Conjecture. I have already recorded audio for a video on the topic soon to be released on https://recursion.is/youtube https://recursion.is/youtube
      - ukj 5y ago
        Let me generalise. There are systems of reasoning which don’t only concern themselves with Booleans (true and false). There are infinitely many non-Boolean types possible in type theory. Human constructions/models have many other interesting and desirable qualities/properties beyond “truth” and “falsity”. Mathematicians/Logicians/Computer scientists are deeply interested in understanding those semantic properties. Recursion is one of those properties studied. It is a foundational concept, not the be all - end all. Convergence and divergence are another example of interesting semantic properties. They are studied in bifurcation theory. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bifurcation_diagram https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bifurcation_diagram Whatever your conjecture you are only constructing a lens through which you are interpreting the world.
jchw 5y ago
The more I think about this comment, the more I feel it is missing the point. They do expound a fair bit on the term “law” but even admit both that the title is a bit flippant (and not the one they originally wanted to go with) and that their formulation of the concept is not yet meeting criteria necessary to consider it a “law,” only that they believe there probably is an underlying law. Like many have said in the past, computer science is not really “science” or even engineering. And if that’s true, then software architecture really isn’t science. It’s closer to a soft science if anything. There may not really be a meaningful definition of “law” and that degree of rigor may not be very easy to accomplish. After all, there’s hardly anything objective about it. However, that doesn’t mean that observations about it are not interesting. I certainly think Conway’s law is interesting despite that it may not meet the criteria to be called a “law” in a harder science.
- lliamander 5y ago
  I agree with you general about the point of the article and the validity of Conway's Law, but I have a quibble: > Like many have said in the past, computer science is not really “science” or even engineering. Computer Science is absolutely science, as much as physics is. Science is the ability to make precise predictive models of the world using math. Computer Science provides plenty of those. For example, by knowing the binary search algorithm we know that the time it takes to do a git-bisect is bounded by the log of the number of commits in a repo. We can also know what kinds of encryption keys could be discovered through brute force guessing given presently available hardware. We can precisely describe the kinds of coordination problems that can afflict concurrent processes (not just in computers) and the kind of mechanisms that can be used to avoid those problems. All of these add knowledge to the world of the same type as the laws of magnetism or gravitation. Computer Science is the science of process. Software engineering is the application of that science to messy human problems, and is no less an engineering discipline than any other. Like other engineering disciplines there will always be room for heuristics and human judgment. Conway's Law absolutely falls into that. The precision of any engineering discipline will always be limited by the precision of the softer sciences, as the phenomenon they describe are an ineradicable aspect of the engineering process.
1970-01-01 5y ago
He spent a few minutes explaining how this isn't a scientific law. I think you missed it. Go 6 minutes in.
holyyikes 5y ago
squeegmeister 5y ago
Doesn't Conway's law make predictions and isn't it falsifiable? You pointed it out yourself "if we look at an org chart for an organization, and we look at the structure of the products that it produces, we would expect them to basically just be collapses of each other [i.e. a homomorphism]" You could validate these claims by looking at org charts across various companies and looking at their software architecture and come up with some measure for how closely they resemble each other

ukj 5y ago

Please spare us from truth-seeking and leave that to the philosophers. In science/engineering we care about instrumentalism, not truth. All models are wrong. Some are useful.

Ygg2 5y ago
> Please spare us from truth-seeking and leave that to the philosophers. What? Parent is litteraly saying don't trust a model that has no predictive power. You're saying leave model evaluation to philosophers. Last time we did that we did that we had theory of four elements and phlogiston.
- ukj 5y ago
  No. I am saying leave truth/truthfulness to philosophers. Every model has predictive power. Even the God model. It predicts something existing; rather than nothing. Of course, it is a worthless prediction but it is a prediction.
  - Ygg2 5y ago
    > No. I am saying leave truth/truthfulness to philosophers. I think you mean scientists. I.e., construct an experiment validate, etc. God model the least possible predictive power imaginable. Also, according to philosophers, God must exist because it's a perfect being. And a perfect being must exist because it is perfect. They are like people left in a sensory deprivation tank hallucinating random patterns into a sensible picture.
    - ukj 5y ago
      No. I mean precisely what I said. Science does not pursue truth. Philosophy does. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instrumentalism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instrumentalism
      - Ygg2 5y ago
        Philosophy divorced from experiment just devolves into navel gazing and batshit insanity.
        ukj 5y ago
        And empiricism divorced from philosophical reflection fails to understand its own limits/biases. It is still navel gazing batshit insanity, but if it works well enough nobody questions why it doesn’t work better.
beebmam 5y ago
So let me try to understand what you're saying here, and correct me if I'm wrong. Is this a mischaracterization of a subset of your claim: "Scientists do not care if their models are truthful, but they do care that their models are useful."?
- jchw 5y ago
  Well, kind of. Models are inherently not absolute truths. Otherwise, they wouldn’t be models.
- hcrean 5y ago
  Or is there just a correlation between truthfulness and usefulness of a model...
  - ukj 5y ago
    No. “False” models can still make accurate and useful predictions. The Ptolemaic/geocentric models still work, even if the mathematics are a bit unwieldy.
    - bombcar 5y ago
      They work well enough that navigation can still be done by them (apparently the tables/math is easier than the “correct” ones).
- ukj 5y ago
  Yes. Something to that effect. Truth is a philosophical notion. It is not the concern of science. I am aligned with model-dependent realism; or epistemic constructivism or thereabouts. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Model-dependent_realism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Model-dependent_realism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constructivism_(philosophy_of_science) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constructivism_(philosophy_of_...
  - beebmam 5y ago
    On a scale of 0 to 100, where 0 is no confidence and 100 is 100% certainty, how confident are you in your belief of this philosophy of Constructivism?
krona 5y ago
Truth is just that which corresponds to or is a reflection of reality. Anyone who thinks otherwise is thinking too hard. The true nature of reality might be unknowable, but science is a means to move towards it.
Dudeman112 5y ago
And that's how you know someone got way too drunk on other people's ruminations without first hand experience. Of course scientists care about their models being close to/matching reality. Have you ever spent any amount of time in an university's lab? Approximately everyone I've met in my alma mater cared about their models being close to reality (or as truthy as they can be).
- ukj 5y ago
  And that’s how you know somebody has only second-hand experience of science - having never reflected upon, or examined the (very human) limits of the knowledge they have been given by others. What scientific procedure would you use to establish whether one working scientific model “matches” reality; while another working model doesn’t? Nobody has direct access to reality outside of their own theoretical paradigm of understanding. It isn’t just me saying such “crazy” things… https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Model-dependent_realism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Model-dependent_realism
  - Dudeman112 5y ago
    >What scientific procedure would you use to establish whether one working scientific model “matches” reality; while another working model doesn’t? See what model1 gives as a prediction for input X. See what model2 gives as a prediction for input X. Input X in the world and compare what actually happened. The models that more closely predict the observations are more likely to reflect reality (aka being closer to the truth). You don't have direct access to reality. And yet if someone thinks F = ma isn't closer to the truth than F = ma^4 (for the usual symbols and approximations and blah blah, assume I'm aware Einstein existed) then they got way too drunk on other people's philosophies. Most scientists I met and worked with care if their models are close to reality/truth. Epistemological uncertainty does not mean every model is equally untruthful.
    - ukj 5y ago
      You haven’t really tackled the strongest interpretation of my question head on. If two different models/theories are observationally equivalent; if two (or more) different curves can be fitted to the same dataset which model is “more true”? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Observational_equivalence https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Observational_equivalence https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/scientific-underdetermination/ https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/scientific-underdetermina... And how do you go from “F=ma for the usual symbols…” to solving the symbol-grounding problem? Symbols are epistemic entities, not ontological entities. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Symbol_grounding_problem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Symbol_grounding_problem The model works. That is all there is to be said about it. If you begin asking questions such as “is the model true or not? Do the terms in the equation correspond to real world entities?” you are no longer doing science, you are doing philosophy.
nmaleki 5y ago
> All models are wrong. Some are useful. While this may hold true in almost every case. Just as truth is not absolute, neither is "wrongness". Furthermore, there exists some model which is neither right nor wrong[1] [1] https://publications.recursion.is https://publications.recursion.is "When all contradictions are resolved what will be left is - an unprovable truth"
- ukj 5y ago
  Why have you chosen a system with a non-contradiction axiom? Why didn’t you choose dialetheism? Seems like an arbitrary choice… Could it be that you are culturally biased in the orthodoxy of Western philosophy dating all the way back to Aristotle? https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/dialetheism/ https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/dialetheism/
  - nmaleki 5y ago
    https://recursion.is https://recursion.is has a running list of quotes, one of those quotes is "True and False" - this is the central idea behind dialetheism and is an integral part to the Recursion Convergence Conjecture. I have already recorded audio for a video on the topic soon to be released on https://recursion.is/youtube https://recursion.is/youtube
    - ukj 5y ago
      Let me generalise. There are systems of reasoning which don’t only concern themselves with Booleans (true and false). There are infinitely many non-Boolean types possible in type theory. Human constructions/models have many other interesting and desirable qualities/properties beyond “truth” and “falsity”. Mathematicians/Logicians/Computer scientists are deeply interested in understanding those semantic properties. Recursion is one of those properties studied. It is a foundational concept, not the be all - end all. Convergence and divergence are another example of interesting semantic properties. They are studied in bifurcation theory. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bifurcation_diagram https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bifurcation_diagram Whatever your conjecture you are only constructing a lens through which you are interpreting the world.

jchw 5y ago

The more I think about this comment, the more I feel it is missing the point. They do expound a fair bit on the term “law” but even admit both that the title is a bit flippant (and not the one they originally wanted to go with) and that their formulation of the concept is not yet meeting criteria necessary to consider it a “law,” only that they believe there probably is an underlying law. Like many have said in the past, computer science is not really “science” or even engineering. And if that’s true, then software architecture really isn’t science. It’s closer to a soft science if anything. There may not really be a meaningful definition of “law” and that degree of rigor may not be very easy to accomplish. After all, there’s hardly anything objective about it. However, that doesn’t mean that observations about it are not interesting. I certainly think Conway’s law is interesting despite that it may not meet the criteria to be called a “law” in a harder science.

lliamander 5y ago
I agree with you general about the point of the article and the validity of Conway's Law, but I have a quibble: > Like many have said in the past, computer science is not really “science” or even engineering. Computer Science is absolutely science, as much as physics is. Science is the ability to make precise predictive models of the world using math. Computer Science provides plenty of those. For example, by knowing the binary search algorithm we know that the time it takes to do a git-bisect is bounded by the log of the number of commits in a repo. We can also know what kinds of encryption keys could be discovered through brute force guessing given presently available hardware. We can precisely describe the kinds of coordination problems that can afflict concurrent processes (not just in computers) and the kind of mechanisms that can be used to avoid those problems. All of these add knowledge to the world of the same type as the laws of magnetism or gravitation. Computer Science is the science of process. Software engineering is the application of that science to messy human problems, and is no less an engineering discipline than any other. Like other engineering disciplines there will always be room for heuristics and human judgment. Conway's Law absolutely falls into that. The precision of any engineering discipline will always be limited by the precision of the softer sciences, as the phenomenon they describe are an ineradicable aspect of the engineering process.

1970-01-01 5y ago

He spent a few minutes explaining how this isn't a scientific law. I think you missed it. Go 6 minutes in.

holyyikes 5y ago

squeegmeister 5y ago

Doesn't Conway's law make predictions and isn't it falsifiable? You pointed it out yourself "if we look at an org chart for an organization, and we look at the structure of the products that it produces, we would expect them to basically just be collapses of each other [i.e. a homomorphism]" You could validate these claims by looking at org charts across various companies and looking at their software architecture and come up with some measure for how closely they resemble each other