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The Relativity of Wrong (1989)
- beebmam 3y agoAsimov is such a poignant writer, I can't help but smile when I read him.
- uranusjr 3y agoI’m glad he decided to invent an English Literature correspondent to pick on, and also the 1990s was a better society than one that votes to poison a disliked person.
- zafka 3y agoIt is also funny that he gave this character the name of one of his editors, who he actually disassociated from when said editor started going a bit off the rails.
- justrealist 3y agoThe impressive thing about Asimov — incidental to the quality of the writing — is he probably sat down and blasted that out in an hour top-to-bottom with no edits. Volumetrically one of the most impressive authors in history.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- iainmerrick 3y agoThere's a funny story in one of his essays where he's talking to Heinlein about this strange habit other writers have of endlessly redrafting. "I just write down the first draft, read it through from start to finish and write up the second draft, and that's it," Asimov says. "What's the second draft for?" Heinlein says.
- the_af 3y agoThis seems in contrast to Borges, who was never done with corrections and redrafting, going as far as to buy back an edition of a book already in print so that he could make additional corrections (or so the story goes...). Anyway, I'm a fan of Asimov.
- lainga 3y agoOne supposes Borges was able to arrive at the final copy by alternately holding up the first and second drafts in any predefined pattern he wanted...
- knodi123 3y agosee also: George Lucas "fixing" the star wars movies and making the originals impossible to find.
- olddustytrail 3y agoHave you ever seen the first draft of Star Wars? It's pretty bad.
- mikhailfranco 3y agoI'm a fan of Borges.
- jimmaswell 3y agoIt made the point in the first few paragraphs and the rest was a long winded beating of a dead horse. It could have done with more editing.
- kr0bat 3y agoGoing from discussing the curvature of the Earth to the finite speed of light wasn't to dunk on the student, it was to demonstrate the increasing relative correctness of our universal theories.
- jimmaswell 3y agoI suppose I would've been more engaged if I didn't already know all of these historical anecdotes. As it is I quickly began skimming.
- irrational 3y agoNot me. I’d like a lot more. Particularly I’d like this part fleshed out: > This particular thesis was addressed to me a quarter of a century ago by John Campbell, who specialized in irritating me. I only know of Campbell from “A Hero With a Thousand Faces”. I’d love to read more about how Campbell specialized in irritating Asimov.
- arkadyark 3y agoYou might be thinking of Joseph Campbell, not John Campbell (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_W._Campbell https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_W._Campbell)
- irrational 3y agoThank you for clarifying my mistake!
- nemo 3y agoThe author of “A Hero With a Thousand Faces” is Joseph Campbell. I think he might be talking about John W. Campbell who was a fellow sci-fi author.
- mcguire 3y agoThis is a very common thing in writers from the 1920s to the 60s---they made their living selling articles to magazines that paid a fraction of a cent per word. If they wanted to eat, they had to hammer something out as fast as physically possible.
- fnovd 3y agoAs much as I enjoy Asimov, I have to say that he is wrong. The gap between what we know and what is true might have decreased immensely, but it is still infinite. Any quantifiable increase is 0 in relation to infinity. Asimov's counter-argument that we are quantifiably less wrong than we were in the past simply does not overcome this core issue. If there is an infinite amount of knowledge separating what we know from what is true, then we can learn an infinite amount of things and still have an infinite amount of things left to learn. To feel justified in thinking the universe is "essentially" understood is to be OK with one's concept of the "essential nature" of the universe to be inherently divergent from a future concept, which according to Asimov's own argument is going to be more correct than our own. To me, it reads as a bitterness towards mortality, a sort of sour grapes: the insights we will have about the universe at some future time must not be very interesting compared to what we know now, because I won't be around to know them. edit: I guess I shouldn't be surprised that Asimov's perspective is shared here. It's very easy to understand the essential nature of the universe when you define the universe as the parts you understand. I don't think human beings in 1000 years will look at our current understanding as special in any way. As transformative as our era is, it will be dwarfed by the scale of transformation in future eras. It's just the most transformative era so far. That's temporal bias, nothing more.
- cnity 3y agoOne way to see Asimov's "infinity of wrongness" is perhaps as a fractal. You could view the bulbs in the mandelbrot as being a kind of knowledge, and the "main bulb" occupying the majority of the area belonging to the set as the set of truths known about our universe. The mandelbrot set is infinite in complexity, however its area is finite and bounded! Or as ironing out the wrinkles on a great big t-shirt, where each wrinkle is sub-wrinkled with smaller wrinkles and so on. We've "ironed out" the biggest wrinkles, there are infinitely more but they are much smaller. We're perhaps over half-way ironed, in a quantitative sense.
- fnovd 3y agoI disagree fundamentally. You may as well ask me to imagine Earth as a disc, with multiple rotating spotlights shining down on it and a giant ice wall around the edges. I understand what the image is trying to convey, I simply do not agree that this is the shape of the thing I experience.
- bell-cot 3y agoI get the sense that Dr. Asimov was too little of a "people person" to usefully discuss the all-too-common human urge to tell others that you are right, and they are wrong. Or positive ways to handle that urge. OTOH, he may have been quite aware that "read more Asimov, and be more smug about being right more often" was a major motive for people buying his non-fiction writing.
- the_af 3y agoAsimov was a people person though. He wasn't a nerd in the typical sense; he went to parties, conventions, meetings, mingled with people, belonged to multiple clubs, etc. From Wikipedia: > "Asimov was an able public speaker and was regularly hired to give talks about science. He was a frequent participant at science fiction conventions, where he was friendly and approachable. He patiently answered tens of thousands of questions and other mail with postcards and was pleased to give autographs." I think that, in driving home a valid point, this essay gives the wrong impression of Asimov as someone who would scold his readers.
- jaclaz 3y agoThis: http://www.asimovonline.com/oldsite/future_of_humanity.html http://www.asimovonline.com/oldsite/future_of_humanity.html is a transcript of a 1974 talk/lecture that shows how fun and modest he was, while still delivering a lot of interesting points to ponder.
- mcstafford 3y ago> Those people who think they know everything are a great annoyance to those of us who do. -- Isaac Asimov Useful discussion is an interesting scope for someone with the broad, in-depth knowledge of a vast array of subjects he demonstrates in the linked essay.
- htoowintshein 3y ago[flagged]
- htoowintshein 3y ago[flagged]
- hirundo 3y agoSocrates then, by a series of ignorant-sounding questions, forced the others into such a mélange of self-contradictions that they would finally break down and admit they didn't know what they were talking about. It is the mark of the marvelous toleration of the Athenians that they let this continue for decades and that it wasn't till Socrates turned seventy that they broke down and forced him to drink poison. It's seldom pleasant to be (accurately) instructed in your own ignorance, particularly by someone pretending not to know anything. Asimov's theory that Socrates' death was a result of his habit of patronizing everyone rather than the actual charges is plausible.
- the_af 3y agoAlso, in internet arguments, there's nothing more infuriating than the other person appointing themselves as some kind of modern-day Socrates and "teaching" you.
- PrimeMcFly 3y agoForgive me, if I may be so kind as to ask, but what makes you think such people are trying to "teach" you?
- paulluuk 3y agoHm, that's an interesting question. What makes you want to ask this?
- tacitusarc 3y agoThere can be a balance here. Often I’ll have a viewpoint and when I hear a different one, I won’t immediately say I disagree. Instead I’ll ask questions to discover where the gap in our understanding lies. Then, it may be helpful to share that I have additional knowledge (I’d I do), or to learn something I was missing, or to recognize we value different things and move on. Immediate disagreement is often far less productive.
- sopooneo 3y ago
- neerajk 3y agoNew life goal: "There is very little that is new to me; I wish my corresponders would realize this." Second life goal: To have corresponders
- the_af 3y agoAsimov had a humorous style of writing. Of course when he wrote "there is very little that is new to me" he was aware of how arrogant that sounded; he's playing this for laughs. He could also be quite self-deprecating.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- PrimeMcFly 3y agoIt's amazing the amount of people who dismiss current findings by claiming we were wrong in the past, so nothing can be trusted.
- alexvitkov 3y agoI'm dumb and ignorant, therefore we all are.
- irrational 3y agoWell, yes, but some more than others.
- somat 3y agoIt is an over reaction, but it is true. in both fields. Scientific: scientific knowledge on a subject is never solved. it merely approaches the solution. it was wrong in the past, it is less wrong today, but still wrong. Cultural: The cultural truths of today were wrong in the past and will be wrong in the future. I think the correct take away is not so much "nothing can be trusted" as it is "trust, but verify"
- feoren 3y agoThere is no parallel between scientific knowledge and whatever you're calling "cultural truths". To the extent that there is lasting progress in culture, it is through art, music, and literature, not through "truth". Truth is the realm of science alone. Yadda-yadda genital mutilation: that is not culture, it's ignorant cruelty, and science can indeed show that, by showing that it causes health problems, causes pain even in babies, brings none of the claimed benefits, etc. Most of the old-hat cultural-relativism arguments come down to plain-old scientific ignorance, just as if there were cultures out there that still believed the Earth is flat. Those are not "cultural truths", they are scientific ignorance. > "trust, but verify" We're talking about the collective knowledge and understanding of all of humanity. How are you going to verify for yourself the value of the Planck constant and the exact curvature of the Earth and the exact age of the Universe? Are you going to build your own $50-billion particle accelerator to verify the existence and strength of the Higgs field? Through decades of study you may get to the point where you can indeed verify one of the millions of foundational truths that we build further knowledge upon. "Trust, but verify" doesn't belong here. You should not "trust", nor can you possibly "verify". It's more like "understand". These truths must fit together cohesively, or if they don't, it should be glaring unsolved problem (e.g. gravity vs. quantum mechanics). Test new ideas against the rest of the theory to relentlessly look for contradictions or poor fits. Develop your mental model. You never need to really "trust"; everything has a wrongness error-bar around it. The wrongness error-bar of the shape of the Earth is very small; it includes subtle corrections due to slight variations in the gravitational field and the pull of other bodies, but it does not include a flat Earth.
- davinci123 3y agoEvery VC and founder needs to read this post - there are no absolute rights or wrongs. So, whatever worked for Google will not work for Instacart.. whatever thesis of investing worked in the last decade will not work in the next decade.. Start from first principles!
- avgcorrection 3y agoI guess all models are wrong but some of them are useful. And more useful than others— > In the first sentence, he told me he was majoring in English Literature, but felt he needed to teach me science. (I sighed a bit, for I knew very few English Lit majors who are equipped to teach me science, but I am very aware of the vast state of my ignorance and I am prepared to learn as much as I can from anyone, however low on the social scale, so I read on.) I couldn't imagine writing the parenthetical.
- rom1v 3y agoOn a related note, sometimes someone may be wrong because he knows more about the subject (but not enough). A canonical example could be about the "leap year" rules. For context, the Earth makes a full rotation around the Sun in about 365.2425 days, so we use leap years to compensate: - add 1 day every 4 years (365 + 1/4 = 365.25) - but not every 100 years (365.25 - 1/100 = 365.24) - but add a day anyway every 400 years (365.24 + 1/400 = 365.2425) Suppose most people only know the first part (1 additional day every 4 years). If we ask "is 2000 a leap year?", they would answer "Of course, 2000 is a multiple of 4". And they would get the correct result. Now, suppose someone started to study the "subject" (here, there is nothing to study, this is a trivial example for illustration), and is aware of the second rule (but not the third one). He would say "Ahah, no, 2000 is not a leap year, because it is a multiple of 100". But he would get the wrong answer. My impression is that this kind of mistakes happens often while learning a subject: by studying, we encounter exceptions or surprising facts, that we may apply too broadly (to the point we make absurd claims, but that appear absurd for the wrong reasons).
- EGreg 3y agoFar more broadly, think of logic as just a low-dimensional approximation of something complex. Humans deal with logic and are taught “i before e except after c” etc. But even with describing human languages that may be inadequate. What AI does is it essentially makes a model by which you can search a latent space quickly — both to clasify input and to generate output. You can throw the recorded motions of the planets and stars at it and it might find physical laws that have 80 variables while humans want to deal only with simplified versions like Kepler’s laws of motion. In the vacuum of space those laws may be enough but when it comes to the complexity of chemistry, biology, genetics, politica, etc. the AI might have way better model that we can never understand. Like for dietary recommendations. Would people follow them? And what if they are wrong in some other ways? Like how humans beat AlphaGo through its blind spot or how you can fool face recognition by wearing a hoodie etc.
- yllautcaj 3y ago"A little knowledge is a dangerous thing."
- foldr 3y agoFunny, if you like this particular variety of snark. But there's a huge bait and switch in the argument. The English major doubts that we have "finally got the basis of the Universe straight" (in Asimov's words). But Asmimov's primary example of the "relativity of wrong" is the shape of the Earth, which is a particular fact about a particular object. Being charitable, almost no-one (not even the kind of English Lit majors that HN loves to hate!) doubts that we can learn facts about the shape and size of particular objects. It doesn't necessarily follow from this that we should be optimistic about the fundamental correctness of our best theories in the physical sciences. As the English Lit major was no doubt aware, there were plenty of people at the turn of the 20th century who thought that physics was basically finished and that there was nothing left to do except add more decimal places to the results.
- mistermann 3y agoVery much agree...and furthermore: > It doesn't necessarily follow from this that we should be optimistic about the fundamental correctness of our best theories in the physical sciences. The disagreement was over the universe, so my first question is: does "the universe" include humans, or not (and: who decides the fact of the matter)? Because all one has to do is watch the news to realize we certainly don't have everything fully figured out....I often wonder if our (from my vantage point anyways) belief that we "pretty much"[1] do may exacerbate this. [1] Colloquial language, figures of speech, etc are a fantastic and endless source of delusion, that typically cannot be realized.
- moefh 3y agoI don't think that's quite right. Another example given by Asimov is Newton's equations, which are obviously not facts about a particular object. We still today accept them as right (in the right contexts), teach them in universities, and use them when they're useful. I think Asimov's point is that if someone in Newton's time said "I'm glad to live in a time when we finally understand everything there is to know about the motion of cannon balls", they'd be justified: even though technically there were relativistic corrections to be made, they're pretty much irrelevant for the stated purposes (understanding how cannonballs move). And so in the same way he thinks he's justified in saying that in the 20th century we finally understood the basics of the Universe, even though we still don't know (in his words): > the nature of the big bang and the creation of the Universe, the properties at the center of black holes, some subtle points about the evolution of galaxies and supernovas, and so on
- LucasLanglois 3y agoInterestingly, this highlights that despite popular belief, the scientific process is not about being right or wrong but rather what's powerful. A theory is promoted because it is powerful in explaining observations and providing tools for humanity until it is improved by the next one. You can build a gun with gravitation but you need relativity for a rocket.
- jgeada 3y agoQuoting from the article "Newton's theory of gravitation, while incomplete over vast distances and enormous speeds, is perfectly suitable for the Solar System. Halley's Comet appears punctually as Newton's theory of gravitation and laws of motion predict. All of rocketry is based on Newton, and Voyager II reached Uranus within a second of the predicted time. None of these things were outlawed by relativity." We need relativity to correct the atomic clocks on GPS satellites so as to maintain positional accuracy to a few feet, but getting the satellites up there needed only Newtonian mechanics.
- feoren 3y agoAll models are wrong; some models are useful.
- pixl97 3y ago> the scientific process is not about being right or wrong but rather what's powerful. Ugh, this is something that bothers me all to hell and back about the non-scientific minded. "Your science was wrong about (this minute detail), therefore whatever completely made up bullshit I thought up without any supporting evidence is totally valid"
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- adasdasdas 3y agoThe real response to the guy is, "so what". Who cares if we used to be wrong, that's how empiricism works, we posit falsifiable claims until they're proven wrong.
- mcguire 3y ago"Virtually all that we know today, however, would remain untouched and when I say I am glad that I live in a century when the Universe is essentially understood, I think I am justified." I think most people at most times would have agreed with that. But the difference would be in the meaning of "the Universe"; the "basic rules of gravity" would hardly be the important part to most peoples at most times. Oh, and... "I received a letter from a reader the other day. It was handwritten in crabbed penmanship so that it was very difficult to read....however low on the social scale..." Nice. "*I received a letter from a reader the other day. It was handwritten in crabbed penmanship so that it was very difficult to read.
- dang 3y agoRelated: The Relativity of Wrong (1989) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29811788 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29811788 - Jan 2022 (5 comments) The Relativity of Wrong (1989) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24055125 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24055125 - Aug 2020 (2 comments) The Relativity of Wrong (1989) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17818069 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17818069 - Aug 2018 (11 comments) The Relativity of Wrong (1989) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13082585 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13082585 - Dec 2016 (16 comments) The Relativity of Wrong by Isaac Asimov (1989) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11654774 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11654774 - May 2016 (60 comments) Isaac Asimov: The Relativity of Wrong (1989) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9629797 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9629797 - May 2015 (138 comments) Isaac Asimov - The Relativity of Wrong (1989) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1147968 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1147968 - Feb 2010 (32 comments)
- nuancebydefault 3y ago(0) is a great book that explains very neatly why even long disproved models of physics were right, only less right then newer models. (0) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reality_Is_Not_What_It_Seems https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reality_Is_Not_What_It_Seems