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You don't understand the aphorism if you think that death in itself causes scientific progress. It means something else. When old, entrenched scientists die, t

You don't understand the aphorism if you think that death in itself causes scientific progress. It means something else. When old, entrenched scientists die, they lose their ability to prevent younger scientists from studying topics they personally don't like. Dead people cannot deny the living use of labs, grants etc. Plenty of otherwise impeccable great minds died "stuck" on bad ideas. For example, the great German pathologist Rudolf Virchow utterly rejected the idea of archaic humans existing, and did his best to slow down the research on the Neanderthals etc. Einstein himself rejected the quantum theory, though, to his credit, he didn't prevent others from studying it. Ancel Keys, who lived to be almost 100, tried to destroy career of every nutritional scientist who toyed with the idea that saturated fats may not be the killers he pronounced them to be, and defended sugar from more scrutiny.

ben_w 1y ago
If (and to the extent that) the aphorism isn't causal, then it is irrelevant to a hypothetical where we solve death.
- inglor_cz 1y ago
  You still don't understand what is being said, and what precisely is the line of causality there. Maybe someone else can explain it better than I can.
  - pas 1y ago
    there's no need to understand it, as being healthy well after being alive for hundreds of years would incentivize a lot of people to do more with their life than clutching their academic pearls. even if not, the aphorism is not a necessity. scientific progress is a very soft thing anyway in most fields (medicine for example), and just because nowadays when the old guard dies off a new paradigm takes over doesn't necessarily mean that were the old guard alive there wouldn't be paradigm shifts! simply accumulating the necessary data to convincingly be able to claim that the new model is better takes decades ... which conveniently coincidences with some old dog dying. sure, likely if the old guard would be alive for a few more decades maybe they would insist on even more convincing data. but that would at least help us to have better science! and no one is prohibited from exploring applications of the new models before they became de facto dogma! ... and so on. most of the time progress is limited by methods (data collection, precision - repeatability, and of course replicability), but those are usually limited by engineering, culture, funding, etc. see the whole story with Alzheimer's and the first mouse model problem, and the failed clinical trials of various treatments, and ... despite all this how still we have no better idea, despite decades of effort! https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/in-defense-of-the-amyloid-hypothesis https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/in-defense-of-the-amyloid-h... https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/your-review-of-mice-mechanisms-and https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/your-review-of-mice-mechani...
kiba 1y ago
I distrust aphorisms, not without having read the literature on the evidence or lack thereof behind the aphorism. For example: History is written by the winner. Certainly not true on its face. The South managed to convince people that the confederacy cause was noble. It certainly wasn't. They managed to reshape popular narrative.
- inglor_cz 1y ago
  History is written by the winner. does not mean that everybody trusts what is written by the winner. It has also become somewhat weaker in the era of digital communication, when censorship of sources becomes harder. "The South managed to convince people that the confederacy cause was noble. " A certain percentage of people will believe in anything. Putin is a virtuous peacemaker, Nazis didn't murder people in industrial ovens, Stalin was a good person, the American Civil War wasn't about slavery, you name it. That still does not negate the overall observation expressed in the aphorism: winners have a lot more clout when determining how the war will be seen by future generations. The percentage of Confederacy supporters in the Western civilization is fairly small. They may be visible, but the vast majority of the Western population, to the extent that they think of ACW at all, don't support the cause of continuing enslavement of blacks. Anyway, aphorisms shouldn't be treated like mathematical theorems. Their validity isn't as "hard" as that of maths, but in human society, nothing is. Aphorisms are the sort of model which is "wrong, but sometimes useful".
  - kiba 1y ago
    Anyway, aphorisms shouldn't be treated like mathematical theorems. Their validity isn't as "hard" as that of maths, but in human society, nothing is. Aphorisms are the sort of model which is "wrong, but sometimes useful". I am not treating them as mathematical statement, I just don't take it for granted that these "aphorism" are in fact historical truth. Cursory search of "winners write history" already reveal to me a far more complex and nuanced reality. Indeed, such a statement is considered harmful.

ben_w 1y ago

If (and to the extent that) the aphorism isn't causal, then it is irrelevant to a hypothetical where we solve death.

inglor_cz 1y ago
You still don't understand what is being said, and what precisely is the line of causality there. Maybe someone else can explain it better than I can.
- pas 1y ago
  there's no need to understand it, as being healthy well after being alive for hundreds of years would incentivize a lot of people to do more with their life than clutching their academic pearls. even if not, the aphorism is not a necessity. scientific progress is a very soft thing anyway in most fields (medicine for example), and just because nowadays when the old guard dies off a new paradigm takes over doesn't necessarily mean that were the old guard alive there wouldn't be paradigm shifts! simply accumulating the necessary data to convincingly be able to claim that the new model is better takes decades ... which conveniently coincidences with some old dog dying. sure, likely if the old guard would be alive for a few more decades maybe they would insist on even more convincing data. but that would at least help us to have better science! and no one is prohibited from exploring applications of the new models before they became de facto dogma! ... and so on. most of the time progress is limited by methods (data collection, precision - repeatability, and of course replicability), but those are usually limited by engineering, culture, funding, etc. see the whole story with Alzheimer's and the first mouse model problem, and the failed clinical trials of various treatments, and ... despite all this how still we have no better idea, despite decades of effort! https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/in-defense-of-the-amyloid-hypothesis https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/in-defense-of-the-amyloid-h... https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/your-review-of-mice-mechanisms-and https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/your-review-of-mice-mechani...

kiba 1y ago

I distrust aphorisms, not without having read the literature on the evidence or lack thereof behind the aphorism. For example: History is written by the winner. Certainly not true on its face. The South managed to convince people that the confederacy cause was noble. It certainly wasn't. They managed to reshape popular narrative.

inglor_cz 1y ago
History is written by the winner. does not mean that everybody trusts what is written by the winner. It has also become somewhat weaker in the era of digital communication, when censorship of sources becomes harder. "The South managed to convince people that the confederacy cause was noble. " A certain percentage of people will believe in anything. Putin is a virtuous peacemaker, Nazis didn't murder people in industrial ovens, Stalin was a good person, the American Civil War wasn't about slavery, you name it. That still does not negate the overall observation expressed in the aphorism: winners have a lot more clout when determining how the war will be seen by future generations. The percentage of Confederacy supporters in the Western civilization is fairly small. They may be visible, but the vast majority of the Western population, to the extent that they think of ACW at all, don't support the cause of continuing enslavement of blacks. Anyway, aphorisms shouldn't be treated like mathematical theorems. Their validity isn't as "hard" as that of maths, but in human society, nothing is. Aphorisms are the sort of model which is "wrong, but sometimes useful".
- kiba 1y ago
  Anyway, aphorisms shouldn't be treated like mathematical theorems. Their validity isn't as "hard" as that of maths, but in human society, nothing is. Aphorisms are the sort of model which is "wrong, but sometimes useful". I am not treating them as mathematical statement, I just don't take it for granted that these "aphorism" are in fact historical truth. Cursory search of "winners write history" already reveal to me a far more complex and nuanced reality. Indeed, such a statement is considered harmful.