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Anyone concerned with this stuff should read: "Everything is Obvious (once you know the answer)" by Duncan Watts. http://www.amazon.com/Everything-Obvious-Commo

Anyone concerned with this stuff should read: "Everything is Obvious (once you know the answer)" by Duncan Watts. http://www.amazon.com/Everything-Obvious-Common-Sense-Fails/dp/0307951790/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1427159236&sr=8-1&keywords=everything+is+obvious http://www.amazon.com/Everything-Obvious-Common-Sense-Fails/... It isn't a great book, but it does clearly identify the difference between explanatory and predictive accounts, and makes a strong case that explanatory, after-the-fact, accounts are simply noise. The exercise the author engages in here, of "making sense" of two contradictory datasets can be done with almost any phenomenon. The more systematic and inclusive data gathering is, the more strongly any explanation is going to be tied to the phenomenon it is going to explain, and historians--like any science--should always be asking themselves, "How can I test this explanatory idea? If it is true, then what else ought to be true?" Otherwise, when you "explain things a lot" you are doing nothing but generating noise. The financial press provides strong evidence for this: tens of thousands of words of "explanation" every single day, and not a single person made rich by any of the predictions the same people make. When you can explain everything and predict nothing, you had better be able to test your explanations by indirect means if you want to be taken more seriously than a fabulist. The latter part is important: historians and others like them expect us to take their pontifications seriously. But we know the untested explanation is almost certainly nothing but a confabulation. So why should we take anything historians say seriously? The history of science--which I define inclusively as "publicly testing ideas by systematic observation, controlled experiment and Bayesian inference"--is one of realizing we've been doing it wrong, that ideas we believed and took seriously were actually rather silly. Blood circulates. Geese don't come from barnacles. Bad air or moral turpitude don't cause plague. And so on. If historians are starting to ask, "Are we doing this wrong?" that's a good thing, and based on my understanding of what science is and how it works I predict that over the next few decades the "digital humanities" will make a lot of traditional beliefs look untenably foolish, and there will be a general shift of the field toward Bayesian methods that will alienate and annoy a great many people whose freedom to confabulate will be greatly curtailed. It will change the face of the humanities to the extent that they will have as little to do with their historical roots as modern psychology has to do with the story-tellers of the early 20th century who gave it its start.

pron 12y ago
You are doing nothing but generating noise if you try to treat this knowledge the same as hard scientific knowledge. You generate something very valuable if you treat it as a different kind of knowledge. I like to give this example: the statement, "the moon is made of cheese" is false when treated as a scientific statement of fact. It can -- and, in fact, has -- been falsified. On the other hand, if taken as a literary statement, it can hold some truth -- or maybe many truths. Except that is a different kind of truth. It can teach us something about human imagination, human desire, human whimsy. Maybe even something deeper, once you analyze the significance of "moon" and that of "cheese". History -- my favorite field of study alongside math -- is somewhere in the middle, a perfect spot between science and literature. It is as scientific as possible when it comes to the what and how stuff happened (which is most of what historians do); when it gets to the why (which doesn't happen as often) history is more literary (and doesn't make any claims of definitiveness). History tries to leave the definitive answers to religions. Finally, I think you're putting too much faith in human ability to defy the math of complex systems. If anything, I predict a different sort of confabulation: that we have managed come up with a scientific theory to something that is provably impenetrable to hard scientific quantitative theory. I have every faith in our ability to convince ourselves that we can somehow use math (and data) to beat math. Is there a data-driven religion being born? It would be one that believes that anything not quantifiable is not worth knowing, and would try to plug any missing holes in our knowledge with data and quantitative theory, even if that's mathematically impossible. Hell, just the other day I had a discussion with some people on Reddit who believed we could somehow beat the Halting Theorem or, at least, make it irrelevant in practice. But just like we'll likely never write a computer program that can fully reason about other computer programs, we will probably never be able to explain human history enough to make definitive explanations/predictions on most things. I am perfectly OK with that. I am also well aware that not being OK with that, and trying to beat the odds is how (some -- not all) progress is made :)
- ajuc 12y ago
  > On the other hand, if taken as a literary statement, it can hold some truth -- or maybe many truths. Except that is a different kind of truth. We can learn from people telling stories, we don't need to call these stories "truths" to do that. No need to muddle up the terminology. There's a hilarious proverb about kinds of truth BTW, but I can't manage to translate it to English, idioms just work differently. > It would be one that believes that anything not quantifiable is not worth knowing, and would try to plug any missing holes in our knowledge with data and quantitative theory, even if that's mathematically impossible. I think you misunderstood. It's not that it's not worth knowing. It's that you don't really know it if you can't quantify it. You're just slapping together some explanation to feel better. > But just like we'll likely never write a computer program that can fully reason about other computer programs Not about ALL the possible computer programs, but about many useful ones - why not? If our brains can do it - surely turing machines can do it too. At worst it would take exponential time and space.

pron 12y ago

You are doing nothing but generating noise if you try to treat this knowledge the same as hard scientific knowledge. You generate something very valuable if you treat it as a different kind of knowledge. I like to give this example: the statement, "the moon is made of cheese" is false when treated as a scientific statement of fact. It can -- and, in fact, has -- been falsified. On the other hand, if taken as a literary statement, it can hold some truth -- or maybe many truths. Except that is a different kind of truth. It can teach us something about human imagination, human desire, human whimsy. Maybe even something deeper, once you analyze the significance of "moon" and that of "cheese". History -- my favorite field of study alongside math -- is somewhere in the middle, a perfect spot between science and literature. It is as scientific as possible when it comes to the what and how stuff happened (which is most of what historians do); when it gets to the why (which doesn't happen as often) history is more literary (and doesn't make any claims of definitiveness). History tries to leave the definitive answers to religions. Finally, I think you're putting too much faith in human ability to defy the math of complex systems. If anything, I predict a different sort of confabulation: that we have managed come up with a scientific theory to something that is provably impenetrable to hard scientific quantitative theory. I have every faith in our ability to convince ourselves that we can somehow use math (and data) to beat math. Is there a data-driven religion being born? It would be one that believes that anything not quantifiable is not worth knowing, and would try to plug any missing holes in our knowledge with data and quantitative theory, even if that's mathematically impossible. Hell, just the other day I had a discussion with some people on Reddit who believed we could somehow beat the Halting Theorem or, at least, make it irrelevant in practice. But just like we'll likely never write a computer program that can fully reason about other computer programs, we will probably never be able to explain human history enough to make definitive explanations/predictions on most things. I am perfectly OK with that. I am also well aware that not being OK with that, and trying to beat the odds is how (some -- not all) progress is made :)

ajuc 12y ago
> On the other hand, if taken as a literary statement, it can hold some truth -- or maybe many truths. Except that is a different kind of truth. We can learn from people telling stories, we don't need to call these stories "truths" to do that. No need to muddle up the terminology. There's a hilarious proverb about kinds of truth BTW, but I can't manage to translate it to English, idioms just work differently. > It would be one that believes that anything not quantifiable is not worth knowing, and would try to plug any missing holes in our knowledge with data and quantitative theory, even if that's mathematically impossible. I think you misunderstood. It's not that it's not worth knowing. It's that you don't really know it if you can't quantify it. You're just slapping together some explanation to feel better. > But just like we'll likely never write a computer program that can fully reason about other computer programs Not about ALL the possible computer programs, but about many useful ones - why not? If our brains can do it - surely turing machines can do it too. At worst it would take exponential time and space.