“I think,” announced Thales, “that water is the basis of all things. We observe that animals and plants need a lot of different things to live, but all of them require water; the earth is tremendously wet; rain is traditionally called ‘life-giving’; even heat comes from water, if you think about it.”
“That’s totally wrong,” Anaximenes said. “Everything in the world is really composed of air. When air condenses, it becomes water; as the condensed air cools, it becomes rock, as we see when puddles seep away into earth. When you burn wood, it becomes air in the form of smoke.”
“That’s completely ridiculous,” Heraclitus said. “Obviously, everything in the world is composed of fire. Everything changes– humans decay and die and are replaced with new humans; states change their governments; rivers erode away mountains. As the ever-changing substance, fire is what the world is made of.”
“I think it’s a mistake to assume that the universe is only made of one thing. We should adopt a more nuanced position and understand that some models apply in some circumstances and other models apply in other circumstances,” Aristotle said. “The universe is composed of four things! Water, earth, fire, and air!”
“I agree with Aristotle, but I would go further,” Karphos said. “We’re not really making truth claims when we say the world is made of things. We’re just noticing patterns– that air condenses and becomes water, that fire changes, and that animals require water. It’s a truth-claim when you say any specific thing is made of something, but it’s hard to think of a way that it could be wrong to say that things in general are made of fire.”
“Hey, guys,” Archimedes said. “What are you talking about? I invented this really cool thing with catapults, wanna see?”
“Ugh, catapults,” Thales said, “that’s so object-level. We’re philosophers. We don’t talk about how to build catapults, we go meta. We talk about the fundamental things in nature. How can you ever learn about the fundamental things of nature if you’re spending all your time talking about catapults?”
“As we were saying,” Pythagoras said. “I think the world is made of an infinite boundless thing that never ages or decays and from which everything we perceive is derived.”
“Why do you think that?” Archimedes asked.
“Well, Pythagoreanism teaches me these really useful things about triangles that are useful to me in my everyday life, so it really validates the whole system.”
“Can’t you just keep the triangles,” Archimedes said, “and not believe in the infinite boundless thing that never ages or decays?”
“No,” Pythagoras said. “The infinite boundless thing that never ages or decays helps me understand the triangles.”
“Okay,” Archimedes said, “sure, I guess. Let’s go build a catapult.”
“Sure!” Pythagoras said.
“Those catapults will be in a certain sense made out of fire!” Heraclitus said. “So be careful they don’t burn down!”
Thing of Things 
A very funny read. I liked this post and yesterday’s.
It’s interesting you bring up weaponry (catapults) though, as the contrast to the pop- theoryizing.
I think you hit on the valid point that no matter how fun or even useful pop-sociology might be, it’s really not a very *rationalist* way of analyzing the world. Where is the testing, where are the statistical degrees of significance, how much should readers be updating their priors based on these anecdata then, etc? It’s distinctly weird for a community that nominally believes in the importance of scientific reasoning, to be in paroxysms over some very rough outlines of what maybe human culture looks like (I say this as someone who really enjoys the posts you linked to yesterday).
Part of the answer at least is that SSC is not really a rationalist writer. He’s much more like a social justice writer, who uses their particular techniques of introspection and analysis, but points it towards different goals. Which is all well and good for him.
So why are so many readers (myself included) so excited about his theories, when they can pretty quickly own up that they don’t take these posts absolutely, and their theories are treated with such kid gloves (“It’s a truth-claim when you say any specificthing is made of something, but it’s hard to think of a way that it could be wrong to say that things in general are made of fire.”)
And we return to the catapults. These pop-theories are best viewed as *weapons*. The social justice movement has an immense arsenal of compelling narratives and explanations for how the world socially works, that serve them well in online and personal dialogue. You could call them “arguments” but they are more fleshed out and multi-purpose than a single contextual argument. They are more like cultural-templates. And they’re very useful.
So Scott gives us “motte-bailey” and “blue tribe” and “courage debates” and no one thinks that explains everything, but it does allow people to fire some of this shot back into hostile territory.
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OMG!
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You can say what you want about greek philosophers, but the level of insight they achieved without the scientific method. Think of Heraklit’s atom theory. Yes of course, they inevitably produced a lot of nonsense, too. Not being an expert, I still get the impression that the following generations often could just see which ideas that were already put out there would hold up.
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Correction: Atom’s were Democritus’ groove
But now I’ll use this as an excuse to _gush_ about what a wonderful idea that was. You might think, “What’s the big deal? Things are made of smaller things, duh.”, but it’s so much more than that.
A cat can be orange, so is it made of orange “atoms”? No! It comes from how the “atoms” are organized, how they reflect different wavelengths of photons, and even those photons aren’t intrinsically “orange”, it’s just how the electromagnetic field changes!
Fire is hot, so it it made of hot “atoms”? No, “hot” means the a large amount of random motion in the atoms that compose the air in the fire. A single atom can’t be hot!
The genius of the atom theory is that at some level, _things bottom out_, and the many, many macro-level properties are all derivable from completely different, yet simpler, set of primitives.
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Your argument here doesn’t really work. Thales, Aristotle, Pythagoras,etc were NOT amateurs. They were, at the time, universally considered experts. Pythagoras and friend’s opinions on physics do not support trusting the experts in fields that do not consistently make correct predicitons. They actually give an example of why “think for yourself” is often good advice. Maybe modern science would have been created faster if people put alot less faith in the Ancient greek “masters.”
=== On a different note:
What do you think of the good Judgement project results?
Most of the “super-forecasters” in the good judgement project were literally amateurs. However it seems they did considerably better than many/most “experts” on concrete problems. Of course the GJP was in “political science” not sociology but the comparrison seems reasonable. Especially since I know of no work that shows academic sociology is especially predictive compared to the best amateurs.
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Despite the title, I believe the point Ozy wants to make is less about the distinction amateurs/professionals, but about speculation/evidence-based arguing.
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Yeah, but if Archimedes wants to get any use out of his catapults, he needs to take ranging into account, which requires the application of mathematical principles which were worked out by the guys sitting around talking and speculating. Which is why Archimedes was a mathematician as well as an engineer.
There isn’t the neat division between “speculation versus evidence-based” that we’d all love to have. Purely theoretical speculation can go badly amiss without evidential back-up, but practical applications can’t run simply on “I don’t know *how* it works or *why* it works and I don’t care as long as it works, all I need to know is you put this here and pull that there and you get a result!”
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This is highly unclear. Look at this exchange from the last Ozy post:
“I think it’s pretty clear that Ozy is counting pretty much all existing sociology as amateur sociology regardless of whether or not people get paid to do it. Professional sociology exists only as a hypothetical, and possibly a hypothetical that will eternally remain hypothetical.” – Ortvin
“No, I’m not. One should have a healthy disrespect for sociology, of course, but at least professional sociology makes an effort to collect empirical data and consider alternate hypotheses. – Ozy
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And so the debate between applied versus fundamental research rages on 🙂
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Yea but there is no Archimedes of sociology. Maybe there never will be. We’re all at the level of Thales and Anaximenes.
If you’re saying we should humbly admit our ignorance, then I’m on-board. But we still have to try to muddle through somehow, flawed as we are.
If you’re saying we should leave sociology to the “professionals”, I reject that notion entirely.
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Trump? He seems to be doing a good job of convincing people of the benefit of random policies.
Maybe just politicians in general.
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Trump is doing a terrible job of convincing anyone of any policy. He’s great at convincing people to vote for him. But have you seen any data that he’s getting policy traction?
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Ozy: are you arguing “leave it to the professionals” or “keep it object-level”? Or both?
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I was originally going to make a post about “modern physics” vs “Sociology” and why physics deservs to be treated differently. But then I realized I am not even really against “amateur physics.”
If someone is clearly intellegent and understands the fundamentals of physics then I think its fine to hear them out. Even if they are saying things that disagree strongly with the physics mainstream. Since physics is a well-funcitoning field I do not think its that easy to find such people. But they do exist!
An example is Ron Maimon. Those who frequented physics stackexcahnge sometime back probably remember Ron. Ron is, imo, obviously an incredibly smart guy. He also has some odd views, especially about cold fusion lol. He is also strongly against the axiom of choice. In gneeral he has alot of strong views…
Never the less I feel like you can learn a ton from Reading ron’s posts. And I would actually suggest people interested in physics consider doing so! Here are his profiles on physicsSE and mathoverflow:
http://physics.stackexchange.com/users/4864/ron-maimon
http://mathoverflow.net/users/14689/ron-maimon
*I will note that Ron does have formal training in MAth/Pysics. He has a degree from Harvard. But he is certainly extremely hetereodox and does not hold any sort of academic position. so Ron is not a perfect example. But Ron is just so smart I had to bring him up!
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I am a physicist, and that example really isn’t selling me on amateur physics. Not only did your example involve formal training, being good at answering physics questions is different from doing good physics. There’s knowing stuff, and then there’s being able to generate new knowledge.
Bloggers generating sociological hypotheses–arguably that’s more like trying to generate new knowledge without referring to current sociological knowledge. I am a blogger and I make social observations all the time, but this is not at all analogous to when I answer physics questions.
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I suspect that most amateur physicists are either better described as crackpots or know enough physics to shut up.
Personal example: I use/subscribe to the de Broglie-Bohm interpretation of QM because it works for all practical purposes and it is the only one that makes intuitive sense to me. (It basically solves the wave/particle duality problem by saying a photon is a particle surfing on a wave of undetectable dark energy, which is a much simpler mental image than Schroedingers’ Cat)
On the other hand:
* I am aware that Occam says I’m probably wrong
* I realise that long-distance entanglement is a real problem
So I don’t promote it much.
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Most amateur physics is absolutely terrible .. not even physics.
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Not physics, but this intelligent design proponent pretty clearly understands biology and is intelligent. But I have no qualms about dismissing him without engaging.
http://www.detectingdesign.com/kennethmiller.html
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I’d like to hope there’s a position between Archimedes’ apatheism, Thales’ agnosticism, and the overconfidence of the rest. A way of squaring the triangle, if you will.
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As his catapult burned, Archimedes remarked with sorrow: “there is a bright orange thing causing my catapult to blacken and fall apart.”
“We have seen this thing in many other places, at many other times, haven’t we?” said Heraclitus.
“I don’t know what you mean,” said Archimedes.
“We saw it just last night, when we were sitting around the hearth.”
“I suppose there was a bright orange thing there,” Archimedes conceded, “but it was a different one. It blackened the firewood, not a catapult.”
“They were both fires,” Heraclitus said with new enthusiasm, “and like fires in general, they –”
Bitterly, Archimedes cut him off: “Don’t tell me about your grand abstractions at a time like this! My catapult is burning. I do not feel like bullshitting about the nature of the universe right now.”
“I’m sorry,” said Heraclitus, and then, after a pause: “it will be a shame if it happens again.”
“I am taking steps to avoid that,” said Archimedes, proudly displaying to his friend the scroll on which he had been scribbling as they talked. There were drawings of many different catapults, and some notes:
“catapult #7 bright orange, fell apart. too large? but #2 was larger. #7 built on hêméra hermoú, no others built on hêméra hermoú — promising?. check height/width ratios, # of pulley used in construction, phase of moon, etc”
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As a counterpoint of sorts, here’s Scott Aaronson on Democritus: http://www.scottaaronson.com/democritus/lec1.html
Of course, Scott Aaronson’s whole shtick is that he has certain very strong “meta-level” opinions that are *just barely* becoming mainstream a century after the “object-level” foundations were laid.
Building on the “foundations” idiom: There’s a sort of pyramid of knowledge. Individual empirical results at the base, “laws” in the physics/biology/linguistics sense (Kepler/Mendel/Grimm) a little bit further up, and a few powerful principles at the top. Different fields have different epistemic angles of repose. Physics has a pretty steep one, so a relatively small amount of empiricism and model-building can support an enormous tower of theory. Chemistry can’t pull off the same balancing act, but a few millennia of alchemy and metallurgy gave them a broad enough base to reach impressive heights. Biology has a yet-more-gradual slope, and sociology is basically an elementary-school sandbox with a few low mounds that keep getting kicked over.
Of course, this model is *definitely* a case of amateur epistemology.
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It is said that it takes more evidence to promote a hypothesis to consideration than to move it from ‘considered’ to ‘true’. Careful, statistically grounded studies simply do not have enough power to accomplish the first task. Not even physics produces enough data to make the answers obvious; relativity and shrödinger’s equation were created by people sitting and thinking until they came up with an idea that made sense to their accurate physical and mathematical intuition.
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As long as we’re (mis)appropriating lessons from physics, there’s something to be said of the fact that the study of physics becomes “simple” in two domains:
1. When there is one of a thing.
2. When there are a whole bunch of a thing.
Thus, sociology is just the physics of N people, for large N. And (by reducto ad physicorum), it should be easy.
More seriously, I wonder if this whole debate is because of a common misrepresentation of the practice of science:
1. Develop a hypothesis.
2. Test Hypothesis.
3. Report with what certainty null hypothesis can be rejected.
When science (physics and sociology included) is really more like:
a. Notice strange pattern.
b. Propose model of strange pattern’s behavior.
c. Determine that model is completely wrong.
d. Repeat steps b,c approximately 100 times.
e. Determine that model_101 is mostly wrong but right enough to be useful.
f. Refine model endlessly.
I don’t think Scott is really claiming to do anything more than step (b) in his essays. The field of sociology, itself, is more or less stuck somewhere between steps (d) and (e).
But, crucially, the practice of science really doesn’t ever advance if people aren’t noticing strange patterns and proposing crazy models for them. These crazy models are first tested by what they can retrodict. If they don’t retrodict anything, they’re obviously worthless. The more they retrodict, the more interesting they are. *Of course* the true power of a model comes from what it predicts, but, as has been pointed out repeatedly (by you included), performing sociological experiments is extremely difficult.
To be honest, I’m not really sure what you’re proposing should change. This and your previous post could be (uncharitably) summarized as “boo armchair sociology”. Great. Everybody’s on board. Talking about models which have no testable predictions are a waste of everyone’s time.
But in your previous post you say: “Similarly, you can have fun talking about toxoplasma of rage as much as you like, but it does not have a place in serious discussions.”
This just strikes me as bizarre. You clearly don’t mean “people shouldn’t try and test the thesis of ‘toxoplasma of rage'” because that’s completely counter to *your* thesis. And different models *absolutely* have a place in serious discussion.
Perhaps I don’t understand what your actual criteria for, “Deserving of serious discussion” is.
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THALES: I’ve noticed that things keep changing into other things. For example, olive pits grow into olive trees if you water them enough. That extra matter must be coming from somewhere. And sometimes humans sweat and piss, and sometimes trees exude sap. There seems to in many cases be a mysterious fungibility among different forms of matter. I wonder if other things are like this.
ARCHIMEDES: Oh, Thales. Always with your armchair theorizing. Leave thinking about olives to prophets of Demeter who have been randomly blinded in both eyes.
THALES: Armchair theorizing? I’d say it’s the opposite! I’m going out and looking at the world! Look outside! Olive trees! They grew from an olive pit! All I did was pour water on them! That’s a fact about the world that seems to require explanation!
ARCHIMEDES: If *you* look at something and try to draw conclusions, it is of necessity armchair theorizing. Only once you become a Prophet of Demeter does your armchair theorizing turn into good proper empiricism.
THALES: Why does become a prophet suddenly make observation into empiricism?
ARCHIMEDES: They’ve spent years looking at olive trees, and studying the great elders’ theories about olive trees, and that has taught them a healthy skepticism that prevents them from jumping to any conclusions.
THALES: Really? Aren’t Prophets of Demeter constantly jumping to conclusions that are later proven wrong? Why, just last week Triptolemus said that the only reason crops failed was because farmers think they were going to fail, and if only the farmers believed they would do better, the crops would succeed. He even demanded that the king spread this word among all the farmers, saying that our society was failing any farmer who was not taught this good news. But the crops here did no better than the crops in Persia! Aren’t Prophets of Demeter notorious for things like this?
ARCHIMEDES: I’m not saying every Prophet of Demeter has learned this skepticism. Only that most of them have.
THALES: Demophon? Trochilus? Who exactly are you talking about?
ARCHIMEDES: I am certain there are many virtuous Prophets.
THALES: And no virtuous non-Prophets? The only way to learn a proper skepticism about beliefs is going through the initiation rites? I notice that I myself have frequently thought things about crops which the Prophets of Demeter disagreed with, but later they agreed I was right. How can this be if I am so much more gullible than the Prophets?
ARCHIMEDES: Perhaps I misspoke. It has nothing to do with the initiation rites. It has to do with formally investigating things while randomly-blinded-in-both-eyes.
THALES: Almost no Prophets of Demeter are truly blind. Most of them just squint and say it’s the same thing.
ARCHIMEDES: At least they are squinting. You are doing nothing of the sort. You say you make “observations”, but perhaps one time in Osaka six hundred years ago olive pits did not grow into olive trees!
THALES: I admit, my observations are limited and informal. I do not have the money nor the time to plant olive pits in every climate of the world and observe that every single one of them grows into a tree. But even the blindest Prophet of Demeter cannot prove a universal negative. I am not making the general claim that every olive pit always grows into a tree, simply pointing out a pattern that seems to often be true and advising we think upon its ramifications. I can do this even without confirmation that this happens in the far-off-land you speak of.
ARCHIMEDES: I understand your desire to think yourself equal to the Prophets, but I would warn you against it. Armchair speculation never works. Only a true Prophet following all the rites can be sure of success.
EPICURUS: Hey guys, I couldn’t help overhearing you, and I just wanted to mention that probably the reason water can cause olive seeds to grow into olive trees is because everything is made of little tiny things called atoms. There are multiple different types of atoms and some of the ones in the water are the same as the ones in the olive trees, so the mass of the water gets converted into tree mass. The reason trees are so different than water is because the atoms are arranged differently and the geometry of atoms is what gives rise to physical properties. These atoms work almost entirely according to natural laws, but there’s also a tiny bit of randomness inherent their behavior. Anyway, I’d love to stay and chat, but I’ve got to go invent evolutionary theory and utilitarian ethics. Bye!
ARCHIMEDES: See, this is exactly what I mean. He thinks that he can just derive things by sitting around, rather than listening to what the Prophets tell us. Imagine. In 250 BC…
THALES: Wait a second, 300 BC? It’s more like 550 BC.
ARCHIMEDES: It can’t be 550 BC, I was born in 287.
THALES: It can’t be 287 BC, I died in 546!
(both stare at each other, growing more and more confused)
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FEYNMAN: As the feynest man I must say, the tree grows out of the air rather up from the ground via water.
(sorry)
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Trying to reign things back to the object level, I’m really not convinced by the “only making observations and general patterns” defense. For one thing, if that is your intention – it isn’t working, people cite your writings as though they were authoritative.
For another thing, I think its just not true – the claim that King Solomon or a general ancient religious person would recognize American cultural norms and practices as being more of a religion than Christianity and therefore religion simply is culture with a group identity – that is a truth claim. It’s not “recognizing a general pattern”. And I think its wrong, certainly the logical structure is bizarre – why does it matter what an ancient person would recognize as a religion first glance? And how do you know that?
You can make fun of historians, anthropologists and the American educational system, but at least they have ways of checking their claims and train new historians so they don’t make basic mistakes. For instance, gathering writings from that time period, gathering writings about that time period, figuring out who exactly wrote those, what place in society they had, figuring out how to reconcile conflicting statements. None of this guessing, assertion, and making up grand theories of things they don’t understand.
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I make the point of only trust ancient greek philosophers who can answer why do kids love the taste of Cinnamon Toast Crunch.
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I also make point of use proper verb tenses.
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I’m not defending DIY academics here but.
What is important is how humans (as in animals) act in life. Humans are able to make decisions or act with (market) information which is shown in their preferences.
I think Robin Hanson made a great post about epistemology here. Even academics who believe only valid knowledge is found in academia act with very different epistemological framework in their private lives.
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