Stats for nerds
9recommend
30mentions
27people
2009–2026years
33% recommend60% neutral7% critical
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- meh. I would be happier with this article if it demonstrated familiarity with the source material. "Del Rigor en la Ciencia" (On Exactitude in Science) was Borges (hilarious) investigation into Korzybski's General Semantics, a fact that was surprisingly absent from the text. Borges implied "the map is not the territory," but Korzybski actually came out in said it a decade or so before Borges wrote the story in question. Understanding the themes of Borges story is greatly informed by a passing familiarity with Korzybski's work. WorldCat tells me the 4th edition of "Science and Sanity" is widely held by libraries, and if you're interested in the assertions made in this article, you might enjoy reading (at least parts of) it.
https://search.worldcat.org/title/369632
The author completely missed the point Borges (and Korzybski) made about the utility of maps. Maps (according to both) are abstractions which allow the user to ignore irrelevant aspects of reality so other, more interesting facets come into sharper resolve. This might be why Beck's London Tube map is so well regarded. It allows the user to easily ignore aspects that are not germane to the task of deciding where and when to get on and off the tube.
But is a scientific paradigm like a map? Certainly it is an abstraction, if we take Kuhn's definition. If you're interested, I can recommend both "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions" and "The Essential Tension : Selected Studies in Scientific Tradition and Change" by Kuhn.
https://search.worldcat.org/title/4660423077
https://search.worldcat.org/title/3034084
Calling scientific paradigms maps isn't wrong, per se, but it does create more of a meta-metaphor, and a weak one at that.
Also. No. Maxwell did not replace a patchwork of equations with four short ones. That was Heaviside.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oliver_Heaviside
Something we don't mention in polite society these days is that Maxwell proposed electromagnetic waves as propagating through an aether:
https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/A_Treatise_on_Electricity_and...
If you're going to talk about new paradigms, Maxwell is a great example, but his story is not complete without mentioning Heaviside, Michelson and Morley.
Also... I bristle at the phrase "Hypernormal Science." It's also introduced without definition or reference. Collins, et al describe it as distinct from (though seemingly related to) the word "Hypernormal" as coined by Yurchak in "Everything Was Forever Until It Was No More."
https://direct.mit.edu/posc/article-abstract/31/2/262/112751...
https://search.worldcat.org/title/1572419463
Or if you're short on time, you can get an entertaining (though not as enlightening) description from Adam Curtis' 2016 documentary HyperNormalization. You won't come away from it with a better understanding of AI, General Semantics or Popperian falsifiability, but it has a striking visual style and a very good soundtrack. And may lead to a better understanding of "hypernormal science."
And getting back to the Michelson-Morley experiment. The author talks about how their results did not cause the scientific establishment to abandon the concept of luminiferous aether. Certainly there is conservatism in science. Gigging science-monkeys tend to want to see interesting results replicated.
And this was one of the issues with the MM experiment. It took a while to replicate. We're MUCH better at replicating it these days and I would guess that thousands (maybe hundreds) of physics undergrads did this very task last year. But we've had over a century of pedagogical experience w/ this experiment. We know how to structure it to get the results we want. This was not the case in the late 1800s and in fact, several early attempts to replicate the experiment suggested the existence of an aether which was drifting slowly towards Cleveland.
And what does it say that heat flow, fluid flow, diffusion and electrostatics share equations? Does it say there's something fundamental in reality? Or does it say there's something fundamental in the way we model reality?
That being said... I think the author has hit upon something here... people are often wary of evidence which contradicts experience, even when that evidence (and not experience) is more correct.
But each of the examples he provides glosses over the process by which new paradigms overrode the old.
I deeply appreciate the author avoiding slavish fealty to fashionable AI trends. He probably could have gone further to describe more representational weakness of ESM3 and GNoME.
I fear, however, he has missed the point. It's less interesting to describe the messy ways in which AI fails than to describe the messy ways in which humans succeed. The process by which paradigms shift is messy, social and fundamentally human. It often has more to do with qualitative explanations than quantitative science. Science, as a human endeavor, is very much a story-telling exercise.
- Not sure what "this" refers to....
edit. OK, I just went back and reread the parent post and now I understand what you're asking. I do agree with you, this is generalizable across the board: file under the old saw "Perfect is the enemy of good."
edit #2. Also applicable, from Alfred Korzybski's classic 1933 book "Science and Sanity": "When in doubt, read on." I've always generalized this statement (which I first encountered around 1968 while an undergraduate at UCLA when reading his book not for a class but because I had gone down a wonderful rabbit hole after learning about Korzybski and his huge influence at the time he was alive ) to all things that puzzle me or cause me to stop moving toward whatever it is I'm aiming at.
edit #3: PDF for Korzybski's book:
https://archive.org/details/alfred-korzybksi-science-and-san...
- Alan mentions all the books in the talks and shows the front page. Sorry, it takes to much time right now to order, edit and prioritise the list of books for you. I'll try to append that to this thread later this week. You can contact me on morphle at ziggo dot nl and we can have an interactive session where I can shower you with critical thinking resources from Alan Kay, Marvin Minksy and a few others.
Book references:
Human Blindspots and “Bad Brains”:
Francis Bacon, “Novum Organum Scientia”
Daniel Kanneman, “Thinking: Fast and Slow”
Robert Meyer, Howard Kunreuthner, “The Ostrich Paradox”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cognitive_biases
Alfred Korzybski, “Science and Sanity”
YouTube: “How To Catch A Baboon” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ctol7JwpcuQ
Exemplary Practices and Perspectives:
Amory Lovins, “Reinventing Fire”
E.F. Schumaker, “Small Is Beautiful”
Christopher Alexander, “Notes on the Synthesis of Form”
from: http://www.vpri.org/pdf/Kay_How.pdf
http://www.squeakland.org/resources/books/readingList.jsp
https://mostrecommendedbooks.com/alan-kay-books
https://wiki.c2.com/?AlanKaysReadingList
https://mostrecommendedbooks.com/alan-kay-books
I know there must be lots more if you search online, there is even a HN post with a book list written by Alan himself.
I have gathered the books on these lists and all the video's of the talks in a 500 GB torrent. Maybe you can help organise it so we can publish it here?
Talks:
- Funny. I started writing
"...Bateson (and Korzybski) are one of mostly undervalued thinkers in my opinion..."
before even clicking the link. Oddly enough, I find Korzybski's name mentioned right there, at the beginning.
Bateson's "Mind and Nature" and Korzybski's "Science and Sanity" make a good, eye opening read.
- One book not already mentioned is Alfred Korzybski's Science and Sanity. It makes fairly broad and sweeping analysis, so there is plenty to disagree with. That said, this book opened my eyes to important concerns about language and cognition that, only in retrospect, seem glaringly obvious.
- "Science and Sanity" by Alfred Korzybski was a good one for me. It's where we get the phrase 'the map is not the territory.' It's been a decade since I read it so I really need to pick it up again. It's a very insightful tome about the relationship between our use of language and the reality is supposedly describes, and the implications of this imprecise relationship on the quality of our thought.
Related
Mind and Nature
6 recommend · 19
Other Minds
34 recommend · 53
The Mind's I
36 recommend · 73
Physics and philosophy
6 recommend · 17
The sciences of the artificial
11 recommend · 27
The Happiness Hypothesis
40 recommend · 87
Mindstorms
89 recommend · 201
