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Eliezer_Yudkowsky comments on Rationality Quotes November 2012 - Less Wrong
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If this were true, the ancient Greeks would've had science.
My impression was that it was the screwing around that was lacking.
-Galen, a Roman doctor/philosopher, on Asclepiades's unwillingness to admit that the kidneys processed urine - despite Galen demonstrating the function of the kidneys to Asclepiades by, well, cutting open a live animal and pointing to the urine flowing from its kidneys to its bladder (search the page for "ligatures" to find Galen's experiment described), among other things.
And in case it's not obvious to readers, the Greeks were huge fans of irony - the above quote should be read sarcastically.
Yes, in MythBusters context, sitting around talking about stuff doesn't qualify as screwing around. It is, at best, the thing you do to prepare for screwing around.
My understanding is that they had the screwing-around, despite some philosophers not doing it. They didn't have the concept that the results of screwing-around was more virtuous than the philosophy.
To say that the Greeks didn't have correct scientific theories is obviously true. To say that they had a methodology that departs from ours is somewhat true. To say that they were merely making stuff up without reference to any observation is to merely make stuff up without reference to any observation.
I could do someone significant bodily harm by hitting them with Aristotle's collected empirical works on the anatomies, reproductive systems, social habits, and forms of locomotion of animals. And I'm not a huge dude.
"Virtue" has a specific meaning in the ancient Greek world which doesn't seem like it's all that relevant here.
The way I would put it is that a clever Greek interested in the natural world became an engineer, and a clever Greek interested in the social world became an active citizen, which is a sort of combination of landlord, lawyer, and philosopher. Archimedes made his living by basically being the iron-punk hero of Syracuse; Plato and Aristotle made their living by teaching young rich folks how to be effective rich adults. A broad-minded citizen should be curious about the natural world, but curiosity is just a hobby, not a calling.
How would we compare these hypotheses?
*10. The ancients achieved less science because they cared less than we do about the actual goals science was useful for. (Later generations cared even less and forgot most of what was already known by the ancients.)
*11. The ancients achieved less science due to lack of research funding models. All funding was private and rich people were patrons to artists, not scientists.
I think that we can dismiss 2. because they did make precision devices when they wanted to (see the Antikythera Mechanism). If this had been the limiting factor they should have been able to reach at least the level we had in the nineteenth century.
8. The ancients achieved a lot of science, but it wasn't applied much to create technology because they had access to cheap slave labor.
Export-oriented slavery in the Americas was actually fairly technically dynamic, so if this is really the explanation I suspect it's because slave societies lack a mass consumer base.
9. Scientific advancement requires that in each generation, your culture acquires more knowledge about the world than it loses — and there are a lot of ways for a culture to lose knowledge; among them mortality, library fires, Alzheimer's, censorship, tech bubbles, faddish beliefs or cults, pareidolia, political propaganda, shame, anti-epistemology, language change, revolt of the masses, economic collapse rendering high-tech/high-knowledge trades untenable, superstitiogenesis¹, the madness of crowds, and other noise. In the absence of really good schooling, literacy, anti-censorship memes, skepticism memes, and economic resilience, the noise is likely to dominate the signal, driving cultures back towards subsistence and ignorant superstition — a condition in which beliefs are no more correlated with reality than is needed to keep you alive from day to day. However, the difference is basically quantitative (how much is preserved?) rather than qualitative (some cultures Have It and others Don't).
10. It's just too hard to maintain the technology base for scientific advancement with 1% literacy; there's just too much chance of losing it due to correlated death of the literate class — plagues; king decides to kill all the scribes and burn the books; barbarians invade and do the same; etc.
¹ any process by which new superstitions are created
I hoped the footnote would exemplify some such processes...
I guess that several of those had a non-negligible impact.
They came impressively close considering they didn't have any giant shoulders to stand on.
Yep. If nothing of what Archimedes did counts as ‘science’, you're using an overly narrow definition IMO.
Well, all of classical and medieval Europe had writing, and yet science was created much later than writing. There were many other pieces to the puzzle: naturalism, for instance.
Naturalism came after science, not before it. Most if not all of the key figures of the Scientific Revolution were devout theists.
Many scientists today are also theists. The actors of the Scientific Revolution successfully compartmentalized their theism. If they had really thought God was likely to modify the results of their experiments to differ from established physical law just to mess around, or that there weren't any regular physical laws, they wouldn't have bothered with science.
It had nothing to do with compartmentalized their theism. They cared for the physical laws because they wanted to know how God wants things to be.
If some witch violates the physical laws through her witchcraft that was considered to be bad, not impossible. God wasn't supposed to have a reason to violate his own laws. A God that violates his own laws wouldn't be perfect.
Their key idea wasn't to get rid of theism but to replace looking at the bible to find out God's will with looking at reality to find out God's will.
I always got the impression that it how physical law was being violated (ie selling your soul) that was condemned.
The core idea of laws is that it's morally bad to violate them.
If you make a contract with another person and then violate that contract you are violating "natural law" in addition to violating the "law of the land". You sin and might get judged by God after your death for violating "natural law".
The witch is also violating "natural law". Now there's the problem that God might punish the village in which the witch lives for natural law violations. As a result that village might prefer to get rid of the witch.
The idea that the physical laws of the universe are qualitatively different than natural laws like "honor your contracts" is a later development. The first interest in finding out the natural laws was a very theistic endevour.
Their revolutionary core idea was that it's possible to understand what God wants by studying reality. Empiric research is a better tool than reading old scriptures to understand God's will.
As I have said, I was under the impression that demons were supposed to have a natural ability to produce "miracles" from their angel days, and used them as payment for the souls of witches. That said, there would have been considerable variation anyway.
A demon who might want to corrupt a woman won't start by asking for her soul. To corrupt her he might start by giving her some power without asking anything in return.
Even today there are still Christians who consider certain New Age practices immoral. Hypnosis doesn't involve summoning the devil and making a bargain with him. It's still considered to be a dark practice by many Christians. The catholic church took till 1956 to accept hypnosis as not being immoral.
Genemanipulated food would be a modern example where some Christians object that the practice is violating "natural law". Craig Venter has to defend against the charge of playing God. According to that Christian perspective biologists are supposed to study how nature works instead of changing it.
Similar things are true for opposition to cryonics. The person who get a contract with Alcor isn't a Satanist. He still sins, by trying to escape God's plans for how human's are supposed to live.
That implies God does not create miracles - violations of his laws. And that was and is a heresy according to the Catholic church, and I imagine almost all other Christian denominations as well. The story of Christ alone is full of law-violating miracles.
If the Texanian government sentence a person to death you don't call the event manslaughter. The fact that the person get's sentenced to death doesn't mean that a law gets violated.
The 10 commendments contain "do not kill" but death as punishment for nearly every offence. Laws are a tricky business.
But yes, those early scientists did had a problem of being seen as heretics by the established church.
That is a mistranslation. The original reads "do not murder", i.e. do not kill extrajudicially.
Also, it's 10 commandments not commendments :) God was apparently not overly pleased with his chosen people, certainly not enough to commend them 10 ways on the exodus well done.
I hear it was actually closer to "do not engage in blood feud", but I don't recall where I heard that so treat it with deep suspicion. In any case, one could add "unless you're God" to these physical laws for the same effect.
(Wait, if God kills you, isn't that still extrajudicial? God isn't working for the government.)
Ahh, that makes more sense.
... wait, does that imply there are non-supernatural (ie heaven and hell) sources of magic? Because I can think of other reasons why you wouldn't want to do business with a demon. Y'know, the whole "wants to torture your soul forever" thing might cause some issues.
EDIT: that is to say, is this intended to justify not using fairies or whatever other superstition? Because I doubt most people are ok with dealing with a demon (that is, something that has "torture all humans forever" as an explicit goal.)
It could imply God left some sort of "backdoor" in his creation, a lawful yet seemingly miraculous and near-impossible to detect part of creation. Matrix Lords, psychic powers etc.
It does seem rather incompatible with Christianity, though.
Law 34: God can do whatever the hell he wants. This law supersedes any precedent and subsequent laws.
If only they'd thought of that one.
That was my first thought.
Oh, true. I guess I read your post too quickly and didn't process the information.
True, but I don't think "naturalism" is the right name for that. "Determinism" seems closer to it; though perhaps many of them believed that humans had souls that were exempt from the physical laws of nature--so, "physical determinism"?
I also don't think "successfully compartmentalized their theism" is a good description of what they did. Many of them would have insisted there the lawfulness of Nature was tied to the existence of a Lawgiver, and that theism and science fit together harmoniously in a unified worldview, not in separate mental boxes. From today's standpoint we can say that the implications of the scientific way of thinking that they launched lead, when fully developed, to an incompatibility or at least a strong tension with theism. But I'd say it is anachronistic to say read that back some hundreds of years and say that the early scientists were compartmentalizing.
Science is also possible in a non-deterministic universe, one in which the evolution of physical systems has a random component and the future is not fully predictable from a full knowledge of the present. All science needs are natural laws, repeated regularities; they don't have to be entirely deterministic. And in fact scientists did not have a strong reason to think the universe is deterministic until they had what looked like a complete set of the laws of physics, in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
On the other hand, a god that does miracles is incompatible with natural law as we know it, because we presumably can't put an upper limit on the probability of a miracle occurring. An intelligent god can selectively cause miracles to disrupt particular experiments or to lead scientists to a false conclusion. Science pretty much assumes that won't happen.
"Many" is ambiguous. What place and time are we talking about? I would expect that until, say, the 19th century, the majority of scientists everywhere were conventionally religious.
An intelligent God could also write crap into a holy book to mislead people. A God that's good has no reason to mislead people.
Or does he?!
I'm talking from the perspective of modern people like Newton. They didn't consider a good God to engage in morally bad practices like lying and misleading.
There are places in the Bible where it sounds very much like God does not want to be clearly understood. I seem to remember a verse (I don't recall which book it's in...) where Jesus says that he speaks in parables (as opposed to plainly) because otherwise most people would understand him. The general argument I've heard is that evil serves a purpose, and perfection according to God requires the experience of lots and lots of bullcrap. The obvious question is why he wouldn't then create people with those experiences built in...
Twentieth? If you're talking about the first couple decades of it, yeah, but I'm pretty sure that, after quantum mechanics became widely accepted and before the relative state interpretation and similar were proposed, most scientists were not determinists, and many still aren't today (see the third column of this table).
I don't know the math of quantum mechanics. My layman's understanding includes the belief that quanum state evolution is deterministic (described by the Shrodinger equation). I may well be wrong about this.
Either way, my point was that before Maxwell's equations for electromagnetism, and the understanding that light was a form of EM, science didn't have anything like a complete description of physics. So it was hard to say whether physics was deterministic, even though the existing Newtonian law of gravity was. Once there was an attempt at a Law of Everything, even though it was refined over time, there was at least strong evidence for determinism.
Yes, the evolution of the quantum state is deterministic, but according to certain interpretations of quantum mechanics, after a “measurement” “wave function collapse” occurs, which is stochastic.
Judea Pearl always gives Abraham arguing with God about Sodom and Gomorrah as the example of the first recorded scientist. The point of science is the discovery of rules (in Abraham's case the rule for collective punishment).
If this is to be believed, “Traditionalists” (i.e. Catholics) were originally already “compartimentalized” (to use your word, which I'm not sure is the best one -- see Alejandro1's reply) to begin with, and it's “Moderns” (i.e. Protestants) who decompartimentalized.
That's a fair description. Even earlier Traditionalists were not yet compartmentalized, and so couldn't do Science. Compartmentalization helped them. Then "Moderns" decompartmentalized again, with the result that some of them moved towards either atheism or a completely lawful (non-interfering) concept of God, and could do science; while others moved towards fundamentalism, and ended up rejecting the lawfulness of nature and therefore science.
Er, yeah, “originally” was the wrong word -- look at what happened to Galileo.
I believe DanArmak may be referring to Methodological naturalism
They didn't screw around, and/or they didn't write about that, because contradicting the Aristotelian/Christian worldview was Evil.
They... did? If you want to make a distinction between Greek natural philosophy and modern science, which understands more about theories, hypotheses, and causality, and is rich enough to support an entire class of professional investigators into the natural world, then sure, the Greeks only had natural philosophy, and Savage is being too broad with his definition of 'science.' I think I side with Savage's approach of normalizing science- I would rather describe science as "deliberate curiosity" than something more rigorous and restrictive.
The people in this thread should read The Forgotten Revolution: How Science Was Born in 300 BC and Why it Had to Be Reborn by Lucio Russo.
They did. Look up Thales, Aristotle, Democritus, and Archimedes just for a start. Particularly Archimedes.