= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
Luke_A_Somers comments on A Parable of Elites and Takeoffs - Less Wrong
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
= 783df68a0f980790206b9ea87794c5b6)
Loading…= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
Powered by Reddit
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d)
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (98)
Because it's psychologically hard and unintuitive, not because it's complicated. Math is complicated and difficult, but it's not psychologically challenging like 'do your best to destroy your own clever explanations and cheer if someone else does'.
Acupuncture makes a great example. Here we have folks who are on to something that works. Yay! Case closed. ... except, not. Because they don't have the idea of science, the hard and unintuitive thing that says you should try to find all the times that that thing you rely on doesn't work, they can't find those boundaries.
...and if science is psychologically hard & unintuitive, all the easier for it to be substituted for something superficially similar but ineffective.
And how does that not make science harder than math?
Skepticism and empiricism are robust ideas, by which I mean there's nothing particularly similar to them. They are also very compact. You can fit them on a post-card. On the other hand, math is this enormous edifice.
The 'getting it wrong' that you see all over modern science is a failure, yes, but most of these scientist-failures are failing due to contingent local factors like conflicts of interest and grant proposals and muddy results and competition pressures... they're failing to fulfill the scientific ideal for sure, but it's not because they lack the scientific ideal. They can correctly teach science. If bad scientists were all we had, then science would have bad habits and that would be bad, but it could be solved much more easily than having to redesign the thing without knowing that it was possible, like we did the first time.
This is still the case even if all the scientists are under the thumbs of warlords who make them do stupid stuff. The idea is there, the light can spread. Not right away, likely, but we won't need to wait thousands of years for it to re-emerge.