SeN Continues Its Love Affair With The Discovery Institute

[Alphus and Omegus]

I completely agree regarding videos. If you can't make a written version of your argument then it's either not a very good argument or it doesn't really matter to you.

That doesn't apply to Hossenfelder, however. She definitely can write well.

[bill4long]

I don’t like watching videos for information. It’s harder in video to skim through the fluff to find the content than it is in text, and a YouTube video on a subject one knows is bound to be mostly fluff even if it’s as concise as the general audience can absorb. Can you summarize what Hossenfelder says?

Um, well, Sabine is a physicist who is a very popular popularizer of physics and produces well done, tightly scripted videos, but okay. Summary: the multiverse ideas are not science because they are not testable and/or the assumptions that have to be made are more complex than the thing being explained and/or they are too simple and/or they postulate unobservables. They are no different than postulating God. May be true, may be false, but out of the purview of science.

[Physics Guy]

I don’t doubt that Hossenfelder’s videos are great for their intended audience, but I’m pretty sure I’m not it. Plus I really don’t like videos in general. Anyway, it sounds like her verdict is the same as mine.

[DrStakhanovite]

Peterson cheats like that regularly, however.

He does and you are absolutely right that the disclaimer doesn't remedy the issue at hand.

is this an additional clarification?

Nope. Daniel started to include those kind of disclaimers after Lem's thread really took off and the examples started to pile up.

This just never ceases to amaze me.

You and me both. It isn't just the fact that what Daniel does technically constitutes plagiarism, but that this is absolutely no way to learn and master a subject, much less conduct research for a book. You can't develop your own ideas and get a meaningful picture of just what it is you believe by spending more than a decade reading entry level material that was written for an audience with no background on the subject.

[DrStakhanovite]

Can you summarize what Hossenfelder says?

Nord VPN is great for protecting your data. She also gets Karl Popper completely backwards and paraphrases him as saying "If it isn't testable then it isn't science" which is very much not what the man argued or wrote.

[Physics Guy]

I guess I again share a view with Hossenfelder, because I also thought that that was what Popper said. How are we mistaken?

[DrStakhanovite]

I guess I again share a view with Hossenfelder, because I also thought that that was what Popper said. How are we mistaken?

So big picture: In the late 19th to the mid 20th century, there was a major intellectual push to give a robust and precise description of the “scientific method” so that it could be emulated by anyone. The underlying hope was that by achieving this, it would establish a kind of universally agreed upon standard of rationality that anyone could appeal to and thus entrenched disagreements about the nature of the world could be resolved.

Boltzmann and Mach’s debate about the reality of atoms was actually at the heart of this, because Mach often liked to claim that Boltzmann was engaging in useless metaphysics with his statistical witchcraft.

Anyways, Popper was a vociferous critic of those who sought to articulate a universally binding scientific method because such a project had already been demolished by David Hume (according to Popper, anyways). What you could do, however, was include a criteria of falsification to help rule out “pseudo-science”; if you included how your belief/hypothesis/theory could be rendered false by some kind of observation or experiment, then you could at least be confident you were not partaking in pseudo-science.

Popper didn’t understand “science” and “pseudo-science” to mean two mutually exclusive practices that were jointly exhaustive. Science obviously worked, we just don’t understand how and may never really understand, while pseudo-science was often self-serving explanations used to bring out the worst in our species. Popper didn’t just include astrology and palm reading under the label of pseudo-science, but Marx and Freud as well.

The nearest Popper got to trying to really end the demarcation problem between science and pseudo-science was late in his career and was pretty unsatisfying. It basically amounts to having enough historical perspective granting one insight into what was properly scientific at a given moment in time, but that only occurs when you have enough temporal distance and 20/20 hindsight and does nothing to help you with contemporary issues and controversies.

The idea that something is only scientifically relevant if it can be confirmed through empirical testing is a position called “verificationism” and Popper’s entire raison d'etre was to disabuse people of this idea and instead offer up “falsification”; something is scientifically relevant if we can falsify it and fail to do so.

Hossenfelder is ascribing to Popper the very idea he wished to discredit, which is kind of an amusing irony.

[Philo Sofee]

I guess I again share a view with Hossenfelder, because I also thought that that was what Popper said. How are we mistaken?

So big picture: In the late 19th to the mid 20th century, there was a major intellectual push to give a robust and precise description of the “scientific method” so that it could be emulated by anyone. The underlying hope was that by achieving this, it would establish a kind of universally agreed upon standard of rationality that anyone could appeal to and thus entrenched disagreements about the nature of the world could be resolved.

Boltzmann and Mach’s debate about the reality of atoms was actually at the heart of this, because Mach often liked to claim that Boltzmann was engaging in useless metaphysics with his statistical witchcraft.

Anyways, Popper was a vociferous critic of those who sought to articulate a universally binding scientific method because such a project had already been demolished by David Hume (according to Popper, anyways). What you could do, however, was include a criteria of falsification to help rule out “pseudo-science”; if you included how your belief/hypothesis/theory could be rendered false by some kind of observation or experiment, then you could at least be confident you were not partaking in pseudo-science.

Popper didn’t understand “science” and “pseudo-science” to mean two mutually exclusive practices that were jointly exhaustive. Science obviously worked, we just don’t understand how and may never really understand, while pseudo-science was often self-serving explanations used to bring out the worst in our species. Popper didn’t just include astrology and palm reading under the label of pseudo-science, but Marx and Freud as well.

The nearest Popper got to trying to really end the demarcation problem between science and pseudo-science was late in his career and was pretty unsatisfying. It basically amounts to having enough historical perspective granting one insight into what was properly scientific at a given moment in time, but that only occurs when you have enough temporal distance and 20/20 hindsight and does nothing to help you with contemporary issues and controversies.

The idea that something is only scientifically relevant if it can be confirmed through empirical testing is a position called “verificationism” and Popper’s entire raison d'etre was to disabuse people of this idea and instead offer up “falsification”; something is scientifically relevant if we can falsify it and fail to do so.

Hossenfelder is ascribing to Popper the very idea he wished to discredit, which is kind of an amusing irony.

I might have to develop this into a video... may I use your information please? With full credit given, no plagiarizin from this kid!

[Philo Sofee]

I completely agree regarding videos. If you can't make a written version of your argument then it's either not a very good argument or it doesn't really matter to you.

That doesn't apply to Hossenfelder, however. She definitely can write well.

I would put my video as evidence showing you are pretty much wrong... once through this short 48 minute video and several sources, one sees the argument is VERY STRONG, and it actually does matter to us all. So instead of reading a paper I would write that takes you 48 minutes, this 48 minute video accomplishes the same thing. And I can't be p[lagiarizing Marquardt, you get to hear his own view from himself. That's pretty doggone good direct evidence straight from the horse's mouth - i.e., hard to refute.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VLJxXh5Vafo&t=1191s

[Physics Guy]

Albert Einstein's doctoral dissertation was about a way to infer molecular sizes from diffusion of solutes through liquids. Although it was almost immediately eclipsed by relativity, the work was a significant contribution in itself, in part because it was one of the last shots fired to settle the reality of molecules. The fact that many quite different natural phenomena could all be explained with molecules wasn't enough to convince everyone that molecules really existed, because the consistency of molecular explanations was itself consistent with the idea that molecules were just mathematical placeholders that were required, kind of grammatically, by our Newtonian explanatory framework. It would be decades before anyone could in any sense see a molecule directly.

In deciding how real molecules were, a crucial issue was just how big these hypothetical little particles were supposed to be. As mathematical placeholders their sizes would be arbitrary, "as small as one likes", like the epsilons and deltas of mathematical proofs in calculus. The data actually pointed to particular molecular sizes, however.

Even this still wasn't compelling, though. One could imagine that a preferred molecular size to explain one particular kind of experiment was really just standing in for some other unexplained issue, as an extra fudge factor. People knew enough to resist the temptation to reification even back then.

The decisive thing was that these preferred molecular sizes all kept turning out to be close to the same size, in completely different kinds of experiments. The size estimates weren't super-precise in Einstein's time, but if molecules were only mathematical fictions, there would have been no obvious reason why their estimated sizes couldn't have ranged over factors of millions or more, even for different experiments involving the same chemical compounds. Only the hypothesis that the molecules were real, and that stuff was really made of them, made it out to be inevitable for the molecular size estimates to come out the same.

Isn't that a good example of Popperian science? Nobody could say that these quite indirect inferences confirmed the reality of molecules, but they could easily have disproved the reality of molecules, and they didn't. Wikipedia, at least, represents Popper's main idea as falsification over confirmation. It says that demarcation of science from non-science was his major theme from the start of his career, and that his criterion for science was indeed testability. His innovation, according to Wikipedia (and my own admittedly fading memory from an old course in philosophy of science), was to emphasise testing as a procedure that could disprove but never prove.

Anecdotally, anyway, I think a lot of working scientists think that that was what Popper said; it's not just Hossenfelder and me. Nobody is all that excited about falsificationism; it's more that people are happy to have a name to drop in order to escape labored arguments about what seem like common-sense points. Scientists are sometimes interested in the philosophy of science, but as a side interest that might as well be orchid-growing for all its relevance to their day-to-day work, because what science seems to mean in the philosophy of science is mainly the stuff that is established in textbooks, whatever that may be. Deciding what goes into textbooks is an important problem, all right, but it's a process that goes on for years, and scientists are generally focused on the next paper. If the philosophy of science were the philosophy of cuisine, scientists would be not chefs but farmers. We may grow all the fancy ingredients but we generally eat simple grub.