Look, elegance and beauty can be used at the search stage, when looking for a better model describing reality:
- Can I make this equation simpler?
- Can I make this model more general?
- Can I make the formulas easier to deal with (and so the theory more useful)?
These are all valid search paths when developing the theory. But the ultimate test is how well the theory matches the experiment.
In fact, programmers know this very well. We avoid spaghetti or giant-ball-of-mud code, we try to express our ideas clearly so we can be more certain that the program works as expected, and it does what it's supposed to do. We use elegance and beauty as a guide when writing and improving out code. However, the ultimate test is whether the program works as expected or not.
No matter how elegant a wrong program is, it is still wrong. Wrong but elegant code can be an intermediate step to the final correct code, but it's not the final goal.
The same with the scientific method. You can guide your research with elegance in mind. (At the end of the day, simpler more elegant models are nicer to work with when developing your theory and when applying it in practice!) But the ultimate test is the experiment. And also, if your theory is elegant but untestable (unfalsifiable), the theory is not scientific. It might be completely wrong.
As useful as it is, even as a search heuristic elegance might be misleading. Prof. Sabine Hossenfelder ( https://backreaction.blogspot.com/ ) wrote a book on how the search for beauty and mathematical elegance led modern fundamental Physics to its currently rather unfruitful state.
I found the article a little strange as well, and I'm not really sure exactly what it's point is -- it seems to argue one thing but then another.
As for the underlying issue, I do think it points to something important, but only at certain stages, as you say.
A model inconsistent with empirical data is not likely to gain traction in the absence of further data. However, there are times when a set of models are equally consistent with the data, and it's not even entirely clear how to empirically distinguish between them. I think in those cases, aesthetic considerations do often come into play. Also, when the evidence slightly favors one model over others, and is also more aesthetically appealing, it tends to amplify perceptions of that evidence even further, in a way that's not logically warranted.
The deeper question is what does it mean for a theory to be aesthetically beautiful? Lots of times, as you're pointing to, it means the theory is simpler or more parsimonious, or something along those lines. I don't actually think that's negligible as a consideration, as it probably means the theory is more powerful, in an information-theoretic sense. If you have two theories, and both match the data well, but one is very baroque and convoluted, and the other is extremely simple, it could be that the convoluted one is correct, but the simpler one is doing so with fewer contortions, it has more degrees of freedom.
I also agree there's a deeper issue about meta-science, along the lines of Feyerabend, that was missed as well in the article. Scientists tend to be blind to their own role in things, as if they're neutral perfectly objective entities. Although this is a good ideal, it never works out in practice (or almost never so), and ignoring it often causes more problems than it solves. I think what Feyerabend was pointing to in part is a lack of meta-scientific evidence for anything in particular, and an awareness that "all models are wrong" applies at the meta-scientific level as well.
The author managed to write an article on the problems of scientific method without even mentioning Paul Feyerabend's "anything goes". He didn't mention either the fantastic "Lost in Math" by Sabine Hossenfelder, in which this precise problem is fully addressed in a manner that uninformed people can grasp. No mention of Karl Popper and the philosophy behind why on Earth do we use data to begin with.
The author confuses the value of elegance in scientific research and scientific correctness.
Many scientists like to drink coffee when doing their research, and it helps. But we don't judge their theories on the basis of whose coffee was the tastiest..
But Sabine is the direct antagonist here. The point of this article is exactly opposite of what Dr. Hossenfelder usually says. Which is a good thing; science benefits from the conflict of opposing points.
Agreed! That's precisely why it's important that she (or someone supporting the "against" argument) is mentioned: it keeps us honest. Which is the whole point about the scientific method, by the way; "The first principle is that you must not fool yourself and you are the easiest person to fool."
I consider Feyerabend's Against Method to be one of the most important books I've ever read. The article primarily addresses beauty as an important feature of science (and it probably is, as Tupolev said, "an ugly plane won't fly") but one can go much farther.
Not only is beauty valid in science, anything that advances science is. Epistemological anarchy is what we should strive for, because everything else inhibits science. In a sense the irony is directly visible in the modern scientific attitude. Empirical data and experimentation are supposed to reign supreme, the only thing that is verboten is experimentation with the scientific doctrine itself, which is supposed to be taken almost on faith, full of complex rituals that everyone needs to abide by.
The mainstream story about Galileo often implies that it was the sinister church at odds with the enlightened scientist. But the reality is much different. It wasn't just the church, but actually also establishment science at the time that was very unconvinced. Galileo's heliocentric worldview could not account for his own empirical observations. (Diffraction was not yet known, so he estimated that observed stars were closer by a factor that was off by a thousand, prompting everyone else to ask why, if his theories are true, observed stars don't change drastically in size if the earth indeed moves around the sun. He didn't really help his case by essentially writing what you could today call trollish treatises in which he was just mocking everyone for their criticism.
But as it turns out in the end he was right, despite what (even relatively sound) science had to say. It shows that science is fundamentally uneven, that ignoring existing 'truths' for the purpose of radical shifts, even for dumb reasons, might advance science.
Agree: Against Method is a great work, and the argument for "anything goes" is compelling. IMHO the core argument can be used to dismiss software dev methodologies too. I recommend Feyerabend's Farewell to Reason as well.
I am reading this right now. A lot of awesome insight in the book. I just can't help but get the feeling that 90% of it is going over my head without having read Kuhn, Popper, etc.
That is indeed a problem. He's responding to a century's worth of epistemological thought, and that reply makes only limited sense without knowing what he's replying to.
I see it as a kind of conversation:
Popper: Scientists invent hypotheses, then try to falsify them.
Kuhn: Turns out that's not really what scientists do most of the time, especially the most important ones. The inspiration comes out of nowhere.
Feyerabend: And that's a good thing, because they'd miss out on pretty much everything. You can never know for sure what's going to be a revolution and what's just crankery.
I find that Feyerabend is a little too broad in that last assertion. But it's a really important observation nonetheless, especially when a lot of scientists (and more importantly, science-adjacent types like most HN readers) are stuck back on Popper.
I feel like a bit of a dick pointing this out, but I think everyone should realize this magazine (as well as Nautil.us by the way) is funded by the Templeton Foundation, which has quite a strong focus on religion (eh, sorry, "the intersection of religion and science"). On the one hand I feel it shouldn't really matter and we can all judge an article by its contents, but on the other hand some of the articles that show up here are really just a religious wolf in a scientific sheep's clothing, and I don't think many here would give them more than 2 seconds of their day if they knew this upfront.
Yes, and with that attitude they and the people that write for them to match the agenda aren't different from the producer of "Ancient Aliens" who has a very specific agenda: to train the viewers to not believe the science (1) and "look for God", in his own words:
"It’s really a show about looking for God. Science would have you believe we are the result of nothing more than a chance assemblage of matter. The real truth is we don’t know."
It's one thing to positively promote your beliefs, what's from a humanistic point very wrong is intentionally sowing confusion and spreading doubt in what is already known (and demotivating people to even attempt to learn something right). Time and again we see how the people eventually suffer from such actions.
Also, "If Life Were Only Like This" (2) I wish I could pull Thomas Kuhn to every writer who mentions him around just to promote his own agenda: "I heard what you're saying, you know nothing of my work, how you ever got to teach a course in anything is totally amazing."
I'm an agnostic person but isn't that the present (scientific) consensus right now?
That doesn't necessarily mean that there was a "God" that was behind of it all, but I was left with the impression that the whole "everything happened by chance and chance only" discussion was more common 15-20 years ago compared to now, when we have other agnostic people seriously proposing the "we live in a simulation" theory or the "multiverse/multi-world" theories, both options which are not necessarily random (especially the "simulation" one).
Just to make clear, I'm no scientist and I didn't follow this conversation ("what are the origins of the world/universe?") that closely because I don't find it to be that interesting, so if I'm talking non-sense maybe some other more knowledgeable people can correct me.
We do know that what all famous religions promote is a complete nonsense, as in, what's in the religious books which claim to be fundamental truth just isn't scientific, but instead matches exactly what the humans of the times in which the books were written understood about the world around them. But the humanity learned much more since then.
And it's not a new phenomenon. As the American continent was discovered by Europeans, with all the vegetables never before seen in Europe, it was already completely obvious that the world as described in the "holy" texts doesn't match the facts. America just doesn't exist in the Bible or in Koran, and neither do most of the products we eat today. (2) And then the Mormons, being in America, filled that gap with their "newer" "holy" text again delivered by an angel.
It's so completely not fitting what we scientifically know that the detractors can't argue at that level at all, trying instead to place their god in the "gaps" (1) which became immensely smaller as the scientific knowledge progressed.
The spreaders of doubt can't increase the "gaps" the science already narrowed down, but work day and night to increase the number of people whose own perception of the world around them has bigger gaps, especially by maintaining the false associations in their minds ("when you hear this think instead about that"). That's doable and that's good enough for them. But it's bad for humanity. That's how we have people drinking bleach and spreading such ideas to others. They just remain confused and demotivated to learn consistently ("we should doubt everything especially the science"). And by the same principles, we get the text we all comment here and your response too, hanging exactly to these words.
2) https://www.britannica.com/list/18-food-crops-developed-in-t... -- there's no: beans, corn (maize), peanut, peppers, potato, sunflower or tomato in the Bible and, of course, no American continent. Both in the Bible and in the Koran the Earth is flat, under the solid firmament (the original word meant something like "the thinly beaten firm dome" as the metal bowls were made) to which the stars are attached. In Koran, moreover, the "god" shoots the devils with the shooting stars.
Edit: a response to the "god is unknown" reply: yes, "god" can be "unknown", and I agree that those who argue should first precisely define their "god", what is however known is that whatever the religious books tell you that god is -- just can't be true, and the stories are on the level of simple child stories, from the today's perspective. My definition therefore is "all the appearances and acts of god in the holy texts." If you are ready to throw away everything in the "holy" texts and still believe in "something" that is not against what is already scientifically known, I surely have no problem with that. But a jealous god demanding a firstborn son to be ritually sacrificed, or sending bears to maul children who mocked his prophet, or sacrificing himself on the cross in spite of being almighty and being able to do any simpler intervention, or giving exclusive prophecies to an illiterate caravan robber allowing him to have as many wives as he wants and commanding him to kill all unbelievers? Forgetaboutit.
All religion has two aspects; outer ritual and inner philosophy.
It’s quite sad to me to see a
community of freethinkers here so summarily dismiss ideas which do not line up with their world view. It’s like Dawkins who only attacks fundamentalists and never looks at more philosophical interpretations, never mind approaching non-Abrahamic traditions.
So yes, rituals differ, maybe outdated and allegory is difficult to relate to. But people throw around this word “God” without even bothering to define it. It’s like saying the answer to an equation is X. No, the answer is not X, X is a postulation which you are required to solve for.
Similarly merely accepting the existence or non existence of God has no meaning. God is unknown. For anyone interested in further reading, please see “The Monk and the Philosopher” (Rivel & Ricard) which served to properly call into question my materialist, “scientific” view of the world and its nature. If you’re looking to challenge your beliefs in this regard and are similarly persuaded as parent or GP, it’s worth a read.
E.g. The followers of Cārvāka school "only accepted pratyakşa (perception) as a valid pramāna (evidence)." They were Buddhism's competitors in the times and areas of its initial development. "Thus, the existence of a soul (ātman) and God were rejected, because they could not be proved by perception." OK. But then: "They also considered everything to be made of four elements: earth, water, air and fire." So the whole still reflect the understanding of the people in the times in which it developed. Well at least they rejected the existence of a soul and god.
Also "Jainism and Buddhism consider atheism to be acceptable." Very good.
But I still make a difference between the religious claims and some irreligious teachings of some schools of thought. Studying that context, Buddhism isn't the most successful in not having nonsense, as it was also a product of the compromises in the times in which it developed (as in, moving more "to the middle" in the spectrum between Cārvāka and the opposite extremes), and the later developments were often in the direction of the religion and ritual.
If somebody can be less attacked by some religious fanatics if claiming that he's simply a Buddhist, I support his/her choice fully. The same way, in the areas occupied by one more recent religion, remaining Christian but acknowledging the supremacy of that newer religion sometimes, but not always, "protected" one from being slaughtered, which also saved many
(but that state is never stable, following even the most recent news). I'm surely against any religion claiming its own supremacy and the right to oppress all who aren't their flock.
Also kindly note that I never wrote what you put under the quotes, namely, that "all religions only promote complete nonsnese" -- that's your construction, trying to create a straw man which could be more easily attacked. You disagree with a statement I have never made. Good. But please don't claim it's mine. "Only" is not how I talk about it. Of course, the religious texts and stories also repeat some non-religious messages, which often reflect "common sense" or some practical experiences or provide some useful ideas in approaching some specific problems, and there's what could be learned from these.
Personally I deeply enjoy reading the texts of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zhuang_Zhou (around 4th century BC). They are so much more satisfying and to me aesthetically pleasing than any in the western world more famous texts written for the religious purposes and therefore more present in people’s minds. I can only recommend Zhuang Zhou. I also thoroughly enjoy works of Homer (8th or 7th century BC) the appearance of gods there as the personified anger or wisdom or lust or the forces of nature are also extremely artistically and intellectually pleasing. We humans do personify everything what we see around us, and on that level, I surely don't have any problem enjoying these stories. The Odyssey is an exceptional work of art, including the acts of all the gods doing what they are doing there. On that level, I claim I believe more in the "gods" of Odyssey than in any other. I surely enjoy when Zeus is mighty, but when he is in Egypt collecting sacrifices, he doesn't have time to help the warriors in Troy which he supports. That's so human and much more easy to relate to, and to believe why he doesn't always "do good." Obviously, he is distracted, and Hera had time to support the warriors she liked! She even distracted him with sex sometimes, if I remember correctly. Pure joy. And when we’re by ancient texts, Gligamesh (2000 years BC) is also a work of geniuses. Written before Bible was written, includes some myths later retold in the Bible, but again still in the form and in the context much more humane than the variants that follow.
This is maybe (but it’s heavy maybe) true for the ideas of religion and science.
In reality religious institutions and people opposed and still oppose science and scientific freedom due to their beliefs. Of course other groups of people also do this, but there is a correlation between religion and science opposition (E.g. creationism is heavily tied to Christian religion).
The more science explains the further religion is pushed back.
I disagree, in fact the history of science and religious institutions dates back to the very beginning of science.
Gregor Mendel, father of modern day Genetics, a Catholic monk. Georges Lemaitre, a Catholic priest who came up with the Big Bang Theory. Look at all the scientific work of the Jesuits, their big research universities, etc. There are countless examples of groundbreaking science coming from religious institutions - and this is just from one world religion that I am most familiar with. Many Islamic and Jewish scholars have also been scientists.
These deeply religious people believe that naturalistic observations can get us closer to the ultimate truth of God. There is no purely empirical argument that can be made to refute that worldview - you must turn to philosophy and contend in that arena.
Maybe it’s the other way? They were scholars in societies/groups s that were religious.
Also you didn’t mentioned cases of Galileo, Copernicus, Bacon, Ockham, Giordano Bruno and countless other punished for merely presenting views other than official provided by religion.
I’m not saying that religious people can’t contribute to science. Everyone can. It doesn’t change the fact, that in science, contrarily to religion, (besides maybe scientific method) there are no views that are not refutable and cannot change provided enough evidence.
I don’t think you understand science or religion very well. Religious opinions change all the time; the Christianity of today is not the Christianity of a century or a millennium ago. Many of these changes came from logical analysis, not empirical knowledge (science). Empirical knowledge is not the only form of knowledge.
Most of your examples also were not merely presenting an alternate view, but directly threatening the established political structure. That is nowhere near the same thing.
a lot of what goes by as 'science' is really just religion with a "this is not religion" facade. (for example all 'science' with a "replication problem").
At the core, both religious people as well as scientific people just want certainty of whatever they believe (also known as 'the truth'). They just go about it in different ways.
Behind claims of the "replication problem" are different phenomena, and some claims there are themselves more wrong than some other. Specifically, one specific person who made his name of claiming "replication problem" as bigger than his peers believed later himself obviously proved to be a tool in promoting unsupported claims under a disguise of scientific work: John Ioannidis, who accepted money from a billionaire to publicly claim, and even write papers, that the pandemics will be magically over in no time.
On another side, there are surely known problems in social "sciences" (which by definition aren't those which establish "hard" physical, chemical or biologic facts, but which can surely be helped by these facts and by the tools developed in the "harder" sciences) but the problems there existed since these areas of study existed and some are inherent to them.
> At the core, both religious people as well as scientific people just want certainty of whatever they believe (also known as 'the truth'). They just go about it in different ways.
There is a tiny difference that you don’t seem to mention. While everyone would like to be right, science people change their views provided with evidence that they are wrong, while religious people don’t, they have dogmas. If someone doesn’t change they only claim to be “scientific people”.
Sure, if science is non-replicable than it can’t and shouldn’t be called science. It bothers me too about social sciences and psychology, but the problem in this disciplines is that objects of their study are extremely complicated.
The article is really weird. First it alleges that we scientists only use "beauty" when talking about theory, but not in scientific publications. That claim by itself is dubious at best, even his examples about the standard model or LIGO contradict it, all the theory that was done before the experiments (and the following experiments) where in a way motivated by "beauty" and they could be published, i.e. it was not like nothing was published until we had experimental evidence. String theory is another counter example (although somewhat more controversial).
He then makes the claim that using experimental facts be the only judge of a usefulness of a theory is somehow detrimental (without actually making an argument).
Finally at the end of the article he directly contradicts this claim using his LIGO example.
So I'm a bit lost what the author wants to tell us. Yes theoretical beauty is a motivator for pursuing experimental evidence. Unlike in previous centuries where theory was often trying to explain known experimental phenomena, it is often theory now that directs experimental science.
In the end however, if a scientific theory is useful for science, is based on if it can accurately predict reality (as measured in experiments), otherwise it might be very elegant math, but not science. To make an counterpoint, nobody would argue we should accept a scientific theory that directly contradicts experiments, even if it was extremely elegant.
He wants to tell you this: "I conjecture, modern science arose in the 17th century, in the course of the so-called Scientific Revolution, precisely because it stumbled upon the extraordinary motivating power of ‘only empirical evidence counts’ – a story I tell in my book The Knowledge Machine (2020)."
I read a handful of paragraphs, but this article is doing the annoying thing where it's deliberately concealing the meat of its argument from you.
The argument has something to do with science 'rejecting beauty', or something? It's not super clear what the point is, or what reasoning supports the point.
I find that most of the time, authors that do this are doing so knowing that their argument isn't actually very strong, so confusing the reader is a better strategy than straightforwardly convincing them.
Rationality has an upper bound that gets hit when dealing with certain types of problems, while irrationality causes progress with those same types of problems.
That won Herbert Simon his Nobel Prize - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herbert_A._Simon
Worth reading about his work (esp as more and more people wrangle with issues way past the bounds of a 6 inch chimp brain)
As we better understand the spectrum of personality types in the population and the problem types, we better understand who needs to be propped up for their irrationality and who does for their rationality.
Misunderstanding this is the reason for a whole lot of resource and energy wastage.
It's a weird article. It's a matter of priorities, a theory can be as beautiful as anything you have seen, but if it does not have any predictive power, then for "hard" science (i.e. physics, chemistry, biology, etc.) its value is almost zero. "Almost" because interesting ideas sometimes can be developed in unexpected directions and even in different fields.
And "beauty" and "elegance" are certainly important, they just come after an ability to predict. Even if this ability is yet unclear, scientific community is open to investigation of promising "elegant" ideas (e.g. see history of the string theory). In the worst case scenario we get an interesting branch of mathematics.
I prefer to look at it at from the following angle: at extreme we have simply collection of experimental records. By accumulating those records we describe reality in the most straightforward way. "Laws" are the way to compress those observations. As an input of this algorithm we have experimental conditions, and as output experimental results. As a byproduct of this compression we get an ability to predict with a certain confidence what will happen in future experiments. "Beauty", "elegance", "compactness", "unity" are subjective ways to measure quality of this compression. Quality can be measured using different metrics: size of the algorithm (i.e. number of laws and constants in them), information loss (i.e. its precision), computational efficiency (i.e. an ability to compute prediction). This way we can view Newton laws as an efficient lossy algorithm, while quantum mechanics are near lossless, but more complex and computationally difficult.
I was pretty frustrated with Aeon until I realized I was trying to read it like a peer-reviewed journal instead of what it is. It's a forum for scientists and philosophers to speculate freely without any rigor whatsoever. They are developing ideas and theories in a more free-form way than would be accepted in a more rigorous journal. That kind of thing has tremendous value - but only if you don't get it confused for "real science".
In fact, programmers know this very well. We avoid spaghetti or giant-ball-of-mud code, we try to express our ideas clearly so we can be more certain that the program works as expected, and it does what it's supposed to do. We use elegance and beauty as a guide when writing and improving out code. However, the ultimate test is whether the program works as expected or not.
No matter how elegant a wrong program is, it is still wrong. Wrong but elegant code can be an intermediate step to the final correct code, but it's not the final goal.
The same with the scientific method. You can guide your research with elegance in mind. (At the end of the day, simpler more elegant models are nicer to work with when developing your theory and when applying it in practice!) But the ultimate test is the experiment. And also, if your theory is elegant but untestable (unfalsifiable), the theory is not scientific. It might be completely wrong.
As useful as it is, even as a search heuristic elegance might be misleading. Prof. Sabine Hossenfelder ( https://backreaction.blogspot.com/ ) wrote a book on how the search for beauty and mathematical elegance led modern fundamental Physics to its currently rather unfruitful state.