Chapter XX: Conservativism And Progress | The Philosophy Of Science by Steven Gussman [1st Edition]

                “Visions may be moral, political, economic, religious, or social.  In these or other realms, we

        sacrifice for our visions and sometimes, if need be, face ruin rather than betray them.  Where

        visions conflict irreconcilably, whole societies may be torn apart.  Conflicts of interests dominate

        the short run, but conflicts of visions dominate history.

                We will do almost anything for our visions, except think about them.  The purpose of this

        book is to think about them.”
        – Thomas Sowell^I

        “The second law of thermodynamics is acknowledged in everyday life, in sayings such as... (from

        Texas lawmaker Sam Rayburn), 'Any jackass can kick down a barn, but it takes a carpenter to build

        one.'... Not only does the universe not care about our desires but in the natural course of events it

        will appear to thwart them, because there are so many more ways for things to go wrong than to go

        right.”
        – Steven Pinker^II

        “As I've tried to stress, at the heart of science is an essential balance between two seemingly

        contradictory attitudes—an openness to new ideas, no matter how bizarre or counterintuitive, and

        the most ruthlessly skeptical scrutiny of all ideas, old and new.  This is how deep truths are

        winnowed from deep nonsense.  The collective enterprise of creative thinking and skeptical

        thinking, working together, keeps the field on track.  Those two seemingly contradictory attitudes

        are, though, in some tension.”

        – Carl Sagan^III

        I am explicitly attempting (and perhaps failing!) to avoid hot button issues in this volume because it is about the timeless foundations of the scientific project.  As such, this is not a chapter on politics.  But it is not entirely unrelated.  Many of us are unaware that our politics are in part formed by deeper philosophical intuitions, themselves influenced by our personality differences (much of which is innate).^IV  There are two broad tendencies in tension when it comes to acting in this world: to preserve what we have, and to change it.  Without the former, we lose what makes us great; all achievement becomes ephemeral like an idle breeze.  Without the latter, we can make no progress, and are damned to mediocrity, always left to wonder what heights could have been reached, what could have been.

        In a sense, science, since it seeks to explain the world, must meet the right balance in this tension.  We must preserve and teach what we know, but we must also constantly revise our understanding and learn new things about the world—there is certainly no end in sight to our knowledge acquisition, because of the high level of ignorance we still have.  But that level of ignorance could itself be cited as a reason our excursions out further are foolhardy and uninformed.  How do we make progress and how quickly?  The scientific method may have something to say about this famous political question (and vice versa).

        The present tension underlies many of those we have seen before.  'Keeping such an open mind that your brains fall out' is tantamount to having a naive obsession with change, and a confusion between “change” and “progress” (regress is another kind of change)—in this case, changing our understanding of the material world.^V  Likewise, total conservativism would be close-minded, dogmatic, and a failure to recognize the provisional nature of knowledge altogether (of the kind associated with revealed-truth religions, which check all claims not against nature, but against a sacred book). A naive zeroth approximation^VI might be to assume that you want a fifty-fifty split of each tendency.  In truth, the project of science (those following its epistemology) must be skewed towards making progress (everyone is performing research in an attempt to refine, improve, and add to our knowledge), but the actual results of that project (the body of knowledge about the ontology) must skew conservative: most excursions will be falsified, null results, dead ends, or otherwise not terribly fruitful or paradigm-shifting lines of research.^VII  In fact, most new ideas are wrong (reflecting the principle of precaution) for the same reason that most thermodynamic microstates correspond to the disordered macrostate: as Boltzmann showed, there are simply more ways to be disordered than ordered, more ways to be wrong (potentially infinite) than right (one).^VIII  In fact, one can view the process of evolution by natural selection as a kind of epistemology, or at least an as-if normative theory that is “attempting” to build fitness-maximizing machines (rather than truth-maximizing theories).  The way evolution works is that pseudo-random mutations give rise to pseudo-random phenotype, the vast majority of which will be completely unviable, but a minority of which will increase the tendency of replication (or fitness).  Over billions of years, this trial-and-error process has “discovered” all sorts of solutions based on the high expectation of adaptation when one applies the low probability of adaptation in any single mutation event.  Researchers studying adaptive systems of progress are finding that the insertion of some random noise here and there may help even in projects otherwise guided by articulated-reason.  Whether mutations (ideas) in scientific research arise by pseudo-random mutation or are educated guesses (such as idea-husbandry),^IX most will still be wrong by sheer probability, and some guiding selection pressure (the scientific method) will be needed to guide it towards adaptation over time (discovery).^X  In light of all of this, it is no wonder scientific discovery is so hard-won.  As a result, teaching (particularly beginner students) must be more conservative to pass down the torch of well-established knowledge, whereas active research is more progressive because it is the attempt to find out something new.  Centuries go by between the Newtons and Einsteins of the world.  Most of us will nary make a contribution, let alone be remembered for a paradigm-shifting discovery.  Progress comes in fits and starts, when someone finally hits on a genius idea after many failed attempts from many great minds.

Footnotes:

0. The Philosophy Of Science table of contents can be found, here (footnotephysicist.blogspot.com/2022/04/table-of-contents-philosophy-of-science.html).

I. See the “Preface To The 1987 Edition” in A Conflict Of Visions by Sowell (pp. xiii-xiv).

II. See “The Second Law Of Thermodynamics” by Pinker (https://www.edge.org/response-detail/27023) in This Idea Is Brilliant edited by Brockman (pp. 18, 20).

III. See The Demon Haunted World by Sagan (pp. 304).

IV. See A Conflict Of Visions by Sowell; The Blank Slate by Pinker; and The Coddling Of The American Mind by Lukianoff and Haidt (especially pp. 110-113).

V. The quote, “It pays to keep an open mind, but not so open your brains fall out,” came to me by way of Sagan (though I cannot find the proximal source), see the goodreads entry: https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/29905-it-pays-to-keep-an-open-mind-but-not-so. It appears the actual origin of the quote however is in newspaper publisher Arthur Hays Sulzberger's, “I favor an open mind. I certainly do not advocate that the mind should be so open that the brains fall out,” as attributed in The Physics Of Climate Change by Krauss (pp. 83).

VI. See the “Approximation” chapter.

VII. See Cosmos by Sagan (pp. 2) and The Demon Haunted World by Sagan (pp. 298, 302, 304-306) which further quotes Descartes on the proper use of skepticism. See also the “Scrutiny And Skepticism” chapter.

VIII. See “The Second Law Of Thermodynamics” by Pinker (https://www.edge.org/response-detail/27023) in This Idea Is Brilliant edited by Brockman (pp. 17-20) and “Precautionary Principle” (Wikipedia) (retrieved 11/17/2022) (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Precautionary_principle) which further cites “The Precautionary Principle Under Fire” by Rupert Read and Tim O'Riordan (Environment / UEA) (2017) (https://ueaeprints.uea.ac.uk/id/eprint/65524/1/Accepted_manuscript.pdf) (though I have not read the Wikipedia article beyond the opening definition, nor any of this paper). B. Weinstein has used the term on his DarkHorse podcast.

IX. See “When Ideas Have Sex” by Matt Ridley (TED) (2010) (https://www.ted.com/talks/matt_ridley_when_ideas_have_sex?language=en / https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OLHh9E5ilZ4).

X. While I believe I independently came up with the view of epistemology as an evolutionary process, it is not unique. As I understand it, philosopher Karl Popper held a similar view (his idea of falsification can be seen as the analog to death in evolution). See also The Ape That Understood The Universe by Stewart-Williams (pp. 268).