hckrnws

"The young man then quoted with approval what Socrates had said on learning that the Delphic oracle had proclaimed him the wisest man in Greece. "If I am the wisest man," said Socrates, "it is because I alone know that I know nothing."

This is a common misquote with similar frequency to perhaps "Play it again, Sam." In his Apology (not meaning apology, from apo-logia, speaking for oneself, i.e. defense) Socrates says:

"... ἔοικα γοῦν τούτου γε σμικρῷ τινι αὐτῷ τούτῳ σοφώτερος εἶναι, ὅτι ἃ μὴ οἶδα οὐδὲ οἴομαι εἰδέναι."

"Although I do not suppose that either of us knows anything really beautiful and good, I am better off than he is – for he knows nothing, and thinks he knows. I neither know nor think I know" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_know_that_I_know_nothing?utm...).

The context is that Socrates was puzzled by the Delphic Oracle's declaration that he is the wisest man. The man mentioned is an unnamed politician who was known to be wise.

I wonder if this is where the writers of The Big Bang Theory came up with this conversation:

Stuart: Oh, Sheldon, I'm afraid you couldn't be more wrong.

Sheldon: More wrong? Wrong is an absolute state and not subject to gradation.

Stuart: Of course it is. It's a little wrong to say a tomato is a vegetable, it's very wrong to say it's a suspension bridge.

"All models are wrong. Some models are useful." is the way that I have heard this thesis quipped. I suppose "All models are wrong. Some models are more wrong than others." would fit Asimov's points better, but I've never actually heard that one

Also, some models aren't even wrong, because they fail to make testable predictions

"not even wrong"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Not_even_wrong

My father-in-law, something of a renaissance man, and also a long-time successful commodities trader, regularly uses your latter expression. The first time I heard him say it, I attempted to correct him (“some are useful”) and he confidently brushed me aside. As I’ve matured, I’ve grown confident that his (your) version is less wrong.

The map-territory relation is possibly a better fit?

More specifically how Alfred Korzybski put it: "The map is not the territory".

The map will never be the territory, and we are just looking for better maps.

Related:

The Relativity of Wrong (1989) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37481166 - Sept 2023 (124 comments)

The Relativity of Wrong (1989) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29811788 - Jan 2022 (5 comments)

The Relativity of Wrong (1989) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24055125 - Aug 2020 (2 comments)

The Relativity of Wrong (1989) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17818069 - Aug 2018 (11 comments)

The Relativity of Wrong (1989) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13082585 - Dec 2016 (16 comments)

The Relativity of Wrong by Isaac Asimov (1989) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11654774 - May 2016 (60 comments)

Isaac Asimov: The Relativity of Wrong (1989) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9629797 - May 2015 (138 comments)

Isaac Asimov - The Relativity of Wrong (1989) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1147968 - Feb 2010 (32 comments)

This wonderful essay explicitly criticizes one genre of philosophy popular in academic English literature departments, but I think it also implicitly undermines another genre popular in academic English-speaking philosophy departments. The latter frequently propound something like the so-called correspondence theory of truth, yet they also treat truth and falsity as absolutes, mutually exclusive. There's no room for approximation and degrees of accuracy.

> The basic trouble, you see, is that people think that "right" and "wrong" are absolute; that everything that isn't perfectly and completely right is totally and equally wrong. However, I don't think that's so. It seems to me that right and wrong are fuzzy concepts

> Theories are not so much wrong as incomplete.

"...when I say I am glad that I live in a century when the Universe is essentially understood, I think I am justified."

Funny how we don't even fully understand what happens when we crack our joints but are certain about how the Universe "essentially" works.

The way that Sean Carroll says it is something along the lines of, the fundamental physics governing everyday life are understood. That is to say, we can solve for what an electron, proton, etc (or a collection of maybe a few dozen) are going to do in a particular experiment. The second and third generations of charged particles are excluded from the definition of everyday life, as are any other hypothesized particles because they require higher energy levels than are relevant. Explaining how the brain works is excluded as not being fundamental, though in principle a sufficiently advanced computer would be able to simulate it.

Exactly, that's where my mind went too. I think people are tempted by a well-meaning skepticism to think that it's high minded to be skeptical of affirmative claims of knowledge, but it ends up throwing a very hard won model of everyday physics out the window.

I saw a very frustrating live "debate" between Dr Blitz (monikor of a really cool science communicator and irl PhD physicist) and a flat earther, where the flat earther essentially borrowed these arguments (eg observations aren't really predictive or generalizable or able to count in favor of specific theories, confirmed theories have no special status etc) to dismiss the evidentiary support of the earth being round. It's an intellectual car crash masquerading as a respectable position on scientific foundations.

Well, let me ask you: when your joints crack do you think the process involves something other than physics at its most basic level?

You may take it from my posing the question that I think its obvious that joint cracking is determined by physics, and I do tend to think this, but I think a compelling argument can at least be made that joint cracking might not actually be fundamentally determined by physics.

> but I think a compelling argument can at least be made that joint cracking might not actually be fundamentally determined by physics.

Wait, what? I was nodding along with you for making a great point about how this doesn't threaten our confidence in the venture of physicalist explanation of the natural world (sidebar, I think we actually do know quite a bit about what happens when joints crack), but I had a record scratch here. I think I agree with your upshot but I wouldn't agree that a compelling argument, tentative or otherwise, can be made for a non physical explanation.

It roughly goes like this: if phenomena can be truly emergent, which is to say that the phenomena is causally independent of the underlying physical system, then its reasonable to say that the emergent behavior is not determined by the physical law of the underlying system.

Terrance Deacon makes this case in "Incomplete Nature." As I said, I think its wrong, but I think its worth considering whether it could be right.

Is Terrance Deacon a physicist?

We don't even know if the laws of physics are constant. In fact, it is literally unknowable.

> a compelling argument can at least be made

Absolutely! But it takes a good deal of hubris to call this knowledge.

Apologies in advance if I'm missing your point (I might be!) but... If it turns out that the laws are not constant, our present understanding would be retained as a special case of a broader theory and the local predictive capabilities would still be real in their scope. And leveraging a "we don't know" to cash out as affirmative skepticism tries to make the absence of data do more than it can.

As you noted, the degree of uncertainty we're currently wrestling with is also what we would see if it was true that the laws were constant. Kind of like an anthropic principle but on behalf of the constancy of the universe's laws.

This may all be restating what you said in a different way, but for me the important upshot is that I don't come out of it with an attitude that our current physical understanding is a tenuous house of cards and that I need to watch my step because, who knows, the strong nuclear force could change at any moment.

It takes a good deal of hubris to deny it.

We don't even know if the gods are real... in fact it is literally unknowable.

An yet... you're claiming to know what the gods like and don't like. Strange.

Replace the word "physics" with "God" and see if it sounds substantially different.

See also https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/L22jhyY9ocXQNLqyE/science-as...

The whole argument in your linked article rubs me the wrong way.

I think I speak for a lot of people when I say that the two ways "because science" or "because God" might stop my curiosity is because 1) I'm looking for a good master's thesis topic (a problem well in my past, thank God) or 2) my immediate survival is dependent on much more immediate problems than the underlying physical phenomena that cause e.g. a lightbulb to work.

I think there's a certain set of people who, in the absence of more pressing concerns, drop everything upon experiencing a new phenomenon, in a quest to understand it. That certainly describes parts of my life. But the writer takes as axiomatic that most people don't drop everything to study whatever event because they were told that it had been explained, and not, you know, because their landlord doesn't accept white papers on the fundamental properties of reality in lieu of rent.

I think embedded in the statement "because science" is the connotation that ignorance of the underlying phenomenon is not itself dangerous to the people experiencing it. If I observed a bright light literally burning people, and I ask "how is that light burning people?", the person who knows more but simply says "its physics" shares some culpability with me if I just accept that answer incuriously and then get burnt by the light.

But if people aren't getting burnt, is it intellectual laziness to grunt "good enough" on my way to more pressing matters? Perhaps. This whole essay reads to me as a way to judge and find wanting the kind of person whose apparent curiosity stopped at how to do their job. The point of the essay (although it took a lot of curiosity on my part to tease it out) is apparently to say "don't let the fact that it is known stop you from finding out yourself", but it ended up sounding like "if you're taking anything as received knowledge, you're abdicating your responsibility as a thinking entity".

> It is the mark of the marvelous toleration of the Athenians that they let this continue for decades and that it wasn't till Socrates turned seventy that they broke down and forced him to drink poison.

Savage.

A philosophy professor I had when I was an undergrad, asked the question "Why did Socrates deliver the Apology in such a way that was clearly unapologetic and designed to annoy the Athenians"? His answer was that he thought Socrates was old and wanted to go out with a bang. I thought his answer had merit, and also that it was an answer I, at 19, would never have come up with. At 70, I go "oh, yeah, baby".

Sounds like he finally pissed off the wrong guy.

It isn't only about the degree of wrongness, but its type:

1. Vacuous, which provide no useful insight beyond what is obviously deducible. Such as "nearsightedness is caused by the wrong shape of the eye".

2. Vanity, which provide useless elaboration of something that is very well understood in a much simpler form, with no realistic hope of any future insight. Such as most of linguistics.

3. Pointless. Explain something that is difficult to get to know, because it matters so little. While technically correct, the actual facts matter so little that they result in no realistic improvement of any kind, and no decisions are changed as the result of the new knowledge. Such as the age of Earth.

4. Theoretically wrong, those that the article is talking about. Even though theoretically wrong, the are so nearly equivalent to the actual truth, that the difference doesn't matter in practice.

5. Practically wrong. Those that "sound good" so that people stick to them, in spite of massive evidence to the contrary. Such as that obesity is caused by overeating, in spite of the near universal failure in practice, in the last instance of Ozempic making people look like walking corpses, rather than anything like a healthy body. This is the kind of errors meant by those who write to people like Asimov.

I firmly believe, more and more each day, that the human mind does not seek truth or correctness, it primarily seeks satisfaction.

The context for satisfaction is different for every individual human. Some parts of the context are shared (to various degrees). These 'shared contexts' we might call rationality, or science, or society, or religion.

Another part of the problem is that satisfaction is recursive.

We may evaluate something based on:

    1. Correctness
    2. Completeness
    3. Satisfaction

For instance, if you are only aware of Electromagnetism, then Maxwell's equations are correct, complete, and satisfying. And then some jerk discovers neutrons.

Anyway, this whole comment may fit into your first three points; or it may help someone understand a failure to communicate.

Obesity is caused by overeating though, at the very least in the same sense that nearsightedness is caused by the wrong shape of the eye.

You have made an interesting point but I think your arguments would have more force if you exercised some restraint in categorically stating your opinions about what is wrong and in what way as facts, basically.

Anyway, while I agree on these other types of "wrong" being important, I don't know about calling 1-3. wrong, per se. Also, I'm curious what part of linguistics you consider to belong under the "vanity" label, and why it would be apt to call "pointless" facts (like the age of the Earth) wrong.

> obviously deducible. Such as "nearsightedness is caused by the wrong shape of the eye"

Not obvious at all. According to Wikipedia it was discovered in 17th century. About only half century earlier than the discovery of bacteria.

While far-sightedness can be caused by shape, OR loss of elasticity in the lens as one ages.

> 3. Pointless. Explain something that is difficult to get to know, because it matters so little. While technically correct, the actual facts matter so little that they result in no realistic improvement of any kind, and no decisions are changed as the result of the new knowledge. Such as the age of Earth.

It's bizarre to even consider that investigating the age of the Earth is "pointless". Finding out the age of our planet and other celestial bodies matters a lot in astronomy! Understanding the universe is the opposite of pointless, it's fascinating.

Or did you mean something else?

>In his discussions of such matters as "What is justice?" or "What is virtue?" he took the attitude that he knew nothing and had to be instructed by others. By pretending ignorance, Socrates lured others into propounding their views on such abstractions. Socrates then, by a series of ignorant-sounding questions, forced the others into such a mélange of self-contradictions that they would finally break down and admit they didn't know what they were talking about.

See also: Jordan Peterson et al. Our tendency to favor logical correctness over empirical correctness is one of our most dangerous cognitive biases. It's very easy to convince people to believe arguments that are perfectly logically consistent in their own self-constructed reality but have no bearing on empirical reality, over arguments that conform to empirical reality but may not have perfect logical consistency. Empirical reality is messy and it's difficult to construct a perfectly consistent set of axioms around it; constructed reality is neat and thus trivial to construct sets of perfectly consistent axioms around it.

Yes. People like to think in terms of 100% or 0%. Never anything in between. Even though almost everything falls somewhere in between. That's why I like bits and dislike q-bits, for example.

The irony of my own statement dawned on me when I discovered that some people suggest that 2 + 2 does not necessarily equal 4, but could also equal 22.

There is no doubt that the exact sciences have something more than philosophy.

It's always a pleasure to read Isaac. Well, almost, I should say.

I grew up fascinated by these essays from maybe age 8 onward.

Now I realize the pervasive bad faith in them, e.g. dismissing Murray (The Bell Curve) and enthronizing the in-retrospect-irrelevant Jay Gould. I knew his novels were kind of silly, but he was supposed to be a Scientist educating us in the scientific view of the world, goddamn it.

> enthronizing the in-retrospect-irrelevant Jay Gould

What? Stephen Jay Gould is not irrelevant.

> I knew his novels were kind of silly

They are not silly. They belong to a different era of Science Fiction, sure. But silly? (He did engage in intentionally goofy humor, of course, but I don't think that's what you meant).

> he was supposed to be a Scientist educating us in the scientific view of the world, goddamn it.

Asimov? He was!

So is this essay the source of “Less Wrong”?

This is an article where I agree with its statements yet disagree with its spirit. Everything written is true, but has to be put in context - the writer he's responding to was challenging these specific claims:

> what I meant was that we now know the basic rules governing the Universe ... We also know the basic rules governing the subatomic particles and their interrelationships ... What's more, we have found that the galaxies and clusters of galaxies are the basic units of the physical Universe ...

I don't think there's anything wrong with making casual statements of this sort, but I also don't think there's anything wrong with pointing out (in response) that these statements are philosophically unrigorous. I mean, what makes something a "basic rule", and how can you tell that we have apprehended all such rules in existence?

I don't think this is right.

The English Lit professor was effectively arguing we cannot know anything; that any certainty is bound to be as false as any debunked theories of the past; that people of the past were also sure of their silly notions and look where they are now; etc.

This is what Asimov is essentially rejecting (in a humorous manner; it's important to know Asimov's claims that he's "never wrong" were to be taken with humor. He was quite the comedian).

Essentially, Asimov is saying to the professor:

- You are wrong in believing nothing can be known.

- You are not saying anything new or unknown to people of science. We've thought of this and have ways of testing our ideas and of evaluating their relative merits.

- Even if two theories are wrong, it's misleading to conclude "everything is equally wrong, therefore assertions about the universe are reckless", because there are degrees of wrongness, and some knowledge that is wrong is nevertheless more useful than other knowledge that is also wrong.

We can never know if this English Lit professor ever existed or is just a rhetorical device by Asimov, but we do know one thing for certain:

He/she was wrong. The wrong kind of wrong, too!

All I can say about this as a dude with a doctorate in physics and an interest in foundations is: I guess, dude, if this is how you want to live your life.

It isn't that I agree with the person who wrote Asimov the letter (in fact, based on his description, I frankly wonder if the letter writer wasn't my father). Its just that there is something subtly wrong with Asimov's view of the progress of scientific knowledge.

At least its extremely instrumentalist. If we think of knowledge as a sort of temporary mental state which lives between setting up a physical state and making a measurement, then, yes, knowledge has progressed in exactly the way that Asimov is saying. And that is nothing to sneeze at.

But like consider quantum mechanics. People still cannot make heads or tails of what the ontology of quantum mechanics is, despite some compelling stories. And that makes perfect sense since QM is not compatible with special or general relativity! So its dumb to try and make sense of what QM tells us about what is. So why not try to understand what the ontology of QFT is? This seems reasonable, since QFT is capable of making correct predictions (at least in the scattering regime) and is invariant. But no one on earth can write down a coherent mathematical theory of QFT, so interpretation is even more difficult than QM. And this is yet to even try to tackle with conceptual gap between GR and QM/QFT, where we genuinely are perplexed but at least have good reason to think that the final interpretation of QM or spacetime has to have something to do with the way that the two theories interact.

From this point of view as our ability to connect experiment with outcome has increased our ability to actually say what it is we are even talking about outside of the purely instrumental has decreased since the 19th Century. Back then we though we knew that there were atoms or electrons or whatever. Light waves or photons. Now, I would argue very strenuously, we genuinely have no understanding at all of what those things are outside of a set of purely instrumental definitions which leave a lot to be desired.

My personal understanding here is that really there are no electrons, photons, quantum fields, masses, gravity. There is just the single substance of the universe which we have learned to manipulate and predict with ever improving precision (in limited cases). Maybe that is knowledge? Doesn't always feel like it.

As another dude with a doctorate in Physics, I have to disagree with you (at least somewhat).

> From this point of view as our ability to connect experiment with outcome has increased our ability to actually say what it is we are even talking about outside of the purely instrumental has decreased since the 19th Century. Back then we though we knew that there were atoms or electrons or whatever. Light waves or photons. Now, I would argue very strenuously, we genuinely have no understanding at all of what those things are outside of a set of purely instrumental definitions which leave a lot to be desired.

I disagree with this entirely. The existence of QFT, and our knowledge of the inconsistency between say GR and the quantum realm does not negate the idea of photons and electrons as real, measurable quantities. The fact that we have GR does not negate the fact that we still use Newtonian gravity in regimes where it is sufficiently accurate.

All the new knowledge we have learned still is (and absolutely must be) consistent with our old knowledge that has been proven correct in the regimes that they were proven correct.

This is effectively what Asimov is saying (as I understand anyway) - the knowledge that the Earth is a sphere does not invalidate the assumption that the Earth is flat approximately and locally.

I would also argue that the only things we can "know" are what you call the instrumental definitions. We only know what we measure. The rest is interpretation, and self-consistent understanding.

String theory can tell me that we have several dimensions etc but until we have a way to measure and check it remains a conceptual framework to make predictions, rather than a description of how things really are.

GR is much closer to a description. It told us about the precession of mercury, it told us to account for time dilation so we can use GPS satellites. It also predicted black holes, which were conceptually consistent but it's only been in the last ~ 5 years that we have the closest thing yet to experimental verification with the Event Horizon Telescope and gravitational wave measurements. If another theory comes along and explains all of GR with a different explanation for black holes, we will need still more accurate measurements to discriminate between the two theories. Knowledge is only as accurate as we can measure.

I agree much more with your approach.

The way I've heard it best described is these notions of electrons and photons etc will still be retained as a special case of whatever theory supersedes them, which is critical, because that's at the heart of the "relativity of wrong" argument.

Some take the prospect of a future revision of theories to mean our present state of knowledge is no different than any prior failed theory, which I think is an urgently, catastrophically wrong, catastrophically confused way to regard the history of scientific knowledge.

QM is so platonic though. Reality consists, ultimately, of forms that can only be described mathematically. It just happens that the math returns (what we see) as a probability distribution/wave function.

I’ve never quite understood what a quantum theory of gravity would be though. QM involves the observer but gravity engages spacetime - the place where you are observing things. A quantum field theory of gravity seems like a contradiction in terms to me. Unless quantum gravity is really about the Big Bang?

I don't think you get my point because I don't think of anything you are saying as having anything to do with what I was saying.

If you have a purely instrumentalist view of reality, where, as I said, your so-called knowledge is actually just a model of an unknown thing which you employ to predict the measurements you read out against a ruler or on a meter or something, then yes, we've made progress exactly of the kind you describe.

But I was trying to make a point about epistemology and ontology. Physics has actually been pretty catastrophic for ontology. I don't think its wrong to say that from the point of view of physics we simply do not know what anything actually is.

> I would also argue that the only things we can "know" are what you call the instrumental definitions. We only know what we measure. The rest is interpretation, and self-consistent understanding.

Yes. But this is a fairly radical position historically and philosophically. Most people would say that there is more to existence than measurement and I while I share your instrumentalist sympathies, like most physicists, I don't see the philosophical case that we can have a consistent worldview if we denounce all knowledge not related to measurement as a total non-starter.

Think about what instrumentalism really means. When you utter the sentence the earth is an oblate spheroid, you are actually making an incredibly complicated set of statements about the outcomes of experiments. If we take the instrumentalist view the measurement doesn't actually tell us the earth is an oblate spheroid - it just tells us that if we make a series of measurements then they come out in such a way as to be concordant with a model of the earth as an oblate spheroid. Are you really prepared to give up the idea that the earth is a thing you can know about?

I actually rather think physics strongly encourages us to adopt the instrumentalist view, primarily because it seems so clear that physics has a local character. In GR there simply is no state of affairs whatever about what is happening "right now" except at the point in spacetime where you make a measurement. Really think about what that means. If we are standing at the north pole and make a measurement of some kind, how can it pertain to the earth as a distributed object in space when we know GR says there is no state of affairs pertaining to that object at the moment of the measurement?

GR tells us all about what the outcome of various measurements will be, but it also calls into question what precisely those measurements might mean. The instrumentalist is committed to the idea that the only thing we can talk about is the results of measurements. What the measurements operate on is just not something we can know. I think that's weird. Physicists often conflate their mathematical models with reality and that lets them think an instrumentalist view is sufficient: the measurements coming out such and such a way is taken as evidence that the universe is filled with objects consistent with the model. But that association is non-trivial in modern physics.

I'm not a native speaker so I had to look up what "ontology" means specifically, and what I got is : "The branch of metaphysics that deals with the nature of being. " (among other things)

I agree in that sense that physics does not do well here. I actually think physics _cannot_ do well here. Physics (and the "hard" sciences more generally) are good at describing what something is, and how it interacts with things around it. We "know" by assembling individual pieces of information that form a consistent model, then declare that model to be true. When a piece of information outside of that model arises, we then have to call that model in question.

I do not "know" the Earth is spherical from direct experience. I do "know" it from other indirect means - reading, measurements, images from space and so on. I do not also think that Asimov is saying anything about how we know what we know - he just talks about how "science is wrong" is not a true statement. Science is always approximately correct, but how approximate is the question.

So perhaps I'm missing the point entirely here, but I don't understand your distinction of "instrumentalist knowledge" vs other kinds of knowledge. If you say physics cannot explain my knowledge that I enjoy watching the sunrise - then absolutely yes. That is not it's realm. In the same way that physics cannot explain the history of medieval China to me. A common issue among physicists is to assume that this is the only way to view the world, and I disagree with that. There are many systems of knowledge, and each is good at certain things. Rejecting one as the "global" system misses the richness of other kinds of knowledge building.

To be honest, I think you're straying from science into philosophy.

"The nature of being", "ontology", "it calls into question what precisely those measurements might mean".

Science is not about the search for meaning, it's about describing and understanding the physical and natural world. Meaning is up to you, and me, and everyone else.

Asimov was not talking about meaning.

It's easy to see that he wasn't, because nobody would make the categorical statement that there's unequivocal progress in the search for meaning, because meaning is such a cultural (and personal) thing. Meaning is not scientific, and is highly subjective. I wouldn't even know how to measure meaning. Self-reporting? Chemically measured happiness? What.

Had the English professor complained "we think we know so much, yet we're so ignorant about what it all means! People are so unfulfilled, live such empty lives! Wake up, sheeple!" I bet Asimov would have... -- well, he probably would have had humorous words for that too, but his argument would have been different.

Your answer here puzzles me.

It seems as if you intended it to disagree with Asimov, while in practice you actually agree with him and disagree with the English Lit professor?

Yeah, I'm not disagreeing with Asimov at all, I just think his characterization of physics as constituting knowledge is overly enthusiastic. Like, yes, its clear physics constitutes knowledge of some sort, but I think its much less knowledge of what things actually are than Asimov might be prepared to entertain.

The reason I raise the point is that its at least conceivable that we could have found ourselves in a world where physics discovered a fundamental ontology of the universe. Eg, maybe we could have discovered that quantum fields could be consistently described at all scales and thus we could more definitively say "yes, Virginia, the universe is composed of quantum fields." But we did not find this. Quantum Fields are widely understood to be effective descriptions of some unknown phenomenon which may not even resemble anything which makes intuitive sense with the rest of the way we think about physics. And all of that is to say nothing about quantum mechanics or quantum gravity.

This isn't a trivial observation. We seemed to know more and more about the ontology of the world up to and perhaps slightly after the annus mirabilis. Simply establishing that atoms existed was a sort of ontological climax which then unraveled into a flaccid denouement as quantum mechanics and then QFT and the inability to formulate quantum gravity cast deep doubt on what things are even made of or whether its even possible to conceive of things at all. I stress again, this might not have happened. I can imagine some possible world where t'Hooft like cellular automata were somehow confirmed and the question of ontology was well and truly put to bed or at least for any but the most extreme philosophical skeptics.

But aren't you essentially arguing that, indeed, there's wrong and there's wronger, and refuting the English professor who seemed to argue that "everyone is wrong but until shown this they are convinced they are right, therefore all knowledge is impossible"? (i.e. a slightly less new age version of "everything is relative!").

In other words, that Asimov is saying 2+2=5, while the English professor is saying "there's not difference between 5 and 'purple' as an answer!".

In other words, don't you agree with main point of the article?

I think we do understand a lot about the universe, even though there's also a huge amount we don't. I do think we understand "the basis" as Asimov put it -- it's just that even with the basis there's a lot we don't understand.

This was a very fun read. Any other recommendations similar to this?

Lockhart's Lament

For a second I thought this was an invocation of one of those informal "laws" (like a Murphys Law or Sturgeons Law), describing the feeling of finding one great thing and lamenting that there's no more like it.

So the hope of it being your discovery of a rich genre turns into the lament that it's one of one (how I feel about the Three Body Problem). But no, it's a real book. And looks like a great suggestion from what I can tell on wiki.

Yes, This was a very very very fun read.........

When my daughter was in middle school we were discussing some concept she learned in Biology that wasn't precisely wrong but wasn't right in all use cases. I told her that a model didn't have to be true to be useful. She said "that's a good way of thinking about it" and since that is such a rare complement from a teenager I have remembered it ever since.

I think it's true though. I think a good science teacher can say from the outset that we don't know it all and science is always growing and changing.

He’s not wrong

If nothing else, I'm glad one of the great agrees with me that Socrates was a twat.

My wife and I always argue about that, she loves Socrates and I find him utterly insufferable. Plato didn't do him any favors.

In fairness, I don't think Socrates went around Athens quizzing people chosen randomly on the street. He was having conversations with the wealthy and/or powerful who were also arrogant and considered themselves wise. Making fools of these people is of course what got him into big trouble eventually.

Which doesn't mean he wasn't an insufferable douche.