Science - Idealistic Versus Signaling

Separate comment to so it can be voted on separately: I don't know how you get this:

the fact that there hasn't been any fundamental breakthroughs in the last fifty years

I think you can only justify it by arbitrarily relabeling the progress of the last 50 years as "engineering" rather than science. This would be unfair, because the new technologies and capabilities did require new scientific advances to overcome the specific practical problems of getting them to work against everything Nature may throw at it.

Such advances may individually have less theoretical generality, but add them up, count the impact on our lives, and it's huge.

To avoid a long debate about this or that recent breakthrough, let me just borrow a point from (the usually angering) Steven Landsburg, who discusses a book written and set in 1991 -- less than 20 years ago -- with the following plot elements:

1) A door-to-door saleswoman pitches (hardcopy) encyclopedias to customers who eagerly seek easy access to vast quantities of information.

2) A man is eager to read an obscure novel he’s heard about, so he scours used book stores, hoping to find a copy. In the meantime, he’s not sure what the novel is about, and has no way to find out.

3) A comedian stores his collection of jokes on notecards, filling two rooms worth of file cabinets.

4) A collector of sound effects stores her collection on cassette tapes, and has no cost-effective way to create backups.

5) A man is unable to stay in close contact with his (adult) children, because long distance calling rates are prohibitively high.

Notice how archaic all of that looks to us?

Thanks for posting this. I'm reminded of the Politics as Mind-killer phenomenon. I attempt to generalize it as:

"Once the question of resource allocation starts to hinge on certain facts, people have a huge impetus to argue for the facts being in whatever way serves them, no matter how logically independent those facts are from their values."

So if some issue of public debate hinged on whether 1+1=2, you would find amazingly good arguments for why it's wrong, if people stood to gain from an implication of it being wrong.

The two important lessons to draw are:

1) In the pursuit of truth, you must always be on the lookout for the motive force of the resource-seeking that hinges on not finding the truth.

2) As in the link above, human thought does not naturally and neatly divide into beliefs and values: the values can yank beliefs "along for the ride", so speak.

This puzzle - the apparent conflict between the truth-seeking understanding of science (e.g. Popper), and the sociology approach (which as I understand it doesn't predict that scientists do find even approximations of the truth) - is very interesting.

A philosopher that I spoke with at the Singularity Summit made the observation that everyone there seemed to be familar and comfortable with Popper but there were almost no mentions of Kuhn. My understanding of why the scientists and technologists at the summit didn't mention Kuhn is that his theory of how science works isn't (obviously) usable. There will be paradigms, and paradigm shift - but as a practictioner, what do you suggest I actually do?

Pickering's "Mangle" concept may be applicable. I've been trying to digest his "The Mangle of Practice" into a top-level LW post, but other priorities keep getting in the way.

Pickering is a sociologist (and therefore writes in a style that I find annoying and off-putting) but he includes as "actors" non-human entities (like microscopes or bubble chambers). This makes his theory less human-society-centric and more recognizable and sensical to a non-sociologist. Unlike Kuhn, I think Pickering's mangle might be able to be applied in improved methodology.

As a programmer, the best way I can explain the "Mangle" (Pickering's theory) is by reference to programming.

In trying to do something with a computer, you start with a goal, a desired "capture of non-human agency" - that is, something that you want the computer to do. You interact with the computer, alternating between human-acts-on-computer (edit) phases, and computer-acts-on-human (run) phases. In this process, the computer may display "resistances" and, as a consequence, you might change your goals. Not all things are possible or feasible, and one way that we discover impossibilities and infeasibilities is via these resistances. Pickering would say that your goals have been "mangled". Symmetrically, the computer program gets mangled by your agency (mangled into existence, even).

Pickering says that all of science and technology can be described by an actor network including both human and non-human components, mangling each other over time, and in his book he has some carefully-worked out examples (e.g. he applies his theory to Hamilton's invention of quaternions) which seem pretty convincing to me.

I'll contribute my hypothesis for why science hasn't made as much progress since 1920, even though I have no special conviction in it. I just thought about the problem recently and it was the best I came up with.

First, I asked a few people to see if they thought it was the case, also, that science hasn't been progressing 'lately'. The small set of answers were unanimous with respect to basic science (e.g. physics) but it was pointed out that plenty of progress has been made in biology and medicine (e.g.,genome project) and technology fields.

My hypothesis is that we evolved a paradigm for science and thinking in the 18th/19th centuries that was really good at systematizing, and we quickly did all the systematizing we readily could. (All the low-hanging fruit.) For another big jump in progress, we need a new, qualitatively different way of thinking about science that is not based on systematizing.

(I personally don't like this hypothesis because I like systematizing and would hope it could be ever-productive.)

A second hypothesis I heard from one of the people I asked is that all the progress has in fact been indirectly due to Gauss; he laid the seeds for all the progress we've made, and we just need to wait for another systematizing genius to come along. I consider this remotely possible, because Gauss significantly touched so many fields.

With respect to the hypothesis of this post, I think there are certain inefficiencies built into the system (endless grant writing, publication gymnastics, etc.) and possibly more publications than necessary clogging up the system, but that there are good scientists doing good science so it's not really such a problem as to be an explanation for the lack of productivity. I guess what I'm saying is that I believe science is both incremental hard work and progress with big game-changing ideas. We've been doing the incremental work well enough, perhaps, but it all seems incremental lately (after calculus, classical mechanics, relativity, .etc).

(My SO criticizes over my shoulder -- what about Quantum Field heory in the 1950s?)

Later edit: was this down-voted for being off-topic, chatty, noisy or proposing unlikely hypotheses?

There is a fantastic 24 part CBC podcast called How to think about science mp3 format here. It interviews 24 different research scientists and philosophy of science experts on the history and different views of both the scientific process, historical trends and the role of science in society. It is beyond well worth the time to listen to.

I have found that the series confirms what scientists have known already: Researchers rarely behave differently as a group than any other profession, yet they are presented as a non biased objective homogeneous group by most (Of course there are always outliers). Indeed the sciences are much more social than most would indicate and I think as you point out peer review indicates "social networking" best.

This is nothing new, after all, theories and their acceptance have meant nothing without a strong group of well respected researchers around it.

Bureaucrats, and especially teachers, will tend strongly toward the signaling and control view.

The U.S. government now requires that research it sponsors be placed into open-access databases. You could say that this was driven by legislatures via public pressure, but it's still a case of government-backed open-acess.

I think it's important not to conflate two separate issues.

The term 'science' is used to denote both the scientific method and also the social structure that performs science. It's critical to separate these in ones mind.

What you call "idealistic science" is the scientific method; what you call "social network" science is essentially a human construct aimed at getting science done. I think this is basically what you said.

The key point, and where I seem to disagree with you, is that these views are not mutually exclusive. I see 'social network' science as a reasonably successful mechanism to take humans, with all their failings, and end up with, at least some, 'idealistic science' as an output.

You do that by awarding people a higher status when they show a more detailed understanding of nature. I would agree that this process is subject to all kinds of market failures, but I don't think that it's as bad as you make out. And I certainly don't think that it has anything to do with why we haven't discovered quantum gravity (which, it appears, is the only discovery that would satisfy your definition of progress). There is literally no field of human endeavour that isn't defined by a search for status; 'network science' accepts this and asks how can we use our rationality to structure the game so that when we win, we win from both a individual perspective (get promoted to professor) and a team perspective (humanity gets new understanding/technology/wealth).

But this in no way calls into question 'idealistic science' since 'network science' is merely the process by which we try to attain 'idealistic science' in the real world.

[full disclosure: I am a young scientist]

I wonder how much of the fact that there hasn't been any fundamental breakthroughs in the last fifty years has to do with the effective takeover of science by academics and government - that is by the signaling and control view. Maybe we have too many "accredited" scientists and they are too beholden to government, and to a lesser extent other grant-making organizations - and they have crowded out or controlled real, idealistic science.

If this is so, then there should be an observable effect when comparing between countries, shouldn't there? Hard to see how one country having massive academic/government control of science could affect all other countries to an equal level. Oughtn't there be research on this? It's an obvious question and has equally obvious ideological value, so funding wouldn't be such an issue.

Nobel laureates is one possible metric: http://www.nationmaster.com/graph/peo_nob_pri_lau_percap-nobel-prize-laureates-per-capita Looks pretty much like one would expect: a bias towards northern Europe (likely in part due to Literature & Peace), and then G8 countries. Only #3, Switzerland, is a country I've ever heard as having a relatively small government.

Or here's a statistical study of scientific papers published per nation: http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/story.asp?storyCode=190149 US, then UK, then Japan, then Germany & France. All places with very large powerful governments.

I suppose you could explain both those away as being already corrupted (#1) and entirely unrelated to actual scientific productivity (especially of breakthroughs), but then you're paddling upstream...

You're conflating normative and positive views of science. Hanson believes in the Signalling model, but I'm not sure he thinks this is desirable, whereas you make it sound like the senior scientists view it as desirable.

Peer review is just a slightly more formal kind of debate, but debate doesn't work and isn't about finding truth.

Traditional empirical science depends on a mechanistic (as opposed to humanistic) principle for obtaining truth: the scientific method.

The traditional scientific method provides a strong principle for evaluating theories. For some fields of inquiry (physics, chemistry), this principle works very well. But modern scientists want theories about economics, nutrition, medicine, climate change, computer vision, and so on. The traditional method does not justify theories in these fields.

To go further, we must discover new mechanistic principles of truth-seeking. We should never ask: "What would it be good to know?" That road leads to alchemy. Rather we should ask: "For what types of questions can the answers be evaluated by mechanistic principles?"

Tyler's last name is "Cowen," not "Cowan."

I believe that Morendil did not understand that the work of Morpurgo simply showed on the largest quantity of material then used ( a few milligrams) that FREE quarks do not exist. His result has been confimed by others (Smith, Perl etc.) on other materials. The result of Fairbank - also considered in the book of Pickering- is wrong.