That's just human beings acting like human beings. Every orthodoxy behaves the same way up to a point because this is how primate power hierarchies behave.
The thing that makes science different isn't that scientists are more rational than everyone else but that it's possible to challenge a scientific finding with evidence. Even with evidence some people will still resist, but if you publish your experiment and your findings and it gets replicated you at least have a chance of changing enough minds to change overall opinion quickly.
Other kinds of dogmas such as religious or (most) political ideologies are untestable and therefore impossible to challenge in any way other than through force or sophistry (force of mental gymnastics?). Opinions in those spheres therefore change very, very slowly and usually more in response to unrelated events such as demographic shifts or wars than in response to anything relevant to the topic.
> The thing that makes science different isn't that scientists are more rational than everyone else but that it's possible to challenge a scientific finding with evidence. Even with evidence some people will still resist, but if you publish your experiment and your findings and it gets replicated you at least have a chance of changing enough minds to change overall opinion quickly.
I don't know. I'm quite a fan of Lynn Waterhouse's 2013 book Rethinking Autism: Variation and Complexity. Waterhouse argues that there has never been any good scientific evidence to support the existence of autism or ASD, that what evidence has accumulated undermines rather than supports the theory that it exists, and that it is past time that researchers abandoned the concept and moved on to something else. (At the end of her book, she tentatively proposes replacing the concept of autism/ASD with "phenotypes of neurodevelopmental social impairment".)
But I very much get the impression that few want to take her argument seriously, not due to the quality of her arguments, but because people have so much invested into the concept of autism/ASD – there is a whole community of people who identify with the concept as a diagnosis for themselves and their family members, there are many professionals who have built their entire career on the concept, entire institutions, billions of dollars of funding (both for research and for support services), and Waterhouse's ideas are just too threatening to all of that for many people to seriously consider them. The social, cultural, political and economic/financial factors supporting the theory are more important than the question of its scientific truth.
(To be clear, Waterhouse doesn't deny that the symptoms of autism/ASD, in their immense variety, actually exist. She has spent much of her career working with children who suffer from these symptoms, and she knows how disabling they can be for individuals and their families. But she argues that autism/ASD is a scientific dead-end in terms of actually finding effective treatments for these symptoms, that abandoning the concept is necessary to move the research forward to discovering their real causes, which will hopefully lead in turn to effective treatments for them.)
But researchers and clinicians don't believe that ASD is a single disorder. No professional assumes that clinical classification implies only a single underlying etiology, and a cluster of phenotypes for clinical distress is precisely what a classification is for.
In Waterhouse's book, she isn't simply assuming that "ASD is a single disorder". (Although she does argue that if you study the history of ASD research, a lot of it has been based on that assumption, and that even in recent years people still get funding for research projects which effectively presume that.)
One of her arguments in particular is that the tying of the two symptom domains of social impairments and repetitive behaviours into a single disorder – or group of related disorders, or spectrum – (she doesn't think those three different framings of "ASD" ultimately change the conclusion) lacks good scientific justification. But, that was one of Kanner's most basic assumptions, and if you break that link what you have isn't autism anymore – you've actually got something much closer to her own proposal of "phenotypes of neurodevelopmental social impairment" (or, DSM-5 social pragmatic communication disorder with the repetitive behaviour exclusion removed)
my working hypothesis on spectrums of all sorts is that we inevitably misrepresent the extremes as separate phenomena (because, strong esteem boost for the “discoverer”), rather than the ends of a continuous distribution, and that causes us to misunderstand all sorts of as-yet-unexplained phenomena as problems. severe autism certainly looks like something different, but we’ve let the label, and the stigmatization that inevitably follows, to trickle down the distribution until it butts unnaturally right up against “normal” (asperger’s, in this example), creating cognitive dissonances we can’t reconcile. you also see this with adhd, introversion/extroversion, and all sorts of psychosocial categorizations.
> severe autism certainly looks like something different
Some authors [0] have criticised that idea though. Severe ASD very often (but not always) co-occurs with intellectual disability, but intellectual disability with and without ASD don't actually look that different from each other, and we really have to ask how useful it is to distinguish ASD from non-ASD in cases of intellectual disability. Added to that, in many jurisdictions people with an ASD diagnosis get better services, so there is continuing pressure to reclassify people from ID without ASD to ID with ASD, not justified on any scientific grounds, but simply because they'll get better supports with the ASD label than without it. That has driven a lot of diagnostic substitution from pure ID to ID+ASD, and lends support to the argument that the whole thing is more about society and culture than actual science
[0] see for example Graham Collins, "Does a Diagnosis of ASD Help Us to Help a Person with Intellectual Disabilities?" in Katherine Runswick-Cole, Rebecca Mallett, Sami Timimi (editors). Re-Thinking Autism: Diagnosis, Identity and Equality. Jessica Kingsley Publishers, 2016. pp. 204–220
yah, such misdiagnoses are a perversion created by the financial incentives at play in psychosocial disorders. it certainly doesn’t help with treatment, only with getting paid for it, dropping negative externalities on the patient along the way. i have a therapist friend who has said as much using different words.
my main point, which i think coincides with the underlying thread of yours, is that (many/most) named disorders are extremes of the human condition, so instead of looking for “what’s wrong”, let’s look for “what’s too much/too little” about them. and for the non-severe versions, let’s mostly just broaden the definition of “normal” to include them and just collectively get better at cherishing and accommodating the amazing diversity of human experience.
> The only requirement is for ideas to be popular within a large community that finds them legitimate.
We live in a community and aren’t individually capable of mastering all these modern competencies. The healthy way to manage these burdens is to share them with community members and to trade on faith or credibility.
We can’t all be empiricists. Unfortunately communities can vary drastically in the number of lawyers, doctors, dentists, and scientists made available, and some have become thoroughly infected with misinformation, such as anti-COVID folks.
Not going to defend that phrasing, but I do think that a lay person questioning *scientific consensus is generally of zero usefulness.
Loeb's assertions are generally rejected by the scientific mainstream precisely because they are questioned. If they weren't questioned (if he wasn't a domain expert), they'd be ignored.
I think they usually don't get anywhere, but i think its important that the general public realizes that science is a process, and one that can be argued about using evidence. I think a lot of harm comes from treating scientists like priests who reveal divine infalliable wisdom to the mere mortals - in a certain way it even promotes the crazies, since once people start treating science as Truth capital T, beyond questioning, its just as logical for them to switch to some other Truth, whether it be flat earth or whatever.
I really don't think most people are confused about this - most understand science is a process backed by evidence. When people say "trust the science" they aren't pointing to an immutable conclusion. Generally, at the level of lay people the science being discussed isn't even complicated enough where the process of inquiry is even terribly relevant - there's lots to learn about the origins of the Earth, but "trusting the science" on the fact that the solar system is heliocentric is perfectly valid outside of doing your own experiments.
> since once people start treating science as Truth capital T,
Woo backed by "science" (see every invocation of "quantum physics" in New Age shit) isn't new, and is not the same as the overwhelming consensus on the efficacy of the Pfizer vaccine, for instance.
That's sophistry shrouded as science, because it's looking to push an agenda and therefore it tries to fit results to a hypothesis, instead of testing the hypothesis with the results.
For any given phenomenon, I don't care what, it is only true to the extent that you can test it in every possible way and still obtain the same results. Anyone who blocks this questioning and testing, is practicing dogma and guarding a belief, instead of doing actual science.
Per usual, it depends :. I am a Catholic who has been told by atheists not to ask questions about meaning because it is “dangerous” (i.e. to run from certain questions).
There are questions that have answers that are beyond the scientific method (e.g. does grandma love you?). They are fascinating to contemplate :)
I'm not sure we're disagreeing here, and also don't see how it depends.
Religion and science do overlap, but their underlying frameworks are like yin and yang. One is about faith, and the other is about doubt.
Without doubt, there is no need to test something, as you already have the answer. Religion is about having faith, and faith is about not doubting. They do overlap, and the overlap is not perfectly clear, so I can see how some can get confused and think there is science that you cannot doubt, but this is false.
As far as gramma loving you, I think you can doubt that... and you can test it, right? You can test people's love, and you can collect results over time and then derive conclusions. Maybe the nature of love itself is untestable, and therefore has no framework on which to be doubted, so the nature of love itself might be of a religious nature and it then becomes about faith.
> Religion is about having faith, and faith is about not doubting
Here you are giving a definition of "faith" which many religious people would disagree with. Faith is compatible with doubt, and I don't think "absence of doubt" is a very good definition of "faith".
You can't doubt everything. At some point you have to just accept that some doubts are not worth entertaining, at least not for you. Philosophers produce all kinds of doubts–e.g. doubting whether other minds exist, doubting that I am just a brain in a vat (or a Boltzmann brain), or that this universe is actually a computer simulation, or that we are being actively deceived by superintelligent aliens who find deception entertaining (I actually read that example in a philosophy book recently, although obviously it is just a slight updating of Descartes' malin génie). Scientists choose to ignore doubts that philosophers entertain, all the time. Scientists also choose to ignore doubts about theories that are outside their area of professional expertise – maybe some mainstream theory in astrophysics is completely wrong, and the fringe voices saying it is wrong are actually right, but if you are a biologist, that's completely outside your field of expertise, so it isn't worth your while to even consider the question.
And it is totally possible to believe in a religion yet still experience periods of doubt about whether its doctrines are true. Many religious leaders will say that's not a sin at all, just one of the trials of this life. (Of course, are others who say doubting is a sin – I think that's a pretty sure sign that one is in a harmful group and one ought to get out.) But, on the other hand, if someone doesn't experience doubt about some religious idea in which they believe, and they choose to disregard those doubts when expressed by others, how is what they are doing fundamentally different from the doubt-ignoring scientists I mentioned above?
> Scientists choose to ignore doubts that philosophers entertain, all the time.
Right, I didn't say all scientists do is doubt. Science can always be doubted, and more importantly, if some concept or idea makes itself immune to doubt, it is not science. Example: doubting Newton's laws of gravity may have seemed to be a worthless effort (because you can test it and get the same results), however Einstein has proven otherwise, and there's no reason to think General Relativity is beyond doubt. Anyone can doubt anything in science, but of course you have to back it up with something that is testable and then prove it.
> And it is totally possible to believe in a religion yet still experience periods of doubt about whether its doctrines are true
Yes it's possible to doubt a religion, but to that extent, you are not part of it. Christians cannot be doubting Jesus as the Son of God, unless you're not a Christian. Same goes with Islam and Mohammad. You can create your own branch of a religion, and set your own rules, but the core of each religion is based on faith, which means you can't question it, you have to follow. That's the point of religion, to believe.
I think you're using "doubt" to mean not being sure of the meaning of something, which is different than doubting the validity or the veracity of something. So I can doubt the meaning of a Bible passage, but I cannot doubt the existence of God, unless I'm not part of that religion.
Science must allow doubt in regards to its own validity, because it validates itself through tests which must yield the same result. Religion/faith must NOT allow doubt in its teachings because doing so would mean it is not true (because there is no way to test it).
> Yes it's possible to doubt a religion, but to that extent, you are not part of it. Christians cannot be doubting Jesus as the Son of God, unless you're not a Christian.
Not all Christians would agree with you there. Here is an article on the topic of doubt from a Catholic viewpoint – https://www.wordonfire.org/resources/blog/is-it-a-sin-to-dou... – it definitely presents the Catholic point of view as being that it is possible to doubt God's existence yet still be a Christian.
And Pope Francis has said some rather positive things about doubt as well – https://cruxnow.com/vatican/2016/11/pope-francis-says-doubt-... – which don't seem compatible with your idea that you can't doubt Christianity's doctrines if you are a Christian
> I think you're using "doubt" to mean not being sure of the meaning of something, which is different than doubting the validity or the veracity of something. So I can doubt the meaning of a Bible passage, but I cannot doubt the existence of God, unless I'm not part of that religion.
No, I mean doubt in the sense of seriously grappling with the possibility that it might not be true. Which is definitely one of the senses in which the first article I cited understands the term. When the then-Cardinal Ratzinger (now Pope Emeritus) said "Both the believer and the unbeliever share, each in his own way, doubt and belief if they do not hide from themselves and from the truth of their being. Neither can quite escape either doubt or belief; for the one, faith is present against doubt; for the other, through doubt and in the form of doubt", he wasn't talking about doubt in the sense of "not being sure of the meaning of something", he was talking about doubt in the sense of "doubting the validity or the veracity of something"
> Religion/faith must NOT allow doubt in its teachings because doing so would mean it is not true (because there is no way to test it).
Philosophers of religion have a decades-old rejoinder to the claim that religion is untestable – there is an easy test to perform, all you have to die. According to many competing religious accounts, you find out which (if any) religion is true soon after death. Whereas, if none of them are true, you may find out nothing at all, for there will no longer be any you to find anything out. And death is an experiment we are all destined to perform, sooner or later, whether we wish to or not.
Actually, quantum immortality theory is interesting as a non-religious afterlife claim. And Hugh Everett, the originator of the many worlds interpretation, apparently privately believed (had faith?) in quantum immortality, and privately discussed quantum suicide, although he never published on either of those topics.
Ok, interesting that you interpret those articles that way. I'm reading something completely different, and those two links support my perspective. It seems we are now in the semantics of doubt territory... we're trying to pin down what we mean by doubt.
To clarify, it's ok we're now discussing the semantics of doubt, it is relevant to the bigger discussion. Both links are talking about doubt as something to at least not lean into, from the perspective of religion and faith. Doubt is there, and you can even appreciate it, but the appreciation of it is to strengthen your faith.
> "So, doubt in the absolute sense is bad. But doubt in the form of a temptation is—like any temptation we experience passively—not a sin."
So the first article is definitely talking about doubt in the sense of "not being sure of the meaning of something". I didn't say there is absolutely no doubt in religion, my point was it is not the goal of religion to be doubting. It is not part of its CORE, it is not "absolute doubt". You can have absolute doubt in science without problem (of course you just have to prove it).
This same point arises in the second article:
> "The key, he said, is to see those doubts as a call to deepen one’s faith either through study or through seeking the guidance of another believer."
Absolute doubt will not deepen your faith... "doubting the validity or the veracity of something" will not deepen your faith. The pope is clear here, he is seeing the glass half-full of doubt. He means doubting as in not being sure, not as in trying to prove it wrong. He even adds another warning:
> "When faith is seen mainly as “an abstract theory,” he said, “doubts multiply.”
Abstract theory is basically science. He is making my point. Science is about multiplying doubt, faith is about reducing it. Both articles are saying this from my understanding.
> there is an easy test to perform, all you have to die
How is that a test? Again, a bit of semantics here, "test" I refer to as something being done by science--a scientific experiment/test. You can't just call anything a test, especially if you have no access to the results! Death is not a test for the living, and science deals with the world of the living. Call it "religious test" if you want, but I was using the word to mean checking something, for which being alive is absolutely necessary.
> So the first article is definitely talking about doubt in the sense of "not being sure of the meaning of something"
The first article quotes Ratzinger as saying "Both the believer and the unbeliever share, each in his own way, doubt and belief..."
If by "doubt" Ratzinger means "not being sure of the meaning of something", what is it that the unbeliever is unsure of the meaning of?
Immediately before that quote, it speaks of the unbeliever wondering that "Perhaps it is true". That is doubt about the correctness of one's belief positions, not doubt about what something means. But if that is what Ratzinger means by "doubt" with respect to the unbeliever, he must mean the same thing for the believer, or else his claim that they share "doubt" doesn't make any sense.
> You can have absolute doubt in science without problem
I don't agree. Philosophers have absolute doubt, scientists do not. Take a proposition such as "Human reason is generally reliable". Philosophers will doubt that proposition, and ask how the doubt may be answered; it is not within the scope of physics or chemistry to doubt that proposition, only to assume its truth, to have faith in it–for without that faith, physics and chemistry are impossible. If an individual physicist or chemist approaches that proposition with doubt instead of faith, they are no longer doing physics or chemistry, they are now doing philosophy. To doubt the most fundamental assumptions of science is beyond the scope of the scientific enterprise. Philosophers are allowed to doubt anything and everything, and still be working within the confines of their discipline. The same does not hold for the natural sciences.
> Absolute doubt will not deepen your faith... "doubting the validity or the veracity of something" will not deepen your faith.
I don't think you are understanding Pope Francis correctly. Let us consider doubting the existence of God. Are you saying doubting God's existence could not deepen the faith of a religious believer? A quite traditional Catholic response to doubts about the existence of God, is to go read the tradition of philosophical theology which attempts to prove God's existence. (Everything from St. Thomas' "Five Ways" through to recent works such as Edward Feser's Five Proofs.) So, from a Catholic viewpoint, doubting God's existence could actually lead to becoming educated in the Catholic tradition of arguments for God's existence, and I believe the Pope would consider such an education to be a way to "deepen your faith".
> Abstract theory is basically science.
I think what Pope Francis is actually talking about here, is an overemphasis on the intellectual side of religion (such as philosophical arguments for God's existence) while ignoring other aspects of it (experiential, mystical, social, communal, ethical, liturgical, ritual, sacramental, prayerful, etc) – religion as an abstract theory as opposed to a lived practice. I don't think he is saying people shouldn't study the intellectual side of Catholicism, I think he is warning that a sole focus on that to the exclusion of living it is not going to answer their doubts. While the natural sciences often involve "abstract theory", not all abstract theories belong to the natural sciences – abstract theories are also found in mathematics, in philosophy, in the humanities, and yes also in religion and theology. The particular abstract theories he is talking about here are, I think, the philosophical and theological ones rather than those of the natural sciences.
And I think there is some truth in what he says. Whatever one believes in (whether a religion or a non-religious worldview), a lot of the confidence one has in one's beliefs is not purely due to abstract arguments, it is also due to other factors such as social reinforcement, pragmatic experience (do the beliefs produce pos...
The problem is that secular/atheist people group all religions into the same bucket without any nuance, and without understanding what the religion actually says. Case in point, Islam contradicts what you're positing:
I'm not familiar with Quran passages (it's on my list though). Reading those doesn't clearly tell me how the core of Islam allows doubt... so I'll ask this, are you saying that it's ok for Muslims to doubt Mohammad as the prophet?
(btw, I commented in a different thread, under the same parent comment if you want details, but I'm not saying religions are free of doubt, I'm saying the core of a religion is faith, and absolute certainty of some kind).
What I quoted was Hadith, not Quran. The Quran is the literal word of God. Hadiths are narrations of Prophet Muhammad Peace be upon him. Both are used in Islamic Jurisprudence for deducing rules, as well as for other matters.
You'll have to explain what you mean by "the core of Islam allows doubt", what "core" are you referring to here? We take our religion from the Quran and Hadith, and I have quoted just two Hadiths that I recall off the top of my head regarding the issue of doubt, and how it is not sinful, nor automatically looked down upon. Here's one quotation from the Quran: https://quran.com/33/10
> so I'll ask this, are you saying that it's ok for Muslims to doubt Mohammad as the prophet?
You'll have to explain exactly what you mean by doubt. A Muslim accepts that Muhammad Peace be upon him is God's final messenger. If doubts happen to cross said Muslim's mind, he's still a Muslim as per the Hadith. This is different from what I feel you're implying in that the person actively tries to take down the Islamic narrative in a way that the enemies of Islam do.
The logic is this way: someone accepts Islam because he did his due diligence and was convinced. It's not logical to start doubting everything again from scratch - it means he did not build up a proper foundation to begin with.
You can see what I mean by the word "doubt" in my other comment above. I'm using it to mean 'absolute doubt', the act of questioning something to the core with no presupposition.
You are proving my point with this statement: > "The Quran is the literal word of God"
Science cannot make such statements of certainty, but religion can and does. To the extent that religion has doubt, as you say, it just means you're still learning or something like that. Science allows restructuring its own foundation and has done so again and again.
> I'm using it to mean 'absolute doubt', the act of questioning something to the core with no presupposition.
I alluded to that toward the end of my reply. A non-Muslim may start off with that presumption until he is convinced that Islam is the truth, at which point he accepts it. Once the foundation is set, it does not make sense to keep that doubt or skepticism around any longer. Why accept the religion otherwise?
> Science cannot make such statements of certainty
God is outside the realms of time and space, which are the domains of science. It is a non-question to attempt to answer philosophical and religious questions through (experimental) science.
Furthermore, it's a fallacy to break up the world into "science" and "religion". Which religion are you talking about?
> Science allows restructuring its own foundation
I don't see how that has anything to do with the subject matter, or that it is indicative that science is somehow the absolute truth, or even leads to it.
The foundations of Islam are the Quran and Hadith. Islam has immutable and axiomatic principles (e.g. God is one, Muslims have to pray 5 times a day, the Hijri year is 12 months and follows a lunar system, etc.), some other aspects are open to interpretation (contingent on having a proper scholarly background of course - a layperson cannot interpret as he/she wishes), while other aspects are left open for society to decide as per its needs and evolution of time. I read that Muslim scholars hundreds of years ago derived rulings for how to pray if we were to fly one day - they were that forward thinking, and today we have airplanes.
> It is a non-question to attempt to answer philosophical and religious questions through (experimental) science.
Yes, I agree.
> Furthermore, it's a fallacy to break up the world into "science" and "religion". Which religion are you talking about?
I'm not attempting to "break up the whole world". I'm simply taking science and comparing it with religion. Which religion? Well I can't go through every single one in a comment section like this. I'm attempting to use examples like Islam, Christianity, etc., etc. is that not clear enough? Are you saying you can't group religions based on the fact that they require faith?
> Islam has immutable and axiomatic principles
Alright... there you go. Can you doubt those principles? That is my main point!
> science is somehow the absolute truth, or even leads to it
I'm saying the exact opposite. I'm saying many religions like Islam and Christianity (sure I'm qualifying it now, but please consider I have to contrive my arguments for brevity) do claim to have the absolute truth in their immutable principles. Again, that is my point, science does not claim absolute truth!!
> I'm attempting to use examples like Islam, Christianity, etc., etc. is that not clear enough?
You just grouped Islam with Christianity with "etc." :) That's still a continuation of the fallacy. You admitted earlier that you have not looked at the Quran, and that you mixed it up with Hadiths that I quoted. Do you agree that you do not have the necessary or even sufficient background to make claims about Islam in that case? I don't mean it in a disparaging way, and I absolutely encourage you to learn more about both, and about Islam.
> Alright... there you go. Can you doubt those principles? That is my main point!
I explained in my post, that a non-Muslim can look at those principles with an interrogative or even doubtful manner. Once he accepts them (and subsequently accepts Islam), it doesn't make sense to doubt them once more does it? Islam does not prohibit asking questions, it tells us to consult with people of knowledge when we do have questions about things we don't understand.
> Again, that is my point, science does not claim absolute truth!!
We don't claim that we know everything in Islam, the Quran states[1][2]
> and say, "My Lord, increase me in knowledge."
> and you ˹O humanity˺ have been given but little knowledge.”
Absolute and full knowledge is an attribute of God. Only He has it, and not anyone or anything else in this world. Islam tells us that our knowledge is limited, yet it pushes us to acquire more. The Islam Golden Age was a direct result of this understanding of Islam. The Islamic empire at the time became a central hub of science and knowledge, at the forefront of scientific endeavor. My point is that the false dichotomy that some people try to claim between "science and religion" totally depends on which religion is being discussed.
You're ignoring my point. I can group religions together, it's not fallacy. You obviously don't understand what a fallacy is. I'm just grouping based on a common trait, to make an over-arching point.
> We don't claim that we know everything in Islam
Did I say this? Who said religions claim to know everything? Not me.
> Once he accepts them (and subsequently accepts Islam), it doesn't make sense to doubt them once more does it?
You are dancing around my point. "Once he accepts them" = not doubting.
Please read my arguments carefully. They are subtle, and it seems you think I am attacking religion, when I'm not.
> My point is that the false dichotomy that some people try to claim between "science and religion" totally depends on which religion is being discussed.
My argument does not depend on a specific religion, they all share things in common. If you deny that they all share SOME things in common, then I don't know what to tell you. Why are they called "religions" if they are so different? Why do they share the same label since before both of us were born.
Everything requires faith at some point, even science. You have to accept certain axioms that you are then able to build science and math on top of, there is no way around it. Are you going to call science a form of religion then? We know that scientism definitely is, and it's emerging these days.
> We know that scientism definitely is, and it's emerging these days.
I agree, and I tried to make the distinction between that and the science that produces results. Whether science also requires faith, would be a lengthy tangent. I don't necessarily disagree with that, it would depend on pinning down what exactly we mean by faith, which I think was beyond this thread. Good discussion though.
As you present it here, that is indeed ridiculous. But people often questioned well established scientific ideas for no sensible reason at all. "I think the earth is 10,000 years old" -> "Is it appropriate for you to dismiss well established ideas in geology backed up by many independent lines of evidence because you think? Why do you think that?"
The appropriate way to question that idea would be find counter-evidence, find mistakes in the data used to arrive at the current orthodoxy, find better explanations, etc etc.
What amazes me is that so many people, including our venerable PG, are so good at identifying groupthink and orthodoxies, are sure they aren't part of those things, and yet see orthodoxies and groupthink threateningly hovering everywhere.
And, the articles keep getting upvoted, by popular demand. So clearly a lot of people also think this way!
Galileo didn't have it easy either. The more push back, the more likely you'll write history. Even it means you have to face the inquisition or whatever name it has at the time...
Galileo didn't have it easy he was tortured. Current day academics do have it easy at least in the democratic countries. They might face criticism but not torture.
Reminds me of a recent incident where a right-wing politician compared having to wear a Covid-mask to the Holocaust.
I did my PhD in astrophysics, and I can tell you that the author's name has become synonymous with, shall we say, fringe ideas. I won't say crack pot because he is a legit tenured astronomer at Harvard, but I have seen his papers roundly critiqued on the merits at too many journal clubs to count. (Eg, life could have evolved in interstellar space https://arxiv.org/abs/1312.0613 ) Its a bit outrageous to claim he's Galileo and the rest of the community is the Church when he is so clearly using his tenure as a defense against the weakness, and untestability, of his ideas.
Perhaps you're not aware that "fringe idea" is precisely the type of research that can turn out to usurp the mainstream and disrupt old paradigms.
The idea that the earth travels around the sun was once a "fringe idea."
> he is so clearly using his tenure as a defense against the ... untestability, of his ideas.
The idea of the earth going around the sun was untestable until Tycho Brahe got enough data and Kepler put it together in a way that could more parsimoniously and accurate predict planetary motion.
In other words, the experience that you describe perfectly fits into his argument. You might want to read Kuhn's "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions" to get the full picture.
The person you're criticizing got a PhD in astrophysics. They definitely would be familiar with all the situations you describe. They've probably also read the wikipedia page for Kuhn's book.
The reality is that Loeb made a claim that is not inconsistent with evidence, but is very fanciful. And the alternative hypotheses are all simpler, and explain the observations well enough that I think either Occam's razor or common sense would say that unless Loeb can somehow conjure up some unquestionable data, it's unlikely his claim will ever be verified or falsified and the mainstream will continue to believe (rightly, I think) that we didn't just see an alien corvette.
Hoofbeats mean horses, not zebras, unless you're on the African savannah, or something like that.
I feel like I often see this line of argument on the internet: “Every scientific revolution was unforeseen by the mainstream of its time, you don’t want to miss the next one do you?”
But until someone proposes a predictive metric for evaluating which of these “non-mainstream ideas” are good and which are bad, I don’t think this is a fruitful area of inquiry. And that’ll be a tall order, since many of the available methods for determining truth are the very things keeping these ideas out of mainstream scientific journals. And cultural metrics like “It pisses off the establishment, so it must be right!” apply equally to both correct and incorrect non-mainstream ideas.
This is a rather ad hominem attack which does not really refute his point or lead to a good discussion.
If we're going to critique someone it does not do them justice to criticize their scientific pedigree just because some of their ideas are fringe (as you rightly pointed out they have sufficient scientific rigor and have published real work that shows they understand the subject matter at an expert level).
It would be much more fruitful to critique the ideas in question (as was done in response to his papers) which would be the correct way to go about it.
actually, having gotten a phd and attended many journal clubs, "seen his papers roundly critiqued on the merits at too many journal clubs to count" is as strong a point as anybody can make.
Journal clubs are vicious. Everybody's got their brains and knives out to find any and all flaws in a paper to demolish it (typically once you have found 2-3 major flaws, it's fine to just assume the paper is wrong, or got the right answer by chance).
I remember the day we had a journal club on Bell's Theorem papers. We went through the EPR paper and the Bell papers. I argued and argued and argued for a deterministic universe and then somebody asked me if I had heard of the Delayed Choice Quantum Eraser experiment (I hadn't; it was published in a Phys Rev Lett a year before, which the physics people read but the biologists didn't). Once I finished up reading that I realized that I had to let go every assumption I had about locality and entanglement and relearn how the universe works through the lens of QM. I am heartened to see that people are still trying out ideas like superdeterminism, but I have to admit, all the data supports the basic QM model of the universe.
actually, having gotten a phd and attended many journal clubs, "seen his papers roundly critiqued on the merits at too many journal clubs to count" is as strong a point as anybody can make.
Journal clubs are vicious. Everybody's got their brains and knives out …
actually, having read what you wrote, saying that “journal clubs are vicious … everybody’s got their … knives out” undermines your argument by implying that even good papers will be “roundly critiqued” in that setting, making this about as weak a point as anybody can make.
—
on further reflection, what I do find to be a strong point but in favor of Loeb’s argument is the fact that it triggered the scientists who wrote this comment and its grandparent to underscore the point of the article by more or less heaping scorn on the author, listing their own credentials, and proceeding to make — forgive me — non sequitur arguments from authority instead of substantively refuting the claims.
if this is what happens to a former department chair at Harvard when they question orthodoxy, it indeed does not augur well for less-credentialed researchers, regardless of the merit of their work.
the only good papers are the ones that survive multiple rounds of critiquing from a wide range of experts. Even great papers have problems, the point of journal clubs is to argue out all the varying reasonable lines (not the fringe ones) of ways the paper could be making a false conclusion (typically due to bad experimental technique or mistaken data analysis).
How would that have worked out in the example you have given, prior to a successful delayed-choice quantum eraser experiment? Would Bell's theorem have been consigned to the scrap heap? Would delayed-choice quantum eraser experiments then have been performed when they were?
By these standards, Darwin should have been rejected on the grounds of his faulty model of biological inheritance.
There needs to be some slack, because sometimes critics are more convincing than they are right.
No, the point of delayed choice quantum eraser is that it's the first really simple experimental setup that non-physicists can understand, and see how it violates the simple assumption of classical physics. It's sort of the Hershey Chase experiment, but for QM. If DCQE hadn't been done, Bell would have been fine, as the last of the no-loophole experiments are being run now.
Again, there is nothing wrong in critiquing his scientific ideas.
Being generous even if he's flat out wrong about Oumuamua, stating that "he has fringe ideas" as a response to an article about the reaction to fringe/fanciful ideas in science is doing him a disservice and not really discussing the article at hand or the points contained therein.
Then indeed there would be nothing to take issue with. However to make the analogy extremely tenuous (at best), one needs to show that there is no baby, rather than just claiming there isn't.
I think in most cases the onus to prove that there is a baby is on the one making the claim that this is so. Besides the impossibility of proving a negative.
Speculation, by definition, lacks proof. Where would we be without speculation? Speculation has to range wider than proof for there to be any intellectual progress.
Galileo, whose name is invoked frequently in these discussions, speculated broadly and was often wrong.
Social acceptance is not validity. Social rejection is not invalidity. Do we need to repeat it? Social acceptance is not validity. Social rejection is not invalidity.
> Everybody's got their brains and knives out to find any and all flaws in a paper to demolish it
Okay, what are the flaws then? Enough hand-waving, let's talk actual issues.
> Social acceptance is not validity. Social rejection is not invalidity.
Yes it is, otherwise the whole scientific method falls flat on its face. If you cannot expect that a person will identify valid and invalid ideas, what's the point of doing experiments and having people write up their research? If you cannot expect that a group of people will identify valid and invalid ideas, what's the point of peer review? If you cannot expect that the community of scientists will identify valid and invalid ideas, what's the point of doing science?
On what basis do you, personally, believe that the earth moves around the sun? For me, I believe it because the scientific community accepts it. Do you believe that it is at least possible that the sun really does move around the earth and the scientific community happens to be wrong?
What do you believe the speed of light to be? Did you just read it in a textbook? Who published the textbook? How did they know?
That said, yes, the process of human evaluation is very slow and very much prone to errors. But it fundamentally works.
Yes. Who else besides the community of scientists is supposed to interpret the evidence and decide whether the earth really goes around the sun? The Pope?
The answer is, anyone who can. If you’re a random statistics professor but if you’ve somehow managed to build the capability to speak coherently about physics and mostly know what you’re talking about, you should be commenting on physics papers, regardless of the fact you’re “not a physicist,” because of your pedigree. You might find a serious mathematical error. The thing is, we tend to call people who do that in a way that’s good, “physicists,” so it’s a chicken-and-egg situation.
This is why science is not the same as truth. It's a method of obtaining truth, but it has major flaws. That said, it's the best method that exists. That does not mean it is perfect however. There exists, barring relativistic notions of state, a true state of the universe, much of which will never be measured or known by science. This should not be surprising.
> For me, I believe it because the scientific community accepts it.
There should be a much stronger reason: that the evidence is available, and not only has it been analyzed by other people, but it should have been analyzed by you as well. If we just accept that others have done the analysis, this is how major mistakes stay undiscovered for decades. (See the problem of the phantom reference.)
> Who published the textbook? How did they know?
Yes, we have to trust that most people are acting competently and with good intentions, because it's physically and emotionally impossible to investigate everything, but for no other reason. We should do our best to look in to every claim, especially ones that seem suspicious, because that diligence is what keeps science moving forward.
> the process of human evaluation is very slow and very much prone to errors. But it fundamentally works.
I agree, but that only holds true if people are actually doing the work of performing those evaluations.
This is nonsense. I'd love to, but I haven't literally dedicated my entire life to this specific topic as so many have, I don't believe I am smarter than the average scientist, I don't believe I can find flaws that the average scientist would have found, and I don't have enough time to test every single hypothesis that's accepted by the scientific community and makes its way into my life. I'm just going to do what most scientists do and focus on what I enjoy doing, and if that doesn't result in me completely revolutionizing physics so be it.
This "epistemological DIY" really only works for you if 1) you want to limit yourself to "proving" that apples and feathers fall at the same speed using highschool mechanics or 2) you're extremely arrogant and/or delusional.
If you can’t, you can’t, and that’s fine. But people who can, should. Knowledge tends to become siloed, and we always need to work against that; I’m sure the writers of physics and sociology papers, by and large, would appreciate a careful eye from a mathematician or statistician. We don’t have to be experts in each other’s fields to contribute to each other’s projects, the same way you don’t need to have a computer science degree to find a bug in systemd.
Otherwise we end up with situations like this, where something is plainly obvious to physicists but somehow never makes its way into an epidemiologist’s brain. [1]
I responded specifically to the claim that "it should be analyzed by you" (which I assume means "regular people" since geoft didn't claim to be a scientist or mathematician or anything). So now you seem to be agreeing with me and disagreeing with what you said before and I quoted.
The article highlights a far more difficult problem, which is to get people who are knowledgeable in area A which happens to interface with area B to trust those who are experts in area B. Which is precisely the opposite of what happens when someone who isn't knowlegeable enough follows your advice and is unable to notice their own errors in interpretation and understanding.
So yeah, I'd rather stick to trusting the experts (in their respective areas) 99% of the time.
I think Neil Tyson has the right idea in his focus on promoting scientific literacy, which does not refer to "believing whatever scientists say." If a scientist says something surprising, we should be at least somewhat capable of verifying that the research says what they say it does. Will you be able to verify everything, or even most things? Of course not. But you will come out of it better than you would have remaining standing in ignorance.
> someone who isn't knowlegeable enough follows your advice and is unable to notice their own errors in interpretation and understanding
This happens even with experts in their own fields. That's why it is supposed to be the beginning of a dialogue between the reader and the writers, not a research project that happens in a vacuum. Science is a collaborative effort.
Oh it's all a bit more nuanced than that. The right kind of social acceptance (i.e. within a sub-society structured to seek validity) is a very good indication of that validity. That is why papers, journals, etc even exist.
It's a good proxy, but like all metrics, it's only accurate to a degree. There have been perfectly valid statements that were socially rejected, but that did not make them invalid, unless we are using a fun definition of "valid."
> I am heartened to see that people are still trying out ideas like superdeterminism, but I have to admit, all the data supports the basic QM model of the universe.
Here's what I don't get about "superdeterminism" – what it is "super-" about it? I read an explanation of "superdeterminism", and it just reads like plain old determinism to me. Any convinced determinist is going to say that of course determinism includes the human will among the things that are determined. Philosophers such as Spinoza or the Baron d'Holbach were already saying exactly that long before any physicist had thought up the term "superdeterminism".
"Determinism" covers a wide range of possibilities. Superdeterminism is more specific: every single piddling bit of apparent quantum randomness is actually already stored in some vast lookup table somewhere.
And everything else in the universe leading up to it, no matter how seemingly irrelevant, is constructed to lead up to that. To get that exact measurement from the device, you needed to set it up in that exact way at that exact time. The amount of time it took the clerk to count your change when you bought ice cream thus is a crucial part of that experiment. It was coded up at the beginning of time precisely so that the experiment could occur to give you that result.
Ordinary determinism can be a bit more lax about the specifics. It doesn't have to be, but it could be. It could focus on some other time scale: "It doesn't matter whether you pick chocolate or vanilla, you're still getting hit by a truck on the way out of the ice cream shop, so you get to choose what flavor you're enjoying when you get flattened". Superdeterminism denies that, right back to the beginning.
So it really is plain old determinism, but with a specific focus on, well, specificities.
I'm still wondering, if we look at the classical determinists in the history of philosophy, such as Spinoza, d'Holbach, Laplace, etc – were they superdeterminists or "subdeterminists"?
If the mainstream of historical determinism is in fact superdeterminism, then the term is a bit misleading, because it makes it sound like physicists are coming up with some new idea rather than just restating one that has been around for centuries (maybe even millennia).
That paper is often misinterpreted. Its breathless conclusions don't look so special once you consider the experiment from the MWI perspective. Notably, they don't talk about the detection intensity much, even though it is quite important to the interpretation. Coincidence counters aren't white cards, and don't work the same! Yet, people interpret the paper as if the experiment would behave identically with an ordinary projector screen as the detector. It wouldn't, and that's the rub...
You too have been indoctrinated into the QM orthodoxy, and you've failed to realise that memorising catechisms might win you accolades with your peers, but doesn't necessarily help you understand the physical universe.
If you peel back modern QM, you'll find it is a very tall Jenga tower wobbling around in the wind, held up by more magical thinking that real science. The experiments it is based on have a very narrow scope, and those caveats and limitations are brushed aside by adherents.
People stating things like instant action at a distance despite special relativity being a thing for a century are just the same as a Christian priest ignoring geology and stating that God created the Earth in seven days. Self-contradictory notions such as the wave-particle duality are no different to the catholic concept of the holy trinity being one god. Giving up your devotion to rational thought is how you prove your devotion to the faith. The greater the nonsense, the stronger the proof of your willingness to be a team member.
Can you elaborate on the "detection intensity"? Genuinely curious as I haven't heard a modern critique of QM before and would like to learn the other side of the argument.
So the issue with coincidence counters in general is that they count... coincidences. Only. Nothing else.
White cards measure total photons.
You can fool yourself very easily by ignoring the total intensity of the photons per second measured with coincidence counters. E.g.: going from some distribution at intensity of "1 unit" to some other distribution at intensities of 1/2, 1/4, etc... might all mean different things. Essentially the detector is acting as a filter, "picking out" subsets of the signal. The drop in intensity is due to the filtering being highly selective.
However, if you read through many of these papers, including the quantum eraser paper, you'll note that they normalise the measurements so that they all look like they have unit intensity. This is misleading, because it looks like something is being changed ("erased"), but in reality its just that the experiment is being set up to increasingly filter to smaller and smaller subsets of the photon stream.
Looking at this through the lens of the many worlds interpretation (MWI) completely removes the mystery, making this a very boring and ordinary experiment that reveals nothing new.
Yet, "classical" QM theorists insist on breathlessly promulgating it as clear evidence of "quantum weirdness". It isn't weird. It's just purposefully misinterpreted to increase the mysticism.
This is directly comparable to the behaviour of priests and holy men. Religions wouldn't have as many ardent adherents if there was no mystery. You gotta have the mystery! The magic! The miracles!
Would Christianity be as popular if Jesus hadn't healed the sick and came back from the dead himself?
Would QM get as much funding if it was just some boring maths?
There were at least two HN posts recently that posits that determinism is far from dead.
In fact, a central position point was that intuition, preference, and science’s unreasonable bias towards elegance has held back physics for a century.
No worries: superdeterminism is perfectly valid QM. You can have that cake and eat it too.
What you lose out is the ability to know what that determinism is. You do the experiment and the universe really does know if the electron is destined to go left or right, and has ever since the Big Bang.
But you cannot possibly. Superdeterminism forbids you from knowing beyond a certain amount. There will always be a minimum uncertainty to you. (That's distinct from Heisenberg uncertainty, but it's related.) The only way to know which direction the electron goes is to do it. And having done it, you can't meaningfully talk about the alternative, which would be like trying to talk about what would happen if 3 were equal to 5.
So, if that's a thing you can live with, then you can have superdeterminism and be happy about it. QM will back you, and so will every QM experiment.
An ad hominem attack is when you criticize the person making the argument instead of criticizing the argument.
The comment above is criticizing the argument: the argument is "My ideas are being unfairly dismissed by the scientific community," and a valid counterargument is "No, your ideas are being fairly dismissed by the scientific community."
Yes, an obvious implication of that counterargument is "The person making the argument is the sort of person who publishes ideas that are regularly dismissed by the scientific community," but the strength of the counterargument does not rest on discrediting the speaker as a person - it rests on directly refuting the claim being made.
Or, in other words, if I were making the argument "Prof. Loeb's ideas are being unfairly dismissed by the scientific community," the exact same counterargument could be made against my argument. The fundamental reason an ad hominem is fallacious is that an argument's validity doesn't depend on who's making it. In this case, the argument is equally prone to refutation regardless of who's making it.
> I can tell you that the author's name has become synonymous with, shall we say, fringe ideas.
This person has bad ideas (going further, this person is synonymous with bad ideas and therefore only has bad ideas).
> I won't say crack pot because he is a legit tenured astronomer at Harvard, but I have seen his papers roundly critiqued on the merits at too many journal clubs to count
Some of his ideas have been proven to be bad although he has an expert understanding of the subject.
> Its a bit outrageous to claim he's Galileo ... against the weakness, and untestability, of his ideas.
This person is making a spurious analogy because Galileo's idea was a good idea and his ideas are bad ideas (some of which have been proven to be bad ideas).
It is ad-hominem in nature because GP is disposing of the content of the article by claiming the above analogy is spurious by pre-supposing that Loeb only has bad ideas.
There is nothing to be read here about the reaction of the scientific community to unconventional ideas which is the content of the article, especially if you pre-suppose that Avi Leob only has bad ideas and therefore was rightfully dismissed by the scientific community (which is what the GP is doing).
If the argument was in fact about whether or not Loeb's ideas are being unfairly dismissed (or in the weaker case, rightfully receiving pushback), that would directly be talking about the content of the article and generate a good discussion. (In fact I disagree with what Loeb is saying in the article and have posted a comment as such below)
The content of the article is specifically using the alleged unfair dismissal of Loeb's ideas to argue the broader point that the scientific community unfairly dismisses unconventional ideas in general. I agree with you that the counterargument above is not validly refuting the article as a whole, but it is definitely making a non-fallacious refutation of that specific sub-argument.
Put another way: the sense of the counterargument is not that this opinion piece itself is a fringe/crackpot idea, which is what you'd expect if the counterargument was simply "This is from a crackpot." In fact, it's not dismissing the content of the article at all. The counterargument is admitting the logical coherence of this opinion piece - that if, among other things, Prof. Loeb's works are unfairly dismissed, then it demonstrates a closed-mindedness in the scientific community - and attacking the premise by saying that the works in question were in fact fairly dismissed.
We are in agreement that the article is broader than that specific point. I disagree that GP was making the argument you are making in your second paragraph (or if he was, it was needlessly circuitous and somewhat mean).
To demonstrate that, supposing that the author of the article was Einstein and he had written the exact same content but instead substituting relativity for Oumamama and reaction to such by Abraham etc. the GP's comment would have no substance, but the content and argument of the article at hand would be little changed.
(Chiming in as someone else with a PhD in astronomy.)
Eh... It's true that strictly following the rules of logic you can't disprove these ideas with an ad hominem. But as a researcher you only have so much time, and oftentimes the errors can be subtle. If a researcher has gotten a reputation for publishing a string of outlandish papers that fall apart under scrutiny, it's just not worth the time to go into them and figure out why exactly they're wrong.
One of the reasons this guy has gotten a reputation for himself is because he keeps publishing sensational results, uses his credentials to gin up media interest, the press picks it up, and then the rest of the community is forced to engage with the ideas to the outside world. The way it would ordinarily work is that he would submit his ideas to a journal, a few reviewers would spend the time finding all the holes in the ideas and either the paper would be published with the sensational claims toned down, or it would be rejected. In my view, the main point of peer review is to make sure that all the obvious problems in a paper have been fixed before it gets published so that most researchers don't waste their time trying to understand garbage. But he engages in a sort of end-run around the peer review process.
This is not a "fringe" idea; it's been a fairly common speculation for decades. What's different about the paper you cite, AFAIK, is the idea that the CMBR during the epoch he describes was the heat source. But there's nothing "fringe" about the CMBR temperature he gives for that epoch; that's standard mainstream cosmology.
> he is so clearly using his tenure as a defense against the weakness, and untestability, of his ideas
That's actually what tenure is for--to give people the security to be able to explore all kinds of ideas, many of which appear weak and untestable, and most of which will never pan out, but a few of which will end up creating enormous value. Loeb's ideas may never pan out, but that doesn't make it wrong for him to explore them or publish them or use his tenured position as a secure base from which to do those things.
What I find off-putting about the article is the fact that he appears to think that resistance to unconventional ideas is somehow wrong. It's not. It's a part of the same dynamic of scientific progress as his proposing of unconventional ideas. Even ideas that end up proving correct still get resisted at first, and that's the way it has to be; it's not some defect that we could somehow avoid if we were just smart or open-minded enough. If he wants to play the role of "explorer of unconventional ideas", he should be willing to take what comes with that territory.
Precisely this, he is perfectly within his right to explore these ideas, that can and in fact should be done. His reaction to the reaction of the wider community is rather odd, and has probably caused him more harm than good in the long run.
> What's different about the paper you cite, AFAIK, is the idea that the CMBR during the epoch he describes was the heat source.
If the CMBR was the heat source, what was the heat sink? You need a temperature difference to produce negentropy and allow for life. Did life evolve in the shadow of primordial black holes, or what?
Life doesn't need a temperature difference. It only needs some material in one energy state whose transition to a lower energy state it can catalyze. Say converting visible light to infrared radiation using photosynthesis, or rusting iron [1], etc. The CMBR with 0-100 C provides for the environment that allows for the molecules to be stable without life needing to take any precautions.
No, the temperature differential is necessary. If life is consuming some food in a high energy state, converting it to a low energy state, and then using the difference for itself, it needs to put that waste energy somewhere once it's done with it. It can do this if the bath is at a lower temperature. But if the bath is at the higher temperature (i.e., if there's no differential) then the organism will be unable to convert the food into the lower energy state.
Strictly speaking, the important thing is to have a differential in entropy. The processes of life produce entropy, and that entropy has to go somewhere else if the organism is to live. But a differential in entropy implies a differential in temperature (though you may have to be careful about how you define temperature since there are different kinds of temperature).
Consider everything in the universe being 40 deg C, including all matter, the CMB, etc. Consider now an organism that eats some food and releases the energy inside that food. It converts this energy into heat and i now 42 deg C. Suddenly there is a differential again. Sure, it can get rid of the heat easier if the differential were larger, but it can get rid of it at all, due to the existence of a differential.
If I'm reading the arxiv search results right, he put out 54 preprints last year in what looks like to me, a non-astronomer, to be a huge variety of different topics.
> Its a bit outrageous to claim he's Galileo and the rest of the community is the Church
He's not just talking about physics... he's also talking about archeo and geo and anthro and paleo, etc. ... and there's FAR too much evidence - across the board, and going back 150 years (the list would take up this whole page) - to demonstrate that rocking the orthodox can be dangerous to your career.
Say what you will about Oumama, Avi's very very right on this one. And of course it works to the detriment of science. Everytime evidence disappears, or is re-interpreted to defend the faith - and the pseudoscience sword is thrown - we all lose. How many babies died before Ignaz Semmelweis died in an insane asylum?
You are only considering the cases where deviations from orthodoxy turned out to be correct. My guess would be that the vast majority of deviations have turned out to be wrong, like cold fusion, and we don't think about those because they haven't been turned into parables.
So many discoveries were untestable at the time. Most, when it was possible to test for them, were disproven. Some were not. Who can say at the time what the future will prove?
When you say "clearly" as to his motives, I might be tempted to ask you for solid evidence of his motives. I'm sure you don't have that. Yet, I believe it is possible you are right. Or not.
While I appreciate why Avi Loeb would author an article like this (for those unfamiliar he posited that Oumuamua was of an intelligent alien origin and hence garnered some pushback), it seems a bit ungenerous in spirit to how science is done these days.
He states that extraordinary claims do require extraordinary evidence so the thesis that skepticism is healthy is still embedded here, however I think he's unwilling to consider (or unconcerned about the idea) that the alien origin claim could very well be misinterpreted/lead credence to a lot of crackpot claims in the lay public which is the source of most of the pushback.
While we do not currently have an explanation for Oumuamua and I cannot intelligently speak on which of the four possibilities mentioned in the article is more likely, communicating science to the lay public is often better done once a theory has been absorbed into the general underpinnings of the larger scientific body of evidence at hand rather than when it is at the precipice to avoid inadvertently misleading people.
I heard him talk to, I think Joe Rogan, about Oumuamua, and he presented the case that the unexplained acceleration could not be outgassing because no tail was observed. He also said it was weird that the velocity of the object was effectively stationary compared to the average velocity of this area of the galaxy, as if it was a kind of lighthouse/beacon. This seemed pretty compelling to me.
Eventually after digging deeper on both these topics I learned that it is absolutely possible to have outgassing that doesn't leave a tail, that could cause the observed acceleration. And that something being stationary relative to the other objects in this area of the galaxy is not at all unusual.
This kind of made me feel he was either being disingenuous or was just too emotionally invested in it being aliens to think clearly.
Sure, it could still be aliens, nonetheless, so could every rock and spot we see in the sky, though.
The scientific orthodoxy rejected the Covid-19 “lab leak conspiracy theory” as crazy, based on no evidence whatsoever. Trump supported it, therefore it must be wrong.
Oftentimes the best we can do is make "educated guesses". Most domain experts, myself included, think it less likely that SARS-CoV-2 originated in a lab. This is not a unanimous position, and most scientists probably don't have a "dogmatic" view of this. Rather, we seek first to find and understand the consensus position, and then to test it.
That you or anyone else might disagree, or might not be able to imagine what type of mental model would lead to such an "educated guess", neither reverses the burden of the proof, nor eliminates the presumption of good faith, nor Occam's razor.
Taking the position that it came from a lab requires more assumptions and more unsubstantiated beliefs than not taking this position. It's just like Russel's teapot.
> Taking the position that it came from a lab requires more assumptions and more unsubstantiated beliefs than not taking this position.
Does it? One view is it came from a lab. The other common view is it came from a wet market. There seems to be evidence the lab was studying covid. While the wet market was seafood focused and I'm yet to see anything showing wildlife meat, let alone bats, while respecting media not showing this doesn't mean they weren't there.
Both are possible but it seems to me more likely a lab studying COVID (confirmed or likely?) plus has a history of multiple virus escapes has as good likelyhood and assumptions as an unproven a bat meat section at a seafood market from a bat that would have been likely had to have been transported over 1500km to reach the market if taken from the wild.
Personally, I dont think we will ever know the truth and don't claim any answer is correct, but there seems less of a leap of faith on the lab than the wet market to me.
I've written before about this: there has long been a "protein orthodoxy" which always defaults to the hypothesis that if something interesting happened, protein did it.
For example when people finally reached the interesting question "what is the molecule which confers heredity", almost everybody thought it had to be proteins, and the mainstream worked hard to ignore the entirely factual and reproducible findings until they couldn't any longer (basically, the period before Avery's experiment, and between it and Hershey/Chase).
The same happened with ribosomes: the community insisted ribosomes were protein machines with some RNA decoration, even though experiments done in the 60s and 70s showed that RNA was the active element. Similarly, with ribozymes- RNA that folds up into structures and carries out specific enzymatic reactions. People worked really hard to avoid changing their mind that only proteins could be enzymes.
Interstingly, the best example I've seen is the opposite: prions. When I was in grad school, the professor who was the expert on prions was at my institution, and had just about managed to run the experiments fully supporting his hypothesis (that prions are infection proteins and the replication process is distinct from that of bacterial or viral replication). The only way you could get the virologists to stop complaining was to point out that it wasn't theoretically impossible that proteins could catalyze other proteins to change shape in a chain reaction, and that Prusiner had reduced everything to a working system in mice that could be reproduced by anybody willing to wait the 60 days a single experiment took.
All human institutions centered on thought and theory are susceptible to the same social illnesses.
Science, religion, politics, programming...
I've been working on a book about this for a while. The framework makes me sound like a bastard but I truly believe the comparison can withstand legitimate scrutiny.
It's not that these institutions at their best are the same, it's that the same shams, grifters, cults and hoodwinkers exist in all of them. The same arguments from popularity, deceptions through marketing and pack animal mentalities.
At their worst they are all the same. At their best, they are of course quite different.
It's always worth remembering that even the most noble human project also has all the grotesque qualities of the human spirit buried within it. Diligence is always required.
The idea/theory/plan to dismiss things using poor methods is it self an idea worth dismissing that some how escaped sufficient scrutiny. But when it is removed (as it should be) there is the challenge preventing the opposite from happening. I suspect we are capable of getting both wrong at the same time. Like 2 shit storms making a poop tornado.
>>> Those who refuse to consider an unconventional idea in science are disturbingly similar to those who refused to look through Galileo’s telescope
While that's a headline and not the text of the article (hence possibly added by an editor), it is worth clarifying the history. When Galileo reported his telescopic observations, the Vatican astronomers went so far as to buy a telescope from him, and after some initial difficulty with it, confirmed his observations.
The idea of refusing to look through the telescope was raised as a rhetorical point in debate over the subject matter, but contradicts what actually happened.
As I understand it, the Church was willing to let go of the Ptolemaic model in favor of a model of Tycho Brahe, which supposed that the sun revolved around the earth, and the planets around the sun, which preserved the apparent lack of motion experienced on earth. They also told Galileo that if he could furnish empirical evidence to support his model, they would have to re-think their interpretation of the Bible. The letter from Bellarmine to Galileo is preserved.
An odd issue that we face with extraterrestrials, or non-earthly beings in general, is that they can be introduced as an explanation for anything, and have been for 5000+ years. We don't have a good way of scientifically investigating extraterrestrial hypotheses.
As I understand it, Bruno was accused of heresy. The same fate would have awaited Galileo, but the Church stopped one step short of accusing Galileo of heresy. The words that I recall reading was that he was "vehemently suspected of heresy."
I read a book, "Galileo's Daughter" that was not strictly about the heliocentrism affair, but gave enough of the details, plus what I thought was good insight into the surrounding social and political issues. One interesting political issue is that the Church hierarchy was facing accusations from lower level clergy, of being "soft on heresy" in the aftermath of the Reformation. Some people saw the Galileo affair as a test of whether the Church was willing to assert its authority or not. Also, Galileo had two trials, that were conducted under two different Popes. And some of the issues were clouded by the fact that it was actually hard to communicate between A and B in Italy. Apparently many of the letters back and forth were held up because they would not carry mail through towns that were under quarantine when a plague came through.
The text of Bellarmine's letter to Galileo is worth reading.
Note that I'm not defending the Church with my comments, but only documenting what I think was the technical difference between the Galileo and Bruno cases.
> As I understand it, the Church was willing to let go of the Ptolemaic model in favor of a model of Tycho Brahe, which supposed that the sun revolved around the earth, and the planets around the sun, which preserved the apparent lack of motion experienced on earth. They also told Galileo that if he could furnish empirical evidence to support his model, they would have to re-think their interpretation of the Bible. The letter from Bellarmine to Galileo is preserved.
This is close, but a little off. First, the (Catholic) Church had little problem with heliocentrism, provided that it was phrased as a hypothesis. Copernicus was even a Catholic priest when he published his heliocentric ideas, and the Church allowed full publication as long as he called it a hypothesis. The religious authorities that had theological problems with heliocentrism were almost all Protestants. Martin Luther was extremely critical of Copernicus and apparently applied one of his many insults toward the Pole. Calvin and other reformers were also quite critical.
The Catholic Church wasn't (and even today isn't) too concerned with literal interpretation of scriptures, but the Church of the time was very into Scholasticism, Thomas Aquinas' fusion of Classical Greek philosophy (principally Aristotle's ideas) with the theological, moral and even epistemic and metaphysical teachings from the Bible. When the Catholic Church got upset at Galileo, they were upset that he was contradicting Aristotle, not the Old Testament.
And Galileo was wrong. First, the Copernican model of heliocentrism held that orbits were perfectly circular, and even preserved epicycles to correct for the observational deviations from the model. Occam's razor would seem to say this made it a worse theory than Ptolemy's. Additionally, Galileo made a pretty serious mistake when calculating the distance to stars based on his telescope observations, underestimating the distance to the nearest stars by around 1000x. The Church correctly noted that if the stars were as close as Galileo proposed, then measurable deviations in their positions and/or sizes should have been observed from earth at parallax positions; however, the star field remained fixed. To the Church, extraordinary claims necessary to overturn Aristotle required extraordinary evidence, and Galileo failed. Not only that, but he was fairly arrogant about it, insisting he was correct when his theory was clearly contradictory. I strongly disagree with the Church's decision to punish Galileo, but the Church was in fact defending science, both consensus and the scientific method, albeit overzealously.
When Kepler published his heliocentric model that incorporated elliptical orbits tuned using Tycho Brahe's observational data, the reception was quite a bit better across Europe. However, Kepler himself ended up excommunicated from his own Lutheran Church because he believed the moon was solid, which allegedly contradicted the Old Testament, though Kepler appears to have been devout and dedicated much of his life toward reconciling Biblical and scientific truth.
> the Church of the time was very into Scholasticism, Thomas Aquinas' fusion of Classical Greek philosophy (principally Aristotle's ideas) with the theological, moral and even epistemic and metaphysical teachings from the Bible. When the Catholic Church got upset at Galileo, they were upset that he was contradicting Aristotle, not the Old Testament.
I would be careful here to distinguish between Aristotelian philosophy from Aristotelian natural science. Scholasticism, especially Thomism, is still the preferred intellectual tradition and point of reference, and rightly so, but there is no refusal to entertain whatever valid insights may be found elsewhere. It is rather that many of Aristotle's scientific explanations have fallen out of favor and been superseded.
This is true. At the time, there wasn't really a distinction between science and philosophy. In fact, what we call science was called natural philosophy in those days. Newton's Principia is "Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy," after all. Philosophy still exists around science at the edges (for example, questions about mind-body dualism or consciousness or even the criteria for mental illness, not to mention various interpretations of quantum mechanics or probability, often involve philosophical argument more than scientific measurement these days).
But you're entirely correct that even in those days, Aristotle wasn't some sort of incontrovertible source of truth for natural philosophy, but someone who should not be cast aside lightly.
This sounds horrible, as if philosophy is now some kind of fringe pseudo thing. Quite the contrary, Richard Carrier for one is arguing[1] that what we are doing is (natural) philosophy and we should call it that (again) (and in fact some university departments have been renamed to contain the word 'philosophy' again).
As for the other poster's remark on Thomism, Carrier writes[2]: "Thomism [...] the Medieval Dumbity that consists of purely armchair, and often pseudological, theorizing about natural reality, which ignores the entirety of the sciences and pretends facts and evidence don’t matter—and even don’t exist, contradicting its every conclusion", so not sure how viable that school of thinking is.
Richard Carrier may have a point about Thomism being theoretical, but using invectives like "dumbity" is mostly only helpful to his, by now dwindling, set of adoring new atheists. It doesn't belong in the scientific discourse he aspires (aspired?) to.
To be clear, I totally sympathize with the skeptical cause when it comes to rooting out prejudices based on shallow religiosity. I just don't believe there is a place in rational discourse for this type of argumentation that skews towards "bierstube" mockery.
In a lot of ways philosophy is some kind of fringe pseudo thing, by dint of having been constructed that way. As soon as something isn't fringey and pseudo, they stop calling it philosophy.
What's left is a mishmash of unrelated notions: metaphysics, ethics, axiology, and (for some reason) logic. Or whatever other slicing you want to apply; the whole point is that what's left as "philosophy" is specifically the stuff that's not locked down. Except logic, which philosophy clings to, rather than letting it live in the math department, even though geometry and arithmetic (also formerly the domain of philosophy) live there.
I agree that we ought to just call it all "philosophy" again, since we all love wisdom. Even the "scientific method" is really just a thing we all do every day, even when we're not practicing "science".
> As I understand it, the Church was willing to let go of the Ptolemaic model in favor of a model of Tycho Brahe, which supposed that the sun revolved around the earth, and the planets around the sun, which preserved the apparent lack of motion experienced on earth. They also told Galileo that if he could furnish empirical evidence to support his model, they would have to re-think their interpretation of the Bible. The letter from Bellarmine to Galileo is preserved.
I don't think this is entirely true. First, because there is no "dogmatic stake", as it were, in either geocentrism or heliocentrism. That is, the Church does not hold a position on this matter and a moment's thought will make it obvious that the Church isn't in the business of making scientific pronouncements anymore than a lawyer makes pronouncements affirming or denying what his mechanic says is wrong with his car (bad metaphysics and ideology masquerading as science, on the other hand...). True, the Church has been an energizing force behind the development of science, but this is a reflection of the Christian spirit and worldview, one which embraces Creation as good, beautiful, rational, and intelligible and thus capable and worthy of study. There never was a need to reinterpret the Bible because there's nothing in the Bible that depends on one or the other model being true. The Bible is not a scientific textbook. It doesn't matter which orb revolves around which.
The whole Galileo affair is routinely misrepresented because the fable we're given is the result of Enlightenment propaganda desired to create the false narrative that there is some grand battle between SCIENCE(tm) on one hand, and faith (Christianity) on the other. The historical accounts of the affair say otherwise. Mostly, Galileo was kind of an ass and it took years of making enemies before things turned for the worse.
> The idea of refusing to look through the telescope was raised as a rhetorical point in debate over the subject matter, but contradicts what actually happened.
Yes, the discoveries Galileo announced from his telescope also touched off an interesting set of debates about whether or not his observation of sunspots and craters on the Moon were actually real features on those bodies, or just artifacts of the telescope itself. Those debates are still with us today in a more general form. Anytime we use instruments to observe something, we have to be careful to make sure that we are observing something in the outside universe rather than an artifact of the instrument itself.
I would mentioned the Duhem-Quine thesis here. The notion of a "critical experiment" is generally quite naive in the grand scheme of things. Parsimonious perhaps, but any falsifying experiment tests not merely the theory under consideration, but all human knowledge, as it were.
The examples listed seem to be cases of broken clocks being right, which does happen, and it looks spectacular in history when they are, but it ignores how many broken clocks were rightly ignored.
For the most part, exact scientists are willing to listen if radical ideas are backed up by evidence. — Einstein's ideas were quite radical at the time, but they were backed up by convincing mathematical reasoning and were accepted, however absurd it might have sounded that nonmassive light is influenced by gravity, or that such things as time dilation occur, and they were not actually observed until decades later.
That being said, — there are definitely entire fields of science where the “mainstream consensus” seems to be based quite a bit on convention and simply things “truths that became repeated” but were never well substantiated, and when empirically justified by some experiments, sometimes later found to not be reproducible, or perhaps not occuring in the wild, and only in lab conditions.
> Finding extraordinary evidence requires a commitment of extraordinary funds
I would suggest that he answers to his own complaints. There is a great deal of prioritisation going on in science and fringe ideas require too large steps away from where we are today. The real break-throughs in science are ideas that massively reduce the size of the backlog. My guess is that these ideas will receive proper treatment them when the time is right.
> The most important task before us as a civilization is to find freethinking actors from exoplanets and learn whether they have a better sense of what the play is all about.
Unironically comparing yourself to Galileo is painful to read. It makes me feel embarrassed for the author.
What is the point of this comparison? Actually persuading whatever fraction of a percentage of your readers who literally believe "scientists can NEVER be wrong"?
The actual point of making such a comparison really just seems to be reassurance to your side of the argument, all while sneaking in an ad hominem against anyone who disagrees with you by comparing them to the Inquisition.
Extraordinary claims do not simply require other extraordinary claims to have been true before. The author is apparently cognizant of this, so he should drop this self-aggrandizing cliche.
Matt O'Dowd at PBS Spacetime did a recent video[0] discussing how a certain Harvard Astronomer (the same author of this piece) has too quickly jumped toward claiming aliens as the answer.
"without bothering to look through Galileo Galilei’s telescope, philosophers overwhelmingly agreed on the incorrect notion that the sun moves around the Earth"—this is ridiculous, as if a look through Galileo's (not very powerful, by later century's standards) could tell you that the Earth circles around the sun. What it does show you is that the moon has mountains and is not a flat disk but a sphere (the latter already deducible from its shadows), that there are tiny specks that circle Jupiter, and that Saturn has handlebars (Galileo, for lack of his telescope's resolution, couldn't tell those were rings).
For one Galileo, there are thousands, if not millions, weirdos and fraudsters. So, statistically speaking, it is a rational decision to reject all unorthodox ideas and let authors walk the walk proving it.
most science is too complex for people to understand the data (e.g. climate change). Therefore science is almost always reduced to religion for the lay public. Ultimately whether you believe is based on if you have faith in the scientists.
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[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 209 ms ] threadThe thing that makes science different isn't that scientists are more rational than everyone else but that it's possible to challenge a scientific finding with evidence. Even with evidence some people will still resist, but if you publish your experiment and your findings and it gets replicated you at least have a chance of changing enough minds to change overall opinion quickly.
Other kinds of dogmas such as religious or (most) political ideologies are untestable and therefore impossible to challenge in any way other than through force or sophistry (force of mental gymnastics?). Opinions in those spheres therefore change very, very slowly and usually more in response to unrelated events such as demographic shifts or wars than in response to anything relevant to the topic.
I don't know. I'm quite a fan of Lynn Waterhouse's 2013 book Rethinking Autism: Variation and Complexity. Waterhouse argues that there has never been any good scientific evidence to support the existence of autism or ASD, that what evidence has accumulated undermines rather than supports the theory that it exists, and that it is past time that researchers abandoned the concept and moved on to something else. (At the end of her book, she tentatively proposes replacing the concept of autism/ASD with "phenotypes of neurodevelopmental social impairment".)
But I very much get the impression that few want to take her argument seriously, not due to the quality of her arguments, but because people have so much invested into the concept of autism/ASD – there is a whole community of people who identify with the concept as a diagnosis for themselves and their family members, there are many professionals who have built their entire career on the concept, entire institutions, billions of dollars of funding (both for research and for support services), and Waterhouse's ideas are just too threatening to all of that for many people to seriously consider them. The social, cultural, political and economic/financial factors supporting the theory are more important than the question of its scientific truth.
(To be clear, Waterhouse doesn't deny that the symptoms of autism/ASD, in their immense variety, actually exist. She has spent much of her career working with children who suffer from these symptoms, and she knows how disabling they can be for individuals and their families. But she argues that autism/ASD is a scientific dead-end in terms of actually finding effective treatments for these symptoms, that abandoning the concept is necessary to move the research forward to discovering their real causes, which will hopefully lead in turn to effective treatments for them.)
One of her arguments in particular is that the tying of the two symptom domains of social impairments and repetitive behaviours into a single disorder – or group of related disorders, or spectrum – (she doesn't think those three different framings of "ASD" ultimately change the conclusion) lacks good scientific justification. But, that was one of Kanner's most basic assumptions, and if you break that link what you have isn't autism anymore – you've actually got something much closer to her own proposal of "phenotypes of neurodevelopmental social impairment" (or, DSM-5 social pragmatic communication disorder with the repetitive behaviour exclusion removed)
Some authors [0] have criticised that idea though. Severe ASD very often (but not always) co-occurs with intellectual disability, but intellectual disability with and without ASD don't actually look that different from each other, and we really have to ask how useful it is to distinguish ASD from non-ASD in cases of intellectual disability. Added to that, in many jurisdictions people with an ASD diagnosis get better services, so there is continuing pressure to reclassify people from ID without ASD to ID with ASD, not justified on any scientific grounds, but simply because they'll get better supports with the ASD label than without it. That has driven a lot of diagnostic substitution from pure ID to ID+ASD, and lends support to the argument that the whole thing is more about society and culture than actual science
[0] see for example Graham Collins, "Does a Diagnosis of ASD Help Us to Help a Person with Intellectual Disabilities?" in Katherine Runswick-Cole, Rebecca Mallett, Sami Timimi (editors). Re-Thinking Autism: Diagnosis, Identity and Equality. Jessica Kingsley Publishers, 2016. pp. 204–220
my main point, which i think coincides with the underlying thread of yours, is that (many/most) named disorders are extremes of the human condition, so instead of looking for “what’s wrong”, let’s look for “what’s too much/too little” about them. and for the non-severe versions, let’s mostly just broaden the definition of “normal” to include them and just collectively get better at cherishing and accommodating the amazing diversity of human experience.
We live in a community and aren’t individually capable of mastering all these modern competencies. The healthy way to manage these burdens is to share them with community members and to trade on faith or credibility.
We can’t all be empiricists. Unfortunately communities can vary drastically in the number of lawyers, doctors, dentists, and scientists made available, and some have become thoroughly infected with misinformation, such as anti-COVID folks.
I’m always left speechless.
Loeb's assertions are generally rejected by the scientific mainstream precisely because they are questioned. If they weren't questioned (if he wasn't a domain expert), they'd be ignored.
> since once people start treating science as Truth capital T,
Woo backed by "science" (see every invocation of "quantum physics" in New Age shit) isn't new, and is not the same as the overwhelming consensus on the efficacy of the Pfizer vaccine, for instance.
Science need not be a dogma.
If something came along that was more useful than science's tools, somehow, I'm sure we would adopt those.
That's sophistry shrouded as science, because it's looking to push an agenda and therefore it tries to fit results to a hypothesis, instead of testing the hypothesis with the results.
For any given phenomenon, I don't care what, it is only true to the extent that you can test it in every possible way and still obtain the same results. Anyone who blocks this questioning and testing, is practicing dogma and guarding a belief, instead of doing actual science.
There are questions that have answers that are beyond the scientific method (e.g. does grandma love you?). They are fascinating to contemplate :)
Religion and science do overlap, but their underlying frameworks are like yin and yang. One is about faith, and the other is about doubt.
Without doubt, there is no need to test something, as you already have the answer. Religion is about having faith, and faith is about not doubting. They do overlap, and the overlap is not perfectly clear, so I can see how some can get confused and think there is science that you cannot doubt, but this is false.
As far as gramma loving you, I think you can doubt that... and you can test it, right? You can test people's love, and you can collect results over time and then derive conclusions. Maybe the nature of love itself is untestable, and therefore has no framework on which to be doubted, so the nature of love itself might be of a religious nature and it then becomes about faith.
Here you are giving a definition of "faith" which many religious people would disagree with. Faith is compatible with doubt, and I don't think "absence of doubt" is a very good definition of "faith".
You can't doubt everything. At some point you have to just accept that some doubts are not worth entertaining, at least not for you. Philosophers produce all kinds of doubts–e.g. doubting whether other minds exist, doubting that I am just a brain in a vat (or a Boltzmann brain), or that this universe is actually a computer simulation, or that we are being actively deceived by superintelligent aliens who find deception entertaining (I actually read that example in a philosophy book recently, although obviously it is just a slight updating of Descartes' malin génie). Scientists choose to ignore doubts that philosophers entertain, all the time. Scientists also choose to ignore doubts about theories that are outside their area of professional expertise – maybe some mainstream theory in astrophysics is completely wrong, and the fringe voices saying it is wrong are actually right, but if you are a biologist, that's completely outside your field of expertise, so it isn't worth your while to even consider the question.
And it is totally possible to believe in a religion yet still experience periods of doubt about whether its doctrines are true. Many religious leaders will say that's not a sin at all, just one of the trials of this life. (Of course, are others who say doubting is a sin – I think that's a pretty sure sign that one is in a harmful group and one ought to get out.) But, on the other hand, if someone doesn't experience doubt about some religious idea in which they believe, and they choose to disregard those doubts when expressed by others, how is what they are doing fundamentally different from the doubt-ignoring scientists I mentioned above?
Right, I didn't say all scientists do is doubt. Science can always be doubted, and more importantly, if some concept or idea makes itself immune to doubt, it is not science. Example: doubting Newton's laws of gravity may have seemed to be a worthless effort (because you can test it and get the same results), however Einstein has proven otherwise, and there's no reason to think General Relativity is beyond doubt. Anyone can doubt anything in science, but of course you have to back it up with something that is testable and then prove it.
> And it is totally possible to believe in a religion yet still experience periods of doubt about whether its doctrines are true
Yes it's possible to doubt a religion, but to that extent, you are not part of it. Christians cannot be doubting Jesus as the Son of God, unless you're not a Christian. Same goes with Islam and Mohammad. You can create your own branch of a religion, and set your own rules, but the core of each religion is based on faith, which means you can't question it, you have to follow. That's the point of religion, to believe.
I think you're using "doubt" to mean not being sure of the meaning of something, which is different than doubting the validity or the veracity of something. So I can doubt the meaning of a Bible passage, but I cannot doubt the existence of God, unless I'm not part of that religion.
Science must allow doubt in regards to its own validity, because it validates itself through tests which must yield the same result. Religion/faith must NOT allow doubt in its teachings because doing so would mean it is not true (because there is no way to test it).
Not all Christians would agree with you there. Here is an article on the topic of doubt from a Catholic viewpoint – https://www.wordonfire.org/resources/blog/is-it-a-sin-to-dou... – it definitely presents the Catholic point of view as being that it is possible to doubt God's existence yet still be a Christian.
And Pope Francis has said some rather positive things about doubt as well – https://cruxnow.com/vatican/2016/11/pope-francis-says-doubt-... – which don't seem compatible with your idea that you can't doubt Christianity's doctrines if you are a Christian
> I think you're using "doubt" to mean not being sure of the meaning of something, which is different than doubting the validity or the veracity of something. So I can doubt the meaning of a Bible passage, but I cannot doubt the existence of God, unless I'm not part of that religion.
No, I mean doubt in the sense of seriously grappling with the possibility that it might not be true. Which is definitely one of the senses in which the first article I cited understands the term. When the then-Cardinal Ratzinger (now Pope Emeritus) said "Both the believer and the unbeliever share, each in his own way, doubt and belief if they do not hide from themselves and from the truth of their being. Neither can quite escape either doubt or belief; for the one, faith is present against doubt; for the other, through doubt and in the form of doubt", he wasn't talking about doubt in the sense of "not being sure of the meaning of something", he was talking about doubt in the sense of "doubting the validity or the veracity of something"
> Religion/faith must NOT allow doubt in its teachings because doing so would mean it is not true (because there is no way to test it).
Philosophers of religion have a decades-old rejoinder to the claim that religion is untestable – there is an easy test to perform, all you have to die. According to many competing religious accounts, you find out which (if any) religion is true soon after death. Whereas, if none of them are true, you may find out nothing at all, for there will no longer be any you to find anything out. And death is an experiment we are all destined to perform, sooner or later, whether we wish to or not.
It reminds me of the QM measurement problem: “The act of observing disturbs the observed”
The nature of the universe is one in which some information transfers always effects the entropy state of the entire system.
Actually, quantum immortality theory is interesting as a non-religious afterlife claim. And Hugh Everett, the originator of the many worlds interpretation, apparently privately believed (had faith?) in quantum immortality, and privately discussed quantum suicide, although he never published on either of those topics.
To clarify, it's ok we're now discussing the semantics of doubt, it is relevant to the bigger discussion. Both links are talking about doubt as something to at least not lean into, from the perspective of religion and faith. Doubt is there, and you can even appreciate it, but the appreciation of it is to strengthen your faith.
> "So, doubt in the absolute sense is bad. But doubt in the form of a temptation is—like any temptation we experience passively—not a sin."
So the first article is definitely talking about doubt in the sense of "not being sure of the meaning of something". I didn't say there is absolutely no doubt in religion, my point was it is not the goal of religion to be doubting. It is not part of its CORE, it is not "absolute doubt". You can have absolute doubt in science without problem (of course you just have to prove it).
This same point arises in the second article:
> "The key, he said, is to see those doubts as a call to deepen one’s faith either through study or through seeking the guidance of another believer."
Absolute doubt will not deepen your faith... "doubting the validity or the veracity of something" will not deepen your faith. The pope is clear here, he is seeing the glass half-full of doubt. He means doubting as in not being sure, not as in trying to prove it wrong. He even adds another warning:
> "When faith is seen mainly as “an abstract theory,” he said, “doubts multiply.”
Abstract theory is basically science. He is making my point. Science is about multiplying doubt, faith is about reducing it. Both articles are saying this from my understanding.
> there is an easy test to perform, all you have to die
How is that a test? Again, a bit of semantics here, "test" I refer to as something being done by science--a scientific experiment/test. You can't just call anything a test, especially if you have no access to the results! Death is not a test for the living, and science deals with the world of the living. Call it "religious test" if you want, but I was using the word to mean checking something, for which being alive is absolutely necessary.
The first article quotes Ratzinger as saying "Both the believer and the unbeliever share, each in his own way, doubt and belief..."
If by "doubt" Ratzinger means "not being sure of the meaning of something", what is it that the unbeliever is unsure of the meaning of?
Immediately before that quote, it speaks of the unbeliever wondering that "Perhaps it is true". That is doubt about the correctness of one's belief positions, not doubt about what something means. But if that is what Ratzinger means by "doubt" with respect to the unbeliever, he must mean the same thing for the believer, or else his claim that they share "doubt" doesn't make any sense.
> You can have absolute doubt in science without problem
I don't agree. Philosophers have absolute doubt, scientists do not. Take a proposition such as "Human reason is generally reliable". Philosophers will doubt that proposition, and ask how the doubt may be answered; it is not within the scope of physics or chemistry to doubt that proposition, only to assume its truth, to have faith in it–for without that faith, physics and chemistry are impossible. If an individual physicist or chemist approaches that proposition with doubt instead of faith, they are no longer doing physics or chemistry, they are now doing philosophy. To doubt the most fundamental assumptions of science is beyond the scope of the scientific enterprise. Philosophers are allowed to doubt anything and everything, and still be working within the confines of their discipline. The same does not hold for the natural sciences.
> Absolute doubt will not deepen your faith... "doubting the validity or the veracity of something" will not deepen your faith.
I don't think you are understanding Pope Francis correctly. Let us consider doubting the existence of God. Are you saying doubting God's existence could not deepen the faith of a religious believer? A quite traditional Catholic response to doubts about the existence of God, is to go read the tradition of philosophical theology which attempts to prove God's existence. (Everything from St. Thomas' "Five Ways" through to recent works such as Edward Feser's Five Proofs.) So, from a Catholic viewpoint, doubting God's existence could actually lead to becoming educated in the Catholic tradition of arguments for God's existence, and I believe the Pope would consider such an education to be a way to "deepen your faith".
> Abstract theory is basically science.
I think what Pope Francis is actually talking about here, is an overemphasis on the intellectual side of religion (such as philosophical arguments for God's existence) while ignoring other aspects of it (experiential, mystical, social, communal, ethical, liturgical, ritual, sacramental, prayerful, etc) – religion as an abstract theory as opposed to a lived practice. I don't think he is saying people shouldn't study the intellectual side of Catholicism, I think he is warning that a sole focus on that to the exclusion of living it is not going to answer their doubts. While the natural sciences often involve "abstract theory", not all abstract theories belong to the natural sciences – abstract theories are also found in mathematics, in philosophy, in the humanities, and yes also in religion and theology. The particular abstract theories he is talking about here are, I think, the philosophical and theological ones rather than those of the natural sciences.
And I think there is some truth in what he says. Whatever one believes in (whether a religion or a non-religious worldview), a lot of the confidence one has in one's beliefs is not purely due to abstract arguments, it is also due to other factors such as social reinforcement, pragmatic experience (do the beliefs produce pos...
[1] https://sunnah.com/mishkat:64
[2] https://sunnah.com/mishkat:76
(btw, I commented in a different thread, under the same parent comment if you want details, but I'm not saying religions are free of doubt, I'm saying the core of a religion is faith, and absolute certainty of some kind).
You'll have to explain what you mean by "the core of Islam allows doubt", what "core" are you referring to here? We take our religion from the Quran and Hadith, and I have quoted just two Hadiths that I recall off the top of my head regarding the issue of doubt, and how it is not sinful, nor automatically looked down upon. Here's one quotation from the Quran: https://quran.com/33/10
> so I'll ask this, are you saying that it's ok for Muslims to doubt Mohammad as the prophet?
You'll have to explain exactly what you mean by doubt. A Muslim accepts that Muhammad Peace be upon him is God's final messenger. If doubts happen to cross said Muslim's mind, he's still a Muslim as per the Hadith. This is different from what I feel you're implying in that the person actively tries to take down the Islamic narrative in a way that the enemies of Islam do.
The logic is this way: someone accepts Islam because he did his due diligence and was convinced. It's not logical to start doubting everything again from scratch - it means he did not build up a proper foundation to begin with.
You are proving my point with this statement: > "The Quran is the literal word of God"
Science cannot make such statements of certainty, but religion can and does. To the extent that religion has doubt, as you say, it just means you're still learning or something like that. Science allows restructuring its own foundation and has done so again and again.
I alluded to that toward the end of my reply. A non-Muslim may start off with that presumption until he is convinced that Islam is the truth, at which point he accepts it. Once the foundation is set, it does not make sense to keep that doubt or skepticism around any longer. Why accept the religion otherwise?
> Science cannot make such statements of certainty
God is outside the realms of time and space, which are the domains of science. It is a non-question to attempt to answer philosophical and religious questions through (experimental) science.
Furthermore, it's a fallacy to break up the world into "science" and "religion". Which religion are you talking about?
> Science allows restructuring its own foundation
I don't see how that has anything to do with the subject matter, or that it is indicative that science is somehow the absolute truth, or even leads to it.
The foundations of Islam are the Quran and Hadith. Islam has immutable and axiomatic principles (e.g. God is one, Muslims have to pray 5 times a day, the Hijri year is 12 months and follows a lunar system, etc.), some other aspects are open to interpretation (contingent on having a proper scholarly background of course - a layperson cannot interpret as he/she wishes), while other aspects are left open for society to decide as per its needs and evolution of time. I read that Muslim scholars hundreds of years ago derived rulings for how to pray if we were to fly one day - they were that forward thinking, and today we have airplanes.
Yes, I agree.
> Furthermore, it's a fallacy to break up the world into "science" and "religion". Which religion are you talking about?
I'm not attempting to "break up the whole world". I'm simply taking science and comparing it with religion. Which religion? Well I can't go through every single one in a comment section like this. I'm attempting to use examples like Islam, Christianity, etc., etc. is that not clear enough? Are you saying you can't group religions based on the fact that they require faith?
> Islam has immutable and axiomatic principles
Alright... there you go. Can you doubt those principles? That is my main point!
> science is somehow the absolute truth, or even leads to it
I'm saying the exact opposite. I'm saying many religions like Islam and Christianity (sure I'm qualifying it now, but please consider I have to contrive my arguments for brevity) do claim to have the absolute truth in their immutable principles. Again, that is my point, science does not claim absolute truth!!
You just grouped Islam with Christianity with "etc." :) That's still a continuation of the fallacy. You admitted earlier that you have not looked at the Quran, and that you mixed it up with Hadiths that I quoted. Do you agree that you do not have the necessary or even sufficient background to make claims about Islam in that case? I don't mean it in a disparaging way, and I absolutely encourage you to learn more about both, and about Islam.
> Alright... there you go. Can you doubt those principles? That is my main point!
I explained in my post, that a non-Muslim can look at those principles with an interrogative or even doubtful manner. Once he accepts them (and subsequently accepts Islam), it doesn't make sense to doubt them once more does it? Islam does not prohibit asking questions, it tells us to consult with people of knowledge when we do have questions about things we don't understand.
> Again, that is my point, science does not claim absolute truth!!
We don't claim that we know everything in Islam, the Quran states[1][2]
> and say, "My Lord, increase me in knowledge."
> and you ˹O humanity˺ have been given but little knowledge.”
Absolute and full knowledge is an attribute of God. Only He has it, and not anyone or anything else in this world. Islam tells us that our knowledge is limited, yet it pushes us to acquire more. The Islam Golden Age was a direct result of this understanding of Islam. The Islamic empire at the time became a central hub of science and knowledge, at the forefront of scientific endeavor. My point is that the false dichotomy that some people try to claim between "science and religion" totally depends on which religion is being discussed.
[1] https://quran.com/20/114
[2] https://quran.com/17/85
> We don't claim that we know everything in Islam
Did I say this? Who said religions claim to know everything? Not me.
> Once he accepts them (and subsequently accepts Islam), it doesn't make sense to doubt them once more does it?
You are dancing around my point. "Once he accepts them" = not doubting.
Please read my arguments carefully. They are subtle, and it seems you think I am attacking religion, when I'm not.
> My point is that the false dichotomy that some people try to claim between "science and religion" totally depends on which religion is being discussed.
My argument does not depend on a specific religion, they all share things in common. If you deny that they all share SOME things in common, then I don't know what to tell you. Why are they called "religions" if they are so different? Why do they share the same label since before both of us were born.
I agree, and I tried to make the distinction between that and the science that produces results. Whether science also requires faith, would be a lengthy tangent. I don't necessarily disagree with that, it would depend on pinning down what exactly we mean by faith, which I think was beyond this thread. Good discussion though.
The appropriate way to question that idea would be find counter-evidence, find mistakes in the data used to arrive at the current orthodoxy, find better explanations, etc etc.
How does your side of the conversation go?
Or when they invoke "Science" as an authority to resolve clearly unscientific questions (unsurprisingly, always in their favor).
And, the articles keep getting upvoted, by popular demand. So clearly a lot of people also think this way!
Reminds me of a recent incident where a right-wing politician compared having to wear a Covid-mask to the Holocaust.
The idea that the earth travels around the sun was once a "fringe idea."
> he is so clearly using his tenure as a defense against the ... untestability, of his ideas.
The idea of the earth going around the sun was untestable until Tycho Brahe got enough data and Kepler put it together in a way that could more parsimoniously and accurate predict planetary motion.
In other words, the experience that you describe perfectly fits into his argument. You might want to read Kuhn's "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions" to get the full picture.
The reality is that Loeb made a claim that is not inconsistent with evidence, but is very fanciful. And the alternative hypotheses are all simpler, and explain the observations well enough that I think either Occam's razor or common sense would say that unless Loeb can somehow conjure up some unquestionable data, it's unlikely his claim will ever be verified or falsified and the mainstream will continue to believe (rightly, I think) that we didn't just see an alien corvette.
Hoofbeats mean horses, not zebras, unless you're on the African savannah, or something like that.
But until someone proposes a predictive metric for evaluating which of these “non-mainstream ideas” are good and which are bad, I don’t think this is a fruitful area of inquiry. And that’ll be a tall order, since many of the available methods for determining truth are the very things keeping these ideas out of mainstream scientific journals. And cultural metrics like “It pisses off the establishment, so it must be right!” apply equally to both correct and incorrect non-mainstream ideas.
It can be extremely risky to agree with someone who is labeled as a crack-pot.
If we're going to critique someone it does not do them justice to criticize their scientific pedigree just because some of their ideas are fringe (as you rightly pointed out they have sufficient scientific rigor and have published real work that shows they understand the subject matter at an expert level).
It would be much more fruitful to critique the ideas in question (as was done in response to his papers) which would be the correct way to go about it.
Journal clubs are vicious. Everybody's got their brains and knives out to find any and all flaws in a paper to demolish it (typically once you have found 2-3 major flaws, it's fine to just assume the paper is wrong, or got the right answer by chance).
I remember the day we had a journal club on Bell's Theorem papers. We went through the EPR paper and the Bell papers. I argued and argued and argued for a deterministic universe and then somebody asked me if I had heard of the Delayed Choice Quantum Eraser experiment (I hadn't; it was published in a Phys Rev Lett a year before, which the physics people read but the biologists didn't). Once I finished up reading that I realized that I had to let go every assumption I had about locality and entanglement and relearn how the universe works through the lens of QM. I am heartened to see that people are still trying out ideas like superdeterminism, but I have to admit, all the data supports the basic QM model of the universe.
Journal clubs are vicious. Everybody's got their brains and knives out …
actually, having read what you wrote, saying that “journal clubs are vicious … everybody’s got their … knives out” undermines your argument by implying that even good papers will be “roundly critiqued” in that setting, making this about as weak a point as anybody can make.
—
on further reflection, what I do find to be a strong point but in favor of Loeb’s argument is the fact that it triggered the scientists who wrote this comment and its grandparent to underscore the point of the article by more or less heaping scorn on the author, listing their own credentials, and proceeding to make — forgive me — non sequitur arguments from authority instead of substantively refuting the claims.
if this is what happens to a former department chair at Harvard when they question orthodoxy, it indeed does not augur well for less-credentialed researchers, regardless of the merit of their work.
By these standards, Darwin should have been rejected on the grounds of his faulty model of biological inheritance.
There needs to be some slack, because sometimes critics are more convincing than they are right.
Being generous even if he's flat out wrong about Oumuamua, stating that "he has fringe ideas" as a response to an article about the reaction to fringe/fanciful ideas in science is doing him a disservice and not really discussing the article at hand or the points contained therein.
Let us not throw the baby out with the bathwater.
Galileo, whose name is invoked frequently in these discussions, speculated broadly and was often wrong.
> Everybody's got their brains and knives out to find any and all flaws in a paper to demolish it
Okay, what are the flaws then? Enough hand-waving, let's talk actual issues.
Yes it is, otherwise the whole scientific method falls flat on its face. If you cannot expect that a person will identify valid and invalid ideas, what's the point of doing experiments and having people write up their research? If you cannot expect that a group of people will identify valid and invalid ideas, what's the point of peer review? If you cannot expect that the community of scientists will identify valid and invalid ideas, what's the point of doing science?
On what basis do you, personally, believe that the earth moves around the sun? For me, I believe it because the scientific community accepts it. Do you believe that it is at least possible that the sun really does move around the earth and the scientific community happens to be wrong?
What do you believe the speed of light to be? Did you just read it in a textbook? Who published the textbook? How did they know?
That said, yes, the process of human evaluation is very slow and very much prone to errors. But it fundamentally works.
> For me, I believe it because the scientific community accepts it.
There should be a much stronger reason: that the evidence is available, and not only has it been analyzed by other people, but it should have been analyzed by you as well. If we just accept that others have done the analysis, this is how major mistakes stay undiscovered for decades. (See the problem of the phantom reference.)
> Who published the textbook? How did they know?
Yes, we have to trust that most people are acting competently and with good intentions, because it's physically and emotionally impossible to investigate everything, but for no other reason. We should do our best to look in to every claim, especially ones that seem suspicious, because that diligence is what keeps science moving forward.
> the process of human evaluation is very slow and very much prone to errors. But it fundamentally works.
I agree, but that only holds true if people are actually doing the work of performing those evaluations.
This is nonsense. I'd love to, but I haven't literally dedicated my entire life to this specific topic as so many have, I don't believe I am smarter than the average scientist, I don't believe I can find flaws that the average scientist would have found, and I don't have enough time to test every single hypothesis that's accepted by the scientific community and makes its way into my life. I'm just going to do what most scientists do and focus on what I enjoy doing, and if that doesn't result in me completely revolutionizing physics so be it.
This "epistemological DIY" really only works for you if 1) you want to limit yourself to "proving" that apples and feathers fall at the same speed using highschool mechanics or 2) you're extremely arrogant and/or delusional.
Otherwise we end up with situations like this, where something is plainly obvious to physicists but somehow never makes its way into an epidemiologist’s brain. [1]
[1] https://www.wired.com/story/the-teeny-tiny-scientific-screwu...
The article highlights a far more difficult problem, which is to get people who are knowledgeable in area A which happens to interface with area B to trust those who are experts in area B. Which is precisely the opposite of what happens when someone who isn't knowlegeable enough follows your advice and is unable to notice their own errors in interpretation and understanding.
So yeah, I'd rather stick to trusting the experts (in their respective areas) 99% of the time.
> someone who isn't knowlegeable enough follows your advice and is unable to notice their own errors in interpretation and understanding
This happens even with experts in their own fields. That's why it is supposed to be the beginning of a dialogue between the reader and the writers, not a research project that happens in a vacuum. Science is a collaborative effort.
Here's what I don't get about "superdeterminism" – what it is "super-" about it? I read an explanation of "superdeterminism", and it just reads like plain old determinism to me. Any convinced determinist is going to say that of course determinism includes the human will among the things that are determined. Philosophers such as Spinoza or the Baron d'Holbach were already saying exactly that long before any physicist had thought up the term "superdeterminism".
And everything else in the universe leading up to it, no matter how seemingly irrelevant, is constructed to lead up to that. To get that exact measurement from the device, you needed to set it up in that exact way at that exact time. The amount of time it took the clerk to count your change when you bought ice cream thus is a crucial part of that experiment. It was coded up at the beginning of time precisely so that the experiment could occur to give you that result.
Ordinary determinism can be a bit more lax about the specifics. It doesn't have to be, but it could be. It could focus on some other time scale: "It doesn't matter whether you pick chocolate or vanilla, you're still getting hit by a truck on the way out of the ice cream shop, so you get to choose what flavor you're enjoying when you get flattened". Superdeterminism denies that, right back to the beginning.
So it really is plain old determinism, but with a specific focus on, well, specificities.
If the mainstream of historical determinism is in fact superdeterminism, then the term is a bit misleading, because it makes it sound like physicists are coming up with some new idea rather than just restating one that has been around for centuries (maybe even millennia).
That paper is often misinterpreted. Its breathless conclusions don't look so special once you consider the experiment from the MWI perspective. Notably, they don't talk about the detection intensity much, even though it is quite important to the interpretation. Coincidence counters aren't white cards, and don't work the same! Yet, people interpret the paper as if the experiment would behave identically with an ordinary projector screen as the detector. It wouldn't, and that's the rub...
You too have been indoctrinated into the QM orthodoxy, and you've failed to realise that memorising catechisms might win you accolades with your peers, but doesn't necessarily help you understand the physical universe.
If you peel back modern QM, you'll find it is a very tall Jenga tower wobbling around in the wind, held up by more magical thinking that real science. The experiments it is based on have a very narrow scope, and those caveats and limitations are brushed aside by adherents.
People stating things like instant action at a distance despite special relativity being a thing for a century are just the same as a Christian priest ignoring geology and stating that God created the Earth in seven days. Self-contradictory notions such as the wave-particle duality are no different to the catholic concept of the holy trinity being one god. Giving up your devotion to rational thought is how you prove your devotion to the faith. The greater the nonsense, the stronger the proof of your willingness to be a team member.
White cards measure total photons.
You can fool yourself very easily by ignoring the total intensity of the photons per second measured with coincidence counters. E.g.: going from some distribution at intensity of "1 unit" to some other distribution at intensities of 1/2, 1/4, etc... might all mean different things. Essentially the detector is acting as a filter, "picking out" subsets of the signal. The drop in intensity is due to the filtering being highly selective.
However, if you read through many of these papers, including the quantum eraser paper, you'll note that they normalise the measurements so that they all look like they have unit intensity. This is misleading, because it looks like something is being changed ("erased"), but in reality its just that the experiment is being set up to increasingly filter to smaller and smaller subsets of the photon stream.
Looking at this through the lens of the many worlds interpretation (MWI) completely removes the mystery, making this a very boring and ordinary experiment that reveals nothing new.
Yet, "classical" QM theorists insist on breathlessly promulgating it as clear evidence of "quantum weirdness". It isn't weird. It's just purposefully misinterpreted to increase the mysticism.
This is directly comparable to the behaviour of priests and holy men. Religions wouldn't have as many ardent adherents if there was no mystery. You gotta have the mystery! The magic! The miracles!
Would Christianity be as popular if Jesus hadn't healed the sick and came back from the dead himself?
Would QM get as much funding if it was just some boring maths?
In fact, a central position point was that intuition, preference, and science’s unreasonable bias towards elegance has held back physics for a century.
Edit: Found the most recent one https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fphy.2020.00139...
What you lose out is the ability to know what that determinism is. You do the experiment and the universe really does know if the electron is destined to go left or right, and has ever since the Big Bang.
But you cannot possibly. Superdeterminism forbids you from knowing beyond a certain amount. There will always be a minimum uncertainty to you. (That's distinct from Heisenberg uncertainty, but it's related.) The only way to know which direction the electron goes is to do it. And having done it, you can't meaningfully talk about the alternative, which would be like trying to talk about what would happen if 3 were equal to 5.
So, if that's a thing you can live with, then you can have superdeterminism and be happy about it. QM will back you, and so will every QM experiment.
The comment above is criticizing the argument: the argument is "My ideas are being unfairly dismissed by the scientific community," and a valid counterargument is "No, your ideas are being fairly dismissed by the scientific community."
Yes, an obvious implication of that counterargument is "The person making the argument is the sort of person who publishes ideas that are regularly dismissed by the scientific community," but the strength of the counterargument does not rest on discrediting the speaker as a person - it rests on directly refuting the claim being made.
Or, in other words, if I were making the argument "Prof. Loeb's ideas are being unfairly dismissed by the scientific community," the exact same counterargument could be made against my argument. The fundamental reason an ad hominem is fallacious is that an argument's validity doesn't depend on who's making it. In this case, the argument is equally prone to refutation regardless of who's making it.
This person has bad ideas (going further, this person is synonymous with bad ideas and therefore only has bad ideas).
> I won't say crack pot because he is a legit tenured astronomer at Harvard, but I have seen his papers roundly critiqued on the merits at too many journal clubs to count
Some of his ideas have been proven to be bad although he has an expert understanding of the subject.
> Its a bit outrageous to claim he's Galileo ... against the weakness, and untestability, of his ideas.
This person is making a spurious analogy because Galileo's idea was a good idea and his ideas are bad ideas (some of which have been proven to be bad ideas).
It is ad-hominem in nature because GP is disposing of the content of the article by claiming the above analogy is spurious by pre-supposing that Loeb only has bad ideas.
There is nothing to be read here about the reaction of the scientific community to unconventional ideas which is the content of the article, especially if you pre-suppose that Avi Leob only has bad ideas and therefore was rightfully dismissed by the scientific community (which is what the GP is doing).
If the argument was in fact about whether or not Loeb's ideas are being unfairly dismissed (or in the weaker case, rightfully receiving pushback), that would directly be talking about the content of the article and generate a good discussion. (In fact I disagree with what Loeb is saying in the article and have posted a comment as such below)
Put another way: the sense of the counterargument is not that this opinion piece itself is a fringe/crackpot idea, which is what you'd expect if the counterargument was simply "This is from a crackpot." In fact, it's not dismissing the content of the article at all. The counterargument is admitting the logical coherence of this opinion piece - that if, among other things, Prof. Loeb's works are unfairly dismissed, then it demonstrates a closed-mindedness in the scientific community - and attacking the premise by saying that the works in question were in fact fairly dismissed.
To demonstrate that, supposing that the author of the article was Einstein and he had written the exact same content but instead substituting relativity for Oumamama and reaction to such by Abraham etc. the GP's comment would have no substance, but the content and argument of the article at hand would be little changed.
Eh... It's true that strictly following the rules of logic you can't disprove these ideas with an ad hominem. But as a researcher you only have so much time, and oftentimes the errors can be subtle. If a researcher has gotten a reputation for publishing a string of outlandish papers that fall apart under scrutiny, it's just not worth the time to go into them and figure out why exactly they're wrong.
One of the reasons this guy has gotten a reputation for himself is because he keeps publishing sensational results, uses his credentials to gin up media interest, the press picks it up, and then the rest of the community is forced to engage with the ideas to the outside world. The way it would ordinarily work is that he would submit his ideas to a journal, a few reviewers would spend the time finding all the holes in the ideas and either the paper would be published with the sensational claims toned down, or it would be rejected. In my view, the main point of peer review is to make sure that all the obvious problems in a paper have been fixed before it gets published so that most researchers don't waste their time trying to understand garbage. But he engages in a sort of end-run around the peer review process.
This is not a "fringe" idea; it's been a fairly common speculation for decades. What's different about the paper you cite, AFAIK, is the idea that the CMBR during the epoch he describes was the heat source. But there's nothing "fringe" about the CMBR temperature he gives for that epoch; that's standard mainstream cosmology.
> he is so clearly using his tenure as a defense against the weakness, and untestability, of his ideas
That's actually what tenure is for--to give people the security to be able to explore all kinds of ideas, many of which appear weak and untestable, and most of which will never pan out, but a few of which will end up creating enormous value. Loeb's ideas may never pan out, but that doesn't make it wrong for him to explore them or publish them or use his tenured position as a secure base from which to do those things.
What I find off-putting about the article is the fact that he appears to think that resistance to unconventional ideas is somehow wrong. It's not. It's a part of the same dynamic of scientific progress as his proposing of unconventional ideas. Even ideas that end up proving correct still get resisted at first, and that's the way it has to be; it's not some defect that we could somehow avoid if we were just smart or open-minded enough. If he wants to play the role of "explorer of unconventional ideas", he should be willing to take what comes with that territory.
If the CMBR was the heat source, what was the heat sink? You need a temperature difference to produce negentropy and allow for life. Did life evolve in the shadow of primordial black holes, or what?
Good question. I haven't read through the paper yet, so I don't know if the author addresses it.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron-oxidizing_bacteria
Strictly speaking, the important thing is to have a differential in entropy. The processes of life produce entropy, and that entropy has to go somewhere else if the organism is to live. But a differential in entropy implies a differential in temperature (though you may have to be careful about how you define temperature since there are different kinds of temperature).
Beyond your appeal to authority, you have convincingly confirmed one of the theses of this article.
He's not just talking about physics... he's also talking about archeo and geo and anthro and paleo, etc. ... and there's FAR too much evidence - across the board, and going back 150 years (the list would take up this whole page) - to demonstrate that rocking the orthodox can be dangerous to your career.
Say what you will about Oumama, Avi's very very right on this one. And of course it works to the detriment of science. Everytime evidence disappears, or is re-interpreted to defend the faith - and the pseudoscience sword is thrown - we all lose. How many babies died before Ignaz Semmelweis died in an insane asylum?
When you say "clearly" as to his motives, I might be tempted to ask you for solid evidence of his motives. I'm sure you don't have that. Yet, I believe it is possible you are right. Or not.
He states that extraordinary claims do require extraordinary evidence so the thesis that skepticism is healthy is still embedded here, however I think he's unwilling to consider (or unconcerned about the idea) that the alien origin claim could very well be misinterpreted/lead credence to a lot of crackpot claims in the lay public which is the source of most of the pushback.
While we do not currently have an explanation for Oumuamua and I cannot intelligently speak on which of the four possibilities mentioned in the article is more likely, communicating science to the lay public is often better done once a theory has been absorbed into the general underpinnings of the larger scientific body of evidence at hand rather than when it is at the precipice to avoid inadvertently misleading people.
Eventually after digging deeper on both these topics I learned that it is absolutely possible to have outgassing that doesn't leave a tail, that could cause the observed acceleration. And that something being stationary relative to the other objects in this area of the galaxy is not at all unusual.
This kind of made me feel he was either being disingenuous or was just too emotionally invested in it being aliens to think clearly.
Sure, it could still be aliens, nonetheless, so could every rock and spot we see in the sky, though.
It’s not looking so crazy anymore.
That you or anyone else might disagree, or might not be able to imagine what type of mental model would lead to such an "educated guess", neither reverses the burden of the proof, nor eliminates the presumption of good faith, nor Occam's razor.
Taking the position that it came from a lab requires more assumptions and more unsubstantiated beliefs than not taking this position. It's just like Russel's teapot.
Does it? One view is it came from a lab. The other common view is it came from a wet market. There seems to be evidence the lab was studying covid. While the wet market was seafood focused and I'm yet to see anything showing wildlife meat, let alone bats, while respecting media not showing this doesn't mean they weren't there.
Both are possible but it seems to me more likely a lab studying COVID (confirmed or likely?) plus has a history of multiple virus escapes has as good likelyhood and assumptions as an unproven a bat meat section at a seafood market from a bat that would have been likely had to have been transported over 1500km to reach the market if taken from the wild.
Personally, I dont think we will ever know the truth and don't claim any answer is correct, but there seems less of a leap of faith on the lab than the wet market to me.
How many land within stones throw of a lab that collects these from a multi-thousand mile radius.
Occam’s razor seems to point…
The use of logic does not help much as long as emotions are strong, we can only reason by stepping back and be as detached as possible.
For example when people finally reached the interesting question "what is the molecule which confers heredity", almost everybody thought it had to be proteins, and the mainstream worked hard to ignore the entirely factual and reproducible findings until they couldn't any longer (basically, the period before Avery's experiment, and between it and Hershey/Chase).
The same happened with ribosomes: the community insisted ribosomes were protein machines with some RNA decoration, even though experiments done in the 60s and 70s showed that RNA was the active element. Similarly, with ribozymes- RNA that folds up into structures and carries out specific enzymatic reactions. People worked really hard to avoid changing their mind that only proteins could be enzymes.
Interstingly, the best example I've seen is the opposite: prions. When I was in grad school, the professor who was the expert on prions was at my institution, and had just about managed to run the experiments fully supporting his hypothesis (that prions are infection proteins and the replication process is distinct from that of bacterial or viral replication). The only way you could get the virologists to stop complaining was to point out that it wasn't theoretically impossible that proteins could catalyze other proteins to change shape in a chain reaction, and that Prusiner had reduced everything to a working system in mice that could be reproduced by anybody willing to wait the 60 days a single experiment took.
Science, religion, politics, programming...
I've been working on a book about this for a while. The framework makes me sound like a bastard but I truly believe the comparison can withstand legitimate scrutiny.
It's not that these institutions at their best are the same, it's that the same shams, grifters, cults and hoodwinkers exist in all of them. The same arguments from popularity, deceptions through marketing and pack animal mentalities.
At their worst they are all the same. At their best, they are of course quite different.
It's always worth remembering that even the most noble human project also has all the grotesque qualities of the human spirit buried within it. Diligence is always required.
While that's a headline and not the text of the article (hence possibly added by an editor), it is worth clarifying the history. When Galileo reported his telescopic observations, the Vatican astronomers went so far as to buy a telescope from him, and after some initial difficulty with it, confirmed his observations.
The idea of refusing to look through the telescope was raised as a rhetorical point in debate over the subject matter, but contradicts what actually happened.
As I understand it, the Church was willing to let go of the Ptolemaic model in favor of a model of Tycho Brahe, which supposed that the sun revolved around the earth, and the planets around the sun, which preserved the apparent lack of motion experienced on earth. They also told Galileo that if he could furnish empirical evidence to support his model, they would have to re-think their interpretation of the Bible. The letter from Bellarmine to Galileo is preserved.
An odd issue that we face with extraterrestrials, or non-earthly beings in general, is that they can be introduced as an explanation for anything, and have been for 5000+ years. We don't have a good way of scientifically investigating extraterrestrial hypotheses.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
The text of Bellarmine's letter to Galileo is worth reading.
Note that I'm not defending the Church with my comments, but only documenting what I think was the technical difference between the Galileo and Bruno cases.
Basically the church got upset he was preaching religious stuff against the church, it had nothing to do with his science.
This is close, but a little off. First, the (Catholic) Church had little problem with heliocentrism, provided that it was phrased as a hypothesis. Copernicus was even a Catholic priest when he published his heliocentric ideas, and the Church allowed full publication as long as he called it a hypothesis. The religious authorities that had theological problems with heliocentrism were almost all Protestants. Martin Luther was extremely critical of Copernicus and apparently applied one of his many insults toward the Pole. Calvin and other reformers were also quite critical.
The Catholic Church wasn't (and even today isn't) too concerned with literal interpretation of scriptures, but the Church of the time was very into Scholasticism, Thomas Aquinas' fusion of Classical Greek philosophy (principally Aristotle's ideas) with the theological, moral and even epistemic and metaphysical teachings from the Bible. When the Catholic Church got upset at Galileo, they were upset that he was contradicting Aristotle, not the Old Testament.
And Galileo was wrong. First, the Copernican model of heliocentrism held that orbits were perfectly circular, and even preserved epicycles to correct for the observational deviations from the model. Occam's razor would seem to say this made it a worse theory than Ptolemy's. Additionally, Galileo made a pretty serious mistake when calculating the distance to stars based on his telescope observations, underestimating the distance to the nearest stars by around 1000x. The Church correctly noted that if the stars were as close as Galileo proposed, then measurable deviations in their positions and/or sizes should have been observed from earth at parallax positions; however, the star field remained fixed. To the Church, extraordinary claims necessary to overturn Aristotle required extraordinary evidence, and Galileo failed. Not only that, but he was fairly arrogant about it, insisting he was correct when his theory was clearly contradictory. I strongly disagree with the Church's decision to punish Galileo, but the Church was in fact defending science, both consensus and the scientific method, albeit overzealously.
When Kepler published his heliocentric model that incorporated elliptical orbits tuned using Tycho Brahe's observational data, the reception was quite a bit better across Europe. However, Kepler himself ended up excommunicated from his own Lutheran Church because he believed the moon was solid, which allegedly contradicted the Old Testament, though Kepler appears to have been devout and dedicated much of his life toward reconciling Biblical and scientific truth.
I would be careful here to distinguish between Aristotelian philosophy from Aristotelian natural science. Scholasticism, especially Thomism, is still the preferred intellectual tradition and point of reference, and rightly so, but there is no refusal to entertain whatever valid insights may be found elsewhere. It is rather that many of Aristotle's scientific explanations have fallen out of favor and been superseded.
But you're entirely correct that even in those days, Aristotle wasn't some sort of incontrovertible source of truth for natural philosophy, but someone who should not be cast aside lightly.
As for the other poster's remark on Thomism, Carrier writes[2]: "Thomism [...] the Medieval Dumbity that consists of purely armchair, and often pseudological, theorizing about natural reality, which ignores the entirety of the sciences and pretends facts and evidence don’t matter—and even don’t exist, contradicting its every conclusion", so not sure how viable that school of thinking is.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Lvg4di3sAw
[2] https://www.richardcarrier.info/archives/18356
To be clear, I totally sympathize with the skeptical cause when it comes to rooting out prejudices based on shallow religiosity. I just don't believe there is a place in rational discourse for this type of argumentation that skews towards "bierstube" mockery.
What's left is a mishmash of unrelated notions: metaphysics, ethics, axiology, and (for some reason) logic. Or whatever other slicing you want to apply; the whole point is that what's left as "philosophy" is specifically the stuff that's not locked down. Except logic, which philosophy clings to, rather than letting it live in the math department, even though geometry and arithmetic (also formerly the domain of philosophy) live there.
I agree that we ought to just call it all "philosophy" again, since we all love wisdom. Even the "scientific method" is really just a thing we all do every day, even when we're not practicing "science".
I don't think this is entirely true. First, because there is no "dogmatic stake", as it were, in either geocentrism or heliocentrism. That is, the Church does not hold a position on this matter and a moment's thought will make it obvious that the Church isn't in the business of making scientific pronouncements anymore than a lawyer makes pronouncements affirming or denying what his mechanic says is wrong with his car (bad metaphysics and ideology masquerading as science, on the other hand...). True, the Church has been an energizing force behind the development of science, but this is a reflection of the Christian spirit and worldview, one which embraces Creation as good, beautiful, rational, and intelligible and thus capable and worthy of study. There never was a need to reinterpret the Bible because there's nothing in the Bible that depends on one or the other model being true. The Bible is not a scientific textbook. It doesn't matter which orb revolves around which.
The whole Galileo affair is routinely misrepresented because the fable we're given is the result of Enlightenment propaganda desired to create the false narrative that there is some grand battle between SCIENCE(tm) on one hand, and faith (Christianity) on the other. The historical accounts of the affair say otherwise. Mostly, Galileo was kind of an ass and it took years of making enemies before things turned for the worse.
Yes, the discoveries Galileo announced from his telescope also touched off an interesting set of debates about whether or not his observation of sunspots and craters on the Moon were actually real features on those bodies, or just artifacts of the telescope itself. Those debates are still with us today in a more general form. Anytime we use instruments to observe something, we have to be careful to make sure that we are observing something in the outside universe rather than an artifact of the instrument itself.
https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2015/09/11/the-most-misr...
"Yeah well...look at the history of crazy ideas in science"
Getting a little tired of people making this argument.
It can be applied to literally any idea so its pretty meaningless to say.
For the most part, exact scientists are willing to listen if radical ideas are backed up by evidence. — Einstein's ideas were quite radical at the time, but they were backed up by convincing mathematical reasoning and were accepted, however absurd it might have sounded that nonmassive light is influenced by gravity, or that such things as time dilation occur, and they were not actually observed until decades later.
That being said, — there are definitely entire fields of science where the “mainstream consensus” seems to be based quite a bit on convention and simply things “truths that became repeated” but were never well substantiated, and when empirically justified by some experiments, sometimes later found to not be reproducible, or perhaps not occuring in the wild, and only in lab conditions.
I would suggest that he answers to his own complaints. There is a great deal of prioritisation going on in science and fringe ideas require too large steps away from where we are today. The real break-throughs in science are ideas that massively reduce the size of the backlog. My guess is that these ideas will receive proper treatment them when the time is right.
> The most important task before us as a civilization is to find freethinking actors from exoplanets and learn whether they have a better sense of what the play is all about.
Does not at all match the arguments presented.
What is the point of this comparison? Actually persuading whatever fraction of a percentage of your readers who literally believe "scientists can NEVER be wrong"?
The actual point of making such a comparison really just seems to be reassurance to your side of the argument, all while sneaking in an ad hominem against anyone who disagrees with you by comparing them to the Inquisition.
Extraordinary claims do not simply require other extraordinary claims to have been true before. The author is apparently cognizant of this, so he should drop this self-aggrandizing cliche.
It's worth a watch.
[0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3sq658Okvao