• Is there something scientists know that, were it widely shared with non-scientists, would make the rest of us better? Or is there something about how scientists come to their knowledge—call it the scientific method—that would make the practices of non-scientists better, were they to master it? Would wide application of the scientist’s way of knowing make our society fairer, more just and flourishing?
.. Shifting attitudes toward this relationship between is and ought explain much of our age’s characteristic uncertainty about authority: about whom to trust and what to believe.
When was modern science invented?
So I found myself writing a history of our ideas about the body, and I was stuck until I realised one couldn’t do it unless one wrote about how knowledge had advanced – despite the fact that historians aren’t supposed to write about progress. The notion that any discussion of progress must be anachronistic and disrespectful of cultural difference established itself in the 1970s, and no one in the profession has really dared question it since, and the result has been that historians of medicine don’t discuss, any more, whether doctors were actually helping their patients.
.. for the last thirty years historians have shied away from any discussion of why knowledge of nature improved in the seventeenth century because of their fear of writing what is called Whig history, history which is written with the benefit of hindsight; and second, some procedures – such as the experimental method– seem so obvious to us that we have difficulty in thinking our way back into a world where that method was not employed; and some ways of thinking, embodied in our language, seem so natural that people simply haven’t been aware of the historical process which led to their construction.
.. The discovery of America proved that the knowledge of the Greeks and the Romans was seriously incomplete – it encouraged people to believe in the possibility of progress in knowledge, and this was embodied in a new word, “discovery”, and a new practice,eponymy, naming discoveries after people (America after Amerigo Vespucci). It is only after the discovery of America, for example, that Pythagoras’s theorem is named after Pythagoras – innovation was now rewarded with immortal fame.
.. it became clear that long-standing debates amongst the philosophers could be definitively settled by the acquisition of new information – the idea seems obvious to us, but that is only because we live in a post-Columbus world.
.. The printing press is crucial in intensifying the communication of information – it makes it possible to consult more sources, compare authorities, keep up to date with new discoveries. It thus creates a new type of intellectual community and a new type of knowledge – knowledge that has passed the test of being subjected to the critical inspection of a wider community of experts, what we call “peer review”.
.. Newton, I argue, could only propound his new theory of gravity because he had the idea of a “theory” – something very different from a proof on the one hand or a working hypothesis on the other. So I think historians and scientists as they work on the history of science regularly overlook the power of certain intellectual tools ..
Elon Musk: First Principles
Musk calls this “reasoning from first principles.” I’ll let him explain:
I think generally people’s thinking process is too bound by convention or analogy to prior experiences. It’s rare that people try to think of something on a first principles basis. They’ll say, “We’ll do that because it’s always been done that way.” Or they’ll not do it because “Well, nobody’s ever done that, so it must not be good.” But that’s just a ridiculous way to think. You have to build up the reasoning from the ground up—“from the first principles” is the phrase that’s used in physics.
.. We could have called Newton’s law of universal gravitation a proof—and for a long time, it certainly seemed like one—but then what happens when Einstein comes around and shows that Newton was actually “zoomed in,” like someone calling the Earth flat, and when you zoom way out, you discover that the real law is general relativity and Newton’s law actually stops working under extreme conditions, while general relativity works no matter what. So then, you’d call general relativity a proof instead. Except then what happens when quantum mechanics comes around and shows that general relativity fails to apply on a tiny scale and that a new set of laws is needed to account for those cases.
.. Like look at Galileo. He engineered the telescope—that’s what allowed him to see that Jupiter had moons. The limiting factor, if you will, is the engineering. And if you want to advance civilization, you must address the limiting factor. Therefore, you must address the engineering
.. Historically, all rockets have been expensive, so therefore, in the future, all rockets will be expensive. But actually that’s not true. If you say, what is a rocket made of? It’s made of aluminum, titanium, copper, carbon fiber. And you can break it down and say, what is the raw material cost of all these components? And if you have them stacked on the floor and could wave a magic wand so that the cost of rearranging the atoms was zero, then what would the cost of the rocket be? And I was like, wow, okay, it’s really small—it’s like 2% of what a rocket costs. So clearly it would be in how the atoms are arranged—so you’ve got to figure out how can we get the atoms in the right shape much more efficiently. And so I had a series of meetings on Saturdays with people, some of whom were still working at the big aerospace companies, just to try to figure out if there’s some catch here that I’m not appreciating. And I couldn’t figure it out. There doesn’t seem to be any catch. So I started SpaceX
.. In the 1960s, a creative performance researcher named George Land conducted a study of 1,600 five-year-olds and 98 percent of the children scored in the “highly creative” range. Dr. Land re-tested each subject during five year increments. When the same children were 10-years-old, only 30 percent scored in the highly creative range. This number dropped to 12 percent by age 15 and just 2 percent by age 25. As the children grew into adults they effectively had the creativity trained out of them. In the words of Dr. Land, “non-creative behavior is learned.”
Gell-Mann Amnesia effect: michael crichton: why speculate?
Briefly stated, the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect is as follows. You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well. In Murray’s case, physics. In mine, show business. You read the article and see the journalist has absolutely no understanding of either the facts or the issues. Often, the article is so wrong it actually presents the story backward—reversing cause and effect. I call these the “wet streets cause rain” stories. Paper’s full of them.
.. In court, there is the legal doctrine of falsus in uno, falsus in omnibus, which means untruthful in one part, untruthful in all. But when it comes to the media, we believe against evidence that it is probably worth our time to read other parts of the paper. When, in fact, it almost certainly isn’t. The only possible explanation for our behavior is amnesia.
.. In the old days, commentators such as Eric Sevareid spent most of their time putting events in a context, giving a point of view about what had already happened. Telling what they thought was important or irrelevant in the events that had already taken place. This is of course a legitimate function of expertise in every area of human knowledge.
But over the years the punditic thrust has shifted away from discussing what has happened, to discussing what may happen.
.. So now let’s consider the advantages of speculation from a media standpoint.
- It’s incredibly cheap. Talk is cheap. And speculation shows are the cheapest thing you can put on television, They’re almost as cheap as running a test pattern. Speculation requires no research, no big staff.
.. Like a bearded nut in robes on the sidewalk proclaiming the end of the world is near, the media is just doing what makes it feel good, not reporting hard facts. We need to start seeing the media as a bearded nut on the sidewalk, shouting out false fears. It’s not sensible to listen to it.
.. We need to start remembering that everybody who said that Y2K wasn’t a real problem was either shouted down, or kept off the air. The same thing is true now of issues like species extinction and global warming.
.. My guy is unhappy because months after the study is over, he in the waiting room of Frankfurt airport and he strikes up a conversation with another man in the lounge, and they discover—to their horror—that they are both involved in the study. My guy was on the team that administered the meds. The other guy is on the team doing the statistics. There isn’t any reason why one should influence the other at this late date, but nevertheless the protocol requires that team members never meet. So now my guy is waiting to hear if the FDA will throw out the entire study, because of this chance meeting in Frankfurt airport.