Re : Following article about Uncertainty
Centroids :
Obviously there is major value in making yourself comfortable with
uncertainty in life.
Some things we will never know, or, anyway, probably will never know.
However,
the article --ironically-- seems to absolutize uncertainty How does
this make sense ?
Uncertainty can be useful, there is no question about that. But you can
also argue the
proposition that pressed too far, uncertainty becomes a serious
impediment. At a minimum
there are all kinds of situations in which the point comes when we must
make up our minds
about issues or decisions before us.
The article concerns science, specifically. But is all science uncertain ?
Have we thrown
out Newton's laws in every and all cases ? Well, not hardly. At least as
I understand it,
those laws are as certain as ever --except when we must deal with the
ultra large scale
and the ultra micro scale. And, of course, Relativity theory makes some
"common sense"
views obsolete at extremely fast speeds, etc. Otherwise Newton remains
right on the money.
Not quite all forms of mechanics / engineering follows Newton and works
just fine.
This being the case, exactly why should we dismiss certainty as a useful
principle, indeed,
why should we be dismissive or entire classes of certain truths ? Among
these truths is
the psychological need we all have for any number of certainties in life.
To follow the logic of sacralization of uncertainty where would we end up
? To push this idea
to where it can go, we no longer would feel sure that up is not down, the
future is not the past,
and find ourselves in an Alice in Wonderland universe where nothing at all
is as it seems to be.
Well, we can't live that way .
The real problem isn't accommodating ourselves to uncertainty. The real
problem is
sorting out areas where we must allow for uncertainty and where we are
justified
in being / feeling certain.
This presents its own problems. We can feel certain that human nature is a
constant, for example,
which it is --except that there is growing evidence that there has been
marginal change even
in recorded history. "In what small ways have we changed ?" therefore
becomes a question
with its own importance. Basically, which is to say overwhelmingly, we
can place reliance
on the constancy of human nature. But we also need to be mindful that we
aren't exactly
like our predecessors, we are more resistant to some diseases, more
susceptible to
others, for example.
Then there are entire institutions dedicated to the proposition that human
nature is
sufficiently malleable that it can and should change --education and
religion, especially,
but also science itself. To the extent this is true, with several centuries
of induced change
at a minimum as far as pure science is concerned, several thousand years in
the case
of religion and education, then we can take it as a given that any number
of assumptions
about human nature we now make are not quite the same as was true in 1000
AD or
1000 BC and before. Which is to say that we can and should make allowances
for such change even when we cannot identify its character exactly.
Yet, when all is said, mostly --let's say 99 & 44/100ths % of the time--
we can depend
on constancy in human nature. There is a floor under our feet, there are
speed limits
we need to observe, and we can be sure that some forms of morality are
self-destructive
and others are not. Its just that 99% + is not the same thing as 100 %.
Thoughts for today
Billy
============================================================
We must learn to love uncertainty and failure, say leading thinkers
Planet's biggest brains answer this year's Edge question: 'What scientific
concept would improve everybody's cognitive toolkit?'
* _Alok Jha_ (http://www.guardian.co.uk/profile/alokjha) , science
correspondent
* _The Guardian_ (http://www.guardian.co.uk/theguardian) , Saturday
15 January 2011
<FIGCAPTION>Edge of reason: Doubt and uncertainty are essential elements
of the scientific process. Photograph:
Being comfortable with uncertainty, knowing the limits of what science can
tell us, and understanding the worth of failure are all valuable tools that
would improve people's lives, according to some of the world's leading
thinkers.
The ideas were submitted as part of an annual exercise by the web magazine
_Edge_ (http://edge.org/) , which invites scientists, philosophers and
artists to opine on a major question of the moment. This year it was, "What
scientific concept would improve everybody's cognitive toolkit?"
The magazine called for "shorthand abstractions" – a way of encapsulating
an idea or scientific concept into a short description that could be used as
a component of bigger questions. The responses were published online
today.
Many responses pointed out that the public often misunderstands the
scientific process and the nature of scientific doubt. This can fuel public
rows
over the significance of disagreements between scientists about
controversial issues such as climate change and vaccine safety.
_Carlo Rovelli_ (http://www.cpt.univ-mrs.fr/~rovelli/) , a physicist at the
University of Aix-Marseille, emphasised _the uselessness of certainty_
(http://edge.org/q2011/q11_4.html#rovelli) . He said that the idea of
something being "scientifically proven" was practically an oxymoron and that
the
very foundation of science is to keep the door open to doubt.
"A good scientist is never 'certain'. Lack of certainty is precisely what
makes conclusions more reliable than the conclusions of those who are
certain: because the good scientist will be ready to shift to a different
point
of view if better elements of evidence, or novel arguments emerge. Therefore
certainty is not only something of no use, but is in fact damaging, if we
value reliability."
The physicist _Lawrence Krauss_ (http://krauss.faculty.asu.edu/) of
Arizona State University _agreed_ (http://edge.org/q2011/q11_6.html#krauss) .
"In
the public parlance, uncertainty is a bad thing, implying a lack of rigour
and predictability. The fact that global warming estimates are uncertain,
for example, has been used by many to argue against any action at the
present time," he said.
"In fact, however, uncertainty is a central component of what makes science
successful. Being able to quantify uncertainty, and incorporate it into
models, is what makes science quantitative, rather than qualitative. Indeed,
no number, no measurement, no observable in science is exact. Quoting
numbers without attaching an uncertainty to them implies they have, in
essence,
no meaning."
_Neil Gershenfeld_ (http://ng.cba.mit.edu/) , director of the Massachusetts
Institute of Technology's Centre for Bits and Atoms wants everyone to know
that _"truth" is just a model_
(http://edge.org/q2011/q11_5.html#gershenfeld) . "The most common
misunderstanding about science is that scientists
seek and find truth. They don't – they make and test models," he said.
"Building models is very different from proclaiming truths. It's a
never-ending process of discovery and refinement, not a war to win or
destination
to reach. Uncertainty is intrinsic to the process of finding out what you
don't know, not a weakness to avoid. Bugs are features – violations of
expectations are opportunities to refine them. And decisions are made by
evaluating what works better, not by invoking received wisdom."
The writer and web commentator _Clay Shirky_ (http://www.shirky.com/)
suggested that people should think more carefully about how they see the world.
His suggestion was _the Pareto principle_
(http://edge.org/q2011/q11_6.html#shirky) , a pattern whereby the top 1% of
the population control 35% of
the wealth or, on Twitter, the top 2% of users send 60% of the messages.
Sometimes known as the "80/20 rule", the Pareto principle means that the
average is far from the middle.
It is applicable to many complex systems, "And yet, despite a century of
scientific familiarity, samples drawn from Pareto distributions are routinely
presented to the public as anomalies, which prevents us from thinking
clearly about the world," said Shirky.
"We should stop thinking that average family income and the income of the
median family have anything to do with one another, or that enthusiastic and
normal users of communications tools are doing similar things, or that
extroverts should be only moderately more connected than normal people. We
should stop thinking that the largest future earthquake or market panic will
be as large as the largest historical one; the longer a system persists, the
likelier it is that an event twice as large as all previous ones is
coming."
_Kevin Kelly_ (http://www.kk.org/biography.php) , editor-at-large of Wired,
pointed to _the value of negative results_
(http://edge.org/q2011/q11_6.html#kelly) . "We can learn nearly as much from an
experiment that does not
work as from one that does. Failure is not something to be avoided but
rather something to be cultivated. That's a lesson from science that benefits
not only laboratory research, but design, sport, engineering, art,
entrepreneurship, and even daily life itself. All creative avenues yield the
maximum
when failures are embraced."
_
Michael Shermer_ (http://www.michaelshermer.com/) , publisher of the
_Skeptic Magazine_ (http://www.skeptic.com/) , wrote about _the importance of
thinking "bottom up not top down"_ (http://edge.org/q2011/q11_4.html#shermer)
, since almost everything in nature and society happens this way. "Water is
a bottom up, self-organised emergent property of hydrogen and oxygen. Life
is a bottom up, self-organised emergent property of organic molecules that
coalesced into protein chains through nothing more than the input of
energy into the system of Earth's early environment."
Economies are self-organised emergent processes of people trying to make a
living, and democracy is a bottom-up emergent political system
"specifically designed to displace top down kingdoms, theocracies, and
dictatorships".
But most people don't see things that way, said Shermer. "Bottom up
reasoning is counterintuitive. This is why so many people believe that life
was
designed from the top down, and why so many think that economies must be
designed and that countries should be ruled from the top down."
_Roger Schank_ (http://www.rogerschank.com/index.html) , a psychologist
and computer scientist, proposed that we should all know _the true meaning of
"experimentation"_ (http://edge.org/q2011/q11_2.html#schank) , which he
said had been ruined by bad schooling, where pupils learn that scientists
conduct experiments and if we copy exactly what they did in our high school
labs we will get the results they got. "In effect we learn that
experimentation is boring, is something done by scientists and has nothing to
do with our
daily lives."
Instead, he said, proper experiments are all about assessing and gathering
evidence. "In other words, the scientific activity that surrounds
experimentation is about thinking clearly in the face of evidence obtained as
the
result of an experiment. But people who don't see their actions as
experiments, and those who don't know how to reason carefully from data, will
continue to learn less well from their own experiences than those who do.
"Since most of us have learned the word 'experiment' in the context of a
boring ninth grade science class, most people have long since learned to
discount science and experimentation as being relevant to their lives."
_Lisa Randall_
(http://www.physics.harvard.edu/people/facpages/randall.html) , a physicist at
Harvard University, argued that perhaps _"science"
itself_ (http://edge.org/q2011/q11_5.html#randall) would be a useful concept
for
wider appreciation. "The idea that we can systematically understand
certain aspects of the world and make predictions based on what we've learned
–
while appreciating and categorising the extent and limitations of what we
know – plays a big role in how we think.
"Many words that summarise the nature of science such as 'cause and
effect', 'predictions', and 'experiments', as well as words that describe
probabilistic results such as 'mean', 'median', 'standard deviation', and the
notion of 'probability' itself help us understand more specifically what this
means and how to interpret the world and behaviour within it."
--
Centroids: The Center of the Radical Centrist Community
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