Horgan on the evil of paradigms

John Horgan writes in his SciAm blog:

In 1972 Thomas Kuhn hurled an ashtray at Errol Morris. Already renowned for The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, published a decade earlier, Kuhn was at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, and Morris was his graduate student in history and philosophy of science.

During a meeting in Kuhn’s office, Morris questioned Kuhn’s views on paradigms, the webs of conscious and unconscious assumptions that underpin, say, Aristotle’s, Newton’s or Einstein’s physics. You cannot say one paradigm is truer than another, according to Kuhn, because there is no objective standard by which to judge them. Paradigms are incomparable, or “incommensurable.”

If that were true, Morris asked, wouldn’t history of science be impossible? Wouldn’t the past be inaccessible -- except, Morris added, for “someone who imagines himself to be God?” Kuhn realized his student had just insulted him. He muttered, “He’s trying to kill me. He’s trying to kill me.” Then he threw the ashtray at Morris and threw him out of the program.

Morris went on to become an acclaimed maker of documentaries. He won an Academy Award for The Fog of War, his portrait of “war criminal” — Morris’s term — Robert McNamara. His documentary The Thin Blue Line helped overturn the conviction of a man on death row for murder. ...

I agree, to an extent, with Morris’s take on Kuhn. I spent hours talking to Kuhn in 1992, when he was at MIT, and he struck me as almost comically self-contradicting. He tied himself in knots trying to explain precisely what he meant when he talked about the impossibility of true communication. He really did seem to doubt whether reality exists independently of our flawed, fluid conceptions of it.

Kuhn is dead now, and his followers are worse than he ever was. We should blame the living scholars who substitute paradigms for reality.

Morris proposes that postmodernism is an attractive ideology for right-wing authoritarians. To support this claim, he notes the scorn for truth evinced by Hitler and the current U.S. President, for whom power trumps truth. Morris suggests that “belief in a real world, in truth and in reference, does seem to speak to the left; the denial of the real world, of truth and reference, to the right.”

That’s simply wrong.

Horgan is right, and the reality deniers are almost all on the political left. The leftists are the ones who always want to ban facts and views from Amazon, Facebook, Google, Apple, and Twitter. Free speech is primarily championed by right-wingers.

The paradigm shifters are one major faction of reality deniers, and the other big faction is the quantum Bell-heads who argue that certain experiments have disproved realism. For example, see this recent paper.

Stephen Boughn writes Against "Reality" in Physics:

The concept of "reality" is often raised in the context of philosophical foundations of physics or interpretations of quantum mechanics. When this term is so raised, it is a warning to me that I am about to be led down a rabbit hole. Such diversions usually lead nowhere unless you consider endless discussions of Schrodinger's cat, wave function collapse, quantum non-locality, and parallel universes to be useful. A prime example is the famous Einstein, Podolsky, and Rosen paper wherein they concluded that the quantum wave function cannot provide a complete description of physical reality. In this essay I suggest that, in physics discourse, the term "reality" should be avoided at all costs.

It has become commonplace to define "reality" as meaning a certain type of hidden variables theory. When the stupid hidden variables theory fails, they say that reality does not exist.

Also on the reality denial front, statisticians urged killing statistical significance:

When was the last time you heard a seminar speaker claim there was ‘no difference’ between two groups because the difference was ‘statistically non-significant’? ...

Our call to retire statistical significance and to use confidence intervals as compatibility intervals is not a panacea. Although it will eliminate many bad practices, it could well introduce new ones. Thus, monitoring the literature for statistical abuses should be an ongoing priority for the scientific community. But eradicating categorization will help to halt overconfident claims, unwarranted declarations of ‘no difference’ and absurd statements about ‘replication failure’ when the results from the original and replication studies are highly compatible. The misuse of statistical significance has done much harm to the scientific community and those who rely on scientific advice. P values, intervals and other statistical measures all have their place, but it’s time for statistical significance to go.

The Nature article had 800 signatories endorsing it, which is a strange way to lobby for a scientific idea.

They are right that P-values are commonly abused, but that is because they are so useful. Replacing them with something else will not be so easy.

Even Feyerabend accepted Copenhagen

A recent paper quotes a well-known philosopher of science making a point about quantum mechanics in 1962:

If I am correct in this, then all those philosophers who try to solve the quantum riddle by trying to provide an alternative interpretation of the current theory which leaves all laws of this theory unchanged are wasting their time. Those who are not satisfied with the Copenhagen point of view must realize that only a new theory will be capable of satisfying their demands (Feyerabend 1962b, 260, fn 49).

The paper notes that John von Neumann said something similar in 1932.

Feyerabend had a lot of goofy views, but he was right about this.

I mention this because there are a lot of people today who admit that quantum mechanics is quantitatively correct in the sense that it makes very accurate predictions, but argue that the Copenhagen interpretation is flawed, and we must find a better interpretation.

Dream on. It's okay if you prefer QBism or consistent histories or decoherence, as these are just minor variations on Copenhagen. Those who attack Copenhagen as untenable really have a problem with quantum mechanics, and no interpretation is going to make them happy.

This was all recognized by experts in 1932 and by informed outsiders in 1962. Today's Copenhagen deniers are going against what has been conventional wisdom for a long time.

Physicist says Atheism is Unscientific

SciAm reports an interview:

Marcelo Gleiser, a 60-year-old Brazil-born theoretical physicist at Dartmouth College and prolific science popularizer, has won this year’s Templeton Prize. ...

Why are you against atheism?

I honestly think atheism is inconsistent with the scientific method. What I mean by that is, what is atheism? It’s a statement, a categorical statement that expresses belief in nonbelief. “I don’t believe even though I have no evidence for or against, simply I don’t believe.” Period. It’s a declaration. But in science we don’t really do declarations. We say, “Okay, you can have a hypothesis, you have to have some evidence against or for that.” And so an agnostic would say, look, I have no evidence for God or any kind of god (What god, first of all? The Maori gods, or the Jewish or Christian or Muslim God? Which god is that?) But on the other hand, an agnostic would acknowledge no right to make a final statement about something he or she doesn’t know about.

Really? We don't do declarations in science?

Atheism is just a denial of God. Most atheists would probably say that they see some evidence for God, some evidence against it, and on balance they do not believe in God. Maybe it is a rational decision, and maybe not.

An agnostic is just someone who thinks that God is unknowable.

Of course not everyone follows the definitions, and atheism becomes identified with the view of prominent atheists who profess their atheism. The funny thing is that those guys talk about their leftist political beliefs much than their evidence against God. So now atheism is widely understood as a leftist political movement.

Also in SciAm, astrophysicist Ethan Siegel and a microbiologist write:

The ongoing measles outbreaks across the United States and Europe prove definitively that our personal choices affect everybody around us. Although you have a right to your own body, your choice to willfully be sick ends where another’s right to be healthy begins. For that reason, people who “opt out” of vaccines should be opted out of American society. ...

No public or private school, workplace or other institution should allow a non-exempt, unvaccinated person through their doors. A basic concern for the health and safety of others is the price it costs to participate. ...

People falsely believe that diseases like measles have “gone away,” but they have not. They’re always there, waiting to strike as soon as our collective guard goes down.

Actually, measles has been eradicated from the USA. The only cases come in from foreigners.

If Americans are all vaccinated, then measles is not a threat.

So it makes more sense for foreigners to be opted out of American society. No public or private school, workplace or other institution should allow a foreigner through their doors.

Unfortunately, there’s no vaccine that can inoculate someone against a counterfactual, unscientific mindset.

There are, however, vaccines that can prevent dozens of harmful diseases. Those who refuse, and recklessly endanger others, should be put in quarantine.

The unscientific mindset blames children, when the measles vector is foreigners. Maybe we should also quarantine those who meet with foreigners. That is the result of Siegel's logic.

Horgan admits math proofs are not dying

SciAm writer John Horgan finally concedes

Okay, Maybe Proofs Aren't Dying After All

Two experts argue that proofs are doing fine, contrary to a controversial 1993 prediction of their impending demise

It appears that a famous mathematician led him astray:

But influential figures were behind the changes. One was William Thurston, who in 1982 won a Fields Medal — the mathematical equivalent of a Nobel Prize — for delineating links between topology and geometry.

Thurston, who served as a major source for my article, advocated a more free-form, “intuitive” style of mathematical research, communication and education, with less emphasis on conventional proofs. He sought to convey mathematical concepts with computer-generated models, including a video that he called “Not Knot.”

“That mathematics reduces in principle to formal proofs is a shaky idea” peculiar to the 20th century, Thurston told me. Ironically, he pointed out, Bertrand Russell and Kurt Godel demonstrated early in the century that mathematics is riddled with logical contradictions. “Set theory is based on polite lies, things we agree on even though we know they're not true,” Thurston said. “In some ways, the foundation of mathematics has an air of unreality.”

The Fields Medal is not really the mathematical equivalent of a Nobel Prize. The Abel Prize is much closer.

No one showed that mathematics is riddled with logical contradictions. Thurston was not knowledgeable about the foundations of math. He was a brilliant mathematician, and he was good at explaining his work to others, but he was lousy at writing up his proofs. Some of his best work was written up by others.

Thurston's ideas were not accepted until proofs were written and published. Probably his biggest idea was that all three-dimensional manifolds could be decomposed into one carrying one of about eight geometric structures. This was always called a conjecture, until Perelman published what appeared to be a proof, and others filled in the gaps so that everyone was convinced that it really was a proof.

Russell showed that certain set theory operations led to contradictions, and then showed how an axiomatic approach could resolve them. Goedel gave much better axiomatizations of set theory, can examples of undecidable statements. An undecidable is the opposite of a contradiction.

Horgan's concession is based on quoting two bloggers. It would have been better if he had asked someone who was trained in mathematical foundations, instead of computer science and particle physics.

BTW, Scott Aaronson comments:

More importantly, I’ve been completely open here about my unfortunate psychological tic of being obsessed with the people who hate me, and why they hate me, and what I could do to make them hate me less. And I’ve been working to overcome that obsession.

I seem to be one of his enemies, but I do not hate him. I don't disagree with his comments about proof, but he is not a mathematician and he does not speak for mathematicians.

Why Cosmologists hate Copenhagen

James B. Hartle explains:

Textbook (Copenhagen) formulations of quantum mechanics are inadequate for cosmology for at least four reasons: 1) They predict the outcomes of measurements made by observers. But in the very early universe no measurements were being made and no observers were around to make them. 2) Observers were outside of the system being measured. But we are interested in a theory of the whole universe where everything, including observers, are inside. 3) Copenhagen quantum mechanics could not retrodict the past. But retrodicting the past to understand how the universe began is the main task of cosmology. 4) Copenhagen quantum mechanics required a fixed classical spacetime geometry not least to give meaning to the time in the Schrödinger equation. But in the very early universe spacetime is fluctuating quantum mechanically (quantum gravity) and without definite value.

There is some merit to this reasoning, but jumping to Everett many-worlds is still bizarre, and does not help.

The decoherence and consistent histories interpretations of quantum mechanics are really just minor variations of Copenhagen.

While Copenhagen says that observers notice quantum states settling into eigenstates, these newer interpretations say it can happen before the observer notices.

Many-worlds just says that anything can happen, and it is completely useless for cosmology.

Sean M. Carroll has announced that he is writing a new book on many-worlds theory. He will presumably take the position that it is a logical necessity for cosmology. Or that it is simpler for cosmology. However, I very much doubt that any benefit for cosmology can be found.

Physicist fired for expressing valid opinion

Lubos Motl writes:

After five months of "investigations" that weren't investigating anything, the vicious, dishonest, and ideologically contaminated individuals who took over CERN have said "good-bye" to Alessandro Strumia, a top particle phenomenologist with 38k citations according to Google Scholar and 32k according to Inspire.

This firing was political, obviously. You can compare male and female employment, but your conclusion must favor females, or else you will be censored, fired, and ostracized.

I don't think that the Physics community has thought this thru. Everyone now knows that women are promoted over more competent men, and the system is maintained by firing anyone who points out the facts.

Nature mag denies existence of gendered brains

You would think that our leading scientific journal would not be consumed by leftist ideology.

Nature mag reports:

The history of sex-difference research is rife with innumeracy, misinterpretation, publication bias, weak statistical power, inadequate controls and worse. ...

Yet, as The Gendered Brain reveals, conclusive findings about sex-linked brain differences have failed to materialize. Beyond the “missing five ounces” of female brain — gloated about since the nineteenth century — modern neuroscientists have identified no decisive, category-defining differences between the brains of men and women. ...

Whatever the subtitle, the book accomplishes its goal of debunking the concept of a gendered brain. The brain is no more gendered than the liver or kidneys or heart. Towards the end, Rippon flirts with the implications of this finding for the growing number of people transitioning or living between current binary gender categories.

If the concept is bunk, then why is anyone transitioning?

The world is crackpots saying silly things, but I get worried when I see those things in our most elite intellectual journals. I would be similarly dismayed if Nature started publishing an Astrology column.

When some otherwise intelligent man denies human consciousness, or denies free will, I wonder how they get thru the day and manage their lives. Likewise, when they believe in infinite doppelgangers, or that we live in a simulation, or when they have certain religious or anti-religious opinions.

Men and women obviously think differently. Otherwise, why would feminism be a thing?

The differences are obvious to anyone who has gone out on a date. This article is silly.

But what’s contracting in relativity?

The "Ask a Physicist" blog explains:

Q: In relativity, length contracts at high speeds. But what’s contracting? Is it distance or space or is there even a difference? ...

This situation is sometimes explained as a consequence of length contraction. But what is it that’s contracting? Some authors put it down to space itself contracting, or just distance contracting (which it seems to me amounts to the same thing) and others say that’s nonsense because you could posit two spaceships heading in the same direction momentarily side by side and traveling at different speeds, so how can there be two different distances?

So what is the correct way to understand the situation from the astronaut’s perspective?

Physicist: Space and time don’t react to how you move around. They don’t contract or slow down just because you move fast relative to someone somewhere. What changes is how you perceive space and time. ...

Einstein’s big contribution (or one of them at least) was “combining” time and space under the umbrella of “spacetime”, so named because Germans love sticking words together

I agree with his explanation, except that the view he described was not Einstein's view.

Minkowski was the German who combined space and time into spacetime, and he based it on Poincare, not Einstein.

Einstein's contribution was not putting time and space together, and he very much disagreed with the view that what changes is our perception of space and time. I explain the point here and in my book, and in other posts. Einstein insisted that his view of the contraction was essentially the same as Lorentz's, and contrary to the non-Euclidean geometry view that is nicely explained in the above blog.