Comments on “What is the role of intelligence in science?”
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How to avert a moderate apocalypse... and create a future we would like
Comments are for the page: What is the role of intelligence in science?
A lightweight triptych character study of "what is science"
https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2017/01/12/cannon-balls-plate-tectonics-and-invisible-elephants/
On what science “is”.
Three parts
1) As you said, objects with scientific rule-like behavior - like billard balls on a perfectly smooth table, are very scarce indeed in nature, but there were thrown heavy objects whose trajectories were sufficiently rule-based that people could learn to throw them to hit targets, and there were the stars, always reappearing and we learned rules for even those that didn’t appear in a given season of the year – always the same, except for the “wanderers”. Some things about optics are not too far from the surface: like the mirror-like behavior of a calm pond. How these for elements were like a like a rosetta stone for getting a handhold on the world of rule-obeying physical objects.
2) How curious minds, willing to collaborate in a certain way, can discover a science where there is a nice tractable set of phenomena - a thought experiment using invisible elephants. A real tractable domain will engender a new form of rationality - new methodologies for gaining more insight; almost certainly new instruments. Any field that fails to do that is probably not ready to become a science. Like medicine 1,000 years ago, for which we had a concept and a need, but little in the way of a handhold, or experimental psychology in the era of A-B studies and making the null hypothesis seem unlikely, and results that say A and B probably (95%) produce systematically different results, but we can’t even make a ballpark quantification of the size of the difference.
3) Big multidisciplinary science, illustrated by plate tectonics, based on one of the rare useful books on epistemology, as something to compare climate science to. An attack on comparisons of climate science to particle physics, or the mythical “scientific method” used mostly for unsuccessful studies of intractable domains, such as most experimental psychology in the 60s – that are used to “prove” AGW is group think and not science.