Hypotheses describe and theories explain. If they don’t make sense they are worthless!
Theories don’t explain- they predict. Consider gravity- Newton’s law tells you the attraction between two masses, and it’s mostly consistent with the mostly elliptical orbits that we observe the planets moving in.
But why does gravity exist? Why does it take that particular form? The theory is silent. It tells you how things will behave, but offers no further explanation.
If you can tell me how anything can have 0 dimensions in reality
So, electrons have mass, and charge, but as far as we can tell their radius is indistinguishable from zero. Does that count as 0 dimensions for you?
Theories don’t explain- they predict. Consider gravity- Newton’s law tells you the attraction between two masses, and it’s mostly consistent with the mostly elliptical orbits that we observe the planets moving in.
The gravitational equation is effectively just* a summary of the observed data, so it is no surprise that it predicts. I believe Monkeymind finds this unsatsifactory, but I’m still not sure exactly how. Perhaps he defines theory differently. I’m a little curious what actually causes the Earth to pull on me, rather than, say, push me away. At the time Newton said he had no hypothesis for that, but now the same equation constitutes a theory or explanation? I feel like these terms are used a little too loosely.
*Not to imply that finding the equation that fit the data wasn’t an important achievement
You can think of it this way: a good explanation lets us make many new predictions. And that is the sole use of explanation. (Does that sound too strong?)
EDIT: Really good explanations can be formulated mathematically, and from mathematical ‘laws’ you can derive predictions, as Desrtopa implies about Newton’s laws.
That’s the problem. Theories predict, but do not explain? What good is that?
… prediction?
I could care less that you tell me an apple falls at whatever ft per second per second.
The artillery captain cares strongly, not just the precise rate at which gravity occurs, but also the precise rate at which the world turns. And a nation whose shells land on target will conquer a nation whose shells miss their targets.
That is, you should care strongly about predictive success in any field personally relevant to you.
I want to know why.
Turn things around: what good is that? Suppose you knew why, but so broadly that it wouldn’t help you differentiate likely futures from unlikely futures (i.e. prediction). What could you do with that?
Something that is indistinguishable from zero just means that it is very small and approaching zero.
What’s the electrical charge of a neutron? How do you know?
If there is no L, W, or H then it has no dimensions. How can that exist except as a concept in some abstract mathematical model?
Edit: I misread what you wrote. To respond to what you actually said: are you doubting the existence of electrons?
I’ll wait and see what EY has to say about it, but honestly, I’m not very confident that he can make sense of arrows that point nowhere.
EY comments infrequently, so I would not hold out too much hope that he’ll address your concerns.
I suggest that you read the Mysterious Answers to Mysterious Questions sequence, if not the whole thing, then posts 1, 2, 5, 7, 8, 9, and 11-18. If that sounds like a lot of reading to do, that’s because quite a lot of work has already gone into explaining the problems with the approach you’re suggesting.
OK, I will do this later today or tomorrow, but unless you wrote the article, I’m not sure we can properly address all the issues that may come up. I will relate everything that you throw at me directly back at this particular article. Already though that has it’s own probs. You told me you didn’t think that EY was talking about arrows that do not point anywhere. You said, in effect, that you weren’t sure. He might actually be saying that.
Will you address the posts I have made so far? I have gone to every link thus far, but I can see how I can potentially spend days, weeks or perhaps months and years, b4 ever getting back to my questions. I am a bit leary of all this because of my experiences. At 9 years old, I was tossed out of Vacation Bible School for asking “what about the dinosaurs” during the Adam and Eve story. My mom was called and I was sent home from school at age 12 for asking the teacher questions (Ha! math teacher BTW). And I was forced out of the military for not accepting (with very good reason) the party line about LOS microwave equipment. In all these instances, it was because I asked questions. I got no answers but was told I was being disruptive. In the first two cases, I literally got NO answers! In the last example, I was told to use ear plugs (no answers here either). They said that might eliminate the headaches the equipment was causing. Of course they didn’t know that I was communicating with the Turkish officers there on base who learning English to apply to the very same equipment. Our boys were being trained on the same faulty equipment that we sold the Turks and phasing out. Their gvnt told them this: The microwaves can cause HA’s, seizures, cancer, insanity and death. Now shut up an do your job!
So I hope you can see why I do not just accept authority blindly! I am not trying to be difficult. I just am, so it comes out that way!
Not accepting answers simply on authority is good. That’s one of the foundational ideas of science. But if scientists demonstrate an understanding that allows them to produce stuff that they otherwise wouldn’t be able to (and quantum theory definitely delivers on this count,) it’s worth taking the likelihood that they know what they’re talking about very seriously.
Some scientific subjects are difficult to understand, and take a lot of time and effort to build up to.
To quote from one of Eliezer’s other posts
Modern science is built on discoveries, built on discoveries, built on discoveries, and so on, all the way back to people like Archimedes, who discovered facts like why boats float, that can make sense even if you don’t know about other discoveries. A good place to start traveling that road is at the beginning.
Don’t be embarrassed to read elementary science textbooks, either. If you want to pretend to be sophisticated, go find a play to sneer at. If you just want to have fun, remember that simplicity is at the core of scientific beauty.
And thinking you can jump right into the frontier, when you haven’t learned the settled science, is like…
…like trying to climb only the top half of Mount Everest (which is the only part that interests you) by standing at the base of the mountain, bending your knees, and jumping really hard (so you can pass over the boring parts).
Don’t be so hasty to try and jump into the advanced stuff. It’s built on lots and lots of developments, and if you don’t take the time to understand those, it’s necessarily going to seem confusing, whether or not the people working on it really know what they’re talking about.
Ultimately all science has to eventually be used for prediction or it is useless except for aesthetic purposes. However, I do sympathize with what (I think) your main point was before, that prediction is no measure of a theory if the “theory” is just curve-fitting (it is, of course, a measure of the utility of the curve or equation that the data was fit to). That is really just common sense, though, so you may have meant something else.
If you have enough information, you can use Newton’s laws to predict when an apple will fall, or work out whether a bridge will stay up before you build it.
If we worked out this “why” you’re talking about, can you say what it would actually do for us?
Well, knowing what quantum theory tells us about light has allowed us to do a whole lot of stuff we weren’t able to do before, most prominently everything that we can do with lasers (which are not predicted to exist at all by classical theory, but were predicted advance by quantum theory, and then created because they had already been predicted, so researchers had an idea what to aim for.)
In any case, if you can’t give an example of any question and how you think scientists would have attempted to answer it compared to how you would have answered it, and why you think that would give superior results, why do you think you know better?
x
AND I don’t think I know better. I only suspect that the SM I am describing will get better results because the principals make better sense than what we are currently using.
But I want to elaborate on something I said about why questions. Been thinking about this the last few days, after being asked what good is knowing why.
You ask why and:
your parents say “Because I said so.”
your teachers say “because smart people say so”
your preachers say “because the bible says so.”
You get tired or maybe conditioned by this and so:
You stop asking the why questions.
If we had more of the why answers maybe the what questions would make more sense. Maybe we would have less what questions.
Whoah, thanks for this. I get what you’re saying now: you oppose Ptolemaic explanations. I think these are good points—why’s this sensible post being downvoted? Even if there is something wrong with the reasoning, these seem like good, interesting questions to me.
Theories don’t explain- they predict. Consider gravity- Newton’s law tells you the attraction between two masses, and it’s mostly consistent with the mostly elliptical orbits that we observe the planets moving in.
But why does gravity exist? Why does it take that particular form? The theory is silent. It tells you how things will behave, but offers no further explanation.
So, electrons have mass, and charge, but as far as we can tell their radius is indistinguishable from zero. Does that count as 0 dimensions for you?
The gravitational equation is effectively just* a summary of the observed data, so it is no surprise that it predicts. I believe Monkeymind finds this unsatsifactory, but I’m still not sure exactly how. Perhaps he defines theory differently. I’m a little curious what actually causes the Earth to pull on me, rather than, say, push me away. At the time Newton said he had no hypothesis for that, but now the same equation constitutes a theory or explanation? I feel like these terms are used a little too loosely.
*Not to imply that finding the equation that fit the data wasn’t an important achievement
x
“Theories predict, but do not explain? What good is that?”
There’s a reason we ask new people to learn a little bit about the LW community before posting. Anticipation of experience as the measure of your belief is a fundamental concept here.
You can think of it this way: a good explanation lets us make many new predictions. And that is the sole use of explanation. (Does that sound too strong?)
EDIT: Really good explanations can be formulated mathematically, and from mathematical ‘laws’ you can derive predictions, as Desrtopa implies about Newton’s laws.
… prediction?
The artillery captain cares strongly, not just the precise rate at which gravity occurs, but also the precise rate at which the world turns. And a nation whose shells land on target will conquer a nation whose shells miss their targets.
That is, you should care strongly about predictive success in any field personally relevant to you.
Turn things around: what good is that? Suppose you knew why, but so broadly that it wouldn’t help you differentiate likely futures from unlikely futures (i.e. prediction). What could you do with that?
What’s the electrical charge of a neutron? How do you know?
Edit: I misread what you wrote. To respond to what you actually said: are you doubting the existence of electrons?
EY comments infrequently, so I would not hold out too much hope that he’ll address your concerns.
x
I suggest that you read the Mysterious Answers to Mysterious Questions sequence, if not the whole thing, then posts 1, 2, 5, 7, 8, 9, and 11-18. If that sounds like a lot of reading to do, that’s because quite a lot of work has already gone into explaining the problems with the approach you’re suggesting.
OK, I will do this later today or tomorrow, but unless you wrote the article, I’m not sure we can properly address all the issues that may come up. I will relate everything that you throw at me directly back at this particular article. Already though that has it’s own probs. You told me you didn’t think that EY was talking about arrows that do not point anywhere. You said, in effect, that you weren’t sure. He might actually be saying that.
Will you address the posts I have made so far? I have gone to every link thus far, but I can see how I can potentially spend days, weeks or perhaps months and years, b4 ever getting back to my questions. I am a bit leary of all this because of my experiences. At 9 years old, I was tossed out of Vacation Bible School for asking “what about the dinosaurs” during the Adam and Eve story. My mom was called and I was sent home from school at age 12 for asking the teacher questions (Ha! math teacher BTW). And I was forced out of the military for not accepting (with very good reason) the party line about LOS microwave equipment. In all these instances, it was because I asked questions. I got no answers but was told I was being disruptive. In the first two cases, I literally got NO answers! In the last example, I was told to use ear plugs (no answers here either). They said that might eliminate the headaches the equipment was causing. Of course they didn’t know that I was communicating with the Turkish officers there on base who learning English to apply to the very same equipment. Our boys were being trained on the same faulty equipment that we sold the Turks and phasing out. Their gvnt told them this: The microwaves can cause HA’s, seizures, cancer, insanity and death. Now shut up an do your job!
So I hope you can see why I do not just accept authority blindly! I am not trying to be difficult. I just am, so it comes out that way!
Not accepting answers simply on authority is good. That’s one of the foundational ideas of science. But if scientists demonstrate an understanding that allows them to produce stuff that they otherwise wouldn’t be able to (and quantum theory definitely delivers on this count,) it’s worth taking the likelihood that they know what they’re talking about very seriously.
Some scientific subjects are difficult to understand, and take a lot of time and effort to build up to.
To quote from one of Eliezer’s other posts
Don’t be so hasty to try and jump into the advanced stuff. It’s built on lots and lots of developments, and if you don’t take the time to understand those, it’s necessarily going to seem confusing, whether or not the people working on it really know what they’re talking about.
I think your position is just too radical here.
Ultimately all science has to eventually be used for prediction or it is useless except for aesthetic purposes. However, I do sympathize with what (I think) your main point was before, that prediction is no measure of a theory if the “theory” is just curve-fitting (it is, of course, a measure of the utility of the curve or equation that the data was fit to). That is really just common sense, though, so you may have meant something else.
If you have enough information, you can use Newton’s laws to predict when an apple will fall, or work out whether a bridge will stay up before you build it.
If we worked out this “why” you’re talking about, can you say what it would actually do for us?
x
Well, knowing what quantum theory tells us about light has allowed us to do a whole lot of stuff we weren’t able to do before, most prominently everything that we can do with lasers (which are not predicted to exist at all by classical theory, but were predicted advance by quantum theory, and then created because they had already been predicted, so researchers had an idea what to aim for.)
In any case, if you can’t give an example of any question and how you think scientists would have attempted to answer it compared to how you would have answered it, and why you think that would give superior results, why do you think you know better?
x AND I don’t think I know better. I only suspect that the SM I am describing will get better results because the principals make better sense than what we are currently using.
But I want to elaborate on something I said about why questions. Been thinking about this the last few days, after being asked what good is knowing why.
You ask why and: your parents say “Because I said so.” your teachers say “because smart people say so” your preachers say “because the bible says so.”
You get tired or maybe conditioned by this and so: You stop asking the why questions.
If we had more of the why answers maybe the what questions would make more sense. Maybe we would have less what questions.
This is a LessWrong idea two: play the why game, keep asking “why” all the way down. Can’t find the post on this though :/
Whoah, thanks for this. I get what you’re saying now: you oppose Ptolemaic explanations. I think these are good points—why’s this sensible post being downvoted? Even if there is something wrong with the reasoning, these seem like good, interesting questions to me.