This seems like your standard physics bias. That is, if what these scientists are doing doesn’t look exactly like what physicists are doing, what they are dong isn’t really science.
Come on guys, this stuff should have died off in the 1960s. Evolutionary biology, microeconomics, and artificial intelligence cannot and should not try to be physics. The very nature of the subject matter prevents it from being so.
There’s a trivial sense in which that is correct—physics doesn’t have much in the way of cladistics, for example—but I suspect that there’s some cause to be thoughtful about this. Even in engineering, a field so ad-hoc-happy that nuclear-grade duct tape is a real product, in the one situation I know of where models without underlying mechanisms were used, the models simply failed.
There’s no requirement that mechanisms be fundamental. If I’m running hot water through a cold pipe at high enough speed, the Dittus-Boelter equation:
is a mechanism, even though it doesn’t even tell me the temperature distribution in a cross-section of the pipe. It starts with physics) and goes through empirical testing to produce a result. But it’s a reliable result, it parallels the behavior of the physical system at the level it models, and as a result I can design my car radiator or steam power plant or liquid electronic chip cooler and expect it to work.
And that’s even more like physics than anything Platt or Burfoot proposed. So I wouldn’t be so quick to dismiss these kinds of remarks as sneering.
For whatever it’s worth, high energy physics is only one of Platt’s examples—the other is molecular biology. And much ofthe basis for evolutionary biology has a quantitative, physics-style way of working. I’m tempted to suggest that evolutionary biology has been so much more unambiguously successful than microeconomics and AI because it has aped physics so well!
That is, if what these scientists are doing doesn’t look exactly like what physicists are doing, what they are dong isn’t really science.
I don’t have a problem with that.
Evolutionary biology, microeconomics, and artificial intelligence cannot and should not try to be physics. The very nature of the subject matter prevents it from being so.
In your view, how should these be conducted instead?
This seems like your standard physics bias. That is, if what these scientists are doing doesn’t look exactly like what physicists are doing, what they are dong isn’t really science.
Come on guys, this stuff should have died off in the 1960s. Evolutionary biology, microeconomics, and artificial intelligence cannot and should not try to be physics. The very nature of the subject matter prevents it from being so.
There’s a trivial sense in which that is correct—physics doesn’t have much in the way of cladistics, for example—but I suspect that there’s some cause to be thoughtful about this. Even in engineering, a field so ad-hoc-happy that nuclear-grade duct tape is a real product, in the one situation I know of where models without underlying mechanisms were used, the models simply failed.
There’s no requirement that mechanisms be fundamental. If I’m running hot water through a cold pipe at high enough speed, the Dittus-Boelter equation:
is a mechanism, even though it doesn’t even tell me the temperature distribution in a cross-section of the pipe. It starts with physics) and goes through empirical testing to produce a result. But it’s a reliable result, it parallels the behavior of the physical system at the level it models, and as a result I can design my car radiator or steam power plant or liquid electronic chip cooler and expect it to work.
And that’s even more like physics than anything Platt or Burfoot proposed. So I wouldn’t be so quick to dismiss these kinds of remarks as sneering.
For whatever it’s worth, high energy physics is only one of Platt’s examples—the other is molecular biology. And much of the basis for evolutionary biology has a quantitative, physics-style way of working. I’m tempted to suggest that evolutionary biology has been so much more unambiguously successful than microeconomics and AI because it has aped physics so well!
I don’t have a problem with that.
In your view, how should these be conducted instead?