This makes me profoundly uncomfortable because strongly advocating for something unproven terrifies me, but as counterargument arguments go that’s pretty weak.
My experience working in a lab is that “taking a position” is very important for overcoming akrasia and coordinating research effort. We use extremizing statements all the time when discussing our research—“we know,” “this is suss,” “that data’s bullshit,” “we don’t know jack shit unless we can get an accurate measurement here,” “I don’t buy it at all,” “don’t worry about it, we can engineer a solution,” and above all, “we’ll burn that bridge when we come to it” and “time to fuck around and find out.”
It’s not that we’re incapable of calibrated forecasts about which scientific facts are true or false. It’s that it’s just not actually the truthfinding bottleneck. Instead, our bottleneck is picking what evidence to gather next, and doing the scientific labor. The scientific truth will take care of itself if we can get that right, and if not, all bets are off.
Wegener, as a practicing scientist among colleagues, probably dealt with this. “Come ON, just look at how these continents fit together. They must have drifted somehow. Let’s figure out how and gather good evidence. PROVE ME WRONG.” That sort of attitude among scientists and engineers in a research lab is familiar to me. From the outside, it would look like wild overconfidence, unless and until proven correct. But it serves an important social coordination function, and I think it’s recognized by other scientists as serving that purpose.
It would be nice to get more explicit signposts for speech for social coordination vs. speech for pure epistemics, but in practice you just have to pick these things up from context. I think this distinction is key in interpreting the history of science.
Taking a position like this is very useful. And it doesn’t even need to be a position you actually believe in. To some extent you are playing a character in order to make a point. Working out the right question to ask is 90% of the battle, and if someone says “here’s a big exciting theory, is it right?” suddenly that gives you a great question to work with.
My experience working in a lab is that “taking a position” is very important for overcoming akrasia and coordinating research effort. We use extremizing statements all the time when discussing our research—“we know,” “this is suss,” “that data’s bullshit,” “we don’t know jack shit unless we can get an accurate measurement here,” “I don’t buy it at all,” “don’t worry about it, we can engineer a solution,” and above all, “we’ll burn that bridge when we come to it” and “time to fuck around and find out.”
It’s not that we’re incapable of calibrated forecasts about which scientific facts are true or false. It’s that it’s just not actually the truthfinding bottleneck. Instead, our bottleneck is picking what evidence to gather next, and doing the scientific labor. The scientific truth will take care of itself if we can get that right, and if not, all bets are off.
Wegener, as a practicing scientist among colleagues, probably dealt with this. “Come ON, just look at how these continents fit together. They must have drifted somehow. Let’s figure out how and gather good evidence. PROVE ME WRONG.” That sort of attitude among scientists and engineers in a research lab is familiar to me. From the outside, it would look like wild overconfidence, unless and until proven correct. But it serves an important social coordination function, and I think it’s recognized by other scientists as serving that purpose.
It would be nice to get more explicit signposts for speech for social coordination vs. speech for pure epistemics, but in practice you just have to pick these things up from context. I think this distinction is key in interpreting the history of science.
Taking a position like this is very useful. And it doesn’t even need to be a position you actually believe in. To some extent you are playing a character in order to make a point. Working out the right question to ask is 90% of the battle, and if someone says “here’s a big exciting theory, is it right?” suddenly that gives you a great question to work with.