Hofstadter on the necessary strangeness of scientific explanations:
It is no accident, I would maintain, that quantum mechanics is so wildly counterintuitive. Part of the nature of explanation is that it must eventually hit some point where further probing only increases opacity rather than decreasing it. Consider the problem of understanding the nature of solids. You might wonder where solidity comes form. What if someone said to you, “The ultimate basis of this brick’s solidity is that it is composed of a stupendous number of eensy weensy bricklike objects that themselves are rock-solid”? You might be interested to learn that bricks are composed of micro-bricks, but the initial question—“What accounts for solidity?”—has been thoroughly begged. What we ultimately want is for solidity to vanish, to dissolve, to disintegrate into some totally different kind of phenomenon with which we have no experience. Only then, when we have reached some completely novel, alien level will we feel that we have really made progress in explaining the top-level phenomenon.
[...]
I first saw this thought expressed in the stimulating book Patterns of Discovery by Norwood Russell Hanson. Hanson attributes it to a number of thinkers, such as Isaac Newton, who wrote, in his famous work Opticks: “The parts of all homogeneal hard Bodies which fully touch one another, stick together very strongly. And for explaining how this may be, some have invented hooked Atoms, which is begging the Question.” Hanson also quotes James Clerk Maxwell (from an article entitled “Atom”): “We may indeed suppose the atom elastic, but this is to endow it with the very property for the explanation of which… the atomic constitution was originally assumed.” Finally, here is a quote Hanson provides from Werner Heisenberg himself: “If atoms are really to explain the origin of color and smell of visible material bodies, then they cannot possess properties like color and smell.” So, although it is not an original thought, it is useful to bear in mind that greeness disintegrates.
— from the postscript to Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle, in Metamagical Themas: Questing for the Essence of Mind and Pattern (his lovely book of essays from his column in Scientific American)
I recently made a dissenting comment on a biggish, well-known-ish social-justice-y blog. The comment was on a post about a bracelet which one could wear and which would zap you with a painful (though presumably safe) electric shock at the end of a day if you hadn’t done enough exercise that day. The post was decrying this as an example of society’s rampant body-shaming and fat-shaming, which had reached such an insane pitch that people are now willing to torture themselves in order to be content with their body image.
I explained as best I could in a couple of shortish paragraphs some ideas about akrasia and precommitment in light of which this device made some sense. I also mentioned in passing that there were good reasons to want to exercise that had nothing to do with an unhealthy body image, such as that it’s good for you and improves your mood. For reasons I don’t fully understand, these latter turned out to be surprisingly controversial points. (For example, surreally enough, someone asked to see my trainer’s certificate and/or medical degree before they would let me get away with the outlandish claim that exercise makes you live longer. Someone else brought up the weird edge case that it’s possible to exercise too much, and that if you’re in such a position then more exercise will shorten, not lengthen, your life.)
Further to that, I was accused of mansplaining twice. and then was asked to leave by the blog owner on grounds of being “tedious as fuck”. (Granted, but it’s hard not to end up tedious as fuck when you’re picked up on and hence have to justify claims like “exercise is good for you”.)
This is admittedly minor, so why am I posting about it here? Just because it made me realize a few things:
It was an interesting case study in memeplex collision. I felt like not only did I hold a different position to the rest of those present, but we had entirely different background assumptions about how one makes a case for said position. There was a near-Kuhnian incommensurability between us.
I felt my otherwise-mostly-dormant tribal status-seeking circuits fire up—nay, go into overdrive. I had lost face and been publicly humiliated, and the only way to regain the lost status was to come up with the ultimate putdown and “win” the argument. (A losing battle if ever there was one.) It kept coming to the front of my mind when I was trying to get other things done and, at a time when I have plenty of more important things to worry about, I wasted a lot of cycles on running over and over the arguments and formulating optimal comebacks and responses. I had to actively choose to disengage (in spite of the temptation to keep posting) because I could see I had more invested in it and it was taking up a greater cognitive load than I’d ever intended. This seems like a good reason to avoid arguing on the internet in general: it will fire up all the wrong parts of your brain, and you’ll find it harder to disengage than you anticipated.
It made me realize that I am more deeply connected to lesswrong (or the LW-osphere) than I’d previously realized. Up ’til now, I’d thought of myself as an outsider, more or less on the periphery of this community. But evidently I’ve absorbed enough of its memeplex to be several steps of inference away from an intelligent non-rationalist-identifying community. It also made me more grateful for certain norms which exist here and which I had otherwise gotten to take for granted: curiosity and a genuine interest in learning the truth, and (usually) courtesy to those with dissenting views.