A while back, I set myself the project of figuring out how much of the MIT undergrad physics curriculum could be taught from free online books. The answer, so far, is more than I had anticipated but much less than what we deserve. But working on that, along with a few other conversations, has got me to wondering. We’ve seen TESCREAL types be just plain wrong about science many times over the years. Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality botches Punnett squares and pretty much everything more advanced than that. LessWrong demonstrably has no filter against old-school math crankery. The (ahem) leading light of “effective accelerationism” just plays Mad Libs with physics words. Yudkowsky’s declarations about organic chemistry boggle the educated mind. They even manage to be weird about theoretical computer science — what we might call the “lambda calculus is super-Turing!” school of TESCREAL.
Sometimes, the difference between a TESCREAL understanding of science and a legitimate one comes from having studied the subject in a formal way. But not every aspiring autodidact with an interest in molecular biology or the theoretical limits of computation is a lost cause!
So, then: What books come down upon the superficial TESCREAL version of cool things like a ton of scientific bricks? What are the texts that one withdraws from an inside coat pocket and slides across the table, saying “This here is the good shit”?
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The Mismeasure Of Man is the obvious threat, given Yudkowsky felt it necessary to post why good rationalists should not read Gould.
So what other books has the subculture declared unsuitable?
The Mismeasure Of Man
I’m working through this one now, and it’s great. Gould was such a great writer, it’s no wonder Big Yud sees his work as a threat.
I did a dive on Yudkowsky’s terrible writeup of it on I Don’t Speak German, I should really write it up as a sneer
(I will never get around to this)
Was that in this episode?
You can just do this really simple exercise: Go to any standard evolutionary biology textbook and ask, is Gould buried? Is he gone? Has he been discarded? Tossed into the dustbin of hist—no, he hasn’t.
that’s great!
now I know what I’m listening to during work
yep!
I want to add William H. Tucker’s posthumous “The Bell Curve in Perspective”, which came out I think right at the end of last year. It’s a short, thorough, assessment both of the history of The Bell Curve book itself and what has happened since.
Even the first chapter is just mindblowingly terse in brutally unpacking how (a) it was written by racists, (b) for racist ends, © Murray lied and lied afterwards in pretending that ‘only a tiny part of the book was about race’ or whatever
The Bell Curve in Perspective is free online.
Seconding, Mismeasure of Man is fantastic.
Jesus, that math crankery post is mind-boggling.
SCSPL, which stands for Self-Configuring Self-Processing Language, is just a totally intrinsic, i.e. completely self-contained, language that is comprehensively and coherently (self-distributively) self-descriptive
Okay but is it also self-fuckable in the sense of being able to go fuck itself?
Sounds like a straight (derogatory) version of homoiconicity.
The Fake Nerd Boys of Silicon Valley isn’t directly about TESCREAL, but its dissection of Silicon Valley’s complete and utter misunderstanding of sci-fi/fantasy does still work wonders against Yudkowsky et al’s views IMO.
I like ‘Star Wars’ way better. I’m a capitalist. ‘Star Wars’ is the capitalist show. ‘Star Trek’ is the communist one. There is no money in ‘Star Trek’ because you just have the transporter machine that can make anything you need. The whole plot of ‘Star Wars’ starts with Han Solo having this debt that he owes and so the plot in ‘Star Wars’ is driven by money [~Peter Thiel]
Your Honor, my client might’ve murdered mr. Thiel with a Lego model of a Star Destroyer, but as witnessed by Exhibit A he acted in good faith and as what can only be described as service to the community. We move for full acquittal.
@V0ldek @BlueMonday1984 You gotta give it to capitalism, it makes an excellent non-personified villain.
Now why would you insult Peter Thiel like that. He’s made it his life’s work to become that personification and he’s worked very hard at it.
@YourNetworkIsHaunted Unlike capitalism he doesn’t star in a lot of movies. And honestly, I don’t think he makes for a very believable villain. No real human is like that. Maybe he could star in some parody movie where his exaggerated opinions make for a joke.
wdym non-personified, it’s this guy
@V0ldek @BlueMonday1984 Also, Star Trek is science fiction that explores new ideas, while Star Wars is fantasy that trots out old ideas with new hardware. Mr. Thiel reveals himself to be stuck in the past, politically, philosophically, and scientifically.
kinda continues to surprise me how many people don’t know the, uh, roots of the Star Wars bits
“It was really about the Vietnam War, and that was the period where Nixon was trying to run for a [second] term, which got me to thinking historically about how do democracies get turned into dictatorships?” Lucas said at his Skywalker Ranch earlier this month. “Because the democracies aren’t overthrown; they’re given away.”
(source)
yes, that’s a feature for Thiel too
@V0ldek @BlueMonday1984 <sarcasm>I like ‘Blade Runner’ way better. I’m a capitalist. ‘Blade Runner’ is the capitalist movie. ‘Star Trek’ is the communist one. There is no money in ‘Star Trek’ because you just have the transporter machine that can make anything you need. The whole plot of ‘Blade Runner’ revolves around a perfect society run by oligarchs exploiting the masses</sarcasm>
What is it about these Tech Bros that causes them to interpret dystopian warnings as a playbook?
@allpoints @V0ldek @BlueMonday1984 Oh it’s clear why the people on the TOP want the dystopia.
What baffles me is the people on the bottom who want them.
I wonder how the workers in Blade Runner justify the situation of replicants. There’s the guy who made the eyes of those machines, he didn’t seem to live the same comfy life as the guy living on top of the fucking pyramid. I guess he did his work because it was “interesting”. The other workers probably went along with it because the wars meant they got cheaper commodities or some other all too common justification.
It’s been a long time since I saw the movie, wasn’t the guy with the eyes in the vat in the beginning a black-market dealer that the replicants used to hide?
OTOH “genius tinkerer who prefers to live in the slums” is a cyberpunk trope - maybe from this guy!
Edit I love Bladerunner but the movie is 90% vibes, don’t expect it to be entirely consistent in how its economic system works.
@zbyte64 They justify it the same way that the workers of the South justified slavery, or the way that workers in the west justify sweat shops.
Ignoring it, or making shit up.
@V0ldek @Illuminatus Never before have I felt this strongly that a social media post needed quotation marks. Like a missile, my finger grew closer and closer to the block button as I read, and only when I got to the end was I able to hit the self destruct abort button. 😂
@V0ldek @BlueMonday1984 Jury nullification with a ticket tape parade thrown in.
Great article, thanks for posting.
had this open for days now to get around to fully reading it sometime
from just the opening paragraphs, reflecting on it being barely 4y since this article was published: the world would be so much better if people could just learn to internalize that narcissists do, in fact, exist and definitely will lie and hurt you. christ it sucks how much this clown is still given airtime
That one Stross essay on space colonization.
The essay is great, but I’d like to stop on this for a second:
the conclusion I draw as a science fiction writer is that if interstellar colonization ever happens, it will not follow the pattern of historical colonization drives that are followed by mass emigration and trade between the colonies and the old home soil.
Okay, but we don’t need that much of a thought experiment to get there. Gliese 832 c is 16 light years away. That means that even if we figured out every technological issue with calling a colony there via Skype, we would have a message latency of 32 years. Can you fucking imagine negotiating a trade treaty where each round of negotiations takes THIRTY-TWO YEARS? How many Earth governments even remain stably in power for 32 years? Of course transporting the actual trade goods would take even longer. So, you negotiate a treaty over three generations of human beings, and then get the actual goods delivered in, optimistically, a few centuries. We’re so good at planning things in advance that climate change will wipe us out in like 50 years, good luck running a trade operation where a freight you ordered will be delivered to your great-great-grandchildren.
With colonisation at best you’re gonna get a bunch of disorganised human clusters that will grow culturally and ideologically apart really quick. It’s obvious on its face that this wouldn’t be a somehow coherent society. Again, how do you plan to organise a government structure where a single memo takes THIRTY-TWO YEARS to be acknowledged? Did anyone in TESCREAL ever grapple with the fact that our globalisation age was brought forth thanks to near-instantenous communications, and that’s flat out impossible on an interstellar scale? Like, the speed of light is not something you can hand-wave away, it’s a physical barrier to information.
the speed of light is not something you can hand-wave away
sorry i just woke up at 4am and realised that bitcoin actually fixes this so i retract my fud
ah yes, quantum entangled blockchains, that’s what we need to solve the scalability problem! that’ll fix it right up!
B-Arks. Put 'em all on B-Arks
Well, minimum 32 years, as presumably there would be some inbox time and drafting time on either end, misunderstandings and subsequent discussion being so critical to avert when followups take a while.
what I’m trying to get across is quite simply that, in the absence of technology indistinguishable from magic (…) interstellar travel for human beings is near-as-dammit a non-starter
“Ha, you see, that’s your problem right there”, Yud exclaimed, “simply invoke technology indistinguishable from magic! Nanomachines, away we go!”
Thats the one! I wish I could offer more.
Yeah Stross is an excellent corrective to most space colonization wanking.
In general British SF is a bit less hoo-rah! than American.
Everything is. I don’t need anyone to tell me that the Red Scare ruined philosophy of science, going to America was the original problem.
The Golem and The Golem at large are two excellent little books about how science and technology actually works. History of science, so heavy on examples (as the historical subjects tend to be) and light on theory. Several examples of what today would be pseudo science but was treated seriously at its time, because they didn’t know what we consider basic knowledge (and you can’t get it from first principle…)
Good for anyone interested in science or technology, but perhaps particularly useful for the cultists (if they can be persuaded).
- The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, by Thomas Kuhn
Bit of philosophy of science is a useful bit of immunization against Rationalist bullshit. Maybe not on its own, but it helps.
My graduate degree was in philosophy of science, and I wouldn’t suggest Kuhn or, indeed, much philosophy of science as a salve for this particular problem. For much of the 20th century, the philosophy of science primarily theorised about two main sets of data: (1) idealised physics, which is to say the “final” theories of physics; (2) historical case studies, which is to say the experimental and theoretical debates which produced those theories. These are two distinct strands of research (of which Kuhn belongs to, and plays an important role in introducing, the second), but perspicuous observers will note that neither of them deal with people who get science wrong, rather they deal with either what is “scientific knowledge”, or how it is that scientific “knowledge” is produced.
Now understanding a little better how scientific knowledge is produced, or even that it is produced (and not intuited, Yudkowsky-style, as if given by a beam of pink energy from the future), could be a preliminary inoculation against behaving as if it is intuited, Yudkowsky-style, as if given by a beam of pink energy from the future. Or, in a twist of which many Kuhn readers have fallen afoul, it can be the radicalisation of a would-be “paradigmatic” thinker, who therefore learns that “normal” scientific knowledge is always local, partial, and primarily intended for the NPC types who populate laboratories. If I wanted to turn somebody with the quintessential rationalist personality into a monstrous basilisk-wraith I would give them Kuhn.
I’m not one for delivering the usual bromides against Kuhn’s supposed sloppiness (I think his treatment has been selective and unkind), but there are also better, more recent works in the same vein (and, naturally, Feyerabend did Kuhn better anyway). If I wanted to give somebody “the good shit” from philosophy of science, I would give them Nancy Cartwright, Ian Hacking, and Bas van Frassen. But the problem remains - how do I explain to these people that they aren’t participating in scientific discourse at all? - after all, as we get more and more recent even the very moderate non-objectivisms of Cartwright, Hacking, van Frassen et al. become diluted as, in practical terms, much of philosophy of science converges on the project of once again reifying a now complicated picture of scientific knowledge in the teeth of perceived worries about its objectivity.
Why is this a problem? Well the pragmatic image of science with which your rationalist is liable to come away from these texts is one in which the body of the whole thing is incredibly complex and everything has its role, including that of the rationalist. With Kuhn we will have deepened their appreciation of their own importance, and with the non-objectivists we will have challenged their STEMacism only to supply their project with an undeserved aura of validity!
(I here leave out the really technical stuff, naturally. Much of philosophy of science is of course concerned with resolving particular puzzles in particular areas. This is of course a lot more difficult and worth doing than any grand project we might have in mind, but it can’t help the people we’re discussing).
Only the hardcore realists remain, but what do they have to offer? Idealised physical models! This simply cannot help us at all.
Hell, if they’re anything like a gamut of arseholes I’ve run into over the years, at least a few of them proudly trumpet that back at the turn of the century Bruno Latour was expressing regret about the critical project in STS, and that it’s the only thing of his they’ve ever read.
The great demarcatory projects are, mostly, a thing of the past, but really this is what we need. Problematically, for the last 50 years it has been widely agreed that they were wrong, and there was no real standard of demarcation between “science” and other modes of thought. Nonetheless, and ignoring that there is one good Popperian still alive to do, we can’t use Popper - that’s absurdly dangerous territory - but we do have Lakatos.
Now that’s an idea I could have put at the top. We have to ignore that, as before, people don’t really believe in “degenerating research programmes” anymore (although perhaps philosophy of science is just a little too close to science to say so). But you know what? Fuck it. Make them read Lakatos.
But it won’t help, because their research programme is almost tailor made to outrun scientific testing. Along with history of science, which I advocate because it shows science in its particulars, the real solution is to starve the cult of oxygen. It’s an attritional war of pointing out that this is bullshit in its particulars.
The committed Rationalists often point out the flaws in science as currently practiced: the p-hacking, the financial incentives, etc. Feeding them more data about where science goes awry will only make them more smug.
The real problem with the Rationalists is that they* think they can do better*, that knowing a few cognitive fallacies and logicaltricks will make you better than the doctors at medicine, better than the quantum physicists at quantum physics, etc.
We need to explain that yes, science has it’s flaws, but it still shits all over pseudobayesianism.
Well this is where I was going with Lakatos. Among the large scale conceptual issues with rationalist thinking is that there isn’t any understanding of what would count as a degenerating research programme. In this sense rationalism is a perfect product of the internet era: there are far too many conjectures being thrown out and adopted at scale on grounds of intuition for any effective reality-testing to take place. Moreover, since many of these conjectures are social, or about habits of mind, and the rationalists shape their own social world and their habits of mind according to those conjectures, the research programme(s) they develop is (/are) constantly tested, but only according to rationalist rules. And, as when the millenarian cult has to figure out what its leader got wrong about the date of the apocalypse, when the world really gets in the way it only serves as an impetus to refine the existing body of ideas still further, according to the same set of rules.
Indeed the success of LLMs illustrates another problem with making your own world, for which I’m going to cheerfully borrow the term “hyperstition” from the sort of cultural theorists of which I’m usually wary. “Hyperstition” is, roughly speaking, where something which otherwise belongs to imagination is manifested in the real world by culture. LLMs (like Elon Musk’s projects) are a good example of hyperstition gone awry: rationalist AI science fiction manifested an AI programme in the real world, and hence immediately supplied the rationalists with all the proof they needed that their predictions were correct in the general if not in exact detail.
But absent the hyperstitional aspect, LLMs would have been much easier to spot as by and large a fraudulent cover for mass data-theft and the suppression of labour. Certainly they don’t work as artificial intelligence, and the stuff that does work (I’m thinking radiology, although who knows when the bigs news is going to come out that that isn’t all it’s been cracked up to be), i.e. transformers and unbelievable energy-spend on data-processing, doesn’t even superficially resemble “intelligence”. With a sensitive critical eye, and an open environment for thought, this should have been, from early on, easily sufficient evidence, alongside the brute mechanicality of the linguistic output of ChatGPT, to realise that the prognostic tools the rationalists were using lacked either predictive or explanatory power.
But rationalist thought had shaped the reality against which these prognoses were supposed to be tested, and we are still dealing with people committed to the thesis that skynet is, for better or worse, getting closer every day.
Lakatos’s thesis about degenerating research programmes asks us to predict novel and look for corroborative evidence. The rationalist programme does exactly the opposite. It predicts corroborative evidence, and looks for novel evidence which it can feed back into its pseudo-Bayesian calculator. The novel evidence is used to refine the theory, and the predictions are used to corroborate a (foregone) interpretation of what the facts are going to tell us.
Now, I would say, more or less with Lakatos, that this isn’t an amazingly hard and fast rule, and it’s subject to different interpretations. But it’s a useful tool for analysing what’s happening when you’re trying to build a way of thinking about the world. The pseudo-Bayesian tools, insofar as they have any impact at all, almost inevitably drag the project into degeneration, because they have no tool for assessing whether the “hard core” of their programme can be borne out by facts.
(I’m thinking radiology, although who knows when the bigs news is going to come out that that isn’t all it’s been cracked up to be)
yes, this is a specific area i have a note to self to look into
From what I have read, it can be a support as long as:
- It is trained on local data, from the machine and procedures normally used.
- The accuracy is regularly tested (because any variation in the indata, whether from equipment or procedures changes the input data).
- It is understood as a tool that gives suggestions for the radiologist, not a replacement.
Of course, it cannot be better than the best radiologists around. So the question is if it is worth it, compared with for example hire more staff.
@dgerard @YouKnowWhoTheFuckIAM About a decade ago I was working with (kinda sorta) a guy who wanted to do a start-em-up that would involve machine recognition of situations from electrocardiograph recordings, in real-time so as to give the cardio outpatient early warning that they should call for help. At that time the buzzword was Machine Learning, but also I looked and found the published research to be voluminous and ongoing for some decades.
@dgerard @YouKnowWhoTheFuckIAM But the most interesting thing I found was the flash cards. You see, we’ve been training meat-based neural networks to do this for a while. Now I wonder what I would find if I looked into radiology.
Oh geez, just saw this response, feel really bad I missed it- you put a ton of effort into it! (And I’m overwhelmed with work right now, so I can’t reply in the depth it deserves, alas!)
In short, though: Your arguments largely make sense to me, and I’m reasonably persuaded by them! I too also think Kuhn has been treated worse than he deserves- yes, others have surpassed him since, but few of them are as approachable to laymen as he is, and that’s worth something, imho. (I’m also kinder to Jared Diamond than many folks for similar reasons. Yeah, he fucked a lot of stuff up, but he got a lot of laymen- including me, before I started by studies in geology- interested in environmental history, so at the very least he deserves that nod.) And I’d agree that Feyerebend did better than Kuhn! (Maybe not on layman approachability, but he’s not that much tougher than Kuhn- I certainly had no trouble, and I’m a dilettante in philosophy of science.)
Wish I had time for a longer (and very belated) reply, but thanks for the great response!
And is the “beam of pink energy from the future” a reference to Philip K Dick’s Valis, by any chance?
Reading a bit about the history of science is good too. For some reason TESCREAL types are like the Whig historians, science is a constant march towards this, the best of all possible worlds.
I read a small monograph years ago about the history of plate tectonics, and it was clear to me that far from being deluded Bible-huggers, the people who preceded modern ideas of how continents form were grappling with the evidence as they saw it.
Also this overview of “dying sun” SF points out that in the late 19th/early 20th century, what powered the Sun was entirely unknown! https://www.typebarmagazine.com/2024/03/24/science-fiction-and-the-death-of-the-sun/ [1]
Considering that much TESCREAL discourse is less about science and more about science fiction, maybe the focus should be on pointing out the many ways where SF tech goes wrong…
[1] as an aside, I got that link from HN, and the discussions are typically shallow, like most HN discussions about SF https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39911155
Super late response (sorry!), but yeah, history of science is great stuff. And your point about TESCREALS engaging with science fiction over science is entirely spot-on. (Which was me as a teenager. There but for the grace of god go I…)
Btw, if you want to read a FANTASTIC book dealing with people grappling with plate tectonics, John McPhee’s Pulitzer-winning Annals of the Ancient World spans literal decades of interviews with geologists, and you get to start with geologists being deeply skeptical of this newfangled plate tectonics (not dismissive, but not convinced of the breadth of its explanatory power), and work to it being fully accepted science over the course of the book.
I have listened to the entirety of John McPhee’s geological books as audiobooks, which is more entertaining than it sounds.
I think the concept of geological Deep Time is very humbling, and it kind of grounds the human condition in a weird way.
John McPhee’s so goddamn good, one of the best nonfiction writers out there. The absolute master of nonfiction narrative structure, imho.
And yeah, Deep Time is… a hell of a trip.
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Fuck yeah The Control of Nature is great.
Basin and Range is the first book in the geology series.
Another fav of min is “Waiting for a Ship”, about the merchant marine.
I thought about assembling a kind of anti-Sequence reading list about quantum mechanics, a view from outside the cult shit that the Sequences try to drown you in, with their bad history, caricatured philosophy and mathematics that ranges from turgid to incorrect. The trouble is that a better understanding is not written all in one place, and even the good papers don’t necessarily convey the everything Yud taught you is wrong emotional hook. The literature does not lead to cracking many smiles, though I did appreciate Adrian Kent’s eel remark in this book review.
Some papers that have a bit more zing than average:
- L. Catani et al., “Why interference phenomena do not capture the essence of quantum theory,” Quantum 7 (2023), 1119.
- K. Camilleri and M. Schlosshauer, “Niels Bohr as philosopher of experiment: Does decoherence theory challenge Bohr’s doctrine of classical concepts?,” Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part B: Studies in History and Philosophy of Modern Physics 49 (2015), 73–83.
- D. Howard, “Who invented the “Copenhagen Interpretation”? A study in mythology.” Philosophy of Science 71 (2004), 669–682.
- C. Chevalley, “Why do We Find Bohr Obscure?.” In Epistemological and Experimental Perspectives on Quantum Physics (Springer, 1999), 59–73.
And, if you really want to dive into the waters and open your eyes below the surface:
- N. Bohr, “The Causality Problem in Atomic Physics.” In New Theories in Physics (International Institute of Intellectual Co-operation, 1939), 11–30.
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