A cultural change in science

 There's something that changed among the culture of the scientists and technologists from 50 years ago to now. And the change is very drastic.

The scientists I have seen/read from that time are mainly Carl Sagan and Feynman. But I don't think it's limited to them only. You pick up that time's media regarding science and you will feel a certain sense of wonder and curiosity and excitement about the great mysteries of the universe that we have started to uncover. The scientists of that time were telling how these were just baby steps that we have started taking, and there was a certain thrill about how great it would be in the future. And this isn't about science in particular, it's also about technology, or to be more exact, the collective effort of discovery and innovation. This great sense of wonder and excitement and onlooking towards the future greatly heightened the imaginations of the people of that time. These elevated imaginations can be sensed in the media of that time including both fictional and non fictional works. People seemed to believe that anything and everything was possible in future.

However today, the people including the scientists and innovators do not seem to believe that. Today, it seems there is a central vision of the future in the collective conscious of the people. And people really don't think anything drastically out of that vision is going to happen. There is a certain sense of confidence that is near-reaching arrogance. Scientists no longer seem to consider themselves as babies taking their first steps on the shore, rather they believe that most of the science is a settled affair, and anyone contradicting to them is mentally incapacitated. Same is the case for innovators and technologists. The space for healthy disagreement has greatly collapsed while unhealthy/violent disagreement is thriving. 

I don't know if the culture of the innovators trickle down to the masses, or if the innovators seem to carry with them the culture of masses to their fields, but whatever it is, I believe at all times the collective culture has been similar among the innovators and the masses. Many thinkers seem to disagree with this as they create a virtual dichotomy between the culture of innovators and that of the masses with the painting of innovators being explorers and breaking the conformity of the masses and so on, while masses being influenced like a herd. I think there obviously will be differences between these two groups at any time, but the collective sense of outlook of future among both will essentially same. The reason for that is that the influences of both of these groups on each other are inseparable. Let's move back 50 years and consider what was happening in the lives of the masses. They heard that there is new machine that is now springing up among people who can afford it, in which you say something and someone thousands of miles away listens to your voice exactly as it sounds at the same moment, and then you can also hear the other person back when they say something in their machine; so one can literally have a verbal conversation thousands of miles away synchronously. The machine became more widespread, and soon enough the masses had it too. Telephone, Radio, Television, and later Computers. I think we don't appreciate how much of a difference they had brought into the lives of the masses. So, it is entirely imaginable why the imaginations of even the masses were so much elevated and why to them, everything was possible in future.

Surely, we continued to progress in the last two decades, but certain elements diminished: the imagination, exploration, and experimentation. Just the other day, I saw a tweet with some different shapes and form factors of mobile phones in early 2000s (Edit: it was this one), but if you look at the technology of that time, you will realize how crazy the designers were being with the designs of these things, and I mean crazy in a good way. Today, essentially all mobile phones look the same. There have been many shifts in the design culture, I don't say they were in right direction or wrong direction, but the weird thing was that at each shift almost everyone followed the exact shift at the same time. Compared to a few decades ago, the experimentation with completely new and different designs is almost zero. Because technologists and scientists have the collective idea that things are now settling in. The same thing is downstream in the masses as well.

The LLM breakthrough due to the transformer architecture was like the decades of imagination finally culminating in reality. But when it rolled out to the masses, what did they do with it? Nothing. Nothing interesting. I'm not denying how great an achievement it was and how some innovators are greatly leveraging (wait, I shouldn't use that word) it. But I'm talking about the masses specifically who are mostly using it to write letters, reports, linkedin posts, assignments, etc. or are chatting with it like a gf/bf greatly enchanted by its sycophantic behavior.

So what's my point by saying all of this?

There has always been nostalgia of the past among people, and I don't deny myself having it. But the nostalgia does not have any functional value of it at all, if we do not take this chance to objectively study observe the past and try to observe the patterns of change along with their reasons. There is a structure to which all changes happen and I think these changes are worth further exploration. The first step is acknowledgement of change, and that is what I am doing here. My initial thought is that it is going to take a few more decades for this culture to revert back, but I think it's too early to say anything, and there is certainly more to uncover from this pattern.

I just recalled something and then I checked out. Feynman has this interesting lecture called "The Unscientific Age", in which he points out how some things are needlessly unscientific in the society and how people by changing their attitude towards it can greatly benefit themselves. It is interesting because some problems he had pointed out in general society have today seeped into the innovators. I'll end this by copying a few passages from there.

The first one has to do with whether a man knows what he is talking about, whether what he says has some basis or not. And my trick that I use is very easy. If you ask him intelligent questions—that is, penetrating, interested, honest, frank, direct questions on the subject, and no trick questions—then he quickly gets stuck. It is like a child asking naive questions. If you ask naive but relevant questions, then almost immediately the person doesn't know the answer, if he is an honest man. It is important to appreciate that. And I think that I can illustrate one unscientific aspect of the world which would be probably very much better if it were more scientific. It has to do with politics. Suppose two politicians are running for president, and one goes through the farm section and is asked, "What are you going to do about the farm question?" And he knows right away— bang, bang, bang. Now he goes to the next campaigner who comes through. "What are you going to do about the farm problem?" "Well, I don't know. I used to be a general, and I don't know anything about farming. But it seems to me it must be a very difficult problem, because for twelve, fifteen, twenty years people have been struggling with it, and people say that they know how to solve the farm problem. And it must be a hard problem. So the way that I intend to solve the farm problem is to gather around me a lot of people who know something about it, to look at all the experience that we have had with this problem before, to take a certain amount of time at it, and then to come to some conclusion in a reasonable way about it. Now, I can't tell you ahead of time what conclusion, but I can give you some of the principles I'll try to use—not to make things difficult for individual farmers, if there are any special problems we will have to have some way to take care of them," etc., etc., etc. 

Now such a man would never get anywhere in this country, I think. Its never been tried, anyway. This is in the attitude of mind of the populace, that they have to have an answer and that a man who gives an answer is better than a man who gives no answer, when the real fact of the matter is, in most cases, it is the other way around. And the result of this of course is that the politician must give an answer. And the result of this is that political promises can never be kept. It is a mechanical fact; it is impossible. The result of that is that nobody believes campaign promises. And the result of that is a general disparaging of politics, a general lack of respect for the people who are trying to solve problems, and so forth. It's all generated from the very beginning (maybe—this is a simple analysis). Its all generated, maybe, by the fact that the attitude of the populace is to try to find the answer instead of trying to find a man who has a way of getting at the answer. 

Now we try another item that comes in the sciences—I give only one or two illustrations of each of the general ideas—and that is how to deal with uncertainty. There have been a lot of jokes made about ideas of uncertainty. I would like to remind you that you can be pretty sure of things even though you are uncertain, that you don't have to be so in-themiddle, in fact not at all in-the-middle. People say to me, "Well, how can you teach your children what is right and wrong if you don't know?" Because I'm pretty sure of what's right and wrong. I'm not absolutely sure; some experiences may change my mind. But I know what I would expect to teach them. But, of course, a child won't learn what you teach him. 

I would like to mention a somewhat technical idea, but it's the way, you see, we have to understand how to handle uncertainty. How does something move from being almost certainly false to being almost certainly true? How does experience change? How do you handle the changes of your certainty with experience? And it's rather complicated, technically, but I'll give a rather simple, idealized example. 

You have, we suppose, two theories about the way something is going to happen, which I will call "Theory A" and "Theory B." Now it gets complicated. Theory A and Theory B. Before you make any observations, for some reason or other, tha t is, your past experiences and other observations and intuition and so on, suppose that you are very much more certain of Theory A than of Theory B—much more sure. But suppose that the thing that you are going to observe is a test. According to Theory A, nothing should happen. According to Theory B, it should turn blue. Well, you make the observation, and it turns sort of a greenish. Then you look at Theory A, and you say, "It's very unlikely," and you turn to Theory B, and you say, "Well, it should have turned sort of blue, but it wasn't impossible that it should turn sort of greenish color." So the result of this observation, then, is that Theory A is getting weaker, and Theory B is getting stronger. And if you continue to make more tests, then the odds on Theory B increase. Incidentally, it is not right to simply repeat the same test over and over and over and over, no matter how many times you look and it still looks greenish, you haven't made up your mind yet. But if you find a whole lot of other things that distinguish Theory A from Theory B that are different, then by accumulating a large number of these, the odds on Theory B increase. 

Example. I'm in Las Vegas, suppose. And I meet a mind reader, or, let's say, a man who claims not to be a mind reader, but more technically speaking to have the ability of telekinesis, which means that he can influence the way things behave by pure thought. This fellow comes to me, and he says, "I will demonstrate this to you. We will stand at the roulette wheel and I will tell you ahead of time whether it is going to be black or red on every shot." 

I believe, say, before I begin, it doesn't make any difference what number you choose for this. I happen to be prejudiced against mind readers from experience in nature, in physics. I don't see, if I believe that man is made out of atoms and if I know all of the—most of the-ways atoms interact with each other, any direct way in which the machinations in the mind can affect the ball. So from other experience and general knowledge, I have a strong prejudice against mind readers. Million to one. 

Now we begin. The mind reader says it's going to be black. It's black. The mind reader says it's going to be red. It's red. Do I believe in mind readers? No. It could happen. The mind reader says it's going to be black. It's black. The mind reader says it's going to be red. It's red. Sweat. I'm about to learn something. This continues, let us suppose, for ten times. Now it's possible by chance that that happened ten times, but the odds are a thousand to one against it. Therefore, I now have to conclude that the odds that a mind reader is really doing it are a thousand to one that he's not a mind reader still, but it was a million to one before. But if I get ten more, you see, he'll convince me. Not quite. One must always allow for alternative theories. There is another theory that I should have mentioned before. As we went up to the roulette table, I must have thought in my mind of the possibility that there is collusion between the so-called mind reader and the people at the table. That's possible. Although this fellow doesn't look like he's got any contact with the Flamingo Club, so I suspect that the odds are a hundred to one against that. However, after he has run ten times favorable, since I was so prejudiced against mind reading, I conclude it's collusion. Ten to one. That it's collusion rather than accident, I mean, is ten to one, but rather more likely collusion than not is still 10,000 to one. How is he ever going to prove he's a mind reader to me if I still have this terrible prejudice and now I claim it's collusion? Well, we can make another test. We can go to another club. 

We can make other tests. I can buy dice. And we can sit in a room and try it. We can keep on going and get rid of all the alternative theories. It will not do any good for that mind reader to stand in front of that particular roulette table ad infinitum. He can predict the result, but I only conclude it is collusion. 

But he still has an opportunity to prove he's a mind reader by doing other things. Now suppose that we go to another club, and it works, and another one and it works. I buy dice and it works. I take him home and I build a roulette wheel; it works. What do I conclude? I conclude he is a mind reader. And that's the way, but not certainty, of course. I have certain odds. After all these experiences I conclude he really was a mind reader, with some odds. And now, as new experiences grow, I may discover that there's a way of blowing through the corner of your mouth unseen, and so on. And when I discover that, the odds shift again, and the uncertainties always remain. But for a long time it is possible to conclude, by a number of tests, that mind reading really exists. If it does, I get extremely excited, because I didn't expect it before. I learned something that I did not know, and as a physicist would love to investigate it as a phenomenon of nature. Does it depend upon how far he is from the ball? What about if you put sheets of glass or paper or other materials in between? That's the way all of these things have been worked out, what magnetism is, what electricity is. And what mind reading is would also be analyzable by doing enough experiments. 

Anyway, there is an example of how to deal with uncertainty and how to look at something scientifically. To be prejudiced against mind reading a million to one does not mean that you can never be convinced that a man is a mind reader. The only way that you can never be convinced that a man is a mind reader is one of two things: If you are limited to a finite number of experiments, and he won't let you do any more, or if you are infinitely prejudiced at the beginning that it's absolutely impossible.

Thinking Session #2

NOTE: THIS IS AN UNFINISHED DRAFT NOT WRITTEN FOR EXTERNAL READERS.

 Few days back I wrote something.

A main point was something like:

You should have extreme opinions about things that matter, but not about things that do not matter.

When I mentioned things that matter, I obviously meant things that had a chance to matter, not necessarily we are sure that they will matter. However, I had defined things that matter rather poorly. In example, I described how principles of practical guidance are what you should have extreme takes about.

This time, I try to figure out what's the right way to formulate this, as my previous formulation was quite wrong.

[To add: many things that didn't seem to matter at first but people continued being interested in them later turned out to matter very much e.g. discoveries in maths and physics]

So, last night, I was thinking about this on my bed, and I figured something out and I jolted them down on my phone:

You have to have hard opinions about principles of practical guidance, but not hard beliefs about how the world works, or about the underlying nature/mechanism of reality.

The latter is more susceptible to bias. People either gravitate totally towards their point of initial standing [belief they started out with], or an extreme opposite to their point of initial standing because it does not work out all things fully, and the opposite extreme explains/ copes those things right that your initial standpoint got wrong, but not because this new extreme is right, but because you were on the verge on falling right side of the bridge and it told you to lean left, but if you start holding it in similar extreme position, you are at risk at falling on the left side of bridge

Why there is a bridge you may ask? Why there is no extreme correct take?

Yes, there might be some extreme or near extreme correct takes, such as you should not harm other people, or try to make the world a better place.

But as I mentioned, these are about principles of practical or functional value that tell you how you ought to live your life.

But if you have extreme takes about how the world works, then I would say you have closed doors on yourself for any new discovery, and you are very very likely to miss the bigger picture

 

 I pondered again about the matter today, and something still doesn't seem quite right. I think I was correct about the latter part, that we should not have any extreme takes about what precisely the nature of reality is. The reason is that our discovery or understanding of our universe is quite in its infancy. We surely have progressed forth a quite and uncovered great many mysteries of the universe, but the proportion of that to the mysteries we haven't uncovered is extremely minute. To settle on our old frameworks is stagnancy and death of further inquiry. And I think this also makes it clear that I am only against hard settling of beliefs about things that we haven't properly uncovered yet. I do not mean that we should still doubt matters that have been proven through extensive evidence over time, such as that we should clean our hands before meals. As human, we have an innate tendency to speculate and theorize and that has set forth us to uncover many a things, and thus we should take actual actions that enable us to test them. Needless doubt will only incapacitate us from actually testing out. So, my point is that we must not treat these theories as settled or hard truths.

But, what I didn't get quite right was when I said we should have hard opinions about principles of practical guidance. I think this formulation can be misleading for someone who does not understand the matter I present henceforth.

There are in reality very few hard principles, that remain as hard truths one should cling to no matter what. Few I could count were integrity, honesty, justice, truth. There might be a handful of others I can't seem to remember now. Although I think these should stand at the root of our actions, I don't think these are the actual drivers of our rightful actions. What I think can be an actual driver of rightful action is the following statement/principle/whatever:

One should use his natural abilities to do the thing that is most appropriate in a given situation.

This principle is important to understand because what is right in a given situation is not right in some other situation. If we cling to rules like, do not harm others, be persistent, etc., we very soon will have to start introducing exceptions and edge cases. Actually edge cases isn't that right word because these exceptions will be much more common than edge cases. Take the point about not harming others, for example. When a surgeon cuts through a patient's body, he is actually inflicting a great deal of harm, but it is still appropriate because the harm is less than the expected alleviation of some other harm to the same person. Similarly, if society punishes a criminal, the harm inflicted upon the criminal is justified on the basis of harm alleviated from other members of society.

Take example of another saying, that we should be loving and caring for people around us. I think this also isn't a good principle to always adhere to. Why? I see many children do not get most out of their innate capabilities because their parents are too loving and caring of them, and this tendency of parents barrs those children from any kind of struggle including the struggle that comes inherent with doing anything meaningful in life. We as a society have been so much traumatized by purposeless struggle that most of us can't imagine a purposeful or meaningful kind of struggle.

Anyways, coming back to the point, in most of our everyday actions, we should not be following some hard and fast rules, but rather asking ourselves, what is the most appropriate thing to do here. We should be thoughtful of our actions, which means we should be trying to figure out the consequences of our actions, including higher-order effects. The problem with higher-order effects is that the higher order, you think about, your certainty about it reduces, so you have to discount that higher order effect due to higher uncertainty.

There is a group of people among rationalists who take this even further, and claim that we should not just be vaguely thinking about these higher order effects, but rather we should mathematically estimate these thing to find out what maximizes a certain objective function which they call us welfare. I think they are right about convincing people to contemplate about whether their actions actually achieved the results they intended to or not, and this was a good thing given that even a lot of seemingly well-intentioned [how do you know?] actions are ineffective. However, I think the mathematical framework they have developed for this contemplation is quite useless. One reason for this is that whatever final objective function they aim to maximize through their mathematical excise is something by nature unquantifiable. The attempts to quantify it nonetheless leads to ridiculous results like shrimpmaxxing. This is why we should keep mathematical models for well defined objective functions like no. of runs in a baseball game, and we might get some useful results from it. Second reason, for this is that we greatly underestimate human mind's capabilities to think about higher-order effects. I don't know what's the proper term for it, but I think this is what people mean when they say intuition. People who are observant of various changes in a given system, and think about it, and then tinker with the system to bring about some other changes and then observant of the whole system, and they do this whole thing for a great deal of time, develop this thing called intuition about that system, and their minds are then capable of accurately estimating higher order effects of a new set of changes in the system. When instead we shift towards mathematical models which can't properly incorporate all changes in a system (probably because some are not properly quantifiable, and as someone who has worked with demographic and survey data, I can assure you that in a complex system, even the quantifiable elements are very hard to get accurate observations of), we are just throwing a lot of useful but either unquantifiable, or not accurately observable information into trash can. I think a great abuse of mathematics in this age is that we have started seeing it as a tool to delegate our thinking to, instead of seeing it as tool to enhance it.

So coming back to the point that we should be thoughtful of our actions, and ask ourselves what is the appropriate thing to do given this situation. But this can also be rephrased to what is the right thing to do given this situation. While the appropriateness covers the part that how the correct course of action is different for different situation, but still given the situation, there is a judgement call, a matter of values. Thoughtfulness tells you about the higher order effects of different courses of action, but then considering the right course of action and actually doing it, requires you to be well-intentioned. [For now, I'm not sure about how to address this part].

These were a few things that remained when I was cutting down principles for things that are appropriate in one situation but not in some other: integrity, honesty, justice, truth, which makes me curious what makes them truly hard-and-fast. I don't think integrity can be compromised in any situation. One who dies fighting to maintain it dies a very honorable death. Similarly, I can't think of any reasonable excuse to be not honest. I do think it is appropriate to hide some true facts in some extreme cases, but it is a different thing to lie or be explicitly dishonest about something. Justice is also something very important because it actually guides a lot of appropriateness. A great deal of apparently good actions are nullified because they violate justice. For instance, a person who shows generosity to his relatives and acquaintances, but this depraves him to give essential necessities to his own family commits injustice to his own family. Similarly, if one starts doing charity work during his working hours, he is being unjust to his employer. So, I don't think there is any situation in which being unjust could be the right thing. About truth, well, I can't think of why someone would want to deviate from truth for even a single moment of his life. This is something so problematic in my framework of understanding that my mind just can't comprehend what could lead someone to believe it. If you are such a person, please let me know.

So, these were a few un-compromisable principles that came to my mind, and I think there might be a few more, but there doesn't seem to be a lot of them. In fact, there are great overlapping elements to integrity, honesty, and truth.

 

I should write something

 It's been a while since I wrote something, and things are being a bit dull and unproductive lately. But I prefer not to write about that.

I was scrolling through twitter a few days back (and I must admit I've been scrolling it too much lately) and I was like tired, like why are they all fighting over petty things. And the fights had the kind of arguments you would see in fights of 7 year old kids. It was weird and strange, and I'm thinking about deactivating my twitter too after my linkedin.

But anyways, I checked out WhatsApp statuses today morning, and realized its independence day. The updates were not unexpected. There was one video clip with title like how this independence day hits different because of the last Pak-India conflict, and it contained videos of military fighter jets, etc. Some other templatish posts. Then a few lads cursing the country and mocking how we are celebrating independence in slavery, etc.

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Strangely, my response on all such things have been turned off in head. I watch/hear this stuff and I only get tired. Reality is complex. Our minds have an innate tendency to oversimplify things so that they can fit in in our framework of reality. It takes some sort of mental energy to go against this tendency and ask yourself, wait a minute; is there a detail I'm missing? but when we ask this question, and try to find out answers, we almost always find out there is some subtlety, some nuance, some detail that we are missing, and that expands our framework of reality, or in other terms, our worldview. People who ask this more and more, get their worldview expand in complexity and detail. When they see any oversimplified notion, they want to point out, hey, I see you have a point here, but there is some other detail you're missing. I'm not with or against your view, but I want you to notice, that whatever your view is, it is flawed or incomplete if you do not incorporate this element into the perspective as well. They do point out early on but soon realize how pointless it is.

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But to scratch the itch, they want to say something nonetheless, so they write blogposts no one reads.

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We owe a great deal of human progress and innovation to a small proportion of individuals who had very extreme and contrarian takes, about things that mattered. I think a disease in our society is that we have extreme takes about all the things that don't matter, and none about the things that matter.

Live in a city, talk to people (or just open up a social media feed that hasn't been personalized in favor of your own views), and you will find out there is a ridiculously high amount of matters of public debate, about which people have opinions -- and very extreme opinions. But ask them if they have a principle of practical value -- something that they have vowed themselves to follow under all circumstances, and most of them would have none.

To give an example, a principle of practical value could be something as simple as I will never litter in public, not even a tissue paper. This is a rather simple principle, but you see it has practical value. The world is marginally a better place because you decided to walk a few yards and throw the wrapper in the trash can. But if you have an opinion about most of matters of public debate, the chances are that your having any opinion about that is definitely not going to have any practical value for anyone, or probably, the expected outcome is net negative, because you might increase the amount of argument or conflicts among people, or at-least waste your time if nothing else.

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I think what a person should do is this.

1. Upon a matter of public debate, ask yourself does this issue matter?

"Suppose in the future there is a movement to ban the color yellow. Proposals to paint anything yellow are denounced as "yellowist", as is anyone suspected of liking the color. People who like orange are tolerated but viewed with suspicion. Suppose you realize there is nothing wrong with yellow. If you go around saying this, you'll be denounced as a yellowist too, and you'll find yourself having a lot of arguments with anti-yellowists. If your aim in life is to rehabilitate the color yellow, that may be what you want. But if you're mostly interested in other questions, being labelled as a yellowist will just be a distraction." -pg

2. If yes, ask yourself, what is x's take and what is y's take and what are they both missing? This will expand your worldview to hold more nuance.

3. When you've understand the nuances of the issue, work out a theory of change for the issue.

"People want to make the world a better place. But how? [X] says I can change the direction of the country by voting for him. [Y] says I can solve the climate crisis with a letter to the editor. [Z] says I can stop George W. Bush by signing their petition. Perhaps, but these requests ring hollow. How is writing a letter to my local paper going to stop the polar ice caps from melting?

Most groups have a couple steps at the end (switch to alternative energy, stopping carbon from being emitted, preventing global warming) and a couple steps at the beginning (write your congressman and send a letter to the paper) but in between they seem to expect that some kind of miracle will happen. They’re missing the concrete steps in between, the actual way we get from here to there.

In the nonprofit world, such a plan is called a Theory of Change. And the reason they’re so rare is because they’re dreadfully hard to come by. The world has no shortage of big problems, but it’s hard to think of ways we might realistically solve them. Instead, the same few things — vote, preach, march — get trotted out again and again."

4. By now, you will either realize that (a) the problem is solvable but you don't care about it enough to spend the effort required to solve it, or (b) in the given circumstances, the problem is not solvable in its entirety and you can only solve a portion of it, and then again, you may or may not care enough about it to actually spend time and energy solving it, or (c) the problem is entirely solvable and you do care about it enough that justifies the amount of the effort required by it (mostly, its not because you care about that thing too much but because the effort it takes is not too much).

If the thing got knocked out in the questions, congrats, you've saved yourself (and probably others) a lot of time, and if turns out not to, well, maybe you should get working.