Markus E Leypold
leypold.de> wrote:
> "J Thomas"
gmail.com> writes:> Why I'm even having that discussion is beyond me ...
I've been feeling the same way. We're clearly talking past each other,
failing to get each other's points. It's as if we're accidentally
trolling each other. I don't know the term for somebody who gets
trolled, but from another context it's like a couple of straight-men
ad-libbing with no comedian....
> -- somebody in
> this thread seemed to deny the usability of theory and someone else
> asserted that "practice was there first" implying a primacy of
> practice over theory. I and others have been trying to shed some more
> light on the relationship between practice and theory from what I'd
> characterize as the pint of view of the theory of science (this
> interesting enough is not the opposite as the practice of science, but
> the science of how science works).
Interesting. I hadn't noticed theory-of-science people doing
controlled experiments etc. What I've noticed from that is more
literary. I saw people looking at history and trying to make theories
about what it means, and asserting the truth of their theories from
historical anecdotes. What I've seen has looked far more like literary
theory applied to science, than science applied to science.
But that aside, I think I agree with you basicly. My claim is that we
get theory that's carefully calibrated against practice (like
engineering theory) and then we get theory that isn't (like
astrology). Not that all theory is useless and not that practice is
primary, but that the interaction of theory and practice is essential
for "good" results. Without that, the theories only get judged in an
evolutionary sense, by how well they satisfy customers (and by how
well their repeat customers do relative to customers who try something
else).
When you appear to argue the primacy of theory, and when you argue
that it's impossible to avoid doing theory, you aren't arguing about
how to do science at all. Surely we agree that it's easy to do theory
in ways that aren't useful.
>> I don't think of "academic" as a swear word either. Just, when a "man
>> of practice" goes out to learn some new theory, he's likely to hope he
>> can apply it within a month or so. "I just want to get my work done."
>
> Which is a bit unrealistic. There is a saying that who have to
> practice something 10 years to get really good in it. Expecting to be
> able to play an instrument after a month is ridiculous, especially
> concerning _practice_.
Sure. But again there's a matter of degree. Say you have somebody who
has an eclectic set of skills and he's doing pretty well at a variety
of projects. He has a binary tree and he finds he might benefit from
balancing it. So he learns enough about binary trees to balance his
tree, and implements it in less than a day, and then he gets to see
whether it actually helps him. He's gotten a useful trick that was
probably worth the time it took him to learn it. There's the chance
he'll find out that his application doesn't actually need a balanced
binary tree, but he can't be sure of that ahead of time.
On the other hand, he might find that with ten years of concentrated
study he can become a real master of object-oriented programming. With
just a month of study he'll be just good enough to shoot himself in
the foot. How much of an investment should he put into it?
There's a place for masters in each specialty (or tautologically for
each specailty there's a place for). And there's a place for people
who just want to get their work done. If a project can be done by a
small number of goal-oriented people, that's good. If the project
requires a large number of specialists who don't communicate well with
specialists in other disciplines, then sadly that's what it takes.
>> Lots of academic stuff isn't *immediately* useful. Lots of it is like
>> the acorns that the squirrels bury and forget. A hundred years from
>> now a big part of the forest will be those acorns, grown up. But they
>> don't provide any squirrel a meal this winter.
>
> I've no pity with people who don't have the patience t wait until such
> things bear their fruit.
Those people can be useful in their place. Some people run tree
nurseries and plant orchards, other people follow the harvests and
pick fruit. Both are useful, and they might not understand each other.
> You see, humans do a lot of things that only pay in the long run. That
> made the species so successful: The ability to plan for a vague and
> misty tomorrow that will perhaps never happen like this. Still we
> plan, scheme, hatch our treasure. The same applies to science.
Sure. It takes a balance. Suppose that you hear various acquaintances
complaining that their cats scratch their furniture. You might
recommend to each of them that they spend ten years studying behavior
modification and then when they are masters of it they can train their
cats. Or you might see a market opportunity, you can spend ten years
learning cat psychology and then offer to come live in each client's
house for two weeks and train their cats. Or you might offer them
practical advice that may not solve their problem. Get scratching
posts. Spray the furniture with evil-smelling odors. Give away the
cat. Perhaps you'll get so interested in cat psychology that you
forget your original reason and spend your time publishing papers that
may be useful sometime within the next hundreds of years. It takes all
kinds of people to make an interesting society.
> I repeat: As somebody that always learned by trying to practice what I
> found in theory I have no, absolutely no pity with the attidute that
> what I can't eat today must be worthless to keep for tomorrow.
I agree. And still, there's a lot more available to learn than any one
person can learn, and we have to pick and choose. Somehow I must learn
the things I need to know, well enough at least to get by.
>>> "People interested in astrology" today are probably cranks.
>> There are professional astrologers with advanced degrees from
>> prestigious universities
>
> Muhahaha. Sorry. I repeat myself: Cranks.
If you say that without controlled experiments, then what are you but
somebody who claims without evidence that your theory is better than
their theory? Not that I disagree, I tend to also believe without
evidence that your theory is better than their theory....
>> (in india). Some astrologers make a lot of
>> money and have a lot of satisfied customers. It's unheard of for
>> astrology projects to come in behind schedule and over budget. Clearly
>> these people are doing something right that software developers
>> haven't learned to do. ;)
>
> Certainly. They don't deliver a product. They just take the
> money. Some software vendors are pretty near to that ideal
> already. Just wait a sec .. we've all been waiting for, say, WinFS,
> how long?
Their customers are satisfied and willingly come back to pay them
more. If they just took the money their customers would call the
police or sue them or whatever.
Similarly, MicroSoft filled a need that satisfied customers. When the
software industry was full of incompatibilities, MicroSoft provided an
almost-adequate standard. Not IMHO a good one, but one that many
businesses were willing to pay for. They were ready to pay well for
things that could be made to fit together, that failed in mostly
predictable ways, rather than accept a hodgepodge of applications and
operating systems etc. And they've tended to get dissatisfied not
because of the technical inadequacy so much as because they saw MS
hooking them into a planned-obsolescence upgrade cycle, where MS
products became incompatible with older MS products and it was a big
inconvenience.
Pretty much anybody who's been involved in a standards effort will
agree that if one company can establish a standard and make it stick,
that's worth money.
I can't tell you for sure what value astrology has for customers. I
don't think it's accurate predictions. Figure out what they're really
selling and you might find a better way to provide that value.
>>> Actually I do not understand your counter argument at all, since
>>> physics is also very limited in scope and astrology is simple bull
>>> shit (please come out and get me, astrology trolls, I say it again:
>>> ASTROLOGY IS BULLSHIT, thanks).
>
>> Let me try to explain my point again, then. You say that theory is
>> important. Now, I have no compelling experience (controlled tests,
>> double-blind trials, etc) to say whether astrological theory works or
>> not. But my prejudice says it shouldn't work because I see no
>> plausible theoretical reason why it would. ....
>> But still, they succeed and they succeed *in spite of* their theory.
>> That would tell me that having a complex formal theory is not always
>> useful. So, is computer science theory more like engineering theory
>> (which most people agree is practical and useful) or is it more like
>> astrology?
>
> Can't you have successful bullshit? After all there are successful
> bank robbers. That doesn't make it a profession you can get entered in
> your passport.
Yes. Sometimes there's a market for BS. It tends to be a demanding
market that accepts only the best BS, not an easy market to break
into. How much of CS is BS?
>> Obviously, we shouldn't trust professional computer scientists to tell
>> us how useful it is any more than we'd trust professional astrologers.
>> Ideally we should listen to their customers and associates.
>
> What do you want to tell us? By analogy, Dirac was wrong and the
> Positron doesn't exist, because I've never ever read anywhere
> testimonials of thankful positron users and customers.
Is it BS? You can't judge by internal consistency, any particular
school of astrology can have that. Try a different example, how much
of english lit criticism is BS? From my perspective, a lot. But you
can get an advanced degree in english lit from prestigious
universities in the USA. How about political science? Here's something
where they occasionally do controlled experiments and do statistics on
their results. They're starting to get a clear sense of how effective
push-polling is and how to make it more effective, for example.
They're making a scientific study of how to do successful BS. But I'm
convinced a lot of political science itself is BS.
So, science can help you tell what's BS, with controlled experiments.
How much of computer science has had those controlled experiments?
Ideally, when we get a new approach to programming (that may take 10
years to become fully proficient in) we should do controlled trials.
Ideally we would do double-blind experiments, where nobody including
the programmers knows whether they're doing OO etc until after the
experiment is over. ;) I say that in the absence of these
experiments we have the possibility for a lot of BS to slip in.
>>>> No doubt quantum mechanics is wrong too. People use whatever physics
>
>>> Certainly. Its even self-contradictory.
>> So what? People who know how to use QM know which rules to apply
>> where. In the short run it doesn't matter if the rules contradict each
>> other, if you know how to use them to get the right answers.
>
> But it does matter in the long run. Scientists look for obvious "fault
> lines" in existing theories to understand how the theory must be
> changed to connect seamlessly to other theories that it presently
> contradicts or can't integrate.
Yes. So I can learn QM to solve particular problems that help me get
my work done. Or I can learn it to aid the long-run advance of
science. (Or both.) If I have the leisure or the profession to advance
science, then that's fine. If I just need to solve a few problems I'm
probably better off to find a QM expert and ask him for answers, and
see how much he charges.
>> However, people who're interested in QM have told me that QM is right
>> because they've gotten answers correct to 20 decimal places. I also
>
> Therefore they also have such problems with quantum gravity ...
I consider these particular people cranks. But of course there are QM
practitioners who aren't cranks.
> And by the way: I'm one of those interested people. I've studied it
> (physics, I mean).
;) I don't think you're a crank for learning about it. I'd do it
myself if I didn't have more pressing priorities.
>> listened to computational guys who talked about the approximations and
>> fudge factors needed to solve any but the very simplest QM problems.
>
> So? That is a numerical problem. Not one of the correctness of the
> theory. That you cannot analytically integrate an elliptical equation
> doesn't mean that the result is not precisely defined. The same BTW
> applies to PI.
Well, if there are a lot of fudge factors then I wouldn't consider
correct answers a validation of the theory. Adjust the unknowns until
the correct answer is found. Then announce that you got the correct
answer so the theory must be correct. Bogus.
Though the other way around, if you couldn't find any way to adjust
the fudge factors to get a correct answer, *would* show the theory was
incomplete.
>> So when they say QM is correct I smile and back away slowly. It
>> isn't worth my time to learn enough QM to decide whether they're
>> right. Just like learning that much astrology.
>
> You choice.
>
> :-)
Sure. You have to pick your topics.
>> So when they have a giant investment in their theories, they become
>> extremely unreliable at deciding the value of their knowledge. Don't
>> listen to them about that, listen to their customers.
>
> That is a rather stupid attidute. Science does not have customers in
> this sense. And where it has, they don't understand a ****
> thing.
How do we decide value? Internal consistency is not enough.
>> Not to say it's useless. Just, don't ask your generals whether you
>> need a war.
>
> A different thing altogether. I won't deny that there _are_ problems
> with way the scientific institutions work (I'm not really qualified to
> comment on that, but I've lots of opinion and some rather nasty
> insights). But all in all I don't see society as a whole fit to judge
> on science -- not before they either stop using the results of science
> or brush up a bit on logic, reasoning and plain common sense.
The choice of how much of society's resources to put into science is a
social choice, and big parts of it are made by politicians. :( If we
were to base it on less-irrational reasoning, we would resort to the
science of economics. :( :(
In economic terms, funding science is like betting in a lottery except
that the payout can be much larger than the total amount bet. And we
don't have much idea how large the payouts will be or how long it will
take them to come. And we don't have very good ideas how to allocate
the fundimg among sciences.
So for example, some microbiologists were studying viruses that attack
bacteria. These viruses had no medical value -- different strains of
the same species of bacteria tended to be immune to different viruses
so we couldn't stockpile them to cure diseases, plus our own immune
systems attacked the viruses. They studied the methods the bacteria
used to protect themselves from the viruses, which also had no
immediate practical use. And eventually they found ways to use those
methods as tools, which led to genetic engineering, which maybe hasn't
yet paid back the money that's been poured into it but it has a whole
lot of potential.
I don't think anybody's competent to allocate research money, but
somehow it has to be done. As to any particular scientific theory,
judge it by agreement with data and by internal consistency. And if
somebody wants to say that astrology is worthless or acupuncture is
worthless because their theories don't have experimental evidence,
then I say before we make that judgement we need to do the experiments
which show the theories don't fit the evidence. They may be BS. They
are quite likely BS. But it's just my clinical intuition saying so
until I get evidence.
