This is why chemists tend to build their models up from physics and why biologists to the same with chemistry.
Chemistry via physics doesn’t really work without quantum mechanics. This is why chemistry didn’t exist until the last 150 years or so, everything before that was just alchemy. Am I getting this right?
And of course, the field has also been slowed down by the nature of calculating the wave function, which is intractable for anything but very simple systems. That’s why biology couldn’t exist until the invention of supercomputers in the 1970s enabled researchers to approximate the wave functions of organic molecules.
There seems to be a confusion between, and I’ll borrow LW terminology here, epistimic reductionism and instrumental reductionism. If you reject the former, Daniel Dennet will jump out of the supplies closet and kick you in the face. Epistemic reductionism is physics students deriving classical equations from quantum mechanics as an exercise.
Instrumental reductionism, on the other hand, is only one tool for actually getting things done and, in practice, many situations involving large, complex systems are better tackled by simpler models that selectively ignore some or all of the “microfoundations” in favor of observing high-level patterns. It is nice, but not required, to be able to prove the accuracy of the high-level rules in terms of low-level laws.
Consider, for instance, Conway’s Game of Life. If you have an otherwise empty field containing just a glider gun), do you need to model the state of the field by iterating the entire thing? No, just look at the period of the gun and the speed of the gliders and you can predict the state with much simpler calculations.
TL;DR version: Don’t care about microfoundations. Care about tractability and accuracy. Just because a system can be reduced does not mean a reductionist analysis is useful.
I don’t think you are disagreeing with me at all. You pretty much sum my point up with this:
Instrumental reductionism, on the other hand, is only one tool for actually getting things done and, in practice, many situations involving large, complex systems are better tackled by simpler models that selectively ignore some or all of the “microfoundations” in favor of observing high-level patterns. It is nice, but not required, to be able to prove the accuracy of the high-level rules in terms of low-level laws.
This sums it up even better:
TL;DR version: Don’t care about microfoundations. Care about tractability and accuracy. Just because a system can be reduced does not mean a reductionist analysis is useful.
The only major thing I can think of that you might disagree with is that microfoundations tend to increase accuracy.
FWIW I wasn’t talking about epistemic reductionism at all.
I don’t think so, either, except possibly to quibble about an analogy. Sorry if I wasn’t clear on that. I was more attempting to discuss what seems to be the confusion you were responding to and make a more general point, that worrying about high-level models reducing to low-level models is potentially misguided if it’s just reductionism for its own sake.
I sometimes skim lengthy posts. If something, particularly near the end, catches my eye I go back and reread the whole thing properly. Your mileage may vary.
Fair enough. I guess I was wondering whether it would work better to put it at the top. For some reason I got distracted and forgot to actually mention that in my previous comment. Sorry.
Chemistry via physics doesn’t really work without quantum mechanics. This is why chemistry didn’t exist until the last 150 years or so, everything before that was just alchemy. Am I getting this right?
And of course, the field has also been slowed down by the nature of calculating the wave function, which is intractable for anything but very simple systems. That’s why biology couldn’t exist until the invention of supercomputers in the 1970s enabled researchers to approximate the wave functions of organic molecules.
There seems to be a confusion between, and I’ll borrow LW terminology here, epistimic reductionism and instrumental reductionism. If you reject the former, Daniel Dennet will jump out of the supplies closet and kick you in the face. Epistemic reductionism is physics students deriving classical equations from quantum mechanics as an exercise.
Instrumental reductionism, on the other hand, is only one tool for actually getting things done and, in practice, many situations involving large, complex systems are better tackled by simpler models that selectively ignore some or all of the “microfoundations” in favor of observing high-level patterns. It is nice, but not required, to be able to prove the accuracy of the high-level rules in terms of low-level laws.
Consider, for instance, Conway’s Game of Life. If you have an otherwise empty field containing just a glider gun), do you need to model the state of the field by iterating the entire thing? No, just look at the period of the gun and the speed of the gliders and you can predict the state with much simpler calculations.
TL;DR version: Don’t care about microfoundations. Care about tractability and accuracy. Just because a system can be reduced does not mean a reductionist analysis is useful.
I don’t think you are disagreeing with me at all. You pretty much sum my point up with this:
This sums it up even better:
The only major thing I can think of that you might disagree with is that microfoundations tend to increase accuracy.
FWIW I wasn’t talking about epistemic reductionism at all.
I don’t think so, either, except possibly to quibble about an analogy. Sorry if I wasn’t clear on that. I was more attempting to discuss what seems to be the confusion you were responding to and make a more general point, that worrying about high-level models reducing to low-level models is potentially misguided if it’s just reductionism for its own sake.
You realize, of course, that no-one’s going to get to the TL;DR version unless they didn’t think it was too long, and already read it? ;)
I sometimes skim lengthy posts. If something, particularly near the end, catches my eye I go back and reread the whole thing properly. Your mileage may vary.
Fair enough. I guess I was wondering whether it would work better to put it at the top. For some reason I got distracted and forgot to actually mention that in my previous comment. Sorry.