Well, there’s also the fact that “true” ontological updates can look like woo prior to the update.
Do you think they often do, and/or have salient non-controversial examples? My guess prior to thinking about it is that it’s rare (but maybe the feeling of woo differs between us).
Past true ontological updates that I guess didn’t look like woo:
reductionism
atomism
special relativity
many worlds interpretation (guy who first wrote it up was quite dispositionally conservative)
belief that you could gain knowledge thru experiment and apply that to the world (IDK if this should count)
germ theory of disease
evolution by natural selection as the origin of humans
Past true ontological updates that seem like they could have looked like woo, details welcome:
AFAIK gravity was indeed considered at least woo-ish back in the day, e.g.:
Newton’s theory of gravity (developed in his Principia), for example, seemed to his contemporaries to assume that bodies could act upon one another across empty space, without touching one another, or without any material connection between them. This so-called action-at-a-distance was held to be impossible in the mechanical philosophy. Similarly, in the Opticks he developed the idea that bodies interacted with one another by means of their attractive and repulsive forces—again an idea which was dismissed by mechanical philosophers as non-mechanical and even occult.
And they were probably right about “action-at-a-distance” being impossible (i.e. locality), but it took General Relativity to get a functioning theory of gravity that satisfied locality.
(Incidentally, one of the main reasons I believe the many worlds interpretation is that you need something like that for quantum mechanics to satisfy locality.)
All interpretations of QM make the same predictions, so if “satisfying locality” is an empirically meaningful requirement, they are all equivalent.
But locality is more than one thing, because everything is more than one thing. Many interpretations allow nonlocal X where X might be a correlation ,but not an action or a signal.
Yeah, it’s not empirically meaningful over interpretations of QM (at least the ones which don’t make weird observable-in-principle predictions). Still meaningful as part of a simplicity prior, the same way that e.g. rejecting a simulation hypothesis is meaningful.
One example, maybe: I think the early 20th century behaviorists mistakenly (to my mind) discarded the idea that e.g. mice are usefully modeled as having something like (beliefs, memories, desires, internal states), because they lumped this in with something like “woo.” (They applied this also to humans, at least sometimes.)
The article Cognition all the way down argues that a similar transition may be useful in biology, where e.g. embryogenesis may be more rapidly modeled if biologists become willing to discuss the “intent” of a given cellular signal or similar. I found it worth reading. (HT: Adam Scholl, for showing me the article.)
I think “you should one-box on Newcomb’s problem” is probably an example. By the time it was as formalized as TDT it was probably not all that woo-y looking, but prior to that I think a lot of people had an intuition along the lines of “yes it would be tempting to one-box but that’s woo thinking that has me thinking that.”
Well… yes, but not for deep reasons. Just an impression. The cases where I’ve made shifts from “that’s woo” to “that’s true” are super salient, as are cases where I try to invite others to make the same update and am accused of fuzzy thinking in response. Or where I’ve been the “This is woo” accuser and later made the update and slapped my forehead.
Also, “woo” as a term is pretty strongly coded to a particular aesthetic. I don’t think you’d ever hear concern about “woo” in, say, Catholicism except to the extent the scientist/atheist/skeptic/etc. cluster is also present. But Catholics still slam into ontology updates that look obviously wrong beforehand and are obviously correct afterwards. Deconversion being an individual-scale example.
(Please don’t read me as saying “Deconversion is correct.” I could just as well have given the inverse example: Rationalists converting to Catholicism is also an ontological update that’s obviously wrong beforehand and obviously correct afterwards. But that update does look like “woo” beforehand, so it’s not an example of what I’m trying to name.)
Do you… have salient non-controversial examples?
I like the examples others have been bringing. I like them better than mine. But I’ll try to give a few anyway.
Speaking to one of your “maybe never woo” examples: if I remember right, the germ theory of disease was incredibly bizarre and largely laughed at when first proposed. “How could living creatures possibly be that small? And if they’re so small, how could they possibly create that much illness?” Prevailing theories for illness were things like bad air and demons. I totally expect lots of people thought the microbes theory was basically woo. So that’s maybe an example.
Another example is quantum mechanics. The whole issue Einstein took with it was how absurd it made reality. And it did in fact send people like Bohm into spiritual frenzy. This is actually an incomplete ontology update in that we have the mathematical models but people still don’t know what it means — and in physics at least they seem to deal with it by refusing to think about it. “If you do the math, you get the right results.” Things like the Copenhagen Interpretation or Many Worlds are mostly ways of talking about how to set up experiments. The LW-rationalist thing of taking Many Worlds deeply morally seriously is, as far as I can tell, pretty fringe and arguably woo.
You might recall that Bishop Berkeley had some very colorful things to say about Newton’s infinitesimals. “Are they the ghosts of departed quantities?” If he’d had the word “woo” I’m sure he would have used it. (Although this is an odd example because now mathematicians do a forgivable motte-and-bailey where they say infinitesimal thinking is shorthand for limits when asked. Meaning many of them are using an ontology that includes infinitesimals but quickly hide it when challenged. It’s okay because they can still do their formal proofs with limits, but I think most of them are unaware of the variousways to formalize infinitesimals as mathematical objects. So this is a case where many mathematicians are intentionally using an arguably woo fake framework and translating their conclusions afterwards instead of making the full available ontology update.)
Given that I’m basically naming the Semmelweis reflex, I think Semmelweis’s example is a pretty good one. “What?! You’re accusing me, an educated professional gentleman, of carrying filth on my hands?! Preposterous! How dare you?!” Obviously absurd and wrong at the time, but later vindicated as obviously correct.
Your examples seem plausible, altho I’d still be interested in more details on each one. Further notes:
“And it did in fact send people like Bohm into spiritual frenzy.”—do you mean Bohr, or is this a story/take I don’t know about?
Re: Semmelweis reflex, I think there’s a pretty big distinction between the “woo” taste and the “absurd” taste. For example, “all plants are conscious and radiate love all the time” sounds like woo to me. “The only reason anybody gets higher education is to find people to have kids with” and “there’s a small organ in the centre of the brain that regulates the temperature of the blood that nobody has found yet” sound absurd to me, but not like woo.
Can you say more about these for the benefit of folks like me who don’t know about them? What kind of “bad reception” or “controversial” was it? Was it woo-flavored, or something else?
Everett tried to express his ideas as drily as possible, and it didn’t entirely work—he was still accused of “theology” by Bohr.
But there were and are technical issues as well, notably the basis problem. It can be argued that if you reify the whole formalism, then you have to reify the basis, and that squares the complexity of multiverse—to every state in every basis. The argument actually was by JS Bell in
Modern approaches tend to assume the multiverse has a single “preferred” basis, which has its own problems. Which tells us that it hasn’t always been one exact theory.
Do you think they often do, and/or have salient non-controversial examples? My guess prior to thinking about it is that it’s rare (but maybe the feeling of woo differs between us).
Past true ontological updates that I guess didn’t look like woo:
reductionism
atomism
special relativity
many worlds interpretation (guy who first wrote it up was quite dispositionally conservative)
belief that you could gain knowledge thru experiment and apply that to the world (IDK if this should count)
germ theory of disease
evolution by natural selection as the origin of humans
Past true ontological updates that seem like they could have looked like woo, details welcome:
‘force fields’ like gravity
studying arguments and logic as things to analyse
the basics of the immune system
calculus
AFAIK gravity was indeed considered at least woo-ish back in the day, e.g.:
And they were probably right about “action-at-a-distance” being impossible (i.e. locality), but it took General Relativity to get a functioning theory of gravity that satisfied locality.
(Incidentally, one of the main reasons I believe the many worlds interpretation is that you need something like that for quantum mechanics to satisfy locality.)
All interpretations of QM make the same predictions, so if “satisfying locality” is an empirically meaningful requirement, they are all equivalent.
But locality is more than one thing, because everything is more than one thing. Many interpretations allow nonlocal X where X might be a correlation ,but not an action or a signal.
Yeah, it’s not empirically meaningful over interpretations of QM (at least the ones which don’t make weird observable-in-principle predictions). Still meaningful as part of a simplicity prior, the same way that e.g. rejecting a simulation hypothesis is meaningful.
Zero was considered weird and occult for a while
One example, maybe: I think the early 20th century behaviorists mistakenly (to my mind) discarded the idea that e.g. mice are usefully modeled as having something like (beliefs, memories, desires, internal states), because they lumped this in with something like “woo.” (They applied this also to humans, at least sometimes.)
The article Cognition all the way down argues that a similar transition may be useful in biology, where e.g. embryogenesis may be more rapidly modeled if biologists become willing to discuss the “intent” of a given cellular signal or similar. I found it worth reading. (HT: Adam Scholl, for showing me the article.)
I think “you should one-box on Newcomb’s problem” is probably an example. By the time it was as formalized as TDT it was probably not all that woo-y looking, but prior to that I think a lot of people had an intuition along the lines of “yes it would be tempting to one-box but that’s woo thinking that has me thinking that.”
I like this inquiry. Upvoted.
Well… yes, but not for deep reasons. Just an impression. The cases where I’ve made shifts from “that’s woo” to “that’s true” are super salient, as are cases where I try to invite others to make the same update and am accused of fuzzy thinking in response. Or where I’ve been the “This is woo” accuser and later made the update and slapped my forehead.
Also, “woo” as a term is pretty strongly coded to a particular aesthetic. I don’t think you’d ever hear concern about “woo” in, say, Catholicism except to the extent the scientist/atheist/skeptic/etc. cluster is also present. But Catholics still slam into ontology updates that look obviously wrong beforehand and are obviously correct afterwards. Deconversion being an individual-scale example.
(Please don’t read me as saying “Deconversion is correct.” I could just as well have given the inverse example: Rationalists converting to Catholicism is also an ontological update that’s obviously wrong beforehand and obviously correct afterwards. But that update does look like “woo” beforehand, so it’s not an example of what I’m trying to name.)
I like the examples others have been bringing. I like them better than mine. But I’ll try to give a few anyway.
Speaking to one of your “maybe never woo” examples: if I remember right, the germ theory of disease was incredibly bizarre and largely laughed at when first proposed. “How could living creatures possibly be that small? And if they’re so small, how could they possibly create that much illness?” Prevailing theories for illness were things like bad air and demons. I totally expect lots of people thought the microbes theory was basically woo. So that’s maybe an example.
Another example is quantum mechanics. The whole issue Einstein took with it was how absurd it made reality. And it did in fact send people like Bohm into spiritual frenzy. This is actually an incomplete ontology update in that we have the mathematical models but people still don’t know what it means — and in physics at least they seem to deal with it by refusing to think about it. “If you do the math, you get the right results.” Things like the Copenhagen Interpretation or Many Worlds are mostly ways of talking about how to set up experiments. The LW-rationalist thing of taking Many Worlds deeply morally seriously is, as far as I can tell, pretty fringe and arguably woo.
You might recall that Bishop Berkeley had some very colorful things to say about Newton’s infinitesimals. “Are they the ghosts of departed quantities?” If he’d had the word “woo” I’m sure he would have used it. (Although this is an odd example because now mathematicians do a forgivable motte-and-bailey where they say infinitesimal thinking is shorthand for limits when asked. Meaning many of them are using an ontology that includes infinitesimals but quickly hide it when challenged. It’s okay because they can still do their formal proofs with limits, but I think most of them are unaware of the various ways to formalize infinitesimals as mathematical objects. So this is a case where many mathematicians are intentionally using an arguably woo fake framework and translating their conclusions afterwards instead of making the full available ontology update.)
Given that I’m basically naming the Semmelweis reflex, I think Semmelweis’s example is a pretty good one. “What?! You’re accusing me, an educated professional gentleman, of carrying filth on my hands?! Preposterous! How dare you?!” Obviously absurd and wrong at the time, but later vindicated as obviously correct.
Your examples seem plausible, altho I’d still be interested in more details on each one. Further notes:
“And it did in fact send people like Bohm into spiritual frenzy.”—do you mean Bohr, or is this a story/take I don’t know about?
Re: Semmelweis reflex, I think there’s a pretty big distinction between the “woo” taste and the “absurd” taste. For example, “all plants are conscious and radiate love all the time” sounds like woo to me. “The only reason anybody gets higher education is to find people to have kids with” and “there’s a small organ in the centre of the brain that regulates the temperature of the blood that nobody has found yet” sound absurd to me, but not like woo.
Received such a bad reception that Everett left academic physics.
Didn’t seem crazy to the Greeks, but was controversial when reintroduced by Boltzman.
A lot of things can be pretty controversial but not woo-ish.
Can you say more about these for the benefit of folks like me who don’t know about them? What kind of “bad reception” or “controversial” was it? Was it woo-flavored, or something else?
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/hugh-everett-biography/
Everett tried to express his ideas as drily as possible, and it didn’t entirely work—he was still accused of “theology” by Bohr.
But there were and are technical issues as well, notably the basis problem. It can be argued that if you reify the whole formalism, then you have to reify the basis, and that squares the complexity of multiverse—to every state in every basis. The argument actually was by JS Bell in
Modern approaches tend to assume the multiverse has a single “preferred” basis, which has its own problems. Which tells us that it hasn’t always been one exact theory.