I’m not convinced you’re drawing the right conclusion. Here’s my take:
The person who has taken a class in mechanics has been given a theory, invented by someone else, which happens to be quite good. Being able to apply an existing theory and being able to create a new theory are different skills. One of the key skills of being able to create your own theories is getting good at noticing anomalies that existing theories don’t account for:
The mystery is how a conception of the utility of outcomes that is vulnerable to such obvious counterexamples survived for so long. I can explain it only by a weakness of the scholarly mind that I have often observed in myself. I call it theory-induced blindness: once you have accepted a theory and used it as a tool in your thinking, it is extraordinarily difficult to notice its flaws. If you come upon an observation that does not seem to fit the model, you assume that there must be a perfectly good explanation that you are somehow missing. You give the theory the benefit of the doubt, trusting the community of experts who have accepted it.
(From Thinking Fast and Slow)
In other words, I think that trusting existing theories too much is a very general mistake that lots of people make in lots of contexts.
Yes! I was thinking about adding a couple paragraphs about this, but couldn’t figure out how to word it quite right.
When you’re trying to create solid theories de-novo, a huge part of it is finding people who’ve done a bunch of experiments with it, looking at the outcomes, and paying really close attention to the places where they don’t match your existing theory. Elinor Ostrom is one of the best examples I know: she won a Nobel in economics for basically saying “ok, how do people actually solve commons problems in practice, and does it make sense from an economic perspective?”
In the case of a wheel with weights on it, that’s been nailed down really well already by generations of physicists, so it’s not a very good example for theory-generation.
But one important aspect does carry over: you have to actually do the math, to see what the theory actually predicts. Otherwise, you won’t notice when the experimental outcomes don’t match, so you won’t know that the theory is incomplete.
Even in the wheel example, I’d bet a lot of physics-savvy people would just start from “oh, all that matters here is moment of inertia”, without realizing that it’s possible to shift the initial gravitational potential. But if you try a few random configurations, and actually calculate how fast you expect them to go, then you’ll notice very quickly that the theory is incomplete.
I’m not convinced you’re drawing the right conclusion. Here’s my take:
The person who has taken a class in mechanics has been given a theory, invented by someone else, which happens to be quite good. Being able to apply an existing theory and being able to create a new theory are different skills. One of the key skills of being able to create your own theories is getting good at noticing anomalies that existing theories don’t account for:
(From Thinking Fast and Slow)
In other words, I think that trusting existing theories too much is a very general mistake that lots of people make in lots of contexts.
Yes! I was thinking about adding a couple paragraphs about this, but couldn’t figure out how to word it quite right.
When you’re trying to create solid theories de-novo, a huge part of it is finding people who’ve done a bunch of experiments with it, looking at the outcomes, and paying really close attention to the places where they don’t match your existing theory. Elinor Ostrom is one of the best examples I know: she won a Nobel in economics for basically saying “ok, how do people actually solve commons problems in practice, and does it make sense from an economic perspective?”
In the case of a wheel with weights on it, that’s been nailed down really well already by generations of physicists, so it’s not a very good example for theory-generation.
But one important aspect does carry over: you have to actually do the math, to see what the theory actually predicts. Otherwise, you won’t notice when the experimental outcomes don’t match, so you won’t know that the theory is incomplete.
Even in the wheel example, I’d bet a lot of physics-savvy people would just start from “oh, all that matters here is moment of inertia”, without realizing that it’s possible to shift the initial gravitational potential. But if you try a few random configurations, and actually calculate how fast you expect them to go, then you’ll notice very quickly that the theory is incomplete.