Epistemologist specialized in the difficulties of alignment and how to solve AI X-Risks. Currently at Conjecture.
Blogging at For Methods.
adamShimi
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Triangulating My Interpretation of Methods: Black Boxes by Marco J. Nathan
Self-Help Corner: Loop Detection
My Methodological Turn
Recently found a new link: Annual Reviews
It sounds like a place that centralizes many different review articles across a lot of disciplines. Only checked a few for the moment, but definitely sounds worth a try!
@Elizabeth suggested that I share here the quick tips I gave her for finding cool history and philosophy of science books, so let’s do it.
I like using awards as starting points. They’re not exhaustive, but often they point to particularly good references in a field that I don’t know about.
For philosophy of science, often with a decent dose of history, there is the Lakatos Award.
For history of science, there is the Sarton Medal, which is given to individuals, not works
Same with book reviews by journals focused on the topic
My favorite are from the British Journal for The Philosophy of Science reviews
Knowing the terminology helps. I find that “History and Philosophy of X” is often a good google query
I recently discovered https://hiphilangsci.net/ on linguistics that way!
Obviously, follow the citations: cool books tend to reference cool books. (And terrible ones, but let’s not mention that)
Also known, but just in case: going to https://scholar.google.com/ and searching for the most cited books that cite a book you liked often leads to great reading material.
Yeah, I agree with the general point (don’t have strong opinion about chaos theory at the moment).
First, negative results are really, really important. Mostly because they let you not lose your time trying to do something impossible, and sometimes they actually point you toward an answer. In general, conservation laws in physics have this role. And knowing what is undecidable is really important in formal methods, where the trick is generally to simplify what you want or the expressive power of your programs in order to sidestep it.
Then, they are indeed quite hard to prove, at least in non-trivial cases. Conservations laws are the results of literally centuries of reframing of classical mechanics and reduction, leading to seeing the importance of energy and potential in unifying everything in physics. Undecidability is the result of 60 years of metamathetical work trying to clean formalisms enough to be able to study these kind of properties.
Is there any empirical question the phlogiston theorists got right that compositional chemistry did not? AFAIK, no, but it’s a real question and I’d like to know if I’m wrong here.
Although I haven’t digged into the historical literature that much, I think there are two main candidates here: explaining the behavior of metals, and potential chemical energy.
On explaining the behavior of metal, this is Chang (Is Water H2O? p.43)
Phlogistonists explained the common properties of metals by saying that all metals were rich in phlogiston; this explanation was lost through the Chemical Revolution, as it does not work if we make the familiar substitution of phlogiston with the absence of oxygen (or, as Lavoisier had it, a strong affinity for oxygen). As Paul Hoyningen-Huene puts it (2008, 110): “Only after more than a 100 years could the explanatory potential of the phlogiston theory be regained in modern chemistry. One had to wait until the advent of the electron theory of metals”.
(Is Water H2O? p.21)
One salient case was the explanation of why metals (which were compounds for phlogistonists) had a set of common properties (Kuhn 1970 , 148). Actually by the onset of the Chemical Revolution this was no longer a research problem in the phlogiston paradigm, as it was accepted almost as common sense that metals had their common metallic properties (including shininess, malleability, ductility, electrical conductivity) because of the phlogiston they contained. The oxygenist side seems to have rejected not so much this answer as the question itself; chemistry reclaimed this stretch of territory only in the twentieth century.
And on potential chemical energy, here are the quotes from Chang again
(Is Water H2O? p.46)
William Odling made the same point in a most interesting paper from 1871. Although not a household name today, Odling was one of the leading theoretical chemists of Victorian Britain, and at that time the Fullerian Professor of Chemistry at the Royal Institution. According to Odling (1871, 319), the major insight from the phlogistonists was that “combustible bodies possess in common a power or energy capable of being elicited and used”, and that “the energy pertaining to combustible bodies is the same in all of them, and capable of being transferred from the combustible body which has it to an incombustible body which has it not”. Lavoisier had got this wrong by locating the energy in the oxygen gas in the form of caloric, without a convincing account of why caloric contained in other gases would not have the ability to cause combustion.
(Is Water H2O? p.47)
Although phlogiston was clearly not exactly chemical potential energy as understood in 1871, Odling (p. 325) argued that “the phlogistians had, in their time, possession of a real truth in nature which, altogether lost sight of in the intermediate period, has since crystallized out in a definite form.” He ended his discourse by quoting Becher: “I trust that I have got hold of my pitcher by the right handle.” And that pitcher (or Becher, cup?), the doctrine of energy, was of course “the grandest generalization in science that has ever yet been established.”
As a summary, let’s quote Chang one last time. (Is Water H2O? p.47-48)
All in all, I think it is quite clear that killing phlogiston off had two adverse effects: one was to discard certain valuable scientific problems and solutions; the other was to close off certain theoretical and experimental avenues for future scientific work. Perhaps it’s all fine from where we sit, since I think the frustrated potential of the phlogistonist system was quite fully realized eventually, by some very circuitous routes. But it seems to me quite clear that the premature death of phlogiston retarded scientific progress in quite tangible ways. If it had been left to develop, I think the concept of phlogiston would have split into two. On the one hand, by the early nineteenth century someone might well have hit upon energy conservation, puzzling over this imponderable entity which seemed to have an elusive sort of reality which could be passed from one ponderable substance to another.
In that parallel universe, we would be talking about the conservation of phlogiston, and how phlogiston turned out to have all sorts of different forms, but all interconvertible with each other. This would be no more awkward than what we have in our actual universe, in which we still talk about the role of “oxygen” (acid-generator, Sauerstoff ) in supporting combustion, and the “oxidation” number of ions. On the other hand, the phlogiston concept could have led to a study of electrons without passing through such a categorical and over-simplified atomic theory as Dalton’s. Chemists might have skipped right over from phlogiston to elementary particles, or at least found an alternative path of development that did not pass through the false simplicity of the atom–molecule–bulk matter hierarchy. Keeping the phlogiston theory would have led chemists to pay more attention to the “fourth state of matter”, starting with flames, and served as a reminder that the durability of compositionist chemical building-blocks may only be an appearance. Keeping phlogiston alive could have challenged the easy Daltonian assumption that chemical atoms were physically unbreakable units. The survival of phlogiston into the nineteenth century would have sustained a vigorous alternative tradition in chemistry and physics, which would have allowed scientists to recognize with more ease the wonderful fluidity of matter, and to come to grips sooner with the nature of ions, solutions, metals, plasmas, cathode rays, and perhaps even radioactivity.
On the Role of Proto-Languages
Compression Moves for Prediction
Apparently people want some clarification on what I mean by anti-library. It’s a Nassim Taleb term which refers to books you own but haven’t read, whose main value is to remind you and keep in mind what you don’t know and where to find it if you want to expand that knowledge.
If the point you’re trying to make is: “the way we go from preparadigmatic to paradigmatic is by solving some hard problems, not by communicating initial frames and idea”, I think this points to an important point indeed.
Still, two caveats:
First, Kuhn’s concept of paradigm is quite an oversimplification of what actually happens in the history of science (and the history of most fields). More recent works that go through history in much more detail realize that at any point in fields there are often many different pieces of paradigms, or some strong paradigm for a key “solved” part of the field and then a lot of debated alternative for more concrete specific details.
Generally, I think the discourse on history and philosophy of science on LW would improve a lot if it didn’t mostly rely on one (influential) book published in the 60s, before much of the strong effort to really understand history of science and practices.
Second, to steelman John’s point, I don’t think he means that you should only communicate your frame. He’s the first to actively try to apply his frames to some concrete problems, and to argue for their impressiveness. Instead, I read him as pointing to a bunch of different needs in a preparadigmatic field (which maybe he could separate better ¯\_(ツ)_/¯)
That in a preparadigmatic field, there is no accepted way of tackling the problems/phenomena. So if you want anyone else to understand you, you need to bridge a bigger inferential distance than in a paradigmatic field (or even a partially paradigmatic field), because you don’t even see the problem in the same way, at a fundamental level.
That if your goal is to create a paradigm, almost by definition you need to explain and communicate your paradigm. There is a part of propaganda in defending any proposed paradigm, especially when the initial frame is alien to most people, and even the impressiveness require some level of interpretation.
That one way (not the only way) by which a paradigm emerges is by taking different insights from different clunky frames, and unifying them (for a classic example, Newton relied on many previous basic frames, from Kepler’s laws to Galileo’s interpretation of force as causing acceleration). But this requires that the clunky frames are at least communicated clearly.
Curated. I’ve heard this book suggested a few times over the years, and feels like it’s a sort of unofficial canon among people studying how preparadigmatic science happens. This review finally compelled me to get the book.
There’s something quite funny in that I discovered this book in January 2022, during the couple of days I spent at Lightcone offices. It was in someone’s office, and I was curious about it. Now, we’re back full circle. ^^
I do think this review would be a lot better if it actually distilled the messy-bits-that-you-need-to-experientially-stew-over into a something that was (probably) much longer than this post, but, much shorter than the book. But that does seem legitimately hard.
Agreed.
But as I said in the post, I think it’s much more important to get the feel from this book than just the big ideas. I believe that there’s a way to write a really good blog post that shares that feel and compresses it, but that was not what I had the intention or energy (or mastery) to write.
It sounds cool, though also intuitively temperature seems like one of the easiest attributes to measure because literally everything is kind of a thermometer in the sense that everything equillibrates in temperature.
Can’t guarantee that you would benefit from it, but this sentence makes me think you have a much cleaner and simplified idea of how one develops even simple measuring device than what the history shows (especially when you don’t have any good theory of temperature or thermodynamics).
So would say you might benefit from reading it. ;)
If you enjoyed Inventing Temperature, Is Water H2O? is pretty much the same genre from the same author.
Yeah, I am a big fan of Is Water H2O? (and the other Chang books). It’s just that I find Is Water H2O? both less accessible (bit more focused on theory) and more controversial (notably in its treatement of phlogiston, which I agree with, but most people including here have only heard off phlogiston from fake histories written by scientists embellishing the histories of their fields (and Lavoisierian propaganda of course)). So that’s why I find Inventing Temperature easier to recommend as a first book.
My another favorite is The Emergence of Probability by Ian Hacking. It gets you feeling of how unimaginably difficult for early pioneers of probability theory to make any advance whatsoever, as well as how powerful even small advances actually are, like by enabling annuity.
It’s in my anti-library, but haven’t read it yet.
It is my pet peeve that people don’t (maybe can’t) appreciate how great intellectual achievement first order logic really is, being the end result of so much frustrating effort. Because learning to use first order logic is kind of trivial, compared to inventing it.
I haven’t read it in a while, but I remember The Great Formal Machinery Works being quite good on this topic.
It’s rare that books describe such processes well, I suspect partly because it’s so wildly harder to generate scientific ideas than to understand them, that they tend to strike people as almost blindingly obvious in retrospect.
Completely agreed!
I think this is also what makes great history of science so hard: you need to unlearn most of the modern insights and intuitions that didn’t exist at the time, and see as close as possible to what the historical actors saw.
This makes me think of a great quote from World of Flows, a history of hydrodynamics:
There is, however, a puzzling contrast between the conciseness and ease of the modern treatment of [wave equations], and the long, difficult struggles of nineteenth-century physicists with them. For example, a modern reader of Poisson’s old memoir on waves finds a bewildering accumulation of complex calculations where he would expect some rather elementary analysis. The reason for this difference is not any weakness of early nineteenth-century mathematicians, but our overestimation of the physico-mathematical tools that were available in their times. It would seem, for instance, that all that Poisson needed to solve his particular wave problem was Fourier analysis, which Joseph Fourier had introduced a few years earlier. In reality, Poisson only knew a raw, algebraic version of Fourier analysis, whereas modern physicists have unconsciously assimilated a physically ‘dressed’ Fourier analysis, replete with metaphors and intuitions borrowed from the concrete wave phenomena of optics, acoustics, and hydrodynamics.
(Also, thanks for the recommendations, will look at them! The response to this post makes me want to write a post about my favorite books on epistemology and science beyond Inventing Temperature ^^)
My Number 1 Epistemology Book Recommendation: Inventing Temperature
My Model of Epistemology
Thanks for the links!
But yeah, I’m more interested in detailed descriptions of how things actually work, rather than models of ideal governance.
Thanks!
After checking them, it feels like most of your links are focused on an economic lens to politics and governance, or at least an economic bent. Does that seem correct?
And of course just reading the rule books for the various governments or parts of the government—for the US that would be looking at the Constitution and the rules governing internal processes for both the House and Senate. Parlimentary systems will have similar rules of governance.
Looking at the organizational charts likely also help—what are the committee structures and how does legislation flow through.Yeah, ideally I would prefer to read an overview and model of these, but I agree that if it doesn’t exist, then reading the docs and charts is probably the simplest alternative.
That said I’m not sure I would view political governance as truely having any gears. I think all the rules tend to become more like the Pirate’s Code in Piarates of the Caribbean: more like guidelines than hard and fast rule.
I would guess that there are probably gears level model of how the governments actually work. Whether these are exactly the models provided in rules and guidelines, I’m not sure, but assuming not.
Yeah, I didn’t mean “iterative thoughtful processes”, I meant “compulsion that unfold at the level of days”. If you arbitrarily change your job every couple of days/weeks, not based on new significant information but because you feel this other one is the one, this is bad.
So there is a vibe here that I maybe didn’t convey well, about the time frame and the auto-generated part of the loops I’m pointing at: it happens often enough that your friends and family can notice, and it happens in reaction to events that no one around you agree would lead to such a drastic change (highlighting that the events are not so much the cause as the post-hoc rationalization).