A number of years ago, I was trying to choose an area to live in and around Melbourne. Since I worked in the CBD, I wanted to keep my commute reasonable. I also wanted a reasonable-sized yard in which to grow fruit and vegetables. The Australian property market was already batshit crazy at that point (it has since advanced to certifiably insane), so any chance of buying in the inner suburbs was out of the question. That left the outer suburbs or surrounding hinterland as options.
Since fruit and vegetable growing was on my list of priorities, I was conscious of things like annual rainfall and quality of soil when evaluating alternative locations to live.
Melbourne has an interesting meteorological quirk in this respect. If you were to draw a diagonal line over the city from north-west to south-east, the areas to the west of that line receive quite a lot less rain than those to the east of it. The western areas belong to the expansive grasslands that stretch, almost uninterrupted, all the way to South Australia. The eastern and northern areas run into the Great Dividing Range, the enormous chain of mountains that runs right up the east coast of Australia.
One of the things that happens in proximity to those mountains is that you can get hailstorms. While researching the area to the north-east of Melbourne as a potential place to live, I noted that a major hail storm seemed to happen about once a decade there. We’re talking golf ball-sized hail that can cause damage to houses and cars, but also fruit and vegetable gardens. Since that area is a food-producing region, growers must reckon with the fact that they will lose an entire crop about once a decade.
As it turns out, I have some experience with those kinds of hailstorms. I grew up in an area that is far enough north that a couple of times every summer a big storm blows down from the subtropics. Sometimes those storms are hail storms. Our house had a metal roof and I distinctly remember one hail storm that caused such a cacophony that we had to shout into each other’s ears just to be heard inside the house.
Although the question of hail was not a deciding factor, I ended up moving to the area to the west of Melbourne’s diagonal rain line. It doesn’t rain as much here. That’s unfortunate. On the positive side, the threat of major hail damage is minute.
Some years ago, a colleague of mine moved into the exact area in the north-east of Melbourne that I had earlier been investigating as a place to live. I knew he wasn’t into gardening, since he used to complain about it. He’s one of those people who resent having to even mow a lawn but who find themselves in Australian suburbia with the annoyance of having to maintain a garden that they don’t really care about and probably wish wasn’t there.
It was shortly after my colleague had moved into his new house in the north east that a hail storm came through. In my part of Melbourne, there was some tiny little hail about the size of sunflower seeds which survived a matter of seconds upon making contact with the ground. In the eastern suburbs, the hail was slightly bigger but still nothing to write home about. It was definitely not one of those once-in-a-decade golf ball-sized hail storms.
Nevertheless, I saw a social media post from my colleague with a photo of the hail on his back lawn. He had captioned the photo with something like “Hail in December. Tell me that climate change isn’t real!”
This colleague of mine works in the IT industry. One of the good things about working with computers is that they are machines that do whatever you instruct them to do. However, because the mechanics of the computer are hidden away beneath layers of abstractions, it is easy to get lost in those abstractions, especially when trying to locate a bug (the recent Crowdstrike global outage provides a topical example of the problem). Thus, a lot of the technical work with computers involves wading through abstractions only to realise that the computer had done exactly what you told it to do. The problem was not the computer. The problem was you.
For this reason, working with computers involves the constant confrontation with your mental models of the world. More specifically, the realisation that your mental model is very often wrong. You thought you were telling the computer to do one thing. Actually, you were telling it something different. This realisation can lead to what we might call epistemological humility on the part of the people who work with computers.
I had believed my colleague to be in that camp, so it was strange to hear him make such an unqualified and categorical statement about climate change from a single observation. Of course, I also knew that the observation was wrong in a factual sense.
The implication of the phrase “hail in December” is that my colleague had assumed that hail is only supposed to happen in winter. In fact, December (the beginning of summer in Melbourne) is exactly the time when hail storms hit since the phenomenon is correlated with weather patterns that blow storms down from the tropical north during the rainy season. If you check the statistics on major hail storms in Victoria, they almost always happen from December to March.
My colleague was clearly unaware of these basic realities. In fact, his area is probably overdue for a major hail storm, the kind that causes property damage. When that does happen, he might have something real to complain about.
I began thinking about how an intelligent person who in their professional life knows the dangers of making unqualified blanket statements could make such a blunder. An obvious point was the simple fact that my colleague had not researched the meteorology of the area before moving to it. Unlike myself, he had no interest in growing fruit and vegetables and therefore had no reason to be concerned. Thus, the difference here is one of perspective based on personal interest.
But then I began wondering whether this seemingly trivial distinction doesn’t end up becoming a very large distinction, perhaps even a different worldview. I knew that my colleague was born and raised in a modern city where clean water comes out of the tap on command and food comes pre-packaged at the supermarket. I doubt it had ever occurred to him to grow his own food. What is the attitude of such a person towards weather in general?
Since being outdoors is synonymous with either commuting or leisure activities for such a person, rain is always an annoyance. I can’t think of a single leisure activity that requires rain, but I can think of plenty that get cancelled because of it, including sports matches, picnics, bushwalking etc. For a professional city person, there’s a kind of zero sum attitude to rain. It’s always correlated with a negative outcome and never with a positive one.
A gardener has a completely different attitude to rain. In most of Australia, water is the limiting factor on fertility. Therefore, rain is almost always welcome. If, like me, you capture the rainwater in tanks, rain has the additional benefit of filling the tanks and creating a resource that is of tangible value. Simply by doing gardening, your perspective on rain changes. Rain is no longer a zero sum equation.
What’s more, a gardener becomes far more attuned to variations in the weather since it directly affects the outcomes you are looking for i.e. fruit and vegetables from the garden. To garden successfully, you must have a more in-depth understanding of the climate. That’s the reason why I knew that my colleague was living in hail-prone area while he did not.
In short, a gardener has a non zero sum attitude to weather. If it rains, I might be annoyed if I have to cancel some activity I wanted to do, but I’m also happy that my garden is receiving water and my water tanks are filling up.
This non-zero sum mindset is actually necessary for successful gardening, especially if you are growing food crops. The experienced gardener learns that, through some combination of weather variations, pests or other more complex causes, you might lose a whole crop of a particular fruit or vegetable. You can get around this by spending all your time and energy protecting a few crops or you can get around it by diversifying. If you plant a variety of different crops, it’s highly unlikely that you’ll lose them all to a single cause (a severe hailstorm is actually one of the few things that can take out an entire garden’s worth of plants).
As long as you can be flexible, you can avoid the zero sum mindset. Maybe you’ll have a bad year for tomatoes but a bumper year for kale. The bad news is almost always offset by some good news.
Now, perhaps I am drawing a long bow, but is it too much of a stretch to see this lack of flexibility in the modern world and is it also possible that it is this which is causing the increasingly zero sum quality of our politics and public discourse? Think of how many different issues are presented as an extreme case of the zero sum mentality. We must switch to renewables OR the world will come to an end. You must take this vaccine OR you and your loved ones will die. You must have your teenage child undergo trans surgery OR they will commit suicide.
I used to think this kind of messaging was the by-product of modern democratic political stalemate where only the most extreme narrative can frighten people into action. That implies a lack of flexibility in the political system. But that of flexibility is everywhere now. The average voter is a now a city person who has the zero sum mindset as a lived reality.
The irony is that the city has traditionally been seen as the place of freedom and opportunity, contrasted against the zero sum mentality of rural communities. At a surface level, that is true. Having grown up in small towns, I know about the zero sum mentality that exists there. But maybe the only real difference is that country folk don’t hide it. Maybe all that happens in the city is that the zero sum mentality gets sublimated and channeled into apocalyptic mythological grand narratives like “climate change” and “pandemic”.
It reminds me of a point made by Nassim Taleb in relation to war. Europe was almost constantly at war for most of its modern history, but those wars were mostly small scale affairs where the damage done to society was quite minimal. The 19th century, by contrast, was a time of relative peace and intelligent people convinced themselves that war was a thing of the past. WW1 and WW2 put an end to that delusion. Taleb concluded that it was preferable to have a lot of small wars rather than save it all up for one big war.
The same dynamic holds for our relationships. You can have small and frequent disagreements with your spouse, your work colleagues and your friends or you can save up all the frustration, let it mature and age into bitterness and rage, and then have it all explode out in one big outburst that could quite likely destroy the relationships altogether.
Maybe the same is true of the zero sum mindset. We pretend it doesn’t exist but it just builds up quietly in the background taking shape in grand apocalyptic mythologies which hand over more and more political power to the modern priests who rail on like medieval bishops about eternal damnation. It’s the most zero sum message imaginable: do exactly what I say or the entire world will come to an end. Everything gradually settles down into one giant zero sum game where the State wields complete power over everything and the “freedom” and “opportunity” of the city morphs into the most extreme form of bondage imaginable.
That old Chinese parable about the farmer and his attitude to good luck and bad luck is good medicine for this mindset, it was actually featured heavily in a recent episode of Bluey the children’s show that my kids watch which surprised me. It seems almost blasphemous to modern discourse.
Skip – I hadn’t heard that one before but I like it. It is a strange attitude that any slight deviation from the expected must be a bad thing. I can think of many memorable occasions in my life that only happened after things “went wrong”.
Simon – I think a common trait of people who tend to think like that is that they are intelligent people who’s ability of think analytically about something, and their personal experience with it have a large gap in favor of the former.
Take nature for example. Someone who is only outside for recreation only gets to experience the weather as it is “well behaved” – not too hot, not too cold, no rain, and generally ideal for recreation. Nature however, is indifferent to human preferences. A lot of fundamental process of nature in fact take place when things are not “nice” – rain is not fun for outdoor activities, but environmental issues such as drought, or floods, which affect society are largely due to effects that require some understanding of rain patterns, as well as second order effects, some of which can only be experienced by those who are out on the rain, usually because their job or lifestyle require them to.
There is a complementary way of understanding nature – through science. Someone who only observes natural phenomena, may acquire intuition, but will have a hard time putting this knowledge into a coherent narrative. Someone with both can craft stories that have some grounding in reality. But what do you do when you can tell stories but have no first hand experience with what you are talking about? I believe you get what you described in your post.
Bakbook – that’s a good summary of the issue. There’s also a problem with science these days in that it increasingly takes the form of analytical thinking that has no grounding in lived experience. You have people whose entire job revolves around constructing models on computers. Meanwhile, empirical lab work is often so specialised and mechanical that it gives no holistic experience of what is being researched. And then, to top it all off, the people telling the stories often have no experience with either the models or the empirical research!
Simon,
It seems modern science has a problem of over abstraction. What started as a discription of nature now shapes how the scientists view nature by dictating how to think not of nature, but on how nature ought to be. A simulacra where the models are viewed as reality, and personal experiance that is only valid if it validates the model.
I once thought it’d be interesting if the only requierment to get a bs.c in chemistry would be to carry out a nontrivial reaction. The student would be supplied with lab equipment and chemicals, and would be responsible for designing and carrying out the procedure, as well as safety. On the one hand, it sounds like a great learning experiance, where the student will have to face reality, and prove real world competance. On the other, even if someone would agree to take the responsobility, how many student would actually pass?
It’s funny you mention that because some years ago I went looking for a chemistry kit to buy and I struggled to find a good one apparently because the “old fashioned” kits are now considered dangerous. Probably somebody really hurt themselves doing something stupid once and the companies that used to sell the kits got sued. I’m sure the same idea is prevalent in schools. Saftey-ism at work.
On a related topic, the best educational book I ever found on computer programming took the exact approach you suggest. Rather than bang on about theory, it gives the students problems to solve and then has the theory follow the problem, which means that by the time you get to the theory, you already have some empirical understanding of its relevance. But, again, that book was the exception to the rule. Most books are all about theory.
Hi Simon,
Ooo, this is eerie. I sort of wrote about this subject as well this week. Must be something in the water? 🙂 A week or two back this weird insight struck me that: Fighting for something, as distinct from fighting against something, is exactly akin to the producer versus consumer mindset. It’s so close it is uncanny. There’s something in that, hmm. Dunno.
But then the larger question you’ve raised is, at what point is consumption detached from production? And how far can that distance widen until it reaches a state of absurdity?
For your interest, the hail we get here is also small. Further south and east, it’s car destroying. After such a storm, the results look like an old style mob hit from the 1920’s.
Interestingly, you’re in the almost perfect area of Melbourne for growing vegetables – if you can get the water. Lower rainfall slows the leaching of minerals from the soil into the sub soil and water table, and not to mention you’ve benefited from numerous tens of thousands of years of soils washing down out of this more mountainous area from several rivers (which used to annually flood). It’s pretty ideal really, if you can get the water. We get two to three times the rain you do (it was raining this morning), but far out, I have to apply easily ten times the minerals as you wowuld back onto the soil. Maths is not usually my thing, but that equation is simple enough to trouble me. Oh well…
My conclusion was that peoples brains are switched off. It’s a big call! But for plenty of people, the system still delivers the goods. Sure, but what happens when the flow of goods slows, or becomes unaffordable – that’s what I wonder about?
Cheers
Chris
Chris – I think it’s a combination of the consumer/employee mindset. What both have in common is there’s no upside payoff from risk. That’s not true for other categories. From the small business owners that I know, they always have a number of funny stories about how something dumb happened but they actually benefited from it. For example, your competitor is an idiot. He keeps screwing up and you win all his business. If you’re an employee, you almost never benefit from stupidity. Dumb things happen and you just have to live with the consequences.
In short, I think that consumer/employee are both zero sum roles whereas usiness owner, farmer, politician, entrepreneur and others are non-zero sum.
As cognitive psychologists keep telling us, critical thinking (and by extension, “epistemological humility”) is not a transferable skill. You may be a top-notch thinker in one domain, but if you try your hand at a problem from a different domain, one that you know little about, you should expect poor results.
Related to over-abstraction: I sometimes think that we live in a psychometric dystopia, or are at least well on our way there. Take Jordan Peterson, the high priest of psychometrics. According to JP, it’s all about IQ and conscientiousness, you see. And maybe some openness, minus neuroticism, with a proper dosage of disagreeableness (some, but not too much). In any case, education (especially higher education) is all about ranking people on an IQ/conscientiousness scale, and it has little to do with the acquisition of such things as knowledge. (Obvious conclusion: you might as well do away with the whole thing and use a psychometric test instead, which would be much quicker and much cheaper.) And the reason this isn’t working as well as it should is because of all that DEI stuff, you see, and it has nothing to do with the fact that you keep hiring people who simply do not have the requisite knowledge to do the job. (BTW, it’s been said – and I suspect this is correct – that one of the major reasons for the American foreign policy blunders is a lack of regional experts with, among other things, the relevant language skills. So, no-one important in Washington knows Mandarin or Russian? No problem! Just get the Taiwanese and the Ukrainians to tell you what’s going on in Beijing/Moscow. What could possibly go wrong?!) It just never occurs to these geniuses that if you set up the incentives right (or rather: wrong), the psychometrically smartest people will just use their intelligence to get better at back-stabbing, sucking up to the right people, and polishing their PowerPoint presentations. As we saw during the corona event, to give just one example.
@Bakbook
When I was in school, I liked math, but not physics. Physics just struck me as sloppy math. Which is precisely how it was taught. We did almost no experiments. Our physics classes were indistinguishable from math classes, except that in math, you had to justify all your steps, whereas physics tolerated a much higher degree of hand-waving. So, both were (taught as) pure abstraction, but one was a lot more rigorous than the other.
Irena – seems to be true. I’m pretty sure that learning philosophy was seen to be an antidote against that once upon a time. The death of philosophy in the 20th century has corresponded with the rise of the subject matter idiot.
I think your example of foreign policy goes for pretty much every area of life now. Leaders can’t possibly be expected to know anything about the world, so they have to listen to the “experts”. Just by magic, all the “experts” have vested financial interests in their area of expertise (because capitalism). Hey, let’s go and ask this virologist who just happens to have 10 patents that earn him millions in government contracts whether we should give him even more government contracts to combat that virus they’re talking about in the newspapers today.
Re: philosophy
Some training in logic will make you a better general-purpose critical thinker than you would be otherwise, but it’s still no substitute for actual subject matter knowledge.
Simon: “Just by magic, all the “experts” have vested financial interests in their area of expertise (because capitalism).”
Yes, but it’s not just capitalism. People have always had vested interests. Where contemporary capitalism as such makes it worse is in that it optimizes for just-in-time manufacturing, which all but guarantees that you have no surge capacity (which is why the West is currently losing its proxy war-of-attrition against Russia). It also goes for skills. “I’d like a Russia expert tomorrow” just does not happen. How long does it take to train a Russia expert, with the requisite language skills, plus the knowledge of history and contemporary politics? A decade? You cannot get that “tomorrow,” just because you’d like to, even if you’re willing to pay a fortune for it. So, you work on your memes instead, win a decisive Twitter victory against Russia (“Putler bad!”), only to have it slowly dawn upon the brighter people in the Pentagon that “oh, poop, we just got ourselves into a war of attrition against Russia.” Why, yes, you did, you geniuses.
And then there’s the work ethic, which you’ve talked about. Sometimes, it makes things worse. For instance, you train people perform a certain complex task, which allows you to win a certain kind of victory (for example, to exterminate smallpox). But now you no longer need these people’s skills! You could, of course, tell them “good job, now you don’t have to work as hard anymore, but you still get to keep your perks.” You *could* say that, but you don’t, because people are supposed to keep working for their perks (because work ethic!). Which means you have two choices (both of them bad): invent work for them (which is one reason why we got the corona fiasco: lots of vaccinologists with no good outlet for their skills), or sack them (as happened with aerospace engineers as the American space program downsized). The problem with the latter is that it sends a strong message to the next generation that acquiring complex skills that come with a major opportunity cost is a sucker’s game. And then you have no proper Russia experts, and then you get yourself into a war of attrition against Russia, which you have no hope of actually winning.
I don’t have the high opinion of expertise that you do. Sure, we need experts. But, as Feynman put it, an expert should be able to explain their expertise to a 10 year old. Experts who can’t do that become subject matter idiots whose opinion is worth less than an average person using common sense. We have a lot of subject matter idiots these days and they get put in charge of things and it’s almost comical how badly they do. The best argument against expertise is the modern world!
As for war, again, expertise is valid only at the line level. You want your soldiers to be experts at firing their guns. The higher up the chain of command, the less relevant is expertise because the more complex are the considerations. In fact, the war with Russia might have been caused by experts for all we know. “Hey, do exactly what I say and I’ll beat Russia for you.” Well, who said we need to “beat” Russia? What does that even mean? The question is not one of expertise but statesmanship and deciding what outcomes are worth pursuing. That’s what I call “philosophy”.
Simon: “The question is not one of expertise but statesmanship and deciding what outcomes are worth pursuing. That’s what I call “philosophy”.”
Y’know, you may just be right about that. Whether it’s expertise or philosophy, though, you definitely need people who (for starters) realize that Russia of the 2020s is not the basket case that it was in the 1990s, and that, no, you cannot just sign some papers, post some memes on Twitter, and have Russia magically collapse because Putler bad. As far as I can tell, that’s precisely what the clowns in charge expected to happen. Heck, some of them *still* expect it to happen. ‘Coz Putler bad, haven’t you heard?
In a ideal scenario, this is what an aristocracy is for; statesmanship. Politics is not supposed to be economic per se, it only became so with the victory of the bourgeoisie.
Irena – Maybe the real reason for the Ukraine War is precisely because the US knows that Russia is no longer a basket case and they saw a rising Russia as a threat to be countered especially since Germany was willingly becoming dependent on Russian gas. In short, maybe the US is getting out of the Ukraine War exactly what it wanted. (Whether it wants what is good for it is another question).
Skip – Yes. And that’s why nobody sees a problem with a virologist or other expert who has obvious financial interests in certain public policy positions. At least the old-fashioned corruption was out there in the open. The new corruption hides behind ideology making it much harder to identify.
Simon: “But, as Feynman put it, an expert should be able to explain their expertise to a 10 year old.”
I realize I’m getting a bit off topic here, but I have to push back on this. No, actually, this is precisely what keeps getting us into trouble. All the anti-corona measures (lockdowns, masks, “vaccines”) can easily be explained to 10-year-olds. Explainability is not a problem. The problem is that it doesn’t work. And explaining that (i.e. why it doesn’t work) to a 10-year-old is actually not quite as simple. (In fact, I don’t think anyone really knows why lockdowns don’t work. They “should” work, except that the data strongly suggests that they don’t. Why? I don’t really know. I do know that I don’t want to be put under house arrest for no reason.) It’s the same with this Russia business. “Ghost of Kyiv” defeating Putler’s army is a fantastic story for 10-year-olds. “This will get us into a war of attrition with Russia, which we cannot win because XYZ” is far less understandable and is emotionally uncompelling (“But we are the good guys and Putler’s evil!” said a 10-year-old somewhere), but it also happens to be accurate, as we now get to see.
I think Skip has a point here. A competent aristocracy (yes, of course, aristocracy can become hopelessly incompetent) has the privilege of being able to think things through and not have to explain everything to overexcited 10-year-olds, or to adults pretending to be 10 years old. And then maybe you get to make some good decisions.
Simon: “Maybe the real reason for the Ukraine War is precisely because the US knows that Russia is no longer a basket case and they saw a rising Russia as a threat to be countered especially since Germany was willingly becoming dependent on Russian gas.”
It’s possible, but I rather doubt it. A combination of utter incompetence, overconfidence, and private interest (see Hunter Biden and Ukraine) strikes me as a more likely explanation. They thought they were going to win this easily. And now it looks like they are going to throw in the towel, after having made a massive mess of things. Mind you, I hope they *do* throw in the towel. Enough is enough. (No doubt, they’ll try to spin it as a victory. “Brave Ukrainians prevented Putler from marching all the way to the English Channel” or something similarly stupid.)
I think there’s two main points to Feynman’s idea.
Point 1: it’s an antidote to a common problem that experts face which is to get lost in the weeds. You’re down some rabbit hole trying to solve a problem that’s three degrees removed from the original purpose of your mission. “Explaining it to a 10 year old” means re-stating your assumptions. It’s amazing how often just the act of explaining it in simple terms leads to a solution to the problem you’ve been struggling with.
Point 2: experts put up barriers to their field of knowledge and then use those barriers for political and economic manipulation. Forcing experts to explain their work in terms the general public understands prevents corruption.
All that assumes that there’s no extra emotional manipulation that is happening but you’re right that the general public nowadays is actually treated like 10 year olds in the sense that they are exposed to thermonuclear levels of propaganda most of which assumes they are 10 years old in that they can be easily emotionally manipulated.
@Simon
Re: Point 1
Who was it (Einstein perhaps…?) that said that you should make your work as simple as possible, but no simpler than that? Oversimplification is a thing, which is in fact exactly what you talked about in your original post. What was your colleague doing if not oversimplifying?
Also, research is messy. Your first solution is likely to be more complicated than necessary (which you also talked about in relation to programming books). Once you’ve found something that works, you can (and probably should) take a step back and try to simplify. But that comes later! The first goal is find something, *anything* that actually works. If you’re doing original research, then you don’t get to skip this step.
Finally, no matter how hard you try to make things as simple as possible (but no simpler than that), some bullshitter or con artist who sees no reason to limit himself to the truth will be able to tell a story that is simpler and more understandable than yours. Lots of things are inherently complex.
Re: Point 2
Up to a point, yes. 🙂 But as someone on the Internet once said: for every complex problem, there is a solution that is simple, obvious, and wrong. 😉 As we indeed saw during the corona fiasco. All the “solutions” were quite simple and made a great deal of sense, and the only downside was that they didn’t work. People who said “wait a minute, this won’t work” never had a story that was as simple as what the lockdowners et al were selling. If obfuscation is one way to manipulate the public, then oversimplification is another. In fact, the reason that obfuscation ever works is because people realize that oversimplification is a thing and guard against it.
Well, yes. All of which is good reason to let scientists work quietly away in universities, monasteries and country estates away from the madding crowd until they have conclusively sorted out for themselves what works. Then it would be possible to explain in a calm and rational fashion what is and is not true. All of which assumes there is no money at stake. Money and power have only really come into it in the post-war years which is why what goes on these days barely even qualifies as “science”.
Irena – About physics, this complaint comes up a lot, and you are right that it has a lot to do with how physics is tought.
Often, the students are handed formulas, who’s derivation they may have seen, or were explained the rational, and are then expected to apply them to solve problems. This mechanical process resembles math, but with an importent distinction.
A mathematician starts with axioms and definitions, and through manipolation that is governed by the rules of logic, arrives at theorms and more complex mathematical stractures.
A physicist in the other hand, tries to come up with models that aim to describe real world observations, and results of experiments. The models often have assumptions, and those seem like axioms in retrospect, but the difference is that an assumption is introduced to explain the experimental results, rather than serve as a starting point for pure logical manipolation.
Because a mathematician starts with a given set of axioms and definitions and then uses logic to go from there, a mathematician can and should be applying logic at every step – this is called “mathematical formalism”.
Physicists actually do the opposite – A physicist knows the end reault, but not the axioms that gave rise to it. Because there are no axioms, mathematical formalism sometimes needs to be strayed from, because some assumptions have to be introduced along the way, to explain the results that were already found. Exactly the opposide direction.
However, when physics is thought without the context of experiments, what happens instead is that the process of observing nature through experiment, introducing assumptions, and using a mathematical model to bridge between them, is reduced to “derivations”. A derivation looks like a formal mathematical proof at first glance, but in reality, it uses assumptions rather than axioms, and it is meant to show how the model explains the result. From there often formulas and equations can be derived.
Because both the result and the assumptions were decided based on the experiment, mathematical formalism only makes sense when it brings us closer to the experimental result from the assumptions, and if it does not, the gap is bridged by knowledge from other experiments. This seems like cheating, but the sale xpeeimental reaults are there to ground the whole thing.
But in the classroom, since the students are often not knowlegable about past experiments, the results from other deeivations are used instead. This creates more confusion between math and physics, as a result of only showing students abstract derivations.
Let me finish by saying derivations actually have their place in physics, but if one is only shown derivations and assumptions with no real world context, the whole thing would indeed look like sloppy math. But rhat’s because physics is done in the opposide sirection than how it is presented in class.
Hi Simon,
You wrote: The average voter is a now a city person who has the zero sum mindset as a lived reality.
I’m not so sure about that. How does that work with the ever escalating house price story? The thing there, is that in a rising market every canoe is lifted, unless you don’t own a canoe. That’s not zero sum to me.
Cheers
Chris
Hi Simon,
Just to further expand upon the previous comment.
There’s an unspoken question here: How far into the future are we talking about here? Take the example of using an expanding money supply at a greater rate than the underlying real wealth, using the instrument of debt. In that situation in the immediate term, it’s non zero sum because, well people are getting more stuff right now by heaping costs onto the future. But in the longer term, it is zero sum because if the intention is to repay the debt, then that’s a loss of possibility to buy stuff for folks in the future.
Cheers
Chris
Chris/Sandra – well, the first thing to note is that that story is falling apart right before our eyes. At least in Australia, the next generation is being priced out of real estate altogether and the gain of those who own real estate is now quite obviously predicated on the loss of those who don’t (and never will).
But, actually, I still think the housing game is an example of the zero sum mentality since it involves a mortgage. Going into debt means that almost any change in your circumstances is going to make you worse off. It’s a bit like catching the 9am train. You plan to arrive on time but almost anything that happens outside the plan is going to slow you down and make you potentially miss the train. A mortgage is the same. Any job loss, interest rate rise, general economic downturn only makes you more likely not to pay off the mortgage or realise financial gains in the timeframe you wanted.
Still, perhaps “zero sum” is not quite the right concept here since I’m not exactly using it in the technical sense that comes from game theory. What I’m really talking about is risk. Upside risks are where unexpected things have large payoffs. Downside risks are where unexpected things have large losses. Property speculation has very little upside risk but lots of downside risk.
Re oversimplifying, Irena and Simon, I get the impression you’re talking past one another a bit, in that Simon seems to be getting at the idea of simplifying to explain — without manipulation or other ulterior motives — is a good thing to aim for. Whereas Irena seems to assume simplifying inherently involves loss of context or detail or includes some other misleading outcome. Which is, to be fair, is exactly what we seem to experience all too often in our current culture: adults tend to talk down to children and experts tend to talk down to Average Joe, in the most condescending ways. I find it’s a very refreshing experience to talk with (not to!) a child, giving honest answers to honest questions, in simple terms they can relate to rather than with fancy vocabulary and theoretical tangents. But who has time for actually conversing anyway, you’ve only got a 15 second sound bite in this news cycle, so just spit some spin and move on.
AM – good point. I think communication gets exponentially more difficult as the number of people involved increases. That’s true even in groups where everybody has the best of intentions. That’s why any organisation of any size has a hierarchy, since the person highest in the hierarchy can assert the “truth” and everybody else must follow. Sometimes that works even when what the superior person is asserting is a lie, because the lie at least allows the resolution of the issue.
It’s a dangerous game though because eventually you get people in positions of authority who realise they can lie for their own benefit instead of the benefit of the general public.
The root reason for why small and long-standing communities are essential to healthy societies is humans are annoyingly slow and need time to get to know each other well enough to read each others real motivations. Motivation is well hidden by jargon, distance and dislocation.
The pivot point isn’t whether to further specialise or not but whether you are observant and honest enough to discern whether going one way or the other is going to be fruitful for oneself and others in the long term.
Humility precedes honesty. That is the reason why a fat CV tends to make people more stupid at making decent decisions. Alas! We are happy to give up kingdoms for our pride but are happy with a horse when when it’s too late to save either.
What we need is people who can be both smart and humble at the same time. That trick demands the kind of internal work that doesn’t and can’t be taught by large institutions.
Lies can never be beneficial, even to the liar, at least in the long-term. How does a liar learn from his mistakes? He doesn’t. Because he’s so used to making up shit there’s no way to recognise them. Let’s call a spade a spade … propaganda and advertising are just the fine art of telling beautiful lies. It’s not just a dangerous game to play, it’s an inherently poisonous cup. Whatever peace and prosperity they win cannot but fail … as we are seeing.
Jinasiri – yep. And when did western governments begin propagandising their citizens on mass? WW1. The level of propaganda has increased proportional to the size of the tax take. So, we get to give the government our money just to have them bullshit us into doing what is not in our interests. Not a great system.
When the Brahmins insisted on their inherent superiority the Buddha retorted: “It were as if a man were to force another to eat a piece of meat and then tell him to pay for it too!”
I wonder whether it’s possible to reach Peak Bullshit.