[FRIAM] invoking quantum woo (was Book publishing advice needed)

[∄ uǝlƃ]

There's a lot to respond to. And I don't *think* I really disagree with much of it. But I wanted to point out that I think, at least in the case of science, "ignorant" isn't the right word. I think I prefer "aptly forgetful" ... or "usefully forgetful". We usefully forget dead-end or tortuous [⨂] paths and remember the "least action" paths because it helps us "get on with it". Similarly, all the human factors accompanying, some facilitating, some inhibiting, some completely orthogonal to, the *results* are sliced away to help us "get on with it" ... maybe we could call that "apt abstraction" or somesuch.

The old adage is "standing on the shoulders of giants". But we can think of it in terms of modularity, hierarchy, reduction, and emergence. We temporarily forget/ignore these things because a) we do our best work when we're focused on a task, in the flow/zone, as it were, and b) we tend to BELIEVE in the hermetic closure of the module. I.e. even if we're, at heart, reductionist, working a layer out, a level up, allows us to believe in what we're doing at that layer and facilitates the work.

So, while I don't disagree with your gist below, I think there's some distinction between people who *love* the messy details and people who love the *antiseptic* abstractions. Personally, I seem to move back and forth ... analogous with time-slicing, maybe. I detail-slice, sliding back and forth between the dirty places (Blade Runner) and the clean ones (Star Trek).


[⨂] Yes, "tortuous", NOT "torturous". 8^D

On 7/13/20 8:02 PM, Prof David West wrote:
> I used to think that computer science / software engineering was abysmally ignorant of its own history, but I am coming to believe that "science" is just as ignorant. (Even worse, believing that science and math began with the Greeks.)
> 
> "Quantum woo," "interpretation doesn't matter, just shut up and calculate," etc. etc.
> 
> "Spooky action at a distance" — not Einstein critiquing quantum entanglement; no, it was the Cartesian's mocking Newton's theory of gravity. Newton did not disagree: he asserted that the inverse square law worked very nicely indeed — mathematically — but was at a loss to "explain how."  "Hypotheses non fingo, he said.
> 
> Similar "explanatory" problems existed for Coulumb's law and with the Biot-Savart law with regard electricity and magnetic fields.
> 
> Faraday "visualized" but could not mathematize (he could do algebra but not much else) fields and movement of copper wire through those fields to 'explain' Coulumb et. al. But, it was Maxwell that did the math for Faraday's conceptualization / explanation.
> 
> The tension between what the math can describe and what the math 'means' is not new.
> 
> What is new; the math has become so esoteric, so incestuous, that it "means" nothing. It is not even a description of 'the world' merely a description of itself.
> 
> "Physics Envy" is an epithet that I directed to Anthropology back when I was a grad student. I also have been claiming that computer science/software engineering has been fatally blinded by the same green monster. Actually, I have said that the problem generalized to "formalism," not just physics but physics is always held up as the exemplar of formalism.
> 
> I have seen articles about "Physics is Dead" for at least a decade. What they mean is that Physics is no longer 'science' because none of its leading-edge hypothesis are subject to falsification and hence cannot advance to the status of theory. If this is the case, maybe other, younger, sciences should rethink their envy and blind pursuit of abstract formalism.


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☣ uǝlƃ