[FRIAM] where are the "patriot hackers"?

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Very cool story! It highlights nicely the point you made in the previous post about the reliance on ambiguity in the conception of science, whether accidental but in good faith or purposeful to serve an agenda.

My ongoing dispute with Nick and EricC that makes me *seem* as if I support subjective/reflective truths is about the inadequacy of *models* of human reasoning. E.g. one of the most difficult exemplars of the inadequacy, difficult for me to parse, is the Curry paradox: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/curry-paradox/

Regardless, the breadth of science and scientists is far, far larger than the way they're (unintentionally) misrepresented in Nick's, Dave's, and Merle's (and many other) narratives, for differing reasons. The flaw they all share is that they limit science to some conception of Scientific Method. There is no such thing. Don't get me wrong. We're not *all* scientists, as elementary school science teachers like to tell us. There are patterns of behavior by which we can distinguish a scientist from a non-scientist (and really good scientists from mediocre scientists). And those behaviors are trainable. But science is cultural, with all the openness of any other cultural thing like poetry or urban planning.

Where I agree with Merle's, Dave's, and Nick's narratives is that *some* patterns of behavior among some scientists can be short-sighted. And such patterns can, like in any cultural thing, accumulate to an unhealthy extent, e.g. pop music clap tracks. [ptouie] The solution isn't to malign "science". It's to take the time to tease it apart and target the unhealthy patterns. Like with Falun Gong, however, if the lion's share of us are unwilling/unable to do/tolerate such fine-grained teasing apart, then I'll choose the Scientism side [⛧] ... for the same reason I largely vote for Democrats these days, because even though the Democrats are just as batsh¡t as the Republicans, they engage in fewer unhealthy patterns.


[⛧] Medlife Crisis does a nice dance around the issue: https://youtu.be/CVPy25wQ07k I think I might have already posted this. But I'm too lazy to search Nabble.

On 12/30/20 4:15 AM, David Eric Smith wrote:
> There is another beautiful example of Marcus’s point below that has come up over the past 8 or 9 years, for which George Musser gave a very good write-up of the current state of play:
> https://www.quantamagazine.org/the-black-hole-information-paradox-comes-to-an-end-20201029/ <https://www.quantamagazine.org/the-black-hole-information-paradox-comes-to-an-end-20201029/>
> Not in regard to empirical evidence in this case, but in regard to mathematical arguments, entirely within the domain of the rules for theorizing.
> 
> Several years ago I happened to pass through IAS at Princeton — notably _not_ visiting the physicists there, who would not let me attempt to tie their shoes, and rightly so — and a young woman physicist who happened to be lodged in the same guest-house as me told me at breakfast that there was a great buzz from a paper that it turns out was written by my former advisor (Polchinski) and a fellow postdoc and friend whom I had met in his very early childhood (Marolf) in our same home-town.
> https://arxiv.org/abs/1207.3123 <https://arxiv.org/abs/1207.3123>
> I think we were talking about Don as a mutual acquaintance, and I remember the way she said it: “Did you hear?  They just did something big.”  She was still quite junior, and very straightforward about the effort it would take her to understand, but determined and eager in that good-faith unadorned way physics grad students can have.
> Of course I knew nothing of any of this, and just as I had never been smart enough to understand either Joe or Don, cannot claim better than a tourist’s level of effort to understand this thread of work, though the broad ideas are ones I think I could characterize without distorting them.
> 
> Anyway, the original papers were written from a frame “We present this calculation.  We are pretty sure it must be wrong, but we can’t find anything wrong with it, because it seems to be put together the way such calculations need to be.  Can someone else see what is wrong with it?”  The major red flag, like an exposed hydrophobic residue in a misfolded protein, was that high-energy phenomena were inescapable in observables where everything we think we understand about spacetime says there should only be low-energy phenomena.  So the chaperone wants to grab and dispose of that protein, whether or not it understands how it should have folded instead of the way it is.  There are many many dimensions in what we think constitutes an understanding of spacetime that it would do less violence to change, than would violating this phenomenology in which we think we know where there should be only low-energy phenomena and where there can be high-energy phenomena.
> 
> The Musser article is about how Marolf and Almheiri (two of the original authors still living; Polchinski died not long after this paper came out) and the other authors have a claim for what had been left out.  The current form of the calculation, as Musser describes it, is really shoestrings-and-glue, but the elements in it all feel right, in the sense that all the constructs are low-energy where they should be low-energy, there is a demand for quantum superposition of two things that classically make no sense superposed, just where there should be for a quantum black hole problem, and so forth.  It could be a few more years (or maybe many years) before the community can put together a version of this calculation that is considered sound and consistent across the board, but one can expect that the major elements in the current version will still be there in roughly the same places.
> 
> It’s really interesting how there can be sense in the ways these judgments are made, in a field where such a large part of what one is using is up in the air.
> 
> Eric
> 
> 
> 
> 
>> On Dec 30, 2020, at 1:21 AM, Marcus Daniels <marcus at snoutfarm.com <mailto:marcus at snoutfarm.com>> wrote:
>>
>> I have heard scientists say, when confronted with certain experimental evidence, that don’t believe the evidence.   It’s not just because they are arrogant, it is because they have experience with other evidence and highly-scrutinized models derived from that evidence – that there has to be another explanation.    (One recent example that comes to mind is the Q-thruster / EmDrive.)  It seems to me it ought to be possible to decouple clear thinking from how organizations work, and from personality.
>>  
>> *From:* Friam <friam-bounces at redfish.com <mailto:friam-bounces at redfish.com>> *On Behalf Of *Merle Lefkoff
>> *Sent:* Tuesday, December 29, 2020 8:24 PM
>> *To:* The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <friam at redfish.com <mailto:friam at redfish.com>>
>> *Subject:* Re: [FRIAM] where are the "patriot hackers"?
>>  
>> Wow, Karl is my guy, but I didn't know about this.  Thank you Stephen.  
>>  
>> To get to Nick's problem, we are at point in the history of our species on this planet where I think we must pay attention to the adjacent possible "truth" of an ecozoic vision (Thomas Berry) that involves an inter-species future.  Someone recently said  "science is a glass half filled" and that's because as practiced by most, science has become a system of thought closed to any but its own "truth."  Doesn't the best science embrace methods that consider all assumptions and facts to be open to question?  The division between what is "real" from what is "belief"  cancels out the possibility of what emerges that is beyond the grasp of modern science.
>>  
>> Einstein famously said "Imagination is more important than knowledge."  The imaginary story is missing in science, colonized by a mind-set and methodology that demands proof of "existence."  Physicist David Bohm, the godfather of the generative dialogue we teach and practice, understood this when he wrote that discussion (and by extension experimentation--not lived experience) uses only rational intelligence, while a full investigation of wicked problems demands additional perspectives perceived through our senses, emotions, self-awareness, and intuition.  There is more than one Truth to be discovered, dear Nick, and that ain't bat-shit.

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