What Does it Mean to Believe in Science?

 

 

What does it mean to believe in science? Why do I believe in science?

 

Many promulgate science’s virtues, but such questions too often go unasked. Many conflate believing in science with believing what it says—or claiming to. Some confuse it with the joy of learning science. Others mistake it for the study of the physical World. To a Complex systems theorist, video games are no less part of Nature than the rainforest. Even most genuine believers have yet to solidify their adherence by answering these questions.

 

This post is the author’s solidification as well as an attempt to dispel common misconceptions about the nature of science.

 

Another misimpression is that belief in science is opposition to baseless opinions. You can’t truly say you believe in something if you don’t appreciate it, and you can’t truly appreciate it if you don’t at least on some level understand it, including its flaws. Belief in science manifests when one acquires UNIVERSAL SKEPTICISM and comes to appreciate how easy it is to be wrong without mathematical and/or empirical verification. In other words, it’s not only well-premised inferences are valid, so much as: If you, or I, don’t subject a hypothesis to rigorous testing, you invite wrongness—and my skepticism. Universal skepticism is skepticism that applies to all mortals including oneself. This article is, thus, a treatise on universal skepticism and science.

  

 

People associate science with truth and rationality. The pinnacle of irrationality is the idea that a mortal ever could be fully rational. Humans aren’t designed for truth and rationality, but simulations known as beliefs and rationalization. However much people enjoy learning, beliefs will always be more of a cognitive, social, and emotional phenomenon than an intellectual one. History makes clear that interest elicits opinions more than lack of information discourages them. If emotional factors are less influential in science, it’s only because its claims are more testable and less directly tied to the practitioners’ psychologies--not because their psychologies are rational. Being rationalizing beings, humans don’t just rationalize specific beliefs and decisions, but they and their community’s rationality generally. Championing science reinforces pseudo-rationality every bit as much as science feeds humanity’s ever-growing addiction to technology.     

 

The closest a sentient can be to rational is being rational in their dealings with their non-rationality. Even in the absence of the cognitive and emotional biases inevitable in a product of evolution, ER has shown that an engineered self-aware thinking apparatus still can’t escape logical, epistemic, and self-referential bias—and, therefore, self-delusion. The most self-understood are those that best understand their delusional nature and re-engineer their thinking for universal skepticism.

 

What about intelligence? Can’t this make a person more rational? Yes, but intelligence always goes into rationalization first, and how much rationality comes out depends more on other factors. The human thinking apparatus has powerful incentives for beliefs other than correctness and lacks a true answer verification system. It has a convincing system, the apparatus convincing itself the answers are correct. Intelligence can be directly and indirectly used to enhance rationality, but it more frequently rationalizes what one wants to believe.

 

So how does truth prevail despite non-rationality? It doesn’t—it more happens because of it.     

 

 

Irrationality and Science

 

Bishko once said, “It isn’t that people want to be successful and happy so much as happier and more successful than other people.” This is known as competitiveness. A field requires competition and cooperation in dynamic proportion. Learning is about more than answers, but also the questions, explanations, and data--including the counter questions, explanations, and data. Cooperation provides the first half, competition the second. As I’ve said, it’s a scientific and historical fact that ninety-nine percent of the true history of science is the story of geniuses who spent their entire lives developing scientific theories that ultimately proved to be ninety-nine percent wrong. And their theories weren’t merely wrong in hindsight or light of future information; even at the time, they were questionable. But because people have motives for beliefs other than truth, the wrong theories got the right adherents, and they provided better theories with the necessary catalysts.

 

Many think scholars like learning new things and hearing new ideas. This is true—provided it doesn’t challenge what they already believe. Anyone who’s studied cognitive psychology knows humans are almost infinitely better designed to confirm their beliefs than question them. Self-inconsistences threaten cognitive, emotional, and intellectual function, and the human thinking apparatus resists threats. This inertia is nonlinearly magnified when the individual is placed in like-minded groups and institutions, making scientific paradigm shifts as sociopolitical as scientific (see Structures of Scientific Revolutions by Thomas Kuhn). But institutional inertia forces upstarts to rigorously prove their theories. Desperately clinging to life, the dying school digs its own grave by repeatedly failing to achieve the requisite results. But by researching themselves out of existence, they help their successor rise in their place.

 

This process, however far from perfect, enhances science’s self-correction, or its ability to correct itself over time. For a robust and adaptable whole, you need fragile and expendable parts. Individuals unwittingly sacrifice themselves for the greater good. As said in other articles, science rose to glory much more on the backs of its members’ failures than by standing on the shoulders of giants. Unfortunately, science education, like nearly everything else, is tremendously survivors-biased: Winners and their theories are immortalized, and losers are lost to history (including the winner’s wrong ideas).

 

A similar process also occurs on the individual level. Only in hindsight do analyses follow logical progressions. In real time, answers are often established before questions and objectives. As thinking intensifies, it get’s more, not less, circular. Logic is mostly a post hoc phenomenon. In both humans and learning machines, thinking is iterative: A possible answer is invoked by the subconscious or equivalent; then logical judgment is passed. If it fails muster, it’s tossed out, and other ideas are considered. If it passes, it’s subjected to further analysis (or reinforcement). This gives thought processes context and allows many ideas to be considered; without it, thinking is deprived of force and direction. This doesn’t automatically compel the thinker to “beg the question” and make the hypothesis a premise of the subsequent thought sequence, but thinking would be unduly hindered if confined to straighter lines. More logically bound thinking would have benefits, especially in life where the priority is avoiding mistakes, but it would inhibit the evolutionary mechanisms of the scientific process, where the focus is correctness and/or its verification. 

 

Interestingly, many attribute the East’s lack of scientific progress in recent centuries to more rational responses to different theories. Collectivist societies are known for being better at understanding different views. This speaks well of the individual, but it blunts competition. It turns out it might be better for single-minded groups go to battle with the hope that the best will eventually prevail.      

 

Over decades, the self-corrective process in the classical sciences has been very successful. Over shorter periods, however, institutional inertia can be destructive, and no length of time can make the corrective arm infallible. Contemporary physics deals with phenomena that are either ridiculously small, or ridiculously large and even further away. Both require incredibly advanced mathematics to understand, and the rise of modern physics granted the field tremendous mathematical and conceptual licenses. In addition to affecting how well phenomena can be studied, these factors limit a field’s accessibility, giving rise to orthodoxies that further restrain competition and outside feedback.

 

Secondly, there’s a difference between a paradigm shift and a paradigm leap. Better theories, even if markedly different, are still often constrained by their predecessors, and a theory is more likely to be recognized if the predecessor provides continuity. Plasma Cosmology, an alternative theory of the cosmos that I think warrants consideration, has almost no conceptual connection to Big Bang Cosmology, which deals in gravity. Despite constituting over 99.9 percent of the Universe’s conventional matter, only a minority of physicists’ study plasma physics, and its mathematics doesn’t appeal to the distinct palates of mathematicians.

 

Like competition and cooperation, rationality and irrationality must exist in dynamic proportion for maximal progress. Obviously, you couldn’t expect much progress if everyone were bonkers, but too much rationality inhibits thinking and creativity, for both the individual and group. Likewise, personal similarities and differences must be in dynamic proportion. Too much similarity, not enough competition; too little, not enough cooperation. Humans are ideal in this way: They all have the same foundational attributes, but they greatly vary in how they manifest--understanding people means understanding both. Humans have both strengths and weaknesses, and you can’t have universal skepticism without understanding both.   

 

Unwrongness and Universal Skepticism

 

The classical sciences, math, and engineering are close to exact sciences, very trainable, and less burdened by the impurities of other fields. Less testability as well as legal, marketing, monetary, bureaucratic, and university constraints impair the correction of personal training, physical therapy, economics, and the mental health field. Where effective treatment depends so heavily on judgment, the latter’s methodologies and pedagogy should focus on wisdom first and knowledge second. But university constraints and the greater abundance, transferability, and marketability of knowledge ensure the opposite. Society’s general pool of beliefs has laughable self-correction and far less consistency than believed.  

 

Humans have always done better in matters of competence than judgment, and self-correction is highest in the latter, lowest in former. Thus, self-correction can be used as crude measure for the reliability of a field’s expertise.           

 

Universal skepticism is made much easier when one recognizes how much more there is to gain by suspending judgment, how much less there is to lose, and how much more there is to be LOST if you don’t.

 

Correct beliefs are far less necessary than people’s cognitive, social, and emotional programming suggests. This includes appreciating that you can take advice or make a decision without adopting the opinion. Jumping to conclusions is a cognitive reflex, not merely an epistemic mistake. Far from engineered for the philosophy of science, human cognition suppresses casual criteria to maintain coherent perceptions, giving correctness an artificial simplicity. Society exacerbates these misconceptions by frequently treating opinions as more important than knowledge. Reinforcing beliefs and perceptions enhances the clarity of thinking, but the thinking apparatus isn’t infallible. This means belief reinforcement isn’t limited to correct beliefs, nor to beliefs themselves: Wrong emotions, language, goals, plans, decisions, and behavior are reinforced by beliefs that, in turn, get reinforced. This makes wrongness a nonlinear positive feedback loop.

 

ER asserts that universal skepticism must be accompanied by Unwrongness.  It teaches that quality life-related thinking comes down to understanding three things that humans are poorly cognitively socially and emotionally programmed to appreciate: Ascertaining correct answers is less necessary than people instinctively think; wrongness is more dangerous; and when you do need or want to be correct, analyses that suspend judgment result in better understandings than hasty ones even if the overall conclusions are the same. If you suspend judgment, you can gather more supporting facts and have a better chance of knowing how they fit together because prolonged analyses are purer and less circular than hasty ones.

 

Unwrongness and universal skepticism, in turn, must be supported by a strong learning ethic. Learning has nothing intrinsically to do with people. People are simply a means to an end. God and Nature don’t share their monopoly on truth with mortals. Even if they could, truth itself is mostly a means to an end. True learning lies in understanding, proficiency, and wisdom. These things don’t come from credentials, conformity, elitism, idolatry, faith, arrogance, or blind contrarianism. They come from universal skepticism. Scientism is the idolatry of scientists, which is often mistaken for belief in science. Idolatry and elitism are enemies of learning, which conflate people with learning. Blind worship leads to blind faith; blind faith means belief despite incomplete understanding. Understanding is often sacrificed for the cheap gratification of blind faith. Open-mindedness is mutual skepticism: skepticism of oneself and others for all the flaws you share.

 

But appreciation for the dangers of wrongness requires a path, not just reading. Conscious beliefs insufficiently supported by emotions and unconscious beliefs have little effect on people’s perspectives and decisions, and nothing elicits emotion more than personal failure and wrongness. Moreover, you can’t understand something if you don’t understand its point of view, and you, therefore, can’t truly understand the flaws of your intuition unless you experience misusing it—and the consequences. While books can only convey so much wisdom, much less an article, I can provide a few page outline of my own history with wrongness.

 

A Personal History of Wrongness as a Path to Universal Skepticism

 

A major part of wisdom is understanding the nature of knowledge. Just as understanding rationality requires understanding irrationality, you can’t understand knowledge without studying ignorance. In fact, when it comes to wisdom and judgment, where the focus is avoiding mistakes, knowledge of ignorance and irrationality are more important. Self-understanding comes more from understanding one’s delusional nature than exploiting readily available self-awareness. My universal skepticism is synonymous with my belief in the sentient duality: Self-awareness and delusion are a consubstantial duality, two of the same essence. In addition to having the right innate predilections, there were three distinct advantages that led to my discovery. 

 

The first was growing up in an extremely educated community where pseudo-rationality, pseudo-open-mindedness, and intellectual idolatry were especially high. The greatest symptom of pseudo-rationality is the delusion that beliefs are primarily an intellectual phenomenon rather than a cognitive, social, and emotional one--and people have this assbackwards for that very reason. Intellect can be used to understand the duality, and, thus, those who understand it best tend to be among the most learned. More often, however, the bias and hubris that come from greater intelligence outstrips the advantages of learning (as pertains to wisdom). Many liberals confuse tolerance and intellectual apathy with open-mindedness, just as the pseudo-skeptics confuse skepticism with arrogance.

 

But to discover the duality, I had to also appreciate my own capacity for delusion and incorrectness.

 

My second advantage (and disadvantage) was the combination of manic-depression, four years of using prescription amphetamines as intellectual performance enhancing drugs, genuine ambition, and little talent—but just enough to convince myself I was. If that combination doesn’t make you delusional, nothing will. Unwilling to let go of the possibility of intellectual and athletic achievement, delusions led to more delusions. When the illness became mostly dormant, I was amazed by how many vestigial delusions and other symptoms persisted for years afterwards.

 

The third was not beginning learning until 23. Every time you learn one thing is right, you learn no less than one thing is wrong; that thing is likely something you could have got wrong yourself. Having accrued so many misconceptions then having them suddenly exposed opened my eyes to how easily facts can prompt false assumptions.

 

Historical fallacies were particularly influential:

There’s a great temptation to explain the history of scientific discovery, for example, by connecting important findings leading to the ultimate discovery. But this isn’t usually how it works. Often, scholars didn’t know of the others, may have had very different interpretations, or prior findings simply weren’t that influential. I came to call this the chronological fallacy.

History loves dubbing leading discoverers “fathers”: Newton is the father of modern physics or Newtonian mechanics, for example; Darwin and Mendal are fathers of the “modern synthesis.” This tends to cause popular history to falsely ascribe many discoveries to fathers—including things they have even got blatantly wrong. Newton had serious misconceptions about energy, and though Mendal respected Darwin, he disagreed with him about many things. This is the father fallacy. False interpolations are common.

Historical trends are almost never as continuous as thought; Nature, after all, tends to be nonlinear. At point A something like racial discrimination, for example, might be much greater than point C, but the record shows that point B could easily have been worse than A, contrary to what would be assumed. I encountered numerous examples of survivorship bias, which had previously masked how dominated the history of science is by wrongness.          

 

My experience with physics reinforced my appreciation for my susceptibility to false assumptions and how dangerous the acquisition of knowledge without correction can be. I can’t even tell you how many times I read a chapter of a physics book and thought I was fully understanding it, then got to the exercises and didn’t even have a clue of where to start.    

   

Writing fiction without feedback for several years before getting critiqued by other writers showed how easy it is to overestimate one’s ability and their understanding of the endeavor itself. I was shocked by how many mistakes I was making and how clueless I was about what fiction was about. It took many months of shell-shocking critiques to break simply-explained habits, and this taught me how much emotional support beliefs sometimes require to adequately affect one’s actions. Even though I ultimately found that fiction wasn’t my thing, going to critique groups was one of the best things I ever did.

 

Judging talent was something I once thought most people were terrible at except, of course, for myself and a few others. I eventually concluded that we were also terrible, and everyone else was even worse. You can have the symptoms of a property like a disease or talent without the property itself. For every one guy that has talent for something above a certain threshold, there could be twenty guys with multiple symptoms. Confusing symptoms with the property itself is a common fallacy I call the fallacy of indications. Weeding out false positives is tricky business. I discovered weakness neglect: Basing assessments too much on strengths, too little on weaknesses. “Competition neglect” is common, underestimating how many things the competition might also do well. The Oakland A’s drafting success based solely on statistics (and ignoring scouts), as chronicled in Moneyball by Micheal Lewis, and the research discussed in Everything is obvious (once you know the answer) by Duncan J Watts were also impactful. A few years ago, I wrote a post about the difficulties of judging talent. By the time I was done, I realized that my true thesis was the unreliability of human judgment generally, with judging talent as a pedagogical example.       

 

The judgment of my own talent by myself and others was especially edifying. I was delusional about my own abilities, and this, in turn, led to more. Some people who thought I was talented insisted on basing their entire evaluations on what they had personally witnessed, as if I should base my entire life on that miniscule fraction of it. Few questions were asked, and they showed little interest in anything I wanted to add. Even if you’ve known someone for thirty years, you’ve probably only seen a tiny fraction of their waking hours—and possibly never observed them doing anything especially relevant to such an evaluation. They thought they were being skeptical by dismissing what they hadn’t witnessed. They didn’t appreciate how much less necessary opinions are on a given issue, nor, more importantly, how easy it is to mistake a piece of knowledge for the whole picture. Knowing the wrong combination of important pieces of information can be very misleading. You can spend ten years brilliantly analyzing something, and if you make an inference without a few easily acquired pieces of information, you’ve jumped to conclusions. Time is an overestimated heuristic for determining the completeness of an analysis.

 

Some suffer from the silly idea that just because you ask a question or allow yourself to receive a piece of information that you either have to form a conclusion, or respond the way the person wants. You don’t; you can simply take the fuckin’ information. The Choice of what to say is information: The very fact someone chose to say what they said has to mean something, even if it’s not what they think.

 

In science, erroneous theories can yield useful questions and data. Many are quick to dismiss alchemy and its contributions, but while its influences were hardly perfect, alchemy still served as the foundation of proto chemistry. In the case of the individual especially, information doesn’t have to be true to be useful. A person’s point of view largely defines who they are, making their accompanying beliefs and attitudes relevant however misguided. Being an intelligent skeptic requires appreciating the importance of information, knowing how to gather and process it, along with the knowledge that you and others are prone to misprocessing it. The latter, in turn, is part of understanding how to gather and process information--so always default to taking it.

 

True skepticism is universal and, therefore, mutual: You shouldn’t just be skeptical of other people because they have flaws and limitations; you should also be skeptical of yourself because you in one way or another have those flaws and limitations—including a limited ability to understand things based on limited information. True open-mindedness and skepticism are one in the same. The pseudo-skeptics are merely arrogant; the pseudo-open-minded people are at best tolerant—worst, intellectually apathetic.      

 

Complexity theory and research in cognitive psychology, however, most directly influenced the scientific basis of ER and the sentient duality. Cognitive psychology and all the many universal human biases it’s identified show how much the need for self-consistent and coherent perceptions affects people’s thinking. A chief consequence is the linear illusion, the illusion that Nature changes linearly rather than nonlinearly, blinding people to the complexities of Nature (see ____).  This Complexity is studied by Complex systems theory (CST), and ER has used it to unify all the systems in Nature directly relevant to life under a single set of laws, including psychologies. Along my path, CST illustrated the vastly underappreciated complexity of causation in Nature and the disparity between prediction and retrodiction (ability to predict the past).

 

The following is the list of the most influential books:

Moneyball by Micheal Lewis: Illustrates cognitive bias and poor judgment

Everything is Obvious (once you know the answer): How Commonsense Fails Us by Duncan J Watts:

Intellectuals by Thomas Sowell: Showed (among other things) how little people understand and appreciate data and statistics—and how much more they appreciate their psychological needs.

Thinking Fast and Thinking Slow by Daniel Kahneman: Detailed experiments and real-life examples of cognitive biases

Noise by Kahneman et all: Showed how easily seemingly benign information can influence people

Works of Nassem Taleb: Taught Complex systems theory and how human cognition is poorly suited to understand it.

Ubiquity by Marc Bucahan: Introduced me to Complexity  

 

 

As shown, learning about the physical World had a proud place in my path toward universal skepticism and appreciation for science but hardly dominated it. This illustrates the universality of scientific reasoning, despite significant differences between science and life. Science education calls for skepticism but fails to adequately show why it’s needed. There are few books and even fewer courses in scientific mistakes. Most of science and its popular history are winners-biased. Learning about correctness and successful theories is not a good way to enlighten people about their susceptibility to error. This is not to say that such learning should be eliminated or that it can’t provide any education in skepticism, but without knowledge of wrongness and human fallibility, you can’t expect to cultivate true skepticism. More is needed.