I've been working on translating and summarizing some of Grothendieck's esoteric writing from his later years. It's...pretty bananas. But some fascinating stuff--clearly brilliant and a little crazy.
This is something I have noticed and that frustrates me a great deal. Science is treated as received wisdom handed down by the authorities.
I have made great efforts to avoid that in my children's education. A hint for people in the UK - look at science GCSEs other than the usual physics, chemistry biology trio. My daughter did astronomy and it was far better as it had a lot of explanation of historical cosmology and what the evidence has been for various theories.
this makes sense as schools mostly exist just to create an educated workforce to can run the machine. Even science is big business these days, just keep cranking out papers of dubious value and reproducibility
I think what the pandemic showed was that you can "follow the science" and do whatever you want, because when scientists disagree you pick the one who says what you want. The same for lots of things - UK drug policy (which involved things like firing a scientific advisor for giving the wrong advice), what to do about global warming, etc.
The whole idea of science as handed down by authority also helps people like creationists and conspiracy theorists because if its just a matter of authority then you can choose a different authority.
This would have been a lot better with a “steelman” version of the “scientism credo” rather than the exaggerated form presented. I found it pretty alienating to try to read this, even though I probably agree with the thesis on the whole.
Yes, the case would be stronger with specific examples. However, I did not find it alienating, as examples of these 6 myths readily come to mind. We see people appeal to expertise all the time, rather than using their expertise to explain. There are lots of examples of people trying to "solve" economics problems rather than, as Thomas Sowell puts it, realizing that there are no solutions but only trade-offs.
As I understood the essay, Grothendieck's argument is precisely that the exaggerated form is what many believe. So I'm not sure a steelman would make sense here, given that his point is to argue against a specific set of widespread beliefs.
The steel-man version of "scientism" wouldn't be scientism, it would just be a straight-forward explanation of the scientific method and empiricism that acknowledges its limits.
A steel man version of scientism by definition has to be scientism, and I imagine that looks like strict determinisn/reductionism. I imagine it would go along the lines of "we acknowledge that our theories invoke notions of probability and since don't have a better solution we should assert them as universal truths."
If you want to argue something is a religion, you need to define “religion”. Often it is defined vaguely enough that anything can be called a religion. But if the word can be applied to everything it is meningless.
> If you want to argue something is a religion, you need to define “religion”.
Wittgenstein famously argued that the word "game" cannot be given an intensional definition – you cannot produce a list of features that all games have and which only games have. For, he argued, "game" is not a category defined in terms of singular essence, rather it is a collection of things which all have a lot in common but there is no one thing which they all have in common. Like members of a family, which all resemble each other, but all in different ways – hence he called this family resemblance (Familienähnlichkeit in German).
Well, I would say the exact same thing is true of "religion" – just like "game", the word can't be defined, because there is no one thing all "religions" have in common.
But, our inability to clearly define "game" doesn't make the concept useless, and isn't an inherent obstacle to using the concept. Well, the same is true of "religion".
If you are going to call something a "religion" which isn't widely considered to be one, you need to identify which particular features you think it shares with those phenomena which are widely considered to be "religions". And I think Grothendieck has done that here.
This is not an essay about whether science "is" a religion, or how "religiony" it is.
He's just arguing that the way science is treated by the general public has many specific negative features, and that many of these are held in common with religion. And he's quite clear about what those aspects here.
There's also an overlooked distinction between a religion versus a religious belief.
For example, "the sun is an egg of the great pillbug that created the universe" is a religious belief, but it would be quite a stretch to call it a religion.
I think the distinction is particularly important because it underlies how a lot of people talk past each other when it comes to atheism, since "zero gods have ever existed" is also a religious belief without being a religion.
That just moves the problem to the definition of “metaphysical”. If a scientific theory is falsifiable, by what definition can it be considered metaphysical?
when a theory makes claims about events that fall outside of the physical system they become metaphysical:
age of the universe,
creator or not,
teleology,
interpretations of probability,
primacy of logic (are we allowing for the law of excluding middle or not)
Science doesn't do these things but scientism does.
Grothendieck starts by asserting that the experimental-deductive method has been spectacularly successful for four hundred years. His article never gets round to revisiting this. He never notices the bi-modal quality of the successes. Some truly spectacular successes, quite a lot of knowledge that hints weakly, and a rather empty middle ground.
Think about gyroscopes. Newton invents classical mechanics, with no specific rules for rotating objects. You get a top mathematician, Euler, to work out the implications for rotating objects. The implications are weird and implausible. But it turns out that they are spot on. People invent gyroscopes and exploit the truly spectacular success of the experimental-deductive method.
Another example could be James Clerk-Maxwell building on the work of Faraday and Ampere to come up with Maxwell's Equations. The equations predict electro-magnetic radiation, so Hertz goes looking and, yes, it is really there!
I want a name for this kind of truly spectacular success. I'll build on the gyroscope example and call it Gyro-gnosis.
But think instead of Hook's law. Spring force is proportional to extension. Kind of. It is useful enough if you don't pull too hard on your spring, but it is not fundamental. Or think of animal testing in medicine. There is some theory. All life on Earth today is based on DNA. We know the branching of the tree of life; mice are mammals, so mouse research should link up with human health, sometimes, a little bit. But theory and experiment combine to give us hints rather than wisdom.
I want a name for this kind of weak knowledge that so often leads to disappointment. Stealing the T from Theory, taking the whole of hint, and the end of wisdom, I'm going to write Thintdom.
By page six, Grothendieck is on to his manifesto "Fighting Scientism". We are certainly in trouble, due to thintdom being granted the prestige of gyrognosis. But if you want to push back, you have to drive a wedge between thintdom and gyrognosis. Since gyrognosis is truly spectacularly successful, fighting against it is just banging your head against a brick wall. One needs to separate out the weaker forms of knowledge so that one can criticize thintdom without its proponent being able to use gyrognosis as a shield. If you let thintdom and gyrognosis be joined together as empiricism, your criticism cannot be made to stick because the parts of empiricism that work well, work far to well to be criticized.
It is now commonplace to notice the depth of the technology stack, from applications, down through compilers, assemblers, the block diagram level of hardware, the register level, the logic gate level, the transistor level, circuits with parasitic inductance and capacitance, doping and migration, statistical effects,... When you build up the way, some of the lower level features are preserved, such as conservation of momentum. And some of the lower level features help with understanding the higher levels. But medicine offers a clear warning that Nature's stack is too deep. Four hundred years of "success" have taught us what that leads to. Sometimes you get gyrognosis. Sometimes you get thintdom.
By the end of his piece Grothendieck is pining his hopes on "inner class contradiction" within the scientific caste. Maybe. I think the most promising starting point is to push back against linguist poverty. We have only one word, empiricism for, err, empiricism, so the four hundred year old empirical lesson that the successes of empiricism are bimodal goes unnoticed.
All life contains DNA only if you consider anything that lacks it to not be alive. There are viruses which only contain RNA for example. DNA-less organisms are an active topic of research.
In my time as a biochem undergrad and grad student, I had to memorize and regurgitate the Krebs cycle no less than four times. None of those romps through it addressed the question of how TF did those scientists figure it out.
There's the science of Karl Popper, where no statement can be considered scientific unless it is possible to devise an experiment to disprove it. And there's the science of education, where we memorize and regurgitate stuff.
Those two are stunningly different from each other. Yet, it's not possible to get to the mysterious work of actually doing Popper-level science without memorizing what went before. The critiques of this paper still ring true half a century on. I wish more students of science from primary school on up would pester their teachers and each other with the question, "how do you know?"
I sort of agree, but compared to just learning the Krebs cycle it takes orders of magnitude more time to understand either (a) the actual historical discovery/justification or (b) a modern streamlined justification that would allow one in principle to reconstruct it. It's already very challenging to teach biology students as much as they need to know without justifications. For them to be able to justify all they know would dramatically reduce how much they could be taught. And indeed, the desire by teachers that their students should know the justifications has often led to the actual history being so grossly compressed and caricaturized that it's downright misleading -- worse than not knowing.
It seems the best we can hope for is to mostly just learn the known facts and, separately, the abstract way in which scientific theories are justified, augmented by a close analysis and understanding of a few case studies. Even that if of course rarely achieved in education.
Incidentally, folks in this thread may be interested in "Proofs and Refutations" by Imre Lakatos, where it's shown how this same issue is (surprisingly) found to exist almost as badly in academic mathematics, despite math being thought of as one of the few places where the experts learn how to the edifice is built from the ground up.
This is a pretty confused piece of writing and totally falls apart on myth 4:
> Only the opinion of the experts in a given
field has any bearing on any question in this field.
This has nothing to do with science and is really a point about the division of labor/economics.
The rejection of experts has been a hallmark of scientific and mathematical thinking since ancient times, most famously in Socrates. But the thread continues throughout all of human history.
I like Grothendieck's work a lot, and I know he had unconventional politics. But this reads like one of the many Marx-influenced attempts from that period to discredit the idea of truth.
I like the word scientism, but what he describes is really academic scholasticism. Maybe we should call it neo-scholasticism. The practioners of this profession is the same old "learned doctors." They make their living by selling (in this field "selling" means "teaching") the knowledge they have hidden in a proprietary language. Academic education is a ponzi scheme. You are forced to pass formal exams in order to gain the right to enter the next level of exams. When there are no more exams to take you are given a piece of paper and thrown out of the system. This is an exaggerated and pessimistic view but it has some truth in it.
this is a modern and popular take because we live in very egalitarian times but inherent to scholasticism is one simple observation, that to work with knowledge you have to have an adequate capacity in the mind of the person handling the knowledge, that is to say, knowledge in some sense is just like anything else. Knowledge needs to be tended to.
We wouldn't call a maintainer of watches, guns, flowers or any other artifact a neo-something-ist when one points out that it requires great skill to handle the respective artifacts in a way that does them justice, but when it comes to knowledge very quickly people are accused of being elitist, gatekeepers or worst of all, academics.
Proprietary language is treated like a conspiracy, not like a natural development in any domain where people invest a lot of time to build specialized knowledge, on the grounds that apparently someone who hasn't invested any time can't understand what's going on. The decline of scholasticism is honestly one of the single worst things in our age and responsible for most modern grifting.
I have been really hoping that these myths would not be as prevalent today as they are.
Personally, I've been greatly influenced by Feynman's great autobiography Surely you must be joking, Mr. Feynman![1].
In it, the Noble-prize winning Scientist conveys a worldview that has none of the scientism derided by Grothendieck in this essay. It is a vaccine against scientism, if you may - and a triumph of curiosity, common and uncommon sense.
Feynman also coined[2] the description of physics (which I use to describe mathematics as well), that annihilates the high-priest narrative of "reason" as the driving force:
Physics is like sex: sure, it may give some practical results, but that's not why we do it
In the end, we do things because they feel good and because they feel right.
Mathematics more so than anything else; we are guided by a sense of beauty and what's interesting. It's an art of story-telling and surprise.
Much of science is motivated by emotion and little else: the curiosity to untangle the patterns of how things work, drive to be the first to solve the mystery, the mission of doing the right thing.
Without those, science doesn't science. Feynman gave one straightforward example: the military wasn't telling some of the lower-ranking researchers of the Manhattan project what they were working on, and why. They were lagging behind. Once they were told, at Feynman's insistence, that they were a part of a project to build a bomb that would end the war, they exceeded all expectations.
Because with that, their work gained a purpose, and gave hope.
In the end, how we feel about things is everything. Scientists are just those people who feel good when they find out how things work, just like engineers are those people who feel good when they make things work (or make things that work).
Science can only prove what can be observed, because the scientific method relies on observation.
There are some things that we can make very accurate guesses on: IE, evolution. No one observed evolution over millennia, yet there is an abundance of observable evidence that makes the theory of evolution generally accepted as fact.
But there are things that we can not observe, and can only make educated guesses at. Today that's multiverse theory. In the past, it was the theory of relativity.
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My point is that to call science a religion (Scienceism) is to fundamentally misunderstand the limits of observation, and the purpose of religion. Science will never tell us why we're here, is there a god, does it love us, is the human soul immortal, do all dogs go to heaven, ect. At best it can only explain religion from anthropomorphic principles.
And that's okay.
The problem comes when scientists think that observed fact (or generally accepted fact) negates religion, or when religious people think science is a replacement for religion.
Can you BELIEVE people once thought the beginning of everything was 6,000 years ago? Thank goodness every sane person is unequivocally certain that it was actually 14 billion years now!
Well, the difference is that "6000" is not science, while "14 billion" is. And no, there is no need to "believe in science" (although many indeed do); the idea that "scientific fact" (let alone a hypothesis) is something that is "unequivocally certain" is certainly wrong.
6,000 was the guess of technology 200 years ago. They had their reasons. Today 14 billion is the technology of our time. We have our reasons. My point is that technological progression seems to support the idea that 14 billion will seem like a silly number 200 years from now, in a similar way.
Funny thing that this a misconception (popularized by Hawking). The Big Bang is not "the beginning of everything" (as Hawking used to say), just an event in the past, that we are fairly certain that it happened, and when it happened.
I see your point. It implies that the way we see and think is bound to this mass of people that we are in the midst of. Like a pebble in the midst of an avalanche.
How could you unbind yourself? For better seeing etc.
I think a healthy dose of skepticism is warranted for claims like the age of the universe. The closer the measurements are to a human magnitude, the more likely they are to hold up to future science.
https://github.com/superb-owl/grothendieck
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