I'm more persuaded by the implications of "the end of theory" than I am by any of the other science-ending scenari you contemplate. For example, as I understand it, AlphaFold has "solved" protein-folding in the sense that it can model how proteins fold; however, it's "only" given us predictive power, rather than understanding. If I understand both it and your argument properly, I suppose that constitutes material control without a theoretical explanation. There presumably are and will be scientists who continue to seek theoretical explanations of protein-folding even after AlphaFold or whatever has given us material control of the process. Sadly (from my perspective), I suspect that most people will become indifferent to theoretical explanations (to a yet-greater extent than they already are) when they are no longer dependent upon those explanations for the material control they covet.
You talked about peer review and its conversation: you are also well versed into philosophy of science: *will you make a video* about the debate between pro-peer review and anti-peer review scientists / philosophers? A video discussing the pros of and cons of peer-review in other words. Surely this must be a topic in philosophy of science.?
Another option is we might end up with more than one theory of comparable explanatory value and no possibility of an experimentum crucis to decide between them. Say that one of these theories is more parsimonious, but the other is more aesthetically pleasing to some. One tribe would accuse the other of being needlessly fanciful, and would in turn be mocked for being dull. I don't know this well enough, but perhaps we might see the beginnings of something like this in theoretical physics, in string theorists vs. the rest. I guess that would be something between optimistic and pessimistic. Science is at its limit, but we have a schism due to reasons outside of scientific method.
The peer review vs no peer review split seem implausible to me. Not because I don't think such a split could accur, but becasue it wouldn't be a true split in science. There's IMO no way they wouldn't read each others journals and attempt to replicate seemingly promising findings in their own journals. Developing ground breaking theories is hard. Copying your neighbourghs homework is much easier.
Yes there is a distinction between the practice of science and its dissemination. In any case the peer review question is a wider issue of academia which has to adapt to the new era of internet self publishing. This video from Kane is a case in point because I doubt it involved a peer review mechanism. We know peer review has its problems as do funding processes, but they do not challenge the concept of repeatable experimentation.
@@martinbennett2228 Did we every actually solve the reproducibility issues though in the institution. Seems to forever be a thorn in its paw that it steps on now and then, as much as it might try pawing at it every now and then.
I guess I'm not as optimistic as you that there will always be interaction between these different traditions. I'm not sure what mechanism there is that could ensure this. I can see that as long as people are producing what we all agree are groundbreaking results, such as surprising experimental outcomes or sophisticated new technologies, we will probably all pay attention to them. But as progress in science slows, different fields might become much more insular. Additionally, there's a more serious problem here, which is what counts as a legitimate replication. Suppose that a consensus emerges in the peer review group that some finding has been successfully replicated, whereas in the non-peer review group the consensus is that the finding is spurious. These sorts of debates are already part of science, and always have been; it's just that the participants in the debates were operating within the same scientific tradition. Think of the Hobbes/Boyle debate about the validity of Boyle's air pump experiments, or the debate in the 60s about Joe Weber's claim to have detected gravitational waves.
@@KaneB As long as new discoveries can be made self interest will insure copying. It seems to me that the scenario you invision is effectively that after we've reached the end of science, science can split, but at that point I don't think we're talking about science anymore, just people bickering about science adjacent philosophical issues that cannot be resolves. The peer review issue it itself wouldn't produce different experimental issues and while temporary disagreements could occur they would unless we'd reached the end of science or come close to it eventually be resolves (or I suppose the side with the better methods would be producing consistently better result). We're not arguing about gravitational waves anymore, the disagreement was temporary.
@@bo6686 >> It seems to me that the scenario you invision is effectively that after we've reached the end of science The scenario I envision is more one of diminishing returns with respect to findings and technologies. If you build an atom bomb, people have to pay attention to it. If you create a new pill that you claim reduces the risk of dementia by 15%, that's of rather less interest. If you propose some underlying causal mechanism to explain how it is that the pill reduces dementia by 15%, then that's of less interest still. I can easily imagine, say, peer reviewers reporting results like this and the non-peer reviewers just not caring. It's much easier to dismiss these kinds of results as due to bias or confounding factors or whatever. Indeed, this is already happening. I made a video on "dietary nihilism" recently, the view that we ought to have very low confidence in much of what is published in nutrition science. There are plenty of scientists who recommend that we just stop paying attention to much of nutrition science. Now, maybe this controversy will go the way of all other scientific controversies so far, and in the long run the community will reach a consensus. But what is it that ensures that? >> We're not arguing about gravitational waves anymore, the disagreement was temporary. Well yeah, the gravitational wave controversy eventually ended, and the scientific community converged on a particular answer. I'm not claiming that a schism has already happened. What the controversy illustrates is that there is plenty of debate about what the discoveries actually are. As I understand it, your proposal is that science will remain unified as long as discoveries are being made because scientists in seemingly alternative traditions will take an interest in, and attempt to build on, the discoveries made in other traditions. This presupposes that there is some mechanism that will ensure agreement that both traditions have made the discoveries they claim.
Wasn't this schisming part of the history of science already? "The New Mathematical Science" of Descartes' time wasn't adopted in unison and was a small enterprise relating to few scholastic centers & geniuses in a sea of aristotelean scholasty. As it grew the scholastics didn't simply adopt in whole sale but became the irrelevant faction slowly over the course of a century or so. There was also increasingly less listening from the both sides - but that didn't matter one of the traditions lost. The story is similar for every paradigm change or creation of a new field (and some theories itself)- it just gets faster. Why would a future schism be the end instead of just another evolution? Also another way science could split up - and I think the most likely - is just politics. Since much of science is dependent on political funding now certain theories and ways of doing science could be declared orthodox by fiat in one area but not in others. The cliche example is Lysenkoism but this stuff happens in military engineering constantly. Easy to imagine it to spill over to theories themselves or the very norms of science.
Another way it could end is if the incentives for doing bad science start to outweigh the incentives for doing good science. I think you see some of this in the controversy over Homo Naledi and interstellar objects.
You should check out the Georgia Criminology fraudulent studies , Stanford president, Some good articles from 2011 exposing ho most psychological studies of the previous 25 yeas had nonreplicable findings. Basically i found you cant trust anything anymore.
If you'd consider it a split if there were a privately funded vs academic science (15:24), then isn't science already split? Because there are different organizations that do secret scientific research. Meaning, not all knowledge is in the academic domain, just like it would be the case in a schism caused by having privately funded vs academic science. Thanks.
One argument I'd had why it's hard to un-unify science is that the computably realizable core of arithmetic already gets you very far. Similarly, no non-math (or non-physics theory) student could really come up with any math that can't be modeled within second-order arithmetic. And physical theories, even if they have different primitives, they are still mathematically modeled and live nicely together.
So? Nobody takes most of the views that I hold seriously. (Not that I'm a fan of Horgan's book. But I'm not impressed by appeals to what people take seriously.)
This might be an end of science as we know it. But it doesn't seem like an end of technological progress. I do recall an older video that you made discussing how science often unfairly gets credit for all the technological progress.
Here's one living example of a living schism: in linguistics, there are two competing traditions. There is generativism and all the rest. The two camps have rival conceptions of what constitutes empirical evidence. Non-generativists accept that actual things people say and write are the basic empirical evidence linguistics has to work with. Generativists insist this evidence is irrelevant (frankly, I never managed to figure out what _is_ acceptable empirical evidence to them, but then I'm not a generativist). The two camps are not united by a joint notion of science, and there is no experiment that can conceivably settle the debate.
I wonder if you'd find what's happened to economics a possible paralell to what could happen to actual science - although, the qualities you mention of hard sciences are absent in economics - it's far more tribal and also as a social science, methods arent comparable so the test of truth is very different. But, essentially economics has become very fragmented between various schools of thought - largely broken down into orthodoxy (neoclassical and austrian) and heterodoxy - of which there are many schools, which do mix and match a lot. Until the 1970's there was discussion in shared journals, viscous debates more accurately also, but the orthodoxy began weening the heterodox economists out of their journals so they had to make their own, and now the orthodoxy largely just ignores the heterodoxy (despite, or maybe because of having lost every significant battle in my opinion). Economics hasnt ended, but it's turned into something which has little to no connection to the real world and is largely just an ideological tool rather than informative study of the possibilities of how we could organise economic life, or even how it is currently organised. It was never, and could never be a natural science of course; and most heterodox economists don't try to deny it, but the orthodoxy are hellbent to be seen as such and cling to some weird, outdated view of what they think science is or scientists do. I can't think of good sources off the top of my head, its quite late, but happy to if youd be interested. What you say about AI around 17:30 is what some parts of the economics profession believe they do already; they think they're just driven by econometrics and data, they see the big issues with the neoclassical approach and dont seem too keen on it - at least one of my old professors and a classmate were of this mind. I'm not very mathematically minded so knew it wasn't for me; but I wonder what you'd think of a purely "data driven/empirical" approach to social science would be - to me it just screams of confirmation bias and selection bias (i hope that's the right word - investigating topics with a bias essentially).
Is it actually possible to reach the end of science? Round about 1900 physicist thought there is nothing more to discover. Then came the relativity theory, big bang theory and quantum mechanics.
Yes but if I recall correctly, even then there was a number of obvious open questions / inconsistencies in the accepted theories, which served as starting points for the 20th century developments. The same thing could be true today, where the unanswered questions in cosmology and particle physics may give rise to novel theoretical advances - Science will only end once the best physical theory is both complete and consistent.
Apparently the book ("The end of science" its called I think, also quoted at the start here) calls into question whether this idea was actually widespread around 1900.
Math and physics used to disparage biology for being a form of "stamp collecting" but the amount of data and research being done today they're all doing stamp collecting but with empirical data lol
It seems as though you think that reality is not consistent. Science is the study of how reality works. Sometimes an experiment expected to determine something gives unexpected results and raises more questions than expected. The Michaelson-Morley experiment is famous for that. The peculiar issue today is that well known science becomes engineering and all competent geeks are expected to understand it. Like the Empire State Building has been around a long time and everyone should understand that the amount of steel had to increase down the structure. The Eiffel Tower is a visible demonstration of this. But it has been Two Decades since the destruction of the Twin Towers and "experts" do not talk about having accurate data on the distribution of steel down the towers. Middle school students should be able to understand this concept. Since 9/11 physics has been history and the longer this drags on the more history it becomes.
I think there is something that causes convergence in science as it improves. It's the classic epistemic / ontological question. The goal of science is to improve our explanations of the way things are. If there is only one way things actually are, improving the explanation should create a convergence.
The apparent lack of splits now is an artifact. Science seems unified today because it is so authoritarian and rigid that it has been able to wipe alternatives off the map. There are huge areas of investigation that attract no attention at all, because anyone who involves themselves in those areas is ridiculed and laughed off the stage. There have been many great scientists in history who have been simply written out of the history books and what they have discovered has similarly been buried under the shifting sands of time. You won't come across these scientists or their discoveries unless you do some really serious 'digging'.
With the AI data schism wouldn’t that just be science as we know it being cut in half into 2 traditions that we used to do in the same time. That’s a different kind of schism then a new kind fundamental theory of science taking hold or whatever else so in that case wouldn’t it be obvious the best thing to do when it comes to gaining knowledge would be to unify? With the spilt just being a practical schism. Also with the data schism you assume that focusing on theory would be leas practical but wouldn’t knowing the fundamental theory behind things make it more easy to practically manipulate our environment Also I really do hate peer review. I’m just silly layman but it feels like a surprisingly lousy goosey unorganized process compared to the rest of the research process. It also let a lot of bad research go through in the past. And the review process seems to put to much trust in the researchers by (to my knowledge) not making them send actual proof of their research alongside the paper. I do understand that would be pretty hard though with the raw data being to much at times but still
It could be argued we already have different the methodology to approach science, case study vs reductive statistical analysis for example. For sure, assuming the fractural nature of the process of science will led to a place where all discoveries have been made, up to the point where the perceived costs outweighs the investment, is what most people would have to conclude based on their support of science, or it could be argued scientism. Another view could be that instead of the science becoming to costly in a physical sense is that as the factual expansion continues, science effectively dilutes itself to the point where the branch, or discipline, cannot see how to continue, and the ability of interdisciplinary science becomes too disparate to function in a human based bureaucracy. It is at this point were AI might be a solution, albeit likely only a temporary one, but this may be inside the scope of science. There is the question if science can lead to a unifying theory, where biology and physic for example can be linked, or if they will forever remain on different spheres or levels. They seemingly remain transcendent in a sense from one another i.e. we learn little about mating habits of mice from studying physics instead of say ecology. Perhaps, instead, the more the type of science overlaps with ideology, areas that don't lend themselves well to reductivity such as complex structures like sociology, economics and psychology, are the places that will cause science, seen as a unified as an institution, to schism. We may find the held position that science is able to progress, toward an almost end of history situation by those at the Chernyshevsky extreme of scientism, will led to a disillusionment within the institution of science. We have seen the sciences reinvent themselves a number of times after getting caught up in crisis', like from replication issues, and these issues ended up impacting the institution as a whole, for example even physics had issues following the replication crisis. After a continued history of reinvention especially, as mentioned, in the social sciences it may be concluded that the we bring more into science ideologically than is claimed and that impartiality can only serve us up to a point and that schools of thought will go there own way as they become dependant on bringing increasing assumptions into the discipline to gain new perceived ground. With this the practises and methodology as well as the institutional structure may diverge. Or maybe one school in disciplines will always remain dominant, but with a longer history of the rise and fall of them we might see cynicism cause science to falter as a whole and this may be the end of the discipline. One final question is whether we truly have made all the discovers possible by "gentleman amateurs working independently funded by private patrons". Or if the institution of science acts as a limit to these endeavours. We have seemingly moved away from universities allowed funding for discoveries to be made by students, students without significant debt. Now we have institutions with hierarchical bureaucracies where the funding goes to those already established demonstrating with applications what discovers will be made beforehand by a team, without the free agency of true experimentation. These teams have the youngest doing the grunt work, at the age when the mind may be at its most capable for novel thinking. This institution can be looked at as an entity preventing progress in this sense and may indicate how it could led itself to a bureaucratic stagnation and then complete failure.
I forget who named it but I remember hearing of the concept of "the boundaries of the knowable". Essentially there are certain things and facts about the universe we will never be able to know, so in that sense science may run out of usefulness?
Maybe we’ll all just get bored of science. Maybe we’ll develop overly elaborate unified theories, which we can never test or actually compute any consequences. Maybe ai will develop such complicated theories, that we can never understand them (just like in chess). Maybe a God will return and simply tell us everything. Maybe we will discover that all logic and reasoning is just incorrect. Maybe we’ll work out every consequence that a brain can actually know, leaving nothing left for us to think about. Maybe we’ll developed a video game so engaging, that nobody will do anything else. Maybe an engineered virus will kill all scientists. Maybe scientists will invent a universe where they are respected, and then they might just abandon this one. But whatever else may happen, climate change will definitely not end science… so chill out.
What a curious attitude scientists have--: "We still don't know that;†b but it is knowable & it is only a question of time till we know it"! As if that went without saying. Wittgenstein (culture and Value).
Here's another story. As scientific theories get more complex, there is more existing science to learn before one reaches the edge of knowledge and begins to produce useful new knowledge. For most sciences it is nearly 30 years, now, but but back in the days of Newton and Leibniz it was 14 or 15 years. What happens if this time gets to be comparable to our life span?
Another option is that people only rely on experts when they have to, and in general science has no real bearing on what people actually believe. You made a good point on the use of big data and the lack of a theoretical direction in engineering. Also, political, economic, and other factors outside of science might corrupt the scientific/academic community to such a degree that what is published is hardly worth considering. I personally believe that this is where we already are.
Particular schisms in fields can coexist but the direction science takes is strongly determined by the material implications. At any given moment there are a lot competing scientific theories in any field, science in a sense transcends that. If two competing theories both have good implications then you just get more fields not a schism in science as a whole. There is no science as a whole in the strict sense of a religion.
If this were true how is it that so many schools of thought have rose and fell while supressing other schools. Take any social science and see to what level the material implications reflect the history of the ideologies.
@@radroatch That's true, wasn't thinking of the social sciences. What I had in mind was something like the schism in 20th century mathematics, point being that you simply can't turn a blind eye to the revelations of a field, no matter if you agree or not.
@@grivza I guess, they is the question if your view is there is a distinction of hard vs soft science. I think it is hard to see how they actually maintain that distinction, at the very least, on a continuum, but maybe that distinction breaks down in other ways beyond just that as well.
2:07
It's happening, folks. Kane is finally showing hints of some realism.
I'm more persuaded by the implications of "the end of theory" than I am by any of the other science-ending scenari you contemplate. For example, as I understand it, AlphaFold has "solved" protein-folding in the sense that it can model how proteins fold; however, it's "only" given us predictive power, rather than understanding. If I understand both it and your argument properly, I suppose that constitutes material control without a theoretical explanation. There presumably are and will be scientists who continue to seek theoretical explanations of protein-folding even after AlphaFold or whatever has given us material control of the process. Sadly (from my perspective), I suspect that most people will become indifferent to theoretical explanations (to a yet-greater extent than they already are) when they are no longer dependent upon those explanations for the material control they covet.
This takes us back to Edmund Husserl's classic The Crisis of European Sciences.
Maybe science wouldn't end if you would turn on the heat so you don't have to wear a fuzzy hat indoors
Bloke does look cold.
heating is a lot for a philosophy major /j
But maybe his money would. ASSumptions, ASSumptions.
paying for heating w/ fossil fuels
or
retaining body heat with clothes.
issa no-brainer until it's not crazy cold
I turn the heat on and I like wearing hats anyway. They’re comfy
You talked about peer review and its conversation: you are also well versed into philosophy of science: *will you make a video* about the debate between pro-peer review and anti-peer review scientists / philosophers? A video discussing the pros of and cons of peer-review in other words. Surely this must be a topic in philosophy of science.?
Another option is we might end up with more than one theory of comparable explanatory value and no possibility of an experimentum crucis to decide between them. Say that one of these theories is more parsimonious, but the other is more aesthetically pleasing to some. One tribe would accuse the other of being needlessly fanciful, and would in turn be mocked for being dull.
I don't know this well enough, but perhaps we might see the beginnings of something like this in theoretical physics, in string theorists vs. the rest. I guess that would be something between optimistic and pessimistic. Science is at its limit, but we have a schism due to reasons outside of scientific method.
Probably the one preferred will be the one justifying movement of wealth from lower to upper castes.
The peer review vs no peer review split seem implausible to me. Not because I don't think such a split could accur, but becasue it wouldn't be a true split in science. There's IMO no way they wouldn't read each others journals and attempt to replicate seemingly promising findings in their own journals. Developing ground breaking theories is hard. Copying your neighbourghs homework is much easier.
Yes there is a distinction between the practice of science and its dissemination. In any case the peer review question is a wider issue of academia which has to adapt to the new era of internet self publishing. This video from Kane is a case in point because I doubt it involved a peer review mechanism. We know peer review has its problems as do funding processes, but they do not challenge the concept of repeatable experimentation.
@@martinbennett2228 Did we every actually solve the reproducibility issues though in the institution. Seems to forever be a thorn in its paw that it steps on now and then, as much as it might try pawing at it every now and then.
I guess I'm not as optimistic as you that there will always be interaction between these different traditions. I'm not sure what mechanism there is that could ensure this. I can see that as long as people are producing what we all agree are groundbreaking results, such as surprising experimental outcomes or sophisticated new technologies, we will probably all pay attention to them. But as progress in science slows, different fields might become much more insular. Additionally, there's a more serious problem here, which is what counts as a legitimate replication. Suppose that a consensus emerges in the peer review group that some finding has been successfully replicated, whereas in the non-peer review group the consensus is that the finding is spurious. These sorts of debates are already part of science, and always have been; it's just that the participants in the debates were operating within the same scientific tradition. Think of the Hobbes/Boyle debate about the validity of Boyle's air pump experiments, or the debate in the 60s about Joe Weber's claim to have detected gravitational waves.
@@KaneB As long as new discoveries can be made self interest will insure copying. It seems to me that the scenario you invision is effectively that after we've reached the end of science, science can split, but at that point I don't think we're talking about science anymore, just people bickering about science adjacent philosophical issues that cannot be resolves.
The peer review issue it itself wouldn't produce different experimental issues and while temporary disagreements could occur they would unless we'd reached the end of science or come close to it eventually be resolves (or I suppose the side with the better methods would be producing consistently better result). We're not arguing about gravitational waves anymore, the disagreement was temporary.
@@bo6686 >> It seems to me that the scenario you invision is effectively that after we've reached the end of science
The scenario I envision is more one of diminishing returns with respect to findings and technologies. If you build an atom bomb, people have to pay attention to it. If you create a new pill that you claim reduces the risk of dementia by 15%, that's of rather less interest. If you propose some underlying causal mechanism to explain how it is that the pill reduces dementia by 15%, then that's of less interest still. I can easily imagine, say, peer reviewers reporting results like this and the non-peer reviewers just not caring. It's much easier to dismiss these kinds of results as due to bias or confounding factors or whatever. Indeed, this is already happening. I made a video on "dietary nihilism" recently, the view that we ought to have very low confidence in much of what is published in nutrition science. There are plenty of scientists who recommend that we just stop paying attention to much of nutrition science. Now, maybe this controversy will go the way of all other scientific controversies so far, and in the long run the community will reach a consensus. But what is it that ensures that?
>> We're not arguing about gravitational waves anymore, the disagreement was temporary.
Well yeah, the gravitational wave controversy eventually ended, and the scientific community converged on a particular answer. I'm not claiming that a schism has already happened. What the controversy illustrates is that there is plenty of debate about what the discoveries actually are. As I understand it, your proposal is that science will remain unified as long as discoveries are being made because scientists in seemingly alternative traditions will take an interest in, and attempt to build on, the discoveries made in other traditions. This presupposes that there is some mechanism that will ensure agreement that both traditions have made the discoveries they claim.
Wasn't this schisming part of the history of science already? "The New Mathematical Science" of Descartes' time wasn't adopted in unison and was a small enterprise relating to few scholastic centers & geniuses in a sea of aristotelean scholasty. As it grew the scholastics didn't simply adopt in whole sale but became the irrelevant faction slowly over the course of a century or so. There was also increasingly less listening from the both sides - but that didn't matter one of the traditions lost. The story is similar for every paradigm change or creation of a new field (and some theories itself)- it just gets faster.
Why would a future schism be the end instead of just another evolution?
Also another way science could split up - and I think the most likely - is just politics. Since much of science is dependent on political funding now certain theories and ways of doing science could be declared orthodox by fiat in one area but not in others. The cliche example is Lysenkoism but this stuff happens in military engineering constantly. Easy to imagine it to spill over to theories themselves or the very norms of science.
kuhn?
Good thinking, I can tell this is an informed view.
Another way it could end is if the incentives for doing bad science start to outweigh the incentives for doing good science. I think you see some of this in the controversy over Homo Naledi and interstellar objects.
You should check out the Georgia Criminology fraudulent studies , Stanford president, Some good articles from 2011 exposing ho most psychological studies of the previous 25 yeas had nonreplicable findings. Basically i found you cant trust anything anymore.
There is no such thing as bad or good science. There is only science. If you don't do it the correct way, then it is not science at all.
If you'd consider it a split if there were a privately funded vs academic science (15:24), then isn't science already split? Because there are different organizations that do secret scientific research. Meaning, not all knowledge is in the academic domain, just like it would be the case in a schism caused by having privately funded vs academic science. Thanks.
One argument I'd had why it's hard to un-unify science is that the computably realizable core of arithmetic already gets you very far. Similarly, no non-math (or non-physics theory) student could really come up with any math that can't be modeled within second-order arithmetic. And physical theories, even if they have different primitives, they are still mathematically modeled and live nicely together.
BTW, nobody takes John Horgan's book(s) on the "end of science" seriously. Just saying.
So? Nobody takes most of the views that I hold seriously. (Not that I'm a fan of Horgan's book. But I'm not impressed by appeals to what people take seriously.)
This might be an end of science as we know it. But it doesn't seem like an end of technological progress. I do recall an older video that you made discussing how science often unfairly gets credit for all the technological progress.
i think there is a diffrence between science here and the scientific method. Its the scientific method that is currupt.
do you have heating in your place?
9:01ff - But the claim that "it isn't done properly" **can** signify a genuine schism. That's how Lutheranism split from Catholicism, for example.
This is relevant to my work, thanks alot!
2:09
"Well, no. We now know that all celestial bodies revolve around the Earth, and that's that."
That's only until we figure out that everything actually revolves around Pluto.
interesting. someone should do a series in the style of Discworld on how these different worldviews would interact
There is no limit to science. There is a limit to humanity.
We thought we had figured everything out before. We were wrong. We still are.
Here's one living example of a living schism: in linguistics, there are two competing traditions. There is generativism and all the rest. The two camps have rival conceptions of what constitutes empirical evidence. Non-generativists accept that actual things people say and write are the basic empirical evidence linguistics has to work with. Generativists insist this evidence is irrelevant (frankly, I never managed to figure out what _is_ acceptable empirical evidence to them, but then I'm not a generativist). The two camps are not united by a joint notion of science, and there is no experiment that can conceivably settle the debate.
I wonder if you'd find what's happened to economics a possible paralell to what could happen to actual science - although, the qualities you mention of hard sciences are absent in economics - it's far more tribal and also as a social science, methods arent comparable so the test of truth is very different. But, essentially economics has become very fragmented between various schools of thought - largely broken down into orthodoxy (neoclassical and austrian) and heterodoxy - of which there are many schools, which do mix and match a lot. Until the 1970's there was discussion in shared journals, viscous debates more accurately also, but the orthodoxy began weening the heterodox economists out of their journals so they had to make their own, and now the orthodoxy largely just ignores the heterodoxy (despite, or maybe because of having lost every significant battle in my opinion). Economics hasnt ended, but it's turned into something which has little to no connection to the real world and is largely just an ideological tool rather than informative study of the possibilities of how we could organise economic life, or even how it is currently organised. It was never, and could never be a natural science of course; and most heterodox economists don't try to deny it, but the orthodoxy are hellbent to be seen as such and cling to some weird, outdated view of what they think science is or scientists do. I can't think of good sources off the top of my head, its quite late, but happy to if youd be interested.
What you say about AI around 17:30 is what some parts of the economics profession believe they do already; they think they're just driven by econometrics and data, they see the big issues with the neoclassical approach and dont seem too keen on it - at least one of my old professors and a classmate were of this mind. I'm not very mathematically minded so knew it wasn't for me; but I wonder what you'd think of a purely "data driven/empirical" approach to social science would be - to me it just screams of confirmation bias and selection bias (i hope that's the right word - investigating topics with a bias essentially).
When the universe run out of design space (When we know all mechanics of the *knowable* universe and how they interact.)
Run out of wrong answers
And if the natural laws are themselves evolving?
In 6:38 you say science and other traditions namely science versus Christianity. I guess you meant theology vs. Science.
Is it actually possible to reach the end of science? Round about 1900 physicist thought there is nothing more to discover. Then came the relativity theory, big bang theory and quantum mechanics.
Yes but if I recall correctly, even then there was a number of obvious open questions / inconsistencies in the accepted theories, which served as starting points for the 20th century developments. The same thing could be true today, where the unanswered questions in cosmology and particle physics may give rise to novel theoretical advances - Science will only end once the best physical theory is both complete and consistent.
Apparently the book ("The end of science" its called I think, also quoted at the start here) calls into question whether this idea was actually widespread around 1900.
Science isn't physics. Even physics as it stands is mostly concerned with cute and compact formulas. Reality much wilder.
Math and physics used to disparage biology for being a form of "stamp collecting" but the amount of data and research being done today they're all doing stamp collecting but with empirical data lol
Though it isn't relegated to just a problem for science, I can see an end to science if the Law of Noncontradiction is known to be false.
It seems as though you think that reality is not consistent. Science is the study of how reality works. Sometimes an experiment expected to determine something gives unexpected results and raises more questions than expected. The Michaelson-Morley experiment is famous for that.
The peculiar issue today is that well known science becomes engineering and all competent geeks are expected to understand it. Like the Empire State Building has been around a long time and everyone should understand that the amount of steel had to increase down the structure. The Eiffel Tower is a visible demonstration of this.
But it has been Two Decades since the destruction of the Twin Towers and "experts" do not talk about having accurate data on the distribution of steel down the towers.
Middle school students should be able to understand this concept. Since 9/11 physics has been history and the longer this drags on the more history it becomes.
I think there is something that causes convergence in science as it improves. It's the classic epistemic / ontological question. The goal of science is to improve our explanations of the way things are. If there is only one way things actually are, improving the explanation should create a convergence.
Empirically test the MWI of QM lol
The apparent lack of splits now is an artifact. Science seems unified today because it is so authoritarian and rigid that it has been able to wipe alternatives off the map. There are huge areas of investigation that attract no attention at all, because anyone who involves themselves in those areas is ridiculed and laughed off the stage. There have been many great scientists in history who have been simply written out of the history books and what they have discovered has similarly been buried under the shifting sands of time. You won't come across these scientists or their discoveries unless you do some really serious 'digging'.
Why be so cryptic? Can you give us an example?
Sounds interesting. What are some examples?
@@aaronchipp-miller9608Anything related to UFOs or parapsychology.
With the AI data schism wouldn’t that just be science as we know it being cut in half into 2 traditions that we used to do in the same time. That’s a different kind of schism then a new kind fundamental theory of science taking hold or whatever else so in that case wouldn’t it be obvious the best thing to do when it comes to gaining knowledge would be to unify? With the spilt just being a practical schism.
Also with the data schism you assume that focusing on theory would be leas practical but wouldn’t knowing the fundamental theory behind things make it more easy to practically manipulate our environment
Also I really do hate peer review. I’m just silly layman but it feels like a surprisingly lousy goosey unorganized process compared to the rest of the research process. It also let a lot of bad research go through in the past. And the review process seems to put to much trust in the researchers by (to my knowledge) not making them send actual proof of their research alongside the paper. I do understand that would be pretty hard though with the raw data being to much at times but still
Looking dapper as always, great video!
It could be argued we already have different the methodology to approach science, case study vs reductive statistical analysis for example.
For sure, assuming the fractural nature of the process of science will led to a place where all discoveries have been made, up to the point where the perceived costs outweighs the investment, is what most people would have to conclude based on their support of science, or it could be argued scientism.
Another view could be that instead of the science becoming to costly in a physical sense is that as the factual expansion continues, science effectively dilutes itself to the point where the branch, or discipline, cannot see how to continue, and the ability of interdisciplinary science becomes too disparate to function in a human based bureaucracy. It is at this point were AI might be a solution, albeit likely only a temporary one, but this may be inside the scope of science.
There is the question if science can lead to a unifying theory, where biology and physic for example can be linked, or if they will forever remain on different spheres or levels. They seemingly remain transcendent in a sense from one another i.e. we learn little about mating habits of mice from studying physics instead of say ecology.
Perhaps, instead, the more the type of science overlaps with ideology, areas that don't lend themselves well to reductivity such as complex structures like sociology, economics and psychology, are the places that will cause science, seen as a unified as an institution, to schism. We may find the held position that science is able to progress, toward an almost end of history situation by those at the Chernyshevsky extreme of scientism, will led to a disillusionment within the institution of science. We have seen the sciences reinvent themselves a number of times after getting caught up in crisis', like from replication issues, and these issues ended up impacting the institution as a whole, for example even physics had issues following the replication crisis.
After a continued history of reinvention especially, as mentioned, in the social sciences it may be concluded that the we bring more into science ideologically than is claimed and that impartiality can only serve us up to a point and that schools of thought will go there own way as they become dependant on bringing increasing assumptions into the discipline to gain new perceived ground. With this the practises and methodology as well as the institutional structure may diverge. Or maybe one school in disciplines will always remain dominant, but with a longer history of the rise and fall of them we might see cynicism cause science to falter as a whole and this may be the end of the discipline.
One final question is whether we truly have made all the discovers possible by "gentleman amateurs working independently funded by private patrons". Or if the institution of science acts as a limit to these endeavours. We have seemingly moved away from universities allowed funding for discoveries to be made by students, students without significant debt. Now we have institutions with hierarchical bureaucracies where the funding goes to those already established demonstrating with applications what discovers will be made beforehand by a team, without the free agency of true experimentation. These teams have the youngest doing the grunt work, at the age when the mind may be at its most capable for novel thinking. This institution can be looked at as an entity preventing progress in this sense and may indicate how it could led itself to a bureaucratic stagnation and then complete failure.
sweet hat. nice vids of late, well as always to be fair :) hope ur good
I forget who named it but I remember hearing of the concept of "the boundaries of the knowable".
Essentially there are certain things and facts about the universe we will never be able to know, so in that sense science may run out of usefulness?
Science used to be Natural Philosophy.
he keeps getting cuter somehow
Maybe we’ll all just get bored of science. Maybe we’ll develop overly elaborate unified theories, which we can never test or actually compute any consequences. Maybe ai will develop such complicated theories, that we can never understand them (just like in chess). Maybe a God will return and simply tell us everything. Maybe we will discover that all logic and reasoning is just incorrect. Maybe we’ll work out every consequence that a brain can actually know, leaving nothing left for us to think about. Maybe we’ll developed a video game so engaging, that nobody will do anything else. Maybe an engineered virus will kill all scientists. Maybe scientists will invent a universe where they are respected, and then they might just abandon this one. But whatever else may happen, climate change will definitely not end science… so chill out.
What a curious attitude scientists have--: "We still don't know that;†b but it is
knowable & it is only a question of time till we know it"! As if that went without
saying.
Wittgenstein (culture and Value).
Here's another story. As scientific theories get more complex, there is more existing science to learn before one reaches the edge of knowledge and begins to produce useful new knowledge. For most sciences it is nearly 30 years, now, but but back in the days of Newton and Leibniz it was 14 or 15 years. What happens if this time gets to be comparable to our life span?
Another option is that people only rely on experts when they have to, and in general science has no real bearing on what people actually believe. You made a good point on the use of big data and the lack of a theoretical direction in engineering.
Also, political, economic, and other factors outside of science might corrupt the scientific/academic community to such a degree that what is published is hardly worth considering.
I personally believe that this is where we already are.
Particular schisms in fields can coexist but the direction science takes is strongly determined by the material implications. At any given moment there are a lot competing scientific theories in any field, science in a sense transcends that. If two competing theories both have good implications then you just get more fields not a schism in science as a whole. There is no science as a whole in the strict sense of a religion.
If this were true how is it that so many schools of thought have rose and fell while supressing other schools. Take any social science and see to what level the material implications reflect the history of the ideologies.
@@radroatch That's true, wasn't thinking of the social sciences. What I had in mind was something like the schism in 20th century mathematics, point being that you simply can't turn a blind eye to the revelations of a field, no matter if you agree or not.
@@grivza I guess, they is the question if your view is there is a distinction of hard vs soft science. I think it is hard to see how they actually maintain that distinction, at the very least, on a continuum, but maybe that distinction breaks down in other ways beyond just that as well.
As a Relativist about truth this is what I'm hoping for 🙂
I do declare, that your beanie is the end of science (do you even have a phd, bro?)
I have a PhD and a PHD.
Why, is wearing beanies forbidden to those who have a PhD?
Isn't it obvious? (It's just a brute fact)
This is what nihilism does to a person :( so sad
Could you wear your fancy read blazer in the next video?
I'm actually wearing it in this video. I just have lots of other layers.
@@KaneB Hahahah just saw it lol
We'll just have to create new science
Lol maybe. The way science used to mean any sistematic body of knowledge, which encompasses religion, a century or two ago.
Dude, please give me graphics, and or event a powerpoint. This is aweful.
I can confirm it really inspires awe.
Love the hat. 😁
Hello 😗👍
No.