Science is an attempt to explain why Nature is the way it is. Collect data, make a prediction, test it, revise the prediction, rinse, repeat. Granted, there are belief systems aplenty in scientific work (string theory?) but as Kuhn has written, sometimes Nature laughs and forces a change.
And Asimov's "level of error" discussion is valid. Newtonian physics, while "wrong" is perfectly useful when aiming spacecraft away from the sun. Box: "All models are wrong. Some models are useful". And Feynman's talked about this as well.
I loved loved loved the part about the curvature per mile.
Last weekend I was cutting the top of a door on a diagonal that had to match the sloped roof-line of a new doorway I'm putting in on my second floor.
When I calculated the slope, I incorrectly rounded up to too few decimal points ..such that over the length of the door (~ 31 inches) the error caused the slope to be off about 1/2 inch -- which, had I cut the door, would have looked horrible.
This problem really perplexed me (because I'm an idiot!) ...until I saw the answer staring me right in the face on my calculator - the many values to the right of the decimal. Of course, leaving those there fixed the issue, and I got a nice accurate slope over the width of the door :)
This is amusing, but the key terms in Asimov's argument are ambiguous, and he's taking a very selective look at the history of science. The position that science edges gradually towards theories that are "more right" (or "less wrong") is roughly correct in the sense that science tends to be empirically conservative. That is, when scientists replace theory A with theory B, it's generally the case that theory B accounts for most or all of the data that theory A accounted for. However, if we look at the actual content of scientific theories, it's clear that radical change and total reversal are quite common. E.g., the germ theory of disease and the theory of continental drift bear little resemblance to their predecessors; Rutherford's model of the atom is not a minor revision of the "plum pudding model"; a relative space-time is very nearly the opposite of an absolute space and time; and the thesis that the universe has a beginning in time is the negation of the thesis that it does not. The last example is probably the best one. At various times, the scientific consensus has been clearly for or against steady state models. So we know that the scientific consensus on that issue has simply been flat out wrong at one time or another.
Of course, there are many areas where we do expect progress to be conservative. So for example, we are not going to discover that DNA does not actually exist, or that the Earth is larger than the Sun. But on some issues it is reasonable to assume that the scientific consensus is quite likely to undergo radical revision. As Scott Adams points out in an article that someone else linked to here, the science of diet and exercise is a case in point.
So to my mind, it all depends on the particular issues that Asimov's lazy caricature had in mind. If the "Eng Lit major" was expressing skepticism about, say, the age of the Earth, or the atomic theory of matter, then Asimov's response would be a fair one. If they had something else in mind, then perhaps not.
It seems as though asimov agrees with you in the last paragraph:
>Naturally, the theories we now have might be considered wrong in the simplistic sense of my English Lit correspondent, but in a much truer and subtler sense, they need only be considered incomplete.
That seems false as applied to most of my examples. If the Big Bang theory turns out to be true, then that doesn't mean that steady state theories were "incomplete", it just means that they were wrong. Similarly, if it turns out that eating lots of fat doesn't make you fat, that doesn't mean that previous dietary advice was merely "incomplete".
> If the Big Bang theory turns out to be true, then that doesn't mean that steady state theories were "incomplete", it just means that they were wrong.
Steady state turned out to be wrong, but it was far less wrong than, say, the theory that the frost from Niflheim and the flames from Muspelheim met in Ginnungagap, melted the ice, and the drops formed Ymir the hermaphrodite giant whose sweat produced more giants, and who was nourished by the milk of Audhumbla the cow (who was also formed from the melting frost), whose licking of salt-licks in the ice uncovered Buri, the first of the Aesir, who had a son named Bor, who married Bestla the giant, who gave birth to their half-breed son Odin and his brothers Vili and Ve, who slew Ymir and constructed the world from his corpse.
Asimov's key point was that right and wrong are not absolutes. There are degrees of rightness and wrongness.
The "steady state" part of those theories was just wrong. And in fact some religions got that part right (no doubt just through luck).
I am not denying that there are degrees of rightness and wrongness, by the way. That isn't Asimov's key point; it's just a banal observation that anyone would agree with. His key point (which I somewhat disagree with) is that the history of science can be viewed as a steady progression from "less right" to "more right" theories. Of course there has been a great deal of scientific progress, but sometimes scientists do just get things wrong.
>That seems false as applied to most of my examples. If the Big Bang theory turns out to be true, then that doesn't mean that steady state theories were "incomplete", it just means that they were wrong.
They still seem incomplete (and not "wrong" to me). They served their purpose and were good approximations for calculations we did and observations we had all those years.
>Similarly, if it turns out that eating lots of fat doesn't make you fat, that doesn't mean that previous dietary advice was merely "incomplete".
Only if "previous dietary advice" was only all about fat, and only if it consisted of just saying "fat makes you fat".
>They served their purpose and were good approximations for calculations we did and observations we had all those years.
In other words they were empirically more-or-less correct. That's what I was talking about in my first paragraph.
>Only if "previous dietary advice" was only all about fat, and only if it consisted of just saying "fat makes you fat".
I don't see the point of picking over the details of the example. Take plate tectonics. The scientific consensus used to be that the Earth's crust was not formed of separate moving plates. The current scientific consensus is exactly the opposite. If you have a concept of wrong according to which it's possible for neither of P and ¬P to be wrong, then I'm not sure where we can go from there.
>The scientific consensus used to be that the Earth's crust was not formed of separate moving plates. The current scientific consensus is exactly the opposite. If you have a concept of wrong according to which it's possible for neither of P and ¬P to be wrong, then I'm not sure where we can go from there.
That's the whole point of Asimov's article - the relativity of wrong. The example he gives for this is not at all different from yours (earth being flat and earth being non-flat are also opposite propositions). So it's not like the "plate tectonics" examples changes anything in his argument.
The argument is that P and ¬P can both be useful if the first could explain a phenomenon to the best degree available at a time, and the second to an even better degree available at a later time. In that sense P and ¬P are degrees of wrongness and truthness.
His is the argument that "wrong" depends on utility, as there's usually no absolute match with the objective status universe (ding an sich), so we just have approximations with different degrees of wrongness.
I think you're going too far here, both in saying something that sounds incorrect, and in reading things into the essay that I don't see there.
There's no need to say that P and ¬P are ever both (somewhat) true, only that evaluating a scientific theory isn't just a matter of finding some single consequence of it to say "this prediction is false: REJECT" (a sort of crude Popperian picture). Instead, the theory should be tested on its overall explanatory power, ability to predict, etc, etc. For each statement the theory implies, that statement is either true or false. But considering two theories, each of which implies some falsehood, we may wish to say that one is still less wrong.
I also didn't notice the sort of Kantian picture you allude to in the essay.
Yep, that's what I said in the first paragraph of my original post. In purely empirical terms, scientific progress is usually quite conservative. However, if you look at the content of the theory, and not just the predictions that it makes, scientific progress looks much less conservative. In the case of the flat earth example, it is indeed true that the flat Earth theory was not totally wrong in the sense that it made some approximately correct predictions. However, it was totally wrong in its assertion that the Earth is flat -- it simply isn't.
This is the same as the example Asimov gave thou, plate tectonics being that the surface of the earth moves at imperceptible rate. That only over great time does this have any impact on the positioning of land masses.
Instead of it being moving at a rate of zero (or static), it is moving at some tiny amount above zero.
It is incomplete in the sense that a theory can only be measured against others by its predictive power and simplicity. You're creating a metric of "success" that Asimov doesn't believe exists -- that a theory has an essential quality which is measurable in any way other than its predictive success.
Right, this is what I said in my first paragraph: science tends to be empirically conservative. As for metrics of success, we're talking about right or wrong here, not successful or unsuccessful. If the scientific consensus in 1900 was P, whereas the current scientific consensus is ¬P, then it's silly to pretend that the previous theory was merely "incomplete". Take plate tectonics as an example. Either the Earth's surface is split into moving plates or it isn't. As it turns out, this hypothesis is correct, and the scientists who denied it well into the 20th century were just flat our wrong.
And you're treating "right" and "wrong" as absolutes, with no in between, which is exactly what Asimov was saying you shouldn't do.
You could apply the same logic you're using for plate tectonics to the shape of the Earth, which is Asimov's main example. If the Earth is a sphere, then it's not flat. If it's an oblate spheroid, then it's not a sphere. If it's slightly pear-shaped, then it isn't an oblate spheroid. So every previous scientific theory about the Earth's shape was just wrong.
The problem with this, as Asimov points out, is that just putting theories into the buckets "right" or "wrong" doesn't tell you how far off they are, predictively, which is what's important. The Earth is not flat--but it's almost flat. It curves about 8 inches per mile; 8 inches per mile is not zero, but it might be indistinguishable from zero if you don't have very good measuring instruments. (And similarly for the increasingly more accurate measurements that have given us more precise knowledge of the exact irregular shape of the Earth.) So treating the Earth is flat is wrong, but it's not very far wrong. It is, however, more wrong than treating the Earth as a sphere, since the error involved is smaller in the latter case.
Similarly, the continents are not motionless, but they're almost motionless. So treating them as motionless is wrong, but it's not very far wrong. You have to have accurate measurements to distinguish the actual motion of the continents from no motion at all. And you have to have even more accurate measurements and more comprehensive data to know that the cause of the motion is that the continents are sitting on plates that are floating in magma.
> the scientists who denied it well into the 20th century were just flat our wrong.
They were wrong, but they were still a lot less wrong than, for example, the Flat Earth Society. Which is Asimov's point.
I’m not actually assuming that ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ are absolutes. I’m just pointing out that some widely accepted scientific theories have turned out to be very clearly at the ‘wrong’ end of the spectrum. If you don’t like the particular example of plate tectonics then just take one of the other examples that I mentioned. E.g., our conception of the structure of matter has undergone several radical changes in the course of scientific history. These changes were fairly conservative in empirical terms, but in terms of the various conceptions of matter that they put forward, they are in some cases radically different. Another example would be the question of whether the universe has a beginning in time. There really isn't any middle ground there. If it did, then the people who said that didn't were wrong, and if it didn't, then the people who said that it did were wrong.
Of course you can always find a germ of truth in a theory if you try hard enough, just as you can find a germ of truth in the book of Genesis if you're determined to defend it. I don't see the point, though. Why bother constructing a false Whig history of scientific progress when the real history is impressive enough?
> our conception of the structure of matter has undergone several radical changes in the course of scientific history
Really? The original conception (or at least the commonly accepted one--even some ancient Greeks hit on the idea of atoms) was that matter was continuous, and it is pretty close to being continuous. Then we started to make observations that indicated that matter was made of atoms. Then we began to get data that indicated that atoms were made of smaller parts. Where is the radical change?
> Another example would be the question of whether the universe has a beginning in time. There really isn't any middle ground there.
Sure there is. What if the concept of "a beginning in time" isn't well-defined, because "time" is not a fundamental property? It's quite possible that both viewpoints--the universe had a beginning in time, and the universe didn't--are useful approximations to something deeper.
You mentioned one of the radical changes: the change from a continuous model to an atomic one. I mentioned another radical change in my post (Rutherford).
As for the claim that matter is close to being continuous, I am not a physicist, but I was under the impression that this was false. I.e., speaking naively, there is far more "empty space" than there is "stuff". I realize that QM makes it difficult to give precise content to that kind of statement, but something like that appears to be true.
> It's quite possible that both viewpoints--the universe had a beginning in time, and the universe didn't--are useful approximations to something deeper.
I can't really answer speculation. However, your only reason for making this speculation, so far as I can see, is your desire to deny that any scientific theory has ever been flat out wrong.
> As for the claim that matter is close to being continuous, I am not a physicist, but I was under the impression that this was false.
We only know this because we have precise enough measurements to detect atoms and their internal structure. Atoms are about a billion times smaller than ordinary macroscopic objects, so it's a very good approximation to treat a cup of water, for example, as a continuous fluid, rather than a bunch of atoms.
> speaking naively, there is far more "empty space" than there is "stuff".
Only on a very naive definition of "empty space". Pop science books and articles often say that "atoms are mostly empty space", but that's because they are thinking of the electrons as little pointlike objects, which they're not. So "atoms are mostly empty space" is wrong, by the definition you've been trying to use, just like "matter is continuous" is wrong.
And before you object that I'm saying "electrons are little pointlike objects" is flat out wrong, electrons are close to being little pointlike objects; you have to make very precise measurements (like the ones that have mapped out the structure of atomic orbitals) to see the quantum "smearing out" of electrons. But in many other contexts, electrons do behave like little pointlike objects.
> I can't really answer speculation.
It isn't just my speculation; it's a serious theoretical proposal in cosmology. Google "eternal inflation".
> your only reason for making this speculation, so far as I can see, is your desire to deny that any scientific theory has ever been flat out wrong.
Quite the contrary; cosmologists consider such proposals seriously because neither simplistic model--"the universe had a beginning in time" or "the universe did not have a beginning in time" as flat statements with no wiggle room--works well.
The problem you are having here is that you continue to think that we humans can get something absolutely right. But every single one of your "absolutely right" statements turns out to have hidden qualifications when we dig deeper. And your "flat out wrong" statements turn out to be workable approximations in many contexts.
>so it's a very good approximation to treat a cup of water, for example, as a continuous fluid, rather than a bunch of atoms.
It's a good approximation empirically. I've said a few times now that scientific progress is indeed quite conservative in empirical terms. However, we know now that water is very unlike a continuous fluid in terms of its actual constitution.
> So "atoms are mostly empty space" is wrong, by the definition you've been trying to use, just like "matter is continuous" is wrong.
Yes I know, that's why I mentioned that QM makes things more complicated. However, it's still roughly true that atoms are mostly empty space, in the sense that they are very far from being of uniform density.
>Google "eternal inflation".
If you're referring to theories which attempt to extend eternal inflation in to the past, then these are attempted variations on steady-state theories. See e.g. this paper: http://arxiv.org/abs/astro-ph/0111191 . It gives a useful overview of the history. (As to whether its specific result is correct, I make no judgment.)
>The problem you are having here is that you continue to think that we humans can get something absolutely right
I'm not sure where you're getting that from. I suppose that we can get some things absolutely right (e.g. some mathematical truths), but that's not central to anything I've said.
What puzzles me is why you're trawling through all these examples trying to show that scientists have never really been wrong about anything. Is it really your view that there has never been a period in scientific history when the scientific consensus on a given topic was simply mistaken?
But that's the whole point: if a theory is a good approximation empirically, then how can you say it's "flat out wrong"? Doesn't that obfuscate the very important distinction between ideas that are good approximations, but not quite right, vs. ideas that aren't even good approximations? (See below for more on this.)
> Is it really your view that there has never been a period in scientific history when the scientific consensus on a given topic was simply mistaken?
In the sense in which you are using the term "simply mistaken", I think there have been such views, but I think they're a lot rarer than you appear to think. (At least if we restrict ourselves to views that can be taken as "scientific" in some sense.)
An example of a view which I think was indeed simply mistaken is the phlogiston theory of combustion. It was simply mistaken because it made no predictions whatsoever; it was not empirical. And when a better theory of combustion was found, there was no sense in which the phlogiston theory could be viewed as an approximation to it.
>Doesn't that obfuscate the very important distinction between ideas that are good approximations, but not quite right, vs. ideas that aren't even good approximations?
No, it just adds an additional distinction between idea that are good approximations but not quite right and ideas that are good approximations but completely wrong.
There's no contradiction. It makes approximately the right predictions, but it's completely wrong as a statement of how things actually are.
A very clear example of such a hypothesis would be one concerning identity. E.g., who was it who committed the murder? The hypothesis that Joe Smith did it might make lots and lots of correct predictions and yet still be completely wrong (because it was actually someone else).
> It makes approximately the right predictions, but it's completely wrong as a statement of how things actually are.
You're assuming that we know "how things actually are". If we know that, how do we know it? If your answer is "because we have a theory that makes correct predictions", how do you know our best current theory gets everything correct? It has to be literally "everything" in order to justify your statement that we know "how things actually are"; anything less than perfection from our current theories does not justify your claim.
It should be obvious that we do not know that our current theories are perfectly correct. All we really know is that they get more predictions correct than our previous theories. But that still leaves room for our best current theories to make incorrect predictions--we just don't know which ones they are (yet). And if they make any incorrect predictions, then there could be some other theory that makes more correct predictions, but models "how things actually are" very differently from our current theories. After all, that has already happened, when we came up with our best current theories. If it happened once, it can happen again. And if it happens again, then all your claims about "how things actually are" are, by your own definition, wrong.
>You're assuming that we know "how things actually are".
No, I'm only assuming that we sometimes know how things actually aren't. In other words, we can sometimes be pretty sure that a particular theory is wrong even if we have no confidence that our current best theory is correct.
I think you're going to have a very tough time defending this claim. You might have better luck, though, with a claim that ends up doing much the same work for the subject under discussion: right and wrong do exist, and every theory we humans have come up with so far is wrong by that purist standard. But some human theories are less wrong than others, and it's the "degree of wrongness" that matters, practically speaking.
If it's only possible to deny that scientific theories are ever wrong by denying the very distinction between right and wrong, then I think that underlines my point. Freedom from being wrong at the price of never being right doesn't seem like a very good bargain.
As to the question of whether pragmatist theories of truth are viable, that is a separate one, but I tend to think that the standard objections are quite decisive.
That's true, but it's also true that the actual scientific consensus has changed a lot over time. You can't blame this all on the media and pretend that dietary advice from experts has been fully consistent for the past 50 years.
>That's because most of it in the form it reaches people is not actually a "science"
...because it's really just "a word from our sponsors".
It uses the language and status of science for marketing and persuasion, without providing any of the rigour or repeatability.
Unfortunately this poisons the well for real science, because non-scientists decide that scientists don't really know anything useful and it's all just a matter of opinion anyway.
This is a nicely written statement of one of the basic points/counterpoints in the philosophy of science and scientific realism. If you want to read more, you can probably find more by chasing citations from this Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy article: http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/scientific-realism/#PesInd.
Surely everybody knows an "English Lit expert" but even after reading this exquisite requiem to believers I still find it impossibly hard to argue with these people. It always feels like they are trying to make the last stand of humanitarian values against the dictat of science.
In all their glorious "everything science says will be as wrong as religion and you my friend are blindly following it" it seems they can't understand the basic principle of science advancing toward some kind of truth yet admitting it is -still- wrong.
I don't know if trying to convince someone who doesn't trust science - and to some extent, logical thinking - with mathematics really works. Sure it convinces me but does it matter?
I'm one of the people you're caricaturing here. I understand science, and mathematics, and logical thinking, which is why I believe (most) people blindly follow science as if it were a religion. (For a very recent example, see this article - io9.com/i-fooled-millions-into-thinking-chocolate-helps-weight-1707251800 )
... and, of course, the rebuttals to this were mostly of the "no true Scotsman" flavor. "It's not the fault of scientists, it's the bad media". Let's ignore http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1182327/ (Why Most Published Research Findings Are False) and many other similar results - we have to defend scientists because!
Look - I'm an engineer. I use a sort-of Bayesian reasoning: I started from what I learned as a child and then kept adjusting probabilities. You (plural "you") wouldn't be surprised if I told you I believe most politicians are liars. Well, I got to "most scientists are wrong" the same way. Sure, I didn't actually talk to most scientists, or even heard about them; those I did hear about, though, are at best misguided.
In any case, my original argument wasn't about the scientists; my argument was: most people treat science as a religion. They feel very superior to the religious people who are accepting everything they are told uncritically and then turn around and accept everything that is prefixed with "science says". Ten years ago, I used to make fun of people for believing the Earth revolves around the Sun - I have yet to find a single one who could do better than "that's what scientists say". That is arguably worse than those who accepted the Ptolemaic model - for one thing, they could at least see that the Sun was rising and setting.
(I can rant on this subject for hours but I don't think this is the proper forum.)
> ... and, of course, the rebuttals to this were mostly of the "no true Scotsman" flavor. "It's not the fault of scientists, it's the bad media". Let's ignore http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1182327/ (Why Most Published Research Findings Are False) and many other similar results - we have to defend scientists because!
It seems like the worst offenders are in biology/pharmacology/genetics/biochemistry. I'm not trained in any of those fields, but it seems pretty obvious that organic life should be orders of magnitudes more complex than mechanics, materials science, aeronautics, or any of the other man-made scientific fields. They are also comparatively young subjects. We don't really understand enough about how all the pieces fit together, or even what all the pieces are, in biological processes to make much in the way of definitive statements.
But seriously, if I hear another nightly news story about how food X prevents cancer based on a study of a dozen people or the current consensus on whether eggs are good or bad for you...
Careful. Human biological response is sufficiently well understood to permit the design of antibodies (which are grown in fermenters) that treat the symptoms of disease (RA, for example). There are decades of successful pharmacological research based on receptor targets, signaling pathways, etc.
However, your point is valid in that knowledge of, say, digital engineering is easier to understand and investigate as the systems are simpler. Those who are successful in the tech field should keep this in mind when they talk of disrupting fields involving wet-ware.
My particular peeve is engineers who kowtow to economics, putting it in a much higher pedestal than sociology or anthropology, because it is "mathy". The implicit assumptions are usually along the lines of "the assumptions seem obvious enough, and look at all those formulae in the transformations thereof!"
Science id defined by its method: to set up experiments in order to look for counterexamples for a theorem. It is pretty much impossible to set up experiments in economics. While I agree that sociology and anthropology do not satisfy the definition of science, economics does not either. Where are the experiments? Without experiments, no science.
This is the example used in methodological discussions of economics. I don't know if astronomers do actually perform experiments on some limited scale, but it seems that classicaly they relied on "luck" to test predictions e. g. testing general relativity through observations of eclipses. In social sciences, there is a somewhat similar thing called "natural experiment", which is the main test for the validity of predictions. In both cases, the researcher takes a more passive role in testing his predictions.
This can be dauting to researchers, but overall it's for the best. There are indeed experiments in economics, specially in game theory. But the majority of possible experiments would cross the boundary of what is morally acceptable, and well into morally abhorrent e. g. randomly restricting a sample's access to education to estimate it's effects on wages.
It helps that astronomy is a branch of physics. In a sense, astronomers do perform experiments, on different conditions but with the same theory. (By the way, that's what bothers me most about cosmology, it seems to not agree with any small scale experiment performed.)
Well, certainly, natural experiments can lead to knowledge. But that's a much slower and more dangerous path, artificial experiments are better in every sense, except that they are mostly not available for economics. Anyway, I don't think the use of natural experiments are the bottleneck currently holding economics back.
For every theorem in sociology, for example, can you show us what experiment they set up, and what results they obtained and how we can repeat their experiment in order to find counterexamples for their theorem? From there, I will acknowledge the scientific status of that one, single theorem. I will still consider every other statement in sociology to be non-science. Seriously, they must produce such data for every single one of their theorems. Physics does that. Chemistry does that. Why would sociology be entitled to the same scientific status without putting in the same effort?
You're confusing science with mathematics. There are no theorems in science, it's all experimental. We have certainty on a few basic principles or models and make inferences based on those models.
I'm not going to defend sociology specifically because I don't know the field or it's state, but in every science (e.g. chemistry), you make a model for some restricted case to fit some data and you make assumptions on the scope of the model. Otherwise you couldn't say pretty much anything about anything: "We tested that proton and that one has a mass of X units. We can't say anything about this proton, thogh." -- the evidence piles up that the model has widespread vality. In the same sense, we can make assumptions on the scope of models. Of course, I imagine we have no hope for the time being of uniting the basic physical laws to that of sociology, simply because we don't have the power to understand the human brain just yet. I don't think refraining from modelling behavior is useful, and it will probably even help us better model the brain and generalize it's behavior towards "better" intelligence (AI).
So we think that is a dangerous thing? Believing the best, tested results of experiments (science) is not superior to random religious tracts written thousands of years ago?
The critical difference between treating science as a religion, and treating religion as a religion, is that the science people have a good chance of being right.
Its rational and reasonable to be uncritical of scientific results - the scientist has already been critical for you. That's kind of the whole point.
_Its [sic] rational and reasonable to be uncritical of scientific results_
I do not believe that this person is sarcastic; I say that because I have talked to hundreds of people with the same opinion. People actually believe this. My authority is better than yours so you uncritically accepting your authority is wrong, me uncritically accepting mine is not only right but obviously so.
Ignoring the absurdity of the statement, and the mind-numbing appeal to authority - this also shows a lack of knowledge of history. When people used Aristotle as an authority 500 years ago, they did it using this same rationale: Aristotle had already done all the thinking, who are you to claim to know better?
It's not an argument from authority, just a statement of the implied Bayesian priors. One who gives greater weight to scientific papers than to religious pronouncements is entirely rational in doing so. That is the entire well-argued thesis of the Relativity of Wrong essay we are discussing.
Unthinking faith in "the institution of science", particularly the denial that it can be co-opted for certain policy goals, and influenced by funding, and lack the foresight to control for important environmental variables, has and will continue to lead into stuff like eugenics, craniology, and austerity.
I'm still reeling from "Its rational and reasonable to be uncritical of scientific results"- smh.
Nobody used the words "unthinking" or "faith", or anything remotely resembling them. Nobody said it was ideal to be uncritical of scientific results, only that it was rational. Rationality is not binary, at least as it appears to be used in a charitable interpretation of the commenter's position. It can be more rational to be uncritical of scientific results (which we can define for the sake of argument any way we like, but probably involving peer review and replication) than to be uncritical of unscientific pronouncements.
Given the available time and energy (or lack thereof) for most of us to examine every scientific result in detail, it can even be more rational (as in best allocation of personal resources) to accept some scientific results uncritically than to study them in detail. I'll note that I would argue for tentative acceptance, with growing confidence over time myself, but the original statement isn't wrong. It's just being interpreted through different vocabularies.
P.S. This next part is not a response to you specifically, just a general comment. I'm really disappointed by the polarizing tone of this thread, the uncharitable readings of others comments, the implications of guilt by association, and the emotionally motivated downvote brigades. HN used to be better; we've discussed this essay before and it wasn't nearly so bad. So I'm disappointed, and I'm disappointed in myself for participating, but feel I must because of how much I like the essay and how important it is for people to understand the concept of the relative wrongness of science.
The essence of science is its method: Setting up experiments in order to look for counterexamples for a scientific statement. Therefore, anybody who is uncritical of scientific results and does not desire to find counterexamples, is not engaging in science but in anti-science, which in turn is a dangerous and counterproductive ideology. The science-as-religion people do not have a good chance of being right. They are always completely wrong.
Advocating positions shown likely true by science does not require a scientist at all. We don't all have to be in the lab, testing every conclusion. We have people for that.
The rest of us will do very, very well to believe the results of science. Because its the only game in town that's actually trying to get it right.
This is painful to read. It leads to a statement like the following.
"The foremost scientific authority claims that the Earth is flat. There is no need to be critical of this scientific finding. All opposing viewpoints must be shunned, and proponents of those contrarian ideas ridiculed and ruined."
> In any case, my original argument wasn't about the scientists; my argument was: most people treat science as a religion. They feel very superior to the religious people who are accepting everything they are told uncritically and then turn around and accept everything that is prefixed with "science says".
We had a subject in my lab yesterday that after the experiment had a "heated" debate where he put physics vs religion with one of the volunteers who was religious. While I was in the control room tinkering with the software, I listened in on their conversation and could hear the smugness of the subject as he used science as a tool to try and "convert" the volunteer. I thought the volunteer handled the conversation quite well, but it seemed like quite the inquisition from the "scientist"…
Its easy to be smug about science; its so often right. If you don't have time to research the subject yourself, I'd always advise taking the side of the scientist.
If one considers all the research papers that have ever been published and retracted, and could enumerate over them and calculate their "rightness" and notices that greater than half are "right" then that would be a fact. As of today, no one has done that, and to assume it to be "often right" is quite dogmatic.
I posit that if one doesn't have time to research the subject themself, one shouldn't form opinion about such subjects beyond that they now know such subjects exist. But I suppose asking that of human beings is too much :P
I didn't argue about the unreliability of science. Do I think such could be quantifiable by what information is available to humans today? Yes. Do I think humans without the aid of technology can say either way to the degree that science is unreliable? Maybe for tiny slivers like meta analysis papers on relatively minute subjects within science, but as a whole? I think not.
That's foolish. Scientists have to work hard to avoid bias. A lot of them don't manage it. Most science isn't as rigorous as eg ATLAS at CERN at avoiding biases.
There are plenty of scientists who are fucking idiots.
There are a vast majority doing good work. Your cell phone is a towering testament to this. To be fair, try making the converse argument: how many religious zealots avoid bias? Zero. Lets not condemn science on the basis of a strawman ("some scientists somewhere are not very good")
> There are a vast majority doing good work. Your cell phone is a towering testament to this. To be fair, try making the converse argument: how many religious zealots avoid bias? Zero. Lets not condemn science on the basis of a strawman ("some scientists somewhere are not very good")
Yet to uphold what people consider science today, you use one example. As if the vast majority of scientists had anything to do with the development of the cell phone (and use the word testament which has a non zero religious connotations), and give no lip service to how many religious people throughout the times have supported scientific endeavors…
I leave other examples to the reader. Hint: point at anything near you. It was the result of science.
As for honoring the religious who supported science. I say, to the degree they pursued religion, they shortchanged their scientific accomplishments. Consider what else Newton might have done, had he abandoned his alchemy and astrology.
"Science (from Latin scientia, meaning "knowledge"[2]) is a systematic enterprise that builds and organizes knowledge in the form of testable explanations and predictions about the universe."
From such definition, if I could point at every person and say it was the result of systematic enterprise that builds and organizes knowledge in the form of a testable explanations and predictions about the universe, it wouldn't be a stretch for one to think that such seems to be in favor of an omniscient being :P
Consider that there was probably some function of Newtons alchamey and astrology experience that allowed him to put forth other ideas that we are willing accept from testable hypothesis… or that had their been no Newton, the phenomena that he described, would have still existed, yet people at that time would continued to have no testable understanding of it.
> point at anything near you. It was the result of science.
The result of some particular branches of science where we do, in fact, have reliable knowledge and the ability to make accurate predictions.
But that is very, very different from "science" in general. There are many more fields that are called "sciences" but do not have anything like that kind of reliable knowledge or predictive power. So it's not enough to just say "science"; you have to specify the field, so we know which category it falls into.
> If you don't have time to research the subject yourself, I'd always advise taking the side of the scientist.
If you don't have time to research the subject yourself, it means you don't care about the answer anyway. So why should you take any side? Why not just accept that you don't know?
I think what's being argued here is that the probability of being right by blindly following scientific consensus is greater than the probability of being right by blindly following non-scientific anything. Nobody's saying that science is never wrong, only that it's less wrong than other sources of knowledge, has a process that makes it even less wrong over time, and when it is wrong, it's only relatively wrong in the way that is described by Asimov.
Asimov wasn't talking about following scientific "consensus". He was talking about things that are nailed down by data. The roundness of the Earth wasn't a matter of scientific "consensus"; it was a matter of making observations that showed the curvature of the Earth's surface (vs. earlier observations which were consistent with flatness), then further observations that showed that the curvature varied from place to place (vs. earlier observations which were consistent with it being a perfect sphere), and so on.
The point is that what is "less wrong" is the understanding we build up by extending the range of our data and our ability to predict what new data that we haven't yet observed will look like. It's not anything we build up by "consensus". So a lay person, trying to figure out what to "blindly follow", should not be looking at "consensus"; they should be looking at what data we have, how reliable it is, what does it cover, and how well we can predict what we will see when we get further data. As you can see, I put "blindly follow" in quotes because you can't do all this blindly; you can't just ask what the "consensus" is. You have to actually look at the content.
By "consensus" I mean what you describe, the accumulation of data from multiple sources. But even a simple human consensus of scientists would be right more of the time than a simple consensus of non-scientists.
Edit: also, I was referring initially to the arguments from other comments, not to Asimov specifically.
Yes, absolutely. I don't agree fully with the statement that set off this whole flame war. It is a very low bar, but my point is that many bars are even lower.
>Ten years ago, I used to make fun of people for believing the Earth revolves around the Sun - I have yet to find a single one who could do better than "that's what scientists say".
Wait... what? If the Earth didn't go around the Sun, why would we have seasons based on the angle of the Sun to the ground? Why would that angle continually cycle throughout the year? And what about the movements of the planets in the night sky, relative to Earth?
Sure, you could have a god who designed perversely complex features into the world for no causally sensible reason, but really, the simplest explanation for our available geological and astronomical data is that the Earth orbits the Sun.
I read your articles and could add one myself but fail to find it : a published scientific paper about how smoking is good for your health because it makes you think about your health at some point (basically saying "don't trust everything science says"). I also agree with you that (most) people blindly following science but I don't feel like you are the kind of person I'm caricaturing (which is true for the sake of my description).
You seem to grasp the concept of critical thinking and I believe that's why you would object. To me talking about science implies critical thinking. Somebody having an argument with you about science without acknowledging the certainty of being wrong is not talking about science but pseudo-science. And so you end up discussing with a fanatic, which is not a discussion.
I'm not saying that English Lit experts are everywhere but I feel like they just do not trust "science lovers" to be capable of critical thinking.
edit: It's like you're asking "how to convince science fanatics that they can be wrong" and I'm asking "how to convince English Lit experts that I know science can be wrong but still think it matters"
Yes, it's not 1989 anymore, people shouldn't have to rely on soap opera caricatures to learn what English literature experts think, how smug they are and how they are the natural enemies of physicists and scientists somehow. I am not saying people like that doesn't exist, but I don't think either that the Liberal Studies are trying to fight any kind of war with science.
The funny thing is Isaac Asimov and most of the science fiction writers have their books filled with traditional philosophical problems and literary figures, they just sugar-coat them with enough speculative science and avoid naming the concepts by name to avoid scaring their public.
The article linked is great, but let's not use it to reinforce senseless clichés.
Seems like Adams' thesis is that science is to blame for media's rampant misreporting of it. That's a really odd thing to suggest given that scientists express consternation about this on a regular basis, and devote much time and effort into trying to clear up common misconceptions that arise because of irresponsible pop media reportage.
I feel like Adams uses the word "science" to mean lots of different things in that article. It can be a process, or it can be "the people who perform experiments to see what happens", or "the media reports on those experiments", or "the government policies influenced by advisors who followed the media", or so on. This makes it hard to unpack precisely what he's saying.
But I don't think it's about assigning blame. He's attempting to describe a situation and how it came about. If all the public sees is the media's irresponsible reporting on journal articles, then for current purposes it doesn't much matter if scientists themselves are trying to correct the media. The public will read the newspaper, the newspaper says science says X, and X turns out to be false. Then they read the newspaper telling them science says Y, and they won't believe Y.
The issue is that many people trying to convince me about science are woefully unaware of their own assumptions and are typically ignorant of some basic philosophy.
In particular, I accept that the scientific method is a reliable path to knowledge, that is, it reliably leads to a true understanding of true things. However it does not follow that the scientific method is the only way to knowledge. It also does not follow that all true knowledge, or even a fraction of it can be acquired through the scientific method.
Other unvoiced assumptions speak to one's life's purpose. The old quote from Emil Faber, 'Knowledge is good', is certainly not a scientific conclusion, or a testable hypothesis. Valuing wisdom over ignorance and indeed freedom over slavery and life over death speaks to a purpose in life which is necessarily ungrounded in any science. I certainly do value all of those things, but it is not a belief anyone achieved through falsifiable hypotheses.
> it does not follow that the scientific method is the only way to knowledge
there's something to that. It seems to me its partially because we often make "doing science" a mental / virtual exercise. A process that is done with data and in the realm of one's head.
But doing science should includes all of our senses.
The idea of gemba comes to mind ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gemba ):
> The idea is that to be customer-driven, one must go to the customer's genba to understand his problems and opportunities, using all one's senses to gather and process data.
I hear this a lot: morality is above science. I don't believe it for a moment. Just look at those that believe in ignorance over wisdom, or death over life - they do very, very badly. Empirically these moral codes are useful and effective. That's science right there.
Science is a method, producing statements about facts. A type of behaviour is not a fact (e.g. "killing someone"). It is statement. Therefore morality produces statements about statements. How could a method dealing with statements about facts ever be in competition with a method dealing with statements about statements? That is impossible. In other words, by comparing morality and science, you are comparing apples and oranges.
This is fumbling about a logical explanation to explain the difference between a logical field and a humanistic field.
It's far easier to say that these are two different worlds of truth; one is more quantitative, the other is more qualitative, and the two are intertwined, building truth upon each other. Science does not meaningfully connect with the human race without a profound understanding and application of the humanities. Humanities do not meaningfully derive human truths without a profound understanding of the reality of existence.
The two are so important to each other that it's a wonder they have always resulted in such dichotomous opposing arguments throughout history. It is stupid, even; a human folly of ignorance and small-mindedness, only effectively resolved through a deep and liberal education of both types of knowledge at once. They are paradoxically opposing and yet deeply intertwined, and it would improve both areas of knowledge to have a deeper understanding of—and especially respect for—the other.
There need not be a well-formed simple logical statement to tell us this is true.
Put simply science is necessarily about 'is', and cannot be about 'should'.
(When confronted with that, a typical rejoinder is that there is no 'should' -- life, consciousness, agency, will is all an illusion, all is meaningless and it reduces to physics in the end. The problem with that view though is that you have to throw out truth and knowledge too then)
Are these widely accepted definitions of "fact", "statement", and "science"? Even if the distinction between "fact" and "statement" in this argument is sound, the example statement, "killing someone", is connected to innumerable "facts" of specific historic creatures having killed specific others, and the fact of their individual success or failure to reproduce is inextricably tied to the biological evolution of a moral instinct, and the cultural evolution of a moral code.
Furthermore, all human behavior can be linked to activity in the brain, which can be studied by neuroscience. Finally, empirical surveys of human behaviors and moral opinions exist.
Therefore, morality is within the purview of science.
Game Theory explicitly talks about behavior in a rigorous way. That should be enough of a counterexample.
Science can talk about specific events ("John stabbed Joe with a knife"), it can talk about how people categorize them ("the stabbing had features X, Y, and Z that the typical mind categorizes at "murder"), and it can talk about how typical minds perceive and judge events it has categorized.
Morality is little more than an abstraction that human brains use to make social value judgements that help them fulfill their complicated set of values. If you can understand the values people have and the way these judgements help fulfill them, you've basically aced morality.
I'm not saying it's easy. I know several brilliant people working on this, and they're still getting surprises and uncovering edge cases. What I'm getting at is that statements like "most people think killing people is bad" can be reduced, with great difficulty, into statements about human behaviors and brain activity.
>"most people think killing people is bad" can be reduced, with great difficulty, into statements about human behaviors and brain activity.
I doubt it, but in any case, the important point is that you can't do the same thing for "Killing people is bad." It's an important distinction. Most people think that homosexuality is bad, but we wouldn't want to conclude that it therefore is.
It feels like you can't do the same for "killing is bad" because people mean a bunch of different things by "killing is bad". Each piece, individually, is much more amenable to a reductionist treatment. Let me be more specific.
Suppose Alice gets in an argument with Bob, and stabs him. Is Alice worse off having done that? Is Bob? What is the impact on Bob's family, friends, and co-workers? Is society better off having a policy of arresting people in Alice's situation? And imprisoning them? Or socially disapproving of such action? When you learn that Alice stabbed Bob, how do you feel about it?
This is vaguely the lines which you'd take to talk about human morality in terms of behavior and mental states. This is not an exhaustive breakdown, and there's some parts that "morality" still claims afterwards. The point is that there's only so many things that people can mean by putting moral judgement on something, and there's nothing left when you've addressed them all. Addressing the pieces is usually done by going to human behavior and experiences.
Circling back to people thinking homosexuality is bad - we can make moral judgements about moral judgements. Statements like "'Thinking homosexuality is morally wrong' causes a great deal of pain for the people I care about."
Minor quibble: at one point, scientists believed that you couldn't prove whether or not two particles were identical in every respect. "I don't think that it's possible to prove X" isn't a proof that it's impossible to prove X. I'd rephrase that quote as "I don't know what a proof of X would look like."
>The trouble is that answering all of those questions still doesn't tell you whether it's right or wrong.
If you answer all the subquestions, then whether it's right or wrong doesn't matter. Let's take a much simpler, analogous question to illustrate the process:
"If a tree falls in a forest, and nobody is around to hear it, does it make a sound?"
The controversial part of this is what people mean by "makes a sound". It's easier to break down here because there are only two senses of the it - vibrations in the air versus the qualitative experience of hearing. Once you've answered that it makes vibrations in the air but doesn't cause a hearing experience, whether or not it "makes a sound" doesn't tell you anything about what to expect.
Similarly, if you figure out what people mean by something being "right" or "wrong", you can use those pieces to cause the things that "rightness" and "wrongness" cause without caring about the overall judgement.
I'm not sure what you mean by that. If I have a troubling ethical decision to make, I might very well answer all of your questions and still be unsure whether the action I was going to take was right or wrong.
The trouble is that answering all of those questions still doesn't tell you whether it's right or wrong. (Also, you formulated some of your questions using equally value-loaded terms, such as "better off".)
FWIW I agree with you despite the downvotes you are receiving. So don't feel alone just because your comment sits at minus whatever.
I think the hangup people have is the mistaken idea that analyzing morality devalues it. But that's not the case. It does allow us to identify and discard obsolete morals (witness the sweeping acceptance of gay marriage), but those that survive are stronger for it.
People have a very good reason to be wary of analyzing morality. The analysis falls short of fulfilling all the complicated things that people value, so almost without fail the analysis misses something important and you wind up with an abomination. As an example, a total utilitarian deciding to maximize total utility by spamming warehouses full of awesome living environments for rats.
This, and most of the other arguments in the whole thread, are so highly simplistic. The links between science and humanity are many and complex, and vice versa. There is no winner, there is no right side. They build on each other, enhance each other, and neither science not the humanities has any real meaning in isolation.
Really, the whole dichotomous argument between the two is absolutely ridiculous. We need fewer people on the sides and more who are truly bridges.
you have to wonder if there is some magnetism in people which draws them to polarizing topics (both to build polarizing arguments, and to engage in them). Maybe it's as simple as we are highly competitive, and in the absence of competition, we create rifts just so we can establish who is greater?
Ask Oppenheimer, after the first atomic bomb test, if morality is above science.
"We waited until the blast had passed, walked out of the shelter and then it was extremely solemn. We knew the world would not be the same. A few people laughed, a few people cried. Most people were silent. I remembered the line from the Hindu scripture, the Bhagavad Gita: Vishnu is trying to persuade the prince that he should do his duty, and to impress him he takes on his multiarmed form and says, 'Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.'"
Suicide bombers see a different purpose to their lives than (presumably) you and I do. By their own measure they are not doing badly, they are doing quite well.
Or consider Richard Dawkin's famous criticisms of Mother Theresa. Mother Theresa unashamedly put religion ahead material comfort among the poor she ministered too. To say she was wrong in so doing is not a statement of fact. It is a statement of ones personal values.
>Suicide bombers see a different purpose to their lives than (presumably) you and I do. By their own measure they are not doing badly, they are doing quite well.
And objectively, suicide bombers are dead, which puts them far behind those of us who remain alive -- at least, by any sensible measure. Of course, when you unravel the story behind the average suicide bomber, you usually find that they were shamed or pressured into the deed, and in fact, have not accomplished, in committing a suicide bombing, all their own noble goals in life.
They are actually sad, pathetic people exploited by powerful clerics to be turned into little more than explosive puppets.
It's question begging because 'any sensible measure' is meant to exclude the subjective measure by which suicide bombers are valuing their own lives. The whole point is that their worldview -- what is important, what is to be valued during our brief time on earth, etc. -- is radically different than yours or mine.
And yet the only argument I seem to get in favor of the worldview that (I believe) you and I largely share is "C'mon. Don't be silly.", which might be rhetorically effective, but is not evidence based.
The important difference is that I am willing to accept that I believe it without proof. You see and the parent seem to need to claim it's 'scientific' and 'rational' to embrace a worldview which values life, freedom, knowledge, etc.
Empirically, its obvious. Most people on the planet value these things. Societies are under selection pressure like organisms. So these things must be advantageous to societies.
So you're willing abandon good and evil in favor of selection pressure? That is to say suicide bombers aren't wrong, they're just the light-colored moths of our day?
The existence of personal values is a fact that has biological and cultural origins that can be studied.
Also, you are conflating one person's opinion with science.
On the subject of cultural differences in morality, these can be surveyed empirically and considered within a framework of natural selection (both biological and cultural). One can choose to derive any moral framework they wish, but scientifically speaking, the moral frameworks that survive are those that can yield the greatest memetic survival advantage of the framework itself.
However it does not follow that the scientific method is the only way to knowledge. It also does not follow that all true knowledge, or even a fraction of it can be acquired through the scientific method.
We would have to agree on the definition of "true knowledge" to come to a complete understanding of each other's positions, but I'll take a stab at justifying my opinion that science is the only possible source for all "true knowledge". I'll define "true" as empirically tested and repeatable by others, and "knowledge" as statements about something tangible (e.g. brains), or about intangible concepts embodied within tangible things (e.g. brains thinking about ideas).
One needn't fully accept these definitions for the argument to hold, if one accepts that personal experience is a source of personal knowledge. Basically, if we consider all the claimed sources of knowledge, and consider which "way" of knowing applies in the most places, gains the most new knowledge over time, and has the best track record for producing societal advancements of knowledge and technology, the only "way of knowing" left standing is science.
You also mention "life purpose" and "knowledge is good" as counterevidence to science. But scientifically speaking, there is no objective purpose or objective good. There is only natural selection favoring the evolution of a desire for knowledge. That desire can be studied scientifically via neurology and related disciplines.
Ultimately, your 'justification' is just an assertion that if it doesn't come via the scientific method, either its not true or its not science.
I wouldn't call the idea that "Knowledge is good", wisdom is better than ignorance, and freedom is better than slavery, etc. counterevidence. But I believe they are true things which I cannot prove via any sort of experiment, in particular because 'good' and 'better' are of necessity subjective.
I don't think you can dismiss my line of reasoning by saying "ultimately" and then saying something I didn't say at all.
It seems that we indeed cannot agree on a useful shared definition of "true". The laws of physics are ultimately indifferent to our notions of truth, and yet our notions of truth are instantiated as emergent phenomena within physics.
> It always feels like they are trying to make the last stand of humanitarian values against the dictat of science.
Except for that in reality the legitimacy of science becomes more and more tenuous with each passing year. In the past 40+ years there have been few if any major advances in the scientific process that have seen wide adoption, despite the innumerable problems that have come to light. And not only have there been no major improvements, but things have actually gotten significantly worse thanks to the corporatization and gamification of academia, the increasing use of proprietary technologies and source code, etc.
True, but humanitarian values do not need a last stand. So how do you discuss with someone being this radical with reasonable arguments? I don't feel like "you can't" is an answer :/
This is why the liberal arts are, in fact, so critically important. It's difficult to understand the beauty of knowledge and science without also understanding it's humanity, and conversely, it's difficult to fully understand humanities without also understanding knowledge, how we know things, and the profound reality of the world around us.
Furthermore, a scientist well versed in the humanities almost to the point of spirituality will have a much easier time translating knowledge between the logical and the human. Both are intertwined, and both contain mountains of truth, and each is made better by the other.
Why does one have to trust science, or what we think of the scientific process today? Does science enable us to do things in the "reality" that one and others may perceive than without it? I'd think yes. Is the way we go about it now, forever the most optimal for constructing such things? Probably not, but humans are probably closer to a local maxima constrained by all the things that make the process inefficient now… which to be fair, I don't think is limited to science but how we are as humans.
this same essay could have been written exactly as is but with the tone of 'you are so right, here are some examples' but instead he chose to try to make a fan feel like an asshole..
this is my biggest problem with degrasse tyson.. he goes out of his way to make himself a public figure in science but uses the information he has accumulated to make people think they know so much less than he
a perfect example was when he visited the daily show, twice, and complained, jokingly, that the earth was spinning backward in the opening graphic
that graphic was made by some artist and now tyson is using his acquired information to ridicule the individual's effort
if you are knowledgeable then use that knowledge to lift people up
how can we have a graphic of the earth spinning backwards?
perhaps the camera has a capture rate that makes the earth appear to spin backwards, like car tires in films..
or maybe you could talk about geosynchronous orbit and angular momentum and really make people think you know more than them all the while lending excuse for why the earth is spinning backwards..
isaac, you got called out on some stupid thing you said out of a myriad of other entertaining things you have said, have some grace.. or at least a sense of humour
hmmm - re asimov: he received a letter from a fan severely lecturing him on a subject. He appears to have read it thoughtfully and then responded in kind - severely, but fairly thoughtfully and with detail.
When I send someone a pithy email/comment on a subject and they respond like asimov did -- its pretty cool to me, even though to an observer it may appear somewhat dickish.
i recognise the strengths in being able to determine if the kid 'had it coming' but still isaac was in the position of power here, and to me it reads like he was embarrassed to be called out by someone he feels unworthy of correcting him
The lack of capitalization and most punctuation makes that jarring to read, which is why I downvoted you from my normal account. (Commenting to let you know why using a throwaway because I believe that if one both replies and downvotes the downvote is removed.)
It is only because the difference between the
rate of change in a static universe and the
rate of change in an evolutionary one is that
between zero and very nearly zero that the
creationists can continue propagating their
folly.
Well, there's still another part sneaking past the fact that biological differentiation occurs at geological time scales: We haven't been around long enough to witness and record an actual "smoking gun" event, that clearly demonstrates the emergence of a completely new plant or animal.
We're aware of things like the three-toed horse, and we know they used to exist. But that's just a small difference on an animal that still exists, and other than that whole thing with the toes, it's still pretty much the same thing. We've seen lots of animals disappear, but nothing replacing them.
Maybe insects are a ripe branch of animals that will bear some fruit, since their life cycles are so short, but otherwise, for the most part, modern theory points out that not only will none of us see a new, radically different class of creatures emerge within our own lifetimes, but not even within the projected limits of our modern civilizations and their effective capacity to record history will we be likely to observe such an event.
So, neither since the start of our recorded history, nor until after the history we do manage to record starts to disappear beyond the possibility of rediscoverable recognition by the next order of civilization which may arrise, shall a truly different creature spring forth from the free-for-all of biological propagation.
In other words, we've never actually experienced a period where a certain life form did not exist and then emerged from some other thing, and we'll probably never get a chance to see such a thing happen, not in 5 million years, and even if we do spot a new previously undiscovered animal, and it turns out to be an example of the emergence of a new and distinctly different animal, even if it makes it into the history books, and the animal is hardy enough to persist in nature, our history books won't last forever, and after we're gone, the next civilized culture (human or oherwise) might not find them, and learn to read them before they disintegrate into unrecognizable ash and dust. But we know it's there. We're sure evolution isn't just a theory.
And so too, are we faced with a scenario, whereby even if hypothetical civilized lizard people of the dinosaur era had been there to witness a new class of rodents spring forth, the records of their culture that we do find might not include that one passage. And so too, with civilized trilobite scholars, if they were there to see the original sharks and amphibians emerge, and wrote it down, we'd probably never find that chapter in the trilobite bible where they realized what they had just seen.
That's a tough idea to pitch to people, and in casual conversations at dinner parties, it's devestatingly easy to stymie people who try to explain it.
It's not arrogance, it's authority. Just because someone might have a better idea than you does not mean you have to agree with people spewing stupidities. Especially when the said people didn't even bother coming up with their own stupidities (which warrants at least a modicum of respect).
Perhaps you might re-read the first paragraph which ends with but I am very aware of the vast state of my ignorance and I am prepared to learn as much as I can from anyone, so I read on.
Science is an attempt to explain why Nature is the way it is. Collect data, make a prediction, test it, revise the prediction, rinse, repeat. Granted, there are belief systems aplenty in scientific work (string theory?) but as Kuhn has written, sometimes Nature laughs and forces a change.
And Asimov's "level of error" discussion is valid. Newtonian physics, while "wrong" is perfectly useful when aiming spacecraft away from the sun. Box: "All models are wrong. Some models are useful". And Feynman's talked about this as well.