On a related note, sometimes someone may be wrong because he knows more about the subject (but not enough).
A canonical example could be about the "leap year" rules.
For context, the Earth makes a full rotation around the Sun in about 365.2425 days, so we use leap years to compensate:
- add 1 day every 4 years (365 + 1/4 = 365.25)
- but not every 100 years (365.25 - 1/100 = 365.24)
- but add a day anyway every 400 years (365.24 + 1/400 = 365.2425)
Suppose most people only know the first part (1 additional day every 4 years). If we ask "is 2000 a leap year?", they would answer "Of course, 2000 is a multiple of 4". And they would get the correct result.
Now, suppose someone started to study the "subject" (here, there is nothing to study, this is a trivial example for illustration), and is aware of the second rule (but not the third one). He would say "Ahah, no, 2000 is not a leap year, because it is a multiple of 100". But he would get the wrong answer.
My impression is that this kind of mistakes happens often while learning a subject: by studying, we encounter exceptions or surprising facts, that we may apply too broadly (to the point we make absurd claims, but that appear absurd for the wrong reasons).
Far more broadly, think of logic as just a low-dimensional approximation of something complex.
Humans deal with logic and are taught “i before e except after c” etc. But even with describing human languages that may be inadequate.
What AI does is it essentially makes a model by which you can search a latent space quickly — both to clasify input and to generate output.
You can throw the recorded motions of the planets and stars at it and it might find physical laws that have 80 variables while humans want to deal only with simplified versions like Kepler’s laws of motion.
In the vacuum of space those laws may be enough but when it comes to the complexity of chemistry, biology, genetics, politica, etc. the AI might have way better model that we can never understand. Like for dietary recommendations. Would people follow them?
And what if they are wrong in some other ways? Like how humans beat AlphaGo through its blind spot or how you can fool face recognition by wearing a hoodie etc.
The bimodal variation of this is the famous (?) quote about the U.S. civil war, which goes something like: in elementary school, you learn the Civil War was about slavery. In high school, you learn it was about economics. In college, you learn it was actually about slavery.
There are human behaviors that appear to be entirely selected for (and then kept around via culture) [0].
In this case a population may do something like have pregnant women avoid eating sharks which are otherwise a normal part of their diet. They don't know why they don't eat the sharks, they just don't. It turns out the sharks contain something that causes birth defects. Commonly people think someone must have realized this and then that original knowledge was forgotten, but it's quite likely it was never known and the behavior was entirely selected (pregnant women that didn't eat the sharks more successfully reproduced).
When you press the women to answer why they don't know, if forced to answer they make something up (it'll give my baby shark skin).
You could imagine someone thinking that's stupid and then eating the sharks and getting a baby with birth defects.
I think this explains a lot about why superstitious belief is so common in humans and animals.
Reason is obviously selectively advantageous, but a little reason incorrectly or over confidently applied can also be harmful, most people are bad at individual reasoning (endless conspiracy theories) and are often better off with consensus.
For every contrarian that unlocks massive value by being contrarian and correct there are ten cranks that just hold false beliefs that potentially harm themselves and others.
The true expert realizes what question is being asked, and grabs a calendar.
Two people, equally knowledgeable and given the same problem, will not necessarily come up with the same solution. Leap years are not a mathematical fact; they are an engineering solution to a mathematical challenge. An expert looking at orbits is unlikely to decide that we must specifically add an extra day to February; you only know that we use this solution by deriving it from calendars.
This follows a pattern I've noticed where an expert's approach may seem similar to a pure novice's. With only the intermediate practitioner seeming to follow any rules.
Socrates then, by a series of ignorant-sounding questions, forced the others into such a mélange of self-contradictions that they would finally break down and admit they didn't know what they were talking about.
It is the mark of the marvelous toleration of the Athenians that they let this continue for decades and that it wasn't till Socrates turned seventy that they broke down and forced him to drink poison.
It's seldom pleasant to be (accurately) instructed in your own ignorance, particularly by someone pretending not to know anything. Asimov's theory that Socrates' death was a result of his habit of patronizing everyone rather than the actual charges is plausible.
Also, in internet arguments, there's nothing more infuriating than the other person appointing themselves as some kind of modern-day Socrates and "teaching" you.
There can be a balance here. Often I’ll have a viewpoint and when I hear a different one, I won’t immediately say I disagree. Instead I’ll ask questions to discover where the gap in our understanding lies. Then, it may be helpful to share that I have additional knowledge (I’d I do), or to learn something I was missing, or to recognize we value different things and move on. Immediate disagreement is often far less productive.
Like many people, I took a college course that talked all about Socrates and we read the Apologia and stuff.
I had assumed that it was basically all fiction. That there was some guy who kept being annoying by asking questions, so much so that he was put to death, it's just a little too cute to be historical fact.
And that all of us discussing this stuff as if it actually happened is actually just an exercise in reiterating the truthiness of the underlying idea; that if we said it was fiction at the start, we'd be doing lit analysis, rather than philosophy.
The impressive thing about Asimov — incidental to the quality of the writing — is he probably sat down and blasted that out in an hour top-to-bottom with no edits.
Volumetrically one of the most impressive authors in history.
Interestingly, this highlights that despite popular belief, the scientific process is not about being right or wrong but rather what's powerful.
A theory is promoted because it is powerful in explaining observations and providing tools for humanity until it is improved by the next one. You can build a gun with gravitation but you need relativity for a rocket.
Quoting from the article "Newton's theory of gravitation, while incomplete over vast distances and enormous speeds, is perfectly suitable for the Solar System. Halley's Comet appears punctually as Newton's theory of gravitation and laws of motion predict. All of rocketry is based on Newton, and Voyager II reached Uranus within a second of the predicted time. None of these things were outlawed by relativity."
We need relativity to correct the atomic clocks on GPS satellites so as to maintain positional accuracy to a few feet, but getting the satellites up there needed only Newtonian mechanics.
> the scientific process is not about being right or wrong but rather what's powerful.
Ugh, this is something that bothers me all to hell and back about the non-scientific minded.
"Your science was wrong about (this minute detail), therefore whatever completely made up bullshit I thought up without any supporting evidence is totally valid"
I’m glad he decided to invent an English Literature correspondent to pick on, and also the 1990s was a better society than one that votes to poison a disliked person.
As much as I enjoy Asimov, I have to say that he is wrong. The gap between what we know and what is true might have decreased immensely, but it is still infinite. Any quantifiable increase is 0 in relation to infinity. Asimov's counter-argument that we are quantifiably less wrong than we were in the past simply does not overcome this core issue. If there is an infinite amount of knowledge separating what we know from what is true, then we can learn an infinite amount of things and still have an infinite amount of things left to learn.
To feel justified in thinking the universe is "essentially" understood is to be OK with one's concept of the "essential nature" of the universe to be inherently divergent from a future concept, which according to Asimov's own argument is going to be more correct than our own.
To me, it reads as a bitterness towards mortality, a sort of sour grapes: the insights we will have about the universe at some future time must not be very interesting compared to what we know now, because I won't be around to know them.
edit: I guess I shouldn't be surprised that Asimov's perspective is shared here. It's very easy to understand the essential nature of the universe when you define the universe as the parts you understand.
I don't think human beings in 1000 years will look at our current understanding as special in any way. As transformative as our era is, it will be dwarfed by the scale of transformation in future eras. It's just the most transformative era so far. That's temporal bias, nothing more.
One way to see Asimov's "infinity of wrongness" is perhaps as a fractal. You could view the bulbs in the mandelbrot as being a kind of knowledge, and the "main bulb" occupying the majority of the area belonging to the set as the set of truths known about our universe. The mandelbrot set is infinite in complexity, however its area is finite and bounded!
Or as ironing out the wrinkles on a great big t-shirt, where each wrinkle is sub-wrinkled with smaller wrinkles and so on. We've "ironed out" the biggest wrinkles, there are infinitely more but they are much smaller. We're perhaps over half-way ironed, in a quantitative sense.
I think you missed the entire point of the essay. You should actually read it.
Science is incremental, revolutions in science mostly just adjust the edges of our knowledge, at more and more extreme corner cases (extreme high energies, extreme high/low temperatures, etc). No, we absolutely don't know it all, but as always, new knowledge and theories will only affect those edges, and refine the predictions for the nth+1 decimal place.
By and by, the science that directly affects our daily lives has remained stable and most progress has been in the engineering to put all this knowledge to practical and efficient use.
I think your use of infinity isn't particularly helpful here as it leads to the contradiction that knowing more doesn't lessen the knowledge gap, whereas it does appear to do so.
Maybe, a better interpretation would be that as we learn and understand more, we approach the limits of knowledge. Now it may take an infinite amount of knowledge to actually reach the limits of knowledge (c.f. an infinite series can approach a finite value, but takes forever to get there), but it can still be shown that we are getting nearer.
The other aspect is that as we understand more, we appreciate that there's even more to understand, but that can be thought of as our precision increasing and looking at the available knowledge in greater detail.
> The gap between what we know and what is true might have decreased immensely, but it is still infinite.
The other two commenters have taken different approaches to infinity, but it seems that your argument doesn't hold even for a plain-as-in-real-numbers infinity.
Being satisfied with finite knowledge gains, I have no hope to achieve 1% of infinity (or any other fraction of infinity).
The universe is infinite in size, another assumption. If I'd fly on vacation to Tenerife, a quantifiable shift of my position by mere thousands of miles would be "zero in relation to infinity". Yet, it's not unimportant for my rest. Talking about infinity doesn't automatically cancel all the finite measurements and bring them to zero.
I think people just yearn for certainties and unchangeable anchors in reality, which is why the beliefs that something is designed made by one constant being or force of nature are so prevalent.
"You told me this is reality and now it changed, why I should believe in it again?"
Schools don't get into people's heads how science works enough, and how it is less "discovering the truth" and more "narrowing the uncertainty on how stuff works"
Well. For me, Immanuel Kants' (1724-1804) "Ding an sich" (The thing in itself) lays the groundwork for modern science. My translation would be: "Since our senses are so easily fooled, we will never grasp the thing in itself." IMAO a reasonable scientist says: "We can only say what is least likely wrong." Can you win elections with sentences like these?
It is an over reaction, but it is true. in both fields.
Scientific: scientific knowledge on a subject is never solved. it merely approaches the solution. it was wrong in the past, it is less wrong today, but still wrong.
Cultural: The cultural truths of today were wrong in the past and will be wrong in the future.
I think the correct take away is not so much "nothing can be trusted" as it is "trust, but verify"
"Virtually all that we know today, however, would remain untouched and when I say I am glad that I live in a century when the Universe is essentially understood, I think I am justified."
I think most people at most times would have agreed with that.
But the difference would be in the meaning of "the Universe"; the "basic rules of gravity" would hardly be the important part to most peoples at most times.
Oh, and...
"I received a letter from a reader the other day. It was handwritten in crabbed penmanship so that it was very difficult to read....however low on the social scale..."
Nice.
"*I received a letter from a reader the other day. It was handwritten in crabbed penmanship so that it was very difficult to read.
I get the sense that Dr. Asimov was too little of a "people person" to usefully discuss the all-too-common human urge to tell others that you are right, and they are wrong. Or positive ways to handle that urge.
OTOH, he may have been quite aware that "read more Asimov, and be more smug about being right more often" was a major motive for people buying his non-fiction writing.
Asimov was a people person though. He wasn't a nerd in the typical sense; he went to parties, conventions, meetings, mingled with people, belonged to multiple clubs, etc.
From Wikipedia:
> "Asimov was an able public speaker and was regularly hired to give talks about science. He was a frequent participant at science fiction conventions, where he was friendly and approachable. He patiently answered tens of thousands of questions and other mail with postcards and was pleased to give autographs."
I think that, in driving home a valid point, this essay gives the wrong impression of Asimov as someone who would scold his readers.
> Those people who think they know everything are a great annoyance to those of us who do. -- Isaac Asimov
Useful discussion is an interesting scope for someone with the broad, in-depth knowledge of a vast array of subjects he demonstrates in the linked essay.
Funny, if you like this particular variety of snark. But there's a huge bait and switch in the argument. The English major doubts that we have "finally got the basis of the Universe straight" (in Asimov's words). But Asmimov's primary example of the "relativity of wrong" is the shape of the Earth, which is a particular fact about a particular object. Being charitable, almost no-one (not even the kind of English Lit majors that HN loves to hate!) doubts that we can learn facts about the shape and size of particular objects. It doesn't necessarily follow from this that we should be optimistic about the fundamental correctness of our best theories in the physical sciences. As the English Lit major was no doubt aware, there were plenty of people at the turn of the 20th century who thought that physics was basically finished and that there was nothing left to do except add more decimal places to the results.
I don't think that's quite right. Another example given by Asimov is Newton's equations, which are obviously not facts about a particular object. We still today accept them as right (in the right contexts), teach them in universities, and use them when they're useful.
I think Asimov's point is that if someone in Newton's time said "I'm glad to live in a time when we finally understand everything there is to know about the motion of cannon balls", they'd be justified: even though technically there were relativistic corrections to be made, they're pretty much irrelevant for the stated purposes (understanding how cannonballs move). And so in the same way he thinks he's justified in saying that in the 20th century we finally understood the basics of the Universe, even though we still don't know (in his words):
> the nature of the big bang and the creation of the Universe, the properties at the center of black holes, some subtle points about the evolution of galaxies and supernovas, and so on
> It doesn't necessarily follow from this that we should be optimistic about the fundamental correctness of our best theories in the physical sciences.
The disagreement was over the universe, so my first question is: does "the universe" include humans, or not (and: who decides the fact of the matter)? Because all one has to do is watch the news to realize we certainly don't have everything fully figured out....I often wonder if our (from my vantage point anyways) belief that we "pretty much"[1] do may exacerbate this.
[1] Colloquial language, figures of speech, etc are a fantastic and endless source of delusion, that typically cannot be realized.
The real response to the guy is, "so what". Who cares if we used to be wrong, that's how empiricism works, we posit falsifiable claims until they're proven wrong.
Every VC and founder needs to read this post - there are no absolute rights or wrongs. So, whatever worked for Google will not work for Instacart.. whatever thesis of investing worked in the last decade will not work in the next decade.. Start from first principles!
I guess all models are wrong but some of them are useful. And more useful than others—
> In the first sentence, he told me he was majoring in English Literature, but felt he needed to teach me science. (I sighed a bit, for I knew very few English Lit majors who are equipped to teach me science, 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, however low on the social scale, so I read on.)
[+] [-] rom1v|2 years ago|reply
A canonical example could be about the "leap year" rules.
For context, the Earth makes a full rotation around the Sun in about 365.2425 days, so we use leap years to compensate:
- add 1 day every 4 years (365 + 1/4 = 365.25)
- but not every 100 years (365.25 - 1/100 = 365.24)
- but add a day anyway every 400 years (365.24 + 1/400 = 365.2425)
Suppose most people only know the first part (1 additional day every 4 years). If we ask "is 2000 a leap year?", they would answer "Of course, 2000 is a multiple of 4". And they would get the correct result.
Now, suppose someone started to study the "subject" (here, there is nothing to study, this is a trivial example for illustration), and is aware of the second rule (but not the third one). He would say "Ahah, no, 2000 is not a leap year, because it is a multiple of 100". But he would get the wrong answer.
My impression is that this kind of mistakes happens often while learning a subject: by studying, we encounter exceptions or surprising facts, that we may apply too broadly (to the point we make absurd claims, but that appear absurd for the wrong reasons).
[+] [-] EGreg|2 years ago|reply
Humans deal with logic and are taught “i before e except after c” etc. But even with describing human languages that may be inadequate.
What AI does is it essentially makes a model by which you can search a latent space quickly — both to clasify input and to generate output.
You can throw the recorded motions of the planets and stars at it and it might find physical laws that have 80 variables while humans want to deal only with simplified versions like Kepler’s laws of motion.
In the vacuum of space those laws may be enough but when it comes to the complexity of chemistry, biology, genetics, politica, etc. the AI might have way better model that we can never understand. Like for dietary recommendations. Would people follow them?
And what if they are wrong in some other ways? Like how humans beat AlphaGo through its blind spot or how you can fool face recognition by wearing a hoodie etc.
[+] [-] karaterobot|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] yllautcaj|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ilyt|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gonehome|2 years ago|reply
There are human behaviors that appear to be entirely selected for (and then kept around via culture) [0].
In this case a population may do something like have pregnant women avoid eating sharks which are otherwise a normal part of their diet. They don't know why they don't eat the sharks, they just don't. It turns out the sharks contain something that causes birth defects. Commonly people think someone must have realized this and then that original knowledge was forgotten, but it's quite likely it was never known and the behavior was entirely selected (pregnant women that didn't eat the sharks more successfully reproduced).
When you press the women to answer why they don't know, if forced to answer they make something up (it'll give my baby shark skin).
You could imagine someone thinking that's stupid and then eating the sharks and getting a baby with birth defects.
I think this explains a lot about why superstitious belief is so common in humans and animals.
Reason is obviously selectively advantageous, but a little reason incorrectly or over confidently applied can also be harmful, most people are bad at individual reasoning (endless conspiracy theories) and are often better off with consensus.
For every contrarian that unlocks massive value by being contrarian and correct there are ten cranks that just hold false beliefs that potentially harm themselves and others.
[0]: https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/06/04/book-review-the-secret...
[+] [-] behnamoh|2 years ago|reply
- Knowledge = little ==> little creativity to add something new
- Knowledge = mid ==> great creativity
- Knowledge = high ==> little creativity to add something new
[+] [-] banannaise|2 years ago|reply
Two people, equally knowledgeable and given the same problem, will not necessarily come up with the same solution. Leap years are not a mathematical fact; they are an engineering solution to a mathematical challenge. An expert looking at orbits is unlikely to decide that we must specifically add an extra day to February; you only know that we use this solution by deriving it from calendars.
[+] [-] ndsipa_pomu|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|2 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] sopooneo|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hsod|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hirundo|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] the_af|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tacitusarc|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mlsu|2 years ago|reply
I had assumed that it was basically all fiction. That there was some guy who kept being annoying by asking questions, so much so that he was put to death, it's just a little too cute to be historical fact.
And that all of us discussing this stuff as if it actually happened is actually just an exercise in reiterating the truthiness of the underlying idea; that if we said it was fiction at the start, we'd be doing lit analysis, rather than philosophy.
Right?
[+] [-] justrealist|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] LucasLanglois|2 years ago|reply
A theory is promoted because it is powerful in explaining observations and providing tools for humanity until it is improved by the next one. You can build a gun with gravitation but you need relativity for a rocket.
[+] [-] jgeada|2 years ago|reply
We need relativity to correct the atomic clocks on GPS satellites so as to maintain positional accuracy to a few feet, but getting the satellites up there needed only Newtonian mechanics.
[+] [-] feoren|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pixl97|2 years ago|reply
Ugh, this is something that bothers me all to hell and back about the non-scientific minded.
"Your science was wrong about (this minute detail), therefore whatever completely made up bullshit I thought up without any supporting evidence is totally valid"
[+] [-] beebmam|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] uranusjr|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dang|2 years ago|reply
The Relativity of Wrong (1989) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29811788 - Jan 2022 (5 comments)
The Relativity of Wrong (1989) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24055125 - Aug 2020 (2 comments)
The Relativity of Wrong (1989) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17818069 - Aug 2018 (11 comments)
The Relativity of Wrong (1989) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13082585 - Dec 2016 (16 comments)
The Relativity of Wrong by Isaac Asimov (1989) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11654774 - May 2016 (60 comments)
Isaac Asimov: The Relativity of Wrong (1989) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9629797 - May 2015 (138 comments)
Isaac Asimov - The Relativity of Wrong (1989) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1147968 - Feb 2010 (32 comments)
[+] [-] fnovd|2 years ago|reply
To feel justified in thinking the universe is "essentially" understood is to be OK with one's concept of the "essential nature" of the universe to be inherently divergent from a future concept, which according to Asimov's own argument is going to be more correct than our own.
To me, it reads as a bitterness towards mortality, a sort of sour grapes: the insights we will have about the universe at some future time must not be very interesting compared to what we know now, because I won't be around to know them.
edit: I guess I shouldn't be surprised that Asimov's perspective is shared here. It's very easy to understand the essential nature of the universe when you define the universe as the parts you understand.
I don't think human beings in 1000 years will look at our current understanding as special in any way. As transformative as our era is, it will be dwarfed by the scale of transformation in future eras. It's just the most transformative era so far. That's temporal bias, nothing more.
[+] [-] cnity|2 years ago|reply
Or as ironing out the wrinkles on a great big t-shirt, where each wrinkle is sub-wrinkled with smaller wrinkles and so on. We've "ironed out" the biggest wrinkles, there are infinitely more but they are much smaller. We're perhaps over half-way ironed, in a quantitative sense.
[+] [-] jgeada|2 years ago|reply
Science is incremental, revolutions in science mostly just adjust the edges of our knowledge, at more and more extreme corner cases (extreme high energies, extreme high/low temperatures, etc). No, we absolutely don't know it all, but as always, new knowledge and theories will only affect those edges, and refine the predictions for the nth+1 decimal place.
By and by, the science that directly affects our daily lives has remained stable and most progress has been in the engineering to put all this knowledge to practical and efficient use.
[+] [-] ndsipa_pomu|2 years ago|reply
Maybe, a better interpretation would be that as we learn and understand more, we approach the limits of knowledge. Now it may take an infinite amount of knowledge to actually reach the limits of knowledge (c.f. an infinite series can approach a finite value, but takes forever to get there), but it can still be shown that we are getting nearer.
The other aspect is that as we understand more, we appreciate that there's even more to understand, but that can be thought of as our precision increasing and looking at the available knowledge in greater detail.
[+] [-] kubanczyk|2 years ago|reply
The other two commenters have taken different approaches to infinity, but it seems that your argument doesn't hold even for a plain-as-in-real-numbers infinity.
Being satisfied with finite knowledge gains, I have no hope to achieve 1% of infinity (or any other fraction of infinity).
The universe is infinite in size, another assumption. If I'd fly on vacation to Tenerife, a quantifiable shift of my position by mere thousands of miles would be "zero in relation to infinity". Yet, it's not unimportant for my rest. Talking about infinity doesn't automatically cancel all the finite measurements and bring them to zero.
[+] [-] PrimeMcFly|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ilyt|2 years ago|reply
"You told me this is reality and now it changed, why I should believe in it again?"
Schools don't get into people's heads how science works enough, and how it is less "discovering the truth" and more "narrowing the uncertainty on how stuff works"
[+] [-] scns|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] alexvitkov|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] somat|2 years ago|reply
Scientific: scientific knowledge on a subject is never solved. it merely approaches the solution. it was wrong in the past, it is less wrong today, but still wrong.
Cultural: The cultural truths of today were wrong in the past and will be wrong in the future.
I think the correct take away is not so much "nothing can be trusted" as it is "trust, but verify"
[+] [-] Workaccount2|2 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] nuancebydefault|2 years ago|reply
(0) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reality_Is_Not_What_It_Seems
[+] [-] mcguire|2 years ago|reply
I think most people at most times would have agreed with that.
But the difference would be in the meaning of "the Universe"; the "basic rules of gravity" would hardly be the important part to most peoples at most times.
Oh, and...
"I received a letter from a reader the other day. It was handwritten in crabbed penmanship so that it was very difficult to read....however low on the social scale..."
Nice.
"*I received a letter from a reader the other day. It was handwritten in crabbed penmanship so that it was very difficult to read.
[+] [-] bell-cot|2 years ago|reply
OTOH, he may have been quite aware that "read more Asimov, and be more smug about being right more often" was a major motive for people buying his non-fiction writing.
[+] [-] the_af|2 years ago|reply
From Wikipedia:
> "Asimov was an able public speaker and was regularly hired to give talks about science. He was a frequent participant at science fiction conventions, where he was friendly and approachable. He patiently answered tens of thousands of questions and other mail with postcards and was pleased to give autographs."
I think that, in driving home a valid point, this essay gives the wrong impression of Asimov as someone who would scold his readers.
[+] [-] mcstafford|2 years ago|reply
Useful discussion is an interesting scope for someone with the broad, in-depth knowledge of a vast array of subjects he demonstrates in the linked essay.
[+] [-] foldr|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] moefh|2 years ago|reply
I think Asimov's point is that if someone in Newton's time said "I'm glad to live in a time when we finally understand everything there is to know about the motion of cannon balls", they'd be justified: even though technically there were relativistic corrections to be made, they're pretty much irrelevant for the stated purposes (understanding how cannonballs move). And so in the same way he thinks he's justified in saying that in the 20th century we finally understood the basics of the Universe, even though we still don't know (in his words):
> the nature of the big bang and the creation of the Universe, the properties at the center of black holes, some subtle points about the evolution of galaxies and supernovas, and so on
[+] [-] mistermann|2 years ago|reply
> It doesn't necessarily follow from this that we should be optimistic about the fundamental correctness of our best theories in the physical sciences.
The disagreement was over the universe, so my first question is: does "the universe" include humans, or not (and: who decides the fact of the matter)? Because all one has to do is watch the news to realize we certainly don't have everything fully figured out....I often wonder if our (from my vantage point anyways) belief that we "pretty much"[1] do may exacerbate this.
[1] Colloquial language, figures of speech, etc are a fantastic and endless source of delusion, that typically cannot be realized.
[+] [-] adasdasdas|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|2 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] neerajk|2 years ago|reply
Second life goal: To have corresponders
[+] [-] htoowintshein|2 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] htoowintshein|2 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] davinci123|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] avgcorrection|2 years ago|reply
> In the first sentence, he told me he was majoring in English Literature, but felt he needed to teach me science. (I sighed a bit, for I knew very few English Lit majors who are equipped to teach me science, 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, however low on the social scale, so I read on.)
I couldn't imagine writing the parenthetical.