They're Wrong About - lydgate/mindmeld GitHub Wiki

A list of arguments against "truths" which seem to be self-evident but are probably wrong, or at the very least ought to be interrogated (in no order).

  1. there is no truth at all; more specifically:
    • there are probably no laws of physics that stand across all levels of observation
      • the laws of physics probably emerge as a statistical regularity or "pattern" at a remove from the (prodigious) quantities they describe
      • biology may also have "laws" if you had 1x10^35 instances and didn't care about any individual organism and didn't try to predict what any single one would do
      • history may also have "laws" if you had 1x10^35 instances and didn't care about any individual civilization and didn't try to predict what any single one would do
    • the scientific method is likely not the best way to approximate "truth"
      • Kuhn: nobody follows the scientific method; they just solve puzzles.
      • Feyerabend: there is no scientific method.
    • truth is a contextual process not an object, ideal, thing
    • truth is qualitative/comparative/expansive and not quantitative/definitive/reductive
    • science is value-laden though in what senses we probably need to discuss
    • Polanyi: there are no bare facts in science. All data collection involves theoretical assumptions.
    • Contra Popper: Evidence cannot really falsify a theory, because every theory actually involves a web of theories, and you cannot tell which part of it is wrong (Duhem). Moreover, scientists are not instructed to challenge theories; they only do this in times of crisis (Kuhn).
    • science is consensus building through a trusted authority, and more like a literary canon than like the Catholic canon (when it is working well).
    • when it is working well, science is anarchic and bottom-up (Kuhn, Polanyi, Taleb). When it becomes top-down it becomes even less able to revise/falsify/challenge theories.
    • maybe look into Latour if we're interested.
    • Critically, this does not mean that there is no truth, or everything is relative, or that all paradigms/worldviews are created equal. Quite the opposite: it's a reminder that they all involve consensus and ethics, and to pretend that they don't can lead to catastrophes or stasis. They're about what works, just like an organism's relationship to its environment. There need not be any optimum. There are many approaches, and they involve deeply complex trade-offs.
  2. self harm/cutting could actually be adaptive rather than pathological; (B: what if inflammation is desirable if you're likely to be in a gang shootout or something; The point of vaccines is to prime the immune system to have a much stronger response later? Slavich says that NSSI produces more cytokines which increase neural threat activity. If your brain knows (but your body doesn't) that you're about to fight, it might make sense to be more awake, alert, wary)); cutting, triggering the physiological alarm bells, could efficiently prepare the system to take on the anticipated threat.
  3. Kuhn: outdated theories may be just as internally consistent and even produce better empirical results than the theories that replace it (Ptolemy predicted things better than Newton for ages; phlogiston had a better explanation for combustion). Possibly all theories are a matter of emphasis. They're not all equal. But you may have to make sacrifices in changing them, and you may wind up changing back. Remember, Aristotle's physics are closer to Einstein's than either of them are to Newton, suggesting cyclicality.
  4. Jaynes: if people say they hear gods, why would we doubt them?
    • Religions are not about belief, they are about rituals, explanations, social binding, and phenomenology.
  5. Individual identity is likely produced by social identity and punishment.
    • Individual consciousness does not precede collective consciousness, but may be a completely incoherent idea without extremely sophisticated intersubjective interactions.
  6. Feeling comes first. What appears to be reason or rational is almost always a post-hoc rationalization. Even best efforts involve worldviews which may be incommensurable.
  7. Culture begins long before humans and may contain things as basic as imitation.
  8. Induction precedes deduction and deduction itself may not be possible without it.
  9. There is probably no sense in which the social sciences will stack cleanly onto biology, but more than that, there's no sense in which biology will cleanly stack onto chemistry or chemistry onto physics, or even subspecialties be compatible with each other. It's probably better to think of them as branches of language or thought than it is to think of them as fitting together in any "objective" sense.
  10. Corporal punishment, capital punishment, and human sacrifice were atrocities, but they were also instrumental in producing scalable societies in which individuals don't need to be punished or executed (because they monitor, discipline, and punish themselves pre-emptively).