The Relativity of Wrong by Isaac Asimov (1989)

http://chem.tufts.edu/AnswersInScience/RelativityofWrong.htm

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jcoffland6• 10 years ago

Since there are infinite things about which we are wrong and only a finite number of things we are right about learning one more thing does not make us any less wrong. Take that Asimov.

ominous• 10 years ago

Thus, the point is not to be right or wrong, but to improve?

sailingparrot• 10 years ago

Since we are able to reason by deduction and learning, there is an infinite number of things about which we are right.

jcoffland6• 10 years ago

I don't see how that follows. There are a finite number of humans each with finite capacity for knowledge and infinite capacity for ignorance.

munchbunny• 10 years ago

While I could see plenty of mathematical/philosophical arguments that you would be correct, I don't see how this is a useful statement, unless its implication is that science actually doesn't move our understanding of the world forward. Then we have a real disagreement.

jcoffland6• 10 years ago

The implication is that we should be humble about what we do know. Pop science is always going on about how great we are at AI, gene editing, quantum computing, drug design, etc. but when you really start to dig in to these topics it's much more amazing how primitive our understanding really is. It's no surprise that we awe ourselves.

jordan0day• 10 years ago

Since there are infinite things about which we are wrong

That's... ahem... wrong.

How could there possibly be an infinite number of things "we" (humanity, I presume?) are wrong about, given that there have only been a finite number of human beings with (as far as I know) finite life spans?

jcoffland6• 10 years ago

It's quite simple. I am assuming there are an infinite number of things to know. That which we do not know we are wrong about.

mwfunk• 10 years ago

The point is that we are wrong about everything to one degree or another. Maturing intellectually is a never ending process of becoming less wrong about the things we choose to study, but at no point do we ever cross a finish line and become right about anything. As soon as you think you're right about something, the only thing you can be certain of is that you're wrong.

sunshiney2• 10 years ago

I think a more accurate observation is that we always exist in a state of incomplete understanding and we will never achieve full understanding. Wrong and right connote a state of absolutes that are often relative and even if not, their usage assumes there will be an end point to deeper levels of understanding. I think not. :-)

simulate• 10 years ago

This essay reminds me of George Box's famous and often misused statement that "All models are wrong, but some are useful."

A spherical earth model is useful and a flat earth model is not. Also, as Asimov explains here, wrong is relative and a spherical model of the earth is much less wrong than a flat earth model.

nitrogen3• 10 years ago

In fairness, a flat earth model is still useful for navigation within limited distances.

13of403• 10 years ago

In fairness, the vast majority of the models of the earth people use day-to-day are flat. Case in point: https://www.google.com/maps/@43.0279156,-94.0814245,3z

schoen• 10 years ago

You can even use a flat Earth model for navigation over long distances -- you just might not get the most optimal route, and your map projection (if you're using a map!) will distort something. But it might not be something that you're very concerned about for your particular navigation purposes.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theorema_Egregium

ThomPete7• 10 years ago

Flat earth is totally fine as long as you need to simply go from village a to b and it's not too much of a distance.

So all models are wrong but some are indeed useful.

Darwins theory (and later modernizations) are indeed wrong (as in not true) but it's the most useful model we have.

pdonis10• 10 years ago

Darwins theory (and later modernizations) are indeed wrong (as in not true)

Not true in what sense?

TheOtherHobbes• 10 years ago

Flat earth is totally fine as long as you need to simply go from village a to b and it's not too much of a distance.

Which is a more useful way of looking at it. Theories have a predictive horizon. The point of science is to increase the predictive horizon.

But the other side of that is the ability to create new classes of technology.

Electromagnetic theory, relativity and quantum theory are lot more than a tweak on the Newtonian world view. They make it possible to build completely new kinds of technology that are impossible if all you have is Newton.

Suggesting that everything is a process of gradual refinement to an increasing number of decimal places is a wrong theory about theories.

There's a lot more to science snd technology than the orbit of Mercury.

Darwins theory (and later modernizations) are indeed wrong (as in not true) but it's the most useful model we have.

That may baffle people, but the problem with the Darwinian view is that it's based on the principle that species evolve - when in fact ecosystem evolve, in the sense that flows of chemicals, information, and energy self-organise into more or less stable configurations.

Species evolution is an interesting epiphenomenon on top of that. But assuming it's all there is to know about natural history is like trying to understand meteorology by classifying icebergs. You're going to catch some of the more obvious patterns, but more complex relationships are going to elude you.

Modelling ecosystems is a very useful skill - especially for long space flight - and it turns out we're still incredibly bad at it, precisely because naive Darwinism doesn't have the predictive horizon to deal with the problem in a useful way.

Without a good theory, systems tend to diverge into instability and everything dies, no matter how fast adaptation happens - which isn't usually the outcome you want.

simonh• 10 years ago

a flat earth model is not

I'd highly recommend reading the article again a little more carefully.

slavik81• 10 years ago

When I worked on mapping software, we actually had a few options for calculating angles and distances. If points were near enough, we'd use a flat Earth approximation to speed up the calculations.

13of403• 10 years ago

"...the Greek philosopher Eratosthenes noted that the sun cast a shadow of different lengths at different latitudes (all the shadows would be the same length if the earth's surface were flat)."

This is an interesting statement, because it means he had some idea of how far away the sun was from the Earth. If it was, say, a thousand miles up, you'd see huge differences in shadow length depending on where you were standing on a flat earth. Since it's tens of millions of miles away, the difference is negligible.

pdonis10• 10 years ago

it means he had some idea of how far away the sun was from the Earth

He didn't really have any idea of the actual distance to the Sun. He just knew it was far enough away that the Sun's rays could be assumed to be parallel.

bladedtoys• 10 years ago

Eratosthenes did not know the sun-earth distance and tentatively assumed it was infinite for that measurement.

But then his successor Aristarchus under took to measure the sun-earth distance as follows:

He looked at the angle the earth and moon form when the moon is exactly half full. This would give the sun distance as a multiple of the moon's distance using trigonometry.

He observed the earth's shadow during lunar eclipses. This gave the moon's size in terms of earth size.

He knew the earth's size from measuring shadows at different latitudes on earth and the distance between those sites.

Knowing the moons size vs apparent size, simple trigonometry gave him the distance to the moon. And therefor also the distance to the sun.

Unfortunately his angle measuring techniques were primitive and he decided the sun was 20x further from earth than the moon (rather than about 400x). But his other figures are quite passable.

angersock• 10 years ago

If he was only off by an order of magnitude, given the equipment at the time, that's still quite impressive!

elevenE• 10 years ago

Previous discussions:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1147968

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9629797

kemiller2• 10 years ago

Relativity, which was the original subject, was not just a refinement of what we knew, it discovering that what we knew was just a special case of a much weirder universe. Actually, so was round-earth, for that matter, relative to the mental models available at the time. In both cases a rather abstract notion with no immediate practical impact. It's NOT a case of just coloring in the details, like the detailed measurements of the precise shape of the earth, it's a revolution in understanding. Pre-relativity, the general consensus was that we knew almost everything, save a few niggling details, like the black body problem. But pulling on that thread revealed a whole world underneath. Newtonian physics was, and still is, extremely useful. And there is certainly a hierarchy of wrongness, but the point is the arrogance of believing yourself to live closer to the end than the beginning.

bad_user• 10 years ago

Science, or at least math and physics, works by modeling the world with imperfect but useful models. And evolution in these fields happens by finding newer models that are more and more precise in modeling the universe, but such breakthroughs can't really happen without the help of old models which shaped our understanding. Einstein stood on the shoulders of giants. And when we'll have a unifying theory between general relativity and quantum theory, you can sure that it wouldn't have been possible without the theories before it. And when that theory will happen, it will not disprove current theories, just as general relativity did not disprove Newton's theory, it will just replace it with something that is more precise. And I think the article does a good job of explaining this.

bo10243• 10 years ago

That's an interesting point. There are different ways to look at it. In terms of a huge change in our understanding of the world, I agree. But I think Asimov is thinking in terms of effectiveness of the model in explaining observations and making predictions.

In say 2000 BC, a flat-earth and spherical-earth theory were probably both about the same level of effectiveness in explaining observations and making predictions about new observations. In the year 1800, Newton's mechanics were extremely effective in making correct predictions. As technology advanced and new observations were possible, some gaps were revealed. But even today, Newton's mechanics are extremely effective and accurate for explaining and predicting many observations in our world; just not all of it. Einstein's relativity does a much better job, but also not perfect.

Now again, you can say that there is a huge fundamental difference between the flat-earth and round-earth theories, or between Newton and Einstein, and I agree, but here I think Asimov is just arguing from this "correctness of model in explaining/predicting" perspective.

bo10243• 10 years ago

Maybe to add to my own point, this gets at an interesting perhaps-philosophical question of the role of models and explanations in science. One extreme, closer to Asimov's arguments here, could be to say that the point of science is just to write down accurate predictions about the world. If a model allows us to do this accurately, then we might tend to accept the model without concern to whether the model is what we think is "really going on". I'm a bit more comfortable with this style of viewpoint because the proof is in the pudding (or rather the predictions) so it speaks for itself.

A more opposing viewpoint could be that the point of science is to develop these models that explain why things happen, not just how they happen. So conservation of momentum is interpreted not just as a description of what happens when bodies move or collide, but also as a reason why they behave as they do. This is a frightening viewpoint because I tend to agree with you that we are very far from really understanding what's going on in physics; for example, imagining that some variant of string theory is true, this could completely change what we think "mass" means, even if the predictions about how objects behave is not very different.

kemiller2• 10 years ago

So Asimov says this: "It seemed that in one of my innumerable essays, I had expressed a certain gladness at living in a century in which we finally got the basis of the universe straight."

Whatever misconceptions our English major has about how science works, this strikes me as incredibly unlikely. If you believe in the law of accelerating returns, then it's almost infinitely unlikely — that the number of scientific revolutions yet to come is vastly larger than of those already past. So it's certainly not correct to say that we had "got it wrong" before, as if each attempt is like rolling the dice all over. It's also wrong (though, as he says, not AS wrong) to say that we've "finally" got it "straight".

sunshiney2• 10 years ago

Spot on!

wslh• 10 years ago

but the point is the arrogance of believing yourself to live closer to the end than the beginning.

Asimov is criticizing the banality of the English student thinking, if he were supporting his claim in a more serious way they would had discussed the subject further.

EGreg2• 10 years ago

Science has built-in regression testing. We eliminate things that have been disproven, and over time we refine our knoweldge. The main phenomenon I think in the progress of science is how much we come to know that we can eliminate as wrong. And that is why Karl Popper considered theories which make testable predictions to be advancing science.

iamcreasy• 10 years ago

I like to think what Michael Stevens(VSauce) said in his video[1] as a continuation of Asimov's letter.

"Susan Haack compares knowledge to a crossword puzzle. Old answers interweave with old one. They all reinforce one another. The clues are the question we ask. And the way the answers fall into a predetermined grid...well, that's our confidence that we are on the right track."

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VNqNnUJVcVs

The Relativity of Wrong by Isaac Asimov (1989)

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