Episode 2: Is the Scientific Method Wrong?
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Thank you. Welcome back to the Theory of Anything podcast. Last time, we talked about the purpose of the podcast and kind of in context of the use of experts. You know, should we defer to experts or not? And what is the use of experts if we don't defer to them? We're now going to be getting into the actual theory of knowledge.

and that will help us understand kind of what the actual role of experts is and why it's okay for us in some circumstances to completely ignore them. And it's interesting because we talked about this last time and we were kind of discussing together, okay, well, obviously you do have to use experts in some cases, even though we all had some skepticism of the idea that we should just defer to them. And a friend sent me this really interesting quote that,

That's from David Deutsch, who's where a lot of this comes from. And apparently in some article somewhere, an interview, he actually talked about using a physician. You know, if a physician does in fact have greater knowledge than you about health, and should you then defer to a physician because of their greater knowledge, or should you...

still say, okay, well, they're an expert. I need my own opinion, things like that. It's really interesting. I won't read the entire quote here, but you guys can see it up on the screen, right? How should this no exceptions fallibilism, we'll talk about what fallibilism is in the future here, play out when a physician suggests a treatment? The right question is not,

Who is more likely to be right, the physician or I? But has this idea been judged rationally by its content, which means in particular, has it been subjected to sufficiently severe attempts to detect and eliminate errors, both by explanatory argument and by rigorous experiment? If you think it has, then your opinion and the physician's should become the same and the issue of deference should not arise.

nor should the need for anyone to claim effective infallibility. On the other hand, if you suspect that the physician has not given enough thought to some feature that makes your case unusual, it would be irrational to defer. The physician's greater knowledge is irrelevant until you are satisfied with the way that idea has been taken into account, and whether the idea was originally suggested to you by a passing hobo or physician makes no difference either.

So what he's trying to get out here is that you have a role to play when you're dealing with a position. You are utilizing their greater knowledge.

But you need to, your role is to make sure that they have made the best attempts to detect error. You may believe at some point, a lot of it does come down to what your understanding is, what your own theories are. I mean, there are certain people who, of course, think that a field, maybe even thinks the physicians is riddled with errors, in which case deferring to their expertise would make no sense at all if you sincerely believe the whole field is in error. Right.

Well, and Bruce, this is what you see with the anti-vax movement. They believe they have better information than the physicians. That's correct. Right.

Now, I don't believe that. There's a certain amount of confirmation bias going on there with the anti-vaxxers. But the thing that's interesting here is even if you believe the physician has superior knowledge to you, and in fact, that's why you're going to the physician, is because they are an expert.

It still comes down to, do you believe the physician has actually fully taken your case, you know, the situation of your case fully into consideration, right? Is there something that you feel that they're overlooking? Have they made the best attempts to make sure that they have eliminated errors in their judgment?

If you think they have, then of course you agree with them. If you don't think that, then you need to still keep working, maybe going to separate physicians, getting second opinions, things like that until you feel the errors have been eliminated. Now, I had a real life case with this.

It can be tough, right? I mean, I had the situation where my shoulder didn't work properly. I went to, what, 12 different physicians before I finally found one that correctly diagnosed me. And in the meantime, the physicians are literally doing damage to me. You know, they're doing a false diagnosis and they're giving me ways to fix it that are making it worse because they've got a false diagnosis.

And in this case, I had to just keep going to physicians until I probably should have done more research myself about my own symptoms and came up with, okay, what are the different possibilities? A lot of people kind of make fun of this because you're going to find all sorts of false ideas. But bringing them up with a physician, have you considered this?

And then have them explain to you why they've eliminated that as a possibility actually makes a certain amount of sense. It's not deference to the physician and it's not simply you making up something in your head because you are getting their explanation as to why that possible diagnosis is the wrong one. And then you can judge that for yourself, right?

So, this is kind of how David Deutsch would go about trying to utilize experts, which I thought was very interesting and consistent with what we had talked about last time. Any questions about this one, this slide? No, although in some ways I feel like in today's world, what has happened with

experts and expertise is there's uh we've kind of decided that experts a lot of times physicians we talked about i mean you went to a physician you didn't agree with his diagnosis rightly you went to multiple physicians i assume potentially even male and female physicians and continue to disagree with their diagnosis yes um primarily because you weren't getting any better so that the the evidence is pretty plain when you're in that situation that you're not getting better

But that's the kind of skepticism that while being healthy is also why we have flat earthers. And so it's an interesting, like we talked about last time, it's a really interesting thin line where probably those of us that are more educated feel like our skepticism is more valid than

And, and we feel, and you know, the people who are less educated feel like their skepticism is just as valid as ours, even though it's not based in as much reality. Yes. It's interesting. Have you guys heard that flat earth societies are growing quite a bit now? Oh yeah. It's, it's interesting. I don't exactly know why that is. I mean, presumably it's because they can find each other on the internet and they can get their propaganda out easier, but that's just, that's just a guess of course.

But it is interesting that a lot of these groups that are skeptics like this are actually seeing some resurgence, even on things like flat earth societies and things like that. Even on things that any of the rest of us would consider ridiculous. Right.

Carrie, do you know you worked with a flat earther? No. Someone at our work? Yes. Somebody rather smart at our work. I know exactly who it was too. Do you? I don't know if you know him. Okay. Well, then there might have been someone else. I know somebody you worked with, Bruce, that

Oh, really? I've worked with two flat earthers apparently. Oh, no, wait, you know what? It may be the same person because now I think about it. He used to work at SolutionStream. So it probably is. I won't say the name, but I won't say the name either, but I'll have to talk to you afterwards. But, you know, it is interesting to see a smart engineer, um,

who understands the maths, he's assuming they're educated, that would choose to prescribe to what most of us looks like a ridiculous and radical like

stupid thing. Right, right. You know, it's so easy just to pick and choose what information you consume. You know, it doesn't seem like that there are unbiased sources of information out there. Yes. And you know what, and this is something we're going to get into as we go further into this, there is no unbiased sources, right? The idea of an unbiased source is just

kind of not true. I shouldn't go too far on this. There are more biased and less biased sources, right? And so it is possible to find less biased sources and to start to put more stock in those and then ones that are... Does anybody doubt that Fox News is more biased than

I can't even think of one that's kind of neutral, but there are sources out there that are for news that are definitely less biased than Fox News. Right. Right. And then there's ones that are just as biased as Fox News, but going the other direction, you know, things like that. Yes. CNBC. Yeah. Yeah.

MSNBC. MSNBC is the, I think probably the worst one on the. Yeah. And CNN is quite bad too. There's actually sites out there that allow you to come up with by based on users voting, they specify what the, what they believe the bias is. And I actually go and I check those sites and number of my sources come right in the middle. So it's interesting. There are some sources that, that people actually on both sides end up saying, no, it's actually fairly good on both sides. Um,

But like Fox News is like way to the right and CNN is way to the left, you know, and it's, but even the ones that, even by article, there's a bias, right? Because CNN or New York Times or something like that may have a very strong left bias, but they may have an article that's written by someone with a really strong right bias. And so it can come right down to just a specific article or something like that. Right. Yeah.

Well, it's in medical research as well. I was listening to a YouTube channel that was all about skin care. And she's a dermatologist and she was saying there's no evidence to support such and such.

So I did a little research and that thing that she was talking about, I couldn't find any research on it at all. Interesting. After looking in PubMed. But the way she presented it was, well, it's not true. Well, you can't say it's not true if it hasn't been researched well. Yes. So just the way it was presented made it, you know, made it sound like she was debunking this thing when in fact there really is no research on this thing.

One of the things that we're going to find is that a term like no evidence for is in and of itself a biased term, right? It can mean a lot of different things to a lot of different people. Right. So it's hard to know what the person even means until you try to understand their biases and what it is that they're actually trying to suggest. And no evidence for and no evidence against are not synonymous. Right.

Okay, so let's actually talk about this problem some. So today, if you were to talk to the majority of people who work in the scientific field, they would tell you that science is based on inductivism. Okay, now there are multiple philosophical theories out here, and I'm...

advocating for the one that I believe is the most correct, which is Karl Popper's. But some of these theories are fairly well known, at least in part, right? Because I mentioned that Karl Popper's famous enough that people do know of him and they at least know about his theory of falsification, which as we'll see is maybe not the most, it's somewhat doesn't quite capture his whole theory. But the majority of people still believe that science is based on something called inductivism, okay? And

Early attempts to make sense of science were built on this idea of inductive reasoning. So we kind of understand what deductive reasoning is, where we're using straightforward propositional logic, you know, that if this, then this has to be true, and you have the premises, and you draw a conclusion, things like that. But the majority of things that we deal with rationally don't have anything to do with deductive logic. So there was this idea that it's based on inductive logic instead.

Okay. And the idea of inductive logic is that you, you start with observations. So you, you see things that are happening in the world. You observe what's going on in the world. You induce from these observations, a general theory about what is going on with those observations. And then you test that theory really well. And it becomes more certain over time,

the more you test it and the more that theory doesn't fail. And this may even seem like a very reasonable description of science. And of course, that's why so many people believe in it is because it does seem so completely intuitively reasonable. Okay. Um,

As I'll show you, though, there's actually a well-known problem with it. Probably the most famous example that people use with this for a very long time was the idea that the sun will rise tomorrow because it always has before. I've seen the sun rise every single day, and I have these tons of observations. So I've got this theory that the sun rises every single morning, and so that's how I know the sun is going to rise tomorrow.

tomorrow is because I have all these past observations of it doing the exact same thing. Okay. And then they'll say something like that the, you know, the past determines the future or,

or something along those lines, right? What is the problem with inductivism? Before I do that, I want to just kind of emphasize the scientific method kind of builds inductivism into it. Now, if you were to go ask a scientist, what's the scientific method? They're not going to give you an answer similar to the answer you get in grade school, right? I mean, the way they teach it to children, most scientists know it's not really the way we do science.

today. But this one I have here up on the screen, scientific method, comes from Khan Academy. This is kind of a somewhat stereotypical way that we try to teach children the scientific method. And it's, you make an observation, you ask a question, you form a hypothesis or testable explanation. You make a prediction based on that hypothesis, you test the prediction, and then you iterate and use the results to make new hypotheses and predictions.

Okay. And again, this probably sounds eminently believable and intuitively maybe even correct. Right.

Right. This is every science fair process ever. And anytime you've participated in the science fair. Yes. And note the inductivism here. It starts with an observation. We're going to see as we go on that it does not start with an observation. Or if you want to say it starts with an observation, it's a very special sort of observation. Inductivism is the way we teach science to children today. Okay.

Okay. And as we'll see, one of the reasons why this seems so intuitively good is because it's not entirely wrong. One of the things we're going to start to understand is that things that are false often have truth content still, have truth.

truth to them. And so there's kind of this, it's somewhat true, but it's wrong in certain ways. And it's possible to formulate it in a way that is more true and therefore more accurate as to what's really going on. Now let's talk about the known problem of induction. That's actually what it's called in philosophical circles. It's called the problem of induction.

And this is a really stereotypical example that gets used. Suppose you're a turkey. You've got this very nice farmer that brings you food every day. So you're going to use induction to make a theory about this farmer. So you have this observation that this farmer is taking care of you. He's bringing you this food, and that's good for you. That's a benefit. Therefore, it must be the case, based on your observations –

The farmer wants what's best for you. Okay. And so the more times he brings you food, the more certain you are that you're correct.

that the farmer wants what's best for you, and you're a pet, he loves you, he wants to take care of you and help you out, okay? Now, we all know this is silly, right? And yet it follows exactly the logic of induction, okay? So what is it that's wrong with

that we can make this really perfect seeming example of induction. And we just all know it's just totally incorrect. Of course, what the farmer's doing is fattening the turkey up to eat him for Thanksgiving. Okay. So that's what we really want to kind of try to understand. And this is a problem with induction. If science is really based on induction and that's it,

then why should we believe it at all, right? Why does it even make sense to be using induction when it's so obviously it can go completely wrong? So Popper points out, and I got a couple of quotes here, that there's no such thing as a pure observation without a theoretical component. All observation, and especially all experimental observation, is an interpretation of facts in the light of some theory or other. And sometimes he puts it as all observations are theory impregnated, which is a quote that I love.

So this is the first thing that's really wrong with this example here is that it's not really that the, the Turkey is observing something and then forming a theory. He's actually got a theory and then he's using that to interpret the observations. Okay. And that is one of the main problems with the whole theory of induction. Okay. Is that it actually flips things where it,

it tries to say theory comes from observations when really you might as well say observations come from theory. Okay. Does that make sense? Yeah, absolutely. And I believe it's true. Okay. So now let's talk about scientific facts. So now all through my life, I've heard people talk about scientific fact, right? Layman. And the,

they seem to have something in mind when they're talking about it. And this often comes up in context of like creationism versus evolution, right? The creationist might say, well, you know, evolution is just a theory, you know, it's not a scientific fact. And that's like a really obvious example, but I've heard this come up all over the place, right? I've had people talk about, well, is that really a scientific fact? I've had people ask questions, you know, can you give me examples of scientific facts? Right.

Okay, and if you're a layman in particular, you clearly have something in mind about how there's scientific fact and there's scientific theory and there's some sort of difference between those two. I don't think it just has to do with laymen. To some people, you know, something like gravity. We believe we understand it. It's a fact because of how we can see an apple behave when you drop it.

Yeah. And in fact, that's the most stereotypical example. That's why I actually have that one. Woohoo! Yeah. And so, I mean, if there ever was a scientific fact, gravity would be it, right? Because we all get to experience it. We all understand, hey, it's really there and it works. But in fact, gravity is not a scientific fact. Okay.

Okay. And let me give you just to understand what I mean by that. So our favorite theory of the force of gravity was, of course, 17th century for, you know, Sir Isaac Newton came up with his laws and that's where the, our, our,

favorite theory of the force and still used today, right? We still talk about it, teach it to children. We talk about the force of gravity and things like that. Okay. And for a long time, that was the only theory that we had for the force of gravity. And there

there wasn't a single known problem with it for centuries, right? I mean, it was just assumed that it was absolute truth, okay? In the early 20th century, though, there did start to develop some problems with it. Even as the problem started to develop, there was not an assumption that it was wrong. There was kind of an assumption that...

we can solve this with a problem with the experiment or, you know, some other way to explain the issue. Okay. So it wasn't, there was no assumption that the theory of gravity was wrong initially. Right. Maybe, maybe it's this other math that we're discovering that's wrong. Yeah. Um,

Obviously, what happened was, in 1905, Einstein came up with an entirely new theory of gravity. Okay, so general relativity. And in Einstein's theory, there is no force of gravity. Okay, it just does not exist. Okay?

Okay, it's actually the curvature of space and things moving closer together because space is curved. And that appears like a force to us, but it's not actually a force at all. And this kind of just blew people's minds. I mean, the assumption that Newton's theories were true was such a huge part of the way scientists thought.

And this is centuries, centuries of using it, centuries of it being useful, centuries of it making correct predictions, centuries of no known problems with it. And it disappeared overnight. And,

got replaced by an entirely new theory where there is no such thing as the force of gravity. Well, so it's interesting though, because when we started this conversation, you were saying, you know, lay people have this concept of a scientific fact, but even within educated communities, kind of to come back to that Popper quote, all observations are theory impregnated.

Even when we know that this theory of relativity thing happened,

people still are more likely to internalize and kind of have an ongoing belief in that thing that they can have observation around. Right. It doesn't matter that the theory of relativity says that the curvature is what causes this thing that looks like gravity. I still get to see what I consider to be gravity all the time. Right. Right.

right we believe a fact if we can observe it it it all it must be a fact because we can observe it right right so now karl popper said we can never know which part of science will have to be revised next and he used this as the example it was such a huge at least emotionally huge fundamental revision to something that we thought was just a fact right and

And so he basically said, look, all of our theories are like that, right? We just do not know what part of the theory is going to get revised next. Okay, so now let's talk about verificationism. So one of the main problems with the theory of induction that's like implicit in it

is this idea of verificationism. Now, verificationism pre-exists induction. Induction was an attempt to explain verificationism. But the idea is that we really want to know how to know that something is true. We want to know how you can be certain that this theory is true. This is an understandable thing, right? We want to know what are the sources of knowledge that we can trust.

But there is no way to verify that something is true. So as Popper says, science offers us only hypotheses or conjectures rather than certain knowledge. And Deutsch adds to that. The objective of science isn't to find evidence that justifies theories as true or probable. Okay. Well, these two statements, they're correct statements, but I guarantee you they're very controversial statements, right? Amongst scientists.

Most scientists really want to still believe that science is about verifying something to be correct. And then they want to make some sort of distinction between pseudoscience and science and science is the knowledge that we verified is true. And pseudoscience is the stuff that is either unverifiable or hasn't been verified. And, and,

Even though they know of the example I just gave, even though they at some level understand the example I just gave, are still thinking in terms of how do we verify something is true? And one of the tricks here is you have to give up on the idea of verificationism because it itself is misleading. All right. And you can't come to a correct conclusion.

understanding of how knowledge grows if you're still trying to figure out how to verify something. This is also called justificationism. How do we justify something to be true? How do we certify something is true? And the simple truth is verificationism, justificationism are wrong. You never verify something is true. You never justify something is true.

Okay, and then just to make things a little bit worse, there's this idea of empiricism. And again, most scientists believe that science is fundamentally about empiricism. Okay, you'll hear that all the time. Okay, and they're not entirely wrong because science has a huge empirical component. All right, but this philosopher here, Stephen R.C. Hicks,

he'd argued in a book that I read, he says, for reason to be objective, it must have contact with reality. The most obvious candidate for such direct contact is sense perception. If however, the senses gives us only internal representations of objects, then

that an obstacle is erected between reality and reason. If reason is presented with an internal sensory representation of reality, then it is not aware directly of reality. Reality then becomes something to be inferred or hoped for beyond a veil of sense perception. Okay. Again, this is a well-known problem with the idea of empiricism. And I...

grabbed from Boy's Life here, a well-known optical illusion where you've got these two lines that are actually exactly the same length and our senses perceive one is longer than the other just because of the way they happen to be drawn. We know our senses are flawed because of things like optical illusions. And so this, as Hicks here says, this seems to suggest that

that we can't trust our senses and therefore we're cut off from ever knowing reality. And you can kind of see why there might be some despair over this initially. One of the things this means though, is that science can't really be about straight up empiricism either, although it has a strong empirical component. So let's kind of look at the, let me just rehash this quickly. What's the score so far here? Science is supposed to be based on induction, but induction clearly doesn't work.

It's not possible to verify something to be true. No matter how certain we are of a theory, it can at any moment turn out to be wrong in seemingly fundamental ways. There are no scientific facts. And we don't actually have any direct connection to the real world via our senses because our senses themselves are flawed. Okay. When you take kind of all these things together, you can start to maybe understand the

the skeptics viewpoint and why things like postmoderns exist. Postmodernism is a philosophy that's kind of aligned very heavily with the left and is used in that way, but it's based around the skepticism of science, the idea that science can't really know anything and everything's uncertain. So really all theories are kind of equal under science.

postmodern philosophy, right? And we can tell there's something wrong with this. Like for one thing, people will make fun of postmoderns and they'll say, well, then why don't you go use your other theories to go build an airplane and fly somewhere? And of course they never do that. They're always going to end up relying on science. So there's clearly something wrong with postmodernism, but it's a little hard to state exactly what it is, given that the things I said above are apparently actually true. Okay.

This makes sense, kind of what I'm discussing here about why it is that skeptics exist about science. Absolutely. Okay. Now, how do you actually solve this problem?

what we're going to do is we're going to, this is going to take more than just this podcast, but we're going to talk through that there is a solution to these problems. Okay. And it's actually well, a well-developed solution, if not maybe super well-known yet. Okay. The first part of it is well-known, which is falsificationism. And as I mentioned, Popper, when you mentioned Karl Popper, people will say, oh yeah, falsificationism. And,

And they believe that Popper's philosophy is falsificationism. Okay. And as we'll see, that's actually a naive understanding of Popper. But there is something to the idea of falsificationism. And so let me use kind of the most famous example here. So are you guys familiar with the book, The Black Swan?

Have you heard of that? Okay. Which is, it's a book about how we can be fooled by randomness, right? He doesn't actually, the same author has a book called Fooled by Randomness. So Nassim Nicholas Taleb is the guy who wrote the book and became famous for writing it. And by the way, his books are actually pretty cool. He's a person with a lot of rage issues, but he's kind of fun because of that. But, but. You can say that about me too, by the way.

He didn't invent this example, but he uses this example as kind of the basis for the title of his book, The Black Swan. Okay. And he points out that at one point there was a theory that all swans are white. Okay. And in fact, when this theory was invented, there was a theory that all swans are white.

there were no known black swans. And so this theory that was used as a kind of philosophical basis was supposed to show, hey, because we've never seen a non-white swan, we can know that swans are white. That's not true, right? In Australia, there are such things as black swans, okay? And the people who thought this just didn't happen to live in Australia. So they had never actually seen a black swan. And so they thought all swans were white, right?

So Taleb points out, he says, if you've seen a thousand white swans, you know, maybe you're hypothesizing all swans are white. And then you say, oh, I have a thousand observations that are the basis for this hypothesis.

So maybe you now go on after that hypothesis and maybe you have like a million, you know, white swans that you see after that. And so maybe you're thinking in your mind, oh, I have a million confirming observations. I've confirmed my theory a million times.

that all swans are white. Okay. Then one day you go to Australia, you see a black swan and your hypothesis is dead with a single observation. Okay. So falsificationism is based on this idea that there's something powerful about a disconfirming observation. Okay. That a single observation can show you to be wrong, but there are no number of observations that can show you to be correct. Right. And, and,

Noticing this, you can start to unravel the mystery of what's really going on here and explain why the skeptics are actually incorrect about science. However, there is a known problem with falsificationism. And if you're a skeptic, you would use this. You would quote this and say, okay, how, but falsificationism has got a problem too.

And it's something called the doom quine thesis. Okay. And the doom quine thesis is actually correct. So it throws some doubt on the apparent view of falsificationism. It says that it's impossible. This is from Wikipedia. It's impossible to test a scientific hypothesis in isolation because an empirical test of the hypothesis requires one or more background assumptions.

And David Deutsch, who in his paper, The Logic of Experimental Tests, he says, nothing about the unmet expectation dictates whether theory T or any other background knowledge assumption was at fault. Therefore, there is no such thing as experimental result logically contradicting T. Okay, so skeptics would say, ah, see, we've now proven that falsificationism is also wrong and we're right to be skeptical.

Okay. And then they call this the doom quine problem. Now there's, there's a distinction to be made here. There's the doom quine thesis, which is what I quoted up above. And then there's a doom quine problem, which is what skeptics use. The doom quine thesis is true. The problem is not. Okay. We don't actually have to take the thesis and draw the conclusion that the skeptics are drawn. So, but let me give you an example of how this actually works in real life. There's

we mentioned general relativity and we mentioned observations that started to become a problem for general relativity. Well, there's something called the perihelion procession of Mercury. I don't know exactly what that is. I only know about it at a general level, but the idea was that Mercury's orbit didn't follow Newtonian predictions. Okay. And this was known, it was known that Mercury's orbit didn't quite follow Newtonian predictions. And so, um,

But nobody really worried about it. That didn't cause them to suddenly say, oh, we have an observation of Newtonian physics being wrong. Therefore, we have falsified Newtonian physics. Nobody did that. Right. And one of the reasons why is how can you be sure that the slight difference in the prediction wasn't because there was some body of gravity out there that we just haven't observed yet that's causing that difference. Right.

Okay. In other words, you might be able to explain the difference in prediction using Newtonian physics itself. Therefore, it wouldn't actually be a problem for Newtonian physics. So the perihelion precession of Mercury was an example of where we had apparently a disconfirming observation, and yet it didn't actually cause anybody to falsify anything. Okay. And this is how it works in real life with real science. A single observation never just falsifies a well-established theory.

There's a similar, this one's actually kind of mind blowing. You probably never thought of it this way. It's something that you know, but you've probably never entirely quite thought through. Quantum mechanics and general relativity are both the, there are two best scientific theories, two best scientific theories, period, but they're the two deepest physics theories.

And they're super well-tested theories and, you know, we, we use them constantly. We treat them as if they're just scientific truth for the most part. And they're also known to be in contradiction to each other. Yeah. And, and,

That's why you always hear about a theory of quantum gravity or a theory of everything that they're looking for is because they know that these two are in contradiction to each other. And so they know there must be some other theory out there that merges the two together and then resolves that contradiction. Or proves them both as wrong and gives us something radically different that we can't comprehend yet. Yes. And of course, that's the assumption. The assumption is

They are both wrong. And we will someday have some other radically different theory that proves both those wrong and is, and obviously it's so radical that we just can't even think of it right now. We can't even come up with what that theory should look like, which is why we haven't been able to come up with it, come up with one at this point.

Well, and part of the problem there is when you start talking about quantum mechanics, even the people who claim to understand it really just can verify that their predictions result mathematically in doing what they do. But we're developing technology on top of these things that we know will work because the math shows us will work, but we don't actually understand why it works.

Most of them don't. Yeah. I'm actually going to argue in some future podcast that we do understand what's going on with quantum mechanics. Let's get that on the schedule because that sounds fun.

But you are correct. The vast majority of physicists that are using quantum mechanics to create technology today will tell you, I don't really know what was going on with, I don't understand quantum mechanics myself. There's a famous quote, which I don't have handy, but a famous quote from Richard Feynman, who's like this super famous Nobel winning scientist, physicist, that if you think you understand quantum mechanics, then you don't really understand quantum mechanics. People quote that all the time. And it's,

In fact, Max Tegmark, who I like some of his books, he did an informal survey of scientists about, you know, what's your current understanding of what quantum mechanics is. And there's various interpretations about what's going on with quantum mechanics. And he said that in, at least in his unscientific survey, that the number one response was, I have no idea. Yeah.

That's a great response. I also have no idea, so it makes me feel a little bit better about it.

So, okay, so why doesn't the fact that we know quantum mechanics and general relativity are known to be in contradiction to each other, why does it not falsify one or both theories and we throw it out the window? Well, we don't have anything better for one thing. Exactly. Okay. So this is one of the main things that is kind of just missing in naive falsificationism.

is the fact that if you've got a theory and it's working in a whole lot of cases, even if you know you have a problem with the theory in some cases, if you don't actually have a better theory to replace it with, you're not throwing the old theory out, right? You're going to continue to treat it as if it's true because you just don't have an alternative yet. Right. Right. And if you're getting really cool stuff out of it, you know, quantum mechanics, we keep getting really cool tech. Yeah.

Right. We keep being able to do things that we didn't believe were possible. Yes. So why would we abandon it? It goes back to the idea of what the purpose of science is, really. I mean, if it provides value to us in any way, if it adds to our levels of knowledge in any way, it's a value even if it's not perfect. Yes. Yes.

What we need to then talk about, and we can decide if we want to continue or if we want to just call it and end the podcast at this point, but we're talking about how do we make progress without certainty. So we've established this idea that the skeptics are at least right about the fact that there is no certainty.

Right. There's no verificationism there. Science induction doesn't actually work because it's based on verifying through observations that doesn't work. Even the idea that you form theories out of observations doesn't work because you always have theories first. So how is it that we can make progress? Okay. Why is it that the postmoderns are wrong when

Everything we've set up to this point matches their theory. Okay. So this is what I'm going to now do from this point forward and kind of open up a new chapter of trying to describe, okay, what is Popper's solution to the problem? So are we good for today and we want to call it or do you want to keep going? This seems like a good resting place. Yeah. Yeah, me too. Okay. Okay.

Why don't we stop there then? And we'll pick it up from this point next time. So this is, and this is the cool stuff, is there's a very clever solution here that Popper came up with that is actually not that hard to understand. In fact, it seems so simple that at first you're like, that's the solution. And then you start to think about it and you start to go, wow, that solution solves a lot of problems. So anyhow, okay, we'll pick it up next time.

Thank you.