Charles van der Haegen's List: Paradigm Changing Initiatives

• The science establishment justifies its existence with the big idea that it offers answers and ultimately solutions. But privately, every scientist knows that what science really does is discover the profundity of our ignorance. The growing sphere of scientific knowledge is not Pope's night-dispelling light, but a campfire glow in the gloom of vast mystery. Touting discoveries helps secure finding and gain tenure, put perhaps the time has come to retire discovery as the ultimate measure of scientific progress. Let us measure progress not by what is discovered, but rather by the growing list of mysteries that remind us of how little we really know.
• In this way, science (and biology in particular) could help bridge the chasm between humans and nature. Ultimately, science education, in concert with other areas of learning, could go a long way toward achieving the "Great Work" described by cultural historian Thomas Berry—transforming the perceived world "from a collection of objects to a communion of subjects."
• Look, nobody disputes that birds fly; the only question is how. Similarly, nobody disputes that humans and other animals learn; the only question is how. Working out the alternative account of learning will involve identifying which innate ideas humans posses, what rules are used to combine them, and how they are revised. But for this to happen, we must first accept not only that association is not the answer, but that association is not even an answer. Only then will the science of learning stop levitating, and take off for real.

• n that front, a massive international collaboration via the Polymath Project website in 2013 successfully extended the work of Yitan Zhang on the Twin Primes Conjecture (and I understand that the University of Montreal's James Maynard has subsequently gone even further). Amazingly, this groundbreaking collaborative work was done primarily in a comment thread.

   

  The field is crying out for better tools; meanwhile better tools already exist in the adjacent field of software development.

   

  It is time for science to go agile.

   

  The scientific literature, taken as content, is stronger than it's ever been—as, of course, it should be. As a form, the scientific literature has never been more inadequate or inept. What is in most dire need of revision is revision itself.

   

   
• The means for collecting and analyzing data are becoming more accessible to the public each day. New ethical issues will need to be discussed and infrastructures built to accommodate those conducting research outside of traditional settings. With this, we will see an increase in the number of scientific discoveries made by informally trained "citizen scientists" of all ages and backgrounds. These previously unheard voices will add valuable contributions to our knowledge of the world.
• The intergenerational transmission of acquired traits is making a comeback as a potential mechanism of evolution. It also opens up the interesting possibility that better diet, exercise, and education which we thought couldn't affect the next generation–except with luck through good example–actually could.
• We need not choose between God and man, science and philosophy, interpretation and evidence. But ironically, in its quest to prove itself as the supreme form of secular knowledge, science has inadvertently elevated itself into a theology. Science is not a practice so much as it is an ideology. We don’t need to destroy science in order to bring it down to earth. But we do need to bring it down to earth again, and the first step in doing so is to abandon the rhetoric of science that has become its most popular devotional practice.
• The theory that 'beauty is in the eyes of the beholder' in the sense of being superficial, arbitrary, and infinitely culturally variable can safely be discarded. I regard it as one of the 'great myths' perpetrated by social scientists in the 20^th century. Its scientific replacement—that beauty is 'in the adaptations of the beholder' as anthropologist Donald Symons phrases it—continues to be disturbing to some. It violates some of our most cherished beliefs and values. But then so did the notion that the earth was not flat or the center of the universe.
• p to now I talked about connections in space. But there are also connections in time. If the stuff that makes the universe is strongly connected in space, and not usefully thought of as the aggregate sum of its parts, then attributing a cause of an event to a specific component may also not be meaningful. Just as you can't attribute the spin of a proton to any one of its constituents, you can't attribute an event in time to a single earlier cause. Complex systems have neither a useful notion of individuality nor a proper notion of causality.
• Applying the same logic to markets—think of them in this context as "groups writ large"—will assist with the development of a richer and more accurate theory of when and why markets are likely to have terrible or uplifting consequences.
• What kind of evidence will convince the doubters of the reality of what might best be called climate disruption? Perhaps the exploration of scientific ideas in need of retirement should be an annual event, with a clear emphasis on the fact that each new synthesis of complex data is potentially more inclusive. Retiring concepts that no longer fit is not primarily a matter of eliminating error but of integrating new information and newly recognized connections into our understanding.     
• Literally and figuratively, we should stop relegating emotion to the periphery, and move emotion to the center—where it belongs.
• Our lives are guided by a series of these guesstimates about the behavior and mental state of ourselves and others that, although imperfect, are adaptive and sufficiently accurate to enable us to muddle along. However, as scientists, we demand more than default explanations based on common sense. Behavioral and brain science provides a path to understanding that challenges the myths of mental life and everyday behavior. One of its delights is that it often turns reality on its head, revealing hidden processes and providing revelations about who we are, what we are doing, and where we are going.

• Since those early days, when I learned from Napoleon Chagnon, it's seemed to me that CULTURE is a 7-letter word for GOD. Good people—some of the best, and intelligent people—some of the smartest, have found meaning in religion: they have faith that something supernatural guides what we do. Other good, intelligent people have found meaning in culture: they believe that something superzoological shapes the course of human events. Their voices are often beautiful; and it's wonderful to be part of a chorus. But in the end, I don't get it. For me, the laws that apply to animals apply to us.

   

  And in that view of life, there is grandeur enough.

• The handprint calculation applies the same methodology as for footprints, but reframes the total as a positive value: Keep growing your handprint and you are steadily reducing your negative impacts on the planet. Make your handprint bigger than your footprint and you are sustaining the planet, not damaging it.

   

  And such a positive spin, motivational research tells us, will be more likely to keep people moving toward the target.
• Worse, reliance on EBM can impede scientific progress. If hospitals and insurance companies mandate EBM, backed up by the threat of lawsuits if adverse outcomes are accompanied by any departure from best practices, physicians will become reluctant to try alternative treatment strategies that have not yet been evaluated using randomized controlled trials. Scientific advancement can become stifled if front-line physicians, who blend medical expertise with respect for research, are prevented from exploration and are discouraged from making discoveries. 
• There is no tragedy: there are conflicts though. And they can be better understood by embracing a vision that is open to Ostrom's notion of polycentric governance of complex economic systems. The danger of a closed vision that only understands conflicts between state regulation and market freedom seem to be even more catastrophic when thinking at climate change and other environmental issues. When we think about the environment, the commons idea seems to be a much more generative notion than many other solutions. It is not a guarantee for a solution, but it is better point to start. The theory of "the tragedy of the commons" has now clearly become a comedy. But it can be a really sad comedy if we don't finish with it and move on.  
• With the complexity, inconsistency, ambiguity and ultimate uncertainty that define our reality, we should not limit ourselves to using only one or the other of these valuable tools of analysis. We need to be more willing to have our own positions challenged, striving to keep an open mind to other arguments, other viewpoints and conflicting data. In order to make the best decisions for the best reasons, we must choose the appropriate heuristics coupled with intellectual honesty to guide our thinking as we grapple with the cunning machinations of the world we inhabit.
• Because our social capacities are largely non-automatic, ingroup-focused, and finite, we can retire the strong version of Aristotle's statement. At the same time, the concept of humans as "social by nature" has lent credibility to numerous significant ideas: that humans need other humans to survive, that humans tend to be perpetually ready for social interaction, and that studying specifically the social features of human functioning is profoundly important. 

• The actual threat of low-dose radiation to humans is so low that the LNT hypothesis can neither be proven true nor proven false, yet it continues to dominate and misguide policies concerning radiation exposure, making them grotesquely conservative and expensive. Once the LNT is explicitly discarded, we can move on to regulations that reflect only discernible, measurable medical effects, and that respond mainly to the much larger considerations of whole-system benefits and harms.

   

  The most crucial decisions about nuclear power are at the category level of world urban prosperity and climate change, not imaginary cancers per millisievert.
• n conclusion, we can no longer rely exclusively on the traditional scientific method in the new era of science emerging through areas like big data, crowdsourcing, and synthetic biology. A multiplicity of models must be employed for the next generation of scientific advance, supplementing the traditional scientific method with new ways that are better suited and equally valid. Not only is a plurality of methods required, it opens up new tiers for the conduct of science. Science can now be carried out downstream at increasingly detailed levels of resolution and permutation, and upstream with broader systemic dynamism. Temporality and the future become more knowable and predictable as all processes, human and otherwise, can be modeled with continuous real-time updates. Epistemologically, how 'we know' and the truth of the world and reality is changing. In some sense we may be in a current intermediary 'dark ages node' where the multiplicity of future science methods can pull us into a new era of enlightenment just as surely as the traditional scientific method pulled us into modernity. 
• So Plank got it wrong. The development of new scientific truths does not depend on the passing of stubborn conservative opponents. It is, instead, mainly dependent on the continuous enrollment of talented newcomers who are eager to make their mark by changing the existing order. In Planck's case it was, in fact, the arrival of the young Albert Einstein, rather than the demise of his senior opponents, that propelled quantum theory forward. As Douglas Stone showed, in Einstein and the Quantum, it was the 25-year-old patent clerk, a fledgling outsider with nothing to lose, who became the driving force in the development of this theory. As for his elders, Einstein couldn't care less
• The old dogma that linguistic meanings and speakers' meaning match denies or discounts a blatant gap. This gap is filled by intense cognitive activity of a specifically human kind. Let's retire the dogma and better explore the gap.

• We define a poverty "line": you are either "above" or "below" it. But poverty is a continuum. Why not say, in dollar-equivalents, how poor you actually are? The preposterous Electoral College system in US presidential elections is another, and especially grievous, manifestation of essentialist thinking. Florida must go either wholly Republican or wholly Democrat—all 25 Electoral College votes—even though the popular vote is a dead heat. But states should not be seen as essentially red or blue: they are mixtures in various proportions.

   

  You can surely think of many other examples of "the dead hand of Plato"—essentialism. It is scientifically confused and morally pernicious. It needs to be retired.
• We have come to accept the notion that life is not preordained. We need to equally give up the quaint notion that the laws of physics are. Cosmic accidents are everywhere. It is quite possible that our entire universe is just another one. 
• The remedy for all this confusion is simple: We must abandon the idea that science is distinct from the rest of human rationality. When you are adhering to the highest standards of logic and evidence, you are thinking scientifically. And when you're not, you're not. 

• But we still don't know if this is merely of academic interest or has important disease-inducing impact. For sure the mosaicism that occurs later in life, in "terminally differentiated" cells, is known to be important in the development of cancer. And the mosaicism of immune cells, particularly lymphocytes, appears to be part of a healthy, competent immune system. Beyond this, it largely remains unclear as to the functional significance of each of us carrying multiple genomes.

   

  The implications are potentially big. When we do use a blood sample to evaluate a person's genome, we have no clue about the potential mosaicism that exists throughout the individual's body. So a lot more work needs to be done to sort this out, and now that we have the technology to do it, we'll undoubtedly better understand our remarkable heterogeneous genomic selves in the years ahead.
• Every last serious and systematic speculation about the world deserves to be preserved. We need to remember how we got to where we are, and we'd like the future not to retire us. Science should look to literature and maintain a vibrant living history as a monument to ingenuity and persistence. We won't retire Shakespeare. Nor should we Bacon.
• All three of these scientific developments suggest that almost everything we do is not just the result of the interaction of nature and nurture, it is both simultaneously. Nurture is our nature and learning and culture are our most important and distinctive evolutionary inheritance.

• What it comes down to is this. Let's ask how English makes a worldview. Our answer requires that the worldview be one shared by Betty White, William McKinley, Amy Winehouse, Jerry Seinfeld, Kanye West, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Gary Coleman, Virginia Woolf and and Bono.

   

  Let's face it, what worldview would that be? Sure, a lab test could likely tease out some infinitesimal squeak of a perceptive predilection shared by all of those people. But none of us would even begin to think of it as a way of perceiving the world or reflecting a culture. Or, if anyone would, then we are on to an entirely new academic paradigm indeed.
• All of this is not to say that the view underlying this year's Edge Question is always wrong. Examples in the fields in which I work myself include: the replacement of biogeographic theories assuming a static Earth by the acceptance of continental drift, from the 1960's onwards; the rise of the taxonomic approach turned cladistics at the expense of previous taxonomic approaches, also from the 1960's onwards; and the rise in the 1960's and 1970's, followed by the virtual disappearance, of attempts to make use of irreversible (non-equilibrium) thermodynamics in the fields of population biology and of cell physiology. Instead, my main point is that the development of science follows much more diverse courses than only or predominantly the course of abandoning old ideas.

• The social sciences are hard because human beings differ fundamentally from inanimate objects. People insist upon making or finding meaning in things. They do it collectively, creating baroque cultural landscapes that can't be explained parsimoniously, and they do it individually, creating their own unique symbolic worlds nested within their broader cultures. As the anthropologist Clifford Geertz put it: "Man is an animal suspended in webs of significance that he himself has spun." This is why it's so hard to predict what any individual will do. This is why there are almost no equations in psychology or sociology. This is why there will never be a Newton in the social sciences.

   

  Let's retire the pursuit of parsimony from the social sciences. Parsimony is beautiful when we find it, but the pursuit of parsimony is sometimes an obstacle to the pursuit of truth.
• What I'm suggesting be retired, are the first three words that I wrote above and what I suggest to be embraced is more academic leeway in theories of approximation that give permission for others to see and discover new patterns.
• When I speak to students or lay audiences about any kind of digital innovation, the first statement or question from the audience takes the form, roughly, "Do smart phones change the brain?" or "We can't let infants play with pads because it might affect their brains." I try to explain that everything that we do affects the nervous system and that the statement is therefore either meaningless or needs to be unpacked. One unpacking would proceed "Does this experience affect the nervous system significantly and perhaps even permanently?" A quite different response: "Do you mean 'affect the mind', or 'affect the brain'?" When the questioner looks blank, I sense that he/she needs a refresher in philosophy, psychology, and neuroscience.
• By starting with Godlessness as a foundational principle of scientific reasoning, we make ourselves unnecessarily resistant to the novelty of human consciousness, its potential continuity over time, and the possibility that it has purpose.
     
• If people who disagree with us are never going to change their mind, then why even talk to them? If we do not engage people who disagree with us in discussion, we will never learn of the—often perfectly good—reasons why they disagree with us. If we cannot address these reasons, then our arguments are likely to prove unconvincing. Our failures to convince will only reinforce the belief that we face pigheadedness rather than rational disagreement. A belief in the inefficiency of argumentation can be a destructive self-fulfilling prophecy. We should give scientists, and argumentation more generally, more credit: it is well deserved. Let's retire Planck's cynical view of scientific change.
• We do not know the answers to these questions. We are in no position at present to know the answers. And we will never be able to know some of the answers. Therefore, there simply is no utility to the terms instinct and innate. Let's retire these terms so the real work can begin.
• The reliance on homo economicus as the basis of human motivation has given rise to a grand body of theory and research over the past two hundred years. As an underlying assumption, it has generated some of the best work in economics. As a foil, it has generated findings about cognitive limitations, the role of social interactions, and ethically based motivations. The power of the concept of homo economicus was once great, but its power has now waned, to be succeeded by new and better paradigms and approaches grounded in more realistic and scientific understandings of the sources of human action.
• Let's keep these and many other wrong theories and hypotheses alive, but remember they are just hypotheses, not facts.
• These reflections won't be news to many philosophers, but they're worth repeating. Rejecting the mind in an effort to achieve scientific legitimacy—a trend we've seen with both behaviorism and some popular manifestations of neuroscience—is unnecessary and unresponsive to the aims of scientific psychology. Understanding the mind isn't the same as understanding the brain. Fortunately, though, we can achieve such understanding without abandoning scientific rigor. Or, to adopt another baking analogy, we can have our cake and eat it, too.
• Is the Hard Problem an idea that demonstrates the need for a major revolution in science if consciousness is ever to be explained, or an idea that demonstrates the frailties of human imagination? That question is not settled at this time, so scientists should consider adopting the cautious course that postpones all accommodation with it. That's how most neuroscientists handle ESP and psychokinesis—assuming, defeasibly, that they are figments of imagination. 
• That science has brought us technology does not mean that technology will always bring us science. Science could go into retirement at any time. Retiring the assumption that as long as technology flourishes, so will science, might help us avoid this mistake.
• By retiring the notion of fully random mutations we can gain some practical advantages. The idea that mutations have a bias can be exploited to more easily to engineer genetic processes using those biases. We can better understand the origin of disease mutations, and to remedy them. And with this new understanding we can better resolve some of the remaining mysteries of macro evolution. An important part of retiring the idea of random mutations is to realize that the chance element operating in mutations is not "imperfect" randomness, but rather contains a bit of order that is generative—a small something that can be used by either us or natural selection. What it is used for, or can be used for, is wide open, but we'll never get there if we cling to the idea that mutations are random. 

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