Michael Nielsen: evaluation

Transcript context

…The thing I’m very curious about with Newton is whether it was the same program, the same heuristics, the same biases that he applied to his alchemical work as he did to his understanding of astronomy. This is from the Keynes essay: “There was extreme method in his madness. All his unpublished works on esoteric and theological matters are marked by careful learning, accurate method, and extreme sobriety of statement. They are just as sane as the Principia if their whole matter and purpose were not magical. They were nearly all composed during the same 25 years of his mathematical studies.” Clearly, there was some aesthetic that motivated people like Einstein to reject earlier ways of thinking and say, “No, the other is wrong, and there’s a better way to think about things.” The same is true with Newton. The question I have is whether similar heuristics toward parsimony, aesthetics, and so on, would be equally useful across time and across disciplines, or whether you need different heuristics. The reason that’s relevant is even if we can’t build a verification loop for science, maybe if the taste tests point in the same direction, you can at least encode that bias into the AIs. That would maybe be enough. The point is that where we always get bottlenecked is where the previous processes and heuristics don’t apply. That’s almost definitionally what causes the bottlenecks. Because people are smart, they know what has worked before. They study it. They apply the same kinds of things, so they don’t get stuck in the same places as before. They keep getting bottlenecked in different places. I’m overgeneralizing a bit, but I think it’s right. If you’re attempting to reduce science to a process, you’re attempting to reduce it to something where there is just a method which you can apply, and you turn the crank and out pops insight. You can do a certain amount of that, but you’re going to get bottlenecked at the places where your existing method doesn’t apply. Definitionally, there’s no crank you can turn. You need a lot of people trying different ideas. The more difficult the idea is to have, the greater the bottleneck, but then also the greater the triumph. Quantum mechanics is a great example of this. It’s such a shocking set of ideas. It’s such a shocking theory. The theory of evolution in some sense is also quite a shocking idea, not the principle of natural selection, but that it can explain so much. That’s a shocking idea. Principia Mathematica is released in 1687. The Origin of Species is released in 1859. At least naively, it seems like Darwin’s theory of natural selection is conceptually easier than the theory of gravity. I asked Terence Tao this question. There was this contemporaneous biologist with Darwin, Thomas Huxley, who read this and said, “How extremely stupid to not have thought of this.” Nobody ever reads the Principia Mathematica and thinks, “God, why didn’t I beat Newton to the punch here?” So what’s going on here? Why did Darwinism take so much longer?…

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