Becoming Less Wrong

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The problem is to be moving toward "more right" you have to have a goal ahead. This is not what we do in science, e.g. Getting to be less wrong is only moving relative to what we have now; moving away from the erroneous part. There is no goal that we are moving toward.

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Perhaps I'm horribly missing something here, but it seems to me that science is moving toward a goal: an accurate description of the real world.

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Those who would sacrifice an essential liberty for a temporary security will lose both, and deserve neither. -- Benjamin FranklinWe see monsters where science shows us windmills. -- Phat

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The letter just seems to be outlining a way of describing why scientists aspire to treat all knowledge tentatively.

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I don't think so. From the letter: While he's certainly advocating a different approach to acquiring knowledge, I think he's also serious in his statement that "there is no such thing as 'right.'"I believe that there is an objective reality that truly exists, and that science is an attempt to discover as much as possible about that reality. I agree with you that we have no way of knowing whether we are absolutely correct in any description (given the inherent tentativity of science), but that doesn't prevent us from being correct.

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Those who would sacrifice an essential liberty for a temporary security will lose both, and deserve neither. -- Benjamin FranklinWe see monsters where science shows us windmills. -- Phat

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I think the point is we don't have a goal to move toward. All we can do is move away from wrongness. We don't actually know if that is necessarily toward "right".

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There are two different ideas here: 1) we don't have a goal to move toward, and 2) we don't actually know if our "motion" is toward right.If there is an objective reality, then right can be defined as accurately describing that reality. This is a separate question from whether a given explanation actually is right. And, while we cannot ever know, to 100% certainty, whether we are moving toward the "truth," that doesn't prevent the "truth" from existing.I'm not necessarily disagreeing with the letter writer, that moving away from wrong is valuable. I'm not sure I agree, however, that we have to approach things from that angle to avoid "rigid hierarchical social organizations." Whether we believe there is or isn't a goal is completely separate from how we try to reach that goal.

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Those who would sacrifice an essential liberty for a temporary security will lose both, and deserve neither. -- Benjamin FranklinWe see monsters where science shows us windmills. -- Phat

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It prevents "truth" existing for us.

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It doesn't prevent "truth" from existing. It simply prevents us from knowing as an absolute certainty that we've found it.Let me give an example. My understanding is that we are quite certain that matter is composed of molecules, which are in turned composed of atoms. (Anyone feel free to correct me if I'm wrong in this, it's not exactly my field.) Now, if in fact this is actually the case, then we have discovered a truth. We consider this truth to be tentatively held, because we might discover something tomorrow that will change it all. But our considering it to be tentative doesn't prevent us from being correct if in fact we are.

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Those who would sacrifice an essential liberty for a temporary security will lose both, and deserve neither. -- Benjamin FranklinWe see monsters where science shows us windmills. -- Phat

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I think the main objective is to get people who would otherwise not trust science, because of that 'We are right' label, to start understanding science with the newly improved 'We are less wrong than before' label.

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To me, this seemed like the whole point to the letter.

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Well, if that was the point, I certainly agree with it. Perhaps I'm getting hung up on the sentence: There is "right." Science is an endeavor to find that, or to get as close to it as we can. Certainly at the same time we are doing that, we are also getting "less wrong." But at bottom, the goal is not to become "less wrong," but to find out what is "right."In fact, I think that the idea that science is not about finding out what is "right" is actually counterproductive. The world is full of anti-science types, and those suspicious of science. They would find solace in the concept that science isn't looking for what's right because there is no right. If instead it's all about getting "less wrong," it's a lot easier for them to say they're getting "less wrong" as much as science is, but in a different way.The goal of science is to accurately describe the world. This goal only makes sense if there is a real world to describe, if there are "truths" about the real world for science to be seeking. There is a curious paradox that science is seeking the "truth," but will never label any of its findings "truth." If the point of the letter was to argue that science needs to make clearer that none of its conclusions are "truth," I agree wholeheartedly. But to argue for that point by suggesting that there is no "truth" is not the way to go about it.

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Those who would sacrifice an essential liberty for a temporary security will lose both, and deserve neither. -- Benjamin FranklinWe see monsters where science shows us windmills. -- Phat