I have made great efforts to avoid that in my children's education. A hint for people in the UK - look at science GCSEs other than the usual physics, chemistry biology trio. My daughter did astronomy and it was far better as it had a lot of explanation of historical cosmology and what the evidence has been for various theories.
A certain pandemic recently showcased this to the world as it was told to „follow the science“ and never mind who was leading it.
The whole idea of science as handed down by authority also helps people like creationists and conspiracy theorists because if its just a matter of authority then you can choose a different authority.
Wittgenstein famously argued that the word "game" cannot be given an intensional definition – you cannot produce a list of features that all games have and which only games have. For, he argued, "game" is not a category defined in terms of singular essence, rather it is a collection of things which all have a lot in common but there is no one thing which they all have in common. Like members of a family, which all resemble each other, but all in different ways – hence he called this family resemblance (Familienähnlichkeit in German).
Well, I would say the exact same thing is true of "religion" – just like "game", the word can't be defined, because there is no one thing all "religions" have in common.
But, our inability to clearly define "game" doesn't make the concept useless, and isn't an inherent obstacle to using the concept. Well, the same is true of "religion".
If you are going to call something a "religion" which isn't widely considered to be one, you need to identify which particular features you think it shares with those phenomena which are widely considered to be "religions". And I think Grothendieck has done that here.
He's just arguing that the way science is treated by the general public has many specific negative features, and that many of these are held in common with religion. And he's quite clear about what those aspects here.
I mean a carpenter knows more about carpentry than a random person - how is that controversial or problematic? But lets call carpenters high priests thereby implying carpentry expertise is somehow suspect. If you try to lecture a seasoned carpenter about carpentry they would probably also call you an idiot in more or less polite words. I guess that just proves how carpenters are like high priests jaleously guarding their status?
The whole essay is just riddled with falacies and strawmen. For example the fact that someone have tried to study war scientifically apparently means this makes war acceptable. How does that follow? Never mind this completely ignores the history of war and justifications of war which is much older than science.
A criticims of scientism and its derived pseudo-religions like nlp, scientology, transhumanism, the singularity, simulation etc would be very welcome, but the analysis need to be coherent, otherwise it is no better.
been chewing on that one for a while now.
For example, "the sun is an egg of the great pillbug that created the universe" is a religious belief, but it would be quite a stretch to call it a religion.
I think the distinction is particularly important because it underlies how a lot of people talk past each other when it comes to atheism, since "zero gods have ever existed" is also a religious belief without being a religion.
But by what criteria is “zero gods exist” a religious belief compared to say “phlogiston does not exist”?
For almost any positive statement about religious topics or implications, the negated version remains also about religious topics or implications.
"Bread doesn't exist" is still a belief about the concept of bread.
age of the universe, creator or not, teleology, interpretations of probability, primacy of logic (are we allowing for the law of excluding middle or not)
Science doesn't do these things but scientism does.
Wait this is a different John Bell (https://publish.uwo.ca/~jbell/) than the Bell Inequalities (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Stewart_Bell). But strangely that John Bell has also worked on quantum foundations (looks like quantum logic and contextuality).
(Not a defence, I was just recently thinking about the Bell Ineqs in terms of the Grothendieck Ineqs and this popped up in my feed)
Think about gyroscopes. Newton invents classical mechanics, with no specific rules for rotating objects. You get a top mathematician, Euler, to work out the implications for rotating objects. The implications are weird and implausible. But it turns out that they are spot on. People invent gyroscopes and exploit the truly spectacular success of the experimental-deductive method.
Another example could be James Clerk-Maxwell building on the work of Faraday and Ampere to come up with Maxwell's Equations. The equations predict electro-magnetic radiation, so Hertz goes looking and, yes, it is really there!
I want a name for this kind of truly spectacular success. I'll build on the gyroscope example and call it Gyro-gnosis.
But think instead of Hook's law. Spring force is proportional to extension. Kind of. It is useful enough if you don't pull too hard on your spring, but it is not fundamental. Or think of animal testing in medicine. There is some theory. All life on Earth today is based on DNA. We know the branching of the tree of life; mice are mammals, so mouse research should link up with human health, sometimes, a little bit. But theory and experiment combine to give us hints rather than wisdom.
I want a name for this kind of weak knowledge that so often leads to disappointment. Stealing the T from Theory, taking the whole of hint, and the end of wisdom, I'm going to write Thintdom.
By page six, Grothendieck is on to his manifesto "Fighting Scientism". We are certainly in trouble, due to thintdom being granted the prestige of gyrognosis. But if you want to push back, you have to drive a wedge between thintdom and gyrognosis. Since gyrognosis is truly spectacularly successful, fighting against it is just banging your head against a brick wall. One needs to separate out the weaker forms of knowledge so that one can criticize thintdom without its proponent being able to use gyrognosis as a shield. If you let thintdom and gyrognosis be joined together as empiricism, your criticism cannot be made to stick because the parts of empiricism that work well, work far to well to be criticized.
It is now commonplace to notice the depth of the technology stack, from applications, down through compilers, assemblers, the block diagram level of hardware, the register level, the logic gate level, the transistor level, circuits with parasitic inductance and capacitance, doping and migration, statistical effects,... When you build up the way, some of the lower level features are preserved, such as conservation of momentum. And some of the lower level features help with understanding the higher levels. But medicine offers a clear warning that Nature's stack is too deep. Four hundred years of "success" have taught us what that leads to. Sometimes you get gyrognosis. Sometimes you get thintdom.
By the end of his piece Grothendieck is pining his hopes on "inner class contradiction" within the scientific caste. Maybe. I think the most promising starting point is to push back against linguist poverty. We have only one word, empiricism for, err, empiricism, so the four hundred year old empirical lesson that the successes of empiricism are bimodal goes unnoticed.
>I think that agriculture, stockbreeding, decentralized energy production, medicine of a certain kind, very different from the medicine that prevails today, will come to the fore.
>In general, people see two extreme alternatives and see no middle ground between the two. If the person I'm talking to has chosen a certain alternative and I have a vision that lies beyond the one they considers good, they'll immediately accuse me of having chosen the opposite extreme alternative, because they can't see the middle ground.
There's the science of Karl Popper, where no statement can be considered scientific unless it is possible to devise an experiment to disprove it. And there's the science of education, where we memorize and regurgitate stuff.
Those two are stunningly different from each other. Yet, it's not possible to get to the mysterious work of actually doing Popper-level science without memorizing what went before. The critiques of this paper still ring true half a century on. I wish more students of science from primary school on up would pester their teachers and each other with the question, "how do you know?"
It seems the best we can hope for is to mostly just learn the known facts and, separately, the abstract way in which scientific theories are justified, augmented by a close analysis and understanding of a few case studies. Even that if of course rarely achieved in education.
Incidentally, folks in this thread may be interested in "Proofs and Refutations" by Imre Lakatos, where it's shown how this same issue is (surprisingly) found to exist almost as badly in academic mathematics, despite math being thought of as one of the few places where the experts learn how to the edifice is built from the ground up.
We wouldn't call a maintainer of watches, guns, flowers or any other artifact a neo-something-ist when one points out that it requires great skill to handle the respective artifacts in a way that does them justice, but when it comes to knowledge very quickly people are accused of being elitist, gatekeepers or worst of all, academics.
Proprietary language is treated like a conspiracy, not like a natural development in any domain where people invest a lot of time to build specialized knowledge, on the grounds that apparently someone who hasn't invested any time can't understand what's going on. The decline of scholasticism is honestly one of the single worst things in our age and responsible for most modern grifting.
Personally, I've been greatly influenced by Feynman's great autobiography Surely you must be joking, Mr. Feynman![1].
In it, the Noble-prize winning Scientist conveys a worldview that has none of the scientism derided by Grothendieck in this essay. It is a vaccine against scientism, if you may - and a triumph of curiosity, common and uncommon sense.
Feynman also coined[2] the description of physics (which I use to describe mathematics as well), that annihilates the high-priest narrative of "reason" as the driving force:
Physics is like sex: sure, it may give some practical results, but that's not why we do it
In the end, we do things because they feel good and because they feel right.
Mathematics more so than anything else; we are guided by a sense of beauty and what's interesting. It's an art of story-telling and surprise.
Much of science is motivated by emotion and little else: the curiosity to untangle the patterns of how things work, drive to be the first to solve the mystery, the mission of doing the right thing.
Without those, science doesn't science. Feynman gave one straightforward example: the military wasn't telling some of the lower-ranking researchers of the Manhattan project what they were working on, and why. They were lagging behind. Once they were told, at Feynman's insistence, that they were a part of a project to build a bomb that would end the war, they exceeded all expectations.
Because with that, their work gained a purpose, and gave hope.
In the end, how we feel about things is everything. Scientists are just those people who feel good when they find out how things work, just like engineers are those people who feel good when they make things work (or make things that work).
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surely_You%27re_Joking,_Mr._Fe...!
[2] Disputed, but it's definitely in his character: https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Richard_Feynman
> Only the opinion of the experts in a given field has any bearing on any question in this field.
This has nothing to do with science and is really a point about the division of labor/economics.
The rejection of experts has been a hallmark of scientific and mathematical thinking since ancient times, most famously in Socrates. But the thread continues throughout all of human history.
I like Grothendieck's work a lot, and I know he had unconventional politics. But this reads like one of the many Marx-influenced attempts from that period to discredit the idea of truth.
This is not a critic of the idea science, ie some kind of pursuit of knowledge using any reasonable means. It is a critic of the modern institution that academic science currently is. As such, yes, some critics are in fact more generally applicable than just for science (as you say, division of labor). But these are particularly visible in science and have specific consequences in this context.
I bet it's fun to pretend like your the little guy fighting against dogma, but try to remember we still live in a world where the majority of people still worship some flavor of desert cult leader from 2000 to 200 years ago. So crying about science being bad too just feels a bit tone deaf
There are some things that we can make very accurate guesses on: IE, evolution. No one observed evolution over millennia, yet there is an abundance of observable evidence that makes the theory of evolution generally accepted as fact.
But there are things that we can not observe, and can only make educated guesses at. Today that's multiverse theory. In the past, it was the theory of relativity.
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My point is that to call science a religion (Scienceism) is to fundamentally misunderstand the limits of observation, and the purpose of religion. Science will never tell us why we're here, is there a god, does it love us, is the human soul immortal, do all dogs go to heaven, ect. At best it can only explain religion from anthropomorphic principles.
And that's okay.
The problem comes when scientists think that observed fact (or generally accepted fact) negates religion, or when religious people think science is a replacement for religion.
How could you unbind yourself? For better seeing etc.