I wrote these two laws down on a scrap of paper years ago. I still have the scrap of paper but not the original reference. They seem relevant to dicussions about power stations, the Murray River and especially the universe.
Harris’s First Law:
Belief in the truth of a theory is inversely proportional to the precision of the science.
Harris’s Second Law:
The creativity of a scientist is directly proportional to how much he knows, and inversely proportional to how much he believes.
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posted August 04, 2005
posted May 09, 2008
posted October 14, 2010
Jennifer Marohasy BSc PhD is a critical thinker with expertise in the scientific method.
Who’s Harris?
We know it’s definitely not Sam Harris.
Jen, found a Harris Law on a google search -Paul Harris lecturer in Agriculural Engineering “The harder you push any system the more unstable it becomes, and the more management it requires!” Is that the same Harris?
I would not fully agree with the latter “law”. I have found that plant runs best and most efficiently at maximum capacity. At less than maximum capacity operators become lazy and disasters can happen. Like the little old lady tootling along the (110km/hr limit) highway at 70 km/hr -not only does she cause a problem for other traffic on the road but is very likely herself to be in an accident.
However, I would go along with your quote of the second law.
To make these laws work, one needs first to distinguish between belief, knowledge, and truth. The distinctions between them are not immediately obvious.
As any expert knows “the more we know, the more we know we don’t know”.
The Uncertainty Principle lies behind the efforts of cap-n-trade etc. This Principle can be expressed – based on political events I have seen – in the Proctor Theory of Social Value, that states:
“The value of any social policy is determined by its face value divided by the chance of it cccuring, such that, Vsp = Vfv/x, x being the chance (<1) of the occurrence."
Thus, fighting climate change. On the face of it, a low value, something we have nothing to do with or can do about. But if there is a 1 in 50 chance that we are doing something, and that thing will come back to bite us, then the policy value become Vfv/0.02, or Vsp = 50Vfv.
Poverty, sickness and war have chances of about 0.99 of occurring. The Vsp is therefore 1.01Vfv. That means that periodically we stand up in the House/Congress and say that other people should stop being mean. But Climate Change, having a Vsp of 50Vfv, well, that means we should look to draconian legislation.
We are funding research to shoot lasers and nuclear missiles at rogue asteroids that might smack the earth. If this isn't an example of the Proctor Theorem in action, nothing is.
(P.S. Excuse the ego with the self-named Theorem. I'm working on a grant application to study the mathematics behind it in its difficult, relativistic detail.)
Maybe there is another scrap of paper with laws #3 and #4. Or maybe a telephone number of the mysterious Mr Harris. Or a shopping list.
The mind boggles.
RE Proctors Theorem, this might well be post hoc Proctor hoc but as every punter knows , expected value is the bet/(odds+1). Woops – looks like A/T, Douggy.
No one should ever believe in a theory, in the dictionary sense “having faith” or “feeling sure of the truth.” Theories are mere tools to describe nature, only as useful as their last test against observation or experiment. We should believe in nature, not our theories about nature. But we are only human…
Here’s what happens when you “believe” in a theory so much that disbelieving the facts before your very eyes seems reasonable:
http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/Features/OceanCooling/page1.php
These people are now hopelessly entangled web of models, adjusted data, stitched data, cherry picking, cognitive dissonance, and ironically, DENIAL. Read how as they semi-consciously corrupt the precision of their data by adjusting it to fit various models their faith increases. A fine illustration of Harris’s First Law.
Here’s the data (left out of the report above) they are still working on to “adjust” to conform to their faith:
http://www-argo.ucsd.edu/nino3_4_atlas.gif
Furthermore, when you believe, you become evangelical. Why have Argo researchers produced an “education” campaign designed to scare the crap of 8-12 year old Pacific Islander kids?
http://www.argo.ucsd.edu/OceansRisingYr8-12Dec10.pdf
Religion is Harris First Law pushed to its limit. True faith is immune to testing against evidence. The great religions of the world do not ask their faithful to believe because the evidence for faith is so great, but to believe in spite of worldly evidence.
Nice try rog, but fear not, we will soon discover the true identity of Harris.
Harris Second Law should really be two separate propositions.
Jen’s old notes are probably a bit rough.
I think anecdotal evidence suggests that creativity isn’t proportional to how much stuff one actually has stored in one’s head, maybe Jen’s notes should have read “inversely.”
For instance, young monkeys and humans appear to contain (statistically speaking) greater potential for creativity than wise old monkeys and humans. Neither rock n’ roll or quantum physics were created by wise old men.
This doesn’t mean that great masterpieces of art or science can be performed without vast knowledge bases. Yet creativity implies paradigm shift, a beginning of something new, not its ultimate culmination. The Mona Lisa is arguable one of the greatest paintings in the world, but it’s not the most creative by a long shot. Darwin’s “On the Origins of Species” was a huge creative break through, but it lacks the vast syncretic knowledge we possess today on the matter.
It seems that being ignorant of the dangers and limits that wiser primates know about empowers creative action. Brash ignorance enables invention at the gut level. How many times have we heard an inventor claim that, “if I knew how difficult the solution was going to be I would have never undertaken the project.”
There is likely some kind of naturally selected for propensity of youth to be more creative than their elders as well.
Creativity is about the ability to synthesize facts that no one else has bothered to connect before, so knowledge is important, but probably only secondarily so. Decisions, creative or otherwise, are always made based upon incomplete knowledge sets. Creativity is the intuitive ability to sift the few germane facts out of the same vast sea of information we all swim in.
As for creativity being inversely proportional to belief, this is perhaps the driving force of all history as well as most of our great literature. To believe in a truth is to proudly defend a status quo, an orthodoxy. Creativity is heresy. Faith will always resist ideological, cognitive or cultural evolution. Faith, pride and oppression…all the fixin’s for a ripping good tragedy.
Luke,
I agree!
‘The specialist learns more and more about less and less until, finally, he knows everything about nothing; whereas the generalist learns less and less about more and more until, finally, he knows nothing about everything.’
Author unknown.
I’m no scientist but to me the first law means ‘keep an open mind’
AND my introduction to AGW sceptisism is encapusated in my letter published in Quadrant Online http://www.quadrant.org.au/blogs/doomed-planet/2010/01/open-letter-on-climate-change
I recall I asked Dr Ball if I could use a paper of his and me wrote saying he would be honoured and thanking me ‘for keeping an open mind’
As I look at media columns about the current ‘carbon tax’ debate I worry that journos don’t do their own research and seem to be subject to ‘group think’
wes george,
The argo edu link is, quite simply, corrupt. But how can they be taken to task?
Perhaps the US senate needs to know . I will try a shortcut.
Val
The journalists have never understood the science, they had faith in the scientists in ‘white coats’. This belief is spawned at universities all over the country in Communication courses, which ostensibly are training people to become workers in some PR capacity.
Of those graduates who get a start in print or electronic media, groupthink is unavoidable. Especially if you’re camped at the ABC.
Yep El Gordo; a sad state of affairs; I did manage to get a comment on The Drum today (Glen Milne’s column)
about the ‘carbon tax’
Professor Carter in Quadrant Online this week says it best ‘Despite this lack of evidence for dangerous, or potentially dangerous, warming, and despite the lack of efficacy of cutting carbon dioxide emissions as a means of preventing the trivial warming that is likely to occur (cutting all of Australia’s emissions would theoretically prevent, perhaps, around one-thousandth of a degree of warming), the political course in Canberra is now set on carbon tax autopilot, and the plane is flying squarely into the eye of a storm that is labelled “let’s spin a regressive new tax as a virtuous environmental measure”.
That’s the first question; where’s the evidence of AGW.
AND taking money from the ‘big carbon dioxide polluters’ and giving it to other people to compensate for rises in the price of things doesn’t mitigate anything.
This is a tax grab and it will put Australian industries on the backfoot; jobs will be lost and people will be poorer
Ian Thompson,
Thanks, Ian.
I can’t express how disgusted I was with the SPREAD campaign directed at Pacific Islander children. Notice the odd typeface font at the bottom of each page near the beginning suggesting really abusive concepts to dump on school kids between the age of 8 and 12. I’ll bet that was added after the document passed through some sort of approval process…
This is just wrong:
http://www.argo.ucsd.edu/OceansRisingYr8-12Dec10.pdf
Doug proctor, you say:
” But Climate Change, having a Vsp of 50Vfv, well, that means we should look to draconian legislation.”
I don’t follow that; why should AGW, if it has a low risk of occurance, require drastic preventitive measures; wouldn’t the salient point be, not the probability of occurance, but the consequence of occurance? After all some things have a low risk of occurance and little or no consequence and so on.
Wes, Thanks for your comments. But my experience is as written:
Harris’s Second Law:
The creativity of a scientist is directly proportional to how much he knows, and inversely proportional to how much he believes.
****
And I suggest you read Thomas Kuhn’s ‘The structure of scientific revolutions’ to understand where I am coming from.
I am still no clearer as to who Harris is, does he drive a bus?
Harris’s law proposes “the creativity of a SCIENTIST is directly proportion to how much he knows. Maybe scientists are a special category of people immune to the normal foibles the rest of us suffer. For the rest of us, there’s little evidence that creativity is tightly coupled to how much we know, which, if you think about it, is what Harris implies next when he proposes–
Creativity… is inversely proportional to how much one believes.
Hang on, how is knowing different from believing?
Perhaps it’s the rare ability to hold a portion of the mind always in a tabula rasa state open to surprise. Someone who knows something, but is capable of cognitively absorbing the significance of contrary evidence to arrive at a new position differs from the believer who cannot allow his knowledge to be questioned. Scientists, one might assume, are specially endowed with this gift. Yet this whole blog is dedicated to providing evidence to the contrary. Max Plank noted that new scientific paradigms only win out when the defenders of the old retire to the next world.
I’m coming from a more behavioural sciences perspective. For instance, those Japanese snow macaques. You know, the ones who sat around morosely shivering all winter until a totally recklessly teenage macaque jumped into a pond, to what the whole mob thought would be his icy death. But it turned out to be a hot springs. Now the whole mob hangs out in the hot springs all winter. And all because of an amazingly reckless leap of imagination by one young monkey who didn’t know better.
That’s all creativity is at its most fundamental. Balls. Unimpeded by wisdom. I’m not saying knowledge can’t be an important handmaiden of creativity, common sense would suggest otherwise, especial within a paradigm (Kuhn, SSR) but it is not the primary forcing agent and it just as often is an impediment to invention.
There is a real “punk” attitude towards authority that seems to permeate most creative breakthroughs, although in hindsight history usually obscures just how transgressive an idea we hold as totally conventional or even dated might have been when it was first suggested. Kuhn addresses this “Punkness” required to think creatively in terms of how the linguistic and cultural cognitive blocks channel human conscious towards orthodoxy.
Another example of why creativity might not be proportional to knowledge is the fact that almost all creative breakthroughs were thought of many times before, but just didn’t catch on. For instance, the Greeks discovered the principle of the steam engine 2,000 years before the Industrial revolution but didn’t bother doing anything with it. They had the metal working technology to do so. They were avid traders. Why didn’t they develop steam engines? Maybe because they didn’t need to. Slave and horse- power were adequate cultural solutions.
We had to wait until the end of slavery, serfdom and “peak-horse” power (plus the Enlightenment) for anyone to get creative with steam power.
Evolution was another idea around for ages until two blokes independent of each other “discovered” it again. Of the two, Darwin’s knowledge base was massively broader than Wallace’s…and Wallace claims the break through came to him in a fevered malarial hallucination wherein a cognitive synesthesia of all the data points came together.
Even weirder, of the billion or so inhabitants of planet Earth circa 1850, the two blokes who independently “discovered” evolution at the same time just happened to be English. A coincidence?
I’d like to propose George’s Law:
“Creativity is proportional to just how “germane” one knowledge is to the challenge at hand.”
By germane I mean knowing the right things at the right time when asked the right question. All other knowledge, no matter how accurate, is just noise at such a moment.
Too much knowledge isn’t helpful because it reduces the search for the germane to looking for needles in a haystack. Worse, too much knowledge produces the illusion that the current working orthodoxy is so complete that all solutions to challenges can be met within the paradigm. “The science is settled.”
As such, many of our greatest creative achievements are artefacts of circumstances which limited the focus on the amount of total information available so that it was possible – even likely –that some clever worker would lift out the germane knowledge necessary for transmogrification into an emergent paradigm. This explains why creative workers in any given field of human endeavour often arrive at creative breakthroughs simultaneously AND totally independently.
Forgive me for using Elvis Presley and his mob in Memphis circa 1954 as an example. These musicians were not Juilliard School trained. The impact of their innovations was totally out of proportion to the actual “amount” of knowledge about music they possessed and yet that’s what enabled them to make the creative breakthrough they did.
No Juilliard trained musicians participated in the invention of rock ‘n roll. Why? Because they knew too much about music to invent outside the orthodoxy of the paradigm they were trained to work within.
Bill Haley, Chuck Berry, Bo Diddly, Elvis and the Sun Record mob didn’t “know” half as much as academically trained musicians, but what they did “know” was germane to that moment in American culture and is now considered a pivotal moment in the history of all music, as it is now studied at Juilliard.
I’m not saying that ignorance makes for blissful creation. Rather that creativity is proportional to how well one can focus on the germane to the exclusion of all else. As the natural selection process would have it, those “ignorant” of all the noise but who find themselves in circumstances where the germane is present tend to invent more frequently than those with vast datasets of knowledge at their disposal.