Selected Aphorisms from Francis Bacon's Novum Organum

I'm currently working to format Francis Bacon's Novum Organum as a LessWrong sequence. It's a moderate-sized project as I have to work through the entire work myself, and write an introduction which does Novum Organum justice and explains the novel move of taking an existing work and posting in on LessWrong (short answer: NovOrg is some serious hardcore rationality and contains central tenets of the LW foundational philosophy notwithstanding being published back in 1620, not to mention that Bacon and his works are credited with launching the modern Scientific Revolution)

While I'm still working on this, I want to go ahead and share some of my favorite aphorisms from is so far:

3. . . . The only way to command reality is to obey it . . .

9. Nearly all the things that go wrong in the sciences have a single cause and root, namely: while wrongly admiring and praising the powers of the human mind, we don’t look for true helps for it.

Bacon sees the unaided human mind as entirely inadequate for scientific progress. He sees for the way forward for scientific progress as constructing tools/infrastructure/methodogy to help the human mind think/reason/do science.

10. Nature is much subtler than are our senses and intellect; so that all those elegant meditations, theorizings and defensive moves that men indulge in are crazy—except that no-one pays attention to them. [Bacon often uses a word meaning ‘subtle’ in the sense of ‘fine-grained, delicately complex’; no one current English word will serve.]

24. There’s no way that axioms •established by argumentation could help us in the discovery of new things, because the subtlety of nature is many times greater than the subtlety of argument. But axioms •abstracted from particulars in the proper way often herald the discovery of new particulars and point them out, thereby returning the sciences to their active status.

Bacon repeatedly hammers that reality has a surprising amount of detail such that just reasoning about things is unlikely to get at truth. Given the complexity and subtlety of nature, you have to go look at it. A lot.

28. Indeed, anticipations have much more power to win assent than interpretations do. They are inferred from a few instances, mostly of familiar kinds, so that they immediately brush past the intellect and fill the imagination; whereas interpretations are gathered from very various and widely dispersed facts, so that they can’t suddenly strike the intellect, and must seem weird and hard to swallow—rather like the mysteries of faith.

Anticipations are what Bacon calls making theories by generalizing principles from a few specific examples and the reasoning from those [ill-founded] general principles. This is the method of Aristotle and science until that point which Bacon wants to replace. Interpretations is his name for his inductive method which only generalizes very slowly, building out slowly increasingly large sets of examples/experiments.

I read Aphorism 28 as saying that Anticipations have much lower inferential distance since they can be built simple examples with which everyone is familiar. In contrast, if you build up a theory based on lots of disparate observation that isn't universal, you know have lots of inferential distance and people find your ideas weird and hard to swallow.

All quotations cited from: Francis Bacon, Novum Organum, in the version by Jonathan Bennett presented at www.earlymoderntexts.com