epicurus

Science as attunement, from Galileo to language models. Crossposted from my website. Written by me and edited in collaboration with Claude Fable (Anthropic). Many would agree that the scientific method is the best process we have discovered to understand the world. But what is the scientific method? The products of the method, i.e., established science, are typically used deductively: we start from a set of principles or axioms and, through mathematics or simply brute-force computation, deduce consequences and predict the world as we see it. This has been spectacularly successful, giving us life-saving vaccines, space travel and a complete transformation of the circumstances of our lives. When established science is applied, to compute a bridge's load or a vaccine's dose for instance, the deductions really are the product. But what about science in the making? The success of the deductive mode has led us to read the whole method in the image of its products: deduction as the substance of science, and intuition as scaffolding, indispensable in the context of discovery but dismantled once the deductive edifice stands. I will argue that it is the other way around. The formalism is the scaffolding; the intuition is the building; and what reasoning is for is the construction. Seeing why will also allow us to appreciate how machine learning and neural networks might change how science is done. From myth to mechanism Let me offer an idiosyncratic history of how the scientific process came to be. We start with the Greeks around 600 B.C. They conceived the world through a mythological lens: gods were real and necessary to explain everyday observations. Human intuition was learned in the dynamics of society, and explanations of nature bootstrapped on this intuition: gods could be angry, jealous, passionate, and were understood in the same narrative terms as humans. This was in fact the typical lens through which any society understood the world at the time. The first p