Pessimistic meta-induction

Posted on by

Charles Chu explains what it means.

Much of what we believe today is doomed to join other infamous dead theories like Lamarckism (“Giraffes have long necks because they used them a lot.”), bloodletting (“Let me put a leech on your forehead. It’ll cure your allergies. I promise.”), and phrenology (“I’m better than you because I have a bigger head.”).

Philosophers have a name for this concept. To help make it memorable for undergraduates, they kindly titled it the “Pessimistic Meta-Induction from the History of Science”.

The essay makes the case for intellectual humility and for challenging yourself to take the ideological Turing test.

5 thoughts on “Pessimistic meta-induction”

  1. Long term it is reasonable to think about how society in 200 years will view today and what values will be rejected in the future. In this exercise, I will assume that history will make the same mistakes: They will tend glorify/blame specific individuals more than society itself, they will have a bit of Andy Griffin syndrome (people cared each other), focus more on military wars, and assume historical occurrences were simply fated. (Say like WW1 was fated reality not just an endless bizarre bad decisions made by European governments.)

    1) I do think societies will evidently outlaw abortion but blame society for the treatment of single mothers and their children. (I still think by 2100 governments and companies will be looking for ways to increase fertility rates.)

    2) There will be run on developed government debt. I still think Japan experience after 1990 is the example all developed nations follow here. (The US is following Japan experience in a lot ways if you think about) However the run on government debt will be a smaller nation and lead to the evidently finances run by large banks in small European nation. (I vote Ukraine but there are other candidates.)

    3) I still believe large companies play an ever increasing role in governing. Facebook and Google (or whoever follows them) will have more impact on global governance than most nations. And suspect a large company will have over-throw a government (small one in South America or Africa) in 100 years. Long term I think this is a good trend but not a perfect one.

    4) I have no idea what happens in the Middle East and how that works out in the long run.

    5) We will see the return of single income families and religion in a couple generations.

  2. He’s partly right, but I wouldn’t take it too far. The ancients believed plenty of things that we still believe today. The Pythagorean Theorem still works just fine; conservation of momentum has been known since ~1700 and still holds (in a slightly different formulation to accommodate Einstein’s discoveries). Neither complete optimism not complete pessimism are justified by experience.

  3. Isaac Asimov had an essay taking down the argument, “People used to say the earth is flat, then they said it was round, now they say it’s an oblate spheroid. Tomorrow it could be something completely different.” He pointed out that the difference between flat and round is a lot bigger than the difference between round and oblate spheroid. In some areas, we may well be converging on truth.

Comments are closed.