Bryan Appleyard » Blog Archive » Uncertainty Does Not Sell

Uncertainty Does Not Sell

06 October 2012

Some things will just not reduce to a tweet and, after several attempts, I have found this is one of them.

There are two kind of scientific rhetoric:

The first is inward. This is to boast of what we know and concludes that, precisely because we know so much, we must one day know everything. This is Dawkins and all the other ‘hard’ scientistic thinkers. You can buy their books everywhere because certainty sells.

The second is outward. This is to gaze in wonder at what we do not know. It is also to look at the past and note how many times we have been wrong. Most scientists, I suspect, are like this. Astronomers cannot help but be like this. You can’t read their books because uncertainty doesn’t sell.

In my mind, this echoes my private definition of the difference between Beethoven and Mozart. The first tends to the inward – look at me - and the second to the outward – look at us. But this only goes so far, Beethoven’s greatness is untouched by the comparison, that of the inward scientists is destroyed.

You can see my problems with the tweet.

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5 Responses to “Uncertainty Does Not Sell”
1. Michael Smith Says:
  8 October 2012 at 2:37 am
  
  You posted on Richard Holloway a while back, where he said that the opposite of faith is certainty:
  
  http://www.bryanappleyard.com/the-opposite-of-faith-is-not-doubt-it-is-certainty-2/
  
  I think it’s the old divide between reason and faith. The ultimate fact is also the ultimate mystery because the ultimate fact can’t be explained with reference to any more fundamental facts. We can establish fact by rational means but must experience mystery spiritually. You can clamber to the top of the mountain in a calculated, scientific fashion but what do you do when you get there? How do you admire a view scientifically?
  
  We are the self-awareness of the universal process which brought us forth, so we have to ‘look outwards’ at that process to really feel complete by knowing it as our truest, deepest self. We have to find ourselves, outside of ourselves as it were.
  
  We can make ourselves invincible through reason, only for that fortress to become a prison. Why would we want to be invincible? Why want to be untouchable? Surely the most beautiful experience that’s given to us is the entwining of our naked souls? We have to be open to each other for that to happen. The ‘inward scientist’ should embrace his destruction because to be free we must be conquered, to be whole we must part from ourselves.
  
  Traditional religion might be terminally flawed, but it has a kernel of insight we need to cling to. A child sleeping in its parent’s arms is an embodiment of perfectly vulnerability, perfect abandonment, and yet perfect bliss. That child is in us all and if we can find it, we’ll release great starbursts of joy that will light up the sky.
2. Peter Says:
  8 October 2012 at 11:03 am
  
  The hubris inherent in inward-looking scientific rhetoric can be seen in the way its advocates will tout the glory of the inherent ever-changing and self-correcting nature of scientific inquiry while at the same time insisting that current orthodoxy must be accepted in public affairs as if it had just delivered to Moses on Mt. Sinai. Implausibility, experience, irrationality, fantasy and even unfulfilled predictions are dismissed out of hand as legitimate objections.
  
  I once was involved in one of those interminable blog debates about Darwinism. The subject was a newly published study in which some scientific sage postulated women evolved blond hair because they were competing for a dwindling supply of mammoth hunters. He managed to be racist, sexist and preposterous all at once. I was disheatened and even a little chilled to see the number of ostensibly intelligent posters insist that, while it did seem a little over the top, we were all under some kind of intellectual obligation to accept the findings until someone came up with a new full-blown alternative theory consistent with the evidence. There was abslutely no room for anyone to say he hadn’t a clue why women evolved blond hair but he was pretty damn confident this scientist didn’t either.
3. Brit Says:
  10 October 2012 at 10:46 pm
  
  Oi, who are you calling ostensibly intelligent, Peter?
  
  ….
  
  Some things will just not reduce to a tweet and, after several attempts, I have found this is one of them.
  
  A shame, since what, after all, is Twitter for, if not to condense one’s musings on the nature of epistemology to a 140-character ejaculation, which a small percentage of one’s followers that aren’t robots might notice as it whistles down their timeline amidst news of people Stephen Fry finds lovely and what somebody off Mock the Week thinks of John Terry?
4. Clyde Davies Says:
  11 October 2012 at 9:39 am
  
  I like looking outwards, despite being a research scientist. I have my own telescope and often gaze in wonder at the beauty of the heavens, when the nights are clear enough and the light pollution doesn’t get in the way.
  But I can’t help admiring those of us, all the same, who want to join the dots in the celestial firmament and come up with a more coherent picture of what’s out there. I listened to the great Jocelyn Bell-Burnell describing how, from a few repetitive squiggles on a radio telescope trace, she deduced the existence and nature of the first pulsar. It was a Holmesian feat of deduction: instead of a few crime scene traces we had the high frequency of the pulses, their short duration, their incredible regularity and their origin smack-bang in the middle of a supernova remnant. The thinking behind the story was cool, sexy, almost Zen-like in its perspicacity.
  Wonder and understanding are inseparable: the former spurs the latter, and the latter would not exist without the former, but without understanding we’d just get totally frustrated as a species.
5. Nemesis Says:
  9 December 2012 at 7:50 pm
  
  And all uttered without any substantiating evidence or equivocating uncertainty; a beautiful piece of unwitting self-parody.
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