Ignorance: How it Drives Science – Stuart Firestein

Thoughts: Ignorance is a short meditation by Stuart Firestein on the value of ignorance, particularly in scientific practice. It’s pitched toward non-scientists, and and while I didn’t find any of the points he raised particularly groundbreaking, there are still some useful insights. It’s short, and a worthwhile read.

(The notes below are not a summary of the book, but rather raw notes - whatever I thought, at the time, might be worth remembering.)

Firestein, Stuart. 2012. Ignorance: How it Drives Science. Oxford UP.

Introduction

• 6-7: There are two sense of ignorance: one, the most common, entails indifference to facts/logic, being “unaware, unenlightened, uninformed” etc. It pertains mostly to individuals. Another definition is “the absence of fact, understanding, insight, or clarity about something.” It’s communal, rather than individual. This book is about the second type of ignorance
  • James Clerk Maxwell: “Thoroughly conscious ignorance is the prelude to every real advance in science.”
• 9: “I have learned from years of teaching that say nearly the same thing in different ways is an often effective strategy.”

One: A Short View of Ignorance

• 17: John Keats’s idea of Negative Capability: “when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts without any irritable reaching after fact & reason”. Keats identified it as an ideal state of mind for creativity, but Firestein holds it up as essential for doing good science.

Two: Finding Out

• 20: book mentioned: Mary Poovey’s A History of the Modern Fact, in which she “traces the development of the fact as a respected and preferred unit of knowledge”
• 26: neuronal “spikes” have been highly studied for many decades, and have been thought to be fundamental to how the brain works. Firestein states, however, that spikes are simply the easiest thing to measure in the brain, and that little attention has been given to the plenty of other things going on within and between neurons, some involving electric charges and some not.

Three: Limits, Uncertainty, Impossibility, and Other Minor Problems

• 36: recalling that even slightly inaccurate knowledge of starting conditions can lead to wildly innacurate knowledge of conditions later on (i.e. Lorenz’s discoveries/Chaos Theory), Firestein points out that due to Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle, there is no way to precisely know the starting conditions of a system. So Yuval Noah Harari’s assertion that there are ‘hard limits’ on predictability holds up.

Four: Unpredicting

Five: The Quality of Ignorance

• 59-60: Firestein points out that grant proposals are a “virtual marketplace of ignorance”, where scientists are rewarded for articulating what they don’t yet know.
• 61- : Firestein proposes some ideas for evaluating the quality of particular patches of ignorance:
  • 61-62: if it is connected with ignorance in other fields, it’s generally useful (in contrast to, say, mathematical proofs that are true but irrelevant, having no bearing on other open questions)
    • on the other hand, he points out, sometimes the value of discoveries is not recognized until later
  • 64: if you can prove that a thing is possibile, it may stimulate further research.
  • 65: if it’s a particularly large or profound unknown. Failure is more likely when pursuing such questions, but if you happen to make a key discovery, it represents a big advance
• 72: Statistician George Box: “All models are wrong, but some are useful”
• 75: Firestein is a neuroscientist specializing in olfaction. He states that “the neurons in your nose and brain that are involved in this process [ the process of molecular recognition] are unique in their ability to regenerate new neurons throughout your life—the only brain cells that do this” j: really? I thought neurogenesis was an underappreciated but acknowledged-within-the-field process. Or maybe I’m confusing this with neuroplasticity?
• 77: “I hate hypotheses…. I see them as imprisoning, biasing, and discriminatory”, and they tend to lead to controversies, people picking sides, etc.
  • j: does this confilict with Popper’s idea of the ‘crucial experiment’?

Six: You and Ignorance

• 82: “If you meet scientists… don’t ask them to explain what they do; ask them what they’re trying to find out…. Ask them what the questions are, what are the interesting things in their field that no one knows about?”
• 86-87: some questions that have proven productive in the seminars Firestein teaches on ignorance:
  • “Do you think things are unknowable in your field? What?”
  • “What are the current technological limits in your work? Can you see solutions?”
  • “Is there something you would like to work on knowing but can’t?”
  • “What was the state of ignorance in your field 10, 15, or 25 years ago, and how has that changed?”

Seven: Case Histories

• 93: “There is an implicit double standard in the thresholds for what is considered proof and how the data are to be obtained”, particularly in studies of animal behavior/intelligence. E.g. all sorts of effort is taken to ensure that animals are not cued when testing linguistic capabilities, avoiding body language etc., even as cuing playes a huge role in how human infants/toddlers communicate.
  • 84: but also, the researcher points out, these precautions are useful to ensure that we don’t observe consciousness where it isn’t. “We have an idea of what consciousness looks like, and we are apt to recognize things that look that way and call them conscious behavior—even when they are not.”
• 106-107: Alex, the African Grey Parrot: “Alex learned to count (really, not like Clever Hans) showing a sense of numerosity that he then applied to getting more of his favorite things; Alex coined new words by combining existing phrases he knew to express new thoughts”
• 114: There was a particularly bright supernova in 1181, recorded in China and Japan, but not in Europe. Firestein attributes this lack of notice in Medieval Europe with the Aristotelian view of a “never-changing perfect celestial sphere”
• 126: “The retina, a five-layered piece of brain tissue covering the inside of the back of your eyeball, has been dubbed a tiny brain, processing visual input in a complex interconnected circuit of cells that manipulate the raw image that falls on it from the outside world, before sending it along to higher centers in the brain for yet more processing, until a visual perception reaches your consciousness.”
• 158: the fallacy of design: “Once the function of something is known, it always appears to have been designed”
• 167: “David Helfand, the astronomer, traces how our view of the wind evolved from the primitive to the scientific: first ‘the wind is angry,’ followed by ‘the wind god is angry,’ and finally ‘the wind is a measurable form of energy.’ The first two statements provide a complete explanation but are clearly ignorant; the third shows our ignorance [i.e. in Firestein’s first sense of ignorance, pp. 6-7] (we can’t predict or alter the weather yet) but is surely less ignorant [in the second sense]. Explanation rather than ignorance is the hallmark of intellectual narrowness” (emphasis mine)
• 169-170: Firestein asserts that Galileo’s main offence against the Catholic Church was not in proposing his model of the solar system—church leaders almost certainly agreed with it, but they hadn’t figured out a way to tell the laity about it without undermining the authority of the Bible—but rather in publishing it in the vernacular, allowing it to be interpreted by the general public without being mediated by the clergy.