
How much things can change - bookofjoe
http://rodneybrooks.com/how-much-things-can-change/
======
munificent
The scientific discovery whose recency most shocks me is plate tectonics.

Here you have massively visible physical manifestations—mountains,
earthquakes, and volcanos—that have shaped human history and played prominent
roles in culture since the beginning of humankind, and we didn't have
agreement on a good explanation for them until after Rubber Soul was recorded
by the Beatles.

~~~
JackFr
Continental Drift or something similar had been theorized for hundreds of
years, but most famously scientifically proposed by Alfred Wegener in the
early 20th century. In a famous survey of Fellows of the Geological Society,
in 1961 only 22% accepted it, but by 1978 87% did. Consider that --- in 1978
13% of the most accomplished geologists still rejected it.

~~~
bfieidhbrjr
Nobody should wonder why the public doesn't automatically trust scientists or
"experts".

~~~
xsmasher
Scientific consensus is the worst possible system for determining the truth,
except for all of the others.

~~~
hcrisp
Not direct revelation? Works okay between two people. Unless you do controlled
blind study on everything you observe and hear.

~~~
mgkimsal
The only truth I think you could confirm is that you believe you got
information X from person Y. You couldn't have a high degree of confidence
that X is 'true' in any meaningful sense just from the revelation.

~~~
hcrisp
According to your view, I can't have confidence that your statement is "true"
in any meaningful sense. But in my view, I can (though I don't, because it's
"false").

------
mnl
I don't understand what's so interesting about pointing out things you
personally dislike in whichever discipline without making any attempt to
justify why you think they're wrong. That's simply prejudice of the lazy sort.

I can improve on this.

Cosmology:

    
    
        If there isn't any dark matter out there, there must be gremlins pushing stuff around to make it look like as there is. Otherwise there's no sensible way to explain the Bullet Cluster for starters.
    
        If the Universe is not expanding, there must be much bigger gremlins stretching homogeneously everything everywhere out, otherwise there's no way to explain the observational Hubble's law.
    
        If the Big Bang is wrong, there must be very naughty and ubiquitous gremlins matching somehow the primordial nucleosynthesis ratios and the CMB distribution everywhere you look at.
    

I would have continued with the physics section, but I can't picture the
gremlins doing theory atm.

It's one thing to have a problem with whatever you think you know after
reading pop sci, but there's textbooks and papers. That's way harder, but it's
all there, the arguments, the counterarguments and more importantly the
observational/experimental facts. You can't allow yourself to have problems
with facts, if your intuition gets in the way of accepting them, just get rid
of it.

~~~
gridlockd
I think bringing up gremlins in order to lampoon some heterodox hypothesis is
intellectually lazy as well.

Dark matter assumes gravity is uniform across the universe. What if it isn't?

Measuring the expansion of the universe relies on the speed of light being a
constant. What if it isn't?

~~~
ssivark
It must be noted that both of those hypotheses would be considered highly
unlikely to pass Occam’s razor, since they involve a far more
radical/fundamental change in our understanding of physics, than sons piddling
“dark matter”.

------
JackFr
I have a soft spot for very heterodox, but not-quite-crank-but-seriously-wrong
theories that I secretly hope are true for no other reason than a contrary
nature and the excitement of the new. The aquatic ape theory of human
evolution. Abiogenic origin of petroleum. Cold fusion. Julian Jayne's theory
on the origin of consciousness.

~~~
andrepd
Same. It's almost certainly wrong, but it's so eccentric without being crank-y
that I just love it.

------
whoisjuan
> There is no dark matter.

If we find proof that there's no dark matter then there must be something else
like dark matter that behaves in the way that dark matter has been described
(something with gravitational pull).

Since gravity requires mass then a universe where there's no dark matter
(conceptually as matter) would completely invalidate Einstein's General Theory
of Relativity.

That would completely break modern Physics. Right? I'm not expert and this is
conjecture from my interest in cosmology and physics, so could someone with
knowledge chime in and explain if what I'm saying make sense?

~~~
lostapathy
It's important to remember that (at least as I understand it) gravity is a
unique force in that we don't have a quantum explanation for it, unlike the
other fundamental forces. Figuring this out will probably be important to or
related to understanding the mystery of dark matter.

~~~
codethief
> Figuring this out will probably be important to or related to understanding
> the mystery of dark matter.

The physicist in me would replace "probably" with "hopefully" here. :)

~~~
philipyoungg
Hi codethief! Sorry I'm hijacking your reply. I can't seem to reach you out
from your bio. About 3 months ago I posted that I'm working on a pomodoro
timer app with analytics—Session. You replied and wanted to know when I
released it.

Just added Show HN on
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24085041](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24085041).
The product is on
[https://www.stayinsession.com](https://www.stayinsession.com)

Cheers!

------
ncmncm
During his children's lifetime we learned that we exist thanks to a meteorite
that killed off every land creature bigger than a cat.

And only in the last decade did we establish that another, only 12800 years
ago, killed off most American megafauna, and much of nascent American cultural
development.

It is somewhat likely we will learn that agriculture originated before it,
with all the evidence now 100+ ft below sea level. Along with a lot else.

~~~
codethief
> And only in the last decade did we establish that another, only 12800 years
> ago, killed off most American megafauna, and much of nascent American
> cultural development.

Could you provide a source for that? Everything I'm finding says this is
anything but well-established.

~~~
Eliezer
Doesn't look truish based on this:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Younger_Dryas_impact_hypothesi...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Younger_Dryas_impact_hypothesis)

but I retain some small probability that the jury is still out.

~~~
ncmncm
Imagine Wikipedia being wrong...

The opposition gave up publishing in 2017. There is a great Nova episode on
Youtube where they sponsored a trip to Greenland to collect ice samples from
that period, and had a camera in the room when the first SEM images came up.
It's all-over nanodiamonds.

[https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/video/megabeasts-sudden-
death/](https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/video/megabeasts-sudden-death/)

That was in, what, 2010? Makes me wonder what motivated everything published
against, since.

------
glofish
notably a surprising number of his predictions are how current concepts are
wrong, and not that new concepts exist.

yet most of the discoveries of the past, DNA, semiconductors, relativity have
nothing to do with prior information being wrong,

just that prior knowledge was incomplete or insufficiently accurate.

~~~
georgeecollins
I think that is because he can't tell you what the new idea is, but suggest
the old ideas the new idea might replace. So relativity replaced aether. Some
new idea could maybe replace dark matter, but he can't know what it is.

------
tmaly
>In just the last few years we have realized that human bodies contain ten
times more cells that are bacteria, than they contain cells that have our DNA
in them, though the bacterial mass is only about 3% of our body weight. Before
that we thought we were mostly us.

I am really interested to see where this goes. How much of this bacteria
determines which diseases we get?

~~~
qwertygnu
Me too. But I was distracted by the author saying at the end "Before that we
thought we were mostly us."

Idk what conventional opinion would be, but the mass part is a lot more
important in my mind than the number of cells part. We're still be 97% 'us' by
mass. As an off the top of my head example, Jupiter is mostly the big gas
planet thing, not the 79 or so moons that orbit it.

------
jmeister
There’s a big meta-question, pertaining to pace of progress: How will the
process of scientific research itself change?

There are drastic changes on the horizon, both positive and negative.

~~~
UncleOxidant
We seem to be in an anti-science phase right now - death threats against Dr.
Fauci are a poignant example. Hopefully this won't last too long, but it could
definitely slow down the pace of discovery. Back in the 50s-70s era the US
recognized that they needed to emphasize science training in order to win the
Cold War. A lot of progress then was driven by the space race. Public funding
for science was lavish in that era as compared to the current era.

Hopefully our current anti-science, anti-intellectual phase is just that: a
phase. But it's also possibly a harbinger of a longer dark age to come, at
least for the US.

~~~
umvi
> We seem to be in an anti-science phase right now - death threats against Dr.
> Fauci are a poignant example.

As always, people are on a spectrum. There will always be vocal anti-science
minorities (flat-earthers, anti-vaxxers, etc.) no matter how enlightened the
civilization. But hopefully they largely stay that way - minorities.

Furthermore, there are people who are quick to trust new science and people
that are slow to trust new science (think people that instantly embrace the
latest study vs. people that are instantly skeptical of the latest study).
Both sets of people may be completely pro-science and trust in the scientific
method, but the disagreement arises on how fast the scientific method
converges on truth, the perceived strength of the presented evidence, etc.
Sometimes I think we are too quick to label people in the second set as "anti-
science".

~~~
RealityVoid
Are they minorities though? I think current anti-science stances are far more
widespread than your post seems to give credit for.

I argue that the more abstract science is, the easyer is for the laymen to
disagree with it. Sometimes in _highly_ unproductive ways.

~~~
BeetleB
> Are they minorities though? I think current anti-science stances are far
> more widespread than your post seems to give credit for.

It is all speculation until we have real hard numbers. It's easy to argue in
both directions.

People believed all kinds of conspiracies when I was a kid. And people still
do. The only difference is that it's more visible now. In the pre-WWW days
you'd only hear it if you were in the room with them. Now you can see it even
if they said it days ago.

Carl Sagan wrote The Demon Haunted World in the 90's, and it is mostly about
exactly this: Whereas science had made tremendous progress in his life, the
attitudes and crazy beliefs people have had not shifted much. The whole book
is a lament about this, and a certain amount of bitterness on this being the
case despite him spending most of his life promoting science.

Probably the only real thing that has changed is the role and type of media
people consume. In the 80's if a whole bunch of people believed something that
was clearly wrong, and were geographically spread out, they didn't have an
easy means to make that an issue for elections. You would need to form a lobby
group which takes time and money. The newspapers usually did not entertain
them.

Now you don't need newspapers and news channels to get your message out. You
have Twitter, Youtube, Facebook, etc. The cost to organize and spread your
message is much lower. So tiny fringe groups have the _potential_ to be much
more influential. The politicians can now exploit that.

------
d_burfoot
There is going to be a huge shift in scientific practice as a result of the
success of GPT-3 and other similar breakthroughs in NLP. The methodology that
produced GPT-3 is going to work for many other domains, not just text. The
process is basically this:

1\. Compile a huge dataset of observations relevant to your domain

2\. Using the cross-entropy loss or some close variant, train a raw data
statistical model of the observations

3\. Make the model immensely complex (GPT-3 has 175 billion parameters); this
can be done without overfitting because of the huge size of the dataset.

4\. Once the raw data model is available, reuse it for various related tasks
of practical interest. The immense sophistication of the raw data model will
make the practical task much easier.

GPT-3 demonstrates clearly that this methodology works, and produces far more
powerful results than other more mainstream approaches in NLP that depend on
laborious human annotation. In my view it is nearly certain to produce
comparably dramatic results in other domains (I'd be happy to bet on this if
anyone is interested).

Here's a longer essay on this topic:
[http://danburfoot.net/research/RediscoveryInteriority.html](http://danburfoot.net/research/RediscoveryInteriority.html)

~~~
yters
what practical task in science will gpt-3 like systems improve?

~~~
ampdepolymerase
Applied genetics. The mapping from gene to phenotype is not, shall we say,
injective. Bring in the complexity of epigenetics, biochemistry and you have a
complex mess. Biological systems are tremendous black boxes with many second
and third order effects that cannot be efficiently simulated and modelled (you
can get pretty good approximations within a very narrow scope with
supercomputers but those tend to have little practical use outside of basic
scientific research).

Another use case would be for pharmaceutical research, there are a number of
companies already in the ML -> drug pipeline space but GPT has brought new
insight to the table.

------
cialowicz
"Progress disappoints in the short run, surprises in the long run." \-- Jim
Keller

------
082349872349872
> _We discover life elsewhere in the solar system and it is clearly not
> related to life on Earth._

I still remember a cartoon one of my father's colleagues had posted on his
office door: a UFO crashed in the desert, with a little green man crawling
away under a blazing sun, crying out "ammonia! ammonia!"

[https://i.imgur.com/NLy7Klz.jpeg](https://i.imgur.com/NLy7Klz.jpeg)

------
johnchristopher
> All animals, plants, and fungi, belong to the latter class. But in fact
> there are two very distinct sorts of prokaryotes, both single celled, the
> bacteria and the archaea. The latter were completely unknown until the first
> ones were found in 1977.

Wait, I can't parse that sentence. Does it mean to say bacteria (`the first
ones`) were only found in 1977 ?

~~~
hammock
The latter (archaea) were completely unknown until the first (archaea) were
found in 1977.

It's not a well-written sentence.

~~~
johnchristopher
> The latter (archaea) were completely unknown until the first (archaea) were
> found in 1977.

Aha ! Thanks.

Quite frankly the rest of the article isn't easy to decipher either (but
English isn't my first language).

The list of beliefs/theories that could change throws me off because some
statements are about some topics that I thought most were in agreement (eg:
the universe is expanding)

> Things will continue to change. Below I have put a few things that I think
> could change from now into the beginning of the next century.

> \- The Universe is not expanding.

The cosmology list is more about fact waiting to happen that expansion of
knowledge but I am just a layman.

~~~
felbane
By the time we experimentally confirm that the entire universe isn't
expanding, we may have transitioned into the phase of universal contraction.

Or something.

------
jeffreyrogers
His list seems pretty reasonable to me, and in agreement with speculation I've
heard from people in some of those fields. Unfortunately, I think that while
our understanding of some of these fields will change, the practical
applications will be limited (maybe with the exception of some developments in
biology)

------
bloaf
Its easy to lose sight of social change too.

In 2008, when Joe Biden debated Sarah Palin, they both supported civil unions
over gay marriage because that was the centrist position at the time.

When the author was born, the USA was over 90% christian, and less than 5% of
people had no religion. Today the country is closer to 70/20.

When the author was born, black people were still being lynched.

~~~
TwoBit
> When the author was born, black people were still being lynched.

The BLM movement would argue that they effectively still are.

~~~
randompwd
Then they would be wrong.

~~~
coddingtonbear
Unfortunately you can't ask Oscar Grant, Ahmoud Arbery, Atatiana Jefferson,
Breonna Taylor, Jordan Edwards or the other countless POC who are killed
disturbingly regularly by our police whether they'd count their deaths as the
modern equivalent of lynching.

~~~
Invictus0
> Lynching is a premeditated extrajudicial killing by a group. It is most
> often used to characterize informal public executions by a mob in order to
> punish an alleged transgressor, punish a convicted transgressor, or
> intimidate. (Wikipedia)

These deaths can hardly be called premeditated extrajudicial mob executions,
with the sole exception of Ahmoud Arbery.

~~~
Dylan16807
But is it the _equivalent_ of lynching? Since premeditated execution by cop is
in several ways worse, and in most ways about the same, I would say yes.

~~~
Invictus0
Which of these deaths were planned out in advance?

------
TedDoesntTalk
Will we get flying cars in active use? :)

------
7373737373
The change in how much the average person knows must have been equally
drastic. Is there a statistic of how many words the average person has at
least heard of?

------
boojack
Lately I've been having more conversations with older people. It's fascinating
hearing stories about such a different world.

