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Portal: History arcs

try org-transclusion under each of these?

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Human rights

Slow progress of human rights. Slave ownership was normal for a long time. Philosophers tended to be open-minded – many ancient philosophers like Stoics and Daoists viewed slaves and women the same as free men. Philosophy is after all "the discipline that makes you more impressed with the poor than with kings" – though this expression was used to mock philosophers.

Somewhat damningly, we started banning slavery only after we had machines with which to replace slave labor.

Suffrage for women came about around 1900. How did that happen, since there was only men voting?

Probability theory

The earliest formulations of probability theory come from gambling, in the 17th century or so? After that, I don't know. Statistics was conceived of as a separate discipline, first by some guy whose paper about the value of keeping track of populations got widely read, and the Swedish gov was the first to do population statistics.

For Bayesians, statistics is just pure probability theory. But Bayesianism did not come about until de Finetti, Savage, Lindley etc popularized it around 1950, Ulam created Monte Carlo methods in WWII, and Markov chain Monte Carlo methods became computationally feasible in 1990.

Mathematicians (pointless category as every scientist is a mathematician)

  • Pascal, Euler, Gauss, Markov, Kolmogorov

Philosphers (pointless category as every scientist can figure in the history of philosophy)

Evolution

  • Anaximander -> Lamarck -> Darwin -> Mendel -> Dawkins…

Chemists

  • Thales (all is water) -> Heraclitus (all is fire) -> Empedocles (four elements) -> Democritus (atoms) -> Lavoisier -> Mendelev …

Healers

  • Hippocrates, Galen, (Vesalius), Semmelweiss, Jenner, Lister, Pasteur, Fleming

Quantum mechanics

  • Bohr, Einstein, Feynman, Everett, Tegmark…

Probability theory

  • Bayes -> Laplace -> Pearson/other guy -> Bruno de Finetti -> Savage -> Lindley -> Jaynes -> Gelman…

Computer science

  • Babbage, Lovelace, Bell, Von Neumann, Turing, Hopper, Ritchie, Dijkstra…

Civilizational incompetence (reproducibility crisis, the recognition that "scientists suck at statistics, and statisticians suck at science", "economists/execs run things badly because of course they do")

  • Ioannidis, Alvesson, Taleb, Alexander, Yudkowsky

The future

  • Ettinger, De Grey, Bostrom, Tetlock

Ethics

  • Gandhi, Hitler, Mandela, King, Parks, Chomsky, Pinker,

Cognitive science

  • Kahneman, Tversky, Cialdini, Stanford Prison Experiment, Milgram Experiment

The art of science

  • Bacon, Feynman, Kuhn, Popper, Mayo, Jaynes,

Astronomers

  • The Babylonians -> Aristarchos -> Ptolemy -> Copernicus -> Brahe -> Galilei -> Bruno -> Kepler -> Cassini -> Huygens -> Newton -> … -> Einstein -> Hubble -> …

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Created (4 years ago)

Abductive reasoning

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abductive_reasoning

Deduction and induction are boring, like a clean math problem or the statistical normal distribution. Abductive reasoning is what you do in the real world.

  • Deductive reasoning allows deriving b from a, only where b is a formal logical consequence of a.
  • Inductive reasoning allows inferring b from a, where b does not follow necessarily from a. a might give us very good reason to accept b, but it does not ensure b.
  • Abductive reasoning allows inferring a as the cause of b. As a result of this inference, abduction allows the precondition a to be abducted from the consequence b.

Abduction is formally equivalent to the fallacy of affirming the consequent (post hoc ergo propter hoc) because of multiple possible explanations for b.

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Created (4 years ago)

Communication problems

Transparent language

“‘In general, beliefs require evidence.’ In general? Which beliefs don’t?”

This exchange comes from a language mismatch. To a scientist/mathematician/engineer, “In general” or “generally” means “always,” whereas in everyday speech, it means “sometimes.”

Another mismatch: the word "should". Avoid "should" or say it only when passing judgment

Created (4 years ago)

Double hermeneutic

What differentiates social sciences from natural sciences? One pestilence unique to the social sciences is the double hermeneutic.

The terms hermeneutics and exegesis are sometimes used interchangeably. Exegesis focuses primarily upon analyzing the word and grammar of texts. Hermeneutics is a wider discipline which includes written, verbal, and non-verbal[7][8] communication.

Modern hermeneutics includes both verbal and non-verbal communication[7][8] as well as semiotics, presuppositions, and pre-understandings. Hermeneutics has been broadly applied in the humanities, especially in law, history and theology.

The double hermeneutic is the theory, expounded by sociologist Anthony Giddens, that everyday "lay" concepts and those from the social sciences have a two-way relationship.[1] A common example is the idea of social class, a social-scientific category that has entered into wide use in society. Since the 1970s, held to be a distinguishing feature of the social sciences,[2] the double hermeneutic has become a criterion for demarcating the human/social from the natural sciences.

Anthony Giddens (1982) argues that there is an important difference between the natural and social sciences.[5] In the natural sciences, scientists try to understand and theorise about the way the natural world is structured. The understanding is one-way; that is, while we need to understand the actions of minerals or chemicals, chemicals and minerals don't seek to develop an understanding of us. He refers to this as the "single hermeneutic".

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Created (4 years ago)
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