Born to do Math 145 – The Marky Markation Problem
Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Born To Do Math
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2019/11/15
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Scott Douglas Jacobsen: The Demarcation Problem, there are a lot of criteria.
Rosner: There’s the Marky Markation Problem.
Jacobsen: [Laughing] what’s the Marky Markation Problem?
Rosner: It is when you are in Times Square in your underpants in the ’90s on a huge billboard.
Jacobsen: [Laughing] Singing about what? Or rapping about what?
Rosner: Or maybe, it is when you are in your teens and beat up a guy and cause him to lose an eye.
Jacobsen: [Laughing] what is science to you?
Rosner: Finding regularities in the environment, by “regularities,” I mean repeatable phenomena. Often, there are theories. You try to explain the repeatable phenomena. That’s pretty much it. As generalists, humans evolved to exploit all sorts of regularities in our world, as opposed to other animals who occupy more specific niches based on a more limited repertoire of behaviour, like anteaters.
It’s right in the name. They eat ants. There are some other things that go along with it. There’s falsifiability. If you have a theory, it has to explain some results that would invalidate the theory if they turned out otherwise.
Jacobsen: It has to make predictions too.
Rosner: Yes, that’s a little tricky. Often, theories follow discoveries. So, theories involve extrapolations. You can have a theory explain a repeatable phenomenon. But it is worthless and also not testable if it is so specific to the on experimental set-up; it is not generalized.
This ball will fall to the ground. Every time you drop the ball. It will fall to the ground. It doesn’t tell you anything or why. It just applies to the one ball. You can, at least, generalize to any ball falling to the ground. It still doesn’t help you.
It is not general enough or predictive enough. You mentioned pseudoscience and soft science. When people think of the sciences, they generally think of the hard sciences: biology, chemistry, physics.
Jacobsen: What are the hard sciences? What are the soft sciences?
Rosner: The hard sciences try to build things up from the least complicated elements of what is being looked at, trying to get at the least complicated elements, formulate theories of those elements, and they’re fairly universal. The elements that are measurable with great precision.
Then the soft sciences are things like political science, psychology, sociology, anthropology. Things that deal with smushy, often human, behaviour. You can come up with rules for soft sciences that are nearly as universal as the rules of the hard sciences, at least statistically.
But they are based on smushier and complex biological systems, humans. That rule would be true well over 99% of the time, which makes it a pretty decent rule in terms of its ability to predict behaviour. However, you’re still dealing with soft sciences.
You don’t get mathematically, numerically exact results. Everybody understands this distinction. If they don’t, then they should pay more attention.
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