Nassim Taleb thinks academia is overrated and that most progress in fields as diverse as engineering, medicine, and finance has come from practical tinkering. Do you think he is right? ========== From a summary of his book Antifragile ( newbooksinbrief/2012/12/17/26-a-summary-of-antifragile-things-that-gain-from-disorder-by-nassim-nicholas-taleb/ ) : "When it comes to technology and innovation there is a widespread belief that it flows directly from scientific discovery. In other words, the direction of travel is from the theoretical to the practical. As Taleb explains, “most texts define [technology] as the application of scientific knowledge to practical projects—leading us to believe in a flow of knowledge going chiefly, even exclusively, from lofty ‘science’… to lowly practice… in the corpus, knowledge is presented as derived in the following manner: basic research yields scientific knowledge, which in turn generates technologies, which in turn lead to practical applications, which in turn lead to economic growth and other seemingly interesting matters” (loc. 3506). For Taleb, though, this model (which he calls the Baconian linear model [“after the philosopher of science Francis Bacon” (loc. 3505)]) is almost entirely backwards. Indeed, for the author, the vast majority of technological innovation, now as ever, has come from practitioners and engineers tinkering with objects, improving on them, and coming up with ideas to solve their practical difficulties. There are exceptions to this, to be sure, but the rule nevertheless holds in most cases. As Taleb explains, “while [the Baconian linear] model may be valid in some very narrow (but highly advertised instances), such as building the atomic bomb, the exact reverse seems to be true in most of the domains I’ve examined” (loc. 3513). Beginning in the distant past, consider ancient architecture. There is a tendency to believe that Euclidian geometry allowed for this. That the geometry came first, and the magnificent buildings followed in its wake (loc. 3959). As Taleb points out, though, this is not at all how it happened. As evidence of this, the author invites us to “take a look at Vitruvius’ manual, De architectura, the bible of architects, written about three hundred years after Euclid’s Elements. There is little formal geometry in it, and, of course, no mention of Euclid, mostly heuristics, the kind of knowledge that comes out of a master guiding his apprentices. (Tellingly, the main mathematical result he mentions is Pythagoras’s theorem, amazed that the right angle could be formed ‘without the contrivances of the artisan.’)” (loc. 3973). Even the wondrous Roman aqueducts appear to have been created out of practical know-how, as opposed to applied mathematics. As Taleb explains, “we are quite certain that the Romans, admirable engineers, built aqueducts without mathematics (Roman numerals did not make quantitative analysis very easy)” (loc. 3968). Even later, by the time the middle ages rolled around, architecture and engineering were still advancing by way of practical experimentation, rather than the application of theory. As the author explains, “according to the medieval science historian Guy Beaujouan, before the thirteenth century no more than five persons in the whole of Europe knew how to perform a division… But builders could figure out the resistance of materials without the equations we have today—buildings that are, for the most part, still standing. The thirteenth-century French architect Villard de Honnecourt documents… how cathedrals were built: experimental heuristics, small tricks and rules… For instance, a triangle was visualized as the head of a horse” (loc. 3961-66). Skipping ahead to the Industrial Revolution, the worlds of science and innovation were largely separated even then. As Taleb points out, most innovations of the Industrial Revolution were made not by scientists but by hobbyists and rectors plodding about in their workshops (loc. 4035-47, 4055). This includes even the most notable inventions of the age: “take… the steam engine, the one artifact that more than anything else embodies the Industrial Revolution… [Terence] Kealey presents a convincing—very convincing—argument that the steam engine emerged from pre-existing technology and was created by uneducated, often isolated men who applied practical common sense and intuition to address the mechanical problems that beset them, and whose solutions would yield obvious economic reward” (loc. 4069). The same can be said of the most important textile technologies of the day—such as the flying shuttle, the spinning jenny, the spinning frame, and the water frame (loc. 4071). “‘These major developments in textile technology… presaged the Industrial Revolution’” Kealey explains, “‘yet they owed nothing to science; they were empirical developments based on the trial, error, and experimentation of skilled craftsmen who were trying to improve the productivity, and so the profits, of their factories’” (loc. 4073). Even today, in the age of big science, Taleb argues, the trend in innovation continues to favor experimentation and trial and error engineering over applied science—even though the textbooks often say otherwise (loc. 3853, 3943). But this last is entirely understandable given that it is the academics and pure science types that are writing the textbooks (loc. 426, 503, 3922-36, 4257). To begin with, consider the therapeutic revolution, “the period in the postwar years that saw a large number of effective therapies [introduced]” (loc. 4132). As Taleb explains, this revolution “was not ignited by a major scientific insight. It came from the exact opposite, ‘the realization by doctors and scientists that it was not necessary to understand in any detail what was wrong, but that synthetic chemistry blindly and randomly would deliver remedies that had eluded doctors for centuries’” (loc. 4132) (the last portion of this quote comes from the doctor and medicine writer James Le Fanu [loc.4131]). Even fields as technical as jet engineering lean towards trial-and-error tinkering. As Taleb explains, the Rutgers professor “[Phil] Scranton showed that we have been building and using jet engines in a completely trial-and-error experiential manner, without anyone truly understanding the theory. Builders need the original engineers who knew how to twist things to make the engine work. Theory came later, in a lame way, to satisfy the intellectual bean counter. But that’s not what you tend to read in standard histories of technology: my son, who studies aerospace engineering, was not aware of this” (loc. 3943). Even when directed science and theory does have some role to play in innovation, such as computer science, it is often a random and undirected unfolding of contributions that is responsible for the specific evolution of the technology (loc. 4004, 4018). For instance, when the computer was first invented it had few practical uses (loc. 4009) until the keyboard and screen monitor came along, at which time “the computer took off because of its fitness to word processing, particularly with the microcomputer in the early 1980’s” (loc. 4011). Then the internet entered the picture (which was actually invented for an entirely different purpose than it is now being used [loc. 4013]), and the end result is what we have now (loc. 4015). The upshot: “although science was of some use along the way since computer technology relies on science in most of its aspects; at no point did academic science serve in setting its direction, rather it served as a slave to chance discoveries in an opaque environment, with almost no one but college dropouts and overgrown high school students along the way. The process remained self-directed and unpredictable at every step” (loc. 4020). All of this goes to show that technological progress is (for the most part) a bottom-up process that proceeds by practical, hands-on tinkering and experimentation (very much like evolution), rather than being a top-down, theory driven phenomenon."
Posted on: Sat, 17 Aug 2013 09:09:46 +0000
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