Comment by wpietri | Hacker News Reader

Comment by wpietri | Hacker News Reader

This is where they lost me:

> Someday, science and art will merge, Bohm predicts. “This division of art and science is temporary,” he observes. “It didn't exist in the past, and there’s no reason why it should go on in the future.”

I think the whole "Two Cultures" criticism [1] was valid, even if it is often over-simplified. (Less so today in that we live in an age of context collapse.) And yes, high modernism is, thank goodness, on its last legs. But there are actual reasons that there are divisions between art and science in terms of purpose and method. I'm open to the notion that we could use more art in science, but handwaving the distinction away like this strikes me as cheap mysticism, not a real argument.

Maybe I'm especially sensitive to this because I recently went with a friend to see Michio Kaku talk about his book "Quantum Supremacy". Many in the audience were apparently impressed, and I'm told Kaku at one point really knew his stuff. But the talk I saw was a shambling mess, where basic errors of fact about quantum computing were used to justify technoutopian mysticism that was just a modern, high-tech gloss on quantum woo. [2]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Two_Cultures

[2] https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Quantum_woo

I haven't read the book but Scott Aaronson agrees with you.

> So I can now state with confidence: beating out a crowded field, this is the worst book about quantum computing, for some definition of the word “about,” that I’ve ever encountered.

https://scottaaronson.blog/?p=7321

Ah, thanks. That's helpful. Amazingly, the talk was even worse. Which suggests to me that there are a bunch of people in the editorial chain who are propping him up.

He probably just accepts any call he gets from media.

That struck me too - Brian Eno said the same at a talk of his I attended. He has friends in both disciplines and remarked on how different the thought processes and methods are. I studied both sculpture (to BA level) and neuroscience (to MSc level) and feel the same. This sounds like one of those things that people from one discipline say after a shallow engagement with the other. (In my definition of "shallow" I include people who have seemingly spent quite a bit of time studying something, but somehow seem to miss its essence, much as that sounds like a "no true Scotsman" argument).

I'm an engineer, not a scientist, but I've worked a lot with them, and also worked for many years directly with artists. I think we can work together much more constructively than we do. but in each of those three areas, we really do approach work in a very different way. in the end, I think the differences are a net positive, but they certainly have to be managed.

My LinkedIn feed included a few quantum computing leaders seething about him recently and it seems that no one who works in the industry/academia (building stuff) takes him seriously.

So glad to hear it. After the talk I nearly had an out of body experience in the lobby afterward hearing people talk positively about what to me was a hot mess.

Genuinely, I had similar experiences going to church as a child.

>But there are actual reasons that there are divisions between art and science in terms of purpose and method.

I would say something with similar ideas much differently.

Current scientists and artists suffer from a distinctly large division of purpose and method which simplifies and diminishes both art and science. That is, there's too much of a difference and not enough overlap in both. And there is a vacuum which needs to be filled with things that can't be fit into a neat split between one or the other.

Not that things heavy with one kind of purpose and method or the other are wrong, we just need a lot more people who are a lot more competent at both at the same time.

People do try and have been talking about it for a long time, unfortunately there is a strong tendency towards rambling nonsense about one side or the other. You do indeed end up with a lot of shitty mysticism.

Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance influenced me the most on the topic probably because it was my first exposure. If you can recognize and filter out the influence of the author's megalomania, there's quite a lot there.

There certainly is a cultural division, but maybe there is no fundamental distinction to be made. Both art and science help us make sense of the world. They both tell stories, about an apparently objective reality. They both excite and inspire, and enable us to transcend a limited point-of-view.

If we take science and art to be the same greater thing, then I'd look at it in terms of constraints. Science could be defined as the subset of art that's about seeking maximally accurate representations of aspect of reality. In the same vein, math is a different subset, one that's maximizing self-consistency. Other types of art - i.e. the things we normally call art - have their own sets of constraints.

Math and science are thus special in the sense that their constraints - self-consistency and accurate representation of objective reality - give powerful, direct practical benefits. Other forms of art can have practical use too, e.g. by moving people, or refining their beliefs (or convincing them of lies in the interest of those who commissioned the art - that's advertising and propaganda).

Another way in which math and science are special is that their constraints are independent of humans. Where other forms of art are necessarily a function of how people perceive and feel, the output of science and mathematics is, in principle, universal. I don't know of any other form of art like this.

It is a sad state of affairs that in general, the humanities have less robust knowledge about the world, yet make more noise than scientists, who have more constructive knowledge, but are not understood by the general public.

The net effect is that the public is almost always terribly misinformed.

This to me sounds a lot like a Two Cultures view on the high modernist side. It seems hopelessly outdated to me. Personally, I'm much more concerned about scientists and technologists who ignore the humanities than vice versa.

Ouch, that was not my intention. The problem I see is in the lack of rigour for obtaining and sharing knowledge.

A lot of research in the social sciences, almost by definition, deals with extremely complex interactions that are hardly possible to say anything constructive about. For example, one cannot reproduce experiments, nor objectively measure things such as, say, happiness.

On the other hand, most contemporary research in the exact sciences, such as quantum computation, is so hard to understand, that one needs a PhD in a respective field to even reasonably talk about it.

Obviously, I should have avoided to make this sweeping kind of generalisation, but from my personal experience this dichotomy at least exists in the fields that I am interested in (e.g. mathematics and physics on one side, contemporary art and philosophy of mind on the other side).

It is not even the culture that is different, it is the method being used, and the matter being studied that differs.

Is this still considered an outdated view? And how should I go about changing my perspective?

I really like it if someone crosses the boundaries of these two domains, but I have found very few inspiring authors who do so successfully. Any hints would be greatly appreciated.

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