Anthropic Awareness: The Human Aspects of Scientific Thinking in NMR Spectroscopy and Mass Spectrometry

Nature.

Part I

Anthropic Awareness (AA) (Mind Your Mind!)

Chapter 1

The Philosophy of Anthropic Awareness in Scientific Thinking

Csaba Szántay, Jr.    Gedeon Richter Plc, Spectroscopic Research Division, Budapest, Hungary

Abstract

This chapter discusses the philosophical background of the remainder of the book. It outlines a way of thinking called Anthropic Awareness that focuses on developing a keen mindfulness of how our human nature influences our thoughts in and about science, and on how this influence can secretly lead us into various Mental Traps. The chapter comprises of two main parts: Firstly, it discusses 30 Pillars, each of which addresses a different aspect of science and the Mental Traps from an anthropic point of view. The Pillars include such topics as what we mean by scientific truth, the role of emotions in scientific thinking, the assessment of scientific models, metaphors in science, paradigms, and everyday thinking versus scientific thinking. Secondly, it outlines 45 Mental Traps that are the most relevant in understanding scientific descriptions and in conducting scientific research. These Mental Traps are an intrinsic feature of how we think both in science and in our everyday lives, and only by becoming conscious of them can we properly avoid them.

Keywords

Scientific truth

Human factor

Mental traps

Avoiding error

Philosophy

Psychology

Scientific theory

Model

Law

Outline

1.1 Introduction   5

1.2 The Pillars   8

Pillar 1. AA Is a Tool   9

Pillar 2. The Definition of Science   9

Pillar 3. The Concepts of Science and Scientific Truth   9

Pillar 4. The AA Model of Scientific Thinking   16

Pillar 5. On the Meaning of Description and Understanding   26

Pillar 6. The Triangle of Understanding   27

Pillar 7. The Relationship Between the AA Model of Thinking and the Triangle of Understanding   31

Pillar 8. Language   31

Pillar 9. The Definition of Definition   32

Pillar 10. Scientific Hypotheses, Models, Theories, Laws, Explanations, Metaphors, and Metaphoric Models   32

Pillar 11. Creativity in Science   37

Pillar 12. Scientific Communication   38

Pillar 13. Sound and Unsound Models   38

Pillar 14. The Role of Refutation in Science   41

Pillar 15. The Practical Versus Theoretical Significance of Exposing Delusors   42

Pillar 16. Paradigm Nests   42

Pillar 17. Forward and Backward Scientific Research   44

Pillar 18. The Meaning of New Scientific Result   45

Pillar 19. The Meaning of Significant Scientific Result   47

Pillar 20. Reporting Scientific Results   48

Pillar 21. The Spideric Nature of a Scientific Problem   48

Pillar 22. AA in the Context of the Literature and Other Initiatives Addressing Cognitive Errors   49

Pillar 23. Everyday Thinking Versus Scientific Thinking   51

Pillar 24. The Trap-Experience   52

Pillar 25. The Dual Nature of Mental Traps   52

Pillar 26. Mental Traps in Relation to Scientific Knowledge and Intellect (Educated Error)   52

Pillar 27. The Relationship and Synergy of Mental Traps   53

Pillar 28. Identifying the Mental Traps   54

Pillar 29. Trap-Blindness and Avoiding Mental Traps   54

Pillar 30. Trap-Consciousness and the Sacredness of Science   54

1.3 Mental Traps (Mind Your Mind!)   55

Interlude   55

Mental Trap (Master Trap) #1. We Seek Mental Security (the Enjoy-Your-Flight Effect)   55

Mental Trap (Master Trap) #2. We Have An Instinctive Urge to Interpret Data   57

Mental Trap (Master Trap) #3. Belief Dominates Over Reason   57

Mental Trap #4. The Initial Belief Syndrome   59

Mental Trap #5. We Accept Anecdotal Evidence   59

Mental Trap #6. We Tend to Trust Authority Without Question (Might is Right)   60

Mental Trap #7. We Go With the Crowd (Herd Instinct)   60

Mental Trap #8. We Accept Knowledge Based on Tradition   61

Mental Trap #9. We Think Inside Our Paradigm Nests   61

Mental Trap #10. We Accept Intuitively Appealing Explanations   62

Mental Trap #11. We Confuse Mathematical Descriptions with a Physical Understanding   62

Mental Trap #12. We Project the Absolute Truths of Mathematics Onto Physics   63

Mental Trap #13. Reflective Versus Reflexive Physicalization of Abstract Mathematical Entities   63

Mental Trap #14. We Confuse Familiarity with Understanding   65

Interlude   66

Mental Trap #15. The Twin Devils of Detail and Entirety   67

Mental Trap #16. Our Mind Loves Metaphors   68

Mental Trap #17. We Are Inclined to Use Superficial Analogies   69

Interlude   69

Mental Trap #18. We Confuse the Model with Reality   69

Mental Trap #19. We Attribute Too Broad a Range of Application to a Model   70

Mental Trap #20. We Confuse a Model’s Inherent Limitations with Its Flaws   71

Mental Trap #21. The Don’t-Look-Any-Further Effect (Confusing Consistency with Correctness)   71

Mental Trap #22. We Rejoice Before Finding the Full Solution   72

Mental Trap #23. Hypothesis Obsession (The Lock-On, Lock-Out Effect)   73

Mental Trap #24. We Seek Novelty-Promising Solutions (The Anti-Occam Trap)   73

Mental Trap #25. We Confuse Experimental Evidence with Interpretational Evidence   74

Mental Trap #26. We Confuse Cause and Effect   74

Mental Trap #27. We See Illusory Correlations Between Unrelated Data   75

Mental Trap #28. We Resist Change   75

Mental Trap #29. We Seek to Confirm   76

Interlude   76

Mental Trap #30. Our Mental Perception Is Preferentially Black-and-White   76

Mental Trap #31. We Petrify Assumptions   77

Mental Trap #32. We Objectify Subjective Claims   77

Mental Trap #33. We Disambiguate Our Conclusions   78

Mental Trap #34. We Ignore the Path Leading to a Conclusion   79

Mental Trap #35. We Are Spellbound by Numbers, Graphs, and Mathematical and Chemical Formulas   79

Interlude   79

Mental Trap #36. Affect/Emotycal Heuristic   80

Interlude   81

Mental Trap #37. We Overplay the Meaning of Scientific Truth   82

Mental Trap #38. We Confuse Deductive and Inductive Statements   82

Mental Trap #39. We Love to Generalize (Hasty Induction)   83

Mental Trap #40. We Prefer Quantity Over Quality   83

Mental Trap #41. Semantic Space   84

Mental Trap #42. The Halo Effect   86

Mental Trap #43. Warped Team Dynamics   86

Mental Trap #44. The Prepublication Illusion of Knowledge   88

Mental Trap #45. The Mental Trap of Becoming Obsessed with Mental Traps   89

1.4 Summary   89

Acknowledgments   92

References   92

Acknowledgments

Except for Figs. 1.13 and 1.14, the graphic artwork presented in this chapter was produced by Ms. Nóra Szirmai who, as a professional artist, was able turn my cursory, feeble, and only verbally communicable conceptions of these images into wonderful reality. During the process that led to each image (often through several iterations), she expressed not only supremely expressive artistic skill, but also remarkable sensitivity, perceptiveness, and patience towards the ideas that I wanted to convey. Any impact that I may hope to have attained with the notions expressed in this chapter should be credited to a significant extent to the catalytic visual effect of Nóra’s wonderful drawings, for which I am eternally thankful. I am also immensely grateful to Tünde Machácsné Halász, Eszter Takaró, and Aletta Gyurcsik for their invaluable assistance in making the idea of these images come true. I am grateful to Dr. Lars Hanson with whom I had the fortune to establish an extremely fruitful discussion on this project, and who offered many constructive and insightful comments. I am also indebted to Ms. Márta Szollát for her useful suggestions as to improving the style.

1.1 Introduction

The basic idea behind Anthropic Awareness (AA) was already outlined in the Preface, and I will build my theme from there.

As a prelude to the forthcoming discourse, I want to recall a short tale, known by many, about a man traveling on a train and getting into a whirl of false presumptions over a bag of crisps. This anecdote is known in several varieties, but the one I find the most striking, and which best suits the purposes of the present discussion, was given by Ian McEwan in his novel, Solar.¹ I have tried to condense the story whereby it may have lost the original flair that it has in Solar, but I hope that it will still make the point.

In the story, a well-situated Nobel Prize-winning physicist (for short, I will just call him the Physicist) gets on a train with a bag of his favorite potato crisps that he had bought previously for this particular occasion and had stuffed into his jacket pocket. He settles at a table and observes that opposite him there is a young hulk of a man (I will call him the Hulk) with a shaven head and piercings in his ears. The Physicist makes himself comfortable, fumbles with his laptop for a while, then leans back in his seat, half closes his eyes, and starts flirting with the sight of the crisps that are right before him on the table, together with a bottle of mineral water which belongs to the Hulk. Finally, yielding to his desire, the Physicist pulls himself up in his seat, leans forward, opens the bag, takes a single crisp, replaces the bag on the table, and sits back. He puts the crisp in his mouth, savoring the flavor while closing his eyes. When he opens them, he finds himself staring into the steely eyes of the man opposite. Somewhat embarrassed, but trying to maintain his dignity, he takes another crisp, only to be met again by the hard, unblinking stare of the other man. At that moment, the Hulk sits forward, steals a crisp from the packet, and eats it with an insolent chewing motion. The Physicist finds this act so flagrantly unorthodox that even he, who is quite capable of unconventional thought, can only sit frozen in shock. From then on, the two men get engaged in a silent psychological duel, each alternatingly taking a crisp from the bag. All this time the Physicist is considering various explanations for the Hulk’s demeanor. He comes to the conclusion that the Hulk’s behavior is aggressive, an act of naked theft, or he may be mocking the Physicist’s ridiculous pleasure in junk food, or he may just be teasing a stuffy bourgeois, or, most probably, he must be a psychopath. When there are only two crisps left, the Hulk retrieves the bag and, as a final insult, offers them to the Physicist in a parody of politeness. The Physicist is outraged. In a desperate show of resistance, driven by self-pity and a sense of otherwise-I-will-never-be-able-to-live-with-myself, he lunges forward, seizes the Hulk’s bottle of water, drinks it up to the last drop, and then defiantly tosses the bottle on the table. The train begins to slow down as it approaches the station. The Hulk stands up, thinks for a moment, and then reaches up and swings the Physicist’s luggage onto the floor, setting it down gently next to its owner. Feeling completely humiliated, the Physicist returns a snarling look of contempt. The Hulk hesitates for a moment, gazing down at the Physicist with an expression of pity, and then leaves the compartment. The Physicist trembles with anger and shock, so he gets into his coat with some difficulty and then steps out onto the platform. While making his way towards the ticket barrier, he reaches under his coat into his jacket pocket for his ticket and finds that something else is in there: his bag of crisps that he had purchased earlier. He is stupefied and suddenly realizes that the bag of crisps he aggressively ate on the train had actually belonged to the Hulk. This forces the Physicist to completely overhaul all of his previous judgments about the nature of the man whom he had regarded as a crook in so many ways, while he himself must have seemed like a vicious madman in the eyes of the Hulk! To quote Ian McEwan:

He was so entirely in the wrong! There could be no excuses; he had no defense. His error was so unambiguous, so unsullied, he stood so completely revealed to himself, a naked fool. That poor fellow whose food and drink you devoured, who offered you his last morsels, fetched down your luggage, was a friend to man.

In the first approximation, this story can be regarded as a proverb on how careful one should be in judging a situation and another person’s character. At a deeper level, however, and thinking in more of a scientific context, the story carries multiple morals that are of paramount importance. It involves the thought processes of an accomplished scientist with a brilliant and well-trained mind. He is a professional thinker with a lifetime of experience in considering problems in a disciplined, analytical, rational, and unbiased fashion and with creative powers that make him quite capable of unconventional thought. Based on the information perceived by him, he makes a firm judgment about the Hulk’s character and generates a variety of hypotheses that might explain his unorthodox behavior. All of these possibilities are consistent with the basic premise that the bag of crisps on the table belongs to the Physicist (note that this premise is thought to be so self-evidently true that it is not even considered as being a premise). However, all of his assumptions, including his judgment that the Hulk’s behavior is outrageous, ultimately prove to be completely false when the basic premise turns out to be false.

This story reflects how our preconceptions, biases, and other emotional factors are interwoven with our rational thought even though we are typically unaware of this or would prefer to deny it. It also shows how willing we are to make inferences from only limited information, how firmly certain we can be about the validity of our conclusions, and how even a brilliant mind can be trapped within a false paradigm. All these factors lead to what I herein call the Mental Traps in our thinking (Fig. 1.1). The story also raises the question whether there is a marked difference (according to many people’s notion) between scientific and everyday thinking, with the latter being more fallible. In that regard one may claim that this is a story about everyday thinking in an emotionally charged setting, and in that sense it is not relevant to scientific thinking under normal emotional conditions, especially in the realm of what we call exact sciences. Below I am going to argue that although there is no question about the powers of the scientific mind and that we should always strive to think more scientifically, in practice there is no clear demarcation line between scientific and everyday thinking, and mishaps of thought such as those appearing in this story can also affect us when we switch to what we believe to be a scientific mode of thinking (this book contains several examples illustrating that point).

Figure 1.1 Mental Trap.

Finally, an important message implicit in this story is that the misjudgments that we tend to make in our scientific (and everyday) lives normally happen under much less dramatic conditions, and usually we never discover that the bag of crisps is still there in our pocket!

The above adage was intended to place the reader in a frame of mind that should facilitate the following discussion of AA. As already stated in the Preface, AA is a human-focused thought scheme that aims to offer a conscientious way of observing and analytically censoring one’s own judgments and those of others, mainly with a view to understanding, detecting, and avoiding possible Mental Traps. AA consists of two main parts: a series of what I call Pillars which constitute its conceptual platform, and a series of the Mental Traps themselves. Both are expounded below with the following preliminary comments: For those readers who are mostly technically inclined, I anticipate that the philosophical/psychological thoughts presented here may be unusual, and therefore they may (initially) find this chapter not to be a light read. Moreover, I expect that the way these ideas will, on first encounter, click with the reader will very much depend on their personal experiential backgrounds. Some of the points may link readily to some related experience that the reader may have had, in which case those points will naturally make sense. However, several ideas may on first reading appear somewhat remote if such a link does not readily come to mind. I am aware of this difficulty and I only want to ask the reader to keep going: the rationale behind the foundations laid down in this chapter will unfold in subsequent chapters in connection with some very real examples that will, hopefully, produce that click. In that respect I want to point out that the basic concept of this book is to unify two rather different ways of thinking—a philosophical/psychological mindset and a technical mindset—and to that end, the foundations of the former must first be introduced; thus, while going through this chapter, the reader is asked to give advanced credit to witnessing the thrills of this unification later on. It should also be noted that this chapter was not meant to be a light read: it contains some subtleties that, as I expect, or even hope, will merit further rumination after reading. For these reasons the reader may choose not to dwell on the details upon his initial exposure to AA, but first just sift through this chapter and return to the relevant points of interest as they come up again in later chapters. In all, this book may be read in either a linear or a cyclic fashion, in the latter case iterating between this chapter and subsequent