335 | Andrew Jaffe on Models, Probability, and the Universe

Hello everyone, welcome to the Mindscape Podcast. I'm your host, Sean Carroll. One of the ideas that has been very common in intellectual history, at least the parts of intellectual history that I know about in the world, is the search for certainty in knowledge. Rock bottom, 100% reliable knowledge of something along the lines of a proof in geometry or logic or other areas of mathematics. It turns out it took the human race a long time.

to learn this lesson, but it turns out that scientific knowledge, empirical knowledge about the actual world in which we live, is not like that. That's not achievable in the world of the scientific exploration of the world because there's a lot of different ideas you might have about the world. There's no a priori way to reason your way into figuring out which one is the right one. And what you have to do is propose lots of different possibilities and sift through them, trying to fit them through the data and understanding that some of them fit better, some of them fit worse, some of them don't fit yet, but still have a chance and all that messy reality of the situation.

We call these theories, if you want to be a little bit less grandiose about it, models. of the world. And scientists use models all the time, but it's not something you need to be grown up sophisticated scientists to do. Little children model the world almost as soon as they're born. We mentioned this both in the podcast with Alison Gopnik and with Judea Pearl.

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