The Scientific Pursuit of Doing the Right Things
we assume to know what the right thing
to do is
but sometimes people do things that end
up being really really bad
they take actions they regret till the
end of their lives
i’m actually a huge fan of denurven’s
ted talk inside the mind of a massive
procrastinator
it’s probably my most watched youtube
video out of many reasons
in this ted talk he mentioned the
concept of a live calendar
and i quote that’s one box for every
week in the month of your life
and that’s not that many boxes
this calendar has been haunting me since
then i’m
terrified of feeling regret when i’m at
the last week of my own calendar
what are the right things to do to avoid
this
throughout the last decade while
studying and practicing physics
i started to see a pattern it’s just a
hypothesis
but it explains plenty of cases why
people are successful
my idea is that scientific thinking
leads to doing the right things
let me quickly walk you through the
concept of scientific thinking
everything starts with seeing and i
don’t mean
literally it’s more observing the active
acquisition of information from your
environment
like reading the newspaper talking to a
person
conducting an experiment and so on after
seeing
comes explaining trying to find answers
to
why you see what you see these two steps
are done by pretty much everybody we see
things and most of the time we have some
explanation to it
now comes the part that distinguishes
modern science from
others it’s testing and at its core
you have to predict additional
observations you would make
if your explanation was right and then
go make
those observations if your prediction is
right
hooray your theory just got stronger and
if your prediction is wrong
i’m sorry you have to ditch your theory
and start again
this is pretty much scientific thinking
i like to call it the golden triangle
countless scientists and philosophers
has refined
this theory throughout the last
millennium running through this process
once
can be as short as a few seconds of
parts in your mind
up to centuries of work divided over
multiple generations of commitment
and you will discover by time that the
more you iterate over this triangle
the deeper your knowledge gets above
all this golden triangle is extremely
powerful with
any kind of topics even beyond science
for example in which universe is that
person more popular than i
am why does that guy get better grades
even though he hardly studies at all
what is the meaning of life it is
cereal soup
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i have found out that continuously
practicing this golden triangle
is the best preparation for doing the
right things
everyone does that consciously or
unconsciously but the inspired people
they are aware of taking advantage of
scientific thinking they know the
importance of applying these rules and
they know how to use it as a source
to motivate their actions scientific
thinking leads to doing the right things
now let me give you an example imagine
you discovered
something important that nobody would
believe
even worse your discovery might get you
into serious trouble
and that’s what happened with nicolas
copernicus 15 14.
back then during the renaissance
understanding the march of the stars was
one of the hottest research topics in
europe
and there virtually everybody believed
that the earth was in the center of the
universe and all the stars revolved
around it
copernicus saw like everyone else that
the standard objects moved from one side
to the other side every single day he
learned in school from the explanation
that this is
due to the so-called geocentric system
in order to test it he calculated the
exact trajectories on how the stars
would move
pointed up his telescope towards the sky
and bam
the geocentric boat we did not agree
with this experiment
the outcome we all know is the dawn of
the scientific revolution
without it the law of gravity could have
never been discovered
and the industrial revolutions might
have never taken place
the root cause of copernicus action is
that he believes that not
only himself but the society as a whole
should follow the principles of science
scientific thinking
leads to doing the right thing let me
give you a more
recent case sir is my go-to example
to a facility which is nowadays running
and enthusiastically following the
principles of science
as the largest particle physics
laboratory in the world
it has 23 member states and over 12 000
participating scientists
the core facility as serm is the
particle accelerator called the large
headroom collider
it is a 27 kilometer underground ring
located 100 meters
below the swiss french border near
geneva
and it is the most powerful as separator
ever built
and it is designed to collide protons
together up to 40 million times each
second
these collisions take place at four
points around the ring and at each
collision points is a large
particle detector each detector is built
and operated by different
international collaborations cms and
atlas are two different general purpose
detectors designed to observe any kind
of physics
that nature might manifest cms stands
for
compact neon solenoid it gets its name
from the fact that it’s 50 meters high
21 meters long and it is really compact
for all the material it contains
and it is designed to detect particles
known as neons very accurately
it has also the most powerful solenoid
magnet ever made
this detector weighs about 14 000 tons
and has around 75 million individual
channels for detecting
and identifying all sorts of particles
now while i was speaking you might have
realized that particle physicists
love to use fancy words like the large
hadron collider
or compact neon solenoid and if you are
worried of not
understanding all the words i said
they’re worried not
even seasoned bbc journalists can become
victims of service terminologies
when they have to report the 2013
headroom collider restart
that actually really showed up in the
television
certs continuous practice of the golden
triangle
has inspired not only the discovery of
the higgs boson that gathered a nobel
prize in 2013
and the invention of the world wide web
but it has been a factory for numerous
scientific discoveries
and industrial revolutions i myself
am part of a team testing a theory that
predicts a new particle which we call
the heavy neutral laptop
this particle explains plenty of
questions
that looms over the greatest thinkers we
have today in the world
it answers questions like what dartmouth
is made of
and other interesting things like
why is the neutrino mass so small or why
do we have so much more matter than
antimatter in the universe
my role here is to see if cern can
produce
this dark matter particle during the
proton conditions or not
the core challenge here is to go through
the entire detector recordings
and observe at every single collision
whether this documentary particle has
been produced or not
and this can be particularly difficult
if we cannot detect the dark matter
particle directly
but can only observe how it interacts
with those the detector can
record under this circumstance
we were inspired to come up with new
static
statistical methods and is based on
advances in modern machine learning
algorithms
that are very similar to those applied
in applications
that can interpret photos like this one
which can distinguish
chihuahuas from blueberry muffins
since detector recordings are
mathematically very similar
to photography digital photographies
we ended up training an artificial
neural network that helps us to identify
the collisions where we have a new
particle or not
the result of inner analysis tells us
with which certainty we have found this
kind of new particle
with which certainty we have found that
kind of new particles since there are
different kinds of particles we can find
and with which certainty we have found
nothing which is also a very valuable
piece of information
now after carefully analyzing the data
for many years
with countless all-nighters and problems
to overcome
i’m actually very proud to stand in
front of you today to announce
that last week friday almost at midnight
we finally managed to
still not have on this particular
we might end up really not finding it
but don’t you see it is too important
not to try it
overall we managed to apply surgically
artificial intelligence to some of our
problems it is also helping some of
other scientists too it is not by far
not as great as leading the scientific
revolution
or inventing the world wide web but
continuously practicing the golden
triangle has given
me the reassuring feeling of being proud
of what i’ve done
and not regretting the sacrifices i had
to make
it’s worked out pretty well so far for
me scientific thinking leads to doing
the right things
let me give you one more example and
this time it is a failure
in scientific thinking that animal
has caused so much trouble in australia
it is called the sugar cane toad and
everything started
at the 1930s
back then sugarcane growers in
queensland were very concerned
of crop damage due to beetles the
australian government
of agriculture looked into possible
solutions
based on reports from successfully
introducing beetle eating cane tools and
hawaii sugarcane fields
the australian government has decided to
import
the toads and that was a catastrophic
decision the toads ultimately failed to
feed on the beatles and instead they
became a massive pest
just over 100 were introduced and there
are now hundreds of millions
native predators that feast on those
toads rarely survived the meal
and australia’s ecosystem was on the
verge of collapse because of this
now i have no doubt that those involved
believed that they were doing the right
things
they saw that the toad method worked in
the hawaii and they believed that
everything would also work
in australia but instead of extensively
testing this idea they took the shortcut
and implemented an untested hypothesis
just a simple but well thought
experiment might be enough to prove that
idea wrong
okay no matter whether it was
overconfidence
or industrial pressure what i want to
stress here is
how hard it is to really know something
how careful we ought to be
with checking our experiments how easy
it is to make mistakes and fool
ourselves
it is so easy to practice the golden
triangle but it is insanely hard
to practice it right but if we try
we will ultimately be rewarded with deep
long-lasting knowledge scientific
thinking
leads to doing the right things
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there’s actually one more problem to
solve this whole concept
is not consistent yet
how can i avoid sugarcane toad disaster
happening with me
when i practice this golden triangle
when do i know that the scientific
thinking i did was
enough or not and i think the solution
is the intuition
listen to your intuition use your gut
feelings it
appears to me like that our intuition is
like a little scientifically thinking
man
sitting in the unconscious part in our
brain far cleverer than our rational
selves
constantly generating wisdom while we
live alone
and once in a while this little man
comes out of his house gives us an
advice
without explanation okay this explains
at least
why some experienced professionals can
develop astounding intuitions of their
skills
and we can also nourish our own
intuition
by putting ourselves deliberately in
specific sceneries
and meditate over the memories once we
have them
do you want to have a better intuition
for culture and language
go travel you want a better intuition
for physics so some physics exercises
you want to be a funnier person
go watch some comedies and practice
telling some jokes
now you can argue if i want to practice
this rational golden triangle
how can i include intuition in such a
process
we are actually already doing it when we
see
things our intuition tells us what
catches our attention
and what we doubt and immediately want
to investigate
and when we explain things our intuition
provides us with a first
guess which we can iterate on rationally
and if we want to test our explanation
the intuition gives us ideas how to test
the hypothesis and whether the testing
we did
was sufficient or not scientific
thinking
leads to doing the right things but
really respect your intuition
for it is an integral part of the whole
process
but also beware of the dangers of
blindly following the intuition and over
trusting it
for the intuition also has its limits it
is only as good as the number and
quality of experiences we had in our
lives
many bankers have ruined their careers
and
even their lives are intuitively betting
on the wrong stocks
i think we should let the intuition be a
loyal consultant to us
but not let it completely and
unsupervised take over the whole wheel
now like many of the young audience here
today
i’m still in the process of finding the
right things i want to do in my life
i’ve certainly not experienced enough
to tell you how to forge a perfect life
but when i
look at other people doing good or
terrible things
i start to realize more and more that
this rule
has something to it scientific thinking
leads to doing the right thing
this is my take home message for you
today and i believe that if more people
practice the golden triangle if more
people believed
and they evaluated and doubted
their worldviews before they start to
make them their own
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the world would then become a better
place thank you
you