(2022-09-12) Marick Imre Lakatos On What Persuades Scientists To Risk Their Careers

Brian Marick: Imre Lakatos on what persuades scientists to risk their careers. He’d develop a theory of what makes it rational for a scientist to either devote their career to a new quote “research programme” or to abandon an old one. Now, it seems to be the consensus that Lakatos failed.

He did however, I think, capture factors that can persuade – if not in a strictly rational way – scientists and science-inclined people to make big bets on radical new approaches

I’ll use Agile as my modern example

Although Lakatos thought Velikovsky was obviously a crackpot, he nevertheless took the quote “Velikovsky affair” seriously. A big problem, as he saw it, was that Velikovsky was playing by the rules of science.

Things get worse because, while Velikovsky played by the rules, unquestionably great scientists don’t. Isaac Newton, for example, broke rules that Velikovsky followed.

So Lakatos’s goal was to find new rules of science that would include Newton in the category “scientist” and exclude Velikovsky, instead putting him in the category “crackpot”. Lakatos called his new rules “the methodology of scientific research programmes”.

Prior to Lakatos (at least according to him) people paid too much attention to isolated scientific theories

philosophy of science most associated with Karl Popper, though arguably Lakatos is treating him as something of a straw man.

Lakatos describes “refutation” as being too far from what actual scientists actually do.

Instead, according to Lakatos, scientists organize in cooperative networks to work on a particular research program that is organized around a hard core of two, three, four, or at most five postulates or statements of fact. The research program is all about exploring the consequences of the hard core. Lakatos considered Newton’s three laws of dynamics and his law of gravitation to be an excellent example of a hard core.

The Agile Manifesto, you’ll note, has four postulates.

I rewrote the Agile postulates to make them have more obviously the function of a hard core: which is to be tools for growth. In software, that growth is in your ability to solve today’s problems, to be more prepared for tomorrow’s problems, and to perform more competently in the steady state between problems.

So far this is all negative: defenses people use to protect a research programme, which is not the same thing as reasons to join up with it. What convinces scientists to join?

The first thing is novel confirmations. What convinced scientists of Newton's theory of gravitation? According to Lakatos, it was Edmund Halley's successful prediction (to within a minute) of the return date of the comet that now bears his name.

Early in the research program, it means both new and dramatic.

Later on, it can mean mostly just new

To my mind, a key novel prediction of Agile was: “work doesn’t have to suck”. A lot of early Agile took place in a context where people just assumed the majority of projects would be quote “death marches”

The second way that research programmes become appealing is a little complicated to explain

Lakatos claims it is common for the hard core of a research programme to be surrounded by a protective belt of auxiliary hypotheses that are used to handle telling counterexamples

little historical digression: Imre Lakatos grew up in a Hungary dominated by the Soviet Union. Around the time of World War Two, he became a committed Stalinist. (Having your country be invaded by Germany will do that for you.) However, his views shifted around 1956. (Having your country be invaded by the Soviet Union will do that for you.).

Out of his disillusionment, he cites the Soviet Union as using the quote “ad hoc” style of protective belt. It goes back to the Soviet Union being a substantial problem for Marxism. Marxism, intended to be scientific about the laws of history, had predicted that communist revolution would come first in the most industrialized nations

That accounts for why they were so intent on building up Russia’s industrial base – you can’t hardly have an industrial proletariat without any industry – and so casual about destroying the peasantry. They were supposed to have been out of the picture long before.

My impression is that by the time Lakatos was growing up, communist leaders had given up on reconciling reality with theory and were intent on explaining it away: Marx was right, of course, but yadda yadda yadda, excuse excuse excuse.
Lakatos objected to such theories because (1) they were obviously motivated by explaining away unfortunate facts, and (2) - more importantly - either couldn’t make predictions for the future

Everything can be explained in this way, but there is never any prediction of a corroborated novel fact."

The practical import of this is that you can never take down a rival research programme by pointing to its failures. They can always be defended. Instead, your approach to that other programme should be “What have you done for me lately? Surprise me. Delight me.”

Scientists join research programs with clear hard cores, that continue to make novel predictions that are confirmed, and whose protective belts do the same.

Once the research program stops doing all that, scientists begin to peel off.

Lakatos puts it: quote “[A programme] is degenerating if ... (1) it does not lead to stunning new predictions (at least occasionally...); (2) if all its bold predictions are falsified; and (3) if it does not grow in steps which follow the spirit of the programme.

My opinion is that Lakatos provides a way for Agilists – and others – to think about what we’re doing. Specifically, whether we’re actually working in the spirit of the hard core or just accumulating whatever kludges can be used to explain away failures.