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ABSTRACTION_BEAM

                                             July 22, 2022

Bertrand Russell, "Limitations of Scientific Method"
from "The Scientific Outlook" (1931):


    "Many people have a passionate hatred of
    abstraction, chiefly, I think, because of its
    intellectual difficulty; but as they do not wish to
    give this reason, they invent all sorts of others
    that sound grand. They say that all reality is
    concrete, and that in making abstractions we are
    leaving out the essential. They say that all
    abstraction is falsification, and that as soon as
    you have left out any aspect of something actual you
    have exposed yourself to the risk of fallacy in
    arguing from its remaining aspects alone."


I don't doubt that Bertrand Russell is
complaining about a real social phenomena
circa 1930, but there really are continual
issues with abstraction.

You choose to ignore "irrelevant" details to                BITWASTES_SOFTCATS
simplify the model, and hope that they really               BITWASTES
are irrelevant.  Or not *too* relevant.                     BITWASTES_DSM


Bertrand Russell concludes:

    "The extreme abstractness of modern physics makes it
    difficult to understand, but gives to those who can
    understand it a grasp of the world as a whole, a
    sense of its structure and mechanism, which no less
    abstract apparatus could possibly supply. The power
    of using abstractions is the essence of intellect,
    and with every increase in abstraction the
    intellectual triumphs of science are enhanced.


You can argue that physicists take it easy on themselves,
by only claiming territory where they can get abstract
models to work.

Subjects that are inherently more complex and more
difficult to grasp, those get filed elsewhere.




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