The Kolmogorov Option

In his best-selling Chinese sci-fi novel (also translated into English), Three Body Problem, Cixin Liu starts with events during the Chinese Revolution. Science got mixed with ideology, as one character in the book laments:

“You changed the names of many physical laws and constants: Ohm’s law you called resistance law, Maxwell’s equations you called electromagnetic equations, Planck’s constant you called the quantum constant.”

Why the renaming?

“All scientific accomplishments resulted from the wisdom of the working masses, and those capitalist academic authorities only stole those fruits and put their names on them.”

One might dismiss all this with a Shakespearian “What’s in a name?” shrug. The problem is that such interference rarely stops with name and credit. Even scientific statements could get you into trouble with the political authorities. Like the Church and communist regimes.

Scott Alexander wrote about the Kolmogorov option (or should it be “complicity”, he asks) as one way to walk that tight rope:

“Mathematician Andrey Kolmogorov lived in the Soviet Union at a time when true freedom of thought was impossible. He reacted by saying whatever the Soviets wanted him to say about politics, while honorably pursuing truth in everything else. As a result, he not only made great discoveries, but gained enough status to protect other scientists.”

But not everyone can be a Kolmogorov:

“An intellectually curious person is a heat-seeking missile programmed to seek out failures in existing epistemic paradigms. God help them if they find one before they get enough political sophistication to determine which targets are safe.”

But the Kolmogorov option has its downside too. Imagine, says Alexander, a political diktat that says “lightning comes after thunder”. Anyone who says otherwise will be prosecuted or worse. You might think such a statement will interfere with some branches of science, but not say, global warming scientists. Aha, argues Alexander:

“The enemies of these groups will have a new cudgel to beat them with, “If you believers in global warming are so smart and scientific, how come so many of you believe in lightning, huh?”

And so, credibility of the entire group suffers.

“The Kolmogorov option is only costless when it’s common knowledge that the orthodoxies are lies, that everyone knows the orthodoxies are lies, that everyone knows everyone knows the orthodoxies are lies, etc. But this is never common knowledge.”

When constrained like this, science moves selectively, as scientists “learn which topics to avoid” and then “move on to doing good work in math or physics or whatever harmless field doesn’t affect Christianity or Marxism or lightning or whatever.”

And as the glaring errors and inconsistencies pile up, it’s not possible for everyone to ignore them. And so many will quit altogether:

“The smartest and most honest will be destroyed first. Then any institution that reliably produces intellect or honesty. Then any philosophy that allows such institutions. It will all be totally pointless, done for the sake of something as stupid as lightning preceding thunder.”

As the saying goes, for want of a nail, the kingdom will be lost.