Acerca do que é uma teoria em ciência

"Theories are neither hunches nor guesses. They are the crown jewels of science.
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“In science, the word theory isn’t applied lightly,” Kenneth R. Miller, a cell biologist at Brown University, said. “It doesn’t mean a hunch or a guess. A theory is a system of explanations that ties together a whole bunch of facts. It not only explains those facts, but predicts what you ought to find from other observations and experiments.”
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It’s helpful, he argues, to think about theories as being like maps.
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“To say something is a map is not to say it’s a hunch,” said Dr. Godfrey-Smith, a professor at the City University of New York and the University of Sydney. “It’s an attempt to represent some territory.”
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A theory, likewise, represents a territory of science. Instead of rivers, hills, and towns, the pieces of the territory are facts.
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“To call something a map is not to say anything about how good it is,” Dr. Godfrey-Smith added. “There are fantastically good maps where there’s not a shred of doubt about their accuracy. And there are maps that are speculative.”"

Nunca esquecerei as aulas de Filosofia do meu 11º ano com o Professor Guedes Miranda, acerca de da mecânica quântica, do indeterminismo e da incerteza de Heisenberg. E nunca esquecerei os recortes do Expresso que ainda guardo com a entrevista a Popper quando veio a Lisboa para as Conferências do Fim do Século, convidado por Mário Soares. Banho de humildade epistemológica para sempre.

Trechos retirados de "In Science, It’s Never ‘Just a Theory’"

É impossível matematizar a realidade... ainda bem!!!

Há livros que quando chegam, ao abrirmos a caixa da Amazon, parecem que ganham uma aura especial. Quinta-feira passada ao chegar a casa, ao final do dia, tinha à minha espera uma caixa com dois livros: "Enchantment" de Guy Kawasaki e "Artistry Unleashed" de Hilary Austen.
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Sei que vou gostar de ler e que vou aprender algo com as reflexões de Guy mas a minha opção de leitura recaiu logo sobre "Artistry Unleashed". O que faz falta, acima de tudo, é criar valor. E valor cria-se com arte!!!
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Na sexta de manhã, cheguei cedo a Pedras Rubras, para fugir ao trânsito, e deliciei-me como o prefácio de Roger Martin que começa com esta citação de Elliot Eisner:
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"The kinds of nets we know to weave determine the kinds of nets we cast. These nets, in turn, determine the kinds of fish we catch."
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Dá logo para pensar nos modelos mentais dos macro-economistas. Esses modelos só lidam com mundos simplificados em que os agentes são racionais e tudo se resume ao preço... onde é que os sentimentos entram nesses modelos?
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"We live in a world preoccupied with science, predictability, and quantitative analysis. Economic forecasters crank out precise predictions of economic growth using massive econometric models."
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Eu já fui assim! Despedi-me do meu primeiro emprego por causa disto. Eu vivia apaixonado pelo meu trabalho, desenhar receitas para produtos a oferecer ao cliente mais inteligente e exigente do ramo automóvel: a VW. E despedi-me quando a empresa me propôs começar a trabalhar com o mundo da moda, o mundo mais subjectivo que se possa imaginar. Enquanto a VW queria medir a cor, a moda não gostava do toque.
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"Where has this obsession gotten us? Not far, I would argue. The slaves to the quantitative world have gotten it consistently wrong. Take the economists: As late as the middle of 2008, none of the world's leading macroeconomists or forecasting organizations were predicting that the economy would shrink that year, let alone crater as disastrously as it did."
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"Our deep-seated desire to quantify the world is not surprising: given the complexity we face on a regular basis, we naturally seek ways to understand and control whatever we can. But, as is painfully apparent, the world isn't responding well to our attempts. Instead, it is making it clear that it refuses to be organized, understood, and controlled in a purely quantitative fashion.
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All of this is not to dismiss the strengths of the quantitative paradigm: when used in a suitable context, its methods produce reliable data. However, the paradigm breaks down when the phenomenon under study is complex and ambiguous. The greatest weakness of the quantitative approach is that it takes the context out of human behavior, removing an event from its real-world setting and ignoring the effects of variables not included in the model. (Moi ici: Como se o mundo dos humanos fosse um universo newtoniano onde o tempo não conta porque não há aprendizagem)
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The fundamental shortcoming is that all of these scientific methods depend entirely on quantities to produce the answer they were meant to generate. (Moi ici: Please rewind and read at least three times this sentence) They were blissfully ignorant of qualities."
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Com esta mensagem ainda fresca, aconselho a leitura dos gráficos com a evolução do calçado aqui, a leitura deste postal sobre o amor, e a leitura destas reflexões de Daniel Bessa de 2005 e de André Macedo de 2008 sobre o futuro do calçado português.
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Quando Arroja começa com as suas reflexões cath vs prot é disto que me lembro, da competição num mundo de quantidades, num mundo de planeamento e rigor, versus a competição num mundo de artistas, de flexibilidade, de intuições, de rasgos, de qualidades.
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"Why are qualities so important? Because to make sense of an ambiguous and uncertain world, understanding, measuring, modeling, and manipulating quantities just won't cut it.
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We need to have a much deeper understanding of their qualities - the ambiguous, hard-to-measure aspects of all of these features. To do so, we need to supplement the quantitative techniques brought to us by the march of science with the artistic understanding of and facility with qualities that have been brushed aside."
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Total sintonia com Greg Satell: "True knowledge begins with wonder"