What Stephen Hawking Teaches Us About Online “Truth”
A worldview that explains only a few things its proponents want isn’t a model—it’s a story. Here's how to spot the difference.
One of the best and worst things about the digital age is that there’s a model of the universe for everyone. Someone like Andrew Tate can command the same audience as someone like Jessica Valenti. Credible and ridiculous influencers alike can convince thousands of people that they’ve modeled the world correctly.
Many people may be able to tell whether a model matches their beliefs, but breaking down whether a model works in the first place is more difficult. The Grand Design by Stephen Hawking and Leonard Mlodinow may be an explanation of our knowledge of cosmology, but it also has a crucial lesson to teach about how to evaluate the world.
The Ancient Greek who Hypothesized Atoms
Hawking and Mlodinow introduce an ancient Greek thinker named Democritus, who is credited with first coming up with the theory of atoms:
“[Democritus] argued that you ought not to be able to continue the process indefinitely. Instead he posulated that everything, including all living beings, is made of fundamental particles that cannot be cut or broken into parts. He named these ultimate particles atoms, from the Greek adjective meaning ‘uncuttable.’ Democritus believed that every material phenomenon is a product of the collision of atoms. In his view, dubbed atomism, all atoms move around in space, and, unless disturbed, move forward indefinitely. Today that idea is called the law of inertia.”
The ancient Greeks had great thinkers, but they lacked the technology to make observations at the atomic level. However, scientists and philosophers, who at that time were often the same people, knew how to develop models of the world that were likely true. Scientists of later generations would run the experiments to prove these models false.
What is a Good Model?
Physicists like Hawking and Mlodinow rely on models for their work and provide four criteria for a good model that anyone can use. According to them, a good model:
Is elegant
Contains few arbitrary or adjustable elements
Agrees with and explains all existing observations
Makes detailed predictions about future observations that can disprove or falsify the model if they are not borne out.
The elegance may seem subjective, but it forces people building them to simplify their models. Cramming too variables into a model not only makes a model inelegant. That stuffing can also overcomplicate the model and introduce arbitrary variables.
It may be hard to track down an entire model’s variables, but anyone can test a model by seeing whether it explains all observations. Above all, a model must be able to be proven wrong. Failure to propose a model that can be falsified is a common mistake among influencers.
For example, Andrew Tate has said publicly that "I'm a realist and when you're a realist, you're sexist. There's no way you can be rooted in reality and not be sexist." Finding someone who tries to live an evidence-based life who also believes that women are the cognitive equals of men would be the easiest refutation of Tate.
He may be an extreme example, but there are many people trying to sell worldviews based on selective facts instead of as full a picture of reality as possible. Breaking down whether other facts conflict with a model or whether someone can acknowledge what would prove them wrong are easy ways to avoid more subtly incorrect models.
Why Use a Model in the First Place?
It’s tempting to reject a model-based view of the world. Why accept a cheap representation of the world when its entirety is at our fingertips?
The reality is that we can’t capture the entire world all at once. There’s no tracking all the ways every individual thinks and how every government will respond to every event. But capturing important slices of the world can help us predict the future and understand crucial patterns. Hawking and Mlodinow defend models this way:
“According to model-dependent realism, it is pointless to ask whether a model is real, only whether it agrees with observation. If there are two models that both agree with observation, like the goldfish’s picture and ours, then one cannot say that one is more real than another. One can use whichever model is more convenient in the situation under consideration. For example, if one were inside the bowl, the goldfish’s picture would be useful, but for those outside, it would be very awkward to describe events from a distant galaxy in the frame of a bowl on earth, especially because the bowl would be moving as the earth orbits the sun and spins on its axis.”
We may be limited in what we can understand about the world, but the pieces we can comprehend help us understand our pieces of it. The cosmology that Hawking and Mlodinow explain is clear and profound. However, their method for trimming bad facts away from their area of expertise is the real value of this book.