科学是一种纠错机制Science Is an Error-Correcting Mechanism
Naval：好的解释从哪里来？
当下，人们痴迷于归纳推理，也就是认为可以根据过去预测未来的想法。你可以说："我看到了一个、两个、三个、四个、五个，所以接下来一定是六、七、八、九。"
人们相信，新知识就是这样产生的，科学理论就是这样形成的，我们就是这样对宇宙作出好的解释的。
归纳法错在哪里？新知识究竟从何而来？
Brett：你刚才提到了黑天鹅，我想回到这个话题上来。多年以来，人们一直用黑天鹅这个例子来说明：反反复复地观察到同样的现象，不应该让你确信它在未来还会继续出现。
在欧洲，我们见到的是白天鹅，所以任何对鸟类感兴趣的生物学家，在观察了一只又一只白天鹅之后，都会顺理成章地得出结论：所有的天鹅都是白色的。后来有人去了西澳大利亚，发现那里的天鹅与欧洲的天鹅在其他方面看起来毫无二致——但它们是黑色的。
我们再来看另一个关于归纳法的例子。
自你出生以来，你观察到的一直是太阳升起。这是否意味着，从科学上讲，你就该断定太阳明天会升起、往后的每一天都会升起？这并不是科学要做的事。
科学不是要把过去发生过的事件编纂成一部历史，然后假定它们在将来还会再次发生。
科学是一套解释框架，是一台纠错机制。它从来都不是"太阳过去总是升起，所以将来也会升起"这种形式。
我们可以想象出种种太阳明天不升起的可能。你只需要去一趟南极洲，在那里，一年中有好几个月太阳根本不会升起。
如果你登上国际空间站，你看到的不会是太阳每天升起落下一次；在环绕地球的极速旅程中，太阳会反反复复地升起又落下。
Naval: Where do good explanations come from?
There’s currently an obsession with induction, the idea that you can predict the future from the past. You can say, “I saw one, then two, then three, then four, then five, so therefore next must be six, seven, eight, nine.”
There’s a belief that this is how new knowledge is created, that this is how scientific theories are formed and this is how we can make good explanations about the universe.
What’s wrong with induction, and where does new knowledge actually come from?
Brett: You mentioned the black swan earlier, and I’d like to go back to that. The black swan is an example people have used over the years to illustrate this idea that repeatedly observing the same phenomena over and over again should not make you confident that it will continue in the future.
In Europe we have white swans, so any biologist who’s interested in birds would observe white swan after white swan and apparently conclude that, therefore, all swans are white. Then someone travels to Western Australia and notices swans there look otherwise identical to the ones in Europe—but they’re black.
Let’s consider another example of induction.
Ever since the beginning of your life, you have observed that the sun has risen. Does this mean that scientifically you should conclude that the sun will rise tomorrow and rise every day after that? This is not what science is about.
Science is not about cataloging a history of events that have occurred in the past and presuming they’re going to occur again in the future.
Science is an explanatory framework. It’s an error-correcting mechanism. It’s not ever of the form, “The sun always rose in the past, therefore it will rise in the future.”
There are all sorts of ways in which we can imagine the sun won’t rise tomorrow. All you need to do is to take a trip to Antarctica, where the sun doesn’t rise at all for some months of the year.
If you go to the International Space Station, you won’t see the sun rise and set once per day. It will rise and set repeatedly over the course of your very fast journey around the Earth.