So my procrastination tonight started early with this interesting article about the proclivities of infants for racial and cultural bias. It’s a good article but I take a bit of an issue with this paragraph.

Spelke’s studies found baby boys and girls have similar mathematical ability, an incidental finding that was at the forefront of her mind in January 2005 when the former Harvard president Larry Summers suggested that the relative lack of female engineers and scientists was down to innate gender differences. ‘When it comes to the basic modules we are born with, they are pretty much the same,’ says Spelke, who was in the thick of the verbal fisticuffs that followed (Summers was ‘wrong, point for point’). Summers resigned as controversy raged. Spelke does not deny that there are differences in the way men and women think but most of this, she believes, is learnt over time, and down to prejudice and the expectations of society.

Of course it’s always easier to repudiate someone’s remarks when you simply assume they said whatever you are itching to reject. But besides mischaracterizing Summers this paragraph also buys into widespread but fallacious assumption that basic computational skills (adding, subtracting etc..) are the skills needed by scientists and engineers; calculation is easy it is the ability to reason abstractly and construct proofs that is hard. I would normally have simply dismissed this as another instance of sloppy journalism but a few minutes later I found the same errors being made in a respectable summary of an article published in the current edition of science, errors seemingly encouraged by the paper itself and it’s lead author.

Tipping off their hand early the summary begins with it’s own (IMO unethical) misquotation of Summers¹ but quickly moves on to reading the result they want to see into this recent study. The study basically plotted gender differences on math tests in a country versus that country’s level of gender equity and concluded that the more equitable the country the smaller the advantage boys enjoyed on math tests. The message the summary takes from this, with support from the study’s lead author, is that gender differences in mathematics are largely a result of enviornmental effects. Of course latter we are given the following qualification.

Having linked social structures to the math gender gap from country to country, Sapienza wonders whether this result rules out biological influences entirely. The answer is no. The biological hypothesis suggests that an average boy would score higher in mathematics than in reading, while for girls the reverse is true. This pattern does not change in more gender equal societies hinting that some aspects of academic performance may be innately different between boys and girls.
Sapienza and colleagues found that boys, regardless of the country and social environment in which they live, typically do better in math than in reading. Similarly, girls are usually better in reading than in math, regardless of the degree of gender equality in their society. As a result, in more gender equal societies, girls will gain an absolute advantage relative to boys.

In short an uncritical reading of either the paper in science or the summary would leave the reader with the impression that we now have even stronger evidence that boys don’t have an innate advantage at mathematics but there are still a few issues that need to be worked out about reading ability. Except the study really shows exactly the opposite. Ignoring for a moment the implicit (but false) assumption that these math tests are good measures of the skills needed to enter math and science professions just try and think about what theory would best explain the fact that cross-culturally boys are better at math than they are at reading while girls are better at reading than they are at math? Seems pretty clear to me that this evidence best supports the idea that their is an innate gender based attraction to math or reading and that in societies with greater gender equity women just perform better in school generally.

Now I don’t actually endorse that theory. It overly simplifies the complex interactions of culture and innate traits and it would be silly to just rely on this evidence while ignoring other evidence supporting larger cultural effects. However, the point remains that the evidence provided actually points in the exact opposite direction of the spin that is provided. Ultimately the point that I take from this is that if you want to have any idea about what’s plausible in this area you really can’t trust anyone’s (except mine of course :-) ) interpretation, even that of the scientists doing the study. You really have to go read the actual papers with a skeptical eye to get something other than spin. In short I worry that their is a bias in the spin given to papers and opinions on this stuff because you get a lot more flak for strident support of one side than the other.

Lately several blogs I read commented on the Fermi paradox and the existance of intelligent alien life. First Greg Laden critisizes a historical argument (poor summary) by Professor Watson that the probability of evolving intelligent life must be quite low given the many lucky breaks that seem to have been necessary for our own evolution. A point I think is largely correct. However, perhaps we should hope that the evolution of intelligent life is rare. This this technology review article argues the reason we don’t observe any aliens is that there are very few of them so the discovery that life is common should make us very scared about our future. Robert O’Callahan’s suggests that instead the low probability event might very well be the transition to intelligent life. Thus if we want to find alien life without learning that we are likely to wipe ourselves out in the short future we should hope something like Professor Watson’s argument holds water.

I tend to think most of these arguments (except perhaps Laden’s) and most discussions of the Fermi paradox or the supposed fine-tuning of the universe for life assume far too much about the nature of intelligent life. In particular it seems unjustified to assume that intelligent life must look anything at all like us. Even assuming that intelligent life must be chemically based seems unjustified. Could configurations of plasma inside stars reproduce in some sense and evolve into intelligent life? Could the patterns of elementary particles in a neutron star do the same? I’m uncertain that we even have any reason to be confident that the chemistry and physics of the gases on jupiter can’t support life. Before we get to the stage of predicting that intelligent life must be rare, and certainly before we can assume our universe is fined tuned for life we need to do some deep mathematics to determine what sorts of laws give rise to interactions likely to support self-reproduction and selection.

On the Fermi paradox, the idea that if intelligent life was common in the universe we should have seen it already, I once again think it incorporates a deep anthropocentric bias. Worse it assumes that millions of years of technological sophistication will leave us with the same primitive desire to fuck our way across the universe. It seems totally plausible to me that the reason we don’t observe much intelligent life is that it’s just not worth the bother to them of looking for us or spreading out across the galaxy. After just begining to build computers we already spend massive amounts of time in them, perhaps aliens are too busy living in virtual worlds to come out and play in the real world. Moreover, we already have the very limited ability to control our own reward system. Give us a few million years and I’m sure that a press of a button could bring us more pleasure than any discovery of an alien civilization. The ultimate fate of intelligent life may very well be unimaginable drugged out bliss.

Additionally the very idea that aliens would colonize planets or be out here in the boring galactic nether regions seems to unimaginatively assume that aliens would remain chemical life forms. Sure people contemplate the idea that advanced life might become largely computational with sufficently advanced races learning to replace their brains with computer chips or other computing machines but few seem to really consider the implications of this idea. Beings such as this wouldn’t be constrained by physical space and would have no need to spread out to avoid overcrowding, rather, they would be limited by computational power. Thus the most likely behavior of truly advanced life is to seek out the most computationally rich physical systems and stay there. This suggests that perhaps we should be looking for the truly advanced alien civilizations to be somehow encoded into the most violent, high energy systems around. Visiting planets or sending out signals to the primitive animals who live there might be the last thing on their minds.

This is just one speculation thrown out about an area we know so impossibly little that it’s hard to conclude anything except that we shouldn’t trust any of our intuitions about what life must be like too much. Ohh and I can’t write a post about this subject without throwing a shout out to Greg Egan for being one of the most imaginative and thoughtful science fiction writers about these issues.

As American consciousness of global warming has increased and a consensus that we need to do something about it has emerged my confidence that we will actual address the problem has waned. Fundamentally global warming is a scientific, engineering and economic problem which requires a solution on those levels. Indeed, dealing with domestic CO2 emissions isn’t that hard of a problem. A CO2 tax would be an easy and (relative to GDP) a fairly inexpensive way to solve the problem. Admittedly there is a real worry that this would drive industries to the third world where they would be subject to less stringent emissions controls but this is one situation where an appropriate use of tariffs could address. In my opinion an optimal solution would be to offer developing countries tariff free export to the US and other participating industrialized countries in return for imposing taxes on CO2 emissions.

Unfortunately greater environmental awareness doesn’t seem to have increased support for sane policies like this one jot. Just in the last few days McCain announced his proposal for a gas tax holiday. Lest you think that this is only a proposal that caters to the trucks and guns crowd consider the fact that no democratic candidates would dare to propose an increased gas tax for fear of the public backlash. It doesn’t seem to matter that such a tax could be made revenue neutral and could even favor the poor people since people respond viscerally to expensive gasoline.

Instead of responding rationally to the global warming issue people, especially those claiming to be environmentally conscious, instead lash out at conspicuous consumption. It is somehow considered a moral hazard to buy a gas guzzling car, take plane flights, run an air conditioner or engage in other activities that have a salient link the emissions. This of course ignores the fact that the money people save as a result of these various conservation measures goes into buying other products which themselves likely have a large carbon footprint. All the tips about how to save electricity/gas or reuse items instead of throwing them out are particularly silly. After all if I save gas that reduces the price for other consumers who may then use more. Of course these factors are likely not 1-1 but it illustrates the point that urging people to avoid activities that seem wasteful is not only a waste of utility (moral guilt doesn’t discriminate between the people for whom running their air conditioning isn’t a big deal and those who get great utility from it) but it isn’t a very effective way of accomplishing the goal.

Unfortunately this attitude that environmentalism is really about eliminating consumer excess seems to be on the lips of every environmental activist I meet lately. They remark about how we will look back on our wasteful product packaging and huge trucks as gross and wasteful. Well hopefully we will look back on them as being inefficient in terms of carbon but there is absolutely no reason we shouldn’t expect the future to eventually provide cheaper energy, more disposable cruft, more gadgets and less need for conspicuous recycling (automated sorting) while making a smaller environmental impact. Even if this isn’t possible surely we ought to aim to improve our standard of living while saving the environment.

I don’t know where this idea that environmentalism is some sort of personal virtue of frugality came from but it’s not only a bunch of bunk but it’s hurting the environment. Not only does this attitude alienate many people who might get on board with a more pragmatic engineering/economic approach to the environment but it also competes with real solutions. People are willing to make a limited amount of sacrifices and if you tell them that they are being good people for enduring daily inconveniences like turning off their AC or buying a car they don’t like as much they won’t be as eager to ‘sacrifice’ again by voting up the gas tax.

A new study¹ suggesting that the benefits of SSRIs (antidepressants like prozac) don’t provide clinically significant benefit to most patients has been making the rounds in the news today. Relying on unpublished studies submitted to FDA during the approval process for various SSRI drugs the authors did a meta-analysis and only found a clinically significant difference between the drugs and placebo for the most severely depressed patients, and only then because these patients seem to respond less to placebo not because they respond more to the medication. The news is reporting this as if this class of antidepressants (still considered some of the most effective medications) only makes a big difference for the very depressed but for once the news may be understating the scientific evidence. The truth is that it’s not clear if antidepressants work at all.

The problem is that the trials used to test antidepressant efficacy compare the medication to a sugar pill but most patients and their doctors are able to tell when they aren’t on a sugar pill. Given the small benefits of these antidepressants over placebos the fact that study participants are able to break the blind may well explain the entire effect. For those who are interested I’ll lay out a full argument for this position below the break. However, it’s important to note that just because antidepressants might not work isn’t any reason to stop prescribing them. So long as they give greater response than placebos (i.e. people believe in them) they may be of use to some people. Alternatively one might think these drugs really do have a *very *minor effect in the most depressed individuals, if for no other reason than a system that is sufficiently far from the mean might be (on average) pushed closer by any substantial intervention (think wacking your ipod to make it work) amplified by the placebo effect.

These considerations add weight to the view that depression is not a disease or even condition in the way that Downs syndrom or Asthma is but is instead the extreme end of a distribution. Thus rather than being the result of a determinate dysfunction as those cute Zoloft commercials would have you believe having depression is more like being short². This theory is being advanced by some serious researchers^{3 4}. For some reason, however, these attitudes seem to frequently come part and parcel with the idea that we ought not to treat ‘natural’ sadness, in this case apparently justified by the evolutionary ‘argument’ that sadness must serve some purpose (of course an inclination toward or efficacy at rape might have been selected for as well it would hardly prove it was something important to preserve in modern society). While some would dispute this theory everyone, it seems, is obsessed with distinguishing normal and abnormal sadness.

I could not disagree more forcefully. Far from being an argument to abandon the idea of alleviating suffering via chemical intervention the idea that depression is just an extreme for of unhappiness, if true, militates for research into effective drugs to elevate mood. Would we deny those so short they experience serious hardship or those with GH deficiencies in adulthood treatment with growth hormone just because some of it’s benefits are available to those with average levels of the hormone? Of course one always has to balance benefits with side effects and depending on the drug that balance may very well weigh against treatment in those who are already quite happy (as I understand does for HGH treatment for most people) but it’s hard to imagine that any bearable level of side effects is enough to justify denying an effective treatment to those who are chronically suicidally depressed.

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Now I occasionally complain about the reporting of some science story in the press but that’s mostly for what amounts to poor choice of analogy in what is essentially a fluff piece that props up public support for science research. This particular example is something different. It’s not only negligent, if not downright fraudulent, as far as journalism goes but is likely to fairly directly result in the death of at least one woman. True, many newspaper stories likely result in a gain or loss of life years but when the loss of life is an obvious effect of misleading reporting.

What I’m talking about is the article in the East Bay Express on the Gardasil vaccine for HPV (thus cervical cancer) titled “One Less“. True, the article describes the ‘controversy’ about the Gardasil vaccine’s deadly side effects for HPV (thus Cervical cancer) without article asserts nothing factually untrue. I don’t doubt the mother of the girl who died as the result of blod clots shortly after taking the vaccine really said the quotes attributed to her nor that the semi-anonymous remarks really do come from someone who had the shots. However, the whole article is set up to portray these as reasonable fears that are on one side of a ‘growing debate’ while plastering a picture of a sweet little 17 year old who died after taking the vaccine on the front of the print magazine with the “One Less” slogan of Gardasil written over it.

I mean the arguments for the involvement of Gardasil are really this bad:

“Some are pretty hard to discount as being a reaction,” Grothe said. “When a patient dies of a blood clot three hours after getting a Gardasil vaccination, that’s pretty consistent to me.”

Of course all the medical professionals interviewed point out that the birth control pills being taken by the girls who died are likely the cause but that doesn’t stop the article from throwing logic overboard to pander to the emotions of a grieving mother and friends or by mixing in real concerns and disadvantages of the vaccine as if they were concessions. Of course even if you grant that the vaccine is as horrible as the grieving mother trying to blame it claims it is hard to see how the harms would overwhelm the 4,000 deaths it could save a year not to mention the suffering it could erase.

Given that newspaper articles like this generate readers and likely convince people not to take the vaccine I have grave doubts about the ability of jurors to evaluate expert testimony in drug and medical device trials.

My fiancee mocks me for my inclination to collect and archive horrible exemplars just because they are so unbelievably bad. She probably has a point about my bookmarks of awful woman’s dresses but at least in the case of science journalism it’s actually useful to notice the way in which it’s bad as that tells us something about the underlying cultural biases that give rise to it. Or that’s just bullshit to justify this new sequence of posts because I couldn’t resist sharing just how bad this sort of reporting is.

The article that motivated this new series was this doozy that amazingly tells us that, “moderate happiness may be preferable to full-fledged elation.” This might make some sense if the study was warning that elation often presaged a crash while moderate happiness was more sustainable but it’s nothing that reasonable. Rather the article ‘warns’ us that:

“The highest levels of income, education and political participation were reported not by the most satisfied individuals (10 on the 10-point scale),” the authors wrote, “but by moderately satisfied individuals (8 or 9 on the 10-point scale).” The 10s earned significantly less money than the eights and nines. Their educational achievements and political engagement were also significantly lower than their moderately happy and happy-but-not-blissful counterparts.

We are further warned that the most happy people tend not to get the best grades in school. Now if I had confidence in these results (see below break) this would be an interesting result but the idea that this shows we should be less happy is so deeply confused it boggles the mind. In fact it’s such an absurd conclusion that I wouldn’t have believed the article was really saying it, much less that the actual researcher endorsed it, if they hadn’t hammered the point home.

The data indicate that happiness may need to be moderated for success in some areas of life, such as income, conscientiousness and career, Diener said. …. All in all, Diener said, the evidence indicates that happiness is a worthy goal for those who lack it, but the endless pursuit of even more happiness for the already happy may be counterproductive.

Great so your telling me that I should give up on that whole being crazy fucking happy thing so I can be more anal retentive about cleaning my room and earn more money for my own benefit. This is so brainfucked I can’t comprehend it. These are probably the same people who object to living (voluntarily) in the matrix because it would make us all really poor (no physical goods). Sometimes I boggle that people like Dennet can deny the existence of experiences then I run across something like this that reminds me just how deep the physicallist fallacy runs in our society.

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I dunno if it is a good idea from a technical point of view but Antarctica has the wonderful property of having no (permanent) residents and thus, unlike Nevada, no NIMBYism to block any disposal site. It just seemed strange to me that the Antarctic Treaty System (ATS) specifically forbids this sort of disposal. I agree such a disposal system should be approved and managed by some international body but if not Yuca mountain this seems like the only place that will work even if the transportation problem makes it less than ideal.

As an aside Yuca mountain is a perfect example of the problems of representative government, and I think one of the best real criticisms of the electoral college system. It’s also a perfect illustration of the fact that you must be dishonest or stupid to win the presidency. I mean it’s obviously much riskier to keep the nuclear waste sitting in unsecured pools besides the reactors than it is to deposit it in Yuca mountain but you can bet anything you like that anyone who stood up and said this would lose Nevada.

Maybe there is some way to pay off the people in Nevada to take the waste repository. Ohh and before anyone asks I wouldn’t have any problem living 90 miles from it myself.

The interesting article about the science of moral judgements in the New York Times also had a really excellent remark about the way our society is responding to the issue of global warming I wanted to share.

And nowhere is moralization more of a hazard than in our greatest global challenge. The threat of human-induced climate change has become the occasion for a moralistic revival meeting. In many discussions, the cause of climate change is overindulgence (too many S.U.V.’s) and defilement (sullying the atmosphere), and the solution is temperance (conservation) and expiation (buying carbon offset coupons). Yet the experts agree that these numbers don’t add up: even if every last American became conscientious about his or her carbon emissions, the effects on climate change would be trifling, if for no other reason than that two billion Indians and Chinese are unlikely to copy our born-again abstemiousness. Though voluntary conservation may be one wedge in an effective carbon-reduction pie, the other wedges will have to be morally boring, like a carbon tax and new energy technologies, or even taboo, like nuclear power and deliberate manipulation of the ocean and atmosphere. Our habit of moralizing problems, merging them with intuitions of purity and contamination, and resting content when we feel the right feelings, can get in the way of doing the right thing.

I think this is spot on. As I’ve been saying for a long time the tendency to view global warming into a personal moral issue is a monumental mistake. For starters by moralizing the environment we immediately alienate a great many people who might have joined an attempt to solve an economic and engineering problem. Surely global warming is an issue that has moral consequences (like any other) but by associating it with the idea that we have a moral duty to live more simply and repudiate consumerism you not only ensure that people with other moral views aren’t inclined to join up but you also create a sort of righteous indignation that interferes with compromise and creates animosity. I mean if global warming had been presented as a pragmatic concern I doubt we would have seen the same extent to denial and resistance to what is ultimately an extremely technical scientific conclusion. However, because global warming was used as part of a sermon to lecture the public about their evil consumerist ways it inspired a strong bitter backlash.

It now appears we are almost past the hurdle of global warming skepticism but nevertheless the moral attitude toward the environment continues to create problems. For instance consider this selection of posts for blog action day. Following the usual formula for personal moral advice these posts tell people what simple sacrifices they could make to use less energy, recycle more and otherwise be more environmentally friendly. What could be wrong with this?

Well everything. For starters by making the issue into one of personal morality we’ve implicitly adopted the idea that environmental solutions must be sacrifices because we don’t give moral credit for things that we want to do anyway. In our personal lives this tends to result in nothing worse than wasted effort but by encouraging this idea we create an environment where the best solutions (those that require the least sacrifice) aren’t properly favored. Also, just as we tend to unreasonably view Mother Teresa as a better person than Bill Gates so too does moralizing environmental choices skew our praise toward useless sacrifice. There is no good reason whatsoever to try and minimize the total volume of waste you produce but because we have moralized environmentalism we end up stupidly glorifying people who carry their trash around with them. Even individual choices to conserve energy aren’t very useful as they lower the price of oil based fuels for others.

If people just wanted to waste their time like this that would be one thing but the real problem arises because the public only has a limited willingness to sacrifice for the environment. After all if I sort my recycling and turn the thermostat down at night why should I have to pay a tax on gas too. It’s bad enough that turning the environment into a personal moral issue uses up people’s willingness to sacrifice on inefficient solutions rather than the needed national fixes but it even creates antipathy for useful economic fixes. So long as it’s an engineering/economic problem the idea of trading emission credits seems perfectly reasonable but the moment you start viewing CO2 emissions as a moral harm the idea that you can purchase indulgences starts to rub people the wrong way. In fact I’ve seen more than a few environmentalists objecting to carbon credits on this basis.

Unfortunately I don’t have the slightest clue what we can do to unmoralize the environment at this state.

There is a great article over on the New York Times about recent psychological studies of moral impulses. Perhaps the most interesting point in the piece was the observation that people’s emotions strongly demand they make distinctions they can’t rationally justify and appear not to really be rationally justifiable at all but that individuals with damage to the relevant emotional centers in the brain revert to being utilitarians. This is interesting because the sort of unjustified moral antipathy toward things like consequence free incest, using parts of an American flag as a bathroom rag or directly (as opposed to indirectly) killing one to save others bear a great resemblance to the moral judgements of earlier ages we now repudiate. It’s the same type of disgust we have at consequence free incest that makes others demonize homosexuality or (at least in the past) interracial marriage and the same distaste we might feel at using the American flag to wipe toliets still gives rise to laws against insulting the prophet in much of the muslim world.

Now the only reason we shouldn’t toss moral philosophy out as useless is that we believe that by formulating simple unifying theories about what’s moral we can refine our judgements. In other words moral theorizing only makes sense if you believe that by rational considerations we can identify and discard the sort of things we now recognize as moral superstitions (like objecting to autopsies). Yet if we know that the same unjustified instinctive reactions that demand punishment without deterrent value or cringe at pure hedonic pleasure are responsible for the misguided morals of the past surely these sorts of emotional pulls must be discounted in our moral theorizing. Given the further evidence that people fall back to being utilitarians once the misleading effect of these emotional reactions has been swept aside it would seem that utilitarianism is the only real candidate for a good moral theory.

In other words if we believe in moral philosophy at all and join with the rest of society in rejecting many of the odious moral notions of the past we must explain what caused these prior moral beliefs to go bad and avoid applying the same methods in the present. If the scientific work shows that what the beliefs we now find objectionable had in common was their grounding in this emotional part of the brain this gives us good reason to discount these emotions as a basis for our current moral theories. If science also tells us that in the absence of these misguiding emotions we end up being utilitarians then it seems we must either repudiate moral philosophy as a reasonable inquiry or accept some form of utilitarianism.

One of the principle arguments both for our confidence in the application of our physical theories to unobservable situations¹ and the reality of the postulated objects is that our physical theories are particularly simple. The background idea is that when we approximate a function by fitting points or some other general method we expect to get a complex unwieldy object back thus the simplicity of our physical theories shows they aren’t just good approximations based on lots of data points but somehow really get at what is happening. However, I’m skeptical that our intuitions about simplicity are correct. In particular I worry that our idea of what’s simple is deeply influenced by what we find useful. To explain further let me offer an example.

Suppose you are given a box that lets you dial in any² number between 0 and 1 and returns some output value between 0 and 1 within some experimental error³. If after trying many values you derive a polynomial with 25 coefficients that lets you very closely approximate the average result⁴ for a given input you probably wouldn’t think you’d hit on anything deep about the operation of the box. In fact you’d probably guess that greater precision (averaging over more tests) would reveal subtle distinctions between your approximate function and the true value. On the other hand if after the same number of tests it appears that sin(x) is an equally good approximation you might think this was the true function and expect this to be born out by further experiments. You might even make hypothesises about the box’s mechanism on this basis.

My worry is that those theories we take to be simple and elegant really aren’t simple at all. For instance is it really the case that sin(x) is a simpler function than some 25 term polynomial with integer coefficients between 1 and 10? The obvious way to answer this is to ask how many symbols it takes to define each function but this answer depends on what we take to be our primitive terms. To put the point more formally the Kolmogorov complexity of a string depends on our choice of a universal prefix-free machine. However, it’s reasonable to think that so long as we pick one system to represent out theories in and stick with it then it will function as a useful measure of a theories complexity⁵.

However, in practice we never really fix one system and insist on writing all our theories in terms of it. When people discovered that the sin function was frequently useful in describing physical systems they stuck it into their toolkit. They didn’t stick with whatever previous system they had been using and include the definition of sin(x) in all of their theories. Yet if our idea of what a simple theory is changes in response to what seems to make good predictions we no longer have a good argument for the truth of our theories. If it had turned out that a parametrized solution to the equation y^3+x*y=x^2 had been widely useful in physical theories instead of solutions to x^2+y^2=1 then it would probably have been those functions rather than cos(x) and sin(x) that we regarded as elementary functions.

I don’t doubt that evolution has endowed us with a notion of simplicity that works well in everyday macroscopic scenarios. What I’m skeptical of is the claim that the abstract mathematical theories that underlie particle physics and cosmology are really especially simple. Certainly it’s true that they can be expressed in a form that strikes us as elegant and appears simple but they only do so by making use of many layers of abstraction. I’m not so sure that if we examined the mathematical framework for quantum mechanics written out as a formal statement in PA it would still strike us as particularly simple.

In short I’m worried that we underestimate the power of additional layers of abstraction. Sure, the mathematical concepts used in modern physics are the result of a series of definitions and abstractions each one of which strikes us as simple and elegant but the essential question is whether alternative theories giving similar agreement with the data would admit a similar chain of definitions. Given that no real work (to my knowledge) has been done about the additional complexity each layer of abstraction brings to a theory what reason do we really have to be confident about the simplicity of physics?