《学术英语读译》2013~2014学年秋季学期
Hideki Yukawa wrote a paper which can still give heart to a young scientist. He took as his starting point the known fact that waves of light can sometimes behave as if they were separate pellets. From this he reasoned that the forces which hold the nucleus of an atom together might sometimes also be observed as if they were solid pellets. A schoolboy can see how thin Yukawa‘s analogy is, and his teacher would be severe with it. Yet Yukawa without a blush calculated the mass of the pellet he expected to see, and waited. He was right; his meson was found, and a range of other mesons, neither the existence nor the nature of which had been suspected before. The likeness had borne fruit. 9
The scientist looks for order in the appearances of nature by exploring such likenesses. For
order does not display itself of itself; if it can be said to be there at all, it is not there for the mere looking. There is no way of pointing a finger or camera at it; order must be discovered and, in a deep sense, it must be created. What we see, as we see it, is mere disorder.
10 This point has been put trenchantly in a fable by Karl Popper.1 Suppose that someone wished to give his whole life to science. Suppose that he therefore sat down, pencil in hand, and for the next twenty, thirty, forty years recorded in notebook after notebook everything that he could observe. He may be supposed to leave out nothing: today‘s humidity, the racing results, the level of cosmic radiation and the stock market prices and the look of Mars, all would be there. He would have compiled the most careful record of nature that has ever been made; and, dying in the calm certainty of a life well spent, he would of course leave his notebooks to the Royal Society. Would the Royal Society thank him for the treasure of a lifetime of observation? It would not. The Royal Society would treat his notebooks exactly as the English bishops have treated Joanna Southcott‘s box.2 It would refuse to open them at all, because it would know without looking that the notebooks contain only a jumble of disorderly and meaningless items.
11 Science finds order and meaning in our experience, and sets about this in quite a different way. It sets about it as Newton did in the story which he himself told in his old age, and of which the schoolbooks give only a caricature. In the year 1665, when Newton was twenty-two, the plague broke out in southern England, and the University of Cambridge was closed. Newton 12
Austrian-bron British philosopher (1902-1994).
Southcott was a nineteenth-century English farm servant who claimed to be a prophet. She left behind a box that was to be opened in a time of national emergency in the presence of all the English bishops. In 1927, a bishop agreed to officiate; when the box was opened, it was found to contain only some odds and ends.
25
《学术英语读译》2013~2014学年秋季学期
therefore spent the next eighteen months at home, removed from traditional learning, at a time when he was impatient for knowledge and, in his own phrase, ―I was in the prime of my age for invention.‖ In this eager, boyish mood, sitting one day in the garden of his windowed mother, he saw an apple fall. So far the books have the story right; we think we even know the kind of apple; tradition has it that it was a Flower of Kent. But now they miss the crux of the story. For what struck the young Newton at the sight was not the thought that the apple must be drawn to the earth by gravity; that conception was older than Newton. What struck him was the conjecture that the same force of gravity, which reaches to the top of the tree, might go on reaching out beyond the earth and its air, endlessly into space. Gravity might reach the moon: this was Newton‘s new thought; and it might be gravity which holds the moon in her orbit. There and then he calculated what force from the earth (falling off as the square of the distance) would hold the moon, and compared it with the known force of gravity at tree height. The forces agreed; Newton says laconically, ―I found them answer pretty nearly.‖ Yet they agreed only nearly: the likeness and the approximation go together, for no likeness is exact. In Newton‘s science modern science is full grown.
12 It grows from a comparison. It has seized a likeness between two unlike appearances; for the apple in the summer garden and the grave moon overhead are surely as unlike in their movements as two things can be. Newton traced in them two expressions of a single concept, gravitation: and the concept (and the unity) are in that sense his free creation. The progress of science is the discovery at each step of a new order which gives unity to what had long seemed unlike.
Background and Culture Notes
Jacob Bronowski was an English mathematician, scientist, and essayist. Born in Poland and educated in England, in 1933 he received a Ph.D. in mathematics from Cambridge University, where he also co-edited an avant-garde literary magazine. Bronowski served as a university lecturer before entering government service during World War II; in 1945 he was an official observer of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Throughout the 1950s he was head of research for Britain's National Coal Board, and from 1964 until his death he was a resident fellow at the Salk Institute, La Jolla, California. The author of many books, among them Science and Human Values (1956; 1965), Nature and Knowledge (1969), and Magic, Science, and Civilization (1978), Bronowski is best remembered in Britain for the thirteen part BBC television series The Ascent of Man (1973-1974).
I. Read the article carefully and find answers to the following questions.
1. Mark the generalizations Bronowski makes in the course of ―The Nature of Scientific
26
《学术英语读译》2013~2014学年秋季学期
Reasoning‖; for example, ―No scientific theory is a collection of facts‖ (paragraph 7). Where is the information that supports them?
2. Bronowski tells the well-known story of Newton and the apple (paragraphs 11-12). How many of his generalizations does it exemplify, and how?
3. ―The scientist,‖ Bronowski observes, ―looks for order in the appearances of nature‖ (paragraph 9). Is this operation unique to scientists? Consider the operations of ―knowers‖ in humanities and social science disciplines such as history, literature, psychology and sociology.
4. Bronowski sets up an adversary, a literary person who believes that scientists observe, collect, and record facts, and writes his essays as a refutation. Adapt his ehetorical strategy in an essay of your own: explain your beliefs about something by refuting the beliefs of someone who disagrees with them.
II. Translate the following Chinese passage into English.
如果有文人把自己比喻成“一架照相机”，只是在记录事实，没有人会信以为真。但大部分人会认为科学家们的工作就是在发现并记录事实。1888年，达尔文曾给科学下过一个定义：“科学就是整理事实，从中发现规律，做出结论”。事实上，科学并非如此简单。任何科学理论都不是事实的简单整理。比如说，古代人们看到太阳每天东升西落，而大地却纹丝不动，就理所当然地得出结论：地球是宇宙的中心，太阳在绕着地球转。单凭日常观察，谁也不会质疑这一观点的正确性。但哥白尼却通过大胆的想象和精准的计算，提出地球绕着太阳转的观点，引发第一次科学革命。如果没有丰富的想象力和创造性，人类是无法推动科学向前发展的。 Unit 7
Choice and Procrastination
By Ted O‘Donoghue & Matthew Rabin
1
Recent models of procrastination due to self-control problems assume that a procrastinator
considers just one option and is unaware of her self-control problems. We develop a model where a person chooses from a menu of options and is partially aware of her self-control problems. This menu model replicates earlier results and generates new ones. A person might forgo completing an attractive option because she plans to complete a more attractive but never-to-be-completed option. Hence, providing a non-procrastinator additional options can induce procrastination, and a person may procrastinate worse pursuing important goals than unimportant ones. 2
―The better is the enemy of the good.‖ –Voltaire
27
《学术英语读译》2013~2014学年秋季学期
I.
3
INTRODUCTION
Most of us procrastinate. We delay doing unpleasant tasks that we wish we would do sooner.
Such procrastination can be very costly. We skip enjoyable events in mid-April because we procrastinate in completing our taxes; we die young because we procrastinate in quitting smoking, starting a diet, or scheduling a medical checkup; and we are denied tenure because of our own, coauthors‘, or journal referees‘ procrastination. 4
There is a growing literature in economics that assumes people have self-control problems,
conceived of as a time-inconsistent taste for immediate gratification. An often discussed implication of such preferences is procrastination.1 These models of procrastination assume that a potential procrastinator has only one task under consideration, and hence the only concern is when the person completes the task. In most situations, however, a person must decide not only when to complete a task, but also which task to complete, or how much effort to apply to a chosen task. If a person must revise a paper for resubmission, she can either respond minimally to the editor‘s suggestions or expend more effort to respond thoroughly. If she is choosing how to invest some money, she can either thoughtlessly follow the advice of a friend, or thoroughly investigate investment strategies. If she is putting together a montage of Johnny Depp photos, she can either haphazardly throw together a few press clippings or work devoutly to construct the shrine that he deserves. 5
In this paper we develop a model of procrastination in which a person must choose not only
when to do a task, but also which task to do. The model makes a number of realistic predictions incompatible with the conventional assumption of time-consistent preferences. These include the possibilities that providing a person with an attractive new option can cause her to switch from doing something beneficial to doing nothing at all, and that a person may procrastinate more severely when pursuing important goals than unimportant ones. 6
We also develop a formal model of partial na?veté, where a person is aware that she will have
future self-control problems, but underestimates their magnitude. The literature on self-control problems has focused entirely on two assumptions regarding a person‘s beliefs about her future self-control problems: that she is sophisticated–fully aware of her future self-control problems–or that she is na?ve–fully unaware of her future self-control problems. We believe that introducing a model of partial na?veté to the growing literature on time-inconsistent preferences is an important 1
See, for instance, Prelec (1989), Akerlof (1991), Fischer (1997), and O‘Donoghue and Rabin (1999a, 1999b, 1999c).
28
《学术英语读译》2013~2014学年秋季学期
ancillary contribution of this paper. Economists have been predisposed to focus on complete sophistication; but since our results show that any degree of na?veté can yield different predictions than complete sophistication, our analysis suggests that restricting attention to complete sophistication could be a methodological and empirical mistake even if people are mostly sophisticated. 7
In Section II we describe a formalization of time-inconsistent preferences originally
developed by Phelps and Pollak (1968) in the context of intergenerational altruism and later employed by Laibson (1994) to capture self-control problems within an individual: in addition to time-consistent discounting, a person always gives extra weight to current well-being over future well-being. These ―present-biased preferences‖ imply that each period a person tends to pursue immediate gratification more than she would have preferred if asked in any prior period. 8
In Section III we present our model of task choice. We suppose that a person faces a menu of
possible tasks. Each period she must either complete one of these tasks or do nothing, without being able to commit to future behavior. Completing a task requires that the person incur an immediate cost, but generates an infinite stream of delayed benefits; tasks may differ in both their costs and their benefits. We assume that the person behaves optimally given her taste for immediate gratification and given her beliefs as to how she will behave in the future, where her beliefs reflect her (sophisticated, na?ve, or partially na?ve) perceptions of her future self-control problems. 9
Na?veté about future self-control problems leads a person to be overoptimistic about how
soon she would complete a task if she were to delay now, and hence is an important determinant of procrastination. Akerlof (1991) emphasizes the role of na?veté in putting off unpleasant tasks, and O‘Donoghue and Rabin (1999a) show that even mild self-control problems can cause severe procrastination for a completely na?ve person, but not for a completely sophisticated person.1 Section III fleshes out the logic behind these earlier results, and generalizes them by allowing for both a menu of tasks and partial na?veté. We show that for any specific environment there is a lower bound on the degree of na?veté needed to generate severe procrastination. But we also show that for a person with any degree of na?veté, no matter how little, there exist environments where that person procrastinates severely. 1
Prelec (1989) discusses how time-inconsistent preferences can lead a person to avoid doing an unpleasant task. Because he does not look at a dynamic model, sophistication is not relevant. Fischer (1997) considers
procrastination of a task that may take a while to complete. She assumes sophistication, although because she explores long-term projects she finds that substantial procrastination is still possible. Akerlof (1991) does not frame his analysis of procrastination to a model of present-biased preferences, and he highlights the role of na?ve beliefs in generating severe procrastination. O‘Donoghue and Rabin (1999a) explicitly compare the na?ve to the sophisticated model; O‘Donoghue and Rabin (1999b, 1999c) explore procrastination with na?ve beliefs.
29