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Please notice how far afield you went to find a failure of inductive reasoning: Financial markets. Not a bad math proof. Not an incorrect physics theorem. Not e

by chroma 11y ago

Please notice how far afield you went to find a failure of inductive reasoning: Financial markets. Not a bad math proof. Not an incorrect physics theorem. Not even a civil engineering disaster. Markets! Markets aren't exactly known for regular behavior. If anything, they are anti-inductive.[1] If you find and exploit any regularity in them, the regularity eventually disappears. It's for these reasons that I remain unswayed by your claim. 1. http://lesswrong.com/lw/yv/markets_are_antiinductive/ http://lesswrong.com/lw/yv/markets_are_antiinductive/

graeme 11y ago
Ok, Newtonian physics. That was accepted for a long time because it was utterly, utterly consistent with all our evidence. Until it wasn't, in some edge cases. And we adopted a new theory that explained things better. My point was that the impossibility of induction is at the core of science. Science generally does things well because it accounts for this. I cited financial crashes as an example of what can happen if you don't account for induction. What, exactly, are you disagreeing with?
- cbd1984 11y ago
  And it's still consistent with most of our everyday evidence. It hasn't been falsified, it's been expanded. There's a difference.
  - scott_s 11y ago
    No, the universe Newton described was falsified. In the Newtonian universe, information (including gravitation and electrical attraction) travelled instantly. Kuhn talks about this concept quite a bit in "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions". Relativity was not merely an expansion of the Newtonian explanation of the universe. It was a complete change of our understanding of how the universe worked, even though relativity reduces to the same equations as Newtonian mechanics at low velocities and low masses.
mirimir 11y ago
Kurt Gödel (1930) Über formal unentscheidbare Sätze der Principia Mathematica und verwandter Systeme I That was rather bad news for Alfred North Whitehead and Bertrand Russell ;)
pron 11y ago
> Please notice how far afield you went to find a failure of inductive reasoning Philosophy doesn't "find a failure" of inductive reasoning because it doesn't care (in this context) about how well things work. It questions whether induction creates knowledge[1] (vs. "mere" utility). You're arguing about plumbing with a banker. If all you care about is plumbing, the bank is indeed a bad place to discuss it. It sounds as if you simply have no interest in looking at the world from a perspective other than utility, and the that you take the value of utility as an axiom. Philosophy is simply an exploration of views of reality with axioms different from yours. It is like the study of logics, while you like sticking to a particular logic system, building on top of that one. What you consider to be the end of the chain of questions that interest you, philosophy considers the beginning. That's perfectly fine and maybe philosophy isn't for you, but you've got no quarrel with it, and so far stated no disagreement with it. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epistemology https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epistemology

by chroma 11y ago

graeme 11y ago

Ok, Newtonian physics. That was accepted for a long time because it was utterly, utterly consistent with all our evidence. Until it wasn't, in some edge cases. And we adopted a new theory that explained things better. My point was that the impossibility of induction is at the core of science. Science generally does things well because it accounts for this. I cited financial crashes as an example of what can happen if you don't account for induction. What, exactly, are you disagreeing with?

cbd1984 11y ago
And it's still consistent with most of our everyday evidence. It hasn't been falsified, it's been expanded. There's a difference.
- scott_s 11y ago
  No, the universe Newton described was falsified. In the Newtonian universe, information (including gravitation and electrical attraction) travelled instantly. Kuhn talks about this concept quite a bit in "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions". Relativity was not merely an expansion of the Newtonian explanation of the universe. It was a complete change of our understanding of how the universe worked, even though relativity reduces to the same equations as Newtonian mechanics at low velocities and low masses.

mirimir 11y ago

Kurt Gödel (1930) Über formal unentscheidbare Sätze der Principia Mathematica und verwandter Systeme I That was rather bad news for Alfred North Whitehead and Bertrand Russell ;)

pron 11y ago

> Please notice how far afield you went to find a failure of inductive reasoning Philosophy doesn't "find a failure" of inductive reasoning because it doesn't care (in this context) about how well things work. It questions whether induction creates knowledge[1] (vs. "mere" utility). You're arguing about plumbing with a banker. If all you care about is plumbing, the bank is indeed a bad place to discuss it. It sounds as if you simply have no interest in looking at the world from a perspective other than utility, and the that you take the value of utility as an axiom. Philosophy is simply an exploration of views of reality with axioms different from yours. It is like the study of logics, while you like sticking to a particular logic system, building on top of that one. What you consider to be the end of the chain of questions that interest you, philosophy considers the beginning. That's perfectly fine and maybe philosophy isn't for you, but you've got no quarrel with it, and so far stated no disagreement with it. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epistemology https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epistemology