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You should hate anything that isn't testable and falsifiable, that's good hatred.
by M_Grey 10y ago
You should hate anything that isn't testable and falsifiable, that's good hatred.
- platz 10y agoThanks!
- bertiewhykovich 10y agoWhy? What fundamental reason is there to reject the untestable and the unfalsifiable? At worst, these claims fall into an epistemological netherworld where they can neither be ascribed truth nor falsity -- at best they may be useful tools.
- M_Grey 10y agoSo your idea of R&D is essentially random, but because you'll occasionally happen upon something useful, don't knock it? Truly, the philosophy of science is dead.
- bertiewhykovich 10y agoThat's not at all what I'm suggesting. I am not advocating for the arbitrary assignment of confidence intervals, expected values, or whatever your chosen epistemological metric is -- I am advocating for restraint in assigning falsity to what we merely cannot assign truth. Logical positivism is not boundary of philosophy of science.
- M_Grey 10y agoThere's a difference between, "Can't assign truth" and "Not testable or falsifiable." A difference I hope not to have to explain.
- snowwrestler 10y agoScience can't tell us whether something will ever be testable or falsifiable; we just know what we know now. So there's no scientific reason to hate any particular idea. Rather, the concepts direct the priority of effort--let's not spend time on things that are not currently testable or falsifiable. The "hatred" aspect comes from somewhere else besides science, and honestly I think it's harmful more often than it is helpful.
- M_Grey 10y agoScience can't tell us whether something will ever be testable or falsifiable; we just know what we know now. That's... almost literally the opposite of reality.
- snowwrestler 10y agoI phrased it poorly. What I meant is that, given a hypothesis that is not currently testable or falsifiable, we cannot use current scientific knowledge to prove that it will never be testable or falsifiable. To your point, the way I wrote it above, it sounds like I believe nothing can ever be tested or falsified. Obviously we have tested and falsified many hypotheses.
- M_Grey 10y agoI'm glad you clarified, because I was getting distressed at the idea of someone so eloquent thinking something so crazy. To clarify a bit myself though, remember that we're talking about something for which the standards of "testable" and "falsifiable" often just mean, "even in some thought experiment." For example people predicting collisions with another universe have a pretty wild hypothesis, but they proposed some ways to explore that idea involving studying the CMB background. When we're talking about the anthropic principle as a hypothetical foundation for a complete understanding of physics though... there's really no room even in theory for testing or falsifying that notion. That's what was being hated, and the hate of which I'm in support.
- snowwrestler 10y agoI can think of two hypotheses that can't currently be ruled out: 1) We're living in a computer simulation of a universe, which was built and operated for our benefit by some unknown intelligence(s). 2) Our universe is just one of an infinitely many universes, each of which has slightly different values for the physical constants. Our universe seems well-suited to our life because of selection bias--in the universes not suited to life, there is no life to observe that fact. These both relate to various formulations of the anthropic principle. The principle itself can't be used to prove the correctness of one or the other. But it's possible that we will find some experiment in the future that will allow us to test one or the other.