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I feel obliged to respond to your accusation that I'm moving the goalposts, which I don't believe I've done. I meant "understanding the reality of a problem" i

I feel obliged to respond to your accusation that I'm moving the goalposts, which I don't believe I've done. I meant "understanding the reality of a problem" insofar as that understanding can be achieved by more than just the internals of one person's mind by achieving "a rigorous consensus on the facts" from a group/team/society. If the team of engineers at SpaceX responsible for landing that rocket booster had a mixture of people who 1) worked with the known facts governing physics, and 2) believed that chariots are pulling the sun across the sky, or that the concept of gravity is a poor approximation of the spiritual energy binding all things, then I doubt they would have gotten close to success. They would have fundamental disagreement on the "reality of the problem" (need to land an object on a floating target) because they'd have no consensus on the facts of the constraints involved (gravity, thermo/aerodynamics, degrees of freedom, confidence intervals, probably a bunch more I can't imagine). Those constraints constitute the reality of the problem. More to your point of fixing bugs, just because you don't understand every tenet of theories of computation, does not mean that you can substitute whatever explanations you imagine for how computers work and they become truth in reality.

metaphorm 10y ago
> insofar as that understanding can be achieved by more than just the internals of one person's mind ok, but let's back up a bit and remember what kind of thing we're discussing. we're discussing the unusual mental states that some people experience which causes them some form of suffering. a psychiatrist might call it schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, or psychosis. the subject in question is very much about the internals of one person's mind. if you're trying to argue that rocket engineering and mental health services are equivalent I think you've got a lot of explaining to do. if, on the other hand, you acknowledge that mental health services are not the same kind of thing as rocket engineering, then maybe we have some grounds to find agreement on. I wouldn't ask a shaman to have anything to do with building rockets. I might ask a shaman to have something to do with mental health services though. Do you see the distinction?

metaphorm 10y ago

> insofar as that understanding can be achieved by more than just the internals of one person's mind ok, but let's back up a bit and remember what kind of thing we're discussing. we're discussing the unusual mental states that some people experience which causes them some form of suffering. a psychiatrist might call it schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, or psychosis. the subject in question is very much about the internals of one person's mind. if you're trying to argue that rocket engineering and mental health services are equivalent I think you've got a lot of explaining to do. if, on the other hand, you acknowledge that mental health services are not the same kind of thing as rocket engineering, then maybe we have some grounds to find agreement on. I wouldn't ask a shaman to have anything to do with building rockets. I might ask a shaman to have something to do with mental health services though. Do you see the distinction?