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I'm genuinely curious: Can you name anything interesting which is concretely falsifiable? Just to list a few things that I believe in, and they're very import

I'm genuinely curious: Can you name anything interesting which is concretely falsifiable? Just to list a few things that I believe in, and they're very important to me, but which I assert are not "concretely falsifiable": Anthropogenic Climate Change Evolution as the origin of species Reducing (not necessarily eliminating) access to guns is effective at reducing gun deaths Bombing Nagasaki was the wrong thing to do Torturing people is not an effective way to gather intelligence, and it's bad policy Waterboarding is torture The US has committed very many war crimes in the last thirty years Abandoning the Gold Standard was a great decision

throwaway5752 8y ago
You don't get falsifiable in the real world in a computability sense. But > 99% confidence is completely reasonable and should be synonymous in an epistemological sense. 1, 2 are falsifiable and true. They are observed, modeled, and predictions have been demonstrated accurate. 3 is falsifiable and true, but I believe misses the point in the controversy there. 4 is not, ethics are not falsifiable. I lack the knowledge to say on 5 (people who I trust agree on both). 6 is just stupid, it tautologically is - not a question of falsifiable or not. I lack the knowledge to say on 7. I agree 8 but don't believe it's falsifiable (or I cannot prove it).
- VikingCoder 8y ago
  Newtonian physics was observed, modeled, and predictions were demonstrated accurate. Until Relativity and Quantum Mechanics showed us that our models were too simple. This whole argument you're making that things are "concretely falsifiable" is still entirely about trust, and faith, and "good enough" in practice. It's nowhere near as rock solid as you're portraying it. With guns, if you can't even agree that reducing access would decrease gun violence, it's hard to then debate whether we should, and whether we would need to modify the Constitution in order to do so. We can't even start the conversation. "Abandoning the gold standard was good" is theoretically falsifiable, but you'd need to explore the multi-verse, or you'd need to run grand experiments in other countries. (Other countries DID do that for us, and it was bad for them.)

throwaway5752 8y ago

You don't get falsifiable in the real world in a computability sense. But > 99% confidence is completely reasonable and should be synonymous in an epistemological sense. 1, 2 are falsifiable and true. They are observed, modeled, and predictions have been demonstrated accurate. 3 is falsifiable and true, but I believe misses the point in the controversy there. 4 is not, ethics are not falsifiable. I lack the knowledge to say on 5 (people who I trust agree on both). 6 is just stupid, it tautologically is - not a question of falsifiable or not. I lack the knowledge to say on 7. I agree 8 but don't believe it's falsifiable (or I cannot prove it).

VikingCoder 8y ago
Newtonian physics was observed, modeled, and predictions were demonstrated accurate. Until Relativity and Quantum Mechanics showed us that our models were too simple. This whole argument you're making that things are "concretely falsifiable" is still entirely about trust, and faith, and "good enough" in practice. It's nowhere near as rock solid as you're portraying it. With guns, if you can't even agree that reducing access would decrease gun violence, it's hard to then debate whether we should, and whether we would need to modify the Constitution in order to do so. We can't even start the conversation. "Abandoning the gold standard was good" is theoretically falsifiable, but you'd need to explore the multi-verse, or you'd need to run grand experiments in other countries. (Other countries DID do that for us, and it was bad for them.)