3 ms·
People are very good at fooling themselves. However, there are certain traditions which contain knowledge of how to do better, and how to think more rationally.
by xlnt 18y ago
People are very good at fooling themselves. However, there are certain traditions which contain knowledge of how to do better, and how to think more rationally. People utilizing this knowledge have made considerable progress. The best example is the scientific tradition. When you want to understand a top-quality scientist, acting as a professional, the first thing you need to understand is the scientific tradition, and you don't need to worry so much about common irrationalities.
We are not doomed to always be irrational. We can create knowledge and, with effort, remove errors from it. Then, when we have supporting knowledge, we can act reasonably rationally.
- gaika 18y agoVery common misconception - science as a process is rational, but scientists are people, and they fall for all the same traps. There are plenty important scientific discoveries accepted only after the generation change. Bayesian statistics is one example of such process happening right now. Instead of being accepted or rejected based on the merits, the process of acceptance is being dragged along with all sorts of totally human irrationalities.
- xlnt 18y agoYou seem to be referring to Kuhn's theory of Scientific Revolutions, which is false, as explained in The Fabric of Reality chapter 13. BTW Bayesian statistics as a replacement for science is not being accepted because it's no good. It's no good because it does not deal in explanations.
- gaika 18y agoSome very good arguments of Science vs. Bayes: http://www.overcomingbias.com/2008/05/science-or-baye.html http://www.overcomingbias.com/2008/05/science-or-baye.html And explanations that people care about are just that what the link is all about - rationalization. Or in other words just because there is no good "explanation" for QM doesn't mean it shouldn't be accepted.
- xlnt 18y agoI have already seen that. It has the error I mentioned. As for raw QM, it corresponds to reality, but people are right to also want to know what it means. And we do know. MWI is a good explanation of QM. There's no need to be an instrumentalist, and being one is not a way of overcoming bias. Explanations of what bias is, and how to overcome it, are one of our major tools against it. (See, again, The Fabric of Reality on MWI (chapter 2), instrumentalism (chapter 1), and about explanations in chapters 1,3,4,7 and mixed in throughout.) The book QED by Feynman also contains very good explanations about QM, but without mention of MWI, so you can see that even with no particular interpretation of QM there is a lot of scope for explanation.
- gaika 18y agoAll the explanations you are talking about are very nice, and give you a lot of warm comfort, but they all are just rationalizations. There's not much you can predict about the rest of the world using them. The cold rationality lies in the math you have to study for 2-3 years to learn how to add up these little amplitude arrows. Using that you can actually model and make predictions. Another great example is Maxwell, he got all the rationalizations "wrong" but the math survived and is called after him.
- xlnt 18y agoYou are presenting an explanation of why I should discount explanations in general. Isn't that a contradiction?
- gaika 18y agoExactly, I'm being irrational here too - I'm addressing your irrational self that would listen to the arguments of a stranger for no good reason :) Here's the kind of arguments I would find rational - http://www.amazon.com/Probability-Causality-AI/lm/R2GX832Q1M6CHV/ref=cm_lm_byauthor_full http://www.amazon.com/Probability-Causality-AI/lm/R2GX832Q1M...
- hugh 18y agoWhile I agree that Kuhn's theory is pretty flawed, and only applicable to very rare cases, I really don't think that you can use "because David Deutsch said so" as an argument.
- xlnt 18y agoOf course. I am saying there is an argument in the book, which I don't want to type in (it's too long).