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The best the scientific process can do is establish facts about repeatable processes. Even then, it isn't carving facts in stone, but a case of increasingly acc
by mmcdermott 5y ago
The best the scientific process can do is establish facts about repeatable processes. Even then, it isn't carving facts in stone, but a case of increasingly accurate approximations of reality.
The reason that it is impossible for mere fact to end political dispute is that facts are only one element in policy. Values are more important in the long run and facts can only be used to improve policy around shared values.
People don't agree on values and they never fully will.
- wombatmobile 5y ago> The best the scientific process can do is establish facts about repeatable processes. And if everyone had the time and resources to discover and digest every fact, facts might be definitive. But everyone doesn't have time and resources. To compensate, we rely on others to curate facts for us. When we encounter an internally consistent subset of facts that suits our ideals and our interests, we adopt that point of view. There are infinitely many subsets of curated facts that can be presented as internally consistent. That's why there are so many different points of view. To complicate things further, it is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.
- Mountain_Skies 5y agoThat's an interesting topic that sometimes gets explored in sci-fi. If an AI is created that is able to learn all knowledge and form it into a single consistent model of reality but it ends up making conclusions we don't want to hear, what are the consequences for humanity and living things in general?
- wombatmobile 5y agoThose “conclusions you don’t want to hear” are not from the AI. They are an embellishment by the sci-fi author. If an AI did do that, the “conclusions you don’t want to hear” would be artifacts of the AI’s algorithmic process or data set. Living things in general don’t worry about conclusions. They just live.
- gryn 5y agogot examples of books where this is done ? I'm currently interested in reading some.
- djokkataja 5y agoThe Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy is almost exactly what Mountain_Skies is describing. If I remember correctly, Peter Watts has a somewhat more realistic take on this in his Rifters trilogy (under the Novels section here: https://rifters.com/real/shorts.htm https://rifters.com/real/shorts.htm), where there's a brain in a box that sifts through loads of information and gives advice to political leaders. The trilogy as a whole is more... deep-sea cyberpunk than particularly centered on the brain in a box, though.
- stevenwoo 5y agoold but good short stories The Defenders by Philip K. Dick a different take - Second Variety by Philip K. Dick. Not totally omniscient AI but running large ships and space stations - Imperial Radch trilogy by Ann Leckie AIs with personality running almost every machine and helping rule the empire in the Culture series by Iain Banks.
- philwelch 5y agoSabine Hossenfelder put it as well as I've seen it put: "Science doesn't tell you not to pee on an electric fence. It only tells you that urine is an excellent conductor of electricity."
- naasking 5y agoThat was a good one for sure. She does have some gems.
- bo1024 5y agoBut the problem is that people aren't even agreeing on facts.
- rkk3 5y ago> people aren't even agreeing on facts. From the TFA. "what happens to politics ... when rhetorical appeals to 'the facts' start to dominate people’s justifications"