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>Oh that's a terrible point! Thermodynamics laws are nothing like predictions about the future. I would have thought linguistic slight of hand like this is bene

by endtime 15y ago

>Oh that's a terrible point! Thermodynamics laws are nothing like predictions about the future. I would have thought linguistic slight of hand like this is beneath Kurzweil. Could you elaborate on this? I'm not a huge Kurzweil fan, but as far as I can tell he's saying something reasonable here - that when he talks about LOAR, he's describing a phenomenon rather than a physical process, and that this is an accepted usage of the word "law". I don't think he's playing semantic tricks so much as responding to a semantic complaint.

bh42222 15y ago
Our understanding of thermodynamics is very thorough. Our understanding allows us to make a plethora of predictions, all of which are falsifiable, and have been throughly tested over the years. This is what makes our theories about thermodynamics real scientific theories. Predictions about the future, no matter how simple or based on long running past trends, are only falsifiable in exactly one way: wait until the predicted date passes. I think a very, very informal use of the term "law" could cover both. But what irks me as a science minded person, is that Kurzweil is attempting to equate the informal meaning of "law", generic description of a phenomenon, with the scientific "law", an actual testable, falsifiable theory with predictive powers.
- hexagonc 15y ago
  No, Kurzweil was not equating the "Law of Accelerating Returns" to a physical law of the universe. Instead, he was comparing it, albeit clumsily, to laws that govern aggregate behavior, like the second law of thermodynamics. There are lot of things that we colloquially call "laws" that clearly don't have the same footing as laws in physics, "Moore's Law" being one of them.
wnewman 15y ago
I thought it was unreasonable for him to choose to compare to the second law of thermo, which is lawful in a much stronger way (very precisely stated, understood in a quantitative way at microfoundations...) than the pattern in accelerating returns that he's pointing out. There are dozens or hundreds of comparisons he could have made, he didn't need to pick one which is so central and stable that thinking one has found a way around it has become a classic sign of being a crank. It would be more reasonable to choose to compare to some other pattern that is generally understood to be important in economics --- e.g., returns to specialization or returns to capital investment.

by endtime 15y ago

bh42222 15y ago

Our understanding of thermodynamics is very thorough. Our understanding allows us to make a plethora of predictions, all of which are falsifiable, and have been throughly tested over the years. This is what makes our theories about thermodynamics real scientific theories. Predictions about the future, no matter how simple or based on long running past trends, are only falsifiable in exactly one way: wait until the predicted date passes. I think a very, very informal use of the term "law" could cover both. But what irks me as a science minded person, is that Kurzweil is attempting to equate the informal meaning of "law", generic description of a phenomenon, with the scientific "law", an actual testable, falsifiable theory with predictive powers.

hexagonc 15y ago
No, Kurzweil was not equating the "Law of Accelerating Returns" to a physical law of the universe. Instead, he was comparing it, albeit clumsily, to laws that govern aggregate behavior, like the second law of thermodynamics. There are lot of things that we colloquially call "laws" that clearly don't have the same footing as laws in physics, "Moore's Law" being one of them.

wnewman 15y ago

I thought it was unreasonable for him to choose to compare to the second law of thermo, which is lawful in a much stronger way (very precisely stated, understood in a quantitative way at microfoundations...) than the pattern in accelerating returns that he's pointing out. There are dozens or hundreds of comparisons he could have made, he didn't need to pick one which is so central and stable that thinking one has found a way around it has become a classic sign of being a crank. It would be more reasonable to choose to compare to some other pattern that is generally understood to be important in economics --- e.g., returns to specialization or returns to capital investment.