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Add to that David Deutsch's point that "Good explanations MUST be hard to vary"

pengstrom 3y ago
Deutsch also heavily argues for explanations as first-class existence on the level of matter. For him, predictions are simply a practical concern. I still fondly remember his dialogue between Socrates and Apollo in dream, where he convincingly makes the point that even there he can find true knowledge about the world.
- crabmusket 3y ago
  I also loved that chapter. Deutsch really argues for Popper's "conjecture and refutation" model of science (or as he renamed it, "conjecture and criticism") and one of the great points he makes is that both those processes can be done entirely in the mind. Physical evidence may be necessary for some kinds of criticism, but sometimes reason alone can produce useful criticism.
  - pengstrom 3y ago
    That's true, I might have been a little aggressive on the claiming
- walleeee 3y ago
  I also like his point (in conversation with Sean Carroll) that we have rigorous proof that the notion of explanation can't be formalized, yet explanation is at the core of the scientific endeavor anyway.
crabmusket 3y ago
"Hard to vary" is, I think, some sort of isomorphism of "easy to refute". I found it difficult when reading Deutsch to pin down exactly what made something hard to vary.
- passion__desire 3y ago
  Let's say we have 16 distinct phenomena. All of them are currently explained by a rooted tree T of explanations of depth 4. Say, we come across 8 new phenomena. Suddenly you can't rejig or shake your tree T anyhow. You have to preserve the original structure of T or at least relationships while constructing a new tree R such that it not only explains old 16 phenomena but also the new 8 as well. We might construct a new tree R such that tree T is a subtree of it. This new tree covers more ground and has more depth. In this sense, new explanations are constrained by whatever that came before and they are tasked with explaining more on top of that. There are very few ways to do it. In physics, they call the more general law to be valid at all time scales, energy scales and length scales, velocity scales and so on.

Deutsch also heavily argues for explanations as first-class existence on the level of matter. For him, predictions are simply a practical concern. I still fondly remember his dialogue between Socrates and Apollo in dream, where he convincingly makes the point that even there he can find true knowledge about the world.

crabmusket 3y ago
I also loved that chapter. Deutsch really argues for Popper's "conjecture and refutation" model of science (or as he renamed it, "conjecture and criticism") and one of the great points he makes is that both those processes can be done entirely in the mind. Physical evidence may be necessary for some kinds of criticism, but sometimes reason alone can produce useful criticism.
- pengstrom 3y ago
  That's true, I might have been a little aggressive on the claiming
walleeee 3y ago
I also like his point (in conversation with Sean Carroll) that we have rigorous proof that the notion of explanation can't be formalized, yet explanation is at the core of the scientific endeavor anyway.

crabmusket 3y ago

"Hard to vary" is, I think, some sort of isomorphism of "easy to refute". I found it difficult when reading Deutsch to pin down exactly what made something hard to vary.

passion__desire 3y ago
Let's say we have 16 distinct phenomena. All of them are currently explained by a rooted tree T of explanations of depth 4. Say, we come across 8 new phenomena. Suddenly you can't rejig or shake your tree T anyhow. You have to preserve the original structure of T or at least relationships while constructing a new tree R such that it not only explains old 16 phenomena but also the new 8 as well. We might construct a new tree R such that tree T is a subtree of it. This new tree covers more ground and has more depth. In this sense, new explanations are constrained by whatever that came before and they are tasked with explaining more on top of that. There are very few ways to do it. In physics, they call the more general law to be valid at all time scales, energy scales and length scales, velocity scales and so on.