BrianScurfield comments on Taking Ideas Seriously - Less Wrong
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All human beings create knowledge - masses of it. Certain ideas can and do impair a person's creativity, but it is always possible to learn and to change one's ideas.
It's not just conjectures, it's "conjectures and refutations". Knowledge is created by advancing conjectural explanations to solve a problem and then criticizing those conjectures in an attempt to refute them. The goal is to find a conjecture that can withstand all criticisms we can think of and to refute all rival conjectures.
No, it never worked. Not a bit. That's what I mean by myth.
Theories are objective. Whether you think a theory is true or false has no bearing on whether it is in fact true or false. Moreover, how do you assign a probability to a complex real-world theory like, say, multiversal quantum mechanics? What counts is whether the theory has stood up to criticism as an explanation to a problem or set of problems. If it has, who cares about how probable you think it is? It's not the probability that you should care about, it's the explanation.
Above all else, we should try to find explanations for things; explanations are the most important kind of knowledge.
Knowledge is always uncertain, yes, but it is impossible to objectively quantify the uncertainty. Put another way, you cannot know what you do not yet know. Theories can be wrong in all sorts of ways but you have no way of doing in advance how or if a theory will go wrong. It's not a definitional dispute.
OK, we agree on that!
Probability is subjectively objective. All conjectures/models are wrong, but some are useful to the extent that they successfully constrain expected experience.