Bayesianism versus Critical Rationalism

Jayson_Virissimo

LESSWRONG
LW

Bayesianism versus Critical Rationalism — LessWrong

Comment Permalink

I hope you stick around - LW needs people who've read Popper. (However, I take that back if it turns out that you've only read Deutsch's simplified, evangelical caricature of him.)

Solomonoff Induction will keep going wrong in random and perverse ways because it pays no heed to theories as explanations.

This is at best unclear. If a person, or the entire scientific community, were given the task of competing with Solomonoff induction to predict an incoming data stream, then either (i) Solomonoff induction would eventually arrive at "the correct theory" (at least in the sense that it no longer 'keeps going wrong') or (ii) the human scientists would 'keep going wrong in random ways' (i.e. ways that seem random to the scientists) or both.

Talking about the need for 'good explanations' over and above mere predictive success is all very well, but it's not that helpful unless you can say something about what makes an explanation good. (It would be even more helpful if you could say something about how an AI could recognize a good explanation.)

I think the point you should be concentrating on is that human scientists do not face the same problem-situation as Solomonoff induction. We can choose what questions to work on, design experiments, and we're also blessed/cursed with the lack of any stable boundary between 'data' and 'theory'.

Richard_Kennaway15y70

I hope you stick around - LW needs people who've read Popper. (However, I take that back if it turns out that you've only read Deutsch's simplified, evangelical caricature of him.)

Turning into a simplified caricature of Popper appears to be a memetic hazard of reading Popper. Not as bad as reading Rand, though.

2Elliot Temple15y

Deutsch does say what makes an explanation good. He has a TED talk about it, and a new book, The Beginning of Infinity (came out 2 days ago in the UK) which has this as a major theme. Good explanations are hard to change while they still solve the same problem. The book has examples and elaboration.

1[anonymous]15y

I have read both Popper and Deutsch. Could you explain your comment about Deutsch? You say human scientists do not face the same problem situation as Solomonoff Induction. But both are trying to create knowledge right? In Solomonoff Induction it is assumed that all knowledge comes to us via sensory organs as data streams and the task of the knowledge creator is to compress that data with the aim of making good predictions. This, it is held, is in some sense what scientists and all people do when they create knowledge and it is what the ideal knowledge creator should do. Critical rationalism rejects the idea that all knowledge comes to us via the senses - that is empiricism - and it rejects the idea that theories are just instruments for making predictions - that is instrumentalism. You seem to think that predictive success can come without underlying explanations, as though explanations are optional. They are not. We can't just neglect explanations and think we can get on with the process of building an AI. That we cannot formalize our current knowledge about explanations in a nice piece of mathematics should not be a deterrent to trying to learn more.

See in context