= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
TobyBartels comments on Some Heuristics for Evaluating the Soundness of the Academic Mainstream in Unfamiliar Fields - Less Wrong
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
= 783df68a0f980790206b9ea87794c5b6)
Loading…= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
Powered by Reddit
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d)
Comments (272)
Sounds like a good idea until you realize that you are throwing out most math and philosophy with the bathwater.
How about accepting either empirical testability or a requirement that all claims be logically proven? (Much of microeconomics and game theory slides in under 'provable' rather than 'testable'. Quite a bit of philosophy fails under both criteria, but some of it approaches 'provable'.)
Even in mathematics, you can find contrarian opinions that much of the field is meaningless. What we have is (or at least seems to be) logically proved from the basis of certain assumptions, but we could as easily have picked very different assumptions and proved different theorems instead. There is a prevailing opinion that certain assumptions (the mainstream foundations of mathematics) are correct or at least useful, but correctness ultimately reduces to an aesthetic judgement, and usefulness is known to be exaggerated.