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lessdazed comments on Your inner Google - Less Wrong
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I found some info on research: http://realpeoplepress.com/blog/research-in-nlp-neurolinguistic-programming-science-evidence.
Disclaimer: the author of that post is a major NLP persona.
Keep in mind that formal science is not the totality of research, see for example the writings of Seth Roberts on self-experimentation (the guy who invented the Shangri La diet and Morning Faces Therapy, among other hacks).
Hey, I thought you might like this post on Science.
I might read that later tonight. Do you have a TLDR for now?
tl;dr:
Science is designed to avoid belief in untrue things, not figure out what is most likely to be true.
Thanks!
Both of those visions of science are flawed, in very similar ways: Each seeks to maximize something without acknowledging the tradeoffs.
Trivially: If science is to avoid belief in untrue things, you can instantly complete science by not believing anything.
The "figure out what is likely to be true" at least isn't so trivially dismissable.
Science should maximize expected value. The difficulty in practice is that you often must understand something before you can know what utility this understanding will provide.
That's why it's a tl;dr.
You've misconstrued what you're replying to. The statement was:
You misconstrued it here:
Analogously:
lessdazed wrote that umbrellas are designed to protect against rain.
You replied that if umbrellas are to protect against rain, then you can instantly complete an umbrella by moving to a place with low precipitation.
When lesswrong said that science is designed to avoid belief in untrue things, he was not saying that everything that is to avoid belief in untrue things is science. Any more than had he said that umbrellas are to protect against rain, he would be saying that anything that protects against rain is an umbrella.
That is a "should" statement. However, what science is, is an is, not an ought. There are many reasons to be careful about not bridging the distinction. One is that you want to distinguish between mechanism, proximate function, and (ultimate) function. Even if the ultimate function of science is to maximize expected value, that does not tell us anything about the mechanism of science or its proximate function, through which it maximizes expected value. Science may, for example, serve the ultimate goal of maximizing expected value by helping avoid belief in untrue things.
If we look at the activity of a scientist, not everything they do is science. A scientist needs to eat breakfast, but eating breakfast is not science. A scientist needs to imagine possibilities, but imagining possibilities is not science. Artists do that as well without being scientists. What makes someone a scientist - and I'm simply restating what I've heard many times and seems plausible, not something I've put a lot of thought into recently - is that he tests these imagined possibilities, which in the context of science are called hypotheses. It's putting the hypotheses to the test, particularly to a systematic, rigorous test, that sets science apart from other activities. And this bit - the testing bit - the bit which is what (I have often heard) makes science science and not religion or art - is designed to avoid belief in untrue things.
You wrote that "what science is, is an is, not an ought." Could you please explain what science is? I only ask because different people have different ideas of what science is or should be, and I'm a little unclear what is being referred to here. Thanks.