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shminux comments on A question about Eliezer - Less Wrong
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Which makes it a wonderfully falsifiable prediction.
Suppose it is falsified. What conclusions would you draw from it? I.e. what subset of his teachings will be proven wrong? Obviously none.
His justification, " I don't think the modern field of physics has its act sufficiently together to predict that a hitherto undetected quantum field is responsible for mass." is basically a personal opinion of a non-expert. While it would make for an entertaining discussion, a discovery of the Higgs boson should not affect your judgement of his work in any way.
I'll update by putting more trust in mainstream modern physics - my probability that something like string theory is true would go way up after the detection of a Higgs boson, as would my current moderate credence in dark matter and dark energy. It's not clear how much I should generalize beyond this to other academic fields, but I probably ought to generalize at least a little.
I'm not sure that this should be the case, as the Higgs is a Standard Model prediction and string theory is an attempt to extend that model. The accuracy of the former has little to say on whether the latter is sensible or accurate. For a concrete example, this is like allowing the accuracy of Newtonian Mechanics (via say some confirmed prediction about the existence of a planetary body based on anomalous orbital data) to influence your confidence in General Relativity before the latter had predicted Mercury's precession or the Michelson-Morley experiment had been done.
EDIT: Unless of course you were initially under the impression that there were flaws in the basic theory which would make the extension fall apart, which I just realized may have been the case for you regarding the Standard Model.
What would a graph of your trust in mainstream modern physics over the last decade or so look like? And how 'bout other academic fields?
One of these things is not like the others, one of these things doesn't belong.
Lots of physicists will acknowledge that string ‘theory’ -- sorry, I cannot bring myself to calling it a theory without scare quotes -- is highly speculative. With 10^500 free parameters, it has no more predictive power than “The woman down the street is a witch; she did it.”
On the other hand, there's no way of explaining current cosmological observations without recurring to dark matter and dark energy (what the hell was wrong with calling it “cosmological constant”, BTW? who renamed it, and why?), short of replacing GR with something much less elegant (read: “higher Kolgomorov complexity”). Seriously, for things measured as 0.222±0.026 and 0.734±0.029 to not actually exist we would have to be missing something big.
Unless your prior for his accuracy on Quantum Physics is very strong, you should update your prior for his accuracy up when he makes accurate predictions, particularly where he would be right and a lot of pros would be wrong.
Not at all. The QM sequence predicts nothing about Higgs and has no original predictions, anyway, nothing that could falsify it, at any rate.
In general, if the situation where "he would be right and a lot of pros would be wrong" happens unreasonably frequently, you might want to "update your prior for his accuracy up" because he might have uncommonly good intuition, but that would probably apply to all his predictions across the board.