= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
thomblake comments on Go Forth and Create the Art! - 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)
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (104)
Indeed - that seems to me like a problem. I am oft reminded of the unemployment worker in History of the World: Part I... "Occupation?" "Did you create an AI last week?" "Did you try to create an AI last week?"
Of course, that's not the end of the story, and nobody would expect a job like that to be the sort of thing you can just do. But without demonstrated efficacy, what's the difference between this "Art" and pseudoscience?
For an art of rationality to even mean anything, it must have predictable, demonstrable results.
This is just false. It's a good property to have, in many cases life-saving one, but it's not always possible. If you seek an Art, but don't expect demonstrable results from the correct one just yet, how do you tell the difference from pseudoscience? How do you move from an idea in your mind to an implementation with demonstrable results, why do you proceed with trying to demonstrate the value of one idea, but not another, before the work is done? Other cues.
No, it's not just false. It's also very nearly true. It's merely technically false because I was talking in an unnecessarily positivist way about it. But you know what I mean, I hope.
That is a good question, and one that I don't have an answer to. Is there one? (you can't?)
You look at the sanity of the theory. How do you tell a sane academic paper from one written by a crackpot (say, you don't look at where it's published and you don't know the author)? Certainly you don't need to go check experimental results or proofs in overwhelming majority of cases. Doing this reliably where absurdity heuristic breaks is claimed as a large part of the Art of rationality. It's necessarily self-referential.
Simple - I don't read it either way. There are plenty of papers written by folks I've heard of or in trusted publications to fill up all of the free time I don't have.
if the ideas seem novel and useful, I expect empirical evidence. If there is none, I withhold judgement until there is.
This doesn't sound realistic. Do you deny your ability to tell the difference?
Between crackpots and valid academic papers, out of context? Yes, I do deny that. Take Louis Savain (please!). I actually have a lot of the same intuitions about the nature of spacetime, and the problems involving even talking about time travel outside of a fictional context. Savain is clearly a crackpot - it's practically painted all over his site. But if I had written a paper discussing some of these intuitions, and nobody noticed that it wasn't published in a peer-reviewed journal nor that I'm not a physicist, then I don't think there would be a clear way to notice that I was wrong.
Of course, a physicist could happily come along and say, "No, our theory is experimentally verified, and yours doesn't even make sense. Here are references to the relevant evidence, and some engineering applications you might not have been aware of".
ETA: I admit, I had "speak of the devil" in mind when I posted this. But it had to be done!
You are not doing the categorization as a civil service, you are doing it to efficiently build on gained understanding. If you are not ready to understand, you shouldn't try to do that. But when you are, you play the role of that very physicist, you don't need to see the crackpot's experimental results.
That's because the physicist has her own experimental results already, and the crackpot has none. If the crackpot has experimental results to back up his theory, then the physicist had bloody well better look at them! (if the paper is even being taken seriously enough to be read in the first place)
The one crackpot I interacted most strongly did have experimental results, and trumpeted them loudly. The experiment turned out to be a notoriously finnicky one (not quite down to Millikan experiment territory) done in slipshod fashion. This was utterly predictable, given purely theoretical considerations and examination of his style, even before it came to the observations - his theory contradicted, say, the existence of comets.
Experiments can be wrong. Maybe even most attempts at experiments are wrong. What makes a scientist a scientist instead of a crackpot is the debugging and validation. Trying to exclude every way the results might not mean what it seems like they mean - not just doing control-experiment comparison and saying you've done your duty.
Crackpot experiments, lacking these extra checks, are worthless.
I agree with everything in your post except the last sentence. That's what a science must have to be meaningful.
What I want to know is why there's so little interest in developing a science of rationality.