= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
Trevor_Blake comments on [SEQ RERUN] My Kind of Reflection - 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 (3)
The regular universe existed before any (known) reasoning being was around, and there wasn't any induction going on. That's not 2 + 2 = 3 territory. The regular universe exists now with some reasoning beings around, and induction still has its problems. No amount of confirmation will tell you that an inductive theory is regularly true, but one falsification will tell you it is regularly false. That's also not 2 + 2 = 3 territory.
Induction works great much of the time, but falsification works a wee bit better and a tiny few more times.
The original point was that the fact that induction works as well as it does would be extremely confusing if there wasn't regularity in the universe. Despite the inherent incompleteness of induction, claiming that induction isn't practically useful is essentially equivalent to asserting the deduction is not practically useful.
I also don't understand your comparison between falsification and induction. Falsifiability is a useful label for dividing pseudo-scientific predictions from scientific predictions, not a way of discovering new truth. Essentially all scientific predictions are inductive.