army1987 comments on Rationality Quotes August 2012 - Less Wrong
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (426)
I would remark that truth is conserved, but profundity isn't. If you have two meaningful statements - that is, two statements with truth conditions, so that reality can be either like or unlike the statement - and they are opposites, then at most one of them can be true. On the other hand, things that invoke deep-sounding words can often be negated, and sound equally profound at the end of it.
In other words, Bohr's maxim seems so blatantly awful that I am mostly minded to chalk it up as another case of, "I wish famous quantum physicists knew even a little bit about epistemology-with-math".
I seem to recall E.T. Jaynes pointing out some obscure passages by Bohr which (according to him) showed that he wasn't that clueless about epistemology, but only about which kind of language to use to talk about it, so that everyone else misunderstood him. (I'll post the ref if I find it. EDIT: here it is¹.)
For example, if this maxim actually means what TheOtherDave says it means, then it is a very good thought expressed in a very bad way.