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DanielLC comments on Making Beliefs Pay Rent (in Anticipated Experiences) - Less Wrong
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Because one of these allows you to make predictions, and the other doesn't. Saying "fire has a cause, and I'm going to call it 'phlogiston'!" doesn't tell you anything about fire, it's just a relabeling. Now, if you make enough observations, maybe you'll eventually conclude that "phlogiston is the absence of oxygen" (even though this isn't really correct), but at that point you can throw out the label "phlogiston". Contrariwise, if you say "oxidization causes fire", where "oxygen" is a previously known thing with known properties, then this allows you to actually make predictions about fire. E.g. the fact a candle in a sufficiently small closed space will go out before it melts, but not necessarily if there's a plant in there too. One pays rent, the other doesn't.
You can make exactly the same predictions with phlogiston. If you burn coal next to iron, it will refine it. You could predict this with oxygen (oxygen is moving from the iron to the coal) or with phlogiston (phlogiston is moving from the coal to the iron).
It's like with electric charge. If you think of it as positive charge moving around, it has almost exactly the same predictive power as thinking of it as electrons moving around.
But you can only predict it if you already know that a gain of phlogiston refines iron; if you don't, you can only observe it afterward and write it down as a property of phlogiston.
If you don't know anything about oxygen or phlogiston beforehand, then, sure, they're pretty much equally predictive, i.e., not very much. But if "oxygen" is not in fact just an arbitrary label as "phlogiston" is, but in fact something you're already working with in other ways, then they're not symmetric.
Also as Nick Tarleton points out below there are other asymmetries, though those are not so much in the predictive power.
"But you can only predict it if you already know that a gain of phlogiston refines iron"
Same goes for oxygen.
Okay, I admit that that's not really a prediction, but until then, they couldn't even explain it.
If you're going to do it like this, what's one thing oxygen predicted?
By the way, I'm responding to the fact that I lost two karma points on that, not any actual post.
That's what I just said.
Sorry. Too used to defending my position to realize you're not attacking it.