TGGP3 comments on Fake Causality - Less Wrong

41 Post author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 23 August 2007 06:12PM

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Comment author: TGGP3 23 August 2007 09:09:41PM 2 points [-]

I think I've said this before, but there is some defense that can be made for the phlogiston theorists. Phlogiston is like an absence of oxygen in modern combustion theory. The falsifiable prediction that caused phlogiston to be abandoned was that phlogiston would have mass, whereas an absence of oxygen (what it was in reality) does not.