JoshuaZ comments on The Futility of Emergence - Less Wrong

36 Post author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 26 August 2007 10:10PM

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Comment author: Rip 27 August 2007 04:07:39AM -2 points [-]

Black holes, dark matter and dark energy seem to pretty much fit this description. They are, after all, inventions tacked on to calculations, in order to make theory and calculation fit observations.

Comment author: JoshuaZ 25 May 2012 05:56:30AM 0 points [-]

That's a bad analogy. Mindbound already addressed black holes. Dark matter is however something where we know there's something weird going on, and the simplest explanation that doesn't involve completely throwing out general relativity is to posit that there's mass out there we can't see. Specific variants of that hypothesis each make different testable predictions (indeed we can even just test the general dark matter hypothesis by looking for other signs of dark matter, such as through gravitational lensing which confirms the presence of dark matter). The comparison doesn't hold.