gwern comments on Open Thread for February 18-24 2014 - Less Wrong
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I recently commented on one of my friends' Facebook posts in regards to the Bill Nye/Ken Ham debate. One of the issues I brought up was that Ham's Creationism lacked the qualities that we would usually associate with good explanations, namely what I called "precision". Which I defined as:
I'm pretty sure I made up this definition of "precision" because upon Google-ing I can't find any definition of "precision" that matches this. More importantly, I can't really find any sort of list that enumerates the items that separate good explanations from bad explanations. The person I posted this in response to rightly pointed this out, so "good explanation" seems entirely subjective from his point of view. Any ideas on how to close the inferential gap between us using a more authoritative source than just my say so?
Reminds me of 'discrimination'. See Yudkowsky. (I'd link to WP, but seems there's no article there on the term.)