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lackofcheese comments on What false beliefs have you held and why were you wrong? - Less Wrong
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Interesting, thank you. I guess our views are not that far apart. And I also
though if someone comes up with an interesting, accurate and fruitful meta-model of partial existence, I'd be happy to change my mind.
Could it be because you are trying to apply them to a wrong domain? Would you agree that in a certain setting (a fantasy tale, a horror story) we can predict behavioral and visual features of the creatures inhabiting it with a fair degree of accuracy? Often more accurately than, say, a path and strength of a tropical storm being born in the Atlantic.
Ah, but then you're talking about a theory of "unicorns" rather than a theory of unicorns.
Not sure what you are saying. My guess is that you are implying that the quotation is not the referent, and unicorns are hypothetical magical creatures, while "unicorns" are vivid and very real descriptions of them in the stories often read and written by the local bronies. If so, then all I have to say that unicorn is not an accurate or fertile theory, while "unicorn" most definitely is. The difference is the domain of validity: can you go outside and find one running around, or can you mostly encounter them in books and movies? But that applies to most theories. If you go slow, Newtonian mechanics is adequate, if you study fast-moving objects, Newton gives bad predictions. Similarly, if you apply the predictions of the "unicorn" model beyond the domain of its validity, you are going to be disappointed, though occasionally you might discover a new applicable domain, such as a cosplay or a SFF convention.
The distinction is that a theory of "unicorns" is a theory that describes how and why other people (and probably you yourself) think about unicorns, while a theory of unicorns would explain actual unicorns. The latter would clearly fail as a theory, because you're never going to actually see a unicorn.
The same distinction doesn't apply to Newtonian mechanics, because Newtonian mechanics is a theory of mechanics, not a theory of how people think about mechanics.
On those grounds, I think it's quite reasonable to say that virtual particles are real, and "unicorns" are real, but unicorns are not real.
Not sure if you read anything I wrote in this thread. Note that both Newton's laws and "unicorn" laws are models. You don't find Newton's laws in Nature, just like you don't find "unicorn" laws. You don't find virtual particles, either, as they are but terms in the perturbative expansion of a particular quantum field theory (which is also a model, and not found in the wild).
Anyway, disengaging now.