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NancyLebovitz comments on Rationality Quotes Thread August 2015 - Less Wrong
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To a first approximation, we care much more about whether theories are interesting than whether they are true
Fuck Nuance by Kieran Healy.
Though this varies by culture. It's more true in France than in England.
EDIT: Now that I've read that part of the essay, I see he meant scientifically interesting, and was speaking mostly prescriptively. I thought he was speaking in condemnation, and meant the irresponsible "we" care most whether a theory is entertaining.
Tetlock's work on whether pundits lose respect for making inaccurate predictions suggests that there's at least a bias towards being interesting rather than being right, at least in America. I'm not sure whether Tetlock was tracking British pundits.
How many people do you know order thier theories about things in subsets of decreasing explanatory power of the variance of observed physical and mental behaviour in the universe? The truth value of a theory is just incidental.