adamisom comments on Configurations and Amplitude - Less Wrong

26 Post author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 10 April 2008 07:41AM

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Comment author: adamisom 16 April 2012 02:58:49AM 2 points [-]

You might still love this community, if you stick around, given your intellectual openness. And you have a good point about the accidental inventions. However, my point about theory - well, it's so basic that it can't really be denied. The transistor may have been invented by accident, but if the scientists didn't have theories about how things worked, they couldn't possibly have messed around with things in the right away to come up with accidental inventions on top of purposeful inventions. Like I said, if you truly had no theories, you mineswell stick your cat on top of your computer tower to make a transistor.

And I'm still puzzled about your response to Swimmer963's comment. Do you really think that if a theory, that made no sense at all to you, but nevertheless made many successful predictions and was even the basis of a new technology, you still wouldn't believe it? Because, if that's so, then you're just stupid. Your comments indicate you're not actually that stupid. That's where I got the "you take intuition as the basis for accepting belief" comment, because your reply to her (I think Swimmer is female and has written posts on her) indicates that you do in fact take your intuition - "but that just can't be" - over empirical demonstration.