Paul_Gowder comments on Where Philosophy Meets Science - Less Wrong

24 Post author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 12 April 2008 09:21PM

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Comment author: Paul_Gowder 17 April 2008 10:18:30PM 5 points [-]

gaaahhh. I stop reading for a few days, and on return, find this...

Eliezer, what do these distinctions even mean? I know philosophers who do scary bayesian things, whose work looks a lot -- a lot -- like math. I know scientists who make vague verbal arguments. I know scientists who work on the "theory" side whose work is barely informed by experiments at all, I know philosophers who are trying to do experiments. It seems like your real distinction is between a priori and a posteriori, and you've just flung "philosophy" into the former and "science" into the latter, basically at random.

(I defy you to find an experimental test for Bayes Rule, incidentally -- or to utter some non-question-begging statistical principle by which the results could be evaluated.)