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steven comments on How Many LHC Failures Is Too Many? - Less Wrong
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IMHO if anthropics worked that way and if the LHC really were a world-killer, you'd find yourself in a world where we had the propensity not to build the LHC, not one where we happened not to build one due to a string of improbable coincidences.
I'd agree that certain worlds would have the building of the LHC pushed back or moved forward, but I doubt there would be many where the LHC was just never built. Unless human psychology is expected to be that different from world to world?
...As I pointed out recently in another context, humans have existed for tens of thousands of years or more. Even civilization existed for millenia before obvious freak Isaac Newton started modern science. Your position is a contender for the nuttiest I've read today.
Possibly it could be made better by dropping this talk of worlds and focusing on possible observers, given the rise in population. But that just reminds me that we likely don't understand anthropics well enough to make any definite pronouncements.
Are you responding to "Unless human psychology is expected to be that different from world to world?"? Because that's not my position, I'd think that most things recognizable as human will be similar enough to us that they'd build an LHC eventually. I guess I'm not exactly sure what you're getting at.
I am strongly disagreeing with you. The cultures that existed on Earth for tens of millenia or more were recognizably human; one of them built an LHC "eventually", but any number of chance factors could have prevented this. Like I just said, modern science started with an extreme outlier.
Gotcha. So, assuming that the actual Isaac Newton didn't rise to prominence*, are you thinking that human life would usually end before his equivalent came around and the ball got rolling? Most of our existential risks are manmade AFAICT. Or you think that we'd tend to die in between him and when someone in a position to build the LHC had the idea to build the LHC? Granted, him being "in a position to build the LHC" is conditional on things like a supportive surrounding population, an accepting government, etcetera; but these things are ephemeral on the scale of centuries.
To summarize, yes, some chance factor would def prevent us from building the LHC as the exact time we did, but with a lot of time to spare, some other chance factor would prime us to build it somewhen else. Building the LHC just seems to me like the kind of thing we do. (And if we die from some other existential risk before Hadron Colliding (Largely), that's outside the bounds of what I was originally responding to, because no one who died would find himself in a universe at all.)
*Not that I'm condoning this idea that Newton started science.
That's what I just said. You seem to have an alarming confidence in our ability to bounce back from ephemeral shifts. If there were actually some selection pressure against a completed LHC, then it would take a lot less than a repetition of this to keep us shifted away from building one.
There's a lot of history of science and it generally doesn't find that it all hinges on one event like Newton.
We're not talking about all of science. (Though I stand by my claim that he started it, unless you can point to someone else writing down a workable scientific method beforehand.) We're talking about whether or not anthropic reasoning tells us to expect to see people building the LHC, at a cost of $1 billion per year.
Thatcher apparently rejected the idea as presented, and rightly too if the Internet accurately reported the pitch they made to her. (In this popular account, the Higgs mechanism doesn't "explain mass," it replaces one arbitrary number with another! I still don't know the actual reasons for believing in it!) So we don't need to imagine humanity dying out, and we don't need to assume that civilization collapses after using up irreplaceable fossil fuels. (Though that one seems somewhat plausible.) I don't think we even need to assume religious tyranny crushes respect for science. Slightly less radical changes to the culture of a small fraction of the world seem sufficient to prevent the LHC expenditure for the foreseeable future. Add in uncertainty about various risks that fall short of total annihilation, and this certainty starts to look ridiculous.
Now as I said, one could make a different anthropic argument based on population in various 'worlds'. But as I also said, I don't think we know enough to get a high probability from that either.
Hakob Barseghyan teaches in his History and Philosophy of Science course that Descartes started it. The hypothetico-deductive method (what's commonly called the scientific method) is a result of the philosophic commitments of Descartes thought.
The video is somewhat odd in that he claims Descartes had no problem with experiments, but I recall the philosopher proposing rules which contradicted experiments and hand-waving this by appealing to the impossibility of observing bodies in isolation.
In any case, Hakob does make clear that Descartes used a more Aristotelian method as a rhetorical device to persuade Aristotelians. (In effect, he proved the method of intuitive truth unreliable by producing a contradiction.) I don't believe his work includes any workable method you could use to do science, while Newton's rules for natural philosophy seem like an OK approximation.
The main point is that if you buy the philosophic commitments of Descartes the hypothetico-deductive method is a straightforward conclusion. Newton might have expressed the method more clearly but various people moved in that directions once Descartes successfully argued against the old way.