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Punoxysm comments on Open thread, Oct. 13 - Oct. 19, 2014 - Less Wrong Discussion

5 Post author: MrMind 13 October 2014 08:17AM

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Comment author: Punoxysm 14 October 2014 05:53:02PM 2 points [-]

Well you can't do things that would be really nice to do in biology like "rerun the tape of life", not to mention the tremendously interdependent system that is any living organism. And the artificial laboratory conditions of psychological experiments, along with variability of subjects, form a huge impediment to study.

It's not that you can't do experiments, but it's much more difficult to isolate parts of biological, economic and psychological systems and experiment usefully on them.

Comment author: [deleted] 14 October 2014 08:50:39PM 3 points [-]

Well you can't do things that would be really nice to do in biology like "rerun the tape of life",

You can't do things in cosmology like "rerun the tape of the universe" either.

Comment author: Punoxysm 14 October 2014 09:19:55PM 2 points [-]

Sure, but I think it's reasonable to say that humans are ill-behaved as experimental subjects compared to other biological organisms, which are ill-behaved compared to particles, stars and galaxies.

I mean ill-behaved in the sense that their behaviors cannot be reliably modeled by compact mathematical models.