Sir Karl Popper argued against induction and against authority in Conjectures and Refutations (and in most of his books). Provisional trust in scientific claims can be useful, but all conjectures are subject to critical examination and perhaps refutation. Popper said the scientific method is defined by use of falsifiability, not by authoritty.

Just realised you're the post author, so: Thanks for posting this, it's something I've wondered about in relation to myself, as well. :)

1: No tentacles

But imagine that we also have independent evidence that Earth is 1 million years old.

This reminds me of something Eliezer once said--"How would I explain the event of my left arm being replaced by a blue tentacle? The answer is that I wouldn't. It isn't going to happen." We do not observe a young (even 10^6) Earth, and by suggesting the possibility of one as counterevidence against the strength of the 'a priori' reasoning I advocated, you must be smuggling in a circular assumption that young Earth models have significant probability.

Your argument as I understand it is roughly that since my a priori reasoning would fail in young Earth scenarios, then that reasoning is unreliable. But if our prior for young Earth scenarios is extremely low, then it will only very rarely happen that my reasoning will fail in that particular way. Therefore for your argument to go through, you would have to place a high prior probability on young Earth scenarios.

To put it another another way: If observing a young Earth would be evidence against my a priori reasoning, then by conservation of expected evidence, our actual observation of a non-young Earth must be evidence in favour of that reasoning.

People in a modern day situation, and LW'ers in particular, are better placed to understand that 'naturalistic' explanations are preferable, and that magic ones should incur huge complexity penalties. Therefore we should have low priors on young Earths, because most of our probability will be concentrated in models where intelligent life arises from nonintelligent (hence slow) processes as opposed to intelligent (e.g. God) processes.

Moreover, the more intelligent the process that generated us, the more we push the explanatory buck back onto that process. God is an extreme case where the mystery of the apparent improbability of human intelligence is replaced with the mystery of the apparent improbability of divine intelligence. But even less extreme cases like superhumanly (but still decidedly 'finitely intelligent') entities simulating us incurs a penalty for passing the explanatory buck back. Natural selection is so elegant and formidable because it is an existing behaviour of what we already observe.

2: Insanity screens off charity

Creationists like to cite irreducible organs

If--even before accepting evolution by natural selection--you can put an extremely high probability on creationists spewing objections like 'irreducible organs' regardless of the veracity of evolution by natural selection, then you can pretty much write off the counterarguments of creationists, because your observation of creationists making these arguments is extremely weak evidence that there is anything to these counterarguments. Now, this is circular if your only reason for not taking creationists seriously is that they are wrong natural selection/irreducible organs, but there's 'any number' of other reasons to suspect creationists are engaging in motivated cognition.

The same way that if natural selection provides a substantial portion of the explanation of evolution, then, you need look no further, if cognitive biases/sociology provide a substantial portion of or even all of the explanation for creationists talking about irreducible organs, then their actual counterarguments are screened off by your prior knowledge of what causes them to deploy those counterarguments; you should be less inclined to consider their arguments than a random string generator that happened to output a sentence that reads as a counterargument against natural selection.

Oh my gosh but I actually am stunned speechless.

I can't even begin to express the way I feel right now, Eliezer Yudkowsky, my friend, you are in possesion of a rare and powerful gift!

You're steelmanning the creationist position.

Sure, but we are not really talking about the creationists here, we're talking about whether evolution is falsifiable and in which sense.

I can't even imagine what premises you are relying on for such a statement.

It's a modification of Hypercalvinism / Dispensationalism / Dominionism / Divine Command Theory that I was taught as a child.

Essentially, power defines morality, because "fuck you, what are you going to do about it?". And (to quote the actual book Catch-22), "Catch-22 says they have a right to do anything we can't stop them from doing".

Basically, the strong are morally justified - in a sense, morally compelled - to dominate and torment the weak, because they can. And the weak deserve every minute of it, because fuck them.

I've spent... roughly four to five hours a day, every day, for 35+ years, trying to update out of that belief system, and yet I fundamentally still operate under it.

You seem to be saying that the Theory of Evolution is unfalsifiable, at least in practice. That would be a bad thing, not a good thing.

Let's be a bit more precise. Evolution is a mechanism. It works given certain well-known preconditions. The fact that it works is not contested by anyone sane.

What actually is contested by creationists is that the mechanism of evolution is sufficient to generate all the variety of life we see on Earth and that it actually did, in fact, generate all that variety. *That* claim is falsifiable -- e.g. by showing that some cause/mechanism/agency other than evolution played an important part in the development of life on Earth.

In other words, is it epistemologically wrong to rely on an authority that has produced a number of correct statements (that I could and did verify) to be more or less correct in the future?

Which statements pertinent to both evolution and plate tectonics did you verify?

Just realised you're the post author, so: Thanks for posting this, it's something I've wondered about in relation to myself, as well. :)

1: No tentacles

But imagine that we also have independent evidence that Earth is 1 million years old.

This reminds me of something Eliezer once said--"How would I explain the event of my left arm being replaced by a blue tentacle? The answer is that I wouldn't. It isn't going to happen." We do not observe a young (even 10^6) Earth, and by suggesting the possibility of one as counterevidence against the strength of the 'a priori' reasoning I advocated, you must be smuggling in a circular assumption that young Earth models have significant probability.

Your argument as I understand it is roughly that since my a priori reasoning would fail in young Earth scenarios, then that reasoning is unreliable. But if our prior for young Earth scenarios is extremely low, then it will only very rarely happen that my reasoning will fail in that particular way. Therefore for your argument to go through, you would have to place a high prior probability on young Earth scenarios.

To put it another another way: If observing a young Earth would be evidence against my a priori reasoning, then by conservation of expected evidence, our actual observation of a non-young Earth must be evidence in favour of that reasoning.

People in a modern day situation, and LW'ers in particular, are better placed to understand that 'naturalistic' explanations are preferable, and that magic ones should incur huge complexity penalties. Therefore we should have low priors on young Earths, because most of our probability will be concentrated in models where intelligent life arises from nonintelligent (hence slow) processes as opposed to intelligent (e.g. God) processes.

Moreover, the more intelligent the process that generated us, the more we push the explanatory buck back onto that process. God is an extreme case where the mystery of the apparent improbability of human intelligence is replaced with the mystery of the apparent improbability of divine intelligence. But even less extreme cases like superhumanly (but still decidedly 'finitely intelligent') entities simulating us incurs a penalty for passing the explanatory buck back. Natural selection is so elegant and formidable because it is an existing behaviour of what we already observe.

2: Insanity screens off charity

Creationists like to cite irreducible organs

If--even before accepting evolution by natural selection--you can put an extremely high probability on creationists spewing objections like 'irreducible organs' regardless of the veracity of evolution by natural selection, then you can pretty much write off the counterarguments of creationists, because your observation of creationists making these arguments is extremely weak evidence that there is anything to these counterarguments. Now, this is circular if your only reason for not taking creationists seriously is that they are wrong natural selection/irreducible organs, but there's 'any number' of other reasons to suspect creationists are engaging in motivated cognition.

The same way that if natural selection provides a substantial portion of the explanation of evolution, then, you need look no further, if cognitive biases/sociology provide a substantial portion of or even all of the explanation for creationists talking about irreducible organs, then their actual counterarguments are screened off by your prior knowledge of what causes them to deploy those counterarguments; you should be less inclined to consider their arguments than a random string generator that happened to output a sentence that reads as a counterargument against natural selection.

We should expect some amount of evolution by natural selection 'a priori', from various obvious premises such as

(1) There is a reproduction process in which characteristics are inherited (2) Things with X characteristics in Y environment die/live etc.

There seems to be an absence of similarly parsimonious explanations, and the account given by natural selection is compelling. I suspect that even a small amount of knowledge of the empirical evidence for natural selection would establish a lower bound on the share of evolution it causes, such that searching for equally significant factors for evolution of life in general should be expected to fail.

If one set up a mathematical representation of a population that took into account characteristics, life, and death, etc. then natural selection would be the name for a provable behaviour of the system, even if the system were just axiomatised by more basic facts such as (1) and (2). I'm not convinced that the same is true of Aristotelian physics.

I struggle far more to fabricate accounts of our observations without natural selection than I did to get to grips with Newtonian mechanics. As in, accounts that don't leave me more confused (e.g. 'God did it', which is a mysterious non-answer).

Quantum mechanics I do not know well enough (and I'm not sure anyone does) at the level where mathematical reductionism meets theoretical physics, but I would not be surprised if it turned out to be extremely parsimonious given even a small number of our empirical observations.

Heliocentrism also seems much more contingent than natural selection, although possibly less than one thinks, given how prevalent star-planet systems are.