Comment author: Tyrrell_McAllister 17 February 2010 04:05:56AM *  4 points [-]

You can't know that something is true.

This is true if you take "know" to mean "absolute certainty". And, precisely because absolute certainty never happens, taking "know" in this sense would be pointless. We would never have the opportunity to use such a word, so why bother having it? For that reason, people on this site take the assertion that they "know" a proposition P to mean that the evidence they've gathered adds up to a sufficiently high probability for P. Here,

  1. "sufficiently high" depends on the context — for example, the expected cost/benefit of acting as though P is true; and

  2. the evidence that they've gathered "adds" in the sense of Bayesian updating.

That's all that they mean by "know".

Induction as a scientific methodology has been known (since Hume) to be impossible.

On the Bayesian interpretation, induction is just a certain mathematical computation. The only limits on its possibility are the limits on your ability to carry out the computations.

Comment author: mlionson 17 February 2010 04:58:24AM 0 points [-]

"evidence they've gathered adds up to a sufficiently high probability for P"

Perhaps I should ask what you mean by "evidence"? By evidence do you mean examples of an event happening that corroborates a particular theory that someone holds ?

So if 1. you have an expectation of something happening, and 2. that something happens,

then you are saying that the event is evidence in favor of the theory. And if the event happens even more when you expect it to then

  1. it is even more evidence for the theory, and this increased probability is calculated by using a Bayesian rule to update your increased expectation of the likelihood of the truth of your theory?

Have I stated your argument correctly?

Comment author: Jack 17 February 2010 01:33:52AM *  2 points [-]

This is pretty muddled and wrong. You use a lot of terms in an unorthodox way. For example I don't know how something that is true cannot ever be justified (how else do you know it's true!). Also, there is no such thing as science without induction, no laws of physics or predictions. So I'm pretty confused about what your position is. That's okay though because it looks like you've never heard of Bayesian inference. In which case this is a really important day in your life.

The wikipedia enty

The SEP entry

Eliezer's explanation of the Math

Also: the "Rationality and Science" subsection at the bottom here.

Who has better links?

Edit: Welcome to less wrong, btw! Feel free to introduce yourself.

Edit again: This PDF looks good.

Comment author: mlionson 17 February 2010 03:02:14AM 1 point [-]

"For example I don't know how something that is true cannot ever be justified (how else do you know it's true!"

You can't know that something is true. We are fallible. And our best theories are often wrong. We gain knowledge by arguing with each other and trying to point out logical contradictions in our explanations. Experiments can help us to show that competing explanations are wrong (or that ours is!) .

Induction as a scientific methodology has been known (since Hume) to be impossible. Happy to discuss this further if you like. I will certainly read the articles you suggest. Please consider reading David Deutsch's, The Fabric of Realtiy. He (better than Hume in my estimation) shows the 'complete irrationality of induction, but I am happy to discuss, if you are interested.

Comment author: Z._M._Davis 28 June 2008 07:14:34AM 0 points [-]

Note the ellipses, Dave.

Comment author: mlionson 17 February 2010 02:19:23AM -3 points [-]

There is no serious quantum physicist who would deny that it is possible to prepare a superposition of states in which a needle penetrates the skin to obtain a blood sugar measurement or does not. This situation could be created, perhaps by briefly freezing a small component of blood and skin on a live person. When this situation predictably resolves into a situation in which the measuring apparatus reads out the result of a blood sugar measurement, though the needle is seen to never penetrate the skin, where was the measurement made?

Where was the bloody needle? Where was the measuring apparatus on which the measurement was made. Where was the arm from which the blood was taken!

Those who do not understand the existence of the multiverse need to provide answers to these simple questions. If the arm is not real in a different universe in which the needle actually went in, how was blood drawn from it and a result reported?

If someone seriously doubts that this scenario can and will be created in the future, which law of physics says that we cannot create this superposition? Which law of physics do you plan to change, to prevent this result, though it has not failed any experiment?

Remarkably, even most of those who deny the existence of the multiverse do not deny that such a blood sugar result could be obtained. This means that virtually all physicists, including those who support Bohm, transactional perspective, Copenhagen, etc., agree that we will be able to obtain a blood sugar result from a needle that never penetrated the arm.

To them I ask again. Where is the arm from which the blood was drawn? Is your hypothesis really that it was drawn in the world of possibility? If so then the map that you call the world of possibility has every component of a real world, including the blood! When the map is as detailed in every respect as the territory, it is the territory. Right?

Comment author: Doug_S. 17 August 2007 03:55:09AM 15 points [-]

Here's the thing.

I could a book and find that the arguments in the book are "valid" - that it is impossible, or at least unlikely, that the premises are true and the conclusion false. However, what I can't do by reading is determine if the premises are true.

In the infamous Alien Autopsy "documentary", there were three specific claims made for the authenticity of the video.

1) An expert from Kodak examined the film, and verified that it is as old as was claimed. 2) A pathologist was interviewed, who said that the autopsy portrayed was done in the manner that an actual autopsy would have been done. 3) An expert from Spielberg's movie studio testified that modern special effects could not duplicate the scenes in the video.

If you accept these statements as true, it becomes reasonable to accept that the footage was actually showing what it appeared to show; an autopsy of dead aliens.

Upon seeing these claims, though, my response was along the lines of "I defy the data." As it turns out, all three of those statements were blatant lies. There was no expert from Kodak who verified the film. Kodak offered to verify the film, but was denied access. Many other pathologists said that the way the autopsy was performed in the film was absurd, and that no competent pathologist would ever do an autopsy on an unknown organism in that manner because it would be completely useless. The person from Spielberg's movie studio was selectively quoted and was very angry about it. What he really said that the film was good for whatever grade B studio happened to have produced it.

I could read your book, but I believe that it is more likely that the statements in the book are wrong than it is that psi exists. As Thomas Jefferson did not say, "It is easier to believe that two Yankee professors [Profs. Silliman and Kingsley of Yale] would lie than that stones would fall from the sky."

The burden of proof is on you, Matthew. Many, many claims of the existence of "psi" have been shown to be bogus, so I give further claims of that nature very little credence. Either tell us about a repeatable experiment - copy a few paragraphs from that book if you have to - or we're going to ignore you.

Comment author: mlionson 17 February 2010 01:10:50AM -7 points [-]

Although I also think Psi is bogus, my belief has nothing to do with the fact that previous claims of psi have been bogus. Evidence can never justify a theory, any more than finding 10 white swans in a row proves that there are no black swans! Believing that psi is false because of evidence that psi has been false in the past is the logical fallacy of inductivism. Most rational people do not believe in Psi because it has no logical theoretical/scientific basis and because it does not explain things well.

Much of this type of argument strikes me as nonsense. Something that is true can not be justified. One can (and should) argue that something is true. But argument is not justification. If the argument explains something well, then one should believe it, if it is the best theory available.

But evidence can never support any argument. It merely corroborates it. The reason that you believe a coin is fair is not ultimately because the results of an experiment convince you. It would be easy to set up an algorithm that causes the first 3000 examples of a computer simulated coin-flip to have the correct number of heads or tails to make the uninformed believe that the simulated coin flip is fair. But the next 10,000 could yield very different results, just by using an easy-to-create mathematical algorithm. No p-value can be assigned even after 3000 computer simulations of a coin flip. The data never tell a story (to quote someone on another site).

The reason we rationally believe the results of experiment when we flip the coin, but not when we see an apparent computer simulation of a coin flip is: In the case of the actual coin we already have explanations of the effects of gravity on two-sided metal objects, well before we have any data about coin flips. The same is not true about the computer simulation of the coin flip, unless we see the program ahead of time.

It is the theory about the effects of gravity on two-sided metal objects (with a particular pattern of metal distribution) that we try to evaluate when we flip coins. The data never tell us a story about whether the coin is fair. We first have a theory about the coin and its properties and then we utilize the experiment (the coin flip) to try to falsify our notion that the coin is fair if the coin looks balanced. Or, we falsify the notion that the coin is not fair, if our initial theory is that the coin does not look balanced. Examples of a phenomena do not increase the probability of it being true.

The reason we may believe that a coin could be fair is that we first evaluate the structure of the material, note that it seems to have a structure that would promote fairness given standard human flips of coins. Only then do we test it. But it is our rational understanding of the properties of the coin and expectations about the environment which make the coin flip reasonable. The results of any test tell you nothing (logically, nothing at all) about the fairness of a coin unless you first have a theory and an explanation about why the coin should or should not be considered fair.

The reason we do not believe in psi is that it does not explain anything, violates multiple known laws of physics, yet creates no alternative scientific structure that allows us to understand and predict events in our world.

Comment author: SilasBarta 30 October 2009 10:03:15PM *  3 points [-]

Okay, I saw in the comments (both here and on the TED site) that Deutsch's point was that good explanations are "hard to vary", but I didn't understand what that means.

So I finally saw the talk (after skipping most of it to get to the explanation of explanation), and it turns out Deutsch just means "lacking unnecessary details" when he says "hard to vary". Which is just the standard point about the conjunction fallacy and how each detail makes your explanation less plausible.

Nothing new here, sorry :-/

Comment author: mlionson 16 February 2010 11:07:17PM 2 points [-]

He does not mean "lacking unnecessary details". For example the statements "Everyone just acts in his own interest" or "Everyone is really an altruist" are simple and lack unnecessary details, explain quite a lot, and are consistent with Occam's razor. But by Deutsch's criteria they are bad explanation because they are too easy to vary. For example, someone who believes in the self-interest theory could say, "John gave to charity because he would have felt guilty otherwise. So he really was selfish" .

We see that it is easy to change the theory that everyone is selfish to accomodate the case of someone who seems altruistic.

Or someone who believes in the altruist theory could say about John murdering Harry, "Well then, Harry must have been very unhappy."

The altruist theory and the selfishness theory are simple and explanatory in their own way, but too easy to vary. Similarly the idea that that sexism, feminism, capitalism, communism, parental coercion, environmental disregard, etc. cause unhappiness or mental illness or some other broad conclusion are equally meaningless. These explanations are bad because they can be varied to explain ANYTHING.

In contrast, theories that are difficult to vary go out on a limb. They are bold conjectures that explain a lot but even one small counterexample easily invalidates the whole thing. A good theory can not easily be changed to "take into account" the aberration. For example, Einstein's theory of gravitation is a good explanation because it explains a lot, it makes counterintuitive predictions, and even one repeatable counterexample invalidates the whole thing. It can't be easily changed to accommodate something else without invalidating everything else about it.

Theories that are hard to vary remain constant over time. They are more true and therefore more timeless. Invariable theories possess more verisimilitude ("truth-likeness" to use Popper's term).

Like the very best possible theory, truth also cannot be varied. It is completely timeless. It was, is, and always will be true, without any change. That is Deutsch's point.

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