LESSWRONG
LW

All of Cure_of_Ars's Comments + Replies

1dudeicus
Science is just a method of filtering hypothesis. Which is exactly what Occam's razor is. Occam's razor is not a philosophy, it is a statistical prediction. To claim that Occam's razor is not a science would be to claim that statistics is not a science. Example: You leave a bowl with milk in it over night, you wake up in the morning and its gone. Two possibly theories, are one, your cat drank it, or two, someone broke into your house, and drank it, then left. Well, we know that cats like milk, and you have a cat, so you know the probability of there being a cat is 1:1, and you also know your cat likes to steal food when your sleeping, so based on past experience you might say the probability of the cat stealing the milk is 1:2, so you know theres two high probabilities. But when we consider the burglar hypothesis, we know that its extremely rare for someone to break into our house, thus the probability for that situation, while being physically possible, is very low say 1 in 10,000. We know that burglars tend to break into houses to steal expensive things, not milk from a bowl, thus the probability of that happening is say 1 in a million. This is Occams razor at work, its 1/1 1/2 vs 1/10,000 1/1,000,000. Its statistics, and its science. Nothing I described here would be inaccessible to experimentation and control groups.
Fake Causality
Cure_of_Ars00

Thanks for the link Davis but it does not address the issue that is brought up in the original post. The examples given in your link were "retrodictions". To quote the original post...

“Thanks to hindsight bias, it's also not enough to check how well your theory "predicts" facts you already know. You've got to predict for tomorrow, not yesterday. It's the only way a messy human mind can be guaranteed of sending a pure forward message.”

I’m not arguing that evolution is pseudoscience. I’m just saying that evolution as an explanation could makes us think we understand more than we really do. Again I am no creationist, the data clearly does not fit the creationist explanation.

Reply
simplicio110

@C of A:

Prediction doesn't have to mean literally predicting future events; it can mean predicting what more we will discover about the past.

E by NS holds that there is one tree of life (at least for complex organisms), just like a family tree. That is a prediction. It means that we won't find a human in the same fossil stratum and dating to the same time period as a fishlike creature that's supposed to be our great-to-the-nth-power grammy. So that's a prediction about our future discoveries, one that has been borne out. That's one example from a non-expert.

Reply
Fake Causality
Cure_of_Ars20

Could evolution be a fake explanation in that it doesn’t predict anything? I’m no creationist but what your explaining in regards to phlogiston seems to have a lot of similarity to evolution. Seems to me like no matter what the data is you can put the tag of evolution on it. Now I’m no expert on evolution so don’t flame me. Just a question on how evolution is different.

Reply
7listo
"Could evolution be a fake explanation in that it doesn’t predict anything?" I wouldn't think so. Evolution theory predicted things like the kind of animals that are in some islands before exploring them. It also predicts what kind of fosils will you find someplace. It also predicts that if you get a bunch of dogs and select only the bigger ones, several generations later you will have "created" a new race of bigger dogs. Etc.
Perplexed190

Since the Theory of Evolution is in the business of explaining the past and present rather than predicting the future, it certainly runs the risk of deluding itself. But running a risk is not the same thing as failing. And whenever individual biologists succumb to hindsight bias, there are other biologists ready to point out their mistakes.

Evolutionary biology is a remarkably introspective discipline with plenty of remora-like philosopher-commensals waiting to devour any sloppy thinking that gets generated. See, for example, the wikipedia article on ... (read more)

Reply