There are not an infinite number of possible hypotheses in a great many sensible situations. For example, suppose the question is "who murdered Fred?", because we have already learned that he was murdered. The already known answer: "A human alive at the time he died.", makes the set finite. If we can determine when and where he died, the number of suspects can typically be reduced to dozens or hundreds. Limiting to someone capable of carrying out the means of death may cut 90% of them.
To the extent that "bits" of evidence...
Einstein didn't come up with General Relativity that way. He didn't even do the hard math himself. He came up with some little truths (e.g. equivalence, speed of light is constant, covariance, must reduce to Newtonian gravity in unexceptional cases), from a handful of results that didn't seem to fit classical theory, and then he found a set of equations that fit.
Newtonian gravity provided heaps of data points and a handful of non-fits. Einstein bootstrapped on prior achievements like Newtonian gravity and special relativity and tweaked them to fit a han...
...Similarly, the 27 bit rule for 100,000,000 people assumes that the bits have equal numbers of people who are yes and no on a question. In fact, some bits are more discriminating than others. "Have you ever been elected to an office that requires a statewide vote or been a Vice President?" (perhaps two bits of information), is going to eliminate 99.9999%+ of potential candidates for President, yet work nearly perfectly to dramatically narrow the field from the 100,000,000 eligible candidates. "Do you want to run for President?", cuts an
One doesn't have to use irrational arguments to push rationality, but one of the lessons we draw from how people make decisions is that people simply do not make decisions about how to view and understand the world, even a decision to do so rationally, in an entirely rational way. The emotional connection matters as well.
Rational ideas proferred without an emotional counterpart wither. The political landscape is full of people who advanced good, rational programs or policy ideas or views about science that crashed and burned for long periods of time beca...
"Reason" and "evidence based" are both quite nice words to convey the idea.
I have, and even started to mention it, but figured that I was going too far afield. I think the problem there is that the established meaning of "Bright" as intelligent, overshadows the secondary meaning that is sought. I think "light" as a metaphor is promising, but the word "Bright" in particular, is inapt.
FWIW, I am inclined to think that "rationality" is a bad brand identification for a good thing. Rationality conjures up "Spock" (the Star Trek character) not "Spock" (the compassionate and wise child rearing guru). It puts an emphasis on a very inhuman part of the kind of human being you feel you are becoming.
Whatever it means in your context, as a brand to evangelize to others about its benefits, it is lacking. Better, in the sense of offering a positive vision, perhaps than "atheism" or "secularism" bu...
In the mental health area the polar extreme from the pathology model is the "neurodiversity" model. The point about allowing treatment when it is available and effective, whether the treatment is an "enhancement" or a "cure" is also worthwhile.
In the area of obesity, I think we are pretty open, as a society, to letting the evidence guide us. In the area of mental health, we are probably less so, although I do think that empirical evidence about the nature of homosexuality has been decisive in driving a dramatic change in pub...
"Often people who dismiss philosophy end up going over the same ground philosophers trode hundreds or thousands of years ago."
Really? When I look at Aquinas or Plato or Aristotle, I see people mostly asking questions that we no longer care about because we have found better ways of dealing with the issues that made those questions worth thinking about.
Scholastic discourse about the Bible or angels makes much less sense when you have a historical-critical context to explain how it emerged in the way that it did, and a canon of contemporaneous s...
It seems to me that philosophy is most important for refining mere intuitions and bumbling around until we find a rigorous way of posing the questions that are associated with those intuitions. Once you have a well posed question, any old scientist can answer it.
But, philosophy is necessary to turn the undifferentiated mass of unprocessed data and potential ideas into something that is succeptible to being examined.
Rationality is all fine and good, but reason applies known facts and axioms with accepted logical relationships to reach conclusions.
The i...
"3. Philosophy has grown into an abnormally backward-looking discipline."
Indeed. One of the salutory roles that philosophy served until about the 18th century (think e.g. "natural philosophy") was to serve as an intellectual context within new disciplines could emerge and new problems could be formulated into coherent complexes of issues that became their own academic disciplines.
In a world where cosmology and quantum physics and neuroscience and statistics and scientific research methods and psychology and "law and whatever"...
The mathematical inconsistency between quantum mechanics and general relativity illustrates a key point. Most of the time the hypothesis set for new solutions, rather than being infnite, is null. It is often quite easy to illustrate that every available theory is wrong. Even if we know that our theory is clearly inconsistent with reality, we still keep using it until we come up with something better. Even if General Relativity were contradicted by some experimental discovery in 1963, Einstein would still have been lauded as a scientist for finding a th... (read more)