To a non string theorist, string theory seems like a theory which makes few testable predictions, like phlogiston
it made testable predictions and was falsified for them. There are a lot of retrodictive and purely theoretical constraints on a candidate ToE, they have to be pretty good just to be in the running.
What? I really didn't understand that.
Shminux's arguments have screened off his authority, and then some.
That isn't a fact. I don't see anything going on here except the same blind side-taking as before.
The majority of physicists working on those kinds of questions are using some form of M-theory of string theory. The next nearest rival is Loop Quantum Gravity. Other theories are minority views. M-theory is favoured because milage can be got out of it in terms of research. The metaphor or a random grab into hypothesis-space isn't appropriate.
Except that poor white neighborhoods are much safer then poor black neighborhoods
...in the US.
Um, now that you mention it, this is not a bad description of the politics of a number of African nations.
It's not at all good. A few rich people exploiting a lot of poor ones is not the same as a few poor people robbing a few wealthier ones. And,it is not as if the politics of most African countries now is so very different from the politics of most European ones up until a few centuries ago; There's no gene for fair government either.
is more concerned with politics than truth...is more concerned with politics than truth.
And that's a bad thing? Trying to translate Hard Science directly into real-world action without considering the ethical, social and political consequences would be disastrous. We need something like social science.
I will point out, for a third time, that "not on (narrowly construed) facts alone" does not mean "not on facts at all".
You need to establish some truths before worrying about the consequences. Scientific facts need controls, for instance. When have you shown any interest in controlling for the effects of environment?
[shrugs]. You construed riots in a sweepingly negative way as "blackmail". The fact that I do not agree does not mean I am construing them in a sweepingly positive way. This is as a pattern you have repeated throughout this discussion, and it illustrates how politics mindkills.
there are still good game theoretic/decision theoretic reasons not to respond to blackmail.
I am glad that the tyrants of the past did not know of them, or you and I would not now enjoy freedom and democracy.
Please provide proof. Please don't point, yet again, to the highly debatable "solution" to FW.
Is any of that avoidable?
"if we implement such-and-such policies, people will riot" is a fact of a sort, but not the sort that is discovered in a laboratory.
If we dont' base policy on (narrowly construed, laboratory-style) facts alone, we use other things in additiojn. Like ethics and practicallity.
ETA: What's unclear about "not on facts alone"?
It's the reader's responsibility to read your words, and read all your words, and not to imagine other words. Recently, someone paraphrased a remark of mine with two "maybe"'s I had used deleted and a "necessarily" I hadn't used inserted. Was that my fault?
I don't see why anyone would read "not on facts alone" as "not on facts at all".
Well, I did say "narrowly construed" facts.
Well, then we have it: they are special.
Subjectively, but not objectively.
Says who?
Whoever failed to equip Clippy with the appropriate oracle when stipulating Clippy.
So if we don't base our politics on facts
I was arguing against basing policy on (narrowly construed) facts alone.
It could mean you don't translate scientific findings about groups directly into policy without considering ethical and practical implications. It could mean that treating people as individuals should be the default. It could mean there is nonetheless a case for treating people as groups where they were discriminated against as groups in the past.
Again; you are observing correlations between socio-economic status and behaviour, and socio economic status happens to coincide with race in the US. African nations are not inhabited by legions of muggers all mugging each other, and there is no gene for mugging.
What is specialness, anyway?
I think that breaks down into what is subjective specialness, and what is objective specialness.
Clippy wants there to be as many paper clips as possible.
Which is to implicitly treat them as special or valuable in some way.
Clippy's stopping to care about paper clips is arguably not conducive there being more paperclips, so from Clippy's caring about paper clips, it follows that Clippy doesn't want to be altered so that it doesn't care about paper clips anymore.
Which leaves Clippy in a quandary. Clippy can't predict wh...
eg:
It's not being upvoted by regulars/believers. It's a magnet for dissidents, and transient visitors with negative perceptions of SI.
It's high-profile,so it needs to be upvoted to put on a show of fair-mindedness.
I did not say that non-reductionism is absurd. I said that "recognizing the absurdity of all other proposed hypotheses is another way of coming about the correct beliefs".
Nonetheless, I do think that non-reductionism is absurd. I cannot imagine a universe which is not reductionistic.
Can you explain to me how it might work?
One formulation of reductionism is that natural laws can be ordered in a hierarchy, with the higher-level laws being predictable from, or reducible to, the lower ones. So emergentism, in the cognate sense, not working would...
For example, we don't actually evaluate each individual's level of maturity before judging, for that individual, whether they're permitted to purchase alcohol, sign contracts, vote in elections, drive cars, etc...
On the other hand, job interviewers judge by individual quaifications, not group membership..
If history and practice led to blacks being treated as if the mean IQ was 20 points lower, and the actual difference is 5 points, then the proper public policy is to act as if the difference is 5 points, not zero points to remedy the history and practice.
Why isn't the proper public policy to treat people as individuals?
You didn't answer my question about treating other things as equal. If genetics based discrimination leads to $X million lost in strikes and rioting, shoulnd't that be taken into account?
*
Are you assuming all other things are equal? They never are.
I am not arguing that Affirmative Action/Positice Discrimination is necessarily right. Just that it doesn't necessarily have anything at all to do with any facts about DNA.
If someone was wrongfully executed, killed in a medical bliunder, etc, it is typically their families who are compensated.
Politics isn't a value-free reflection of nature. The disvalue of reflecting a fact politically might outweigh the value. For instance, people aren't the same in their political judgement, but everyone gets one vote, for instance.
But they are still laws of physics,
Microphysical laws map microphysical states to other microphysical states.Top-down causation maps macrophysical states to microphysical states.
Such laws are still fundamental laws, on the lowest level of the universe.
In the sense that they are irreducible, yes. In the sense that they are concerned only with microphyics, no.
...Ergo, a reductionistic universe is also deterministic from a probabilistic standpoint, i.e. the lowest level properties and laws can tell you exactly what to anticipate, and with how much s
"Holistic" seems to label that phenomenon more clearly, for my money.
Accurate beliefs about what? If a group (however defined) has been subject to negative discrimination, however arbitrary, then there is an argument for treating them to a period of positive discrimination to compensate. That has nothing to do with how jusitfied the original negative discrimination was.
eg: being macrscopic, featuring only in the special sciences
First, off you needed about 5 "in the US"'s above.
Second: you're part of the problem. If you want to discuss socio-cultural-polical problems in the US, discuss them as such. Say "we have problems with populations of the urban poor". We have problems with the urban poor too, and they don't coincide with race. Given the way you have described the problem above, your initial approach of kicking off discussion of the problem by talking about genetic differences is exactly the wrong one -- it will block off sensible discussion, and it isn't...
No it isn't?
Yes it is.
"A property of a system is said to be emergent if it is in some sense more than the "sum" of the properties of the system's parts. An emergent property is said to be dependent on some more basic properties (and their relationships and configuration), so that it can have no separate existence. However, a degree of independence is also asserted of emergent properties, so that they are not identical to, or reducible to, or predictable from, or deducible from their bases. The different ways in which the independence req...
That is what it means to posit reductionism; that from an information theoretical standpoint, you can make entirely accurate predictions about a system with only knowledge about its most basic level of perspective.
That's a fusion of reductionism and determinism. Reductionism ins't necessarily false in an indeterministic universe. What is more pertinent is being able to predict higher level properties and laws from lower level properties and laws. (synchronously, in the latter case).
That's barely half an argument. You would need to believe that there are significant between-group differences AND that they are significant AND that they should be relevant to policy or decision making in some way. You didn't argue the second two points there, and you haven't elsewhere.
Comparing outcomes of existing systems would be good, assuming that you have multiple systems used by the same population. Some countries have this data, other countries don't. For example, if majority of schools in a country follows a government blueprint, and only a few alternative schools are allowed to coexist, it is not obvious whether the differences between their results are caused by different education, or simply by a selection bias (alternative schools are chosen by parents who are more interested in their child's education).
If one is trying ...
Phlogiston. Falsified because combusted materials gain weight.