ohwilleke
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ohwilleke has not written any posts yet.
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 means things that we don't know yet, the number of bits can be much smaller than suggested. To the extent that "bits" of evidence includes everything we know so far, we all have trillions of bits already in our brains and the minimal number is meaningless.
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 handful of additional data points better. His confidence came from fitting 100% of the small available data set... (read more)
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 because the audience didn't respond.
Look at the argument of SarahC's original post itself. It isn't a philosophical proof... (read more)
"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" but not still not grounded and humane enough. I like "naturalist" better, although it is loaded with the connotation of bird watching,... (read more)
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 public opinion about it.
A key concept that sums up your analysis, which you call "determinist consequenntialist" is the revelation that... (read more)
"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 secular works to make sense of what was going on in their world at the time.
Philosophical atomism... (read more)
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 importance of hypothesis generation is much underappreciated by scientists, but critical to the enterprise, and to generate a hypothesis, one needs intuition as much as reason.
Genius, meanwhile, comes from being able to intuitively generate a hypothesis the nobody else would, breaking the mold of others intuitions, and building new conceptual structures from which to generate novel intuitive hypothesises and eventually to formulate the conceptual structure well enough that it can be turned over to the rationalists.
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 theory that fit more data points that the previous one.
In science, and in a lot of other contexts, simply showing that a theory could be right, is much more important the establishing to any degree of statistical significance that it is right.