Posted inPhilosophy
The I Have Ascended Beyond Fallacy
There is a special kind of argument you hear only from academic Experts. Non-academic non-Experts never use it; or, if they do, I've not seen any example (beyond parroting AEs).…
Posted inPhilosophy
How The Laws Of Physics Lie
The title is Nancy Cartwright's, from her book of the same name, and from an article which forms Chapter 3, "Do the Laws of Physics State the Facts?" No, she…
Posted inPhilosophy Statistics
There Is No Problem Of Old Evidence In Bayesian Probability
Rationalists, like those at Less Wrong (think Eliezer Yudkowsky and Scott Alexander), are prone to fetishsize Bayes theorem, seeing it as the key to all thought. It isn't. Bayes is…
Posted inPhilosophy
Do We Need Philosophy, Or Can Science Replace It?
You see the news? Woman pretending to be a man walked into a school and murdered a bunch of kids. "I know what you're going to say. You're going to…
Posted inBook review Philosophy Statistics
The Multiverse Hides The Problem It Was Supposed To Solve, And Calls It Solved
Let's end the review of Sabine Hossenfelder's book. We did some already: Emergence, Entropy, and Many Worlds. With this post, we'll have covered the most interesting topics. Old Hoss, and…
Posted inBook review Philosophy
Emergence Comes From Nowhere, Does Nothing, Goes Nowhere, But Still Becomes Theory
We return to reviewing Sabine Hossenfelder's, a.k.a. Old Hoss's, new book Existential Physics. First part (many worlds), second part (entropy). If you knew all there is to know about hydrogen…
Posted inPhilosophy
What’s The Difference Between Explanation & Prediction?
Our main goal is to learn if or how a theory can be falsified. Sound easy? It isn't. In order to get there, we first need to grasp what is…
Posted inCulture Philosophy
Experts: Stop Us Before We Let AI Become Aware & Kill Us All!
To reify, v: consider an abstract concept to be real. Now the Scientist was more cunning than any Expert in the field which the Dean had made. And he said…