The Beginning of Infinity
If you haven't read it already, I suspect you would greatly enjoy "The Beginning of Infinity" by David Deutsch (a quantum computation-focused physicist). It's a surprisingly optimistic take humanity's nearly-unlimited potential (or so he posits) for discovery and creation, and a great companion for any armchair philosophizer. I suspect that many of the replies to this comment who cynically cite variations of "the principle of mediocrity" would also do well to read it. He makes the point that the single coldest place in the known universe is not anywhere in the depths of space (which is gets…
This page credits David Deutsch with first writing about this philosophy of parenting. It's more-or-less the style of parenting I was subjected to. I didn't know until now that he had written about parenting, but he's the author of one of my favorite works of nonfiction, The Beginning of Infinity. I plan to take this approach to parenting with my own children. That is to say, I'm very supportive of it. HOWEVER: there's a major philosophical failing of TCS, which is that you can't objectively justify claims about what you should and shouldn't do (aka normative claims). If you tell your child…
Deutsch in Beginning of Infinity places the cornerstone at conjecture and criticism leading to Good Explanations: “An explanation that is hard to vary while still accounting for what it purports to account for” that are treated as fallible (“Fallibilism The recognition that there are no authoritative sources of knowledge, nor any reliable means of justifying knowledge as true or probable.”). Falliblism to Deutsch is in contrast to: * Relativism The misconception that statements cannot be objectively true or false, but can be judged only relative to some cultural or other arbitrary…
> why do you believe whatever makes us smart cannot be replicated by a computer program? Turing's Universality of Computation actually guarantees that whatever is feasible in the physical world can be replicated as a computation in bits. However, I don't share the belief that AI research is anywhere close to achieving this in the most general sense of intelligence. Most AI researchers seem to agree: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9109140 Did you have a chance to look at David Deutsch's work on this…
The review confuses psychological optimism with a problem-based definition of optimism: that problems are solvable (and hence progress is possible). As David Deutsch points out in The Beginning of Infinity, Winston Churchill was an optimistic leader and a fan of science and progress who nonetheless suffered from depression (the 'black dog') [1]. Whereas Thomas Malthus (mistakenly) predicted mass starvation due to population growth [2] and was therefore a pessimist who nonetheless was of a sunny disposition and the life and soul of dinner parties in London. [1]…
Firstly, to say any political belief is "scientifically accurate" is a gross misunderstanding of both science and political beliefs. Best definitions for both I have found are: -Science = the search for the best explanation given available information [1]. -Political belief = shared myths through which we agree society should be organized [2] Secondly, don't discount bias in science. Once a paradigm is established, good luck breaking it, especially for complex subjects. It usually takes decades (e.g., DNA is the genetic material, microbiomes are a thing, even relativity). A more…
Important to distinguish Bayesian epistemology (the idea that knowledge comes from induction) from Bayesian techniques in statistics. Karl Popper’s epistemology (critical rationalism) refutes the former, but does not mind the latter. Popper would agree that Bayesian techniques are useful (and even powerful) tools in statistics and practical problem-solving. But he would say that Bayesian ideas are insufficient to understand how knowledge grows and progresses. From a critical rationalism viewpoint, knowledge grows through conjecture and refutation - the proposal and testing of new explanatory…
Elephants form social hierarchies too (which provide 'value comparison', surely?) and have larger brains than us but still they are less smart, no? They make vocal calls and signals but they haven't evolved a general-purpose language. Presumably they could have. But they haven't. Whereas humans did. Language is a huge meme transmission booster and we evolved other boosters such as large sclera so you tell roughly where someone is looking. I don't know why elephants haven't gone that way. Perhaps because their adaptive niche and lifestyle isn't so dependent on memes to start with. Whereas…
I guess that that's what happened, and what's happening everyday... Newton action at a distance wasn't convincing enough, so others sought other, "deeper" explanations, among which most notable is of course general relativity. (And it's probably noteworthy that, from an "instrumental" point of view, its benefits were initially marginal...) The difference to me is between saying "the explanatory power of this current theory can (and will eventually) be outdone" and "being able to explain is a dimension of no importance in a scientific theory". Maybe that is Chomsky's concern, even though this…
> I am saying this just as a random guy who never studied these things OK, well, let me tell you as a non-random guy who has studied these things extensively that the MWI is very commonly misrepresented. It is not a case of simplification for a lay audience, it is flat-out lying, at least most of the time. The math does not say that there are parallel universes. All the math tells you is that in order to recover the results of experiments you have to throw away some of the information contained in the wave function. MWI proponents interpret this by saying that the discarded information…