Comment by throwaway_bad | Hacker News Reader

Comment by throwaway_bad | Hacker News Reader

I was really hoping this would be about "Philosophy of Science"[0]

For example in "The Problem of Induction" you can see a bajillion sunrises but can't infer that there will be another. Likewise you can conduct a bajillion controlled experiments and can't really tell if the result will generalize. Worse yet is that the more conditions you control, the less likely it's to generalize. Infamously, clinical trials wanted to control for the variations caused by periods so they only tested on men and it turns out some drugs affect women differently! In general, if you control for everything, you can't say anything about the real world outside of those precise lab controlled conditions.

[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophy_of_science

> For example in "The Problem of Induction" you can see a bajillion sunrises but can't infer that there will be another.

Which is why scientists, like everyone else, uses statistical reasoning.

> In general, if you control for everything, you can't say anything about the real world outside of those precise lab controlled conditions.

This is one of those statements which is only true if you ignore all the times it's false. It's like Zeno's Paradox: If this really troubles you, it's a sign your model's incomplete, not that there's something irreconcilably wrong with the universe. Some of what you're getting at can be fixed with better experimental design, but the rest can only be fixed by, as I said, statistical reasoning, which is universally used in practice.

It's possible to be somewhat uncertain. Some people don't get that, or refuse to acknowledge it so they can sow FUD.

Another way to express that is degrees of confidence.

Nature is the authority, and we have understanding that is incomplete.

This is a classic philosopher vs. pragmatic discussion.

Zeno: "How can movement exist? A flying arrow, at any point in its trajectory, is static, but at the next moment, it-"

Pragmatic: "Hey, I shot ten arrows. They took 4 seconds average to reach the target at 200 m, so they move at 50 m/s, therefore movement does exist. Can we eat something? I'm hungry."

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