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Comment by ThomPete | Hacker News Reader

Not from a non-bayesian perspective. It's what Deutsch would call a "bad explanation" i.e. it's easy to vary and thus doesn't tell us about how the sun is powered.

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It's a bad explanation because the sun (probably) IS powered by nuclear fusion.

Deutsch is confused by this situation because he doesn't have the scientific background to understand the usefulness of negations of hypotheses.

Historically, for example, a lot of people believed the sun revolved around the earth. If we treat this as T, then ~T is "the sun does not revolve around the earth".

~T certainly lacks details, but to say it's a "bad explanation" is rather silly. Obviously it's an incomplete explanation, which is why Galileo presented a full explanation ("the earth revolves around the sun") rather than just saying, "the sun does not revolve around the earth". But in fact, "the sun does not revolve around the earth" was the part that was controversial because it was the bad explanation being presented by the church (who happened to be closer to philosophers than scientists).

Basically, Deutsch is just making a straw man argument. In Deutsch's mind, the fact that "the sun does not revolve around the earth" is an incomplete theory of heliocentrism is somehow a refutation of all science, when in fact that's simply not the sort of hypothesis scientists even explore typically.

He's talking about Bayesian philosophy of science, not science, which ultimately does not rely on Bayesian epistemology.

Agreed--in fact, science doesn't rely on philosophy at all. If the entire field of philosophy disappeared, science would go on functioning just fine. In fact, science has generally been hindered by philosophy--it's seemingly impossible to discuss scientific methodology without some wanker interjecting "well ackchyually nothing is knowable". Animals with nervous systems were learning from observation before humans invented enough language to epistemologize, and will continue to do so with or without philosophers.

Bayesian epistemology is an attempt to model why science works--it relies on science, not the other way around.

Bayesian epistemology is not used in almost any domain in science, it does not model why science works, and it does not rely on science: it relies on metaphysics.

Science do in fact rely on philosophy that's how we got the scientific method.

The scientific method may at one time have been conceived by philosophers, but we are centuries away from that time, and in recent centuries, all the refinements and improvements to science have been done by scientists. The roots of the scientific method which one could reasonably call philosophy are so changed as to be considered invalid today.

The reverse is not true--scientists have written a lot of philosophy--and since they tend to base their philosophy in reality rather than logic based on speculation, it tends to be better philosophy than philosophers.

No the sun either is or isn't powered by nuclear fusion. There is no way of knowing whether that's the case until you can come up with a good explanation (hard to vary) everything before that is just guessing.

I can assure you Deutsch is no confused by anything in that matter and it's obvious you don't know who he is.

He is literally the guy who created quantum computation and IS a scientist.

And no that's not his argument against the the sun is revolve around the earth.

> No the sun either is or isn't powered by nuclear fusion. There is no way of knowing whether that's the case until you can come up with a good explanation (hard to vary) everything before that is just guessing.

"The sun is powered by nuclear fusion" is a clear explanation of the phenomena we observe. "The sun is not powered by nuclear fusion" would be an explanation if we observed phenomena that were inconsistent with the sun being powered by nuclear fusion.

> I can assure you Deutsch is no confused by anything in that matter and it's obvious you don't know who he is.

Well, I do now, and I assure you he is still confused.

> He is literally the guy who created quantum computation and IS a scientist.

So, he's a programmer.

What hypotheses is he known for testing? What makes him a scientist in your mind?

> And no that's not his argument against the the sun is revolve around the earth.

I'm not sure who you think said it was; I certainly didn't.

He's an astrophysicist, by the way.

He's a theoretical physicist whose most notable is in quantum computing, philosophizing about experimental physics. Essentially his work has more to do with math/logic than science, and as far as I can tell you're simply incorrect that he's done any work in astrophysics at all.

Ctrl+F "astro" finds nothing on this page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Deutsch

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