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Comment by wpietri | Hacker News Reader

I agree completely on a philosophical level. But evolution has equipped us with a substantial ability to think in terms of agents with intentions. So I think talking about what evolution "wants" is in practice a very useful framing. The same is true in talking about what a company or a country "wants".

As George Box put it, "All models are wrong, but some are useful".

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But I think that's the point: when we attempt to "frame" nature in terms of agency, our dialectic often drifts toward "I" and bias. It's all rather circular.

Perhaps Aristotle and George would have been good friends?

Sure, but all of our cognition is biased. We're made out of meat.

I agree that using our agency-processing abilities can easily lead to wrong answers. But that's true of any of our abilities. We have a lot of hardware for visual processing, so we make graphs. Sometimes graphs mislead. But that doesn't mean we should stop using them. Instead, I think it means we should be aware of the limits of any particular cognitive mode and be energetic in cross-checking.

Right, in science, bias is what we are attempting to isolate and eliminate from the experiment. Thus, regardless of what type of meat I am, causation and will exist predictably...regardless of social ontology.

I think of it in terms of bias vs bias bias, and getting caught up in my own reflection; or, it's turtles all the way down (rationalism).

Sure, but what goes on in an experiment is a small part of science. Hypothesis generation is looser. As is public understanding. If I can take people who don't get evolution and talking to them in terms of what evolution "wants" pushes them over the edge, I still see that as a step forward.

Well, I'll be patiently waiting for the day when a sophist moves the ball for us and not for their scheme.

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