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I don’t think so, for two reasons. 1) Skepticism came long before Popper’s fallibilism.
No, see #3706. I’m open to user input (within reason). That covers creative parts. The non-creative parts can be automated by definition.
Deutsch should instead name some examples the reader would easier to disagree with, and then walk them through why some explanations are harder to vary than others.
A heuristic or heuristic technique (problem solving, mental shortcut, rule of thumb) is any approach to problem solving that employs a pragmatic method that is not fully optimized, perfected, or rationalized, but is nevertheless "good enough" as an approximation or attribute substitution.
None of this means a heuristic couldn’t be programmed. On the contrary, heuristics sound easier to program than full-fledged, ‘proper’ algorithms.
I’d be happy to see some pseudo-code that uses workarounds/heuristics. That’d be a fine starting point.
Maybe Deutsch just means hard to vary as a heuristic, not as a full-fledged decision-making algorithm.
Deutsch should instead name some examples the reader would easier to disagree with, and then walk them through why some explanations are harder to vary than others.
Persephone vs axis tilt is low-hanging fruit. The reader finds it easy to disagree with the Persephone myth and easy to agree with the axis tilt, from cultural background alone. But that doesn’t mean there’s anything to hard to vary.
Deutsch leaves open whether ‘difficulty to vary’ is a relative scale or an absolute one.
Do I need at least two explanations to know whether one is harder to vary than the other? Or can I tell, with only a single explanation, how hard it is to vary on its own?
Choosing between explanations “according to how good they are” is vague. If I have three explanations, A, B, and C, and A is better than B is better than C, does that mean I adopt only A and reject both B and C? I assume so, but I don’t think Deutsch ever says anywhere.
The quoted statement is also compatible with adopting A with strong conviction, B with medium conviction (as a backup or something), and only slightly adopting C (if it’s still good, just not as good as the others) or rejecting C slightly (if it’s a little bad) or rejecting it very strongly (if it’s really bad).
Deutsch’s stance in my own words:
The distinguishing characteristic between rationality and irrationality is that rationality is the search for good explanations. All progress comes from the search for good explanations. So the distinction between good vs bad explanations is epistemologically fundamental.
A good explanation is hard to vary “while still accounting for what it purports to account for.” (BoI chapter 1 glossary.) A bad explanation is easy to vary.
For example, the Persephone myth as an explanation of the seasons is easy to change without impacting its ability to explain the seasons. You could arbitrarily replace Persephone and other characters and the explanation would still ‘work’. The axis-tilt explanation of the earth, on the other hand, is hard to change without breaking it. You can’t just replace the axis with something else, say.
The quality of a theory is a matter of degrees. The harder it is to change a theory, the better that theory is. When deciding which explanation to adopt, we should “choose between [explanations] according to how good they are…: how hard to vary.” (BoI chatper 9; see similar remark in chapter 8.)
From my article:
[T]he assignment of positive values enables self-coercion: if I have a ‘good’ explanation worth 500 points, and a criticism worth only 100 points, Deutsch’s epistemology (presumably) says to adopt the explanation even though it has a pending criticism. After all, we’re still 400 in the black! But according to the epistemology of Taking Children Seriously, a parenting philosophy Deutsch cofounded before writing The Beginning of Infinity, acting on an idea that has pending criticisms is the definition of self-coercion. Such an act is irrational and incompatible with his view that rationality is fun in the sense that rationality means unanimous consent between explicit, inexplicit, unconscious, and any other type of idea in one’s mind.
In short, does the search for good explanations enable self-coercion and contradict TCS?
Our explanations do get better the more criticisms we address, but Deutsch has it backwards: the increasing quality of an explanation is the result of critical activity, not its means.
From my article:
[T]he assignment of positive values enables self-coercion: if I have a ‘good’ explanation worth 500 points, and a criticism worth only 100 points, Deutsch’s epistemology (presumably) says to adopt the explanation even though it has a pending criticism. After all, we’re still 400 in the black! But according to the epistemology of Taking Children Seriously, a parenting philosophy Deutsch cofounded before writing The Beginning of Infinity, acting on an idea that has pending criticisms is the definition of self-coercion. Such an act is irrational and incompatible with his view that rationality is fun in the sense that rationality means unanimous consent between explicit, inexplicit, unconscious, and any other type of idea in one’s mind.
In short does the search for good explanations enable self-coercion and contradict TCS?
From my article:
Isn’t the assignment of positive scores, of positive reasons to prefer one theory over another, a kind of justificationism? Deutsch criticizes justificationism throughout The Beginning of Infinity, but isn’t an endorsement of a theory as ‘good’ a kind of justification?
From my article:
[I]sn’t the difficulty of changing an explanation at least partly a property not of the explanation itself but of whoever is trying to change it? If I’m having difficulty changing it, maybe that’s because I lack imagination. Or maybe I’m just new to that field and an expert could easily change it. In which case the difficulty of changing an explanation is, again, not an objective property of that explanation but a subjective property of its critics. How could subjective properties be epistemologically fundamental?
From my article:
[D]epending on context, being hard to change can be a bad thing. For example, ‘tight coupling’ is a reason software can be hard to change, and it’s considered bad because it reduces maintainability.
Deutsch’s stance in my own words:
The distinguishing characteristic between rationality and irrationality is that rationality is the search for good explanations. All progress comes from the search for good explanations. So the distinction between good vs explanations is epistemologically fundamental.
A good explanation is hard to vary “while still accounting for what it purports to account for.” (BoI chapter 1 glossary.) A bad explanation is easy to vary.
For example, the Persephone myth as an explanation of the seasons is easy to change without impacting its ability to explain the seasons. You could arbitrarily replace Persephone and other characters and the explanation would still ‘work’. The axis-tilt explanation of the earth, on the other hand, is hard to change without breaking it. You can’t just replace the axis with something else, say.
The quality of a theory is a matter of degrees. The harder it is to change a theory, the better that theory is. When deciding which explanation to adopt, we should “choose between [explanations] according to how good they are…: how hard to vary.” (BoI chatper 9; see similar remark in chapter 8.)
From my article:
[I]sn’t the difficulty of changing an explanation at least partly a property not of the explanation itself but of whoever is trying to change it? If I’m having difficulty changing it, maybe that’s because I lack imagination. Or maybe I’m just new to that field and an expert could easily change it. In which case the difficulty of changing an explanation is, again, not an objective property of that explanation but a subjective property of its critics. How could subjective properties be epistemologically fundamental?
Deutsch says rationality means seeking good explanations, so without a step-by-step guide on how to seek good explanations, we cannot know when we are being irrational. That’s bad for error correction.
Popper formalized much of his epistemology, such as the notions of empirical content and degrees of falsifiability. Why hold Deutsch to a different standard? Why couldn’t he formalize the steps for finding the quality of a given explanation?
No, it’s asking for a formalization of rational decision-making, which is a related but separate issue. Given a set of explanations (after they’ve already been created), what non-creative sorting algorithm do we use to find the best one?
Isn’t this asking for a formalization of creativity, which is impossible?
No, see #3706. I’m open to user input (within reason). That covers any creative parts. The non-creative parts can be automated by definition.
Isn’t this basically asking for a specification of the creative program? Isn’t this effectively an AGI project?