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Deutsch says to choose between explanations “according to how good they are” – note the plural.
What if I can only come up with one explanation? Can I just go with that one? What if it’s bad but still the best I could do? He leaves such questions open.
Deutsch contradicts his yardstick for understanding a computational task. He says that you haven’t understood a computational task if you can’t program it. His method of decision-making based on finding good explanations is a computational task. He can’t program it, so he hasn’t understood it.
Even if we allow creative user input, eg a score for the quality of an explanation, we run into all kinds of open questions, such as what upper and lower limits to use for the score, and unexpected behavior, such as criticisms pushing an explanations score beyond those limits.
Isn't every theory infinitely underspecified ?
This stance is presumably a version of the epistemological cynicism I identify here.
Deutsch leaves open how we find out how hard to vary an explanation is. We need more details. In some cases it’s obvious, but we need a general description for less-obvious cases.
Deutsch’s stance in my own words:
The distinguishing characteristic between rationality and irrationality is that rationality is the search for good explanations. We make progress by searching for good explanations.
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.)
I think your challenge asks for the wrong kind of thing. Deutsch’s “hard to vary” is a guideline for criticizing explanations, not a step by step decision algorithm. In this paper he says scientific methodology does not prescribe exact procedures, and that “better” explanations are not always totally rankable in a clean, mechanical way. “Hard to vary” mainly means avoiding explanations that can be tweaked to fit anything, because then they explain nothing, so the lack of a universal scoring program does not refute the idea.
THE LOGIC OF EXPERIMENTAL TESTS, PARTICULARLY OF EVERETTIAN QUANTUM THEORY
https://www.constructortheory.org/portfolio/logic-experimental-tests/
From the paper (p. 3):
An explanation is better the more it is constrained by the explicanda and by other good explanations,5 but we shall not need precise criteria here; we shall only need the following: that an explanation is bad (or worse than a rival or variant explanation) to the extent that…
(i) it seems not to account for its explicanda; or
(ii) it seems to conflict with explanations that are otherwise good; or
(iii) it could easily be adapted to account for anything (so it explains nothing).
The quote uses bullet points where the original source uses none.
(defn add [a b](if (zero? b)a(recur (inc a) (dec b))))
When you have program [sic] you can test a concept (incl. whether it is sufficiently defined to allow a program in the first place). But the other way around does not work: "If one does not have a program, then the concept is underspecified".
That isn’t what I said anyway. No disrespect but frankly I don’t think you know what you’re talking about.
I didn’t read the rest of your comment because you keep talking instead of coding. I’ll delete any further comments of yours that don’t contain code that at least tries to meet the bounty terms.
Yes. When you have program you can test a concept (incl. whether it is sufficiently defined to allow a program in the first place). But the other way around does not work: "If one does not have a program, then the concept is underspecified".
One way to program HTV could be to feed 2 explanations of the same phenomenon (in the form of text strings) to an LLM that is trained on seeking ETV patterns in text (things of the form "and then -all of a sudden- X happened ..." or "and Y (e.g. tears of a God) is kind of like Z (e.g. rain)" ) and seeking HTV patterns in text (e.g. Y happened because of X, with the LLM evaluating whether it is actual causation, whether if X did not happen, Y could not happen).And then the LLM could rank score the HTV-ness of each string (as a first approximation)
Isn't every theory infinitely underspecified ?
No. For example, the theory of addition is sufficiently specified: we have enough info to implement an algorithm of addition on a computer, then run it, test it, correct errors with it, and so on.
We’re getting off topic. I’m currently running a bounty requesting a working implementation of HTV.
If you think you can beat the bounty, do it. I’m not interested in anything else for now.
Also, I would think that criteria for sufficiency must always be subjective ones (e.g. a working computerprogram [sic] cannot be itself a proof of meeting an some objective sufficiency criterium)?
No, there are objective criteria.
Isn't every theory infinitely underspecified ?
No.
Isn't every theory infinitely underspecified ? Also, I would think that criteria for sufficiency must always be subjective ones (e.g. a working computerprogram cannot be itself a proof of meeting an some objective sufficiency criterium)? So I don't see how insufficiency points to a conflict of ideas/ contradiction
The mistake is insufficiency. If someone gives you a recipe for baking a cake but doesn’t specify ingredients or bake time, that’s a problem.
How is that a criticism ? What mistake does it point out/ argue for ?
"HTV is underspecified by Deutsch"
That isn’t a quote. Don’t put things in quotation marks unless they are literal quotations or obviously scare quotes.
It’s a criticism. Deutsch says to use HTV but never explains in sufficient detail how to do that.
Do you mean "HTV is underspecified by Deutsch" ? But that is not a criticism ? It does not point to a mistake/ contradiction with HTV ?
Criticising HTV would anyway be the more important first step. Maybe examples of good theories with some ETV aspects (compared to rejected theories) in them could reveal some more.
That could work, yeah. What other criticisms of HTV can you think of?