Oh yes, rando on Hacker News is far more educated about philosophy of science than an actual philosopher!
Surely he knows about Popper (duh!).
Surely he knows about Popper (duh!).
By the way, do you mean that it is better for a HN member to attack an outsider (who has not consented to be subjected to the usual HN nonsense), than it is for a HN member to attack another?
Anyway, thanks for the clarification---personally, I believe the dogmatic “We are hackers, therefore we can easily grasp any topic in 20 minutes which it has taken an expert a lifetime to learn!” nonsense which is so prevalent here (as I am sure you have observed) is worse, and deserves to be smacked down.
I'll end my participation in this convo here, though, since I don't think there's anything to be gained for anyone in continuing it.
Perhaps I'm oversensitive, but when people do this it usually strikes me as a presumptuous attempt to seize the last word in an argument. There's no need to announce that one's participation is ending; one can simply end it. I don't want to end mine, because your comments raise points that have been on my mind lately about this community.
> "the usual HN nonsense"
> "nonsense which is so prevalent here"
These fall under the trope of 'dissing the community while being part of it'. There's something unbecoming about that. It feels like a status move, a way of putting oneself above others. If you're commenting here, you're as much part of the community as anyone else is.
People post such supercilious putdowns of the community all the time and have done for years, but it has slowly dawned on me that it's a kind of vandalism—like smashing windows in a neighborhood—that subliminally communicates that no one much cares about this place. (Yes I buy the Broken Windows Theory.) Somebody needs to stand up for the opposite position: that this is a community worth making better, not a swimming pool to pee in. I guess that makes it my job to do.
I'm sure you wouldn't smash windows, pee in a pool, or throw litter out the car window, so please don't do their online forum equivalents here. (When I say 'you', I don't just mean you personally, I mean all of us in your position, which is almost everyone here, including me.)
> deserves to be smacked down
No one could agree with you more strongly than I about the badness of being shallowly dismissive of others' work, and how important it is to have a culture of resisting that. But the sad fact is, there are worse layers than that in the layer cake of incivility—and if you go around smacking others down, you're doing one of them. That's incongruent with your case that people should be more considerate of others, much as it would be to point out how someone's manners need improving by socking them.
Apologies---my intention was to signal that I wasn't interested in escalating the conversation or causing unpleasantness. I am completely happy to leave the last word to you.
Re "vandalism" and "being part of the community", thanks for your thoughts. I don't see myself at all as part of this community, but I do occasionally comment in it and on it. How is that possible? HN is a community of hackers and startup doers, and I once really was part of that (when I had the misfortune of being employed by a YC company); but a community is defined not just by collocation but by shared values & shared norms. Completely understandable if you'd rather I just buzzed off!
I understand the remainder of your comments, but I don't agree with them at all; to me, it is quite similar to the old bourgeois-liberal argument against antifa action, "you're just as bad as them!". In any case, it's completely understandable how & why you think that way, and I'm not interested in having a fight about it.
I will simply take the position that it is worse to arrogantly claim instant expertise than it is to (snarkily) criticize arrogance.
"[...] if you notice that I have been hell-banned, just let me know so I can delete my account from this shithole."
https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=jonsterling
I'm probably not the first person to suggest this to you, but I've found that what I get from a community/workplace/neighborhood/family has a lot to do with what I put into it.
Huh? The comment I am criticizing in this thread is not directed at me, and has nothing to do with me. Seems a bit of a stretch to think that I caused it by my attitude, etc. It's a general characteristic of the HN community, not caused or sparked at all by my criticism or engagement.
For example, defining just what is and is not "science" or "the scientific method" is something that scientists and philosophers of science have been working on for centuries. But this thread is full of HN randos basically chiming in with "here's my grade-school textbook's definition, guess we don't need all those so-called experts, lol". The level of not just ignorance, but ignorance of ignorance, HN users routinely display in this kind of conversation is frankly staggering.
Edit: Much cosmology and some theoretical physics seem pretty iffy to me, but at least there's the possibility of falsifiable hypotheses.
Also, there's seems to be some attachment to the idea that truth can be proven.
That's true. But that does not mean that the problem is unsolvable, and it does not mean that the problem has not been solved. It has. Popper solved it.
The article makes the point that knowing what something is and defining it are different. He then repeats that claim about 55 times, and says nothing else about science at all, certainly nothing about attempting to define the scientific method.
(I don't really want to spend time arguing about Popper or Lakatos here. But that's not relevant to the content of the article at all.)
(and the comments section on the nytimes site is a mixed bag as well)
"When a scientist tests a hypothesis and finds that its predictions do not quite match available observations, there is always the option of forcing the hypothesis to fit the data."
is a straw man.