The Problem of Induction (1953) | Hacker News Reader

The Problem of Induction (1953)

dieoff.com

16 pointspoetically7 comments

This always felt like the reverse of Pascal and his wager where you believed because you couldn't disprove it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pascal%27s_wager

Karl Popper also happened to be the teacher of George Soros and a big influence on him. His most widely read book is The Open Society and Its Enemies:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Open_Society_and_Its_Enemi...

This makes me think of the difficulties of using scientific ideas as a basis for policy. This has become very apparent during the pandemic where I repeatedly hear people say "just follow the science." But policy is fundamentally philosophically based. For example, Sweden did not lock down and many places in the UK locked down for more than a year. Surely science cannot be different in different locations, so the philosophy must be different. Therefore "following the science" by itself is meaningless.

Follow the science means gather data and see what works, it's not about philosophical differences about whether lockdowns are good or not from a philosophical perspective but whether they actually have their intended outcomes, i.e. reduction of infections and deaths.

It would be idiotic to think lockdowns don't make a difference for a highly contagious airborne virus. The fewer people there are out and about the less chances the virus has of jumping from one host to the next. That's not even following science, that's just basic logic. But people don't have logical skills anymore because they keep consuming nonsense from their internet connected pocket supercomputers.

Unfortunately I've seen it used in a variety of contexts. I agree that it should mean what you think it means, but that is not how it is always used.

science = descriptive until predictive, at which point it is compatible with policy, which implicates the predictive to form the prescriptive.

Can you elaborate on this a bit? I think you are saying that policy is prescriptive and can use predictions from science, but I don't understand the use of "descriptive".

Love to see it on the top of HN. To Popper!

"Popper has argued (I think successfully) that a scientific idea can never be proven true, because no matter how many observations seem to agree with it, it may still be wrong. On the other hand, a single contrary experiment can prove a theory forever false."

But then how do we decide which theory is worth taking the time to criticize?--I think this is where David Deutsch comes in. Redefining scientific progress in therms of "hard-to-vary explanations". No need to eat a pound of grass to test if it cures the common cold, because it's an easy-to-vary and doesn't _explain why_ it works (eg why not a pound of rosemary or a pint of beer)? Seems like a pretty obvious thing, perhaps, but then why is homeopathy such a huge industry? See also, A New Way to Explain Explanation: https://www.ted.com/talks/david_deutsch_a_new_way_to_explain...

The AIM of science: https://www.bretthall.org/uploads/3/1/2/9/31298571/karl_r._p...

The Open Society and it's Enemies: https://antilogicalism.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/open-s...

Economist article: https://www.economist.com/democracy-in-america/2016/01/31/fr...

Also, David Deutsch: https://archive.org/details/TheFabricOfReality/page/n45/mode...

The Beginning of Infinity: https://ia800107.us.archive.org/29/items/RichardDawkinsTheSe...

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