Can you recommend any philosophy of science (or life) treatises about this?
I long considered myself a Popperian. A few years ago, I decided that I'm a "Predictionist" (a placeholder made up word until I learn better). I'm struggling to figure out what that even means.
I still agree with Popper. Empathetically.
I'm just tired of arguing. I forfeit. I give up. I no longer believe that discourse is helpful, that people are persuadable, that we can share Truth.
Instead, I just want to know the predictive strength of someone's Truth.
For example:
The Earth is flat? Oh? Cool. Please, tell me, how does that Truth help me?
My research involve applying Popper's epistemology to natural language processing.
So I am quite involved in this.
As far as I can tell, almost all of what Popper tried to do with quantification measures of information are exactly what you are talking about.
In particular Conjectures and Refutations covers this really extensively so I'd recommend reading or re-reading that. Though Logic of Scientific Probability covers an early form. David Miller's Critical Rationalism covers it well too and some of it's problems.
I.e:
His notion (shared with positivists like Carnap and others) that science is a set of logical statements. A collection of statements is a theory, a theory entails a set of predictions which is called the information content of the theory (sometimes I(c) or C(I) in his notation).
If the I(c) > I(c') where c' is a competing theory then it is said to have more explanitory power. I.e. it makes more predictions.
This is part of his defnition of what makes a good explanation and what david desutch calls "hard to vary".
The other main part of the definitition is about whether these statements reflect Truth in anyway.. that is covered by his notion of verisimiltude or truthlikeness which is quantified as the degree to which the information content of a theory I(c) can be corroborated.
Both of these are essentailly "The predictive strength of someone's Truth"
The problem you and many other have probably encountered is the information content of an explanation is *intractable* it's an open set of statements which cannot full by fleshed out. So instead we can never have a perfect quantification of whether my theories or your theories are better... there may indeed be statements entailed by flat earth theory that have yet to be discovered and could indeed be more corroborated and provide better information content than a non-flat earth theory! Popper revels in this fact and fully embraces it.
Beyond Popper though, we need to understand more of the dynamics of "predictive strength" - I am finding causality a great source of literature that for which I would recommend Judea Perl and the Book of Why among other things.
For Philosophy of Science in particular there are ton's of great articles on stanford encyclopedia of philosophy about Explanation that go into this in depth - in fact the positivists like Carnap wrote amazing things about this which I would recommend.
Slight tweak to this imo: models that can predict which new reframings/samples of current scientific-community-consensus SOTAs/benchmarks/datasets will disprove contemporary consensus is science :)
That's actually one of the flaws of Austrian economics. Mises just postulates that certain of his personality traits apply to all humans and ignores the personality traits of other humans. He is also confusing the informational theoretical world inside his mind with the harsh reality of the real world.
The word "capital depreciation" kind of summarizes all sorts of flaws. Gold is considered an ideal currency yet it suffers from no capital depreciation at all, while all other forms of physical capital depreciate. Once you have built all the houses, roads and schools, etc there is nothing left to build. If you happen to have built too many schools, then you are a fool and should convert the school back to gold by demolishing it and selling the scrap or in other words, idle capital, that is left to depreciate, must be eliminated.
When you think about this, this is secretly rewarding monopolies and all sorts of other nonsense that capitalism suffers from. For 10 people there are exactly 10 jobs. If a workaholic hoards a job by working 80 hours per week to retire early, then somehow there won't be enough "jobs" for everyone. This gives employers the upper hand during negotiations as employees start competing with each other instead of employers competing over employees. The current system is also dumb because it tries to represent capital depreciation through an increase in the price level i.e. 2% inflation targeting.
I disagree with this definition. We have yet to produce a perfect model of the world (aka, a theory of everything). All models produced by "science" thus far are "wrong", at least on some level (ex. Newton's model doesn't cover relativity). I think "Creating models with predictive power is also a precise definition of science." is a fair description.
I think it's fair to say that a "theory of everything" is sort of the great work of any particular field of science. In practice that means refining models, but the model-building is ancillary to the truth-finding, not the other way around. Of course, if the truth wasn't predictive we're all just screwed, but that doesn't mean that whatever is predictive is necessarily the truth. It just means we might all be screwed.
I think that most work in quantum physics negates that claim.
While we are improving our predictive power, we’re still baffled by the underlying nature of reality. We don’t know the “mechanism” by which the quantum world works.
Can you recommend any philosophy of science (or life) treatises about this?
I long considered myself a Popperian. A few years ago, I decided that I'm a "Predictionist" (a placeholder made up word until I learn better). I'm struggling to figure out what that even means.
I still agree with Popper. Empathetically.
I'm just tired of arguing. I forfeit. I give up. I no longer believe that discourse is helpful, that people are persuadable, that we can share Truth.
Instead, I just want to know the predictive strength of someone's Truth.
For example:
The Earth is flat? Oh? Cool. Please, tell me, how does that Truth help me?
My research involve applying Popper's epistemology to natural language processing. So I am quite involved in this.
As far as I can tell, almost all of what Popper tried to do with quantification measures of information are exactly what you are talking about.
In particular Conjectures and Refutations covers this really extensively so I'd recommend reading or re-reading that. Though Logic of Scientific Probability covers an early form. David Miller's Critical Rationalism covers it well too and some of it's problems.
I.e: His notion (shared with positivists like Carnap and others) that science is a set of logical statements. A collection of statements is a theory, a theory entails a set of predictions which is called the information content of the theory (sometimes I(c) or C(I) in his notation).
If the I(c) > I(c') where c' is a competing theory then it is said to have more explanitory power. I.e. it makes more predictions.
This is part of his defnition of what makes a good explanation and what david desutch calls "hard to vary".
The other main part of the definitition is about whether these statements reflect Truth in anyway.. that is covered by his notion of verisimiltude or truthlikeness which is quantified as the degree to which the information content of a theory I(c) can be corroborated.
Both of these are essentailly "The predictive strength of someone's Truth"
The problem you and many other have probably encountered is the information content of an explanation is *intractable* it's an open set of statements which cannot full by fleshed out. So instead we can never have a perfect quantification of whether my theories or your theories are better... there may indeed be statements entailed by flat earth theory that have yet to be discovered and could indeed be more corroborated and provide better information content than a non-flat earth theory! Popper revels in this fact and fully embraces it.
Beyond Popper though, we need to understand more of the dynamics of "predictive strength" - I am finding causality a great source of literature that for which I would recommend Judea Perl and the Book of Why among other things.
For Philosophy of Science in particular there are ton's of great articles on stanford encyclopedia of philosophy about Explanation that go into this in depth - in fact the positivists like Carnap wrote amazing things about this which I would recommend.
Slight tweak to this imo: models that can predict which new reframings/samples of current scientific-community-consensus SOTAs/benchmarks/datasets will disprove contemporary consensus is science :)
Instead of reasoned & formula based models, now we have purely empirical models. See Wolfram's New Kind Of Science.
Does ANKS engage with empirical models beyond what is necessary to hype up cellular automata?
Isn't wolfram's new kind of science purely rational? No observations of the universe needed
That's actually one of the flaws of Austrian economics. Mises just postulates that certain of his personality traits apply to all humans and ignores the personality traits of other humans. He is also confusing the informational theoretical world inside his mind with the harsh reality of the real world.
The word "capital depreciation" kind of summarizes all sorts of flaws. Gold is considered an ideal currency yet it suffers from no capital depreciation at all, while all other forms of physical capital depreciate. Once you have built all the houses, roads and schools, etc there is nothing left to build. If you happen to have built too many schools, then you are a fool and should convert the school back to gold by demolishing it and selling the scrap or in other words, idle capital, that is left to depreciate, must be eliminated.
When you think about this, this is secretly rewarding monopolies and all sorts of other nonsense that capitalism suffers from. For 10 people there are exactly 10 jobs. If a workaholic hoards a job by working 80 hours per week to retire early, then somehow there won't be enough "jobs" for everyone. This gives employers the upper hand during negotiations as employees start competing with each other instead of employers competing over employees. The current system is also dumb because it tries to represent capital depreciation through an increase in the price level i.e. 2% inflation targeting.
The universe is required to run Mathematica.
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Not necessarily, since models that predict correctly can still be wrong. Science is figuring out the real mechanism
I disagree with this definition. We have yet to produce a perfect model of the world (aka, a theory of everything). All models produced by "science" thus far are "wrong", at least on some level (ex. Newton's model doesn't cover relativity). I think "Creating models with predictive power is also a precise definition of science." is a fair description.
I think it's fair to say that a "theory of everything" is sort of the great work of any particular field of science. In practice that means refining models, but the model-building is ancillary to the truth-finding, not the other way around. Of course, if the truth wasn't predictive we're all just screwed, but that doesn't mean that whatever is predictive is necessarily the truth. It just means we might all be screwed.
I think that most work in quantum physics negates that claim.
While we are improving our predictive power, we’re still baffled by the underlying nature of reality. We don’t know the “mechanism” by which the quantum world works.
Testing models*