#knowledge #epistemology #rationality # [[Epistemic status]] #shower-thought # Related - [[Karl Popper]] - [[Philosophy/Rationality/Models/Black Swan|Black Swan]] - [[Karl Raimund Popper - The Logic of Scientific Discovery]] - [[Confirmation]] - [[It is more efficient to know what you do not know than knowing what you know]] - [[Book]] - [[Epistemic humility]] - [[Induction]] # Falsifiability >Similarly, the speculator George Soros, when making a financial bet, keeps looking for instances that would prove his initial theory wrong. This, perhaps, is true self-confidence: the ability to look at the world without the need to find signs that stroke one’s ego. >~ [[Nassim Taleb|Taleb]] [[The criterion of demarcation]] allows us to distinguish ideas belonging to the [[Metaphysical ]] from the [[Scientific]] realm. Finding negative evidence is the best strategy to date to create [[Philosophy/Epistemology/Knowledge|knowledge]]. >It was simply a rule of how scientists operated that you had to try to **disprove your own theories**, and if you made an honest effort and failed, that was **victory**. >~ [[Eliezer Yudkowsky]] When you want to know if broccoli is healthy, do not type on Google "is broccoli healthy", rather, type "why broccoli is unhealthy". >There is only one way, that we know of, to discern falsehoods from truths, one way to see if our model of the world has errors. That method is to actively **seek evidence that contradicts our beliefs**. >~ [[Jeff Hawkins]] Despite thousand [[Confirmation|confirmation]]s of [[Newton]] theory of gravity, it took only general [[Relativity|relativity]] to falsify it. ## Falsifying evidence must be [[Empiricism|empirical]] If Bob said broccoli is unhealthy, that does not mean it is true. You need to look at scientific evidence, [[Do not rely on authority|do not rely on authority]], read the papers showing decent experiments, but be still aware that humans do a lot of statistical errors. ## [[We will always play an incomplete information game]] >Now it is far from obvious, from a logical point of view, that we are justifed in inferring universal statements from singular ones, no matter how numerous; for any conclusion drawn in this way may always turn out to be false: **no matter how many instances of white swans we may have observed, this does not justify the conclusion that all swans are white**. >~ [[Karl Popper]] ## Bottleneck of [[Karl Popper]] theories The fact that [[Plato's allegory|our senses do not reflect physical reality]] is ignored in his theories, we cannot, sometimes, rely on experience alone this it is shaped by our [[Genome|genome]] into survival-optimised [[Information|information]]. ## The more fundamental the more falsifiable ### How to measure composition? How fundamental a theory is? ### How to compare the composition of theories? Does this theory is more fundamental than this one? Why? ### Should we then be very [[Skepticism|skeptical]] of very deep subclasses? ## A theory is not [[Empiricism|empirical]] if it is merely relying on [[Empiricism|empirical]] subclasses I.e. it has no falsifiable components in itself but rather merely falsifiable subclasses. - [[Planck]]'s' conservation of energy ## Cannot be modified >The third criterion for a good explanation is that it cannot easily be modified. So a good explanation can be tested by experiments because it cannot easily be adapted to fit new experimental data that would otherwise contradict it. In Popper’s words, it can be falsified. >~ [[Nicolas Gisin]] ## Tricks ### If your shower thoughts already display falsifying tests, do it >When there’s a confusing problem and you’re just starting out and you have a falsifiable hypothesis, go test it. Find some simple, easy way of doing a basic check and do it right away. Don’t worry about designing an elaborate course of experiments that would make a grant proposal look impressive to a funding agency. >~ [[Eliezer Yudkowsky]] ## It is rarely possible to actually falsify an idea >[[Karl Popper - The Logic of Scientific Discovery|Karl Popper]]’s idea that scientific theories must be **falsifiable** has long been an outdated philosophy. I am glad to hear this, as it’s a philosophy that nobody in science ever could have used, other than as a rhetorical device. **It is rarely possible to actually falsify an idea, since ideas can always be modified or extended to match incoming evidence**. Rather than falsifying theories, therefore, we “implausify” them: a continuously adapted theory becomes increasingly difficult and arcane—not to say ugly—and eventually practitioners lose interest. >~ [[Sabine Hossenfelder - Lost in Math - How Beauty Leads Physics Astray]]