Tag: Philosophy of Science

Effective Altruism Should Seek Less Criticism

Posted on | By The Chaostician | No comments

This is a submission to the Effective Altruism Criticism Contest, originally posted on the Effective Altruism forum.

Key Ideas:
– Paradigmatic criticism leads to value drift.
– The virtues for individuals, organizations, and societies are not exactly the same.
– Even if you want to have value drift for individuals and for society, you might not want to have value drift for organizations.
– A society with narrowly focused & mostly inflexible organizations, and a culture of individuals moving between them as their values shift, could be better than a society with organizations continually looking for paradigmatic criticism.
– Effective Altruism will probably never be scientific in Kuhn’s sense – and it shouldn’t try to be. It should instead try to be scientific in Lakatos’s sense.

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Hard Science and Soft Science

Posted on | By The Chaostician | No comments

The criteria people typically use to distinguish the more reliable ‘hard sciences’ from the less reliable ‘soft sciences’ do not match our understanding of which is which. Instead, I think that the difference lies in the history of the fields. For hard sciences, the science precedes the community. For soft sciences, the community precedes the science. Hard sciences have norms of empiricism. Soft sciences try to import rules of empiricism. If you want to harden a science, it is more important to grow the norms than to establish the rules. One way to accomplish this is to require early career scientists replicate at least one major result in their field as part of their education.

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Perihelion Drifts

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In the mid 1800s, two of the planets were discovered to move slightly differently from what was expected from Newtonian mechanics: Uranus and Mercury. Although the discrepancy in the data looked similar, the underlying cause was very different. In one case, it meant that there is an additional planet. In the other, it meant that Newtonian mechanics was wrong.

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Whitewater Tongues

Posted on | By The Chaostician | No comments

We scientists like to think that information follows from the observations upwards through various intermediate steps to the theories we use to describe, predict, and control our world. Our ideas are determined by our observations; our observations are not determined by our ideas. If there is a disagreement between our observations and our ideas, the ideas must change, not the observations. This isn’t entirely the case. Our ideas can also influence our observations. What we see is influenced by what we think exists. I will present one example of how our observations are influenced by our ideas.

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