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Science vs. Pseudoscience


Altherion

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29 minutes ago, Ser Scot A Ellison said:

Not “something”.  Saying “all things are relative” is an absolute statement.

This reminds me of when people hear Obi-wan say "only Sith deal in absolutes" and go "lol that's an absolute Obi-wan must be a Sith". It ignores that terms can have multiple meanings, in Obi-wan's case he means that Sith deal in philosophical absolutes, not that only Sith make unqualified statements. In this case yes "all things are relative" is unqualified and therefore an absolute statement, what it is not however is viewed or existing independently and not in relation to other things. The phrase "all things are relative" does not in anyway imply that absolute statements do not exist. If it makes you feel better we can instead say "all things are considered in relation or in proportion to something else." Which is true, even of the previous statement.

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1 minute ago, TrueMetis said:

This reminds me of when people hear Obi-wan say "only Sith deal in absolutes" and go "lol that's an absolute Obi-wan must be a Sith". It ignores that terms can have multiple meanings, in Obi-wan's case he means that Sith deal in philosophical absolutes, not that only Sith make unqualified statements. In this case yes "all things are relative" is unqualified and therefore an absolute statement, what it is not however is viewed or existing independently and not in relation to other things. The phrase "all things are relative" does not in anyway imply that absolute statements do not exist. If it makes you feel better we can instead say "all things are considered in relation or in proportion to something else." Which is true, even of the previous statement.

“Only the Sith deal in absolutes” is clearly self contradictory if the person making the statement is not a Sith.

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13 minutes ago, Ser Scot A Ellison said:

“Only the Sith deal in absolutes” is clearly self contradictory if the person making the statement is not a Sith.

 Again, you're ignoring this:

 

17 minutes ago, TrueMetis said:

This reminds me of when people hear Obi-wan say "only Sith deal in absolutes" and go "lol that's an absolute Obi-wan must be a Sith". It ignores that terms can have multiple meanings, in Obi-wan's case he means that Sith deal in philosophical absolutes, not that only Sith make unqualified statements. In this case yes "all things are relative" is unqualified and therefore an absolute statement, what it is not however is viewed or existing independently and not in relation to other things. The phrase "all things are relative" does not in anyway imply that absolute statements do not exist. If it makes you feel better we can instead say "all things are considered in relation or in proportion to something else." Which is true, even of the previous statement.

 

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1 hour ago, Chaircat Meow said:

The issue is if we suppose E&NS is true we have very good reasons for thinking we don't have reliable faculties

Absolutely not, it's the very opposite. While natural selection does not favor any purely abstract beliefs, it definitely does favor individuals with the better cognitive faculties. Therefore, while at any given point in time we have no certainty that an abstract belief is "true," we still have the ability to keep working toward ever "truer" ones.

BTW, there was another fallacy hidden in your reasoning. Earlier you wrote that because animals don't hold beliefs, beliefs can't affect survival chances. This is not completely true, because mankind (and possibly a significant number of other apes) can consciously (or semi-consciously) adapt its behavior when it becomes necessary, which means (at least in the case of mankind) that corresponding beliefs will be adapted to better correspond to reality as well. This is why earlier I was careful to distinguish beliefs that are linked to behavior and beliefs that aren't. In a nutshell, natural selection works differently on different species. Because apes rely on their cognitive abilities far more than other species, natural selection ends up favoring individuals with the best cognitive abilities. In the end, even if mankind can cling to erroneous beliefs for millenia if they don't affect behavior or not too much, it nevertheless has developed the ability to call them into question. Eventually, we will do away with the stupidest beliefs at least, even if we will never have the certainty of having reached any "absolute truths" about the world, since we are mortal and fallible, and will keep some biological limitations, at least for the foreseeable future.
And this is what history is. Basically the biology evolved first, out of necessity. Then, the belief systems followed, slowly. First those that affected behavior. Today, even those that don't. At some point in time, survival became less of an issue for men, and we were given the luxury of analysing the material world, and ourselves, merely to satisfy our curiosity and better the human condition. Belief systems became increasingly disconnected from the material world. Even religions morphed from animism to become sets of moral codes. We moved from the technical to the technological....
I could go on, but this is completely pointless and I have to go to bed...

Anyway, there are so many fallacies and mistakes necessary to reach your conclusions that it would take days to identify all of them. Basically you accumulate both minor and major mistakes that allow you to reach a completely nonsensical conclusion. This is what often happens when one starts from a conclusion and then, working in reverse, attempts to find logical arguments to support it. Most of the arguments end up being flawed in subtle ways, and the overall theory crumbles under careful scrutiny.

Oh, and also, I looked up Plantinga and he is a theistic evolutionist. His attacks are against extreme naturalism. He definitely believes in evolution, and he certainly doesn't present religion as an "alternative" to evolution and natural selection, as you did (quite the contrary, his entire life's work seems to be about not seeing them as being in opposition). You probably borrowed some of his arguments and used them to support a far stupider theory.
Because it's a funny thing, but I've always thought that evolution didn't have to be purely naturalist myself, and never understood why deeply religious people felt the need to reject it. So I'm quite curious avout Plantinga's ideas. Because apparently what he does is use scientific theories and facts and debates their interpretation.

Which means, once more, what people call "pseudo-science" is really the interpretations and conclusions on the data. Faced with conclusions they don't like, people seek to dismiss it all, including the data. Instead of proposing convincing interpretations of that data that can in turn be scrutinized and debated. But of course, that would require work. Research. Reading. Thinking. Ain't nobody got time for that, right? Bloody hell, all you had to do was explain that you had a beef with naturalism instead of giving us all that nonsense. Was that too much for you?

 

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20 minutes ago, Rippounet said:

Absolutely not, it's the very opposite. While natural selection does not favor any purely abstract beliefs, it definitely does favor individuals with the better cognitive faculties. Therefore, while at any given point in time we have no certainty that an abstract belief is "true," we still have the ability to keep working toward ever "truer" ones.

BTW, there was another fallacy hidden in your reasoning. Earlier you wrote that because animals don't hold beliefs, beliefs can't affect survival chances. This is not completely true, because mankind (and possibly a significant number of other apes) can consciously (or semi-consciously) adapt its behavior when it becomes necessary, which means (at least in the case of mankind) that corresponding beliefs will be adapted to better correspond to reality as well. This is why earlier I was careful to distinguish beliefs that are linked to behavior and beliefs that aren't. In a nutshell, natural selection works differently on different species. Because apes rely on their cognitive abilities far more than other species, natural selection ends up favoring individuals with the best cognitive abilities. In the end, even if mankind can cling to erroneous beliefs for millenia if they don't affect behavior or not too much, it nevertheless has developed the ability to call them into question. Eventually, we will do away with the stupidest beliefs at least, even if we will never have the certainty of having reached any "absolute truths" about the world, since we are mortal and fallible, and will keep some biological limitations, at least for the foreseeable future.
And this is what history is. Basically the biology evolved first, out of necessity. Then, the belief systems followed, slowly. First those that affected behavior. Today, even those that don't. At some point in time, survival became less of an issue for men, and we were given the luxury of analysing the material world, and ourselves, merely to satisfy our curiosity and better the human condition. Belief systems became increasingly disconnected from the material world. Even religions morphed from animism to become sets of moral codes. We moved from the technical to the technological....
I could go on, but this is completely pointless and I have to go to bed...

Anyway, there are so many fallacies and mistakes necessary to reach your conclusions that it would take days to identify all of them. Basically you accumulate both minor and major mistakes that allow you to reach a completely nonsensical conclusion. This is what often happens when one starts from a conclusion and then, working in reverse, attempts to find logical arguments to support it. Most of the arguments end up being flawed in subtle ways, and the overall theory crumbles under careful scrutiny.

Oh, and also, I looked up Plantinga and he is a theistic evolutionist. His attacks are against extreme naturalism. He definitely believes in evolution, and he certainly doesn't present religion as an "alternative" to evolution and natural selection, as you did (quite the contrary, his entire life's work seems to be about not seeing them as being in opposition). You probably borrowed some of his arguments and used them to support a far stupider theory.
Because it's a funny thing, but I've always thought that evolution didn't have to be purely naturalist myself, and never understood why deeply religious people felt the need to reject it. So I'm quite curious avout Plantinga's ideas. Because apparently what he does is use scientific theories and facts and debates their interpretation.

Which means, once more, what people call "pseudo-science" is really the interpretations and conclusions on the data. Faced with conclusions they don't like, people seek to dismiss it all, including the data. Instead of proposing convincing interpretations of that data that can in turn be scrutinized and debated. But of course, that would require work. Research. Reading. Thinking. Ain't nobody got time for that, right? Bloody hell, all you had to do was explain that you had a beef with naturalism instead of giving us all that nonsense. Was that too much for you?

 

I’m a Theistic evolutionist too.  I have no problem believing in the Christian God and evolution.

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On 9/23/2018 at 4:11 AM, Jo498 said:

The idealized model proposed is not fulfilled by a lot of "hard sciences" as for example geology and biology are far less general than most physics or chemistry and often deal with "single systems", say the ecology of one particular island or the anatomy of one species. (And as I seem to recall from the 1990s even hard physics often dealt with very "poor statistics", I think the top quark or one of the more exotic things back then orginally was discovered on a very narrow data basis of at first only a handful of "events".)

The top quark was discovered with two handfuls of events: one each at two independent detectors operated by two independent groups of researchers. More importantly, they didn't stop at those two handfuls -- they collected a great deal more events and measured every property of it that they could measure. Then, once an accelerator better suited to producing top quarks had been built, a new generation did all of this over again and then some because the millions of top quarks are now a background to possible new physics that hasn't been discovered yet.

In fact, this happens quite often to scientific discoveries: the first experiment is enough to show that there is something interesting there, but its statistics are usually on the low side and it's quite possible that somebody made a mistake along the way. If you look for them, there are plenty of "discoveries" that were ultimately due to such mistakes (e.g. superluminal neutrinos). This was the point of the penultimate paragraph of my original post: the discovery study is necessary, good and often brilliant, but it's not worth much without further investigation. If something is genuinely important, people will go after every aspect of it and if there are flaws in the original study, they will be found (see the wiki article about superluminal neutrinos above wherein theorists actually tried to predict what would happen if neutrinos went faster than light and found that it's not consistent with the experimental results).

On 9/23/2018 at 4:11 AM, Jo498 said:

As for (most of) the humanities, they usually are not pseudoscience because their methods are entirely different, they deal with a different kind of "data" e.g. history and we (should) trust them to have developed appropriate methods that are simply different from natural sciences.

I agree with you that the humanities do their own thing and there is no reason for it to be the same as the sciences. The trouble is with disciplines that look and act an awful lot like science (and even call themselves some flavor of science), but are actually quite different.

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This is one of the most farcical threads - by the author - I've ever seen.  @Altherion wants to pretend his racism is justified by a lack of scientific rigor.  That's pretty outrageous.  If you want to be a pathetic little Trumpist, then just admit it.  Because that's all this is.  There's no "scientific" or even "pseudoscientific" aspect here.  The only "pseudo" going on is the precursor for the drugs those people take that you say somehow are not the most disenfranchised.

On 9/22/2018 at 6:26 PM, Altherion said:

our current conception of the word is knowledge that we can use to make accurate, verifiable predictions about the world.

Um, what?  When did "verifiable predictions" become paramount among the aims of science?  You think the natural, or "hard," or what-the-fuckever sciences you want to call them predict things as a primary purpose?  No.  They identify and explain things.  Oftentimes, that attempt to explain things is TBD -- which is, gasp, just like the soft sciences.

On 9/22/2018 at 6:26 PM, Altherion said:

Unfortunately, not everything that claims to be scientific actually falls under that definition: there is a large variety of people ranging from quacks on the internet to professors in academia who do something that, on the surface, looks scientific, but in fact is nothing of the sort.

As opposed to what?  Provide examples and please specify.

On 9/22/2018 at 6:26 PM, Altherion said:

We had a debate in the politics thread about the validity of certain results and I wanted to point out some general criteria for spotting pseudoscience (this can be difficult when it hides behind jargon and math).

General procedure at this point would be to define what "pseudoscience" is actually defined as.  But that's OK.  It's fun watching one's own gravedigger.

On 9/22/2018 at 6:26 PM, Altherion said:

First, any empirical result must either be based on a large, representative sample size or a prior probability distribution with a good explanation of why it makes sense in your case. This is a general requirement across fields because regardless of what it is you are measuring, you must eventually quantify your prediction in terms of probability and the two things I mentioned are the respective requirements for the frequentist and Bayesian varieties of the latter.

Well, no on so many counts.  First of all, any empirical result does not - and must not - "be based on a large, representative sample size or..."  blah blah blah.  It's plain to know you don't understand sample size theory nor statistical power.  Or, if you do, you're acting in bad faith.  Either way, you're just so ludicrously wrong it's not worth it..

Then, we get to the the main event - you trying to use Bayes as something that will help you.  Or at least make you seem smart.  What a....I'll get in trouble.  Again, you have no idea what either terms means:  Please describe to me how you would analyze data differently in such a way?  That's a PS0700 basic test question - guarantee you can't answer it.  All dem dumb social scientists have been trained in these types of stuff, Skeeter, so please, enlighten me on why I suck at math?

On 9/22/2018 at 6:26 PM, Altherion said:

Second, the subject matter of a result must either be proven to be independent of time or its evolution with time must be fully understood. A snapshot can be useful for understanding such evolution (as part of a series), but a single one should never be used to predict something in the future. Again, natural laws do not change with time (people have tested this pretty extensively), but some things about human beings do (and some do not).

Um, tons of natural laws change with time.  My dad is a "real" scientist, and he's been killing mice for near forty years now.  Why?  Because the development in the disease he's studying changes with time.  So, that's like the fifth really incredibly stupid thing said in this OP.  As for instrumental, time-series, or even longitudinal data and studies - there are methods in each that allow one to deal with measurement error..

Your problem isn't that academics "don't know math," it's that they know math better than you.  Hell, never wanted it, but in terms of any type of statistical methods, I'd bet good money I know more than you.  And that's even though cuz when I started I wanted to ramble about the founders and such.

On 9/22/2018 at 6:26 PM, Altherion said:

Finally, a result must be verifiable and actually verified by means other than simply reproducing the original study (although for some disciplines, even the latter appears to be a challenge). The scientific method and even mathematics itself (which underlies all scientific results) have rather famous philosophical problems. The reason we trust them despite this is that they work: everything from cold medicine to washing machines to roads to smartphones is build on top of the natural and formal sciences. This is also true for some aspects of the social sciences... but not all.

LOLOLOL.  God damn that is a stupid first sentence.  A result must be..what?  "Verifiable and actually verified."  You actually put those four words together like they meant something?  Well, who woulda thought those both would be on the agenda?  To be charitable, I believe the term you're desperately searching for is validity.  And there's lot of type of validity.  External vs. internal I'd love to talk to you about it depth, but you're plainly not arguing in good faith.  

On 9/22/2018 at 6:26 PM, Altherion said:

Note that these rule out, for example, much of macroeconomics. It deals with large and diverse groups which makes getting a representative sample difficult, it is time dependent in an unpredictable way and it is almost impossible to test in practice. This doesn't mean that studying it is worthless -- as I mentioned above, with enough snapshots patterns start to emerge -- but it is very dangerous to make predictions based on its results. It's closest in nature to something like an almanac (which had a combination of common sense, genuine data such as the rising and setting times of the Sun... but also weather forecasts made months in advance). Despite the use of enough math to make it incomprehensible to most of the population and enough jargon to do so for most of the rest, it's not science so I see no reason for giving it any deference... and it's far from being the worst offender.

This Is You.  You are the one that wants to deny all empirical facts and believe in your own reality.  Do you know what's sad?  The entire thrust of your argument was obviously leading to your perpetual whining about the Census Bureau and Labor statistics.  But you couldn't even bring yourself to mention that by the conclusion of the OP.

That is because what you're saying isn't logically valid - no matter how much @Rippounet and @OldGimletEye entertain you for..whatever reason - you have no legitimate argument.  You are the same as every anti-intellectual Trumpista.  At least recognize that.

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52 minutes ago, DMC said:

Um, what?  When did "verifiable predictions" become paramount among the aims of science?  You think the natural, or "hard," or what-the-fuckever sciences you want to call them predict things as a primary purpose?  No.  They identify and explain things.  Oftentimes, that attempt to explain things is TBD -- which is, gasp, just like the soft sciences.

There is a wide variety of systems that identify and explain things. For example, people could (and did) look at lightning and say that it is the weapon of Zeus/Perun/etc. and he is throwing it around because he's angry -- there, identified and explained. The chief difference between this and the scientific explanation describing it as electrostatic discharge is that the latter, when combined with other things we know about electricity, predicts (among other things) that if we put a tall conducting rod on top of a building and use wire to link it to the ground, the electricity will travel down our the path we made for it instead of setting the building on fire.

Yes, science identifies and explains, but its real power is that it predicts things that you would not otherwise expect. Sometimes these predictions can be used to build stuff, sometimes they're pointers to further scientific results, but there must be some prediction or else the description is unfalsifiable.

1 hour ago, DMC said:

As opposed to what?  Provide examples and please specify.

In addition to what was already discussed in this thread, consider, for example, opinion polling regarding elections. It uses a lot of mathematical modeling, but amounts to a kind of guesswork (sometimes worse than other methods of guessing). Note that it fails all three of the criteria in the post you quoted.

1 hour ago, DMC said:

Um, tons of natural laws change with time.  My dad is a "real" scientist, and he's been killing mice for near forty years now.  Why?  Because the development in the disease he's studying changes with time.  So, that's like the fifth really incredibly stupid thing said in this OP.

A specific disease in a specific organism is not a law of nature.

1 hour ago, DMC said:

A result must be..what?  "Verifiable and actually verified."  You actually put those four words together like they meant something?  Well, who woulda thought those both would be on the agenda?  To be charitable, I believe the term you're desperately searching for is validity.

Actually, no -- I mean exactly what I said: "verifiable and actually verified by means other than simply reproducing the original study." Validity is important too (part of it is having the sample be representative which I refer to above), but here I mean that the result be useful for something else. This can be another study or, ideally, something tangible like the lightning rod example above.

2 hours ago, DMC said:

You are the same as every anti-intellectual Trumpista.  At least recognize that.

Not at all. I spent much of my adult life in academia (first as a grad student and then as a postdoc) and it saddens me to see it opposed to nearly half of the population because of the behavior of a fraction of academics -- and the most worthless and parasitic fraction, too. At the rate this is going, there's a good chance that in the next decade or two, the anti-intellectuals will do significant damage to it and while certain people (especially in fields such as government) would get what they richly deserve if this happens, a lot of people who have nothing to do with this mess would also get hurt. This is why it is important to be able to tell science from pseudoscience.

1 hour ago, DMC said:

To emphasize:  @Altherion is asserting everything and anything beyond what he terms "natural" sciences is simply "pseudoscience.'

Not everything. Most fields or even sub-fields do not cleanly fall into one camp or the other. In fact, even physics doesn't do that (consider the debate over string theory...).

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On 9/22/2018 at 6:26 PM, Altherion said:

Second, the subject matter of a result must either be proven to be independent of time or its evolution with time must be fully understood. A snapshot can be useful for understanding such evolution (as part of a series), but a single one should never be used to predict something in the future. Again, natural laws do not change with time (people have tested this pretty extensively), but some things about human beings do (and some do not).

 Supposing there are a variety of studies that have the same general conclusion. I'd assume you wouldn't have a principle objection to using that to make a prediction of what is likely to occur, even if "golly, anything could happen!"
 

On 9/22/2018 at 6:26 PM, Altherion said:

Note that these rule out, for example, much of macroeconomics. It deals with large and diverse groups which makes getting a representative sample difficult, it is time dependent in an unpredictable way and it is almost impossible to test in practice. 

1. Usually, analysis of macroeconomic data doesn't make a pretense of analyzing "diverse groups" . It analyzes aggregates such as GDP, monetary base, consumption data, government spending, and their relationship to one another. So, I'm not sure what you mean here.
2. Secondly there are several methods to analyze the time series properties of  data, like AR, MA, VAR, Garch models and so forth. There are test for structural breaks, unit root test, and test to see if two time series have a co-integrating relationship. So I'm not really sure what you mean by this paragraph. 
3. Not saying that getting a grip on understanding what is going is easy. It isn't. There can be a variety of issues with models and data. Like say you're a knucklehead intern at the Cato Institute and run an OLS regression without understanding  endogeneity issues, with your regression. But saying it's impossible to get an idea of what has occurred or will likely occur is a bit of a stretch.
4. In so far as analyzing "diverse groups" like say individual cities, particular populations, or whatever their are methods to analyze them too, such fixed and random effect models, hierarchical models and so forth.
 

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7 hours ago, DMC said:

That is because what you're saying isn't logically valid - no matter how much @Rippounet and @OldGimletEye entertain you for..whatever reason - you have no legitimate argument.  You are the same as every anti-intellectual Trumpista.  At least recognize that.

I get the feeling he might have been pulling our leg with his "anything can happenism".
In fact, I think he doesn't believe it.
He has a problem with "identity politics" (and never with the excesses of neoliberalism, me thinks). And he watched and observed the candidates and updated his priors accordingly. And then made a forecast, a prediction about the future, if you will, about who would likely prove detrimental to so called  "identity politics" and voted accordingly. And his prediction has proven quite correct, even if one couldn't say it would happen with 100% certainty.

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5 hours ago, Altherion said:

Yes, science identifies and explains, but its real power is that it predicts things that you would not otherwise expect. Sometimes these predictions can be used to build stuff, sometimes they're pointers to further scientific results, but there must be some prediction or else the description is unfalsifiable.

Falsifiability is obviously a central tenet of scientific inquiry.  This necessary link of it to prediction, however, only exists in your head.

5 hours ago, Altherion said:

consider, for example, opinion polling regarding elections. It uses a lot of mathematical modeling, but amounts to a kind of guesswork (sometimes worse than other methods of guessing). Note that it fails all three of the criteria in the post you quoted.

No.  Polling does not amount to guesswork.  Anyone that says that simply does not understand polling nor the concept of confidence intervals, nor how polling has demonstrated the representative sampling you've been complaining about literally thousands (probably millions) of times over.  This is why you have no credibility...

5 hours ago, Altherion said:

Actually, no -- I mean exactly what I said: "verifiable and actually verified by means other than simply reproducing the original study." Validity is important too (part of it is having the sample be representative which I refer to above), but here I mean that the result be useful for something else. This can be another study or, ideally, something tangible like the lightning rod example above.

...And this too.  Because if you had any idea of what you're talking about, you'd know that "the result be useful for something else" is precisely the same as generalizability, which is the very definition of external validity.  So validity isn't "important too," it's exactly what you're talking about.  And it's a primary concern for any social scientist hoping to get published even if you write their work off as pseudoscience because you don't understand basic "jargon."  And by jargon I mean conceptual definitions I teach to undergrads.

5 hours ago, Altherion said:

the anti-intellectuals will do significant damage to it and while certain people (especially in fields such as government) would get what they richly deserve if this happens, a lot of people who have nothing to do with this mess would also get hurt.

I know, right?  It's almost like the anti-intellectuals will refuse to acknowledge the merit of any rigorous work in the interest of advancing their own biased opinions based on whimsical and nonsensical notions.

1 hour ago, OldGimletEye said:

I get the feeling he might have been pulling our leg with his "anything can happenism".
In fact, I think he doesn't believe it.

If that's true he may well be the funniest person I've ever encountered.  Or at least the most committed to his joke.  Cuz that's a hell of a long con.

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3 hours ago, DMC said:

Falsifiability is obviously a central tenet of scientific inquiry.  This necessary link of it to prediction, however, only exists in your head.

Look, I'm not an academic, but isn't testing a hypothesis essentially about making predictions?  I don't think it's that weird to say that making and testing predictions is an important part of the scientific method.

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11 minutes ago, larrytheimp said:

Look, I'm not an academic, but isn't testing a hypothesis essentially about making predictions?  I don't think it's that weird to say that making and testing predictions is an important part of the scientific method.

Hypotheses testing is not prediction in the way @Altherion is describing it.  Whether it be observational or experimental data, any econometric analysis is simply subjecting such data to a test of whether there are the expected significant relationships.  Much and most of that work has nothing to do with "predicting" anything in the future beyond interpreting what that data entails for the future of the subjected analysis.

ETA:  And there's nothing wrong with that.  That's how science - or even epistemology - works.

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10 hours ago, Altherion said:

...

In addition to what was already discussed in this thread, consider, for example, opinion polling regarding elections. It uses a lot of mathematical modeling, but amounts to a kind of guesswork (sometimes worse than other methods of guessing). Note that it fails all three of the criteria in the post you quoted.

...

Only if you willingly ignore the error-bars people do include in their polls. Similar to weather prediction actually.

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Yes, I think most polls are pretty well defined and have fairly rigorous methodologies, and are not different from other scientific model (the weather analogy is a good one, for instance, see the amount of rainfall for the monsoons in India as an easy to measure observable). A model in that it predicts an outcome, which can then be checked and verified. It is also possible to post-facto (if that is a word) go back into the model, see which assumptions were off (usually turnout demographics) and re-run to see if it matches more closely. Speaking as a 'hard science' practitioner myself, I cant see any obvious reasons why it wouldnt be considered so.

Then again, I have a more expansive view of science and think practically everything in the universe is science (except the Goop website).

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3 minutes ago, IheartIheartTesla said:

It is also possible to post-facto (if that is a word)

When people try to look smart - and in this case I agree with Altherion about his jargon complaint - they refer to prior belief as a priori and after-the-fact beliefs as a posteriori.  Albeit the latter one isn't used as commonly.  I prefer post-hoc, and that's usually what you'll see, if anything.

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18 hours ago, Rippounet said:

Absolutely not, it's the very opposite. While natural selection does not favor any purely abstract beliefs, it definitely does favor individuals with the better cognitive faculties. Therefore, while at any given point in time we have no certainty that an abstract belief is "true," we still have the ability to keep working toward ever "truer" ones.

This is once again pretty vague.

I suggested reasons what I guess we can semantic epiphenomenalism is likely true given the usual view of mind in the natural sciences. What we might call the usual view of mind in the natural sciences does not take how things seem to us as giving accurate descriptions of how our cognitive processes work but argues that our cognitive processes are causally determined by physical processes (neurons firing).

SE is the view that beliefs are by-products of biological processes (neurons firing) that themselves are not beliefs and that beliefs don't cause anything themselves. My belief you are wrong is some kind of conscious/mental happening I have, while my neurons are something else. The belief is a result of the neurons firing, but as an emergent mental property it won't cause anything (even though it may appear to). SE seems the most plausible view of things on the usual view of mind in the biological sciences.

So the question remains, why assume beliefs play a causal role in NS. Remember the giant penguin Gwagwa. And if beliefs don't play a causal role in NS and only behaviours do then we are left without a set of truth finding faculties, and so not set of beliefs we have is likely to be reliable. 

Now if the argument from you is that we can see some beliefs we have held are false and others true and then work to get better beliefs that's obviously true but it does nothing to prove the rationality of believing E&NS.

Your argument may go:

If E&NS does not generate reliable beliefs then we do not have reliable beliefs

It is the not the case that we do not have reliable beliefs

Therefore it is not the case E&NS does not generate true beliefs

And it is entirely question begging to say that we can only have reliable beliefs on E&NS, there is simply no reason to assume that. 

 

18 hours ago, Rippounet said:

Oh, and also, I looked up Plantinga and he is a theistic evolutionist. His attacks are against extreme naturalism. He definitely believes in evolution, and he certainly doesn't present religion as an "alternative" to evolution and natural selection, as you did (quite the contrary, his entire life's work seems to be about not seeing them as being in opposition). You probably borrowed some of his arguments and used them to support a far stupider theory.
Because it's a funny thing, but I've always thought that evolution didn't have to be purely naturalist myself, and never understood why deeply religious people felt the need to reject it. So I'm quite curious avout Plantinga's ideas. Because apparently what he does is use scientific theories and facts and debates their interpretation.

 

See here for Professor Plantinga vs Daniel Dennett on this very argument. The argument I presented is just his EAAN (evolutionary argument against naturalism). Although it goes without saying he presents it better than me. 

You can take Theistic Evolutionist (TE) in two ways.

One way is as just a theist who believes in evolution, taking evolution as the E in E&NS. That is to say they believe God did not create species or kinds so that animals have always remained in perfect and unchanging categories but that lifeforms have, beginning with microbes, morphed into new, more complex and diverse forms over millennia (meaning men and chimps have a common ancestor). Alvin Plantinga is one of these.

The second kind of TE would be someone who says the mechanism that caused the morphing was purely natural and that, specifically it was NS (or survival of the fittest) although maybe they could add a few other natural mechanisms  (say sexual selection if they feel that it is a bit different than SOTF). These TE would say God exists but that he did not intervene in the process of E&NS aside from sustaining the natural laws that underpin reality. Alvin Plantinga appears not to be one of these, as he says it is irrational to believe we would have reliable faculties on E&NS and so be irrational to believe E&NS.

 

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3 hours ago, Chaircat Meow said:

Alvin Plantinga appears not to be one of these, as he says it is irrational to believe we would have reliable faculties on E&NS and so be irrational to believe E&NS.

 

If he really thinks that, then he must be an idiot.

To paraphrase this argument: evolution does not explain "reliable faculties" (whatever exactly is meant by them). Therefore I am entitled to "disbelieve" (presumably this means consider to be disproved) the whole of the theory of evolution, never mind what other things it might explain.

The flaw in that argument is obvious, so a philosopher ought to see it instantly.

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