| ▲ | ordu 4 days ago | |
I don't remember Yudkowski good enough to point at the missing references. But I can point to my last find. Didn't you hear about Charles Sanders Pearce[1]? He said basically that the truth is what people are ready to bet on. Not something hand-wavy like "scientific method" or "millions of flies" or anything else, it is what real people are ready to rely on. Yudkowski is in favor of betting, moreover it tends to measure "truthiness" by bets. He is much in favor of the scientific method, but if you look closely it is because you can bet on a scientific knowledge. BTW, about his belief in a scientific method. All or almost all psychology Yudkowski refers to was debunked, and sometimes very hard. Standford prison experiment for example was staged, it was like a play in a theater with Zimbardo whispering from behind the curtains "more brutality please". It is a separate issue with Yudkowski, he can't distinguish good science from bad science even when bad science was debunked decades ago. He is (like his version of Harry Potter) believes that if he vowed his allegiance to Science and knows what integral is then he is a scientist. He talks a lot of training one's mind, but this training doesn't include reading basic textbooks for a branch of the science that he is interested in. You see, "Zimbardo experiment" technically speaking is not an experiment. There are no two groups with varying stimuli to compare outcomes. If we tried to classify it, it can probably be classified as "observation", the lowest tier of research approaches (experiment is the highest one, though meta-research is probably even higher, but it is about reading works of others instead of asking questions to Reality directly). It doesn't allow us to reason about causes and effects. It is something that undergraduates in social sciences learn in their first year. | ||