Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

What if I’m wrong? (2023)

behavioralscientist.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

31–40 of 294 posts

Re: What if I’m wrong? (2023)

#31

Post by javajosh »

delichon wrote: post #2

Ptolemy was wrong. But he was wrong with a large pile of actual measurements of celestial bodies, and a falsifiable theory. That made him wrong in the positive sense of wrong in the phrase "not even wrong", where wrong is just the first step of the ladder. I wish I could say the same about Freud, but that ladder is distressingly horizontal.

There is a strong analogy in software engineering here. Often the first implementation is "wrong" in the sense that it doesn't resolve the inherent tensions in the system. But that doesn't make it useless - in fact, it's quite useful because it actually showed you what is important. Plus, the people who attempt the initial solution to a problem deserve special honor, even if their work is eventually tossed away, specifically because they revealed these system tensions. The common dictum to "write a prototype and throw it away" is largely based on this insight.

What I'm saying is that Ptolemy, Aristotle, etc did a great service to humanity by taking a stab at hard problems, even if their solutions were convincing but wrong. Whether they knew it or not they were the primordial programmers writing a throw-away prototype upon which all future progress was based.

Re: What if I’m wrong? (2023)

#32

Post by pixl97 »

JonChesterfield wrote: post #20

> if this novelty is worth understanding, somebody I trust will soon explain it to me in terms I can readily digest That's unsound. It prevents learning anything which is not widely known and simply explained. I don't know the author. All the context I have is the article up to that point where I lost interest. However yes, if all you try to learn are the trivial things everyone agrees on, for some circular definitio…

What value is something that only you know? The moment you act on these hidden bits of information you start leaking entropy that points back to the knowledge you keep.

Re: What if I’m wrong? (2023)

#33

Post by jrlocke »

svat wrote: post #16

What is his life's work / major insight that he's referring to here? > I had found— and partly invented— a prodigious explanation- device that reliably devoured difficulties, day after day. The insights (if that is what they were) that I had struggled so hard to capture in my dissertation and my first book have matured and multiplied, generating answers to questions, solutions to problems, rebuttals to objections, an…

I think, broadly, it's that a theory of mind should be informed by empirical evidence, by scientific research, and that liberal doses of the those will dissolve away many of the classic problems in philosophy of mind.

Re: What if I’m wrong? (2023)

#34

Post by aspenmayer »

dataflow wrote: post #27
aspenmayer wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "Not even wrong" is a phrase often used to describe pseudoscience or bad science. It describes an argument or explanation that purports to be scientific but uses faulty reasoning or speculative premises, which can be neither affirmed nor denied and thus cannot be discussed rigorously and scientifically. The phrase "not even wrong" is synonymous with "unfalsifiable".[0][1] [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Not_even_…

I'm not sure "not even wrong" actually means the same thing as "unfalsifiable" like Wikipedia claims? I thought "not even wrong" means the asker is so confused that their question doesn't make sense. As I understand it, "ghosts exist" (or even "the universe is infinite") may well be impossible to falsify, but it doesn't signal any sort of confusion on the part of the asker. But if the statement was "ghosts exist beca…

I understand “not even wrong” to be synonymous with unfalsifiable in the sense that the statement being described as such is not a truth claim, or is otherwise not a valid formal statement or claim, such that the scientific method is not able to be deployed to consider its validity.

> In religion, a truth claim is an assertion that the belief system holds to be true; however, from the existence of an assertion that the belief system holds to be true, it does not follow that the assertion is true. For example, a truth claim in Judaism is that only one God exists. Conflicting truth claims between different religions can be a cause of religious conflict. The theory of truth claims has been advanced by John Hick.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Truth_claim

Re: What if I’m wrong? (2023)

#35

Post by ihaveajob »

digbybk wrote: post #22
paulpauper wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have grown accustomed to being wrong a lot as well, especially online, but it would be nice being right more often too. It's like "Am I really that far off the mark? Maybe I am. Downvotes coming." I like to think my opinions are not that bad. Yet when it comes to investing in other aspects in life ,where money is at stake or making income, I have been right more often than not. So I guess I right where it matters m…

> I like to think my opinions are not that bad. I find this sentence kind of funny. If you thought your opinions were bad wouldn’t you change them?

I suppose they meant that their opinions are not that controversial or against the norm. I've encountered this when I talk online about car safety, speeding, and generally about safe streets. There's a particular type of car lovers who are always waiting to swamp any dissenting opinion with downvotes, effectively drowning the discussion. I think my opinions are not that bad but for that crowd, it would make you reconsider your priors; if they're so offended by what I said, am I wrong?

Re: What if I’m wrong? (2023)

#36

Post by rfrey »

digbybk wrote: post #22
paulpauper wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have grown accustomed to being wrong a lot as well, especially online, but it would be nice being right more often too. It's like "Am I really that far off the mark? Maybe I am. Downvotes coming." I like to think my opinions are not that bad. Yet when it comes to investing in other aspects in life ,where money is at stake or making income, I have been right more often than not. So I guess I right where it matters m…

> I like to think my opinions are not that bad. I find this sentence kind of funny. If you thought your opinions were bad wouldn’t you change them?

Of course "I think my opinions are correct" is a tautology. But what people mean when they say things like "I think I have good opinions" is that they think they were reasonably careful and thoughtful in forming their opinions... that they don't hold opinions just because they read a comment on an internet forum, for example.

IMO.

Re: What if I’m wrong? (2023)

#37

Post by paganel »

delichon wrote: post #2

Ptolemy was wrong. But he was wrong with a large pile of actual measurements of celestial bodies, and a falsifiable theory. That made him wrong in the positive sense of wrong in the phrase "not even wrong", where wrong is just the first step of the ladder. I wish I could say the same about Freud, but that ladder is distressingly horizontal.

Trying to apply falsifiable theory to Freud (or to psychoanalysis) is wrong in itself, as a matter of fact thinking about Freud and psychoanalysis in the realm of scientifically right or wrong is, well, scientifically wrong.

Re: What if I’m wrong? (2023)

#38

Post by nonameiguess »

PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #17
FrustratedMonky wrote: post #14

I actually got a little suckered in, and thought this might be Dennett opening up to being wrong and giving some new account of what he might now think is correct. Especially after all the debates on free will with Sapolsky. Instead it ended up being backhanded self complement, more like, "a lot of other great people agree with me, so maybe I'm wrong, but probably not". "Descartes’s theory of everything is, even in h…

I had an interesting email exchange with Dennett in the 90s. He had just brought out his book "Consciousness Explained". I read it and emailed him a short note saying that I thought the book was mistitled - the contents were an explanation of what we were conscious of not how we could be conscious. I expected him to write back with some eloquent or witty or pithy defense of the link between the title and the contents…

This probably means I'm a bit younger than you, but I also had some e-mail conversations with Dennett about the same book, I think in 2001 or so. I always found him gracious and patient and he is still the only public intellectual I have ever carried on a meaningful conversation with and gained insight from in this way, and I was just a random college student, not even his student.

Re: What if I’m wrong? (2023)

#39

Post by aspenmayer »

killthebuddha wrote: post #30
aspenmayer wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "Not even wrong" is a phrase often used to describe pseudoscience or bad science. It describes an argument or explanation that purports to be scientific but uses faulty reasoning or speculative premises, which can be neither affirmed nor denied and thus cannot be discussed rigorously and scientifically. The phrase "not even wrong" is synonymous with "unfalsifiable".[0][1] [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Not_even_…

Hmm. I always thought "not even wrong" meant "correct, but answering the wrong question" or more generally "correct but irrelevantly so".

I think that your example is something I would consider “beside the point,” whereas the flavor of “not even wrong” to me seems to describe a statement or claim that has truthiness[0] rather than a truth value[1].

A statement which is not even wrong is one that can’t or isn’t expressed properly as a logical assertion or argument but rather asserted without evidence or in such a way that it is made to seem inherently or intuitively obvious. Such a statement isn't argued for or against properly or logically, or isn’t otherwise properly expressed or derived, or a statement or claim which falls short of making a concrete point or argument which can be dismissed or validated on the basis of evidence or logical argument.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Truthiness

> Truthiness is the belief or assertion that a particular statement is true based on the intuition or perceptions of some individual or individuals, without regard to evidence, logic, intellectual examination, or facts. Truthiness can range from ignorant assertions of falsehoods to deliberate duplicity or propaganda intended to sway opinions.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Truth_value

> In logic and mathematics, a truth value, sometimes called a logical value, is a value indicating the relation of a proposition to truth, which in classical logic has only two possible values (true or false).

Re: What if I’m wrong? (2023)

#40

Post by randomdata »

paulpauper wrote: post #6
ggm wrote: post #3

I've grown used to being corrected, to the point that it's a pleasant surprise to be told I might be right. What I notice more and more, is the "you're wrong" is used to buttress opinion masquerading as fact. If you preface "I think that.." to asserts it doesn't stop the "you're wrong" but it at least puts the discussion into the realms of conjecture about things, including facts, rather than simple asserts of facts…

I have grown accustomed to being wrong a lot as well, especially online, but it would be nice being right more often too. It's like "Am I really that far off the mark? Maybe I am. Downvotes coming." I like to think my opinions are not that bad. Yet when it comes to investing in other aspects in life ,where money is at stake or making income, I have been right more often than not. So I guess I right where it matters m…

I’d rather not ever be right. If I am that means I learned nothing, making it a waste of time.
Post reply on HN