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My critique of David Deutsch’s The Beginning of Infinity as a programmer. In short, his ‘hard to vary’ criterion at the core of his epistemology is fatally underspecified and impossible to apply.

He says people should adopt explanations based on how hard they are to change. The hardest-to-change explanation is the best and should be adopted. But he doesn’t say how to do that.

A decision-making method is a computational task. He says you haven’t understood a computational task if you can’t program it. He can’t program the steps for finding out how ‘hard to vary’ an explanation is, if only because those steps are underspecified. There are too many open questions.

So by his own yardstick, he hasn’t understood his epistemology.

You will find that and many more criticisms here: https://blog.dennishackethal.com/posts/hard-to-vary-or-hardly-usable

My critique of David Deutsch’s The Beginning of Infinity as a programmer. In short, his ‘hard to vary’ criterion at the core of his epistemology is fatally underspecified and impossible to apply.

He says one should adopt explanations based on how hard they are to change while still explaining what they claim to explain. The hardest-to-change explanation is the best and should be adopted. But he doesn’t say how to figure out which is hardest to change.

A decision-making method is a computational task. He says you haven’t understood a computational task if you can’t program it. He can’t program the steps for finding out how ‘hard to vary’ an explanation is, if only because those steps are underspecified. There are too many open questions.

So by his own yardstick, he hasn’t understood his epistemology.

You will find that and many more criticisms here: https://blog.dennishackethal.com/posts/hard-to-vary-or-hardly-usable