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#5558·Jad Elmourad, about 11 hours agoI don't think the program needs to choose one of the surviving variants if our current knowledge gives us no reason to choose.
If several variants of the better explanation still work and we currently have nothing that differentiates them, then I think it's fine for them to remain competing possibilities. In fact, my guess is that this is exactly how different research programs can get started: people can follow the different explanatory threads until further criticism, experiments, observations, or other new knowledge gives us a reason to distinguish them.
So I don't think the program should invent a preference between variants when our current problem situation and knowledge don't provide one. Sometimes the rational state really is that we don't yet know which variant is right. We can continue developing and testing them until we find something that differentiates them.
I don't think the program needs to choose one of the surviving variants if our current knowledge gives us no reason to choose.
It does. Preference formation is the point of the program.
Sometimes the rational state really is that we don't yet know which variant is right. We can continue developing and testing them until we find something that differentiates them.
Then we’d need to find a way to feed the results of the tests back into the program. Tests would somehow need to be formally tied to HTV. The program has to at least be able to tell the user which preference to form (short of the user not typing in the variant he’s already decided he doesn’t want, eg because of a negative test case).