Hard to Vary or Hardly Usable?
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With an account, you can revise, criticize, and comment on ideas.My critique of David Deutsch’s The Beginning of Infinity as a programmer. In short, his ‘hard to vary’ criterion 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.
This 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 it’s underspecified. There are too many open questions.
So by his own yardstick, he hasn’t understood his epistemology.
https://blog.dennishackethal.com/posts/hard-to-vary-or-hardly-usable