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Deutsch’s book The Beginning of Infinity suffers from this problem, too. Deutsch rejects appeals to authority but repeatedly appeals to Popper’s authority.
Same issue as in #2052: I don’t think Deutsch ever appeals to Popper’s authority. Deutsch ‘just’ thinks Popper is right, and so he quotes/refers to him. Also, recall that Deutsch criticizes Popper’s criterion of demarcation in chapter 1 as being insufficient:
Testability is now generally accepted as the defining characteristic of the scientific method. Popper called it the ‘criterion of demarcation’ between science and non-science.
Nevertheless, testability cannot have been the decisive factor in the scientific revolution either.
A key tenet of critical rationalism is that knowledge is tentative, improvable, because all of us are fallible, we can never be sure we’re right. But Rat Festers cite Popper and Deutsch as if they are infallible.
My impression is that, when they cite Popper and Deutsch, they consider their citations unproblematic, ie background knowledge shared with other attendees – to an outsider, that can look like an appeal to authority.
Horgan writes several passages about Rat Fest being “cult-y”:
[W]hy do I call Rat Fest “cult-y”?
Because what binds this band of rebels together is veneration for Popper and Deutsch. Five folks give talks on physics, and all seem to assume as axiomatic that the many-worlds interpretation is true. Why? Because Deutsch says it’s true.
I partly agree but also disagree.
My impression is that there is a mixture of Deutsch fans. Some – and I think that includes the physicists – came to their own reflected conclusion that Many Worlds is the theory to adopt. Others couldn’t possibly do that because they don’t have the requisite physics knowledge; they probably defer to the experts.
I have had discussions with some fans of Deutsch where I was interested in getting to the truth of some matter whereas they were more interested in quoting Deutsch, as if that settled the debate.
Sometimes, I remind fans of Deutsch that they need to decide between merely socializing around his ideas and actually applying them, which includes being critical of him. After all, listening to music, talking about music, going to concerts, etc are all different from actually making music!
Full disclosure: I used to be one of Deutsch’s biggest fans but have since become one of his bigger critics, as evidenced by some articles such as this one and this one. I have also published criticisms of some of Popper’s ideas, though I think on the whole my view of Popper is more favorable than my view of Deutsch.
… My students are using AI to do their thinking for them.
Generally speaking, people who have properly functioning minds enjoy thinking about things they are interested in and use tools to outsource toil and other things they are not interested in.
They would not want to use those tools to spend less time doing things they do enjoy. If Horgan’s students are using AI, that means they are not interested in whatever he teaches them. (That isn’t necessarily an indictment of Horgan – people often go to school not because it interests them but because they think they should.)
In this sense – and similar to what Horgan says Brett Hall pointed out to him – AI is more like a calculator allowing mathematicians to focus on what really matters: using their creativity to find new proofs, theorems, etc (I’m not a mathematician, but I imagine that’s what they do).
Dennis Hackenthal weighs the relative merits of “patches” versus “purges,” meaning incremental political reforms versus revolutions. Hackenthal asks Rat Festers which they prefer. More hands go up for incremental reform. Popper was an incrementalist, and, well, revolutions can get messy.
I don’t recall asking. The central thesis of my talk was that Popper’s advocacy of gradual improvement doesn’t work in certain fundamental matters, ie matters which allow no room for compromise because even the slightest deviation from the ideal means utter surrender of the underlying principle. https://blog.dennishackethal.com/posts/reason-by-purge-or-by-patch
Oh and it’s Hackethal btw :) No ‘n’.
Lulie Tanett, wearing a “Beginning of Infinity” t-shirt, suggests you can use reason to pinpoint and overcome hidden, irrational fears. So… critical rationalism can help you be your own psychotherapist?
Did she refer to reason? My impression lately is that she repurposes Deutsch’s distinction between explicit thought on the one hand and inexplicit/unconscious (“hidden”) thought on the other to repackage and rebrand Kant’s marriage of reason and unreason.
Over three days Rat Festers give more than 30 talks, most just 15 minutes long, on [several topics including] objectivism (Ayn Rand’s schtick)…
My macOS Dictionary app says for schtick: “a gimmick, comic routine, style of performance, etc. associated with a particular person…”
Calling Objectivism, a serious philosophy developed over decades that has influenced millions to live a life guided by reason, a “schtick”, as if Rand had never had any serious intentions with it, is dismissive and insulting.
But if Horgan has any legitimate criticisms of Objectivism, I want to know. (I have some, too!)
@dennis-hackethal*, could you expand your argument in Lucas' blog post that self-similarity must entail correspondence?
Can't think of how it could be otherwise. Do you have any examples of inexplicit explanations?
The latter is still zero-sum because the author gets nothing in exchange for the work they put in upfront, but expected to get something, and made the distribution of their work contingent upon this expectation being fulfilled.
Fair. I don't know much about the laws around this but I'll take your word for it.
I can also think of ways this could be misused.
Edit: This alone is not a sufficient argument to discredit laws against defamation.
The important thing is to be able to make predictions about images on the astronomers’ photographic plates, frequencies of spectral lines, and so on, and it simply doesn’t matter whether we ascribe these predictions to the physical effects of gravitational fields on the motion of planets and photons [as in pre-Einsteinian physics] or to a curvature of space and time.
I’m getting conflicting results online for this quote. Some sources that quote the same passage say singular ‘effect’, others use the plural like Deutsch does.
I don’t have access to the original text, so I can’t say for sure if this is possibly a slight misquote or if different people are just quoting different editions.
How will people know what n / m means?
See #1992: “The instructions at the top of the page are clear that not all ideas are being rendered.”
For all ideas, the total number of pending criticisms (if any) should always be shown, even if they are not all being rendered.
The instructions at the top of the page are clear that not all ideas are being rendered.