I'd like more, please. My view is that the wo...

2009-12-30T06:10:47.271-08:00

I'd like more, please.

My view is that the woes of "science" can be traced to the idea that there is any sort of objective truth. The best we can ever do is establish "truth beyond reasonable doubt", so to speak. For instance, our experience is that objects fall toward the Earth's center. We can't prove that this will always happen, but we can draw on many "experiments" to bolster our expectations, i.e. it is highly unlikely that we will never see an object "fall up".

The mind, unfortunately, gravitates toward absolutes. We "choose" (consciously or not) to judge hypotheses as absolutely true or false, and this combined with a sort of "herd mentality" leads to information cascades, memes, etc. Whenever someone says "we know that hypothesis X is true", what they're really saying is that they chose to believe hypothesis X absolutely.

By contrast, Bayesian Inference allows no such choices. Belief in a hypothesis is simply a number generated by the available information. Two people with the same information will arrive at the same level of belief. As new information arrives, those beliefs are updated. The attributes of falsifiability, Occam's razor, etc. are all implicit with this approach. Weak evidence (e.g. epidemiological) can only move beliefs slightly; strong evidence (e.g. double-blind placebo controlled studies) have larger effect. In no case, however, can we ever arrive at absolute truth/falsehood, since this implies that we know absolutely all information which could affect our belief in a hypothesis.

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