yego.me
💡 Stop wasting time. Read Youtube instead of watch. Download Chrome Extension

Science Is an Error-Correcting Mechanism


2m read
·Nov 3, 2024

So getting back to good explanations, where do these explanations come from?

There's currently an obsession with induction. Induction being the idea that you can predict the future from the past. You can say, "I saw one, then two, then three, then four, then five, so therefore next must be six, seven, eight, nine."

There's a belief that this is how new knowledge is created, this is how scientific theories are formed, and this is how we can make good explanations about the universe.

What's wrong with induction, and where does new knowledge come from? You did mention the black swan earlier, and I'd like to go back to that.

The black swan is an example that various people have used over the years in order to illustrate this idea that repeatedly observing the same phenomena over and again should not make you confident that it will continue in the future.

In Europe, we have white swans. So any biologist who's interested in birds may be observing white swan after white swan and apparently concluding on that basis that therefore all swans are white. Then someone travels to Western Australia, and there you notice that there are swans that otherwise look identical to the ones in Europe, but they're black.

Let's consider another example of induction. Ever since the beginning of your life, you have observed that the sun has risen. Does this mean that scientifically you should conclude the sun will rise tomorrow and rise every day after that?

This is not what science is about. Science is not about cataloging a history of events that have occurred in the past and presuming they're going to occur again in the future. Science is an explanatory framework; it's an error-correcting mechanism.

It's not ever of the form, "The sun always rose in the past; therefore, it will rise in the future." There's all sorts of ways in which we can imagine the sun won't rise tomorrow. All you need to do is to take a trip to Antarctica, and there, for some months of the year, the sun doesn't rise at all.

If you go to the International Space Station, you won't see the sun rise once per day and set once per day; it will rise and set repeatedly over the course of your very fast journey around the earth.

More Articles

View All
Walking Alone in the Wilderness: A Story of Survival (Part 1) | Nat Geo Live
One day I was sitting in Australia, in a desert. The land was red. I was next to an old man. An old Aboriginal man. And after we gaze at the horizon, after a few minutes, he looks at me and he said, “Hey little one. You be careful.” And I look at him a bi…
Functions defined by integrals: switched interval | AP Calculus AB | Khan Academy
The graph of f is shown below. Let G of X be equal to the definite integral from 0 to X of f of T DT. Now, at first when you see this, you’re like, “Wow, this is strange! I have a function that is being defined by an integral, a definite integral, but on…
How the delivery of a speech affects the impact of the words | Reading | Khan Academy
Hello readers. Today we’re talking about how the delivery of the speech affects the impact of the words. So what do I mean by that? It’s all the ways that how a person says something affects what they mean. Words on a page may have a certain definition, b…
Mohnish Pabrai SELLS his Alibaba Stock!
All right team, in this video we are talking about Monash Proprietor’s most recent 13F filings. So this gives us an update to what he was doing with his US listed stocks in the third quarter, of which he owns three: Micron’s, Heritage, and Alibaba. And le…
Finding z-score for a percentile | AP Statistics | Khan Academy
The distribution of resting pulse rates of all students at Santa Maria High School was approximately normal, with a mean of 80 beats per minute and a standard deviation of nine beats per minute. The school nurse plans to provide additional screening to st…
Her Cooking Offers a Taste of India to People Far From Home | Short Film Showcase
[Music] It’s a very humble thing that you put something very nice in somebody’s. Tell me, this is what I want to do in the morning: I want to create a dish with so many colors, and the flavor should be [Music] good. I’m her prit, so I cook for families w…