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David Chisnall (*Now with 50% more sarcasm!*)
David Chisnall (*Now with 50% more sarcasm!*)
@david_chisnall@infosec.exchange  ·  activity timestamp 2 weeks ago

One of the things that annoys me in science reporting is the popular oversimplification of Occam's Razor as 'the simplest explanation must be correct'. That's not what it days and it's often wrong.

Science isn't about being correct or true, it's about building models that give accurate predictions. Occam said that, if there are two theories that explain something and one adds factors that are missing from the other, the more simple one is more useful.

The Gospel according to Matthew says that God sees every sparrow fall. If you want to model the fall of a sparrow, a model with just gravity will give pretty good predictions. Add in wind resistance and they will get better. The model with wind resistance is less simple, but more accurate. Add in God observing and it makes no change to the predictions. You can use the razor to remove God from the model and suffer no loss of accuracy.

This doesn't mean that science says God isn't watching, it says that to existence of a noninterventionist deity is not falsifiable and so not relevant to science. It's a subject of belief. If you believe God is watching the sparrow, that's fine. If you believe the Flying Spaghetti Monster is watching, also fine. If you believe there is no supernatural entity watching, it has zero impact on the model.

And that misunderstanding is how you end up with polls asking people if they believe in evolution.

I don't believe in evolution. I've seen the results of evolution and moderately competent design could do a lot better. I tend to avoid it as a way of building things. But that's not what the question is supposed to be about. It's about whether evolution is a good model for explaining the current state of the natural world and predicting changes. And models that are a series if refinements on Darwinian evolution are currently the best models for that. No amount of belief changes that.

I believe that a mutation in electric eels developed the ability to electrolyse water and turned their swim bladders into flight bladders full if hydrogen, allowing them to achieve neutral buoyancy in air. That they exhaled oxygen, which caused combustion and looked like breathing fire. I believe that there are no remains of them because the flight bladder rupturing on death caused them to burn to ash. And I believe this because living in a world where dragons at extinct is far cooler than living in one where they never existed. And, because it's not falsifiable (at least, not without a time machine), science has nothing to say on whether I'm right or not. Occam's Razor says that dragons are not needed to explain anything and so don't need to be added to any model. And scientists today are unswayed by the argument that any model is cooler if you add dragons.

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Preston MacDougall
Preston MacDougall
@ChemicalEyeGuy@mstdn.science replied  ·  activity timestamp 2 weeks ago

@david_chisnall It took a couple of readings, but your toot seems to refer to the theory of evolution, not the observed process. ✅

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Rodrigo Dias
Rodrigo Dias
@rgo@masto.pt replied  ·  activity timestamp 2 weeks ago

@david_chisnall Occam’s Razor misused reminds me of devs overcomplicating code. Simpler models work until they break. Add complexity only when predictions fail.

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jon crowcroft
jon crowcroft
@tforcworc@todon.nl replied  ·  activity timestamp 2 weeks ago

@david_chisnall there's an entire series of sci fi books with dragons that are explained scientifically (anne mccaffrey's dragonworld) - on the other hand explainig human's irrational behaviour in some cases is difficult without at least accepting that some people believe in the existence of unprovable things.

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-𝚍𝚜𝚛- (has pronouns)
-𝚍𝚜𝚛- (has pronouns)
@dashdsrdash@tilde.zone replied  ·  activity timestamp 2 weeks ago

@tforcworc @david_chisnall

Unfortunately, McCaffrey's dragons also have telepathy and teleportation, phenomena which have never been reliably observed, unlike flight and fire.

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David Chisnall (*Now with 50% more sarcasm!*)
David Chisnall (*Now with 50% more sarcasm!*)
@david_chisnall@infosec.exchange replied  ·  activity timestamp 2 weeks ago

@dashdsrdash @tforcworc She also doesn't explain how scaling up tiny flying lizards to enormous size is possible without completely redesigning their skeletons.

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jon crowcroft
jon crowcroft
@tforcworc@todon.nl replied  ·  activity timestamp last week

@david_chisnall as far as i recall she actually does (in one of the much later sequels) but its been ages since i read the, she also covers how the telepathy and teleportation work, but given she's writing in the same genre as star trek and asimov (e.g. mule/2nd foundation etc), i think we can forgive the use of some tropes that have yet to be turned into viable technologies except in some peoples' wild imagination...sadly.

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Patrick
Patrick
@pu@ieji.de replied  ·  activity timestamp 2 weeks ago

@david_chisnall The problem is the attention span. Reading your (still very short) toot, thinking about it, checking a formal definition of Occam’s razor and forging their own opionion appears to be out of reach for people who take at most 3s to decide whether a TikTok video is worth watching or not.
We need to get our attention back. Most of the time there are no easy answers, just decent models.
That said, pastafarians are more easy to be around with and I absolutely choose to believe in your dragon theory!

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