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  >There's a model and corpus of data that converges to approximate reality better than any other model.

How you define "better" exactly is where you smuggle in your messy human value judgements.

I say "better" models are ones which more efficiently convert the entire world to my particular brand of evangelical Christianity. And who are you to say otherwise??? :-/

"No no, I mean accurate not better." Sure. And your model inaccurately denies the existence of Yahweh...

by UltraSane8 hours ago|

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Better means smaller gap with reality. Science works because it is basically a negative feedback control loop to minimize this gap.

by schiffern7 hours ago|

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Thesaurus whack-a-mole, lol.

Who decides what "reality" is, and how big the gap is? Will Exxon permit you to decide reality on climate change? Will the Catholic Church let you decide reality about abortion?

Humanity can't even agree on the existence or non-existence of various Gods, so we're far from a universally agreed "objective reality" to compare with. Inevitably the most powerful forces will get their way (Exxon etc), regardless of any idealistic notions of truth-seeking.

This is what happens when we defund (and worse, devalue) soft sciences like Philosophy class: a bunch of people making the same 300 year old mistakes all over again! :-\

by UltraSane4 hours ago|

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"Who decides what "reality" is,"

Repeatable scientific experiments. Trying to argue objective reality doesn't exist is logically incoherent.

by VSerge2 hours ago|

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And to Account39's point, or my representation of it at least: all these tribes with wildly different worldviews still agree trees have roots, fire is hot, shelter is helpful, if you jump off something you will fall, etc etc. The parts there are disagreements on are built on a mountain of shared representations of reality, and gods or politics are just tiny pieces of this world model. We tend to focus on them and fight about them, so they are important, but nonetheless they are a tiny minority of how we all understand and represent reality.