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There are many misconceptions about where scientific theories are derived from. A popular one is Empiricism, that we derive theories from our senses. Another is Inductivism, that the future will resemble the past. Testability is also generally accepted as a defining characteristic of the scientific method. All of these are wrong - there are many ex... See more

Alex MacCaw • The Beginning of Infinity

Evolution has no foresight.

Peter Watts • Blindsight (Firefall Book 1)

Instead of trying to improve and integrate those two powerful but slightly flawed explanatory theories, and to explain why the rule of thumb worked, most of the theoretical-physics community retreated rapidly and with remarkable docility into instrumentalism. If the predictions work, they reasoned, why worry about the explanation? So they tried to

David Deutsch • The Beginning of Infinity: Explanations That Transform the World

feminism

Briar Harvey • 1 card

today governments have played virtually no role in the breakthroughs in “foundation models” that are revolutionizing computer science.

Audrey Tang • ⿻ 數位 Plurality: The Future of Collaborative Technology and Democracy

Ideas

Wendy Washburn • 1 card

By theory, I mean building models of the world based on assumptions about how it works.

J. Doyne Farmer • Making Sense of Chaos: A Better Economics for a Better World

None of these models works well

Emanuel Derman • Models.Behaving.Badly.: Why Confusing Illusion with Reality Can Lead to Disaster, on Wall Street and in Life

Yet it is widely believed, especially in the court of public opinion, that a true theory can have no failures and a false theory no successes.