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Re:Underestimating the mind-warping potential of fake video by throwaway5752 on Tuesday April 24, 2018 @12:21PM (#16913972)
We'll have to agree to disagree. Perhaps both of our approaches have merits in different situations, but in the case where something is concretely falsifiable then people can be wrong not different. Perhaps convincing them otherwise is a job best left to kinder people than me.
Re:Underestimating the mind-warping potential of fake video by VikingCoder on Tuesday April 24, 2018 @06:13PM (#16917118)
I'm genuinely curious:

Can you name anything interesting which is concretely falsifiable?

Just to list a few things that I believe in, and they're very important to me, but which I assert are not "concretely falsifiable":

Anthropogenic Climate Change

Evolution as the origin of species

Reducing (not necessarily eliminating) access to guns is effective at reducing gun deaths

Bombing Nagasaki was the wrong thing to do

Torturing people is not an effective way to gather intelligence, and it's bad policy

Waterboarding is torture

The US has committed very many war crimes in the last thirty years

Abandoning the Gold Standard was a great decision

Re:Underestimating the mind-warping potential of fake video by throwaway5752 on Tuesday April 24, 2018 @06:57PM (#16917401)
You don't get falsifiable in the real world in a computability sense. But > 99% confidence is completely reasonable and should be synonymous in an epistemological sense.

1, 2 are falsifiable and true. They are observed, modeled, and predictions have been demonstrated accurate. 3 is falsifiable and true, but I believe misses the point in the controversy there. 4 is not, ethics are not falsifiable. I lack the knowledge to say on 5 (people who I trust agree on both). 6 is just stupid, it tautologically is - not a question of falsifiable or not. I lack the knowledge to say on 7. I agree 8 but don't believe it's falsifiable (or I cannot prove it).

Re:Underestimating the mind-warping potential of fake video by VikingCoder on Tuesday April 24, 2018 @08:06PM (#16917758)
Newtonian physics was observed, modeled, and predictions were demonstrated accurate. Until Relativity and Quantum Mechanics showed us that our models were too simple.

This whole argument you're making that things are "concretely falsifiable" is still entirely about trust, and faith, and "good enough" in practice. It's nowhere near as rock solid as you're portraying it.

With guns, if you can't even agree that reducing access would decrease gun violence, it's hard to then debate whether we should, and whether we would need to modify the Constitution in order to do so. We can't even start the conversation.

"Abandoning the gold standard was good" is theoretically falsifiable, but you'd need to explore the multi-verse, or you'd need to run grand experiments in other countries. (Other countries DID do that for us, and it was bad for them.)