News for hackers. Stuff that matters.
Re:A Primer on the Doomsday Argument by andybak on Monday August 18, 2014 @02:30PM (#8193824)
Is this not a weakness in many (all?) deductive arguments? i.e. if we throw out this argument then we have to throw out much of science.
Re:A Primer on the Doomsday Argument by dogecoinbase on Monday August 18, 2014 @02:50PM (#8193931)
In a general sense, I don't believe so. While "there exists an experimenter" is an inherent assumption in many deductive chains, there's no attempt to use the existence of the experimenter as a prior in a Bayesian calculation. The logical flaw in the DA comes when you say "I, the reasoner, am likely to exist at a random point in the history of humanity", because the reasoning could not take place without your existence and therefore the hypothesis is not-falsifiable (no matter when in the history of humanity the reasoning occurred).
Re:A Primer on the Doomsday Argument by marcosdumay on Monday August 18, 2014 @06:08PM (#8194988)
Science (the way that it's practiced nowadays) has no ambition to reach logical truths. It just collects empirical validation.