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points by skinfaxi 1 day ago | 0 comments
> No, this is not how evidence works. If you can accurately model a system with method X and you cannot come up with a model that works with method Y, you should think it’s more likely (but not certain) that X is the actual physical model.

Could you expand on this point?

[–] swid 22 hours ago
Try to model radioactive decay via a process other than statistical and you will almost certainly fail, since that is our best understanding of it.

I was also going to suggest coin flips, but it’s not quite the same… I think any chaotic system is generally best modeled that way, and if you cared about the effect the system has on other things, it’s unlikely you can do better since measuring the initial state will not be feasible.

[–] hocusPokeUs 17 hours ago
Try to express it in anything but the language of stats you will fail because we haven't invented another language for it; we could but have no reason to with the ubiquitous nature of stats syntax and semantics

Math is not physics and physics is not math. Writing a Superman story does not mean the language and pictures represent physics

That's the difference being highlighted here; stats are not evidence of gravity and electromagnetism; physical phenomena when materials influenced by those forces are relative to local gravity, electromagnetic fields are our evidence

Stats of 1960s demographics did not capture immutable physical phenomena because entropy-> generational churn -> those people are now dead

The languages do not matter; they're just to communicate some ground truth.

Shackling society to the past through careful statistical methods relative to finance and politics to avoid societal change is not a scientific conclusion; there's no reason to use 30-40 years ago as the center of our social universe

The concern with stats consumption is we walk away from a result as if its an immutable forever conclusion as we ignore that gravity and electromagnetism, etc have not stopped changing ground truth; past truths that no longer matter to our next choices

[–] RussianBot9580 5 hours ago
> Writing a Superman story does not mean the language and pictures represent physics

You can write many imagined stories, but one of them will match observed reality. It won't be about an airborne male model who wears his underpants on the outside. But you can write a story that describes reality. And you can describe observable phenomena with statistics. Of course, you can describe plenty of pseudoscientific drivel with statistics too.

[–] theptip 4 hours ago
The key point is quite simple: You can write any retroactive explanation you want. But only some stories are _predictive_. And you can weigh models by how good their predictions are; which was my original point above.