In hindsight, my presentation in this article was suboptimal. I clarify in a number of comments on this thread.
The common thread that ties together the quantitative majors example and the Penrose example is “rather than dismissing arguments that appear to break down upon examination, one should recognize that such arguments often have a nontrivial chance of succeeding owing to model uncertainty, and one should count such arguments as evidence.”
In the case of the quantitative majors example, the point is that you can amass a large number such arguments to reach a confident conclusion. In the Penrose example, the point is that one should hedge rather than concluding that Penrose is virtually certain to be wrong.
I can give more examples of the use of MWAs to reach a confident conclusion. They’re not sufficiently polished to post, so if you’re interested in hearing them, shoot me at email at jsinick@gmail.com.
Perhaps “hedging” is another term that also needs expanding here. One can reasonably assume that Penrose’s analysis has some definite flaws in it, given the number of probable flaws identified, while still suspecting (for the reasons you’ve explained) that it contains insights that may one day contribute to sounder analysis. Perhaps the main implication of your argument is that we need to keep arguments in our mind in more categories then just a spectrum from “strong” to “weak”. Some apparently weak arguments may be worth periodic re-examination, whereas many probably aren’t.
In hindsight, my presentation in this article was suboptimal. I clarify in a number of comments on this thread.
The common thread that ties together the quantitative majors example and the Penrose example is “rather than dismissing arguments that appear to break down upon examination, one should recognize that such arguments often have a nontrivial chance of succeeding owing to model uncertainty, and one should count such arguments as evidence.”
In the case of the quantitative majors example, the point is that you can amass a large number such arguments to reach a confident conclusion. In the Penrose example, the point is that one should hedge rather than concluding that Penrose is virtually certain to be wrong.
I can give more examples of the use of MWAs to reach a confident conclusion. They’re not sufficiently polished to post, so if you’re interested in hearing them, shoot me at email at jsinick@gmail.com.
Perhaps “hedging” is another term that also needs expanding here. One can reasonably assume that Penrose’s analysis has some definite flaws in it, given the number of probable flaws identified, while still suspecting (for the reasons you’ve explained) that it contains insights that may one day contribute to sounder analysis. Perhaps the main implication of your argument is that we need to keep arguments in our mind in more categories then just a spectrum from “strong” to “weak”. Some apparently weak arguments may be worth periodic re-examination, whereas many probably aren’t.