My guess is the person most likely to defend this criterion is a Popperian of some flavor, since precise explanations (as you define them) can be cleanly falsified.
While it’s nice when something is cleanly falsified, it’s not clear we should actively strive for precision in our explanations. An explanation that says all observations are equally likely is hard to disprove and hence hard to gather evidence for by conversation of evidence, but that doesn’t mean we should give it an extra penalty.
If all explanations have equal prior probability, then Bayesian reasoning will tend to favor the most precise explanations consistent with the evidence. Seeing a black marble is most likely when all the marbles in a collection are black. If you then found a red marble, that would definitely rule out the black collection (assuming they both had to come from the same one). The best candidate would then be one that is half each. Ultimately, this all comes back down to likelihoods though, so I’m not sure the idea of precision adds much.
I agree it’s very Popperian, but I purposefully shied away from mentioning anything “science” related since that seemed to be a source of conflict; this person specifically thinks that science is just something that people with lab coats do and is part of a large materialist conspiracy to reject morality. But leaving any “science-y” words out of it and relying on axioms of probability theory, he rejoined with something along the lines of “real life isn’t a probability game”. I kinda just threw up my hands at that point, telling myself that the inferential distance is too large to cross.
An explanation that says all observations are equally likely is hard to disprove and hence hard to gather evidence for by conversation of evidence, but that doesn’t mean we should give it an extra penalty.
You shouldn’t give it an extra penalty. He’s just using an unusual method for explaining the first penalty. The penalty due to the fact that the friend who has all colors of marbles is less likely to drop a black one is equivalently stated as a penalty due to the fact that he has more possible colors he can drop.
An explanation that says all observations are equally likely is hard to disprove and hence hard to gather evidence for by conversation of evidence, but that doesn’t mean we should give it an extra penalty.
A straw Popperian could say that the hypothesis “flipping the coin provides random results” is unscientific, because it allows any results, and thus it cannot be falsified.
My guess is the person most likely to defend this criterion is a Popperian of some flavor, since precise explanations (as you define them) can be cleanly falsified.
While it’s nice when something is cleanly falsified, it’s not clear we should actively strive for precision in our explanations. An explanation that says all observations are equally likely is hard to disprove and hence hard to gather evidence for by conversation of evidence, but that doesn’t mean we should give it an extra penalty.
If all explanations have equal prior probability, then Bayesian reasoning will tend to favor the most precise explanations consistent with the evidence. Seeing a black marble is most likely when all the marbles in a collection are black. If you then found a red marble, that would definitely rule out the black collection (assuming they both had to come from the same one). The best candidate would then be one that is half each. Ultimately, this all comes back down to likelihoods though, so I’m not sure the idea of precision adds much.
I agree it’s very Popperian, but I purposefully shied away from mentioning anything “science” related since that seemed to be a source of conflict; this person specifically thinks that science is just something that people with lab coats do and is part of a large materialist conspiracy to reject morality. But leaving any “science-y” words out of it and relying on axioms of probability theory, he rejoined with something along the lines of “real life isn’t a probability game”. I kinda just threw up my hands at that point, telling myself that the inferential distance is too large to cross.
You shouldn’t give it an extra penalty. He’s just using an unusual method for explaining the first penalty. The penalty due to the fact that the friend who has all colors of marbles is less likely to drop a black one is equivalently stated as a penalty due to the fact that he has more possible colors he can drop.
A straw Popperian could say that the hypothesis “flipping the coin provides random results” is unscientific, because it allows any results, and thus it cannot be falsified.