>So you think the tree that falls in the forest without someone to hear it doesn’t meaningfully make a sound?
Worse, I don’t think trees meaningfully fall in forests that nobody ever visits.
>You do get into problems in cases where the majority of measurements of a given thing share a measurement bias.
I don’t know that that’s meaningful. Measurement is a social construct. If every thermometer since they were first invented had a constant 1 degree bias, there wouldn’t be a bias, our scale would just be different. It’s as meaningless as shifting the entire universe one foot to the left is. Who is to say that the majority is wrong and a minority is correct? And if there is some objective way to say that, then we can define the bias in terms of that objective way, like if we defined it in relation to some particular thermometer that’s declared to be perfect (not unlike how some measurements were actually defined for some time).
>You are not going to reason well about a question like Are Americans Becoming More Depressed? if you treat the subject as not being about an underlying reality.
I mean, surely you see how questions like that might not be terribly meaningful until you operationalize it somehow? And as I’ve said, my theory does not differ in predictive ability, so if I’m reasoning worse in some respect but I get all the same predictions, what’s wrong?
>So you think the tree that falls in the forest without someone to hear it doesn’t meaningfully make a sound?
Worse, I don’t think trees meaningfully fall in forests that nobody ever visits.
>You do get into problems in cases where the majority of measurements of a given thing share a measurement bias.
I don’t know that that’s meaningful. Measurement is a social construct. If every thermometer since they were first invented had a constant 1 degree bias, there wouldn’t be a bias, our scale would just be different. It’s as meaningless as shifting the entire universe one foot to the left is. Who is to say that the majority is wrong and a minority is correct? And if there is some objective way to say that, then we can define the bias in terms of that objective way, like if we defined it in relation to some particular thermometer that’s declared to be perfect (not unlike how some measurements were actually defined for some time).
>You are not going to reason well about a question like Are Americans Becoming More Depressed? if you treat the subject as not being about an underlying reality.
I mean, surely you see how questions like that might not be terribly meaningful until you operationalize it somehow? And as I’ve said, my theory does not differ in predictive ability, so if I’m reasoning worse in some respect but I get all the same predictions, what’s wrong?