in this case we have an apparent falsification of standard evolutionary theory. We must be able to explain away an apparrent falsification or we should abandon evolution and go apologize to the discovery institute.
I think I’m misunderstanding your words here, Roko, so please don’t be offended. But if I’m understanding you correctly, I think you should reformulate “falsify” with probabilities. So that if Theory 1 implies that we’ll see underdog-dislike with e.g. a 99% probability, and underdog-liking with a 1% probability, we can say that observing underdog-liking decreases our credence in Theory 1, rather than falsifying Theory 1 full-stop.
Suppose that, after gathering together all LW-readers and thinking carefully through the issue, we decided that indeed, an unbiased observer who knew evolution and other facts of human psychology but who did not know our response to underdogs, would think it 99% likely that humans would dislike underdogs. (Assigning a probability as high as 99% sounds like absurd overconfidence, given both the difficulty of pulling high-probability predictions out of evolution in messy systems, and the thoroughness of analysis we can reasonably manage in an informal discussion group without experiments. But suppose.) Then, given that we indeed observe underdog-liking (at least in narratives, etc.), the observation of underdog-liking should indeed decrease our probabilistic estimate that evolution was true. But by how much?
Well, before we considered underdog-liking, Prob( observed biological data | evolution ) was unimaginably larger than Prob( observed biological data | creationism ), or given any other known hypothesis (er, I’m ignoring general theories like “evolution basically got it right, but with some as yet unknown set of errors we’ll need to fix”, to keep this analysis simple). Prob( observed biological data | evolution ) is sufficiently much greater that, even if Prob( underdog-liking | creationism ) = 1, and Prob ( underdog-liking | evolution ) = 0.01, the resulting Prob( observed biological data, and underdog-liking | evolution ) will still be unimaginably greater than Prob ( observed biological data, and underdog-liking | creationism ).
So the kind of probabilistic “falsification” we could get from observing underdog-liking in the face of a hypothetically strong evolutionary prediction against underdog-liking should decrease our credence in evolution, but not by a psychologically discernable amount, which makes talk of falsification misleading. Unless you suppose that the LW community could get evolutionary theory to make a “we don’t see underdog-liking” prediction with confidence much greater than 99%.
I think I’m misunderstanding your words here, Roko, so please don’t be offended. But if I’m understanding you correctly, I think you should reformulate “falsify” with probabilities. So that if Theory 1 implies that we’ll see underdog-dislike with e.g. a 99% probability, and underdog-liking with a 1% probability, we can say that observing underdog-liking decreases our credence in Theory 1, rather than falsifying Theory 1 full-stop.
Suppose that, after gathering together all LW-readers and thinking carefully through the issue, we decided that indeed, an unbiased observer who knew evolution and other facts of human psychology but who did not know our response to underdogs, would think it 99% likely that humans would dislike underdogs. (Assigning a probability as high as 99% sounds like absurd overconfidence, given both the difficulty of pulling high-probability predictions out of evolution in messy systems, and the thoroughness of analysis we can reasonably manage in an informal discussion group without experiments. But suppose.) Then, given that we indeed observe underdog-liking (at least in narratives, etc.), the observation of underdog-liking should indeed decrease our probabilistic estimate that evolution was true. But by how much?
Well, before we considered underdog-liking, Prob( observed biological data | evolution ) was unimaginably larger than Prob( observed biological data | creationism ), or given any other known hypothesis (er, I’m ignoring general theories like “evolution basically got it right, but with some as yet unknown set of errors we’ll need to fix”, to keep this analysis simple). Prob( observed biological data | evolution ) is sufficiently much greater that, even if Prob( underdog-liking | creationism ) = 1, and Prob ( underdog-liking | evolution ) = 0.01, the resulting Prob( observed biological data, and underdog-liking | evolution ) will still be unimaginably greater than Prob ( observed biological data, and underdog-liking | creationism ).
So the kind of probabilistic “falsification” we could get from observing underdog-liking in the face of a hypothetically strong evolutionary prediction against underdog-liking should decrease our credence in evolution, but not by a psychologically discernable amount, which makes talk of falsification misleading. Unless you suppose that the LW community could get evolutionary theory to make a “we don’t see underdog-liking” prediction with confidence much greater than 99%.