From pwno:
“Aren’t true theories defined by how useful they are in some application?”
My definition of “usefulness” was built with the express purpose of relating the truth of theories to how useful they are and is very much a context specific temporary definition (hence “define:”). If I had tried to deal with it directly I would have had something uselessly messy and incomplete, or I could have used a true but also uninformative expectation approach and hid all of the complexity. Instead, I experimented and tried to force the concepts to unify in some way. To do so I stretched the definition of usefulness pretty much to the breaking point and omitted any direct relation to utility functions. I found it a useful thought to think and hope you do as well even if you take issue with my use of the name “usefulness”.
From pwno: “Aren’t true theories defined by how useful they are in some application?”
My definition of “usefulness” was built with the express purpose of relating the truth of theories to how useful they are and is very much a context specific temporary definition (hence “define:”). If I had tried to deal with it directly I would have had something uselessly messy and incomplete, or I could have used a true but also uninformative expectation approach and hid all of the complexity. Instead, I experimented and tried to force the concepts to unify in some way. To do so I stretched the definition of usefulness pretty much to the breaking point and omitted any direct relation to utility functions. I found it a useful thought to think and hope you do as well even if you take issue with my use of the name “usefulness”.