undershirt

disagreeing with someone is a political view, debasing them for it is ideological

so the holy grail of software engineering is a tool that allows us to commit minimally sufficient design documents as source code.

i'd be enthused to work this way if changes to `src/*.md` files could be "hot-reloaded" on save, like an iterative LLM watch compiler, and skipping the chat prompts altogether.

I was only addressing your argument. If fallibilism leads to a contradiction then it doesn't work to undermine all agnostic arguments against the actual reality of fields.

My warning is that science becomes something like a 'scientism' religion when "real" is used as shorthand for "effective abstraction". Science has philosophical boundaries that isn't part of the science curriculum.

Fallibilism seems to smuggle a claim of certainty about how we can't be certain about anything, which leads to a performative contradiction when brought up in an argument where people are trying to arrive at certainty.

I think so. Are you familiar with epistemology and how assumptions can be formally justified?

Sure. Just making sure people understand that the "scientific definition of real" is based on a metaphysical assumption that real = works. It is very hard to remember this since philosophy of science is not taught in school.

We cant even verify if these fields are real though. It is an ordered mythology for making predictions that work. If I have a machine that can reproduce the footprints of an animal no one has ever seen, I have not discovered that animal. (This is personally a more powerful analogy than saying "the map is not the territory" which gets at the same point.)

Cmd+space, cmd+1 to search apps only

> Don't post generated text or AI-edited text. HN is for conversation between humans.

it's an AI comment

yes galileo was forced to recant heliocentricism to the roman catholic church, because they had gone insane.

also consider the dogmatic commitment that scientism has to methodological naturalism. this is the religious spirit of science today

I’ll never understand how GEB was using math, art, and music to explain consciousness (and Hofstadter himself still thinks no one understood it), but Nagel and Newman did a great job explaining why logic as a mechanical thing has only a tenuous relationship to concepts we understand, and that helped me crack at least a little bit of the mystery I was after when giving up on GEB.

any intersection with val.town use cases?

allowing functions to treat nil arguments as empty versions of their expected types

i would love to see a version of this for the antikythera