Post #4024539

2026-07-22 19:21 UTC

“Last song about Popper” https://blog.oddly-influenced.dev/2026/07/22/last-song-about-popper.html “Last Song About Satan” by Slim Cessna’s Auto Club leads into my last post being rude to the critical rationalists. I present three different people’s discovery stories: C.S. Peirce on Kepler, Lakatos on Newton, and Andy Pickering on Hamilton’s quaternions. The first and third are believable to me. They emphasize iteration, action, backtracking, and goals that shift in response to feedback over Big Design Up Front.

Replies (1)

@Spoofer3@infosec.exchange 2026-07-23 02:12

@marick@mstdn.social The successful scientists/engineers that I've observed focus a lot of their attention to the uncertainty part of their models. The uncertainty often has shape or relationships/sensitivities to the data that are often insightful, and also allow for determining when "good enough" is achieved. One scientist told me that the detail and length of the description of the problem is probably proportionate to the accuracy of the model. An enlightening exercise was looking through the references for NIST standards and understanding how they determine a constant (like a half-life). Often, they are great for everyday use, but maybe not so much beyond a certain precision and one might not have as much confidence in that constant after going through the experience. E.g. it might be the average of 5 master's thesises results and there might be quite a bit of variety in the rigor exercised.

Open ##4024538