- Phrased in a different way: Knowledge can grow only by conjecture and refutation.
- This insight provides a link between theory of evolution and epistemology. David Deutsch regards them as two of The four main strands of explanation.
- It’s variation and selection. The same process that underlies natural evolution underlies the creation of knowledge.
- We create better explanations by choosing among an infinite number of possible explanations. Our choices need to be informed by fundamentals. Finding explanations requires deep knowledge of fundamentals.
- The quality of explanations are determined by rigidity and reach thus better can mean it gives us more degrees of freedom for reaching goals we value (rigidity) or it can be applied in more situations (reach).
- Fallibility is the believe that we can’t reach “justified belief”. Thus criticism and scepticism are always warranted.
- Because we need to criticise and test explanations to judge and improve on them we need to be able to look behind abstractions. Bad abstractions are illusions
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Many of these New & Exciting ideas involve introducing increasingly opaque abstraction layers. They promise to push us towards The Future, yet only bring us further from understanding our own abilities and needs. It’s easy to sell ideas like these. What isn’t easy, is creating something both practical and sustainable. If we want to make the world more sustainable, we need to understand the inputs, outputs, dependencies, constraints, and implementation details of the systems we rely on. Whenever we make it more difficult to know something, we inch closer to an information dark age.
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