[extropy-chat] against ID

[Damien Broderick]

At 03:16 PM 12/8/2005 -0600, I probably confusingly wrote:

>But the test of a supposed discipline's status as a science isn't -- for 
>Popper, at any rate -- the accuracy of its predictions, but the fact that 
>they can be tested empirically, and *in principle* falsified.

While that's true (in a more complicated frame of reference that invokes 
Type I and Type II statistical errors, etc), what I meant to say was: the 
test isn't the simple *fact* that it makes predictions, but whether those 
predictions can be tested sharply against alternative predictions and thus 
in principle falsified.

Not just: if I do X, the result will be Y, but: if I do X, and theory A is 
correct, the result will be Y, whereas if theory B is correct, the result 
will not be Y but Z. It's a matter of excluding specifiable alternatives.

What Eliezer said about ID.

Damien Broderick