John Nerst

October 10th, 2022

• reading John Nerst everythingstudies.com/2021/10/26/the-woke-up-call-a-review-of-cynical-…
  • > scientific astronomy not being meaningfully different in an objective correctness sense from tribal mythology
    • struck by a good critique of this postmodern take
      
    • first of all, we have to separate objectivity from meaning/value — it's fine to have a non-objective story about something! good, even!
    • then, we could use David Deutsch's hard-to-vary explanation criterion
    • but we could equivalently point at the key difference by saying that we would expect different people with different contexts to be able to both derive/rediscover astronomy, which isn't true for tribal myths
      • intersubjectivity becomes objectivity in the limit
        • which seems to imply something of an ordering
          
        • I've been over this before, but it's newly salient having been thinking about cultural evolution and the meta-protocol, which has this convergent intersubjective quality, while enabling increased diversity & originality!!
        • something about coming into deeper relationship with reality, here
        • and ofc the tribal mythologies are tried and tested and good at answering all the questions they're good at answering, which may include situated ones like "when do the salmon come up the river?" that convergent astronomy doesn't
        • this is the sense in which meta-protocol is a science of trust
        • but unlike most sciences which try to start with the completely objective (at least physical sciences, idk wtf soft sciences are doing) and move towards increasing precision & predictive power
        • it's starting with the subjective and then moving towards increasing intersubjective!
          • first-person research