Epicycles weren't untrue, they're just an unnecessarily complex model that can be used to describe what picking a different point of reference can yield as a much simpler model. Not all heliocentric models got everything right just because they picked a simpler reference point for producing a model. Judge a model based on its accuracy, not its point of reference.
I think we disagree pretty fundamentally on what something "being true" means.
It's possible to come up with an "unnecessarily complex model" for why someone accused of a crime did the crime, but that has completely no bearing on whether the defendant is actually guilty. If the defendant is, in fact, innocent, then the prosecution's model is, in fact, untrue - no matter how well it fits the evidence.
Are you proposing that an explanation can be true even though there's a different explanation which better fits the evidence?
Or are we talking about cases where both candidate explanations fit the evidence equally, and you have access to some kind of intuition which tells you which of the two are true?
I'm talking about a case where the _best explanation_ you have suggests the defendant is guilty, however the _actual truth_ happens to be that they're innocent
> Epicycles weren't untrue, they're just an unnecessarily complex model that can be used to describe what picking a different point of reference can yield as a much simpler model.
That’s another way of saying it’s untrue.
> Judge a model based on its accuracy, not its point of reference.
Something can be both accurate and wrong, in the manner of a model that pinpoints the cause of death from cancer as admission to a cancer ward.
That's an interesting stance to take. So if you have multiple theories all of which make the same predictions, are you saying that the simplest one is the true one?
Are you sure there will always be just one simplest theory? Or are you using some other criteria to pick it?
No, the one that is actually explaining the phenomenon is the true one. The concept I'm conveying is sometimes called "mechanism of action"
There's a basic principle called Ockham's Razor that I'm sure you're aware of, which proposes that the simplest theory is the most likely candidate, but that's a heuristic, not a rule.
Another relevant concept here is that the map is not the territory. All theories are attempts to express some kind of underlying truth via some sort of formal system. Some of those theories map much more closely to the truth than others, in a way that's independent of accurately predicting observed behavior to date.
The philosophical problem of that approach is that it's impossible to assess whether you've arrived to the underlying truth, as you have no way to perceive it directly.
All you have is the different theories, so there's no definitive way to assess their closeness to truth other than by their predictive accuracy. If you don't have the physical capacity to leave the room and observe the world, all you've got is the maps themselves and how well they predict travel times and features found along the way.
I question whether a unique mechanism of action exists for all phenomena, but let's suppose that it does. Can you always know which one it is?
The only tool you have is the inductive strength of a big pile of observations in which correlations emerge. You can do experiments to prune certain causal stories, but there's never time to eliminate all possible stories. You end up with something that makes sense for you, in terms of the equipment that you have, and the theories that you and your peers use, and it's good enough, so we move forward with it.
I can see how it might be useful to document a particular explanation as "the" explanation, especially if you're communicating why a drug works because it will lead to useful conclusions about who should or shouldn't take the drug.
But when it comes to speculation about whether a given astronomical body will be visible at a particular time, I think science would have progressed much more quickly if we had not held so tightly to the notion that one explanation is intrinsically correct, and we're probably holding ourselves back now in other domains by doing the same.
It's not illegitimate to model the solar system from the perspective of earth. It just makes the model more complicated than if you do it from the sun's perspective.
I saw a great re-use of IKEA parts to build something new and spectacular when I visited an office where they desks made from table legs from IKEA, plus old wooden doors with a lot of character they found at a a home building materials salvage store, they had put a thick coat of finish on the doors and then put a sheet of glass on top of that. And the office was filled with these door-desks, each a little different yet they looked so good together. They really left an impact on me, I've been thinking about them for the last 15 years whenever someone talks about tables or desks!
In my own life right now I'm in the market for a particular kind of wooden cabinet - I need a large space with doors up top, and I don't care whether the bottom has doors or shelves. I can only find the opposite, either bookshelves with no doors, or doors top and bottom, or bottom-only doors with shelves on top. So it seems I'll have to modify something to get doors on top and shelves on the bottom.
This doesn't resonate with me at all. I tell Claude in new projects: Create a todo.md file, check for open todo items there. If we work on them, check them off and leave a note with our decision and enough context for you and me to remember what we did later. After you've done this for dozens of projects, I decided to put it in my claude.md and now I say "Make a todo file and let's use it how I like".
Or I want local git for being able to roll back edits, so I say in each new folder: Create a git repository right away. Commit often. After every round. Do not ask first, just commit all the time. And if you see me manually add or edit files, add any new files and changes and commit those too. Commit liberally.
And so I can just say: "Start using Git how I want".
Or when building iOS apps I like to do things from the API where possible instead of pushing buttons in Xcode. And I want a single CLI command that will beam a new build of the iOS app to my phone. I have preferences about icons, about pricing, about international availability, etc. So now I can say "Build the iOS app in the way I like to work".
None of these are laws written in anger, or grievances, or souvenirs of the worst 30 seconds of our 'relationship', they're just the things I keep finding myself repeating.
Maybe the problem isn't Claude.md but the way you self-control your own emotions while using it.
As a web developer who has just begun building native apps: running outside of the various sandboxes browser based apps are quarantined in. Deeper file system access, better access to hardware and sensors, notifications where helpful, deeper integration into the operating system (open with, file previews, widgets to launch the app, etc) and performance. Some things the web does well, some things it does less well than native. With a native wrapper around a web app you can leverage the best of both!
Anecdotally, I've had an iPhone for 15 years, and that whole time I've dreamed of apps - some silly, some useful, that I would tell people "Imagine if there was an app that did x…". In those 15 years I learned to program and built websites and web apps, and built very basic web apps to use on my phone but shipped zero iOS apps.
Thanks to Claude, as a hobby, I've built and shipped 4 iOS apps in the last month. None of them are world-changing, but that's 4 in the last month thanks to Claude and zero in the 15 years before it. I'm clearly getting my subscription's worth out of Claude and squeezing more juice out of my own devices. It's a fun hobby! (And I'm sure if I used Android I could do more and customize my own device even more!)
This is what skeptics are missing. The strongest answer to what AI has delivered to society so far is the new, fulfilling hobby of vibecoding. Their disparagement is like being skeptical of the routine, regular investment into iterative improvements in smartphone cameras purely on the basis that you can't pinpoint a specific lump of business process value. The vibecoding is the point. That's what people want and what they are willing to pay for.
People like OP have frivolously wasted large chunks of their life writing and maintaining open source code that no valuable businesses really care about, just because they have this dumb hobby of typing out code and thinking about logic. (I'm saying this tongue in cheek.)
They, of all people, should be to understand the unlock that AI is for a large swath of humanity.
Why not pick a hobby like painting or music rather than something ridiculous like VibeCoding. Vicodin as a hobby is like claiming scrolling TikTok or playing the slot machine is a hobby.
Personally, I've cracked very few programming books and I've been building websites since ~2004 back when magazines and books were the best sources for information. Some people learn skills from books well, and some people end up bewildered and confused until they can actually try it out and see how it works. I need to explore to discover and learn.
I did find "Eloquent JavaScript" very helpful, it didn't just get me started on JavaScript but actually introduced that whole computer-sciencey side of programming that I hadn't encountered in my various markup and stylesheet language coding. I never finished Eloquent JavaScript though, it was like a springboard that got me into JavaScript (which is dynamic and has an interactive runtime) and as soon as I could be having a conversation with JavaScript at runtime, from there I continued learning by talking to the REPL and seeing what happened.
I've always been told by my parents that people can still hear and understand even if they appear unconscious or non-responsive, and so I have a personal policy of speaking respectfully toward them just the same as if they were alert and responding and part of the conversation, but it has shocked and amazed me (and saddened me) by what some people say in the presence of a living person who can very possibly hear and understand but may not be able to respond. Be careful not to be cruel to people in that situation!
