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What Hacker News says
- You jest but are right.
There is nothing new in the article and has already been covered well by some of the greatest Scientists/Mathematicians. We must be careful that articles/papers like these are not used by the anti-scientific crowd to promote their talking points and agendas.
Notably, Henri Poincare (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henri_Poincar%C3%A9 and https://henripoincarepapers.univ-nantes.fr/en/) wrote three philosophy of science books; viz. 1) Science and Hypothesis 2) The Value of Science and 3) Science and Method.
These were published together under the apt title, The Foundations of Science which is available here - https://www.gutenberg.org/files/39713/39713-h/39713-h.htm and here (ebook versions) - https://archive.org/details/foundationsscie01poingoog
Details of the works;
1) Science and Hypothesis (1902) - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Science_and_Hypothesis
2) The Value of Science (1904) - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Value_of_Science
3) Science and Method (1908) - pdf at https://henripoincarepapers.univ-nantes.fr/chp/hp-pdf/hp1914... At the minimum read this completely.
See also;
a) History of Scientific Method - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_scientific_method
b) Scientific Method - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_method
- I am keen to second here. With a PhD in probability & loads of experience in data analytics, my experience has told me that we are too ignorant and sometime too ambitious to try to predict a the outcome of a stochastic process (e.g. financial time series) without knowing that the amount of information required to make a sound prediction is far beyond those we have. Unless there's a very clear dominating signal among thousands of information sources, very often we are trading on noise.
Although I don't necessarily agree with all the points in this article, it just reminds me what Poincaré said:
`You ask me to predict for you the phenomena about to happen. If, unluckily, I knew the laws of these phenomena I could make the prediction only by inextricable calculations and would have to renounce attempting to answer you; but as I have the good fortune not to know them, I will answer you at once. And what is most surprising, my answer will be right.' -- Poincaré, H. (1913) The Foundations of Science. New York, The Science Press. p. 396.
- Yes there is:
Poincaré's writings in English translation
Popular writings on the philosophy of science:
Poincaré, Henri (1902–1908), The Foundations of Science, New York: Science Press; reprinted in 1921; This book includes the English translations of Science and Hypothesis (1902), The Value of Science (1905), Science and Method (1908).
Go to the archive.org page and you will have a download.
