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From: David Brown <david.brown@hesbynett.no>
Newsgroups: comp.arch
Subject: Re: Is Intel exceptionally unsuccessful as an architecture designer?
Date: Tue, 1 Oct 2024 20:56:46 +0200
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On 01/10/2024 20:20, MitchAlsup1 wrote:
> On Tue, 1 Oct 2024 15:51:36 +0000, Thomas Koenig wrote:
> 
>> David Brown <david.brown@hesbynett.no> schrieb:
>>
>>> Science is not a religion.
>>>
>>> And as someone (whose name I have forgotten) once said, "Science is
>>> about unanswered questions.  Religion is about unquestioned answers."
>>
>> That is the ideal of science - scientific hypotheses are proposed.
>> They have to be falsifiable (i.e. you have to be able to do experiments
>> which could, in theory, prove the hypothesis wrong).  You can never
>> _prove_ a hypothesis, you can only fail to disprove it, and then it
>> will gradually tend to become accepted.  In other words, you try
>> to make predictions, and if those predictions fail, then the theory
>> is in trouble.
>>
>> For example, Einstein's General Theory of Relativity was never
>> proven, it was found by a very large number of experiments by a
>> very large number of people that it could not be disproven, so
>> people generally accept it.  But people still try to think of
>> experiments which might show a deviation, and keep trying  for it.
>>
>> Same for quantum mechanics.  Whatever you think of it
>> philosophically, it has been shown to be remarkably accurate
>> at predicting actual behavior.
>>
>> Mathematics is not a sciene under this definition, by the way.
> 
> Indeed, Units of forward progress in Math are done with formal
> proofs.

It's worth remembering that mathematical proofs always start at a base - 
a set of axioms.  And these axioms are assumed, not proven.

>>
>> The main problem is with people who try to sell something as
>> science which isn't, of which there are also many examples.
> 
> The colloquial person thinks theory and conjecture are
> essentially equal. As in: "I just invented this theory".
> No, you just: "Invented a conjecture." you have to have
> substantial evidence to go from conjecture to theory.
> 

I think you need evidence, justification, and a good basis for proposing 
something before it can even be called a "conjecture" in science.  You 
don't start off with a conjecture - you start with an idea, and have a 
long way to go to reach a "scientific theory", passing through 
"conjecture" and "hypothesis" on the way.

>> "Scientific Marxism" is one such example.  It is sometimes hard
>> for an outsider to differentiate between actual scientific theories
>> which have been tested, and people just claiming that "the science
>> says so" when they have not been applying the scientific method
>> faithfully, either through ignorance or through bad intent.
>>
>> There is also the problem of many people not knowing statistics well
>> enough and misapplying it, for example in social or medical science.
> 
> Or politics....

Or even in hard sciences - scientists are humans too, and some of them 
get their statistics wildly wrong.