OK, I'm officially putting a ban on mask-complaining in my blog. Not gonna complain about it anymore (unless the rules at my work change in some new and more crazy way). I've purchased a breathable mask and I'm figuring out ways to fold it so that it gives me some fresh air and doesn't mess up the shape of my beard, while still hanging in front of my face-holes, so I think nobody will complain. (I might just cut the bottom half of the mask off later...). More, I'm not really concerned about giving a bad message to operators about how I feel on the matter, because I've got a big red badge hanging from my person all the time, which says that my company requires me to wear the mask. Nobody is gonna be confused about my position. I found out that some other people in my workplace, worse off than me, are not even allowed to remove their masks while sitting at their desk, because they're in a cube-farm; I'll still, for both our sakes, be working on a way to help them out, and I might update if any big breakthroughs occur on the stupid-policy front. 

Also, I recently read someone else's blog who complains in an even more melodramatic way than me. It was no comfort to me, but rather made me entirely more self-conscious about the kind of complaining I do here. I enjoy being a little melodramatic sometimes, because I enjoy a mild bit of prose, and prose is sometimes at its best when dramatic and hyperbolic. 

Speaking of prose, I've been letting myself wax a little more poetic in conversation with my wife recently, and she seems to really enjoy it. I suppose if I did it all the time, she wouldn't like it, but recently she's seemed to like it, and I am actually really glad that someone enjoys my prose.

...

TBH I don't have anything particular on my mind that I want to blog about this time.... I guess I'm just here to ramble because I'm stressed today.

Recently, someone I like has told me that my philosophy of science is "patchy, incomplete, and stultifying". I didn't engage in a thorough discussion to get them to explain the point to me, because, while I do want an explanation, my brain is tired these days, and I don't want the extended debate. So, in the short term, what I'm going to do is try to elucidate my philosophy of science for myself.

As usual for any given criticism, I guess, there are two possible ways for me to interpret the criticism:(a) they understand my philosophy of science, and so make a  warranted criticism; (b) they don't understand my philosophy of science, and so make an unwarranted criticism.

I'm not convinced of (a), because I don't think I've really explained my philosophy of science fully to them, and I also think that our usages of the word, "science" are so different that we quite talk past one another when attempting to compare systems.

However, I also agree with the criticism. I said that I want to try to elucidate my philosophy of science, because I do believe that my philosophy of science is incomplete and requires development. If I were to simply assert my understanding of empirical epistemics as I currently hold it, I would stultify myself.

But there's one major hurdle involved with the term "philosophy of science", which I so dislike that I'm tempted to abandon usage of the word "science" altogether, and demand that it is not used in future discussion with me about empirical epistemic warrants. That is, I seem often to hear people make a big deal about the notion that a particular view is or isn't science, when the designation actually would not change anything about the so-far-stated epistemic grounds for the view. It's as if calling an idea "science" gives it extra epistemic warrant, regardless of what actually prompted the idea, and calling something "not science" or "pseudoscience" is a great insult to the thing. This would make sense if all scientific ideas shared equal epistemic warrant, but they don't, and in fact, as far as I can tell, there exist within the set of things undisputedly called "science" several areas where pools of nominally scientific ideas exist with the expectation that all but one of them will eventually fail. So, the designation, "scientific", really only seems to denote that an idea has sufficient empirical weight to be worthy of critical attention -- this bar seems to me much lower than the way most people treat the word, "science", and I'm not sure that this bar is even high enough to make the term "science" useful in a debate about any given idea. If the idea were not scientific on these terms, then it seems the debate is a waste of time for the negative.

I know that the issue is more complicated than what I've presented above. I've recently read a few articles, and listened to a few lectures, from (afaict) reputable secular resources on what makes a theory "scientific". I'll here proceed to comment on the presentation by Forbes, because it seems concise enough. Here's my summary (including paraphrases and additional notes, per my understanding) of the list:

Forbes says a scientific idea is/has...

• Plausible (Consistent with other things we know to be true)
• Unique (Why is this on the list? If it's the same as another idea, then it is the other idea, and the other idea and this one should be evaluated together on all of the other terms.)
• Power (The idea not only describes something which can coexist in a consistent manner with what we know to be true, but it causes or explains some of the things which we observe.)
• Simplicity (The idea isn't too Rube-Goldberg to be more plausible than other simpler ideas. I don't think this is a realistic epistemic criteria, except inasmuch as several simultaneous unrelated specific causes are generally less likely than a single specific cause happening without the others, or than several related simultaneous specific causes. What I'm saying is that I think this is subjective and should be evaluated on a case-by-case basis; I don't think it's worth its own bullet point, unless we want to change the bullet to "probable" instead of "simple", but then I think that plausibility occurs on a gradient which includes assessments of probability, making "simplicity/probability" a redundant criterion at best.)
• Testability (or falsifiability, by means of a test which can potentially be executed with existing technologies. This one I agree with, on a somewhat qualified understanding of the clause, "can be potentially executed with existing technologies")

A scientific idea graduates to being a "framework", when its consequences have been worked out to the extent that several conceivable tests can be conducted to falsify it. A scientific framework graduates to being a "theory" when several such tests have been performed and it has withstood them unfalsified.

I think my ideas about testability and falsifiability might make the average science enjoyers uncomfortable -- less so, perhaps, if they took the time to understand the aim of my Feb 16, 2022 post, but even after that -- they might argue that I've broadened the scope of falsifiability outside the boundaries of practical usefulness, but I don't agree, because I think that the qualifier "executed with existing technologies" ignores several valid avenues for falsification, e.g. a rational proof. (To boot, I don't think that the criteria of falsifiability, without my qualifiers, is applied consistently to the established scientific theories.) And I don't think that rationalizations should be given lower epistemic warrant simply by virtue of their being abstracted from empirical observation, so if we limit "science" to empirical matters, then I don't believe that the designator, ("science"), has any bearing at all on the actual epistemic warrant associated with an idea, except where ideas which involve zero rationalization are concerned (of which there are none). So, when I read someone calling an idea (X) "non-scientific" because its potential for immediate empirical falsification is lower than the popular scientific threshold, with intent to devalue the epistemic warrant for X, I can't help but think they're ignoring the bulk of available faculties by which epistemic warrant can be garnered, and they're simultaneously invalidating all of science, because science ultimately has its roots in rational calculations which are needed to justify the potential for empirical assessments before empirical observation can even be conducted.

But the issue which appears to come up most often with respect to my philosophy of science is not that it lacks conformity with the requirement for falsification, power, plausibility, &c.. It's more like I reject the epistemic weights assigned to certain kinds of (so called) empirical tests. In particular, what keeps coming up is my disagreement with the notion that we can view a piece of evidence, devise an explanation for what processes caused that evidence to become its current condition, and then treat the evidence itself as the result of a past unobserved experiment consisting of the processes thus explained (i.e. my take on much of the OE and evolutionary evidence). 

Now, I allow for inferences concerning unobserved or unobservable objects/processes where tests can be performed to (indirectly) demonstrate the existence of said objects/processes. However, given two explanations for how a piece of evidence can acquire some property, (e.g. a rock charring black by smoke or heat from two possible sources), all other things being basically the same, I don't think that we can say that the evidence suggests one or the other of them. And, given only one available explanation (X) for a given phenomena, we still cannot say that the evidence is making a positive assertion for X, but only that the evidence positively asserts the phenomena itself, or else, supposing another source of information (P) asserts, "it wasn't X", or generally contradicts X by its own properties; if the information from P has sufficiently greater epistemic warrant than the explanation X, then I believe it is ok to say, "I don't know what the explanation is, but I am confident that it wasn't X".

So, briefly applying this to the discussion which I believe prompted this criticism.... The other said that the fossil record (in particular the arrangement of complexities in the geological layers) entails or asserts evolution. I am no expert, but I am willing to grant that a progression can be seen in the complexity of organisms in the layers of earth, or even that said progression involves particular qualities being gained and lost in an orderly fashion from bottom to top. I do not believe that the evidence makes any assertions about the reason for this progression, its cause or origins, but only that the fossils are thus and thus. I am not aware of any observable or repeatable tests actually performed to demonstrate the evolutionary hypothesis concerning the fossils as they are, (evolution from kind to kind, I mean), and I'm under the impression that such a demonstration would take longer than my lifetime. The other party said that the evidence can be seen as a series of unobserved past tests confirming the hypothesis -- without meaning to be uncharitable (I don't mean to attack my interlocutor, since I admitted at the beginning of this post that we haven't worked out an understanding of one another's ideas at length), I am not sure how this isn't question-begging. 

I simply don't see the epistemic warrant for the evolutionary hypothesis; maybe one could say it's because I'm uninformed about the evidence, but I literally have the evidence shoved in my face from all angles all the time -- assertions concerning the age of the earth and the evidence for those assertions are on TV, at the zoo, at the aquarium, in every movie, in books, on YouTube, in my discussions with people online, in debates that I watch on the topic, in articles in science magazines or journals, in lectures (I do actively search out lectures on the topic to help myself better understand the opposing position), I get it from Christians and atheists alike, and I haven't seen anything warranting the degree of confidence espoused by the advocates of this position. It seems like everyone just assumes the idea and builds on it, saying that every stone placed on that foundation is additional support for the foundation itself. I feel like there has been a lot of opportunity to show me the evidence, and I'm genuinely seeking it out, but it's just not there. I'd suggest me getting a PhD on the topic so that I could become informed and gain the epistemic certainty that those around me have, but those who so strongly espouse evolution are not PhDs themselves -- where did they get all this certainty?

What I do have available to me, however, is a source with such high epistemic warrant that it easily overrules all of the above hypotheses or explanations of the evidence resulting in evolution with common origin -- a P who asserts, "it wasn't X" -- and that is the Bible. I recognize that there are several allegorical options for interpretation of the Genesis, but it seems to me that these require very unnatural readings of the text, and their weirdness evidences their dependence on motivated reasoning. I really don't see a way around it. People say, "chiasm evidences allegory", but there's chiasm in the whole Bible -- the Mosaic sacrifices to the Messianic sacrifice -- and nobody serious argues for an allegorical Moses and an allegorical Jesus. People say, "if you accept YEC then you must also accept a literal dome over the earth", but the Bible elsewhere rather plainly contradicts a literal dome over the earth (by describing the firmament/heavens in terms which don't permit firmness), whereas it doesn't do that to a historical Adam, so, just based on usage and references from other places in scripture, if we allow that the whole of scripture has a single-author with unanimous intent, there's a clear categorical difference in the way that the single word "firmament" should be interpreted over against the entire first 9 chapters of Genesis.

"But I live out in the Styx so I have to worry about coyotes."