> So if I consistently tell you that that lithium atoms are heavier than carbon atoms, that would make it more likely to be true?
Nope. But if you said that, and used it as part of an explanation of some process, and every step logically checked out, and the outcome checked out too, and agreed with other things you said, and other things others said, then yes, I'd be likely to believe you.
Alas, a quick look at the periodic table raises a red flag - your explanation is inconsistent with the periodic table and what I know about its structure.
That doesn't necessarily say you are wrong - could be me. But judging by the tone of your comment vs. heaps of other things I know that are consistent with my understanding of chemistry and inconsistent with your statement...
> Physicists don't need self-consistency. They can test consistency against reality itself. That's not self-consistency, that's just plain old empiricism.
No they can't. No one has that much time or money. Physicists aren't routinely replicating every core result empirically for themselves. They rely on the descriptions of experiments and data that they read, and the self-consistency and extreme interconnectedness of reality, which means that wrong information will not add up with someone's experiment, expectations, or lived experience somewhere, and will be quickly flagged as wrong.
Empiricism is only useful because reality is self-consistent. If it weren't, you couldn't really infer anything from empirical evidence because things would just be whatever they wanted to be.
(Or more precisely: we can't prove reality is self-consistent, but if it isn't, nothing can ever make any sense, and we may just as well pack up our technological civilization and go back to the caves we crawled out of. Fortunately, empirical evidence supports the notion of reality being self-consistent to the extent we can observe it :).)
>But if you said that, and [...] I'd be likely to believe you.
That wasn't what I asked. I was very deliberate, I asked if it would be more likely to be true. What's under discussion is not your standard of evidence, but whether non-contradiction by itself is sufficient to conclude that a claim is true.
>Alas, a quick look at the periodic table raises a red flag
That's not self-consistency anymore, that's cross-corroboration. Which, yeah, good on you if you do that, but it's not the process being proposed either by the OP or by fy20.
>Physicists aren't routinely replicating every core result empirically for themselves.
OK, but that wasn't what I said. A physicist can't test every result, sure, but he can test those that are most relevant to his work. I'm not going to get into the philosophy of empiricism because it's not relevant here. My point was that an expert reading a peer's paper is not the least bit comparable to a layman reading an LLM's summary of a field of study. They're just not similar situations. One has the context and the capability to detect bullshit, while the other does not.
Nope. But if you said that, and used it as part of an explanation of some process, and every step logically checked out, and the outcome checked out too, and agreed with other things you said, and other things others said, then yes, I'd be likely to believe you.
Alas, a quick look at the periodic table raises a red flag - your explanation is inconsistent with the periodic table and what I know about its structure.
That doesn't necessarily say you are wrong - could be me. But judging by the tone of your comment vs. heaps of other things I know that are consistent with my understanding of chemistry and inconsistent with your statement...
> Physicists don't need self-consistency. They can test consistency against reality itself. That's not self-consistency, that's just plain old empiricism.
No they can't. No one has that much time or money. Physicists aren't routinely replicating every core result empirically for themselves. They rely on the descriptions of experiments and data that they read, and the self-consistency and extreme interconnectedness of reality, which means that wrong information will not add up with someone's experiment, expectations, or lived experience somewhere, and will be quickly flagged as wrong.
Empiricism is only useful because reality is self-consistent. If it weren't, you couldn't really infer anything from empirical evidence because things would just be whatever they wanted to be.
(Or more precisely: we can't prove reality is self-consistent, but if it isn't, nothing can ever make any sense, and we may just as well pack up our technological civilization and go back to the caves we crawled out of. Fortunately, empirical evidence supports the notion of reality being self-consistent to the extent we can observe it :).)