THE VIDEO SHELF · philosophy of explanation
David Deutsch: A new way to explain explanation
Physicist David Deutsch's TED talk on why science took off, arguing that good explanations are those that are hard to vary. It contrasts scientific explanation with myth.
Why HN readers recommended it
HN points to it as a short, tight introduction to Deutsch's idea of hard-to-vary explanations.
This is a summary from the source dataset, not an endorsement by Hacker News or the video creator.
Video & recommendation details
- Creator / channel
- TED
- Topic
- philosophy of explanation
- Format
- talk
- Level
- general
- HN recommenders in dataset
- 2
- HN mentions in dataset
- 3
- Recommendation years in dataset
- 2022–2026
These counts and years describe the included Hacker News records; they are not YouTube views or the video’s publication date.
From the original HN conversations
Excerpts from the recorded comments. Follow each source for the full comment and surrounding discussion.
As kevinwang has pointed out in slightly different terms: the hypothesis that seems wooly to you seems sharply pointed to others (and vice versa) because explanationless hypotheses ("changing the colour of the button will help") are easily variable (as are the colour of the xkcd …
thingification on Hacker News · 2023-06
In Annoying A/B testing mistakes every engineer should knowGreat essay, deeper than being about just Bayesianism. In the essay David talks a lot about explanations and what is good one v/s a bad one. The short TED lecture by him gives a deeper insight into his explanation of why good explanations (hard to …
npalli on Hacker News · 2022-04
In Against Bayesianism – David Deutsch
Summaries, classifications and recommendation records are from the HackerTube source dataset. Read about this library and its limitations.