What are the differences between a Good Explanation and a Bad Explanation?
| For example:
Q: How does the winter season come?
Bad Explanation: Due to the gods. The god of the underworld, Hades, kidnapped and raped Persephone, the goddess of spring. So Persephone will marry Hades, and the magic seed will compel her to visit Hades once in a year. As a result, her mother Demeter became sad, and that's why the winter season comes. Now why not the other Gods? Why it is a magic seed and not any other kind of magic?
| Why it is a marriage contract? What all of these things have to do with the actual problem? You can replace all the details with some more fictional stories and the explanation will remain the same so it's easy to vary. This is also not testable. We can't experiment with it.
| Good explanation: Earth's axis of rotation is tilted relative to the plane of of its orbit around the sun. The details here play functional roles, and changing the details is also very hard as it will ruin the explanation. It's also testable.
Another example is the Prophet's apocalyptic theory. A mysterious creature or disease will end the world. It's easy to vary. Can someone explain it more clearly?
| >2026
>not knowing what's a bad explanation
lmao dumbass
| >>1114487
sure but isn't it obvious? i mean, you can be wrong in many different ways because it's open-ended, truth is not open-ended
| Good explanation makes me feel good. Bad explanation makes me feel bad. Example: why do you love me? *kisses you *
Why do you love me *begins speaking about the origins of human romance *
| >>1114488
Idk though can’t I just say ‘no you can’t vary those, winter wouldn’t happen without specifically perphosphone’ and couldn’t I say ‘why can’t the earth spin the other way for winter?’ I’m not sure this all lines up perfectly, though I think he’s approaching something good
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| I want to discuss David Deutsch books as I read them. So from what I understand, a good explanation should be hard to vary. It means that all the details of the explanation should play a functional role, and the details should be related to the problem. A good explanation should also be testable.
A bad explanation is easy to vary. Details don't play a functional role and changing them would create equally bad explanations. Even if they are testable, it's still useless.