David Deutsch: A new way to explain explanation
Why Hacker News recommends it
HN points to it as a short, tight introduction to Deutsch's idea of hard-to-vary explanations.
What it is
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.
Recommended by 2 HN commenters across 2 different months, 2022 to 2026.
What Hacker News said
Strong rec thingification · 2023-06 · on “Annoying A/B testing mistakes every engineer should know”
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 jelly beans), while hypotheses that are tied strongly to an explanation are not. You can test an explanationless hypothesis, but that doesn't get you very far, at least in understanding. As usual here I'm channeling David Deutsch's language and ideas on this, I think mostly from The Beginning of Infinity, which he delightfully and memorably explains using a different context here: [this video] (the yt link if you're impat
Recommends npalli · 2022-04 · on “Against Bayesianism – David Deutsch”
Great 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 vary theory of the world) are the key to scientific and human progress since the scientific revolution. (17 min at 1x) [this video]
Cites rramadass · 2026-07 · on “The Illusion of Explanatory Depth”
You have to be careful with the "Explanation(Understanding) vs. Prediction" dichotomy. They are related but Explanations should always have precedence since they are fundamental to creating a Theory in the first place that then can make Predictions. David Deutsch actually argues for Understanding/Explanations over Predictions. Here is a nice Reddit thread on this; David Deutsch argues that explanation, not prediction, is the primary goal of science. How widely accepted is this view? - [LINK] David Deutsch: A New Way To Explain Explanation - (TED talk) [this video] and (Transcript of the previous) [LINK] Here he points out that "good explanations" should be "hard-to-vary". What does he mean by thi