Some answers end inquiry without explaining anything, because they are shaped like explanations and carry no predictions.
Yudkowsky's examples are words that arrive at the end of a causal chain and stop it: God, democracy, the free market, human nature. The test is not whether the word is true but whether anything follows from it. A stopsign feels like a floor and functions as a door that nobody opens.
In practice
- An incident explained by human error has been labelled rather than investigated.
- A decision justified by the culture here has been closed to the only question that would have improved it.
- Standing
- Compare the maxim that naming is not explaining, and the entry on Mill's Handle, which names the same risk from the other direction.
- Subject
- Science & Epistemology
- Essay
- How knowledge grows, and how inquiry fools itself