[lmm]

You'd observe that the players treat it as a contest, and care about the results. It's like if you were trying to understand, say, a water pump, that you couldn't understand see internals of - speculating blindly about what kind of gears and motors might be inside would be completely futile, the path to understanding it would be to first understand what it's being used for, and then you might be able to start to reason about how.

[jjk166]

No, you would observe blobs of water and carbon jiggling and perhaps making some noises. You'd have to develop quite a sophisticated model of human behavior to infer that they are treating it as a contest and care about the results. Even then, if they've previously seen humans at a casino, they might reasonably deduce that chess is no more a game of skill than craps is.

[lmm]

> You'd have to develop quite a sophisticated model of human behavior to infer that they are treating it as a contest and care about the results.

Sure. But again, trying to understand chess without having that understanding would be putting the cart before the horse.

> Even then, if they've previously seen humans at a casino, they might reasonably deduce that chess is no more a game of skill than craps is.

That would be a reasonable starting assumption, but they'd eventually notice contradictions: the fact that some players consistently had advantages over others, more experienced players generally beat less experienced players, commentary and analysis of board positions is considered worthwhile...

[jjk166]

You are deliberately misinterpreting the analogy to the point of absurdity. The aliens are only observing a black box system that spits out "white wins" or "black wins," they are trying to determine if there's any reason to develop the means of probing the contents of the black box. Regardless of whether you start by modelling the players or the board, you are still assuming the winner is determined by some complicated model with numerous hidden variables which you would have no reason to believe unless you start with the assumption that this is not a random number generator - an assumption for which you have no evidence. The author's thesis is that assuming a complex explanation for a black box's behavior is reasonable because that's the only way that leads to experiments to probe the contents of the box.

[lmm]

> The aliens are only observing a black box system that spits out "white wins" or "black wins," they are trying to determine if there's any reason to develop the means of probing the contents of the black box. Regardless of whether you start by modelling the players or the board, you are still assuming the winner is determined by some complicated model with numerous hidden variables which you would have no reason to believe unless you start with the assumption that this is not a random number generator - an assumption for which you have no evidence.

If you actually did that, you'd start creating complicated hidden variable theories to explain every random coin flip you could see, despite the overwhelming majority of them actually being random coin flips.

> The author's thesis is that assuming a complex explanation for a black box's behavior is reasonable because that's the only way that leads to experiments to probe the contents of the box.

The thesis only holds if it's actually common to have a complex hidden detail inside a black box that is nevertheless somehow completely impossible to infer from the outside. And what I'm saying is that that's actually absurd; in cases where there are meaningful details to be found out, it will be apparent from the outside that there is detail in there, at least the overwhelming majority of the time.

[jjk166]

Black box systems are incredibly common. By definition, there isn't anything readily apparent from the outside. You haven't shown that to be absurd, you only showed that if you can see enough of the interior of a black box, it is no longer a black box.

You complain that the author's logic will lead to creating complicated hidden variable theories but that's exactly what the author is advocating. While there will always be some ever more convoluted model to explain results, any given model is testable, whereas assuming there is nothing to model is not testable.

[lmm]

> Black box systems are incredibly common. By definition, there isn't anything readily apparent from the outside.

Citation needed. The author is trying to claim that this kind of extremely opaque black box system is common (at least, common enough that we should take the possibility seriously), but their only argument is a made-up example that falls apart under the slightest scrutiny.

> While there will always be some ever more convoluted model to explain results, any given model is testable, whereas assuming there is nothing to model is not testable.

The claim that Russell's Teapot exists in any given orbit is testable, whereas assuming Russell's Teapot doesn't exist anywhere is not testable.