“This is because planetary physics can be formalized relatively easily” - they can now, and could when they were, but not before. One can argue that we thought many “complex” and very “human” abilities could not be algroithmically emulated in the past, and recent advances in AI (with neural nets and all that) have proven otherwise. If a program can do/predict something, there is a set of mechanical rules that explain it. The set might not be as elegant as Newton’s laws of motion, but it is still a set of equations nonetheless. The idea behind Villam’s comment (I think) is that in the future someone might say, the same way you just did, that “We can formalize how happy people generally are in a given society because that’s relatively easy, but what about something truly complex like what an individual might imagine if we read him a specific story?”.
In other words, I don’t see the essential differentiation between biology and sociology questions and physics questions, that you try to point to. In the post itself you also talk about moral preference, and I tend to agree with you that some people just have very individually strongly valued axioms that might contradict themselves or others, but it doesn’t in itself mean that questions about rationality differ from questions about, say, molecular biology, in the sense that they can be hypothetically answered to a satisfactory level of accuracy.
“This is because planetary physics can be formalized relatively easily” - they can now, and could when they were, but not before. One can argue that we thought many “complex” and very “human” abilities could not be algroithmically emulated in the past, and recent advances in AI (with neural nets and all that) have proven otherwise. If a program can do/predict something, there is a set of mechanical rules that explain it. The set might not be as elegant as Newton’s laws of motion, but it is still a set of equations nonetheless. The idea behind Villam’s comment (I think) is that in the future someone might say, the same way you just did, that “We can formalize how happy people generally are in a given society because that’s relatively easy, but what about something truly complex like what an individual might imagine if we read him a specific story?”.
In other words, I don’t see the essential differentiation between biology and sociology questions and physics questions, that you try to point to. In the post itself you also talk about moral preference, and I tend to agree with you that some people just have very individually strongly valued axioms that might contradict themselves or others, but it doesn’t in itself mean that questions about rationality differ from questions about, say, molecular biology, in the sense that they can be hypothetically answered to a satisfactory level of accuracy.