Thou shalt have no other gods before the ANSI C standard 1515

Bill Leary

I'm not talking about how you arrived at the solution. I don't care (for the purposes of this discussion) how you discovered the solution.

What I care about is how you know that your solution is correct. Can you evaluate whether your solution is a good one? Can you explain why it is correct, why it is the right solution? Can you back up your answer with reasoning or independently verifiable evidence?

If you can, that's pretty much all we need for science. If you can't, then you are not doing science.

JMFBAH's most recent post failed to make a clear distinction between how you come up with the solution vs. how you know whether the solution is a good one, but her earlier one seemed to be claiming that the bit gods she knows come up with a solution without being able to justify whether it is a good one. If so, well, those bit gods are irrelevant to science.

But in my experience, the gurus I've known have always been able to explain why their solution is the right one, even if they weren't able to explain how they arrived at their solution.