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SilasBarta comments on David Deutsch: A new way to explain explanation - Less Wrong
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Comments (28)
I agree that there's nothing new to people who have been on Overcoming Bias and Less Wrong for a few years (hence the cautionary statement at the start of the post) but I do think it's important that we don't forget that there are new people arriving all the time.
Not everyone would consider "the conjunction fallacy and how each detail makes your explanation less plausible" a standard point. We shouldn't make this site inaccessible to those people. Credit where it's due - Deutsch does a nice job of presenting this in a way that most people can understand.
I don't think his way of explaining it is any easier for a newcomer. It doesn't make sense unless and until you already have a firm grasp of the basis for Occam's razor. And if you know how to justify Occam's razor, you already understand why adding details penalizes the explanation's probability.
Furthermore, his idea can't be summarized as "good explanations are hard to vary". It's more like, "good explanations are hard to vary while preserving their predictions".
I do appreciate that you added a summary.
I don't think he is saying, "good explanations are hard to vary while preserving their predictions".
As described above the statement "Everyone just acts in his own interest" very easily preserves its predictive power in a multitude of situations. Indeed, the problem with it is that the statement preserves its predictive power in too many situations! The explanation is consistent with just about whatever happens, so one cannot design a test that makes one believe that the statement is certainly false. So it is too easy to vary and hence a bad explanation.
I don't believe this should be asserted with the level of certainty you use. His explanation makes good intuitive sense to me, and I don't see why that must be overwhelmingly determined by preexisting understanding.
Then why didn't you realize that the bit about "while preserving their predictions" was an essential part of Deutsch's explanation and therefore include it in your summary of his idea?
If it was hard to see why you should have included that part, then it seems to me that Deutsch's approach doesn't clarify matters.
If I merely refer to his explanation, I need not say more. There is no point in arguing that my few-words summary is significantly less explanatory than the whole talk.
What about the other elements of the iceberg not explicitly mentioned, either in my summary or the talk itself? As an idea of rational methodology, Deutsch's message is already implicit in any person's mind, one only has to fill the gaps, if there is no ambiguity as to which idea was being discussed. Of course, it's impossible to expect this kind of ingenuity of the audience, but then the question of which details are essential and which are not is moot.
Of course you can't recap the whole talk, but you can describe the critical part. Very few good ideas actually need a full fifteen minutes to express. Look at what my post did for the talk: explained Deutsch's phrasing of Occam's razor. That's the critical part people were wondering about, and the explanation I gave sufficed to tell those people whether the talk would be worth their time.
It seems summarizing is a lost art.
I disagree that what you singled out here is critical.
The title of this top-level post is: "David Deutsch: A new way to explain explanation".
That makes Deutsch's explanation of explanation critical.
Which is why I slogged through the video to get to it and save everyone else the time.
I think that 'whilst preserving the predictions' was assumed. Otherwise what's the constraint that's making things hard?
Perhaps it's clearer when written more explicitly though.
It is assumed; it's just not clear to someone who's told that that's Deutsch's idea.
And I certainly wasn't alone in not realizing what "hard to vary" means here; Vladimir_Nesov already had a +5 comment with the term that attempted to summarize the lecture, but my comment with the fuller explanation still got modded up to 4 and some thanks. This probably wouldn't have happened if Nesov's summary, using just "hard to vary", were already clear enough.
I don't agree with your summary.
By your own admission you haven't watched the entire talk. That might make it difficult to provide a full review.
By reducing what Deutsch said to the conjunction fallacy you missed the different emphasis that both Vladimir and I found interesting. If the people that voted up your comment didn't watch the talk (which seems plausible because of the negative nature of the review) then they wouldn't appreciate the difference between what Deutsch says and what you say. Therefore they aren't agreeing with your summary, they're simply appreciating your effort.
I summarized what was important to LW readers. I skipped through the parts of the video that most LWers would have found uninteresting (people used to posit theories with unnecessary details called "myths"? who knew?) so I could get to Deutsch's new explanation of explanation which amounts to "unnecessary details are bad" (which are equivalent to "easy-to-vary" aspects).
Yes, you may have found it interesting. It still would have been nice to know the basic form of Deutsch's point before blowing ~15 minutes listening to boring stuff just to get to something that can be restated in a few sentences.
(Modding my appreciated summary down sure helps your argument though.)
I welcome anyone else to blow 20 minutes of their life to confirm my summary.
I hadn't realised that you were taking the karma ratings as indicative of agreement. I didn't vote it down before because I have tended only to use my downvote on stupid or thoughtless comments - not valid comments that disagree with what I think.
Once it became clear that you thought that the votes weren't just appreciating effort but were signalling agreement it would have been dishonest not to vote it down.
I don't think voting down indicates disagreement, nor do I believe people should use mere disagreement as a reason to vote down. My point was that you can artificially increase the merit of your point by voting down my summary so as to make it look less appreciated.