Perplexed comments on Rationality Quotes: November 2010 - Less Wrong

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Comment author: Perplexed 03 November 2010 02:54:38AM *  14 points [-]

David Hume was right to predict that superstition would survive for hundreds of years after his death, but how could he have anticipated that his own work would inspire Kant to invent a whole new package of superstitions? Or that the incoherent system of Marx would move vast populations to engineer their own ruin? Or that the infantile rantings of the author of Mein Kampf would be capable of bringing the whole world to war?

Perhaps we will one day succeed in immunizing our societies against such bouts of collective idiocy by establishing a social contract in which each child is systematically instructed in Humean skepticism. Such a new Emile would learn about the psychological weaknesses to which Homo sapiens is prey, and so would understand the wisdom of treating all authorities - political leaders and social role-models, academics and teachers, philosophers and prophets, poets and pop stars - as so many potential rogues and knoves, each out to exploit the universal human hunger for social status. He would therefore appreciate the necessity of doing all of his own thinking for himself. He would understand why and when to trust his neighbors. Above all, he would waste no time yearning for utopias that are incompatible with human nature.

-- Ken Binmore, in Natural Justice, p56

Comment author: MichaelVassar 03 November 2010 11:23:13PM 7 points [-]

Science works by scientists not doing all their thinking for themselves. That's also how it fails. Getting the balance right may be hard, but no-one has really tried very hard, so it may not be. Trying to do that is largely what I see SIAI as being about.

Comment author: Perplexed 04 November 2010 12:10:43AM 4 points [-]

Hmmm. A mathematician learning a new field thinks for himself, up to a point. Oh, he gets his ideas, theorems, and even proofs from the book, but he is supposed to verify the thinking for himself.

The same kind of thing applies to scientists. They get ideas, formulas, and even empirical data from other scientists, but they are supposed to verify the inferences and even some of the derivations themselves. At least in their own field. A neuroscientist using FMRI doesn't need to know the fine points of the portions of QED dealing with particle spins in a varying magnetic field. Nor the computer science involved in the image processing. But he does appreciate that these tools, whether he understands them in detail himself or not, are not based on tradition or authority, but instead draw their legitimacy from the work of his colleagues in those fields who definitely do think for themselves.

If the balance you seek to strike is the balance that lets you distinguish path-breaking innovation from crackpottery, I would suggest this: It is ok to try doing something that the experts think is impossible if you really understand why they are so pessimistic and you think you might understand why they are wrong.

Comment author: simplyeric 04 November 2010 05:35:09PM 0 points [-]

I'm not sure that's true. The issue isn't what a person "thinks"...it's what a person ultimately concludes. A scientist must think for itself in order to hypothesize, no? I think science goes wrong when scientists conclude for themselves, in the face of the actul facts on the matter.
I think what is being referenced above is how to separate information from who said it, and how.

Comment author: PhilGoetz 03 November 2010 03:31:14AM 1 point [-]

I like the sentiment, but - instructed in Humean skepticism? Isn't that going overboard in the opposite direction?

Comment author: Perplexed 03 November 2010 04:37:49AM *  4 points [-]

Binmore is on something of a "Hume is God, Kant is Satan" kick in this book. Another quote I like deals with Binmore's efforts to comprehend the "categorical imperative":

It eventually dawned on me that I was reading the work of an emperor who was clothed in nothing more than the obscurity of his prose.

I share much of Binmore's enthusiasm for Hume. I don't think that rationalists have much reason to dislike Hume's skepticism. Hume was a practical man, and his famous argument against induction is far from a counsel of epistemological despair. As for instructing the young to be skeptical of gods - well it may violate the US Constitution, but then so does gun control. ;)

Nonetheless, I suspect that many people here would not care much for this particular quote in its full context - starting a couple paragraphs before my quote and continuing a paragraph further.

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