Every few months, I post a summary of my beliefs to my blog. This has several advantages:
It helps to clarify where I'm "coming from" in general.
It clears up reader confusion arising from the fact that my beliefs change.
It's really fun to look back on past posts and assess how my beliefs have changed, and why.
It makes my positions easier to criticize, because they are clearly stated and organized into one place.
It's an opportunity for people to very quickly "get to know me."
To those who are willing: I invite you to post your own web of beliefs. I offer my own, below, as an example (previously posted here). Because my world is philosophy, I frame my web of beliefs in those terms, but others need not do the same:
My Web of Beliefs (Feb. 2011)
Philosophy
Philosophy is not a matter of opinion. As in science, some positions are much better supported by reasons than others are. I do philosophy as a form of inquiry, continuous with science.
But I don’t have patience for the pace of mainstream philosophy. Philosophical questions need answers, and quickly.
Scientists know how to move on when a problem is solved, but philosophers generally don’t. Scientists don’t still debate the fact of evolution or the germ theory of disease just because alternatives are (1) logically possible, (2) appeal to many people’s intuitions, (3) are “supported” by convoluted metaphysical arguments, or (4) fit our use of language better. But philosophers still argue about Cartesian dualism and theism and contra-causal free will as if these weren’t settled questions.
We encounter reality and form beliefs about it by way of our brains. So the study of how our brains do that is central to epistemology. (Quine would be pleased.) In apparent ignorance of cognitive science and experimental psychology, most philosophers make heavy use of intuition. Many others have failed to heed the lessons of history about how badly traditional philosophical methods fare compared to scientific methods. I have little patience for this kind of philosophy, and see myself as practicing a kind of ruthlesslyreductionisticnaturalistic philosophy.
I do not care whether certain beliefs qualify as “knowledge” or as being “rational” according to varying definitions of those terms. Instead, I try to think quantitatively about beliefs. How strongly should I believe P? How should I adjust my probability for P in the face of new evidence X? There is a single, exactly correct answer to each such question, and it is provided by Bayes’ Theorem. We may never know the correct answer, but we can plug estimated numbers into the equation and update our beliefs accordingly. This may seem too subjective, but remember that you are always giving subjective, uncertain probabilities. Whenever you use words like “likely” and “probable”, you are doing math. So stop pretending you aren’t doing math, and do the math correctly, according to the proven theorem of how probable P given X is – even if we are always burdened by uncertainty.1
However, it is useful to develop an account of language that captures most of our discourse systematically – specifically for use in formal argument and artificial intelligence. To this end, I think something like the Devitt / Sterelny account may be the most useful.
A huge percentage of Anglophone philosophy is still done in service of conceptual analysis, which I see as a mostly misguided attempt to build a Super Dictionary full of definitions for common terms that are (1) self-consistent, (2) fit the facts if they are meant to, and (3) agree with our use of and intuitions about each term. But I don’t think we should protect our naive use of words too much – rather, we should use our words to carve reality at its joints, because that allows us to communicate more effectively. And effective communication is the point of language, no? If your argument doesn’t help us solve problems when you play Taboo with your key terms and replace them with their substantive meaning, then what is the point of the argument if not to build a Super Dictionary?
A Super Dictionary would be nice, but humanity has more urgent and important problems that require a great many philosophical problems to be solved. Conceptual analysis is something of a lost purpose.
Normativity
The only source of normativity I know how to justify is the hypothetical imperative: “If you desire that P, then you ought to do Y in order to realize P.” This reduces (roughly) to the prediction: “If you do Y, you are likely toobjectively satisfy your desire that P.”2
For me, then, the normativity of epistemology is: “If you want to have more true beliefs and fewer false beliefs, engage in belief-forming practices X, Y, and Z.”
The normativity of logic is: “If you want to be speaking the same language as everyone else, don’t say things like ‘The ball is all green and all blue at the same time in the same way.’”
Ethics, if there is anything worth calling by that name (not that it matters much; see the language section), must also be a system of hypothetical imperatives of some kind. Alonzo Fyfe and I are explaining our version of this here.
I'll post this here and put a copy on my desktop so I remember to check it in a few months. My beliefs tend to change very often and very quickly.
Beliefs that I think are most likely to change:
Existence is very tied up with relative causal significance. Classical subjective anticipation makes little sense. Quantum immortality should be replaced with causal immortality.
Reflective consistency is slippery due to impermanence of agency and may be significantly less compelling than I had previously thought.
Something like human 'morality' (possibly more relevant to actions pre-Singularity than Eliezer's conception of 'good' as humanity-CEV) might be important for reasons having to do with acausal control and, to a lesser extent, smarter-than-human intelligences in the multiverse looking at humanity and other alien civilizations as evidence of what patterns of action could be recognized as morally justified.
Building a seed AI that doesn't converge on a design something like the one outlined in Creating Friendly AI may be impossible due to convergent decision theoretic reflective self re-engineering (and the grounding problem). Of course, for all purposes this intuition doesn't matter, as we still have to prove something like Friendliness.
Solving Friendliness (minus the AGI part (which would be rather integrated so this is kind of vague)) is somewhat easier than cleanly engineered seed AI, independent of the previous bullet point.
Death the way it is normally conceptualized is a confusion. The Buddhist conception of rebirth is more accurate. (And it doesn't mean the transparently stupid thing that most Westerners imagine.)
Most of Less Wrong's intuitions about how the world works are based on an advanced form of naive realism that just doesn't work. "It all adds up to normality" is either tautologous or just plain wrong. What you thought of as normality normally isn't.
Ensemble universe theories are almost certainly correct.
Suicide with the intent of ending subjective experience is downright impossible. (The idea of a 'self' that is suffering is also a confusion, but anyway...) The only form of liberation from suffering is Enlightenment in the Buddhist sense.
I am the main character to the extent that 'I' 'am'. At the very least I should act as if I am for instrumentally rational reasons.
People that are good at 'doing things' will never have the epistemic rationality necessary to build FAI or seed AI, due to limits of human psychology. Whoever does build AI will probably have some form of schizoid personality disorder or, ironically somewhat oppositely, autistic spectrum disorder.
My intuition is totally awesome and can be used reliably to see important themes in scientific, philosophical, and spiritual fields.
I'd be interested to hear about this one in more detail. There are a lot of possible interpretations of it, but most of them seem egoist in a way that doesn't seem to mesh well with the spirit of your other comments.
0Kevin
Causal immortality seems more and more true to me over time (I would be surprised if any of the major SIAI donors, including older ones, die before the Singularity) but could definitely use some explanation. Though I'm not sure of the consequences of encouraging people to maximize their causal significance. Almost definitely not good.
Every few months, I post a summary of my beliefs to my blog. This has several advantages:
To those who are willing: I invite you to post your own web of beliefs. I offer my own, below, as an example (previously posted here). Because my world is philosophy, I frame my web of beliefs in those terms, but others need not do the same:
My Web of Beliefs (Feb. 2011)
Philosophy
Philosophy is not a matter of opinion. As in science, some positions are much better supported by reasons than others are. I do philosophy as a form of inquiry, continuous with science.
But I don’t have patience for the pace of mainstream philosophy. Philosophical questions need answers, and quickly.
Scientists know how to move on when a problem is solved, but philosophers generally don’t. Scientists don’t still debate the fact of evolution or the germ theory of disease just because alternatives are (1) logically possible, (2) appeal to many people’s intuitions, (3) are “supported” by convoluted metaphysical arguments, or (4) fit our use of language better. But philosophers still argue about Cartesian dualism and theism and contra-causal free will as if these weren’t settled questions.
How many times must the universe beat us over the head with evidence before we will listen? Relinquish your dogmas; be as light as a feather in the winds of evidence.
Epistemology
My epistemology is one part cognitive science, one part probability theory.
We encounter reality and form beliefs about it by way of our brains. So the study of how our brains do that is central to epistemology. (Quine would be pleased.) In apparent ignorance of cognitive science and experimental psychology, most philosophers make heavy use of intuition. Many others have failed to heed the lessons of history about how badly traditional philosophical methods fare compared to scientific methods. I have little patience for this kind of philosophy, and see myself as practicing a kind of ruthlessly reductionistic naturalistic philosophy.
I do not care whether certain beliefs qualify as “knowledge” or as being “rational” according to varying definitions of those terms. Instead, I try to think quantitatively about beliefs. How strongly should I believe P? How should I adjust my probability for P in the face of new evidence X? There is a single, exactly correct answer to each such question, and it is provided by Bayes’ Theorem. We may never know the correct answer, but we can plug estimated numbers into the equation and update our beliefs accordingly. This may seem too subjective, but remember that you are always giving subjective, uncertain probabilities. Whenever you use words like “likely” and “probable”, you are doing math. So stop pretending you aren’t doing math, and do the math correctly, according to the proven theorem of how probable P given X is – even if we are always burdened by uncertainty.1
Language
Though I was recently sympathetic to the Austin / Searle / Grice / Avramides family of approaches to language, I now see that no simple theory of meaning can capture every use (and hypothetical use) of human languages. Besides, categorizing every way in which humans use speech and writing to have an effect on themselves and others is a job for scientists, not armchair philosophers.
However, it is useful to develop an account of language that captures most of our discourse systematically – specifically for use in formal argument and artificial intelligence. To this end, I think something like the Devitt / Sterelny account may be the most useful.
A huge percentage of Anglophone philosophy is still done in service of conceptual analysis, which I see as a mostly misguided attempt to build a Super Dictionary full of definitions for common terms that are (1) self-consistent, (2) fit the facts if they are meant to, and (3) agree with our use of and intuitions about each term. But I don’t think we should protect our naive use of words too much – rather, we should use our words to carve reality at its joints, because that allows us to communicate more effectively. And effective communication is the point of language, no? If your argument doesn’t help us solve problems when you play Taboo with your key terms and replace them with their substantive meaning, then what is the point of the argument if not to build a Super Dictionary?
A Super Dictionary would be nice, but humanity has more urgent and important problems that require a great many philosophical problems to be solved. Conceptual analysis is something of a lost purpose.
Normativity
The only source of normativity I know how to justify is the hypothetical imperative: “If you desire that P, then you ought to do Y in order to realize P.” This reduces (roughly) to the prediction: “If you do Y, you are likely to objectively satisfy your desire that P.”2
For me, then, the normativity of epistemology is: “If you want to have more true beliefs and fewer false beliefs, engage in belief-forming practices X, Y, and Z.”
The normativity of logic is: “If you want to be speaking the same language as everyone else, don’t say things like ‘The ball is all green and all blue at the same time in the same way.’”
Ethics, if there is anything worth calling by that name (not that it matters much; see the language section), must also be a system of hypothetical imperatives of some kind. Alonzo Fyfe and I are explaining our version of this here.
Focus
Recently, the focus of my research efforts has turned to the normative (not technical) problems of how to design the motivational system of a self-improving superintelligent machine. My work on this will eventually be gathered here. A bibliography on the subject is here.