Vladimir_Nesov comments on Less Wrong Rationality and Mainstream Philosophy - Less Wrong

106 Post author: lukeprog 20 March 2011 08:28PM

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Comment author: lukeprog 21 March 2011 02:36:27AM 4 points [-]

It's true that Quine lacked the insights of contemporary probability theory and AI, but remember that Quine's most significant work was done before 1970. Quine was also a behaviorist. He was wrong about many things.

My point was that both Quine and Yudkowsky think that recursive justification bottoms out in using the lens that sees its own flaws to figure out how humans gain knowledge, and correcting mistakes that come in. That's naturalized epistemology right there. Epistemology as cognitive science. Of course, naturalized epistemology has made a lot of progress since then thanks to the work of Kahneman and Tversky and Pearl and so on - the people that Yudkowsky learned from.

Comment author: Will_Sawin 21 March 2011 11:17:25AM 4 points [-]

Bayesian inference is not a big step up from Laplace, and the idea of an optimal model that humans should try to approximate is a common philosophical position.