lukeprog 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: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 21 March 2011 09:59:59AM 26 points [-]

I'll await your next post, but in retrospect you should have started with the big concrete example of mainstream philosophy doing an LW-style dissolution-to-algorithm not already covered on LW, and then told us that the moral was that we shouldn't ignore mainstream philosophy.

I did the whole sequence on QM to make the final point that people shouldn't trust physicists to get elementary Bayesian problems right. I didn't just walk in and tell them that physicists were untrustworthy.

If you want to make a point about medicine, you start by showing people a Bayesian problem that doctors get wrong; you don't start by telling them that doctors are untrustworthy.

If you want me to believe that philosophy isn't a terribly sick field, devoted to arguing instead of facing real-world tests and admiring problems instead of solving them and moving on, whose poison a novice should avoid in favor of eating healthy fields like settled physics (not string theory) or mainstream AI (not AGI), you're probably better off starting with the specific example first. "I disagree with your decision not to cover terminal vs. instrumental in CEV" doesn't cover it, and neither does "Quineans agree the world is made of atoms". Show me this field's power!

Comment author: lukeprog 21 March 2011 09:14:37PM 0 points [-]

By the way, it's not that I disagree with your decision not to cover means vs. ends in CEV. I explained how it would be useful and clarifying. You then agreed that that insight from mainstream philosophy is useful for CEV, but you didn't feel it was necessary to mention in the paper because your CEV paper didn't go into enough detail to make it necessary. I don't have a problem with that.