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Eliezer_Yudkowsky comments on Less Wrong Rationality and Mainstream Philosophy - Less Wrong
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Comments (328)
Cool. Let me know when you've finished your comment here and I'll respond.
Done.
Quine's naturalized epistemology: agreed.
Tarski: But I thought you said you were not only influenced by Tarski's mathematics but also his philosophical work on truth?
Chalmers' paper: Yeah, it's mostly useful as an overview. I should have clarified that I meant that Chalmers' paper makes a more organized and compelling case for Good's intelligence explosion than anybody at SIAI has in one place. Obviously, your work (and your debate with Robin) goes far beyond Chalmers' introductory paper, but it's scattered all over the place and takes a lot of reading to track down and understand.
And this would be the main reason to learn something from the mainstream: If it takes way less time than tracking down the same arguments and answers through hundreds of Less Wrong posts and other articles, and does a better job of pointing you to other discussions of the relevant ideas.
But we could have the best of both worlds if SIAI spent some time writing well-referenced survey articles on their work, in the professional style instead of telling people to read hundreds of pages of blog posts (that mostly lack references) in order to figure out what you're talking about.
Bratman: I don't know his influence first hand, either - it's just that I've seen his 1987 book mentioned in several books on AI and cognitive science.
Pearl: Jack beat me to the punch on this.
Talbot: I guess I'll have to read more about what you mean by dissolution to cognitive algorithm. I thought the point was that even if you can solve the problem, there's that lingering wonder about why people believe in free will, and once you explain why it is that humans believe in free will, not even a hint of the problem remains. The difference being that your dissolution of free will to cognitive algorithm didn't (as I recall) cite any of the relevant science, whereas Talbot's (and others') dissolutions to cognitive algorithms do cite the relevant science.
Is there somewhere where you explain the difference between what Talbot, and also Kip Werking, have done versus what you think is so special and important about LW-style philosophy?
As for the others: Yeah, we seem to agree that useful work does sometimes come from philosophy, but that it mostly doesn't, and people are better off reading statistics and AI and cognitive science, like I said. So I'm not sure there's anything left to argue.
The one major thing I'd like clarification on (if you can find the time) is the difference between what experimental philosophers are doing (or what Joshua Greene is doing) and the dissolution-to-algorithm that you consider so central to LW-style philosophy.
I'd like to emphasize, to no one in particular, that the evaluation that seems to be going on here is about whether or not reading these philosophers is useful for building a Friendly recursively self-improving artificial intelligence. While thats a good criteria for whether or not Eliezer should read them, failure to meet this criteria doesn't render the work of the philosopher valueless (really! it doesn't!). The question "is philosophy helpful for researching AI" is not the same as the question "is philosophy helpful for a rational person trying to better understand the world".
Tarski did philosophical work on truth? Apart from his mathematical logic work on truth? Haven't read it if so.
What does Talbot say about a cognitive algorithm generating the appearance of free will? Is it one of the cognitive algorithms referenced in the LW dissolution or a different one? Does Talbot talk about labeling possibilities as reachable? About causal models with separate nodes for self and physics? Can you please take a moment to be specific about this?
Okay, now you're just drawing lines around what you don't like and calling everything in that box philosophy.
Should we just hold a draft? With the first pick the philosophers select... Judea Pearl! What? whats that? The mathematicians have just grabbed Alfred Tarski from right under the noses the of the philosophers!
To philosophers, Tarski's work on truth is considered one of the triumphs of 20th century philosophy. But that sort of thing is typical of analytic and especially naturalistic philosophy (including your own philosophy): the lines between mathematics and science and philosophy are pretty fuzzy.
Talbot's paper isn't about free will (though others in experimental philosophy are); it's about the cognitive mechanisms that produce intuitions in general. But anyway this is the post I'm drafting right now, so I'll be happy to pick up the conversation once I've posted it. I might do a post on experimental philosophy and free will, too.
Yet to Wikipedia, Tarski is a mathematician. Period. Philosophy is not mentioned.
It is true that mathematical logic can be considered as a joint construction by philosophers and mathematicians. Frege, Russell, and Godel are all listed in Wikipedia as both mathematicians and philosophers. So are a couple of modern contributors to logic - Dana Scott and Per Martin-Lof. But just about everyone else who made major contributions to mathematical logic - Peano, Cantor, Hilbert, Zermelo, Skolem, von Neumann, Gentzen, Church, Turing, Komolgorov, Kleene, Robinson, Curry, Cohen, Lawvere, and Girard are listed as mathematicians, not philosophers. To my knowledge, the only pure philosopher who has made a contribution to logic at the level of these people is Kripke, and I'm not sure that should count (because the bulk of his contribution was done before he got to college and picked philosophy as a major. :)
Quine, incidentally, made a minor contribution to mathematical logic with his idea of 'stratified' formulas in his 'New Foundations' version of set theory. Unfortunately, Quine's theory was found to be inconsistent. But a few decades later, a fix was discovered and today some of the most interesting Computer Science work on higher-order logic uses a variant of Quine's idea to avoid Girard's paradox.
Wikipedia is not authoritative (and recognizes this explicitly - hence the need to give citations). Here is a quote from Tarski himself:
That sounds like a good way to describe the LW ideal as well.
This sort of thing is less a fact about the world and more an artifact of the epistemological bias in English Wikipedia's wording and application of its verifiability rules. en:wp's way of thinking started at computer technology - as far as I can tell, the first field in which Wikipedia was the most useful encyclopedia - and went in concentric circles out from there (comp sci, maths, physics, the other sciences); work in the humanities less than a hundred or so years old gets screwed over regularly. This is because the verifiability rules have to more or less compress a degree's worth of training in sifting through human-generated evidence into a few quickly-comprehensible paragraphs, which are then overly misapplied by teenage science geek rulebots who have an "ugh" reaction to fuzzy subjects.
This is admittedly a bit of an overgeneralisation, but this sort of thing is actually a serious problem with Wikipedia's coverage of the humanities. (Which I'm currently researching with the assistance of upset academics in the area in order to make a suitable amount of targeted fuss about.)
tl;dr: that's stronger evidence of how Wikipedia works than of how the world works.
I believe Carnap is also primarily listed as a philosopher in wikipiedia, and he certainly counts as a major contributor to modern logic (although, of course, much of his work relates to mathamatics as well).
Quine's set theory NF has not been shown to be inconsistent. Neither has it been proven consistent, even relative to large cardinals. This is actually a famous open problem (by the standards of set theory...)
However, NFU (New Foundations with Urelements) is consistent relative to ZF.
Quoting Wikipedia
So I was wrong - the fix came only one decade later.