= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
Risto_Saarelma comments on Open Thread, April 2011 - Less Wrong
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
= 783df68a0f980790206b9ea87794c5b6)
Loading…= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
Powered by Reddit
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d)
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (109)
There's a fresh Metafilter thread on John Baez's interview of Yudkowsky. It also mentions HP:MoR.
Noticed this comment:
So people actually do start thinking of the Enlightenment era school of philosophy, like some earlier commenters feared. I also remembered a couple of philosophy blog posts from a few years ago, The Remnants of Rationalism and A Lesson Forgotten, which seem to work from the assumption that 'rationalism' will be understood to mean an abandoned school of philosophy.
Redefining established terms is a crank indicator, so stuff like this might be worth paying attention to.
I think Eliezer can't be reasonably accused of trying to redefine "rationality" and the problem is on the part of the Metafilter commenter. It seems easy enough to fix though. Just point them to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rationality or http://books.google.com/books?id=PBftMFyTCR0C&lpg=PA3&dq=rationality&pg=PA3#v=onepage&q&f=false
Good call. There being an Oxford Handbook of Rationality with a chapter on Bayesianism seems to show that the term is acquiring new connotations on a bit wider scope than just on LW.
Tangentially, looking through this, I note that it appears to address the circularity of basing utility on probability and probability on utility. It claims there's a set of axioms that gets you both at once, and it's due to Leonard Savage, 1954. How has this gone unmentioned here? I'm going to have to look up the details of this.
We need a decent "Bayesian epistemology" article on LW. The SEP one may suck. And EY's "Intuitive Explanation" is, IME, nothing of the sort.
If the Metafilter commenter is saying that the book is mistitled because rationalism is the opposite of empiricism, his or her comment doesn't make sense considering that the book's title uses "rationality", not "rationalism". (Compare Google hits for rationality versus rationalism.)