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Khoth comments on Popperian Decision making - Less Wrong
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Comments (100)
My criticism is not generic. It would not work on an idea which consisted of cute cat pictures. Therefore, your criticism of my criticism does not apply.
I can continue providing specious counter-counter-...counter-criticisms until the cows come home. I don't see how your scheme lets sensible ideas get in edgeways against that sort of thing.
Anyhow, criticism of criticisms wasn't in your original method.
If you understand they are specious, then you have a criticism of it.
Criticisms are themselves ideas/conjectures and should themselves be criticized. And I'm not saying this ad hoc, I had this idea before posting here.
I understand they are specious, but I'm not using your epistemology to determine that. What basis do you have for saying that they are specious?
It doesn't engage with the substance of my idea. It does not explain what it regards as a flaw in the idea.
Unless you meant the tl;dr as your generic criticism and the flaw you are trying to explain is that all good idea should be short and simple. Do you want me to criticize that? :-)
What I'm trying to get at is: By your system, the idea to be accepted is the one without an uncountered criticism. What matters isn't any external standard of whether the criticism is good or bad, just whether it has been countered. But any criticism, good or bad, can be countered by a (probably bad) criticism, so your system doesn't offer a way to distinguish between good criticism and bad criticism.
You have to conjecture standards of criticism (or start with cultural ones). Then improve them by criticism, and perhaps by conjecturing new standards.
If you want to discuss some specific idea, say gardening, you can't discuss only gardening in a very isolated way. You'll need to at least implicitly refer to a lot of background knowledge, including standards of criticism.
One way this differs from foundations is if you think a standard of criticism reaches the wrong conclusion about gardening, you can argue from your knowledge of gardening backwards (as some would see it) to criticize the standard of criticism for getting a wrong answer.
How can you expect that criticizing your standards of criticism will be productive if you don't have a good standard of criticism in the first place?
Many starting points work fine.
In theory, could you get stuck? I don't have a proof either way.
I don't mind too much. Humans already have standards of criticism which don't get stuck. We have made scientific progress. Our standards we already have allow self-modifiaction and thereby unbounded progress. So it doesn't matter what would have happened if we had started with a bad standard once a upon a time, we're past that (it does matter if we want to create an AI).
You would definitely get stuck. The problem Khoth pointed out is that your method can't distinguish between good criticism and bad criticism. Thus, you could criticize any standard that you come up with, but you'd have know way of knowing which criticisms are legitimate, so you wouldn't know which standards are better than others.
I agree that in practice we don't get stuck, but that's because we don't use the method or the assumptions you are defending.
I meant stuck in the sense of couldn't get out of. Not in the sense of could optionally remain stuck.
What's the argument for that?
We have knowledge about standards of criticism. We use it. Objections about starting points aren't very relevant because Popperians never said they were justified by their starting points. What's wrong with this?