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Desrtopa comments on Popperian Decision making - Less Wrong
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I wrote a response up, but I deleted it because I think this is getting too confrontational to be useful. I have plenty of standing objections to Critical Rationalism, but I don't think I can pose them without creating an attitude too adversarial to be conducive to changing either of our minds. I hate to be the one to start bringing this in again, but I think perhaps if you want to continue this discussion, you should read the Sequences, at which point you should hopefully have some understanding of how we are convinced that Bayesianism improves people's information processing and decisionmaking from a practical standpoint. I will be similarly open to any explanations of how you feel Critical Rationalism improves these things (let me be very clear that I'm not asking for more examples of people who approved of Popper or things you feel Critical Rationalism can take credit for, show me how people who can only be narrowly interpreted as Popperian outperform people who are not Popperian.) I have standing objections to Popper's critiques of induction, but this is what I actually care about and am amenable to changing my mind on the basis of.
The reason I'm not very interested in carefully reading your Sequences is that I feel they miss the point and aren't useful (that is, useful to philosophy. lots of your math is nice). In my discussions here, I have not found any reason to think otherwise.
Show it how? I can conjecture it. Got a criticism?
Which exposes one of the problems with Popperianism..it leads to the burden of proof being shifted to the wrong place. The burden should be with who proposes a claim, or whoever makes the most extraordinary claim. Popperianism turns it into a burden of disproof on the refuter. All you have to do is "get in first" with your conjecture, and you can sit back and relax. "Why, you have to show Barack Obama is NOT an alien".
In Popperism, there is no burden of proof.
How did you find me here, Peter?
Responses to criticisms are not interesting to me; proponents of any philosophy can respond to criticisms in ways that they are convinced are satisfying, and I'm not impressed that supporters of Critical Rationalism are doing a better job. If you cannot yourself come up with a convincing way to demonstrate that Critical Rationalism results in improved success in ways that supporters of other philosophies cannot, why should I take it seriously?
What would you find convincing? What convinced you of Bayes' or whatever you believe?
Examples of mistakes in processing evidence people make in real life which lead to bad results, and how Bayesian reasoning resolves them, followed by concrete applications such as the review of the Amanda Knox trial.
Have you already looked at the review of the Amanda Knox trial? If you haven't, it might be a useful point for us to examine.
It doesn't help anyone to point out an example of inductive reasoning, say "this is a mistake" because you reject the foundations of inductive reasoning, but not demonstrate how rejecting it leads to better results than accepting it. So far the examples you have given of the supposed benefits of Critical Rationalism have been achievements of people who can only be loosely associated with Critical Rationalism, or arguments in a frame of Critical Rationalism for things that have already been argued for outside a frame of Critical Rationalism.
I'm replying a second time to this remark because thinking about it more it illustrates a major problem you are having. You are using a specific set of epistemological tools and notation when that is one of the things that is in fact in dispute. That's unproductive and is going to get people annoyed.
It is all the more severe because many of these situations are cases where the specific epistemology doesn't even matter. For example, the claim under discussion is the claim that " people who can only be narrowly interpreted as Popperian outperform people who are not Popperian" That's something that could be tested regardless of epistemology. To use a similar example, if someone is arguing for Christianity and they claim that Christians have a longer lifespan on average then I don't need to go into a detailed discussion about epistemology to examine the data. If I read a paper, in whatever branch of science, I could be a Popperian, a Bayesian, completely uncommitted, or something else, and still read the paper and come to essentially the same results.
Trying to discuss claims using exactly the framework in question is at best unproductive, and is in general unhelpful.
Sure I am. But so are you! We can't help but use epistemological tools. I use the ones I regard as actually working. As do you. I'm not sure what you're suggesting I do instead.
If you want me to recognize what I'm doing, I do. If you want me to consider other toolsets, I have. In depth. (Note, btw, that I am here voluntarily choosing to learn more about how Bayesians think. I like to visits various communities. Simultaneously I'm talking to Objectivists (and reading their books) who have a different way of approach epistemology.) The primary reason some people have accused me (and Brian) of not understanding Bayesian views and other views not our own isn't our unfamiliarity but because we disagree and choose to think differently than them and not to accept or go along with various ideas.
When people do stuff like link me to http://yudkowsky.net/rational/bayes it is their mistake to think I haven't read it. I have. They think if I read it I would change my mind; they are just plain empirically wrong; I did read it and did not change my mind. They ought to learn something from their mistake, such as that their literature is less convincing than they think it is.
On the other hand, no one here has noticeably familiar with Popper. And no one has pointed me to any rigorous criticism of Popper by any Bayesian. Nor any rigorous rebuttal to Popper's criticisms of Bayesianism (especially the most important ones, that is the philosophical not mathematical ones).
The situation is that Popper read up on Bayesian stuff, and many other ideas, engaged with and criticized other ideas, formulated his own ideas, rebutted criticisms of his views, and so on. That is all good stuff. Bayesians do it some too. But they haven't done it with Popper; they've chosen to disregard him based on things like his reputation, and misleading summaries of his work. At best some people here have read his first book, which is not the right one to start with if you want to understand what he's about, and gotten a very unrepresentative picture of what Popper is about. This disregarding of Popper without engaging with the bulk of his work is no good.
The same thing can be found, btw, in Objectivist circles. Here's what happened when my friend asked Harry Binswanger (a big shot who knew Rand personally for a long time) about Popper: Binswanger gave Popper quotes attributed to the wrong book and briefly stated a few mythes about Popper. And in one of the quotes he inserted a clarifying word. It was roughly, at the start of the quote: "That doctrine [realism]" when Popper wasn't talking about realism, Binswanger hadn't read (or had misread, but I think hadn't read since he didn't know what book the quotes were from) the context. When confronted with his mistakes he basically ignored them and said "I'm right anyway" except, amazingly, without the "anyway" part. I think you may be happy to jump on the dumb Objectivists. But from my perspective, the reception here hasn't been better. In some ways the Objectivsts were superior. They provided some relevant published material on the matter (it was badly wrong, but at least they had something).
As I was talking about in other comments recently (edit: oops, I actually wrote a different post first but haven't managed to post it yet due to the rate limit. it's a reply to you, so you can find it in your inbox in 10 minutes. i'll post it next), all mistakes matter. It doesn't work to ignore mistakes thinking they aren't relevant and just keeping going and hope they wont' bite you. You know, I've gotten a bunch of flak where people say Popper isn't rigorous enough and Bayesian stuff is more rigorous. But it's not quite like that. Popper thought that certain kinds of formalness used by philosophers were mistakes, said why, and didn't do them (especially in his later works). But for other issues, the Popperian attitude is more rigorous. We don't gloss over small mistakes. We think they all matter! Is that not being more rigorous in a way? Maybe you think the wrong way. But that's a substantive disagreement.
BTW your entire question asking for empirical evidence that a non-empirical philosophy produces better results is itself a product of your epistemological tools. Popperians regard that as something of a bad question. That's why you don't get the direct answer you expect. It's not evasion but disagreement about your premises. Large parts of philosophy are not empirical and can't really be judged empirically. And there's so many issues that make a rigorous answer to what you want impracticable. No philosophy can answer it because there's too many uncontrolled factors. People always have lots of ideas of a variety of types, and imperfect understanding of the philosophy they are associated with.
Tell us what you think your tool does better, in some area where we see a problem with Bayes. (And I do mean Bayes' Theorem as a whole, not a part of it taken out of context.)
Seems like any process that leads to harmful priors can also produce a criticism of your position as you've explained it so far. As I mentioned before, the Consistent Gambler's Fallacy would lead us to criticize any theory that has worked in the past.
Yes. There's no reason to conjecture this other than your own personal preference. I could conjecture that people with red hair perform better and that would have almost as much basis.
(The mere act of asserting a hypothesis is not a reason to take it seriously.)