:) , but ...

Occasional trollish behavior does not brand one as inherently and essentially trollish. IMHO, our Popperian friends are exhibiting sufficiently good behavior in this conversation as to deserve being treated with a modicum of respect.

I'm curious why this has been downvoted. Does it mean people don't believe you? I think this is another illustration of why the voting system sucks. Your protestations of innocence are now hidden and no-one is fronting up with an argument. I know you have been upvoted and I upvoted a bunch of posts myself once because I was annoyed that you were getting systematically downvoted to, I think, rate-limit your posts (which you were annoyed about to) and to hide them (which makes it a pain reading threads). Oh, the sort of silliness the kharma system leads to!

I would be happy to discard the hypothesis should it be falsified. Or even if a more plausible hypothesis were to be brought to my attention. So let me ask. Do you know why your karma jumped sufficiently to make that conjunction fallacy posting? I would probably accept your explanation if you have a plausible one.

Please give up on us. We're obviously not as careful and rational thinker as you are. Utterly hopeless. We're stuck in our realm of imagined cognitive biases. Go find something productive to do. Please go away.

Tversky and Kahneman believe in such ideas as "evolved mental behaviour" and "bounded rationality". These beliefs exist right enough. If you read The Beginning of Infinity by David Deutsch you will see arguments against these sort of things. You're arguing by assertion again and haven't carefully looked at the substance.

I'd be very curious to see where anything Tversky wrote contains the phrase "evolved mental behavior"- as I explained to you T&K have classically been pretty agnostic about where these biases and heuristics are coming from. That other people in the field might think that they are evolved is a side issue. I can't speak as strongly about Kahneman, but I'd be surprised to see any joint paper of the two had where that phrase was used.

But there's a more serious issue here which I pointed out to you earlier and you are still missing: You cannot let philosophy override evidence. When evidence and your philosophy contradict, philosophy must lose. No matter how good my philosophical arguments are, they cannot withstand empirical data. If my philosophy says the Earth is flat, my philosophy is bad, since the evidence is overwhelming that the Earth is not flat. If my philosophy requires a geocentric universes, then my philosophy is bad. If my philosophy requires irreducible mental entities then my philosophy is bad. And if my philosophy requires humans to be perfect reasoners then my philosophy is bad.

As long as you keep insisting that your philosophical desires about what humans should be override the evidence of what humans are you will not be doing a good job understanding humans or the rest of the universe.

And to be blunt, as long as you keep making this sort of claim, people here are going to not take you seriously. So please go elsewhere. We don't have much to say to each other.

Tversky and Kahneman believe in such ideas as "evolved mental behaviour" and "bounded rationality". These beliefs exist right enough. If you read The Beginning of Infinity by David Deutsch you will see arguments against these sort of things.

That sounds pretty awful. Bounded rationality is a standard concept. Surely if you argue against it, you are confused, or don't understand it properly. I'm not sure what an "evolved mental behaviour" is, but that sounds pretty uncontroversial too. Looking at Deutsch on video about 28:00 in he is using the term "bounded rationality" to refer to something different - so this seems like a simple confusion based on different definitions of terms.

First, in response to your first paragraph, my complaint about 'tone-deafness' was not intended as a complaint about style. It was a complaint about your failure to do well at the listening half of conversation. A failure to tailor your arguments to the responses you receive. A failure to understand the counterarguments. My complaint may be wrong and unjustified, but it is definitely not a complaint about style.

But, speaking of style, you suggest:

We think rational people ought to be able to look beyond [issues of style]. Right?

Well, I can see the attractiveness of that slogan, but we tend to think of it a bit differently here. Here, we think that rational people ought to be able to fix any rough edges in their 'style' that prevent them from communicating their ideas successfully. We don't believe that it makes sense to place the entire onus of adjustment on the listener. And we especially don't believe that only one side has the onus of listening.

Perhaps it is you that has been deaf?

Perhaps. But that's enough about me. Lets talk about you. :) As you may have noticed, responding to an attack with a counterattack usually doesn't achieve very much here.

You seem to care about kharma. If one thinks that kharma is an authoritarian mistake, as I do, then how much respect to you think I should have?

I guess that would depend on how interested you are in having me listen to your ideas.

I do want to hear some good arguments against Popper. Unfortunately most arguments, including those here, are to do with the myths - such as Popper is falsificationism, and come from people that don't know Popper well or got their information from second-hand sources.

You are probably right. And that presents you with a problem. How do you induce people to come to know Popper well? How do you tempt them to get their information from some non-second-hand source?

<snark> Now I'm sure you guys have given long and careful thought to this problem and have developed a plan. But if you should discover that things are not going well, I have some ideas that might help.</snark> Which is simply that you might consider producing some discussion postings consisting mostly of long quotes from Popper and his most prominent disciples, with only short glosses from yourselves.

Tversky and Kahneman believe in such ideas as "evolved mental behaviour" and "bounded rationality". These beliefs exist right enough. If you read The Beginning of Infinity by David Deutsch you will see arguments against these sort of things.

Hmmm. There is something here I just don't understand. Why all this hostility to what seems to me to be the fairly uncontroversial realization that people are often less good at reasoning than we would like them to be. It is almost as if you had religious or political objections to some evil doctrine. Do you think it would be possible to enlighten me as to why it seems to you that the stakes are so high with this issue?

As for reading Deutsch, I intend to. I don't think I have ever had a book recommended to me so many times before it is even published in this country.

just to illustrate again, here is a quote from where recursive justification hits bottom

Everything, without exception, needs justification.

I'm sorry. Could you clarify exactly what it is you think that quote illustrates?

I intend to respond more completely to your posting, but that clarification would be helpful.

has anybody admitted that there are these mistakes?

Some did. At the same time that others didn't.

The ones admitting it said all epistemologies have those flaws, and it's impossible to do anything about it. When told that one already exists they just dismissed that as impossible instead of being interested in researching whether it succeeds. Or sometimes they took an attitude similar to EY: it's a flaw and maybe we'll fix it some day but we don't know how to yet and the attempts in progress don't look promising. (Why doesn't the Popperian attempt in particular look promising? Why hasn't it already succeeded? No comment given.)

And they dismissed it without even knowing of any scholarly work by anyone on their side which makes their point for them. As far as they know, no one from their side ever refuted Popper in depth, having carefully read his books. And they are OK with that.

@lip service -- anyone who cares to can find criticisms of Popper on my blog on a variety of subjects. This is just accusing sources of ideas of bias as a way to dismiss them, without even doing basic research about whether these claims are true (let alone explaining why source should be used to determine quality of substance).