Yvain comments on The Blue-Minimizing Robot - Less Wrong

162 Post author: Yvain 04 July 2011 10:26PM

You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.

Comments (159)

You are viewing a single comment's thread. Show more comments above.

Comment author: Yvain 07 July 2011 06:11:50AM 4 points [-]

Well, like I said, all I have to go on is stuff people said on Reddit and one failed replication study I was able to find somewhere by a grad student of the guy who did the original research. The original research is certainly interesting and relevant and does speak to the problems with a very reductionist model.

This actually gets to the same problem I'm having looking up stuff on perceptual control theory, which is that I expect a controversial theory to be something where there are lots of passionate arguments on both sides, but on both PCT and Rat Park, when I've tried to look them up I get a bunch of passionate people arguing that they're great, and then a few scoffs from more mainstream people saying "That stuff? Nah." without explaining themselves. I don't know whether it's because of Evil Set-In-Their-Ways Mainstream refusing to acknowledge the new ideas, or whether they're just so completely missing the point that people think it's not worth their while to respond. It's a serious problem and I wish that "skeptics" would start addressing this kind of thing instead of debunking ghosts for the ten zillionth time.