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Will_Newsome comments on Rationality quotes January 2012 - Less Wrong
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Because he didn't cite the quote? 'Cuz the quote is obviously true the vast majority of the time. Maybe he should've put quotes around "answers", but as sane readers we should do so in his stead.
Big questions do sometimes have no answer. The trouble comes because although this isn't always true, some people would like to pretend that it is so that they can ignore all challenges to their pet idea. "Does the Sun revolve around the Earth" is a big question where the answer was there to be found, and yet it was resisted by those who used words like "big questions."
It's not that big questions often don't have answers, it's that most proffered answers are often wrong. So the majority of the time finding "answers" is foolishness, whereas continuing to search for an answer is wise. (If the questions were presumed not to have answers then searching for those answers would be somewhat odd.) Anyway I realize that's not how you interpreted the quote. As to your interpretation...
Um... that is the weirdest form of argument I have seen in awhile.
Anyway, it's not that people thought that the question was unanswerable, they just thought they already had the answer. Kinda unrelated. Your conclusion is almost certainly correct, but you need to rationalize it better. (ETA: I don't think good rationalization is bad, by the way; I didn't intend any negative connotations.)
Agreed,
Yeah, no. :P If there isn't an answer, and you understand why there isn't an answer, don't keep searching for an answer.
As dlthomas pointed out, you seem to have replied to some stupid comment that is vaguely similar to mine except doesn't actually exist. Are you trolling? Or are you just kinda meh about this whole 'actually reading what the other person says' thing? I know I am sometimes.
Why yes, now that you mention it: I do like purple. How did you know?
The map is not the territory!
True. But I'm out of gas.
No, no, just failing basic reading comprehension / replying to the OP instead of the post I actually hit the "reply" button to.
I think that's what the parent said.
Edited to add: Or that's not quite right - it's that you're speaking of a world the parent explicitly denied. The sentence before what you quoted was
Saying that what follows is wrong in the opposite case is immaterial.
My interpretation of that argument was that 'people who used words like "big questions"' refers to people who considered the question of whether or not the sun revolved to be a philosophical matter with moral implications, rather than a mundane true-or-false. If the truth of the statement "the sun revolves around the earth" is implied to mean that "God created our planet at the centre of the universe because he loves mankind", then most people who believe in its truth would be reluctant to look for mundane, commonplace answers concerning actual gravity and solar system models and stuff.
And once there was a concrete answer to that question, for many people it ceased to be a "big question" with moral implications about human worth. I know plenty of people who are well educated in cosmology and say "well, duh" to the statement that "the earth revolves around the sun", but who still think that "is morality an innate quality of the universe or purely evolved by human brains?" to be a Big Question, with good versus bad answers instead of true versus false.
Your use of the word "purely" here confuses me; this isn't an either-or question. Evolution happens due to selection effects, selection effects come from contingent facts about the environment but also less-contingent logical facts about types and equilibria of timeless games and many other things like that. Superrational game theory is an "innate" quality of the universe and seems to have a lot to do with our intuitions about morality. We don't know if "morality" is a powerfully attractive telos or contingent result of primate evolution. In general moral philosophy is not obvious. If it was then my life would be a lot easier.
(ETA: And when it comes down to actual decision policies you have to do a lot tricky renormalization anyway, so even if it was obvious that morality (the truly optimal-justified decision policy) was a powerful telos it's not clear how much it would help us to know that fact. Yeah, maybe everything will turn out okay in the end, but maybe it will only do that if you act as if it won't. (Or maybe it only will if you act as if it will, as Borges and Voltaire talked about.))
Agreed that it's more complicated than either/or. However, I was using it as an example of a "Big Question" that some people believe shouldn't be investigated for fear of damaging moral consequences. To people who see it that way, I think it would be an either/or.
Well, looking too closely at a Schelling point is likely to destroy it, even if the Schelling point was serving a useful function.
That doesn't sound true. I'd go as far as to say it is likely to strengthen it.
Frequently, looking at the Schelling point one will notice it is fundamentally arbitrary, or at the very least be tempted to move it "just a little" in one direction or another.
My model of the local universe differs and I don't believe you. I expect more strengthening than weakening.
Voltaire
(Will Sawin pointed out that this also works if you replace "God" with "computers"; I agree, since in the limit they mean the same thing.)
Insofar as the heavens manifest computers. Though I suppose we can treat that part as pure poetic frippery. Of course, if we do that, the quote also applies to high-speed cargo rail.
I'm not sure what Aquinas would make of the idea that one perfection of God is "high-speed cargo rail-ness". Computers are a lot more like gods than trains are; hence Leibniz's monadology, which is about both God and computer programs. A similarly compelling metaphysics involving trains instead would be kinda hard to pull off, I imagine.
I'm not claiming that trains are particularly like gods, I'm claiming that "If high speed cargo rail didn't exist, it would be necessary to invent it" is also true.
Ah, that makes even more sense.