= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
wedrifid comments on Rationality Quotes February 2012 - Less Wrong
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
= 783df68a0f980790206b9ea87794c5b6)
Loading…= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
Powered by Reddit
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d)
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (401)
Or potentially good luck if the combination of your instincts and the (irrationally justified) memes you inherited from tradition are better than your abstract decision making.
Or maybe some non-negligible subset of superstitions give good luck because they're in fact rationally justifiable.
Or because their signalling (or countersignalling) value outweighs their instrumental disadvantages.
Or, while we are at it, superstitions held by those with a generally optimistic outlook will tend towards 'good luck' superstitions and so result in greater exploitation of potential opportunities.
Is this not approximately the same thing that I said, just changed from: "It is good luck to <be a person who tends to selectively implement strategies in class X>" to "There is a class X of strategies that represent good luck" and a truncation of some causal details regarding the selection process? (That is, is my meaning not clear?)
Mere difference in connotation. I attribute my good luck to the gods, and would be annoyed at the implication that such an attribution is irrational justification obscuring my good luck's allegedly-actual origin in my optimistic outlook or whatever. By my lights some non-negligible subset of superstitions give good luck due to the combination of ones instincts, cultural inheritance, and also quite crucially the help of the gods. This is compatible with what you said but I wanted to emphasize the importance of the gods, without which I suspect many superstitions would be pointless. It's true that as you imply maybe even in the absence of gods superstitions would still be adaptive, but I'm less sure of such a counterfactual than of this world where there are in fact gods.
I'm afraid I must disagree with your connotation now that it is explicit and for the following reason:
No, the problem isn't with the whole "gods exist" idea. Rather, given that gods (counterfactually) exist, rational and justified belief in them and behaving in a way that reflects that belief is not superstition. It's the same as acting as though quarks exist. When those crackpots who don't believe in gods (despite appearing to be on average for more epistemically rational in all other areas and appearing to have overwhelming evidence with respect to this one) call you superstitious for behaving as an agent who exists in the actual world they are mistaken.
This is a dispute over definitions then? On your terms then what should I call the various cognitive habits I have about not jinxing things and so on? (I don't think the analogy to quarks holds, because quarks aren't mysterious agenty things in my environment, they're just some weird detail of some weird model of physics, whereas gods are very phenomenologically present.) It seems there is a distinct set of behaviors that people call "superstition" and that should be called "superstition" even if they are the result of epistemically rational beliefs. The set of behaviors is largely characterized by its presumption of mysterious supernatural agency. I see no reason not to call various of my cognitive habits superstitions, as it'd be harder to characterize them if I couldn't use that word. This despite thinking my superstitions have strong epistemic justification.
That, and how the abstract concepts represented by them interact with the insight underlying the quote. Oh, and underneath that and causing the disagreement is a fundamental incompatibility of view of the nature of the universe itself which is in turn caused by, from what you have said in the past, a dispute over how the very act of epistemological thinking should be done.
What's the nature of the difference? I figure we both have some sort of UDT-inspired framework for epistemology, bolstered in certain special cases by intuitions about algorithmic probability, and so any theoretical disagreements we have could presumably be resolved by recourse to such higher level principles. On the practical end of course we're likely to have somewhat varying views simply due to differing cognitive styles and personal histories, and we've likely reached very different conclusions on various particular subjects for various reasons. Is our dispute more on the theoretical or pragmatic side?
I can only make inferences based on what you have described of yourself (for example 'post-rationalist' type descriptions) as well, obviously, as updates based on conclusions that have been reached. Given that the subject is personal I should say explicitly that nothing in this comment is intended to be insulting - I speak only as a matter of interest.
I think UDT dominates your epistemology more than it does mine. Roughly speaking UDT considerations don't form the framework of my epistemology but instead determine what part of the epistemology to use when decision making. This (probably among other things that I am not aware of) leads me to make less drastic conclusions about fundamental moralities and gods. Yet UDT considerations remain significant when deciding which things to bother even considering as probabilities in such a way that the diff of will/wedrifid's epistemology kernel almost certainly remains far smaller than wedrifid/average_philosopher.
Yes, most of our thinking is just a bunch of messy human crap that could be ironed out by such recourse.
A little of both I think? At least when I interpret that at the level of "theories about theorizing" and "pragmatic theorizing". Not much at all (from what I can see) with respect to actually being pragmatic.
But who knows? Modelling other humans internal models is hard enough even when you are modelling cookie cutter 'normal' ones.
(I don't know if this at all interests you, but I feel like putting it on the record:) It's true my intuitions about decision theory are largely what drive my belief in objective morality a.k.a. the Thomistic/Platonic God a.k.a. objectively-optimal-decision-theory a.k.a. Chaitin's omega, but my belief in little-g gods is rather removed from my intuitions about decision theory and is more the result of straightforward updating on observed evidence. In my mind my belief in gods and my belief in God are two very distinct nodes and I can totally imagine believing in one but not the other, with the caveat that if that were the case then God would have to be as the Cathars or the Neoplatonists conceptualized Him, rather than my current view where He has a discernible "physical" effect on our experiences. I'm still really confused about what I should make of gods/demons that claim to be the One True God; there's a lot of literature on that subject but I've yet to read it. In the meantime I'd rather not negotiate with potential counterfactual terrorists. (Or have I already consented to negotiation without explicitly admitting it to myself? Bleh bleh bleh bleh...)