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ciphergoth comments on Go Forth and Create the Art! - Less Wrong
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Both of these things mean that we're assessing this material on a different basis than demonstrated efficacy.
Indeed - that seems to me like a problem. I am oft reminded of the unemployment worker in History of the World: Part I... "Occupation?" "Did you create an AI last week?" "Did you try to create an AI last week?"
Of course, that's not the end of the story, and nobody would expect a job like that to be the sort of thing you can just do. But without demonstrated efficacy, what's the difference between this "Art" and pseudoscience?
For an art of rationality to even mean anything, it must have predictable, demonstrable results.
This is just false. It's a good property to have, in many cases life-saving one, but it's not always possible. If you seek an Art, but don't expect demonstrable results from the correct one just yet, how do you tell the difference from pseudoscience? How do you move from an idea in your mind to an implementation with demonstrable results, why do you proceed with trying to demonstrate the value of one idea, but not another, before the work is done? Other cues.
No, it's not just false. It's also very nearly true. It's merely technically false because I was talking in an unnecessarily positivist way about it. But you know what I mean, I hope.
That is a good question, and one that I don't have an answer to. Is there one? (you can't?)
You look at the sanity of the theory. How do you tell a sane academic paper from one written by a crackpot (say, you don't look at where it's published and you don't know the author)? Certainly you don't need to go check experimental results or proofs in overwhelming majority of cases. Doing this reliably where absurdity heuristic breaks is claimed as a large part of the Art of rationality. It's necessarily self-referential.
Simple - I don't read it either way. There are plenty of papers written by folks I've heard of or in trusted publications to fill up all of the free time I don't have.
if the ideas seem novel and useful, I expect empirical evidence. If there is none, I withhold judgement until there is.
This doesn't sound realistic. Do you deny your ability to tell the difference?
Between crackpots and valid academic papers, out of context? Yes, I do deny that. Take Louis Savain (please!). I actually have a lot of the same intuitions about the nature of spacetime, and the problems involving even talking about time travel outside of a fictional context. Savain is clearly a crackpot - it's practically painted all over his site. But if I had written a paper discussing some of these intuitions, and nobody noticed that it wasn't published in a peer-reviewed journal nor that I'm not a physicist, then I don't think there would be a clear way to notice that I was wrong.
Of course, a physicist could happily come along and say, "No, our theory is experimentally verified, and yours doesn't even make sense. Here are references to the relevant evidence, and some engineering applications you might not have been aware of".
ETA: I admit, I had "speak of the devil" in mind when I posted this. But it had to be done!
You are not doing the categorization as a civil service, you are doing it to efficiently build on gained understanding. If you are not ready to understand, you shouldn't try to do that. But when you are, you play the role of that very physicist, you don't need to see the crackpot's experimental results.
That's because the physicist has her own experimental results already, and the crackpot has none. If the crackpot has experimental results to back up his theory, then the physicist had bloody well better look at them! (if the paper is even being taken seriously enough to be read in the first place)
I agree with everything in your post except the last sentence. That's what a science must have to be meaningful.
What I want to know is why there's so little interest in developing a science of rationality.
My question is : as well understood as it is, how much of it do any single individual here, know, understand, and is able to use on a recurring basis ?
We'll want to develop more than what exists, but we'll build that upon - once we have it - a firm basis. So I wonder, how much knowledge and practice of those well understood parts of rationality, does it require of the would-be builders of the next tier ? Otherwise, we stand the risk, of being so eager as to hurriedly build sky high ivory towers on sand, with untrained hands.
Can you clarify?
Exactly which material are you referring to? What basis would you suggest that you're assessing it on?
I mean the bulk of Eliezer's 300-odd OB/LW posts. To use an example I've used before, you'd be crazy to say that you think well of Argument screens off authority because you have empirically demonstrated that reading it makes you more rational. I find its argument persuasive. Obviously one must be wary of the many ways you can find something persuasive that are not related to merit, but to carry away from the study of cognitive bias the message that one should not be persuaded by any argument ever would be to give up on thinking altogether.
I agree that the quality of the argument is an important first screening process in accepting something into the rationality canon. In addition, by truly understanding the argument, it can allow us to generalise or apply it to novel situations. This is how we progress our knowledge.
But the most convincing argument means nothing if we apply it to reality and it doesn't map the territory. So I don't understand why I'd be crazy to think well of Argument screens off authority if reading it makes me demonstrably more rational? Could you point me towards the earlier comments you allude to?