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nyan_sandwich comments on The noncentral fallacy - the worst argument in the world? - Less Wrong
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Comments (1742)
That discussion sucked. I was appalled at LW when I came back after a few hours and still "patriarchy" "abuse" etc hadn't been tabooed.
You could have asked for them to be tabooed.
I did. Multiple times.
Thanks.
That's interesting-- as I recall, requests for words to be tabooed are usually at least somewhat honored.
Not in my experience.
You ask for "exist" "true" etc to be tabooed, which is hard. Assuming they even try, it would take a while to wade thru all the philosophical muck and actually get to something, by which point the moment has passed.
My usual response to requests for "X exists" to be tabooed is to start talking about reliably predicting future experiences E2 in a range of contexts C (as C approaches infinity) consistent with the past experiences E1 which led me to to put X in my model in the first place. If someone wants to talk about E2 being reliably predictable even though X "doesn't really exist", it's not in the least bit clear to me what they're talking about.
Thanks! This is a very useful explanation / reduction / taboo.
It also sheds some light and helped me understand quite a bit more, I believe, on this whole "instrumentalism" business some people here seem to really want to protect.
(link is just in case someone misunderstands this as an accusation of "Politics!")
You're welcome. I vaguely remember being involved in an earlier discussion that covered this idea at greater length, wherein I described myself as a compatibilist when it comes to instrumentalism, but the obvious google search doesn't find it so perhaps I'm deluded.
Was it from a couple days ago?
(I found this with Wei Dai's lesswrong_user.php script.)
Yes. I recently described it as this:
I wholeheartedly approve of this approach. If more people used it, we would avoid the recurrent unproductive discussions of QM interpretations, qualia and such.
EDIT. Just to clarify, the part saying "put X in my model" is the essential bit to preempt the discussion of "but does it exist outside your model?", since the latter would violate this definition of "exist". such as this statement by our esteemed Kaj Sotala:
Oh, I very much doubt that. But I'd like to think so.
EDIT: I wrote the above before your edit, and don't really understand your edit.
Instrumentalism is pretty unproductive when it comes to answering questions about what really exists.
Or at least unusual enough to be brushed aside as "wtf".
There are lots of words that I don't know how to taboo, because I only have a partial and largely intuitive understanding of the concepts I'm referring to by them, and can't fully explain those concepts. Examples: "exist", "truth", "correct", "right", "moral", "rational", "should", "mathematical". I don't think anyone has asked me directly to taboo any of these words, but if someone did, I might ignore the request because I think my time could be better spent trying to communicate with others who seem to already share my understandings of these words.
In the case of "exist", I think that something exists implies that I can care about it and not be irrational. ("care about": for example, have a term for it in my utility function) This seems to at least capture a large part of what I mean when I say something exists, but I'm not sure if "exists" just means (something like) the correct decision theory allows a utility function to have a term for something, or if existence is somehow more fundamental than that and our ability to rationally care about something derives from its existence in that more fundamental sense. Does this make sense?
ETA: See also this relevant post.
Well, apparently TheOtherDave is bold enough to give a meaningful definition of "exist". Would you agree with it? If not, what would be a counterexample?
I disagree with it because an agent (such as one using UDT) does not necessarily have memory and the associated concepts of "future experiences" and "past experiences", but "exist" still seems meaningful even for such an agent.
I'd say that asking people to taboo "true" is very common, in certain circles outside Less Wrong. That's why Eliezer wrote The Simple Truth.
Unfortunately, the last sensible (to me) exchange in it was around
After that the instrumentalist argument got heavily strawmanned:
It gets worse after that, until EY kills the offending in-strawman-talist with some gusto.
Upvoted entirely for "in-strawman-talist", which I will be giggling about at unpredictable intervals for days, probably requiring me to come up with some entirely false but more easily explained answer to "What's so funny?".
Would you be satisfied if I tabooed "Fs exist" as "The set of all Fs is non-empty"?
I dislike fake formalizations. TheOtherDave's approach makes a lot more sense to me.
Well, it would, given that you're an instrumentalist. Since I'm not an instrumentalist, TheOtherDave's suggestion (in so far as I understand it) clearly differs from what I mean when I talk about existence. Surely you wouldn't maintain that the only possible tabooings of "existence" are instrumentalist-friendly ones.
But why do you think my formulation is a "fake formalization"? It captures what I mean by existence pretty well, I think. Is the worry that I haven't provided an empirical criterion for existence?