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Thrasymachus comments on Eliezer's Sequences and Mainstream Academia - Less Wrong
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Comments (153)
I don't think there's much value in pretending that issues like God (and the absence thereof) or the compatibility between determinism and (any logically coherent view of) free will haven't been decisively answered.
Seriously now, the compatibility between free will and determinism is something that I was figuring out by myself back in junior high. Eliezer with his "Thou Art Physics" expressed it better and more compactly than I ever did to myself (I was instead using imagery of the style "we're the stories that write themselves", and this was largely inspired by Tolkien's Ainulindale, where the various gods sing a creation song that predicts all their future behaviour), but the gist is really obvious once you get rid of the assumption that determinism and free will must somehow be opposed.
In every discussion I've had since, in any forum, nobody who thinks them to be incompatible can describe even vaguely what "free will" would be supposed to look like if it does not contain determinism inside it.
I think this is a case of exactly the problem I diagnosed above.
Compatibilism (and related views) have been mentioned at least since Hume, and have been discussed extensively in modern analytic philosophy. Although it commands a slender majority of philosophers of action, it is not like the entire philosophical community considers compatibilism obviously or decisively the 'right answer' (see here, and here for a long index of reasons/objections etc.). You'd be pretty hard pressed to find a single philosopher of action who considers free will a 'solved problem'.
Yet it seems the less wrong community considers it solved based on a sequence of blog posts which merely explicates compatibilism: I couldn't find any discussion of compatibilism which goes beyond undergrad philosophy level, no discussion of common objections to compatibilism, engagement with any thinkers arguing against, nothing.
The two best explanations I have for this is either compatibilism is just obvious and people of sufficient rationality can be confident that domain experts on free will who don't buy compatibilism are wrong, or that the LW 'solution' is frankly philosophically primitive but LWers are generally too far on the wrong side of the Dunning-Kruger effect to appreciate why it isn't the decisive answer to a 'millenia old philosophical dilemma' they think it is.
Surely the outside view would find the latter account much more plausible?
Thanks for that poll. It's a slender majority, but a very strong plurality, since the next most favourite option is less than half as popular, and if you examine only the 'Accept' answers instead of the 'lean towards' answers, the compatibilists are also much more certain in their belief, while the libertarians and no-free-willers tend to be uncertain much more often.
And the faculty is more definitely compatibilistic than the students, which seems to indicate education correlates with acceptance of compatibilism.
But more importantly: these people also seem to prefer to two-box in Newcomb's problem. So why should I put much weight in their opinion?
A weak majority/strong plurality of relevant domain experts does not make the question decisively answered. I don't have survey data on this, but I'm pretty sure none of the compatibilists (even those who 'accept' it), take the question to be obviously answered etc. etc.
The majority of decision theory specialists two-box. I'm sure you can guess what I'm going to say about doman expertise and dunning-kruger effect here, too.
Tell me, do you have any criterion over whether something is "decisively answered" other than how many "relevant domain experts" agree with it? If your definition of "decisively answered" is solely dependent on this, then we can just agree that we were using different definitions for the term.
So much for the decision theory specialists. Implement a real life version of Newcomb's box, where you fill in the opaque box based on whether they said they'll one-box or two-box. Assuming everyone follows what they said they should do, the one-boxers will just win, and the two-boxers will be weeping.
I take 'decisively answered' to mean something along the lines of "here is an account, which, properly understood, solves this problem to the satisfaction of reasonable people". So (near) unanimity among relevant domain experts is necessary but not sufficient for this. I can't think of anything in natural language we would call a 'decisive answer' or similar in which 40% or so of relevant domain experts disagree with.
This is recapitulating a standard argument for one-boxing, and it is well discussed in the literature. The fact the bulk of people who spend their time studying this issue and don't find this consideration decisive should make you think it is less a silver bullet than you think it is.
I should update slightly towards that direction, yes, but I have to note that the poll you gave me are not just about people who study the issue, but people who also seem to have made a career out of discussing it, and therefore (I would cynically suggest) perhaps wouldn't like the discussion to be definitively over.
e.g. Theologists and Priests are perhaps not the best people to poll, if you want to determine the existence of God.
Ah, but I just remembered atheism was one of the things you complained about being treated as obviously correct by most of us here? Because the domain experts about God (Theologists and Priests) haven't come to same conclusion?
I don't feel a pressing need to be non-standard: One-boxing wins, two-boxing loses -- that's all one needs to know for the purpose of choosing between them.
Sure, but I gather there are other things you can discuss in decision theory besides Newcomb's problem, so it isn't like the decision theorists need an artificial controversy about this to keep their jobs.
There are dissimilarities between decision theorists and (say) theologians, priests etc. Decision theorists are unlikely to have prior convictions about decision theory before starting to study it, unlike folks who discuss religion. The relevant domain expert in 'Does God exist' would likely be philosophers of religion, although there is a similar selection effect. However, for what it's worth, I doubt atheist philosophers of religion would consider the LW case for atheism remotely creditable.