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loup-vaillant comments on The Useful Idea of Truth - Less Wrong
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I dislike the "post utopian" example, and here's why:
Language is pretty much a set of labels. When we call something "white", we are saying it has some property of "whiteness." NOW we can discuss wavelengths and how light works, or whatnot, but 200 years ago, they had no clue. They could still know that snow is white, though. At the same time, even with our knowledge of how colors work, we can still have difficulties knowing exactly where the label "white" ends, and grey or yellow begins.
Say I'm carving up music-space. I can pretty easily classify the differences between Classical and Rap, in ways that are easy to follow. I could say that classical features a lot of instrumentation, and rap features rhythmic language, or something. But if I had lots of people spending all their lives studying music, they're going to end up breaking music space into much smaller pieces. For example, dub step and house.
Now, I can RECOGNIZE dubstep when I hear it, but if you asked me to teach you what it was, I would have difficulties. I couldn't necessarily say "It's the one that goes, like, WOPWOPWOPWOP iiinnnnnggg" if I'm a learned professor, so I'll use jargon like "synthetic rhythm," or something.
But not having a complete explainable System 2 algorithm for "How to Tell if it's Dubstep" doesn't mean that my System 1 can't readily identify it. In fact, it's probably easier to just listen to a bunch of music until your System 1 can identify the various genres, even if your System 2 can't codify it. The example is treating the fact that your professor can't really codify "post utopianism" to mean that it's not "true". (this example has been used in other sequence posts, and I disagreed with it then too)
Have someone write a bunch of short stories. Give them to English Literature professors. If they tend to agree which ones are post utopian, and which ones aren't, then they ARE in fact carving up literature-space in a meaningful way. The fact that they can't quite articulate the distinction doesn't make it any less true than knowing that snow was white before you knew about wavelengths. They're both labels, we just understand one better.
Anyways, I know it's just an example, but without a better example, i can't really understand the question well enough to think of a relevant answer.
There is the literature professor's belief, the student's belief, and the sentence "Carol is 'post-utopian'". While the sentence can be applied to both beliefs, the beliefs themselves are quite different beasts. The professor's belief is something that carve literature space in a way most other literature professors do. Totally meaningful. The student's belief, on the other hand, is just a label over a set of authors the student have scarcely read. Going a level deeper, we can find an explanation for this label, which turns out to be just another label ("colonial alienation"), and then it stops. From Eliezer's main post (emphasis mine) :
Well, not that floating. The student definitely expects a sensory experience: grades. The problem isn't the lack of expectations, but that they're based on an overly simplified model of the professor's beliefs, with no direct ties to the writing themselves –only to the authors' names. Remove professors and authors' names, and the students' beliefs are really floating: they will have no way to tie them to reality –the writing. And if they try anyway, I bet their carvings won't agree.
Now when the professor grades an answer, only a label will be available ("post-utopian", or whatever). This label probably reflects the student's belief directly. That answer will indeed be quickly patterned matched against a label inside the professor's brain, generating a quick "right" or "wrong" response (and the corresponding motion in the hand that wield the red pen). Just as drawn in the picture actually.
However, the label in the professor's head is not a floating belief like the student's. It's a cached thought, based on a much more meaningful belief (or so I hope).
Okay, now that I recognize your name, I see you're not exactly a newcomer here. Sorry if I didn't told anything you don't know. But it did seem like you conflated mysterious answers (like "phlogiston") and floating beliefs (actual neural constructs). Hope this helped.
If the teacher does not have a precise codification of what makes a writer "post-utopian", then how should he teach it to students?
I would say the best way is a mix of demonstrating examples ("Alice is not a post-utopian; Carol is a post-utopian"), and offering generalizations that are correlated with whether the author is a post-utopian ("colonial alienation"). This is a fairly slow method of instruction, at least in some cases where the things being studied are complicated, but it can be effective. While the student's belief may not yet be as well-formed as the professor's, I would hesitate to call it meaningless. (More specifically, I would agree denotatively but object connotatively to such a classification.) I would definitely not call the belief useless, since it forms the basis for a later belief that will be meaningful. If a route to meaningful, useful belief B goes through "meaningless" belief A, then I would say that A is useful, and that calling A meaningless produces all the wrong sorts of connotations.
The example assumed bad teaching based on rote learning. Your idea might actually work.
(Edit: oops, you're probably aware of that. Sorry for the noise)
If that is what Eliezer meant, then it was confusing to use an example for which many people suspect that the concept itself is not meaningful. It just generates distraction, like the "Is Nixon a pacifist?" example in the original Politics is the mind-killer post (and actually,the meaningfulness of post-colonialism as a category might be a political example in the wide sense of the word). He could have used something from physics like "Heat is transmitted by convention", or really any other topic that a student can learn by rot without real understanding.
I don't think Eliezer meant all what I have written (edit: yep, he didn't). I was mainly analysing (and defending) the example to death, under Daenerys' proposed assumption that the belief in the professor's head is not floating. More likely, he picked something familiar that would make us think something like "yeah, if those are just labels, that's no use".¹
By the way is there any good example? Something that (i) clearly is meaningful, and (ii) let us empathise with those who nevertheless extract a floating belief out of it? I'm not sure. I for one don't empathise with the students who merely learn by rot, for I myself don't like loosely connected belief networks: I always wanted to understand.
Also, Eliezer wasn't very explicit about the distinction between a statement, embodied in text, images, or whatever our senses can process, and belief, embodied in a heap of neurons. But this post is introductory. It is probably not very useful to make the distinction so soon. More important is to realize that ideas are not floating in the void, but are embodied in a medium: paper, computers… and of course brains.
[1] We're not familiar to "post-utopianism" and "colonial alienation" specifically, but we do know the feeling generated by such literary mumbo jumbo.
Thank you! Your post helped me finally to understand what it was that I found so dissatisfying with the way I'm being taught chemistry. I'm not sure right now what I can do to remedy this, but thank you for helping me come to the realization.