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DSimon comments on The Useful Idea of Truth - Less Wrong
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Comments (513)
With the first item, "all concepts start out equal", consider that Occam's Razor says we should prefer simpler concepts.
With "we can make arbitrary maps", I don't see how adding the word "social" in there anywhere makes it any better. Although there are many different cultures, the space of possible culture-models or culture-maps is much larger still, and so if we're trying to model how a culture works we can't just pick a map arbitrarily.
Same issue applies to "truth is determined by politics". A political theory is a hypothesis about what conditions will create a given sort of society. Some political theories are better than others at such predictions.
I presume that the point with "social" is that, even if some political theories are better than others, the extent to which different theories are accepted or believed by the population at large is also strongly affected by social factors. Which, again, is an idea that has been discussed on LW a lot, and is generally accepted here...
Also, (guessing from my discussions with smart humanities people) it's saying that supposedly neutral and impartial research by scientists will be affected by a large number of (social) biases, some of them conscious, some of them unconscious, and this can have a big impact on which theory is accepted as the best and the most "experimentally tested" one. Again, not exactly a heretical belief on LW.
Ironically, I always thought that many of the posts on LW were using scientific data to show what my various humanities friends had been saying all along.