Eliezer_Yudkowsky comments on The Useful Idea of Truth - Less Wrong
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DevilWorm and pragmatist point to the "reliabilism" school of philosophy (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reliabilism & http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/reliabilism). Clicking on either link reveals arguments concerned mainly with that old dispute over whether the word "knowledge" should be used to refer to "justified true belief". Going on the wording I'm not even sure whether they're considering how photons from the Sun are involved in correlating your visual cortex to your shoelaces. But it does increase the probability of a precedent - does anyone have something more specific? (A lot of the terminology I've seen so far is tremendously vague, and open to many interpretations...)
Incidentally, there might be an even higher probability of finding some explicit precedent in a good modern AI book somewhere?
It might be too obvious to be worth mentioning. If you're actually building (narrow) AI devices like self-driving cars, then of course your car has to have a way of sensing things round about it if it's going to build a map of its surroundings.
This fact should be turned into an SMBC cartoon.
That's what I was thinking. Maybe in something like Knowledge Representation and Reasoning.
AI books tend to assume that one pretty explicitly. For those of a more philosophical bent, some might say something like "The world pushes back", but it's not like anyone doing engineering is in the business of questioning whether the external world exists.
Epistemology and the Psychology of Human Judgment (badger's summary) seems relevant, as one of the things they do is attack reliabilism's uselessness. I don't recall any direct precedents, but it's been a while since I read it.
Bishop & Trout call their approach "strategic reliabilism." A short summary is here. It's far more Yudkowskian than normal reliabilism. LWers may also enjoy their paper The Pathologies of Standard Analytic Epistemology.
That was a pretty cool paper. I don't think I've ever seen SPRs in a philosophy paper before.
For the curious, I interviewed Michael Bishop a couple years ago.