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I was being serious -- I can't tell what that stare means. The explicit claim, "FAI research is more inherently valuable than trivialism research," is clear, but that's not a criticism of trivialism. As far as I can tell, EY believes many serious research fields are less valuable than FAI research.
The primary statement of trivialism, as I understand it:
"(X and ¬X) for any possible value of X
Therefore, P(X|A) = P(¬X|A) = 1.
Therefore, for any evidence A, Value of Information = 0."
Personally, I think they have successfully found the ideal philosophy of perfect emptiness. [Insert disdainful status signal]
Exactly! Status signals aren't valid arguments!
I agree. I think this was obvious, but I'm also not quite clear on what the real criticism is. It doesn't seem like trivialism is useful at all, but usefulness is not correlated to truth according to the priors of proponents of trivialism (or at least, I expect that to be true).
I just accept that the hypothesis does not match the evidence according to my own models and current model-forming strategies (some of which I was presumably born with and are there because ancestors which happened to have those traits had more children) and that as such should be discarded. It also doesn't produce any value within my best estimate of my utility system, and I attribute utility to a belief or theory producing value in said system... so we're back to "This is ridiculous" full circle.
It isn't practically useful, no. But from a politico-philosophical standpoint, if dialetheism can't distinguish itself from trivialism, nobody will bother to study it.
By analogy, a running joke in some mathematics circles involves people studying Hoelder continuous functions with parameter greater than one. As it turns out, all such functions are constant. However, before one knows that fact, there is a very nice research program that can be run proving all sorts of interesting properties of such functions, e.g., they are all smooth (which would be unexpected to such a mathematician, as when the parameter is one they are not even differentiable everywhere). Such a research program is ultimately useless, but only after one knows the critical fact.
As for the overwhelming amount of empirical evidence against trivialism, this is covered in the dissertation. However, a shorter argument one could give is that humanity will likely only ever "observe" the truth value of finitely many propositions. That subset is of measure zero in the set of all propositions, i.e., practically no evidence. Since trivialism necessarily rejects the law of non-contradiction, observing finitely many false sentences does not imply that all sentences are not true. For example, perhaps it's just much harder to "observe" that the sentences we've observed to be false are also true, as would be the case if, say, proving their truth required a proof of length 3^^^3.
Also:
¬(P(X|A) = P(¬X|A) = 1)
Therefore, for any evidence A, Value of information > 0.
Contradictions are not failure conditions in trivialsim.
I wasn't positing this as a failure condition within trivialism, but of trivialism.
According to what I'm seeing here, a perfectly trivialist agent sees no difference between the truth of dying when shooting themselves in the head, the truth of not dying when shooting themselves in the head, and the truth of dying and not dying when being alive. No imaginable action can have any effect on the world, because everything is true, and so there's no real reason to do anything, including living. This too is true, as is the opposite, to said agent.
Basically, a trivialist assigns the null hypothesis over whether to care or not about the universe and themselves? Everything is true, but that doesn't consist in a reason to not act? Everything is true when it lets you write a paper and get grant money, but otherwise some things can safely be considered false for the purposes of living a normal life?
How convenient can question-begging get? Can I become a billionaire doing nothing but this? ("Yes, that's true." says the trivialist)
The way I see it, trivialism rejects logic and any kind of possibly imaginable rule for the purposes of writing philosophy papers, but conveniently ignores itself whenever it's time to go home or eat or live a perfectly normal life just like they would if some possible things were actually false.
Lots of strawman in there- especially with the assumption that trivialism implies meta-trivialism.
Doesn't the strict rationalist have trouble with the truth value of statements conditioned on false statements?
You are looking for a philosophy which tells you what the indicated course of action is. That means that trivialism is poorly suited for you.
You are looking for a philosophy because you want your philosophy to tell you what you should do. That means that trivialism is the perfect philosophy for you to practice.
Trivialism is not nihilism, and only a perfect trivialist could believe that it was.
As a final koan: Why are the characteristics of trivialism that you list negative? So what? Why does that matter?
Sorry, not my intention to strawman. It is alien to me.
No. Not bayesians, at any rate.
What's an "indicated" course of action? How is it different from "what you should do", below?
What does trivialism predict? What does it tell us to do? Does trivialism let me predict anything more accurately than any other theory? A single instance of one thing that it would predict more accurately and/or reliably in reality than any other theory would make it instantly much less worthy of derision.
At present, it is to me nothing more than a humorous thought experiment similar to "This sentence is false."