I'm struggling to understand anything technical on this website. I've enjoyed reading the sequences, and they have given me a lot to thing about. Still, I've read the introduction to Bayes theorem multiple times, and I simply can't grasp it. Even starting at the very beginning of the sequences I quickly get lost because there are references to programming and cognitive science which I simply do not understand.
Thinking about it, I realized that this might be a common concern. There are probably plenty of people who've looked at various more-or-less technical or jargony Less Wrong posts, tried understanding them, and then given up (without posting a comment explaining their confusion).
So I figured that it might be good to have a thread where you can ask for explanations for any Less Wrong post that you didn't understand and would like to, but don't want to directly comment on for any reason (e.g. because you're feeling embarassed, because the post is too old to attract much traffic, etc.). In the spirit of various Stupid Questions threads, you're explicitly encouraged to ask even for the kinds of explanations that you feel you "should" get even yourself, or where you feel like you could get it if you just put in the effort (but then never did).
You can ask to have some specific confusing term or analogy explained, or to get the main content of a post briefly summarized in plain English and without jargon, or anything else. (Of course, there are some posts that simply cannot be explained in non-technical terms, such as the ones in the Quantum Mechanics sequence.) And of course, you're encouraged to provide explanations to others!
There are three ways to answer the free will/determinism question: I) yes, they're incompatible, but we have free will, II) yes, they're incompatible, and we don't have free will, III) they're not incompatible.
I've often heard EY's free will solution referred to as a form of (III), compatibilism. If this is the case, then I don't think I understand his argument. So far as I can tell, EY's solution is this:
1) free will is incompatible with determinism / the natural world is relevantly deterministic // we therefore do not have free will.
2) here is an error theory explaining why we sometimes think we do.
3) moral responsibility is a matter of convention (but, I take it, not therefore unimportant).
This is fine, if that's the answer. But it's not a compatibilist answer. Am I missing something? I'm comparing EY's answer here to something like the philosopher Donald Davidson's paper Mental Events, which is a more traditionally compatibilist view.
Pick a favorite ice cream flavour. Now tell me it (it's chocolate, great) and let's make a "theory of ice cream preferences". It reads "Hen favours chocolate above others". I go to a third person (let's call him Dave) and tell a story about how I got a divine mission to make a fact in the paper to come true. I wave my magic wand and afterwards Dave checks that indeed the mission was accomplished. All a natural law is a description how things happen, the law itself is not the cause of it's truth. If you try to ask "Did hen or the la... (read more)