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ChristianKl comments on Open thread, Jul. 25 - Jul. 31, 2016 - Less Wrong
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Comments (133)
That assumes that a rational person is one who holds beliefs because of a chain of logic. Empricially Superforcasters don't simply try to follow a chain of logic to get their beliefs. A rational person in the LW sense thus is not one that holds beliefs because of a chain of logic.
Tedlock gives in his book a good outlook about how to form beliefs about the likelihood that beliefs are true.
Neither do bad forecasters, or cranks, or schizophrenics. The suppressed premiss here is that superforcasters are right or reliable. But that implies that their claims are tested or testable and that implies some basic presumptions of logic or empricism.
Tedlock lays out a bunch of principles to come to correct conclusions. One of the principles is being a fox that uses multiple chains instead of trying to use one correct chain that rests on a foundation based on which other beliefs can be logically deduced.
The paradigm that Arielgenesis proposes is to follow a hedgehog system where a single chain of logic can be relied on because certain basic presuppositions are accepted as true.
Holding a belief because of a chain of logic has little to do with the principle of empricism.
There are many ways to do bad forecasts. As far as the examples of cranks and schizophrenics go, those are usually hedgehogs. A lot of cranks usually follow a chain of logic. If you take people who think there are illegal tricks to avoid paying income tax, they usually have elaborate chains of logic to back up their case.
How do you know that I hold my belief based on a "suppresed premiss"? If something is supressed and you can't see it, maybe the structure of my reasoning process isn't the structure you guess.
Missing the point. The point is how their conclusions are verified.
Logic is implicit in empricisicm because the idea that contradictions are false is implicit in the idea of disproof by contradictory evidence.
Missing the point. I didn't say that logic is sufficient for correctness. I am saying that if you have some sort of black-box, but effective reasoning, then some kind of presupposition is going to be needed to verify it.
If you have other reasoning show it. Otherwise that was an irrelevant nitpick.
I think Science and Sanity lays out a framework for dealing with beliefs that doesn't categories them into true/false that is better than the basic true/false dichomity.
I care more about what Science and Sanity called semantic reactions than I care about presuppositions.
Basically you feed the relevant data into your mind and then you let it process the data. As a result of processing it there's a semantic reaction. Internally the brain does that with a neural net that doesn't use logical chains to do it's work.
When I write here I point out the most important piece of the data, but not all of what my reasoning is based on because it's based on lots of experiences and lots of empiric data.
Using a ramified logic with more than two truth values is not the same as not using logic at all!
That is such a vague description of reasoning that it covers everything from superforecasting to schizobabble. You have relieved yourself of the burden of explaining how reasoning works without presupposiitons by not treating reasoning as something that necessarily works at all.
Could you define what you mean with "logic" if not thinking in terms of whether a statement is true?
Thinking about how probable it is, or how much subjective credence it should have. There are formal ways of demonstrating how fuzzy logic and probability theory extend bivalent logic.
Science and Sanity is not about probability theory or similar concepts of having numbers between 0 and 1.
"The map is not the territory" doesn't mean "The map is the territory with credence X that's between 0 and 1". It's rather a rejection about the concept of the is of identity and instead thinking in terms like semantic reactions.
I was pointing out that the claim that logic is implicit in empiricism survives an attack on bivalence. I couldn't see any other specific point being made.
If you agree that it covers superforcasting than my argument is right. Using presuppotions is a very particular way of reasoning and there are many other possible heuristics that can be used.
A LW comment also isn't long enough to lay out a complete system of reasoning as complex as the one proposed in Science and Sanity or that proposed in Superforcasting. That why I refer to general arguments are refer to the books for a more detailed explanation of particular heuristics.
There's basically two kinds of reasoning - the kind that can be made manifest (explicit,etc) and the kind that can't. The gold standard of solving of solving the problem of presuppositions (foundations, intuitions) is to show that nothing presupposition-like is needed in explicit reasoning. Failed attempts tend to switch to implicit reasoning, or to take it that sufficiently obvious presupposiitons don't count as presuppositions (We can show this with induction...we can show this with empiricism).
I don't think that's the case. Trying to put complex concepts into two boxes binary boxes is done very frequently in the Western tradition but there no inherent argument that it's the best way to do things. Science and Sanity argues in detail why binary thining is limiting.
As far as this particular case of the implicit/explicit distinction, most kinds of reasoning tend to be a mix. Reasoning that's completely explicit is the kind of reasoning that can be done by a computer with very limited bandwith. For many problems we know that computers can't solve them as easily as calculating 23472349 * 5435408 which can be done completely explicitely. If you limit yourself to what can be made completely explicit you limit yourself to a level of intelligence that can't outperform computers with very limited memory/CPU power.
Explicit reasoning has a its disadvantages, but is still hard to do without. In talking about superforecasters, you are taking it that someone has managed to determine who they are as opposed to ordinary forecasters, raving lunatics, etc. Deterimining that kind of thing is where explicit reasoning..what's the alternative? Groups of people intuiting that each other are reliable intuiters?