JGWeissman comments on Taboo Your Words - Less Wrong

71 Post author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 15 February 2008 10:53PM

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Comment author: Amanojack 11 March 2010 05:45:26PM 2 points [-]

Albert says that people have "free will". Barry says that people don't have "free will". Well, that will certainly generate an apparent conflict. Most philosophers would advise Albert and Barry to try to define exactly what they mean by "free will", on which topic they will certainly be able to discourse at great length. I would advise Albert and Barry to describe what it is that they think people do, or do not have, without using the phrase "free will" at all. (If you want to try this at home, you should also avoid the words "choose", "act", "decide", "determined", "responsible", or any of their synonyms.)

Careful here. You may sometimes find that there was no coherent concept there to begin with, that the notion was simply semantic cotton candy whipped up out of the ambiguity of language.

Comment author: RobinZ 11 March 2010 07:59:56PM *  1 point [-]

Aside: Welcome to LessWrong! Feel free to introduce yourself. (I see you are already reading through a lot of the backlog - hope you're having fun!)

Regarding your point, I think it is important to figure out why they are proposing an incoherent concept - while it is sometimes because they are trolls or postmodernists (but I repeat myself edit: not really - the motives are different), it is more often because they are generalizing incorrectly from their mental experience.

Comment author: JGWeissman 11 March 2010 08:08:02PM 2 points [-]

while it is sometimes because they are trolls or postmodernists (but I repeat myself)

I'll agree that postmodernists say and believe lots of silly things, but do they really deserve that kick in the pants? It's not like they say those silly things for the same reasons trolls do, to deliberately upset people.

Comment author: RobinZ 11 March 2010 08:12:20PM *  0 points [-]

You're right - most of them are, so far as I can tell, in the generalizing-incorrectly category. I'll make an edit.