Suppose I had casually dismissed a belief that the sun would rise tomorrow because induction was unprovable. Or I had gone after the rule of the excluded middle. THEN it might make sense to wonder if I was making some largish mistake in over interpreting the non-deducibility of some things which we nevertheless treat as true.
But MWI is vastly different from these other unprovable beliefs.
Induction and simple logic have been overwhelmingly useful in making true statements about the future, the essence of man's power. I can design and build a machine based on inducing that the laws of engineering (or physics if you prefer) I have developed previously will apply to this new configuration, and I will be wrong sometimes but I will be right sometimes and the machine will work, and will move me across 1000s of miles in a few hours or will allow me to discuss rationality with people whose physical locations are scattered widely.
To the best of my knowledge, MWI is not actually "used" for anything that Copenhagen cannot currently also be used for. And the best of my knowledge is pretty good. But further, I have ASKED if I am missing something numerous times. And further, if y'all were championing Copenhagen as though the alternatives (even the not-yet known ones) were dismissable, I'd be making fun of that.
And wedrifid didn't choose not to interact with me, rather he chose to interact with me by labeling my post as "puerile" and "political."
Parenthetically he is right that my post had an element of immaturity. I was mainly making a point that had no relationship to MWI and for fun I threw a casual rebuke at MWI in to it. When dealing with a clubby lot who wear MWI the way Mormons wear magic underwear, this is a stupid thing to do. I could have made the point I wanted to make and not had you and wedrifid get your metaphorical panties in a bunch.
But you see, I have certain other beliefs which get in the way of my respecting the sacred cows of a group purporting, among other purposes, a general interest and respect for methods of avoiding error. I believe respect for sacred cows is consistently more productive of error than protective from it. I believe that minority opinions from well informed and thoughtful people are valuable in protecting from error, and may even be invaluable.
And by the way, I don't think a belief in sacred cows "totally subverts rationality." Even when it is literally a belief in sacred cows. There's plenty of wonderful Hindu engineers and physicists out there building great stuff and finding great truths. When they tell me about quarks, the sacred cows are irrelevant. When they tell me how to avoid human error and human biases, the sacred cows come in to play.
So I suppose, ultimately, the questions are: Is MWI more like a sacred cow, more like Mormon magic underwear, or more like induction? How many of the purposes of lesswrong do we thwart if MWI is not accepted as a given? Is "cult of personality" a valid purpose of lesswrong? Is "cult of personality" something to avoid for lesswrong? Do the constant sniping of highly trained and educated, but "puerile" skeptics at our weakest beliefs serve us or thwart us? Does "catastrophizing" the claims of these skeptics in order to promote the dismissal of these skeptics serve or hinder the purpose of being less wrong?
Because if I'm understanding you correctly, well... let's just say I disagree and leave it at that.
In summary, I don't believe you were understanding me correctly. I think it is perfectly possible to make a bad choice about MWI (whichever direction that might mean) and still be a net plus by a wide margin to rationality. What do you think?
In summary, I don't believe you were understanding me correctly.
OK, cool. Thanks for answering my question.
To answer your questions...
Is MWI more like a sacred cow, more like Mormon magic underwear, or more like induction?
Beats me. I don't see how its especially like any of those things, though I can see how analogies to all of them might be sound, depending on how it's being used and by whom.
How many of the purposes of lesswrong do we thwart if MWI is not accepted as a given?
Twelve.
...Is "cult of personality" a valid purpose of lessw
Followup to: The Genetic Fallacy, Where Recursive Justification Hits Bottom
Yesterday I said that—because humans are not perfect Bayesians—the genetic fallacy is not entirely a fallacy; when new suspicion is cast on one of your fundamental sources, you really should doubt all the branches and leaves of that root, even if they seem to have accumulated new evidence in the meanwhile.
This is one of the most difficult techniques of rationality (on which I will separately post, one of these days). Descartes, setting out to "doubt, insofar as possible, all things", ended up trying to prove the existence of God—which, if he wasn't a secret atheist trying to avoid getting burned at the stake, is pretty pathetic. It is hard to doubt an idea to which we are deeply attached; our mind naturally reaches for cached thoughts and rehearsed arguments.
But today's post concerns a different kind of difficulty—the case where the doubt is so deep, of a source so fundamental, that you can't make a true fresh beginning.
Case in point: Remember when, in the The Matrix, Morpheus told Neo that the machines were harvesting the body heat of humans for energy, and liquefying the dead to feed to babies? I suppose you thought something like, "Hey! That violates the second law of thermodynamics."
Well, it does violate the second law of thermodynamics. But if the Matrix's makers had cared about the flaw once it was pointed out to them, they could have fixed the plot hole in any of the sequels, in fifteen seconds, this easily:
Now, mind you, I am not saying that this excuses the original mistake in the script. When my mind generated this excuse, it came clearly labeled with that warning sign of which I have spoken, "Tada! Your mind can generate an excuse for anything!" You do not need to tell me that my plot-hole-patch is a nitwit idea, I am well aware of that...
...but, in point of fact, if you woke up out of a virtual reality pod one day, you would have to suspect all the physics you knew. Even if you looked down and saw that you had hands, you couldn't rely on there being blood and bone inside them. Even if you looked up and saw stars, you couldn't rely on their being trillions of miles away. And even if you found yourself thinking, you couldn't rely on your head containing a brain.
You could still try to doubt, even so. You could do your best to unwind your thoughts past every lesson in school, every science paper read, every sensory experience, every math proof whose seeming approval by other mathematicians might have been choreographed to conceal a subtle flaw...
But suppose you discovered that you were a computer program and that the Dark Lords of the Matrix were actively tampering with your thoughts.
Well... in that scenario, you're pretty much screwed, I'd have to say.
Descartes vastly underestimated the powers of an infinitely powerful deceiving demon when he supposed he could trust "I think therefore I am." Maybe that's just what they want you to think. Maybe they just inserted that conclusion into your mind with a memory of it seeming to have an irrefutable chain of logical support, along with some peer pressure to label it "unquestionable" just like all your friends.
(Personally, I don't trust "I think therefore I am" even in real life, since it contains a term "am" whose meaning I find confusing, and I've learned to spread my confidence intervals very widely in the presence of basic confusion. As for absolute certainty, don't be silly.)
Every memory of justification could be faked. Every feeling of support could be artificially induced. Modus ponens could be a lie. Your concept of "rational justification"—not just your specific concept, but your notion that any such thing exists at all—could have been manufactured to mislead you. Your trust in Reason itself could have been inculcated to throw you off the trail.
So you might as well not think about the possibility that you're a brain with choreographed thoughts, because there's nothing you can do about it...
Unless, of course, that's what they want you to think.
Past a certain level of doubt, it's not possible to start over fresh. There's nothing you can unassume to find some firm rock on which to stand. You cannot unwind yourself into a perfectly empty and perfectly reliable ghost in the machine.
This level of meta-suspicion should be a rare occasion. For example, suspecting that all academic science is an organized conspiracy, should not run into anything like these meta-difficulties. Certainly, someone does not get to plead that unwinding past the Bible is impossible because it is too foundational; atheists walk the Earth without falling into comas. Remember, when Descartes tried to outwit an infinitely powerful deceiving demon, he first tried to make himself absolutely certain of a highly confusing statement, and then proved the existence of God. Consider that a caution about what you try to claim is "too basic for a fresh beginning". And even basic things can still be doubted, it is only that we use our untrustworthy brains to doubt them.
Or consider the case of our existence as evolved brains. Natural selection isn't trustworthy, and we have specific reason to suspect it. We know that evolution is stupid. We know many specific ways in which our human brains fail, taken beyond the savanna. But you can't clear your mind of evolutionary influences and start over. It would be like deciding that you don't trust neurons, so you're going to clear your mind of brains.
And evolution certainly gets a chance to influence every single thought that runs through your mind! It is the very reason why you exist as a thinker, rather than a lump of carbon—and that doesn't mean evolution summoned a ghost-in-the-machine into you; it designed the ghost. If you learn culture, it is because you were built to learn culture.
But in fact, we don't run into unmanageable meta-trouble in trying to come up with specific patches for specific known evolved biases. And evolution is stupid, so even though it has set up self-deceptive circuits in us, these circuits are not infinitely difficult to comprehend and outwit.
Or so it seems! But it really does seem that way, on reflection.
There is no button you can press to rewind past your noisy brain, and become a perfectly reliable ghost of perfect emptiness. That's not just because your brain is you. It's also because you can't unassume things like modus ponens or belief updating. You can unassume them as explicit premises for deliberate reasoning—a hunter-gatherer has no explicit concept of modus ponens—but you can't delete the actual dynamics (and all their products!)
So, in the end, I think we must allow the use of brains to think about thinking; and the use of evolved brains to think about evolution; and the use of inductive brains to think about induction; and the use of brains with an Occam prior to think about whether the universe appears to be simple; for these things we really cannot unwind entirely, even when we have reason to distrust them. Strange loops through the meta level, I think, are not the same as circular logic.
Part of The Metaethics Sequence
Next post: "Rebelling Within Nature"
Previous post: "My Kind of Reflection"