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jimrandomh comments on Bayesian Epistemology vs Popper - Less Wrong Discussion
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For a formal mathematical discussion of these sorts of problems, read Causality by Judea Pearl. He reduces cause to a combination of conditional independence and ordering, and from this he defines algorithms for discovering causal models from data, predicting the effect of interventions and computing counterfactuals.
Could you give a short statement of the main ideas? How can morality be reduced to math? Or could you say something to persuade me that that book will address the issues in a way I won't think misses the point? (e.g. by showing you understand what I think the point is, otherwise I won't except you to be able to judge if it misses the point in the way I would).
Sorry, I over-quoted there; Pearl only discusses causality, and a little bit of epistemology, but he doesn't talk about moral philosophy at all.
His book is all about causal models, which are directed graphs in which each vertex represents a variable and each edge represents a conditional dependence between variables. He shows that the properties of these graphs reproduce what we intuitively think of as "cause and effect", defines algorithms for building them from data and operating on them, and analyzes the circumstances under which causality can and can't be inferred from the data.
I don't understand the relevance.
Your quote seemed to be saying that that Bayesianism couldn't handle why/because questions, but Popperian philosophy could. I mentioned Pearl as a treatment of that class of question from a Bayes-compatible perspective.
Causality isn't explanation. X caused Y isn't the issue I was talking about.
For example, the statement "Murder is bad because it is illiberal" is an explanation of why it is bad. It is not a statement about causality.
You may say that "illiberal" is a short cut for various other ideas. And you may claim that eventually that reduce away to causal issues. But that would be reductionism. We do not accept that high level concepts are a mistake or that emergence isn't important.
Huh? It may be that I haven't read Logic of Scientific Discovery in a long time, but as far as I remember/can tell, Popper doesn't care about moral whys like "why is murder bad" at all. That seems to be an issue generally independent of both Bayesian and Popperian epistemology. One could be a Bayesian and be a utilitarian, or a virtue ethicist, or some form of deontologist. What am I missing?
He doesn't discuss them in LScD (as far as I remember). He does elsewhere, e.g. in The World of Parmenides. Whether he published moral arguments or not, his epistemology applies to them and works with them -- it is general purpose.
Epistemology is about how we get knowledge. Any epistemology which can't deal with entire categories of knowledge has a big problem. It would mean a second epistemology would be needed for that other category of knowledge. And that would raise questions like: if this second one works where the first failed, why not use it for everything?
Popper's method does not rely on only empirical criticism but also allows for all types of philosophical criticism. So it's not restricted to only empirical issues.
You seem to be assuming that "morality" is a fact about the universe. Most people here think it's a fact about human minds.
(ie we aren't moral realists, at least not in the sense that a religious person is).
Yes, morality is objective.
I don't want to argue terminology.
There are objective facts about how to live, call them what you will. Or, maybe you'll say there aren't. If there are, then it's not objectively wrong to be a mass murderer. Do you really want to go there into full blown relativism and subjectivism?