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JoshuaZ comments on Bayesian Epistemology vs Popper - Less Wrong Discussion

-1 Post author: curi 06 April 2011 11:50PM

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Comment author: JoshuaZ 07 April 2011 03:40:44PM *  2 points [-]

The number of major ideas in epistemology is not very large. After Aristotle, there wasn't very much innovation for a long time. It's a small enough field you can actually trace ideas all the way back to the start of written history. Any professional can look at everything important. Some Bayesian should have. Maybe some did, but I haven't seen anything of decent quality.

As to a professional, I already referred you to Earman. Incidentally, you seem to be narrowing the claim somewhat. Note that I didn't say that the set of major ideas in epistemology isn't small, I referred to the much larger class of philosophical ideas (although I can see how that might not be clear from my wording). And the set is indeed very large. However, I think that your claim about "after Aristotle" is both wrong and misleading. There's a lot of what thought about epistemological issues in both the Islamic and Christian worlds during the Middle Ages. Now, you might argue that that's not helpful or relevant since it gets tangled up in theology and involves bad assumptions. But that's not to say that material doesn't exist. And that's before we get to non-Western stuff (which admittedly I don't know much about at all).

(I agree when you restrict to professionals, and have already recommended Earman to you.)

It works exactly identically to how Popperian epistemology creates any other kind of knowledge. There's nothing special for morality.

Knowledge is created by an evolutionary process involving conjecture and refutation. By criticizing flaws in ideas, we seek to improve them (by making better conjectures we hope will eliminate the flaws).

This is a deeply puzzling set of claims. First of all, a major point of his epistemological system is falsfiability based on data (at least as I understand it from LScD). How that would at all interact with moral issues is unclear to me. Indeed, the semi-canonical example of a non-falsifiable claim in the Popperian sense is Marxism, a set of ideas that has a large set of attached moral claims.

I also don't see how this works given that moral claims can always be criticized by the essential sociopathic argument "I don't care. Why should you?" Obviously, that line of thinking can be/should be expanded. To use your earlier example, how would you discuss "murder is wrong" in a Popperian framework? I would suggest that this isn't going to be any different than simply discussing moral ideas based on shared intuitions with particular attention to the edge cases. You're welcome to expand on these claims, but right now, nothing you've said in this regard is remotely convincing or even helpful since it amounts to just saying "well, do the same thing."

I have a lot of familiarity with the other Popperians. But Popper and Deutsch are by far the best. There isn't really anything non-Popperian that draws on Popper much. Everyone who has understood Popper is a Popperian, IMO. If you disagree, do tell.

I'm going to be obnoxious and quote a friend of mine "Everyone who understands Christianity is a Christian." I don't have any deep examples of other individuals although I would tentatively say that I understood Popper's views in Logic of Scientific Discovery just fine.

Do you have a criticism of his arguments in LScD or not?

Sure. The most obvious one is when he is discussing the law of large numbers and frequentist v. Bayesian interpretations (incidentally to understand those passages it is helpful to note that he uses the term "subjective" to describe Bayesians rather than Bayesian which is consistent with the language of the time, but in modern terminology has a very different meaning (used to distinguish between subject and objective Bayesians)). In that section he argues that (I don't have the page number unfortunately since I'm using my Kindle edition. I have a hard copy somewhere but I don't know where) that "it must be inadmissable to give after the deduction of Bernoulli's theorem a meaning to p different from the one which was given to it before the deduction." This is, simply put, wrong. Mathematicians all the time prove something in one framework and then interpret it in another framework. You just need to show that all the properties of the relevant frameworks overlap in sufficiently non-pathological cases. If someone wrote this as a complaint about say using the complex exponential to understand the symmetries of the Euclidean plane, we'd immediately see this as a bad claim. There's an associated issue in this section which also turns up but it is more subtle; Popper doesn't appreciate what you can do with measure theory and L_p spaces and related ideas to move back and forth between different notions of probability and different metrics on spaces. That's ok, it was a very new idea when he wrote LScD (although the connections were to some extent definitely there). But it does render a lot of what he says simply irrelevant or outright wrong.

Comment author: curi 07 April 2011 06:58:34PM *  0 points [-]

As to a professional, I already referred you to Earman.

Which you stated you had not read. I have rather low standards for recommendations of things to read, but "I never read it myself" isn't good enough.

I don't agree with "restrict to professionals". How is it to be determined who is a professional? I don't want to set up arbitrary, authoritative criteria for dismissing ideas based on their source.

First of all, a major point of his epistemological system is falsfiability based on data (at least as I understand it from LScD).

That is a major point for scientific research where the problem "how do we use evidence?" is important. And the answer is "criticisms can refer to evidence". Note by "science" here I mean any empirical field. What do you do in non-scientific fields? You simply make criticisms that don't refer to evidence. Same method, just missing one type of criticism which is rather useful in science but not fundamental to the methodology.

Indeed, the semi-canonical example of a non-falsifiable claim in the Popperian sense is Marxism, a set of ideas that has a large set of attached moral claims.

It is not empirically falsifiable. It is criticizable. For example Popper criticized Marx in The Open Society and its Enemies..

I also don't see how this works given that moral claims can always be criticized by the essential sociopathic argument "I don't care. Why should you?"

Any argument which works against everything fails at the task of differentiating better and worse ideas. So it is a bad argument. So we can reject it and all other things in that category, by this criticism.

To use your earlier example, how would you discuss "murder is wrong" in a Popperian framework?

The short answer is: since we don't care to have justified foundations, you can discuss it any way you like. You can say it's bad because it hurts people. You can say it's good because it prevents overpopulation. You can say it's bad because it's mean. These kinds of normal arguments, made by normal people, are not deemed automatically invalid and ignored. Many of them are indeed mistakes. But some make good points.

For more on morality, please join this discussion:

http://lesswrong.com/lw/552/reply_to_benelliott_about_popper_issues/3uv7

I would tentatively say that I understood Popper's views in Logic of Scientific Discovery just fine.

He has like 20 books. There's way more to it. When one reads a lot of them, a whole worldview comes across that is very hard to understand from just a couple books. And I wasn't trying to argue with that statement, I was just commenting. I mentioned it because of a comment to do with whether I had studied results of non-Popperians using Popperian ideas.

"it must be inadmissable to give after the deduction of Bernoulli's theorem a meaning to p different from the one which was given to it before the deduction." This is, simply put, wrong.

Are you really telling me that you can prove something, then take the conclusion, redefine a term, and work with that, and consider it still proven? You could only do that if you created a second proof that the change doesn't break anything, you can't just do it. I'm not sure you took what Popper was saying literally enough; I don't think your examples later actually do what he criticized. Changing the meaning of a term in a conclusion statement, and considering a conclusion from a different perspective, are different.

Popper doesn't appreciate what you can do with measure theory and L_p spaces

Would you understand if I said this has no relevance at all to 99.99% of Popper's philosophy? Note that his later books generally have considerably less mention of math or logic.

Comment author: JoshuaZ 08 April 2011 02:43:45AM *  3 points [-]

Which you stated you had not read. I have rather low standards for recommendations of things to read, but "I never read it myself" isn't good enough.

Earman is a philosopher and the book has gotten positive reviews from other philosophers. I don't know what else to say in that regard.

I don't agree with "restrict to professionals". How is it to be determined who is a professional? I don't want to set up arbitrary, authoritative criteria for dismissing ideas based on their source.

Hrrm? You mentioned professionals first. I'm not sure why you are now objecting to the use of professionals as a relevant category.

That is a major point for scientific research where the problem "how do we use evidence?" is important. And the answer is "criticisms can refer to evidence". Note by "science" here I mean any empirical field. What do you do in non-scientific fields? You simply make criticisms that don't refer to evidence. Same method, just missing one type of criticism which is rather useful in science but not fundamental to the methodology

I'm not at all convinced that this is what Popper intended (but again I've only read LScD) but if this is accurate then Popper isn't just wrong in an interesting way but is just wrong. Does one mean for example to claim that pure mathematics works off of criticism? I'm a mathematician. We don't do this. Moreover, it isn't clear what it would even mean for us to try to do this as our primary method of inquiry. Are we supposed to spend all our time going through pre-existing proofs trying to find holes in them?

He has like 20 books. There's way more to it. When one reads a lot of them, a whole worldview comes across that is very hard to understand from just a couple books.

Yes, and I'm quite sure that I get much more of a worldview if I read all of Hegel rather than just some of it. That doesn't mean I need to read all of it. Similar remarks would apply to Aquinas or more starkly the New Testament. Do you need to read all of the New Testament to decide that Christianity is bunk? Do you need to read the entire Talmud to decide that Judaism is incorrect? But you get a whole worldview that you don't obtain from just reading the major texts.

The short answer is: since we don't care to have justified foundations, you can discuss it any way you like. You can say it's bad because it hurts people. You can say it's good because it prevents overpopulation. You can say it's bad because it's mean. These kinds of normal arguments, made by normal people, are not deemed automatically invalid and ignored. Many of them are indeed mistakes. But some make good points

Right, and then we just the criticism "why bother" or "and how does that maximize the number of paperclip in the universe?" Or one can say "mean" "good" bad" are all hideously ill-defined. In any event, does it not bother you that you are essentially claiming that your moral discussion with your great epistemological system looks just like a discussion about morality by a bunch of random individuals? There's nothing in the above that uses your epistemology in any substantial way.

Are you really telling me that you can prove something, then take the conclusion, redefine a term, and work with that, and consider it still proven? You could only do that if you created a second proof that the change doesn't break anything, you can't just do it.

Right! And conveniently in the case Popper cares about you can prove that.

Popper doesn't appreciate what you can do with measure theory and L_p spaces

Would you understand if I said this has no relevance at all to 99.99% of Popper's philosophy? Note that his later books generally have considerably less mention of math or logic.

Do you mean understand or do you mean care? I don't understand why you are making this statement given that my remark was addressing the question you asked of whether I had specific problems with Popper's handling of Bayesianism in LScD. This is a specific problem there.

Comment author: AlephNeil 08 April 2011 06:12:28PM *  1 point [-]

Does one mean for example to claim that pure mathematics works off of criticism? I'm a mathematician. We don't do this.

I don't know what Popper himself would say, but one of his more insightful followers, namely Lakatos, argues for exactly that position.

I read Proofs and Refutations too many years ago to say anything precise about it. I remember finding it interesting but also frustrating. Lakatos seems determined to ignore/deny/downplay the fact of mathematical practice that we only call something a 'theorem' when we've got a proof, and we only call something a 'proof' when it's logically watertight in such a way that no 'refutations' are possible. Still, it's well-researched (in its use of a historical case-study) and he comes up with some decent ideas along the way (e.g. about "monster barring" and "proof-oriented definitions".)

Comment author: JoshuaZ 09 April 2011 02:11:08PM 1 point [-]

Yes, Lakatos does argue for that in a certain fashion, (and I suppose it is right to bring this up since I've myself repeatedly pointed people here on LW to read Lakatos when they think that math is completely reliable.) However, Lakatos took a more nuanced position than the position that curi is apparently taking that math advances solely through this method of criticism. I also think Lakatos is wrong in so far as the examples he uses are not actually representative samples of what the vast majority of mathematics looks like. Euler's formula is an extreme example, and it is telling that when one wants to give other similar examples one often gives other topological claims from before 1900 or so.