curi comments on Bayesian Epistemology vs Popper - Less Wrong Discussion
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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.
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.
It is not empirically falsifiable. It is criticizable. For example Popper criticized Marx in The Open Society and its Enemies..
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
Hrrm? You mentioned professionals first. I'm not sure why you are now objecting to the use of professionals as a relevant category.
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?
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.
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.
Right! And conveniently in the case Popper cares about you can prove that.
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.
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".)
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.