You're looking at Less Wrong's discussion board. This includes all posts, including those that haven't been promoted to the front page yet. For more information, see About Less Wrong.

curi comments on Bayesian Epistemology vs Popper - Less Wrong Discussion

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

You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.

Comments (226)

You are viewing a single comment's thread. Show more comments above.

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.