It's probably not a good idea to laugh at people until you've at least heard their arguments. It is at the very least very bad signaling for an intellectual community to dismiss a small body of work because a sentence on Wikipedia (source unknown) makes it sound silly.
Remember that LW sounds pretty silly on Rational Wiki.
You mean that the graduate student of the philosophy of logic doesn't know about things like math and theories of truth? That seems unlikely to me.
We can have papers published about this, we really ought to be able to get papers published about Friendly AI subproblems.
Are you implying that you are trying to get papers published about Friendly AI subproblems and having difficulty?
Pfft, I don't see what's so funny about the end. If it had been , alright, that would have been somewhat ironic at least, but )? Nobody was even arguing against that.
In college I was part of the cult of Alfred the Duck. It was a religion with five or so members, formed when our founder decided to take False as an axiom, and also drew a little picture of a duck. Using the holy T=F axiom, it's easy to prove that Alfred the Duck knows all and sees all, and that everything both exists and doesn't exist. It actually worked pretty well as a religion. (There was also something about welcoming alien invaders, but I think that was a different religion.)
That seems to be a practical accomplishment of trivialist philosophy.
To paraphrase something Eliezer said to me in person, "Here's one more thing philosophers have written more papers about than reflective decision theory."
I am a proponent of Wednesdayism. "Wednesdayism is the view that true is true and false is false except, crucially, on Wednesdays."
Heh.
My own view is that this argument is as convincing as an argument for any philosophically interesting position, and so should be taken seriously. Trivialism should not be treated as a special case in this regard. Philosophers have committed to claims on the basis of a lot less.
It was definitely worth skimming through. Two... well, not really questions, but thoughts:
How does trivialism differ from assuming the existence of a Tegmark IV universe?
A spectral argument given in defense of trivialism in the dissertation runs like this:
a. Natural language is inconsistent.
b. Therefore, by explosion, every sentence in natural language is true.
c. Every classical proposition may be interpreted in natural language.
d. Therefore, classical logic is inconsistent.
The error in the argument is actually quite subtle!
That must be a hoax. Tell me it's a hoax! [takes a look at the references] No, it isn't a hoax. What the ...
Graham Priest interview with Julia Galef and Massimo Pigliucci on paraconsitency and dialetheism:
http://rationallyspeaking.blogspot.de/2012/11/rationally-speaking-podcast-graham.html
Does anyone know if trivialism has to be interpreted as "every sentence is at least true" or as "every sentence is true and only true"?
sighs This is why, when one studies philosophy, one does well to pretty much ignore anyone who claims that the universe is completely knowable a priori.
In fact, given the number of sets of axioms from which one can derive statements, pretty much any argument that hinges primarily on a priori claims is probably mistaken. (Note: This is an a posteriori claim.)
Straight from Wikipedia.
I just had to stare at this a while. We can have papers published about this, we really ought to be able to get papers published about Friendly AI subproblems.
My favorite part is at the very end.
Trivialism is the theory that every proposition is true. A consequence of trivialism is that all statements, including all contradictions of the form "p and not p" (that something both 'is' and 'isn't' at the same time), are true.[1]
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