In my understanding, there’s no one who speaks for LW, as its representative, and is *responsible* for addressing questions and criticisms. LW, as a school of thought, has no agents, no representatives – or at least none who are open to discussion.
The people I’ve found interested in discussion on the website and slack have diverse views which disagree with LW on various points. None claim LW is true. They all admit it has some weaknesses, some unanswered criticisms. They have their own personal views which aren’t written down, and which they don’t claim to be correct anyway.
This is problematic. Suppose I wrote some criticisms of the sequences, or some Bayesian book. Who will answer me? Who will fix the mistakes I point out, or canonically address my criticisms with counter-arguments? No one. This makes it hard to learn LW’s ideas in addition to making it hard to improve them.
My school of thought (Fallible Ideas – FI – https://fallibleideas.com) has representatives and claims to be correct as far as is known (like LW, it’s fallibilist, so of course we may discover flaws and improve it in the future). It claims to be the best current knowledge, which is currently non-refuted, and has refutations of its rivals. There are other schools of thought which say the same thing – they actually think they’re right and have people who will address challenges. But LW just has individuals who individually chat about whatever interests them without there being any organized school of thought to engage with. No one is responsible for defining an LW school of thought and dealing with intellectual challenges.
So how is progress to be made? Suppose LW, vaguely defined as it may be, is mistaken on some major points. E.g. Karl Popper refuted induction. How will LW find out about its mistake and change? FI has a forum where its representatives take responsibility for seeing challenges addressed, and have done so continuously for over 20 years (as some representatives stopped being available, others stepped up).
Which challenges are addressed? *All of them*. You can’t just ignore a challenge because it could be correct. If you misjudge something and then ignore it, you will stay wrong. Silence doesn’t facilitate error correction. For information on this methodology, which I call Paths Forward, see: https://curi.us/1898-paths-forward-short-summary BTW if you want to take this challenge seriously, you’ll need to click the link; I don’t repeat all of it. In general, having much knowledge is incompatible with saying all of it (even on one topic) upfront in forum posts without using references.
My criticism of LW as a whole is that it lacks Paths Forward (and lacks some alternative of its own to fulfill the same purpose). In that context, my criticisms regarding specific points don’t really matter (or aren’t yet ready to be discussed) because there’s no mechanism for them to be rationally resolved.
One thing FI has done, which is part of Paths Forward, is it has surveyed and addressed other schools of thought. LW hasn’t done this comparably – LW has no answer to Critical Rationalism (CR). People who chat at LW have individually made some non-canonical arguments on the matter that LW doesn’t take responsibility for (and which often involve conceding LW is wrong on some points). And they have told me that CR has critics – true. But which criticism(s) of CR does LW claim are correct and take responsibility for the correctness of? (Taking responsibility for something involves doing some major rethinking if it’s refuted – addressing criticism of it and fixing your beliefs if you can’t. Which criticisms of CR would LW be shocked to discover are mistaken, and then be eager to reevaluate the whole matter?) There is no answer to this, and there’s no way for it to be answered because LW has no representatives who can speak for it and who are participating in discussion and who consider it their responsibility to see that issues like this are addressed. CR is well known, relevant, and makes some clear LW-contradicting claims like that induction doesn’t work, so if LW had representatives surveying and responding to rival ideas, they would have addressed CR.
BTW I’m not asking for all this stuff to be perfectly organized. I’m just asking for it to exist at all so that progress can be made.
Anecdotally, I’ve found substantial opposition to discussing/considering methodology from LW people so far. I think that’s a mistake because we use methods when discussing or doing other activities. I’ve also found substantial resistance to the use of references (including to my own material) – but why should I rewrite a new version of something that’s already written? Text is text and should be treated the same whether it was written in the past or today, and whether it was written by someone else or by me (either way, I’m taking responsibility. I think that’s something people don’t understand and they’re used to people throwing references around both vaguely and irresponsibly – but they haven’t pointed out any instance where I made that mistake). Ideas should be judged by the idea, not by attributes of the source (reference or non-reference).
The Paths Forward methodology is also what I think individuals should personally do – it works the same for a school of thought or an individual. Figure out what you think is true *and take responsibility for it*. For parts that are already written down, endorse that and take responsibility for it. If you use something to speak for you, then if it’s mistaken *you* are mistaken – you need to treat that the same as your own writing being refuted. For stuff that isn’t written down adequately by anyone (in your opinion), it’s your responsibility to write it (either from scratch or using existing material plus your commentary/improvements). This writing needs to be put in public and exposed to criticism, and the criticism needs to actually get addressed (not silently ignored) so there are good Paths Forward. I hoped to find a person using this method, or interested in it, at LW; so far I haven’t. Nor have I found someone who suggested a superior method (or even *any* alternative method to address the same issues) or pointed out a reason Paths Forward doesn’t work.
Some people I talked with at LW seem to still be developing as intellectuals. For lots of issues, they just haven’t thought about it yet. That’s totally understandable. However I was hoping to find some developed thought which could point out any mistakes in FI or change its mind. I’m seeking primarily peer discussion. (If anyone wants to learn from me, btw, they are welcome to come to my forum. It can also be used to criticize FI. http://fallibleideas.com/discussion-info) Some people also indicated they thought it’d be too much effort to learn about and address rival ideas like CR. But if no one has done that (so there’s no answer to CR they can endorse), then how do they know CR is mistaken? If CR is correct, it’s worth the effort to study! If CR is incorrect, someone better write that down in public (so CR people can learn about their errors and reform; and so perhaps they could improve CR to no longer be mistaken or point out errors in the criticism of CR.)
One of the issues related to this dispute is I believe we can always proceed with non-refuted ideas (there is a long answer for how this works, but I don’t know how to give a short answer that I expect LW people to understand – especially in the context of the currently-unresolved methodology dispute about Paths Forward). In contrast, LW people typically seem to accept mistakes as just something to put up with, rather than something to try to always fix. So I disagree with ignoring some *known* mistakes, whereas LW people seem to take it for granted that they’re mistaken in known ways. Part of the point of Paths Forward is not to be mistaken in known ways.
Paths Forward is a methodology for organizing schools of thought, ideas, discussion, etc, to allow for unbounded error correction (as opposed to typical things people do like putting bounds on discussions, with discussion of the bounds themselves being out of bounds). I believe the lack of Paths Forward at LW is preventing the resolution of other issues like about the correctness of induction, the right approach to AGI, and the solution to the fundamental problem of epistemology (how new knowledge can be created).
Regardless of the topic, I would say that the article should be easy to read, and relatively self-contained. For example, instead of "go read this book by Popper to understand how he defines X" you could define X using your own words, preferably giving an example (of course it's okay to also give a quote from Popper's book).
I don't even know what the abbreviation is supposed to mean. Seriously.
Generally, I think that the greatest risk is people not even understanding what you are trying to say. If you include links to other pages, I guess most people will not click them. Aim to explain, not to convince, because a failure in explaining is automatically also a failure in convincing.
Maybe it would make sense for you to look at the articles that I believe (with my very unclear understanding of what you are trying to say) may be most relevant to your topic:
1) "Infinite Certainty" (and its mathy sequel "0 And 1 Are Not Probabilities"), and
2) "Scientific Evidence, Legal Evidence, Rational Evidence".
Because it seems to me that the thing about Popper and induction is approximately this...
Simplicio: "Can science be 100% sure about something?"
Popper: "Nope, that would mean that scientists would never change their minds. But they sometimes do, and that is an accepted part of science. Therefore, scientists are never 100% sure of their theories."
Simplicio: "Well, if they can't prove anything with 100% certainty, why don't we just ignore them completely? It's just another opinion, right?"
Popper: "Uhm... wait a minute... scientists cannot prove anything, but they can... uhm... disprove things! Yeah, that's what they do; they make many theories, they disprove most of them, and the one that keeps surviving is the official winner, for the moment. So it's not like the scientists proved e.g. the theory of relativity, but rather that they disproved all known competing theories, and failed to disprove the theory of relativity (yet)."
To which I would give the following objection:
1) How exactly could it be impossible to prove "X", and yet possible to disprove "not X"? If scientists are able to falsify e.g. the hypothesis that "two plus two does not equal four", isn't it the same as proving the hypothesis that "two plus two equals four"?
I imagine that the typical situation Popper had in mind included a few explicit hypotheses, e.g. A, B, C, and then a remaining option "something else that we did not consider". So he is essentially saying that scientists can experimentally disprove e.g. B and C, but that's not the same as proving A. Instead, they proved "either A, or something else that we did not consider, but definitely neither B nor C". Shortly: B and C were falsified, but A wasn't proven. And as long as there remains an unspecified category "things we did not consider", there is always a chance that A is merely an approximate solution, and the real solution is still unknown.
But it doesn't always have to be like this. Especially in math. But also in real life. Consider this:
According to Popper, not matter how much scientific evidence we have in favor of e.g. theory of relativity, all it needs is one experiment that will falsify it, and then all good scientists should stop believing in it. And recently, theory of relativity was indeed falsified by an experiment. Does it mean we should stop teaching the theory of relativity, because now it was properly falsified?
With the benefit of hindsight, now we know there was a mistake in the experiment. But... that's exactly my point. The concepts of "proving" and "falsifying" are actually much closer than Popper probably imagined. You may have a hypothesis "H", and an experiment "E", but if you say that you falsified "H", it means you have a hypothesis "F" = "the experiment E is correct and falsifies the theory H". To falsify H by E is to prove F; therefore if F cannot be scientifically proven, then H cannot be scientifically falsified. Proof and falsification are not two fundamentally different processes; they are actually two sides of the same coin. To claim that the experiment E falsifies the hypothesis H, is to claim that you have a proof that "the experiment E falsifies the hypothesis H"... and the usual interpretation of Popper is that there are no proofs in science.
The answer generally accepted on LessWrong, I guess, is that what really happens in science is that people believe theories with greater and greater probability. Never 100%. But sometimes with a very high probability instead, and for most practical purposes such high probability works almost like certainty. Popper may insist that science is unable to actually prove that moon is not made of cheese, but the fact is that most scientists will behave as if they already had such proof; they are not going to keep an open mind about it.
.
Short version: Popper was right about inability to prove things with 100% certainty, but then he (or maybe just people who quote him) made a mistake of imagining that disproving things is a process fundamentally different from proving things, so you can at least disprove things with 100% certainty. My answer is that you can't even disprove things with probability 100%, but that's okay, because the "100%" part was just a red herring anyway; what actually happens in science is that things are believed with greater probability.
Do you even know the name of Popper's philosophy? Did you read the discussions about this that already happened on LW?
It seems that you're completely out of your depth, can't answer me, and don't want to make the effort to learn. You can't answer Popper, don't know of anyone or any writing that can, and are content with that. Your fellows here are the same way. So Popper goes unanswered and you guys stay wrong.
FYI Popper has lots of self-contained writing. Many of his book chapters a... (read more)