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).
I generally agree with your judgment (assuming that the "effort to learn" refers strictly to Popper).
But before I leave this debate, I would like to point out that you (and Ilya) were able to make this (correct) judgment only because I put my cards on the table. I wrote, relatively shortly and without obfuscation, what I believe. Which allowed you to read it and conclude (correctly) "he is just an uneducated idiot". This allowed a quick resolution; and as a side effect I learned something.
This may or may not be ironically related to the idea of falsification, but at this moment I feel unworthy to comment on that.
Now I see two possible futures, and it is more or less your choice which one will happen:
Option 1:
You may try to describe (a) your beliefs about induction, (b) what you believe are LW beliefs about induction, and (c) why exactly are the supposed LW beliefs wrong, preferably with a specific example of a situation where following the LW beliefs would result in an obvious error.
This is the "high risk / high reward" scenario. It will cost you more time and work, and there is a chance that someone will say "oh, I didn't realize this before, but now I see this guy has a point; I should probably read more of what he says", but there is also a chance that someone will say "oh, he got Popper or LW completely wrong; I knew it was not worth debating him". Which is not necessarily a bad thing, but will probably feel so.
Yeah, there is also the chance that people will read your text and ignore it, but speaking for myself, there are two typical reasons why I would do that: either is text is written in a way that makes it difficult for me to decipher what exactly the author was actually trying to say; or the text depends on links to outside sources but my daily time budget for browsing internet is already spent. (That is why I selfishly urge you to write a self-contained article using your own words.) But other people may have other preferences. Maybe the best would be to add footnotes with references to sources, but make them optional for understanding the gist of the article.
Option 2:
You will keep saying: "guys, you are so confused about induction; you should definitely read Popper", and people at LW will keep thinking: "this guy is so confused about induction or about our beliefs about induction; he should definitely read the Sequences", and both sides will be frustrated about how the other side is unwilling to spend the energy necessary to resolve the situation. This is the "play it safe, win nothing" scenario. Also the more likely one.
Last note: Any valid argument made by Popper should be possible to explain without using the word "Popper" in text. Just like Pythagorean theorem is not about the person called Pythagoras, but about squares on triangles, and would be equally valid if instead it would be discovered or popularized by a completely different person; you could simply call it "squares-on-triangles theorem" and it would work equally well. (Related in Sequences: "Guessing the teacher's password"; "Argument Screens Off Authority".) If something is true about induction, it is true regardless of whether Popper did or didn't believe it.
when i asked for references to canonical LW beliefs, i was told that would make it a cult, and LW does not have beliefs about anything. since no pro-LW ppl could/would state or link to LW's beliefs about induction – and were hostile to the idea – i think it's unreasonable to ask me to. individual ppl at LW vary in beliefs, so how am i supposed to write a one-size-fits-all criticism? LW ppl offer neither a one-size-fits-all pro-induction explanation nor do any of them offer it individually. e.g. you hav... (read more)