This is a linkpost for http://curi.us/2065-open-letter-to-machine-intelligence-research-institute
No, you do not get to publicly demand an in-depth discussion of the philosophy of induction from a specific, small group of people. You can raise the topic in a place where you know they hang out and gesture in their direction. But what you're doing here is trying to create a social obligation to read ten thousand words of your writing. With your trademark in capital letters in every other sentence. And to write a few thousand words in response. From my outside perspective, engaging in this way looks like it would be a massive unproductive time sink.
There are thousands of philosophers about whom I could ask the same question. It makes sense to focus attention on those people who are most likely to provide useful information and not those people who are engaging in the most effort to get heart by coming and posting in our forum.
I have no reason for me to believe that Curi is among the people who's a really good philosopher.
Popper might have said useful things given his time but he's dead. I won't read from Popper about what he thinks about the development of the No Free Lunch theorem and ideas that came up after he died.
Barry Smith would be an example of a person that I like and where it's worth to spend more time reading more of his work. His work of applied ontology actually matters for real world decision making and knowledge modeling.
Reading more from Judea Pearl (who by the way supervised Ilya Shpitser's Phd) is also on my long-term philosophic reading list.
Your sockpuppet: "There is a shortage of good philosophers."
Me: "Here is a good philosophy book."
You: "That's not philosophy."
Also you: "How is Ayn Rand so right about everything."
Also you: "I don't like mainstream stuff."
Also you: "Have you heard that I exchanged some correspondence with DAVID DEUTSCH!?"
Also you: "What if you are, hypothetically, wrong? What if you are, hypothetically, wrong? What if you are, hypothetically, wrong?" x1000
Part of rationality is properly dealing with people-as-they-are. What your approach to spreading your good word among people-as-they-are led to is them laughing at you.
It is possible that they are laughing at you because they are some combination of stupid and insane. But then it's on you to first issue a patch into their brain that will be accepted, such that they can parse your proselytizing, before proceeding to proselytize.
This is what Yudkowsky sort of tried to do.
How you read to me is a smart young adult who has the same problem Yudkowsky has (although Yudkowsky is not so young anymore) -- someone who has been the smartest person in the room for too long in their intellectual development, and lacks the sense of scale and context to see where he stands in the larger intellectual community.
I hunted around your website until I found an actual summary of Popper's thinking in straightforward language.
Until I found that I had not seen you actually provide clear text like this, and I wanted to exhort you to write an entire sequence in language with that flavor: clean and clear and lacking in citation. The sequence should be about what "induction" is, and why you think other people believed something about it (even if not perhaps by that old fashioned name), and why you think those beliefs are connected to reliably predictable failures...
I think there are two big facts here.
ONE: You're posting over and over again with lots of links to your websites, which are places you offer consulting services, and so it kinda seems like you're maybe just a weirdly inefficient spammer for bespoke nerd consulting.
This makes almost everything you post here seem like it might all just be an excuse for you to make dramatic noise in the hopes of the noise leading somehow to getting eyeballs on your website, and then, I don't even know... consulting gigs or something?
This interpretation would seem less salient if you were trying to add value here in some sort of pro-social way, but you don't seem to be doing that so... so basically everything you write here I take with a giant grain of salt.
My hope is that you are just missing some basic insight, and once you learn why you seem to be half-malicious you will stop defecting in the communication game and become valuable :-)
TWO: From what you write here at an object level, you don't even seem to have a clear and succinct understanding of any of the things that have been called a "problem of induction" over the years, which is your major beef, from what I can see.
You've mentioned...
Fundamentally, the thing I offer you is respect, the more effective pursuit of truth, and a chance to help our species not go extinct, all of which I imagine you want (or think you want) because out of all the places on the Internet you are here.
If I'm wrong and you do NOT want respect, truth, and a slightly increased chance of long term survival, please let me know!
One of my real puzzles here is that I find it hard to impute a coherent, effective, transparent, and egosyntonic set of goals to you here and now.
Personally, I'd be selfishly just as happy if, instead of writing all new material, you just stopped posting and commenting here, and stopped sending "public letters" to MIRI (an organization I've donated to because I think they have limited resources and are doing good work).
I don't dislike books in general. I don't dislike commercialism in general. I dislike your drama, and your shallow citation filled posts showing up in this particular venue.
Basically I think you are sort of polluting this space with low quality communication acts, and that is probably my central beef with you here and now. There's lots of ways to fix this... you writing better stuff... you writi...
At one point in that discussion curi says the following, about me:
and then he was hostile to concepts like keeping track of what points he hadn't answered or talking about discussion methodology itself. he was also, like many people, hostile to using references.
I'd just like to say, for the record, that that is not an accurate characterization of my opinion or attitudes, and I do not believe it is an accurate characterization of my words either. What is true is that we'd been talking about various Popperish things, and then curi switched to only wantin...
Disclosure: I didn't read Popper in original (nor do I plan to in the nearest future; sorry, other priorities), I just had many people mention his name to me in the past, usually right before they shot themselves in their own foot. It typically goes like this:
There is a scientific consensus (or at least current best guess) about X. There is a young smart person with their pet theory Y. As the first step, they invoke Popper to say that science didn't actually prove X, because it is not the job of science to actually prove things; science can merely falsify ...
You are trying to reject a philosophy based on edge cases without trying to understand the big problems the philosophy is trying to solve.
Let's give some context to the stair-falling scenario. Consider that the parent is a TCS parent, not a normie parent. This parent has in fact heard the stair-falling scenario many times. It is often the first thing other people bring up when TCS is discussed.
Given the TCS parent has in fact thought about stair falling way more than a normie parent, how do you think the TCS parent has set up their home? Is it going to be a home where young children are exposed to terrible injury from things they do not yet have knowledge about?
Given also that the TCS parent will give lots of help to a child curious about stairs, how long before that child masters stairs? And given that the child is being given a lot of help in many other things as well and not having their rationality thwarted, how do you think things are like in that home generally?
The typical answer will be the child is "spoilt". The TCS parent will have heard the "spoilt" argument many times. They know the term "spoilt" is used to denegrate children and that the ideas underlying the idea of "spoilt" are nasty. So now we have got "spoilt" out of the way, how do you think things are like?
Ok, you say, but what if the child is outside near the edge of a busy road or something and wants to run across it? Do you not think the TCS parent hasn't also heard this scenario over and over? Do you think you're like the first one ever to have mentioned it? The TCS parent is well aware of busy road scenarios.
Instead of trying to catch TCS advocates out by bringing up something that has been repeatedly discussed why don't you look at the core problems the philosophy speaks to and address those? Those problems need urgent attention.
EDIT: I should have said also that the stair-falling scenario and other similar scenarios are just excuses for people not to think about TCS. They don't have want to think about the real problems children face. They want to continue to be irrational towards their children and hurt them.
Do you not think that I am aware that people who believe in extremist ideologies are capable of making excuses for not following the extreme consequences of their extremist ideologies?
But this is just the same as a religious person giving excuses for why the empirical consequences of his beliefs are the same whether his beliefs are true or false.
You have two options:
1) Embrace the extreme consequences of your ... (read more)