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.
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 ...
I wish to conclude this debate somehow, so I will provide something like a summary:
If I understand you correctly, you believe that (1) induction and probabilities are unacceptable for science or "critical rationalism", and (2) weighing evidence can be replaced by... uhm... collecting verbal arguments and following a flowchart, while drawing a tree of arguments and counter-arguments (hopefully of a finite size).
I believe that you are fundamentally wrong about this, and that you actually use induction and probabilities.
First, because without induction, no reasoning about the real world is possible. Do you expect that (at least approximately) the same laws of physics apply yesterday, today, and tomorrow? If they don't, then you can't predict anything about the future (because under the hypothetical new laws of physics, anything could happen). And you even can't say anything about the past, because all our conclusions about the past are based on observing what we have now, and expecting that in the past it was exposed to the same laws of physics. Without induction, there is no argument against "last Thursdayism".
Second, because although to refuse to talk about probabilities, and definitely object against using any numbers, some expressions you use are inherently probabilistic; you just insist on using vague verbal descriptions, which more or less means rounding the scale of probability from 0% to 100% into a small number of predefined baskets. There is a basket called "falsified", a basket called "not falsified, but refuted by a convincing critical argument", a basket called "open debate; there are unanswered critical arguments for both sides", and a basket called "not falsified, and supported by a convincing critical argument". (Well, something like that. The number and labels of the baskets are most likely wrong, but ultimately, you use a small number of baskets, and a flowchart to sort arguments into their respective baskets.) To me, this sounds similar to refusing to talk about integers, and insisting that the only scientifically valid values are "zero", "one", "a few", and "many". I believe that in real life you can approximately distinguish whether you chance of being wrong is more in the order of magnitude "one in ten" or "one in a million". But your vocabulary does not allow to make this distinction; there is only the unspecific "no conclusion" and the unspecific "I am not saying it's literally 100% sure, but generally yes"; and at some point of the probability scale you will make the arbitrary jump from the former to the latter, depending on how convincing is the critical argument.
On your website, you have a strawman powerpoint presentation about how people measure "goodness of an idea" by adding or removing goodness points, on a scale 0-100. Let me tell you that I have never seen anyone using or supporting that type of scale; neither on Less Wrong, nor anywhere else. Specifically, Bayes Theorem is not about "goodness" of an idea; it is about mathematical probability. Unlike "goodness", probabilities can actually be calculated. If you put 90 white balls and 10 black balls in a barrel, the probability of randomly drawing a white ball is 90%. If there is one barrel containing 90 white balls and 10 black balls, and another barrel containing 10 white balls and 90 black balls, and you choose a random barrel, randomly draw five balls, and get e.g. four white balls and one black ball, you can calculate the probability of this being the first or the second barrel. It has nothing to do with "goodness" of the idea "this is the first barrel" or "this is the second barrel".
My last observation is that your methodology of "let's keep drawing the argument tree, until we reach the conclusion" allows you to win debates by mere persistence. All you have to do is keep adding more and more arguments, until your opponent says "okay, that's it, I also have other things to do". Then, according to your rules, you have won the debate; now all nodes at the bottom of the tree are in favor of your argument. (Which is what I also expect to happen right now.)
And that's most likely all from my side.
This is the old argument that CR smuggles induction in via the backdoor. Critical Rationalists have given answers to this argument. Search, for example, what Rafe Champion has to say about induction smuggling. Why have you not done research about this before commenting? You point is not original.
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