thomblake comments on Rationality: Appreciating Cognitive Algorithms - LessWrong

37 Post author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 06 October 2012 09:59AM

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Comment author: thomblake 08 October 2012 06:42:17PM 5 points [-]

Taboo is useful when you notice two people arguing over an equivocation, to get them to stop doing that. I'm not sure what the use is when there wasn't already confusion about the word "systematically".

Comment author: [deleted] 08 October 2012 07:09:14PM *  4 points [-]

If it's useful when people argue about an equivocation, it should be useful when there simply is an equivocation. Here, it would be easier to expose the equivocation of someone tried to spell out what "systematic" means in this context, which is the problem of what the concept of probability means when you try to apply it to the usefulness of an algorithm.

The equivocation in question is between recognizing that an algorithm's effectiveness depends on the concrete particulars of a given problem and recognizing that an algorithm must be reliable to use it to prove knowledge claims. This would have been easier to show equivocal if someone made a serious attempt to unpack "systematically" (or "tends probabilistically") which really does all the work in this account.

Comment author: thomblake 08 October 2012 07:34:54PM 3 points [-]

if someone made a serious attempt to unpack "systematically"

Since you seem to understand that there's an equivocation, wouldn't it be easier to just state up front what the two different meanings are supposed to be?

I'm still not sure what you're trying to point out here. Can you be more explicit/specific?