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PhilGoetz comments on Reductionist research strategies and their biases - LessWrong
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Comments (27)
This post has gotten 3? downvotes and no comments. If you downvote it, it would help me if you left a comment saying why.
I haven't downvoted it, but the post looks like a few pages of personal notes with little effort spent to make them palatable or interesting to other people. A tl;dr and some explanation why anyone should care could help.
Everyone should care because the biases that are "close to home" are ones that matter. This is an important subject.
Normative versus descriptive. Saying "everyone should care" doesn't change the fact that some don't, and that for those people, a tidier presentation may help, even if it wouldn't make a difference for an ideal rationalist.
Regarding the subject as important is not at all exclusive of wanting a better presentation.
I upvoted, but the tone of this post is terse which makes it fairly difficult to understand. Some of the examples are confusing. It's not very readable for people who haven't already been exposed to these ideas, you may be assuming too much background knowledge that reading the book gave you.
I didn't moderate it, but this post looks pretty close to a Gish Gallop.
I don't see this as a Gish Gallop, as it doesn't even appear to me to be an argument. It just looks like a list of biases that reductionists should take extra care to avoid. The "should" part wasn't argued, just assumed.
"Reductionists should avoid these biases" implies that reductionists have those biases to a significant degree, and that when examples are given they are examples of these biases. This post contains at least 33 separate items implying that reductionists are often biased in some particular way, plus all the specific examples that are brought up. Nobody could possibly answer them all.
Why would you "answer" them? This is not a "reductionism is bad" argument, and I would find it oddly religious if you felt the need to insist that reductionism was unique among all methodologies in not imposing a bias.
"This is not a "reductionism is bad" argument"
Conversational implicature suggests that when you give a list of 33 ways in which reductionists can be biased, you are claiming that reductionists are exceptionally biased. It is logically possible that you are merely saying they are biased like everyone else, but actual human communication doesn't work that way.
I don't really get that feeling. But if some people do maybe it would make sense for Phil to add a clarifying remark that that's not intended.
A Gish Gallop is presenting a lot of not-very-good points and then drawing a conclusion, so that you ignore people who disagree with your conclusion if they missed any of your points. This is not drawing a conclusion, and I think the points are individually interesting.
The book I wrote about a month or two ago, Real Presences--now that was a Gish Gallop.
I was going to downvote your comment, but then I realized you gave a useful answer to a question I asked, so that would be ingrateful of me, and I will say "thanks!" instead. I guess people are interpreting this as an attack on reductionism.
(Would it make sense to say "thanks and a downvote" when you're grateful for a response that you think is wrong? That is, should the votes represent gratitude, assessment of usefulness in the larger context, or accuracy of claims made in the comment?)
A wrong response documented is worth the implicit benefit of the response being addressed in the minds of all who would object with that response's reasoning.
And I think you meant to say you read Real Presences, not wrote it. :P
Ah. "I wrote about a month ago" = "I <wrote about> a month ago", not "I wrote <about a month ago>".
A wrong response is worth something, but I wouldn't want to vote it up, since that would be read as agreement.
Would downvoting imply disagreement, then?
I think an upvote suggests agreement with the content rather than gratefulness for it. If someone has a wrong opinion, but people are interested in why, and he explains it, and they all upvote it out of gratitude, he might interpret that as agreement.
If a downvote implies something other than the opposite of what an upvote implies, it becomes difficult to interpret votes.