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Such as?
Such as, in this ancient example, understanding 'the nature of justice', as if that were some objective phenomenon.
I'm not up to date on philosophy since covering the drop-dead basics in high school seven years ago, so ignore this if modern philosophy has explicitly reduced itself to the cognitive science of understanding the mental machinery that underlies our intuitions. From what snippets I hear, though, I don't get that impression.
In response to
Less Wrong Rationality and Mainstream Philosophy
After a proposed analysis or definition is overturned by an intuitive counterexample, the idea is to revise or replace the analysis with one that is not subject to the counterexample. Counterexamples to the new analysis are sought, the analysis revised if any counterexamples are found, and so on...
Interestingly, that sounds a lot like (an important part of) how linguistics research works. Of course, it's a problem for philosophy because it doesn't see itself as a cognitive science like linguistics does, and it endeavours to do other things with this approach than deducing the rules of the system that generates the intuitions.
In response to
Rationality Quotes December 2012
Long quote to make a simple point, but relevant. (Context: this is from a Star Wars novel, so it's fiction.)
A death hollow is a low point where the heavier-than-air toxic gases that roll downslope from the volcanoes can pool.
The corpse of a hundred-kilo tusker lay just within its rim, its snout only a meter below the clear air that could have saved it. Other corpses littered the ground around it: rot crows and jacunas and other small scavengers I didn't recognize, lured to their deaths by the jungle's false promise of an easy meal.
I said something along these lines to Nick. He laughed and called me a Balawai fool.
"There's no false promise," he'd said. "There's no promise at all. The jungle doesn't promise. It exists. That's all. What killed those little ruskakks wasn't a trap. It was just the way things are."
Nick says that to talk of the jungle as a person-to give it the metaphoric aspect of a creature, any creature-that's a Balawai thing. That's part of what gets them killed out here.
It's a metaphor that shades the way you think: talk of the jungle as a creature, and you start treating it like a creature. You start thinking you can outsmart the jungle, or trust it, overpower it or befriend it, deceive it or bargain with it.
And then you die.
"Not because the jungle kills you. You get it? Just because it is what it is." These are Nick's words. "The jungle doesn't do anything. It's just a place. It's a place where many, many things live... and all of them die. Fantasizing about it - pretending it's something it's not - is fatal. That's your free life lesson for the day," he told me. "Keep it in mind."
I will.
- Mace Windu, in Shatterpoint by Matthew Stover
"more than you currently believe you're capable of" is any-thing.
No, it is "not less than one thing that is not in the set of things that you believe you are capable of". "Anything" includes "more than you currently believe you're capable of" but the reverse isn't true.
To make it tangible, someone who believes they wouldn't be able to get a date with a particular prospective mate when they in fact could and also believes they can not fly at faster than the speed of light is capable of doing more than they believe they are capable of but it still isn't correct to tell them "you can do anything". Because they in fact cannot fly faster than the speed of light.
Right. More concisely put: If you do so-and-so, it may expand the set of things you can attain, but it won't remove all limitations.
In response to
Rationality Quotes October 2012
"A car with a broken engine cannot drive backward at 200 mph, even if the engine is really really broken."
--Eliezer
Good quote, of course, but it's against one of the rules:
- Do not quote comments/posts on LW/OB
In response to
Rationality Quotes October 2012
The trick is to combine your waking rational abilities with the infinite possibilities of your dreams. Because, if you can do that, you can do anything. -Waking life (2001)
It's always "you can do anything" and never "you can do more than you currently believe you're capable of" with these motivational quotes.
If someone wrote the code to make the inclusion of an "Other" option a default, opt-out behavior of LW polls, I would not object if that code were added.
Well, no one's voting for her anyway.
In response to
New study on choice blindness in moral positions
concealing another person whom replaces the experimenter as the door passes.
(Very minor and content-irrelevant point here, but my grammar nazi side bids me to say it, at the risk of downvotery: it should be "who" here, not "whom", since it's the subject of the relative clause.)
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I don't know what example you are referring to, or what you mean by "some objective phenomenon". Justice clearly isn't something you can measure in the laboratory. It is not clearly subjective either, since people are either imprisoned or not, they can be inprisoned-for-me but free-for-you. Philosophical questions often fall into such a grey area. Socratic discussions assume that people intersubjectviely have the same concept in mind, or are capable of converging on an improved definition intersubjectively. Neither assumption is unreasonable.
I'm quoting the essay.
Justice is subjective, after a fashion. It is a set of intuitions, systematised into commonly accepted laws, which can change over time. Whether people are in jail isn't part of the phenomenon 'justice', only of how people act on these subjective ideas. On the other hand, people can be rightly-imprisoned-for-me and undeservedly-imprisoned-for-you if we disagree about the law.