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None of these feel like Real Explanations, but (at least?) one of them must be the case.
Or there could be a fourth explanation neither of us has thought of.
If propositional calculus (simpler than it sounds is a good way of describing causality in the territory, I very much doubt there is a fourth option. If I'm doing logic right:
1.¬A is A's cause(1)∨A is A's cause (1)(By NOT-3)
2.A has a cause→ ¬A is A's cause(1)∨A is A's cause(1)(By THEN-1)
3.A has a cause→ ¬A is A's cause(1)∨A is A's cause(1)→A has a cause ∧¬A is A's cause(1)∨A is A's cause(1)(By AND-3)
4.A has a cause→A has a cause ∧¬A is A's cause(1)∨ A is A's cause(1)(Modus Ponens on 3)
- ¬A has a cause∨A has a cause⊢A has a cause ∧ A is A's cause(1)∨¬A is A's cause* (By NOT-3)
6.¬A has a cause∨A has a cause ∧ A is A's cause(1)∨¬A is A's cause(1)(Modus ponens on 5)
Which, translated back into English, means that something either has a cause apart from itself, is it's own cause*,or has no cause. If you apply "has a cause apart from itself" recursively, you end up with an infinite chain of causes. Otherwise, you have to go with "is it's own cause(1)", which means the causal chain loops back on itself or "has no cause" which means the causal chain ends.
Nothing thus far, to my knowledge, has been found to defy the axioms of PC, and thus, if PC were wrong, it would seem not only unsatisfying but downright crazy. I believe that I could make at least a thousand claims which I believe as strongly as "If the Universe defied the principles of logic, it would seem crazy to me." and be wrong at most once, so I assign at least a 99.9% probability to the claim that "Why is everything" has no satisfying answer if "It spontaneously sprang into being", "Causality is cyclical." and "an infinite chain of causes" are unsatisfying.
(1)Directly or indirectly
Sure. Though even in cases like that, humans have a way of generalizing these sorts of things -- that is, of inferring an intensional definition which they extend, rather than treating the set strictly extensionally. It would not surprise me if after a few generations such a community came to consider marrying someone whose parent has the same first name as oneself to be |kàù, for example.
If I recall correctly, they actually do. It falls under their incest taboo. So "bad" in any culture could probably be defined by a list of generalised principals which don't necessarily share any characteristics other than being labelled as "bad".
It's worth being a little careful when talking about "list-based" as opposed to "feature-based" definitions, because it's easy to confuse those ideas with the more standard ideas of extensional and intentional definitions.
E.g., an extensional definition of "art" doesn't allow new works of art to be recognized as belonging to the set, and is therefore clearly not what English speakers mean when they say "art", but if I'm understanding what you mean by "list-based" here the same objection doesn't apply. What you seem to to be talking about here is an intentional definition where the defining properties are not explicitly articulable, and where knowledge of them is transmitted by analysis of prototypical examples and non-examples.
Yes?
That works a bit better, at least for the art example. A better example of where you'd best "define" a set by memorising all of it's members might be the morality of a particular culture. For instance, some African tribes consider it evil to marry someone whose sibling has the same first name as oneself. Not only is it hard to put into words, in English or Ju|'hoan, a definition of "bad" (or |kàù) which would encompass this, but one couldn't look at a bunch of other things that these tribes consider bad and infer that one shouldn't marry someone who has a sibling who share's one's first name. Better to just know that that's one of the things that is said to |kàù in that culture.
In response to
Fallacies of Compression
I started reading this blog a few days ago and am particularly interested in your posts since you seem to be a modeler. This sort of thing appeals to me.
Comments/criticisms:
I agree that it is not a good idea to cram too much into one point/label. However, what are your thoughts regarding the necessity of doing this? This is a point which I have not seen you address.
What I would claim is that our own personal "definitions" for words correspond strongly to the computational structures related to those words (as I expect you would agree) - however it may be, and we should expect that it is, difficult to operate outside of our current computational structures. To bifurcate a definition (e.g. to split "phenomonological sound" into "systematic sound" and "experiential sound") might be extremely mentally taxing, it might bring the conversation to a halt. How easy is it to change the map, in your opinion?
I am also somewhat wary of the recent trends in your thinking. In particular, all of your examples refer to very specific phenomena, very simple phenomena. Can you give an example of how you think that we apply/should apply (is there a should in here somewhere?) decoupling in order to disambiguate in very high-order contexts? E.g. let's say we're talking about a difficult-to-pin-down-but-easy-to-use term like "post-modernism?" Is there any way to talk about such a thing without developing a definition with someone? The dictionary definition would obviously be worthless, but so would pretty much any definition that we can come up with.
What about words that "can't be defined"? (e.g. "art")
I have many more questions for you, but I'll end here.
You seem like you might actually think somewhat clearly about the world, which is rare indeed. I really do appreciate the clarity and thoughtfulness of your posts, I'm merely trying to bring up points pertinent to my current and past interests and (hopefully) open up your eyes to potential gaps in your thinking.
Hope all is well.
What about words that "can't be defined"? (e.g. "art")
If you can't think of any unifying features of a category, but you still want to use it, you could go about listing members: "Art" Includes (for all known English-speaking humans): * Intentional paintings from before 1900 *Statues *Stained-glass windows &c. Includes for many: *abstract art *modern art *cubism *Photography &c. Includes for a few: Man-made objects not usually labelled as art &c. Includes for no known English-speaking human: Non man-made objects The Holocaust &c.
If the effect of knowing what "art" is (although that one's common-usage definition can be articulated in terms of features) is understanding what English-speakers mean when they say it, then a list-based definition is as effective, though not as efficient, as a feature based one. (You can make up for not knowing what criterion someone uses with a bit of Bayesian updating: The probability that Alice will call a Jackson Pollock piece "art" is greater if she called Léger's "Railway Crossing" "art" than if she did not)
In response to
Pascal's Mugging: Tiny Probabilities of Vast Utilities
It seems as though Pascal's mugging may be vulnerable to the same "professor god" problem as Pascal's wager. With probabilities that low, the difference between P(3^^^^3 people being tortured|you give the mugger $5) and P(3^^^^3 people being tortured| you spend $5 on a sandwich) may not even be calculable. It's also possible that the guy is trying to deprive the sandwich maker of the money he would otherwise spend on the Simulated People Protection Fund. If you're going to say that P(X is true|someone says X is true)>P(X is true|~someone says X is true) in all cases, then that should apply to Pascal's wager as well; P(Any given untestable god is real|there are several churches devoted to it)>P(Any given untestable god is real|it was only ever proposed hypothetically, tongue-in-cheek) and thus P(Pascal's God)>P(professor god). In this respect, I'm not sure how the two problems are different.
In all honesty, I haven't even read the study, because I can't find the full text online
Here it is (pdf link).
Ok, I'm confused. Under what scenario is it at all plausible for individual IQ differences but not racial IQ differences to be genetic?
Circumstances which look arbitrarily contrived and absurd upon examination but should be acknowledged as at least technically possible. ie. The distributions of IQ within each race are miraculously identical because contrary to expectations the universe really is Fair regarding this one complex trait (but not others).
Or one where the differences are small, or trivial. I don't think this is "miraculous" or "implausible". Before the invention of agriculture, about seven to twelve thousand years ago, I'm not sure what pressures there could have been on Europeans to develop higher intelligence than Africans, so in contrast to physical differences, many of which have well-established links to specific climates, intellectual genetic differences would probably be attributable to genetic drift and >~10,000 years of natural selection. To be clear, my position isn't that I have good evidence for this, merely that I don't know and I don't assign this scenario as low a prior probability as you seem to.
Yes, and I have had numerous twin studies cited at me that purport to show that genetics plays a key role. I can't vouch for the quality of either but it is clear that the research is likely to remain inconclusive for quite so time.
Really? I've seen twin studies that purport a genetic explanation for IQ differences between individuals, but never between racial groups. If you've saved a link to a study of the latter type, I'd be really interested to read it.
Well the fact that race is correlated with things like IQ is pretty well established empirically, and there is no obvious a priori reason to prefer environmental to genetic explanations.
Not a priori, but there has been at least one study performed on black children adopted by white families, this one, which comes to the conclusion that environment plays a key role. In all honesty, I haven't even read the study, because I can't find the full text online, but if more studies like it are performed and come to similar conclusions, then that could be taken as evidence of a largely environmental explanation.
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I'm afraid I just don't buy it. The distinguishing feature of one's boss is that this person has certain kinds of (formally recognized) power over you within your organization's hierarchy. No one thinks that their boss has the power to rearrange physical reality at a whim.
My objection to the quote as a rationality quote is that it reads like this: "Because my job performance may be affected by the laws of physical reality, which my boss is powerless to alter, he (the boss) in fact has no power over me!" Which is silly. It's a sort of sounds-like-wisdom that doesn't actually have any interesting insight. By this logic, no one has any legal/economic/social power over anyone else, and no one is anyone's boss, ever, because anything that anyone can do to anyone else is, in some way, limited by the laws of physics.
P.S. I think the Francis Bacon quote is either not relevant, or is equally vacuous (depending on how you interpret it). I don't think Bacon is "advising" us to obey nature. That would be meaningless, because we are, in fact, physically incapable of not obeying nature. We can't disobey nature — no matter how hard we try — so "advising" us to obey it is nonsense.
In a similar vein, saying that the mice have "the final say" on whether the compound is safe is nonsensical. The mice have no say whatsoever. The compound is either safe or not, regardless of the mice's wishes or decisions. To say that the have "the final say" implies that if they wished, they might say differently.
In short, I think a "poetic reading" just misleads us into seeing nonexistent wisdom in vacuous formulations.
You're considering just the word "boss". Consider the phrase "real boss". Regardless of the meanings of the constituent words, the phrase itself can often be replaced with "the one with the real power", or "the one who actually makes the decisions." For example, "The king may have nominal power, but he's really only a figurehead, his vizier is the real boss."
Now, we still find something lacking in that the mice don't actually make decisions, the people observing the mice do. However, if the people observing the mice care about doing good research, then decisions about what course of action to take in the future must take into account what happens with the mice. What happens with the mice provides evidence which forces the researchers to update their models, possibly changing the optimal course of action, or fail. The literal meaning "The mice provide evidence, forcing us to update our models, making us, in order to do our job correctly, change our decisions." may be expressed metaphorically as "The mice make decisions on how to do our job correctly" or "The mice are the real boss."
From the context of the article, in which he uses this as an argument for not coming up with certain specific goals before beginning research, this is likely what the author meant.