A lot of websites present both sides of the story, and then logically conclude that their side is the winner, 100 percent of the time.

I would be very surprised (and immediately suspicious) to find a website that didn't. People like to be right. If someone does a lot of research, writes up an article, and comes up with what appears to be overwhelming support for one side or the other, then they will begin to identify with their side. If that was the side they started with, then they would present an article along the lines of "Why <My Side> Is Correct". If that was not the side they started with, then they would present an article along the lines of "Why I Converted To <My New Side>".

If they don't come up with overwhelming support for one side or another, then I'd imagine they'd either claim that there is no strong evidence against their side, or write up an article in support of agnosticism.

16.

It looks like we may have enough people interested in Probability Theory, Though I doubt we all live in the same city. I live near DC.

Depending on how many people are interested/where they live, it might make sense to meet over video chat instead.

I was wondering about the ages of all the people who want to start this club.

Not that age really matters, I just wanted to know what kinds of people we have here.

How about we give our ages in a 10 year range?

Was this intended to be a response to a different comment?

I don't think Eliezer meant all what I have written (edit: yep, he didn't). I was mainly analysing (and defending) the example to death, under Daenerys' proposed assumption that the belief in the professor's head is not floating. More likely, he picked something familiar that would make us think something like "yeah, if those are just labels, that's no use".¹

By the way is there any good example? Something that (i) clearly is meaningful, and (ii) let us empathise with those who nevertheless extract a floating belief out of it? I'm not sure. I for one don't empathise with the students who merely learn by rot, for I myself don't like loosely connected belief networks: I always wanted to understand.

Also, Eliezer wasn't very explicit about the distinction between a statement, embodied in text, images, or whatever our senses can process, and belief, embodied in a heap of neurons. But this post is introductory. It is probably not very useful to make the distinction so soon. More important is to realize that ideas are not floating in the void, but are embodied in a medium: paper, computers… and of course brains.

[1] We're not familiar to "post-utopianism" and "colonial alienation" specifically, but we do know the feeling generated by such literary mumbo jumbo.

Fair enough; I had wanted to say that but don't have sufficiently intimate awareness of every academic field to be comfortable doing so. I think it works just as well to illustrate that we oughtn't confuse passing flaws in a field with fundamental ones, or the qualities of a /discipline/ with the qualities of seeking truth in a particular domain.

Well, in the case of answers to questions like that in the humanities what does the word 'right' actually mean? If we say a particular author is 'post utopian' what does it actually mean for the answer to that question to be 'yes' or 'no'? It's just a classification that we invented. And like all classification groups there is a set of rules characteristics that mean that the author is either post utopian or not. I imagine it as a checklist of features which gets ticked off as a person reads the book. If all the items in the checklist are ticked then the author is post utopian. If not then the author is not.

The problem with this is that different people have different items in their checklist and differ in their opinion on how many items in the list need to be checked for the author to be classified as post utopian. You can pick any literary classification and this will be the case. There will never be a consensus on all the items in the checklist. There will always be a few points that everybody does not agree on. This makes me think that objectively speaking there is not 'absolutely right' or 'absolutely wrong' answer to a question like that.

In hard science on the other hand. There is always an absolutely right answer. If we say: "Protons and neutrons are oppositely charged." There is an answer that is right because no matter what my beliefs, experiment is the final arbiter. Nobody who follows through the logical steps can deny that they are oppositely charged without making an illogical leap.

In the literary classification, you or your neural network can go through logical steps and still arrive at an answer that is not the same for everybody.

EDIT: I meant "protons and electrons are oppositely charged" not "protons and neutrons". Sorry!

I'm sorry for posting such a pointless comment, but how do we change how the comments are sorted? I can see a Sort By: Old thing above the comments, but nothing happens when I click on it. Is there somewhere I can change settings, or something?
Thank you.