= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
It already exists, if poorly maintained.
In response to
Let's Make an Open Problems Page
yea, that's just a wiki entry. And the problems there are much more general than the sort of thing i am imagining. I'm thinking things like, interpretations of dutch book arguments, solutions to grue, optimizing problems, newcomb problems, open decision theory problems, and the like.
Let's Make an Open Problems Page
It's simple enough of a proposal. Make a page where we post open problems, work on solutions to said problems, and where we can discuss these problems prior to attempting to solve them with other LWers. I would suggest two main parts:
- Lesswrong specific/original problems, i.e., problems posed by LWers, or which are particularly relevant to LW style rationality.
- General problems which we believe LWers should have the tools to solve, but which have not been solved.
I would propose using the same karma system we use now. Each problem could have a long list of proposed solutions, cautionary comments, and newly found lemmas relevant to the problem, and each solution, warning, or lemma, could have its own comment tree section. But it is important that we don't think of solutions as articles; they should be scientific writing. No sentence or phrase should be in a solution without adding to the literal meaning of the solution. We should judge solutions based on how well they solve the problem, not on how well written they are. We might even want to make chat rooms devoted to each problem, so that we can actively engage in conversation in stead of waiting for comment responses.
This would have at least three major benefits:
- We would have a place for LW students to actually practice their skills on fresh problems without putting them through the less effective torture of already solved, homework-like tasks.
- We would have a large record of our successes and failures as rationalists, and an easy way to get a sense of how far we've come since 2011.
- This would provide us with a way to test the results of LW style rationality training/study by looking at who has been giving the best solutions. If we find that after a few years of being on LW, 50% of LWers give a really good solution to one of the open problems, then we can conclude that reading/using LW has had positive effects on the rationality of its readers/users.
In response to
(Subjective Bayesianism vs. Frequentism) VS. Formalism
Why can't a frequentist say: "Bayesians are conflating probability with subjective degree of belief." ? They were here first after all.
Probability does model frequency, and it does model subjective degree of believe, and this is not a contradiction. Using the copula is the problem, obviously: if subjective degree of believe is not frequency, and probability is frequency, then probability is not subjective degree of belief. Analogously, if subjective degree of believe is not frequency, and probability is subjective degree of belief, then probability is not frequency.
The problem is that they all conflate "probability" with "subjective degree of belief" and "frequency", the bayesian conflates subjective degree of belief and probability. The frequentist conflates probability and frequency.
The frequentist/Bayesian dispute is of real import, because ad-hoc frequentist statistical methods often break down in extreme cases, throw away useful data, only work well with Gaussian sampling distributions etc.
The debate over whether to use Bayesian methods or frequentest methods is of import. I think potato was trying to say this here:
How we should actually model the situation as a probability distribution depends on our goal. But remember that Bayesianism is the stronger magic.
But the question of whether probability is frequency, or if probability is subjective degree of belief, is just as silly as a dispute over whether numbers are quantity, or if they are orders. The answer is that numbers model both, and are neither.
Welcome!
I want to work on the hard questions of philosophy, grue and induction, cognition and consciousness, nominalism v.s. realism, Bayesian epistemology, philosophy of probability and mathematics in general, and even meta-physics, though I would like to positivize the field a bit.
That's a huge amount of philosophy to look at. Might I suggest narrowing your interests down a bit, at least at first? It's very easy to read a little bit of everything, but much harder to contribute something non-trivial to every field.
Lastly, I would like to ask, how does less wrong see itself? I mean what is the general LW opinion of what LW is? Is it a blog? An open source research institute? A philosophical movement? A non-philosophical movement? A self-help movement? I am curious.
It seems to be a little bit of all of those things. Some people here are rabidly anti-philosophy, and so if LW overtly called itself a philosophical movement, those people would probably end up evaporating off. On the other hand, some people would very much like to see the self-help aspects of LW become secondary to the more philosophical or technical aspects. Like everything else, it's a bit hard to pin down to a distinct category.
Narrowing my interests is probably not an option. The fact that I can practically work on anything and still be a philosopher is one of the things that appeals to me about the field, but maybe that has something to do with why it so rarely done competently :/ My only other option is to work my butt off, but I know that to be a generalist and contribute takes lots of work. I do specialize in what I like to call algorithmic philosophy, and philosophy of mathematics, but that is only because I think they are of great import to my other fields of interest.
In response to
Welcome to Less Wrong! (2010-2011)
So what if anything is the standard lesswrong approach to Nelson Goodman's grue problem? If there is any paradox I could imagine someone posing against LW, I would imagine it would be the Grue problem.
(damn down voters edit): Not that I think it would pose any real threat. Just curious, I'm sure LW has a brilliant solution. And if not it can def be made by assembling the bits of other posts. I would really like to know why this got down voted.
"Lesswrongianism" however, that's a badass word.
It would be badderass in a dead language. "Minorifalsianism" or something.
"Minorfalsology" is totally the best word for it.
Welcome!
I want to work on the hard questions of philosophy, grue and induction, cognition and consciousness, nominalism v.s. realism, Bayesian epistemology, philosophy of probability and mathematics in general, and even meta-physics, though I would like to positivize the field a bit.
That's a huge amount of philosophy to look at. Might I suggest narrowing your interests down a bit, at least at first? It's very easy to read a little bit of everything, but much harder to contribute something non-trivial to every field.
Lastly, I would like to ask, how does less wrong see itself? I mean what is the general LW opinion of what LW is? Is it a blog? An open source research institute? A philosophical movement? A non-philosophical movement? A self-help movement? I am curious.
It seems to be a little bit of all of those things. Some people here are rabidly anti-philosophy, and so if LW overtly called itself a philosophical movement, those people would probably end up evaporating off. On the other hand, some people would very much like to see the self-help aspects of LW become secondary to the more philosophical or technical aspects. Like everything else, it's a bit hard to pin down to a distinct category.
Being anti-philosophy is something philosophy needs. Not in a boring, the field is dead Rorty sense. In a, these are scientific questions with definite right and wrong answers, kind of way.
I don't think anyone is ever really anti-philosophy; perhaps my imagination is so daft that I can't imagine someone with different tastes. I think philosophy has really frustrated a lot of truth seekers because it was being done poorly. Even in analytic philosophy, only ever so rarely does a tool from analytic philosophy come about that could not be compared to using a stick to break apart and probe matter.
Lesswrong needs to solve philosophical problems to do its job, whether to build AI, or systematically cause rationality. It needs to solve scientific problems too, but lesswrong's practice seems to consist primarily in long winded, immersive, and concentrated discussion, using previously established technical terminology and calculi, with the aim of settling the truth value of some claim. The method of argument is the method of philosophy. This mixed with the philosophical nature of much of the content here on LW, are enough for me to think of LW as a philosophical movement. But a philosophical movement separated from the long western tradition stretching back to plato.
I like to think of LW as a philosophical movement, analogously to that famous internet meme about that statistician which goes something like this:
Derp was late to his probability class, and quickly jotted down the HW for that week's class. He worked on it for quite a while. When he got there next week, he told his professor that he found the HW harder than usual. Derp's professor informed him that what he had jotted down was not the HW, it was three unsolved conjectures. Derp then presented those proofs with the help of his professor as his dissertation.
LW solves some seemingly unsolvable philosophical dilemmas in a similar fashion; and if the average LW user is somehow helped in solving open and VERY DIFFICULT philosophical problems in the manner of insanely competent philosophers, by not thinking of him/herself as a philosopher, or by just treating philosophical problems as trivial HW, then who gives a damn? "Philosophy" is a pretty lame word anyway, "Lesswrongianism" however, that's a badass word. If you guys want us to be called "LWers" instead of "philosophers" I don't care, as long as we still solve the open philosophical problems of the previous and new century.
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I am confused, I thought we were to weight hypotheses by 2^-(kolmogorov(H)) not 2^-length(H). Am I missing something?