I didn't vote on this article, as it happens.
This post is another one of the ones I was talking about. I wasn't really paying attention to where in the sequences anything was (it's been so long since I read them that they're all blurred together in my mind).
There are certainly strong arguments against the meaningfulness of coincidence (and I think the heuristics and biases program does address some of when and why people think coincidences are meaningful).
The page says:
But this doesn't answer the legitimate philosophical dilemma: If every belief must be justified, and those justifications in turn must be justified, then how is the infinite recursion terminated?
I do not assume that every belief must be justified, except possibly within rationality.
Do the arguments against the meaningfulness of coincidence state that coincidences do not exist?
If you respond to that letter, I will not engage in conversation, because the letter is a badly written outdated progress report of my work. The work is now done, it will be published as a book, and I already have a publisher. If you want to know when the book comes out, you might want to join this Facebook community.
...but I don't want to be rational for deep philosophical reasons. My justification is that (instrumental) rationality is useful. To demonstrate that, one would have to look at outcomes for those behaving rationally and those behaving irrational -- not necessarily easy, but definitely a tractable problem.
I am not talking about a prescriptive theory that tells, whether one should be rational or not. I am talking about a rational theory, that produces a taxonomy of different ways of being rational or irrational without making a stance on which way should be chosen. Such a theory already implicitly advocates rationality, so it doesn't need to explicitly arrive at conclusions about whether one ought to be rational or not.
That post in particular is a vague overview of meta-rationality, not a systematic account of it. It doesn't describe meta-rationality as something that qualifies as a theory. It just says there is such a thing without telling exactly what it is.
(I prefer to avoid the term 'rationalism' whenever possible and stick to 'rationality'. Mostly because 'rationalism' has been taken already, we have largely opposing views to that philosophy, and '-isms' should be kept narrow lest they become tainted by their weakest points/members. Buddhism, Hinduism, and libertarianism, for examples.)
How is Buddhism tainted? Christianity could have been tainted during the purges in the early centuries, but I don't find Buddhism to have deviated from its original teachings in such a way that Buddhists themselves would no longer recognize them. There are millions of Buddhists in the world, so there are bound to be weirdos in that lot. But consider the question: "What is Buddhism, as defined by prominent Buddhists themselves, whose prominence is recognized by traditional institutions that uphold Buddhism?" It doesn't seem to me the answer to this question would have changed much during the last millennium.
Likewise, rationalism could not be tainted by some Christian preacher who claims he is a rationalist, but whose preaching implicitly oppose rationalism and who is not considered a rationalist by anyone on LW.
The problem with "rationalism" is not that people don't know what it means, it's that it means something different to most people then it does to us. With terms like "LessWrongism" or "Yudkowskian", at least people will realize that they don't know what they mean.
The rationalism-empiricism philosophical debate is somewhat dead. I see no problem in using "rationalism" to mean LW rationalism. "Rationality" (1989) by Rescher defines rationality in the way LW uses the word, but doesn't use "rationalism", ostensibly because of the risk of confusion with the rationalism-empiricism debate. Neither LW nor average people are subject to similar limitations as the academic Rescher, so I think it is prudent to overwrite the meaning of the word "rationalism" now.
Maybe "rationalism" used to mean "rationalism in the rationalism-empiricsm debate", but the concept of "rationality" has become very important during the past century, and that "rationality" means the LW type rationality. Yet, "rationality" is only a method. What LW clearly advocates is that this method is somehow the best, the only right method, the only method, a superior method, or a method that ought to be used. Hence, LW is somewhat founded on a prescriptive belief that "rationality" is a good method. It is very reasonable to call such a belief "rationalism", as someone without belief in the superiority of rationality could still use rationality without being a rationalist.
I think people confusing rationalism with one side of the age old rationalism/empiricism debate in philosophy is a much more probable event than someone confusing it with a faith based ideology.
According to Rationality (1989) by Nicholas Rescher, who is for all intents and purposes a rationalist in the sense LW (not academic philosophy) uses the word, the LW rationality is a faith based ideology. See confirmation holism by Quine, outlined in "The Two Dogmas of Empiricism". Rationality is insufficient to justify rationality with rational means, because to do so would presuppose that all means of justification are rational, which already implicitly assumes rationality. Hence, it cannot be refuted that rationality is based on faith. Rescher urges people to accept rationality nevertheless.
Are random people allowed to visit harmless psych patients with those patients' consent? This sounds fascinating.
Hehe. I'm a psych patient and I'm allowed to visit LessWrong.
Okay. In this case, the article does seem to begin to make sense. Its connection to the problem of induction is perhaps rather thin. The idea of using low Kolmogorov complexity as justification for an inductive argument cannot be deduced as a theorem of something that's "surely true", whatever that might mean. And if it were taken as an axiom, philosophers would say: "That's not an axiom. That's the conclusion of an inductive argument you made! You are begging the question!"
However, it seems like advancements in computation theory have made people able to do at least remotely practical stuff on areas, that bear resemblance to more inert philosophical ponderings. That's good, and this article might even be used as justification for my theory RP - given that the use of Kolmogorov complexity is accepted. I was not familiar with the concept of Kolmogorov complexity despite having heard of it a few times, but my intuitive goal was to minimize the theory's Kolmogorov complexity by removing arbitrary declarations and favoring symmetry.
I would say, that there are many ways of solving the problem of induction. Whether a theory is a solution to the problem of induction depends on whether it covers the entire scope of the problem. I would say this article covers half of the scope. The rest is not covered, to my knowledge, by anyone else than Robert Pirsig and experts of Buddhism, but these writings are very difficult to approach analytically. Regrettably, I am still unable to publish the relativizability article, which is intended to succeed in the analytic approach.
In any case, even though the widely rejected "statistical relevance" and this "Kolmogorov complexity relevance" share the same flaw, if presented as an explanation of inductive justification, the approach is interesting. Perhaps, even, this paper should be titled: "A Formalization of Occam's Razor Principle". Because that's what it surely seems to be. And I think it's actually an achievement to formalize that principle - an achievement more than sufficient to justify the writing of the article.
Commenting the article:
"When artificial intelligence researchers attempted to capture everyday statements of inference using classical logic they began to realize this was a difficult if not impossible task."
I hope nobody's doing this anymore. It's obviously impossible. "Everyday statements of inference", whatever that might mean, are not exclusively statements of first-order logic, because Russell's paradox is simple enough to be formulated by talking about barbers. The liar paradox is also expressible with simple, practical language.
Wait a second. Wikipedia already knows this stuff is a formalization of Occam's razor. One article seems to attribute the formalization of that principle to Solomonoff, another one to Hutter. In addition, Solomonoff induction, that is essential for both, is not computable. Ugh. So Hutter and Rathmanner actually have the nerve to begin that article by talking about the problem of induction, when the goal is obviously to introduce concepts of computation theory? And they are already familiar with Occam's razor, and aware of it having, at least probably, been formalized?
Okay then, but this doesn't solve the problem of induction. They have not even formalized the problem of induction in a way that accounts for the logical structure of inductive inference, and leaves room for various relevance operators to take place. Nobody else has done that either, though. I should get back to this later.
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I can't reply to some of the comments, because they are below the threshold. Replies to downvoted comments are apparently "discouraged" but not banned, and I'm not on LW for any other reason than this, so let's give it a shot. I don't suppose I am simply required to not reply to a critical post about my own work.
First of all, thanks for the replies, and I no longer feel bad for the about -35 "karma" points I received. I could have tried to write some sort of a general introduction to you, but I've attempted to write them earlier, and I've found dialogue to be a better way. The book I wrote is a general introduction, but it's 140 pages long. Furthermore, my published wouldn't want me to give it away for free, and the style isn't very fitting to LessWrong. I'd perhaps hape to write another book and publish it for free as a series of LessWrong articles.
Mitchell_Porter said:
The contents of the normative and objective continua are relatively easily processed by an average LW user. The objective continuum consists of dialectic (classical quality) about sensory input. Sensory input is categorized as it is categorized in Maslow's hierarchy of needs. I know there is some criticism of Maslow's theory, but can be accept it as a starting point? "Lower needs" includes homeostasis, eating, sex, excretion and such. "Higher needs" includes reputation, respect, intimacy and such. "Deliberation" includes Maslow's "self-actuation", that is, problem solving, creativity, learning and such. Sense-data is not included in Maslow's theory, but it could be assumed that humans have a need to have sensory experiences, and that this need is so easy to satisfy that it did not occur to Maslow to include it as the lowest need of his hierarchy.
The normative continuum is similarily split to a dialectic portion and a "sensory" portion. That is to say, a central thesis of the work is that there are some kind of mathematical intuitions that are not language, but that are used to operate in the domain of pure math and logic. In order to demonstrate that "mathematical intuitions" really do exist, let us consider the case of a synesthetic savant, who is able to evaluate numbers according to how they "feel", and use this feeling to determine whether the number is a prime. The "feeling" is sense-data, but the correlation between the feeling and primality is some other kind of non-lingual intuition.
If synesthetic primality checks exist, it follows that mathematical ability is not entirely based on language. Synesthetic primality checks do exist for some people, and not for others. However, I believe we all experience mathematical intuitions - for most, the experiences are just not as clear as they are for synesthetic savants. If the existence of mathematical intuition is denied, synesthetic primality checks are claimed impossible due to mere metaphysical skepticism in spite of lots of evidence that they do exist and produce strikingly accurate results.
Does this make sense? If so, I can continue.
Mitchell_Porter also said:
I'm aware of that. Objectivity is just one continuum in the theory.
I'm not exactly in trouble. I have a publisher and I have people to talk with. I can talk with a mathematician I know and on LilaSquad. But given that Pirsig's legacy appears to be continental philosophy, nobody on LilaSquad can help me improve the formal approach even though some are interested of it. I can talk about everything else with them. Likewise, the mathematician is only interested of the formal structure of the theory and perhaps slightly of the normative continuum, but not of anything else. I wouldn't say I have something to prove or that I need something in particular. I'm mostly just interested to find out how you will react to this.
Something to that effect. This is another reason why I like talking with people. They express things I've thought about with a different wording. I could never make progress just stuck in my head.
I'd say the irrational continua do not have fixed notions of truth and falsehood. If something is "true" now, there is no guarantee it will persist as a rule in the future. There are no proof methods of methods of justification. In a sense, the notions of truth and falsehood are so distorted in the irrational continua that they hardly qualify as truth or falsehood - even if the Bible, operating in the subjective continuum, would proclaim that it's "the truth" that Jesus is the Christ.
Mitchell asked:
As far as I know, the letter was never delivered to Pirsig. The insiders of MoQ-Discuss said their mailing list is strictly for discussing Pirsig's thoughts, not any derivative work. The only active member of Lila Squad who I presume to have Pirsig's e-mail address said Pirsig doesn't understand the Metaphysics of Quality himself anymore. It seemed pointless to press the issue that the letter be delivered to him. When the book is out, I can that to him via his publisher and hope he'll receive it. The letter wasn't even very good - the book is better.
I thought Pirsig might want to help me with development of the theory, but it turned out I didn't require his help. Now I only hope he'll enjoy reading the book.