Yeah. Okay. Is there any consensus about what caused the big bang? Like, how it happened?
It seems to me abiogenesis is super tricky but conceivable. The "beginning" of everything is a bit more conceptually problematic.
Positing a hyper-powerful creative entity seems not that epistemologically reckless when the more "scientific" alternative is "something happened".
This is essentially what username2 was getting at, but I'll try a different direction.
It's entirely possible that "what caused the big bang" is a nonsensical question. 'Causes' and 'Effects' only exist insofar as there are things which exist to cause causes and effect effects. The "cause and effect" apparatus could be entirely contained within the universe, in the same way that it's not really sensible to talk about "before" the universe.
Alternatively, it could be that there's no "before" because the universe has always existed. Or that our universe nucleated from another universe, and that one could follow the causal chain of universes nucleating within universe backwards forever. Or that time is circular.
I suspect that the reason I'm not religious is that I'm not at all bothered by the question "Why is there a universe, rather than not a universe?" not having a meaningful answer. Or rather, it feels overwhelmingly anthropocentric to expect that the answer to that question, if there even was one, would be comprehensible to me. Worse, if the answer really was "God did it," I think I would just be disappointed.
By that standard of admission, "Gauss the Sane" admitted that Eliezer was correct.
I was very vague because I was not interested in engaging with you.
If you aren't interested in engaging with me, then why did you respond to my thread? Especially when the content of your post seems to be "No you're wrong, and I don't want to explain why I think so."?
It seems to me that Eliezer is basically correct on the physics. It seems to me that you and SU3 looked at a big jump and instead of trying to figure out what he was trying to say, even to the extent of following the links on the reddit thread, just rounded it off to the nearest error you had a counterexample at hand for.
I think "sneer" is a pretty appropriate description.
I have seen some criticism of the example that engages with it, and maybe it would be best to say that it is not a legitimate argument because it relies on fragile things holding when a closely related fragile thing has shattered. But that is a very different criticism.
What precisely is Eliezer basically correct about on the physics?
It is true that non-unitary gates allow you to break physics in interesting ways. It is absolutely not true that violating conservation of energy will lead to a nonunitary gate. Eliezer even eventually admits (or at least admits that he 'may have misunderstood') an error in the physics here. (see this subthread).
This isn't really a minor physics mistake. Unitarity really has nothing at all to do with energy conservation.
Your dedication to the cause of discerning who has rightly discerned who has rightly discerned errors in HPMOR greatly exceeds mine. I shall leave it there.
"I'm going to use Joe as an example of The Bad Thing, but whether or not he actually is an example isn't the real point."
On my meta-level point, do you see how this would rankle a person's basic sense of fairness regardless of how they felt about Joe?
I never claimed whether he was or not wasn't Important. I just didn't focus on that aspect of the argument because it's been discussed at length elsewhere (the reddit thread, for example). And I've repeatedly offered to talk about the object level point if people were interested.
I'm not sure why someone's sense of fairness would be rankled when I directly link to essentially all of the evidence on the matter. It would be different if I was just baldly claiming "Eliezer done screwed up" without supplying any evidence.
I think Eliezer is pretty cool. I aso don't think he's immune from criticism, nor do I think he's an inappropriate target of this sort of post.
The problem is that there is no way for anyone to check your claims about the cited thread without closely reading a large amount of contentious discussion of HPMOR and all the parts of HPMOR being talked about, in order to work out who is being wrong on the Internet. Whoever is going to do that?
I never said that determining the sincerity of criticism would be easy. I can step through the argument with links, I'd you'd like!
I mean, if you'd like to talk about the object level point of "was the criticism of Eliezer actually true"
I'm not particularly interested in that. It just seemed to me that the example was the point of the article and the meta-stuff was there only to be a support for it.
I mean, people in class (d) are straightforwardly committing what one might call the Sneer Fallacy. Sneering is their bottom line, and it's even easier to sneer than to make an argument. To adapt C.S. Lewis, it is hard to make an argument, but effortless to pretend that an argument has been made. A similar sentiment is expressed in the catchphrase "haters gonna hate".
But you skip over that and go straight to a meta-fallacy of misidentifying someone as committing Sneer. This seems too small a target to be worth the attention of a post. Eliezer, on the other hand, is a big target. Therefore Eliezer, and not Sneer Fallacy Fallacy, is the real subject.
Yes, I wrote this article because Eliezer very publicly committed the typical sneering fallacy. But I'm not trying to character-assassinate Eliezer. I'm trying to identify a poisonous sort of reasoning, and indicate that everyone does it, even people that spends years of their life writing about how to be more rational.
I think Eliezer is pretty cool. I aso don't think he's immune from criticism, nor do I think he's an inappropriate target of this sort of post.
I suspect how reader's respond to my anecdote about Eliezer will fall along party lines, so to speak.
Which makes for a handy immunizing strategy against criticisms of your post, n'est–ce pas?
(I do agree, though, that snarkiness isn't really useful in trying to get people to listen to criticism, and often just backfires)
Nor, perhaps, is yanking in opposition to people's party affiliations useful in trying to get them to listen to an idea.
I'm actually all for snark and ridicule, but then you really need to be hitting your target, because it is reasonable for people to update that a criticism is relatively unconcerned about finding the truth when it demonstrates another motivation being pursued.
Which makes for a handy immunizing strategy against criticisms of your post, n'est-ce pas?
It's my understanding that your criticism of my post was that the anecdote would be distracting. One of the explicit purposes of my post was to examine a polarizing example of [the fallacy of not taking criticism seriously] in action--an example which you proceed to not take seriously in your very first post in this thread simply because of a quote you have of Eliezer blowing the criticism off.
The ultimate goal here is to determine how to evaluate criticism. Learning how to do that when the criticism comes from across party lines is central.
I suspect how reader's respond to my anecdote about Eliezer will fall along party lines, so to speak.
My response, the moment I read the paragraph beginning "This is the point in the article where..." was, "This is the real subject of the post and will be a criticism of the person named. The preamble was written to generate priming and framing for the claims, which will be unsubstantiated other than by reference to a discussion somewhere else."
I mean, if you'd like to talk about the object level point of "was the criticism of Eliezer actually true", we can do that. The discussion elsewhere is kind of extensive, which is why I tried to focus on the meta-level point of the Typical Sneer Fallacy.
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It's an incredibly good indicator of poor sleep quality for me. I have to take phenibut to get good sleep quality nowadays though.
Yes I have. I notice it has to do with body position or when my head is on a tilt.
I've found that I only ever get something sort of like sleep paralysis when I sleep flat on my back, so +1 for sleeping orientation mattering for some reason.