I changed my mind about some things. These examples are illustrative of potential weaknesses of focusing on error correction and critical discussion like Karl Popper advised. I don't think the weaknesses are inherent or unavoidable. They're practical issues that don't require different epistemology principles to address. They're just ways you...
I wrote a dense paragraph about Critical Fallibilism (CF), particularly ideas inspired by Eli Goldratt's Theory of Constraints (TOC). This article breaks it down and explains it. Here's the paragraph with small changes from the original: > People want complex solutions like correctly weighting and adding 50 factors, which are...
Solomonoff Induction (SI) focuses on short code. What’s short in English is not necessarily short in code, and vice versa. Most of our intuition in favor of short, simple explanations is from our experience with English, not code. Is there literature arguing that code and English brevity usually or always...
What counts as a hypothesis for Solomonoff induction? The general impression I’ve gotten in various places is “a hypothesis can be anything (that you could write down)”. But I don’t think that’s quite it. E.g. evidence can be written down but is treated separately. I think a hypothesis is more...
Highlights from the Blackmail Debate (Robin Hanson vs Zvi Mowshowitz) by Ben Pace: > Here's my overview of their positions. > > * Zvi thinks that blackmail would incentivize a whole host of terrible actions, such as trying to trick people into norm violation, and people becoming intensely secretive even...
I thought about how to use comments better and get along with people better. I wrote notes about it: * Write comments that would be appreciated by a new observer, who hasn’t read any of my previous stuff, hasn’t read the sequences, and only skimmed the post he’s commenting under....
Discussions should end gracefully. There should be some clarity about why they’re ending and why that’s rationally acceptable. If someone wants to continue the discussion, they should have the opportunity to see why this ending is reasonable. (Or, failing that, they should have some evidence available to enable them to...