Discussion article for the meetup : Baltimore / UMBC Weekly Meetup: How To Actually Change Your Mind (part 2)

Discussion article for the meetup : Baltimore / UMBC Weekly Meetup: How To Actually Change Your Mind (part 2)

Discussion article for the meetup : UMBC / Baltimore Weekly Meetup: How To Actually Change Your Mind

Discussion article for the meetup : UMBC / Baltimore Weekly Meetup: How To Actually Change Your Mind

Discussion article for the meetup : UMBC / Baltimore: Intro to LW / general discussion

Discussion article for the meetup : UMBC / Baltimore: Intro to LW / general discussion

Discussion article for the meetup : Baltimore Area / UMBC: Intro to LW and future of the meetup

Discussion article for the meetup : Baltimore Area / UMBC: Intro to LW and future of the meetup

Discussion article for the meetup : Baltimore Area Meetup: Futurology / Open Discussion

Discussion article for the meetup : Baltimore Area Meetup: Futurology / Open Discussion

Discussion article for the meetup : Baltimore Area: Epistemology of Disagreement

Discussion article for the meetup : Baltimore Area: Epistemology of Disagreement

Excellent list by Brenton Mayer and Peter McIntyre: http://mcntyr.com/52-concepts-cognitive-toolkit/

I think the list can also serve as a useful index and/or introduction to a lot of LessWrong concepts.

A note of caution: I find that brief lists like this can actually be counterproductive, since they make you feel like you understand the issues when all you did was read a short definition and peg a name on the concept. I'd recommend doing the following: Look through the list carefully and slowly. If there's a concept there that you've read a lot about then you can go on to the next one, although do take a look at where the link points to in case it's to an interesting article you haven't seen before. If you haven't read a lot about the concept then ideally you should click on the link and read all about it. If you're more pressed for time, then at least take a few moments to reflect on each concept and think how it might apply to you. If you have even a slight suspicion that there might be something in the concept that wasn't completely obvious to you before, then click on the link even though you're pressed for time. If you're so time constrained that you can't even do this, then consider just bookmarking the list and getting back to it later. Personally I think it's better to read it later carefully than to read it now and think you understand it when you really don't.

Discussion article for the meetup : Baltimore Area Meetup

Discussion article for the meetup : Baltimore Area Meetup

For a while now I've been trying hard to understand philosophical viewpoints that defer from mine. Somewhere along the line I've picked up or developed a lot of the LW-typical viewpoints (not sure if this was because of LW, or if I developed them earlier and that's what later attracted me to LW), but I know there are a lot of smart people out there who disagree with those viewpoints. I've tried to read articles and books on this, but they either don't address what I'm looking for somehow, or they're so technical that I have a hard time following them. I've also talked at some length with a philosophy professor, but our conversations often seem to end with me still being confused and the professor being confused about what it is I might be confused about.

I'm thinking maybe it'll help to get some input from people who do intuitively agree with my viewpoints, hence this post. So, can someone please tell me what the central arguments or motivations are for promoting the following:

Epistemology:

• Trusting philosophical intuitions and/or the way people use words to the point of making strong metaphysical claims about the world, despite the findings of cognitive science / evolutionary psychology / experimental philosophy / etc. that there doesn't seem to be any good reason to trust those intuitions / ways of talking
• Not looking at the world in a probabilistic way
• Using personal preference or personal intuitions as priors instead of some objective measure along the lines of Solomonoff Induction

Ontology / philosophy of mind:

• Moral realism
• Mathematical Platonism
• Libertarian free will (I'm looking for arguments other than those from religion)
• The view that there actually exist abstract "tables" and "chairs" and not just particles arranged into those forms
• The existence of non-physical minds (I'm looking for arguments other than the argument from the Hard Problem of Consciousness)

I suspect I'm having trouble with the ontology issues because of my trouble understanding the epistemology issues. Specifically, I keep getting the impression that most (all?) of the arguments for the ontology issues boil down to trusting philosophical intuitions and/or the way people use words. Something along the following lines:

I intuitively feel that there really are objective morals (or: objective mathematics, actual free will, tables and chairs, minds).

Therefore, there really are objective morals (etc.).

Or the equivalent using the way people talk about things.

But this just seems totally ludicrous to me. If we trust cognitive science, evolutionary psychology, etc., and if those fields give us perfectly plausible reasons for why we might intuitively feel this way / talk this way, even if it didn't reflect the truth, then what could possibly be your motivation for sticking to your intuitions anyway and using them to support some grand metaphysical theory?

The only thing I can think of is that people who support using intuitions like this say, "well, you're also ultimately basing yourself on intuitions for things like logic, existence of mind-independent objects, Occamian priors, and all the other viewpoints that you view as intuitively plausible, so I can jolly well use whatever intuitions I feel like too." But although I can hear such words and why they sound reasonable in a sense, they still seem totally crazy to me, although I'm not 100% sure why.

Any help would be appreciated.

I often like to think of my epistemic probability assignments in terms of probabilities-of-probabilities, or meta-probabilities. In other words, what probability would I assign that my probability estimate is accurate? Am I very confident, am I only mildly confident, or do I only have a vague clue?

I often think of it as a sort of bell curve, with the x-axis being possible probability estimates and the y-axis being my confidence in those estimates. So if I have very low confidence in my estimate then the height of the bell will be very low, and if I have high confidence it'll be pretty high.

Here are a few issues and insights that have come up when discussing or thinking about this:

What would a meta-probability actually mean?

There's two ways I have for thinking about it:

1) The meta-probability is my prediction for how likely I am to change my mind (and to what extent) as I learn more information about the topic.

2) I know that I'm not even close to being an ideal Bayesian agent, and that my best shots at a probability estimate are fuzzy, imprecise, and likely mistaken anyway. The meta-probability is my prediction for what an ideal Bayesian agent would assign as the probability for the question at hand.

What's the point?

Primarily it's just useful for conveying how sure I am of the probability estimate I'm assigning. It's a way of conveying that a coin flip is 50% heads in a very different sense than me saying "I have not the slightest clue whether it'll rain tomorrow on the other side of the world, and if I need to bet on it I'd give it ~50% odds". I've seen other people convey related sentiments by saying things like, "well 90% is probably too low an estimate, and 99% is probably too high, so somewhere between those". I'd just view the 90% and 99% figures as maybe 95% confidence bounds on a bell curve.

Why not keep going and say how confident you are about your confidence estimates?

True, I could do this, and I sometimes will do this if needed by visualizing a bit of fuzziness in my bell curve. But in any case it's usually enough for my purposes.

Is there any use for such a view in terms of instrumental or utilitarian calculations?

Not sure. I've seen some relevant discussion by Scott Alexander and Holden Karnofsky, but I'm not sure I followed everything there. I also suspect that if you view it as a prediction of how your views might change if you learned more about the subject, then this might imply that it's useful in deciding how much time to invest in further research.

Thoughts?

[Note 1: I discussed this topic about a year ago on LessWrong, and got some insightful responses then. Some commenters disagreed with me then and I'll predict that they'll do so again here - I'd give it, oh, say an 80% chance, moderate confidence ;).]

[Note 2: If you could try to avoid complicated math in your responses that would be appreciated. I'm still on the precalculus level here.]

[Note 3: As I finished writing this I dug up some interesting LessWrong posts on the subject, with links to yet more relevant posts.]