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All of DeeElf's Comments + Replies

[SEQ RERUN] Changing the Definition of Science
DeeElf
00

Thanks. I don't know either. That's why I don't come here that often. The karma points system doesn't serve the aims of science. It serves the "scientific consensus" myth which is mostly a glorified popularity contest without regard for fallibilism, iteration, paradigm shifting and counterinduction.

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Open Thread April 8 - April 14 2014
DeeElf
20

Feyerabend's counterinduction and Bayesianism. Has anyone here thought about how these two views of science bear on each other?

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Open Thread April 8 - April 14 2014
DeeElf
-20

Belief & double-blind randomized control group studies: response to IlyaShpitser

In a previous thread IlyaShpitser said >According to your blog, you don't believe in RCTs, right? What do you believe in?

This is part of the problem I'm trying to address. Belief/non-belief are inappropriate locutions to use in terms not only of the double-blind randomized control group method (DBRCGM), but of models and methods of science in general. "Belief in" a any scientific method is not even remotely relevant to science or the philosophy of science. ... (read more)

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0drethelin
What are you actually trying to say here? And this is the wrong way to respond to someone: If you reply to someone they are notified and can continue the conversation, and the conversation is also confined to the specific subthread.
3Anders_H
Sorry, can you be more specific? Where does anybody claim that smoking is not strongly correlated with life expectancy? The second "in house" link is a very simple thought experiment to explain the concept of confounding. It is meant as an example where evidential decision theory fails. In this situation, causal decision theory gives the right answer, it is certainly not a 50-50 proposition. Moreover, the correct answer within the thought experiment is that smoking does not cause cancer. This is because they postulated the existence of a deterministic confounder. This has no implications for whether or not such a confounder exists in the real world. Because the confounders, ie the "smoking lesions", would have to be unrealistically strong to fully explain the observed correlation between smoking and lung cancer. This is the part where I showed you the sensitivity analysis. Of course we don't have a "sure" way of knowing about causal relationships. But if you adopt "certainty" as your epistemic standard, you wouldn't even be able to tell whether parachutes save lives in people who are falling from airplanes. This is called an "ecologic" argument, and it is considered very weak. Note that your sample size is essentially 2, as the units you are making inferences about are countries, not individuals. Now you're just trolling... We're talking about life expectancy, lung cancer, heart attacks etc here.
1IlyaShpitser
Why? According to your blog, you don't believe in RCTs, right? What do you believe in?
2Anders_H
Smoking is not "accused" of being strongly correlated with negative outcomes. It is strongly correlated with negative outcomes, as a simple empirical fact. This is a statement about the joint distribution of the observed variables "smoking" and "negative outcomes", and it has nothing to do with causal inference. I cannot even imagine a scenario where the statement "Smoking is strongly correlated with lung cancer" is false, short of a vast conspiracy among scientists and doctors A slightly more interesting question is whether the correlation between smoking and cancer is due to causation. It is theoretically possible that an unmeasured confounder is responsible for the observed correlation. In fact, R.A. Fisher believed such a confounder was probably at work . One of the first uses of sensitivity analysis was to show how unrealistic Fisher's claim was. A sensitivity analysis is essentially a thought experiment that lets you play around with how "strong" a confounder has to be, in order to account for the observed correlation if the causal null hypothesis were true. See http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2755131/. In this case, I think any reasonable investigator who looks at the data and does some basic reasoning about possible confounders, will come away with a very strong posterior in favor of smoking causing lung cancer. However, the relationship between smoking and certain other negative outcomes is in some cases much more questionable, and it would not surprise me if publication bias accounts for many of the negative outcomes smoking has been connected to
4wedrifid
Start here. Follow the references (and the references' references). If you are still not convinced then try here.
5IlyaShpitser
Do you believe the nutritional etiology of scurvy?
[SEQ RERUN] Changing the Definition of Science
DeeElf
-20

Relevant: -Anything by David Hume -Carl G. Hempel. Laws and Their Role in Scientific Explanation: http://www.scribd.com/doc/19536968/Carl-G-Hempel-Laws-and-Their-Role-in-Scientific-Explanation -Studies in the Logic of Explanation: http://www.sfu.ca/~jillmc/Hempel%20and%20Oppenheim.pdf -Causation as Folk Science: http://www.pitt.edu/~jdnorton/papers/003004.pdf -Causation: The elusive grail of epidemiology: http://link.springer.com/article/10.1023%2FA%3A1009970730507 -Causality and the Interpretation of Epidemiologic Evidence: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc... (read more)

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0Daermonn
I don't understand why you're getting downvoted. Those were great links, and indeed relevant. I appreciated them.
Open Thread April 8 - April 14 2014
DeeElf
-10

So the underlying philosophies are extremely similar if not the same even though the methods, largely due to practical problems (lack or presence of mathematical tools)?

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1ChristianKl
The math is at the core of Bayesianism. It's part of the underlying philosophy.
Open Thread April 8 - April 14 2014
DeeElf
20

What are the differences and similarities between fallibilism and Bayesianism?

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3ChristianKl
If you look at the wikipedia page that describes fallibilism, the word probability doesn't directly appear. In the main body of the article. People like Pyrrho were practicing fallibilism long before the kind of math that you need to think about probabilities that you can multiple with each other got invented.
3Plasmon
There can be Bayesian evidence for non-falsifyable hypotheses. You might perhaps be interested in "Belief in the Implied Invisible "
The Comedy of Behaviorism
DeeElf
50

Really? "Skinnerian" behaviorism (Skinner preferred the term "radical behaviorism") is thriving.

The Perfected Self B. F. Skinner’s notorious theory of behavior modification was denounced by critics 50 years ago as a fascist, manipulative vehicle for government control. But Skinner’s ideas are making an unlikely comeback today, powered by smartphone apps that are transforming us into thinner, richer, all-around-better versions of ourselves. The only thing we have to give up? Free will (The Atlantic Monthly, June 2012).

... (read more)
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The Comedy of Behaviorism
DeeElf
00

Eliezer_Yudkowsky (EY) said (above):

Let me see if I understand your thesis. You think we shouldn't anthropomorphize people?" -- Sidney Morgenbesser to B. F. Skinner

  • As far as I've I can tell, this never happened.
  • Perhaps your understanding of "anthropomorphic" is too narrow?

EY said (above):

Behaviorism was the doct

... (read more)
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3Ben_Welchner
As a psychology student, I can say with some certainty that Watson is a behaviorist poster boy.
Tell Your Rationalist Origin Story
DeeElf
20

Would you please refer me to the discussions on meditation you're thinking of?

This is a sticky subject. "Meditation" and "mysticism" differ from context to context. E.g., Christian mysticism (the telos of which is union with God) and what Crowley meant by mysticism are fundamentally different (the latter sharing more in common with Hindu yogi praxis where union or samādhi is not necessarily restricted to a Diety; and in Buddhist mediation the purpose of samādhi is subsumed under a different goal altogether.). Meditation can refer to ... (read more)

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2Vaniver
Here are the two main posts tagged with Meditation, and here are the three discussion posts. Also see DavidM's posts (1 and 2, 3 appears to have never been written) and a more recent thread about it. I missed a few posts you can find by searching for meditation. The impression I get is that there are several people who find it interesting/useful, but it hasn't penetrated deeply enough to become part of the LW core. (I personally don't meditate, after a few initial tests suggested that noticeable effects would take far more time input than I was willing to give it.)
Tell Your Rationalist Origin Story
DeeElf
00

Fair enough. I like your sense of humour and you (and pretty much everyone I've interacted with here) are very polite and civil which I appreciate a bunch. I've spent some substantial time on some internet forums and shit can get pretty heated in a hurry. I'm sure people go to battle here occasionally, but I haven't encountered anything to volatile (yet?). Anyway, just my way of saying thanks. Besides, I'm not here to make sure LW fits into to my perceptions about RAW et al. I'm here to learn more about rationality.

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Tell Your Rationalist Origin Story
DeeElf
10

RAW was chronically skeptical of everything

This mis-characterizes him. He was too optimistic about humanity, technology and the future for this to be true. Furthermore, he preferred zeteticism over skepticism.

...nondualist ontology...

please detail what you mean by this...I think I know but want to be sure before I proceed .

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Tell Your Rationalist Origin Story
DeeElf
40

RAW was very interested in parapsychology and the "eight-circuit model", to LW that's all pseudoscience and crackpottery.

How do you and/or LWers distinguish among science, pseudoscience and crackpottery?

RAW had an interest in mystical states of consciousness and nondualist ontology, LW in mind-as-computation and atheist naturalism.

How do you and/or LWers distinguish mystical mental states from mind-as-computation mental states (that looks like cognitive reductionism from my perspective). Have you read his Nature's God? One could make a case for a naturalistic atheism from that and his similar works?

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5Mitchell_Porter
Such a question demands a serious and principled answer, which I won't give. But it's a cultural fact about this place that parapsychology (and all other standard skeptics' whipping-boys) will be regarded as pseudoscience, and something like the eight-circuit model as too incoherent to even count as pseudoscience. There are thousands of people here, so there are all sorts of ideological minorities lurking in the woodwork, but the preferred view of the universe is scientifically orthodox, laced with a computer scientist's version of platonism, and rounded out with a Ray Kurzweil concept of the future. Mysticism isn't a topic that LW has paid any attention to. I think it would mostly be filed under "religious mental disorder", except that, because of the inevitable forays into reality-as-computer-program and all-is-mathematics, people keep reinventing propositions and attitudes which sound "mystical". This is a place where people try to understand their subjectivity in terms of computation, and it's natural that they would also do this for mystical subjectivity, and they might even regard an evocative computational metaphor as a plausible theory for the cognitive neuroscience of mysticism. For example... maybe mystical states are what happens when your global cognitive workspace is populated with nothing but null pointers! You could turn that into a physical proposition about cortical columns and neural activation patterns. That's the sort of "theory of mysticism" I would expect a LWer to invent if they took up the topic. These are topics in which I deviate somewhat from the LW norm. My trademark spiel is all about qualia-structures in quantum biology, not universe as Turing machine. Also, LW isn't all scientific reductionism, there are many other things happening here at the same time. In framing RAW vs LW as tolerance for mystical nondualism versus preference for atheist naturalism, I'm just singling out the biggest difference in sensibility.
Tell Your Rationalist Origin Story
DeeElf
20

It's a different culture and a different sensibility to what you find in RAW.

I don't know enough about LW's culture to say yet, but for a site--and correct me if I'm wrong--whose "mission" includes taking the "curse" out of "singularity" Robert Anton Wilson's technological optimism strikes me as a great support for such a pursuit...no?

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9Mitchell_Porter
Yes but: * RAW was chronically skeptical of everything, LW believes very strongly in the "reality-tunnel" of natural science. * RAW was very interested in parapsychology and the "eight-circuit model", to LW that's all pseudoscience and crackpottery. * RAW had an interest in mystical states of consciousness and nondualist ontology, LW in mind-as-computation and atheist naturalism. Eliezer's general ideas are the sort of thing that Wilson would have partly assimilated into his personal mix (he would have loved the site's name), and partly rejected as "fundamentalist materialism". Also, LW has a specific futurist eschatology, in which the fate of the world is decided by the value system of the first AI to bootstrap its way beyond human intelligence. There are people here who seriously aspire to determine safe initial conditions for such an event, and related concepts such as "paperclip maximizer" and "timeless decision theory" (look them up in the LW wiki) are just as pervasive here, as are the distinctive concepts of LW discourse about general rationality.
Tell Your Rationalist Origin Story
DeeElf
00

the cranky outsider contrarian fans who think the system as the end-all of philosophy, and yet his stuff seems mostly ignored by contemporary academia.

i haven't heard that end-all of philosophy bit (could come from his strong following of Wittgenstein) , but I do know he is considered to be a principle predecessor of self-help psychology, which might explain the anti-academic bias...i would not stereotype him with likes of Rand or Hubbard (yikes!)

The only academic I can recall talking to him about was my Learning and History & Systems of Psych. pro... (read more)

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1Risto_Saarelma
Yeah, there's the difference between deciding that his stuff is actually the same kind of stuff as some very iffy stuff, and then skipping it, and just noting a vague and very possibly unfair surface resemblance to iffy stuff, and then not bothering to investigate further since the stuff is 70 years old and there should be more people saying it's important if it really is. What should I know about this one? I know that when a book has "quantum" in the title and is not a physics book, the odds are that it really is a book you shouldn't be reading. If my quick-and-unfair pattern match for Korzybski was Hubbard+Rand, my quick-and-unfair pattern match for something titled "Quantum Psychology" is The Secret. Then again, I do know that RAW should be more interesting than that, though I also have the suspicion that his stuff may be a bit too stuck in the counterculture of the 60s and 70s to really have aged well.
Tell Your Rationalist Origin Story
DeeElf
40

It seemed like everywhere I went on this site yesterday talked about maps and territories. I don't recall exactly where, but I thought it was rightly attributed to Alfred Korzybski (AK). The map and territory heuristic is, AFIK, AK's coinage, and I just assumed all the map and territory references alluded to a strong Korzybskian foundation.

E-prime was the invention of someone else (I forget his name-easily Googleable or Wikipediable) but closely followed AK. I find it impractical for language, but more helpful for reasoning.

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Tell Your Rationalist Origin Story
DeeElf
00

"AI" as in artificial intelligence? Please link me to the explanation of that on this site. Thanks (if I don't find it myself first). I'm still reluctant to use phrasing like "LW humans" as that type of definitionalism sends up "group think" red flags. I'm not saying it's bull but that I need some persuading and time to snoop around (this site is HUGE).

I didn't mean to say I'm entirely dismissive of rationalism, just that I want to be clear on what it means at LW. Epistemologically, I've generally been an empiricist, but ... (read more)

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2hairyfigment
They mean 'rationalist' in the sense of following a rational approach, which we loosely associate with Bayesian thought. As for AI, this seems like the most relevant connection and also mentions a limitation of pure Bayesian reasoning. Then there's the middle icon at the top right of the page.
Tell Your Rationalist Origin Story
DeeElf
-10

I'm a little puzzled as to why the question contains the phrase "how you came to identify as rationalist." My introduction to what I think this site means by rationalism (not the "rationalism" of Descartes, Leibniz and Spinoza I HOPE) was through Robert Anton Wilson's books Quantum Psychology and Prometheus Rising (although this just watered some seeds planted earlier). R.A.W. led me to Korzybski and his famous "is of identity" polemics. So why does a site which attributes much of its influence to Korzybksi as me a question... (read more)

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1arundelo
Eliezer got some early influence from the General Semantics-inspired Null-A books by A.E. van Vogt. (I'm leaving two versions of this comment in different threads because buybuydandavis also asked about Korzybski and LW.) Edit: I realized that this comment doesn't make much sense as a direct reply to yours. Consider it an addendum to Mitchell_Porter's comment.
Mitchell_Porter
100

Korzybski and E-Prime are not well-known on LW. LW's ideal of rationalism is an AI which reasons perfectly using the available evidence and whose actions really are optimal for its particular goals. The Sequences are full of introspective tips and behavioral tests for telling whether you're on the right track, so in that sense the philosophy has been given a human form, but the rational ideal which LW humans seek to approximate is described mathematically and computationally, in formulae due to Bayes, Solomonoff, and others. It's a different culture and a ... (read more)

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3beoShaffer
Since, I didn't write this post post I can't answer your main question, but I can shed some light on: We're entirely about rationality, not rationalism. I've mentioned that this can be confusing, unfortunately we couldn't think of a better alternative. This should clear up what we mean by rationality.
Welcome to Less Wrong! (July 2012)
DeeElf
20

Just joined. Into: Hume, Nietzsche, J.S. Mill, WIliam James, Aleister Crowley, Wittgenstein, Alfred Korzybski, Robert Anton Wilson, Paul K. Feyerabend, etc.... DeeElf

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Crowley on Religious Experience
DeeElf
00

The link "Crowley on Religious Experience" doesn't work. Why?

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1RomanDavis
I think this is it: http://hermetic.com/crowley/book-4/aba1.html