Verbalizing your entire framework/worldview is too hard, but CR manages to verbalize quite a lot of epistemology. Does LW have verbalized epistemology to rival CR, which is verbalized in a reasonably equivalent kinda way to e.g. Popper's books? I thought the claim was that it does. If you don't have an explicit epistemology, may I recommend one to you? It's way, way better than nothing! If you stick with unverbalized epistemology, it really lets in bias, common sense, intuition, cultural tradition, etc, and makes it hard to make improvements or have discussions.
I have asked LW to specify terms (preferably pre-written not ad hoc) – an alternative to Paths Forward – and no one has.
There are of course pre-existing criticisms of Hegel, e.g. by Popper in OSE. People have written that.
From your post I take that you believe "you need to offer any epistemology at all under which the arguments you're currently making are correct" to be true?
If it is you should be able to explain how you came to believe that claim.
Epistemology is the field that tells you the methods of thinking, arguging, evaluating ideas, judging good and bad ideas, etc. Whenever you argue, you're using an epistemological framework, stated or not. I have stated mine. You should state yours. Induction is not a complete epistemological framework.
CR offers a general pupose epistemology. Epistemology is the most important field (because thinking methods are used by every other field), and CR has the only known general purpose epistemology that isn't known to be wrong.
You asked for an elevator pitch, I provided one, and you then wrote "I don't see anything of value so far" while not engaging with it (you responded to some addenda by guessing I'm grossly ignorant for some reason which is unclear to me). And yes of course SI rejects empirically refuted ideas first, so what? The...
You seem to have at least one typo and also to suggest you disagree without directly saying so. Can you please clarify what you're saying? Also I don't know how you expect me to explain all the steps involved with CR to you given your ignorance of CR – should I rewrite multiple books in my reply, or will you read references, or do you want a short summary which omits almost everything? If you want a summary, you need to give more information about where you're coming from, what you're thinking, and what your point and perspective are, s...
Those don't learn. The coders are the knowledge creators and the machine does grunt work.
CR has arguments refuting induction – it doesn't work, has never been done, cannot be done. Induction is a myth, a confusion, a misconception that doesn't even refer to a well-defined physically-possible process of thought. (This is partly old – that induction doesn't work has been an unsolved problem for ages – but CR offers some improved critical arguments instead of the usual hedges and excuses for believing in induction despite the probelsm.) Deduction is fine but limited.
Can CR be not only a starting point but also the only process necessary?
Yes.
I'm literally asking you to specify your epistemology. Offer some rival to CR...? Instead you offer me Occam's Razer which is correct according to some unspecified epistemology you don't want to discuss.
CR is a starting point. Do you even have a rival starting point which addresses basic questions like how to create and evaluate ideas and arguments, in general? Seems like you're just using common sense assumptions, rather than scholarship, to evaluate a variant of Occam's Razor (in order to defend induction). CR, as far as I can te...
I don't really see why I would need a coherent/perfect/complete epistemology to make this kind of argument or come to that conclusion.
Epistemology tells you things like what an argument is and how to evaluate whether ideas are good or bad, correct or incorrect. I'm saying you need to offer any epistemology at all under which the arguments you're currently making are correct. Supposedly you have an induction-based epistemology (I presume), but you haven't been using it in your comments, you're using some other unspecified epistemolo...
None of this is relevant to specifying the prior epistemology you are using to make this argument, plus you begin with "simple models" but don't address evaluating explanations/arguments/criticisms.
Popper didn't change views significantly but LScD is harder to understand, and philosophy is more than hard enough to understand in general. Popper is in low repute because he disagreed with people, and advocated some things (e.g. that induction is imposisble) that they consider ridiculous (which isn't an answer to him). Plus most people go by secondary sources. My colleague surveyed over 100 textbooks and found none of them accurately represented Popper's views – they're broadly similar to the SEP.
(a) Simply ignores Popper's appra...
Such is the hideously unfair world we live in
What's unfair? You're saying merit succeeds, that merit isn't a mixed blessing. Seems fair to me.
There is a tradition of philosophy with value.
Many famous and modern philosophers are distractions from this. The same was true in the past. Each generation, most philosophers did not carry on the important, mainstream (in hindsight) tradition.
If you can't tell which is which, to me that suggests you could learn something by studying philosophy. Once you do understand what's what, then you can read exclusively good philosophy. For example, you'd know to ignore Wittgenstein, as the future will do. But the worthlessness of some philosophers does not stop people like William Godwin or Xenophanes from having valuable things to say (and the more recent philosophers who are carrying on their tradition).
Leonid,
Once hunting music was created, females could select mates not just by how well they hunted directly (which they often didn't directly observe), but also by the quality of their hunting music. A man's hunting music provided extra information about his knowledge of hunting. Once females started selecting mates partially in this way, there was evolutionary selection pressure on men to start making music for the purpose of attracting a mate.
Female taste in music did not correspond to hunting music absolutely perfectly; it was just flawed rules of thumb...
Leonid,
Humans used to live in small tribes of about 50 people, and prepared for the hunt by looking at their cave paintings of animals they would soon kill. But cave paintings are not a perfect virtual reality aid for imagining a hunt. So they also rubbed their furs in the grass to get the right smell, and they also made sounds to remind themselves of the hunt. Natural selection favored these behaviors because they helped people hunt for food better. Over time, people evolved to desire certain kinds of visual, olfactory, and auditory sensations -- this was...
You seem very impressed with love, as our entire culture is. Might that be a bias?
It's hard to point to concrete ways that love helps people (cooperation, parenting, and various other things are perfectly possible without love).
It's easy to point to many known ways that love hurts people. First, there are broken hearts and divorces. Then there's external pressure on who we love or not (if you don't love me I'm going to leave you; if you love her, I'm going to leave you). And then there is the theory that my love for you gives you obligations to me. People ...
The utility function is not up for grabs. If you value love, this has nothing to do with your beliefs. Valuing love can trigger biases, such as wishful thinking, but it is not of itself a bias. It's neither rational nor irrational, but arational.
You seem very impressed with love, as our entire culture is. Might that be a bias?
One of the things the post does is point out that it's a bias.
Eliezer,
Is the unstated premise of your comment that (at least a significant amount of) human psychology is genetic in origin? I agree with you that given some preexisting psychology there are restrictions on what memes are (feasibly) acquired. Without a premise along those lines, I don't see the relevance of what psychology can do. But any argument with that premise cannot address the question of why you attribute things to genes over memes in the first place.
Eliezer,
"Genes determined the framework which memes exist in" is not an important argument about what sorts of memes we have. I think your intended implication is that genes fundamentally have control over these issues. But genes created brains with the following characteristic: brains are universal knowledge creators. With this established, other parts of the design of brains don't really matter. Memes are a kind of knowledge and so there are no restrictions on what memes are found in humans due to genetics or some aspect of our brain's design.
B...
Tim Tyler,
Genes and memes are both things on which evolution acts (replicators), but they also have important differences so it's useful to use different words. In particular, the logic of what sort of behaviors would evolve in people is different if you consider memes or genes. The available replication strategies are different if for genes (which require sex and parenting) and memes (which require older people to communicate to younger people).
Whether something is genetic or memetic is also highly relevant to A) how (by what mechanism) it might influence people's behavior B) how difficulty it is for someone to change that trait.
Eliezer,
You attribute a lot of things to genetic evolution, and nothing to memetic (cultural) evolution. What is the reasoning behind disregarding memes? Is there an argument that none of our emotions, and others things discussed, are memetic?
It's worth considering how
And evolution certainly gets a chance to influence every single thought that runs through your mind!
works (if it does). Just because evolution created minds in the first place does not necessarily imply it has retained influence over everything that happens in them. For example, if a person builds a house that doesn't necessarily give him influence over the termites in the walls.
Sir Roger Penrose - a world-class physicist - still thinks that consciousness is caused by quantum gravity. I expect that no one ever warned him against mysterious answers to mysterious questions - only told him his hypotheses needed to be falsifiable and have empirical consequences. Just like Eliezer18.
There's nothing wrong with proposing the hypothesis. The problem is believing and supporting it while it's pending. That it hasn't been refuted yet is no reason to take that side of the issue. (Arguably it has been refuted, because there are known criti...