All of Elliot_Temple's Comments + Replies

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.

1spiralingintocontrol
I assume you have read Myth of the Framework. Doesn't Popper himself emphasize that it's not necessary to share an epistemological framework with someone, nor explicitly verbalize exactly how it works (since doing that is difficult-to-impossible), to make intellectual progress?

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... (read more)

2ChristianKl
There are many people who are wrong and there's no reason to write low texts about how everybody of them is wrong. Being a thinker doesn't mean that you have to argue about how everybody is wrong. If you think otherwise, how about writing a treatize about how Hegel was wrong (of course you actually have to read him first)?

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... (read more)

6ChristianKl
I don't want you to explain the principle in general but illustrate it on the example that you brought up. Explaining general principles on concrete examples is a classic way principles are taught. Students learn physics by working through various test problems. Reasoning by example is a classic way to transfer knowledge. 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. Otherwise you could say that you hold that belief that have nothing to do with how you claim knowledge should be derived. If CR can't be used to derive the knowledge of the example it's not a general epistomology with practical use.

Those don't learn. The coders are the knowledge creators and the machine does grunt work.

0TAG
That's an epicycle. You can patch up your theory, but the fact that you need to doesn't speak wel for it.

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.

1TAG
Induction, as the prediction of observations without necessarily having an explanation of the regularity, works just fine. The anti induction argument is purely against induction as a source of hypotheses or explanations. Everyone has given up on that idea, and the pro induction people don't even use the word that way. There is a lot of talking-past bere.
9ChristianKl
If induction has never been done, what do machine learning algorithms whose authors think it does induction do?

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... (read more)

4ZeitPolizei
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... (read more)

4ChristianKl
Could you describe how you know this? Take it as an example of how you derive a supposedly true proposition with your favorite epistemology. Illustrate all the steps that you consider important of Popper's way to come to knowledge with that claim.
6ZeitPolizei
So because the discussion in general is about epistemology, you won't accept any arguments for which the epistemology isn't specified, even if the topic of that argument doesn't pertain directly to epistemology, but if the discussion is about something else, you will just engage with the arguments regardless of the epistemology others are using? That seems… unlikely to work well (if the topic is epistemology) and inconsistent. I'd like to reiterate, that I would really appreciate a link to an example where somebody convinced you to change your mind. Failing that, you've mentioned elsewhere that you often changed your mind in discussions with David Deutsch. If you might reproduce or at least sketch a discussion you've had with him, I would be very interested.

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.

5ZeitPolizei
Given some data and multiple competing hypotheses that explain the data equally well, the laws of probability tell us that the simplest hypothesis is the likeliest. We call this principle of preferring simpler hypotheses Occam's Razor. Moreover, using this principle works well in practice. For example in machine learning, a simpler model will often generalize better. Therefore I know that Occam's Razor is "any good". Occam's Razor is a tool that can be used for problems as described by the italicized text above. It makes no claims regarding arguments or criticisms. 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. It seems to me, like you are saying, that any claims that aren't attained via the One True Epistemology are useless/invalid/wrong. That you wouldn't even accept someone saying that the sky is blue, if that person didn't first show you that they are using the right epistemology. I notice that I don't know what an argument that you would accept could even look like. You're a big fan of having discussions written down in public. Could you link to an example where you argued for one position and then changed your mind because of somebody else's argument(s)?

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... (read more)

5Charlie Steiner
You've done a whole lot of telling us how amazing this stuff is, but not much telling what it actually is. So I'm going to guess, in the hopes that you can tell me not just that I'm wrong, but specifically what a better version would be. According to what you've said, it seems the process of people having valuable knowledge of future events (e.g., the sun will rise tomorrow), is that people generate guesses (by some unspecified process that's definitely not induction), and then over time, other people criticize guesses, and the guesses best able to stand up to criticism are what we should use to predict tomorrow's sunrise. And the reason this works, according to you, is that it's like evolution. Just like how in evolution, mutation and selection leads to creatures that take advantage of patterns in their environment to get a fitness advantage, guessing and criticism leads to ideas that take advantage of some sort of pattern in the environment in order to be more valuable. But, of course, taking advantage of patterns in the environment in order to make valuable predictions about the future totally isn't induction, and there's no way you could formalize it other than the precise way Popper chose to formalize it.
2Bjarni Þór Sigurðsson
What is the relationship between CR and other processes that can create knowledge, such as induction and deduction? Are the latter a subset of the former? What does 'induction is impossible' mean, that it cannot be used as a starting point or something stronger? Can CR be not only a starting point but also the only process necessary?
5ZeitPolizei
Imo chapter 28 of this book gives a good sense why Occam's Razor is good. I'll try to explain it here briefly as I understand it. Suppose we have a class of simple models, with three free binary parameters, and a class of more complex models, with ten free binary parameters. We also have some data, and we want to know which model we should choose to explain the data. A priori, out of the parameter sets for the simple model each has a probability of 1/8 of being the best one, whereas for the complex model the probability is only 1/1024. As we observe the data, probability mass moves between the parameter sets. Given equally good fit between data and model, the best simple model will always have a higher probability than the best complex model. For one, because it started with a higher probability. For another, because there will be several complex models fitting the data about equally well. E.g. there may be 8 complex models, which all fit the data better than the second-best simple model. So the probability mass needs to be shared between all of those. A complex model needs to fit the data better in order to gain enough probability mass to beat out the simpler model. So even if we do not penalize complex models just for being more complex, we still favour simpler ones.

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... (read more)

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... (read more)

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 ... (read more)

DanielLC260

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.

PhilGoetz250

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... (read more)

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... (read more)