All of Reality_Check's Comments + Replies

3ArisKatsaris
You know what, if you were to actually have to program a conclusion-drawing machine, not just philosophize about it, I'd bet that your decision algorithm in which conclusions are drawn "based upon the rationality of their assertions alone" would be indistinguishable from a decision algorithm in which conclusions are based on "'evidence' (which are opinions)". You might name the functions differently through, you might have a "concludeBasedOnRationailty()" function instead of a "concludeBasedOnEvidence()" function. I bet it would still translate into the same code, because there's not a single word you've stated that relates to anything other than how we name things.
-1ArisKatsaris
Someone is more of an expert on something than someone else if they have more useful experience on it. Someone is more informed of a topic than someone else if they possess more accurate information about it. You keep arguing about definitions and you've still not uttered any concrete disagreement, you still seem to be just playing with words.
0thomblake
To quote, prefix the quote with a greater-than sign >. See the "Show help" button for more.
2Peterdjones
* Appropriate authority:Expert. * Expert: Person whose opinions are worth something.
0TheOtherDave
At the risk of repeating myself I'll weigh in here: X is an authority with respect to a proposition P to the extent that X's assertion of P is evidence for P. On many topics, some people's assertions are stronger evidence than others. That makes those people authorities on those topics, relatively speaking. To my mind, the interesting question is how we best distinguish actual authorities on a topic from people who merely claim authority. That's difficult. But the first step in learning distinguish among A and B is to acknowledge that A and B actually are different things: in this case, that actual authorities on a topic are a distinct thing in the world from non-authorities. Asserting that there are no authorities, or that everyone is equally authoritative, is a step in the wrong direction.
1ArisKatsaris
Well, using your definition of authority as "person with opinions that others agree with", these statements would translate as follows: * 'everyone is an authority' becomes "Every person has opinions that others agree with." * 'there are no authorities' becomes "No person has opinions that others agree with." The problem is that you seem to want to use the connotations of the word "authority", but you aren't explicitly including them in your definition. I don't use the word 'authority' in reference to people, because it communicates meaning badly. I'd prefer to use a word like 'expert' or a phrase like 'informed on the subject'.
-2ArisKatsaris
Then far from saying that "there are no authorities", you ought have said "everyone is an authority", since every person has at least some opinions that other people agree with. (I at least don't know of anyone who is wrong about absolutely everything, so by that definition I consider everyone an authority) I'll note that this is not a typical usage of the word 'authority' and therefore I'll not be using it in the future as it can only create confusion, not communicate meaning decently.
1ArisKatsaris
This again seems like just a definitional issue, of how to define 'authority', and I'll suggest to everyone not to be tempted to use different definitions as if they're matters of actual disagreement. Nobody here believes in the existence of absolute authorities whose word would trump any amount of other evidence -- but even random people off the street might have opinions on a subject that could be considered 'Bayesian evidence' towards a conclusion; very slim evidence but evidence nonetheless.
-2ArisKatsaris
You said "truth=opinion", but to defend that you ask people not to do something true to you that isn't a matter of opinion, but to "give you a statement that does not resolve to opinion". That's false reasoning. You didn't originally say "all true statements are produced by people's opinions" which is trivially true according to some definition of "opinions", as all statements people can make are by necessity produced by their minds. But if e.g. you get in an accident and you lose your leg, nobody will have offered you an opinion, but nonetheless it'll be true that you'll be missing a leg. If you then say it's only a matter of opinion that you'll have lost your leg, I direct you to the well-known Monty Python sketch.... Your failure seems to arise from a very basic confusion between map and territory, where you think that because statements about reality derive from opinion, then reality itself must derive from opinion. That doesn't follow at all. In truth: F(x)-> y and Mind(Reality) -> "Statements about Reality". -- you didn't disprove the existence of x, just by illustrating that all y can be mapped from x through a function F.
-2Eugine_Nier
If I hit you with this stick it will hurt. (If you insist that's false, I will continue hitting you.)
0TimS
Airplanes fly in the air. Human engineers designed the airplanes for the purpose of flying in the air.
3TheOtherDave
You may be correct about your own ability to understand anything that a superintelligence understands. I don't know you, and it would not be polite of me to speculate about that. But based on my own experiences, I'm rather confident that I don't have that ability. I'm also rather confident that there are tools that increase my ability to reason effectively.
1gwern
Arguing from a few famous anecdotes? Not a good approach, especially since more systematic approaches show rates similar to what one would expect of the general population: http://blog.computationalcomplexity.org/2011/07/disproofing-myth-that-many-early.html Mental disease, it seems, is a part of the general human condition, and not a flaw of the "philosophy and math approach to reality...pursuing infinities and other irrational ideas".
7TheOtherDave
This turns out not to be the case.
1Robert Miles
I think the idea of 'probability as authority' makes some sense as a metaphor. Probability has some rules, and if you follow those rules you are rewarded, and if you break those rules you are punished. The reward and punishment come in the form of 'making good decisions' and 'making dumb decisions'. I'd say probability is an authority in roughly the same way that gravity is a law, i.e. not really, but an occasionally useful metaphor. This sounds like a disagreement in definitions of "Authority". It's probably worth tabooing it.