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All of Ab3's Comments + Replies

Mysterious Answers to Mysterious Questions
Ab300

I understand why elan vital is a mysterious answer, but what makes the question mysterious? Isn't the question "why does living matter move?" a perfectly intelligible one, and the point is simply that we can do a lot better in answering it than "elan vital"?

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Mysterious Answers to Mysterious Questions
Ab310

I would like to suggest that the concept of "beauty" in art, relationships and even evolutionary biology seems to satisfy EY's criteria of being a mysterious answer.

If I ask, "how does the male peacock attract female peacocks" and one answers "because his tail is big and beautiful", haven't they failed to answer my question? Beauty in this response is a 1- curiosity stopper, 2- has no moving parts, 3- Is often uttered by people with a great deal of pride (the painting is so beautiful!), and 4- leaves the phenomenon a mystery (In the case of the peacock, I still don't really know why female peacocks like big colorful tails).

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1pnrjulius
Also, symmetry is a sign of health in bilaterians such as we; so it makes sense that we'd evolve to find symmetry beautiful.
1APMason
The Handicap Principle is one possibility.
Making Beliefs Pay Rent (in Anticipated Experiences)
Ab300

It seems we have empirical and non-empirical beliefs that can both be rational, but what we mean by “rational” has a different sense in each case. We call empirical beliefs “rational” when we have good evidence for them, we call non-empirical beliefs like the PoF “rational” when we find that they have a high utility value, meaning there is a lot we can do with the principle (it excludes maps that can’t conform to any territory).

To answer my original question, it seems a consequence of this is that the PoF doesn’t apply to itself, as it is a principle th... (read more)

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1TheOtherDave
I think it depends on what the PoF actually is. If it can be restated as "I will on average be more effective at achieving my goals if I only adopting falsifiable beliefs," for example, then it is equivalent to an empirical belief (and is, incidentally, falsifiable). If it can be restated as "I should only adopt falsifiable beliefs, whether doing so gets me anything I want or not" then there exists no empirical belief to which it is equivalent (and is, incidentally, worth discarding).
Making Beliefs Pay Rent (in Anticipated Experiences)
Ab300

Thank you for your thoughts.

What are the criteria that we use for accepting or refuting rational non-empirical beliefs? You mention that falsifiability would be refuted if some other criteria “secured the advance of science.” You also mention that we should give up the refutability criterion if “sheer dogmatism conduces to the growth of knowledge.” It sounds like our criteria for the refutability of non-empirical beliefs are mostly practical; we accept the epistemic assumptions that make things “work best.” Is there more to it than this?

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1[anonymous]
To be pedantic and Popperian, I'd have to correct your use of "empirical beliefs." The philosophical positions at issue aren't scientific but they are empirical. "Empirical"--to be the basis for scientific observation statements-- must be expressible in low-level observation sentences that all competent scientists agree on. The belief in question is that science's crucial distinguishing feature allowing it to advance is the subjection of science's claims to empirical testing, allowing strict falsification. We can't run an experiment or otherwise record observation statements, so we resort to philosophical debate aimed at refutation. Refutation is obtained by plausible argument. For instance, in the discussion about demarcation, an example of a potentially plausible argument goes if we relied on falsification exclusively, we would never have evidence that a claim is true, only that it isn't false. But we rely on scientific theories and consider them close to the truth (or at least as probably so). Therefore, falsifiability can't explain the distinctiveness of science. This involves highly plausible claims, based on observation, about how we in fact use scientific theories. But although the result of observation, it can't be reduced to something everyone agrees on that is closely tied to direct perception, as with an observation statement.
Making Beliefs Pay Rent (in Anticipated Experiences)
Ab300

Thanks for the reply Dave. Are you saying I should not look at falsifiability as a belief, but rather a tool of some sort? That distinction sounds interesting but is not 100% clear to me. Perhaps someone should do a larger post about why the principle should not be applied to itself.

I have also thought of putting the problem this way: Eliezer states that the only ideas worth having are the ones we would be willing to give up. Is he willing to give up that idea? I don't think so..., and I would be really interested to know why he doesn't believe this to be a contradiction.

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4TheOtherDave
What I'm saying is that the important thing is what I can do with my beliefs. If the "principle of falsifiability" does some valuable thing X, then in worlds where the PoF doesn't do X, I should be willing to discard it. If the PoF doesn't do any valuable thing X, then I should be willing to discard it in this world.
Making Beliefs Pay Rent (in Anticipated Experiences)
Ab310

I understand that having beliefs that are falsifiable in principle and make predictions about experience is incredibly important. But I have always wondered if my belief in falsifiability was itself falsifiable. In any possible universe I can imagine it seems that holding the principle of falsifiability for our beliefs would be a good idea. I can't imagine a universe or an experience that would make me give this up.

How can I believe in the principle of falsifiability that is itself unfalsifiable?! I feel as though something has gone wrong in my thinking but I can't tell what. Please help!

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2[anonymous]
You have just refuted the contention that all warranted beliefs must be falsifiable in principle. Karl Popper, who introduced the falsifiability criterion and pushed it as far if not further than it can go, never advocated that all beliefs should be falsifiable. Rather, he used falsifiability as the criterion of demarcation between science and non-science, while denying that all beliefs should be scientific. His contention that falsifiability demarcates science does imply, as he recognized, that the criterion of falsifiability is not itself a scientific hypothesis. Rational beliefs are not necessarily scientific beliefs. Mathematics is rational without being falsifiable. The same is true of philosophical beliefs, such as the belief that scientific beliefs are falsifiable. But rational beliefs that are not scientific must be refutable, and falsifiable beliefs are a proper subset of refutable beliefs. Falsifiable beliefs are refutable in one particular way: they are refutable by observation statements, which I think are equivalent to EY's anticipations. Science is special because it is 1) empirical (unlike mathematics) and 2) has an unusual capacity to grow human knowledge systematically (unlike philosophy). But that does not imply that we can make do with scientific beliefs exclusively, one reason being the one that you mention about criteria for the acceptance of scientific theories. The broader criterion of refutability doesn't necessarily involve refutation by observation statements. How would you refute the falsifiability criterion? It would be false if science it were the case that scientists secured the advance of science by using some other criteria (such as verification). It's a mistake to conflate the questions of whether a theory is scientific and whether it's corroborated (by attempted falsifications). Or to conflate whether it's scientific or it's rationally believable. Theories aren't bad because they aren't science. They're bad because they're set up
0TimS
For me the principle of falsifiability is best understood as a way of distinguishing scientific theories about the world from other theories about the world. In other words, falsifiability is one way of defining what science is and is not. A theory that does not constrain experience ("God works in mysterious ways") is not a scientific theory because it can explain any occurrence and is therefore not falsifiable. Because falsifiability is a definition, not a theory about the world, there's no reason to think it can be falsified. The definition could be wrong by failing to accurately or usefully define scientific theory, but that's conceptually different.
3TheOtherDave
Excellent question! Excellent, because it illustrates the problem with "believing in" the principle of falsifiability, as opposed to using it and understanding how it relates to the rest of my thinking. Forget that the principle of falsifiability is itself incredibly important. What sorts of beliefs does the principle of falsifiability tell me to increase my confidence in? To decrease my confidence in? What would the world have to be like for the former beliefs to be in general less likely than the latter?
What is Evidence?
Ab320

I think it depends on that, and only that, and should be completely disconnected from any social criteria such as "being contagious."

Also, Eliezer writes, "If your model of reality suggests that the outputs of your thought processes should not be contagious to others, then your model says that your beliefs are not themselves evidence, meaning they are not entangled with reality."

This seems false. Should LW thinkers take it as a problem that our methods are usually completely lost on, for example, fundamentalist scientologists? In fa... (read more)

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1Viktor Riabtsev
I think this should be more like "then your model offers weak evidence that your beliefs are not themselves evidence". If you're Galileo and find yourself incapable of convincing the church about heliocentrism, this doesn't mean you're wrong. Edit: g addresses this nicely.
0entirelyuseless
"Should LW thinkers take it as a problem..." Yes to all of that. There are many problems with LW methods and beliefs, and those problems impede other people from seeing the parts that are right.
0Bound_up
I think "should" here means "justified," not necessarily "likely." Your (rational) beliefs should be considered evidence by the irrational, even though they likely won't be.
What is Evidence?
Ab380

Great article, I have only this one comment:

"If your beliefs are entangled with reality, they should be contagious among honest folk."

Haven't true and false beliefs both proven to be contagious among honest folk? Just as we should not use a machine that beeps for all numbers as evidence for winning lottery numbers, we should not use whether or not a belief is contagious as evidence of its truth.

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9thomblake
I don't think that Eliezer suggested using a belief's contagiousness as strong evidence of its truth. Rather, a belief's lack of contagiousness is strong evidence of its untruth.
0dlthomas
It depends on how likely the respective explanations are.
St. Louis, Missouri Meetup - now happening every week!
Ab300

Is this group still active in St. Louis? I'm new to LW and would like to participate in a group doing a systematic study of the sequences. Anybody out there?

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Bayes' Theorem Illustrated (My Way)
Ab320

Thank you Komponisto! Apparently, my brain works similar to yours on this matter. Here is a video by Richard Carrier explaining Bayes' theorem that I also found helpful.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HHIz-gR4xHo

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