James_Bach
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James_Bach has not written any posts yet.
James_Bach has not written any posts yet.
Far more important than rationality is the story of who we are and what we believe. I think that may be the best rational explanation for your insistence on trying to convince people that rationality is a good thing. It's your story and it obviously means a lot to you.
There is no special rational basis for claiming that when lives are at stake, it's especially important to be rational, because the value we place on lives is beyond rational control or assessment. But there may be any number of non-rational reasons to be rational... or appear rational, anyway.
Rationality is a game. It's a game I, personally, like to play. Irrationality is how humans actually live and experience the world, most of the time.
For me, the purpose of doubt is to motivate inquiry. When any particular doubt no longer serves inquiry, I retire it.
If the purpose of doubt were to eliminate doubt, it would be far more efficient simply never to doubt.
Therefore, I doubt your philosophy of doubt. Let the inquiry continue.
When you wrote "But neither does it seem like the same shade of uncertainty" I suppose you mean that it doesn't seem that way, to you. Nor does it to me. But before, as a thinking person, I suggest that the difference is meaningful, I need a context or a reason. You haven't provided one, and that's why your argument has the flavor of religion, to my palette.
I'd love to see your answer to the actual skeptical argument, rather than the straw man you offer, here. Here you are doing the equivalent of announcing "I'm thinking of a number!..... 5!...... I'm right again! My quest for order is rewarded!"
If you use mathematics... (read more)
I love math. It's the only reason I sometimes wish I'd stayed in school. When I get rich, I want to hire a mathematician to live in my basement and tutor me. I bet they can be had for cheap.
Pure math is potentially a perfect idea. Applied math; not so much. When you see that line of 2's, how do you know it continues forever? You don't. You're making an induction; a beautiful guess. It's only because you peeked at the real answer-- an answer you yourself created-- that you can confidently say that you "predicted" the sequence with your method.
I'm much more interested in sequences produced in a simple deterministic way... (read more)
Thanks, Eliezer. Helpful post.
I have personally witnessed a room of people nod their heads in agreement with a definition of a particular term in software testing. Then when we discussed examples of that term in action, we discovered that many of us having agreed with the words in the definition, had a very different interpretation of those words. To my great discouragement, I learned that agreeing on a sign is not the same as agreeing on the interpretant or the object. (sign, object, and interpretant are the three parts of Peirce's semiotic triangle)
In the case of 2+2=4, I think I know what that means, but when Euclid, Euler, or Laplace thought of... (read more)
I wonder what your life must be like. The way you write, it sounds as if you spend a lot of your time trying to convince crazy people (by which I mean most of humanity, of course) to be less crazy and more rational, like us. Why not just ignore them?
Then I looked at your Wikipedia entry and noticed how young you are. Ah! When I was your age, I was also trying to convert everybody. My endless arguments about software development methods, circa 1994, are still in Google's Usenet archive. So, who am I to talk?
(Note: Mostly I write comments that complain about something you say, but please understand that there's a selection bias here. Even though I often find myself thinking "What an interesting way to think about that. Great idea, Eliezer!" I would rather write comments that have some kind of content, and those tend to be the critical ones.)
It sounds like you are trying to rescue induction from Hume's argument that it has no basis in logic. "The future will be like the past because in the past the future was like the past" is a circular argument. He was the first to really make that point. Immanuel Kant spent years spinning elaborate philosophy to try to defeat that argument. Immanuel Kant, like lots of people, had a deep need for universal closure.
An easier way to go is to overcome your need for universal closure.
Induction is not logically justified, but you can make a different argument. You could point out that creatures who ignore the apparent patterns in nature tend... (read more)
I don't understand why you invoke probability theory in a situation where it has no rhetorical value. Your conversation was a rhetorical situation, not a math problem, so you have to evaluate it and calibrate your speech acts accordingly-- or else you get nowhere, which is exactly what happened.
Your argument to your friend was exactly like someone justifying something about their own religion by citing their bible. It works great for people in your own community who already accept your premises. To anyone outside your community, you might as well be singing a tuneless hymn.
Besides that, the refuge available to anyone even within your community is to challenge the way that you... (read more)
I think the advocates of Naturalistic Inquiry (see Lincoln and Guba) would say that you aren't talking about all of science, but of just the "positivistic paradigm" of science, whereas there is another paradigm called "naturalistic" or "constructivist" that does science differently.
I don't buy the whole Naturalistic program, but they raise some useful points. One of them is that the experiments you suggest require you to impose upon the object of your study an ontology along with the value system associated with it. When studying complex and ill-defined systems, such as psychological or social systems, this may suppress or disrupt the very phenomena that matter, and we never the wiser.
A naturalistic approach... (read more)
"If the largest utility you care about is the utility of feeling good about your decision, then any decision that feels good is the right one."
I don't think so, Eliezer. Perhaps you've misunderstood the argument. It isn't necessarily "any decision that feels good", it's any decision that gets the decider what the decider wants. I was trying to raise a question about your assumptions about what matters. Sometimes, the way you write, it seems you may not be aware that your particular model of what should matter to people isn't shared by everyone.
I agree that if you think you are playing a particular game, and you want to win that game, there... (read more)