All of James_Bach's Comments + Replies

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!... (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 ... (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 th... (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... (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 singin... (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 study... (read more)

Forget voting. Here's how to make a big difference in society: at least once a month, do something amazingly kind for a perfect stranger. My preference is leaving $100 tips for waitresses or hotel maids, because I'm basically lazy.

Also, raise your kids with kindness.

Practice showing courage in challenging situations.

Don't instigate a lawsuit unless it's reaaaaaally important.

What's great about America is not democracy, but the sense we have that we can travel almost anywhere here and other people will smile with us, do business with us, and not hate us. Th... (read more)

Since I don't accept being part of a majority that dominates a minority, I only consent to vote in a situation where my vote is for the minority, and therefore cannot possibly influence the outcome. This is mathematically identical to staying home, except staying home is more pleasant. So, I'd rather stay home.

For those who believe in majority rule, I still don't understand why you vote, since your vote cannot make any difference. There is no such thing as a deciding vote in a large election, since the error present in the system even for a fair election i... (read more)

You're such a lion against religion, I admire that. So, I'm surprised you would say that living with doubt is not a virtue. You know about incommensurability right? You know about perspectivism? There is no "view from nowhere" that can make perfect objectivity possible.

Therefore: doubt. To live with doubt makes room for learning. Lose doubt and you also lose inquiry. Some doubts are annihilated by inquiry, but as Richard Feynman said, "science is the belief in the ignorance of experts". He said we need a well developed theory of ignoran... (read more)

Eliezer, never mind black, the true iconoclasts don't go to school. I quit in 10th grade and became an emancipated minor. In the three years prior, I refused to do homework, citing the 13th Amendment. My motivation echoes yours: I could not abide fakers, and public school abounds with them. Fake lessons. Fake arguments. Fake sentiments. Public school is a thinly disguised day care center.

Fortunately, education is not the same as schooling, and there are plenty of ways to become better educated in private life. Then I discovered as an adult that being unconventionally educated could be a competitive advantage.

I don't see this exercise as being so much about rationality as it is about our relationship with dissonance. People in my community (context-driven software testers) are expected to treat confusion or controversy as itself evidence of a potentially serious problem. For the responsible tester, such evidence must be investigated and probably raised as an issue to the client.

In short, in the situation given in the exercise, I would not answer the question, but rather raise some questions.

I drive telephone surveyors nuts in this way. They just don't know what... (read more)

Thank you for this post. I'm in the process of writing about my system of self-education, which has two interesting elements I haven't heard anywhere else: A) it requires no self-discipline whatsoever, B) it is centered on the feelings of learning, rather than artifacts and techniques of learning (those latter two things are interesting, but they orbit the first).

One of the things I try to explain is how to embrace certain mental behaviors that seem bad, such as procrastination. I procrastinate extensively. I am procrastinating right now (I'm "suppose... (read more)

Great essay!

But, how can a set of ideas be a closed system? It's ridiculous. If someone were to tell me that Objectivism is closed, I would say, Ha! I just reopened it. Ha! Try and stop me from calling myself an Objectivist if I feel like it! Oh, they can trademark it, I supposed, but if they do, I could rename my system as Reasonablism and explain it as an improved form of what-Ayn-Rand-was-talking-about.

A community of people can close itself off, but ideas are helpless to resist whatever buccaneering minds may prey upon them. This harkens to Buckminster Fuller's cry that "true wealth only increases", because true wealth is knowledge and knowledge is infinitely replicable and shareable.

When you speak of "guardians of truth" I hear "guardians of social order." I don't think the Inquisition thought of truth in epistemic terms, the way we do. They thought of "truth" as the order of the world that was under constant assault by dark forces.

Truth guardianship in science might be understood as defending Kuhnian "normal science" from assault by people outside of the dominant paradigm; or perhaps the process of indoctrinating new scientists in the accepted norms of that paradigm.

You said: "So it seems there's an asymmetry between argument and authority. If we know authority we are still interested in hearing the arguments; but if we know the arguments fully, we have very little left to learn from authority."

I like your conclusion, but I can't find anything in your argument to support it! By rearranging some words in your text I could construct an equally plausible (to a hypothetical neutral observer) argument that authority screens off evidence. You seem to believe that evidence screens off authority simply because you ... (read more)

As a high school dropout and aspiring philosopher of self-education, I salute you.

My son is homeschooled, and the homeschooling consists of... nothing. He studies spontaneously to solve problems that are authentic to him, just as I do. Mostly these involve video games and online fantasy role-playing games. It's like A.S. Neill's Summerhill school except he's all alone. There are disadvantages to this sort of education, but inauthenticity is not among them.

I am writing a book along these lines. It's about how we can creates ourselves as individual thinkers.... (read more)

I'm nervous about the word happiness because I suspect it's a label for a basket of slippery ideas and sub-idea feelings. Still, something I don't understand about your argument is that when you demonstrate that for you happiness is not a terminal value you seem to arbitrarily stop the chain of reasoning. Terminating your inquiry is not the same as having a terminal value.

If you say you value something and I know that not everyone values that thing, I naturally wonder why you value it. You say it's a terminal value, but when I ask myself why you value it i... (read more)

Quantitative thinking is just so much mystical numerology unless it is grounded in qualitative thinking. Unless you don't need your mathematics to mean anything with respect to the world, you must relate it to the world by using a system of assertions called a model. Of course, you know this, I'd just like you to bring this fact out from behind the curtain where you normally keep it.

Example: when I hear a scientist talk about how winning the lottery (or some other rare event) is less likely than getting hit by lightning, I have to wonder what the odds are ... (read more)

Until you pick one interim best guess, the discomfort will consume your attention, distract you from the search, tempt you to confuse the issue whenever your analysis seems to trend in a particular direction.

Oh no. Eliezer, I have disagreed with you at times, but you have not actually disappointed me until this moment. As an avid reader of yours, I beseech you, please think through this again.

You simply have not presented a moral dilemma. You've presented a pantomine; shadows on a wall; an illusion of a dilemma. If there's any dilemma here at all, it was w... (read more)

Regarding your example of income disparity: I might rather be born into a system with very unequal incomes, if, as in America (in my personal and biased opinion), there is a reasonable chance of upping my income through persistence and pluck. I mean hey, that guy with all that money has to spend it somewhere-- perhaps he'll shop at my superstore!

But wait, what does wealth mean? In the case where everyone has the same income, where are they spending their money? Are they all buying the same things? Is this a totalitarian state? An economy without disparity ... (read more)

Yes the answer is obvious. The answer is that this question obviously does not yet have meaning. It's like an ink blot. Any meaning a person might think it has is completely inside his own mind. Is the inkblot a bunny? Is the inkblot a Grateful Dead concert? The right answer is not merely unknown, because there is no possible right answer.

A serious person-- one who take moral dilemmas seriously, anyway-- must learn more before proceeding.

The question is an inkblot because too many crucial variables have been left unspecified. For instance, in order for thi... (read more)

Your point would be so much stronger, Eliezer, if you were allowed to ignore the role of models in rationality. But in all cases an infinity of alternative models may also account for what you think you have proven rationally. In your terms, no one can revoke the law that any belief in "accurate beliefs" rests on a priori assertions about what can exist and what constitutes evidence. It rests on a priori structures in your brain, designed to notice some things and not others.

Rationality is heuristic. In the case of waiting for water to spontaneou... (read more)

I like the spirit of what you're saying, but I'm not convinced that you've made a rational argument for it. Also, I'm concerned that you might have started with the conclusion that a rational argument must flow forward and constructed an account to justify it. If so, in your terms, though not in mine, that would make your conclusion irrational.

I think it can be perfectly rational to think backwards from any conclusion you want to any explanation that fits. Rationality is among other things about being bound by the requirement of consistency in reasoning. I... (read more)

Um, guys, there are an infinite number of possible hypotheses. Any evidence that corroborates one theory also corroborates (or fails to refute) an infinite number of alternative specifiable accounts of the world.

What evidence does is allow us to say "Whatever the truth is, it must coexist in the same universe with the true nature of this evidence I have accepted. Theory X and its infinite number of variants seems to be ruled out by this evidence (although I may have misinterpreted the theory or the nature of the evidence), whereas Theory Y and its inf... (read more)

Hi Eliezer,

I like the word entanglement, because it's a messy concept. Reality, whatever else it might be, is messy. That's why statements like the preceding sentence can't ever be completely true. The messiness makes it hard to talk about anything real in any absolutely definitive sort of way.

I can be definitive about artificial constructs in an artificial world, yes. Hence, mathematics. But when you or I try to capture the real world with that comforting clarity, we are doomed. Well, mostly doomed. 85.27% doomed, plus or minus an unknown set of unknowns.... (read more)

"Evolution does not operate on species. It operates on individuals. Genes that are statistically bad for individuals drop out of the gene pool no matter what they do for the species."

Imagine a gene that caused 9/10 of the humans who have it to be twice as fertility and attractiveness as the population that did not have it, while 1/10 of the humans who have it can't reproduce at all. This would be a gene that would serve the species (i.e. the portion of the species that had it), even though it would harm some individuals. Notice that the inability... (read more)

I'm pleased to say that, through a great deal of study and practice, I have learned how to unlearn things that I know. This is called skepticism. A key to it is the ability to imagine plausible alternatives to whatever is believed. Descartes is famous for developing this idea, although he was constrained by his society from completely embracing it. Pyrrho and Sextus Empiricus developed this idea, but their community was persecuted and destroyed by the Christians, too.

Skepticism is not opposed to rationality, but neither does it accept that a rationally der... (read more)

Curiously Eliezer, I feel like applauding. Good post.

Something seems out of kilter about this, Eliezer.

When I was 13, I thought I had a proof in principle that there must be a minimum possible distance-- because to move is to move a finite distance, but no sum of infitesimal distances can compose a finite distance. I shared my idea with a professional physicist, who dismissed my idea using an appeal to authority. I don't care how fabulous the authority was, nor how ignorant I may have been, it was a terrible thing to for him to do that. It killed my enthusiasm for questioning physics, or math, at the time.

Re... (read more)

Hey Brandon, I hear you. I think you'll find is fascination to see this Google Video Presentation by Thomas Metzinger:

"Being No One: Consciousness, The Phenomenal Self, and First-Person Perspective"

http://video.google.co.uk/videoplay?docid=-3658963188758918426

He tries to do exactly what you suggest. He reviews what we know empirically about self-awareness, and constructs a philosophical model of self that accounts for those phenomena. I got a lot out of it.

He even complains about certain Kantians who have taken the bold step of denying certain kinds of mental illness, because their world view can't account for them.

At some point it maybe helpful to define curiosity. My sense of the meaning of curiosity is that it's an urge to learn something that you suspect maybe important to know at some point, even if it may not matter now. A paper I read recently (http://www.idsia.ch/~juergen/curioussingapore/curioussingapore.html) defined curiosity more formally, as a special kind of search strategy that focuses on places that your experience shows have a higher than average probability of teaching you something useful. This doesn't seem too far from my definition.

It seems to me... (read more)

I like your list of signs of a curiosity stopper. I don't necessarily think that "elan vital" meets those requirements (as Roy points out), but perhaps it did for many people or at some times.

I like the list because my brain feels a little more limber and a little more powerful, having pondered it. The list is a curiosity ENHANCER, and an anticipation SHARPENER.

-- James

I love this idea. It reminds me of a bit of management advice I once heard: knives in the chest, not in the back. For better results, get debate out in the open.