I think there is a problem in the culture of philosophy.
It's seen as generally better to define things up front, as this is seen as being more precise.
That sounds reasonable. Who doesn't want greater precision?
Precision is good when it is possible. But often we don't have a good enough understanding of the phenomena to be precise, and the "precision" that is given is a faux-precision.
Often logic is used to define precise categories, by philosophers examining their concept for X. Then they look at and discuss and argue over the consequences o...
they might, though you have to be very careful in treating partial data as representative of the whole picture.
but the data for the kind of factors she's talking about (i've read the book, though it was a while ago) goes beyond what property records could provide.
The data necessary for such systematic examination is not available in some fields. I'm not sure about this field, but maybe it was one of them (back then at least)?
Nice post. You could write a similar one on helping the environment. How often do you hear people say, about helping the environment, that "every little bit helps"?
While we're on the topic of an Australian meetup, are there any other LW ppl in Brisbane? If there's some we could organise a meetup.
So, my suggestion is to use "rationality" consistently and to avoid using "rationalism". Via similarity to "scientist" and "physicist", "rationalist" doesn't seem to have the same problem. Discus
A while back I argued against using the term "rationalist".
Some further thoughts:
Noticing that something isn't right is very different from developing a solution.
The former may draw on experience and intuition - like having developed a finely honed bullshit detector. You can often just immediately see that there's something wrong.
I've noticed that when people complain that someone has given a criticism but hasn't or can't suggest something better, they seem expect that person to be able to do so on the spot, off the top of their head.
But the task of developing a solution is not usually something you can do o...
Yes. Too often people treat it as a sin to criticize without suggesting an alternative. (as if a movie critic could only criticize an element of a film if they were to write a better film).
But coming up with alternatives can be hard, and having clear criticisms of current approaches can be an important step towards a better solution. It might take years of building up various criticisms -- and really coming to understand the problem -- before you are ready to build an alternative.
Brisbane, Australia
Yet our brains assume that we hear about all those disasters [we read about in the newspaper] because we've personally witnessed them, and that the distribution of disasters in the newspapers therefore reflects the distribution of disasters in the real world.
Even if we had personally witnessed them, that wouldn't, in itself, be any reason to assume that they are representative of things in general. The representativeness of any data is always something that can be critically assessed.
This seems to be a common response - Tyrrell_McAllister said something similar:
I think that your distinction is really just the distinction between physics and mathematics.
I take that distinction as meaning that a precise maths statement isn't necessarily reflecting reality like physics does. That is not really my point.
For one thing, my point is about any applied maths, regardless of domain. That maths could be used in physics, biology, economics, engineering, computer science, or even the humanities.
But more importantly, my point concerns wh...
I fully agree, and this is completely in line with the points I was trying to make.
It is theoretically possible to accurately describe the motions of celestial bodies using epicycles, though one might need infinite epicycles, and epicycles would themselves need to be on epicycles. If you think there's something wrong with the math, it won't be in its inability to describe the motion of celestial bodies.
But I don't think there's anything "wrong with the math" - I even said precisely that:
...A believer in epicycles would likely have thought that it must have been correct because it gave mathematically correct answers. An
As far as I can see, that's just an acknowledgement that we can't know anything for certain -- so we can't be certain of any 'laws', and any claim of certainty is invalid.
I was arguing that any applied maths term has two types of meanings -- one 'internal to' the equations and an 'external' ontological one, concerning what it represents -- and that a precise 'internal' meaning does not imply a precise 'external' meaning, even though 'precision' is often only thought of in terms of the first type of meaning.
I don't see how that relates in any way to the question of absolute certainty. Is there some relationship I'm missing here?
I'm not trying to be a jerk. Let me try to explain things, as I don't think I communicated my point very clearly.
Just to start off, the quoted text is something you said.
But perhaps you are saying that the sentence I've embedded it in does not reflect what any thing you said? If so, it's not mean to - it's describing the point I was making, and to which your response included that quoted text.
Essentially, my last comment was trying to point out what I'd originally said had been misinterpreted in the Just-So Story bit, even though I didn't do a great ...
An intuition is correct if it matches reality.
Indeed, and that is why it's wrong to say that attempts to rationally justify statements about reality are "almost certainly going to produce an ad hoc Just-So Story".
science is basically a means to determine whether initial intuitions are true.
No, science is a methodology to determine whether an assertion about reality should be discarded. If it merely dealt with initial intuitions, it's usefulness would be exhausted once the supply of initial intuitions had been run through.
I'm not sur...
I doubt those kings can be killed. I think victory against them comes more from inserting layers of suppression between them and action, to modulate and reduce their power. You might be able to think of those layers as governmental machinery.
“If a nation expects to be both ignorant and free in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be” -- Thomas Jefferson
it's score would be the number of karma points to be awarded for implementing it.
upon reflection, a poll might be better. along the lines of:
how many points is the implementation of this feature worth?
I wonder - would it be useful for people to receive karma points for programming contributions to the LW community? It sounds reasonable to me.
An interesting question is, how do you determine the number of karma points the work deserves? One approach would be that one of the site admins could assign it a value. Another would be that it could be voted upon.
Essentially the description of the 'feature' to be added would be a post, and it's score would be the number of karma points to be awarded for implementing it. Vote up if you think that score is too...
Here's an example of such external referencing of Less Wrong posts
http://www.37signals.com/svn/posts/1750-the-planning-fallacy
[edit: included quote]
Any 'figuring out' is almost certainly going to produce an ad hoc Just-So Story.
that implies that the only correct intuition is one you can immediately rationally justify. how could progress in science happen if this was true?
science is basically a means to determine whether initial intuitions are true.
So it seems possible to me that I have an oversensitivity to noise and Bill has an undersensitivity to it.
That seems to imply that the typical case is the "correct" one, and that somehow your (or Bill's) case is invalid because it's non-typical.
If noise means that you can't sleep, study or concentrate, and you can't really help this, then this is a valid factor that should be taken into account.
[edit] though after reading further down i can see that you appreciate that.
that is exactly what you can't assume if you want to explain the basis of representation.
...because they ask for a moral intuition about a case where the outcome is predefined.
One thing i found a bit dodgy about that example is that it just asserts that the outcomes were positive.
I would bet that, for the respondents, simply being told that the outcomes were positive would still have left them feeling that in a real brother-sister situation like that there would likely have likely been some negative consequences.
Greene does not seem to factor this into account when he interprets their responses.
I don't think there's anything that comes close to giving a theoretical account of how mathematical statements are able to, in some sense, represent things in reality.
perhaps i should have phrased it as '...stand by your intuition for a while -- even if you can't reason it out initially -- to give yourself an adequate chance to figure it out'
forgot - there was another observation i had.... this one is just quick sketching:
regarding the idea that 'moral properties' are projected onto reality.
As our moral views are about things in reality, they are -- amongst other things -- forms of representation.
I think we need a solid understanding of what representations are, how they work, and thus exactly what it is they "refer" to in the world (and in what sense they do so), before we'll really even have adequate language for talking about such issues in a precise, non-ambiguous fashion. ...
Ok, i skimmed that a bit because it was fairly long, but here's a few observations...
I think the default human behavior is to treat what we perceive as simply being what is out there (some people end up learning better, but most seem not to). This is true for everything we percieve, regardless of the subject matter - i.e. is nothing specific to morality.
I think it can -- sometimes -- be reasonable to stand by your intuition even if you can't reason it out. Sometimes it takes time to figure out and articulate the reasoning. I am not trying to justify obs...
see also
"How Obama Is Using the Science of Change" http://www.time.com/time/printout/0,8816,1889153,00.html
I think there's some misunderstanding here. I said don't assume. If you have some reason to think what you're doing is reasonable or ok, then you're not assuming.
Rich enough that, if you're going to make these sorts of calculations, you'll get reasonable results (rather than misleading or wildly misleading ones).
A lot of this probably comes down to:
Don’t assume – that you have a rich enough picture of yourself, a rich enough picture of the rest of reality, or that your ability to mentally trace through the consequences of actions comes anywhere near the richness of reality’s ability to do so.
The problem is language. If you use a concept frequently, you pretty much need a shorthand way of referring to it.
But I would ask, do you need that concept – a concept for labeling this type of person – in the first place?
"Mate selection for the male who values the use of a properly weighted Bayesian model in the evaluation of the probability of phenomena" would not make a very effective post title. [as] "Mate selection for the male rationalist".
I don’t think that’s the only other option. Maybe it could’ve been called “Mate ...
I agree that identifying yourself with the label rationality … But it still seems useful to have some sort of terminology to talk about clear thinking, and I can't think of a better candidate term than rationality.
‘Rationality’ is a perfectly fine term to talk about clear thinking, but that is quite a different matter to using 'rationalist' or any other term as a label to identify with.
...I must say that I can't help but find it odd that you link to "Keep Your Identity Small" in discussing this problem. Did you read the footnotes? Graham lis
Heavily paraphrasing:
For local purposes [“rationalists” seems suitable]. For outside purposes [I use a description not a label]
I think it’s pretty much impossible for us to have any sort of private label for ourselves. Even if we were to use a label for ourselves within this site and never use that outside of the site, that use of it within the site is still going to be projecting that label to the wider world.
Anyone from outside the community who looks at the site is going to see whatever label(s) we employ. And even if we employ a label just o...
I don't think Zelazny's statement makes out that "detecting falsehood and discovering truth are not the same skill in practice". He just seems to be saying that you can have good 'detecting falsehood' skills without caring much about the truth ("I’m not at all sure, though, that they care much about truth").
If I thought I was going to have to detect falsehoods - if that, not discovering a certain truth, were my one purpose in life - then I'd probably apprentice myself out to a con man.
I think that's equating 'detecting falsehood...
I'd estimate that writing a good post takes me about 20 times as much time and effort as writing a long comment. Many people simply can't commit that much time [...] I don't think fear of rejection is the problem. (my emphasis)
I take nazgulnarsil's comment as suggesting that there may be value to more people writing posts that aren't necessarily "good"... in which case that sort of rejection may not be optimal.
I'd argue that intelligence has a contextual nature as well. A simple example would be a computer chess tournament with a fixed algorithm that used as much resources as you threw at it. Say you manage to increase the resources for your team steadily by 10 MIPs per year, you will not win more chess games if another team is expanding their capabilities by 20 MIPs per year.
If you're comparing a randomly selected intelligent system against another randomly selected intelligent system drawn from the same pool, then of course the relative difference isn'...
(Most people take a concept to mean whatever most uniquely distinguishes it from other concepts - so 'rational' means whatever, in the characteristics they associate with rationality, is most unique and different from the other concepts they have. i.e. Spock-like).
it would appear to the average person that most rational types are only moderately successful while all the extremely wealthy people are irrational.
This only makes sense if you consider "rational" to equal "geeky Spock-wannabe",
We're talking here about perception, not reality, and I'm sorry to say that "geeky Spock-wannabe" probably does equate to the average person's perception of "most rational types" .
So perhaps we need a norm that criticizes use of authority in one area to make claims in an unrelated area. A preacher's opinion carries little weight in biology, just as biologists do not typically do much to define religious rhetoric.
But that would also mean that nobody but an authority in the religion could criticize the religion.
These rules always have to be symmetrical.
That said, I do think it is valid to say "I am entitled to an opinion" in situations where your right to expression is being attacked.
I'm not saying you always do have a right to freely and fully express yourself. But in situations when you do have some measure of this, it can be unfairly stomped on.
For example, you might be in a business meeting where you should be able to have input on a matter but one person keeps cutting you off.
Or say you're with friends and you're outlining your view on some topic and, though you're able to get your view out there, someone else always responds with personal attacks.
Sometimes people are just trying to shut you down.
That article is entitled "You Are Never Entitled to Your Opinion" and says:
If you ever feel tempted to resist an argument or conclusion by saying "everyone is entitled to their opinion," stop! This is as clear a bias indicator as they come.
I don't think Robin really means that people aren't entitled to their opinions. I think what he really means is people aren't allowed to say "I'm entitled to my opinion" - that is, to use that phrase as a defense.
There's a big difference. When people use that defense they don't r...
I agree, I probably just didn't explain myself very well. I was just trying to talk about the situations when people express an opinion without really giving any consideration to why they think it is true.
I think a norm is likely to be a product of the solution, not the solution itself.
So the problem is we have a lot of people who don't appreciate what constitutes a reasonable foundation for an opinion. They think they can just say what they feel. To put it one way, they have a poor understanding of the nature of evidence.
I don't think a norm like you describe could have any effect on anyone like that who had a poor understanding of evidence. Those people would just think the norm was wrong or ridiculous.
If they were to come to better understand the nat...
Hi, I'm in Brisbane and potentially interested. Not a lot of free time at the moment though (finishing off PhD). I've been to Skeptics in the Pub, but haven't had time to go recently. I think I'm a member of UQ Skeptics on Facebook.