All of Knuckels McGinty's Comments + Replies

I've heard similar things and agree completely. It's just difficult to fight the impulse to bury away the details!

I'm glad i managed to finally be understandable. Part of the problem is that my enthusiasm for the project leads me to be a bit coy about revealing too much detail on the internet. The other problem is that I'm frequently straying into academic territories I don't know that well so I think I tend to use words to describe it that are probably not be the correct ones.

Thanks for those, it was interesting to see how some other people have approached the problem and if nothing else it tells me that other people are trying to take the epistemology of everyday discourse seriously so hopefully there will be an appetite for my version.

3ESRogs
FWIW, it may be worth keeping in mind the Silicon Valley maxim that ideas are cheap, and execution is what matters. In most cases you're far more likely to make progress on the idea if you get it out into the open, especially if execution at all depends on having collaborators or other supporters. (Also helpful to get feedback on the idea.) The probability that someone else successfully executes on an idea that you came up with is low.

Definitely the "framework or rubrik" option. More like a rubrik than anything else, but with some fun nuance here and there. Work would be done by humans but all following the same rules.

There are a number of ways that I would like to use it in the future, but in the immediate most practical sense what I'm working on is a plan to create internet content that answers people's questions (via google. Siri, Alexa, etc) but makes declarative statements about the quality of information used to create those answers.

So for example, right now (... (read more)

2ESRogs
Ah! It's much clearer to me now what you're looking for. Two things that come to mind as vaguely similar: 1) The habit of some rationalist bloggers of flagging claims with "epistemic status". (E.g. here or here) 2) Wikipedia's guidelines for verifiability (and various other guidelines that they have) Of course, neither is exactly what you're talking about, but perhaps they could serve as inspiration.

I read "37 ways...". Thanks. I think I understand what you mean now.

I think those would definitely be the sorts of problems I would run into if I was to do this via a Philosophy PHD (something I've thought about, but don't think I would be very likely to pursue) or in building an AI algorithm.

I think they are problems that I would need to be cognizant of, but I think I have a workaround that still lets me create something valuable, but maybe not something that would satisfy philosophers.

That was really interesting. Some of it was a little too technical for me, but hopefully I can spend some time learning some of the parts that threw me and see if I can figure out exactly how close that is.

My first impression is that would be the microscopic view of one part of the whole model. I actually had in mind something much more basic, but where that level of complexity could be added slowly as the overall model is built. It's a kind of never-ending project that improves it's accuracy as more is added to it.

In one imaginary iteration of this, I just hire people to do that level of work for me and tell me what the answer is.

Anyway, thanks.

Yeah, I suppose in a way it is!

Thanks for the reply

I haven't read anything besides overviews of (or takes on) Wittgenstein, but if you think it's worthwhile I'll definitely give it a shot.

I can't say that I'm familiar with the morass that you speak of. I work in clinical medicine and tend to just have a 10,000 mile view on philosophy. Can you maybe elaborate on what you see the problem as?

I really am mostly just anxious not to waste my time on things that have been done before and failed.

4rsaarelm
The problem is that we think statements have a somewhat straightforward relation to reality because we can generally make sense of them quite easily. In reality it turns out that that ease comes from a lot of hidden work our brain does being smart on the spot every time it needs to fit a given sentence to the given state of reality, and nobody really appreciated this until people started trying to build AIs that do anything similar and repeatedly ended up with things with no ability to distinguish between things that are realistically plausible and incoherent nonsense. I'm not really sure how to communicate this effectively beyond gesturing at the sorry history of the artificial intelligence research program from the 1950s onwards despite thousands of extremely clever people putting their minds to it. The sequences ESrogs suggests in the sibling reply also deal with stuff like this.
ESRogs130
I can't say that I'm familiar with the morass that you speak of. I work in clinical medicine and tend to just have a 10,000 mile view on philosophy. Can you maybe elaborate on what you see the problem as?

You might want to take a look at the A Human's Guide to Words sequence. (Or, for a summary, see just the last post in that sequence: 37 Ways That Words Can Be Wrong.)