Are you sure you understood the point? I am highlighting a writing technique where you write the same short story over and over again slightly differently to convey a probabilistic model to the reader in a way that is interesting. HPMoR is not quite this; it's a different story every time, with a different lesson every time, that is treated as a sequence of events.
He literally tells the same story over and over again, differently every time. He has several stories that he does this to. The book is a fictional autobiography; O'Brien was in the Vietnam War, and writes as though he were recollecting stories from the Vietnam War, but the stories are all made up. Here, I found an excerpt that illustrates the principle in a somewhat okay manner.
EDIT: Here, this is better (PDF warning).
If you want, read it. Hopefully, though, the principle that I was highlighting was clear, wasn't it? While fiction with a probability distribution given for each sequence of events is boring, fiction with many short stories describing the different possible scenarios is interesting, and gives the same probabilistic model.
Should I give examples of how O'Brien does it? I don't know how much I can type out without violating copyright law.
I've found that going by significant digits helps.
"If I represented the date that Einstein came to the US with only one significant digit of precision, what would it be? Definitely 2000. What about two? Definitely 1900. What about three? Probably 1900 again; I'm willing to take that bet. But four digits of precision? I'm not sure at all. I'll leave it as 1900."
The answer came out way off, but hopefully it prevented any anchoring, and it also accurately represents my knowledge of Einstein (namely, I know which properties of physics he discovered, ...
That's exactly what I can't make my mind up about, and forces me to default to nihilism on things like that. Maybe it really is irrelevant where the pleasure comes from? If we did wirehead everyone for eternity, then would it be sad if everyone spontaneously disappeared at some point? Those are questions that I can't answer. My morality is only good for today's society, not tomorrow's. I guess strictly morally, yes, wireheading is a solution, but philosophically, there are arguments to be made against it. (Not from a nihilistic point of view, though, which...
You're completely right. I tried, at first, to look for ways that it could be a true statement that "some areas shouldn't have consistent belief systems attached", but that made me upset or something (wtf, me?), so I abandoned that, and resolved to attack the argument, and accept it if I couldn't find a fault with it. And that's clearly bad practice for a self-proclaimed rarionalist! I'm ashamed. Well, I can sort of make the excuse of having experienced emotions, which made me forget my principles, but that's definitely not good enough.
I will be ...
Oh, okay. That makes sense. So then what's the rational thing to conclude at this point? I'm not going to go back and argue with my friend—they've had enough of it. But what can I take away from this, then?
(I was using the French term philosophe, not omitting a letter, though. That's how my history book used to write it, anyway.)
My point was that they probably did mean both things, because the distinction between "it's impossible" and "I don't know how" is not really clear in their mind. But that is not as alarming as it would be coming from someone who did know the difference, and insisted that they really did mean "impossible."
Hmm, I agree, but I don't think that it adequately explains the entire picture. I think it might have been two different ideas coming from two different sources. I can imagine that my friend had absorbed "applying form...
It seems possible that when your friend said, in effect, that there can never be any axioms for social justice, what they really meant was simply, "I don't know the axioms either." That would indeed be a map/territory confusion on their part, but it's a pretty common and understandable one. The statement, "Flying machines are impossible" is not equivalent to "I don't know how to build a flying machine," but in the short term they are making a similar prediction: no one is flying anywhere today.
They seemed to be saying both ...
I don't think your friend's point of view is impossible to argue against (as I mentioned in my other comment you can argue based on results)
I'm talking hypothetically. I did allow myself to consider the possibility that the idea was not perfect. Actually, I assumed that until I could prove otherwise. It just seemed pretty hopeless, so I'm considering the extreme.
it's not obvious to me that you've correctly understood your friend's point of view
Maybe not. I'm not angry at my friend at all, nor was I before. I felt sort of betrayed, but my friend had ...
But the point is that it, to me, is much more interesting/useful/not tedious to consider this idea that challenges rationality very fundamentally
This is what I mean when I say I don't think you've correctly understood your friend's point of view. Here is a steelmanning of what I imagine your friend's point of view to be that has nothing to do with challenging rationality:
"Different domain experts use different kinds of frameworks for understanding their domains. Taking the outside view, someone who claims that a framework used in domain X is more a...
It took me the whole day to figure even that out, really. Stress from other sources was definitely a factor, but what I observed is, whenever I thought about that idea, I got very angry, and got sudden urges to throw heavy things. When I didn't, I was less angry. I concluded later that I was angry at the idea. I wasn't sure why (I'm still not completely sure: why would I get angry at an idea, even if it was something that was truly impossible to argue against? a completely irrefutable idea is a very special one; I guess it was the fact that the implication...
Oh. Well, that was a while ago, and I get over that stuff quickly. Very few people have that power over me, anyway; they were one of the only friends I had, and it was extremely unusual behavior foming from them. It was kind of devastating to me that there was a thought that was directed at me by a trusted source that was negative and I couldn't explain... but I could, so now I'm all the more confident. This is a success story! I've historically never actually committed sucide, and it was a combination of other stress factors as well that produced that res...
Well, the friend had counterexamples to "math as a basis for society is good". I sort of skipped over that. They mentioned those who rationalized bad things like racism, and also Engels. (We both agree that communism is not a successful philosophy.) Counterexamples aren't really enough to dismiss an idea unless they're stronger than the evidence that the idea is good, but I couldn't think of such evidence at the time, and I still can't think of anything particularly convincing. There's no successful society to point at that derived all of its laws and givernment axiomatically.
Right, that's true. In the particular case of The Things They Carried, I'd trust O'Brien moderately well to depict what the Vietnam War was like, since he participated in it.