All of StephenR's Comments + Replies

I entered "Other: electic mixture" on the survey. On my Facebook profile, I elaborate this as "classical liberalism, Rawlsian liberalism, reactionary, left-libertarianism, conservatism, and techno-futurism." Ideologies are for picking apart, not buying wholesale. I gather a variety of them together and cut away the rotten parts like moldy cheese. What's left is something much more workable than the originals.

All done.

Believing that a theory is true that says "true" is not a thing theories can be is obviously silly.

Oh okay. This is a two-part misunderstanding.

I'm not saying that theories can't be true, I'm just not talking about this truth thing in my meta-model. I'm perfectly a-okay with models of truth popping up wherever they might be handy, but I want to taboo the intuitive notion and refuse to explicate it. Instead I'll rely on other concepts to do much of the work we give to truth, and see what happens. And if there's work that they can't do, I want ... (read more)

Many of them render considering them not true pointless, in the sense all my reasoning and senses are invalid if they don't hold so I might as well give up and save computing time by conditioning on them being true.

I call these sorts of models sticky, in the sense that they are pervasive in our perception and categorisation. Sitcky categories are the sort of thing that we have a hard time not taking literally. I haven't gone into any of this yet, of course, but I like it when comments anticipate ideas and continue trains of thought.

Maybe a short run-lo... (read more)

That was a wonderful comment. I hope you don't mind if I focus on the last part in particular. If you'd rather I addressed more I can accommodate that, although most of that will be signalling agreement.

To assert P is equivalent to asserting "P is true" (the deflationary theory in reverse). That is still true if P is of the form "so and so works". Pragmatism is not orthogonal to, or transcendent of, truth. Pragmatists need to be concerned about what truly works.

I'll note a few things in reply to this:

• I'm fine with some conceptual

Applying it to what problem? (If you mean the physics posts you linked to, I need more time to digest it fully)

No, not that comment, I mean the initial post. The problem is handling mathematical systems in an epistemology. A lot of epistemologies have a hard time with that because of ontological issues.

Nobody actually conceptualises science as being about deriving from thinking "pink is my favority color and it isn't" -> "causality doesn't work".

No, but many people hold the view that you can talk about valid statements as con... (read more)

If you call for a core change in epistemology it sounds like you want more than that. To me it's not clear what that more happens to be.

I'm going to have to do some strategic review on what exactly I'm not being clear about and what I need to say to make it clear.

In case you don't know the local LW definition of rationality is : "Behaving in a way that's likely to make you win."

Yes, I share that definition, but that's only the LW definition of instrumental rationality; epistemic rationality on the other hand is making your map more accura... (read more)

I think there's a bit of a misunderstanding going on here, though, because I am perfectly okay with people using classical logic if they like. Classical logic is a great way to model circuits, for example, and it provides some nice reasoning heuristics.There's nothing in my position that commits us to abandoning it entirely in favour of intuitionistic logic.

Intuitionistic logic is applicable to at least three real-world problems: formulating foundations for math, verifying programmes, and computerised theorem-proving. The last two in particular will have ... (read more)

I've added an addendum. If reading that doesn't help, let me know and I'll summarise it for you in another way.

Intuitionistic logic can be interpreted as the logic of finite verification.

Truth in intuitionistic logic is just provability. If you assert A, it means you have a proof of A. If you assert ¬A then you have a proof that A implies a contradiction. If you assert A ⇒B then you can produce a proof of B from A. If you assert A ∨ B then you have a proof of at least one of A or B. Note that the law of excluded middle fails here because we aren't allowing sentences A ∨ ¬A where you have no proof of A or that A implies a contradiction.

In all cases, the assertion ... (read more)

I've added an addendum that I hope will make things clearer.

I'm going to drop discussion about the universe in particular for now. Explaining why I think that the map-territory epistemology runs into problems there would require a lot of exposition on points I haven't made yet, so it's better suited for a post than a comment.

I've realised that there's a lot more inferential distance than I thought between some of the things I said in this post and the content of other posts on LW. I'm thinking of strategies to bridge that now.

That doesn't mean that it's helpful to just tell the positivists to pretend that map(un

Not among people who really follow the "the map is not the territory". There are many maps of the city of Berlin. I will use a different map when I want to navigate Berlin via the public transport system than when I want to drive via bike.

At the same time if my goal is staying remaining sane, it's useful to not forget that neither of those maps are the territory of the city of Berlin. In the case of the city of Berlin few people will make the mistake of confusing the two. In other domains people do get into issues because things get complicated

Do you think that some of that mysticism is a fruitful path that get's wrongly rejected?

No, but that's because I've seen it in action and noted that I don't have much use for it, and not because I've constructed an epistemology that proscribes it altogether.

I don't see the point of barring paths as inherently epistemically irrational. I would rather let anyone judge for themselves which tools would be appropriate or inappropriate, and model the success or failures in whichever way helps them choose tools more effectively later.

For example there's a co... (read more)

What do you mean with "coherent" concept inside pragmatism? In what sense does a pragmatist worry about whether or not something is coherent?

"Coherent" is a stand-in for some worries I have: Does having our epistemology underpinned by a model-reality relationship skew our motivations for creating models? Does it close certain fruitful paths by making us believe they are epistemically nonsensical or questionable? Does it have significant limitations in where it can be fruitfully applied and how? I think the answer to each is yes, whi... (read more)

In what aspect is your idea of pragmatism supposed to differ from general semantics with the slogan "The map is not the territory"?

I'm not requiring that "territory" be a coherent concept at all. Suppositions about territories are models that my epistemology evaluates rather than assumptions built into the epistemology.

That's a claim about ontology not a claim about epistemology. When it comes to modern source I consider Barry Smith worth reading. He's doing practical ontology for bioinformatical problems.

If you like, you can t... (read more)

A sentence's meaning is more like the odds ratio multipliers it provides for your priors than like a truth predication.

And what do you mean by this? That the old truth model is less correct than the probabilistic model, or that the probabilistic model performs better in applications? Or maybe you're prone to say that the latter is more correct, but what you mean by that is that there's more use for it. That's the tension I am trying to bring out, those two different interpretations of epistemic claims. And my claim is that the second gets us farther tha... (read more)

I think you greatly exaggerate your originality here.

I thought it might come across that way, but didn't want to invest a bunch of time listing my intellectual debts (the post is long enough already). For the record, I'm aware that my ideas aren't entirely original, and I suspect that when I think they are I would be able to find similar ideas in others' writing independently.

the fact that it has been around for quite a while without seeming to have radically triumphed over all rivals does provide some reason for doubt about the extent of its world-b

I'm fine with agents being better at achieving their goals than I am, whether or not computational models of the brain succeed. We can model this phenomenon in several ways: algorithms, intelligence, resource availability, conditioning pressures, so on.

But "most correct" isn't something I feel comfortable applying as a blanket term across all models. If we're going to talk about the correctness (or maybe "accuracy," "efficiency," "utility," or whatever) of a model, I think we should use goals as a modulus. So we'd b... (read more)

I think you're exaggerating. The amount of references he makes to publications in philosophy, social science, science and history suggests he was aware of a big chunk of the literature relevant to his interests.

Still, I'm interested in hearing some criticisms in more detail. Where specifically does he rely on straw man arguments?

"We must not criticize an idiom [...] because it is not yet well known and is, therefore, less strongly connected with our sensory reactions and less plausible than is another, more 'common' idiom. Superficial criticisms of this kind, which have been elevated into an entire 'philosophy', abound in discussions of the mind-body problem. Philosophers who want to introduce and to test new views thus find themselves faced not with arguments, which they could most likely answer, but with an impenetrable stone wall of well-entrenched reactions. This is not

• The Grand Budapest Hotel
• Fantastic Mr. Fox

Both fantastically written by Wes Anderson.

The Structure of Scientific Revolutions by Thomas Kuhn. Very famous book, and worthy of its reputation by the looks of things. About halfway through at the moment. Something I did not know before reading the preface was that Kuhn was a grad student in theoretical physics.

Induction: Processes of Inference, Learning and Discovery by Holland et al. This is a collaborative interdisciplinary work that straddles computer science, psychology and philosophy of science. It's almost 30 years old now, but I still found that I gained some perspective by reading it. O... (read more)

There's a nice conventional categorisation of behaviour modification programmes that goes like this:

Fixed-ratio: a reward is given after a fixed number of nonreinforced responses (e.g. an M&M after every pomodoro, or even fifth pomodoro). Fixed-interval: a reward is given after a fixed interval of time (e.g. you might always set the pomodoro for 25 minutes as per convention). Variable-ratio: a reward is given after a variable number of nonreinforced responses (e.g. you flip a coin after every pomodoro to decide whether you get an M&M). Variable-in... (read more)