For those of you who have been following my campaignagainst the “It’s impossible to explain this, so don’t expect me to!” defense: today, the campaign takes us to a post on anti-reductionist Gene Callahan’s blog.
In case he deletes the entire exchange thus far (which he’s been known to do when I post), here’s what’s transpired (paragraphing truncated):
Me: That’s not the moral I got from the story. The moral I got was: Wow, the senior monk sure sucks at describing the generating function (“rules”) for his actions. Maybe he doesn’t really understand it himself?
Gene: Well, if I had a silly mechanical view of human nature and thought peoples’ actions came from a “generating function”, I would think this was a problem.
Me: Which physical law do humans violate? What is the experimental evidence for this violation? Btw, the monk problem isn’t hard. Watch this: “Hello, students. Here is why we don’t touch women. Here is what we value. Here is where it falls in our value system.” There you go. It didn’t require a lifetime of learning to convey the reasoning the senior monk used to the junior, now, did it?
ETA: Previous remark by me was rejected by Gene for posting. He instead posted this:
Gene: Silas, you only got through one post without becoming an unbearable douche [!] this time. You had seemed to be improving.
I just tried to post this:
Me: Don’t worry, I made sure the exchange was preserved so that other people can view for themselves what you consider “being an unbearable douche”, or what others might call, “serious challenges to your position”.
Me: If you ever want to specify how it is that human beings’ actions don’t come from a generating function, thereby violating physical law, I’d love to have that chat and help you flesh out the idea enough to get yourself a Nobel. However, what I think you really meant to say was that the generating function is so difficult to learn directly, that lifelong practice is easy by comparison (if you were to argue the best defense of your position, that is)
Me: Can you at least agree you picked a bad example of knowledge that necessarily comes from lifelong practice? Would that be too much to ask?
Well, I haven’t read any other blog posts of him but the one you linked to, but in this specific case I cannot find what there is to be attacked.
It is stories like this that are used to explain that some values are of higher importance than others, in simple terms (a style that also exists in the not-so-extended circle of LW).The fictional senior monk’s answer would be obvious for anybody who has read up even just a little bit on Zen and/or Buddhism, it is more reinforcing than teaching news.
If the blogger is often holding an anti-reductionist position you’d like to counter, I’d go for actually anti-reductionist posts of him...
It is stories like this that are used to explain that some values are of higher importance than others, in simple terms
It’s true that some values are more important than others. But that wasn’t the point Gene was trying to make in the particular post that I linked. He was trying to make (yet another) point about the futility of specifying or adhering to specific rules, insisting that mastery of the material necessarily comes from years of experience.
This is consistent with the theme of the recentposts he’s been making, and his dissertation against rationalism in politics (though the latter is not the same as the “rationalism” we refer to here).
Whatever the merit of the point he was trying to make (which I disagree with), he picked a bad example, and I showed why: the supposedly “tacit”, inarticulable judgment that comes with experience was actually quite articulable, without even having to anticipate this scenario in advance, and while only speaking in general terms!
(I mentioned his opposition to reductionism only to give greater context to my frequent disagreement with him (unfortunately, past debates were deleted as he or his friend moved blogs, others because he didn’t like the exchange). In this particular exchange, you find him rejecting mechanism, specifically the idea that humans can be described as machines following deterministic laws at all.)
For those of you who have been following my campaign against the “It’s impossible to explain this, so don’t expect me to!” defense: today, the campaign takes us to a post on anti-reductionist Gene Callahan’s blog.
In case he deletes the entire exchange thus far (which he’s been known to do when I post), here’s what’s transpired (paragraphing truncated):
Me: That’s not the moral I got from the story. The moral I got was: Wow, the senior monk sure sucks at describing the generating function (“rules”) for his actions. Maybe he doesn’t really understand it himself?
Gene: Well, if I had a silly mechanical view of human nature and thought peoples’ actions came from a “generating function”, I would think this was a problem.
Me: Which physical law do humans violate? What is the experimental evidence for this violation? Btw, the monk problem isn’t hard. Watch this: “Hello, students. Here is why we don’t touch women. Here is what we value. Here is where it falls in our value system.” There you go. It didn’t require a lifetime of learning to convey the reasoning the senior monk used to the junior, now, did it?
ETA: Previous remark by me was rejected by Gene for posting. He instead posted this:
Gene: Silas, you only got through one post without becoming an unbearable douche [!] this time. You had seemed to be improving.
I just tried to post this:
Me: Don’t worry, I made sure the exchange was preserved so that other people can view for themselves what you consider “being an unbearable douche”, or what others might call, “serious challenges to your position”.
Me: If you ever want to specify how it is that human beings’ actions don’t come from a generating function, thereby violating physical law, I’d love to have that chat and help you flesh out the idea enough to get yourself a Nobel. However, what I think you really meant to say was that the generating function is so difficult to learn directly, that lifelong practice is easy by comparison (if you were to argue the best defense of your position, that is)
Me: Can you at least agree you picked a bad example of knowledge that necessarily comes from lifelong practice? Would that be too much to ask?
Well, I haven’t read any other blog posts of him but the one you linked to, but in this specific case I cannot find what there is to be attacked.
It is stories like this that are used to explain that some values are of higher importance than others, in simple terms (a style that also exists in the not-so-extended circle of LW).The fictional senior monk’s answer would be obvious for anybody who has read up even just a little bit on Zen and/or Buddhism, it is more reinforcing than teaching news.
If the blogger is often holding an anti-reductionist position you’d like to counter, I’d go for actually anti-reductionist posts of him...
It’s true that some values are more important than others. But that wasn’t the point Gene was trying to make in the particular post that I linked. He was trying to make (yet another) point about the futility of specifying or adhering to specific rules, insisting that mastery of the material necessarily comes from years of experience.
This is consistent with the theme of the recent posts he’s been making, and his dissertation against rationalism in politics (though the latter is not the same as the “rationalism” we refer to here).
Whatever the merit of the point he was trying to make (which I disagree with), he picked a bad example, and I showed why: the supposedly “tacit”, inarticulable judgment that comes with experience was actually quite articulable, without even having to anticipate this scenario in advance, and while only speaking in general terms!
(I mentioned his opposition to reductionism only to give greater context to my frequent disagreement with him (unfortunately, past debates were deleted as he or his friend moved blogs, others because he didn’t like the exchange). In this particular exchange, you find him rejecting mechanism, specifically the idea that humans can be described as machines following deterministic laws at all.)