Seems to me that you can in principle rationally believe (1) that your beliefs are entangled with reality but (2) that you don’t have any more effective way of persuading others than to say “see, I believe this”. Specifically, imagine that every now and then you find yourself acquiring a belief in a particular, weird, internal way (say, you have the strong impression that God speaks to you, accompanied by a mysterious smell of apricots), and that several times this has happened and you’ve checked out the belief and it’s turned out to be true. (And you’ve never checked it and found it to be false, and the instances you checked were surprising, etc.)
I think you’d be entitled, in this situation, to believe that your weirdly acquired beliefs are entangled with reality; but I can’t see any way you could be very convincing to someone who didn’t know the history (barring further such episodes in the future, of which there is no guarantee); and even in the best-possible case where whenever this thing happens to you you immediately tell someone else of the belief you’ve acquired and get them to check it, it could be very difficult for them to rule out hoaxing well enough to make them trust you.
Now, the standard case of incommunicably grounded beliefs—which I suspect Eliezer had in mind here—is of some sorts of religious belief; and they share at least some features with my semi-silly example. They generally lack the really important one (namely, repeated testing), and that’s a big strike against them; but the big strike is the poor quality of the evidence, not its incommunicability as such.
So yes, incommunicability is suspicious, and a warning sign, but I think Eliezer goes too far when he says that a model that says your beliefs aren’t evidence for others is ipso facto saying that you don’t yourself have reason to believe. Unless he really means literally absolutely no evidence at all for others, but I don’t think anyone really believes that.
You can tell them that your impressions have previously always been correct and surprising. To the extent that they trust you, the evidence will be just as good for them as it was for you.
The extent to which they trust you may not be very great, especially given that what you’re telling them is that sometimes God speaks to you with an aura of apricots and reveals surprising but mundane truths. In any case, telling them this doesn’t make your evidence any less incommunicable, except in so far as it makes all evidence communicable.
In this case, they’ll trust you less than if you told them that your shoelaces were untied, but it’s not fundamentally different. Your shoelaces being untied is only communicable in the sense that you can tell someone, unless you count telling them to look at your shoes, but that doesn’t seem to be what this is talking about.
Unless I misunderstood Eliezer, he seemed to be saying that all evidence is communicable in exactly this way.
Seems to me that you can in principle rationally believe (1) that your beliefs are entangled with reality but (2) that you don’t have any more effective way of persuading others than to say “see, I believe this”. Specifically, imagine that every now and then you find yourself acquiring a belief in a particular, weird, internal way (say, you have the strong impression that God speaks to you, accompanied by a mysterious smell of apricots), and that several times this has happened and you’ve checked out the belief and it’s turned out to be true. (And you’ve never checked it and found it to be false, and the instances you checked were surprising, etc.)
I think you’d be entitled, in this situation, to believe that your weirdly acquired beliefs are entangled with reality; but I can’t see any way you could be very convincing to someone who didn’t know the history (barring further such episodes in the future, of which there is no guarantee); and even in the best-possible case where whenever this thing happens to you you immediately tell someone else of the belief you’ve acquired and get them to check it, it could be very difficult for them to rule out hoaxing well enough to make them trust you.
Now, the standard case of incommunicably grounded beliefs—which I suspect Eliezer had in mind here—is of some sorts of religious belief; and they share at least some features with my semi-silly example. They generally lack the really important one (namely, repeated testing), and that’s a big strike against them; but the big strike is the poor quality of the evidence, not its incommunicability as such.
So yes, incommunicability is suspicious, and a warning sign, but I think Eliezer goes too far when he says that a model that says your beliefs aren’t evidence for others is ipso facto saying that you don’t yourself have reason to believe. Unless he really means literally absolutely no evidence at all for others, but I don’t think anyone really believes that.
You can tell them that your impressions have previously always been correct and surprising. To the extent that they trust you, the evidence will be just as good for them as it was for you.
The extent to which they trust you may not be very great, especially given that what you’re telling them is that sometimes God speaks to you with an aura of apricots and reveals surprising but mundane truths. In any case, telling them this doesn’t make your evidence any less incommunicable, except in so far as it makes all evidence communicable.
(Note: old “g” = newer “gjm”.)
In this case, they’ll trust you less than if you told them that your shoelaces were untied, but it’s not fundamentally different. Your shoelaces being untied is only communicable in the sense that you can tell someone, unless you count telling them to look at your shoes, but that doesn’t seem to be what this is talking about.
Unless I misunderstood Eliezer, he seemed to be saying that all evidence is communicable in exactly this way.