But the actual objections to them, of course, will be disproportionately around those few core bits.
Well yeah, but hey: take what’s useful and chuck out the rest.
Besides which, by bothering to try to come up with a wholly naturalistic worldview that never resorts to mysticism in the first place, Eliezer is massively ahead of the overwhelming majority of, for example, laypeople and philosophers. Practicing scientists are better at science, but often resort to mysticism themselves when confronted with questions outside their own domain (ie: Roger Penrose and his quantum-woo on consciousness).
I do dislike the degree of mathematical Platonism and Tegmarkism I occasionally see around here, but that’s just my personal extreme distaste for mysticism coming out.
Basically, it’s really nice to have a community where words like “irreducible” will get you lynched, and if I have to put up with a few old blog entries being kinda bad at conveying their intended point, or just plain being wrong, so be it.
Besides which, by bothering to try to come up with a wholly naturalistic worldview that never resorts to mysticism in the first place, Eliezer is massively ahead of the overwhelming majority of, for example, laypeople and philosophers.
That means that if I just say “space aliens have replaced the President”, I’m saying something bad, but if I copy a math textbook, and add a footnote “also, space aliens have replaced the President”, I’m saying something good, because the sum total of what I am saying (a lot of good math + one bad thing about aliens) is good. In one sense that’s correct; people could certainly learn lots of math from my footnoted math textbook. But we don’t generally add these kinds of things together.
Well yeah, but hey: take what’s useful and chuck out the rest.
Besides which, by bothering to try to come up with a wholly naturalistic worldview that never resorts to mysticism in the first place, Eliezer is massively ahead of the overwhelming majority of, for example, laypeople and philosophers. Practicing scientists are better at science, but often resort to mysticism themselves when confronted with questions outside their own domain (ie: Roger Penrose and his quantum-woo on consciousness).
I do dislike the degree of mathematical Platonism and Tegmarkism I occasionally see around here, but that’s just my personal extreme distaste for mysticism coming out.
Basically, it’s really nice to have a community where words like “irreducible” will get you lynched, and if I have to put up with a few old blog entries being kinda bad at conveying their intended point, or just plain being wrong, so be it.
That means that if I just say “space aliens have replaced the President”, I’m saying something bad, but if I copy a math textbook, and add a footnote “also, space aliens have replaced the President”, I’m saying something good, because the sum total of what I am saying (a lot of good math + one bad thing about aliens) is good. In one sense that’s correct; people could certainly learn lots of math from my footnoted math textbook. But we don’t generally add these kinds of things together.
Did you write the rest of the math textbook?