. Having compelling-sounding arguments matters, but in the end the physical world judges you on whether you ended up getting the right answer, not on your reasoning per se.
There is a set of claims that LW holds to be true, and a set that can be tested directly and unambiguously—where “physical reality judges you”—and they are not the same set. Ask yourself how many Lesswrongian claims other than Newcombe are directly testable.
The pragmatic or “winning” approach just doesn’t go far enough.
You can objectively show that a theory succeeds or fails at predicting observations, and at the closely related problem of achieving practical results . It is is less clear whether an explanation succeeds in explaining, and less clear still whether a model succeeds in corresponding to the territory. The lack of a test for correspondence per se, ie. the lack of an independent “standpoint” from which the map and the territory can be compared, is the is the major problem in scientific epistemology. And the lack of direct testability is one of the things that characterises philosophical problems as opposed to scientific ones—you can’t test ethics for correctness,you can’t test personal identity, you can’t test correspondence-to-reality separately from prediction-of-obsevation—so the “winning” or pragmatic approach is a particularly bad fit for philosophy.
Pragmatism, the “winning” approach, could form a basis of epistemology if the scope of epistemology were limited only to the things it can in fact prove, such as claims about future observations. Instrumentalism and Logcal positivism are well known forms of this approach. But rationalism rejects those approaches!
If you can’t make a firm commitment to instrumentalism, then you’re in the arena where, in the absence of results, you need to use reason to persuade people—you can’t have it both ways.
There is a set of claims that LW holds to be true, and a set that can be tested directly and unambiguously—where “physical reality judges you”—and they are not the same set. Ask yourself how many Lesswrongian claims other than Newcombe are directly testable.
The pragmatic or “winning” approach just doesn’t go far enough.
You can objectively show that a theory succeeds or fails at predicting observations, and at the closely related problem of achieving practical results . It is is less clear whether an explanation succeeds in explaining, and less clear still whether a model succeeds in corresponding to the territory. The lack of a test for correspondence per se, ie. the lack of an independent “standpoint” from which the map and the territory can be compared, is the is the major problem in scientific epistemology. And the lack of direct testability is one of the things that characterises philosophical problems as opposed to scientific ones—you can’t test ethics for correctness,you can’t test personal identity, you can’t test correspondence-to-reality separately from prediction-of-obsevation—so the “winning” or pragmatic approach is a particularly bad fit for philosophy.
Pragmatism, the “winning” approach, could form a basis of epistemology if the scope of epistemology were limited only to the things it can in fact prove, such as claims about future observations. Instrumentalism and Logcal positivism are well known forms of this approach. But rationalism rejects those approaches!
If you can’t make a firm commitment to instrumentalism, then you’re in the arena where, in the absence of results, you need to use reason to persuade people—you can’t have it both ways.