I’m responding to you, rather than to Mellway, because you responded to him and got strongly upvoted for it when his post was downvoted. Granted that I’m responding nearly seven years after the fact, so you probably won’t see this, but others might.
For your first sentence, you are arguing definitions. The words do not have a single unambiguous meaning in that context, and some of those meanings are incorrect, and therefore the statement by EY is, quite arguably, incorrect. It is not hard to be more of a chemist than I, yet I postulate that for the first three examples of an “atomic theory of chemistry” you define, I can either point out a known counterexample or a point where the error bars are too large to begin to call the result “pretty damn certain”. As an example, the claim that “bonds form between atoms, producing molecules, which have consistent chemical effects” runs into issues such as the orientations of the atoms (protein folding being a common real-world example of how differently-configured molecules of exactly the same atoms bound to the same other atoms can produce completely different chemical effects). Even seemingly-obvious statements, combined with the immediately-obvious caveats, can be incorrect: “all matter (which is more massive than an atom, because atoms aren’t actually atomic) is composed of atoms” completely fails to account for neutron stars. I thus claim that the expected definition of the term in such a context as this one cannot be a correct one. Do you have a non-trivial definition of “the atomic theory of chemistry” which is “pretty damn certain”? Normally I’d have said EY would be among the first to point out how much we don’t know and still have to learn even where we think we know the answer.
Do not stop your search till you have found an interpretation of the words that makes the sentence non-foolish and non-false.
Absolutely not. That way lies a path toward one of the very things this (in most ways excellent) article warns against:
runs a little automatic program that takes whatever the Great Leader says and generates a justification that your fellow followers will view as Reason-able.
It is not our job to take everything said by EY or anybody else and consider it from all possible meanings and contexts until we hit upon one that can be justified. It is occasionally useful to do so, such as considering whether a quote taken out of context might actually not mean what the quoter meant to indicate, but it is neither practical nor desirable in common discourse or when reading the author’s words in their full context.
The most charitable explanation I can come up with Yudkowsky’s words is that “Yudkowsky is not a chemist, and seven years ago needed a statement that sounded both scientific and hard to dispute, came up with something like \”atoms are the basic unit of chemistry\” (which is, indeed, a useful approximation in most contexts), and worded it to sound both more scientific and more emphatic.” If the Great Leader meant something more precise, he should have stated it. If he meant ”… once you take into account all the other things that influence chemistry as well” then that makes his statement false on the face of it, because we keep coming with new examples of those other things.
Downvoted for telling us to run that little automatic program.
I’m not sure what you’re getting at. If I say “It’s pretty damned certain that the Earth is round”, and someone objected because I didn’t specify what I meant by round, I’d think they were wasting everyones time trying to sound smart.
Atomic theory is a standard phrase. The theory was vigorously debated in the 19th century, when it was not clear that the structure of matter wasn’t, for example, continuous and homogeneous. Claiming it’s not precise enough to call certain...I don’t know, if you were making a subtler point it was lost on me.
(I’m just responding to this comment—I haven’t read the post)
I’m responding to you, rather than to Mellway, because you responded to him and got strongly upvoted for it when his post was downvoted. Granted that I’m responding nearly seven years after the fact, so you probably won’t see this, but others might.
For your first sentence, you are arguing definitions. The words do not have a single unambiguous meaning in that context, and some of those meanings are incorrect, and therefore the statement by EY is, quite arguably, incorrect. It is not hard to be more of a chemist than I, yet I postulate that for the first three examples of an “atomic theory of chemistry” you define, I can either point out a known counterexample or a point where the error bars are too large to begin to call the result “pretty damn certain”. As an example, the claim that “bonds form between atoms, producing molecules, which have consistent chemical effects” runs into issues such as the orientations of the atoms (protein folding being a common real-world example of how differently-configured molecules of exactly the same atoms bound to the same other atoms can produce completely different chemical effects). Even seemingly-obvious statements, combined with the immediately-obvious caveats, can be incorrect: “all matter (which is more massive than an atom, because atoms aren’t actually atomic) is composed of atoms” completely fails to account for neutron stars. I thus claim that the expected definition of the term in such a context as this one cannot be a correct one. Do you have a non-trivial definition of “the atomic theory of chemistry” which is “pretty damn certain”? Normally I’d have said EY would be among the first to point out how much we don’t know and still have to learn even where we think we know the answer.
Absolutely not. That way lies a path toward one of the very things this (in most ways excellent) article warns against:
It is not our job to take everything said by EY or anybody else and consider it from all possible meanings and contexts until we hit upon one that can be justified. It is occasionally useful to do so, such as considering whether a quote taken out of context might actually not mean what the quoter meant to indicate, but it is neither practical nor desirable in common discourse or when reading the author’s words in their full context.
The most charitable explanation I can come up with Yudkowsky’s words is that “Yudkowsky is not a chemist, and seven years ago needed a statement that sounded both scientific and hard to dispute, came up with something like \”atoms are the basic unit of chemistry\” (which is, indeed, a useful approximation in most contexts), and worded it to sound both more scientific and more emphatic.” If the Great Leader meant something more precise, he should have stated it. If he meant ”… once you take into account all the other things that influence chemistry as well” then that makes his statement false on the face of it, because we keep coming with new examples of those other things.
Downvoted for telling us to run that little automatic program.
I’m not sure what you’re getting at. If I say “It’s pretty damned certain that the Earth is round”, and someone objected because I didn’t specify what I meant by round, I’d think they were wasting everyones time trying to sound smart.
Atomic theory is a standard phrase. The theory was vigorously debated in the 19th century, when it was not clear that the structure of matter wasn’t, for example, continuous and homogeneous. Claiming it’s not precise enough to call certain...I don’t know, if you were making a subtler point it was lost on me.
(I’m just responding to this comment—I haven’t read the post)