I’m looking for an old post where Eliezer makes the basic point that we should be able to do better than intellectual figures of the past, because we have the “unfair” advantage of knowing all the scientific results that have been discovered since then.
I think he cites in particular the heuristics and biases literature as something that thinkers wouldn’t have known about 100 years ago.
I don’t remember if this was the main point of the post it was in, or just an aside, but I’m pretty confident he made a point like this at least once, and in particular commented on how the advantage we have is “unfair” or something like that, so that we shouldn’t feel at all sheepish about declaring old thinkers wrong.
Max Gluckman once said: “A science is any discipline in which the fool of this generation can go beyond the point reached by the genius of the last generation.” Science moves forward by slaying its heroes, as Newton fell to Einstein. Every young physicist dreams of being the new champion that future physicists will dream of dethroning.
Ayn Rand’s philosophical idol was Aristotle. Now maybe Aristotle was a hot young math talent 2350 years ago, but math has made noticeable progress since his day. Bayesian probability theory is the quantitative logic of which Aristotle’s qualitative logic is a special case; but there’s no sign that Ayn Rand knew about Bayesian probability theory when she wrote her magnum opus, Atlas Shrugged. Rand wrote about “rationality”, yet failed to familiarize herself with the modern research in heuristics and biases. How can anyone claim to be a master rationalist, yet know nothing of such elementary subjects?
(Not sure if the material is accurate, but I think it’s the post you’re looking for. There could have been more than one on that though.)
I’m looking for an old post where Eliezer makes the basic point that we should be able to do better than intellectual figures of the past, because we have the “unfair” advantage of knowing all the scientific results that have been discovered since then.
I think he cites in particular the heuristics and biases literature as something that thinkers wouldn’t have known about 100 years ago.
I don’t remember if this was the main point of the post it was in, or just an aside, but I’m pretty confident he made a point like this at least once, and in particular commented on how the advantage we have is “unfair” or something like that, so that we shouldn’t feel at all sheepish about declaring old thinkers wrong.
Anybody know what post I’m thinking of?
1. https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/96TBXaHwLbFyeAxrg/guardians-of-ayn-rand
(Not sure if the material is accurate, but I think it’s the post you’re looking for. There could have been more than one on that though.)
2. https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/7s5gYi7EagfkzvLp8/in-defense-of-ayn-rand
References 1.
Thanks!