You accuse lukeprog of being misleading in taking a quote from a mere “librarian”, and as we all know, a librarian is a harmless drudge who just shelves books
I really can’t think of a polite way to say this, so:
Bullshit.
I wasn’t accusing Luke of anything; I was disagreeing with him. Disagreement is not accusation. When I want to make an accusation, I will make an accusation, like this one: You have mischaracterized what I wrote, and made totally false insinuations about my opinions and attitudes, and I have to say I’m pretty shocked to see someone as generally excellent as you behaving in such a way.
I do not think, and I did not say, and I had not the slightest intention of implying, that “a librarian is a harmless drudge who just shelves books”.
Allow me to remind you how Luke’s comment begins. The boldface emphasis is mine.
We also know many famous examples of scientists just completely making up their pessimism, for example about the impossibility of human heavier-than-air flight.
This isn’t what you asked for, but I might as well enumerate a few of these examples, for everyone’s benefit. For the field of AI research:
Taube was, despite his many excellent qualities, not a scientist as that term is generally understood, and he was, despite his many excellent qualities, not working in “the field of AI research”.
(Yes, I know the Wikipedia page says he was “a true innovator in the field of science”. Reading what it says he did, though, I really can’t see that what he did was science. For the avoidance of doubt, and in the probably overoptimistic hope that saying this will stop you pulling the same what-a-snob-this-person-is move as you already did above, I don’t think that “not science” is in any way the same sort of thing as “not valuable” or “not important” or “not difficult”. What the creators of (say) the Firefox web browser did was important and valuable and difficult, but happens not to be science. What Beethoven did was important and valuable and difficult, but happens not to be science. What Martin Luther King did was important and valuable and difficult, but happens not to be science.)
Pointing this out doesn’t mean I think there’s anything wrong with being a librarian. When I said “a librarian is a fine thing to be”, I meant it. (And, for the avoidance of doubt, it is my opinion both when “librarian” means “someone who shelves books in a library” and when it means “a world-class expert on organizing information in catalogues”.)
Now, having said all that, I should add that you are quite right about one thing: when I said that Taube was neither a computer expert nor a philosopher, I was oversimplifying. (Not least because I hadn’t looked deeply into Taube’s career.) He was an important innovator in the use of punched cards for document indexing, which is quite a bit like being a computer expert; and he was a PhD in philosophy, which is quite a bit like being a philosopher. None the less, I stand by what I said: neither being a world-class expert in document indexing, nor knowing a lot about punched-card reading machinery, nor being a PhD in philosophy, seems to me to be the kind of expertise that makes it particularly startling if one’s wrong about whether machines can play chess.
(And, once again, for the avoidance of doubt, I am not in the least trying to belittle his expertise and creativity. I just don’t see that they were the kind of expertise and creativity that make it startling for someone to be wrong about the possibilities of computer chess-playing.)
[EDITED to clarify a bit of wording and add some emphasis. … And again, later, to add a missing negative; oops. Also, while I’m here, two other remarks. 1: I regret the confrontational tone this exchange has taken; but I don’t see any way I could have responded sufficiently forcefully to the accusations levelled at me without perpetuating it. 2: I see a lot of downvotes are flying around in this subthread. For the record, I haven’t cast any.]
I wasn’t accusing Luke of anything; I was disagreeing with him.
You were claiming he cherrypicked the example; I’ll quote again:
… Also, Taube wasn’t a scientist or a computer expert or a chess expert or even a philosopher. He was a librarian. A librarian is a fine thing to be, but it doesn’t confer the kind of expertise that would make it surprising or even very interesting for Taube to have been wrong here.
If that were true, Luke would be seriously cherrypicking and that is not a harmless error but the sort of biased selection and lying which one would rightly take into account in considering flipping the bozo bit on someone and henceforth ignoring anything they said. This isn’t a harmless mistake of attribution or minor peccadilloe that might hurt a single clause or subpoint or tangential argument, this is the sort of thing that discredits an entire line of thought. Maybe you didn’t mean it as an accusation, but I treat it as one since if it was true it would be very serious; in much the same way maybe someone bringing up the fact that the lead author on a drug study has taken millions of dollars from the dug company doesn’t mean anything serious by it, hey, they’re just discussing the paper, but I would take it very seriously indeed and maybe even ignore the study entirely.
You have mischaracterized what I wrote, and made totally false insinuations about my opinions and attitudes
Duly noted, but see above, I don’t especially care what you actually think, I care just what you wrote and whether it is a serious issue with Luke’s comment.
I do not think, and I did not say, and I had not the slightest intention of implying, that “a librarian is a harmless drudge who just shelves books”.
Right. I’m sure you actually meant “I think librarians are fantastic smart people who know everything about everything and have many valid and expert opinions, however it just so happens that chess and AI and cybernetics happens to be one of the few areas where their informed commentary is worthless and ′ it doesn’t confer the kind of expertise that would make it surprising or even very interesting for Taube to have been wrong here’”.
Yes, I know the Wikipedia page says he was “a true innovator in the field of science”. Reading what it says he did, though, I really can’t see that what he did was science. For the avoidance of doubt, and in the probably overoptimistic hope that saying this will stop you pulling the same what-a-snob-this-person-is move as you already did above, I don’t think that “not science” is in any way the same sort of thing as “not valuable” or “not important” or “not difficult”.
If working on key organization schemes and pushing forward the field of information science cannot be construed as ‘science’ no matter how broadly defined, then I guess we’d better exempt computer science and AI from that moniker too.
He was an important innovator in the use of punched cards for document indexing, which is quite a bit like being a computer expert; and he was a PhD in philosophy, which is quite a bit like being a philosopher. None the less, I stand by what I said: neither being a world-class expert in document indexing, nor knowing a lot about punched-card reading machinery, nor being a PhD in philosophy, seems to me to be the kind of expertise that makes it particularly startling if one’s wrong about whether machines can play chess.
ಠ_ಠ
Actually, that doesn’t quite convey my impression of your no-true-Scotsmanning, I’ll try that again: ಠ_ಠ ಠ_ಠ ಠ_ಠ
A PhD in philosophy is not enough to be called a philosopher? zomgwtfbbq.
You were claiming he cherrypicked the example. [...] If that were true, Luke would be seriously cherrypicking and that is not a harmless error [...].
This appears to me to be an instance of a common error: assuming that when someone says something, they intended every inference you find it natural to make from it. It doesn’t appear to me, at all, that for Luke to have been wrong in the way I say he was he needs to have been a liar or bozo or whatever else you’re trying to suggest I accused him of being.
(I’m puzzled, too. We seem to be agreed that Luke’s quotation gives a misleading impression about what claim Taube was making, and—rightly, in my opinion—you don’t appear to have concluded from this that Luke was dishonestly cherrypicking and needs the bozo bit flipped. But I don’t understand, at all, why giving a misleading impression about Taube’s relevant expertise is a worse thing to “accuse” him of than giving a misleading impression about what Taube was claiming. Either of them means that the quotation from Taube fails to serve the purpose Luke put it there for.)
I don’t especially care what you actually think, I care just what you wrote and whether it is a serious issue with Luke’s comment.
If you don’t especially care what I actually think, then what the hell are you doing putting words into my mouth about how librarians are uninteresting low-status unintellectual drudges? (Which, just in case it needs saying again, in no way resemble my actual opinion.)
I’m sure you actually meant [...]
I meant what I said. I did not mean what you said. I also did not mean the particular equally-ridiculous thing you now sarcastically suggest I could have meant. I honestly have no idea what I’ve done to bring forth all this hostility, but if you want an actual reasoned discussion then I politely suggest that you stop flinging shit at me and then we can have one.
cannot be construed as ‘science’ no matter how broadly defined
Those last five words are yours, not mine. I’m sure you can find definitions according to which Taube’s work was “science”. I’m also sure you can quickly and easily think of plenty of instances where “no matter how broadly defined” ends up meaning “way too broadly defined for most purposes”. (Here’s an extreme example: Richard Dawkins is on record as accepting the term “cultural Christian” as applying to him. I would accordingly not say that RD cannot be construed as ‘Christian’ no matter how broadly defined—but, none the less, for most purposes describing him as a Christian would be silly. Taube’s work is certainly nearer to being science than Richard Dawkins is to being a Christian; the point of the example is to clarify my point, not to be a perfect analogy.)
A PhD in philosophy is not enough to be called a philosopher?
Ian Bostridge has a doctorate in history, and spent some time as an academic historian. However, I would not now call him a historian but a singer. (Or, more specifically, a tenor.) Angela Merkel has a PhD in physics, but I wouldn’t now call her a physicist but a politician (or, perhaps, some more august term along those lines). George Soros has a PhD in philosophy but I wouldn’t call him a philosopher.
So: no, the fact that someone got a PhD in philosophy in 1935 is not sufficient reason to call them a philosopher in 1960. As I say, having a PhD in philosophy is certainly quite like being a philosopher; it’s certainly not wholly irrelevant; I oversimplified and I shouldn’t have. But it’s not the same thing.
This appears to me to be an instance of a common error: assuming that when someone says something, they intended every inference you find it natural to make from it.
(I agree that private_messaging’s comment is extremely silly, and I regret the fact that what I wrote seems to have encouraged it.)
Indeed.
If you don’t especially care what I actually think, then what the hell are you doing putting words into my mouth about how librarians are uninteresting low-status unintellectual drudges? (Which, just in case it needs saying again, in no way resemble my actual opinion.)
Right, because you just threw that in for no reason...
I’m sure you can find definitions according to which Taube’s work was “science”.
And I even gave several. Feel free to deal with the examples; do you think computer science and AI are not ‘science’?
Here’s an extreme example: Richard Dawkins is on record as accepting the term “cultural Christian” as applying to him. I would accordingly not say that RD cannot be construed as ‘Christian’ no matter how broadly defined—but, none the less, for most purposes describing him as a Christian would be silly.
I don’t see what’s the least bit silly about describing him a a “cultural Christian” especially if he accepts the label. He was indeed raised in a Christian culture and implicitly accepts a lot of the background beliefs like belief in guilt and sin (heck, I still think in those terms to some degree and say things like ‘goddamn it’); even if we don’t go quite as far as Moldbug in diagnosing Dawkins as holding to a puritanical secular Christanity, the influence is ineradicable. There is no view from nowhere.
Ian Bostridge has a doctorate in history, and spent some time as an academic historian. However, I would not now call him a historian but a singer. (Or, more specifically, a tenor.)
Wow, so not only is he a trained historian who has published & defended his doctorate of original research, you describe him as actually having been in academia post-graduate school, and you still won’t describe him as a historian? Would I describe him as a historian? Heck yes. Because if I won’t even grant that description to Bostridge, I don’t know who the heck I would grant it to. You know, describing someone as a historian is not committing to describing him as a ‘great historian’ or a ‘ground-breaking historian’ or a ‘famous historian’. You don’t need to be Marvin Minsky to be called ‘an AI researcher’ and you don’t need to be a pre-eminent figure to be described as a worker in a field. Even a bad programmer is still a ‘programmer’; someone who has moved up into management is still a programmer even if they haven’t written a large program in years.
Angela Merkel has a PhD in physics, but I wouldn’t now call her a physicist but a politician (or, perhaps, some more august term along those lines).
From Wikipedia: “After being awarded a doctorate (Dr. rer. nat.) for her thesis on quantum chemistry,[17] she worked as a researcher and published several papers.”
But no, all that is chopped liver because gjm doesn’t think she’s a physicist/chemist.
George Soros has a PhD in philosophy but I wouldn’t call him a philosopher.
I imagine Soros would be disappointed to hear that; his Popperian philosophy grounds his ‘reflexivity’ on which he has written extensively and believes can significantly influence economics as it’s currently practiced.
So: no, the fact that someone got a PhD in philosophy in 1935 is not sufficient reason to call them a philosopher in 1960.
It is more than sufficient, Taube had excellent training (the University of Chicago, especially in the 1930s thanks to Adler & Hutchinson, was a philosophy powerhouse, and still is to some extent—ranked #24 in the Anglosphere by Leiter), received his PhD, kept up with the issues both as a practitioner and commenter, and was reportedly working on a philosophy book when he died. He was a philosopher. And your other examples were hardly better.
Before you bother to read any of what follows, I would be grateful if you would answer the following question: Have you, in fact, bozo-bitted me? Because I’ve been proceeding on the assumption that it is in principle possible for us to have a reasoned discussion, but that’s looking less and less true, and if I’m wasting my time here then I’d prefer to stop.
On librarians and librarianship
Unless I misunderstand you badly, you are arguing either that I have been lying constantly about this or that I am appallingly unaware of my own opinions and attitudes and you know them better than I do. And, if I understand this remark correctly …
Right, because you just threw that in for no reason...
… your basis for this is that you can’t think of any reason why I might have mentioned that Taube was a librarian other than that I have “contempt for librarians” and that I wanted to put Taube down by calling him names.
So, allow me to propose a very simple alternative explanation (which is, in fact, the correct explanation, so far as I can tell by introspection): I said it because, having listed a bunch of things that weren’t Taube’s profession, it seemed appropriate to say what his profession actually was.
On the basis of this thread so far, I’m guessing that you still don’t believe me; so let me ask: Is there, in fact, anything I could possibly say or do that would convince you that I do not hold librarians in contempt? Because it looks to me as if there isn’t, and it seems rather odd that describing someone who was in fact a librarian as a librarian could be such strong evidence of contempt for librarians as to outweigh all future testimony from the person in question.
On professions and the like
There are at least three things you can mean by saying someone is, e.g., “a biologist”. (1) That they know something about biology and think about it from time to time. (2) That doing biology is their job, or at least that they do it as much and as well as you could reasonably expect if it were. (3) That, regardless of how much biology they actually do, they have at least some (fairly high) threshold level of expertise in it.
Angela Merkel is surely a physicist(1). She is not a physicist(2) now, although she used to be. Whether she’s a physicist(3) depends on what threshold we pick and on the extent to which she’s kept up her expertise. Similarly, Ian Bostridge is a historian(1), not a historian(2) so far as I know, and might or might not be a historian(3), and similarly for George Soros and philosophy.
In general, being an X PhD is a guarantee of being an Xer(1) and (at least for a while; knowledge decays) of being an Xer(3) for some plausible choices of threshold; it is of course no guarantee of being an Xer(2).
You appear to be taking the position that it is never reasonable to deny that someone with an X PhD is “an Xer”. That seems like excessive credentialism to me.
The relevant notion of “scientist”, “philosopher”, etc., here was never made explicit. I think I’ve had meaning 2 in mind sometimes and meaning 3 in mind sometimes. Eliezer’s original post about Pascalian wagers takes Enrico Fermi as its leading example, and talks about “famous scientists” and “prestigious scientists” in general. The present post takes Lord Kelvin as another example, but also points to skepticism about flying machines (which was not generally from famous scientists). So I don’t know what the “right” threshold for meaning 3 would be here, but it seems like it should be fairly high.
Bostridge, Merkel and Soros seem to me like pretty decent examples of people who are no longer Xers(2), and probably aren’t Xers(3) with a high threshold. I could be wrong about some or all of them, though; I mentioned them only to make the more general point that holding a doctoral degree is no guarantee of being an Xer(2) or Xer(3) with high threshold.
On Taube and his qualifications
Taube was an expert in the indexing of documents, and an innovator in that field. In your opinion, does that amount to expertise in computer chess-playing comparable to, say, Fermi’s expertise in nuclear fission?
Taube was (I think; perhaps it was actually others in his company who were concerned with this) an expert in automated punched-card reading machines. Does that amount to expertise in computer chess-playing comparable to, etc.?
Taube held a PhD in philosophy; I think his thesis was on the history of philosophical thought about causality. Does that amount to, etc., etc.?
I repeat: Mortimer Taube was an impressive person. He was clearly very smart. He accomplished more than I am ever likely to. I do not hold him in contempt. Still less do I hold him in contempt for having been a librarian. I simply don’t think that his opinions on computer chess-playing are the same kind of thing as Fermi’s opinions on nuclear fission, or Kelvin’s on the age of the earth.
Before you bother to read any of what follows, I would be grateful if you would answer the following question: Have you, in fact, bozo-bitted me?
I haven’t yet, but if you’re going to persist in claiming that people with PhDs in philosophy are not even allowed the description ‘philosopher’, it’s tempting because why should I bother with people who abuse language and redefine words so abysmally?
So, allow me to propose a very simple alternative explanation (which is, in fact, the correct explanation, so far as I can tell by introspection): I said it because, having listed a bunch of things that weren’t Taube’s profession, it seemed appropriate to say what his profession actually was.
Which was pursuant to your belief that a mere librarian could have nothing to say about the issue, could not be any sort of authority or indicator of the times, and so does not belong in the list lukeprog presented. Yes, I’ve said all this before.
On the basis of this thread so far, I’m guessing that you still don’t believe me; so let me ask: Is there, in fact, anything I could possibly say or do that would convince you that I do not hold librarians in contempt?
The obvious reading of your concluding paragraph was obvious, before you started trying to defend it.
Angela Merkel is surely a physicist(1). She is not a physicist(2) now, although she used to be. Whether she’s a physicist(3) depends on what threshold we pick and on the extent to which she’s kept up her expertise. Similarly, Ian Bostridge is a historian(1), not a historian(2) so far as I know, and might or might not be a historian(3), and similarly for George Soros and philosophy...The relevant notion of “scientist”, “philosopher”, etc., here was never made explicit. I think I’ve had meaning 2 in mind sometimes and meaning 3 in mind sometimes.
Indeed. And I think it’s absurd to restrict usage of descriptions to the rarefied and elevated #2s (how many biologists get tenure?) and even more absurd to restrict it to the even more rarefied and elevated #3s.
(Merkel & Bostridge were both #2s at some point, but seem likely to never be #3s in those fields; whether we could consider Soros a #3 - because he claims his philosophical approach of reflexivity guides his philanthropy & investing and so his inarguably historic roles there are part and parcel of philosophy—is an interesting question, but getting a bit far afield.)
Taube was an expert in the indexing of documents, and an innovator in that field. In your opinion, does that amount to expertise in computer chess-playing comparable to, say, Fermi’s expertise in nuclear fission?
It gives him a great deal of expertise in organizing and searching data mechanically, which is relevant to AI; and inasmuch as chess-playing falls under AI… No, he didn’t write his thesis on chess-playing, but here again I would say it’s absurd to insist on such doctrinaire rigidity that no one can have respectable expertise without being the expert on a topic. (I would note in passing that Fermi’s laurea thesis was not on fission, but X-ray imaging; is that close enough? Well, probably, but then why is indexing and search so out of bounds? Search at Google involves a great deal of AI work, so clearly there is a real connection at some point in time...)
Taube held a PhD in philosophy; I think his thesis was on the history of philosophical thought about causality. Does that amount to, etc., etc.?
I’m afraid I have shocking news for you, many respected philosophers in AI may not have written their theses directly on AI: Dennett’s dissertation on consciousness was etc. etc. etc? Or consider John Searle’s early work on speech acts, was it etc etc etc? Keeping in mind the recent praise on LW for his work...
I simply don’t think that his opinions on computer chess-playing are the same kind of thing as Fermi’s opinions on nuclear fission, or Kelvin’s on the age of the earth.
All I can do is point to my previous summary and observe that Taube was one of the few contemporaries who grappled with the cybernetics issues, was trained philosophically, built a tech career on primitive computers etc etc. His observations are not chopped liver.
(I’m going to be brief, because I’m losing hope that you’re going to pay any attention to anything I say. I haven’t the least intention of bozo-bitting you globally because you have been consistently extremely impressive elsewhere, but in this particular discussion it seems that at least one of us—and I’m perfectly willing to consider that it may be me—is being sufficiently irrational that we’re doomed to produce more heat than light. More specifically, what it looks like to me is that you’re treating me as an enemy combatant who needs to be defeated, rather than a person who disagrees with you who needs to be either taught or learned from or both.)
[EDITED to add: well, it turns out I wasn’t so brief. But I tried.]
Which was pursuant to your belief that [...]
What’s annoying here is not so much your evident belief that I am lying through my teeth about my own opinion about librarians (why on earth would I even do that?) as your refusal even to acknowledge that your fantasy about that opinion is anything other than a mutually-agreed truth.
[...] Is there, in fact, anything I could possibly say or do that would convince you that I do not hold librarians in contempt?
The obvious reading of your concluding paragraph was obvious, before you started trying to defend it.
I’m sorry, was that meant to be an answer to the question I asked?
I wasn’t asking the question just to make a rhetorical point. Your behaviour in this thread suggests to me that as soon as you read the last sentence of what I wrote you leapt to a conclusion, got angry about it, and came out fighting, and that ever since you’ve refused even to consider the possibility that you leapt to the wrong conclusion.
It’s absured to insist on such doctrinaire rigidity that no one can have respectable expertise without being the expert on the topic.
It’s just as well that I’m not insisting on any such thing. So far as I know, there were other people around who were about as expert on nuclear physics as Fermi. I am not an expert on the history, so maybe that’s wrong, but I haven’t been assuming it’s wrong and when I say “comparable to Fermi’s expertise in nuclear fission” I don’t mean “expertise as of the world’s greatest expert”, I mean “expertise as of someone very expert in the field”. Because it seems to me that that’s the level of expertise that’s actually relevant to Eliezer’s original point and his more recent question.
many respected philosophers in AI may not have written their theses directly on AI
Of course. But what makes them respected philosophers in AI, and means that if they make pronouncements about AI that turn out to be very wrong then they might be examples of the phenomenon Eliezer was talking about, is not the fact that they are philosophy PhDs but their further body of work in the field that is related to AI.
(“Might be” rather than “are” because I have the impression that a sizeable number of people around here hold that philosophy is so terribly diseased a discipline that being a respected philosopher in AI is no ground for paying much attention to their opinions on AI.)
On the other hand, you’ve been arguing (I think) that Taube’s philosophical expertise made him an expert in the nascent field of AI, and the only evidence we have for his philosophical expertise is that he was a philosophy PhD. So it’s of some relevance what stuff this tells us he’d studied and thought about in depth. The stuff in question seems pretty interesting, but I don’t see how it could have shed much light on the prospects for computer chess-playing.
I was slightly wrong about the topic of (the book I think was derived from) Taube’s thesis, by the way; it wasn’t only a historical study of other philosophers’ thinking about causation but also “an attempt to solve the causal problem”, as the title puts it. Apparently his solution involved saying that causation and determination are incompatible and hence that causation implies freedom.
in this particular discussion it seems that at least one of us—and I’m perfectly willing to consider that it may be me—is being sufficiently irrational that we’re doomed to produce more heat than light.
Doing a perfect post on this topic would be hitting a dead horse right between the eyes at a thousand paces.
I really can’t think of a polite way to say this, so:
Bullshit.
I wasn’t accusing Luke of anything; I was disagreeing with him. Disagreement is not accusation. When I want to make an accusation, I will make an accusation, like this one: You have mischaracterized what I wrote, and made totally false insinuations about my opinions and attitudes, and I have to say I’m pretty shocked to see someone as generally excellent as you behaving in such a way.
I do not think, and I did not say, and I had not the slightest intention of implying, that “a librarian is a harmless drudge who just shelves books”.
Allow me to remind you how Luke’s comment begins. The boldface emphasis is mine.
Taube was, despite his many excellent qualities, not a scientist as that term is generally understood, and he was, despite his many excellent qualities, not working in “the field of AI research”.
(Yes, I know the Wikipedia page says he was “a true innovator in the field of science”. Reading what it says he did, though, I really can’t see that what he did was science. For the avoidance of doubt, and in the probably overoptimistic hope that saying this will stop you pulling the same what-a-snob-this-person-is move as you already did above, I don’t think that “not science” is in any way the same sort of thing as “not valuable” or “not important” or “not difficult”. What the creators of (say) the Firefox web browser did was important and valuable and difficult, but happens not to be science. What Beethoven did was important and valuable and difficult, but happens not to be science. What Martin Luther King did was important and valuable and difficult, but happens not to be science.)
Pointing this out doesn’t mean I think there’s anything wrong with being a librarian. When I said “a librarian is a fine thing to be”, I meant it. (And, for the avoidance of doubt, it is my opinion both when “librarian” means “someone who shelves books in a library” and when it means “a world-class expert on organizing information in catalogues”.)
Now, having said all that, I should add that you are quite right about one thing: when I said that Taube was neither a computer expert nor a philosopher, I was oversimplifying. (Not least because I hadn’t looked deeply into Taube’s career.) He was an important innovator in the use of punched cards for document indexing, which is quite a bit like being a computer expert; and he was a PhD in philosophy, which is quite a bit like being a philosopher. None the less, I stand by what I said: neither being a world-class expert in document indexing, nor knowing a lot about punched-card reading machinery, nor being a PhD in philosophy, seems to me to be the kind of expertise that makes it particularly startling if one’s wrong about whether machines can play chess.
(And, once again, for the avoidance of doubt, I am not in the least trying to belittle his expertise and creativity. I just don’t see that they were the kind of expertise and creativity that make it startling for someone to be wrong about the possibilities of computer chess-playing.)
[EDITED to clarify a bit of wording and add some emphasis. … And again, later, to add a missing negative; oops. Also, while I’m here, two other remarks. 1: I regret the confrontational tone this exchange has taken; but I don’t see any way I could have responded sufficiently forcefully to the accusations levelled at me without perpetuating it. 2: I see a lot of downvotes are flying around in this subthread. For the record, I haven’t cast any.]
You were claiming he cherrypicked the example; I’ll quote again:
If that were true, Luke would be seriously cherrypicking and that is not a harmless error but the sort of biased selection and lying which one would rightly take into account in considering flipping the bozo bit on someone and henceforth ignoring anything they said. This isn’t a harmless mistake of attribution or minor peccadilloe that might hurt a single clause or subpoint or tangential argument, this is the sort of thing that discredits an entire line of thought. Maybe you didn’t mean it as an accusation, but I treat it as one since if it was true it would be very serious; in much the same way maybe someone bringing up the fact that the lead author on a drug study has taken millions of dollars from the dug company doesn’t mean anything serious by it, hey, they’re just discussing the paper, but I would take it very seriously indeed and maybe even ignore the study entirely.
Duly noted, but see above, I don’t especially care what you actually think, I care just what you wrote and whether it is a serious issue with Luke’s comment.
Right. I’m sure you actually meant “I think librarians are fantastic smart people who know everything about everything and have many valid and expert opinions, however it just so happens that chess and AI and cybernetics happens to be one of the few areas where their informed commentary is worthless and ′ it doesn’t confer the kind of expertise that would make it surprising or even very interesting for Taube to have been wrong here’”.
If working on key organization schemes and pushing forward the field of information science cannot be construed as ‘science’ no matter how broadly defined, then I guess we’d better exempt computer science and AI from that moniker too.
ಠ_ಠ Actually, that doesn’t quite convey my impression of your no-true-Scotsmanning, I’ll try that again: ಠ_ಠ ಠ_ಠ ಠ_ಠ A PhD in philosophy is not enough to be called a philosopher? zomgwtfbbq.
This appears to me to be an instance of a common error: assuming that when someone says something, they intended every inference you find it natural to make from it. It doesn’t appear to me, at all, that for Luke to have been wrong in the way I say he was he needs to have been a liar or bozo or whatever else you’re trying to suggest I accused him of being.
(I’m puzzled, too. We seem to be agreed that Luke’s quotation gives a misleading impression about what claim Taube was making, and—rightly, in my opinion—you don’t appear to have concluded from this that Luke was dishonestly cherrypicking and needs the bozo bit flipped. But I don’t understand, at all, why giving a misleading impression about Taube’s relevant expertise is a worse thing to “accuse” him of than giving a misleading impression about what Taube was claiming. Either of them means that the quotation from Taube fails to serve the purpose Luke put it there for.)
If you don’t especially care what I actually think, then what the hell are you doing putting words into my mouth about how librarians are uninteresting low-status unintellectual drudges? (Which, just in case it needs saying again, in no way resemble my actual opinion.)
I meant what I said. I did not mean what you said. I also did not mean the particular equally-ridiculous thing you now sarcastically suggest I could have meant. I honestly have no idea what I’ve done to bring forth all this hostility, but if you want an actual reasoned discussion then I politely suggest that you stop flinging shit at me and then we can have one.
Those last five words are yours, not mine. I’m sure you can find definitions according to which Taube’s work was “science”. I’m also sure you can quickly and easily think of plenty of instances where “no matter how broadly defined” ends up meaning “way too broadly defined for most purposes”. (Here’s an extreme example: Richard Dawkins is on record as accepting the term “cultural Christian” as applying to him. I would accordingly not say that RD cannot be construed as ‘Christian’ no matter how broadly defined—but, none the less, for most purposes describing him as a Christian would be silly. Taube’s work is certainly nearer to being science than Richard Dawkins is to being a Christian; the point of the example is to clarify my point, not to be a perfect analogy.)
Ian Bostridge has a doctorate in history, and spent some time as an academic historian. However, I would not now call him a historian but a singer. (Or, more specifically, a tenor.) Angela Merkel has a PhD in physics, but I wouldn’t now call her a physicist but a politician (or, perhaps, some more august term along those lines). George Soros has a PhD in philosophy but I wouldn’t call him a philosopher.
So: no, the fact that someone got a PhD in philosophy in 1935 is not sufficient reason to call them a philosopher in 1960. As I say, having a PhD in philosophy is certainly quite like being a philosopher; it’s certainly not wholly irrelevant; I oversimplified and I shouldn’t have. But it’s not the same thing.
It’s a common error indeed, and one that is justifiable when enough other people draw that error. Yeah Hitler said to kill all the Jews, but he really meant to kill the Jew inside, not real Jews. If I may quote your other comment:
Indeed.
Right, because you just threw that in for no reason...
And I even gave several. Feel free to deal with the examples; do you think computer science and AI are not ‘science’?
I don’t see what’s the least bit silly about describing him a a “cultural Christian” especially if he accepts the label. He was indeed raised in a Christian culture and implicitly accepts a lot of the background beliefs like belief in guilt and sin (heck, I still think in those terms to some degree and say things like ‘goddamn it’); even if we don’t go quite as far as Moldbug in diagnosing Dawkins as holding to a puritanical secular Christanity, the influence is ineradicable. There is no view from nowhere.
Wow, so not only is he a trained historian who has published & defended his doctorate of original research, you describe him as actually having been in academia post-graduate school, and you still won’t describe him as a historian? Would I describe him as a historian? Heck yes. Because if I won’t even grant that description to Bostridge, I don’t know who the heck I would grant it to. You know, describing someone as a historian is not committing to describing him as a ‘great historian’ or a ‘ground-breaking historian’ or a ‘famous historian’. You don’t need to be Marvin Minsky to be called ‘an AI researcher’ and you don’t need to be a pre-eminent figure to be described as a worker in a field. Even a bad programmer is still a ‘programmer’; someone who has moved up into management is still a programmer even if they haven’t written a large program in years.
From Wikipedia: “After being awarded a doctorate (Dr. rer. nat.) for her thesis on quantum chemistry,[17] she worked as a researcher and published several papers.”
But no, all that is chopped liver because gjm doesn’t think she’s a physicist/chemist.
I imagine Soros would be disappointed to hear that; his Popperian philosophy grounds his ‘reflexivity’ on which he has written extensively and believes can significantly influence economics as it’s currently practiced.
It is more than sufficient, Taube had excellent training (the University of Chicago, especially in the 1930s thanks to Adler & Hutchinson, was a philosophy powerhouse, and still is to some extent—ranked #24 in the Anglosphere by Leiter), received his PhD, kept up with the issues both as a practitioner and commenter, and was reportedly working on a philosophy book when he died. He was a philosopher. And your other examples were hardly better.
On flipping the bozo bit
Before you bother to read any of what follows, I would be grateful if you would answer the following question: Have you, in fact, bozo-bitted me? Because I’ve been proceeding on the assumption that it is in principle possible for us to have a reasoned discussion, but that’s looking less and less true, and if I’m wasting my time here then I’d prefer to stop.
On librarians and librarianship
Unless I misunderstand you badly, you are arguing either that I have been lying constantly about this or that I am appallingly unaware of my own opinions and attitudes and you know them better than I do. And, if I understand this remark correctly …
… your basis for this is that you can’t think of any reason why I might have mentioned that Taube was a librarian other than that I have “contempt for librarians” and that I wanted to put Taube down by calling him names.
So, allow me to propose a very simple alternative explanation (which is, in fact, the correct explanation, so far as I can tell by introspection): I said it because, having listed a bunch of things that weren’t Taube’s profession, it seemed appropriate to say what his profession actually was.
On the basis of this thread so far, I’m guessing that you still don’t believe me; so let me ask: Is there, in fact, anything I could possibly say or do that would convince you that I do not hold librarians in contempt? Because it looks to me as if there isn’t, and it seems rather odd that describing someone who was in fact a librarian as a librarian could be such strong evidence of contempt for librarians as to outweigh all future testimony from the person in question.
On professions and the like
There are at least three things you can mean by saying someone is, e.g., “a biologist”. (1) That they know something about biology and think about it from time to time. (2) That doing biology is their job, or at least that they do it as much and as well as you could reasonably expect if it were. (3) That, regardless of how much biology they actually do, they have at least some (fairly high) threshold level of expertise in it.
Angela Merkel is surely a physicist(1). She is not a physicist(2) now, although she used to be. Whether she’s a physicist(3) depends on what threshold we pick and on the extent to which she’s kept up her expertise. Similarly, Ian Bostridge is a historian(1), not a historian(2) so far as I know, and might or might not be a historian(3), and similarly for George Soros and philosophy.
In general, being an X PhD is a guarantee of being an Xer(1) and (at least for a while; knowledge decays) of being an Xer(3) for some plausible choices of threshold; it is of course no guarantee of being an Xer(2).
You appear to be taking the position that it is never reasonable to deny that someone with an X PhD is “an Xer”. That seems like excessive credentialism to me.
The relevant notion of “scientist”, “philosopher”, etc., here was never made explicit. I think I’ve had meaning 2 in mind sometimes and meaning 3 in mind sometimes. Eliezer’s original post about Pascalian wagers takes Enrico Fermi as its leading example, and talks about “famous scientists” and “prestigious scientists” in general. The present post takes Lord Kelvin as another example, but also points to skepticism about flying machines (which was not generally from famous scientists). So I don’t know what the “right” threshold for meaning 3 would be here, but it seems like it should be fairly high.
Bostridge, Merkel and Soros seem to me like pretty decent examples of people who are no longer Xers(2), and probably aren’t Xers(3) with a high threshold. I could be wrong about some or all of them, though; I mentioned them only to make the more general point that holding a doctoral degree is no guarantee of being an Xer(2) or Xer(3) with high threshold.
On Taube and his qualifications
Taube was an expert in the indexing of documents, and an innovator in that field. In your opinion, does that amount to expertise in computer chess-playing comparable to, say, Fermi’s expertise in nuclear fission?
Taube was (I think; perhaps it was actually others in his company who were concerned with this) an expert in automated punched-card reading machines. Does that amount to expertise in computer chess-playing comparable to, etc.?
Taube held a PhD in philosophy; I think his thesis was on the history of philosophical thought about causality. Does that amount to, etc., etc.?
I repeat: Mortimer Taube was an impressive person. He was clearly very smart. He accomplished more than I am ever likely to. I do not hold him in contempt. Still less do I hold him in contempt for having been a librarian. I simply don’t think that his opinions on computer chess-playing are the same kind of thing as Fermi’s opinions on nuclear fission, or Kelvin’s on the age of the earth.
I haven’t yet, but if you’re going to persist in claiming that people with PhDs in philosophy are not even allowed the description ‘philosopher’, it’s tempting because why should I bother with people who abuse language and redefine words so abysmally?
Which was pursuant to your belief that a mere librarian could have nothing to say about the issue, could not be any sort of authority or indicator of the times, and so does not belong in the list lukeprog presented. Yes, I’ve said all this before.
The obvious reading of your concluding paragraph was obvious, before you started trying to defend it.
Indeed. And I think it’s absurd to restrict usage of descriptions to the rarefied and elevated #2s (how many biologists get tenure?) and even more absurd to restrict it to the even more rarefied and elevated #3s.
(Merkel & Bostridge were both #2s at some point, but seem likely to never be #3s in those fields; whether we could consider Soros a #3 - because he claims his philosophical approach of reflexivity guides his philanthropy & investing and so his inarguably historic roles there are part and parcel of philosophy—is an interesting question, but getting a bit far afield.)
It gives him a great deal of expertise in organizing and searching data mechanically, which is relevant to AI; and inasmuch as chess-playing falls under AI… No, he didn’t write his thesis on chess-playing, but here again I would say it’s absurd to insist on such doctrinaire rigidity that no one can have respectable expertise without being the expert on a topic. (I would note in passing that Fermi’s laurea thesis was not on fission, but X-ray imaging; is that close enough? Well, probably, but then why is indexing and search so out of bounds? Search at Google involves a great deal of AI work, so clearly there is a real connection at some point in time...)
I’m afraid I have shocking news for you, many respected philosophers in AI may not have written their theses directly on AI: Dennett’s dissertation on consciousness was etc. etc. etc? Or consider John Searle’s early work on speech acts, was it etc etc etc? Keeping in mind the recent praise on LW for his work...
All I can do is point to my previous summary and observe that Taube was one of the few contemporaries who grappled with the cybernetics issues, was trained philosophically, built a tech career on primitive computers etc etc. His observations are not chopped liver.
(I’m going to be brief, because I’m losing hope that you’re going to pay any attention to anything I say. I haven’t the least intention of bozo-bitting you globally because you have been consistently extremely impressive elsewhere, but in this particular discussion it seems that at least one of us—and I’m perfectly willing to consider that it may be me—is being sufficiently irrational that we’re doomed to produce more heat than light. More specifically, what it looks like to me is that you’re treating me as an enemy combatant who needs to be defeated, rather than a person who disagrees with you who needs to be either taught or learned from or both.)
[EDITED to add: well, it turns out I wasn’t so brief. But I tried.]
What’s annoying here is not so much your evident belief that I am lying through my teeth about my own opinion about librarians (why on earth would I even do that?) as your refusal even to acknowledge that your fantasy about that opinion is anything other than a mutually-agreed truth.
I’m sorry, was that meant to be an answer to the question I asked?
I wasn’t asking the question just to make a rhetorical point. Your behaviour in this thread suggests to me that as soon as you read the last sentence of what I wrote you leapt to a conclusion, got angry about it, and came out fighting, and that ever since you’ve refused even to consider the possibility that you leapt to the wrong conclusion.
It’s just as well that I’m not insisting on any such thing. So far as I know, there were other people around who were about as expert on nuclear physics as Fermi. I am not an expert on the history, so maybe that’s wrong, but I haven’t been assuming it’s wrong and when I say “comparable to Fermi’s expertise in nuclear fission” I don’t mean “expertise as of the world’s greatest expert”, I mean “expertise as of someone very expert in the field”. Because it seems to me that that’s the level of expertise that’s actually relevant to Eliezer’s original point and his more recent question.
Of course. But what makes them respected philosophers in AI, and means that if they make pronouncements about AI that turn out to be very wrong then they might be examples of the phenomenon Eliezer was talking about, is not the fact that they are philosophy PhDs but their further body of work in the field that is related to AI.
(“Might be” rather than “are” because I have the impression that a sizeable number of people around here hold that philosophy is so terribly diseased a discipline that being a respected philosopher in AI is no ground for paying much attention to their opinions on AI.)
On the other hand, you’ve been arguing (I think) that Taube’s philosophical expertise made him an expert in the nascent field of AI, and the only evidence we have for his philosophical expertise is that he was a philosophy PhD. So it’s of some relevance what stuff this tells us he’d studied and thought about in depth. The stuff in question seems pretty interesting, but I don’t see how it could have shed much light on the prospects for computer chess-playing.
I was slightly wrong about the topic of (the book I think was derived from) Taube’s thesis, by the way; it wasn’t only a historical study of other philosophers’ thinking about causation but also “an attempt to solve the causal problem”, as the title puts it. Apparently his solution involved saying that causation and determination are incompatible and hence that causation implies freedom.
Doing a perfect post on this topic would be hitting a dead horse right between the eyes at a thousand paces.
Doing X for a living is a lower bar than being tenured.
Peccadillo. (Sorry; couldn’t resist the temptation to flag that accidental autology for posterity.)