No, you do not get to publicly demand an in-depth discussion of the philosophy of induction from a specific, small group of people. You can raise the topic in a place where you know they hang out and gesture in their direction. But what you’re doing here is trying to create a social obligation to read ten thousand words of your writing. With your trademark in capital letters in every other sentence. And to write a few thousand words in response. From my outside perspective, engaging in this way looks like it would be a massive unproductive time sink.
It’s worse than that. I tried to have a discussion of the philosophy of induction with him (over on the slack). He took exception to some details of how I was conducting myself, essentially because I wasn’t following his “Paths Forward” methodology, and from that point on he wasn’t interested in discussing the philosophy of induction.
So in effect he’s publicly demanding an in-depth discussion of the philosophy of induction according to whatever idiosyncratic standards of debate he decides to set up from a specific small group of people.
There are thousands of philosophers about whom I could ask the same question. It makes sense to focus attention on those people who are most likely to provide useful information and not those people who are engaging in the most effort to get heart by coming and posting in our forum.
There are thousands of philosophers about whom I could ask the same question.
Who are these thousands? It would be great if the world had lots of really good philosophers. It doesn’t. The world is starving for good philosophers: they are very few and far between.
I have no reason for me to believe that Curi is among the people who’s a really good philosopher.
Popper might have said useful things given his time but he’s dead. I won’t read from Popper about what he thinks about the development of the No Free Lunch theorem and ideas that came up after he died.
Barry Smith would be an example of a person that I like and where it’s worth to spend more time reading more of his work. His work of applied ontology actually matters for real world decision making and knowledge modeling.
Reading more from Judea Pearl (who by the way supervised Ilya Shpitser’s Phd) is also on my long-term philosophic reading list.
I don’t suppose you’re going to give names and references? Let alone point to anyone (them, yourself, or anyone else) who will take responsibility for addressing questions and criticisms about the referenced works?
Spirtes, Glymour, and Scheines, for starters. They have a nice book. There are other folks in that department who are working on converting mathematical foundations into an axiomatic system where proofs can be checked by a computer.
I am not going to do leg work for you, and your minions, however. You are the ones claiming there are no good philosophers. It’s your responsibility to read, and keep your mouth shut if you are not sure about something.
It’s your responsibility to read, and keep your mouth shut if you are not sure about something.
I have read and I know what I am talking about. You on the other hand don’t even know the basics of Popper, one of the best philosophers of the 20th century.
Your sockpuppet: “There is a shortage of good philosophers.”
Me: “Here is a good philosophy book.”
You: “That’s not philosophy.”
Also you: “How is Ayn Rand so right about everything.”
Also you: “I don’t like mainstream stuff.”
Also you: “Have you heard that I exchanged some correspondence with DAVID DEUTSCH!?”
Also you: “What if you are, hypothetically, wrong? What if you are, hypothetically, wrong? What if you are, hypothetically, wrong?” x1000
Part of rationality is properly dealing with people-as-they-are. What your approach to spreading your good word among people-as-they-are led to is them laughing at you.
It is possible that they are laughing at you because they are some combination of stupid and insane. But then it’s on you to first issue a patch into their brain that will be accepted, such that they can parse your proselytizing, before proceeding to proselytize.
This is what Yudkowsky sort of tried to do.
How you read to me is a smart young adult who has the same problem Yudkowsky has (although Yudkowsky is not so young anymore) -- someone who has been the smartest person in the room for too long in their intellectual development, and lacks the sense of scale and context to see where he stands in the larger intellectual community.
curi has given an excellent response to this. I would like to add that I think Yudkowsky should reach out to curi. He shares curi’s view about the state of the world and the urgency to fix things, but curi has a deeper understanding. With curi, Yudkowsky would not be the smartest person in the room and that will be valuable for his intellectual development.
Well, this comes back to the problem of LW Paths Forward. curi has made himself publicly available for discussion, by anyone. Yudkowsky not so much. So what to do?
I don’t have a sock puppet here. I don’t even know who Fallibilist is. (Clearly it’s one of my fans who is familiar with some stuff I’ve written elsewhere. I guess you’ll blame me for having this fan because you think his posts suck. But I mostly like them, and you don’t want to seriously debate their merits, and neither of us thinks such a debate is the best way to proceed anyway, so whatever, let’s not fight over it.)
But then it’s on you to first issue a patch into their brain that will be accepted, such that they can parse your proselytizing, before proceeding to proselytize.
People can’t be patched like computer code. They have to do ~90% of the work themselves. If they don’t want to change, I can’t change them. If they don’t want to learn, I can’t learn for them and stuff it into their head. You can’t force a mind, nor do someone else’s thinking for them. So I can and do try to make better educational resources to be more helpful, but unless I find someone who honestly wants to learn, it doesn’t really matter. (This is implied by CR and also, independently, by Objectivism. I don’t know if you’ll deny it or not.)
I believe you are incorrect about my lack of scale and context, and you’re unfamiliar with (and ridiculing) my intellectual history. I believe you wanted to say that claim, but don’t want to argue it or try to actually persuade me of it. As you can imagine, I find merely asserting it just as persuasive and helpful as the last ten times someone told me this (not persuasive, not helpful). Let me know if I’m mistaken about this.
I was generally the smartest person in the room during school, but also lacked perspective and context back then. But I knew that. I used to assume there were tons of people smarter than me (and smarter than my teachers), in the larger intellectual community, somewhere. I was very disappointed to spend many years trying to find them and discovering how few there are (an experience largely shared by every thinker I admire, most of whom are unfortunately dead). My current attitude, which you find arrogant, is a change which took many years and which I heavily resisted. When I was more ignorant I had a different attitude; this one is a reaction to knowledge of the larger intellectual community. Fortunately I found David Deutsch and spent a lot of time not being the smartest person in the room, which is way more fun, and that was indeed super valuable to my intellectual development. However, despite being a Royal Society fellow, author, age 64, etc, David Deutsch manages to share with me the same “lacks the sense of scale and context to see where he stands in the larger intellectual community” (the same view of the intellectual community).
EDIT: So while I have some partial sympathy with you – I too had some of the same intuitions about what the world is like that you have (they are standard in our culture) – I changed my mind. The world is, as Yudkowsky puts it, not adequate. https://www.lesserwrong.com/posts/dhj9dhiwhq3DX6W8z/hero-licensing
I was generally the smartest person in the room during school, but also lacked perspective and context back then.
This is not that untypical in this community. LW Censi put the average IQ on LW at something like 140.
There are plenty of people inside Mensa that spend their youth being smarter than the people in the room in school and that go on to develop crackpot theories.
From the perspective of Ilya Shpitser, who was supervised for his Phd by Judea Pearl (who’s famous of producing a theory of causality that’s very useful for practical purposes), corresponding with David Deutsch in an informal way doesn’t give you a lot of credentials.
You don’t seem to be a formal coauthor of the book, so your relationship is informal in a way that a Phd supervision isn’t. The book also doesn’t list you as editor but under “friends or colleagues” while he does mention that he does have a relationship with someone he calls copy-editor.
You seem to be implying I’m a liar while focusing on making factual claims in a intentionally biased way (you just saw, but omitted, relevant information b/c it doesn’t help “your side”, which is to attack me).
Your framing here is as dishonest, hostile, and unfair as usual: I did not claim to be a coauthor.
You are trying to attack informality as something bad or inferior, and trying to deny my status as a professional colleague of Deutsch who was involved with the book in a serious way. You are, despite the vagueness and hedging, factually mistaken about what you’re suggesting. Being a PhD student under Deutsch would have been far worse – much less attention, involvement, etc. But you are dishonestly trying to confuse the issues by switching btwn arguing about formality itself (who cares? but you’re using it as a proxy for other things) and actually talking about things that matter (quality, level of involvement, etc).
I made a statement that the relationship is informal and back up my claim. If you get offended by me simply saying things that are true, that’s not a good basis to have a conversation about philosophic matters.
If David Deutsch would have decided to hire you as an editor, that’s would be a clear sign that he values your expertise enough to pay for it.
The information that you provided shows that you provided a valuable service to him by organising an online forum as a volunteer and as a result he saw you as a friend who got to read his draft and he listened to your feedback on his draft. You seem to think that the fact that you spent the most time on providing feedback makes you the most important editor of it, but there’s no statement of David Deutsch himself in the acknowledgement section that suggests that he thinks the same way.
There literally is such a statement as the one you deny exists: he put the word “especially” before my name. He also told me directly. You are being dishonest and biased.
Your comments about organizing a forum, etc, are also factually false. You don’t know what you’re talking about and should stop making false claims.
I made and own the website and discussion group for the book. David is a founder of Taking Children Seriously (TCS) and Autonomy Respecting Relationships (ARR). I own the dicussion groups for both of those, too.
That’s your own presenation of your relationship with him.
That situation today doesn’t prevent you from being ignorant of things like timelines. Your claim that “you provided a valuable service to him by organising an online forum as a volunteer and as a result he saw you as a friend who got to read his draft and he listened to your feedback on his draft” is factually false. I didn’t run or own those forums at the time. I did not in fact get to read “his draft” (falsely singular) due to running a forum.
You don’t know what you’re talking about and you’re making up false stories.
You are right that I don’t know about the timeline given that it’s not public information and this can lead to getting details wrong. The fact that you are unable to think of what I refer to still suggests that your abilities to think in a fact based way about this aren’t good.
That aspect of the timeline actually is public information, you just don’t know it. Again you’ve made a false factual claim (about what is or isn’t public info).
You are clinging to a false narrative from a position of ignorance, while still trying to attack me (now I suck at thinking in a fact based way, apparently because I factually corrected you) rather than reconsidering anything.
I’ve told you what happened. You don’t believe me and started making up factually false claims to fit your biases, which aren’t going anywhere when corrected. You think someone like David Deutsch couldn’t possibly like and value my philosophical thinking all that much. You’re mistaken.
You could say that a lot of philosophers who dealt with logic where just doing math, that doesn’t change anything about practical application of logic being important philosophically.
Looking into what can be proven to be true with logic is important philosophically.
Being a good philosopher has nothing to do with taking responsibility for answering any questions that they are asked.
Most people who are actually good care about their time and don’t just spend significant amounts of time because a random person contacts them. They certainly don’t consider that to be their responsibility.
The right answer is maybe they won’t. The point is that it is not up to you to fix them. You have been acting like a Jehovah’s Witness at the door, except substantially more bothersome. Stop.
No, you do not get to publicly demand an in-depth discussion of the philosophy of induction from a specific, small group of people. You can raise the topic in a place where you know they hang out and gesture in their direction. But what you’re doing here is trying to create a social obligation to read ten thousand words of your writing. With your trademark in capital letters in every other sentence. And to write a few thousand words in response. From my outside perspective, engaging in this way looks like it would be a massive unproductive time sink.
It’s worse than that. I tried to have a discussion of the philosophy of induction with him (over on the slack). He took exception to some details of how I was conducting myself, essentially because I wasn’t following his “Paths Forward” methodology, and from that point on he wasn’t interested in discussing the philosophy of induction.
So in effect he’s publicly demanding an in-depth discussion of the philosophy of induction according to whatever idiosyncratic standards of debate he decides to set up from a specific small group of people.
suppose hypothetically that me/Popper/DD are right. how will y’all stop being wrong?
There are thousands of philosophers about whom I could ask the same question. It makes sense to focus attention on those people who are most likely to provide useful information and not those people who are engaging in the most effort to get heart by coming and posting in our forum.
Who are these thousands? It would be great if the world had lots of really good philosophers. It doesn’t. The world is starving for good philosophers: they are very few and far between.
I have no reason for me to believe that Curi is among the people who’s a really good philosopher.
Popper might have said useful things given his time but he’s dead. I won’t read from Popper about what he thinks about the development of the No Free Lunch theorem and ideas that came up after he died.
Barry Smith would be an example of a person that I like and where it’s worth to spend more time reading more of his work. His work of applied ontology actually matters for real world decision making and knowledge modeling.
Reading more from Judea Pearl (who by the way supervised Ilya Shpitser’s Phd) is also on my long-term philosophic reading list.
I know lots of folks at CMU who are good.
I don’t suppose you’re going to give names and references? Let alone point to anyone (them, yourself, or anyone else) who will take responsibility for addressing questions and criticisms about the referenced works?
Spirtes, Glymour, and Scheines, for starters. They have a nice book. There are other folks in that department who are working on converting mathematical foundations into an axiomatic system where proofs can be checked by a computer.
I am not going to do leg work for you, and your minions, however. You are the ones claiming there are no good philosophers. It’s your responsibility to read, and keep your mouth shut if you are not sure about something.
It’s not my responsibility to teach you.
I have read and I know what I am talking about. You on the other hand don’t even know the basics of Popper, one of the best philosophers of the 20th century.
That isn’t even a philosophy book. And then you mention others who are doing math, not philosophy.
Your sockpuppet: “There is a shortage of good philosophers.”
Me: “Here is a good philosophy book.”
You: “That’s not philosophy.”
Also you: “How is Ayn Rand so right about everything.”
Also you: “I don’t like mainstream stuff.”
Also you: “Have you heard that I exchanged some correspondence with DAVID DEUTSCH!?”
Also you: “What if you are, hypothetically, wrong? What if you are, hypothetically, wrong? What if you are, hypothetically, wrong?” x1000
Part of rationality is properly dealing with people-as-they-are. What your approach to spreading your good word among people-as-they-are led to is them laughing at you.
It is possible that they are laughing at you because they are some combination of stupid and insane. But then it’s on you to first issue a patch into their brain that will be accepted, such that they can parse your proselytizing, before proceeding to proselytize.
This is what Yudkowsky sort of tried to do.
How you read to me is a smart young adult who has the same problem Yudkowsky has (although Yudkowsky is not so young anymore) -- someone who has been the smartest person in the room for too long in their intellectual development, and lacks the sense of scale and context to see where he stands in the larger intellectual community.
curi has given an excellent response to this. I would like to add that I think Yudkowsky should reach out to curi. He shares curi’s view about the state of the world and the urgency to fix things, but curi has a deeper understanding. With curi, Yudkowsky would not be the smartest person in the room and that will be valuable for his intellectual development.
Who are you talking to? To the audience? To the fourth wall?
Surely not to me, I have no sway here.
Well, this comes back to the problem of LW Paths Forward. curi has made himself publicly available for discussion, by anyone. Yudkowsky not so much. So what to do?
I don’t have a sock puppet here. I don’t even know who Fallibilist is. (Clearly it’s one of my fans who is familiar with some stuff I’ve written elsewhere. I guess you’ll blame me for having this fan because you think his posts suck. But I mostly like them, and you don’t want to seriously debate their merits, and neither of us thinks such a debate is the best way to proceed anyway, so whatever, let’s not fight over it.)
People can’t be patched like computer code. They have to do ~90% of the work themselves. If they don’t want to change, I can’t change them. If they don’t want to learn, I can’t learn for them and stuff it into their head. You can’t force a mind, nor do someone else’s thinking for them. So I can and do try to make better educational resources to be more helpful, but unless I find someone who honestly wants to learn, it doesn’t really matter. (This is implied by CR and also, independently, by Objectivism. I don’t know if you’ll deny it or not.)
I believe you are incorrect about my lack of scale and context, and you’re unfamiliar with (and ridiculing) my intellectual history. I believe you wanted to say that claim, but don’t want to argue it or try to actually persuade me of it. As you can imagine, I find merely asserting it just as persuasive and helpful as the last ten times someone told me this (not persuasive, not helpful). Let me know if I’m mistaken about this.
I was generally the smartest person in the room during school, but also lacked perspective and context back then. But I knew that. I used to assume there were tons of people smarter than me (and smarter than my teachers), in the larger intellectual community, somewhere. I was very disappointed to spend many years trying to find them and discovering how few there are (an experience largely shared by every thinker I admire, most of whom are unfortunately dead). My current attitude, which you find arrogant, is a change which took many years and which I heavily resisted. When I was more ignorant I had a different attitude; this one is a reaction to knowledge of the larger intellectual community. Fortunately I found David Deutsch and spent a lot of time not being the smartest person in the room, which is way more fun, and that was indeed super valuable to my intellectual development. However, despite being a Royal Society fellow, author, age 64, etc, David Deutsch manages to share with me the same “lacks the sense of scale and context to see where he stands in the larger intellectual community” (the same view of the intellectual community).
EDIT: So while I have some partial sympathy with you – I too had some of the same intuitions about what the world is like that you have (they are standard in our culture) – I changed my mind. The world is, as Yudkowsky puts it, not adequate. https://www.lesserwrong.com/posts/dhj9dhiwhq3DX6W8z/hero-licensing
This is not that untypical in this community. LW Censi put the average IQ on LW at something like 140.
There are plenty of people inside Mensa that spend their youth being smarter than the people in the room in school and that go on to develop crackpot theories.
From the perspective of Ilya Shpitser, who was supervised for his Phd by Judea Pearl (who’s famous of producing a theory of causality that’s very useful for practical purposes), corresponding with David Deutsch in an informal way doesn’t give you a lot of credentials.
Dear Christian, please don’t pull rank on my behalf. I don’t think this is productive to do, and I don’t want to bring anyone else into this.
I didn’t correspond with David Deutsch in an “informal way” as you mean it. For example, I was the most important editor of BoI (other than DD ofc).
You don’t seem to be a formal coauthor of the book, so your relationship is informal in a way that a Phd supervision isn’t. The book also doesn’t list you as editor but under “friends or colleagues” while he does mention that he does have a relationship with someone he calls copy-editor.
You seem to be implying I’m a liar while focusing on making factual claims in a intentionally biased way (you just saw, but omitted, relevant information b/c it doesn’t help “your side”, which is to attack me).
Your framing here is as dishonest, hostile, and unfair as usual: I did not claim to be a coauthor.
You are trying to attack informality as something bad or inferior, and trying to deny my status as a professional colleague of Deutsch who was involved with the book in a serious way. You are, despite the vagueness and hedging, factually mistaken about what you’re suggesting. Being a PhD student under Deutsch would have been far worse – much less attention, involvement, etc. But you are dishonestly trying to confuse the issues by switching btwn arguing about formality itself (who cares? but you’re using it as a proxy for other things) and actually talking about things that matter (quality, level of involvement, etc).
I made a statement that the relationship is informal and back up my claim. If you get offended by me simply saying things that are true, that’s not a good basis to have a conversation about philosophic matters.
If David Deutsch would have decided to hire you as an editor, that’s would be a clear sign that he values your expertise enough to pay for it. The information that you provided shows that you provided a valuable service to him by organising an online forum as a volunteer and as a result he saw you as a friend who got to read his draft and he listened to your feedback on his draft. You seem to think that the fact that you spent the most time on providing feedback makes you the most important editor of it, but there’s no statement of David Deutsch himself in the acknowledgement section that suggests that he thinks the same way.
There literally is such a statement as the one you deny exists: he put the word “especially” before my name. He also told me directly. You are being dishonest and biased.
Your comments about organizing a forum, etc, are also factually false. You don’t know what you’re talking about and should stop making false claims.
You wrote on your website:
That’s your own presenation of your relationship with him.
That situation today doesn’t prevent you from being ignorant of things like timelines. Your claim that “you provided a valuable service to him by organising an online forum as a volunteer and as a result he saw you as a friend who got to read his draft and he listened to your feedback on his draft” is factually false. I didn’t run or own those forums at the time. I did not in fact get to read “his draft” (falsely singular) due to running a forum.
You don’t know what you’re talking about and you’re making up false stories.
You are right that I don’t know about the timeline given that it’s not public information and this can lead to getting details wrong. The fact that you are unable to think of what I refer to still suggests that your abilities to think in a fact based way about this aren’t good.
That aspect of the timeline actually is public information, you just don’t know it. Again you’ve made a false factual claim (about what is or isn’t public info).
You are clinging to a false narrative from a position of ignorance, while still trying to attack me (now I suck at thinking in a fact based way, apparently because I factually corrected you) rather than reconsidering anything.
I’ve told you what happened. You don’t believe me and started making up factually false claims to fit your biases, which aren’t going anywhere when corrected. You think someone like David Deutsch couldn’t possibly like and value my philosophical thinking all that much. You’re mistaken.
You said you can’t deduce something. This means that there’s a puzzle that you couldn’t solve and it’s not a hard problem to solve.
I didn’t say it was untypical, i was replying to the parent comment. Pay attention instead of responding out-of-context.
I didn’t claim that you did say it was untypical.
You could say that a lot of philosophers who dealt with logic where just doing math, that doesn’t change anything about practical application of logic being important philosophically. Looking into what can be proven to be true with logic is important philosophically.
Being a good philosopher has nothing to do with taking responsibility for answering any questions that they are asked. Most people who are actually good care about their time and don’t just spend significant amounts of time because a random person contacts them. They certainly don’t consider that to be their responsibility.
The right answer is maybe they won’t. The point is that it is not up to you to fix them. You have been acting like a Jehovah’s Witness at the door, except substantially more bothersome. Stop.
And besides, you aren’t right anyway.