But in fact I am quite aware that there is a lot of truth to what you say here about artificial intelligence.
You say that seemingly in ignorance that what I said contradicts Less Wrong.
I have no need to learn that, or anything else, from curi.
One of the things I said was Taking Children Seriously is important for AGI. Is this one of the truths you refer to? What do you know about TCS? TCS is very important not just for AGI but also for children in the here and now. Most people know next to nothing about it. You don’t either. You in fact cannot comment on whether there is any truth to what I said about AGI. You don’t know enough. And then you say you have no need to learn anything from curi. You’re deceiving yourself.
And many of your (or yours and curi’s) opinions are entirely false, like the idea that you have “disproved induction.”
You still can’t even state the position correctly. Popper explained why induction is impossible and offered an alternative: critical rationalism. He did not “disprove” induction. Similarly, he did not disprove fairies. Popper had a lot to say about the idea of proof—are you aware of any of it?
You say that seemingly in ignorance that what I said contradicts Less Wrong.
First, you are showing your own ignorance of the fact that not everyone is a cult member like yourself. I have a bet with Eliezer Yudkowsky against one of his main positions and I stand to win $1,000 if I am right and he is mistaken.
Second, “contradicts Less Wrong” does not make sense because Less Wrong is not a person or a position or a set of positions that might be contradicted. It is a website where people talk to each other.
One of the things I said was Taking Children Seriously is important for AGI. Is this one of the truths you refer to?
No. Among other things, I meant that I agreed that AIs will have a stage of “growing up,” and that this will be very important for what they end up doing. Taking Children Seriously, on the other hand, is an extremist ideology.
You still can’t even state the position correctly.
Since I have nothing to learn from you, I do not care whether I express your position the way you would express it. I meant the same thing. Induction is quite possible, and we do it all the time.
I meant the same thing. Induction is quite possible, and we do it all the time.
What is the thinking process you are using to judge the epistemology of induction? Does that process involve induction? If you are doing induction all the time then you are using induction to judge the epistemology of induction. How is that supposed to work? And if not, judging the special case of the epistemology of induction is an exception. It is an example of thinking without induction. Why is this special case an exception?
Critical Rationalism does not have this problem. The epistemology of Critical Rationalism can be judged entirely within the framework of Critical Rationalism.
What is the thinking process you are using to judge the epistemology of induction?
The thinking process is Bayesian, and uses a prior. I have a discussion of it here
If you are doing induction all the time then you are using induction to judge the epistemology of induction. How is that supposed to work?
…
Critical Rationalism does not have this problem. The epistemology of Critical Rationalism can be judged entirely within the framework of Critical Rationalism.
The thinking process is Bayesian, and uses a prior.
What is the epistemological framework you used to judge the correctness of those? You don’t just get to use Bayes’ Theorem here without explaining the epistemological framework you used to judge the correctness of Bayes. Or the correctness of probability theory, your priors etc.
If you are doing induction all the time then you are using induction to judge the epistemology of induction. How is that supposed to work? … Critical Rationalism does not have this problem. The epistemology of Critical Rationalism can be judged entirely within the framework of Critical Rationalism.
Little problem there.
No. Critical Rationalism can be used to improve Critical Rationalism and, consistently, to refute it (though no one has done so). This has been known for decades. Induction is not a complete epistemology like that. For one thing, inductivists also need the epistemology of deduction. But they also need an epistemological framework to judge both of those. This they cannot provide.
You don’t just get to use Bayes’ Theorem here without explaining the epistemological framework you used to judge the correctness of Bayes
I certainly do. I said that induction is not impossible, and that inductive reasoning is Bayesian. If you think that Bayesian reasoning is also impossible, you are free to establish that. You have not done so.
Critical Rationalism can be used to improve Critical Rationalism and, consistently, to refute it (though no one has done so).
If this is possible, it would be equally possible to refute induction (if it were impossible) by using induction. For example, if every time something had always happened, it never happened after that, then induction would be refuted by induction.
If you think that is inconsistent (which it is), it would be equally inconsistent to refute CR with CR, since if it was refuted, it could not validly be used to refute anything, including itself.
Yes. I didn’t mean to imply it isn’t. The CR view of deduction is different to the norm, however. Deduction’s role is commonly over-rated and it does not confer certainty. Like any thinking, it is a fallible process, and involves guessing and error-correction as per usual in CR. This is old news for you, but the inductivists here won’t agree.
FYI that’s what “abduction” means – whatever is needed to fill in the gaps that induction and deduction don’t cover. it’s rather vague and poorly specified though. it’s supposed to be some sort of inference to good explanations (mirror induction’s inference to generalizations of data), but it’s unclear on how you do it. you may be interested in reading about it.
in practice, abduction or not, what they do is use common sense, philosophical tradition, intuition, whatever they picked up from their culture, and bias instead of actually having a well-specified epistemology.
(Objectivism is notable b/c it actually has a lot of epistemology content instead of just people thinking they can recognize good arguments when they see them without needing to work out systematic intellectual methods relating to first principles. However, Rand assumed induction worked, and didn’t study it or talk about it much, so that part of her epistemology needs to be replaced with CR which, happily, accomplishes all the same things she wanted induction to accomplish, so this replacement isn’t problematic. LW, to its credit, also has a fair amount of epistemology material – e.g. various stuff about reason and bias – some of which is good. However LW hasn’t systematized things to philosophical first principles b/c it has a kinda anti-philosophy pro-math attitude, so philosophically they basically start in the middle and have some unquestioned premises which lead to some errors.)
An epistemology is a philosophical framework which answers questions like what is a correct argument, how are ideas evaluated, and how does one learn. Your link doesn’t provide one of those.
I said the thinking process used to judge the epistemology of induction is Bayesian, and my link explains how it is. I did not say it is an exhaustive explanation of epistemology.
Second, “contradicts Less Wrong” does not make sense because Less Wrong is not a person or a position or a set of positions that might be contradicted. It is a website where people talk to each other.
The best introduction to the ideas on this website is “The Sequences”, a collection of posts that introduce cognitive science, philosophy, and mathematics.
“[I]deas on this website” is referring to a set of positions. These are positions held by Yudkowsky and others responsible for Less Wrong.
No. Among other things, I meant that I agreed that AIs will have a stage of “growing up,” and that this will be very important for what they end up doing. Taking Children Seriously, on the other hand, is an extremist ideology.
Taking AGI Seriously is therefore also an extremist ideology? Taking Children Seriously says you should always, without exception, be rational when raising your children. If you reject TCS, you reject rationality. You want to use irrationality against your children when it suits you. You become responsible for causing them massive harm. It is not extremist to try to be rational, always. It should be the norm.
“[I]deas on this website” is referring to a set of positions. These are positions held by Yudkowsky and others responsible for Less Wrong.
This does not make it reasonable to call contradicting those ideas “contradicting Less Wrong.” In any case, I am quite aware of the things I disagree with Yudkowsky and others about. I do not have a problem with that. Unlike you, I am not a cult member.
Taking Children Seriously says you should always, without exception, be rational when raising your children. If you reject TCS, you reject rationality.
So it says nothing at all except that you should be rational when you raise children? In that case, no one disagrees with it, and it has nothing to teach anyone, including me. If it says anything else, it can still be an extremist ideology, and I can reject it without rejecting rationality.
Taking Children Seriously says you should always, without exception, be rational when raising your children. If you reject TCS, you reject rationality.
So it says nothing at all except that you should be rational when you raise children?
It says many other things as well.
In that case, no one disagrees with it, and it has nothing to teach anyone, including me. If it says anything else, it can still be an extremist ideology, and I can reject it without rejecting rationality.
Saying it is “extremist” without giving arguments that can be criticised and then rejecting it would be rejecting rationality. At present, there are no known good criticisms of TCS. If you can find some, you can reject TCS rationally. I expect that such criticisms would lead to improvement of TCS, however, rather than outright rejection. This would be similar to how CR has been improved over the years. Since there aren’t any known good criticisms that would lead to rejection of TCS, it is irrational to reject it. Such an act of irrationality would have consequences, including treating your children irrationally, which approximately all parents do.
Saying it is “extremist” without giving arguments that can be criticised and then rejecting it would be rejecting rationality.
Nonsense. I say it is extremist because it is. The fact that I did not give arguments does not mean rejecting rationality. It simply means I am not interested in giving you arguments about it.
TCS applies CR to parenting/edu and also is consistent with (classical) liberal values like not initiating force against children as most parents currently do, and respecting their rights such as the rights to liberty and the pursuit of happiness. See http://fallibleideas.com/taking-children-seriously
not initiating force against children as most parents currently do
Exactly. This is an extremist ideology. To give several examples, parents should use force to prevent their children from falling down stairs, or from hurting themselves with knives.
I reject this extremist ideology, and that does not mean I reject rationality.
Children don’t want to fall down stairs. You can help them not fall down stairs instead of trying to force them. It’s unclear to me if you know what “force” means. Here’s the dictionary:
2 coercion or compulsion, especially with the use or threat of violence: they ruled by law and not by force.
A standard classical liberal conception of force is: violence, threat of violence, and fraud. That’s the kind of thing I’m talking about. E.g. physically dragging your child somewhere he doesn’t want to go, in a way that you can only do because you’re larger and stronger. Whereas if children were larger and stronger than their parents, the dragging would stop, but you can still easily imagine a parent helping his larger child with not accidentally falling down stairs.
They do, however, want to move in the direction of the stairs, and you cannot “help them not fall down stairs” without forcing them not to move in the direction of the stairs.
You are trying to reject a philosophy based on edge cases without trying to understand the big problems the philosophy is trying to solve.
Let’s give some context to the stair-falling scenario. Consider that the parent is a TCS parent, not a normie parent. This parent has in fact heard the stair-falling scenario many times. It is often the first thing other people bring up when TCS is discussed.
Given the TCS parent has in fact thought about stair falling way more than a normie parent, how do you think the TCS parent has set up their home? Is it going to be a home where young children are exposed to terrible injury from things they do not yet have knowledge about?
Given also that the TCS parent will give lots of help to a child curious about stairs, how long before that child masters stairs? And given that the child is being given a lot of help in many other things as well and not having their rationality thwarted, how do you think things are like in that home generally?
The typical answer will be the child is “spoilt”. The TCS parent will have heard the “spoilt” argument many times. They know the term “spoilt” is used to denegrate children and that the ideas underlying the idea of “spoilt” are nasty. So now we have got “spoilt” out of the way, how do you think things are like?
Ok, you say, but what if the child is outside near the edge of a busy road or something and wants to run across it? Do you not think the TCS parent hasn’t also heard this scenario over and over? Do you think you’re like the first one ever to have mentioned it? The TCS parent is well aware of busy road scenarios.
Instead of trying to catch TCS advocates out by bringing up something that has been repeatedly discussed why don’t you look at the core problems the philosophy speaks to and address those? Those problems need urgent attention.
EDIT: I should have said also that the stair-falling scenario and other similar scenarios are just excuses for people not to think about TCS. They don’t have want to think about the real problems children face. They want to continue to be irrational towards their children and hurt them.
Do you not think the TCS parent hasn’t also heard this scenario over and over? Do you think you’re like the first one ever to have mentioned it?
Do you not think that I am aware that people who believe in extremist ideologies are capable of making excuses for not following the extreme consequences of their extremist ideologies?
But this is just the same as a religious person giving excuses for why the empirical consequences of his beliefs are the same whether his beliefs are true or false.
You have two options:
1) Embrace the extreme consequences of your extreme beliefs.
2) Make excuses for not accepting the extreme consequences. But then you will do the same things that other people do, like using baby gates, and then you have nothing to teach other people.
I should have said also that the stair-falling scenario and other similar scenarios are just excuses for people not to think about TCS.
You are the one making excuses, for not accepting the extreme consequences of your extremist beliefs.
Of course you can help them, there are options other than violence. For example you can get a baby gate or a home without stairs. https://parent.guide/how-to-baby-proof-your-stairs/ Gates let them e.g. move around near the top of the stairs without risk of falling down. Desired, consensual gates, which the child deems helpful to the extent he has any opinion on the matter at all, aren’t force. If the child specifically wants to play on/with the stairs, you can of course open the gate, put out a bunch of padding, and otherwise non-violently help him.
i literally already gave u a definition of force and suggested you had no idea what i was talking about. you ignored me. this is 100% your fault and you still haven’t even tried to say what you think “force” is.
I ignored you because your definition of force was wrong. That is not what the word means in English. If you pick someone up and take them away from a set of stairs, that is force if they were trying to move toward them, even if they would not like to fall down them.
I suppose you’re going to tell me that pushing or pulling my spouse out of the way of a car that was going to hit them, without asking for consent first (don’t have time), is using force against them, too, even though it’s exactly what they want me to do. While still not explaining what you think “force” is, and not acknowledging that TCS’s claims must be evaluated in its own terminology.
At that point I’ll wonder what types of “force” you advocate using against children that you do not think should be used on adults.
I suppose you’re going to tell me that pushing or pulling my spouse out of the way of a car
Yes, it is.
Secondly, it is quite different from the stairway case, because your spouse would do the same thing on purpose if they saw the car, but the child will not move away when they see the stairs.
At that point I’ll wonder what types of “force” you advocate using against children that you do not think should be used on adults.
Who said I advocate using force against children that we would not use against adults? We use force against adults, e.g. putting criminals in prison. It is an extremist ideology to say that you should never use force against adults, and it is equally an extremist ideology to say that you should never use force with children.
So you don’t feel these quotes represent an “extremist” point of view?
Current parenting and educational practices destroy children’s minds. They turn children into mental cripples, usually for life. … Almost everyone is broken by being psychologically tortured for the first 20 years of their life. Their spirit is broken, their rationality is broken, their curiosity is broken, their initiative and drive are broken, and their happiness is broken. And they learn to lie about what happened …
When I use words like “torture” regarding things done to children or to the “mentally ill”, people often assume I’m exaggerating or speaking about the past when kids were physically beaten much more. But I mean psychological “torture” literally …
Parenting more reliably hurts people in a longterm way than torture, but has less overt malice and cruelty. Parenting is more dangerous because it taps into anti-rational memes better …
curi is describing some ways in which the world is burning and you are worried that the quotes are “extremist”. You are not concerned about the truth of what he is saying. You want ideas that fit with convention.
I am not worried. However taking positions viewed as extremist by the mainstream (aka the normies) has consequences. Often you are shunned and become an outcast—and being an outcast doesn’t help with extinguishing the fire. There are also moral issues—can you stand passively and just watch? If you can, does that make you complicit? If you can’t, you are transitioning from a preacher into a revolutionary and that’s an interesting transition.
The quotes above don’t sound like they could be usefully labeled “true” or “not true”—they smell like ranting and for this genre you need to identify the smaller (and less exciting) core claims and define the terms: e.g. what is a “mental cripple” and by which criteria would we classify people as such or not?
Oh, and I would also venture a guess that neither you nor curi have children.
I don’t talk about my own family publicly, but from what I can tell roughly half my fans are parents (at least the more involved ones, all of whom like TCS to some degree. I can’t speak about lurkers.) Historically, the large majority of TCS fans were parents b/c it’s a parenting philosophy (so it interested parents who wanted to be nicer to their children, be more rational, stop fighting, etc), but this dropped as non-parents liked my non-parenting philosophy writing and transitioned to the parenting stuff (the same thing happens with non-parent fans of DD’s books then transitioning to TCS material).
The passivity thing is a bad perspective which is commonly used to justify violence. I’m not accusing you of trying to do that on purpose, but I think it lends itself to that. The right approach is to use purely voluntary methods which are not rightly described as passive.
I don’t see the special difficulty with evaluating those statements as true or false. They do involve a great deal of complexity and background knowledge, but so does e.g. quantum physics.
The right approach is to use purely voluntary methods which are not rightly described as passive.
How successful do you think these are, empirically?
I don’t see the special difficulty with evaluating those statements as true or false.
I do. Quantum physics operates with very well defined concepts. Words like “cripple” or “torture” are not well-defined and are usually meant to express the emotions of the speaker.
How successful do you think these are, empirically?
Roughly: everything good in all of history is from voluntary means. (Defensive force is acceptable but isn’t a positive source of good, it’s an attempt to mitigate the bad.) This is a standard (classical) liberal view emphasized by Objectivism. Do you have much familiarity? There are also major aggressive-force/irrationality connections, b/c basically ppl initiate force when they fail to persuade (as William Godwin pointed out) and force is anti-error-correction (making ppl act against their best judgement; and the guy with a gun isn’t listening to reason).
@torture: The words have meanings. I agree many people use them imprecisely, but there’s no avoiding words people commonly use imprecisely when dealing with subjects that most people suck at. You could try to suggest better wording to me but I don’t think you could do that unless you already knew what I meant, at which point we could just talk about what I meant. The issues are important despite the difficulty of thinking objectively about them, expressing them adequately precisely in English, etc. And I’m using strong words b/c they correspond to my intended claims (which people usually dramatically underestimate even when I use words like “torture”), not out of any desire for emotional impact. If you wanted to try to understand the issues, you could. If you want it to be readily apparent, from the outset, how precise stuff is, then you need to start with the epistemology before its parenting implications.
everything good in all of history is from voluntary means
I understand this assertion. I don’t think I believe it.
ppl initiate force when they fail to persuade
Kinda. When using force is simpler/cheaper than persuasion. And persuading people that they need to die is kinda hard :-/
The words have meanings.
Words have a variety of meanings which also tend to heavily depend on the context. If you want to convey precise meaning, you need not only to use words precisely, but also to convey to your communication partner which particular meaning you attach to these words.
Right here is an example: I interpret you using words like “cripple” and “torture” as tools of emotional impact. In my experience this is how people use them (outside of specific technical areas). If you mean something else, you need to tell me: you need to define the words you use.
It’s not a replacement for talking about issues you think are important, it’s a prerequisite to meaningful communication.
So you said “I’m using strong words b/c they correspond to my intended claims” and that tells me nothing. So you basically want to say that conventional upbringing is bad? Extra bad? Super duper extra bad? Are there any nuances, any particular kind of bad?
And persuading people that they need to die is kinda hard :-/
ppl don’t need to die, that’s wrong.
I understand this assertion. I don’t think I believe it.
that’s the part where you give an argument.
“torture” has an English meaning separate from emotional impact. you already know what it is. if you wanted to have a productive conversation you’d do things like ask for examples or give an example and ask if i mean that.
you don’t seem to be aware that you’re reading a summary essay and there’s a lot more material, details, etc. you aren’t treating it that way. and i don’t think you want references to a lot more reading.
to begin with, are you aware of many common ways force is initiated against children?
Nope, that’s true only if I want to engage in this discussion and I don’t. Been there, done that, waiting for the t-shirt.
i don’t suppose you or anyone else wrote down your reasoning. (this is the part where either you provide no references, or you provide one that i have a refutation of, and then you don’t respond to the problems with your reference. to save time, let’s just skip ahead and agree that you’re unserious, ignorant, and mistaken.)
Yes. Using that meaning, the sentence “I mean psychological “torture” literally” is false.
i disagree that it’s false. you aren’t giving an argument.
are you aware of many common ways force is initiated against children?
Of course. So?
well if you don’t want to talk about it, then i guess you can continue your life of sin.
I made no claims as to extremeness. I spoke to the issue of whether TCS says nothing at all other than “be rational”. This is one of many cases here where people respond to my comments without paying attention to what my point was, what I said.
You are basically a missionary: you see savages engage in horrifying practices AND they lose their soul in the process. The situation looks like it calls for extreme measures.
I’m not interested in putting forward a positive claim of extremeness (I prefer other phrasing, e.g. that I’m making big, important claims with major implications), but I’m also not very interested in denying it. I hope we can agree that accusations of “extremism” are not critical arguments and are commonly used as a smear. I like Ayn Rand’s essay on this: https://campus.aynrand.org/works/1964/09/01/extremism-or-the-art-of-smearing/page1
As to extreme measures: I absolutely do not advocate the initiation of force. But I’m willing to make intellectual arguments which some people deem “extreme”, and I’m willing to take the step (which seems to be extreme by some people’s standards) of saying unpopular things that get me ridiculed by some people.
accusations of “extremism” are not critical arguments
Of course they are not. But such perceptions have consequences for those who are not hermits or safely ensconced in an ivory tower. If you want to persuade (and you do, don’t you?) the common people, getting labeled as an extremist is not particularly helpful.
I don’t attempt persuasion via attaining social status and trying to manage people’s perceptions. I don’t think that method can work for what I want to do.
It didn’t? What’s your criterion for “worked”, then? If you want to convert most of the world to your ideology you better call yourself a god then, or at least a prophet—not a mere philosopher.
I guess Karl Marx is a counterexample, but maybe you don’t want to use these particular methods of “persuasion”.
Deutsch invented Taking Children Seriously and Autonomous Relationships. That was some decades ago. He spent years in discussion groups trying to persuade people. His status did not help at all. Where are TCS and AR today? They are still only understood by a tiny minority. If not for curi, they might be dead.
Deutsch wrote “The Fabric of Reality” and “The Beginning of Infinity”. FoR was from 1997 and BoI was from 2011. These books have ideas that ought to change the world, but what has happened since they were published? Some people’s lives, such as curi’s, were changed dramatically, but only a tiny minority. Deutsch’s status has not helped the ideas in these books gain acceptance.
EDIT: That should be Autonomy Respecting Relationships (ARR).
So, a professor of physics failed to convert the world to his philosophy. Why are you surprised? That’s an entirely normal thing, exactly what you’d expect to happen. Status has nothing to do with it, this is like discussing the color of your shirt while trying to figure out why you can’t fly by flapping your arms.
Huh, you’re someone who would get the name of ARR [1] wrong? I didn’t expect that. You’re giving away significant identifying information, FYI. Why are you hiding your identity from me, btw?
And DD’s status has a significant counter productive aspect – it intimidates people and prevents him from being contacted in some ways he’d like.
Feynman complained bitterly about his Nobel prize, which he didn’t want, but they didn’t give him the option to decline it privately (so that no one found out). After he got it, he kept getting the wrong kinds of people at his public lectures (non-physicists) which heavily pressured him to do introductory lectures that they could understand. (He did give some great lectures for lay people, but he also wanted to do advanced physics lectures.) Feynman made an active effort not to intimidate people and to counteract his own high status.
If you want to convert most of the world to your ideology you better call yourself a god then, or at least a prophet—not a mere philosopher.
I’d be very happy to persuade 1000 people – but only counting productive doer/thinker types who learn it in depth. That’s better than 10,000,000 fans who understand little and do less. I estimate 1000 great people with the right philosopher [typo: PHILOSOPHY] is enough to promptly transform the world, whereas the 10,000,000 fans would not.
EDIT: the word “philosopher” should be “philosophy” above, as indicated.
I estimate 1000 great people with the right philosopher is enough to promptly transform the world
ROFL. OK, so one philosopher and 1000 great people. Presumably specially selected since early childhood since normal upbringing produces mental cripples? Now, keeping in mind that you can only persuade people with reason, what next? How does this transformation of the world work?
Sorry that was a typo, the word “philosopher” should be “philosophy”.
How would they transform the world? Well consider the influence Ayn Rand had. Now imagine 1000 people, who all surpass her (due to the advantages of getting to learn from her books and also getting to talk with each other and help each other), all doing their own thing, at the same time. Each would be promoting the same core ideas. What force in our current culture could stand up to that? What could stop them?
Concretely, some would quickly be rich or famous, be able to contact anyone important, run presidential campaigns, run think tanks, dominate any areas of intellectual discourse they care to, etc. (Trump only won because his campaign was run, to a partial extent, by lesser philosophers like Coulter, Miller and Bannon. They may stand out today, but they have nothing on a real philosopher like Ayn Rand. They don’t even claim to be philosophers. And yet it was still enough to determine the US presidency. What more do you want as a demonstration of the power of ideas than Trump’s Mexican rapists line, learned from Coulter’s book? Science? We have that too! And a good philosopher can go into whatever scientific field he wants and identify and fix massive errors currently being made due to the wrong methods of thinking. Even a mediocre philosopher like Aubrey de Grey managed to do something like that.)
They could discuss whatever problems came up to stop them. This discussion quality, having 1000 great thinkers, would far surpass any discussions that have ever existed, and so it would be highly effective compared to anything you have experience with.
As the earliest adopters catch on, the next earliest will, and so on, until even you learn about it, and then one day even Susie Soccer Mom.
Have you read Atlas Shrugged? It’s a book in which a philosophy teacher and his 3 star students change the world.
Look at people like Jordan Peterson or Eliezer Yudkowsky and then try to imagine someone with ~100x better ideas and how much more effective that would be.
His ideas got to be very very popular.
He spread bad ideas which have played a major role in killing over a hundred million of people and it looks like they will kill billions before they’re done (via e.g. all the economic harm that delays medical science to save people from dying of aging). Oops… As an intellectual, Marx fucked up and did it wrong. Also he’s been massively misunderstood (I’m not defending him; he’s guilty; but also I don’t think he’d actually like or respect most of his fans, who use him as a symbol for their own purposes rather than seriously studying his writing.)
Presumably specially selected since early childhood since normal upbringing produces mental cripples?
a few people survive childhood. you might want to read the inexplicable personal alchemy by Ayn Rand (essay, not book). or actually i doubt you do… but i mean that’s the kind of thing you could do if you wanted to understand.
Let’s see… Soviet Russia lived (relatively) happily until 1991 when it imploded through no effort of Ayn Rand. Libertarianism is not a major political force in any country that I know of. So, not that much influence.
What could stop them?
Oh dear, there is such a long list. A gun, for example. Men in uniform who are accustomed to following orders. Public indifference (a Kardashian lost 10 lbs through her special diet!).
some would quickly be rich or famous, be able to contact anyone important, run presidential campaigns, run think tanks, dominate any areas of intellectual discourse they care to, etc
Are you familiar with the term “magical thinking”? Popper couldn’t do it. Ayn Rand couldn’t do it. DD can’t do it. You can’t do it. So why would suddenly you have this thousand of god-emperors who can do anything they want to, purely through the force of reasoning?
Trump only won because his campaign was run, to a partial extent, by lesser philosophers
I think our evaluations of the latest presidential elections… differ.
a good philosopher can go into whatever scientific field he wants and identify and fix massive errors currently being made due to the wrong methods of thinking
You are a good philosopher, yes? Would you like to demonstrate this with some scientific field?
Even a mediocre philosopher like Aubrey de Grey managed to do something like that.
de Grey runs a medical think tank that so far has failed at its goal. In which way did he “fix massive errors”?
Have you read Atlas Shrugged? It’s a book in which a philosophy teacher and his 3 star students change the world.
… (you do understand that this is fiction?)
try to imagine someone with ~100x better ideas and how much more effective that would be
We’re back to magical thinking (I can imagine a lot of things, but presumably we are talking about reality), but even then, what will that someone do against a few grams of lead at high velocity?
He spread bad ideas
Did he believe they were bad ideas? How is his belief in his ideas different from your belief in your ideas?
a few people survive childhood
Since my childhood was sufficiently ordinary, I presume that I did not survive. Oops, you’re talking to a zombie...
Let’s see… Soviet Russia lived (relatively) happily until 1991 when it imploded through no effort of Ayn Rand. Libertarianism is not a major political force in any country that I know of. So, not that much influence.
Considering Rand was anti-libertarianism, you don’t know the first thing about her.
You are a good philosopher, yes? Would you like to demonstrate this with some scientific field?
sure, wanna do heritability studies? cryonics?
de Grey runs a medical think tank that so far has failed at its goal. In which way did he “fix massive errors”?
did you read his book? ppl were using terrible approaches and he came up with much better ones.
Ronald Reagan was a fan of Ayn Rand. He won the cold war so what is Lumifer talking about when he says Rand had no influence? He’s ignorant of history. Woefully ignorant if he thinks that the Soviet Union “lived (relatively) happily”. He hates Trump too. Incidentally, Yudkowsky lost a chunk of money betting Trump would lose. That’s what happens with bad philosophy.
Funny how a great deal of libertarians like her a lot… But we were talking about transforming the world. How did she transform the world?
wanna do heritability studies? cryonics?
Cryonics is not a science. It’s an attempt to develop a specific technology which isn’t working all that well so far. By heritability do you mean evo bio? Keep in mind that I read people like Gregory Cochran and Razib Khan so I would expect you to fix massive errors in their approaches.
Pointing me to large amounts of idiocy in published literature isn’t a convincing argument: I know it’s there, all reasonable people know it’s there, it’s a function of the incentives in academia and doesn’t have much to do with science proper.
he came up with much better ones
You are a proponent of one-bit thinking, are you not? In Yes/No terms de Grey set himself a goal and failed at it.
Funny how a great deal of libertarians like her a lot...
Where can I find them?
You are a proponent of one-bit thinking, are you not? In Yes/No terms de Grey set himself a goal and failed at it.
This is an over-simplification of a nuanced theory with a binary aspect. You don’t know how YESNO works, have chosen not to find out, and can’t speak to it.
Gregory Cochran
According to a quick googling, this guy apparently thinks that homosexuality is a disease. Is that the example you want to use and think I won’t be able to point out any flaws in? There seems to be some political bias/hatred in this webpage so many it’s not an accurate secondary source. Meanwhile I read that, “Khan’s career exemplifies the sometimes-murky line between mainstream science and scientific racism.”
I am potentially OK with this topic, but it gets into political controversies which may be distracting. I’m concerned that you’ll disagree with me politically (rather than scientifically) when I comment. What do you think? Also I think you should pick something more specific than their names, e.g. is there a particular major paper of interest? Cuz I don’t wanna pick a random paper from one of them, find errors, and then you say that isn’t their important work.
Also, at first glance, it looks like you may have named some outliers who may consider their field (most of the ppl/work/methods in it) broadly inadequate, and therefore might actually agree with my broader point (about the possibility of going into fields and pointing out inadequacies if you know what you’re doing, due to the fields being inadequate).
I’m not plugged into these networks, but Cato will probably be a good start.
apparently thinks that homosexuality is a disease
Kinda. As far as I remember, homosexuality is an interesting thing because it’s not very heritable (something like 20% for MZ twins), but also tends to persist in all cultures and ages which points to a biological aspect. It should be heavily disfavoured by evolution, but apparently isn’t. So it’s an evolutionary puzzle. Cochran’s theory—which he freely admits lacks any evidence in its favour—is that there is some pathogen which operates in utero or at a very early age and which pushes the neurohormonal balance towards homosexuality.
This is clearly spitballing in the dark and Cochran, as far as I know, doesn’t insist that it’s The Truth. It’s just an interesting alternative that everyone else ignores.
scientific racism
Generally translated as “I don’t like the conclusions which science came up with” :-D
I might or might not disagree with you politically, but I believe myself to be capable of distinguishing normative statements (this is what it is) from prescriptive ones (this is what it should be).
I don’t wanna pick a random paper from one of them
I am not expecting you to go critique their science. Their names were a handwave in the direction of what kind of heritability studies we’re talking about.
might actually agree with my broader point (about the possibility of going into fields and pointing out inadequacies if you know what you’re doing, due to the fields being inadequate)
It’s a bit more complicated. Scientific fields have a lot of diverse content. Some of it is invariably garbage and it’s not hard to go into any field, find some idiots, and point out their inadequacies. However it’s not a particularly difficult or worthwhile activity and certainly one that can be done by non-philosophers :-D In particular, during the last decade or so people who understand statistics have been having at lot of fun at the expense of domain “experts” who don’t.
I would generally expect that in every field there would be a relatively small core of clueful people who are actually pushing the frontier and a lot of deadweight just hanging on. I would also expect that it would be difficult to identify this core without doing a deep dive into the literature or going to conferences and actually talking to people.
However the thing is, I like empirical results. So if you claim to be able to go into a field and “fix massive errors”, I don’t think that merely pointing at the idiots and their publications is going to be sufficient. Fixing these errors should produce tangible results and if the errors are massive, the results should be massive as well. So where is my cure for aging? frozen and fully revived large mammals? better batteries, flying cars, teleportation devices, etc.?
As you could have guessed, I’m already familiar with Cato. If you’re not plugged into these networks, why are you trying to make claims about them?
Fixing these errors should produce tangible results and if the errors are massive,
No, I was talking about intellectual fixing of errors. That could lead to tangible results if ppl in the fields used the improved ideas, but i don’t claim to know how to get them to do that.
So where is my cure for aging?
Aubrey de Grey says there’s a 50% chance it’s $100 million a year for 10 years away. That may be optimistic, but he has some damn good points about science that merit a lot of research attention ASAP. But he’s massively underfunded anyway (partly b/c his approach to outreach is wrong, but he doesn’t want to hear that or change it).
The holdup here isn’t needing new scientific ideas (there’s already an outlier offering those and telling the rest of the field what they’re doing wrong) – it’s most scientists and funders not wanting the best available ideas. Also, related, most people are pro-aging and pro-death so the whole anti-aging field itself has way too little attention and funding even for the other approaches.
Generally translated as “I don’t like the conclusions which science came up with” :-D
I agree, though I don’t think I agree with the people you named. The homosexuality stuff and the race/IQ stuff can and should be explained in terms of culture, memes, education, human choice, environment, etc. The twin studies are garbage, btw. They routinely do things like consider two people living in the US to have no shared environment (despite living in a shared culture).
I didn’t think that stating that libertarians like Ayn Rand was controversial. We are talking about political power and neither libertarians nor objectivists have any. In this context the fact that they don’t like each other is a small family squabble in some far-off room of the Grand Political Palace.
intellectual fixing of errors
What is an “intellectual” fixing of an error instead of a plain-vanilla fixing of an error?
Aubrey de Grey says there’s a 50% chance it’s 100 million a year for 10 years away.
What’s the % chance that he is correct? AFAIK he has been saying the same thing for years.
it’s most scientists and funders not wanting the best available ideas
You don’t think that figuring out which ideas are “best available” is the hard part? Everyone and his dog claims his idea is the best.
most people are pro-aging and pro-death
I don’t think that’s true. Most people don’t want to live for a long time as wrecks with Alzheimer’s and pains in every joint, but invent a treatment that lets you stay at, say, the the 30-year-old level of health indefinitely and I bet few people will refuse (at least the non-religious ones).
can and should be explained in terms of culture, memes, education, human choice, environment, etc
What is an “intellectual” fixing of an error instead of a plain-vanilla fixing of an error?
I’m talking about identifying an error and writing a better idea. That’s different than e.g. spending 50 years working on the better idea or somehow getting others to.
What’s the % chance that he is correct? AFAIK he has been saying the same thing for years.
Yeah it’s been staying the same due to lack of funding.
I don’t typically do % estimates like you guys, but I read his book and some other material (for his side and against), and talked with him, and I believe (using philosophy) his ideas merit major research attention over their rivals.
You don’t think that figuring out which ideas are “best available” is the hard part? Everyone and his dog claims his idea is the best.
well, using philosophy i did that hard part and figured out which ones are good.
I don’t think that’s true. Most people don’t want to live for a long time as wrecks with Alzheimer’s and pains in every joint, but invent a treatment that lets you stay at, say, the the 30-year-old level of health indefinitely and I bet few people will refuse (at least the non-religious ones).
oh they won’t refuse that after it’s cheaply available. they are confused and inconsistent.
Why is there a “should”?
b/c i didn’t want the interpretation that it can be explained multiple ways. i’m advocating just the one option.
The twin studies are garbage, btw
All of them?
i have surveyed them and found them to all be garbage. i looked specifically at ones with some of the common, important conclusions, e.g. about heritability of autism, IQ, that kinda stuff. they have major methodological problems. but i imagine you could find some study involving twins, about something, which is ok.
if you believe you know a twin study that is not garbage, would you accept an explanation of why it’s garbage as a demonstration of the power and importance of CR philosophy?
You don’t think that figuring out which ideas are “best available” is the hard part? Everyone and his dog claims his idea is the best.
well, using philosophy i did that hard part and figured out which ones are good
LOL. Oh boy.
Really? So you just used the force philosophy and figured it out? That’s great! Just a minor thing I’m confused about—why are you here chatting on the ’net instead of sitting on your megayacht with a line of VCs in front of your door, willing to pay you gazillions of dollars for telling them which ideas are actually good? This looks to be VERY valuable knowledge, surely you should be able to exchange it for lots and lots of money in this capitalist economy?
When Banzan was walking through a market he overheard a conversation between a butcher and his customer.
“Give me the best piece of meat you have,” said the customer.
“Everything in my shop is the best,” replied the butcher. You cannot find here any piece of meat that is not the best.”
No, what surprises me is your belief that you just figured it all out. Using philosophy. That’s it, we’re done, everyone can go home now.
And since everything is binary and you don’t have any tools to talk about things like uncertainty, this is The Truth and anyone who doesn’t recognize it as such is either a knave or a fool.
There also a delicious overtone of irony in that a guy as lacking in humility as you are, chooses to describe his system as “fallible ideas”.
i have tools to talk about uncertainty, which are different than your tools, and which conceive of uncertainty somewhat differently than you do.
i have not figured it ALL out, but many things, such as the quality of SENS and twin studies.
fallibilism is one of the major philosophical ideas used in figuring things out. it’s crucial but it doesn’t imply, as you seem to believe, hedging, ignorance, equivocation, not knowing much, etc.
You say that seemingly in ignorance that what I said contradicts Less Wrong.
One of the things I said was Taking Children Seriously is important for AGI. Is this one of the truths you refer to? What do you know about TCS? TCS is very important not just for AGI but also for children in the here and now. Most people know next to nothing about it. You don’t either. You in fact cannot comment on whether there is any truth to what I said about AGI. You don’t know enough. And then you say you have no need to learn anything from curi. You’re deceiving yourself.
You still can’t even state the position correctly. Popper explained why induction is impossible and offered an alternative: critical rationalism. He did not “disprove” induction. Similarly, he did not disprove fairies. Popper had a lot to say about the idea of proof—are you aware of any of it?
First, you are showing your own ignorance of the fact that not everyone is a cult member like yourself. I have a bet with Eliezer Yudkowsky against one of his main positions and I stand to win $1,000 if I am right and he is mistaken.
Second, “contradicts Less Wrong” does not make sense because Less Wrong is not a person or a position or a set of positions that might be contradicted. It is a website where people talk to each other.
No. Among other things, I meant that I agreed that AIs will have a stage of “growing up,” and that this will be very important for what they end up doing. Taking Children Seriously, on the other hand, is an extremist ideology.
Since I have nothing to learn from you, I do not care whether I express your position the way you would express it. I meant the same thing. Induction is quite possible, and we do it all the time.
What is the thinking process you are using to judge the epistemology of induction? Does that process involve induction? If you are doing induction all the time then you are using induction to judge the epistemology of induction. How is that supposed to work? And if not, judging the special case of the epistemology of induction is an exception. It is an example of thinking without induction. Why is this special case an exception?
Critical Rationalism does not have this problem. The epistemology of Critical Rationalism can be judged entirely within the framework of Critical Rationalism.
The thinking process is Bayesian, and uses a prior. I have a discussion of it here
Little problem there.
What is the epistemological framework you used to judge the correctness of those? You don’t just get to use Bayes’ Theorem here without explaining the epistemological framework you used to judge the correctness of Bayes. Or the correctness of probability theory, your priors etc.
No. Critical Rationalism can be used to improve Critical Rationalism and, consistently, to refute it (though no one has done so). This has been known for decades. Induction is not a complete epistemology like that. For one thing, inductivists also need the epistemology of deduction. But they also need an epistemological framework to judge both of those. This they cannot provide.
I certainly do. I said that induction is not impossible, and that inductive reasoning is Bayesian. If you think that Bayesian reasoning is also impossible, you are free to establish that. You have not done so.
If this is possible, it would be equally possible to refute induction (if it were impossible) by using induction. For example, if every time something had always happened, it never happened after that, then induction would be refuted by induction.
If you think that is inconsistent (which it is), it would be equally inconsistent to refute CR with CR, since if it was refuted, it could not validly be used to refute anything, including itself.
Deduction isn’t an epistemology (it’s a component), and is compatible with CR too. I don’t think it’s a good point to attack.
Yes. I didn’t mean to imply it isn’t. The CR view of deduction is different to the norm, however. Deduction’s role is commonly over-rated and it does not confer certainty. Like any thinking, it is a fallible process, and involves guessing and error-correction as per usual in CR. This is old news for you, but the inductivists here won’t agree.
Yes, I was incorrect. Induction, deduction, and something else (what?) are components of the epistemology used by inductivists.
FYI that’s what “abduction” means – whatever is needed to fill in the gaps that induction and deduction don’t cover. it’s rather vague and poorly specified though. it’s supposed to be some sort of inference to good explanations (mirror induction’s inference to generalizations of data), but it’s unclear on how you do it. you may be interested in reading about it.
in practice, abduction or not, what they do is use common sense, philosophical tradition, intuition, whatever they picked up from their culture, and bias instead of actually having a well-specified epistemology.
(Objectivism is notable b/c it actually has a lot of epistemology content instead of just people thinking they can recognize good arguments when they see them without needing to work out systematic intellectual methods relating to first principles. However, Rand assumed induction worked, and didn’t study it or talk about it much, so that part of her epistemology needs to be replaced with CR which, happily, accomplishes all the same things she wanted induction to accomplish, so this replacement isn’t problematic. LW, to its credit, also has a fair amount of epistemology material – e.g. various stuff about reason and bias – some of which is good. However LW hasn’t systematized things to philosophical first principles b/c it has a kinda anti-philosophy pro-math attitude, so philosophically they basically start in the middle and have some unquestioned premises which lead to some errors.)
Yes, I’m familiar with it. The concept comes from the philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce in the 19th century.
An epistemology is a philosophical framework which answers questions like what is a correct argument, how are ideas evaluated, and how does one learn. Your link doesn’t provide one of those.
I said the thinking process used to judge the epistemology of induction is Bayesian, and my link explains how it is. I did not say it is an exhaustive explanation of epistemology.
No. From About Less Wrong:
“[I]deas on this website” is referring to a set of positions. These are positions held by Yudkowsky and others responsible for Less Wrong.
Taking AGI Seriously is therefore also an extremist ideology? Taking Children Seriously says you should always, without exception, be rational when raising your children. If you reject TCS, you reject rationality. You want to use irrationality against your children when it suits you. You become responsible for causing them massive harm. It is not extremist to try to be rational, always. It should be the norm.
This does not make it reasonable to call contradicting those ideas “contradicting Less Wrong.” In any case, I am quite aware of the things I disagree with Yudkowsky and others about. I do not have a problem with that. Unlike you, I am not a cult member.
So it says nothing at all except that you should be rational when you raise children? In that case, no one disagrees with it, and it has nothing to teach anyone, including me. If it says anything else, it can still be an extremist ideology, and I can reject it without rejecting rationality.
It says many other things as well.
Saying it is “extremist” without giving arguments that can be criticised and then rejecting it would be rejecting rationality. At present, there are no known good criticisms of TCS. If you can find some, you can reject TCS rationally. I expect that such criticisms would lead to improvement of TCS, however, rather than outright rejection. This would be similar to how CR has been improved over the years. Since there aren’t any known good criticisms that would lead to rejection of TCS, it is irrational to reject it. Such an act of irrationality would have consequences, including treating your children irrationally, which approximately all parents do.
Nonsense. I say it is extremist because it is. The fact that I did not give arguments does not mean rejecting rationality. It simply means I am not interested in giving you arguments about it.
TCS applies CR to parenting/edu and also is consistent with (classical) liberal values like not initiating force against children as most parents currently do, and respecting their rights such as the rights to liberty and the pursuit of happiness. See http://fallibleideas.com/taking-children-seriously
Exactly. This is an extremist ideology. To give several examples, parents should use force to prevent their children from falling down stairs, or from hurting themselves with knives.
I reject this extremist ideology, and that does not mean I reject rationality.
Children don’t want to fall down stairs. You can help them not fall down stairs instead of trying to force them. It’s unclear to me if you know what “force” means. Here’s the dictionary:
A standard classical liberal conception of force is: violence, threat of violence, and fraud. That’s the kind of thing I’m talking about. E.g. physically dragging your child somewhere he doesn’t want to go, in a way that you can only do because you’re larger and stronger. Whereas if children were larger and stronger than their parents, the dragging would stop, but you can still easily imagine a parent helping his larger child with not accidentally falling down stairs.
They do, however, want to move in the direction of the stairs, and you cannot “help them not fall down stairs” without forcing them not to move in the direction of the stairs.
You are trying to reject a philosophy based on edge cases without trying to understand the big problems the philosophy is trying to solve.
Let’s give some context to the stair-falling scenario. Consider that the parent is a TCS parent, not a normie parent. This parent has in fact heard the stair-falling scenario many times. It is often the first thing other people bring up when TCS is discussed.
Given the TCS parent has in fact thought about stair falling way more than a normie parent, how do you think the TCS parent has set up their home? Is it going to be a home where young children are exposed to terrible injury from things they do not yet have knowledge about?
Given also that the TCS parent will give lots of help to a child curious about stairs, how long before that child masters stairs? And given that the child is being given a lot of help in many other things as well and not having their rationality thwarted, how do you think things are like in that home generally?
The typical answer will be the child is “spoilt”. The TCS parent will have heard the “spoilt” argument many times. They know the term “spoilt” is used to denegrate children and that the ideas underlying the idea of “spoilt” are nasty. So now we have got “spoilt” out of the way, how do you think things are like?
Ok, you say, but what if the child is outside near the edge of a busy road or something and wants to run across it? Do you not think the TCS parent hasn’t also heard this scenario over and over? Do you think you’re like the first one ever to have mentioned it? The TCS parent is well aware of busy road scenarios.
Instead of trying to catch TCS advocates out by bringing up something that has been repeatedly discussed why don’t you look at the core problems the philosophy speaks to and address those? Those problems need urgent attention.
EDIT: I should have said also that the stair-falling scenario and other similar scenarios are just excuses for people not to think about TCS. They don’t have want to think about the real problems children face. They want to continue to be irrational towards their children and hurt them.
Do you not think that I am aware that people who believe in extremist ideologies are capable of making excuses for not following the extreme consequences of their extremist ideologies?
But this is just the same as a religious person giving excuses for why the empirical consequences of his beliefs are the same whether his beliefs are true or false.
You have two options:
1) Embrace the extreme consequences of your extreme beliefs. 2) Make excuses for not accepting the extreme consequences. But then you will do the same things that other people do, like using baby gates, and then you have nothing to teach other people.
You are the one making excuses, for not accepting the extreme consequences of your extremist beliefs.
Of course you can help them, there are options other than violence. For example you can get a baby gate or a home without stairs. https://parent.guide/how-to-baby-proof-your-stairs/ Gates let them e.g. move around near the top of the stairs without risk of falling down. Desired, consensual gates, which the child deems helpful to the extent he has any opinion on the matter at all, aren’t force. If the child specifically wants to play on/with the stairs, you can of course open the gate, put out a bunch of padding, and otherwise non-violently help him.
We were talking about force before, not violence. A baby gate is using force.
i literally already gave u a definition of force and suggested you had no idea what i was talking about. you ignored me. this is 100% your fault and you still haven’t even tried to say what you think “force” is.
I ignored you because your definition of force was wrong. That is not what the word means in English. If you pick someone up and take them away from a set of stairs, that is force if they were trying to move toward them, even if they would not like to fall down them.
I suppose you’re going to tell me that pushing or pulling my spouse out of the way of a car that was going to hit them, without asking for consent first (don’t have time), is using force against them, too, even though it’s exactly what they want me to do. While still not explaining what you think “force” is, and not acknowledging that TCS’s claims must be evaluated in its own terminology.
At that point I’ll wonder what types of “force” you advocate using against children that you do not think should be used on adults.
Yes, it is.
Secondly, it is quite different from the stairway case, because your spouse would do the same thing on purpose if they saw the car, but the child will not move away when they see the stairs.
Who said I advocate using force against children that we would not use against adults? We use force against adults, e.g. putting criminals in prison. It is an extremist ideology to say that you should never use force against adults, and it is equally an extremist ideology to say that you should never use force with children.
So you don’t feel these quotes represent an “extremist” point of view?
curi is describing some ways in which the world is burning and you are worried that the quotes are “extremist”. You are not concerned about the truth of what he is saying. You want ideas that fit with convention.
I am not worried. However taking positions viewed as extremist by the mainstream (aka the normies) has consequences. Often you are shunned and become an outcast—and being an outcast doesn’t help with extinguishing the fire. There are also moral issues—can you stand passively and just watch? If you can, does that make you complicit? If you can’t, you are transitioning from a preacher into a revolutionary and that’s an interesting transition.
The quotes above don’t sound like they could be usefully labeled “true” or “not true”—they smell like ranting and for this genre you need to identify the smaller (and less exciting) core claims and define the terms: e.g. what is a “mental cripple” and by which criteria would we classify people as such or not?
Oh, and I would also venture a guess that neither you nor curi have children.
I don’t talk about my own family publicly, but from what I can tell roughly half my fans are parents (at least the more involved ones, all of whom like TCS to some degree. I can’t speak about lurkers.) Historically, the large majority of TCS fans were parents b/c it’s a parenting philosophy (so it interested parents who wanted to be nicer to their children, be more rational, stop fighting, etc), but this dropped as non-parents liked my non-parenting philosophy writing and transitioned to the parenting stuff (the same thing happens with non-parent fans of DD’s books then transitioning to TCS material).
The passivity thing is a bad perspective which is commonly used to justify violence. I’m not accusing you of trying to do that on purpose, but I think it lends itself to that. The right approach is to use purely voluntary methods which are not rightly described as passive.
I don’t see the special difficulty with evaluating those statements as true or false. They do involve a great deal of complexity and background knowledge, but so does e.g. quantum physics.
How successful do you think these are, empirically?
I do. Quantum physics operates with very well defined concepts. Words like “cripple” or “torture” are not well-defined and are usually meant to express the emotions of the speaker.
Roughly: everything good in all of history is from voluntary means. (Defensive force is acceptable but isn’t a positive source of good, it’s an attempt to mitigate the bad.) This is a standard (classical) liberal view emphasized by Objectivism. Do you have much familiarity? There are also major aggressive-force/irrationality connections, b/c basically ppl initiate force when they fail to persuade (as William Godwin pointed out) and force is anti-error-correction (making ppl act against their best judgement; and the guy with a gun isn’t listening to reason).
@torture: The words have meanings. I agree many people use them imprecisely, but there’s no avoiding words people commonly use imprecisely when dealing with subjects that most people suck at. You could try to suggest better wording to me but I don’t think you could do that unless you already knew what I meant, at which point we could just talk about what I meant. The issues are important despite the difficulty of thinking objectively about them, expressing them adequately precisely in English, etc. And I’m using strong words b/c they correspond to my intended claims (which people usually dramatically underestimate even when I use words like “torture”), not out of any desire for emotional impact. If you wanted to try to understand the issues, you could. If you want it to be readily apparent, from the outset, how precise stuff is, then you need to start with the epistemology before its parenting implications.
I understand this assertion. I don’t think I believe it.
Kinda. When using force is simpler/cheaper than persuasion. And persuading people that they need to die is kinda hard :-/
Words have a variety of meanings which also tend to heavily depend on the context. If you want to convey precise meaning, you need not only to use words precisely, but also to convey to your communication partner which particular meaning you attach to these words.
Right here is an example: I interpret you using words like “cripple” and “torture” as tools of emotional impact. In my experience this is how people use them (outside of specific technical areas). If you mean something else, you need to tell me: you need to define the words you use.
It’s not a replacement for talking about issues you think are important, it’s a prerequisite to meaningful communication.
So you said “I’m using strong words b/c they correspond to my intended claims” and that tells me nothing. So you basically want to say that conventional upbringing is bad? Extra bad? Super duper extra bad? Are there any nuances, any particular kind of bad?
You are failing to communicate.
ppl don’t need to die, that’s wrong.
that’s the part where you give an argument.
“torture” has an English meaning separate from emotional impact. you already know what it is. if you wanted to have a productive conversation you’d do things like ask for examples or give an example and ask if i mean that.
you don’t seem to be aware that you’re reading a summary essay and there’s a lot more material, details, etc. you aren’t treating it that way. and i don’t think you want references to a lot more reading.
to begin with, are you aware of many common ways force is initiated against children?
And yet everyone dies.
Nope, that’s true only if I want to engage in this discussion and I don’t. Been there, done that, waiting for the t-shirt.
Yes. Using that meaning, the sentence “I mean psychological “torture” literally” is false. Or did you mean something by these scare quotes?
LOL. Now, if you wanted to have a productive conversation you would have defined your terms. See how easy it is? :-D
Oh, I am.
Of course. So?
i don’t suppose you or anyone else wrote down your reasoning. (this is the part where either you provide no references, or you provide one that i have a refutation of, and then you don’t respond to the problems with your reference. to save time, let’s just skip ahead and agree that you’re unserious, ignorant, and mistaken.)
i disagree that it’s false. you aren’t giving an argument.
well if you don’t want to talk about it, then i guess you can continue your life of sin.
Correct! :-)
This is false under my understanding of the standard English usage of the word “torture”.
Woohoo! Life of sin! Bring on the seven deadlies!!
I made no claims as to extremeness. I spoke to the issue of whether TCS says nothing at all other than “be rational”. This is one of many cases here where people respond to my comments without paying attention to what my point was, what I said.
Would you like to?
You are basically a missionary: you see savages engage in horrifying practices AND they lose their soul in the process. The situation looks like it calls for extreme measures.
I’m not interested in putting forward a positive claim of extremeness (I prefer other phrasing, e.g. that I’m making big, important claims with major implications), but I’m also not very interested in denying it. I hope we can agree that accusations of “extremism” are not critical arguments and are commonly used as a smear. I like Ayn Rand’s essay on this: https://campus.aynrand.org/works/1964/09/01/extremism-or-the-art-of-smearing/page1
As to extreme measures: I absolutely do not advocate the initiation of force. But I’m willing to make intellectual arguments which some people deem “extreme”, and I’m willing to take the step (which seems to be extreme by some people’s standards) of saying unpopular things that get me ridiculed by some people.
Of course they are not. But such perceptions have consequences for those who are not hermits or safely ensconced in an ivory tower. If you want to persuade (and you do, don’t you?) the common people, getting labeled as an extremist is not particularly helpful.
I don’t attempt persuasion via attaining social status and trying to manage people’s perceptions. I don’t think that method can work for what I want to do.
“Not getting shunned” is not quite the same thing as attempting “persuasion via attaining social status”.
Which method do you think can work for what you want to do? Any success so far?
David Deutsch has status. It hasn’t worked for him. Worse, seeking status compromised him intellectually.
It didn’t? What’s your criterion for “worked”, then? If you want to convert most of the world to your ideology you better call yourself a god then, or at least a prophet—not a mere philosopher.
I guess Karl Marx is a counterexample, but maybe you don’t want to use these particular methods of “persuasion”.
Deutsch invented Taking Children Seriously and Autonomous Relationships. That was some decades ago. He spent years in discussion groups trying to persuade people. His status did not help at all. Where are TCS and AR today? They are still only understood by a tiny minority. If not for curi, they might be dead.
Deutsch wrote “The Fabric of Reality” and “The Beginning of Infinity”. FoR was from 1997 and BoI was from 2011. These books have ideas that ought to change the world, but what has happened since they were published? Some people’s lives, such as curi’s, were changed dramatically, but only a tiny minority. Deutsch’s status has not helped the ideas in these books gain acceptance.
EDIT: That should be Autonomy Respecting Relationships (ARR).
So, a professor of physics failed to convert the world to his philosophy. Why are you surprised? That’s an entirely normal thing, exactly what you’d expect to happen. Status has nothing to do with it, this is like discussing the color of your shirt while trying to figure out why you can’t fly by flapping your arms.
Huh, you’re someone who would get the name of ARR [1] wrong? I didn’t expect that. You’re giving away significant identifying information, FYI. Why are you hiding your identity from me, btw?
And DD’s status has a significant counter productive aspect – it intimidates people and prevents him from being contacted in some ways he’d like.
Feynman complained bitterly about his Nobel prize, which he didn’t want, but they didn’t give him the option to decline it privately (so that no one found out). After he got it, he kept getting the wrong kinds of people at his public lectures (non-physicists) which heavily pressured him to do introductory lectures that they could understand. (He did give some great lectures for lay people, but he also wanted to do advanced physics lectures.) Feynman made an active effort not to intimidate people and to counteract his own high status.
[1] http://curi.us/1539-autonomy-respecting-relationships
It surprised me too. I think it was just a blooper, but I’ve done it twice now. So hmm. You didn’t pick me up the first time.
I’m aware of that.
I expect you already know who I am. I’ll take this over to FI forum.
I don’t see what’s to envy about Marx.
I’d be very happy to persuade 1000 people – but only counting productive doer/thinker types who learn it in depth. That’s better than 10,000,000 fans who understand little and do less. I estimate 1000 great people with the right philosopher [typo: PHILOSOPHY] is enough to promptly transform the world, whereas the 10,000,000 fans would not.
EDIT: the word “philosopher” should be “philosophy” above, as indicated.
His ideas got to be very very popular.
ROFL. OK, so one philosopher and 1000 great people. Presumably specially selected since early childhood since normal upbringing produces mental cripples? Now, keeping in mind that you can only persuade people with reason, what next? How does this transformation of the world work?
Sorry that was a typo, the word “philosopher” should be “philosophy”.
How would they transform the world? Well consider the influence Ayn Rand had. Now imagine 1000 people, who all surpass her (due to the advantages of getting to learn from her books and also getting to talk with each other and help each other), all doing their own thing, at the same time. Each would be promoting the same core ideas. What force in our current culture could stand up to that? What could stop them?
Concretely, some would quickly be rich or famous, be able to contact anyone important, run presidential campaigns, run think tanks, dominate any areas of intellectual discourse they care to, etc. (Trump only won because his campaign was run, to a partial extent, by lesser philosophers like Coulter, Miller and Bannon. They may stand out today, but they have nothing on a real philosopher like Ayn Rand. They don’t even claim to be philosophers. And yet it was still enough to determine the US presidency. What more do you want as a demonstration of the power of ideas than Trump’s Mexican rapists line, learned from Coulter’s book? Science? We have that too! And a good philosopher can go into whatever scientific field he wants and identify and fix massive errors currently being made due to the wrong methods of thinking. Even a mediocre philosopher like Aubrey de Grey managed to do something like that.)
They could discuss whatever problems came up to stop them. This discussion quality, having 1000 great thinkers, would far surpass any discussions that have ever existed, and so it would be highly effective compared to anything you have experience with.
As the earliest adopters catch on, the next earliest will, and so on, until even you learn about it, and then one day even Susie Soccer Mom.
Have you read Atlas Shrugged? It’s a book in which a philosophy teacher and his 3 star students change the world.
Look at people like Jordan Peterson or Eliezer Yudkowsky and then try to imagine someone with ~100x better ideas and how much more effective that would be.
He spread bad ideas which have played a major role in killing over a hundred million of people and it looks like they will kill billions before they’re done (via e.g. all the economic harm that delays medical science to save people from dying of aging). Oops… As an intellectual, Marx fucked up and did it wrong. Also he’s been massively misunderstood (I’m not defending him; he’s guilty; but also I don’t think he’d actually like or respect most of his fans, who use him as a symbol for their own purposes rather than seriously studying his writing.)
a few people survive childhood. you might want to read the inexplicable personal alchemy by Ayn Rand (essay, not book). or actually i doubt you do… but i mean that’s the kind of thing you could do if you wanted to understand.
Let’s see… Soviet Russia lived (relatively) happily until 1991 when it imploded through no effort of Ayn Rand. Libertarianism is not a major political force in any country that I know of. So, not that much influence.
Oh dear, there is such a long list. A gun, for example. Men in uniform who are accustomed to following orders. Public indifference (a Kardashian lost 10 lbs through her special diet!).
Are you familiar with the term “magical thinking”? Popper couldn’t do it. Ayn Rand couldn’t do it. DD can’t do it. You can’t do it. So why would suddenly you have this thousand of god-emperors who can do anything they want to, purely through the force of reasoning?
I think our evaluations of the latest presidential elections… differ.
You are a good philosopher, yes? Would you like to demonstrate this with some scientific field?
de Grey runs a medical think tank that so far has failed at its goal. In which way did he “fix massive errors”?
… (you do understand that this is fiction?)
We’re back to magical thinking (I can imagine a lot of things, but presumably we are talking about reality), but even then, what will that someone do against a few grams of lead at high velocity?
Did he believe they were bad ideas? How is his belief in his ideas different from your belief in your ideas?
Since my childhood was sufficiently ordinary, I presume that I did not survive. Oops, you’re talking to a zombie...
Considering Rand was anti-libertarianism, you don’t know the first thing about her.
sure, wanna do heritability studies? cryonics?
did you read his book? ppl were using terrible approaches and he came up with much better ones.
Ronald Reagan was a fan of Ayn Rand. He won the cold war so what is Lumifer talking about when he says Rand had no influence? He’s ignorant of history. Woefully ignorant if he thinks that the Soviet Union “lived (relatively) happily”. He hates Trump too. Incidentally, Yudkowsky lost a chunk of money betting Trump would lose. That’s what happens with bad philosophy.
Funny how a great deal of libertarians like her a lot… But we were talking about transforming the world. How did she transform the world?
Cryonics is not a science. It’s an attempt to develop a specific technology which isn’t working all that well so far. By heritability do you mean evo bio? Keep in mind that I read people like Gregory Cochran and Razib Khan so I would expect you to fix massive errors in their approaches.
Pointing me to large amounts of idiocy in published literature isn’t a convincing argument: I know it’s there, all reasonable people know it’s there, it’s a function of the incentives in academia and doesn’t have much to do with science proper.
You are a proponent of one-bit thinking, are you not? In Yes/No terms de Grey set himself a goal and failed at it.
Where can I find them?
This is an over-simplification of a nuanced theory with a binary aspect. You don’t know how YESNO works, have chosen not to find out, and can’t speak to it.
According to a quick googling, this guy apparently thinks that homosexuality is a disease. Is that the example you want to use and think I won’t be able to point out any flaws in? There seems to be some political bias/hatred in this webpage so many it’s not an accurate secondary source. Meanwhile I read that, “Khan’s career exemplifies the sometimes-murky line between mainstream science and scientific racism.”
I am potentially OK with this topic, but it gets into political controversies which may be distracting. I’m concerned that you’ll disagree with me politically (rather than scientifically) when I comment. What do you think? Also I think you should pick something more specific than their names, e.g. is there a particular major paper of interest? Cuz I don’t wanna pick a random paper from one of them, find errors, and then you say that isn’t their important work.
Also, at first glance, it looks like you may have named some outliers who may consider their field (most of the ppl/work/methods in it) broadly inadequate, and therefore might actually agree with my broader point (about the possibility of going into fields and pointing out inadequacies if you know what you’re doing, due to the fields being inadequate).
I’m not plugged into these networks, but Cato will probably be a good start.
Kinda. As far as I remember, homosexuality is an interesting thing because it’s not very heritable (something like 20% for MZ twins), but also tends to persist in all cultures and ages which points to a biological aspect. It should be heavily disfavoured by evolution, but apparently isn’t. So it’s an evolutionary puzzle. Cochran’s theory—which he freely admits lacks any evidence in its favour—is that there is some pathogen which operates in utero or at a very early age and which pushes the neurohormonal balance towards homosexuality.
This is clearly spitballing in the dark and Cochran, as far as I know, doesn’t insist that it’s The Truth. It’s just an interesting alternative that everyone else ignores.
Generally translated as “I don’t like the conclusions which science came up with” :-D
I might or might not disagree with you politically, but I believe myself to be capable of distinguishing normative statements (this is what it is) from prescriptive ones (this is what it should be).
I am not expecting you to go critique their science. Their names were a handwave in the direction of what kind of heritability studies we’re talking about.
It’s a bit more complicated. Scientific fields have a lot of diverse content. Some of it is invariably garbage and it’s not hard to go into any field, find some idiots, and point out their inadequacies. However it’s not a particularly difficult or worthwhile activity and certainly one that can be done by non-philosophers :-D In particular, during the last decade or so people who understand statistics have been having at lot of fun at the expense of domain “experts” who don’t.
I would generally expect that in every field there would be a relatively small core of clueful people who are actually pushing the frontier and a lot of deadweight just hanging on. I would also expect that it would be difficult to identify this core without doing a deep dive into the literature or going to conferences and actually talking to people.
However the thing is, I like empirical results. So if you claim to be able to go into a field and “fix massive errors”, I don’t think that merely pointing at the idiots and their publications is going to be sufficient. Fixing these errors should produce tangible results and if the errors are massive, the results should be massive as well. So where is my cure for aging? frozen and fully revived large mammals? better batteries, flying cars, teleportation devices, etc.?
As you could have guessed, I’m already familiar with Cato. If you’re not plugged into these networks, why are you trying to make claims about them?
No, I was talking about intellectual fixing of errors. That could lead to tangible results if ppl in the fields used the improved ideas, but i don’t claim to know how to get them to do that.
Aubrey de Grey says there’s a 50% chance it’s $100 million a year for 10 years away. That may be optimistic, but he has some damn good points about science that merit a lot of research attention ASAP. But he’s massively underfunded anyway (partly b/c his approach to outreach is wrong, but he doesn’t want to hear that or change it).
The holdup here isn’t needing new scientific ideas (there’s already an outlier offering those and telling the rest of the field what they’re doing wrong) – it’s most scientists and funders not wanting the best available ideas. Also, related, most people are pro-aging and pro-death so the whole anti-aging field itself has way too little attention and funding even for the other approaches.
I agree, though I don’t think I agree with the people you named. The homosexuality stuff and the race/IQ stuff can and should be explained in terms of culture, memes, education, human choice, environment, etc. The twin studies are garbage, btw. They routinely do things like consider two people living in the US to have no shared environment (despite living in a shared culture).
I didn’t think that stating that libertarians like Ayn Rand was controversial. We are talking about political power and neither libertarians nor objectivists have any. In this context the fact that they don’t like each other is a small family squabble in some far-off room of the Grand Political Palace.
What is an “intellectual” fixing of an error instead of a plain-vanilla fixing of an error?
What’s the % chance that he is correct? AFAIK he has been saying the same thing for years.
You don’t think that figuring out which ideas are “best available” is the hard part? Everyone and his dog claims his idea is the best.
I don’t think that’s true. Most people don’t want to live for a long time as wrecks with Alzheimer’s and pains in every joint, but invent a treatment that lets you stay at, say, the the 30-year-old level of health indefinitely and I bet few people will refuse (at least the non-religious ones).
Why is there a “should”?
All of them?
I’m talking about identifying an error and writing a better idea. That’s different than e.g. spending 50 years working on the better idea or somehow getting others to.
Yeah it’s been staying the same due to lack of funding.
I don’t typically do % estimates like you guys, but I read his book and some other material (for his side and against), and talked with him, and I believe (using philosophy) his ideas merit major research attention over their rivals.
well, using philosophy i did that hard part and figured out which ones are good.
oh they won’t refuse that after it’s cheaply available. they are confused and inconsistent.
b/c i didn’t want the interpretation that it can be explained multiple ways. i’m advocating just the one option.
i have surveyed them and found them to all be garbage. i looked specifically at ones with some of the common, important conclusions, e.g. about heritability of autism, IQ, that kinda stuff. they have major methodological problems. but i imagine you could find some study involving twins, about something, which is ok.
if you believe you know a twin study that is not garbage, would you accept an explanation of why it’s garbage as a demonstration of the power and importance of CR philosophy?
http://existentialcomics.com/comic/191
LOL. Oh boy.
Really? So you just used
the forcephilosophy and figured it out? That’s great! Just a minor thing I’m confused about—why are you here chatting on the ’net instead of sitting on your megayacht with a line of VCs in front of your door, willing to pay you gazillions of dollars for telling them which ideas are actually good? This looks to be VERY valuable knowledge, surely you should be able to exchange it for lots and lots of money in this capitalist economy?When Banzan was walking through a market he overheard a conversation between a butcher and his customer. “Give me the best piece of meat you have,” said the customer.
“Everything in my shop is the best,” replied the butcher. You cannot find here any piece of meat that is not the best.”
At these words Banzan became enlightened.
http://12stepsandzenkoans.blogspot.com.au/2013/08/everything-is-best-part-ii.html?m=1
the VCs would laugh, like you, and don’t want to hear it. surely this doesn’t surprise you.
i’m also not a big fan of yachts and prefer discussions.
No, what surprises me is your belief that you just figured it all out. Using philosophy. That’s it, we’re done, everyone can go home now.
And since everything is binary and you don’t have any tools to talk about things like uncertainty, this is The Truth and anyone who doesn’t recognize it as such is either a knave or a fool.
There also a delicious overtone of irony in that a guy as lacking in humility as you are, chooses to describe his system as “fallible ideas”.
i have tools to talk about uncertainty, which are different than your tools, and which conceive of uncertainty somewhat differently than you do.
i have not figured it ALL out, but many things, such as the quality of SENS and twin studies.
fallibilism is one of the major philosophical ideas used in figuring things out. it’s crucial but it doesn’t imply, as you seem to believe, hedging, ignorance, equivocation, not knowing much, etc.
Reason. Some.
Appeasing irrational shunning criteria is intellectually self-destructive and those people don’t matter intellectually anyway.
Ivory tower it is, then.