I’ve said that I think your criticisms have been inconsistent, unclear, or equivocation-prone on a lot of points
Elaborate please. My claims about EY’s “memetic collapse” should be clear and simple: it’s a bad idea supported by bad arguments. My claims about how reasonable your response to “memetic collapse” is, are much weaker and more complicated. This is largely because I can’t read your mind, and you haven’t shared your reasoning much. What was your prior for “memetic collapse” before you read this? What is your probability estimate after reading it? Do you agree that EY does try to make multiple arguments, and that they are all very bad? Maybe you actually agree that it is a very bad post, maybe you even downvoted it, I wouldn’t know.
There’s no realistic way for everyone to have the same judgments about everyone else’s epistemic reliability
You example with A, B, C is correct, but it’s irrelevant. Nobody is saying that the statement “I believe X” is bad. The problem is with statement “I believe X because Y”, where X does not follow from Y. “Memetic collapse” is not some sidenote in this post, EY does repeatedly try to share his intuitions about it. The argument about fictional characters is the one I’ve cited, because it’s the most valid argument he’s made (twice), and I was being charitable. But he also cites, e.g. Martin Shkreli trial and other current events, without even bothering to compare those situations to events in the past. Surely this is an implicit argument “it’s bad now, so it was better in the past”. How is that acceptable?
Epistemic reliability of the author is useful when he provides no arguments. But when he does write arguments, you’re supposed to consider them.
You may point out that the claim “author used bad argument for X” is does not imply “X is false”, and this is correct, but I believe that faulty arguments need to be pointed out and in some way discouraged. Surely this is what comments are for.
The level of charity you are exhibiting is ridiculous. Your arguments are fully general. You could take any post, no matter how stupid, and say “the author didn’t have time to share his hard-to-transmit evidence”, in defense of it. This is not healthy reasoning. I could believe that you’re just that charitable to everyone, but then I’m not feeling quite that much charity directed at myself. Why did you feel a need to reply to my original comment, but not a need to leave a direct comment on EY’s post?
If local validity meant never sharing your confidence levels without providing all your evidence for your beliefs, local validity would be a bad desideratum.
Local validity is a criteria that rejects the argument “climate change is true because it was hot yesterday”. EY does not consider whether the climate supporter had the time to lay out his evidence, and he is not worried about passing the climate supporter’s ITT. I think half of your criticisms directed to me would fit EY just fine, so I don’t really understand why you wouldn’t say them to him.
“top evopsych journals tend to be more careful and rigorous than top nutrition science journals” or “4th-century AD Roman literature used less complex wordplay and chained literary associations than 1st-century AD Roman literature”
These aren’t actually much harder to transmit then “climate change” (i.e. “daily temperatures over the recent years tend to be higher than daily temperatures over many years before that”). You examples are more subjective (and therefore shouldn’t have very high confidences), but apart from that, their evidence would look a lot like the evidence for climate change: counts and averages of some simple features, performed by a trusted source. And even if you didn’t have that, citing one example of complex wordplay and one example of lack of it, would be a stronger argument than what EY did.
Regarding “memetic collapse”, you haven’t yet explained to me why the fictional character argument is the best EY could do. I feel like even I can find better ones myself (although it is hard to find good arguments for false claims). E.g. take some old newspaper and suggest that it is more willing to consider the outgroup’s views than current papers.
The level of charity you are exhibiting is ridiculous. Your arguments are fully general. You could take any post, no matter how stupid, and say “the author didn’t have time to share his hard-to-transmit evidence”, in defense of it. This is not healthy reasoning.
If Fully General Counterargument A exists, but is invalid, then any defense against Counterargument A will necessarily also be Fully General.
I don’t understand what you’re trying to say. All fully general arguments are invalid, and pointing out that an argument is fully general is a reasonable defence against it. This defence is not fully general, in the sense that it only works when the original argument is, in fact, fully general.
Rob isn’t saying that “complex ideas are hard to quickly explain” supports Yudkowsky’s claim. He’s saying that it weakens your argument against Yudkowsky’s claim. The generality of Rob’s argument should be considered relative to what he’s defending against. You are saying that since the defense can apply to any complex idea, it is fully general. But it’s a defense against the implied claim that only quick-to-explain ideas are valid.
A fully general counter-argument can attack all claims equally. A good defense against FGCAs should be capable of defending all claims just as equally. Pointing out that you can defend any complex idea by saying “complex ideas are hard to quickly explain” does not, in fact, show the defense to be invalid. (Often FGCAs can’t attack all claims equally, but only all claims within a large reference class which is guaranteed to contain some true statements. Mutandis mutandum.)
Here is what our exchange looks like from my point of view.
Me: EY’s arguments are bad.
Rob: But EY didn’t have time to transmit his evidence.
Indeed he is not saying “EY is correct”. But what is he saying? What is the purpose of that reply? In what way is it a reasonable reply to make? I’d love to hear an opinion from you as a third party.
Here is my point of view. I’m trying to evaluate the arguments, and see if I want to update P(“memetic collapse”) as well as P(“EY makes good arguments”) or P(“EY is a crackpot”), and then Rob tells me not to, while providing no substance as to why I shouldn’t. Indeed I should update P(“EY is a crackpot”), and so should you. And if you don’t, I need you to explain to me how exactly that works.
And I’m very much bothered by the literal content of the argument. Not enough time? Quickly? Where are these coming from? Am I the only one seeing the 3000 word post that surely took hours to write? You could use the “too little time” defense for a tweet, or a short comment on LW. But if you have the time to make a dozen bad arguments and emotional appeals, then surely you could also find the time for one decent argument. How long does a post have to be for Rob to actually engage with its arguments?
As I see it, Rob is defending the use of [(possibly shared) intuition?] in an argument, since not everything can be feasibly and quickly proved rigorously to the satisfaction of everyone involved:
These are the kinds of claims where it’s certainly possible to reach a confident conclusion if (as it happens) the effect size is large, but where there will be plenty of finicky details and counter-examples and compressing the evidence into an easy-to-communicate form is a pretty large project. A skeptical interlocutor in those cases could reasonably doubt the claim until they see a lot of the same evidence (while acknowledging that other people may indeed have access to sufficient evidence to justify the conclusion).
(My summary is probably influenced by my memory of Wei Dai’s top-level comment, which has a similar view, so it’s possible that Rob wouldn’t use the word “intuition”, but I think that I have the gist of his argument.)
It appears that Yudkowsky simply wasn’t trying to convince a skeptic of memetic collapse in this post—Little Fuzzy provided more of an example than a proof. This is more about connecting the concepts “memetic collapse” and “local validity” and some other things. Not every post needs to prove the validity of each concept it connects with. And in fact, Yudkowsky supported his idea of memetic collapse in the linked Facebook post. Does he need to go over the same supporting arguments in each related post?
Not every post needs to prove the validity of each concept it connects with.
Nobody ever said that it does. It’s ok not to give any arguments. It’s bad when you do give arguments and those arguments are bad. Can you confirm whether you see any arguments in the OP and whether you find them logically sound? Maybe I am hallucinating.
Yudkowsky simply wasn’t trying to convince a skeptic of memetic collapse in this post
That would be fine, I could almost believe that it’s ok to give bad arguments when the purpose of the post is different. But then, he also linked to another facebook post which is explicitly about explaining memetic collapse, and the arguments there are no better.
Rob is defending the use of [(possibly shared) intuition?]
What is that intuition exactly? And is it really shared?
I’m a bit late to this but I’m glad to see that you were pointing this stuff out in thread. I see this post as basically containing 2 things:
some useful observations about how the law (and The Law) requires even-handed application to serve its purpose, and how thinking about the law at this abstract level has parallels in other sorts of logical thinking such as the sort mathematicians do a lot of. this stuff feels like the heart of the post and i think it’s mostly correct. i’m unsure how convinced i would be if i didn’t already mostly agree with it, though.
some stuff about how people used to be better in the past, which strikes me as basically the “le wrong generation” meme applied to Being Smart rather than Having Taste. this stuff i think is all basically false and is certainly unsupported in the text.
i think you’re seeing (2) as more central to the post than I am, so I’m less bothered by its inclusion.
But I think you’re correct to point out that it’s unsupported, and i’m in agreement that it’s probably false, and I’m glad you pointed out the irony of giving locally-invalid evidence in a post about how doing that is bad, and it seems to me that Rob spent quite a lot of words totally failing to engage with your actual criticism.
Elaborate please. My claims about EY’s “memetic collapse” should be clear and simple: it’s a bad idea supported by bad arguments. My claims about how reasonable your response to “memetic collapse” is, are much weaker and more complicated. This is largely because I can’t read your mind, and you haven’t shared your reasoning much. What was your prior for “memetic collapse” before you read this? What is your probability estimate after reading it? Do you agree that EY does try to make multiple arguments, and that they are all very bad? Maybe you actually agree that it is a very bad post, maybe you even downvoted it, I wouldn’t know.
You example with A, B, C is correct, but it’s irrelevant. Nobody is saying that the statement “I believe X” is bad. The problem is with statement “I believe X because Y”, where X does not follow from Y. “Memetic collapse” is not some sidenote in this post, EY does repeatedly try to share his intuitions about it. The argument about fictional characters is the one I’ve cited, because it’s the most valid argument he’s made (twice), and I was being charitable. But he also cites, e.g. Martin Shkreli trial and other current events, without even bothering to compare those situations to events in the past. Surely this is an implicit argument “it’s bad now, so it was better in the past”. How is that acceptable?
Epistemic reliability of the author is useful when he provides no arguments. But when he does write arguments, you’re supposed to consider them.
You may point out that the claim “author used bad argument for X” is does not imply “X is false”, and this is correct, but I believe that faulty arguments need to be pointed out and in some way discouraged. Surely this is what comments are for.
The level of charity you are exhibiting is ridiculous. Your arguments are fully general. You could take any post, no matter how stupid, and say “the author didn’t have time to share his hard-to-transmit evidence”, in defense of it. This is not healthy reasoning. I could believe that you’re just that charitable to everyone, but then I’m not feeling quite that much charity directed at myself. Why did you feel a need to reply to my original comment, but not a need to leave a direct comment on EY’s post?
Local validity is a criteria that rejects the argument “climate change is true because it was hot yesterday”. EY does not consider whether the climate supporter had the time to lay out his evidence, and he is not worried about passing the climate supporter’s ITT. I think half of your criticisms directed to me would fit EY just fine, so I don’t really understand why you wouldn’t say them to him.
These aren’t actually much harder to transmit then “climate change” (i.e. “daily temperatures over the recent years tend to be higher than daily temperatures over many years before that”). You examples are more subjective (and therefore shouldn’t have very high confidences), but apart from that, their evidence would look a lot like the evidence for climate change: counts and averages of some simple features, performed by a trusted source. And even if you didn’t have that, citing one example of complex wordplay and one example of lack of it, would be a stronger argument than what EY did.
Regarding “memetic collapse”, you haven’t yet explained to me why the fictional character argument is the best EY could do. I feel like even I can find better ones myself (although it is hard to find good arguments for false claims). E.g. take some old newspaper and suggest that it is more willing to consider the outgroup’s views than current papers.
If Fully General Counterargument A exists, but is invalid, then any defense against Counterargument A will necessarily also be Fully General.
I don’t understand what you’re trying to say. All fully general arguments are invalid, and pointing out that an argument is fully general is a reasonable defence against it. This defence is not fully general, in the sense that it only works when the original argument is, in fact, fully general.
Rob isn’t saying that “complex ideas are hard to quickly explain” supports Yudkowsky’s claim. He’s saying that it weakens your argument against Yudkowsky’s claim. The generality of Rob’s argument should be considered relative to what he’s defending against. You are saying that since the defense can apply to any complex idea, it is fully general. But it’s a defense against the implied claim that only quick-to-explain ideas are valid.
A fully general counter-argument can attack all claims equally. A good defense against FGCAs should be capable of defending all claims just as equally. Pointing out that you can defend any complex idea by saying “complex ideas are hard to quickly explain” does not, in fact, show the defense to be invalid. (Often FGCAs can’t attack all claims equally, but only all claims within a large reference class which is guaranteed to contain some true statements. Mutandis mutandum.)
Here is what our exchange looks like from my point of view.
Me: EY’s arguments are bad.
Rob: But EY didn’t have time to transmit his evidence.
Indeed he is not saying “EY is correct”. But what is he saying? What is the purpose of that reply? In what way is it a reasonable reply to make? I’d love to hear an opinion from you as a third party.
Here is my point of view. I’m trying to evaluate the arguments, and see if I want to update P(“memetic collapse”) as well as P(“EY makes good arguments”) or P(“EY is a crackpot”), and then Rob tells me not to, while providing no substance as to why I shouldn’t. Indeed I should update P(“EY is a crackpot”), and so should you. And if you don’t, I need you to explain to me how exactly that works.
And I’m very much bothered by the literal content of the argument. Not enough time? Quickly? Where are these coming from? Am I the only one seeing the 3000 word post that surely took hours to write? You could use the “too little time” defense for a tweet, or a short comment on LW. But if you have the time to make a dozen bad arguments and emotional appeals, then surely you could also find the time for one decent argument. How long does a post have to be for Rob to actually engage with its arguments?
As I see it, Rob is defending the use of [(possibly shared) intuition?] in an argument, since not everything can be feasibly and quickly proved rigorously to the satisfaction of everyone involved:
(My summary is probably influenced by my memory of Wei Dai’s top-level comment, which has a similar view, so it’s possible that Rob wouldn’t use the word “intuition”, but I think that I have the gist of his argument.)
It appears that Yudkowsky simply wasn’t trying to convince a skeptic of memetic collapse in this post—Little Fuzzy provided more of an example than a proof. This is more about connecting the concepts “memetic collapse” and “local validity” and some other things. Not every post needs to prove the validity of each concept it connects with. And in fact, Yudkowsky supported his idea of memetic collapse in the linked Facebook post. Does he need to go over the same supporting arguments in each related post?
Nobody ever said that it does. It’s ok not to give any arguments. It’s bad when you do give arguments and those arguments are bad. Can you confirm whether you see any arguments in the OP and whether you find them logically sound? Maybe I am hallucinating.
That would be fine, I could almost believe that it’s ok to give bad arguments when the purpose of the post is different. But then, he also linked to another facebook post which is explicitly about explaining memetic collapse, and the arguments there are no better.
What is that intuition exactly? And is it really shared?
I’m a bit late to this but I’m glad to see that you were pointing this stuff out in thread. I see this post as basically containing 2 things:
some useful observations about how the law (and The Law) requires even-handed application to serve its purpose, and how thinking about the law at this abstract level has parallels in other sorts of logical thinking such as the sort mathematicians do a lot of. this stuff feels like the heart of the post and i think it’s mostly correct. i’m unsure how convinced i would be if i didn’t already mostly agree with it, though.
some stuff about how people used to be better in the past, which strikes me as basically the “le wrong generation” meme applied to Being Smart rather than Having Taste. this stuff i think is all basically false and is certainly unsupported in the text.
i think you’re seeing (2) as more central to the post than I am, so I’m less bothered by its inclusion.
But I think you’re correct to point out that it’s unsupported, and i’m in agreement that it’s probably false, and I’m glad you pointed out the irony of giving locally-invalid evidence in a post about how doing that is bad, and it seems to me that Rob spent quite a lot of words totally failing to engage with your actual criticism.