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.
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.