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.
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.