David Deutsch is an accomplished scientist/philosopher who is in the intellectual tradition of Feynman and Popper (but not of Aristotle). He has none of the characteristics Oscar mentions. Oscar has no idea what people like David Deutsch are like. Plus Deutsch has achieved way more than anybody here, but so much for being a Popperian eh?
I would question how you know what everyone here has achieved.
Anyway, Deutsch may have an impressive list of accomplishments but I wouldn’t say he surpasses Newton. Does that mean he should give up on Popper and go back to 16th century Christianity?
Well, for one thing, I know that you haven’t built an AI or come anywhere near close and I know that because your philosophy is empiricist, instrumentalist, and inductivist, all mistakes that prevent your project getting off the ground. Deutsch, on the other hand, invented universal quantum computation, founded Taking Children Seriously (which anyone interested in AI really ought to know about), wrote a best seller, pioneered universal constructor theory, advanced Popperian philosophy, and has a new book just out. So, unless someone here has done something significant outside AI that I don’t know about, I rest my claim.
I know that you haven’t built an AI or come anywhere near close
Depends what counts as an AI, but no, we havn’t built an AGI. Nor are we currently trying to. Nor has Deutsch, and none of his actual achievements are even close to being of similar difficulty, so this is an unreasonably high bar.
I know that because your philosophy is empiricist, instrumentalist, and inductivist, all mistakes that prevent your project getting off the ground.
For someone whose philosophy is supposed to avoid circularity, you have a bad tendency to resort to “you’re wrong because you’re wrong, so there” arguments.
invented universal quantum computation
Less impressive than universal laws of motion. Once again, why aren’t you a 16th century Christian like Newton?
founded Taking Children Seriously (which anyone interested in AI really ought to know about),
Many very irrational people have founded political movements
wrote a best seller,
Many very irrational people have written popular books
pioneered universal constructor theory, and has a new book just out.
See above.
Bottom line, you’re arguing from authority, which I though was a big no-no for Popper.
Do they usually let irrational cranks into the Royal Society? Honest question. I know that some crap people get Nobel prizes (though that’s the peace and economics prizes, which are politicized. I don’t know if anyone awful got the physics prize).
I pointed those out not to argue from authority but to point out what a scientist in the tradition of Popper and Feynman has done, and it is a world away from what was suggested scientists in that tradition do.
Taking Children Seriously is not a political movement; it is a philosophy.
Taking Children Seriously is not a political movement; it is a philosophy.
Many irrational people have founded those as well.
Looking into it, it looks very similar to something Hanson came up with independently.
Also, read the sequences before you make accusations about their content! Yudkowsky is a big fan of Feynmann, he doesn’t view himself as refuting Feynmann but building upon him. He is happy to say that traditional rationality (his definition not yours) is a great thing (he does not say the same of Aristotle). He merely points out that it is not enough to prevent many people, including himself, from believing stupid things. One of the running themes of the sequences is high standards.
Do you have a link to Hanson? Taking Children Seriously is trickier than it appears, so new people often mistakenly think it is similar to ideas they heard before or were thinking before.
Cool that we all like Feynman. But Feynman was in the Popperian tradition, so I don’t see how Yudkowsky could be building on Feynman when he says he is “dethroning Popper”. Can you point me to a place in the sequences where Feynman is discussed?
He merely points out that it is not enough to prevent many people, including himself, from believing stupid things
Yes, it is easy to fool ourselves, as Feynman said. That’s why you need a philosophy that focuses on finding errors and correcting them, as Popperism does. You’re always going to make mistakes—the truth is not obvious after all—but it is through our mistakes that we progress, so be relentless in uncovering mistakes, make your mistakes fast, and celebrate them!
Cool that we all like Feynman. But Feynman was in the Popperian tradition, so I don’t see how Yudkowsky could be building on Feynman when he says he is “dethroning Popper”. Can you point me to a place in the sequences where Feynman is discussed?
Can I make a serious request?
Please, try really hard to cut back on the ‘us versus them’ mentality. Earlier in this thread someone tried to explain what Yudkowsky means when he says ‘traditional rationality’ and the process he mentioned that such people often mention Popper, which they do (not every Popperian shares your views). Now you are saying that someone is not allowed to say ‘I think Feynmann was a reality smart guy, he had a lot of good advice and reading his books as a kid set me down a very good path’ without accepting everything Popper said.
Where can I find these many people who mention Popper?
How come they find you guys, but don’t manage to find any of the Popperian meeting places online that Brian, I, and others we know frequent? Do they have any websites where they post Popperian related material? I’ve done plenty of searches for such things. I don’t think there’s very much by people I don’t know.
I have not looked into it closely, they may or may not have their own website. My philosophy teacher claims to be a Popperian, but he sounds nothing like you or Brian, he does place a lot of emphasis on the whole ‘black swan white swan, falsification is possible but confirmation isn’t’ stuff.
Many of the people I am referring to are more casual fans than you and Brian, they may have read a few of his books or maybe just some secondary texts. They probably haven’t seriously looked into the details or underlying principles, and they definitely haven’t looked into the alternatives. When questioned about philosophy of science, Popper is their fall-back option.
FYI most people with casual knowledge of Popper have read summaries rather than Popper’s books (and, if anything, just read LScD and maybe OSE). In general secondary sources are unreliable and introduce many errors. In the case of Popper in particular the situation is much worse than usual and the secondary sources are jam packed with myths.
There are several reasons for this:
1) Popper questioned some deeply ingrained common sense cultural assumptions. People have a hard time grasping what his position even is, and that those assumptions aren’t laws of nature and are possible to be questioned.
2) Popper pissed some people off by criticizing them. In particular, Marxists. Marxists played a major role in spreading myths about Popper. Marxists are low on moral qualms about high quality scholarship.
3) Popper somewhat associated with some people he didn’t agree with. In particular the Vienna Circle. They published some of his work and took an interest in it. This encouraged the myth that Popper agreed with their main program, which he never did.
4) Some members of the Vienna Circle tried to understand on their own terms. Two major mistakes they made were:
A) they reinterpreted Popper’s criterion of demarcation between science and non-science (which is: science is stuff where empirical observations are relevant and used) as a criterion of meaningfulness. That is, they took it to mean non-science was meaningless. That is in line with their other philosophy, but Popper never thought anything like that.
B) they mistakenly took Popper’s ideas about falsification as a replacement for confirmation, instead of recognizing them as a different kind of thing.
Due to issues like these, people with a casual acquaintance with Popper aren’t really Popperians. They don’t get it. One has to study him more closely to get past issues like this, as well as the difficulty of the material (Popper solved major philosophical problems that many others failed to solve. It’s not that easy to understand.)
My friend Rafe Champion (http://www.the-rathouse.com/) has a particular interest in this. He takes new philosophy books, especially ones used by schools, and checks what they say about Popper. The answer is basically always: not much, and most of it wrong. Yudkowsky’s comments on Popper at http://yudkowsky.net/rational/bayes are representative of the mistakes found in most general overview philosophy books.
If one has a manufacturing process that often produces below-specification products, it seems odd to suggest that one should develop an extensive inspection and testing process.
One should really just develop a better manufacturing process.
(in this analogy, traditional rationalism + science is the old manufacturing process, Popperism is the extensive inspection process, and Bayesianism is the new manufacturing process)
All epistemologies purport to be good for developing knowledge. We dispute the notion here that Popperism is as good at arriving at true conclusions in practice. You tend to run into errors with regards to privileging the hypothesis in particular, and to privileging clever arguers whose conclusions are not tied to the evidence.
If you want to further discuss this matter, please read the sequences, which were written to provide people with the shared base of knowledge necessary to hold fruitful discussions here, so that we wouldn’t have to keep providing constant corrections, explanations and clarifications.
If you want to dispute that the criticisms we have with regards to Popper’s epistemology are legitimate, please do so after reading the sequences; it will help you understand why we’ve made them, and encourage others to take your arguments seriously. Otherwise you would be wasting your time.
I don’t think he hates Popper. I will resist the urge to answer this question, because I can’t and shouldn’t speak for Eliezer.
My own opinion is that both Popper and Feynmann were intelligent, and far more rational than the average person, or even the average scientist, especially when for their time. Both of them pushed rationality forwards, but with the introduction of Bayesian epistemology it can be pushed further still, and for the first time made rigorous. It is not their fault that they were born to early to see this happen, but this doesn’t mean we should prevent it from happening out of respect for them.
As Eliezer said, “heroes are milestones to tick off in your rear-view mirror”.
David Deutsch is an accomplished scientist/philosopher who is in the intellectual tradition of Feynman and Popper (but not of Aristotle). He has none of the characteristics Oscar mentions. Oscar has no idea what people like David Deutsch are like. Plus Deutsch has achieved way more than anybody here, but so much for being a Popperian eh?
I would question how you know what everyone here has achieved.
Anyway, Deutsch may have an impressive list of accomplishments but I wouldn’t say he surpasses Newton. Does that mean he should give up on Popper and go back to 16th century Christianity?
Well, for one thing, I know that you haven’t built an AI or come anywhere near close and I know that because your philosophy is empiricist, instrumentalist, and inductivist, all mistakes that prevent your project getting off the ground. Deutsch, on the other hand, invented universal quantum computation, founded Taking Children Seriously (which anyone interested in AI really ought to know about), wrote a best seller, pioneered universal constructor theory, advanced Popperian philosophy, and has a new book just out. So, unless someone here has done something significant outside AI that I don’t know about, I rest my claim.
Depends what counts as an AI, but no, we havn’t built an AGI. Nor are we currently trying to. Nor has Deutsch, and none of his actual achievements are even close to being of similar difficulty, so this is an unreasonably high bar.
For someone whose philosophy is supposed to avoid circularity, you have a bad tendency to resort to “you’re wrong because you’re wrong, so there” arguments.
Less impressive than universal laws of motion. Once again, why aren’t you a 16th century Christian like Newton?
Many very irrational people have founded political movements
Many very irrational people have written popular books
See above.
Bottom line, you’re arguing from authority, which I though was a big no-no for Popper.
Do they usually let irrational cranks into the Royal Society? Honest question. I know that some crap people get Nobel prizes (though that’s the peace and economics prizes, which are politicized. I don’t know if anyone awful got the physics prize).
Probably, I’m not qualified to comment. Since I don’t think Deutsch is a crank that’s fairly irrelevant.
I pointed those out not to argue from authority but to point out what a scientist in the tradition of Popper and Feynman has done, and it is a world away from what was suggested scientists in that tradition do.
Taking Children Seriously is not a political movement; it is a philosophy.
Many irrational people have founded those as well.
Looking into it, it looks very similar to something Hanson came up with independently.
Also, read the sequences before you make accusations about their content! Yudkowsky is a big fan of Feynmann, he doesn’t view himself as refuting Feynmann but building upon him. He is happy to say that traditional rationality (his definition not yours) is a great thing (he does not say the same of Aristotle). He merely points out that it is not enough to prevent many people, including himself, from believing stupid things. One of the running themes of the sequences is high standards.
Do you have a link to Hanson? Taking Children Seriously is trickier than it appears, so new people often mistakenly think it is similar to ideas they heard before or were thinking before.
Cool that we all like Feynman. But Feynman was in the Popperian tradition, so I don’t see how Yudkowsky could be building on Feynman when he says he is “dethroning Popper”. Can you point me to a place in the sequences where Feynman is discussed?
Yes, it is easy to fool ourselves, as Feynman said. That’s why you need a philosophy that focuses on finding errors and correcting them, as Popperism does. You’re always going to make mistakes—the truth is not obvious after all—but it is through our mistakes that we progress, so be relentless in uncovering mistakes, make your mistakes fast, and celebrate them!
Can I make a serious request?
Please, try really hard to cut back on the ‘us versus them’ mentality. Earlier in this thread someone tried to explain what Yudkowsky means when he says ‘traditional rationality’ and the process he mentioned that such people often mention Popper, which they do (not every Popperian shares your views). Now you are saying that someone is not allowed to say ‘I think Feynmann was a reality smart guy, he had a lot of good advice and reading his books as a kid set me down a very good path’ without accepting everything Popper said.
Where can I find these many people who mention Popper?
How come they find you guys, but don’t manage to find any of the Popperian meeting places online that Brian, I, and others we know frequent? Do they have any websites where they post Popperian related material? I’ve done plenty of searches for such things. I don’t think there’s very much by people I don’t know.
I have not looked into it closely, they may or may not have their own website. My philosophy teacher claims to be a Popperian, but he sounds nothing like you or Brian, he does place a lot of emphasis on the whole ‘black swan white swan, falsification is possible but confirmation isn’t’ stuff.
Many of the people I am referring to are more casual fans than you and Brian, they may have read a few of his books or maybe just some secondary texts. They probably haven’t seriously looked into the details or underlying principles, and they definitely haven’t looked into the alternatives. When questioned about philosophy of science, Popper is their fall-back option.
FYI most people with casual knowledge of Popper have read summaries rather than Popper’s books (and, if anything, just read LScD and maybe OSE). In general secondary sources are unreliable and introduce many errors. In the case of Popper in particular the situation is much worse than usual and the secondary sources are jam packed with myths.
There are several reasons for this:
1) Popper questioned some deeply ingrained common sense cultural assumptions. People have a hard time grasping what his position even is, and that those assumptions aren’t laws of nature and are possible to be questioned.
2) Popper pissed some people off by criticizing them. In particular, Marxists. Marxists played a major role in spreading myths about Popper. Marxists are low on moral qualms about high quality scholarship.
3) Popper somewhat associated with some people he didn’t agree with. In particular the Vienna Circle. They published some of his work and took an interest in it. This encouraged the myth that Popper agreed with their main program, which he never did.
4) Some members of the Vienna Circle tried to understand on their own terms. Two major mistakes they made were:
A) they reinterpreted Popper’s criterion of demarcation between science and non-science (which is: science is stuff where empirical observations are relevant and used) as a criterion of meaningfulness. That is, they took it to mean non-science was meaningless. That is in line with their other philosophy, but Popper never thought anything like that.
B) they mistakenly took Popper’s ideas about falsification as a replacement for confirmation, instead of recognizing them as a different kind of thing.
Due to issues like these, people with a casual acquaintance with Popper aren’t really Popperians. They don’t get it. One has to study him more closely to get past issues like this, as well as the difficulty of the material (Popper solved major philosophical problems that many others failed to solve. It’s not that easy to understand.)
My friend Rafe Champion (http://www.the-rathouse.com/) has a particular interest in this. He takes new philosophy books, especially ones used by schools, and checks what they say about Popper. The answer is basically always: not much, and most of it wrong. Yudkowsky’s comments on Popper at http://yudkowsky.net/rational/bayes are representative of the mistakes found in most general overview philosophy books.
If one has a manufacturing process that often produces below-specification products, it seems odd to suggest that one should develop an extensive inspection and testing process.
One should really just develop a better manufacturing process.
(in this analogy, traditional rationalism + science is the old manufacturing process, Popperism is the extensive inspection process, and Bayesianism is the new manufacturing process)
All epistemologies purport to be good for developing knowledge. We dispute the notion here that Popperism is as good at arriving at true conclusions in practice. You tend to run into errors with regards to privileging the hypothesis in particular, and to privileging clever arguers whose conclusions are not tied to the evidence.
If you want to further discuss this matter, please read the sequences, which were written to provide people with the shared base of knowledge necessary to hold fruitful discussions here, so that we wouldn’t have to keep providing constant corrections, explanations and clarifications.
If you want to dispute that the criticisms we have with regards to Popper’s epistemology are legitimate, please do so after reading the sequences; it will help you understand why we’ve made them, and encourage others to take your arguments seriously. Otherwise you would be wasting your time.
If Yudkowsky hates Popper and likes Feynman, then either
1) he likes some individual, narrow aspects of feynman (perfectly fine and unobjectionable)
2) he hasn’t understood what feynman is about
3) i have misunderstood feynman, badly
Agree so far? Do you think it’s number 1?
I don’t think he hates Popper. I will resist the urge to answer this question, because I can’t and shouldn’t speak for Eliezer.
My own opinion is that both Popper and Feynmann were intelligent, and far more rational than the average person, or even the average scientist, especially when for their time. Both of them pushed rationality forwards, but with the introduction of Bayesian epistemology it can be pushed further still, and for the first time made rigorous. It is not their fault that they were born to early to see this happen, but this doesn’t mean we should prevent it from happening out of respect for them.
As Eliezer said, “heroes are milestones to tick off in your rear-view mirror”.