This is not a novel contribution, it’s based on a confusion of the position we hold here. The traditional response to comments like this is “read the sequences,” because a lot of effort was put into them so we wouldn’t have to spend time sorting out comments like this. But the sequences are a lot of reading, and it’s not always fair to expect people to do that much work to participate in a conversation, so we don’t do that as much anymore, but when a person persistently doesn’t show the commitment to catching up on the information everyone else in the discussion is already operating on, a lot of people will just get frustrated and downvote.
I did not downvote, but I am going to suggest that Brian Scurfield read the sequences if he’s going to participate further. That’s why they were written after all; to bring people up to speed to the point where they’re able to meaningfully participate.
The comment I responded to made factual errors about Popper and Feynman and attributed to them positions they did not hold. I don’t need to read the sequences to point that out.
The comment referred to characteristics of modern individuals, particularly scientists, who identify as rational individuals, and associate themselves with the intellectual traditions of Feynman and Popper. If you read the sequences, you would receive examples which show exactly to what these criticisms refer.
There are many pages in the sequences devoted to addressing mistakes made by individuals who identify as rational, who associate themselves with the traditions of modern science, and showing how to do better (not just arguments for a procedure that alleges to be more epistemically sound but how it produces better results in the real world.)
In devoting ourselves to the procedures that produce the best tangible results, we have found no reason to take a particular interest in producing criticisms of Popper. If Critical Rationalism distinguished itself as an epistemology that produced exceptional real world results, then matters would be different.
Hmm...I had something else written here, but had a thought causing me to be less certain of what I wrote. I do think Popper should be criticized by someone on this site, to point out what is wrong with his epistemology.
I agree that the whole Popper debate has passed the point of being silly; I’m ashamed to have continued to participate in it so far past the point where it was clear that further headway was unlikely to be made. I dispute the allegation of bad scholarship though.
The purpose isn’t to criticize the authors, but how the specified people behave. What the authors actually say is irrelevant; the criticisms of the people specified by the reference to “traditional rationalists” would be equally applicable whether Popper and Feynman’s writings on epistemology were complete nonsense or identical to what Eliezer is arguing.
There are, of course, wide selections of views encompassed in mainstream philosophy and traditional rationality, but the differences between them are only salient to the discussion if they distinguish them from the qualities that are being referenced.
I apologize, I edited my after submitting it. I did realize the issue of relevance, and I also think that my criticism was unfair in that I think the critique of “Traditional Rationality” is meant to be a methodological critique. I think the critique is very much in terms of valuing process (even a particular scholarly process) over results; which was also part of your point.
I guess I’m very much used to the scholarship process, and I’m not entirely clear on what “Traditional Rationality” ultimately is meant to imply, other than finding clues on various pages. I shouldn’t have expressed my confusion as disagreement.
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”.
Eliezer uses “Traditional Rationality” to mean something like “Rationality, as practised by scientists everywhere, especially the ones who read Feynman and Popper”. It refers to the rules that scientists follow.
… could be interpreted as making claims about Popper or Feynman, or attributing any positions to them. Oscar’s writing was quite clear and understandable.
Read the context. Oscar makes a set of claims about scientists, especially those who read Popper and Feynman. Such scientists, apparently, make a fetish of falsification, they operate only in a small domain, don’t explain how knowledge is created etc. Well, those sort of things are not in the tradition of Popper and Feynman and if there are scientists who do that, and who have read Popper and Feynman, then they did not understand what they read. Not only is Oscar’s comment rude to the tradition of Popper and Feynman, he doesn’t understand that tradition.
if there are scientists who do that, and who have read Popper and Feynman, then they did not understand what they read.
Right, and if that’s the case, then Oscar’s characterization was correct, and not attributing any positions to Feynman and Popper.
Oscar was just summarizing Eliezer (with caveats like “something like”), it seems a bit like a wate of time to attack his summary in detail, where instead you could just find from which of Eliezer’s writings Oscar formed that impression, and point out any errors at their source.
My vague recollection of Eliezer’s position would be something like “Here are the kind of mistakes that I made, that listening to Feynman didn’t prevent, and that scientists still make”. But again, that’s just my vague summary, no point in trying to take it apart.
most of brian’s post was about stuff he knows about (e.g. popper). it was correcting mistaken comments about that topic. “read the sequences” is a stupid response to that.
But it’s based on misunderstandings of what we’re actually talking about, which he would not hold had he read the sequences.
His first statement “Traditional rationality goes back to Aristotle and is something that both Feynman and Popper rejected” is irrelevant because it’s not addressing what anyone else in the conversation is talking about. Oscar Cunningham clarified what Eliezer was talking about, and Eliezer’s commentary on it is elucidated in the sequences, and if Brian Scurfield had read them, he could have dispensed with the remainder of his post as well.
His first statement “Traditional rationality goes back to Aristotle and is something that both Feynman and Popper rejected” is irrelevant because it’s not addressing what anyone else in the conversation is talking about.
if you would pay any attention, you would notice that oscar wrote
Eliezer uses “Traditional Rationality” to mean something like “Rationality, as practised by scientists everywhere, especially the ones who read Feynman and Popper”.
Oscar made a list of things that were allegedly in the tradition of Feynman and Popper. He was wrong about those. Furthermore, Feynman and Popper are in a different tradition to Aristotle, which is conventionally called “traditional rationality”. Oscar says that Bayesianism is not “traditional rationality”, meaning it is not Popperism, but it is firmly in the mainstream tradition of Aristotle: it is conventional traditional rationality.
Aristotle invented the idea of induction. It is a major false idea in philosophy, one that Less Wrong subscribes to. If you disagree, please show me a criticism of induction in the sequences.
Reversed stupidity is not intelligence. Just because we think Aristotle was wrong about some things doesn’t mean we are obliged to disagree with him about everything.
Also, I’m pretty sure Aristotle did not invent induction. He may have been the first person to call it that, but he didn’t invent the concept, which probably predates writing.
Thinking about it, dogs are capable of induction, which suggests that no human invented it at all, in the same way that no human invented sensory perception.
Translation quality is, in general, terrible. By “terrible” I mean not nearly good enough for philosophy where some precision and detail matters. I’ve read 5 different translations of Xenophanes’ fragments. They are all significantly different, and they change the meaning.
BTW I’m not even sure if an English translation of Xenophanes existed yet when Popper learned Greek. Lesher’s book was published in 1992. Of course Popper was fluent in German, but the German translators are in general significantly worse, and the German language is not good for philosophy. Once Popper learned English he stopped doing philosophy in German saying it was much worse for it.
Popper did his own translations of some text and published criticisms of other translation which had got it wrong. He gives good arguments about why he has it right which are persuasive. Some of the people replied, and you can read their view of the matter and judge for yourself who had it right (Popper :).
To do good translations of philosophers, you have to not just know the language but also have some understanding of the philosophy. That’s the main reason Popper was able to do better than other translators who knew the language better than him. Popper came up with good explanations about what the people were trying to say, while others focussed on words too directly.
About the dog, you’re correct that on the theory that both people and animals do induction all the time it must have predated Aristotle. So if Popper is wrong about his major ideas, he’s wrong about this one too; but if not then you’re argument wouldn’t hold for this. On our theory that induction is a substantive philosophical idea, not ever done by anyone but merely a misconception, then it was invented. And Aristotle is the best candidate for who did it, as Popper explained.
One thing to consider is: if induction predates aristotle, which philosophers predating aristotle are in the inductivist tradition? In my reading, they are all different in their attitudes, assumptions and outlooks. Xenophanes is a good example of this (who Aristotle disliked). If you can’t find any induction in the presocratics, then saying it was popular since prehistory wouldn’t really make sense.
The dog is just enacting programs encoded in its genes by evolution (uniquely among animals, dog genes contain knowledge of human memes). Dogs can’t create knowledge, humans are the only animal that have that capacity, and the evolutionary process that created the knowledge in a dog’s genes is not an inductive process.
Popper learnt ancient Greek because he knew that translations are often wildly inaccurate and they are inaccurate because all translations are interpretations. He liked to get his facts correct.
Dogs do not have ‘knowledge’ in their genes. What they do have is pattern-matching capabilities. If they see a pattern enough times, they start expecting it to occur more often.
This same pattern matching goes on in the brains of humans, with the difference that the patterns it can spot are more sophisticated. Without it we would never have invented science or technology, and for that matter we would never have survived in the ancestral environment.
If the first three people to wander into the swamp get eaten by crocodiles, and you don’t consider this a valid argument for not walking into the swamp, then your genes won’t be present in the next generation.
I take it you have a subjectivist conception of knowledge. Is that right?
If the first three people to wander into the swamp get eaten by crocodiles, and you don’t consider this a valid argument for not walking into the swamp, then your genes won’t be present in the next generation.
If they considered something else a good argument for the same conclusion, then that argument wouldn’t work (had to do induction or die). Agreed?
This is not a novel contribution, it’s based on a confusion of the position we hold here. The traditional response to comments like this is “read the sequences,” because a lot of effort was put into them so we wouldn’t have to spend time sorting out comments like this. But the sequences are a lot of reading, and it’s not always fair to expect people to do that much work to participate in a conversation, so we don’t do that as much anymore, but when a person persistently doesn’t show the commitment to catching up on the information everyone else in the discussion is already operating on, a lot of people will just get frustrated and downvote.
I did not downvote, but I am going to suggest that Brian Scurfield read the sequences if he’s going to participate further. That’s why they were written after all; to bring people up to speed to the point where they’re able to meaningfully participate.
The comment I responded to made factual errors about Popper and Feynman and attributed to them positions they did not hold. I don’t need to read the sequences to point that out.
The comment referred to characteristics of modern individuals, particularly scientists, who identify as rational individuals, and associate themselves with the intellectual traditions of Feynman and Popper. If you read the sequences, you would receive examples which show exactly to what these criticisms refer.
could you link a page in the sequences with a (high quality) criticism of Popper?
No.
There are many pages in the sequences devoted to addressing mistakes made by individuals who identify as rational, who associate themselves with the traditions of modern science, and showing how to do better (not just arguments for a procedure that alleges to be more epistemically sound but how it produces better results in the real world.)
In devoting ourselves to the procedures that produce the best tangible results, we have found no reason to take a particular interest in producing criticisms of Popper. If Critical Rationalism distinguished itself as an epistemology that produced exceptional real world results, then matters would be different.
Hmm...I had something else written here, but had a thought causing me to be less certain of what I wrote. I do think Popper should be criticized by someone on this site, to point out what is wrong with his epistemology.
I agree that the whole Popper debate has passed the point of being silly; I’m ashamed to have continued to participate in it so far past the point where it was clear that further headway was unlikely to be made. I dispute the allegation of bad scholarship though.
The purpose isn’t to criticize the authors, but how the specified people behave. What the authors actually say is irrelevant; the criticisms of the people specified by the reference to “traditional rationalists” would be equally applicable whether Popper and Feynman’s writings on epistemology were complete nonsense or identical to what Eliezer is arguing.
There are, of course, wide selections of views encompassed in mainstream philosophy and traditional rationality, but the differences between them are only salient to the discussion if they distinguish them from the qualities that are being referenced.
I apologize, I edited my after submitting it. I did realize the issue of relevance, and I also think that my criticism was unfair in that I think the critique of “Traditional Rationality” is meant to be a methodological critique. I think the critique is very much in terms of valuing process (even a particular scholarly process) over results; which was also part of your point.
I guess I’m very much used to the scholarship process, and I’m not entirely clear on what “Traditional Rationality” ultimately is meant to imply, other than finding clues on various pages. I shouldn’t have expressed my confusion as disagreement.
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”.
I don’t see how
… could be interpreted as making claims about Popper or Feynman, or attributing any positions to them. Oscar’s writing was quite clear and understandable.
You really don’t see how that could be done, even with the usage of words such as “especially”?
Read the context. Oscar makes a set of claims about scientists, especially those who read Popper and Feynman. Such scientists, apparently, make a fetish of falsification, they operate only in a small domain, don’t explain how knowledge is created etc. Well, those sort of things are not in the tradition of Popper and Feynman and if there are scientists who do that, and who have read Popper and Feynman, then they did not understand what they read. Not only is Oscar’s comment rude to the tradition of Popper and Feynman, he doesn’t understand that tradition.
Right, and if that’s the case, then Oscar’s characterization was correct, and not attributing any positions to Feynman and Popper.
Oscar was just summarizing Eliezer (with caveats like “something like”), it seems a bit like a wate of time to attack his summary in detail, where instead you could just find from which of Eliezer’s writings Oscar formed that impression, and point out any errors at their source.
My vague recollection of Eliezer’s position would be something like “Here are the kind of mistakes that I made, that listening to Feynman didn’t prevent, and that scientists still make”. But again, that’s just my vague summary, no point in trying to take it apart.
Accurately understanding a work is no prerequisite to being influenced by it.
most of brian’s post was about stuff he knows about (e.g. popper). it was correcting mistaken comments about that topic. “read the sequences” is a stupid response to that.
But it’s based on misunderstandings of what we’re actually talking about, which he would not hold had he read the sequences.
His first statement “Traditional rationality goes back to Aristotle and is something that both Feynman and Popper rejected” is irrelevant because it’s not addressing what anyone else in the conversation is talking about. Oscar Cunningham clarified what Eliezer was talking about, and Eliezer’s commentary on it is elucidated in the sequences, and if Brian Scurfield had read them, he could have dispensed with the remainder of his post as well.
if you would pay any attention, you would notice that oscar wrote
and that brian’s reply was relevant to that.
your comment is plainly factually false.
If he was disputing the definition, then his comment was irrelevant. What he was describing was not what was under discussion.
Oscar made a list of things that were allegedly in the tradition of Feynman and Popper. He was wrong about those. Furthermore, Feynman and Popper are in a different tradition to Aristotle, which is conventionally called “traditional rationality”. Oscar says that Bayesianism is not “traditional rationality”, meaning it is not Popperism, but it is firmly in the mainstream tradition of Aristotle: it is conventional traditional rationality.
It really isn’t.
Aristotle is one of the few philosophers who is explicitly named and criticized in the sequences.
Aristotle invented the idea of induction. It is a major false idea in philosophy, one that Less Wrong subscribes to. If you disagree, please show me a criticism of induction in the sequences.
Reversed stupidity is not intelligence. Just because we think Aristotle was wrong about some things doesn’t mean we are obliged to disagree with him about everything.
Also, I’m pretty sure Aristotle did not invent induction. He may have been the first person to call it that, but he didn’t invent the concept, which probably predates writing.
Thinking about it, dogs are capable of induction, which suggests that no human invented it at all, in the same way that no human invented sensory perception.
No, he invented it. Read Popper’s The World of Parmenides. (BTW, Popper took the trouble to learn ancient Greek)
Then explain how my dog figured out that when if she sits when I say ‘sit’ I give her food.
I’m pretty sure she’s never read Aristotle.
Aristotle may have codified induction, he may have taken credit for it, but he didn’t invent it.
Bit of a waste of time for someone so important, no? Is there anything he gained from that which he couldn’t have gained from a translation?
Translation quality is, in general, terrible. By “terrible” I mean not nearly good enough for philosophy where some precision and detail matters. I’ve read 5 different translations of Xenophanes’ fragments. They are all significantly different, and they change the meaning.
BTW I’m not even sure if an English translation of Xenophanes existed yet when Popper learned Greek. Lesher’s book was published in 1992. Of course Popper was fluent in German, but the German translators are in general significantly worse, and the German language is not good for philosophy. Once Popper learned English he stopped doing philosophy in German saying it was much worse for it.
Popper did his own translations of some text and published criticisms of other translation which had got it wrong. He gives good arguments about why he has it right which are persuasive. Some of the people replied, and you can read their view of the matter and judge for yourself who had it right (Popper :).
To do good translations of philosophers, you have to not just know the language but also have some understanding of the philosophy. That’s the main reason Popper was able to do better than other translators who knew the language better than him. Popper came up with good explanations about what the people were trying to say, while others focussed on words too directly.
About the dog, you’re correct that on the theory that both people and animals do induction all the time it must have predated Aristotle. So if Popper is wrong about his major ideas, he’s wrong about this one too; but if not then you’re argument wouldn’t hold for this. On our theory that induction is a substantive philosophical idea, not ever done by anyone but merely a misconception, then it was invented. And Aristotle is the best candidate for who did it, as Popper explained.
One thing to consider is: if induction predates aristotle, which philosophers predating aristotle are in the inductivist tradition? In my reading, they are all different in their attitudes, assumptions and outlooks. Xenophanes is a good example of this (who Aristotle disliked). If you can’t find any induction in the presocratics, then saying it was popular since prehistory wouldn’t really make sense.
The dog is just enacting programs encoded in its genes by evolution (uniquely among animals, dog genes contain knowledge of human memes). Dogs can’t create knowledge, humans are the only animal that have that capacity, and the evolutionary process that created the knowledge in a dog’s genes is not an inductive process.
Popper learnt ancient Greek because he knew that translations are often wildly inaccurate and they are inaccurate because all translations are interpretations. He liked to get his facts correct.
Dogs do not have ‘knowledge’ in their genes. What they do have is pattern-matching capabilities. If they see a pattern enough times, they start expecting it to occur more often.
This same pattern matching goes on in the brains of humans, with the difference that the patterns it can spot are more sophisticated. Without it we would never have invented science or technology, and for that matter we would never have survived in the ancestral environment.
If the first three people to wander into the swamp get eaten by crocodiles, and you don’t consider this a valid argument for not walking into the swamp, then your genes won’t be present in the next generation.
I take it you have a subjectivist conception of knowledge. Is that right?
If they considered something else a good argument for the same conclusion, then that argument wouldn’t work (had to do induction or die). Agreed?