There’s one great cybernetics book with the German title “Wahrheit ist die Erfindung eines Lügners” which translates into “Truth is the invention of a liar”. It’s unfortunate that cybernetics came out of fashion and lost in the intellectual marketplace against probabilistic thinking. Fourty-years ago there were a lot of smart nerds in cybernetics and our community might likely get a lot out of integrating it more.
Especially when it comes to the article about meta-honesty I was also thinking to myself: “It’s not trivial to know whether one will lie in a certain situation beforehand. In the back of my mind there’s the thought that the studies we have likely showed that people are quite bad at that kind of self introspection about possible future situations.”
All the examples also seemed very detached. Quite practically emotions matter a great deal when it comes to whether or not people lie and the kind of abstract examples of the meta-honesty post didn’t contain any information about the emotional state of the speaker. I think it’s questionable how honest a reply to the question of whether you would lie in situation X is when it doesn’t consider the emotional state in which the situation occurs when we see as honesty about telling the truth.
I like the kind of honesty I saw at Radical Honesty workshop that doesn’t include any “you shall not lie or you shall tell the truth” much more desirable then what Eliezer proposed in his post. I haven’t heard the word cybernetics at a Radical Honesty workshop but it still works in that general paradigm. It’s also worth noting that withholding of information counts as lying in the Radical Honesty context (e.g. glomarization would be seen as lying).
In the case of Radical Honesty, it comes out of Gestalt therapy which was founded by Fritz Perls who was influenced by cybernetics. Practically, it has a lot to do with speaking out emotions that one feels in response to the environment. Unfortunately, I can’t do it justice in explaining it in a few paragraphs and I didn’t get what it was about myself before attending workshops.
I think you can be sceptical about know-that knowledge whilst accepting the existence of know-how knowledge. Doesn’t have much to do with cybernetics, though.
Cyberneticists is relevant since learning about the world is a project necessarily carried out by cybernetic systems. It has something to say about anything where we have feedback.
There’s one great cybernetics book with the German title “Wahrheit ist die Erfindung eines Lügners” which translates into “Truth is the invention of a liar”. It’s unfortunate that cybernetics came out of fashion and lost in the intellectual marketplace against probabilistic thinking. Fourty-years ago there were a lot of smart nerds in cybernetics and our community might likely get a lot out of integrating it more.
Especially when it comes to the article about meta-honesty I was also thinking to myself: “It’s not trivial to know whether one will lie in a certain situation beforehand. In the back of my mind there’s the thought that the studies we have likely showed that people are quite bad at that kind of self introspection about possible future situations.”
All the examples also seemed very detached. Quite practically emotions matter a great deal when it comes to whether or not people lie and the kind of abstract examples of the meta-honesty post didn’t contain any information about the emotional state of the speaker. I think it’s questionable how honest a reply to the question of whether you would lie in situation X is when it doesn’t consider the emotional state in which the situation occurs when we see as honesty about telling the truth.
I like the kind of honesty I saw at Radical Honesty workshop that doesn’t include any “you shall not lie or you shall tell the truth” much more desirable then what Eliezer proposed in his post. I haven’t heard the word cybernetics at a Radical Honesty workshop but it still works in that general paradigm. It’s also worth noting that withholding of information counts as lying in the Radical Honesty context (e.g. glomarization would be seen as lying).
How does cybernetics help with epistemology?
If we admit that we don’t know the truth we can still calibrate ourselves with reality through feedback processes.
For those who know German https://media.ccc.de/v/24c3-2334-de-die_wahrheit_und_was_wirklich_passierte is a great view of that kind of Skeptic thinking.
In the case of Radical Honesty, it comes out of Gestalt therapy which was founded by Fritz Perls who was influenced by cybernetics. Practically, it has a lot to do with speaking out emotions that one feels in response to the environment. Unfortunately, I can’t do it justice in explaining it in a few paragraphs and I didn’t get what it was about myself before attending workshops.
I think you can be sceptical about know-that knowledge whilst accepting the existence of know-how knowledge. Doesn’t have much to do with cybernetics, though.
Cyberneticists is relevant since learning about the world is a project necessarily carried out by cybernetic systems. It has something to say about anything where we have feedback.