Rooney, as discussed in The Simple Truth I follow a correspondence theory of truth. I am also a Bayesian and a believer in Occam’s Razor. If a belief has no empirical consequences then it could receive no Bayesian confirmation and could not rise to my subjective attention. In principle there are many true beliefs for which I have no evidence, but in practice I can never know what these true beliefs are, or even focus on them enough to think them explicitly, because they are so vastly outnumbered by false beliefs for which I can find no evidence.
I, too, am nervous about having anticipated experience as the only criterion for truth and meaning. It seems to me that a statement can get its meaning either from the class of prior actions which make it true or from the class of future observations which its truth makes inevitable. We can’t do quantum mechanics with kets, but no bras. We can’t do Gentzen natural deduction with rules of elimination, but no rules of introduction. We can’t do Bayesian updating with observations, but no priors. And I claim that you can’t have a theory of meaning which deals only with consequences of statements being true but not with what actions put the universe into a state in which the statement becomes true.
This position of mine comes from my interpretation of the dissertation of Noam Zeilberger of CMU (2005, I think). Zeilberger’s main concern lies in Logic and Computer Science, but along the way he discusses theories of truth implicit in the work of Martin-Lof and Dummett.
Perplexed, I’m not sure I understood what you meant by
you can’t have a theory of meaning which deals only with consequences of statements being true but not with what actions put the universe into a state in which the statement becomes true.
Or if I agree with it at all. Wouldn’t statements about what actions make certain statements true simply be part of the first category? I don’t see a problem with only having statements and their consequences. I see you’ve made this comment 12 years ago, so I don’t know how you would stand on this today.
I, too, am nervous about having anticipated experience as the only criterion for truth and meaning. It seems to me that a statement can get its meaning either from the class of prior actions which make it true or from the class of future observations which its truth makes inevitable.
That seems obviously correct. However, unless you pursue knowledge for its own sake, you should probably not be overly concerned with preserving past truths—unless they are going to impact on future decisions.
Of course, the decisions of a future superintelligence might depend on all kinds of historical minutae that we don’t regard as important. So maybe we should preserve those truths we regard as insignificant to us for it. However, today, probably relatively few are enslaved to future superintelligences—and even then, it isn’t clear that this is what they would want us to do.
An explicit belief that you would not allow yourself to hold under these conditions would be that the tree which falls in the forest makes a sound—because no one heard it, and because we can’t sense it afterwards, whether it made sound or not had no empirical consequence.
Every time I have seen this philosophical question posed on lesswrong, the two sophists that were arguing about it were in agreement that a sound would be produced (under the physical definition of the word), so I’d be really surprised if you could let go of that belief.
Hm, yeah. The trouble is how the doctrine handles deductive logic—for example, the belief that a falling tree makes vibrations in the air when the laws of physics say so is really a direct consequence of part of physics. The correct answer definitely appears to be that you can apply logic, and so the doctrine should be not to believe in something when there is no Bayesian evidence that differentiates it from some alternative.
While I fully agree with the principle of the article, something stuck out to me about your comment:
In principle there are many true beliefs for which I have no evidence, but in practice I can never know what these true beliefs are, or even focus on them enough to think them explicitly, because they are so vastly outnumbered by false beliefs for which I can find no evidence.
What I noticed was that you were basically defining a universal prior for beliefs, as much more likely false than true. From what I’ve read about Bayesian analysis, a universal prior is nearly undefinable, so after thinking about it a while, I came up with this basic counterargument:
You say that true beliefs are vastly outnumbered by false beliefs, but I say, how could you know of the existence of all these false beliefs, unless each one had a converse, a true belief opposing it that you first had some evidence for? For otherwise, you wouldn’t know whether it was true or false.
You may then say that most true beliefs don’t just have a converse. They also have many related false beliefs opposing them. But I would say, those are merely the converses that spring from the connections of that true belief with its many related true beliefs.
By this, I hope I’ve offered evidence that a fifty-fifty universal T/F prior is at least as likely as one considering most unconsidered ideas to be false. (And I would describe my further thoughts if I thought they would be useful here, but, silly me, I’m replying to a post from almost 8 years ago.)
If you have an arbitrary proposition—a random sequence of symbols constrained only by the grammar of whatever language you’re using—then perhaps it’s about equally likely to be true or false, since for each proposition p there’s a corresponding proposition not p of similar complexity.
But the “beliefs” people are mostly interested in are things like these:
There is exactly one god, who created the universe and watches over us; he likes forgiveness, incense-burning, and choral music, and hates murder, atheism and same-sex marriage.
Two nearby large objects, whatever they are, will exert an attractive force on one another proportional to the mass of each and inversely proportional to the square of the distance between them.
and the negations of these are much less interesting because they say so much less:
Either there is no god or there are multiple gods, or else there is one god but it either didn’t create the universe or doesn’t watch over us—or else there is one god, who created the universe and watches over us, but its preferences are not exactly the ones stated above.
If you have two nearby objects, whatever force there may be between them is not perfectly accurately described by saying it’s proportional to their masses, inversely proportional to the square of the distance, and unaffected by exactly what they’re made of.
So: yeah, sure, there are ways to pick a “random” belief and be pretty sure it’s correct (just say “it isn’t the case that” followed by something very specific) but if what you’re picking are things like scientific theories or religious doctrines or political parties then I think it’s reasonable to say that the great majority of possible beliefs are wrong, because the only beliefs we’re actually interested in are the quite specific ones.
I don’t think “converse” is the word you’re looking for here—possibly “complement” or “negation” in the sense that (A || ~A) is true for all A—but I get what you’re saying. Converse might even be the right word for that; vocabulary is not my forte.
If you take the statement “most beliefs are false” as given, then “the negation of most beliefs is true” is trivially true but adds no new information. You’re treating positive and negative beliefs as though they’re the same, and that’s absolutely not true. In the words of this post, a positive belief provides enough information to anticipate an experience. A negative belief does not (assuming there are more than two possible beliefs). If you define “anything except that one specific experience” as “an experience”, then you can define a negative belief as a belief, but at that point I think you’re actually falling into exactly the trap expressed here.
If you replace “belief” with “statement that is mutually incompatible with all other possible statements that provide the same amount of information about its category” (which is a possibly-too-narrow alternative; unpacking words is hard sometimes) then “true statements that are mutually incompatible with all other possible statements that provide the same amount of information about their category are vastly outnumbered by false statements that are mutually incompatible with all other possible statements that provide the same amount of information about their category” is something the I anticipate you would find true. You and Eliezer do not anticipate a different percentage of possible “statements that are mutually incompatible with all other possible statements that provide the same amount of information about their category” being true.
As for universal priors, the existence of many incompatible possible (positive) beliefs in one space (such that only one can be true) gives a strong prior that any given such belief is false. If I have only two possible beliefs and no other information about them, then it only takes one bit of evidence—enough to rule out half the options—to decide which belief is likely true. If I have 1024 possible beliefs and no other evidence, it takes 10 bits of evidence to decide which is true. If I conduct an experiment that finds that belief 216 +/- 16 is true, I’ve narrowed my range of options from 1024 to 33, a gain of just less than 5 bits of evidence. Ruling out one more option gives the last of that 5th bit. You might think that eliminating ~96.8% of the possible options sounds good, but it’s only half of the necessary evidence. I’d need to perform another experiment that can eliminate just as large a percentage of the remaining values to determine the correct belief.
Rooney, as discussed in The Simple Truth I follow a correspondence theory of truth. I am also a Bayesian and a believer in Occam’s Razor. If a belief has no empirical consequences then it could receive no Bayesian confirmation and could not rise to my subjective attention. In principle there are many true beliefs for which I have no evidence, but in practice I can never know what these true beliefs are, or even focus on them enough to think them explicitly, because they are so vastly outnumbered by false beliefs for which I can find no evidence.
I, too, am nervous about having anticipated experience as the only criterion for truth and meaning. It seems to me that a statement can get its meaning either from the class of prior actions which make it true or from the class of future observations which its truth makes inevitable. We can’t do quantum mechanics with kets, but no bras. We can’t do Gentzen natural deduction with rules of elimination, but no rules of introduction. We can’t do Bayesian updating with observations, but no priors. And I claim that you can’t have a theory of meaning which deals only with consequences of statements being true but not with what actions put the universe into a state in which the statement becomes true.
This position of mine comes from my interpretation of the dissertation of Noam Zeilberger of CMU (2005, I think). Zeilberger’s main concern lies in Logic and Computer Science, but along the way he discusses theories of truth implicit in the work of Martin-Lof and Dummett.
Perplexed, I’m not sure I understood what you meant by
Or if I agree with it at all. Wouldn’t statements about what actions make certain statements true simply be part of the first category? I don’t see a problem with only having statements and their consequences. I see you’ve made this comment 12 years ago, so I don’t know how you would stand on this today.
That seems obviously correct. However, unless you pursue knowledge for its own sake, you should probably not be overly concerned with preserving past truths—unless they are going to impact on future decisions.
Of course, the decisions of a future superintelligence might depend on all kinds of historical minutae that we don’t regard as important. So maybe we should preserve those truths we regard as insignificant to us for it. However, today, probably relatively few are enslaved to future superintelligences—and even then, it isn’t clear that this is what they would want us to do.
An explicit belief that you would not allow yourself to hold under these conditions would be that the tree which falls in the forest makes a sound—because no one heard it, and because we can’t sense it afterwards, whether it made sound or not had no empirical consequence.
Every time I have seen this philosophical question posed on lesswrong, the two sophists that were arguing about it were in agreement that a sound would be produced (under the physical definition of the word), so I’d be really surprised if you could let go of that belief.
Hm, yeah. The trouble is how the doctrine handles deductive logic—for example, the belief that a falling tree makes vibrations in the air when the laws of physics say so is really a direct consequence of part of physics. The correct answer definitely appears to be that you can apply logic, and so the doctrine should be not to believe in something when there is no Bayesian evidence that differentiates it from some alternative.
While I fully agree with the principle of the article, something stuck out to me about your comment:
What I noticed was that you were basically defining a universal prior for beliefs, as much more likely false than true. From what I’ve read about Bayesian analysis, a universal prior is nearly undefinable, so after thinking about it a while, I came up with this basic counterargument:
You say that true beliefs are vastly outnumbered by false beliefs, but I say, how could you know of the existence of all these false beliefs, unless each one had a converse, a true belief opposing it that you first had some evidence for? For otherwise, you wouldn’t know whether it was true or false.
You may then say that most true beliefs don’t just have a converse. They also have many related false beliefs opposing them. But I would say, those are merely the converses that spring from the connections of that true belief with its many related true beliefs.
By this, I hope I’ve offered evidence that a fifty-fifty universal T/F prior is at least as likely as one considering most unconsidered ideas to be false. (And I would describe my further thoughts if I thought they would be useful here, but, silly me, I’m replying to a post from almost 8 years ago.)
If you have an arbitrary proposition—a random sequence of symbols constrained only by the grammar of whatever language you’re using—then perhaps it’s about equally likely to be true or false, since for each proposition p there’s a corresponding proposition not p of similar complexity.
But the “beliefs” people are mostly interested in are things like these:
There is exactly one god, who created the universe and watches over us; he likes forgiveness, incense-burning, and choral music, and hates murder, atheism and same-sex marriage.
Two nearby large objects, whatever they are, will exert an attractive force on one another proportional to the mass of each and inversely proportional to the square of the distance between them.
and the negations of these are much less interesting because they say so much less:
Either there is no god or there are multiple gods, or else there is one god but it either didn’t create the universe or doesn’t watch over us—or else there is one god, who created the universe and watches over us, but its preferences are not exactly the ones stated above.
If you have two nearby objects, whatever force there may be between them is not perfectly accurately described by saying it’s proportional to their masses, inversely proportional to the square of the distance, and unaffected by exactly what they’re made of.
So: yeah, sure, there are ways to pick a “random” belief and be pretty sure it’s correct (just say “it isn’t the case that” followed by something very specific) but if what you’re picking are things like scientific theories or religious doctrines or political parties then I think it’s reasonable to say that the great majority of possible beliefs are wrong, because the only beliefs we’re actually interested in are the quite specific ones.
I don’t think “converse” is the word you’re looking for here—possibly “complement” or “negation” in the sense that (A || ~A) is true for all A—but I get what you’re saying. Converse might even be the right word for that; vocabulary is not my forte.
If you take the statement “most beliefs are false” as given, then “the negation of most beliefs is true” is trivially true but adds no new information. You’re treating positive and negative beliefs as though they’re the same, and that’s absolutely not true. In the words of this post, a positive belief provides enough information to anticipate an experience. A negative belief does not (assuming there are more than two possible beliefs). If you define “anything except that one specific experience” as “an experience”, then you can define a negative belief as a belief, but at that point I think you’re actually falling into exactly the trap expressed here.
If you replace “belief” with “statement that is mutually incompatible with all other possible statements that provide the same amount of information about its category” (which is a possibly-too-narrow alternative; unpacking words is hard sometimes) then “true statements that are mutually incompatible with all other possible statements that provide the same amount of information about their category are vastly outnumbered by false statements that are mutually incompatible with all other possible statements that provide the same amount of information about their category” is something the I anticipate you would find true. You and Eliezer do not anticipate a different percentage of possible “statements that are mutually incompatible with all other possible statements that provide the same amount of information about their category” being true.
As for universal priors, the existence of many incompatible possible (positive) beliefs in one space (such that only one can be true) gives a strong prior that any given such belief is false. If I have only two possible beliefs and no other information about them, then it only takes one bit of evidence—enough to rule out half the options—to decide which belief is likely true. If I have 1024 possible beliefs and no other evidence, it takes 10 bits of evidence to decide which is true. If I conduct an experiment that finds that belief 216 +/- 16 is true, I’ve narrowed my range of options from 1024 to 33, a gain of just less than 5 bits of evidence. Ruling out one more option gives the last of that 5th bit. You might think that eliminating ~96.8% of the possible options sounds good, but it’s only half of the necessary evidence. I’d need to perform another experiment that can eliminate just as large a percentage of the remaining values to determine the correct belief.