On first glance your post looked like it was written by someone who lacks the ability to write clearly. At second glance it looks like it’s simply the product of deconstrutivist thinking and therefore not easily accessible.
I’m not sure that the way a few terms get used here is clear to you.
Economists started to speak about rational agents when they mean an agent that optimizes it’s actions according to an utility function. In those models it’s not important whether or not the agent has reasons for his decisions that he can articulate. On LW we use a notion of rationality that’s derived from that idea. Rationality is using a systemized process which has maximizes utility.
In retrospect I’m not sure whether that’s a good way to use the word, but it’s the way it’s evolved in this community. Here it’s not about engaging in an action that can be rationalized.
Parables do happen to be a nice tool but it’s a tool that’s not easily understood. Cognitive Science suggests that our naive intuitions about what parables do are not good.
Eliezer recently wrote on facebook:
I don’t know the status of informed debate on whether there was a real person corresponding to Buddha at the start of Buddhism, but if there was, telling the mythology as if Buddha stood up from under a tree containing the entire idea, and furthermore woke up with the ability to explain it using parables that people needed to have faith in and would only fully appreciate years later, did a tremendous disservice to Buddhism.
The concept that deep parables do exist and do things with time lags of a year does get acknowledged by Eliezer. On the other hand we lack any good theory.
If you read HPMOR with a critical eye you see that it’s full of parables.
The problem of parables is that it’s hard to talk about them directly.
Also, I’d like to steer away from a debate on the question of whether “deep parables” exist. Let’s ask directly, “are the parables here on LW deep?” Are they effective?
Why is it difficult to talk about parables directly? We have the word and the abstract concept. Seems like a good start.
I feel like you’ve pointed out what is at least a genuine inconsistency in purpose. The point of this article was not meant to subvert any discussion of economic rationality but rather to focus discussions of intelligence on more universally acceptable models of cognition.
Because most people think that when they read an article they either agree or disagree and that’s pretty clear the moment they read the article.
The idea that the article contains a parable that creates cognitive change with a time lack of a day, week, month or year isn’t in the common understanding of cognition.
It’s not a phenomena that’s well studied.
That means there a lot of claims on the subject for which people would want proof but no scientific studies to back up those claims.
I just read Dune and it contains the description of a character:
It was obvious that Fenring seldom did anything he felt to be unnecessary, or used two words where one would do, or held himself to a single meaning in a single phrase.
Speaking in that way where phrases generally have more than one meaning is not easy when you try to make complex arguments that are defensible.
I think I must have explained myself poorly … you don’t have to take my subjective experience or my observations as proof of anything on the subject of parables or on cognition. I agree that double entendre can make complex arguments less defensible, but would caution that it may never be completely eliminated from natural language because of the way discourse communities are believed to function.
Specifically, what subject contains many claims for which there is little proof? Are we talking now about literary analysis?
If you also mean to refer to the many claims about the mechanisms of cognition that lack a well founded neuro-biological foundation, there are several source materials informing my opinion on the subject. I understand that the lack experimentally verifiable results in the field of cognition seems troubling at first glance. For the purposes of streamlining the essay, I assumed a relationship between cognition and intelligence by which intelligence can only be achieved through cognition. Whether this inherently cements the concept of intelligence into the unverifiable annals of natural language, I gladly leave up to each reader to decide. Based on my sense of how the concepts are used here on LW, intelligence and cognition are not completely well-defined in such a way that they could be implemented in strictly rational terms.
On first glance your post looked like it was written by someone who lacks the ability to write clearly. At second glance it looks like it’s simply the product of deconstrutivist thinking and therefore not easily accessible.
I’m not sure that the way a few terms get used here is clear to you.
Economists started to speak about rational agents when they mean an agent that optimizes it’s actions according to an utility function. In those models it’s not important whether or not the agent has reasons for his decisions that he can articulate. On LW we use a notion of rationality that’s derived from that idea. Rationality is using a systemized process which has maximizes utility.
In retrospect I’m not sure whether that’s a good way to use the word, but it’s the way it’s evolved in this community. Here it’s not about engaging in an action that can be rationalized.
Parables do happen to be a nice tool but it’s a tool that’s not easily understood. Cognitive Science suggests that our naive intuitions about what parables do are not good.
Eliezer recently wrote on facebook:
The concept that deep parables do exist and do things with time lags of a year does get acknowledged by Eliezer. On the other hand we lack any good theory. If you read HPMOR with a critical eye you see that it’s full of parables.
The problem of parables is that it’s hard to talk about them directly.
Also, I’d like to steer away from a debate on the question of whether “deep parables” exist. Let’s ask directly, “are the parables here on LW deep?” Are they effective?
LW is quite diverse. There are a lot of different people with different views.
That alone is not an obstacle necessarily. We must establish what these views have in common and how they differ in structure and content.
Why is it difficult to talk about parables directly? We have the word and the abstract concept. Seems like a good start.
I feel like you’ve pointed out what is at least a genuine inconsistency in purpose. The point of this article was not meant to subvert any discussion of economic rationality but rather to focus discussions of intelligence on more universally acceptable models of cognition.
Because most people think that when they read an article they either agree or disagree and that’s pretty clear the moment they read the article.
The idea that the article contains a parable that creates cognitive change with a time lack of a day, week, month or year isn’t in the common understanding of cognition. It’s not a phenomena that’s well studied.
That means there a lot of claims on the subject for which people would want proof but no scientific studies to back up those claims.
I just read Dune and it contains the description of a character:
Speaking in that way where phrases generally have more than one meaning is not easy when you try to make complex arguments that are defensible.
I think I must have explained myself poorly … you don’t have to take my subjective experience or my observations as proof of anything on the subject of parables or on cognition. I agree that double entendre can make complex arguments less defensible, but would caution that it may never be completely eliminated from natural language because of the way discourse communities are believed to function.
Specifically, what subject contains many claims for which there is little proof? Are we talking now about literary analysis?
If you also mean to refer to the many claims about the mechanisms of cognition that lack a well founded neuro-biological foundation, there are several source materials informing my opinion on the subject. I understand that the lack experimentally verifiable results in the field of cognition seems troubling at first glance. For the purposes of streamlining the essay, I assumed a relationship between cognition and intelligence by which intelligence can only be achieved through cognition. Whether this inherently cements the concept of intelligence into the unverifiable annals of natural language, I gladly leave up to each reader to decide. Based on my sense of how the concepts are used here on LW, intelligence and cognition are not completely well-defined in such a way that they could be implemented in strictly rational terms.
However, your thoughts on this are welcome.