Commented on EA under sibling comment. Sorry, it wasn’t meant as a personal attack, although it probably seems so. Sorry again.
It didn’t, because you couldn’t even if you wanted to. You don’t know me personally so why would I assume you were attacking me personally? I was merely trying to state a terminological disagreement in an attempt to change the readers hidden inference.
To me it seems that pragmatism without accurate beliefs is a bit like running across a minefield.
This is not what philosophical pragmatism is about. With pragmatism you learn what is useful which in 99.999% of cases will be the thing thats accurate. Note that I said:
Do people realize that you can’t always do both? [emphasis added]
But philosophy is all about the edge cases. What do you do when there is knowledge that is dangerous for humanity’s survival? Do you learn things that are probably memetic hazards? Realism says ‘yes’, Pragmatism says ‘no’. Pragmatism is about ‘winning’, realism is about ‘truth’. If somehow you can show that these clearly opposed philosophies are actually reconcilable you will win all thephilosophy awards. Until that time, I choose winning.
OK, thanks for explanation. The part about avoiding memetic hazards… seems like a valuable thing to do, but also seems to me that in practice most attempts to avoid memetic hazards have second-order effects. (Obvious counter-argument: if there are successful cases of avoiding memetic hazards that do not have side effects, I would probably not know about them. An important part of keeping a secret is never mentioning that there is a secret.)
But this would be a debate for another day. Maybe an entire field of research: how to communicate infohazards. (If you found it, there is a chance other people will, too. How can you decrease that probability, without doing things that will likely blow back later.)
In the meanwhile, if in most cases the accurate thing is the useful thing, and if we don’t know how to handle the remaining cases, I feel okay going for the accurate thing. (This is probably easier for me, because I personally don’t do anything important on a large scale, so I don’t have to worry about accidentally destroying humanity.)
It didn’t, because you couldn’t even if you wanted to. You don’t know me personally so why would I assume you were attacking me personally? I was merely trying to state a terminological disagreement in an attempt to change the readers hidden inference.
This is not what philosophical pragmatism is about. With pragmatism you learn what is useful which in 99.999% of cases will be the thing thats accurate. Note that I said:
But philosophy is all about the edge cases. What do you do when there is knowledge that is dangerous for humanity’s survival? Do you learn things that are probably memetic hazards? Realism says ‘yes’, Pragmatism says ‘no’. Pragmatism is about ‘winning’, realism is about ‘truth’. If somehow you can show that these clearly opposed philosophies are actually reconcilable you will win all the philosophy awards. Until that time, I choose winning.
OK, thanks for explanation. The part about avoiding memetic hazards… seems like a valuable thing to do, but also seems to me that in practice most attempts to avoid memetic hazards have second-order effects. (Obvious counter-argument: if there are successful cases of avoiding memetic hazards that do not have side effects, I would probably not know about them. An important part of keeping a secret is never mentioning that there is a secret.)
But this would be a debate for another day. Maybe an entire field of research: how to communicate infohazards. (If you found it, there is a chance other people will, too. How can you decrease that probability, without doing things that will likely blow back later.)
In the meanwhile, if in most cases the accurate thing is the useful thing, and if we don’t know how to handle the remaining cases, I feel okay going for the accurate thing. (This is probably easier for me, because I personally don’t do anything important on a large scale, so I don’t have to worry about accidentally destroying humanity.)