Re all your comments, do you want to attempt to debate these matters to a rational conclusion? I don’t think we’re going to reach a quick conclusion/agreement and I don’t know if you’re interested enough to make a serious effort at an organized, persistent-over-time discussion.
A common discussion failure case is something like someone decides (often around when they start losing the argument) that the other guy’s messages are low quality and not worth engaging with further. Another is there are too many relevant tangents, so I’ll just stop discussing. I’d like mutual agreement in advance not to do those, as well as some discussion of appropriate discussion methodology. Otherwise, due to large inferential distance issues, I wouldn’t expect us to get anywhere substantial and would prefer to abort at the start rather than have the discussion end in the middle.
On the basis of past discussions with you, I suspect that when you say “debate these matters to a rational conclusion” you may mean something like “commit to never ever deciding that the discussion is no longer providing anyone with enough enlightenment to be worth the effort involved”. And the answer is: no, I do not want to make any such commitment, and I don’t think anyone ever should, because it amounts to undertaking to give a potentially limitless amount of time and effort to something of finite value. (I doubt that anyone else here will be willing to make such a commitment either. If that’s truly something you require in order to have a discussion then I think that’s functionally equivalent to not being interested in discussion. Of course you don’t have to be interested in discussion! But in that case maybe you should say so up front.)
My position on that methodological question has not changed appreciably since a previous discussion we had, though of course what you’re wanting now is not necessarily the same as what you wanted then and so my opinion of what you want now might differ from my opinion about what you wanted then.
I’d be interested if anyone has any other attempts at solving the same problem that could be used instead.
I am interested in discussion, but not one plagued by certain problems (summarized briefly above re arbitrarily ending discussions in the middle without explanation or resolution). If you will acknowledge the problems are a real concern, we can talk about potential rational ways to address them which aren’t overly burdensome to anyone. Do those problems concern you too? Would you like to do anything to address them if it wasn’t too expensive? If not, why?
an “impasse”, here, is anything that stops the original discussion proceeding fruitfully;
when you encounter one, you should switch to discussing the impasse;
that discussion may also reach an impasse, which you deal with the same way;
it’s OK to give up unilaterally when you accumulate enough impasses-while-dealing-with-impasses-while-dealing-with-impasses;
you propose that a good minimum would be a chain of five or more impasses.
I think only a small minority of discussions are so important as to justify a commitment to continuing until the fifth chained impasse.
I do agree that there’s a genuine problem you’re trying to solve with this stuff, but I think your cure is very much worse than the disease. My own feeling is that for all but the most important discussions nothing special is needed; if anything, I think there are bigger losses from people feeling unable to walk away from unproductive discussions than from people walking away when there was still useful progress to be made, and so I’d expect that measures to make it harder to walk away will on balance do more harm than good.
(Not necessarily; perhaps there are things one could do that make premature walking-away harder but don’t make not-premature walking-away harder. I don’t know of any such things, and the phenomenon you alluded to earlier, that premature walking-away often feels like fully justified walking away to the person doing it, makes it harder to contrive them.)
I also think that, in practice, if A thinks B is being a bozo then having made a commitment to continue discussion past that point often won’t result in A continuing; they may well just leave despite the commitment. (And may be right to.) Or they may continue, but adding resentment at being obliged to keep arguing with a bozo to whatever other things made them want to leave, and the ensuing discussion is not very likely to be fruitful.
I guess I haven’t yet addressed one question you asked: would I like to address the premature-ending problem if it weren’t too expensive? If there were a magical spell that would arrange that henceforth discussions wouldn’t end when (1) further discussion would in fact be fruitful and (2) the benefits of that discussion would exceed the costs, for both parties—then yes, I think I’d be happy for that spell to be cast. But I am super-skeptical about actually possible measures to address the problem, because I think the opposite problem (of effort going into discussions that are not in fact productive enough to justify that effort) is actually a bigger problem, and short of outright magic it seems very difficult to improve one of those things without making the other worse.
I’m glad that you seem to have largely understood me and also given a substantive response about your main concern. That is fairly atypical. I’m also glad that you agree that there are important issues in this general area.
I will agree to discuss to a length 3 impasse chain with you (rather than 5) if that’d solve the problem (I doubt it). I’d also prefer to discuss impasse chains and discussion ending issues (which I consider a very important topic) over the conjunction fallacy or law of least effort, but I’m open to either.
I think you’re overestimating how much effort it takes to create length 5 impasse chains, but I know that’s not the main issue. He’s an example of a length 5 impasse chain which took exactly 5 messages, and all but the first were quite short. It wasn’t a significant burden for me (especially given my interest in the topic of discussion methods themselves) and in fact was considerably faster and easier for me than some other things I’ve done in the past (i try very hard to be open to critical discussion and am interested in policies to enable that). If it had taken more than 5 messages, that would have only been because the other guy said some things I thought were actually good messages.
Discussion ending policies and the problems with walking away with no explanation are a problem that particularly interests me and I’d write a lot about regardless of what you did or didn’t do. I actually just wrote a bunch about it this morning before seeing your comment. By contrast, I don’t want to discuss the LoLE stuff with you without some sort of precommitment re discussion ending policies because I think your messages about LoLE were low quality and explaining the errors is not the type of writing I’d choose just for my own benefit. (This kind of statement is commonly hard to explain without offending people, which is awkward because I do want to tell people why I’m not responding, and it often would only take one sentence. And I don’t think it should be offense: we disagree, and i expect your initial perspective is that there were quality issues with what I wrote, so I expect symmetry on this point anyway, no big deal.) It’s specifically the discussions which start with symmetric beliefs that the other guy is wrong in ways I already understand, or is saying low quality stuff, or otherwise isn’t going to offer significant value in the early phases of the discussion, that especially merit using approaches like impasse chains to enable discussion. The alternative to impasse chains is often no discussion. But I’d rather offer the impasse chain method over just ignoring people (though due to risk of offending people, sometimes I just say nothing – but at least I have a publicly posted debate policy and paths forward policy, as well as the impasse chain article, so if anyone really cares they can find out about and ask for options like that.)
As a next step, you can read and reply to – or not – what I wrote anyway about impasse chains today. Rationally Ending Discussions
You may also, if you want, indicate your good faith interest in the topic of too much effort going into bad discussions, and how that relates to rationally ending discussions. If you do, I expect that’ll be enough for me to write something about it even with no formal policy. (I didn’t say much about that in the Rationally Ending Discussions linked in the previous paragraph, but I do have ideas about it.) Anyone else may also indicate this interest or request a discussion to agreement or impasse chain with me (i’m open to them on a wide range of topics including basically anything about rationality, and i don’t think we’ll have much trouble finding a point of disagreement if we try to).
I think the whole “impasse chains” mechanism is unhelpful, and as you suspected I am not much more enthusiastic about using it with length 3 than with length 5. (Though if I were somehow required to have a discussion on those terms with either length 3 or length 5, I would indeed prefer length 3.)
The example you link to is interesting, but to me it seems like a fine example of how your approach doesn’t work well! Not just because in that case the discussion ended up getting terminated as unconstructive—of course that is inevitable given why you linked to it at all. But:
The “impasse chain” concept didn’t end up actually being useful. The other person did things you found unhelpful; you declared an “impasse”; and then every time he responded you just stonewalled him incremented your impasse count until it reached 5.
… Even though the responses you reacted to in this way were (so it seems to me) clearly responsive to the things you said constituted an impasse; e.g., asking for examples of what you were wanting with the arithmetic-expression tree.
It’s entirely possible that the discussion was never going to be productive and so ending it was a good idea—but the particular complaints that provoked its ending seem strange to me. E.g., you asked him to “make a tree of 1-2+3” to see whether he understood the notion of tree you were using; while his first attempt was (1) wrong because he misread the formula and (2) garbled because he thought he could use indentation in a way that didn’t actually work, what he subsequently did was perfectly reasonable, especially in the context of “idea trees”. And while I don’t think he explained what he was saying about externalities super-clearly, I think his placement of those two propositions in the tree was quite reasonable.
So this has mostly served to confirm my initial opinion that having a discussion with some sort of impasse-chain-based rules for termination would not be any sort of improvement on (1) having a discussion whose ending condition is informal as usual or (2) not having a discussion at all.
As for whether you deign to respond to my comments about the actual topic of the post whose comments we’re in, that’s up to you. My (perhaps biased) evaluation of my own track record is that I am not in the habit of abandoning discussions because I’m losing the argument. (I do sometimes lose interest for other reasons, and I don’t think there is anything wrong with that.) But if you reckon my comments are low-quality and I’m likely to bail prematurely, you’ll have to decide for yourself whether that’s a risk you want to take.
But if you reckon my comments are low-quality and I’m likely to bail prematurely, you’ll have to decide for yourself whether that’s a risk you want to take.
I have decided and I don’t want to take that risk in this particular case.
But I believe I’m socially prohibited from saying so or explaining the analysis I used to reach that conclusion.
This is a significant issue for me because I have a similar judgment regarding most responses I receive here (and at most forums). But it’s problematic to just not reply to most people while providing no explanation. But it’s also problematic to violate social norms and offend and confuse people with meta discussion about e.g. what evidence they’ve inadvertently provided that they’re irrational or dumb. And often the analysis is complex and relies on lots of unshared background knowledge.
I also think I’m socially prohibited from raising this meta-problem, but I’m trying it anyway for a variety of reasons including that there are some signs that you may understand what I’m saying. Got any thoughts about it?
LW is less constrained than most places by such social norms. However, to some extent those social norms are in place because breaking them tends to have bad results on net, and my experience is that a significant fraction of people who want to break them may think they are doing it to be frank and open and honest and discuss things rationally without letting social norms get in the way, but actually are being assholes in just the sort of way people who violate social norms usually are: they enjoy insulting people, or want to do it as a social-status move, or whatever. And a significant fraction of people who say they’re happy for norms to be broken “at” them may think they are mature and sensible enough not to be needlessly offended when someone else says “I think you’re pretty stupid” (or whatever), but actually get bent out of shape as soon as that happens.
If it’s any consolation, I have my own opinions about the likely outcome of such a discussion, some of which I too might be socially prohibited from expressing out loud :-).
I hereby grant you and everyone else license to break social norms at me. (This is not a license to break rational norms, including rational moral norms, which coincide with social norms.) I propose trying this until I get bent out of shape once. I do have past experience with such things including on 4chan-like forums.
I agree with you about common cases.
What I don’t see in your comment is a solution. Do you regard this as an important, open problem?
I think “this” in your last sentence is underspecified.
It is unfortunate that there are things that might be useful to say (because they convey potentially useful information) but that one usually can’t or shouldn’t because (1) they might cause offence or (2) they violate norms designed to reduce such offence-causing or (3) they would harm others’ social status in a way we don’t generally want people to be able to harm others’ social status.
One “could” solve that problem by radically changing human nature such that people no longer get easily offended and can no longer be manipulated into changing their social-status judgements in inappropriate ways. Of course “could” is in scare-quotes there because no plausible way of changing human nature in such a way is in sight. (And if there were, I don’t think I would want to trust either you or me with the human-nature-changing apparatus.)
Otherwise, I’m not sure what a solution to the problem might look like. People are offendable and manipulable, and if there’s a way to design social norms to stop those buttons getting pushed excessively without sometimes preventing what might have been useful communication, I haven’t seen any sign of it. And, as with the issue of wasting time on unproductive conversations / ending conversations prematurely, my feeling is that the problem you’re focusing on is likely the wrong one because right now more harm is being done by rudeness and status-fights than by being unable to say otherwise-useful things that risk offending or status-fighting, and interventions that make those things more sayable will (in my view) likely do more harm than good.
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Since you (more or less) asked for it, here is the brief version of my norm-breaking explanation of why I fear that discussions between us might be less fruitful than one would hope: 1. Our past discussions have not led anywhere useful; my perception (which I’m sure differs from yours) is that you have repeatedly attempted to switch from discussing issues that actually interest me (about, e.g., how well broadly-Bayesian approaches work, and about Popper’s alleged refutation of empirical induction) to methodological issues (around e.g. what you call “paths forward”), and that you have repeatedly insisted that to discuss things with you others must adopt particular highly restrictive patterns of discussion which don’t look to me as if they actually improve the discourse. 2. My tentative interpretation of this, and of other interactions of yours that I’ve observed—and here comes the norm-breaking bit—is that on some level you aren’t really interested in discussion on an equal footing; you are looking for disciples not peers, you find discussion satisfactory only when you get to control the terms on which it happens, and when that doesn’t seem possible you generally choose to engage in status-attacks on the other parties instead of discussing on equal terms. I don’t think you are here on LW in order to have a discussion in which you and we might refine our ideas by correcting each others’ errors; I think you are here to demonstrate your superiority and hopefully pick up some new disciples. 3. I have not been convinced, by what I have read of your writing and seen of your debating, that you are the intellectual superior of everyone around you as you seem to think you are, and in particular I am not convinced that you are my intellectual superior in ways that would justify treating you as a guru, nor that you are possessed of insights valuable enough that jumping through the methodological hoops you hold out would lead to gains that would justify the frustration involved.
Now, obviously I could be wrong about any or all of that; and even if I’m not, it’s all perfectly compatible with your having some interesting ideas to share, useful critiques of things I currently believe, new information I don’t have, etc. So I’m perfectly happy to engage with you on equal terms under something like the LW-usual norms of discussion; but jumping through your hoops would (1) be more annoying than any gains would justify, and (2) incentivize what I see as your harmful uncooperative and status-seeking behaviour patterns.
(If you disagree with my characterization of you—which you may well do—and care enough about changing it to take some time trying to do so—which I suspect you don’t—then things that might change my mind include (1) providing recent examples where you engaged in discussion with someone who disagreed with you and decided that they were right and you were wrong and (2) providing recent examples where you conceded that someone else you were in discussion with was smarter than you, at least in some specific area relevant to the discussion. Or even, though of course it would be much less evidence, (3) providing recent examples where you had a discussion with someone you didn’t already know to agree with you about most things and didn’t attempt to lay down strict conditions they had to follow in order to continue the discussion. For the avoidance of doubt, I am not at all suggesting that you’re obliged to do either of those things, nor that your not doing so would be strong evidence that my characterization of you is correct.)
I’d be more interested in discussing Popper and Bayes stuff than your LoLE comments. Is there any literature which adequately explains your position on induction, which you would appreciate criticism of?
FYI I do not remember our past conversations in a way that I can connect any claims/arguments/etc to you individually. I also don’t remember if our conversations ended by either of our choice or were still going when moderators suppressed my participation (slack ban with no warning for mirroring my conversations to my forum, allegedly violating privacy, as well as repeated moderator intervention to prevent me from posting to the LW1.0 website.)
I do not know of any literature that I am confident says the exact same things about induction as I would. (There might well be some literature I would completely agree with; my opinions are not super-idiosyncratic. In this context, though, the relevant thing is probably what I think about what Popper thinks about induction, which is a much more specific topic, or even what I think about what you think about induction, equally specific but much less likely to be already addressed in the literature.)
We had some discussion before about Popper’s argument where—this summary should not be taken too literally, since its main purpose is to identify the argument in question—he gives a certain additive decomposition of Pr(A|B) and calls one of the addends “deductive support” and the other “inductive support”; he then proves that the “inductive support” is a negative number, and says that therefore induction is nonsense. (I think I looked at that argument in particular because you said you found it convincing.) I find many things about his argument unsatisfactory; the most important, and the one I focused on before, is that I think all the work is being done by the names he uses (“deductive support”, “inductive support”) and I don’t think the names accurately correspond to anything in reality. That is: his mathematical calculations are fine, it’s really true that s() = s() + s(), but there’s no good reason for giving the two addends the names he does, and if you just called them “support term 1″ and “support term 2” then no one would think that his argument offered anything remotely like a refutation of induction. He’s implicitly assuming some proposition like “support term 2 is the best characterization of what empirical evidence B gives for A”; he gives no justification for anything like that, and without it his argument doesn’t make any real contact with what he’s trying to prove.
This discussion was on Slack (which unfortunately hides all but the most recent messages unless you pay them, which LW doesn’t). We had at least two other discussions going on concurrently, about whether our opinions about what propositions are true should be binary or something more like probabilistic and about the overall merits of “critical rationalism”. The discussion largely broke down (in ways I am quite sure I saw as your fault and you saw as mine, which I don’t propose to go into right now because this comment is long enough already) and then you got banned from the slack. At the point when it ended, I was happy to continue discussing Popper’s argument or probabilistic beliefs or critical rationalism, but you were (I think) only interested in discussing two things: paths-forward-type methodologies, and how I was allegedly being an unsatisfactory participant in the discussion.
I don’t think this comment thread would be a great venue for discussion of critical rationalism generally, of Popper’s argument against induction, or of the idea that our opinions of propositions should generally be quantitative rather than binary (or, more strongly, that something like the language and techniques of probability theory are appropriate for quantifying them), what with it being nominally a discussion of how “the law of least effort contributes to the conjunction fallacy”. If you are interested in pursuing any of those discussions, maybe I can make a post summarizing my position and we can proceed in comments there. But, fair warning, I will not have any interest in diverting the discussion to matters methodological, and while I will gladly undertake to argue in good faith I will not be giving any of the specific undertakings you frequently ask for.
This discussion was on Slack (which unfortunately hides all but the most recent messages unless you pay them, which LW doesn’t).
Well, fortunately, I did save copies of those discussions. You could find them in the FI archives if you wanted to. (Not blaming you at all but I do think this is kinda funny and I don’t regret my actions.)
I don’t plan to review the 3 year old discussions and I don’t want to re-raise anything that either one of us saw negatively.
If you are interested in pursuing any of those discussions, maybe I can make a post summarizing my position and we can proceed in comments there.
Sure but I’d actually mostly prefer literature, partly because I want something more comprehensive (and more edited/polished) and partly because I want something more suitable for quoting and responding to as a way to present and engage with rival, mainstream viewpoints which would be acceptable to the general public.
Is there any literature that’s close enough (not exact) or which would work with a few modifications/caveats/qualifiers/etc? Or put together a position mostly from selections from a few sources? E.g. I don’t exactly agree with Popper and Deutsch but I can provide selections of their writing that I consider close enough to be a good starting point for discussion of my views.
I also am broadly in favor of using literature in discussions, and trying to build on and engage with existing writing, instead of rewriting everything.
If you can’t do something involving literature, why not? Is your position non-standard? Are you inadequately familiar with inductivist literature? (Yes answers are OK but I think relevant to deciding how to proceed.)
And yes feel free to start a new topic or request that I do instead of nesting further comments.
what I think about what Popper thinks about induction
I actually think the basics of induction would be a better topic. What problems is it trying to solve? How does it solve it? What steps does one do to perform an induction? If you claim the future resembles the past, how do you answer the basic logical fact that the future always resembles the past in infinitely many ways and differs in infinitely many ways (in other words, infinitely many patterns continue and infinitely many are broken, no matter what happens), etc.? What’s the difference, if any, between evidence that doesn’t contradict a claim and evidence that supports it? My experience with induction discussions is a major sticking point is vagueness and malleability re what the inductivist side is actually claiming, and a lack of clear answers to initial questions like those above, and I don’t actually know where to find any books which lay out clear answers to this stuff.
Another reason for using literature is I find lots of inductivists don’t know about some of the problems in the field, and sometimes deny them. Whereas a good book would recognize at least some of the problems are real problems and try to address them. I have seen inductivist authors do that before – e.g. acknowledging that any finite data set underdetermines theory or pattern – just not comprehensively enough. I don’t like to try to go over known ground with people who don’t understand the ideas on their own side of the debate – and do that in the form of a debate where they are arguing with me and trying to win. They shouldn’t even have a side yet.
I think I looked at that argument in particular because you said you found it convincing
FYI I’m doubtful that I said that. It’s not what convinced me. My guess is I picked it because someone asked for math. I’d prefer not to focus on it atm.
I also saved a copy of much of the Slack discussion. (Not all of it—there was a lot—but substantial chunks of the bits that involved me.) Somehow, I managed to save those discussions without posting other people’s writing on the public internet without their consent.
You do not have my permission (or I suspect anyone else’s) to copy our writing on LW to your own website. Please remove it and commit to not doing it again. (If you won’t, I suspect you might be heading for another ban.)
(I haven’t looked yet at the more substantive stuff in your comment. Will do shortly. But please stop with the copyright violations already. Sheesh.)
Before October 2014, copyright law permitted use of a work for the purpose of criticism and review, but it did not allow quotation for other more general purposes. Now, however, the law allows the use of quotation more broadly. So, there are two exceptions to be aware of, one specifically for criticism and review and a more general exception for quotation. Both exceptions apply to all types of copyright material, such as books, music, films, etc.
Quoting is a copyright violation in every jurisdiction I know of, if it’s done en masse.
“en masse” is vague.
Wow, you know about a lot of different legal frameworks. How does copyright violation work in Tuvalu and Mauritius? I’ve always wondered.
-- general comments --
It’s trivial to see that your idea of quoting is incomplete because most instances of quoting you see aren’t copyright violations (like news, youtube commentary, academic papers, whatever).
However, you obviously care about copyright violations deeply, so I suggest you get in touch with google too; they are worse offenders.
Since you care about *COPYRIGHT INFRINGEMENT* and not *BEING CRITICISED* surely this blatant infringement of your copyright is a much larger priority. The probability of someone seeing material which is infringing your copyright is orders of magnitude larger on google than on a small random website.
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Edit/update/mini-post-mortem: I made this post because of an emotional reaction to the post above it by @gjm, which I shouldn’t have done. Some points were fine, but I was sarcastic (“Wow, you …”) and treated @gjm’s ideas unfairly, e.g. by using language like “trivial” to make his ideas sound less reasonable than they might be (TBH IANAL so really it’s dishonest of me to act with such certainty). Those statements were socially calibrated (to some degree) to try and either upset/annoy gjm or impact stuff around social status. Since I’d woken up recently (like less than 30min before posting) and was emotional I should have known better than to post those bits (maybe I should have avoided posting at all). There’s also the last paragraph, “Since you care about …” part, which at best is an uncharitable interpretation and at worst is putting words in gjm’s mouth (which isn’t okay).
For those reasons I’d like to apologies to gjm for those parts. I feel it’d be dishonest to remove them so I’m adding this update instead.
Yep, “en masse” is vague, and what it turns out curi actually did—which is less drastic than what his use of the word “mirrored” and his past history with LW led me to assume—was not so very en masse as I feared. My apologies, again, for not checking.
I didn’t, of course, claim to know what happens in every jurisdiction; the point of my “in every jurisdiction I know of” was the reverse of what you’re taking it to be.
I don’t know anything much about the law in Tuvalu and Mauritius, but I believe they are both signatories to the Berne Convention, which means that their laws on copyright are probably similar to everyone else’s. The Berne Convention requires signatories to permit some quotation, and its test for what exceptions are OK doesn’t give a great deal of leeway to allow more (see e.g. https://www.keionline.org/copyright/berne-convention-exceptions-revisions), so the situation there is probably similar to that in the UK (which is where I happen to be and where the site you linked to is talking about).
The general rule about quoting in the UK is that you’re allowed to quote the minimum necessary (which is vague, but that’s not my fault, because the law is also vague). What I (wrongly) thought curi had done would not, I think, be regarded as the minimum necessary to achieve a reasonable goal. But, again, what he actually did is not what I guessed, and what he did is OK.
If someone sees something I wrote on Google and takes an interest in it, the most likely result is that they follow Google’s link and end up in the place where I originally wrote it, where they will see it in its original context. If someone sees something I wrote that curi has “mirrored” on his own site, the most likely result is that they see whatever curi has chosen to quote, along with his (frequently hostile) comments of which I may not even be aware since I am not a regular there, and comments from others there (again, likely hostile; again, of which I am not aware).
None of that means that curi shouldn’t be allowed to quote what I said (to whatever extent is required for reasonable criticism and review, etc.) but I hope it makes it clearer why I might be more annoyed by curi’s “mirroring” than Google’s.
(Thanks for the update; as it happens I didn’t see your comment until after you posted it. Not that there’s any reason why you need care, but I approve of how you handled that.)
I didn’t quote you en masse. I didn’t just dump all your posting history. I quoted some specific stuff related to my critical commentary. Did you even look?
I had not looked, at that point; I took “mirrored” to mean taking copies of whole discussions, which would imply copying other people’s writing en masse. I have looked, now. I agree that what you’ve put there so far is probably OK both legally and morally.
My apologies for being a bit twitchy on this point; I should maybe explain for the benefit of other readers that the last time curi came to LW, he did take a whole pile of discussion from the LW slack and copy it en masse to the publicly-visible internet, which is one reason why I thought it plausible he might have done the same this time.
Noted. (I take it “this one” means this post rather than requesting that I not acknowledge having read this comment.)
I don’t 100% promise to comply (e.g., if I see you saying something importantly false and no one else comments on it, I might do so) but I’ll leave your posts alone unless some need arises that trumps courtesy :-).
Since in connection with this you publicly slandered me over on your website, I will add that I consider your analysis there of my motives and purposes to be extremely wrong.
I think that attempting to discuss something as broad as “the basics of induction” might be problematic just because the topic is so broad. People mean a variety of different things by terms like “induction” or “inductivism” and there’s a great danger of talking past one another.
For instance, the sort of induction principle I would (tentatively) endorse doesn’t at first glance look like an induction principle at all: it’s something along the lines of “all else being equal, prefer simpler propositions”. There are lots of ways to do something along those lines, some are better than others, I don’t claim to know the One True Best Way to do it, but I think this is the right approach. This gets you something like induction because theories in which things change gratuitously tend to be more complex. But whether you would call me an inductivist, I don’t know. I am fairly sure we don’t disagree about everything in this area, and it’s quite possible that our relevant disagreements are not best thought of as disagreements about induction, as opposed to disagreements about (say) inference or probability or explanation or simplicity that have consequences for what we think about induction.
(My super-brief answers to your questions about induction, taking “induction” for this purpose to mean “the way I think we should use empirical evidence to arrive at generalized opinions”: It’s trying to solve the problem of how you discover things about the world that go beyond direct observations. “Solve” might be too strong a word, but it addresses it by giving a procedure that, if the world behaves in regular ways, will tend to move your beliefs into better correspondence with reality as you get more evidence. (It seems, so far, as if the world does behave in regular ways, but of course I am not taking that as anything like a deductive proof that this sort of procedure is correct; that would be circular.) You do it by (1) weighting your beliefs according to complexity in some fashion and then (2) adjusting them as new evidence comes in—in one idealized version of the process you do #1 according to a “universal prior” and #2 according to Bayes’ theorem, though in practice the universal prior is uncomputable and applying Bayes in difficult cases involves way too much computation, so you need to make do with approximations and heuristics. I do not, explicitly, claim that the future resembles the past (or, rather, I kinda do claim it, but not as an axiom but as an inductive generalization arrived at by the means under discussion); I prefer simpler explanations, and ones where the future resembles the past are often simpler. For evidence to support one claim over another, it needs to be more likely when the former claim is true than when the latter is; of course this doesn’t follow merely from its being consistent with the former claim. Most evidence is consistent with most claims.)
Re all your comments, do you want to attempt to debate these matters to a rational conclusion? I don’t think we’re going to reach a quick conclusion/agreement and I don’t know if you’re interested enough to make a serious effort at an organized, persistent-over-time discussion.
A common discussion failure case is something like someone decides (often around when they start losing the argument) that the other guy’s messages are low quality and not worth engaging with further. Another is there are too many relevant tangents, so I’ll just stop discussing. I’d like mutual agreement in advance not to do those, as well as some discussion of appropriate discussion methodology. Otherwise, due to large inferential distance issues, I wouldn’t expect us to get anywhere substantial and would prefer to abort at the start rather than have the discussion end in the middle.
On the basis of past discussions with you, I suspect that when you say “debate these matters to a rational conclusion” you may mean something like “commit to never ever deciding that the discussion is no longer providing anyone with enough enlightenment to be worth the effort involved”. And the answer is: no, I do not want to make any such commitment, and I don’t think anyone ever should, because it amounts to undertaking to give a potentially limitless amount of time and effort to something of finite value. (I doubt that anyone else here will be willing to make such a commitment either. If that’s truly something you require in order to have a discussion then I think that’s functionally equivalent to not being interested in discussion. Of course you don’t have to be interested in discussion! But in that case maybe you should say so up front.)
My position on that methodological question has not changed appreciably since a previous discussion we had, though of course what you’re wanting now is not necessarily the same as what you wanted then and so my opinion of what you want now might differ from my opinion about what you wanted then.
This is my proposed approach for unilateral discussion ending: https://www.elliottemple.com/essays/debates-and-impasse-chains
I’d be interested if anyone has any other attempts at solving the same problem that could be used instead.
I am interested in discussion, but not one plagued by certain problems (summarized briefly above re arbitrarily ending discussions in the middle without explanation or resolution). If you will acknowledge the problems are a real concern, we can talk about potential rational ways to address them which aren’t overly burdensome to anyone. Do those problems concern you too? Would you like to do anything to address them if it wasn’t too expensive? If not, why?
So, to summarize the proposal behind that link:
an “impasse”, here, is anything that stops the original discussion proceeding fruitfully;
when you encounter one, you should switch to discussing the impasse;
that discussion may also reach an impasse, which you deal with the same way;
it’s OK to give up unilaterally when you accumulate enough impasses-while-dealing-with-impasses-while-dealing-with-impasses;
you propose that a good minimum would be a chain of five or more impasses.
I think only a small minority of discussions are so important as to justify a commitment to continuing until the fifth chained impasse.
I do agree that there’s a genuine problem you’re trying to solve with this stuff, but I think your cure is very much worse than the disease. My own feeling is that for all but the most important discussions nothing special is needed; if anything, I think there are bigger losses from people feeling unable to walk away from unproductive discussions than from people walking away when there was still useful progress to be made, and so I’d expect that measures to make it harder to walk away will on balance do more harm than good.
(Not necessarily; perhaps there are things one could do that make premature walking-away harder but don’t make not-premature walking-away harder. I don’t know of any such things, and the phenomenon you alluded to earlier, that premature walking-away often feels like fully justified walking away to the person doing it, makes it harder to contrive them.)
I also think that, in practice, if A thinks B is being a bozo then having made a commitment to continue discussion past that point often won’t result in A continuing; they may well just leave despite the commitment. (And may be right to.) Or they may continue, but adding resentment at being obliged to keep arguing with a bozo to whatever other things made them want to leave, and the ensuing discussion is not very likely to be fruitful.
I guess I haven’t yet addressed one question you asked: would I like to address the premature-ending problem if it weren’t too expensive? If there were a magical spell that would arrange that henceforth discussions wouldn’t end when (1) further discussion would in fact be fruitful and (2) the benefits of that discussion would exceed the costs, for both parties—then yes, I think I’d be happy for that spell to be cast. But I am super-skeptical about actually possible measures to address the problem, because I think the opposite problem (of effort going into discussions that are not in fact productive enough to justify that effort) is actually a bigger problem, and short of outright magic it seems very difficult to improve one of those things without making the other worse.
I’m glad that you seem to have largely understood me and also given a substantive response about your main concern. That is fairly atypical. I’m also glad that you agree that there are important issues in this general area.
I will agree to discuss to a length 3 impasse chain with you (rather than 5) if that’d solve the problem (I doubt it). I’d also prefer to discuss impasse chains and discussion ending issues (which I consider a very important topic) over the conjunction fallacy or law of least effort, but I’m open to either.
I think you’re overestimating how much effort it takes to create length 5 impasse chains, but I know that’s not the main issue. He’s an example of a length 5 impasse chain which took exactly 5 messages, and all but the first were quite short. It wasn’t a significant burden for me (especially given my interest in the topic of discussion methods themselves) and in fact was considerably faster and easier for me than some other things I’ve done in the past (i try very hard to be open to critical discussion and am interested in policies to enable that). If it had taken more than 5 messages, that would have only been because the other guy said some things I thought were actually good messages.
Discussion ending policies and the problems with walking away with no explanation are a problem that particularly interests me and I’d write a lot about regardless of what you did or didn’t do. I actually just wrote a bunch about it this morning before seeing your comment. By contrast, I don’t want to discuss the LoLE stuff with you without some sort of precommitment re discussion ending policies because I think your messages about LoLE were low quality and explaining the errors is not the type of writing I’d choose just for my own benefit. (This kind of statement is commonly hard to explain without offending people, which is awkward because I do want to tell people why I’m not responding, and it often would only take one sentence. And I don’t think it should be offense: we disagree, and i expect your initial perspective is that there were quality issues with what I wrote, so I expect symmetry on this point anyway, no big deal.) It’s specifically the discussions which start with symmetric beliefs that the other guy is wrong in ways I already understand, or is saying low quality stuff, or otherwise isn’t going to offer significant value in the early phases of the discussion, that especially merit using approaches like impasse chains to enable discussion. The alternative to impasse chains is often no discussion. But I’d rather offer the impasse chain method over just ignoring people (though due to risk of offending people, sometimes I just say nothing – but at least I have a publicly posted debate policy and paths forward policy, as well as the impasse chain article, so if anyone really cares they can find out about and ask for options like that.)
As a next step, you can read and reply to – or not – what I wrote anyway about impasse chains today. Rationally Ending Discussions
You may also, if you want, indicate your good faith interest in the topic of too much effort going into bad discussions, and how that relates to rationally ending discussions. If you do, I expect that’ll be enough for me to write something about it even with no formal policy. (I didn’t say much about that in the Rationally Ending Discussions linked in the previous paragraph, but I do have ideas about it.) Anyone else may also indicate this interest or request a discussion to agreement or impasse chain with me (i’m open to them on a wide range of topics including basically anything about rationality, and i don’t think we’ll have much trouble finding a point of disagreement if we try to).
I think the whole “impasse chains” mechanism is unhelpful, and as you suspected I am not much more enthusiastic about using it with length 3 than with length 5. (Though if I were somehow required to have a discussion on those terms with either length 3 or length 5, I would indeed prefer length 3.)
The example you link to is interesting, but to me it seems like a fine example of how your approach doesn’t work well! Not just because in that case the discussion ended up getting terminated as unconstructive—of course that is inevitable given why you linked to it at all. But:
The “impasse chain” concept didn’t end up actually being useful. The other person did things you found unhelpful; you declared an “impasse”; and then every time he responded you just stonewalled him incremented your impasse count until it reached 5.
… Even though the responses you reacted to in this way were (so it seems to me) clearly responsive to the things you said constituted an impasse; e.g., asking for examples of what you were wanting with the arithmetic-expression tree.
It’s entirely possible that the discussion was never going to be productive and so ending it was a good idea—but the particular complaints that provoked its ending seem strange to me. E.g., you asked him to “make a tree of 1-2+3” to see whether he understood the notion of tree you were using; while his first attempt was (1) wrong because he misread the formula and (2) garbled because he thought he could use indentation in a way that didn’t actually work, what he subsequently did was perfectly reasonable, especially in the context of “idea trees”. And while I don’t think he explained what he was saying about externalities super-clearly, I think his placement of those two propositions in the tree was quite reasonable.
So this has mostly served to confirm my initial opinion that having a discussion with some sort of impasse-chain-based rules for termination would not be any sort of improvement on (1) having a discussion whose ending condition is informal as usual or (2) not having a discussion at all.
As for whether you deign to respond to my comments about the actual topic of the post whose comments we’re in, that’s up to you. My (perhaps biased) evaluation of my own track record is that I am not in the habit of abandoning discussions because I’m losing the argument. (I do sometimes lose interest for other reasons, and I don’t think there is anything wrong with that.) But if you reckon my comments are low-quality and I’m likely to bail prematurely, you’ll have to decide for yourself whether that’s a risk you want to take.
I have decided and I don’t want to take that risk in this particular case.
But I believe I’m socially prohibited from saying so or explaining the analysis I used to reach that conclusion.
This is a significant issue for me because I have a similar judgment regarding most responses I receive here (and at most forums). But it’s problematic to just not reply to most people while providing no explanation. But it’s also problematic to violate social norms and offend and confuse people with meta discussion about e.g. what evidence they’ve inadvertently provided that they’re irrational or dumb. And often the analysis is complex and relies on lots of unshared background knowledge.
I also think I’m socially prohibited from raising this meta-problem, but I’m trying it anyway for a variety of reasons including that there are some signs that you may understand what I’m saying. Got any thoughts about it?
LW is less constrained than most places by such social norms. However, to some extent those social norms are in place because breaking them tends to have bad results on net, and my experience is that a significant fraction of people who want to break them may think they are doing it to be frank and open and honest and discuss things rationally without letting social norms get in the way, but actually are being assholes in just the sort of way people who violate social norms usually are: they enjoy insulting people, or want to do it as a social-status move, or whatever. And a significant fraction of people who say they’re happy for norms to be broken “at” them may think they are mature and sensible enough not to be needlessly offended when someone else says “I think you’re pretty stupid” (or whatever), but actually get bent out of shape as soon as that happens.
If it’s any consolation, I have my own opinions about the likely outcome of such a discussion, some of which I too might be socially prohibited from expressing out loud :-).
I hereby grant you and everyone else license to break social norms at me. (This is not a license to break rational norms, including rational moral norms, which coincide with social norms.) I propose trying this until I get bent out of shape once. I do have past experience with such things including on 4chan-like forums.
I agree with you about common cases.
What I don’t see in your comment is a solution. Do you regard this as an important, open problem?
I think “this” in your last sentence is underspecified.
It is unfortunate that there are things that might be useful to say (because they convey potentially useful information) but that one usually can’t or shouldn’t because (1) they might cause offence or (2) they violate norms designed to reduce such offence-causing or (3) they would harm others’ social status in a way we don’t generally want people to be able to harm others’ social status.
One “could” solve that problem by radically changing human nature such that people no longer get easily offended and can no longer be manipulated into changing their social-status judgements in inappropriate ways. Of course “could” is in scare-quotes there because no plausible way of changing human nature in such a way is in sight. (And if there were, I don’t think I would want to trust either you or me with the human-nature-changing apparatus.)
Otherwise, I’m not sure what a solution to the problem might look like. People are offendable and manipulable, and if there’s a way to design social norms to stop those buttons getting pushed excessively without sometimes preventing what might have been useful communication, I haven’t seen any sign of it. And, as with the issue of wasting time on unproductive conversations / ending conversations prematurely, my feeling is that the problem you’re focusing on is likely the wrong one because right now more harm is being done by rudeness and status-fights than by being unable to say otherwise-useful things that risk offending or status-fighting, and interventions that make those things more sayable will (in my view) likely do more harm than good.
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Since you (more or less) asked for it, here is the brief version of my norm-breaking explanation of why I fear that discussions between us might be less fruitful than one would hope: 1. Our past discussions have not led anywhere useful; my perception (which I’m sure differs from yours) is that you have repeatedly attempted to switch from discussing issues that actually interest me (about, e.g., how well broadly-Bayesian approaches work, and about Popper’s alleged refutation of empirical induction) to methodological issues (around e.g. what you call “paths forward”), and that you have repeatedly insisted that to discuss things with you others must adopt particular highly restrictive patterns of discussion which don’t look to me as if they actually improve the discourse. 2. My tentative interpretation of this, and of other interactions of yours that I’ve observed—and here comes the norm-breaking bit—is that on some level you aren’t really interested in discussion on an equal footing; you are looking for disciples not peers, you find discussion satisfactory only when you get to control the terms on which it happens, and when that doesn’t seem possible you generally choose to engage in status-attacks on the other parties instead of discussing on equal terms. I don’t think you are here on LW in order to have a discussion in which you and we might refine our ideas by correcting each others’ errors; I think you are here to demonstrate your superiority and hopefully pick up some new disciples. 3. I have not been convinced, by what I have read of your writing and seen of your debating, that you are the intellectual superior of everyone around you as you seem to think you are, and in particular I am not convinced that you are my intellectual superior in ways that would justify treating you as a guru, nor that you are possessed of insights valuable enough that jumping through the methodological hoops you hold out would lead to gains that would justify the frustration involved.
Now, obviously I could be wrong about any or all of that; and even if I’m not, it’s all perfectly compatible with your having some interesting ideas to share, useful critiques of things I currently believe, new information I don’t have, etc. So I’m perfectly happy to engage with you on equal terms under something like the LW-usual norms of discussion; but jumping through your hoops would (1) be more annoying than any gains would justify, and (2) incentivize what I see as your harmful uncooperative and status-seeking behaviour patterns.
(If you disagree with my characterization of you—which you may well do—and care enough about changing it to take some time trying to do so—which I suspect you don’t—then things that might change my mind include (1) providing recent examples where you engaged in discussion with someone who disagreed with you and decided that they were right and you were wrong and (2) providing recent examples where you conceded that someone else you were in discussion with was smarter than you, at least in some specific area relevant to the discussion. Or even, though of course it would be much less evidence, (3) providing recent examples where you had a discussion with someone you didn’t already know to agree with you about most things and didn’t attempt to lay down strict conditions they had to follow in order to continue the discussion. For the avoidance of doubt, I am not at all suggesting that you’re obliged to do either of those things, nor that your not doing so would be strong evidence that my characterization of you is correct.)
I’d be more interested in discussing Popper and Bayes stuff than your LoLE comments. Is there any literature which adequately explains your position on induction, which you would appreciate criticism of?
FYI I do not remember our past conversations in a way that I can connect any claims/arguments/etc to you individually. I also don’t remember if our conversations ended by either of our choice or were still going when moderators suppressed my participation (slack ban with no warning for mirroring my conversations to my forum, allegedly violating privacy, as well as repeated moderator intervention to prevent me from posting to the LW1.0 website.)
I do not know of any literature that I am confident says the exact same things about induction as I would. (There might well be some literature I would completely agree with; my opinions are not super-idiosyncratic. In this context, though, the relevant thing is probably what I think about what Popper thinks about induction, which is a much more specific topic, or even what I think about what you think about induction, equally specific but much less likely to be already addressed in the literature.)
We had some discussion before about Popper’s argument where—this summary should not be taken too literally, since its main purpose is to identify the argument in question—he gives a certain additive decomposition of Pr(A|B) and calls one of the addends “deductive support” and the other “inductive support”; he then proves that the “inductive support” is a negative number, and says that therefore induction is nonsense. (I think I looked at that argument in particular because you said you found it convincing.) I find many things about his argument unsatisfactory; the most important, and the one I focused on before, is that I think all the work is being done by the names he uses (“deductive support”, “inductive support”) and I don’t think the names accurately correspond to anything in reality. That is: his mathematical calculations are fine, it’s really true that s() = s() + s(), but there’s no good reason for giving the two addends the names he does, and if you just called them “support term 1″ and “support term 2” then no one would think that his argument offered anything remotely like a refutation of induction. He’s implicitly assuming some proposition like “support term 2 is the best characterization of what empirical evidence B gives for A”; he gives no justification for anything like that, and without it his argument doesn’t make any real contact with what he’s trying to prove.
This discussion was on Slack (which unfortunately hides all but the most recent messages unless you pay them, which LW doesn’t). We had at least two other discussions going on concurrently, about whether our opinions about what propositions are true should be binary or something more like probabilistic and about the overall merits of “critical rationalism”. The discussion largely broke down (in ways I am quite sure I saw as your fault and you saw as mine, which I don’t propose to go into right now because this comment is long enough already) and then you got banned from the slack. At the point when it ended, I was happy to continue discussing Popper’s argument or probabilistic beliefs or critical rationalism, but you were (I think) only interested in discussing two things: paths-forward-type methodologies, and how I was allegedly being an unsatisfactory participant in the discussion.
I don’t think this comment thread would be a great venue for discussion of critical rationalism generally, of Popper’s argument against induction, or of the idea that our opinions of propositions should generally be quantitative rather than binary (or, more strongly, that something like the language and techniques of probability theory are appropriate for quantifying them), what with it being nominally a discussion of how “the law of least effort contributes to the conjunction fallacy”. If you are interested in pursuing any of those discussions, maybe I can make a post summarizing my position and we can proceed in comments there. But, fair warning, I will not have any interest in diverting the discussion to matters methodological, and while I will gladly undertake to argue in good faith I will not be giving any of the specific undertakings you frequently ask for.
Well, fortunately, I did save copies of those discussions. You could find them in the FI archives if you wanted to. (Not blaming you at all but I do think this is kinda funny and I don’t regret my actions.)
FYI, full disclosure, on a related note, I have mirrored recent discussion from LW to my own website. Mostly my own writing but also some comments from other people who were discussing with me, including you. See e.g. http://curi.us/2357-less-wrong-related-dicussion and http://curi.us/archives/list_category/126
I don’t plan to review the 3 year old discussions and I don’t want to re-raise anything that either one of us saw negatively.
Sure but I’d actually mostly prefer literature, partly because I want something more comprehensive (and more edited/polished) and partly because I want something more suitable for quoting and responding to as a way to present and engage with rival, mainstream viewpoints which would be acceptable to the general public.
Is there any literature that’s close enough (not exact) or which would work with a few modifications/caveats/qualifiers/etc? Or put together a position mostly from selections from a few sources? E.g. I don’t exactly agree with Popper and Deutsch but I can provide selections of their writing that I consider close enough to be a good starting point for discussion of my views.
I also am broadly in favor of using literature in discussions, and trying to build on and engage with existing writing, instead of rewriting everything.
If you can’t do something involving literature, why not? Is your position non-standard? Are you inadequately familiar with inductivist literature? (Yes answers are OK but I think relevant to deciding how to proceed.)
And yes feel free to start a new topic or request that I do instead of nesting further comments.
I actually think the basics of induction would be a better topic. What problems is it trying to solve? How does it solve it? What steps does one do to perform an induction? If you claim the future resembles the past, how do you answer the basic logical fact that the future always resembles the past in infinitely many ways and differs in infinitely many ways (in other words, infinitely many patterns continue and infinitely many are broken, no matter what happens), etc.? What’s the difference, if any, between evidence that doesn’t contradict a claim and evidence that supports it? My experience with induction discussions is a major sticking point is vagueness and malleability re what the inductivist side is actually claiming, and a lack of clear answers to initial questions like those above, and I don’t actually know where to find any books which lay out clear answers to this stuff.
Another reason for using literature is I find lots of inductivists don’t know about some of the problems in the field, and sometimes deny them. Whereas a good book would recognize at least some of the problems are real problems and try to address them. I have seen inductivist authors do that before – e.g. acknowledging that any finite data set underdetermines theory or pattern – just not comprehensively enough. I don’t like to try to go over known ground with people who don’t understand the ideas on their own side of the debate – and do that in the form of a debate where they are arguing with me and trying to win. They shouldn’t even have a side yet.
FYI I’m doubtful that I said that. It’s not what convinced me. My guess is I picked it because someone asked for math. I’d prefer not to focus on it atm.
I also saved a copy of much of the Slack discussion. (Not all of it—there was a lot—but substantial chunks of the bits that involved me.) Somehow, I managed to save those discussions without posting other people’s writing on the public internet without their consent.
You do not have my permission (or I suspect anyone else’s) to copy our writing on LW to your own website. Please remove it and commit to not doing it again. (If you won’t, I suspect you might be heading for another ban.)
(I haven’t looked yet at the more substantive stuff in your comment. Will do shortly. But please stop with the copyright violations already. Sheesh.)
No. Quoting is not a copyright violation. And I won’t have a discussion with you without being able to mirror it. Goodbye and no discussion I guess?
Quoting is a copyright violation in every jurisdiction I know of, if it’s done en masse. Evidence to the contrary, please?
here
https://www.copyrightuser.org/understand/exceptions/quotation/ - first link on google. there are more details about conditions there, and particularly what you’d have to show in order to prove infringement. Good luck ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
“en masse” is vague.
Wow, you know about a lot of different legal frameworks. How does copyright violation work in Tuvalu and Mauritius? I’ve always wondered.
-- general comments --
It’s trivial to see that your idea of quoting is incomplete because most instances of quoting you see aren’t copyright violations (like news, youtube commentary, academic papers, whatever).
However, you obviously care about copyright violations deeply, so I suggest you get in touch with google too; they are worse offenders.
https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:1fkfDXctehAJ:https://www.lesswrong.com/+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=au
Since you care about *COPYRIGHT INFRINGEMENT* and not *BEING CRITICISED* surely this blatant infringement of your copyright is a much larger priority. The probability of someone seeing material which is infringing your copyright is orders of magnitude larger on google than on a small random website.
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Edit/update/mini-post-mortem: I made this post because of an emotional reaction to the post above it by @gjm, which I shouldn’t have done. Some points were fine, but I was sarcastic (“Wow, you …”) and treated @gjm’s ideas unfairly, e.g. by using language like “trivial” to make his ideas sound less reasonable than they might be (TBH IANAL so really it’s dishonest of me to act with such certainty). Those statements were socially calibrated (to some degree) to try and either upset/annoy gjm or impact stuff around social status. Since I’d woken up recently (like less than 30min before posting) and was emotional I should have known better than to post those bits (maybe I should have avoided posting at all). There’s also the last paragraph, “Since you care about …” part, which at best is an uncharitable interpretation and at worst is putting words in gjm’s mouth (which isn’t okay).
For those reasons I’d like to apologies to gjm for those parts. I feel it’d be dishonest to remove them so I’m adding this update instead.
Yep, “en masse” is vague, and what it turns out curi actually did—which is less drastic than what his use of the word “mirrored” and his past history with LW led me to assume—was not so very en masse as I feared. My apologies, again, for not checking.
I didn’t, of course, claim to know what happens in every jurisdiction; the point of my “in every jurisdiction I know of” was the reverse of what you’re taking it to be.
I don’t know anything much about the law in Tuvalu and Mauritius, but I believe they are both signatories to the Berne Convention, which means that their laws on copyright are probably similar to everyone else’s. The Berne Convention requires signatories to permit some quotation, and its test for what exceptions are OK doesn’t give a great deal of leeway to allow more (see e.g. https://www.keionline.org/copyright/berne-convention-exceptions-revisions), so the situation there is probably similar to that in the UK (which is where I happen to be and where the site you linked to is talking about).
The general rule about quoting in the UK is that you’re allowed to quote the minimum necessary (which is vague, but that’s not my fault, because the law is also vague). What I (wrongly) thought curi had done would not, I think, be regarded as the minimum necessary to achieve a reasonable goal. But, again, what he actually did is not what I guessed, and what he did is OK.
If someone sees something I wrote on Google and takes an interest in it, the most likely result is that they follow Google’s link and end up in the place where I originally wrote it, where they will see it in its original context. If someone sees something I wrote that curi has “mirrored” on his own site, the most likely result is that they see whatever curi has chosen to quote, along with his (frequently hostile) comments of which I may not even be aware since I am not a regular there, and comments from others there (again, likely hostile; again, of which I am not aware).
None of that means that curi shouldn’t be allowed to quote what I said (to whatever extent is required for reasonable criticism and review, etc.) but I hope it makes it clearer why I might be more annoyed by curi’s “mirroring” than Google’s.
(Thanks for the update; as it happens I didn’t see your comment until after you posted it. Not that there’s any reason why you need care, but I approve of how you handled that.)
I didn’t quote you en masse. I didn’t just dump all your posting history. I quoted some specific stuff related to my critical commentary. Did you even look?
I had not looked, at that point; I took “mirrored” to mean taking copies of whole discussions, which would imply copying other people’s writing en masse. I have looked, now. I agree that what you’ve put there so far is probably OK both legally and morally.
My apologies for being a bit twitchy on this point; I should maybe explain for the benefit of other readers that the last time curi came to LW, he did take a whole pile of discussion from the LW slack and copy it en masse to the publicly-visible internet, which is one reason why I thought it plausible he might have done the same this time.
gjm, going forward, I don’t want you to comment on my posts, including this one.
Noted. (I take it “this one” means this post rather than requesting that I not acknowledge having read this comment.)
I don’t 100% promise to comply (e.g., if I see you saying something importantly false and no one else comments on it, I might do so) but I’ll leave your posts alone unless some need arises that trumps courtesy :-).
Since in connection with this you publicly slandered me over on your website, I will add that I consider your analysis there of my motives and purposes to be extremely wrong.
I think that attempting to discuss something as broad as “the basics of induction” might be problematic just because the topic is so broad. People mean a variety of different things by terms like “induction” or “inductivism” and there’s a great danger of talking past one another.
For instance, the sort of induction principle I would (tentatively) endorse doesn’t at first glance look like an induction principle at all: it’s something along the lines of “all else being equal, prefer simpler propositions”. There are lots of ways to do something along those lines, some are better than others, I don’t claim to know the One True Best Way to do it, but I think this is the right approach. This gets you something like induction because theories in which things change gratuitously tend to be more complex. But whether you would call me an inductivist, I don’t know. I am fairly sure we don’t disagree about everything in this area, and it’s quite possible that our relevant disagreements are not best thought of as disagreements about induction, as opposed to disagreements about (say) inference or probability or explanation or simplicity that have consequences for what we think about induction.
(My super-brief answers to your questions about induction, taking “induction” for this purpose to mean “the way I think we should use empirical evidence to arrive at generalized opinions”: It’s trying to solve the problem of how you discover things about the world that go beyond direct observations. “Solve” might be too strong a word, but it addresses it by giving a procedure that, if the world behaves in regular ways, will tend to move your beliefs into better correspondence with reality as you get more evidence. (It seems, so far, as if the world does behave in regular ways, but of course I am not taking that as anything like a deductive proof that this sort of procedure is correct; that would be circular.) You do it by (1) weighting your beliefs according to complexity in some fashion and then (2) adjusting them as new evidence comes in—in one idealized version of the process you do #1 according to a “universal prior” and #2 according to Bayes’ theorem, though in practice the universal prior is uncomputable and applying Bayes in difficult cases involves way too much computation, so you need to make do with approximations and heuristics. I do not, explicitly, claim that the future resembles the past (or, rather, I kinda do claim it, but not as an axiom but as an inductive generalization arrived at by the means under discussion); I prefer simpler explanations, and ones where the future resembles the past are often simpler. For evidence to support one claim over another, it needs to be more likely when the former claim is true than when the latter is; of course this doesn’t follow merely from its being consistent with the former claim. Most evidence is consistent with most claims.)
Damn. Just realized I was looking to follow someone as a disciple, without thinking in those terms.
Oh brother...I am a sheep after all. What a mess. I do want to learn from curi though, but I hate the idea of being someone’s disciple.