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.
---
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.)
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.
---
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.)