To what extent do you find the above explanation unsatisfying? And if you do not find it unsatisfying, then (I repeat): what is the use of talking about the “problem of the criterion”, beyond (perhaps) the fact that it allows you to assert fun and quirky and unintuitive (and false) things like “facts don’t exist”?
To me this is like asking what’s the point in talking about a Theory of Everything when trying to talk about physics. You might complain you can do a lot of physics without it, yet we still find it useful to have a theory that unifies physics at a fundamental level (even if we keep failing to find one). I argue that the problem of the criterion fills a conceptually similar niche in epistemology: it’s the fundamental thing to be understood in order to be able to say anything else meaningful and not inconsistent about how we know or what we know, which is itself fundamental to most activity. Thus it is often quite useful to appeal to because lots of deconfusion research, like this post, are ultimately consequences of the problem of the criterion, and so I find most object-level arguments, like those found in this post, a certain kind of wasted motion that could be avoided if only the problem of the criterion were better understood.
I agree that this is a real difficulty that people run into. I disagree with [what I see as] your [implicit] claim that the “problem of the criterion” framing provides any particular tools for addressing this problem, or that it’s a useful framing in general. (Indeed, the sequence I just linked constitutes what I would characterize as a “real” attempt to confront the issue, and you will note the complete absence of claims like “there is no such thing as knowledge” in any of the posts in question; in the absence of such claims, you will instead see plenty of diagrams and mathematical notation.)
I think the thing the framing of the sequence you link and the way most people approach this is missing something fundamental about epistemology that lets one get confused, specifically by easily forgetting that one’s knowledge is always contingent on some assumption that one may not even be able to see, and so mistakes one’s own perspective for objectivity. As for what tools understanding the problem of the criterion provides, I’d say it’s more like a mindset of correctly calibrated epistemic humility. Not to say that grokking the problem of the criterion makes you perfectly calibrated in making predictions, but to say it requires adopting a mindset that is sufficient to achieve the level of epistemic humility/update fluidity necessary to become well calibrated or, dare we say, Bayesian rational.
(Note: I realize my claim about grokking the problem of the criterion sets up a potential “no true Scotsman” situation where anyone who claims to grok the problem of the criterion and then seems to lack this capacity for update fluidity can be dismissed as not really grokking it. I’m not really looking to go that far, but I want to say that this claim is, I believe, predictive enough to make useful inferences.)
It should probably be obvious by now that I view the latter approach as far superior to the former.
Maybe it is for some people (you wouldn’t be the first person to make this claim). Others do seem to find my approach useful. Perhaps the whole point of this should be that not everyone is necessarily reasoning from the same base assumptions, and thus the ground of truth is unstable enough that what seem like reasonable explanations cannot be sure to be arbitrarily convincing. To be fair, Eliezer doesn’t miss this point, but it seems poorly enough appreciated that I often find cause to remind people of it.
If I really wanted to be pointed about it, I think you’d be less annoyed with me if you grokked the point both Eliezer and I are trying to make in different ways about how epistemology grounds out, since taken to its extreme we must accept that the same lines of reasoning don’t work for everyone on a practical level, by which I mean that even if you show someone correct math, they may yet not be convinced by it, and this is epistemically relevant and not to be dismissed since we are each performing our own reckoning of what to accept as true, no matter how much we may share in common (which, for what it’s worth, brings us right back to the core of the intentional stance and the object level concerns of the OP!).
To me this is like asking what’s the point in talking about a Theory of Everything when trying to talk about physics. You might complain you can do a lot of physics without it, yet we still find it useful to have a theory that unifies physics at a fundamental level (even if we keep failing to find one). I argue that the problem of the criterion fills a conceptually similar niche in epistemology: it’s the fundamental thing to be understood in order to be able to say anything else meaningful and not inconsistent about how we know or what we know, which is itself fundamental to most activity. Thus it is often quite useful to appeal to because lots of deconfusion research, like this post, are ultimately consequences of the problem of the criterion, and so I find most object-level arguments, like those found in this post, a certain kind of wasted motion that could be avoided if only the problem of the criterion were better understood.
I think the thing the framing of the sequence you link and the way most people approach this is missing something fundamental about epistemology that lets one get confused, specifically by easily forgetting that one’s knowledge is always contingent on some assumption that one may not even be able to see, and so mistakes one’s own perspective for objectivity. As for what tools understanding the problem of the criterion provides, I’d say it’s more like a mindset of correctly calibrated epistemic humility. Not to say that grokking the problem of the criterion makes you perfectly calibrated in making predictions, but to say it requires adopting a mindset that is sufficient to achieve the level of epistemic humility/update fluidity necessary to become well calibrated or, dare we say, Bayesian rational.
(Note: I realize my claim about grokking the problem of the criterion sets up a potential “no true Scotsman” situation where anyone who claims to grok the problem of the criterion and then seems to lack this capacity for update fluidity can be dismissed as not really grokking it. I’m not really looking to go that far, but I want to say that this claim is, I believe, predictive enough to make useful inferences.)
Maybe it is for some people (you wouldn’t be the first person to make this claim). Others do seem to find my approach useful. Perhaps the whole point of this should be that not everyone is necessarily reasoning from the same base assumptions, and thus the ground of truth is unstable enough that what seem like reasonable explanations cannot be sure to be arbitrarily convincing. To be fair, Eliezer doesn’t miss this point, but it seems poorly enough appreciated that I often find cause to remind people of it.
If I really wanted to be pointed about it, I think you’d be less annoyed with me if you grokked the point both Eliezer and I are trying to make in different ways about how epistemology grounds out, since taken to its extreme we must accept that the same lines of reasoning don’t work for everyone on a practical level, by which I mean that even if you show someone correct math, they may yet not be convinced by it, and this is epistemically relevant and not to be dismissed since we are each performing our own reckoning of what to accept as true, no matter how much we may share in common (which, for what it’s worth, brings us right back to the core of the intentional stance and the object level concerns of the OP!).