In my understanding, there’s no one who speaks for LW, as its representative, and is responsible for addressing questions and criticisms. [...] No one is responsible for defining an LW school of thought and dealing with intellectual challenges.
Correct. There is no Pope of LW, we don’t all agree about everything, and no one has any obligation to answer anyone else’s objections. That may be inconvenient for some purposes, but that’s how it is.
This is also how it is for many other things besides LW. Suppose someone claims that there is something wrong with science; there is no Pope of Science any more than there is one of LW, no one responsible for defining how scientists do their thing or answering criticisms. The same goes for all of the following: atheism, Protestantism, conservatism, environmentalism, reductionism, mathematical intuitionism, moral nonrealism, “Big Bang” cosmology. And, in fact, for pretty much everything else.
There are movements that have a clearly defined set of doctrines and a clearly defined representative, such that if the representative’s positions are refuted then the whole movement is sunk. These movements are generally called cults. Empirically, being such a movement doesn’t seem to be conducive to valuable things like good thinking, success in persuading others, or making the movement’s members successful outside the movement.
None claim LW is true.
LW is not the kind of thing that can be “true”. Nor, really, is (say) “the LW philosophy” in so far as there is one—because a philosophy is a complicated machine with lots of moving parts and almost certainly some things in it aren’t quite right.
And, of course, because really there isn’t a precisely-defined thing that is “the LW philosophy” or “what LW people believe” or whatever; LW is a community, not a cult, and we don’t expect to agree about everything.
You’ll probably find plenty of us who will happily endorse some weaker claim, though; something like “most of the ideas found in the Sequences, in Scott’s less-blatantly-speculative posts, etc., are pretty good ideas”.
Suppose LW, vaguely defined as it may be, is mistaken on some major points. E.g. Karl Popper refuted induction. How will LW find out about its mistake and change?
Well, perhaps we won’t. But if we do, it will probably go like this: someone active on LW learns of a problem; posts about it on LW / discusses it in person with other LW people / posts it in some other venue where LW people hang out; it gets discussed, and (perhaps after a few iterations, since “you’re doing it all wrong” tends to be a hard lesson to learn even when true) other LW people are gradually convinced; then either we start doing things differently, or (if not a large enough fraction are convinced) some people go off and form their own (sub)community where things are done differently.
Which challenges are addressed? All of them. You can’t just ignore a challenge because it could be correct. If you misjudge something and then ignore it, you will stay wrong.
There is no procedure that guarantees not staying wrong. Always addressing every challenge is one way to try to avoid that, but it does not guarantee not staying wrong and the fact that not always addressing every challenge doesn’t guarantee not staying wrong is not a strong argument against it.
CR is well known, relevant, and makes some clear LW-contradicting claims like that induction doesn’t work, so if LW had representatives surveying and responding to rival ideas, they would have addressed CR.
But LW does not have “representatives” in the sense you describe, and isn’t likely to start having them. However, LW has addressed CR in a weaker sense: e.g., some time ago you came here and tried to persuade us to abandon LW-style probabilistic inference in favour of your version of critical rationalism; the community took a look at your ideas, was not impressed, and downvoted your posts to hell.
Of course that may have been a mistake. (Again: there is no guarantee of not making mistakes. Not ever.) But that’s what addressing CR looks like for a community like LW: someone proposes it, making the best case they can, then people take a look, argue about it as seems appropriate, and see what they think.
Some people I talked with at LW seem to still be developing as intellectuals.
You say that as if “still developing as intellectuals” implies some sort of immaturity. I hope to continue developing as an intellectual until I die, though empirically it seems most people don’t manage to do that :-).
Some people also indicated they thought it’d be too much effort to learn about and address rival ideas like CR.
It is possible that I haven’t seen everything you’re referring to here. But the things I have seen, on LW and on the LW Slack, that I think you’re referring to are not accurately described by the words above. What I’ve seen people say is much more like “I don’t think your particular ideas, from what I have seen about them, merit the particular effort you are saying I should put in”. Or, more generally, “It is not feasible to give a deep investigation to every single rival idea that comes along.”
These are not the same proposition as “it would be too much effort to learn about and address rival ideas”: they are both compatible with the idea that some ideas might justify the deeper investigation that most of the LW community evidently hasn’t yet been persuaded by your arguments to give to CR.
I believe the lack of Paths Forward at LW is preventing the resolution of other issues [...]
You are welcome to believe that. I don’t think you should find it surprising that we are largely unconvinced. Not least because the only actual argument you’ve offered for this, other than saying “go to my website”, is the claim that it’s always a mistake to leave anything at all unaddressed—which I suspect seems to others here, as it seems to me, an obvious mistake in its own right.
In my understanding, there’s no one who speaks for LW, as its representative, and is responsible for addressing questions and criticisms. [...] No one is responsible for defining an LW school of thought and dealing with intellectual challenges.
Correct. There is no Pope of LW, we don’t all agree about everything, and no one has any obligation to answer anyone else’s objections.
Asking for someone who thinks some set of ideas is consistent and true, and will address questions about those ideas thoroughly, is not asking for a Pope. It’s more like asking for someone who’s more than an casual fan.
That may be inconvenient for some purposes, but that’s how it is.
One purpose that the lack of a serious LW advocate is “inconvenient” for is truth-seeking—a rather important case!
Asking for someone who [...] is not asking for a Pope.
No. But curi was asking for more than that. E.g., he wants someone who “speaks for LW”. He wants them to do it “as [LW’s] representative”. He wants them to address arguments against LWish ideas “canonically”. He wants someone “responsible for defining an LW school of thought”. And so forth.
And, as I said above, this is just not how most communities or schools of thought work, nor should it be, nor I think could it be. Except for ones where in order to claim any sort of affiliation you are required to sign up to a particular body of doctrine. That mostly means religions, political parties, etc. And (again, as I said above) groups of that sort don’t have an encouraging record of successfully distinguishing truth from error; I don’t think we should be emulating them.
if someone spoke for something smaller than LW, e.g. Bayesian Epistemology, that’d be fine. CR and Objectivism, for example, can be questioned and have people who will answer (unlike science itself).
and if someone wanted to take responsibility for gjm-LW or lumifer-LW or some other body of ideas which is theirs alone, that’d be fine too. but people aren’t doing this as a group or individually!
The fact that objectivism has cultists who want to defend the objectivist way isn’t a quality that’s worthy of emulation. If CR is copying the same group think structures that’s also no argument in favor of it either.
If you have an argument about Ayn Rand’s ideas, that would be important.
Regardless, you can get correct answers to tons of common questions about Objectivism at a variety of places online (including both pro-ARI and anti-ARI places). That’s good. And Binswanger, linked negatively above, engaged with Popperian criticism more than anyone at LW has. He also has combined seriously writing down ideas with discussing ideas, whereas LW people seem to only do much of one or the other, which I think is a big problem.
That’s … not a very accurate way of describing what happened. Not because there’s literally no way to understand it that makes it factually correct, but because it gives entirely the wrong impression.
Here’s a more complete description of what happened.
curi came here in early April 2011 (well, he actually first appeared earlier, but before then he made a total of three comments ever) and posted five lengthy top-level posts in five days. They were increasingly badly received by the community, getting scores of −1,-1,-1,-22,-38. The last one was entitled “The conjunction fallacy does not exist” and what it attempted to refute was a completely wrong statement of what the c.f. is about, namely the claim (which no one believes) that “people attribute higher probability to X&Y than to Y” for all X and Y.
As this was happening, more and more of the comments on curi’s posts were along the general lines of this one saying, in essence: This is not productive, you are just repeating the same wrong things without listening to criticism, so please stop.
It was suggested that there was some reason to think curi was using sockpuppets to undo others’ downvotes and keep enough karma to carry on posting.
And then, in that context, curi’s fifth post—which attempted to refute the conjunction fallacy but which completely misunderstood what the conjunction fallacy is, and which was sitting on −38 points—was removed.
Now, maybe that’s because Eliezer was afraid of curi’s ideas and wanted to close down discussion or something of the sort. But a more plausible explanation is that he thought further discussion was likely to be a waste of time for the same reason as several commenters.
I don’t think removing the post was a good decision, and generally I think Eliezer’s moderation has been too heavy-handed on multiple occasions. But I don’t think the kind of explanation curi is offering for this is at all likely to be correct.
On the other hand, if curi is merely saying that Eliezer is unlikely to be interested if curi contacts him and asks for a debate on Bayes versus CR, then I think he’s clearly right about that.
Well, both Lumifer and I have (mostly in different venues) been answering a lot of questions and criticisms you’ve posed. But no, I don’t think either of us feels “responsibility” in the specific (and, I think, entirely non-standard) sense you’re using here, where to “take responsibility” for a set of ideas is to incur a limitless obligation to answer any and all questions and criticisms made of those ideas.
The total of what your “paths forward” page says about limited resources: (1) instead of writing your own answers to every criticism, you can point critics to already-written things that address their criticisms; (2) if you have a suitable forum with like-thinking other people there, they may address the criticisms for you.
Perhaps it seems to you that these make it reasonable to have a policy of addressing every criticism and question despite limited resources. It doesn’t seem so to me.
I have read your document, I am not convinced by your arguments that we should attempt to address every single criticism and question, I am not convinced by your arguments that we can realistically do so, and I think the main practical effects of embracing your principles on this point would be (1) to favour obsessive cranks who have nothing else to do with their time than argue about their pet theories, (2) to encourage obsessive-crank-like behaviour, and (3) to make those who embrace them spend more time arguing on the internet. I can’t speak for others, but I don’t want to give advantages to obsessive cranks, I don’t want to become more obsessive and cranky myself, and I think it much more likely that I spend too much time arguing on the internet rather than too little.
I see nothing to suggest that further investigation of “paths forward” is likely to be a productive use of my time.
So: no, I don’t want to spend more time learning, discussing, or using “paths forward”. I think it would be a suboptimal way to use that time.
Both here and on the LW slack, “Justin CEO” turned up at about the same time as curi and has done more or less nothing other than agreeing with curi and disagreeing with people who are disagreeing with him.
This is perfectly consistent with Justin not being a sockpuppet of curi, of course.
is it really that interesting? i posted a rough draft of “Less Wrong Lacks Representatives and Paths Forward” to the FI forum for comment. i routinely post links and comments about discussions i’m having to FI. is this surprising?
LW has addressed CR in a weaker sense: e.g., some time ago you came here and tried to persuade us to abandon LW-style probabilistic inference in favour of your version of critical rationalism; the community took a look at your ideas, was not impressed, and downvoted your posts to hell.
downvotes aren’t arguments. addressing ideas, in my post, refers to intellectually addressing them – e.g. explaining why an idea is incorrect.
anyway, do you have any suggestion as to a Path Forward to get the intellectual disagreements resolved?
also did you actually read about Paths Forward? If so, why don’t you reply to it directly and point out a mistake in it?
Downvoting is not an argument because downvoting is a judgement that an idea is not worthy of “intellectually addressing” (on this forum). That’s not not addressing an idea.
I did not claim that downvotes are arguments, of course. What they are is assessments. As it happens, your posts about CR here got comments as well as downvotes.
do you have any suggestion as to a Path Forward to get the intellectual disagreements resolved?
Not necessarily, just as if we were visited by fundamentalists demanding that everything be “proved from scripture” I would not necessarily have a suggestion as to how to Prove From Scripture that their fundamentalism was wrong.
And I think that “to get the intellectual disagreements resolved” is a noble but hilariously overoptimistic goal. We are not, realistically, going to end up agreeing about everything, and picking an approach on the basis of whether it could in principle lead to us agreeing about everything is not a good idea.
did you actually read about Paths Forward?
Yes.
If so, why don’t you reply to it directly and point out a mistake in it?
Because I think many other things I could do with the same time I could use for that would be more productive.
Correct. There is no Pope of LW, we don’t all agree about everything, and no one has any obligation to answer anyone else’s objections. That may be inconvenient for some purposes, but that’s how it is.
This is also how it is for many other things besides LW. Suppose someone claims that there is something wrong with science; there is no Pope of Science any more than there is one of LW, no one responsible for defining how scientists do their thing or answering criticisms. The same goes for all of the following: atheism, Protestantism, conservatism, environmentalism, reductionism, mathematical intuitionism, moral nonrealism, “Big Bang” cosmology. And, in fact, for pretty much everything else.
There are movements that have a clearly defined set of doctrines and a clearly defined representative, such that if the representative’s positions are refuted then the whole movement is sunk. These movements are generally called cults. Empirically, being such a movement doesn’t seem to be conducive to valuable things like good thinking, success in persuading others, or making the movement’s members successful outside the movement.
LW is not the kind of thing that can be “true”. Nor, really, is (say) “the LW philosophy” in so far as there is one—because a philosophy is a complicated machine with lots of moving parts and almost certainly some things in it aren’t quite right.
And, of course, because really there isn’t a precisely-defined thing that is “the LW philosophy” or “what LW people believe” or whatever; LW is a community, not a cult, and we don’t expect to agree about everything.
You’ll probably find plenty of us who will happily endorse some weaker claim, though; something like “most of the ideas found in the Sequences, in Scott’s less-blatantly-speculative posts, etc., are pretty good ideas”.
Well, perhaps we won’t. But if we do, it will probably go like this: someone active on LW learns of a problem; posts about it on LW / discusses it in person with other LW people / posts it in some other venue where LW people hang out; it gets discussed, and (perhaps after a few iterations, since “you’re doing it all wrong” tends to be a hard lesson to learn even when true) other LW people are gradually convinced; then either we start doing things differently, or (if not a large enough fraction are convinced) some people go off and form their own (sub)community where things are done differently.
There is no procedure that guarantees not staying wrong. Always addressing every challenge is one way to try to avoid that, but it does not guarantee not staying wrong and the fact that not always addressing every challenge doesn’t guarantee not staying wrong is not a strong argument against it.
But LW does not have “representatives” in the sense you describe, and isn’t likely to start having them. However, LW has addressed CR in a weaker sense: e.g., some time ago you came here and tried to persuade us to abandon LW-style probabilistic inference in favour of your version of critical rationalism; the community took a look at your ideas, was not impressed, and downvoted your posts to hell.
Of course that may have been a mistake. (Again: there is no guarantee of not making mistakes. Not ever.) But that’s what addressing CR looks like for a community like LW: someone proposes it, making the best case they can, then people take a look, argue about it as seems appropriate, and see what they think.
You say that as if “still developing as intellectuals” implies some sort of immaturity. I hope to continue developing as an intellectual until I die, though empirically it seems most people don’t manage to do that :-).
It is possible that I haven’t seen everything you’re referring to here. But the things I have seen, on LW and on the LW Slack, that I think you’re referring to are not accurately described by the words above. What I’ve seen people say is much more like “I don’t think your particular ideas, from what I have seen about them, merit the particular effort you are saying I should put in”. Or, more generally, “It is not feasible to give a deep investigation to every single rival idea that comes along.”
These are not the same proposition as “it would be too much effort to learn about and address rival ideas”: they are both compatible with the idea that some ideas might justify the deeper investigation that most of the LW community evidently hasn’t yet been persuaded by your arguments to give to CR.
You are welcome to believe that. I don’t think you should find it surprising that we are largely unconvinced. Not least because the only actual argument you’ve offered for this, other than saying “go to my website”, is the claim that it’s always a mistake to leave anything at all unaddressed—which I suspect seems to others here, as it seems to me, an obvious mistake in its own right.
Asking for someone who thinks some set of ideas is consistent and true, and will address questions about those ideas thoroughly, is not asking for a Pope. It’s more like asking for someone who’s more than an casual fan.
One purpose that the lack of a serious LW advocate is “inconvenient” for is truth-seeking—a rather important case!
No. But curi was asking for more than that. E.g., he wants someone who “speaks for LW”. He wants them to do it “as [LW’s] representative”. He wants them to address arguments against LWish ideas “canonically”. He wants someone “responsible for defining an LW school of thought”. And so forth.
And, as I said above, this is just not how most communities or schools of thought work, nor should it be, nor I think could it be. Except for ones where in order to claim any sort of affiliation you are required to sign up to a particular body of doctrine. That mostly means religions, political parties, etc. And (again, as I said above) groups of that sort don’t have an encouraging record of successfully distinguishing truth from error; I don’t think we should be emulating them.
if someone spoke for something smaller than LW, e.g. Bayesian Epistemology, that’d be fine. CR and Objectivism, for example, can be questioned and have people who will answer (unlike science itself).
and if someone wanted to take responsibility for gjm-LW or lumifer-LW or some other body of ideas which is theirs alone, that’d be fine too. but people aren’t doing this as a group or individually!
The fact that objectivism has cultists who want to defend the objectivist way isn’t a quality that’s worthy of emulation. If CR is copying the same group think structures that’s also no argument in favor of it either.
I like Ayn Rand’s writing, not whatever you think is a “cult”. See e.g. http://curi.us/1930-harry-binswanger-refuses-to-think
If you have an argument about Ayn Rand’s ideas, that would be important.
Regardless, you can get correct answers to tons of common questions about Objectivism at a variety of places online (including both pro-ARI and anti-ARI places). That’s good. And Binswanger, linked negatively above, engaged with Popperian criticism more than anyone at LW has. He also has combined seriously writing down ideas with discussing ideas, whereas LW people seem to only do much of one or the other, which I think is a big problem.
Speaking for “objectivism” instead of someone personal opinions implies structures that get people think alike in a cultish way.
You can, of course, go and bother Eliezer. I doubt he would be inclined to listen to you, though.
Eliezer has already indicated [1] he’d prefer to take administrative action to prevent discussion than speak to the issues. No Paths Forward there!
[1] http://lesswrong.com/lw/56m/the_conjunction_fallacy_does_not_exist/3wf5
That’s … not a very accurate way of describing what happened. Not because there’s literally no way to understand it that makes it factually correct, but because it gives entirely the wrong impression.
Here’s a more complete description of what happened.
curi came here in early April 2011 (well, he actually first appeared earlier, but before then he made a total of three comments ever) and posted five lengthy top-level posts in five days. They were increasingly badly received by the community, getting scores of −1,-1,-1,-22,-38. The last one was entitled “The conjunction fallacy does not exist” and what it attempted to refute was a completely wrong statement of what the c.f. is about, namely the claim (which no one believes) that “people attribute higher probability to X&Y than to Y” for all X and Y.
As this was happening, more and more of the comments on curi’s posts were along the general lines of this one saying, in essence: This is not productive, you are just repeating the same wrong things without listening to criticism, so please stop.
It was suggested that there was some reason to think curi was using sockpuppets to undo others’ downvotes and keep enough karma to carry on posting.
And then, in that context, curi’s fifth post—which attempted to refute the conjunction fallacy but which completely misunderstood what the conjunction fallacy is, and which was sitting on −38 points—was removed.
Now, maybe that’s because Eliezer was afraid of curi’s ideas and wanted to close down discussion or something of the sort. But a more plausible explanation is that he thought further discussion was likely to be a waste of time for the same reason as several commenters.
I don’t think removing the post was a good decision, and generally I think Eliezer’s moderation has been too heavy-handed on multiple occasions. But I don’t think the kind of explanation curi is offering for this is at all likely to be correct.
On the other hand, if curi is merely saying that Eliezer is unlikely to be interested if curi contacts him and asks for a debate on Bayes versus CR, then I think he’s clearly right about that.
Yep, sounds like Eliezer. No surprises.
Well, both Lumifer and I have (mostly in different venues) been answering a lot of questions and criticisms you’ve posed. But no, I don’t think either of us feels “responsibility” in the specific (and, I think, entirely non-standard) sense you’re using here, where to “take responsibility” for a set of ideas is to incur a limitless obligation to answer any and all questions and criticisms made of those ideas.
there are methods for doing Paths Forward with limited resource use. you just don’t want to learn/discuss/use them.
The total of what your “paths forward” page says about limited resources: (1) instead of writing your own answers to every criticism, you can point critics to already-written things that address their criticisms; (2) if you have a suitable forum with like-thinking other people there, they may address the criticisms for you.
Perhaps it seems to you that these make it reasonable to have a policy of addressing every criticism and question despite limited resources. It doesn’t seem so to me.
I have read your document, I am not convinced by your arguments that we should attempt to address every single criticism and question, I am not convinced by your arguments that we can realistically do so, and I think the main practical effects of embracing your principles on this point would be (1) to favour obsessive cranks who have nothing else to do with their time than argue about their pet theories, (2) to encourage obsessive-crank-like behaviour, and (3) to make those who embrace them spend more time arguing on the internet. I can’t speak for others, but I don’t want to give advantages to obsessive cranks, I don’t want to become more obsessive and cranky myself, and I think it much more likely that I spend too much time arguing on the internet rather than too little.
I see nothing to suggest that further investigation of “paths forward” is likely to be a productive use of my time.
So: no, I don’t want to spend more time learning, discussing, or using “paths forward”. I think it would be a suboptimal way to use that time.
By Jove, I think you got it!
:-D
And who are you, a freshly-minted account with strong opinions?
Both here and on the LW slack, “Justin CEO” turned up at about the same time as curi and has done more or less nothing other than agreeing with curi and disagreeing with people who are disagreeing with him.
This is perfectly consistent with Justin not being a sockpuppet of curi, of course.
BTW I don’t even think anything I said was particularly opinionated (by my standards).
And the context makes it funny.
Saying—on the LW forum—that it’d be good for LW to have a strong advocate? Ooooh, controversial!
No, not particularly opinionated. But it’s an interesting place and time you chose for diving into LW.
is it really that interesting? i posted a rough draft of “Less Wrong Lacks Representatives and Paths Forward” to the FI forum for comment. i routinely post links and comments about discussions i’m having to FI. is this surprising?
Not you—RealJustinCEO.
that wasn’t clear enough? he is a member of the FI forum. he followed one of my links.
Yep, I’m a freshly-minted account with strong opinions.
downvotes aren’t arguments. addressing ideas, in my post, refers to intellectually addressing them – e.g. explaining why an idea is incorrect.
anyway, do you have any suggestion as to a Path Forward to get the intellectual disagreements resolved?
also did you actually read about Paths Forward? If so, why don’t you reply to it directly and point out a mistake in it?
Downvoting is not an argument because downvoting is a judgement that an idea is not worthy of “intellectually addressing” (on this forum). That’s not not addressing an idea.
I did not claim that downvotes are arguments, of course. What they are is assessments. As it happens, your posts about CR here got comments as well as downvotes.
Not necessarily, just as if we were visited by fundamentalists demanding that everything be “proved from scripture” I would not necessarily have a suggestion as to how to Prove From Scripture that their fundamentalism was wrong.
And I think that “to get the intellectual disagreements resolved” is a noble but hilariously overoptimistic goal. We are not, realistically, going to end up agreeing about everything, and picking an approach on the basis of whether it could in principle lead to us agreeing about everything is not a good idea.
Yes.
Because I think many other things I could do with the same time I could use for that would be more productive.