I am Tom. Allow me to introduce myself, my perception of rationality, and my goals as a rationalist. I hope what follows is not too long and boring.
I am a physicist, currently a post-doc in Texas, working on x-ray imaging. I have been interested in science for longer than I have known that ‘science’ is a word. I went for physics because, well, everything is physics, but I sometimes marvel that I didn’t go for biology, because I have always felt that evolution by natural selection is more beautiful than any theory of ‘physics’ (of course, really it is a theory of physics, but not ‘nominal physics’).
Obviously, the absolute queen of theories is probability theory, since it is the technology that gives us all the other theories.
A few years ago, during my PhD work, I listened to a man called Ben Goldacre on BBC radio, and as a result stumbled onto several useful things. Firstly, by googling his name afterwards, I discovered that there are things called science blogs (!) and something called a ‘skeptic’s community.’ I became hooked.
The next thing I learned from Goldacre’s blog was that I had been shockingly badly educated in statistics. I realized for example, that science and statistics are really the same thing. Damn, hindsight feels weird sometimes—how could I possibly have gone through two and a bit degrees in physics, without realizing this stupendously obvious thing? I started a systematic study.
Through the Bad Science blog, I also found my way to David Colquhoun’s noteworthy blog, where a commenter brought to my attention a certain book by a certain E.T. Jaynes. Suddenly, all the ugly, self-contradictory nonsense of frequentist statistics that I’d been struggling with (as a result of my newly adopted labors to try to understand scientific method better) was replaced with beauty and simple common sense. This was the most eye-opening period of my life.
It was also while looking through professor Colquhoun’s ‘recently read’ sidebar that I first happened to click on a link that brought me to some writing by one Dr. Yudkowsky. And it was good.
In accord with my long-held interest in science, I think I have always been a rationalist. Though I don’t make any claims to be particularly rational, I hold rationality as an explicit high goal. Not my highest goal, obviously – rationality is an approach for solving problems, so without something of higher value to aim for, what problem is there to solve? What space left for being rational? I might value rationality ‘for its own sake,’ but ultimately, this means ‘being rational makes me happy’, and thus, as is necessarily so, happiness is the true goal.
But rationality is a goal, nonetheless, and a necessary one, if we are to be coherent. To desire anything is to desire to increase one’s chances of achieving it. Science (rationality) is the set of procedures that maximize one’s expectation to identify true statements about reality. Such statements include those that are trivially scientific (e.g. ‘the universe is between 13.7 and 13.9 billion years old’), and those that concern other matters of fact, that are often not considered in science’s domain, such as the best way to achieve X. (Thus questions that science can legitimately address include: How can I build an airoplane that won’t fall out of the sky? What is the best way to conduct science? How can I earn more money? What does it mean to be a good person?) Thus, since desiring a thing entails desiring an efficient way to achieve it, any desire entails holding rationality as a goal.
And so, my passion for scientific method has led me to recognize that many things traditionally considered outside the scope of science are in fact not: legal matters, political decisions, and even ethics. I realized that science and morality are identical: all questions of scientific methodology are matters of how to behave correctly, all questions of how to behave are most efficiently answered by being rational, thus being rational is the correct way to behave.
Philosophy? Yup, that too – if I (coherently) love wisdom, then necessarily, I desire an efficient procedure for achieving it. But not only does philosophy entail scientific method, since philosophy is an educated attempt to understand the structure of reality, there is no reason (other than tradition) to distinguish it from science – these two are also identical.
My goals as a rationalist can be divided into 3 parts: (1) to become more adept at actually implementing rational inference, particularly decision making, (2) to see more scientists more fully aware of the full scope and capabilities of scientific method, and (3) to see society’s governance more fully guided by rationality and common sense. Too many scientists see science as having no ethical dimension, and too many voters and politicians see science as having no particular role in deciding political policy: at best it can serve up some informative facts and figures, but the ultimate decision is a matter of human affairs, not science (echoing a religious view, that people are somehow fundamentally special, dating back to a time before anybody had even figured out that cleaning the excrement from your hands before eating is a good idea). I’m tired of democratically elected politicians making the same old crummy excuse of having a popular mandate—“How can I deny the will of the people?”—when they have never even bothered to look into whether or not their actions are in the best interests of the people. In a rational society, of course, there would be no question of evidence-based politics defying the will of the people: the people would vote to be governed rationally, every time.
Goal (1) I pursue almost wholly privately. Perhaps the Less Wrong community can help me change that. After my PhD, while still in The Netherlands, I tried to establish and market a short course in statistics for PhD students, which was my first effort to work on goal (2). This seemed like the perfect approach: firstly, as I mentioned, my own education (and that of many other physicists, in particular) on the topic of what science actually is, was severely lacking. Secondly, in NL, the custom is for PhD students to be sent for short courses as part of their education, but the selection of courses I was faced with was abysmal, and the course I was ultimately forced to attend was a joke – two days of listening to the vacuousness of a third-rate motivational speaker.
I really thought the dutch universities would jump at the chance to offer their young scientists something useful, but they couldn’t see any value in it. So I took the best bits of my short course, and made them into a blog, which also serves, to a lesser degree, to address goal (3).
As social critters, wanting the best for us and our kind, I expect that most of us in the rationalist community share a goal somewhat akin to my goal (3). Furthermore, I expect that more than any other single achievement, goal (3) would also dramatically facilitate goals (1) and (2), and their kin. Thus I predict that a reasoned analysis will yield goal (3), or something very similar, to be the highest possible goal within the pursuit of rationalism. The day that politicians consistently dare not neglect to seek out and implement the best scientific advice, for fear of getting kicked out by the electorate, will be the dawn of a new era of enlightenment.
Hi folks
I am Tom. Allow me to introduce myself, my perception of rationality, and my goals as a rationalist. I hope what follows is not too long and boring.
I am a physicist, currently a post-doc in Texas, working on x-ray imaging. I have been interested in science for longer than I have known that ‘science’ is a word. I went for physics because, well, everything is physics, but I sometimes marvel that I didn’t go for biology, because I have always felt that evolution by natural selection is more beautiful than any theory of ‘physics’ (of course, really it is a theory of physics, but not ‘nominal physics’).
Obviously, the absolute queen of theories is probability theory, since it is the technology that gives us all the other theories.
A few years ago, during my PhD work, I listened to a man called Ben Goldacre on BBC radio, and as a result stumbled onto several useful things. Firstly, by googling his name afterwards, I discovered that there are things called science blogs (!) and something called a ‘skeptic’s community.’ I became hooked.
The next thing I learned from Goldacre’s blog was that I had been shockingly badly educated in statistics. I realized for example, that science and statistics are really the same thing. Damn, hindsight feels weird sometimes—how could I possibly have gone through two and a bit degrees in physics, without realizing this stupendously obvious thing? I started a systematic study.
Through the Bad Science blog, I also found my way to David Colquhoun’s noteworthy blog, where a commenter brought to my attention a certain book by a certain E.T. Jaynes. Suddenly, all the ugly, self-contradictory nonsense of frequentist statistics that I’d been struggling with (as a result of my newly adopted labors to try to understand scientific method better) was replaced with beauty and simple common sense. This was the most eye-opening period of my life.
It was also while looking through professor Colquhoun’s ‘recently read’ sidebar that I first happened to click on a link that brought me to some writing by one Dr. Yudkowsky. And it was good.
In accord with my long-held interest in science, I think I have always been a rationalist. Though I don’t make any claims to be particularly rational, I hold rationality as an explicit high goal. Not my highest goal, obviously – rationality is an approach for solving problems, so without something of higher value to aim for, what problem is there to solve? What space left for being rational? I might value rationality ‘for its own sake,’ but ultimately, this means ‘being rational makes me happy’, and thus, as is necessarily so, happiness is the true goal.
But rationality is a goal, nonetheless, and a necessary one, if we are to be coherent. To desire anything is to desire to increase one’s chances of achieving it. Science (rationality) is the set of procedures that maximize one’s expectation to identify true statements about reality. Such statements include those that are trivially scientific (e.g. ‘the universe is between 13.7 and 13.9 billion years old’), and those that concern other matters of fact, that are often not considered in science’s domain, such as the best way to achieve X. (Thus questions that science can legitimately address include: How can I build an airoplane that won’t fall out of the sky? What is the best way to conduct science? How can I earn more money? What does it mean to be a good person?) Thus, since desiring a thing entails desiring an efficient way to achieve it, any desire entails holding rationality as a goal.
And so, my passion for scientific method has led me to recognize that many things traditionally considered outside the scope of science are in fact not: legal matters, political decisions, and even ethics. I realized that science and morality are identical: all questions of scientific methodology are matters of how to behave correctly, all questions of how to behave are most efficiently answered by being rational, thus being rational is the correct way to behave.
Philosophy? Yup, that too – if I (coherently) love wisdom, then necessarily, I desire an efficient procedure for achieving it. But not only does philosophy entail scientific method, since philosophy is an educated attempt to understand the structure of reality, there is no reason (other than tradition) to distinguish it from science – these two are also identical.
My goals as a rationalist can be divided into 3 parts: (1) to become more adept at actually implementing rational inference, particularly decision making, (2) to see more scientists more fully aware of the full scope and capabilities of scientific method, and (3) to see society’s governance more fully guided by rationality and common sense. Too many scientists see science as having no ethical dimension, and too many voters and politicians see science as having no particular role in deciding political policy: at best it can serve up some informative facts and figures, but the ultimate decision is a matter of human affairs, not science (echoing a religious view, that people are somehow fundamentally special, dating back to a time before anybody had even figured out that cleaning the excrement from your hands before eating is a good idea). I’m tired of democratically elected politicians making the same old crummy excuse of having a popular mandate—“How can I deny the will of the people?”—when they have never even bothered to look into whether or not their actions are in the best interests of the people. In a rational society, of course, there would be no question of evidence-based politics defying the will of the people: the people would vote to be governed rationally, every time.
Goal (1) I pursue almost wholly privately. Perhaps the Less Wrong community can help me change that. After my PhD, while still in The Netherlands, I tried to establish and market a short course in statistics for PhD students, which was my first effort to work on goal (2). This seemed like the perfect approach: firstly, as I mentioned, my own education (and that of many other physicists, in particular) on the topic of what science actually is, was severely lacking. Secondly, in NL, the custom is for PhD students to be sent for short courses as part of their education, but the selection of courses I was faced with was abysmal, and the course I was ultimately forced to attend was a joke – two days of listening to the vacuousness of a third-rate motivational speaker.
I really thought the dutch universities would jump at the chance to offer their young scientists something useful, but they couldn’t see any value in it. So I took the best bits of my short course, and made them into a blog, which also serves, to a lesser degree, to address goal (3).
As social critters, wanting the best for us and our kind, I expect that most of us in the rationalist community share a goal somewhat akin to my goal (3). Furthermore, I expect that more than any other single achievement, goal (3) would also dramatically facilitate goals (1) and (2), and their kin. Thus I predict that a reasoned analysis will yield goal (3), or something very similar, to be the highest possible goal within the pursuit of rationalism. The day that politicians consistently dare not neglect to seek out and implement the best scientific advice, for fear of getting kicked out by the electorate, will be the dawn of a new era of enlightenment.
Welcome!
Where are you in Texas?
Thanks for the welcome.
I’m in Houston.