I’m not all that sure that this is going anywhere helpful, but since curi has asked for objections to Critical Rationalism, I might as well make mine known.
My first objection is that it attempts to “solve” the problem of induction by doing away with an axiom. Yes, if you try to prove induction, you get circularity or infinite regress. That’s what happens when you attempt to prove axioms. The Problem of Induction essentially amounts to noticing that we have axioms on which inductive reasoning rests.
Popperian reasoning could be similarly “refuted” simply by refusing to accept any or all of its axioms. The axiom of induction that Critical Rationalism rejects is one that we have every reason to suspect is true, save that we cannot prove it, which is as good as axioms get, so Critical Rationalism is not any more secure.
Second, with respect to the principle of criticism, it gives too much leeway to a mere clever arguer. Philosophy as a discipline is testament to the fact that humans can criticize each others’ ideas endlessly without coming to meaningful consensuses. Wittgenstein criticized Popper. Was that the end of Popper? No, Popper and supporters countered criticisms, which were met with counter-counters, and so on till today and almost certainly beyond. For humans operating in natural language, following this principle does not have a good track record of getting people to promote good ideas over bad ones, when compared to distinction based on plausibility and evidence.
My first objection is that it attempts to “solve” the problem of induction by doing away with an axiom.
Proposed axioms can be mistakes. Do we need that axiom? Popper says the argument that we need it is mistaken. That could be an important and valid insight if true, right?
Popperian reasoning could be similarly “refuted” simply by refusing to accept any or all of its axioms.
You are applying foundationalist and justificationist criticism to a philosophy which has, as one of its big ideas, that those ways of thinking are mistaken. That is not a good answer to Popper’s system.
The axiom of induction that Critical Rationalism rejects is one that we have every reason to suspect is true
No, it’s worse than that. Try specifying the axiom. How are ideas justified?
If the answer you give is “they are justified by other ideas, which themselves must be justified” then that isn’t merely not proven but wrong. That doesn’t work.
If the answer you give is, “they are justified by other ideas which are themselves justified, or the following set of foundational ideas …” then the problem is not merely that you can’t prove your foundations are correct, but that this method of thinking is anti-critical and not sufficiently fallibilist.
Fallibilism teaches that people make mistakes. A lot. It is thus a bad idea to try to find the perfect truth and set it up to rule your thinking, as the unquestionable foundations. You will set up mistaken ideas in the role of foundations, and that will be bad. What we should do instead is to try set up institutions which are good at (for example):
1) making errors easy to find and question—highlighting rather than hiding them
2) making ideas easy to change when we find errors
Popper’s solution to the problem of justification isn’t merely dropping an axiom but involves advocating an approach along these lines (with far more detail than I can type in). It’s substantive. And rejecting it on the grounds that “you can’t prove it” or “i refuse to accept it” is silly. You should give a proper argument, or reconsider rejecting it.
Second, with respect to the principle of criticism, it gives too much leeway to a mere clever arguer.
It is non-obvious how it doesn’t. There is a legitimate issue here. But the problem can be and is dealt with. I do not have this problem in practice, and I know of no argument that I really have it in theory. You give Wittgenstein as an example, and suggest things go back and forth kind of indefinitely. Some replies:
1) stuff gets resolved or figured out. broad consensuses get reached. there isn’t a rule to force people not to be idiots, but being an idiot isn’t a fulfilling life and people tire of it when they understand a better way. this isn’t easy but it happens.
2) adding a rule to require people to listen to your conception of reason would not solve the problem. they might refuse your premises.
3) I don’t agree with your pessimism. most people don’t try hard enough to organize their thinking and reach conclusions. but it can be done, in practice. you can look at issues in depth, and actually sort through all the arguments and counter arguments. it takes patience, persistence and effort to do high quality learning, but progress is possible.
following this principle does not have a good track record
As I see it, it is responsible for the enlightenment, in broad terms. i’m not trying to claim all the credit but the things done in the enlightenment were basically compatible with what i’m advocating. Also for the golden age of athens (plato and aristotle are not representative of the height of athens, they lived just after. it’s the pre-socratics i have in mind, such as xenophanes.)
one aspect of the enlightenment was rebelling against authority (in particular religious authority, and in particular religious authority as applied to science. also in particular, political authority). this is broadly in line with my philosophy. and i think not so much in line with an attempt to set up foundational axioms for everyone to obey to prevent them from thinking wrong.
That said, Popper’s insights beyond description of how people already learn have little track record. What they do have is pretty positive. Popper and his philosophy of science in particular has been respected by many scientists great and small, like Einstein, Deutsch, Feynman, Wheeler, Medawar, Eccles, Monod.
Anyway, back to those clever people. They can be dealt with. Wittgenstein is easy to argue with, he’s so bad. Do you have an example of some argument you don’t know how to resolve and want me to resolve?
I wrote a response up, but I deleted it because I think this is getting too confrontational to be useful. I have plenty of standing objections to Critical Rationalism, but I don’t think I can pose them without creating an attitude too adversarial to be conducive to changing either of our minds. I hate to be the one to start bringing this in again, but I think perhaps if you want to continue this discussion, you should read the Sequences, at which point you should hopefully have some understanding of how we are convinced that Bayesianism improves people’s information processing and decisionmaking from a practical standpoint. I will be similarly open to any explanations of how you feel Critical Rationalism improves these things (let me be very clear that I’m not asking for more examples of people who approved of Popper or things you feel Critical Rationalism can take credit for, show me how people who can only be narrowly interpreted as Popperian outperform people who are not Popperian.) I have standing objections to Popper’s critiques of induction, but this is what I actually care about and am amenable to changing my mind on the basis of.
The reason I’m not very interested in carefully reading your Sequences is that I feel they miss the point and aren’t useful (that is, useful to philosophy. lots of your math is nice). In my discussions here, I have not found any reason to think otherwise.
show me how people who can only be narrowly interpreted as Popperian outperform people who are not Popperian
Show it how? I can conjecture it. Got a criticism?
Responses to criticisms are not interesting to me; proponents of any philosophy can respond to criticisms in ways that they are convinced are satisfying, and I’m not impressed that supporters of Critical Rationalism are doing a better job. If you cannot yourself come up with a convincing way to demonstrate that Critical Rationalism results in improved success in ways that supporters of other philosophies cannot, why should I take it seriously?
Examples of mistakes in processing evidence people make in real life which lead to bad results, and how Bayesian reasoning resolves them, followed by concrete applications such as the review of the Amanda Knox trial.
Have you already looked at the review of the Amanda Knox trial? If you haven’t, it might be a useful point for us to examine.
It doesn’t help anyone to point out an example of inductive reasoning, say “this is a mistake” because you reject the foundations of inductive reasoning, but not demonstrate how rejecting it leads to better results than accepting it. So far the examples you have given of the supposed benefits of Critical Rationalism have been achievements of people who can only be loosely associated with Critical Rationalism, or arguments in a frame of Critical Rationalism for things that have already been argued for outside a frame of Critical Rationalism.
Inductive reasoning doesn’t lead to any results, ever.
No one has ever used it.
The theory they have is a mistake.
This cannot be demonstrated in the way you request. It can only be argued. e.g. by beginning with the question: what precisely does induction say to do? (which has never been successfully answered.)
have people done stuff similar to induction, and did it work OK? well that depends on philosophical understanding of what is and isn’t similar to something that doesn’t make sense. i’m not very inclined to start calling any coherent things similar to any incoherent ones.
Many Popperian insights are of this type: they are philosophical ideas.
So far the examples you have given of the supposed benefits of Critical Rationalism have been achievements of people who can only be loosely associated with Critical Rationalism
What are you talking about? I don’t think you know much about the philosophies of the people I listed. They aren’t all just loosely associated.
So what if nobody has ever used induction? I’m convinced that Popper is wrong, but without any evidence that following his epistemology produces improved results, I don’t see why I should be interested in the possibility that he’s right. Even supposing induction is merely an approximation of how we really gain knowledge, it’s a computable approximation which produces results that are at least as viable, so there’s no reason why it not being the “real” method of knowledge production should matter, for AI or for humans.
What are you talking about? I don’t think you know much about the philosophies of the people I listed. They aren’t all just loosely associated.
Then explain specifically what each of them have achieved that could not have been achieved equally well had they not been Critical Rationalists, and why these achievements are due to Critical Rationalism. Or hell, explain what any of them have achieved that’s unambiguously due to critical rationalism.
Even supposing induction is merely an approximation
Popper says it’s not.
Does that matter to you?
Then explain specifically what each of them have achieved that could not have been achieved equally well had they not been Critical Rationalists, and why these achievements are due to Critical Rationalism. Or hell, explain what any of them have achieved that’s unambiguously due to critical rationalism.
You are challenging me to explain things to you which you could learn about on your own if you wanted. You want me to answer questions you chose not to research. That is OK, but...
Before that you were dismissive. So I’m not sure if I want to help answer your questions about scientists. Are you a person with intellectual integrity who is worth talking to? Help me decide. You made a statement about the people I had listed, without knowing much about the people I had listed, and in particular without knowing if they all only have a loose association with CR or not. You falsely asserted they did all have a loose association only. You were mistaken to speak from ignorance about scientists—assuming I was wrong without even asking—and now you would like to learn better and change your mind. Is that correct?
Note for example that Deutsch has published two books advocating Popperian philosophy and talking extensively about Popper. That isn’t a loose association. Even wikipedia level knowledge of these people would be sufficient not to make the mistake you did. You had less than that level of knowledge and posted anyway. Do you want to apologize, retract your statements, or anything? Or do you want to get mad at me now? I want to test your reaction.
I don’t see why it should, unless you can demonstrate that it leads to different results. This is what I expect in order to have an interest in this discussion, please provide it if you want me to continue to participate.
You are challenging me to explain things to you which you could learn about on your own if you wanted. You want me to answer questions you chose not to research. That is OK, but...
Why should I commit to reading a large amount of material without an indication that it contains useful ideas? That’s an opportunity cost, time I could be dedicating to countless other things including any other philosophy. You yourself haven’t committed the time to reading the Sequences, and have demonstrated basic level misunderstandings of the positions we hold here; you’re applying a double standard in your expectations.
I am giving you ample opportunity to convince me that doing this research is worth my time, and am becoming less and less patient as you fail to provide anything I consider a meaningful incentive.
Inductive reasoning doesn’t lead to any results, ever.
No one has ever used it.
This is so empirically false that I don’t know how to approach it. Do you actually think that when people are saying that they are using induction they really aren’t? Note that this isn’t the same claim that people shouldn’t be using induction or that their induction is unjustified. But claiming they are not using it is just wrong unless you are using some very non-standard terminology under which one could say things like “No one has ever used homeopathy.” This seems like an abuse of language.
Which exposes one of the problems with Popperianism..it leads to the burden of proof being shifted to the wrong place. The burden should be with who proposes a claim,
or whoever makes the most extraordinary claim. Popperianism turns it into a burden of disproof on the refuter. All you have to do is “get in first” with your conjecture, and you can sit back and relax. “Why, you have to show Barack Obama is NOT an alien”.
Show it how? I can conjecture it. Got a criticism?
I’m replying a second time to this remark because thinking about it more it illustrates a major problem you are having. You are using a specific set of epistemological tools and notation when that is one of the things that is in fact in dispute. That’s unproductive and is going to get people annoyed.
It is all the more severe because many of these situations are cases where the specific epistemology doesn’t even matter. For example, the claim under discussion is the claim that ” people who can only be narrowly interpreted as Popperian outperform people who are not Popperian” That’s something that could be tested regardless of epistemology. To use a similar example, if someone is arguing for Christianity and they claim that Christians have a longer lifespan on average then I don’t need to go into a detailed discussion about epistemology to examine the data. If I read a paper, in whatever branch of science, I could be a Popperian, a Bayesian, completely uncommitted, or something else, and still read the paper and come to essentially the same results.
Trying to discuss claims using exactly the framework in question is at best unproductive, and is in general unhelpful.
I’m replying a second time to this remark because thinking about it more it illustrates a major problem you are having. You are using a specific set of epistemological tools and notation when that is one of the things that is in fact in dispute. That’s unproductive and is going to get people annoyed.
Sure I am. But so are you! We can’t help but use epistemological tools. I use the ones I regard as actually working. As do you. I’m not sure what you’re suggesting I do instead.
If you want me to recognize what I’m doing, I do. If you want me to consider other toolsets, I have. In depth. (Note, btw, that I am here voluntarily choosing to learn more about how Bayesians think. I like to visits various communities. Simultaneously I’m talking to Objectivists (and reading their books) who have a different way of approach epistemology.) The primary reason some people have accused me (and Brian) of not understanding Bayesian views and other views not our own isn’t our unfamiliarity but because we disagree and choose to think differently than them and not to accept or go along with various ideas.
When people do stuff like link me to http://yudkowsky.net/rational/bayes it is their mistake to think I haven’t read it. I have. They think if I read it I would change my mind; they are just plain empirically wrong; I did read it and did not change my mind. They ought to learn something from their mistake, such as that their literature is less convincing than they think it is.
On the other hand, no one here has noticeably familiar with Popper. And no one has pointed me to any rigorous criticism of Popper by any Bayesian. Nor any rigorous rebuttal to Popper’s criticisms of Bayesianism (especially the most important ones, that is the philosophical not mathematical ones).
The situation is that Popper read up on Bayesian stuff, and many other ideas, engaged with and criticized other ideas, formulated his own ideas, rebutted criticisms of his views, and so on. That is all good stuff. Bayesians do it some too. But they haven’t done it with Popper; they’ve chosen to disregard him based on things like his reputation, and misleading summaries of his work. At best some people here have read his first book, which is not the right one to start with if you want to understand what he’s about, and gotten a very unrepresentative picture of what Popper is about. This disregarding of Popper without engaging with the bulk of his work is no good.
The same thing can be found, btw, in Objectivist circles. Here’s what happened when my friend asked Harry Binswanger (a big shot who knew Rand personally for a long time) about Popper: Binswanger gave Popper quotes attributed to the wrong book and briefly stated a few mythes about Popper. And in one of the quotes he inserted a clarifying word. It was roughly, at the start of the quote: “That doctrine [realism]” when Popper wasn’t talking about realism, Binswanger hadn’t read (or had misread, but I think hadn’t read since he didn’t know what book the quotes were from) the context. When confronted with his mistakes he basically ignored them and said “I’m right anyway” except, amazingly, without the “anyway” part. I think you may be happy to jump on the dumb Objectivists. But from my perspective, the reception here hasn’t been better. In some ways the Objectivsts were superior. They provided some relevant published material on the matter (it was badly wrong, but at least they had something).
It is all the more severe because many of these situations are cases where the specific epistemology doesn’t even matter.
As I was talking about in other comments recently (edit: oops, I actually wrote a different post first but haven’t managed to post it yet due to the rate limit. it’s a reply to you, so you can find it in your inbox in 10 minutes. i’ll post it next), all mistakes matter. It doesn’t work to ignore mistakes thinking they aren’t relevant and just keeping going and hope they wont’ bite you. You know, I’ve gotten a bunch of flak where people say Popper isn’t rigorous enough and Bayesian stuff is more rigorous. But it’s not quite like that. Popper thought that certain kinds of formalness used by philosophers were mistakes, said why, and didn’t do them (especially in his later works). But for other issues, the Popperian attitude is more rigorous. We don’t gloss over small mistakes. We think they all matter! Is that not being more rigorous in a way? Maybe you think the wrong way. But that’s a substantive disagreement.
BTW your entire question asking for empirical evidence that a non-empirical philosophy produces better results is itself a product of your epistemological tools. Popperians regard that as something of a bad question. That’s why you don’t get the direct answer you expect. It’s not evasion but disagreement about your premises. Large parts of philosophy are not empirical and can’t really be judged empirically. And there’s so many issues that make a rigorous answer to what you want impracticable. No philosophy can answer it because there’s too many uncontrolled factors. People always have lots of ideas of a variety of types, and imperfect understanding of the philosophy they are associated with.
Tell us what you think your tool does better, in some area where we see a problem with Bayes. (And I do mean Bayes’ Theorem as a whole, not a part of it taken out of context.)
Show it how? I can conjecture it. Got a criticism?
Seems like any process that leads to harmful priors can also produce a criticism of your position as you’ve explained it so far. As I mentioned before, the Consistent Gambler’s Fallacy would lead us to criticize any theory that has worked in the past.
show me how people who can only be narrowly interpreted as Popperian outperform people who are not Popperian
Show it how? I can conjecture it. Got a criticism?
Yes. There’s no reason to conjecture this other than your own personal preference. I could conjecture that people with red hair perform better and that would have almost as much basis.
(The mere act of asserting a hypothesis is not a reason to take it seriously.)
I’m not all that sure that this is going anywhere helpful, but since curi has asked for objections to Critical Rationalism, I might as well make mine known.
My first objection is that it attempts to “solve” the problem of induction by doing away with an axiom. Yes, if you try to prove induction, you get circularity or infinite regress. That’s what happens when you attempt to prove axioms. The Problem of Induction essentially amounts to noticing that we have axioms on which inductive reasoning rests.
Popperian reasoning could be similarly “refuted” simply by refusing to accept any or all of its axioms. The axiom of induction that Critical Rationalism rejects is one that we have every reason to suspect is true, save that we cannot prove it, which is as good as axioms get, so Critical Rationalism is not any more secure.
Second, with respect to the principle of criticism, it gives too much leeway to a mere clever arguer. Philosophy as a discipline is testament to the fact that humans can criticize each others’ ideas endlessly without coming to meaningful consensuses. Wittgenstein criticized Popper. Was that the end of Popper? No, Popper and supporters countered criticisms, which were met with counter-counters, and so on till today and almost certainly beyond. For humans operating in natural language, following this principle does not have a good track record of getting people to promote good ideas over bad ones, when compared to distinction based on plausibility and evidence.
Proposed axioms can be mistakes. Do we need that axiom? Popper says the argument that we need it is mistaken. That could be an important and valid insight if true, right?
You are applying foundationalist and justificationist criticism to a philosophy which has, as one of its big ideas, that those ways of thinking are mistaken. That is not a good answer to Popper’s system.
No, it’s worse than that. Try specifying the axiom. How are ideas justified?
If the answer you give is “they are justified by other ideas, which themselves must be justified” then that isn’t merely not proven but wrong. That doesn’t work.
If the answer you give is, “they are justified by other ideas which are themselves justified, or the following set of foundational ideas …” then the problem is not merely that you can’t prove your foundations are correct, but that this method of thinking is anti-critical and not sufficiently fallibilist.
Fallibilism teaches that people make mistakes. A lot. It is thus a bad idea to try to find the perfect truth and set it up to rule your thinking, as the unquestionable foundations. You will set up mistaken ideas in the role of foundations, and that will be bad. What we should do instead is to try set up institutions which are good at (for example):
1) making errors easy to find and question—highlighting rather than hiding them 2) making ideas easy to change when we find errors
Popper’s solution to the problem of justification isn’t merely dropping an axiom but involves advocating an approach along these lines (with far more detail than I can type in). It’s substantive. And rejecting it on the grounds that “you can’t prove it” or “i refuse to accept it” is silly. You should give a proper argument, or reconsider rejecting it.
It is non-obvious how it doesn’t. There is a legitimate issue here. But the problem can be and is dealt with. I do not have this problem in practice, and I know of no argument that I really have it in theory. You give Wittgenstein as an example, and suggest things go back and forth kind of indefinitely. Some replies:
1) stuff gets resolved or figured out. broad consensuses get reached. there isn’t a rule to force people not to be idiots, but being an idiot isn’t a fulfilling life and people tire of it when they understand a better way. this isn’t easy but it happens.
2) adding a rule to require people to listen to your conception of reason would not solve the problem. they might refuse your premises.
3) I don’t agree with your pessimism. most people don’t try hard enough to organize their thinking and reach conclusions. but it can be done, in practice. you can look at issues in depth, and actually sort through all the arguments and counter arguments. it takes patience, persistence and effort to do high quality learning, but progress is possible.
As I see it, it is responsible for the enlightenment, in broad terms. i’m not trying to claim all the credit but the things done in the enlightenment were basically compatible with what i’m advocating. Also for the golden age of athens (plato and aristotle are not representative of the height of athens, they lived just after. it’s the pre-socratics i have in mind, such as xenophanes.)
one aspect of the enlightenment was rebelling against authority (in particular religious authority, and in particular religious authority as applied to science. also in particular, political authority). this is broadly in line with my philosophy. and i think not so much in line with an attempt to set up foundational axioms for everyone to obey to prevent them from thinking wrong.
That said, Popper’s insights beyond description of how people already learn have little track record. What they do have is pretty positive. Popper and his philosophy of science in particular has been respected by many scientists great and small, like Einstein, Deutsch, Feynman, Wheeler, Medawar, Eccles, Monod.
Anyway, back to those clever people. They can be dealt with. Wittgenstein is easy to argue with, he’s so bad. Do you have an example of some argument you don’t know how to resolve and want me to resolve?
Edit:
I wrote a response up, but I deleted it because I think this is getting too confrontational to be useful. I have plenty of standing objections to Critical Rationalism, but I don’t think I can pose them without creating an attitude too adversarial to be conducive to changing either of our minds. I hate to be the one to start bringing this in again, but I think perhaps if you want to continue this discussion, you should read the Sequences, at which point you should hopefully have some understanding of how we are convinced that Bayesianism improves people’s information processing and decisionmaking from a practical standpoint. I will be similarly open to any explanations of how you feel Critical Rationalism improves these things (let me be very clear that I’m not asking for more examples of people who approved of Popper or things you feel Critical Rationalism can take credit for, show me how people who can only be narrowly interpreted as Popperian outperform people who are not Popperian.) I have standing objections to Popper’s critiques of induction, but this is what I actually care about and am amenable to changing my mind on the basis of.
The reason I’m not very interested in carefully reading your Sequences is that I feel they miss the point and aren’t useful (that is, useful to philosophy. lots of your math is nice). In my discussions here, I have not found any reason to think otherwise.
Show it how? I can conjecture it. Got a criticism?
Responses to criticisms are not interesting to me; proponents of any philosophy can respond to criticisms in ways that they are convinced are satisfying, and I’m not impressed that supporters of Critical Rationalism are doing a better job. If you cannot yourself come up with a convincing way to demonstrate that Critical Rationalism results in improved success in ways that supporters of other philosophies cannot, why should I take it seriously?
What would you find convincing? What convinced you of Bayes’ or whatever you believe?
Examples of mistakes in processing evidence people make in real life which lead to bad results, and how Bayesian reasoning resolves them, followed by concrete applications such as the review of the Amanda Knox trial.
Have you already looked at the review of the Amanda Knox trial? If you haven’t, it might be a useful point for us to examine.
It doesn’t help anyone to point out an example of inductive reasoning, say “this is a mistake” because you reject the foundations of inductive reasoning, but not demonstrate how rejecting it leads to better results than accepting it. So far the examples you have given of the supposed benefits of Critical Rationalism have been achievements of people who can only be loosely associated with Critical Rationalism, or arguments in a frame of Critical Rationalism for things that have already been argued for outside a frame of Critical Rationalism.
Inductive reasoning doesn’t lead to any results, ever.
No one has ever used it.
The theory they have is a mistake.
This cannot be demonstrated in the way you request. It can only be argued. e.g. by beginning with the question: what precisely does induction say to do? (which has never been successfully answered.)
have people done stuff similar to induction, and did it work OK? well that depends on philosophical understanding of what is and isn’t similar to something that doesn’t make sense. i’m not very inclined to start calling any coherent things similar to any incoherent ones.
Many Popperian insights are of this type: they are philosophical ideas.
What are you talking about? I don’t think you know much about the philosophies of the people I listed. They aren’t all just loosely associated.
This doesn’t address my requests at all.
So what if nobody has ever used induction? I’m convinced that Popper is wrong, but without any evidence that following his epistemology produces improved results, I don’t see why I should be interested in the possibility that he’s right. Even supposing induction is merely an approximation of how we really gain knowledge, it’s a computable approximation which produces results that are at least as viable, so there’s no reason why it not being the “real” method of knowledge production should matter, for AI or for humans.
Then explain specifically what each of them have achieved that could not have been achieved equally well had they not been Critical Rationalists, and why these achievements are due to Critical Rationalism. Or hell, explain what any of them have achieved that’s unambiguously due to critical rationalism.
Popper says it’s not.
Does that matter to you?
You are challenging me to explain things to you which you could learn about on your own if you wanted. You want me to answer questions you chose not to research. That is OK, but...
Before that you were dismissive. So I’m not sure if I want to help answer your questions about scientists. Are you a person with intellectual integrity who is worth talking to? Help me decide. You made a statement about the people I had listed, without knowing much about the people I had listed, and in particular without knowing if they all only have a loose association with CR or not. You falsely asserted they did all have a loose association only. You were mistaken to speak from ignorance about scientists—assuming I was wrong without even asking—and now you would like to learn better and change your mind. Is that correct?
Note for example that Deutsch has published two books advocating Popperian philosophy and talking extensively about Popper. That isn’t a loose association. Even wikipedia level knowledge of these people would be sufficient not to make the mistake you did. You had less than that level of knowledge and posted anyway. Do you want to apologize, retract your statements, or anything? Or do you want to get mad at me now? I want to test your reaction.
I don’t see why it should, unless you can demonstrate that it leads to different results. This is what I expect in order to have an interest in this discussion, please provide it if you want me to continue to participate.
Why should I commit to reading a large amount of material without an indication that it contains useful ideas? That’s an opportunity cost, time I could be dedicating to countless other things including any other philosophy. You yourself haven’t committed the time to reading the Sequences, and have demonstrated basic level misunderstandings of the positions we hold here; you’re applying a double standard in your expectations.
I am giving you ample opportunity to convince me that doing this research is worth my time, and am becoming less and less patient as you fail to provide anything I consider a meaningful incentive.
Go read Jaynes’ defense of Laplace’s rule of succession (which is an example of inductive reasoning) in Chapter 18.
This is so empirically false that I don’t know how to approach it. Do you actually think that when people are saying that they are using induction they really aren’t? Note that this isn’t the same claim that people shouldn’t be using induction or that their induction is unjustified. But claiming they are not using it is just wrong unless you are using some very non-standard terminology under which one could say things like “No one has ever used homeopathy.” This seems like an abuse of language.
Post the method of induction, step by step, in sufficient detail that a reasonable person could do it without having to ask any questions.
When you fail—in particular by having large unspecified parts—it will be because you are wrong about the issue in question.
When you respond to this failure by making ad hoc additions that still don’t provide followable instructions, then I will stop talking to you.
OK, go ahead.
Please reread my statement. The issue I was arguing with is not whether or not induction is justified. It was whether or not people are using it.
Which exposes one of the problems with Popperianism..it leads to the burden of proof being shifted to the wrong place. The burden should be with who proposes a claim, or whoever makes the most extraordinary claim. Popperianism turns it into a burden of disproof on the refuter. All you have to do is “get in first” with your conjecture, and you can sit back and relax. “Why, you have to show Barack Obama is NOT an alien”.
In Popperism, there is no burden of proof.
How did you find me here, Peter?
I’m replying a second time to this remark because thinking about it more it illustrates a major problem you are having. You are using a specific set of epistemological tools and notation when that is one of the things that is in fact in dispute. That’s unproductive and is going to get people annoyed.
It is all the more severe because many of these situations are cases where the specific epistemology doesn’t even matter. For example, the claim under discussion is the claim that ” people who can only be narrowly interpreted as Popperian outperform people who are not Popperian” That’s something that could be tested regardless of epistemology. To use a similar example, if someone is arguing for Christianity and they claim that Christians have a longer lifespan on average then I don’t need to go into a detailed discussion about epistemology to examine the data. If I read a paper, in whatever branch of science, I could be a Popperian, a Bayesian, completely uncommitted, or something else, and still read the paper and come to essentially the same results.
Trying to discuss claims using exactly the framework in question is at best unproductive, and is in general unhelpful.
Sure I am. But so are you! We can’t help but use epistemological tools. I use the ones I regard as actually working. As do you. I’m not sure what you’re suggesting I do instead.
If you want me to recognize what I’m doing, I do. If you want me to consider other toolsets, I have. In depth. (Note, btw, that I am here voluntarily choosing to learn more about how Bayesians think. I like to visits various communities. Simultaneously I’m talking to Objectivists (and reading their books) who have a different way of approach epistemology.) The primary reason some people have accused me (and Brian) of not understanding Bayesian views and other views not our own isn’t our unfamiliarity but because we disagree and choose to think differently than them and not to accept or go along with various ideas.
When people do stuff like link me to http://yudkowsky.net/rational/bayes it is their mistake to think I haven’t read it. I have. They think if I read it I would change my mind; they are just plain empirically wrong; I did read it and did not change my mind. They ought to learn something from their mistake, such as that their literature is less convincing than they think it is.
On the other hand, no one here has noticeably familiar with Popper. And no one has pointed me to any rigorous criticism of Popper by any Bayesian. Nor any rigorous rebuttal to Popper’s criticisms of Bayesianism (especially the most important ones, that is the philosophical not mathematical ones).
The situation is that Popper read up on Bayesian stuff, and many other ideas, engaged with and criticized other ideas, formulated his own ideas, rebutted criticisms of his views, and so on. That is all good stuff. Bayesians do it some too. But they haven’t done it with Popper; they’ve chosen to disregard him based on things like his reputation, and misleading summaries of his work. At best some people here have read his first book, which is not the right one to start with if you want to understand what he’s about, and gotten a very unrepresentative picture of what Popper is about. This disregarding of Popper without engaging with the bulk of his work is no good.
The same thing can be found, btw, in Objectivist circles. Here’s what happened when my friend asked Harry Binswanger (a big shot who knew Rand personally for a long time) about Popper: Binswanger gave Popper quotes attributed to the wrong book and briefly stated a few mythes about Popper. And in one of the quotes he inserted a clarifying word. It was roughly, at the start of the quote: “That doctrine [realism]” when Popper wasn’t talking about realism, Binswanger hadn’t read (or had misread, but I think hadn’t read since he didn’t know what book the quotes were from) the context. When confronted with his mistakes he basically ignored them and said “I’m right anyway” except, amazingly, without the “anyway” part. I think you may be happy to jump on the dumb Objectivists. But from my perspective, the reception here hasn’t been better. In some ways the Objectivsts were superior. They provided some relevant published material on the matter (it was badly wrong, but at least they had something).
As I was talking about in other comments recently (edit: oops, I actually wrote a different post first but haven’t managed to post it yet due to the rate limit. it’s a reply to you, so you can find it in your inbox in 10 minutes. i’ll post it next), all mistakes matter. It doesn’t work to ignore mistakes thinking they aren’t relevant and just keeping going and hope they wont’ bite you. You know, I’ve gotten a bunch of flak where people say Popper isn’t rigorous enough and Bayesian stuff is more rigorous. But it’s not quite like that. Popper thought that certain kinds of formalness used by philosophers were mistakes, said why, and didn’t do them (especially in his later works). But for other issues, the Popperian attitude is more rigorous. We don’t gloss over small mistakes. We think they all matter! Is that not being more rigorous in a way? Maybe you think the wrong way. But that’s a substantive disagreement.
BTW your entire question asking for empirical evidence that a non-empirical philosophy produces better results is itself a product of your epistemological tools. Popperians regard that as something of a bad question. That’s why you don’t get the direct answer you expect. It’s not evasion but disagreement about your premises. Large parts of philosophy are not empirical and can’t really be judged empirically. And there’s so many issues that make a rigorous answer to what you want impracticable. No philosophy can answer it because there’s too many uncontrolled factors. People always have lots of ideas of a variety of types, and imperfect understanding of the philosophy they are associated with.
Tell us what you think your tool does better, in some area where we see a problem with Bayes. (And I do mean Bayes’ Theorem as a whole, not a part of it taken out of context.)
Seems like any process that leads to harmful priors can also produce a criticism of your position as you’ve explained it so far. As I mentioned before, the Consistent Gambler’s Fallacy would lead us to criticize any theory that has worked in the past.
Yes. There’s no reason to conjecture this other than your own personal preference. I could conjecture that people with red hair perform better and that would have almost as much basis.
(The mere act of asserting a hypothesis is not a reason to take it seriously.)