Socrates initially offered as an alternative punishment that he be given free meals for the rest of his life; he never suggested that he should be paid money, though that’s a quibble. More importantly, the final proposal he made (under pressure from his friends) was that he (well, his friends) pay a whopping huge fine. This may have partly backfired because it also reminded people that he had rich and unpopular friends, but it was a substantial penalty. Though you are right that exile would have been more likely to be acceptable to the jury, especially as you are also correct that he never promised to behave differently in the future (which exile, unlike a fine, would have made irrelevant).
Protagoras
Karma: 892
Neither Plato nor Xenophon describe Socrates as someone who fails to acknowledge the gods that the city acknowledges. Even in Plato, any criticism of the traditional Greek religion is veiled, while in Xenophon Socrates’ religious views are completely orthodox.
On why Socrates didn’t choose exile, what Plato has Socrates say in Crito makes it sound like he thought fleeing would be harming the city. But I’m not sure that Socrates really makes a compelling case for why fleeing is bad anywhere in Plato’s account. In Xenophon’s version of the trial, Socrates also seems to think that a 70 year old only has a few more years of declining health left anyway, so it’s silly to go to any effort for such a meager “reward.”
I’m torn. There are definitely differences between the way Less Wrong operates and the situation the article describes, but that’s always going to be the case. It would be nice to see more studies, of course, examining how the details of the system matter, but no such seem to be available. Absent that it kind of seems like special pleading to say “we do things slightly differently, so obviously it won’t apply to us.” On the other hand, only one study is rather weak evidence, and the differences do exist, even if we don’t have any actual evidence that they matter. I really don’t know if it makes sense to consider changing our system in light of this.
I agree that an AI with such amazing knowledge should be unusually good at communicating its justifications effectively (because able to anticipate responses, etc.) I’m of the opinion that this is one of the numerous minor reasons for being skeptical of traditional religions; their supposedly all-knowing gods seem surprisingly bad at conveying messages clearly to humans. But to return to VAuroch’s point, in order for the scenario to be “wildly inconsistent,” the AI would have to be perfect at communicating such justifications, not merely unusually good. Even such amazing predictive ability does not seem to me sufficient to guarantee perfection.
As I said, I’m sympathetic to pragmatism. But I guess I’d turn the question around, and ask what you think pragmatism will improve. Serious researchers are pretty good at rationalizing how procedures that work fit into their paradigm (or just not thinking about it and using the procedures that work regardless of any conflicting absolutist principles they might have). I’m sure removing the hypocrisy would be of some benefit, but given the history it would also likely be extremely difficult; in what cases do you think it is clear that this would be the best place to apply effort, and why?
Oh, and on reductionism (and to some extent truth absolutism generally), trying to give a unified account of everything requires thoroughly exploring the connections between different realms, and there are definitely tendencies to view realms as much more isolated than they are for purposes of simplification. To take what is admittedly a small scale reductionist project rather than a global reductionist project, there seems to be a strong tendency to sharply separate the physiological from the psychological when looking at behavior, in ways that seem to hinder understanding, not to mention the ability to deal with serious problems. For example, the pointless disputes about drugs for psychological therapy that focus on the bogus question of whether the psychological disorders have a biological base (how could they not, unless perhaps we’re Cartesians?) rather than the much more pertinent questions of whether they work and how they compare to alternatives. While reductionist projects that try to fit everything into a single framework are sometimes guilty of ignoring phenomena that are too complicated or insufficiently well understood to fit into the framework, it is equally true that sharply separating projects into distinct categories can drastically underestimate how much influence there is from factors outside a particular narrowly defined sphere.
Pragmatists from Pierce through the positivists to Rorty have agreed with you that the goal is to avoid wasting time on theories of truth and meaning and instead focus on finding practical tools; they’ve only spoken of theories of truth when they thought there was was no other way to make their points understandable to those too firmly entrenched in the philosophical mainstream (or, even more often, had such theories attributed to them by people who assumed that must be what they were up to despite their explicit disavowals). I’m not saying all of those people agreed with you about everything (the positivists, for example, thought the fact/value distinction was a useful tool, although of course they didn’t think it represented any fundamental truth about reality), but I think you greatly exaggerate your originality here. Of course, one might reasonably insist that originality is not as important as whether the theories actually are useful, but while I tend to be in sympathy with the pragmatist tradition, the fact that it has been around for quite a while without seeming to have radically triumphed over all rivals does provide some reason for doubt about the extent of its world-beating potential.
Because that ends the discussion. I think a lot of people around here just enjoy debating arguments (certainly I do).
I don’t have time to re-read the whole book to come up with examples, and there is unhelpfully no index in my copy, but checking through the footnotes quickly, I found exactly two references to actual positivists (or close enough); a quick dismissive paragraph on Ernest Nagel’s use of probability theory, and a passing reference to Philipp Frank’s biography of Einstein. No references to Reichenbach or Hempel or Carnap. The closest he comes is perhaps the (one) reference to Goodman, who was heavily influenced by Carnap, but Kuhn cites Goodman favorably, while apparently being unaware of how positivist-influenced the ideas he was agreeing with were. There’s also a citation of Wittgenstein, which seems vaguely favorable but complains about Wittgenstein’s lack of development of an idea, which is surely fair enough; I won’t mark anyone down for complaining about that problem in Wittgenstein. But I do have to give low marks for talking so much about “the positivist” while citing only one major positivist philosopher of science (Ernest Nagel) and attributing many views to “the positivist” which are far more simplistic than that positivist would ever have endorsed. Also no references to Duhem. Quine doesn’t get mentioned until the postscript, although it’s quite plausible that the enthusiasm for Kuhn at the time was part of the same broader phenomenon that turned Quine and Putnam and Goodman into huge stars in philosophy around the same time (all three of those were also to varying degrees prone to denial about the extent of their influence from positivism, but at least they were generally better about citing actual positivists when criticizing them).
Maybe he’s referring to Comte or Mach? But I saw no references to them at all, and criticizing 19th century figures in 1962 doesn’t sound very revolutionary. The most charitable I can be is that there may have been some confused historians of science employing some positivist ideas without understanding them (I don’t know much about history of science in Kuhn’s time), and Kuhn’s “positivist” may be an assembly of such characters. But that’s just speculation. It still seems to me that Kuhn is part of the depressing philosophical tradition of ignoring and misrepresenting previous philosophers in order to appear more original and insightful.
Which is not to say that the book is worthless. I do find the idea of a paradigm very fruitful, and it seems a lot of scientific progress involves the discovery of new ways of making observations, and these are issues that perhaps hadn’t gotten sufficient emphasis prior to Kuhn. But a lot of the radical claims that he is most famous for are either not as radical or original as he claimed, or not as well supported by his examples as his very slick writing might lead one to believe, or both.
Kuhn certainly knew physics better than he knew philosophy. The frequently mentioned “positivist” in his narrative is entirely made of straw. He discusses a lot of interesting ideas, and he wrote better than many people who had discussed similar ideas previously, but most of the ideas had been discussed previously, sometimes extensively; he was apparently simply not very aware of the previous literature in the philosophy of science.
The biggest problem is that twins raised apart are actually pretty rare, so almost any study of them goes to desperate lengths to just get enough of them for the study. This often involves fudging what they’re willing to accept as “raised apart” to a degree no unbiased observer would be comfortable with, just to get sufficient numbers.
Also, from the same background, it is striking to me that a lot of the criticisms Less Wrong people make of philosophers are the same as the criticisms philosophers make of one another. I can’t really think of a case where Less Wrong stakes out positions that are almost universally rejected by mainstream philosophers. And not just because philosophers disagree so much, though that’s also true, of course; it seems rather that Less Wrong people greatly exaggerate how different they are and how much they disagree with the philosophical mainstream, to the extent that any such thing exists (again, a respect in which their behavior resembles how philosophers treat one another).
I’m pretty sure I was also a victim, if a rather recent and relatively small scale one, and I’m glad to see something was done. However much I told myself it wasn’t really important, that karma’s a horribly noisy measure, with a few slightly funny comments gaining me the majority of my karma while my most thoughtful contributions usually only gathered a handful, the block downvoting really did make me feel disinclined to post new comments. Banning seems like an extreme measure, and I guess I can see where people who think there should have been warnings are coming from, but I’m actually kind of surprised that it was all or nearly all one person, and given the amount of distress it seems to have caused, I think we can do without a person like that around here, even if he did sometimes contribute good comments.
The reviews are fairly critical. Anything in the book that struck you as particularly compelling? What do you think about the discussion of the A vs. B theory debate, or was there another issue you thought she discussed in a particularly interesting way?
It looks like this has been an unpopular suggestion, but I wouldn’t discount motivation completely. A lot of early 20th century economists thought centrally planned economies were a great idea, based on the evidence of how productive various centrally planned war economies had been. Presumably there’s some explanation for why central planning works better (or doesn’t fail as badly) with war economies compared with peacetime economies, and I’ve always suspected that people’s motivation to help the country in wartime was probably one of the factors.
2 wouldn’t surprise me. A non-relativistic universe seems to have hidden incoherence (justifying Einstein’s enormous confidence in relativity), so while my physics competence is insufficient to follow any similar QM arguments, it wouldn’t shock me if they existed.
I am inclined to believe that the more recent controversy may be a factor. It’s the first time I’ve been block downvoted, so I’m inclined to believe that there’s been an increase in that kind of activity.
The Logical Positivists were mostly pretty far left, but they mostly didn’t engage in much political advocacy; though this was controversial among members of the movement (Neurath thought they should be more overtly political), most of them seemed to think that helping people think more clearly and make better use of science was a better way to encourage superior outcomes than advocating specific policies. They were also involved in various causes, though; many members of the Vienna Circle were involved in adult education efforts in Vienna, for example. The more I think about it, the more I think it’s pretty accurate to say they had a lot in common with the Less Wrong crowd in their approach to politics (though they were almost certainly further left, even taking into account that the surveys suggest Less Wrong itself is further left than many people seem to realize).
Cool! I’ve looked for that manifesto on line before, and failed to find it; thanks for the link! Too many people seem to get all of their knowledge of the Vienna Circle and Logical Positivism from its critics. It’s good to look at the primary sources. The translation is a little clunky (perhaps too literal), but so much better than not having it available at all.
You make a lot of assumptions. When I said the grad student population was “racially diverse” I was not trying to give a more impressive sounding name to the fact that it included a decent number of Asians. It did, of course, but it also included plenty of people from Africa, the West Indies, the Middle East, and, well, pretty much everywhere.
Indeed. A more plausible alternative strategy for Germany would be to forget the invading Belgium plan, fight defensively on the western front, and concentrate their efforts against Russia at the beginning. Britain didn’t enter the war until the violation of Belgian neutrality. Admittedly, over time French diplomats might have found some other way to get Britain into the war, but Britain was at least initially unenthusiastic about getting involved, so I think Miller is on the right track in thinking Germany’s best hope was to look for ways to keep Britain out indefinitely.