You’ve done a whole lot of telling us how amazing this stuff is, but not much telling what it actually is. So I’m going to guess, in the hopes that you can tell me not just that I’m wrong, but specifically what a better version would be.
According to what you’ve said, it seems the process of people having valuable knowledge of future events (e.g., the sun will rise tomorrow), is that people generate guesses (by some unspecified process that’s definitely not induction), and then over time, other people criticize guesses, and the guesses best able to stand up to criticism are what we should use to predict tomorrow’s sunrise.
And the reason this works, according to you, is that it’s like evolution. Just like how in evolution, mutation and selection leads to creatures that take advantage of patterns in their environment to get a fitness advantage, guessing and criticism leads to ideas that take advantage of some sort of pattern in the environment in order to be more valuable.
But, of course, taking advantage of patterns in the environment in order to make valuable predictions about the future totally isn’t induction, and there’s no way you could formalize it other than the precise way Popper chose to formalize it.
I asked if anyone here has a criticism (including a reference they endorse). No one seems to. Apparently you personally are unfamiliar with the matter and expect me to open by assuming your ignorance and teaching you? Should I want to teach you? What value do you have to offer? If you want to be taught about CR, why don’t you join the FI forum and ask for help there? Will you read books and otherwise put in the work?
You have not specified what you think “induction” is which makes you difficult to talk with. I know you’ll try to blame me for not already knowing what you think (even though there are dozens of variants of induction and I got heavily flamed recently for suggesting LW should have any canonical ideas and targets for criticism), but e.g. you seem to claim induction is a method of theory generation when SI is a method of theory preference not generation. Induction in general has never adequately specified which theories to generate (some variations of induction recommend you generate the theories the evidence point to, but evidence doesn’t point and there are infinitely many theories compatible with the evidence). Inductivists are broadly more interested in saying the evidence supports/justifies theory X over theory Y, not that the evidence led them to generate theory X but not theory Y (which doesn’t get them very far in debates with someone who did generate theory Y, and wants to judge ideas by their content instead of their source or generation method). What I seem to be dealing with, as usual, is it’s hard to talk to someone who doesn’t understand their own position in much detail and changes it as convenient in the moment.
You also decided to interpret CR as being “like” evolution. I don’t know why. I have a general policy of being clear that it’s literally evolution, and people misinterpret in this way routinely. I certainly specified “literally” above. Perhaps you should quote specific things you’re replying to and then try to engage with them more precisely. That’s what we do at the FI forum and it improves discussion quality dramatically.
You also decided to try to learn CR from a few brief comments, which is not a method you should reasonably expect to succeed. Perhaps you’re used to epistemology that simplistic from your experiences at LW?
You’ve done a whole lot of telling us how amazing this stuff is, but not much telling what it actually is. So I’m going to guess, in the hopes that you can tell me not just that I’m wrong, but specifically what a better version would be.
According to what you’ve said, it seems the process of people having valuable knowledge of future events (e.g., the sun will rise tomorrow), is that people generate guesses (by some unspecified process that’s definitely not induction), and then over time, other people criticize guesses, and the guesses best able to stand up to criticism are what we should use to predict tomorrow’s sunrise.
And the reason this works, according to you, is that it’s like evolution. Just like how in evolution, mutation and selection leads to creatures that take advantage of patterns in their environment to get a fitness advantage, guessing and criticism leads to ideas that take advantage of some sort of pattern in the environment in order to be more valuable.
But, of course, taking advantage of patterns in the environment in order to make valuable predictions about the future totally isn’t induction, and there’s no way you could formalize it other than the precise way Popper chose to formalize it.
I asked if anyone here has a criticism (including a reference they endorse). No one seems to. Apparently you personally are unfamiliar with the matter and expect me to open by assuming your ignorance and teaching you? Should I want to teach you? What value do you have to offer? If you want to be taught about CR, why don’t you join the FI forum and ask for help there? Will you read books and otherwise put in the work?
You have not specified what you think “induction” is which makes you difficult to talk with. I know you’ll try to blame me for not already knowing what you think (even though there are dozens of variants of induction and I got heavily flamed recently for suggesting LW should have any canonical ideas and targets for criticism), but e.g. you seem to claim induction is a method of theory generation when SI is a method of theory preference not generation. Induction in general has never adequately specified which theories to generate (some variations of induction recommend you generate the theories the evidence point to, but evidence doesn’t point and there are infinitely many theories compatible with the evidence). Inductivists are broadly more interested in saying the evidence supports/justifies theory X over theory Y, not that the evidence led them to generate theory X but not theory Y (which doesn’t get them very far in debates with someone who did generate theory Y, and wants to judge ideas by their content instead of their source or generation method). What I seem to be dealing with, as usual, is it’s hard to talk to someone who doesn’t understand their own position in much detail and changes it as convenient in the moment.
You also decided to interpret CR as being “like” evolution. I don’t know why. I have a general policy of being clear that it’s literally evolution, and people misinterpret in this way routinely. I certainly specified “literally” above. Perhaps you should quote specific things you’re replying to and then try to engage with them more precisely. That’s what we do at the FI forum and it improves discussion quality dramatically.
You also decided to try to learn CR from a few brief comments, which is not a method you should reasonably expect to succeed. Perhaps you’re used to epistemology that simplistic from your experiences at LW?