To some extent our thought processes can certainly improve, however there is no guarantee of this
Yes, there is no guarantee. One doesn’t need a guarantee for something to happen. And one can’t have guarantees about anything, ever. So the request for guarantees is itself a mistake.
Ultimately, neither will ever be convinced of the other’s viewpoint. If Alice conjectures anti-induction then she will immediately have a knock-down criticism, and vice versa for Bob and Induction. One of them has an irreversibly flawed starting point.
The sketches you give of Bob and Alice are not like real people. They are simplified and superficial, and people like that could not function in day to day life. The situation with normal people is different. No everyday people have irreversibly flawed starting points.
The argument for this is not short and simple, but I can give it. First I’d like to get clear what it means, and why we would be discussing it. Would you agree that if my statement here is correct then Popper is substantially right about epistemology? Would you concede? If not, what would you make of it?
Like it or not, you, me, Popper and every other human is an Alice.
That is a misconception. One of its prominent advocates was Hume. We do not dispute things like this out of ignorance, out of never hearing it before. One of the many problems with it is that people can’t be like Alice because there is no method of induction—it is a myth that one could possibly do induction because induction doesn’t describe a procedure a person could do. Induction has no set of instructions to follow to offer.
That may sound strange to you. You may think it offers a procedure like:
1) gather data
2) generalize/extrapolate (induce) a conclusion from the data
3) the conclusion is probably right, with some exceptions
The problem is step 2 which does not how how to extrapolate a conclusion from a set of data. There are infinitely many conclusions consistent with any finite data set. So the entire procedure rests on having a method of choosing between them. All proposals made for this either don’t work or are vague. The one I would guess you favor is Occam’s Razor—pick the simplest one. This is both vague (what are the precise guidelines for deciding what is simpler) and wrong (under many interpretations. for example because it might reject all explanatory theories b/c omitting the explanation is simpler).
Another issue is how one thinks about things he has no past experience about. Induction does not answer that. Yet people do it.
which of the following criticisms seems more logically appealing to you
I think they are both terrible arguments and they aren’t how I think about the issue.
This might be correct, but there is a heavy burden of proof to show it.
The “burden of proof” concept is a justificationist mistake. Ideas cannot be proven (which violates fallibility) and they can’t be positively shown to be true. You are judging Popperian ideas by standards which Popper rejected which is a mistake.
That is a recipe for disaster.
But it works in practice. The reason it doesn’t turn into a disaster is people want to find the truth. They aren’t stopped from making a mess of things by authoritative rules but by their own choices because they have some understanding of what will and won’t work.
The authority based approach is a mistake in many ways. For example, authorities can themselves be mistaken and could impose disasters on people. And people don’t always listen to authority. We don’t need to try to force people to follow some authoritative theory to make them think properly, they need to understand the issues and do it voluntarily.
Personal preferences aren’t evil, and imposing what you deem the best preference as a replacement is an anti-liberal mistake.
As I see it, Popperian reasoning is pretty much the way humans reason naturally
No. Since Aristotle, justificationism has dominated philosophy and governs the unconscious assumptions people make in debates. They do not think like Popperians or understand Popper’s philosophy (except to the extent that some of their mental processes are capable of creating knowledge, and those have to be in line with the truth of the matter about what does create knowledge).
The argument for this is not short and simple, but I can give it. First I’d like to get clear what it means, and why we would be discussing it. Would you agree that if my statement here is correct then Popper is substantially right about epistemology? Would you concede? If not, what would you make of it?
Since I’m not familiar with the whole of Popper’s position I’m noting going to accept it blindly. I’m also not even certain that he’s incompatible with Bayesianism.
Anyway, that fact that no human has a starting point as badly flawed as anti-induction doesn’t make Bayesianism invalid. It may well be that we are just very badly flawed, and can only get out of those flaws by taking the mathematically best approach to truth. This is Bayesianism, it has been proven in more than one way.
The problem is step 2 which does not how how to extrapolate a conclusion from a set of data. There are infinitely many conclusions consistent with any finite data set.
This is exactly we we need induction. It is usually possible to stick any future onto any past and get a consistent history, induction tells us that if we want a probable history we need to make the future and the past resemble each other.
The reason it doesn’t turn into a disaster is people want to find the truth.
People certainly say that. Most of them even believe it on a conscious level, but there in your average discussion there is a huge amount of other stuff going on, from signalling tribal loyalty to rationalising away unpleasant conclusions. You will not wander down the correct path by chance, you must use a map and navigate.
The authority based approach is a mistake in many ways. For example, authorities can themselves be mistaken and could impose disasters on people. And people don’t always listen to authority. We don’t need to try to force people to follow some authoritative theory to make them think properly, they need to understand the issues and do it voluntarily.
Personal preferences aren’t evil, and imposing what you deem the best preference as a replacement is an anti-liberal mistake.
I have no further interest in talking with you if you resort to straw men like this. I am not proposing we set up a dictatorship and kill all non-Bayesians, nor am I advocating censorship of views opposed the correct Bayesian conclusion.
All I am saying is your mind was not designed to do philosophical reasoning. It was designed to chase antelope across the savannah, lob a spear in them, drag them back home to the tribe, and come up with an eloquent explanation for why you deserve a bigger share of the meat (this last bit got the lion’s share of the processing power).
Your brain is not well suited to abstract reasoning, it is a fortunate coincidence that you are capable of it at all. Hopefully, you are lucky enough to have a starting point which is not irreversibly flawed, and you may be able to self improve, but this should be in the direction of realising that you run on corrupt hardware, distrusting your own thoughts, and forcing them to follow rigorous rules. Which rules? The ones that have been mathematically proven to be the best seem like a good starting point.
(The above is not intended as a personal attack, it is equally true of everyone)
Anyway, that fact that no human has a starting point as badly flawed as anti-induction doesn’t make Bayesianism invalid.
I did not say it makes Bayesianism invalid. I said it doesn’t make Popperism invalid or require epistemological pessimism. You were making myth of the framework arguments against Popper’s view. My comments on those were not intended to refute Bayesianism itself.
This is exactly we we need induction. It is usually possible to stick any future onto any past and get a consistent history, induction tells us that if we want a probable history we need to make the future and the past resemble each other.
That is a mistake and Popper’s approach is superior.
Part 1: It is a mistake because the future does not resemble the past except in some vacuous senses. Why? Because stuff changes. For example an object in motion moves to a different place in the future. And human societies invent new technologies.
It is always the case that some things resemble the past and some don’t. And the guideline that “the future resembles the past” gives no guidance whatsoever in figuring out which are which.
Popper’s approach is to improve our knowledge piecemeal by criticizing mistakes. The primary criticisms of this approach are that is it is incapable of offering guarantees, authority, justification, a way to force people to go against their biases, etc.. These criticisms are mistaken: no viable theory offers what they want. Setting aside those objections—that Popper doesn’t meet standard too high for anything to meet—it works and is how we make progress.
Regarding people wanting to find the truth, indeed they don’t always. Sometimes they don’t learn. Telling them they should be Bayesians won’t change that either. What can change it is sorting out the mess of their psychology enough to figure out some advice they can use. BTW the basic problem you refer to is static memes, the theory of which David Deutsch explains in his new (Popperian) book The Beginning of Infinity.
I have no further interest in talking with you if you resort to straw men like this.
Please calm down. I am trying my best to explain clearly. If I think that some of your ideas have nasty consequences that doesn’t mean I’m trying to insult you. It could be the case that some of your ideas actually do have nasty consequences of which you are unaware, and that by pointing out some of the ways your ideas relate to some ideas you consciously deem bad, you may learn better.
All justificationist epistemologies have connections to authority, and authority has nasty connections to politics. You hold a justificationist epistemology. When it comes down to it, justification generally consists of authority. And no amount of carefully deciding what is the right thing to set up as that authority changes that.
This connect to one of Popper’s political insights which is that most political theories focus on the problem “Who should rule?” (or: what policies should rule?). This question is a mistake which begs for an authoritarian answer. The right question is a fallibilist one: how can we set up political institutions that help us find and fix errors?
Getting back to epistemology, when you ask questions like, “What is the correct criterion for induction to use in step 2 to differentiate between the infinity of theories?” that is a bad question which begs for an authoritarian answer.
All I am saying is your mind was not designed to do philosophical reasoning
My mind is a universal knowledge creator. What design could be better? I agree with you that it wasn’t designed for this in the sense that evolution doesn’t have intentions, but I don’t regard that as relevant.
Evolutionary psychology contains mistakes. I think discussion of universality is a way to skip past most of them (when universality is accepted, they become pretty irrelevant).
Your brain is not well suited to abstract reasoning, it is a fortunate coincidence that you are capable of it at all.
I’d urge you to read The Beginning of Infinity by David Deutsch which refutes this. I can give the arguments but I think reading it would be more efficient and we have enough topics going already.
forcing them to follow rigorous rules.
See! I told you the authoritarian attitude was there!
And there is no mathematical proof of Bayesian epistemology. Bayes’ theorem itself is a bit of math/logic which everyone accepts (including Popper of course). But Bayesian epistemology is an application of it to certain philosophical questions, which leaves the domain of math/logic, and there is no proof that application is correct.
Part 1: It is a mistake because the future does not resemble the past except in some vacuous senses. Why? Because stuff changes. For example an object in motion moves to a different place in the future. And human societies invent new technologies.
The object in motion moves according to the same laws in both the future and the past, in this sense the future resembles the past. You are right that the future does not resemble the past in all ways, but the ways in which it does themselves remain constant over time. Induction doesn’t apply in all cases but we can use induction to determine which cases it applies in and which it doesn’t. If this looks circular that’s because it is, but it works.
Popper’s approach is to improve our knowledge piecemeal by criticizing mistakes. The primary criticisms of this approach are that is it is incapable of offering guarantees, authority, justification, a way to force people to go against their biases, etc.. These criticisms are mistaken: no viable theory offers what they want. Setting aside those objections—that Popper doesn’t meet standard too high for anything to meet—it works and is how we make progress.
As far as Bayesianism is concerned this is a straw man. Most Bayesians don’t offer any guarantees in the sense of absolute certainty at all.
All justificationist epistemologies have connections to authority, and authority has nasty connections to politics. You hold a justificationist epistemology. When it comes down to it, justification generally consists of authority. And no amount of carefully deciding what is the right thing to set up as that authority changes that.
No Bayesian has ever proposed setting up some kind of Bayesian dictatorship. As far as I can tell the only governmental proposal based on Bayesianism thus far is Hanson’s futarchy, which could hardly be further from Authoritarianism.
forcing them to follow rigorous rules.
See! I told you the authoritarian attitude was there!
You misunderstand me. What I meant was that as a Bayesian I force my own thoughts to follow certain rules. I don’t force other people to do so. You are arguing from a superficial resemblance. Maths follows rigorous, unbreakable rules, does this mean that all mathematicians are evil fascists?
And there is no mathematical proof of Bayesian epistemology. Bayes’ theorem itself is a bit of math/logic which everyone accepts (including Popper of course). But Bayesian epistemology is an application of it to certain philosophical questions, which leaves the domain of math/logic, and there is no proof that application is correct.
Incorrect. E.T. Jaynes book Probability Theory: The Logic of Science gives a proof in the first two chapters.
My mind is a universal knowledge creator. What design could be better? I agree with you that it wasn’t designed for this in the sense that evolution doesn’t have intentions, but I don’t regard that as relevant.
Evolutionary psychology contains mistakes. I think discussion of universality is a way to skip past most of them (when universality is accepted, they become pretty irrelevant).
You obviously haven’t read much of the heuristics and biases program. I can’t describe it all very quickly here but I’ll just give you a taster.
Subjects asked to rank statements about a woman called Jill in order of probability of being true ranked “Jill is a feminist and a bank teller” as more probable than “Jill is a bank teller” despite this being logically impossible.
U.N. diplomats, when asked to guess the probabilities of various international events occurring in the nest year gave a higher probability to “USSR invades Poland causing complete cessation of diplomatic activities between USA and USSR” than they did to “Complete cessation of diplomatic activities between USA and USSR”.
Subjects who are given a handful of evidence and arguments for both sides of some issue, and asked to weigh them up, will inevitably conclude that the weight of the evidence given is in favour of their side. Different subjects will interpret the same evidence to mean precisely opposite things.
Employers can have their decision about whether to hire someone changed by whether they held a warm coffee or a cold coke in the elevator prior to the meeting.
People can have their opinion on an issue like nuclear power changed by a single image of a smiley or frowny face, flashed to briefly for conscious attention.
People’s estimates of the number of countries in Africa can be changed simply by telling them a random number beforehand, even if it is explicitly stated that this number has nothing to do with the question.
Students asked to estimate a day by which they are 99% confident their project will be finished, go past this day more than half the time.
People are more like to move to a town if the town’s name and their name begin with the same letter.
There’s a lot more, most of which can’t easily be explained in bullet form. Suffice to say these are not irrelevant to thinking, they are disastrous. It takes constant effort to keep them back, because they are so insidious you will not notice when they are influencing you.
And there is no mathematical proof of Bayesian epistemology. Bayes’ theorem itself is a bit of math/logic which everyone accepts (including Popper of course). But Bayesian epistemology is an application of it to certain philosophical questions, which leaves the domain of math/logic, and there is no proof that application is correct.
Incorrect. E.T. Jaynes book Probability Theory: The Logic of Science gives a proof in the first two chapters.
You obviously haven’t read much of the heuristics and biases program.
Would you agree that this is a bit condescending and you’re basically assuming in advance that you know more than me?
I actually have read about it and disagree with it on purpose, not out of ignorance.
Does that interest you?
And on the other hand, do you know anything about universality? You made no comment about that. Given that I said the universality issue trumps the details you discuss in your bullet points, and you didn’t dispute that, I’m not quite sure why you are providing these details, other than perhaps a simple assumption that I had no idea what I was talking about and that my position can be ignored without reply because, once my deep ignorance is addressed, I’ll forget all about this Popperian nonsense..
Incorrect. E.T. Jaynes book Probability Theory: The Logic of Science gives a proof in the first two chapters.
Ordered but there’s an error in the library system and I’m not sure if it will actually come or not. I don’t suppose the proof is online anywhere (I can access major article databases), or that you could give it or an outline? BTW I wonder why the proof takes 2 chapters. Proofs are normally fairly short things. And, well, even if it was 100 pages of straight math I don’t see why you’d break it into separate chapters.
You misunderstand me. What I meant was that as a Bayesian I force my own thoughts to follow certain rules. I don’t force other people to do so.
No I understood that. And that is authoritarian in regard to your own thoughts. It’s still a bad attitude even if you don’t do it to other people. When you force your thoughts to follow certain rules all the epistemological problems with authority and force will plague you (do you know what those are?).
Regarding Popper, you say you don’t agree with the common criticisms of him. OK. Great. So, what are your criticisms? You didn’t say.
If this looks circular that’s because it is, but it works.
If there was an epistemology that didn’t endorse circular arguments, would you prefer it over yours which does?
Would you agree that this is a bit condescending and you’re basically assuming in advance that you know more than me?
I actually have read about it and disagree with it on purpose, not out of ignorance.
I apologise for this, but I really don’t see how anyone could go through those studies without losing all faith in human intuition.
I don’t suppose the proof is online anywhere (I can access major article databases), or that you could give it or an outline?
The text can be found online. My browser (Chrome) wouldn’t open the files but you may have more luck.
BTW I wonder why the proof takes 2 chapters. Proofs are normally fairly short things. And, well, even if it was 100 pages of straight math I don’t see why you’d break it into separate chapters.
Part of the reason for length is that probability theory has a number of axioms and he has to prove them all. The reason for the two chapter split is that the first chapter is about explaining what he wants to do, why he wants to do it, and laying out his desiderata. It also contains a few digressions in case the reader isn’t familiar with one or more of the prerequisites for understanding it (propositional logic for example). All of the actual maths is in the second chapter.
No I understood that. And that is authoritarian in regard to your own thoughts.
I agree to the explicit meaning of this statement but you are sneaking in connotations. Let us look more closely about what ‘authoritarian’ means.
You probably mean it in the sense of centralised as opposed to decentralized control, and in that sense I will bite the bullet and say that thinking should be authoritarian.
However, the word has a number of negative connotations. Corruption, lack of respect for human rights and massive bureaucracy that stifles innovation to name a few. None of those apply to my thinking process, so even though the term may be technically correct it is somewhat intellectually dishonest to use it, something more value-neutral like ‘centralized control’ might be better.
Regarding Popper, you say you don’t agree with the common criticisms of him. OK. Great. So, what are your criticisms? You didn’t say.
I will confess that I am not familiar with the whole of Popper’s viewpoint. I have never read anything written by him although after this conversation I am planning to.
Therefore I do not know whether or not I broadly agree or disagree with him. I did not come here to attack him, originally I was just responding to a criticism of yours that Bayesianism fails in a certain situation
To some extent I think the approach with conjectures and criticisms may be correct, at least as a description of how thinking must get off the ground. Can you be a Popperian and conjecture Bayesianism?
The point that I do disagree with is the proposed asymmetry between confirmation and falsification. In my view neither the black swan or the white swan proves anything with certainty, but both do provide some evidence. It happens in this case that one piece of evidence is very strong while the other is very weak, in fact they are pretty much at opposite extremes of the full spectrum of evidence encountered in the real world. This does not mean there is a difference of type.
If there was an epistemology that didn’t endorse circular arguments, would you prefer it over yours which does?
All else being equal, yes. Other factors, such as real-world results might take precedence. I also doubt that any philosophy could manage without either circularity or assumptions, explicit or otherwise. As I see it when you start thinking you need something to begin your inference, logic derives truths form other truths, it cannot manufacture them out of a vacuum. So any philosophy has two choices:
Either, pick a few axioms, call them self evident and derive everything from them. This seems to work fairly well in pure maths, but not anywhere else. I suspect the difference lies in whether the axioms really are self evident or not.
Or, start out with some procedures for thinking. All claims are judged by these, including proposals to change the procedures for thinking. Thus the procedures may self-modify and will hopefully improve. This seems better to me, as long as the starting point passes a certain threshold of accuracy any errors are likely to get removed (the phrase used here is the Lens that Sees its Flaws). It is ultimately circular, since whatever the current procedures are they are justified only by themselves, but I can live with that.
Ideal Bayesians are of the former type, but they can afford to be as they are mathematically perfect beings who never make mistakes. Human Bayesians take the latter approach, which means in principle they might stop being Bayesians if they could see that for some reason it was wrong.
So I guess my answer is that if a position didn’t endorse circular arguments, I would be very worried that it is going down the unquestionable axioms route, even if it does not do so explicitly, so I would probably not prefer it.
Notice how it is only through the benefits of the second approach that I can even consider such a scenario.
I agree to the explicit meaning of this statement but you are sneaking in connotations. Let us look more closely about what ‘authoritarian’ means.
I’m not trying to argue by connotation. It’s hard to avoid connotations and I think the words I’m using are accurate.
You probably mean it in the sense of centralised as opposed to decentralized control, and in that sense I will bite the bullet and say that thinking should be authoritarian.
That’s not what I had in mind, but I do think that centralized control is a mistake.
I take fallibilism seriously: any idea may be wrong, and many are. Mistakes are common.
Consequently, it’s a bad idea to set something up to be in charge of your whole mind. It will have mistakes. And corrections to those mistakes which aren’t in charge will sometimes get disregarded.
However, the word has a number of negative connotations. Corruption, lack of respect for human rights and massive bureaucracy that stifles innovation to name a few. None of those apply to my thinking process, so even though the term may be technically correct it is somewhat intellectually dishonest to use it, something more value-neutral like ‘centralized control’ might be better.
Those 3 things are not what I had in mind. But I think the term is accurate. You yourself used the word “force”. Force is authoritarian. The reason for that is that the forcer is always claiming some kind of authority—I’m right, you’re wrong, and never mind further discussion, just obey.
You may find this statement strange. How can this concept apply to ideas within one mind? Doesn’t it only apply to disagreements between separate people?
But ideas are roughly autonomous portions of a mind (see: http://fallibleideas.com/ideas). They can conflict, they can force each other in the sense of one taking priority over another without the conflict being settled rationally.
Force is a fundamentally epistemological concept. Its political meanings are derivative. It is about non-truth-seeking ways of approaching disputes. It’s about not reaching agreement by one idea wins out anyway (by force).
Settling conflicts between the ideas in your mind by force is authoritarian. It is saying some ideas have authority/preference/priority/whatever, so they get their way. I reject this approach. If you don’t find a rational way to resolve a conflict between ideas, you should say you don’t know the answer, never pick a side b/c the ideas you deem the central controllers are on that side, and they have the authority to force other ideas to conform to them.
This is a big topic, and not so easy to explain. But it is important.
Force, in the sense of solving difficulties without argument, is not what I meant when I said I force my thoughts to follow certain rules. I don’t even see how that could work, my individual ideas do not argue with each-other, if they did I would speak to a psychiatrist.
I’m afraid you are going to have to explain in more detail.
They argue notionally. They are roughly autonomous, they have different substance/assertions/content, sometimes their content contradicts, and when you have two or more conflicting ideas you have to deal with that. You (sometimes) approach the conflict by what we might call an internal argument/debate. You think of arguments for all the sides (the substance/content of the conflict ideas), you try to think of a way to resolve the debate by figuring out the best answer, you criticize what you think may be mistakes in any of the ideas, you reject ideas you decide are mistaken, you assign probabilities to stuff and do math, perhaps, etc...
When things go well, you reach a conclusion you deem to be an improvement. It resolves the issue. Each of the ideas which is improved on notionally acknowledges this new idea is better, rather than still conflicting. For example, if one idea was to get pizza, and one was to get sushi, and both had the supporting idea that you can’t get both because it would cost too much, or take too long, or make you fat, then you could resolve the issue by figuring out how to do it quickly, cheaply and without getting fat (smaller portions). If you came up with a new idea that does all that, none of the previously conflicting ideas would have any criticism of it, no objection to it. The conflict is resolved.
Sometimes we don’t come up with a solution that resolves all the issues cleanly. This can be due to not trying, or because it’s hard, or whatever.
Then what?
Big topic, but what not to do is use force: arbitrarily decide which side wins (often based on some kind of authority or justification), and declare it the winner even though the substance of the other side is not addressed. Don’t force some of your ideas, which have substantive unaddressed points, to defer to the ideas you put in charge (granted authority).
Big topic, but what not to do is use force: arbitrarily decide which side wins (often based on some kind of authority or justification), and declare it the winner even though the substance of the other side is not addressed. Don’t force some of your ideas, which have substantive unaddressed points, to defer to the ideas you put in charge (granted authority).
I certainly don’t advocate deciding arbitrarily. The would fall into the fallacy of just making sh*t up which is the exact of everything Bayes stands for. However, I don’t have to be arbitrary, most of the ideas that run up against Bayes don’t have the same level of support. In general, I’ve found that a heuristic of “pick the idea that has a mathematical proof backing it up” seems to work fairly well.
There are also sometimes other clues, rationalisations tend to have a slightly different ‘feel’ to them if you introspect closely (in my experience at any rate), and when the ideas going up against Bayes seem to include a disproportionately high number of rationalisations, I start to notice a pattern.
I also disagree about ideas being autonomous. Ideas are entangled with each other in complex webs of mutual support and anti-support.
Did you read my link? Where did the argument about approximately autonomous ideas go wrong?
I did. To see what is wrong with it let me give an analogy. Cars have both engines and tyres. It is possible to replace the tyres without replacing the engine. Thus you will find many cars with very different tyres but identical engines, and many different engines but identical tyres. This does not mean that tyres are autonomous and would work fine without engines.
Well this changes the topic. But OK. How do you decide what has support? What is support and how does it differ from consistency?
Well, mathematical proofs are support, and they are not at all the same a consistency. In general however, if some random idea pops into my head, and I spot that it in fact it only occurred to me as a result of conjunction bias I am not going to say “well, it would be unfair of me to reject this just because it contradicts probability theory, so I must reject both it and probability theory until I can find a superior compromise position”. Frankly, that would be stupid.
@autonomous—you know we said “approximately autonomous” right? And that, for various purposes, tires are approximately autonomous, which means things like they can be replaced individually without touching the engine or knowing what type of engine it is. And a tire could be taken off one car and put on another.
No one was saying it’d function in isolation. Just like a person being autonomous doesn’t mean they would do well in isolation (e.g. in deep space). Just because people do need to be in appropriate environments to function doesn’t make “people are approximately autonomous” meaningless or false.
Well, mathematical proofs are support, and they are not at all the same a consistency.
First,l you have not answered my question. What is support? The general purpose definition. I want you to specify how it is determined if X supports Y, and also what that means (why should we care? what good is “support”?).
Second, let’s be more precise. If a person writes what he thinks to be a proof, what is supported? What he thinks is the conclusion of what he thinks is a proof, and nothing else? An infinite set of things which have wildly different properties? Something else?
No one was saying it’d function in isolation. Just like a person being autonomous doesn’t mean they would do well in isolation (e.g. in deep space). Just because people do need to be in appropriate environments to function doesn’t make “people are approximately autonomous” meaningless or false.
You argue from ideas being approximately autonomous to the fact that words like ‘authoritarian’ apply to them, and that the approximately debate, but this is not true in the car analogy. Is it ‘authoritarian’ that the brakes, accelerator and steering wheel have total control of the car, while the tyres and engine get no say, or is it just efficient?
I didn’t give a loose argument by analogy. You’re attacking a simplified straw man. I explained stuff at some length and you haven’t engaged here with all of what I said. e.g. your comments on “authoritarian” here do not mention or discuss anything I said about that. You also don’t mention force.
I don’t know the etiquette or format of this website well or how it works. When I have comments on the book, would it make sense to start a new thread or post somewhere/somehow?
Can you be a Popperian and conjecture Bayesianism?
You can conjecture Bayes’ theorem. You can also conjecture all the rest, however some things (such as induction, justificationism, foundationalism) contradict Popper’s epistemology. So at least one of them has a mistake to fix. Fixing that may or may not lead to drastic changes, abandonment of the main ideas, etc
The point that I do disagree with is the proposed asymmetry between confirmation and falsification.
That is a purely logical point Popper used to criticize some mistaken ideas. Are you disputing the logic? If you’re merely disputing the premises, it doesn’t really matter because its purpose is to criticize people who use those premises on their own terms.
In my view neither the black swan or the white swan proves anything with certainty,
Agreed.
but both do provide some evidence. It happens in this case that one piece of evidence is very strong while the other is very weak, in fact they are pretty much at opposite extremes of the full spectrum of evidence encountered in the real world. This does not mean there is a difference of type.
I think you are claiming that seeing a white swan is positive support for the assertion that all swans are white. (If not, please clarify). If so, this gets into important issues. Popper disputed the idea of positive support. The criticism of the concept begins by considering: what is support? And in particular, what is the difference between “X supports Y” and “X is consistent with Y”?
I also doubt that any philosophy could manage without either circularity or assumptions, explicit or otherwise. As I see it when you start thinking you need something to begin your inference, logic derives truths form other truths, it cannot manufacture them out of a vacuum.
Questioning this was one of Popper’s insights. The reason most people doubt it is possible is because, since Aristotle, pretty much all epistemology has taken this for granted. These ideas seeped into our culture and became common sense.
What’s weird about the situation is that most people are so attached to them that they are willing to accept circular arguments, arbitrary foundations, or other things like that. Those are OK! But that Popper might have a point is hard to swallow. I find circular arguments rather more doubtful than doing without what Popperians refer to broadly as “justification”. I think it’s amazing that people run into circularity or other similar problems and still don’t want to rethink all their premises. (No offense intended. Everyone has biases, and if we try to overcome them we can become less wrong about some matters, and stating guesses at what might be biases can help with that.)
All the circularity and foundations stem from seeking to justify ideas. To show they are correct. Popper’s epistemology is different: ideas never have any positive support, confirmation, verification, justification, high probability, etc… So how do we act? How do we decide which idea is better than the others? We can differentiate ideas by criticism. When we see a mistake in an idea, we criticize it (criticism = explaining a mistake/flaw). That refutes the idea. We should act on or use non-refuted ideas in preference over refuted ideas.
That’s the very short outline, but does that make any sense?
You can conjecture Bayes’ theorem. You can also conjecture all the rest, however some things (such as induction, justificationism, foundationalism) contradict Popper’s epistemology. So at least one of them has a mistake to fix. Fixing that may or may not lead to drastic changes, abandonment of the main ideas, etc
Fully agreed. In principle, if Popper’s epistemology is of the second, self-modifying type, there would be nothing wrong with drastic changes. One could argue that something like that is exactly how I arrived at my current beliefs, I wasn’t born a Bayesian.
I can also see some ways to make induction and foundationalism easer to swallow.
I don’t know the etiquette or format of this website well or how it works. When I have comments on the book, would it make sense to start a new thread or post somewhere/somehow?
A discussion post sounds about right for this, if enough people like it you might consider moving it to the main site.
I think you are claiming that seeing a white swan is positive support for the assertion that all swans are white. (If not, please clarify).
This is precisely what I am saying.
If so, this gets into important issues. Popper disputed the idea of positive support. The criticism of the concept begins by considering: what is support? And in particular, what is the difference between “X supports Y” and “X is consistent with Y”?
The beauty of Bayes is how it answers these questions. To distinguish between the two statements we express them each in terms of probabilities.
“X is consistent with Y” is not really a Bayesian way of putting things, I can see two ways of interpreting it. One is as P(X&Y) > 0, meaning it is at least theoretically possible that both X and Y are true. The other is that P(X|Y) is reasonably large, i.e. that X is plausible if we assume Y.
“X supports Y” means P(Y|X) > P(Y), X supports Y if and only if Y becomes more plausible when we learn of X. Bayes tells us that this is equivalent to P(X|Y) > P(X), i.e. if Y would suggest that X is more likely that we might think otherwise then X is support of Y.
Suppose we make X the statement “the first swan I see today is white” and Y the statement “all swans are white”. P(X|Y) is very close to 1, P(X|~Y) is less than 1 so P(X|Y) > P(X), so seeing a white swan offers support for the view that all swans are white. Very, very weak support, but support nonetheless.
(The above is not meant to be condescending, I apologise if you know all of it already).
To show they are correct. Popper’s epistemology is different: ideas never have any positive support, confirmation, verification, justification, high probability, etc...
This is a very tough bullet to bite.
How do we decide which idea is better than the others? We can differentiate ideas by criticism. When we see a mistake in an idea, we criticize it (criticism = explaining a mistake/flaw). That refutes the idea. We should act on or use non-refuted ideas in preference over refuted ideas.
One thing I don’t like about this is the whole ‘one strike and you’re out’ feel of it. It’s very boolean, the real world isn’t usually so crisp. Even a correct theory will sometimes have some evidence pointing against it, and in policy debates almost every suggestion will have some kind of downside.
There is also the worry that there could be more than one non-refuted idea, which makes it a bit difficult to make decisions. Bayesianism, on the other hand, when combined with expected utility theory, is perfect for making decisions.
1) gather data 2) generalize/extrapolate (induce) a conclusion from the data 3) the conclusion is probably right, with some exceptions
The problem is step 2 which does not how how to extrapolate a conclusion from a set of data.
Step 1 is problematic also, as I explained in some of my comments to Tim Tyler. What should I gather data about? What kind of data? What measurements are important? How accurate? And so on.
Yes I agree. Another issue I mentioned in one of my comments here is that your data isn’t a random sample of all possible data, so what do you do about bias? (I mean bias in the data, not bias in the person.)
Step 3 is also problematic (as it explicitly acknowledges).
Yes, there is no guarantee. One doesn’t need a guarantee for something to happen. And one can’t have guarantees about anything, ever. So the request for guarantees is itself a mistake.
The sketches you give of Bob and Alice are not like real people. They are simplified and superficial, and people like that could not function in day to day life. The situation with normal people is different. No everyday people have irreversibly flawed starting points.
The argument for this is not short and simple, but I can give it. First I’d like to get clear what it means, and why we would be discussing it. Would you agree that if my statement here is correct then Popper is substantially right about epistemology? Would you concede? If not, what would you make of it?
That is a misconception. One of its prominent advocates was Hume. We do not dispute things like this out of ignorance, out of never hearing it before. One of the many problems with it is that people can’t be like Alice because there is no method of induction—it is a myth that one could possibly do induction because induction doesn’t describe a procedure a person could do. Induction has no set of instructions to follow to offer.
That may sound strange to you. You may think it offers a procedure like:
1) gather data 2) generalize/extrapolate (induce) a conclusion from the data 3) the conclusion is probably right, with some exceptions
The problem is step 2 which does not how how to extrapolate a conclusion from a set of data. There are infinitely many conclusions consistent with any finite data set. So the entire procedure rests on having a method of choosing between them. All proposals made for this either don’t work or are vague. The one I would guess you favor is Occam’s Razor—pick the simplest one. This is both vague (what are the precise guidelines for deciding what is simpler) and wrong (under many interpretations. for example because it might reject all explanatory theories b/c omitting the explanation is simpler).
Another issue is how one thinks about things he has no past experience about. Induction does not answer that. Yet people do it.
I think they are both terrible arguments and they aren’t how I think about the issue.
The “burden of proof” concept is a justificationist mistake. Ideas cannot be proven (which violates fallibility) and they can’t be positively shown to be true. You are judging Popperian ideas by standards which Popper rejected which is a mistake.
But it works in practice. The reason it doesn’t turn into a disaster is people want to find the truth. They aren’t stopped from making a mess of things by authoritative rules but by their own choices because they have some understanding of what will and won’t work.
The authority based approach is a mistake in many ways. For example, authorities can themselves be mistaken and could impose disasters on people. And people don’t always listen to authority. We don’t need to try to force people to follow some authoritative theory to make them think properly, they need to understand the issues and do it voluntarily.
Personal preferences aren’t evil, and imposing what you deem the best preference as a replacement is an anti-liberal mistake.
No. Since Aristotle, justificationism has dominated philosophy and governs the unconscious assumptions people make in debates. They do not think like Popperians or understand Popper’s philosophy (except to the extent that some of their mental processes are capable of creating knowledge, and those have to be in line with the truth of the matter about what does create knowledge).
Since I’m not familiar with the whole of Popper’s position I’m noting going to accept it blindly. I’m also not even certain that he’s incompatible with Bayesianism.
Anyway, that fact that no human has a starting point as badly flawed as anti-induction doesn’t make Bayesianism invalid. It may well be that we are just very badly flawed, and can only get out of those flaws by taking the mathematically best approach to truth. This is Bayesianism, it has been proven in more than one way.
This is exactly we we need induction. It is usually possible to stick any future onto any past and get a consistent history, induction tells us that if we want a probable history we need to make the future and the past resemble each other.
People certainly say that. Most of them even believe it on a conscious level, but there in your average discussion there is a huge amount of other stuff going on, from signalling tribal loyalty to rationalising away unpleasant conclusions. You will not wander down the correct path by chance, you must use a map and navigate.
I have no further interest in talking with you if you resort to straw men like this. I am not proposing we set up a dictatorship and kill all non-Bayesians, nor am I advocating censorship of views opposed the correct Bayesian conclusion.
All I am saying is your mind was not designed to do philosophical reasoning. It was designed to chase antelope across the savannah, lob a spear in them, drag them back home to the tribe, and come up with an eloquent explanation for why you deserve a bigger share of the meat (this last bit got the lion’s share of the processing power).
Your brain is not well suited to abstract reasoning, it is a fortunate coincidence that you are capable of it at all. Hopefully, you are lucky enough to have a starting point which is not irreversibly flawed, and you may be able to self improve, but this should be in the direction of realising that you run on corrupt hardware, distrusting your own thoughts, and forcing them to follow rigorous rules. Which rules? The ones that have been mathematically proven to be the best seem like a good starting point.
(The above is not intended as a personal attack, it is equally true of everyone)
I did not say it makes Bayesianism invalid. I said it doesn’t make Popperism invalid or require epistemological pessimism. You were making myth of the framework arguments against Popper’s view. My comments on those were not intended to refute Bayesianism itself.
That is a mistake and Popper’s approach is superior.
Part 1: It is a mistake because the future does not resemble the past except in some vacuous senses. Why? Because stuff changes. For example an object in motion moves to a different place in the future. And human societies invent new technologies.
It is always the case that some things resemble the past and some don’t. And the guideline that “the future resembles the past” gives no guidance whatsoever in figuring out which are which.
Popper’s approach is to improve our knowledge piecemeal by criticizing mistakes. The primary criticisms of this approach are that is it is incapable of offering guarantees, authority, justification, a way to force people to go against their biases, etc.. These criticisms are mistaken: no viable theory offers what they want. Setting aside those objections—that Popper doesn’t meet standard too high for anything to meet—it works and is how we make progress.
Regarding people wanting to find the truth, indeed they don’t always. Sometimes they don’t learn. Telling them they should be Bayesians won’t change that either. What can change it is sorting out the mess of their psychology enough to figure out some advice they can use. BTW the basic problem you refer to is static memes, the theory of which David Deutsch explains in his new (Popperian) book The Beginning of Infinity.
Please calm down. I am trying my best to explain clearly. If I think that some of your ideas have nasty consequences that doesn’t mean I’m trying to insult you. It could be the case that some of your ideas actually do have nasty consequences of which you are unaware, and that by pointing out some of the ways your ideas relate to some ideas you consciously deem bad, you may learn better.
All justificationist epistemologies have connections to authority, and authority has nasty connections to politics. You hold a justificationist epistemology. When it comes down to it, justification generally consists of authority. And no amount of carefully deciding what is the right thing to set up as that authority changes that.
This connect to one of Popper’s political insights which is that most political theories focus on the problem “Who should rule?” (or: what policies should rule?). This question is a mistake which begs for an authoritarian answer. The right question is a fallibilist one: how can we set up political institutions that help us find and fix errors?
Getting back to epistemology, when you ask questions like, “What is the correct criterion for induction to use in step 2 to differentiate between the infinity of theories?” that is a bad question which begs for an authoritarian answer.
My mind is a universal knowledge creator. What design could be better? I agree with you that it wasn’t designed for this in the sense that evolution doesn’t have intentions, but I don’t regard that as relevant.
Evolutionary psychology contains mistakes. I think discussion of universality is a way to skip past most of them (when universality is accepted, they become pretty irrelevant).
I’d urge you to read The Beginning of Infinity by David Deutsch which refutes this. I can give the arguments but I think reading it would be more efficient and we have enough topics going already.
See! I told you the authoritarian attitude was there!
And there is no mathematical proof of Bayesian epistemology. Bayes’ theorem itself is a bit of math/logic which everyone accepts (including Popper of course). But Bayesian epistemology is an application of it to certain philosophical questions, which leaves the domain of math/logic, and there is no proof that application is correct.
I know. My comments weren’t either.
The object in motion moves according to the same laws in both the future and the past, in this sense the future resembles the past. You are right that the future does not resemble the past in all ways, but the ways in which it does themselves remain constant over time. Induction doesn’t apply in all cases but we can use induction to determine which cases it applies in and which it doesn’t. If this looks circular that’s because it is, but it works.
As far as Bayesianism is concerned this is a straw man. Most Bayesians don’t offer any guarantees in the sense of absolute certainty at all.
No Bayesian has ever proposed setting up some kind of Bayesian dictatorship. As far as I can tell the only governmental proposal based on Bayesianism thus far is Hanson’s futarchy, which could hardly be further from Authoritarianism.
You misunderstand me. What I meant was that as a Bayesian I force my own thoughts to follow certain rules. I don’t force other people to do so. You are arguing from a superficial resemblance. Maths follows rigorous, unbreakable rules, does this mean that all mathematicians are evil fascists?
Incorrect. E.T. Jaynes book Probability Theory: The Logic of Science gives a proof in the first two chapters.
You obviously haven’t read much of the heuristics and biases program. I can’t describe it all very quickly here but I’ll just give you a taster.
Subjects asked to rank statements about a woman called Jill in order of probability of being true ranked “Jill is a feminist and a bank teller” as more probable than “Jill is a bank teller” despite this being logically impossible.
U.N. diplomats, when asked to guess the probabilities of various international events occurring in the nest year gave a higher probability to “USSR invades Poland causing complete cessation of diplomatic activities between USA and USSR” than they did to “Complete cessation of diplomatic activities between USA and USSR”.
Subjects who are given a handful of evidence and arguments for both sides of some issue, and asked to weigh them up, will inevitably conclude that the weight of the evidence given is in favour of their side. Different subjects will interpret the same evidence to mean precisely opposite things.
Employers can have their decision about whether to hire someone changed by whether they held a warm coffee or a cold coke in the elevator prior to the meeting.
People can have their opinion on an issue like nuclear power changed by a single image of a smiley or frowny face, flashed to briefly for conscious attention.
People’s estimates of the number of countries in Africa can be changed simply by telling them a random number beforehand, even if it is explicitly stated that this number has nothing to do with the question.
Students asked to estimate a day by which they are 99% confident their project will be finished, go past this day more than half the time.
People are more like to move to a town if the town’s name and their name begin with the same letter.
There’s a lot more, most of which can’t easily be explained in bullet form. Suffice to say these are not irrelevant to thinking, they are disastrous. It takes constant effort to keep them back, because they are so insidious you will not notice when they are influencing you.
Replied here:
http://lesswrong.com/r/discussion/lw/54u/bayesian_epistemology_vs_popper/
Would you agree that this is a bit condescending and you’re basically assuming in advance that you know more than me?
I actually have read about it and disagree with it on purpose, not out of ignorance.
Does that interest you?
And on the other hand, do you know anything about universality? You made no comment about that. Given that I said the universality issue trumps the details you discuss in your bullet points, and you didn’t dispute that, I’m not quite sure why you are providing these details, other than perhaps a simple assumption that I had no idea what I was talking about and that my position can be ignored without reply because, once my deep ignorance is addressed, I’ll forget all about this Popperian nonsense..
Ordered but there’s an error in the library system and I’m not sure if it will actually come or not. I don’t suppose the proof is online anywhere (I can access major article databases), or that you could give it or an outline? BTW I wonder why the proof takes 2 chapters. Proofs are normally fairly short things. And, well, even if it was 100 pages of straight math I don’t see why you’d break it into separate chapters.
No I understood that. And that is authoritarian in regard to your own thoughts. It’s still a bad attitude even if you don’t do it to other people. When you force your thoughts to follow certain rules all the epistemological problems with authority and force will plague you (do you know what those are?).
Regarding Popper, you say you don’t agree with the common criticisms of him. OK. Great. So, what are your criticisms? You didn’t say.
If there was an epistemology that didn’t endorse circular arguments, would you prefer it over yours which does?
I apologise for this, but I really don’t see how anyone could go through those studies without losing all faith in human intuition.
The text can be found online. My browser (Chrome) wouldn’t open the files but you may have more luck.
Part of the reason for length is that probability theory has a number of axioms and he has to prove them all. The reason for the two chapter split is that the first chapter is about explaining what he wants to do, why he wants to do it, and laying out his desiderata. It also contains a few digressions in case the reader isn’t familiar with one or more of the prerequisites for understanding it (propositional logic for example). All of the actual maths is in the second chapter.
I agree to the explicit meaning of this statement but you are sneaking in connotations. Let us look more closely about what ‘authoritarian’ means.
You probably mean it in the sense of centralised as opposed to decentralized control, and in that sense I will bite the bullet and say that thinking should be authoritarian.
However, the word has a number of negative connotations. Corruption, lack of respect for human rights and massive bureaucracy that stifles innovation to name a few. None of those apply to my thinking process, so even though the term may be technically correct it is somewhat intellectually dishonest to use it, something more value-neutral like ‘centralized control’ might be better.
I will confess that I am not familiar with the whole of Popper’s viewpoint. I have never read anything written by him although after this conversation I am planning to.
Therefore I do not know whether or not I broadly agree or disagree with him. I did not come here to attack him, originally I was just responding to a criticism of yours that Bayesianism fails in a certain situation
To some extent I think the approach with conjectures and criticisms may be correct, at least as a description of how thinking must get off the ground. Can you be a Popperian and conjecture Bayesianism?
The point that I do disagree with is the proposed asymmetry between confirmation and falsification. In my view neither the black swan or the white swan proves anything with certainty, but both do provide some evidence. It happens in this case that one piece of evidence is very strong while the other is very weak, in fact they are pretty much at opposite extremes of the full spectrum of evidence encountered in the real world. This does not mean there is a difference of type.
All else being equal, yes. Other factors, such as real-world results might take precedence. I also doubt that any philosophy could manage without either circularity or assumptions, explicit or otherwise. As I see it when you start thinking you need something to begin your inference, logic derives truths form other truths, it cannot manufacture them out of a vacuum. So any philosophy has two choices:
Either, pick a few axioms, call them self evident and derive everything from them. This seems to work fairly well in pure maths, but not anywhere else. I suspect the difference lies in whether the axioms really are self evident or not.
Or, start out with some procedures for thinking. All claims are judged by these, including proposals to change the procedures for thinking. Thus the procedures may self-modify and will hopefully improve. This seems better to me, as long as the starting point passes a certain threshold of accuracy any errors are likely to get removed (the phrase used here is the Lens that Sees its Flaws). It is ultimately circular, since whatever the current procedures are they are justified only by themselves, but I can live with that.
Ideal Bayesians are of the former type, but they can afford to be as they are mathematically perfect beings who never make mistakes. Human Bayesians take the latter approach, which means in principle they might stop being Bayesians if they could see that for some reason it was wrong.
So I guess my answer is that if a position didn’t endorse circular arguments, I would be very worried that it is going down the unquestionable axioms route, even if it does not do so explicitly, so I would probably not prefer it.
Notice how it is only through the benefits of the second approach that I can even consider such a scenario.
I’m not trying to argue by connotation. It’s hard to avoid connotations and I think the words I’m using are accurate.
That’s not what I had in mind, but I do think that centralized control is a mistake.
I take fallibilism seriously: any idea may be wrong, and many are. Mistakes are common.
Consequently, it’s a bad idea to set something up to be in charge of your whole mind. It will have mistakes. And corrections to those mistakes which aren’t in charge will sometimes get disregarded.
Those 3 things are not what I had in mind. But I think the term is accurate. You yourself used the word “force”. Force is authoritarian. The reason for that is that the forcer is always claiming some kind of authority—I’m right, you’re wrong, and never mind further discussion, just obey.
You may find this statement strange. How can this concept apply to ideas within one mind? Doesn’t it only apply to disagreements between separate people?
But ideas are roughly autonomous portions of a mind (see: http://fallibleideas.com/ideas). They can conflict, they can force each other in the sense of one taking priority over another without the conflict being settled rationally.
Force is a fundamentally epistemological concept. Its political meanings are derivative. It is about non-truth-seeking ways of approaching disputes. It’s about not reaching agreement by one idea wins out anyway (by force).
Settling conflicts between the ideas in your mind by force is authoritarian. It is saying some ideas have authority/preference/priority/whatever, so they get their way. I reject this approach. If you don’t find a rational way to resolve a conflict between ideas, you should say you don’t know the answer, never pick a side b/c the ideas you deem the central controllers are on that side, and they have the authority to force other ideas to conform to them.
This is a big topic, and not so easy to explain. But it is important.
Force, in the sense of solving difficulties without argument, is not what I meant when I said I force my thoughts to follow certain rules. I don’t even see how that could work, my individual ideas do not argue with each-other, if they did I would speak to a psychiatrist.
I’m afraid you are going to have to explain in more detail.
They argue notionally. They are roughly autonomous, they have different substance/assertions/content, sometimes their content contradicts, and when you have two or more conflicting ideas you have to deal with that. You (sometimes) approach the conflict by what we might call an internal argument/debate. You think of arguments for all the sides (the substance/content of the conflict ideas), you try to think of a way to resolve the debate by figuring out the best answer, you criticize what you think may be mistakes in any of the ideas, you reject ideas you decide are mistaken, you assign probabilities to stuff and do math, perhaps, etc...
When things go well, you reach a conclusion you deem to be an improvement. It resolves the issue. Each of the ideas which is improved on notionally acknowledges this new idea is better, rather than still conflicting. For example, if one idea was to get pizza, and one was to get sushi, and both had the supporting idea that you can’t get both because it would cost too much, or take too long, or make you fat, then you could resolve the issue by figuring out how to do it quickly, cheaply and without getting fat (smaller portions). If you came up with a new idea that does all that, none of the previously conflicting ideas would have any criticism of it, no objection to it. The conflict is resolved.
Sometimes we don’t come up with a solution that resolves all the issues cleanly. This can be due to not trying, or because it’s hard, or whatever.
Then what?
Big topic, but what not to do is use force: arbitrarily decide which side wins (often based on some kind of authority or justification), and declare it the winner even though the substance of the other side is not addressed. Don’t force some of your ideas, which have substantive unaddressed points, to defer to the ideas you put in charge (granted authority).
I certainly don’t advocate deciding arbitrarily. The would fall into the fallacy of just making sh*t up which is the exact of everything Bayes stands for. However, I don’t have to be arbitrary, most of the ideas that run up against Bayes don’t have the same level of support. In general, I’ve found that a heuristic of “pick the idea that has a mathematical proof backing it up” seems to work fairly well.
There are also sometimes other clues, rationalisations tend to have a slightly different ‘feel’ to them if you introspect closely (in my experience at any rate), and when the ideas going up against Bayes seem to include a disproportionately high number of rationalisations, I start to notice a pattern.
I also disagree about ideas being autonomous. Ideas are entangled with each other in complex webs of mutual support and anti-support.
Did you read my link? Where did the argument about approximately autonomous ideas go wrong?
Well this changes the topic. But OK. How do you decide what has support? What is support and how does it differ from consistency?
I did. To see what is wrong with it let me give an analogy. Cars have both engines and tyres. It is possible to replace the tyres without replacing the engine. Thus you will find many cars with very different tyres but identical engines, and many different engines but identical tyres. This does not mean that tyres are autonomous and would work fine without engines.
Well, mathematical proofs are support, and they are not at all the same a consistency. In general however, if some random idea pops into my head, and I spot that it in fact it only occurred to me as a result of conjunction bias I am not going to say “well, it would be unfair of me to reject this just because it contradicts probability theory, so I must reject both it and probability theory until I can find a superior compromise position”. Frankly, that would be stupid.
@autonomous—you know we said “approximately autonomous” right? And that, for various purposes, tires are approximately autonomous, which means things like they can be replaced individually without touching the engine or knowing what type of engine it is. And a tire could be taken off one car and put on another.
No one was saying it’d function in isolation. Just like a person being autonomous doesn’t mean they would do well in isolation (e.g. in deep space). Just because people do need to be in appropriate environments to function doesn’t make “people are approximately autonomous” meaningless or false.
First,l you have not answered my question. What is support? The general purpose definition. I want you to specify how it is determined if X supports Y, and also what that means (why should we care? what good is “support”?).
Second, let’s be more precise. If a person writes what he thinks to be a proof, what is supported? What he thinks is the conclusion of what he thinks is a proof, and nothing else? An infinite set of things which have wildly different properties? Something else?
You argue from ideas being approximately autonomous to the fact that words like ‘authoritarian’ apply to them, and that the approximately debate, but this is not true in the car analogy. Is it ‘authoritarian’ that the brakes, accelerator and steering wheel have total control of the car, while the tyres and engine get no say, or is it just efficient?
I didn’t give a loose argument by analogy. You’re attacking a simplified straw man. I explained stuff at some length and you haven’t engaged here with all of what I said. e.g. your comments on “authoritarian” here do not mention or discuss anything I said about that. You also don’t mention force.
I haven’t got any faith in human intuition. That’s not what I said.
OK fair enough.
Oh the book is here: http://bayes.wustl.edu/etj/prob/book.pdf
That was easy.
I don’t know the etiquette or format of this website well or how it works. When I have comments on the book, would it make sense to start a new thread or post somewhere/somehow?
You can conjecture Bayes’ theorem. You can also conjecture all the rest, however some things (such as induction, justificationism, foundationalism) contradict Popper’s epistemology. So at least one of them has a mistake to fix. Fixing that may or may not lead to drastic changes, abandonment of the main ideas, etc
That is a purely logical point Popper used to criticize some mistaken ideas. Are you disputing the logic? If you’re merely disputing the premises, it doesn’t really matter because its purpose is to criticize people who use those premises on their own terms.
Agreed.
I think you are claiming that seeing a white swan is positive support for the assertion that all swans are white. (If not, please clarify). If so, this gets into important issues. Popper disputed the idea of positive support. The criticism of the concept begins by considering: what is support? And in particular, what is the difference between “X supports Y” and “X is consistent with Y”?
Questioning this was one of Popper’s insights. The reason most people doubt it is possible is because, since Aristotle, pretty much all epistemology has taken this for granted. These ideas seeped into our culture and became common sense.
What’s weird about the situation is that most people are so attached to them that they are willing to accept circular arguments, arbitrary foundations, or other things like that. Those are OK! But that Popper might have a point is hard to swallow. I find circular arguments rather more doubtful than doing without what Popperians refer to broadly as “justification”. I think it’s amazing that people run into circularity or other similar problems and still don’t want to rethink all their premises. (No offense intended. Everyone has biases, and if we try to overcome them we can become less wrong about some matters, and stating guesses at what might be biases can help with that.)
All the circularity and foundations stem from seeking to justify ideas. To show they are correct. Popper’s epistemology is different: ideas never have any positive support, confirmation, verification, justification, high probability, etc… So how do we act? How do we decide which idea is better than the others? We can differentiate ideas by criticism. When we see a mistake in an idea, we criticize it (criticism = explaining a mistake/flaw). That refutes the idea. We should act on or use non-refuted ideas in preference over refuted ideas.
That’s the very short outline, but does that make any sense?
Fully agreed. In principle, if Popper’s epistemology is of the second, self-modifying type, there would be nothing wrong with drastic changes. One could argue that something like that is exactly how I arrived at my current beliefs, I wasn’t born a Bayesian.
I can also see some ways to make induction and foundationalism easer to swallow.
A discussion post sounds about right for this, if enough people like it you might consider moving it to the main site.
This is precisely what I am saying.
The beauty of Bayes is how it answers these questions. To distinguish between the two statements we express them each in terms of probabilities.
“X is consistent with Y” is not really a Bayesian way of putting things, I can see two ways of interpreting it. One is as P(X&Y) > 0, meaning it is at least theoretically possible that both X and Y are true. The other is that P(X|Y) is reasonably large, i.e. that X is plausible if we assume Y.
“X supports Y” means P(Y|X) > P(Y), X supports Y if and only if Y becomes more plausible when we learn of X. Bayes tells us that this is equivalent to P(X|Y) > P(X), i.e. if Y would suggest that X is more likely that we might think otherwise then X is support of Y.
Suppose we make X the statement “the first swan I see today is white” and Y the statement “all swans are white”. P(X|Y) is very close to 1, P(X|~Y) is less than 1 so P(X|Y) > P(X), so seeing a white swan offers support for the view that all swans are white. Very, very weak support, but support nonetheless.
(The above is not meant to be condescending, I apologise if you know all of it already).
This is a very tough bullet to bite.
One thing I don’t like about this is the whole ‘one strike and you’re out’ feel of it. It’s very boolean, the real world isn’t usually so crisp. Even a correct theory will sometimes have some evidence pointing against it, and in policy debates almost every suggestion will have some kind of downside.
There is also the worry that there could be more than one non-refuted idea, which makes it a bit difficult to make decisions. Bayesianism, on the other hand, when combined with expected utility theory, is perfect for making decisions.
When replying it said “comment too long” so I posted my reply here:
http://lesswrong.com/r/discussion/lw/552/reply_to_benelliott_about_popper_issues/
Step 1 is problematic also, as I explained in some of my comments to Tim Tyler. What should I gather data about? What kind of data? What measurements are important? How accurate? And so on.
Yes I agree. Another issue I mentioned in one of my comments here is that your data isn’t a random sample of all possible data, so what do you do about bias? (I mean bias in the data, not bias in the person.)
Step 3 is also problematic (as it explicitly acknowledges).