E.g. this is what most theism actually looks like: http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/divine-simplicity/ . A lot of it is simply hypotheses about attractors for superintelligences and the Platonic algorithms that they embody. Trust me, I am not just being syncretic.
Please make a claim. Are you saying that if one were to take a proxy for quality like citations to papers/capita of religious studies branches of universities, or the top theological seminaries attached to the most competitive Ivy League Schools, or similar, you are 95% confident that at least 70% of the theist professors believe something like this?
Or is it a stronger claim? With 50% confidence, what percentage of counties and county-equivalents in the United States have most self-identified theists or spiritualists or whatever believing something like this? 50%? 10%?
In what percentage are there at least ten such people?
I don’t see how that is the claim at issue. Most people are incompetent. That tells us little about what theism is. How would knowing the answer tell us anything useful about whether or not theism itself is or isn’t a tenable philosophical position? I really dislike focusing on individual people, I’d rather look at memes. Can I guess at how many of the SEP’s articles on theism are not-obviously-insane and not just if-a-tree-falls debates? I think that question is much more interesting and informative. I’d say… like, 30%.
That’s what the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy calls it. Most biologists are mediocre at biology (many are creationists, God forbid!); that doesn’t mean we should call the thing that good biologists do by some other name. (If this is a poor analogy I don’t immediately see how, but it does have the aura of an overly leaky analogy.) If you asked “why reason in terms of theism instead of decision theory?” then I’d say “well we should obviously reason in terms of decision theory; I’d just prefer we not have undue contempt for an interesting memeplex that we’re not yet very familiar with”.
Biology is the repository of probable information left over after putting data and experiments through the sieve of peer review (the process is also “biology”). The more important ideas get parsed more. Mediocre enough biologists don’t add to biology.
Theology starts with a belief system and is the remnants that by their own lights theologians have not discarded. The process of discarding is also called theology. Unsophisticated people are likely to fail to see what is wrong with more of the original belief set than sophisticated ones, they don’t add to showing what is wrong with the belief pile. It isn’t a crazy analogy, but it’s not quite symmetrical.
To call this theism says more about the language than the beliefs you describe. Is the word closest in idea-space to this memeplex theism? OK, maybe, but it could have been “hunger for waffles and other, lesser breakfast foods” with a few adjustments to the history without adjusting anything at all about the ideas. These beliefs didn’t originate as the unfalsifiable part of an arbitrary cult focused on breakfast, as it happens.
an interesting memeplex
it’s interesting as the least easy to falsify, arguably unfalsifiable core of motivated, unjustified belief. It’s not interesting as something at all likely to be true.
it’s interesting as the least easy to falsify, arguably unfalsifiable core of motivated, unjustified belief. It’s not interesting as something at all likely to be true.
I disagree; certain ideas that theism originated are as likely to be true as certain ideas about decision theory are likely to be true, because they’re isomorphic.
You are reasoning from cached priors without bothering to recompute likelihood ratios (not like you’re actually looking at evidence at all; did you read the article on divine simplicity? Do you have a knockdown reason that I should ignore that debate other than “stupid people believe in God, therefore belief in God is stupid”?). You are ignoring evidence. “Ignore”: ignorance. You are ignorant about theism. That’s cool; you don’t have all the time in the world. But don’t confidently assert that something is not likely to be true when you clearly know very little about it. This is an important part of rationality.
Edit: In other words, you do not have magical inductive biases and you have seen significantly less evidence than I have. This should be more than enough to cause you to be hesitant.
You are ignorant about theism. That’s cool; you don’t have all the time in the world. But don’t confidently assert that something is not likely to be true when you clearly know very little about it. This is an important part of rationality.
You confidently assert my ignorance. That assertion is notable.
you have seen significantly less evidence than I have.
You’re much more confident of this than I am. You should be more hesitant.
Duly noted. Can we share a few representative reasons? What do you think I don’t already think you know about why “theism” (a word that may soon need to be tabooed) isn’t worth looking into?
I can briefly try to translate the divine simplicity thing: “The perfectly reflective Platonic decision algorithm that performs optimally on all optimization problems doesn’t ‘possess’ the quality of optimizerness—it is optimization, just as it is reflectivity. Being a Platonic algorithm, it does not have inputs or outputs, but controls all programs ambiently. It has no potentiality, only actuality: everything is at equilibrium.” And so on and so forth. (Counterarguments would be like “what, there is a sense of equilibrium that implies that this algorithm is a decision theoretic zombie, I think you’re using a non-intuitive definition of ‘equilibrium’” and things like that, or something. It’s better to talk in terms of decision theory but that doesn’t mean they’re not actually equivalent. The parts that don’t boil down to predictions about decision theory tend to be just quibbling over ways of carving reality, which is often informative but not when the subject matter is so politically charged.)
I can briefly try to translate the divine simplicity thing: “The perfectly reflective Platonic decision algorithm that performs optimally on all optimization problems doesn’t ‘possess’ the quality of optimizerness—it is optimization, just as it is reflectivity. Being a Platonic algorithm, it does not have inputs or outputs, but controls all programs ambiently. It has no potentiality, only actuality: everything is at equilibrium.” And so on and so forth.
I think you need to take a big step back and consider what you’ve studied and what you’ve come up with. I’m not sure where divine simplicity fits in your worldview exactly, but in the course of my own decision theory studies, I came up with an issue that seems to shoot down that concept entirely: there can be no decision algorithm that performs optimally on all optimization problems, because there are optimization problems for which the solution space is infinite, and there is an infinite chain of progressively better solutions. Worse, the universe we presently occupy appears to be infinite, and to have such chains for almost all sensible optimization criteria. The best we can do, decision-theory wise, is to bite off special cases, come up with transforms and simplifications to make those cases more broadly applicable, and fall back on imperfect heuristics for the rest.
But there’s a much bigger issue here. It looks to me like you’ve taken a few batches of concentrated confusion—the writings of old philosophers—and invented a novel interpretation to give it meaning. You then took these reinterpretations and mixed them into what started out as a sensible worldview. You’re talking about studying Aquinas and Leibniz, and this makes me very worried, because my longstanding belief is that these authors, and most others of their era, are cognitive poison that will drive you insane. Furthermore, your writings recently look to me like evidence that this may actually be happening. You should probably be looking to consolidate your findings, and to communicate them.
Divine simplicity is a hypothesis, what you say is strong evidence against that hypothesis. But I think it’s still a coherent hypothesis. At the very least we can talk about Goedelian stuff or NFL theorems to counterargue a bunch of the stronger ‘omnipotence, omniscience’ stuff… but things are all weird when you’re that abstract; you can just say, “okay, well, this agent is multipartite and so even if one part has one Chaitin’s constant this other part has another Chaitin’s constant and so you can get around it”, or something, but I doubt that actually works or makes sense. On the other hand it’s always really unclear to me when the math is or isn’t being used outside its intended domain. Basically I notice I am confused when I try to steel man “optimal decision policy” arguments, for or against. (There’s also this other thing that’s like “optimal given boundedness” but I think that doesn’t count.)
I disagree about Aquinas and Leibniz. I see them as putting forth basically sane hypotheses that are probably wrong but probably at least a little relevant for our decision policies. I don’t think that theology is a useful area of study, not when we have decision theory, but I really don’t think that Leibniz especially was off track with his theology. (I dunno if you missed my comments about how he was really thinking in terms of the intuitions behind algorithmic information theory?)
I have significant familiarity with Aquinas, and I do not see anything worth reading Aquinas for, save perhaps arguing with theists. Insofar as there are interesting ideas in his writing, they are better presented elsewhere (particularly in modern work with the benefit of greatly improved knowledge and methods), with greater clarity and without so much nonsense mixed in. Recommending that people read Aquinas, or castigating them for not having read Aquinas, seems like a recipe for wasting their time.
I saw this after making my Plato’s theory of forms comment at 10:19:54AM.
This is what I thought the article was saying.
the subject matter is so politically charged
Everyone seems to be operating under something like the law of conservation of ninjitsu here. You seem to be perhaps the worst offender, with gratuitous offensiveness and the like being approximately equal among all of the few theists here and the many atheists.
In this thread alone:
Sadly Less Wrong seems to know absolutely nothing about theism, which ends up with me repeatedly facepalming when people feel obliged to demonstrate how incredibly confident they are that theism is stupid and worth going out of their way to signal contempt for.
It tends to be like, yeah, we get it, minds reside in brains, neuroscience is cool and shit, but repeatedly bringing it up as if nobody had ever heard that before is a facepalm-inducing red herring.
theism is a less naive perspective on cosmology-morality than atheism is
Also bad is how you characterize what LW thinks, this seems like a artificial way to pretend you have the only or best informed position by averaging many people on here with the people who do’t know and don’t care to know about things that the best evidence they have shows are elaborate rationalizations and meta-hipsterism by intellectuals.
E.g. this is what most theism actually looks like: http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/divine-simplicity/ . A lot of it is simply hypotheses about attractors for superintelligences and the Platonic algorithms that they embody. Trust me, I am not just being syncretic.
Please make a claim. Are you saying that if one were to take a proxy for quality like citations to papers/capita of religious studies branches of universities, or the top theological seminaries attached to the most competitive Ivy League Schools, or similar, you are 95% confident that at least 70% of the theist professors believe something like this?
Or is it a stronger claim? With 50% confidence, what percentage of counties and county-equivalents in the United States have most self-identified theists or spiritualists or whatever believing something like this? 50%? 10%?
In what percentage are there at least ten such people?
I don’t see how that is the claim at issue. Most people are incompetent. That tells us little about what theism is. How would knowing the answer tell us anything useful about whether or not theism itself is or isn’t a tenable philosophical position? I really dislike focusing on individual people, I’d rather look at memes. Can I guess at how many of the SEP’s articles on theism are not-obviously-insane and not just if-a-tree-falls debates? I think that question is much more interesting and informative. I’d say… like, 30%.
Why call it “theism”?
That’s what the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy calls it. Most biologists are mediocre at biology (many are creationists, God forbid!); that doesn’t mean we should call the thing that good biologists do by some other name. (If this is a poor analogy I don’t immediately see how, but it does have the aura of an overly leaky analogy.) If you asked “why reason in terms of theism instead of decision theory?” then I’d say “well we should obviously reason in terms of decision theory; I’d just prefer we not have undue contempt for an interesting memeplex that we’re not yet very familiar with”.
Biology is the repository of probable information left over after putting data and experiments through the sieve of peer review (the process is also “biology”). The more important ideas get parsed more. Mediocre enough biologists don’t add to biology.
Theology starts with a belief system and is the remnants that by their own lights theologians have not discarded. The process of discarding is also called theology. Unsophisticated people are likely to fail to see what is wrong with more of the original belief set than sophisticated ones, they don’t add to showing what is wrong with the belief pile. It isn’t a crazy analogy, but it’s not quite symmetrical.
To call this theism says more about the language than the beliefs you describe. Is the word closest in idea-space to this memeplex theism? OK, maybe, but it could have been “hunger for waffles and other, lesser breakfast foods” with a few adjustments to the history without adjusting anything at all about the ideas. These beliefs didn’t originate as the unfalsifiable part of an arbitrary cult focused on breakfast, as it happens.
it’s interesting as the least easy to falsify, arguably unfalsifiable core of motivated, unjustified belief. It’s not interesting as something at all likely to be true.
I disagree; certain ideas that theism originated are as likely to be true as certain ideas about decision theory are likely to be true, because they’re isomorphic.
You are reasoning from cached priors without bothering to recompute likelihood ratios (not like you’re actually looking at evidence at all; did you read the article on divine simplicity? Do you have a knockdown reason that I should ignore that debate other than “stupid people believe in God, therefore belief in God is stupid”?). You are ignoring evidence. “Ignore”: ignorance. You are ignorant about theism. That’s cool; you don’t have all the time in the world. But don’t confidently assert that something is not likely to be true when you clearly know very little about it. This is an important part of rationality.
Edit: In other words, you do not have magical inductive biases and you have seen significantly less evidence than I have. This should be more than enough to cause you to be hesitant.
You confidently assert my ignorance. That assertion is notable.
You’re much more confident of this than I am. You should be more hesitant.
Duly noted. Can we share a few representative reasons? What do you think I don’t already think you know about why “theism” (a word that may soon need to be tabooed) isn’t worth looking into?
I can briefly try to translate the divine simplicity thing: “The perfectly reflective Platonic decision algorithm that performs optimally on all optimization problems doesn’t ‘possess’ the quality of optimizerness—it is optimization, just as it is reflectivity. Being a Platonic algorithm, it does not have inputs or outputs, but controls all programs ambiently. It has no potentiality, only actuality: everything is at equilibrium.” And so on and so forth. (Counterarguments would be like “what, there is a sense of equilibrium that implies that this algorithm is a decision theoretic zombie, I think you’re using a non-intuitive definition of ‘equilibrium’” and things like that, or something. It’s better to talk in terms of decision theory but that doesn’t mean they’re not actually equivalent. The parts that don’t boil down to predictions about decision theory tend to be just quibbling over ways of carving reality, which is often informative but not when the subject matter is so politically charged.)
I think you need to take a big step back and consider what you’ve studied and what you’ve come up with. I’m not sure where divine simplicity fits in your worldview exactly, but in the course of my own decision theory studies, I came up with an issue that seems to shoot down that concept entirely: there can be no decision algorithm that performs optimally on all optimization problems, because there are optimization problems for which the solution space is infinite, and there is an infinite chain of progressively better solutions. Worse, the universe we presently occupy appears to be infinite, and to have such chains for almost all sensible optimization criteria. The best we can do, decision-theory wise, is to bite off special cases, come up with transforms and simplifications to make those cases more broadly applicable, and fall back on imperfect heuristics for the rest.
But there’s a much bigger issue here. It looks to me like you’ve taken a few batches of concentrated confusion—the writings of old philosophers—and invented a novel interpretation to give it meaning. You then took these reinterpretations and mixed them into what started out as a sensible worldview. You’re talking about studying Aquinas and Leibniz, and this makes me very worried, because my longstanding belief is that these authors, and most others of their era, are cognitive poison that will drive you insane. Furthermore, your writings recently look to me like evidence that this may actually be happening. You should probably be looking to consolidate your findings, and to communicate them.
Divine simplicity is a hypothesis, what you say is strong evidence against that hypothesis. But I think it’s still a coherent hypothesis. At the very least we can talk about Goedelian stuff or NFL theorems to counterargue a bunch of the stronger ‘omnipotence, omniscience’ stuff… but things are all weird when you’re that abstract; you can just say, “okay, well, this agent is multipartite and so even if one part has one Chaitin’s constant this other part has another Chaitin’s constant and so you can get around it”, or something, but I doubt that actually works or makes sense. On the other hand it’s always really unclear to me when the math is or isn’t being used outside its intended domain. Basically I notice I am confused when I try to steel man “optimal decision policy” arguments, for or against. (There’s also this other thing that’s like “optimal given boundedness” but I think that doesn’t count.)
I disagree about Aquinas and Leibniz. I see them as putting forth basically sane hypotheses that are probably wrong but probably at least a little relevant for our decision policies. I don’t think that theology is a useful area of study, not when we have decision theory, but I really don’t think that Leibniz especially was off track with his theology. (I dunno if you missed my comments about how he was really thinking in terms of the intuitions behind algorithmic information theory?)
I have significant familiarity with Aquinas, and I do not see anything worth reading Aquinas for, save perhaps arguing with theists. Insofar as there are interesting ideas in his writing, they are better presented elsewhere (particularly in modern work with the benefit of greatly improved knowledge and methods), with greater clarity and without so much nonsense mixed in. Recommending that people read Aquinas, or castigating them for not having read Aquinas, seems like a recipe for wasting their time.
(I agree with this.)
I saw this after making my Plato’s theory of forms comment at 10:19:54AM.
This is what I thought the article was saying.
Everyone seems to be operating under something like the law of conservation of ninjitsu here. You seem to be perhaps the worst offender, with gratuitous offensiveness and the like being approximately equal among all of the few theists here and the many atheists.
In this thread alone:
Also bad is how you characterize what LW thinks, this seems like a artificial way to pretend you have the only or best informed position by averaging many people on here with the people who do’t know and don’t care to know about things that the best evidence they have shows are elaborate rationalizations and meta-hipsterism by intellectuals.