This post just appeared at Language log and has this to say:
Language Log could devote a thousand posts to the project of underlining and elaborating the ways in which grammar does not protect us against misunderstanding the sound of an uttered name, and logic does not protect us against what we say having double meaning. Come to think of it, the thousand posts may already have been written: there are over 5,500 old posts searchable here and already over 1,200 new ones on the present server searchable here.
One theme of OB and LW has been to take the fuzzy complexity of the real world and show that in principle at some level it’s related to something precise. We can’t actually do Bayesian math in our heads for real-world calculations, but just knowing how to work the ideal case protects us against certain real-world errors. Likewise, Eliezer’s meta-ethics reduces morality down to some horrendously complex thing that we can never calculate, but it’s nice to know that morality does reduce to something when we’re wondering whether it exists at all, whether it’s all relative, or so on.
The real positivists thought they could reduce all language to their positivism and spent thirty years trying. I don’t think I’m going to do that in a few days of posting about stuff on a blog. But if I can sketch a few really-large-scale things and then let people’s common sense fill in the blanks, that’ll still be better than nothing.
Speaking of themes; I guess one thing that bothered me about this post (many of your other posts are very good) is that this post doesn’t seem to serve a point; questioning assumptions is often brought up on OB and LW and asking others to be more precise in describing their assumptions is also very common. Any connection to positivism here seems very tenuous; criticizing positivism has little or no impact on soft-positivism.
I feel that there are many other OB and LW posts that would address this issue more effectively and it might be better to just make this page an index of them as opposed to a full post.
That said, there is no way to easily recognize a lot of the themes here and LW in particular runs the risk of just becoming a repository of the same things over and over again.
Are we really refining the art of human rationality here?
This post just appeared at Language log and has this to say:
http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=1258
Asking others to clarify their assumptions is good, but translating them into positivist language might not be as precise as it sounds
One theme of OB and LW has been to take the fuzzy complexity of the real world and show that in principle at some level it’s related to something precise. We can’t actually do Bayesian math in our heads for real-world calculations, but just knowing how to work the ideal case protects us against certain real-world errors. Likewise, Eliezer’s meta-ethics reduces morality down to some horrendously complex thing that we can never calculate, but it’s nice to know that morality does reduce to something when we’re wondering whether it exists at all, whether it’s all relative, or so on.
The real positivists thought they could reduce all language to their positivism and spent thirty years trying. I don’t think I’m going to do that in a few days of posting about stuff on a blog. But if I can sketch a few really-large-scale things and then let people’s common sense fill in the blanks, that’ll still be better than nothing.
Speaking of themes; I guess one thing that bothered me about this post (many of your other posts are very good) is that this post doesn’t seem to serve a point; questioning assumptions is often brought up on OB and LW and asking others to be more precise in describing their assumptions is also very common. Any connection to positivism here seems very tenuous; criticizing positivism has little or no impact on soft-positivism.
I feel that there are many other OB and LW posts that would address this issue more effectively and it might be better to just make this page an index of them as opposed to a full post.
That said, there is no way to easily recognize a lot of the themes here and LW in particular runs the risk of just becoming a repository of the same things over and over again.
Are we really refining the art of human rationality here?
Yeah, see my response to ciphergoth