Of course I’d learned some great replies to that sort of question right here on LW, so I did my best to sort her out, but everything I said invoked more confused slogans and cached thoughts.
Taking the outside view, what distinguishes your approach from hers?
nyan’s cached thoughts are better? I mean, it would be nice if we could stop relying on cached thoughts entirely, but there’s just not enough time in the day. A more practical solution is to tend your garden of cached thoughts as best you can. The problem is not just that she has cached thoughts but that her garden is full of weeds she hasn’t noticed.
“Outside view” refers to some threshold of reliability in the details that you keep in a description of a situation. If you throw out all relevant detail, “outside view” won’t be able to tell you anything. If you keep too much detail, “outside view” won’t be different from the inside view (i.e. normal evaluation of the situation that doesn’t invoke this tool). Thus, the decision about which details to keep is important and often non-trivial, in which case simply appealing to something not being “outside view” is not helpful.
I took it to be obvious that “taking the outside view” in the grandparent comment meant dropping the detail that ‘Nyan and everyone here thinks his cached thoughts are better than his sisters’ and so Qiaochu_Yuan’s reply was not answering the question.
I have inside view reasons to believe that nyan’s cached thoughts are genuinely better. If the point you’re trying to make is “repeating cached thoughts is in general not a productive way to have arguments, and you should assume you’re doing this by default,” I agree but don’t think that the outside view is a strong argument supporting this conclusion. And I still think that cached thoughts can be useful. For example, having a cached thought about cached thoughts can be useful.
I agree with all that: my point was just that the question you were replying to asked about the outside view (which in this context I took to mean excluding the fact that we think our cluster of ideas is better than Nyan’s sister’s cluster of ideas). I’m just saying: rationalists can get exploded by philosophical landmines too and it seems worthwhile to be able to avoid that when we want to even though our philosophical limbs are less wrong than most people’s.
Or to put it another way: philosophical landmines seem like a problem for self-skepticism because they keep you from hearing and responding adequately to the concerns of others. So any account of philosophical landmines ought to be neutral on the epistemic content of sloganeering since assuming we’re on the right side of the argument is really bad for self-skepticism.
Um, I just wanted to parachute in and say that “cached thought” should not be a completely general objection to any argument. All it means is that you’ve thought about it before and you’re not, as it were, recomputing everything from scratch in real time. There is nothing epistemically suspect about nyan_sandwich not re-deriving their entire worldview on the spot during every conversation.
Cached thoughts can be correct! The germane objection to them comes when you never actually, personally thought the thought that was cached (it was just handed to you by your environment), or you thought it a long time ago and you need to reconsider the issue.
“Cached thought!” doesn’t refute the thought. But OP suggests that persuading his sister of something true was made more difficult by the her cached thoughts on the subject. I’ve definitely seen similar things happen before. If that is the case then I’ve probably done it before. I want to be convinced of true things if they are true. So if I have the time and energy it is advantageous to suppress cached thoughts and recompute my answers. Maybe this is only worth doing with certain interlocutors—people with sufficient education, intelligence and thoughtfulness. Or maybe it is worth doing on a long car ride but not in a rapid-flowing conversation at a party.
you never actually, personally thought the thought that was cached (it was just handed to you by your environment), or you thought it a long time ago and you need to reconsider the issue.
Part of the problem is that thoughts aren’t tagged with this information. Which is why it helps to recompute often and it is often easier to recompute when someone else is providing counter-arguments.
Not much. It feels reasonable on the inside, but in outside view, everyone is chanting slogans.
That’s what makes the landmine process so nefarious. If only one person is chanting slogans, it’s just a cached thought, but if the response is also a cached thought and causes more, the conversation is derailed and people aren’t thinking anymore. (though as Qiaochu says, using chached thoughts is usually not bad).
Maybe my self deprecation was too subtle? I’m going to fix it, but internet explorer is too shitty to fix it right now.
Taking the outside view, what distinguishes your approach from hers?
nyan’s cached thoughts are better? I mean, it would be nice if we could stop relying on cached thoughts entirely, but there’s just not enough time in the day. A more practical solution is to tend your garden of cached thoughts as best you can. The problem is not just that she has cached thoughts but that her garden is full of weeds she hasn’t noticed.
.
“Outside view” refers to some threshold of reliability in the details that you keep in a description of a situation. If you throw out all relevant detail, “outside view” won’t be able to tell you anything. If you keep too much detail, “outside view” won’t be different from the inside view (i.e. normal evaluation of the situation that doesn’t invoke this tool). Thus, the decision about which details to keep is important and often non-trivial, in which case simply appealing to something not being “outside view” is not helpful.
I took it to be obvious that “taking the outside view” in the grandparent comment meant dropping the detail that ‘Nyan and everyone here thinks his cached thoughts are better than his sisters’ and so Qiaochu_Yuan’s reply was not answering the question.
I have inside view reasons to believe that nyan’s cached thoughts are genuinely better. If the point you’re trying to make is “repeating cached thoughts is in general not a productive way to have arguments, and you should assume you’re doing this by default,” I agree but don’t think that the outside view is a strong argument supporting this conclusion. And I still think that cached thoughts can be useful. For example, having a cached thought about cached thoughts can be useful.
I agree with all that: my point was just that the question you were replying to asked about the outside view (which in this context I took to mean excluding the fact that we think our cluster of ideas is better than Nyan’s sister’s cluster of ideas). I’m just saying: rationalists can get exploded by philosophical landmines too and it seems worthwhile to be able to avoid that when we want to even though our philosophical limbs are less wrong than most people’s.
Or to put it another way: philosophical landmines seem like a problem for self-skepticism because they keep you from hearing and responding adequately to the concerns of others. So any account of philosophical landmines ought to be neutral on the epistemic content of sloganeering since assuming we’re on the right side of the argument is really bad for self-skepticism.
Um, I just wanted to parachute in and say that “cached thought” should not be a completely general objection to any argument. All it means is that you’ve thought about it before and you’re not, as it were, recomputing everything from scratch in real time. There is nothing epistemically suspect about nyan_sandwich not re-deriving their entire worldview on the spot during every conversation.
Cached thoughts can be correct! The germane objection to them comes when you never actually, personally thought the thought that was cached (it was just handed to you by your environment), or you thought it a long time ago and you need to reconsider the issue.
“Cached thought!” doesn’t refute the thought. But OP suggests that persuading his sister of something true was made more difficult by the her cached thoughts on the subject. I’ve definitely seen similar things happen before. If that is the case then I’ve probably done it before. I want to be convinced of true things if they are true. So if I have the time and energy it is advantageous to suppress cached thoughts and recompute my answers. Maybe this is only worth doing with certain interlocutors—people with sufficient education, intelligence and thoughtfulness. Or maybe it is worth doing on a long car ride but not in a rapid-flowing conversation at a party.
Part of the problem is that thoughts aren’t tagged with this information. Which is why it helps to recompute often and it is often easier to recompute when someone else is providing counter-arguments.
Not much. It feels reasonable on the inside, but in outside view, everyone is chanting slogans.
That’s what makes the landmine process so nefarious. If only one person is chanting slogans, it’s just a cached thought, but if the response is also a cached thought and causes more, the conversation is derailed and people aren’t thinking anymore. (though as Qiaochu says, using chached thoughts is usually not bad).
Maybe my self deprecation was too subtle? I’m going to fix it, but internet explorer is too shitty to fix it right now.