This matters because if the Less Wrong view of the world is correct, it’s more likely that there are clean mathematical algorithms for thinking about and sharing truth that are value-neutral (or at least value-orthogonal, e.g. “aim to share facts that the student will think are maximally interesting or surprising”.
I don’t think this is correct—it misses the key map-territory distinction in the human mind. Even though there is “truth” in an objective sense, there is no necessity that the human mind can think about or share that truth. Obviously we can say that experientially we have something in our heads that correlates with reality, but that doesn’t imply that we can think about truth without implicating values. It also says nothing about whether we can discuss truth without manipulating the brain to represent things differently—and all imperfect approximations require trade-offs. If you want to train the brain to do X, you’re implicitly prioritizing some aspect of the brain’s approximation of reality over others.
Yep. There are a number of intelligent agents, each with their own subset of true beliefs. Since agents have finite resources, the they cannot learn everything, and so their subset of true beliefs must be random or guided by some set of goals or values. So truth is entangled with value in that sense, and if not in the sense of wishful thinking.
Also, there is no evidence of a any kind of One Algorithm To Rule Them All. Its in no way implied by the existence of objective reality, and everything that has been exhibited along those lines has turned out to be computationally intractable.
That they make some sensible points, but they’re wrong when they push them to far (and that they are mixing factual truths with preferences a lot). Christians do have their own “truths”, if we interpret these truths as values, which is what they generally are. “It is a sin to engage in sex before marriage” vs “(some) sex can lead to pregnancy”. If we call both of these “truths”, then we have a confusion.
Right, both of these views on truth, traditional rationality and postmodernism, result in theories of truth that don’t quite line up with what we see in the world but in different ways. The traditional rationality view fails to account for the fact that humans judge truth and we have no access to the view from nowhere, so it’s right that traditional rationality is “wrong” in the sense that it incorrectly assumes it can gain privileged access to the truth of claims to know which ones are facts and which ones are falsehoods. The postmodernist view makes an opposite and only slightly less equal mistake by correctly noticing that humans judge truth but then failing to adequately account for the ways those judgements are entangled with a shared reality. The way through is to see that both there is something shared out there that there can in theory be a fact of the matter of and also realizing that we can’t directly ascertain those facts because we must do so across the gap of (subjective) experience.
As always, I say it comes back to the problem of the criterion and our failure to adequately accept that it demands we make a leap of faith, small though we may manage to make it.
I don’t think this is correct—it misses the key map-territory distinction in the human mind. Even though there is “truth” in an objective sense, there is no necessity that the human mind can think about or share that truth. Obviously we can say that experientially we have something in our heads that correlates with reality, but that doesn’t imply that we can think about truth without implicating values. It also says nothing about whether we can discuss truth without manipulating the brain to represent things differently—and all imperfect approximations require trade-offs. If you want to train the brain to do X, you’re implicitly prioritizing some aspect of the brain’s approximation of reality over others.
Yep. There are a number of intelligent agents, each with their own subset of true beliefs. Since agents have finite resources, the they cannot learn everything, and so their subset of true beliefs must be random or guided by some set of goals or values. So truth is entangled with value in that sense, and if not in the sense of wishful thinking.
Also, there is no evidence of a any kind of One Algorithm To Rule Them All. Its in no way implied by the existence of objective reality, and everything that has been exhibited along those lines has turned out to be computationally intractable.
What’s your answer to the postmodernist?
That they make some sensible points, but they’re wrong when they push them to far (and that they are mixing factual truths with preferences a lot). Christians do have their own “truths”, if we interpret these truths as values, which is what they generally are. “It is a sin to engage in sex before marriage” vs “(some) sex can lead to pregnancy”. If we call both of these “truths”, then we have a confusion.
Right, both of these views on truth, traditional rationality and postmodernism, result in theories of truth that don’t quite line up with what we see in the world but in different ways. The traditional rationality view fails to account for the fact that humans judge truth and we have no access to the view from nowhere, so it’s right that traditional rationality is “wrong” in the sense that it incorrectly assumes it can gain privileged access to the truth of claims to know which ones are facts and which ones are falsehoods. The postmodernist view makes an opposite and only slightly less equal mistake by correctly noticing that humans judge truth but then failing to adequately account for the ways those judgements are entangled with a shared reality. The way through is to see that both there is something shared out there that there can in theory be a fact of the matter of and also realizing that we can’t directly ascertain those facts because we must do so across the gap of (subjective) experience.
As always, I say it comes back to the problem of the criterion and our failure to adequately accept that it demands we make a leap of faith, small though we may manage to make it.