“Other-optimizing” occurs in atheist/theist debates when the atheist (Donna) deploys her one-size-fits-all arguments against religion without even bothering to listen long enough to learn what the theist actually believes and why. It is important to keep in mind (with apologies to LT) that, while all rational atheists are alike, each theist is irrational in her own way.
Another quote that may be relevant here. Eliezer’s “Other optimizing” posting led me to this article by Michael Shermer on how one rationalist movement turned into a cult:
The fallacy in Objectivism is the belief that absolute knowledge and final Truths are attainable through reason, and therefore there can be absolute right and wrong knowledge, and absolute moral and immoral thought and action. For Objectivists, once a principle has been discovered through reason to be True, that is the end of the discussion. If you disagree with the principle, then your reasoning is flawed. If your reasoning is flawed it can be corrected, but if it is not, you remain flawed and do not belong in the group. Excommunication is the final step for such unreformed heretics.
If you find it hard to believe that such a line of reasoning could lead a rational, well-intentioned group down the road to culthood, history demonstrates how it can happen.
Yeah, I think Michael Shermer’s wrong about what went wrong exactly. Chemists have access to the indisputable Truth about the atomic theory of chemistry and it hasn’t turned them into a cult. http://lesswrong.com/lw/m1/guardians_of_ayn_rand/.
Perhaps because they didn’t try to excommunicate the disbelievers. They simply waited for them to die off.
People really like this idea of old scientists just dying off as a new paradigm comes in. But frequently old people don’t have trouble adopting the new paradigms. When Einstein proposed special relativity, it didn’t take a generation to get accepted. Similarly, it didn’t take very long for the double helix or the triplet code to get accepted by biologists. To be sure, there are exceptions to this trend. One prominent example is Joseph Priestly who despite being responsible for the experiments that discovered oxygen and paved the way for modern chemistry until his dying days continued to defend phlogiston theory. But he’s the exception rather than the rule. Others of the same age as Priestly embraced the chemical revolution.
(Incidentally, this is connected to why I don’t like the common LW tendency to use phlogiston as an example of a bad hypothesis. In its original forms it worked. Others rejected it precisely because it had been falsified. The vague, convoluted form of phlogiston that is discussed here was the consequence of seeing the theory handed down after already being intertwined with Priestly’s convoluted defenses from the last few years of his life.)
The upshot is that scientists very rarely need to wait for the old ones to die off.
People really like this idea of old scientists just dying off as a new paradigm comes in. But frequently old people don’t have trouble adopting the new paradigms.
“Other-optimizing” occurs in atheist/theist debates when the atheist (Donna) deploys her one-size-fits-all arguments against religion without even bothering to listen long enough to learn what the theist actually believes and why. It is important to keep in mind (with apologies to LT) that, while all rational atheists are alike, each theist is irrational in her own way.
Another quote that may be relevant here. Eliezer’s “Other optimizing” posting led me to this article by Michael Shermer on how one rationalist movement turned into a cult:
Yeah, I think Michael Shermer’s wrong about what went wrong exactly. Chemists have access to the indisputable Truth about the atomic theory of chemistry and it hasn’t turned them into a cult. http://lesswrong.com/lw/m1/guardians_of_ayn_rand/.
Perhaps because they didn’t try to excommunicate the disbelievers. They simply waited for them to die off.
People really like this idea of old scientists just dying off as a new paradigm comes in. But frequently old people don’t have trouble adopting the new paradigms. When Einstein proposed special relativity, it didn’t take a generation to get accepted. Similarly, it didn’t take very long for the double helix or the triplet code to get accepted by biologists. To be sure, there are exceptions to this trend. One prominent example is Joseph Priestly who despite being responsible for the experiments that discovered oxygen and paved the way for modern chemistry until his dying days continued to defend phlogiston theory. But he’s the exception rather than the rule. Others of the same age as Priestly embraced the chemical revolution.
(Incidentally, this is connected to why I don’t like the common LW tendency to use phlogiston as an example of a bad hypothesis. In its original forms it worked. Others rejected it precisely because it had been falsified. The vague, convoluted form of phlogiston that is discussed here was the consequence of seeing the theory handed down after already being intertwined with Priestly’s convoluted defenses from the last few years of his life.)
The upshot is that scientists very rarely need to wait for the old ones to die off.
My related post on this.