What I have found discouraging in this regard is that you and Curi have been so hopelessly tone-deaf in coming to understand just why your doctrines have been so difficult to sell. Why (and in what sense) people here think that support is possible.
You’re not giving any reasons here why you think we are “tone-deaf” other than you think we have not explained, for example, why LW people think support is possible. But that’s not tone-deafness. Tone deafness is a complaint not about the substance of ideas but about how well you have expressed those ideas with respect to some norm: it is essentially a complaint about style, and it would seem you want us to pay attention to kharma. We think rational people ought to be able to look beyond those things. Right? With regard to support, we explained and gave examples but, briefly, just to illustrate again, here is a quote from where recursive justification hits bottom
Everything, without exception, needs justification.
Perhaps it is you that has been deaf?
We know that Popperian philosophy is a hard sell and we know that in order to sell it we have to combat lies and myths that have been spread around. Popper himself spent a lot of time doing that. Some of those myths are right here at LW, in the sequences, and we gave examples. But, again, deafness—has anybody admitted that there are these mistakes? Is that deafness a reaction to our “tone-deafness” and is that rational?
All you have to do is to expend as much effort in reacting to what other people say as in trying to get your own points across. In trying to understand what they are saying, rather than reacting negatively.
I agree, but rather than just asserting I haven’t been, perhaps you should illustrate with some examples.
People can engage in persistent disagreement with the local orthodoxy without losing karma. People can occasionally speak too impolitely without losing excessive karma.
You seem to care about kharma. If one thinks that kharma is an authoritarian mistake, as I do, then how much respect to you think I should have?
That folks who pay lip service to Popper seem to treat their own positions as given by authority and measure ‘progress’ by how much the other guy changes his mind.
That you think we are paying lip service is reacting negatively and rather hostile don’t you think? Also I do want to hear some good arguments against Popper. Unfortunately most arguments, including those here, are to do with the myths—such as Popper is falsificationism, and come from people that don’t know Popper well or got their information from second-hand sources.
How could he have thought it worthwhile to use sock puppets to raise his karma enough to make that posting?
Why do you think he did that? You’re just making things up here.
Attacking non-existent beliefs in a doctrine he clearly didn’t understand
Tversky and Kahneman believe in such ideas as “evolved mental behaviour” and “bounded rationality”. These beliefs exist right enough. If you read The Beginning of Infinity by David Deutsch you will see arguments against these sort of things. You’re arguing by assertion again and haven’t carefully looked at the substance.
Please give up on us. We’re obviously not as careful and rational thinker as you are. Utterly hopeless. We’re stuck in our realm of imagined cognitive biases. Go find something productive to do. Please go away.
First, in response to your first paragraph, my complaint about ‘tone-deafness’ was not intended as a complaint about style. It was a complaint about your failure to do well at the listening half of conversation. A failure to tailor your arguments to the responses you receive. A failure to understand the counterarguments. My complaint may be wrong and unjustified, but it is definitely not a complaint about style.
But, speaking of style, you suggest:
We think rational people ought to be able to look beyond [issues of style]. Right?
Well, I can see the attractiveness of that slogan, but we tend to think of it a bit differently here. Here, we think that rational people ought to be able to fix any rough edges in their ‘style’ that prevent them from communicating their ideas successfully. We don’t believe that it makes sense to place the entire onus of adjustment on the listener. And we especially don’t believe that only one side has the onus of listening.
Perhaps it is you that has been deaf?
Perhaps. But that’s enough about me. Lets talk about you. :) As you may have noticed, responding to an attack with a counterattack usually doesn’t achieve very much here.
You seem to care about kharma. If one thinks that kharma is an authoritarian mistake, as I do, then how much respect to you think I should have?
I guess that would depend on how interested you are in having me listen to your ideas.
I do want to hear some good arguments against Popper. Unfortunately most arguments, including those here, are to do with the myths—such as Popper is falsificationism, and come from people that don’t know Popper well or got their information from second-hand sources.
You are probably right. And that presents you with a problem. How do you induce people to come to know Popper well? How do you tempt them to get their information from some non-second-hand source?
Now I’m sure you guys have given long and careful thought to this problem and have developed a plan. But if you should discover that things are not going well, I have some ideas that might help. Which is simply that you might consider producing some discussion postings consisting mostly of long quotes from Popper and his most prominent disciples, with only short glosses from yourselves.
Tversky and Kahneman believe in such ideas as “evolved mental behaviour” and “bounded rationality”. These beliefs exist right enough. If you read The Beginning of Infinity by David Deutsch you will see arguments against these sort of things.
Hmmm. There is something here I just don’t understand. Why all this hostility to what seems to me to be the fairly uncontroversial realization that people are often less good at reasoning than we would like them to be. It is almost as if you had religious or political objections to some evil doctrine. Do you think it would be possible to enlighten me as to why it seems to you that the stakes are so high with this issue?
As for reading Deutsch, I intend to. I don’t think I have ever had a book recommended to me so many times before it is even published in this country.
As for reading Deutsch, I intend to. I don’t think I have ever had a book recommended to me so many times before it is even published in this country.
Somehow I was able to buy it in the Amazon Kindle store for about $18, but the highlight feature is not working properly. My introduction to Deutsch was several years ago with The Fabric of Reality, in which he defends the Everett interpretation, among other things. At that point he became a must-read author (which means I find him worth reading, not that I agree fully with him), one of only a handful. (Daniel Dennett is another). If you want to read Deutsch now, The Fabric of Reality is immediately available. As I recall, it’s a mix of persuasive arguments and dubious arguments.
Tversky and Kahneman believe in such ideas as “evolved mental behaviour” and “bounded rationality”. These beliefs exist right enough. If you read The Beginning of Infinity by David Deutsch you will see arguments against these sort of things. You’re arguing by assertion again and haven’t carefully looked at the substance.
I’d be very curious to see where anything Tversky wrote contains the phrase “evolved mental behavior”- as I explained to you T&K have classically been pretty agnostic about where these biases and heuristics are coming from. That other people in the field might think that they are evolved is a side issue. I can’t speak as strongly about Kahneman, but I’d be surprised to see any joint paper of the two had where that phrase was used.
But there’s a more serious issue here which I pointed out to you earlier and you are still missing: You cannot let philosophy override evidence. When evidence and your philosophy contradict, philosophy must lose. No matter how good my philosophical arguments are, they cannot withstand empirical data. If my philosophy says the Earth is flat, my philosophy is bad, since the evidence is overwhelming that the Earth is not flat. If my philosophy requires a geocentric universes, then my philosophy is bad. If my philosophy requires irreducible mental entities then my philosophy is bad. And if my philosophy requires humans to be perfect reasoners then my philosophy is bad.
As long as you keep insisting that your philosophical desires about what humans should be override the evidence of what humans are you will not be doing a good job understanding humans or the rest of the universe.
And to be blunt, as long as you keep making this sort of claim, people here are going to not take you seriously. So please go elsewhere. We don’t have much to say to each other.
No, as far as I know, they don’t use the phrase “evolved mental behaviour”, but I didn’t say they did, only that they believe in such things. That they do is evident here:
“From its earliest days, the research that Tversky and I conducted was guided
by the idea that intuitive judgments occupy a position – perhaps corresponding
to evolutionary history – between the automatic operations of perception
and the deliberate operations of reasoning.”
Read the wording closely. To me it indicates they don’t have a good explanation for these heuristics, or, if they do have an explanation, it is vague so that it is consistent with both evolved and not-evolved. But they don’t have a problem with evolved. I also gave you other arguments in my comments to you in our other discussion.
Why are you continuing this when you’ve already sarcastically told me to go away?
Edit: This wikipedia page says “Cognitive biases are instances of evolved mental behavior”: Do you think that is an accurate description of what cognitive biases are supposed to be? Is there any controversy about whether they are evolved or not?
Yes, I understood that, but my question was about why you wrote:
With regard to support, we explained and gave examples but, briefly, just to illustrate again, here is a quote from where recursive justification hits bottom
So, apparently, what was illustrated was that Eliezer was not a good and faithful disciple of Popper when he wrote that. I’m a bit surprised you thought that needed illustration.
ETA: Or maybe you meant that your ability to dredge up that quote illustrates that you have been paying attention to whether and why LesWrongers believe support is possible. Yeah, that makes more sense, is more charitable, and is the interpretation I’ll go with.
Ok, with that out of the way, I will respond to your long great-grandfather comment (above) directly.
Tversky and Kahneman believe in such ideas as “evolved mental behaviour” and “bounded rationality”. These beliefs exist right enough. If you read The Beginning of Infinity by David Deutsch you will see arguments against these sort of things.
That sounds pretty awful. Bounded rationality is a standard concept. Surely if you argue against it, you are confused, or don’t understand it properly. I’m not sure what an “evolved mental behaviour” is, but that sounds pretty uncontroversial too. Looking at Deutsch on video about 28:00 in he is using the term “bounded rationality” to refer to something different—so this seems like a simple confusion based on different definitions of terms.
If you are going to assume that people are confused for arguing against “standard concepts” or because you think something is uncontroversial, then that is just argument from authority.
The supposed heuristics which Herbert Simon and others propose which give rise to our alledged cognitive biases are held by them to have evolved via biological evolution, to be based on induction, and to be bounded. Hard-coded processes based on induction that can generate some knowledge but not all knowledge goes against the ideas that Deutsch discusses in The Beginning of Infinity. For one thing, induction is impossible and doesn’t happen anywhere including in human brains. For another, knowledge creation is all or nothing; a machine that can generate some knowledge can generate all knowledge (the jump to universality) - halfway houses like these heuristics would be very difficult to engineer, they would keep jumping. And, for another, human knowledge and reasoning is memetic, not genetic, and there are no hard-coded reasoning rules.
This is just an argument over the definition of the phrase “bounded rationality”. Let’s call these two definitions BR1 and BR2. The definition that timtyler, Kahnemann and Tversky, and I are using is BR1; the definition that you, curi, and David Deutsch use is BR2.
BR1 means “rationality that is performed using a finite amount of resources”. Think of this as bounded-resource rationality. All rationality done in this universe is BR1, by definition, because you only get a limited amount of time and memory to think about things. This definition does not contain any claims about what sort of knowledge BR1 can or can’t generate. A detailed theory of BR1 would say things like “solving this math problem requires at least 10^9 operations”. More commonly, people refer to BR1 to distinguish it from things like AIXI, which is a mathematical construct that can theoretically figure out anything given sufficient data, but which is impossible to construct because it contains several infinities. A mind with universal reasoning is BR1 if it only has a finite amount of time to do it in.
BR2 means “rationality that can generate some types of knowledge, but not others”. Think of this as bounded-domain rationality. Whether this exists at all depends on what you mean by “knowledge”. For example, if you have a computer program that collects seismograph data and predicts earthquakes, you might say it “knows” where earthquakes will occur; this would make it a BR2. If you say that this sort of thing doesn’t count as knowledge until a human reads it from a screen or printout, then no BR2s exist.
BR1 is a standard concept, but as far as I know BR2 is unique to Deutsch’s book Beginning of Infinity. BR1 exists, tautologically from its definition. Whether BR2 exists or not depends on how you define some other things, but personally I don’t find BR2 illuminating so I see no reason to take a stance either way on it.
I’m pretty sure there’s a similar issue with the definition of “induction”. I know of at least two definitions relevant to epistemology, but neither of them seems to make sense in context so I suspect that Deutsch has come up with a third. Could you explain what Deutsch uses the word induction to mean? I think that would clear up a great deal of confusion.
All your points are wrong, though. Induction has been discussed to death already. Computation universality doesn’t mean intelligent systems evolve without cognitive biases, and the fact that human cultural knowledge is memetic doesn’t mean there are not common built-in biases either. The human brain is reprogrammable to some extent, but much of the basic pattern-recognition circuitry has a genetically specified architecture.
Many of the biases in question are in the basic psychology textbooks—this is surely not something that is up for debate.
The conjunction fallacy: explanations of the linda problem by the theory of
hints
Empirical research has shown that in some situations, subjects tend to assign
a probability to a conjunction of two events that is larger than the probability
they assign to each of these two events. This empirical phenomenon is
traditionally called the conjunction fallacy. One of the best-known experiments
used to demonstrate the conjunction fallacy is the Linda problem introduced by
Tversky and Kahneman in 1982. They explain the “fallacious behavior” by their
so-called judgemental heuristics. These heuristics have been criticized heavily
as being far “too vague to count as explanations”. In this article, it is shown
that the “fallacious behavior” in the Linda problem can be explained by the
so-called theory of hints.
Why do you argue from authority saying things like something surely cannot be up for debate because it’s in all the textbooks? curi and I are fallibilists: nothing is beyond question.
You say you’re a fallibist, but you’re actually falling into the failure mode described in this article. Suppose you’ve got a question with positions A and B, with a a bunch of supporting arguments for A, and a bunch of supporting arguments for B. Some of those arguments for each side will be wrong, or ambiguous, or inapplicable—that’s what fallibilism predicts and I think we all agree with that.
Suppose there are 3 valid and 3 invalid arguments for A, and 3 valid and 3 invalid arguments for B. Now suppose someone decides to get rid any of the arguments that are invalid, but they happen to think A is better. Most people will end up attacking all the arguments for B, but they won’t look as closely at the arguments for A. After they’re finished, they’ll have 3 valid and 3 invalid arguments for A, and 3 valid arguments for B—which looks like a preponderance of evidence in favor of B, but it isn’t.
Now read the abstract of that paper you linked again. That paper disagrees with where K&T draw the boundary between questions that trigger the conjunction fallacy and questions that don’t, and describe the underlying mechanism that produces it differently. They do not claim that the conjunction fallacy doesn’t exist.
Empirical research has shown that in some situations, subjects tend to assign a probability to a conjunction of two events that is larger than the probability they assign to each of these two events. This empirical phenomenon is traditionally called the conjunction fallacy. One of the best-known experiments used to demonstrate the conjunction fallacy is the Linda problem introduced by Tversky and Kahneman in 1982. They explain the “fallacious behavior” by their so-called judgemental heuristics. These heuristics have been criticized heavily as being far “too vague to count as explanations”. In this article, it is shown that the “fallacious behavior” in the Linda problem can be explained by the so-called theory of hints. source
It seems as though they acknowledge the conjunction fallacy and are proposing different underlying mechanisms to explain how it is produced.
Why do you argue from authority saying things like something surely cannot be up for debate because it’s in all the textbooks? curi and I are fallibilists: nothing is beyond question.
If you want to argue with psychology 101, fine, but do it in public, without experimental support, and a dodgy theoretical framework derived from computation universality and things are not going to go well.
If citing textbooks is classed as “arguing from authority”, one should point out that such arguments are usually correct.
They have put fallacious behaviour in quotes to indicate that they don’t agree the fallacy exists. I could be wrong, however, as I am just going from the abstract and maybe the authors do claim it exists. However they seem to be saying it is just an artifact of hints. I’ll need to read the paper to understand better. Maybe I’ll end up disagreeing with the authors.
Textbook arguments are often wrong. Consider quantum physics and the Copenhagen Interpretation for example. And one way of arguing against CI is from a philosophical perspective (it’s instrumentalist and a bad explanation).
I looked through the whole paper and don’t think you’re wrong.
I don’t agree with the hints paper in various respects. But it disagrees with the conjunction fallacy and argues that conjunction isn’t the real issue and the biases explanation isn’t right either. So certainly there is disagreement on these issues.
If citing textbooks is classed as “arguing from authority”, one should point out that such arguments are usually correct.
Do you mean in the context of arguments in textbooks? This seems like a very weak claim, given how frequently some areas change. Indeed, psychology is an area where what an intro level textbook would both claim to be true and would even discuss as relevant topics has changed drastically in the last 60 years. For example, in a modern psychology textbook the primary discussion of Freud will be to note that most of his claims fell into two broad categories:untestable or demonstrably false. Similarly, even experimentally derived claims about some things (such as how children learn) has changed a lot in the last few years as more clever experimental design has done a better job separating issues of planning and physical coordination from babies’ models of reality. Psychology seems to be a bad area to make this sort of argument.
Do you mean in the context of arguments in textbooks?
Yes.
This seems like a very weak claim, given how frequently some areas change.
It is weak, in that it makes no bold claims, and merely states what most would take for granted—that most of the things in textbooks are essentially correct.
has anybody admitted that there are these mistakes?
Some did. At the same time that others didn’t.
The ones admitting it said all epistemologies have those flaws, and it’s impossible to do anything about it. When told that one already exists they just dismissed that as impossible instead of being interested in researching whether it succeeds. Or sometimes they took an attitude similar to EY: it’s a flaw and maybe we’ll fix it some day but we don’t know how to yet and the attempts in progress don’t look promising. (Why doesn’t the Popperian attempt in particular look promising? Why hasn’t it already succeeded? No comment given.)
And they dismissed it without even knowing of any scholarly work by anyone on their side which makes their point for them. As far as they know, no one from their side ever refuted Popper in depth, having carefully read his books. And they are OK with that.
@lip service—anyone who cares to can find criticisms of Popper on my blog on a variety of subjects. This is just accusing sources of ideas of bias as a way to dismiss them, without even doing basic research about whether these claims are true (let alone explaining why source should be used to determine quality of substance).
Previously, the most popular philosophy of science was probably Karl Popper’s falsificationism—this is the old philosophy that the Bayesian revolution is currently dethroning.
You can even formalize Popper’s philosophy mathematically
Popper’s dictum that an idea must be falsifiable
Karl Popper’s insight that falsification is stronger than confirmation,
Karl Popper’s idea that theories can be definitely falsified,
Has anybody here said, yes, these are myths and should be retracted?
I do not trust that they are accurate. Consequently I discount them when I encounter them. I am currently reading The Beginning of Infinity (which is hard to obtain in the US as it is not to be published until summer, though inexplicably I was able to buy it for the Kindle, though inexplicably my extensive highlights from the book are not showing up on my highlights page at Amazon), and trust Deutsch much more on the topic of Popper. I trust Popper still more on the topic of Popper, and I read the essay collection Objective Knowledge a few weeks ago.
I do not trust myself on the topic of Popper, which is why I will not declare these to be myths, as such a statement would presuppose that I am trustworthy.
Occasionally you make valid points and this is one of them. I agree that most of what you’ve quoted above is accurate. In general, Eliezer is somewhat sloppy when it comes to historical issues. Thus, I’ve pointed out here before problems with the use of phlogiston as an example of an unfalsifiable theory, as well as other essentially historical issues.
So we should now ask should Eliezer read any Popper? Well, I’d say he should read LScD and I’ve recommended Popper before to people here before (along with Kuhn and Lakatos). But there’s something to note: I estimate that the chance that any regular LW reader is going to read any of Popper has gone down drastically in the last 1.5 weeks. I will let you figure out why I think that and leave it to you to figure out if that’s a good thing or not.
LScD is not the correct book to read if you want to understand Popper’s philosophy. C&R and OK are better choices.
What do you mean “along with” Kuhn and Lakatos? They are dissimilar to Popper.
Popper’s positions aren’t important as historical issues but because there is an epistemology that matters today which he explained. It’s not historical sloppiness when Eliezer dismisses a rival theory using myths; it’s bad scholarship in the present about the ideas themselves (even if he didn’t know the right ideas, why did he attack a straw man instead of learning better ideas, improving the ideas himself, or refraining from speaking?)
BTW I emailed Eliezer years ago to let him know he had myths about Popper on his website and he chose not to fix it.
What do you mean “along with” Kuhn and Lakatos? They are dissimilar to Popper
As in they are people worth reading.
LScD is not the correct book to read if you want to understand Popper’s philosophy. C&R and OK are better choices.
You’ve asserted this before. So far no one here including myself has seen any reason from what you’ve said to think that. LScD has some interesting points but is overall wrong. I fail to see why at this point reading later books based on the same notions would be terribly helpful. Given what you’ve said here, my estimate that there’s useful material there has gone downwards.
LScD is Popper’s first major work. It is not representative. It is way more formalistic than Popper’s later work. He changed on purpose and said so.
He changed his mind about some stuff from LScD; he improved on it later. LScD is written before he understood the justificationism issue nearly as well as he did later.
LScD engages with the world views of his opponents a lot. It’s not oriented towards presented Popper’s whole way of thinking (especially his later way of thinking, after he refined it).
The later books are not “based on the same notion”. They often take a different approach: less logic, technical debate, more philosophical argument and explanation.
Since you haven’t read them, you really ought to listen to experts about which Popper books are best instead of just assuming, bizarrely, that the one you read which the Popper experts don’t favor is his best material. We’re telling you it’s not his best material; don’t judge him by it. It’s ridiculous to dismiss our worldview based on the books we’re telling you aren’t representative, while refusing to read the books we say explain what we’re actually about.
It’s ridiculous to dismiss our worldview based on the books we’re telling you aren’t representative, while refusing to read the books we say explain what we’re actually about.
I’m not dismissing your worldview based on books that aren’t representative. Indeed, earlier I told you that what you were saying especially in regards to morality seemed less reasonable than what Popper said in LScD.
The later books are not “based on the same notion”. They often take a different approach: less logic, technical debate, more philosophical argument and explanation.
So you are saying that he does less of a job making his notions precise and using careful logic? Using more words and less formalism is not making more philosophical argument, it is going back to the worst parts of philosophy. I don’t know what you think you think my views are, but whatever your model is of me you might want to update it or replace it if you think the above was something that would make me more inclined to read a text. Popper is clearly quite smart and clever, and there’s no question that there’s a lot of bad or misleading formalism in philosophy, but the general trend is pretty clear that philosophers who are willing to use formalism are more likely to have clear ideas.
in regards to morality seemed less reasonable than what Popper said in LScD.
He changed his mind to the same kind of view I have, FYI.
So you are saying that he does less of a job making his notions precise and using careful logic?
He changed his mind about what types of precision matter (in what fields). He is precise in different ways. Better explanations which get issues more precisely right; less formalness, less attempts to use math to address philosophical issues. It’s not that he pays less attention to what he writes later, it’s just that he uses the attention for somewhat different purposes.
I don’t know what you think you think my views are, but whatever your model is of me you might want to update it or replace it if you think the above was something that would make me more inclined to read a text.
I’m just explaining truths; I’m not designing my statements to have an effect on you.
but the general trend is pretty clear that philosophers who are willing to use formalism are more likely to have clear ideas.
I’m not sure about this trend; no particular opinion either way. Regardless, Popper isn’t a trend, he’s a category of his own.
You’re not giving any reasons here why you think we are “tone-deaf” other than you think we have not explained, for example, why LW people think support is possible. But that’s not tone-deafness. Tone deafness is a complaint not about the substance of ideas but about how well you have expressed those ideas with respect to some norm: it is essentially a complaint about style, and it would seem you want us to pay attention to kharma. We think rational people ought to be able to look beyond those things. Right? With regard to support, we explained and gave examples but, briefly, just to illustrate again, here is a quote from where recursive justification hits bottom
Perhaps it is you that has been deaf?
We know that Popperian philosophy is a hard sell and we know that in order to sell it we have to combat lies and myths that have been spread around. Popper himself spent a lot of time doing that. Some of those myths are right here at LW, in the sequences, and we gave examples. But, again, deafness—has anybody admitted that there are these mistakes? Is that deafness a reaction to our “tone-deafness” and is that rational?
I agree, but rather than just asserting I haven’t been, perhaps you should illustrate with some examples.
You seem to care about kharma. If one thinks that kharma is an authoritarian mistake, as I do, then how much respect to you think I should have?
That you think we are paying lip service is reacting negatively and rather hostile don’t you think? Also I do want to hear some good arguments against Popper. Unfortunately most arguments, including those here, are to do with the myths—such as Popper is falsificationism, and come from people that don’t know Popper well or got their information from second-hand sources.
Why do you think he did that? You’re just making things up here.
Tversky and Kahneman believe in such ideas as “evolved mental behaviour” and “bounded rationality”. These beliefs exist right enough. If you read The Beginning of Infinity by David Deutsch you will see arguments against these sort of things. You’re arguing by assertion again and haven’t carefully looked at the substance.
Please give up on us. We’re obviously not as careful and rational thinker as you are. Utterly hopeless. We’re stuck in our realm of imagined cognitive biases. Go find something productive to do. Please go away.
Plus, we’re a cult. and we read Harry Potter fan fiction. And the groupthink is staggering.
First, in response to your first paragraph, my complaint about ‘tone-deafness’ was not intended as a complaint about style. It was a complaint about your failure to do well at the listening half of conversation. A failure to tailor your arguments to the responses you receive. A failure to understand the counterarguments. My complaint may be wrong and unjustified, but it is definitely not a complaint about style.
But, speaking of style, you suggest:
Well, I can see the attractiveness of that slogan, but we tend to think of it a bit differently here. Here, we think that rational people ought to be able to fix any rough edges in their ‘style’ that prevent them from communicating their ideas successfully. We don’t believe that it makes sense to place the entire onus of adjustment on the listener. And we especially don’t believe that only one side has the onus of listening.
Perhaps. But that’s enough about me. Lets talk about you. :) As you may have noticed, responding to an attack with a counterattack usually doesn’t achieve very much here.
I guess that would depend on how interested you are in having me listen to your ideas.
You are probably right. And that presents you with a problem. How do you induce people to come to know Popper well? How do you tempt them to get their information from some non-second-hand source?
Now I’m sure you guys have given long and careful thought to this problem and have developed a plan. But if you should discover that things are not going well, I have some ideas that might help. Which is simply that you might consider producing some discussion postings consisting mostly of long quotes from Popper and his most prominent disciples, with only short glosses from yourselves.
Hmmm. There is something here I just don’t understand. Why all this hostility to what seems to me to be the fairly uncontroversial realization that people are often less good at reasoning than we would like them to be. It is almost as if you had religious or political objections to some evil doctrine. Do you think it would be possible to enlighten me as to why it seems to you that the stakes are so high with this issue?
As for reading Deutsch, I intend to. I don’t think I have ever had a book recommended to me so many times before it is even published in this country.
Somehow I was able to buy it in the Amazon Kindle store for about $18, but the highlight feature is not working properly. My introduction to Deutsch was several years ago with The Fabric of Reality, in which he defends the Everett interpretation, among other things. At that point he became a must-read author (which means I find him worth reading, not that I agree fully with him), one of only a handful. (Daniel Dennett is another). If you want to read Deutsch now, The Fabric of Reality is immediately available. As I recall, it’s a mix of persuasive arguments and dubious arguments.
I’d be very curious to see where anything Tversky wrote contains the phrase “evolved mental behavior”- as I explained to you T&K have classically been pretty agnostic about where these biases and heuristics are coming from. That other people in the field might think that they are evolved is a side issue. I can’t speak as strongly about Kahneman, but I’d be surprised to see any joint paper of the two had where that phrase was used.
But there’s a more serious issue here which I pointed out to you earlier and you are still missing: You cannot let philosophy override evidence. When evidence and your philosophy contradict, philosophy must lose. No matter how good my philosophical arguments are, they cannot withstand empirical data. If my philosophy says the Earth is flat, my philosophy is bad, since the evidence is overwhelming that the Earth is not flat. If my philosophy requires a geocentric universes, then my philosophy is bad. If my philosophy requires irreducible mental entities then my philosophy is bad. And if my philosophy requires humans to be perfect reasoners then my philosophy is bad.
As long as you keep insisting that your philosophical desires about what humans should be override the evidence of what humans are you will not be doing a good job understanding humans or the rest of the universe.
And to be blunt, as long as you keep making this sort of claim, people here are going to not take you seriously. So please go elsewhere. We don’t have much to say to each other.
No, as far as I know, they don’t use the phrase “evolved mental behaviour”, but I didn’t say they did, only that they believe in such things. That they do is evident here:
“From its earliest days, the research that Tversky and I conducted was guided by the idea that intuitive judgments occupy a position – perhaps corresponding to evolutionary history – between the automatic operations of perception and the deliberate operations of reasoning.”
Read the wording closely. To me it indicates they don’t have a good explanation for these heuristics, or, if they do have an explanation, it is vague so that it is consistent with both evolved and not-evolved. But they don’t have a problem with evolved. I also gave you other arguments in my comments to you in our other discussion.
Why are you continuing this when you’ve already sarcastically told me to go away?
Edit: This wikipedia page says “Cognitive biases are instances of evolved mental behavior”: Do you think that is an accurate description of what cognitive biases are supposed to be? Is there any controversy about whether they are evolved or not?
I’m sorry. Could you clarify exactly what it is you think that quote illustrates?
I intend to respond more completely to your posting, but that clarification would be helpful.
He is saying that one always has to make an argument to prove that an idea is true or more likely to be true. Ideas must be supported.
Yes, I understood that, but my question was about why you wrote:
So, apparently, what was illustrated was that Eliezer was not a good and faithful disciple of Popper when he wrote that. I’m a bit surprised you thought that needed illustration.
ETA: Or maybe you meant that your ability to dredge up that quote illustrates that you have been paying attention to whether and why LesWrongers believe support is possible. Yeah, that makes more sense, is more charitable, and is the interpretation I’ll go with.
Ok, with that out of the way, I will respond to your long great-grandfather comment (above) directly.
That sounds pretty awful. Bounded rationality is a standard concept. Surely if you argue against it, you are confused, or don’t understand it properly. I’m not sure what an “evolved mental behaviour” is, but that sounds pretty uncontroversial too. Looking at Deutsch on video about 28:00 in he is using the term “bounded rationality” to refer to something different—so this seems like a simple confusion based on different definitions of terms.
If you are going to assume that people are confused for arguing against “standard concepts” or because you think something is uncontroversial, then that is just argument from authority.
The supposed heuristics which Herbert Simon and others propose which give rise to our alledged cognitive biases are held by them to have evolved via biological evolution, to be based on induction, and to be bounded. Hard-coded processes based on induction that can generate some knowledge but not all knowledge goes against the ideas that Deutsch discusses in The Beginning of Infinity. For one thing, induction is impossible and doesn’t happen anywhere including in human brains. For another, knowledge creation is all or nothing; a machine that can generate some knowledge can generate all knowledge (the jump to universality) - halfway houses like these heuristics would be very difficult to engineer, they would keep jumping. And, for another, human knowledge and reasoning is memetic, not genetic, and there are no hard-coded reasoning rules.
This is just an argument over the definition of the phrase “bounded rationality”. Let’s call these two definitions BR1 and BR2. The definition that timtyler, Kahnemann and Tversky, and I are using is BR1; the definition that you, curi, and David Deutsch use is BR2.
BR1 means “rationality that is performed using a finite amount of resources”. Think of this as bounded-resource rationality. All rationality done in this universe is BR1, by definition, because you only get a limited amount of time and memory to think about things. This definition does not contain any claims about what sort of knowledge BR1 can or can’t generate. A detailed theory of BR1 would say things like “solving this math problem requires at least 10^9 operations”. More commonly, people refer to BR1 to distinguish it from things like AIXI, which is a mathematical construct that can theoretically figure out anything given sufficient data, but which is impossible to construct because it contains several infinities. A mind with universal reasoning is BR1 if it only has a finite amount of time to do it in.
BR2 means “rationality that can generate some types of knowledge, but not others”. Think of this as bounded-domain rationality. Whether this exists at all depends on what you mean by “knowledge”. For example, if you have a computer program that collects seismograph data and predicts earthquakes, you might say it “knows” where earthquakes will occur; this would make it a BR2. If you say that this sort of thing doesn’t count as knowledge until a human reads it from a screen or printout, then no BR2s exist.
BR1 is a standard concept, but as far as I know BR2 is unique to Deutsch’s book Beginning of Infinity. BR1 exists, tautologically from its definition. Whether BR2 exists or not depends on how you define some other things, but personally I don’t find BR2 illuminating so I see no reason to take a stance either way on it.
I’m pretty sure there’s a similar issue with the definition of “induction”. I know of at least two definitions relevant to epistemology, but neither of them seems to make sense in context so I suspect that Deutsch has come up with a third. Could you explain what Deutsch uses the word induction to mean? I think that would clear up a great deal of confusion.
All your points are wrong, though. Induction has been discussed to death already. Computation universality doesn’t mean intelligent systems evolve without cognitive biases, and the fact that human cultural knowledge is memetic doesn’t mean there are not common built-in biases either. The human brain is reprogrammable to some extent, but much of the basic pattern-recognition circuitry has a genetically specified architecture.
Many of the biases in question are in the basic psychology textbooks—this is surely not something that is up for debate.
Looks to me that those biases are very much up for debate and not just by curi and myself:
Why do you argue from authority saying things like something surely cannot be up for debate because it’s in all the textbooks? curi and I are fallibilists: nothing is beyond question.
You say you’re a fallibist, but you’re actually falling into the failure mode described in this article. Suppose you’ve got a question with positions A and B, with a a bunch of supporting arguments for A, and a bunch of supporting arguments for B. Some of those arguments for each side will be wrong, or ambiguous, or inapplicable—that’s what fallibilism predicts and I think we all agree with that.
Suppose there are 3 valid and 3 invalid arguments for A, and 3 valid and 3 invalid arguments for B. Now suppose someone decides to get rid any of the arguments that are invalid, but they happen to think A is better. Most people will end up attacking all the arguments for B, but they won’t look as closely at the arguments for A. After they’re finished, they’ll have 3 valid and 3 invalid arguments for A, and 3 valid arguments for B—which looks like a preponderance of evidence in favor of B, but it isn’t.
Now read the abstract of that paper you linked again. That paper disagrees with where K&T draw the boundary between questions that trigger the conjunction fallacy and questions that don’t, and describe the underlying mechanism that produces it differently. They do not claim that the conjunction fallacy doesn’t exist.
It seems as though they acknowledge the conjunction fallacy and are proposing different underlying mechanisms to explain how it is produced.
If you want to argue with psychology 101, fine, but do it in public, without experimental support, and a dodgy theoretical framework derived from computation universality and things are not going to go well.
If citing textbooks is classed as “arguing from authority”, one should point out that such arguments are usually correct.
They have put fallacious behaviour in quotes to indicate that they don’t agree the fallacy exists. I could be wrong, however, as I am just going from the abstract and maybe the authors do claim it exists. However they seem to be saying it is just an artifact of hints. I’ll need to read the paper to understand better. Maybe I’ll end up disagreeing with the authors.
Textbook arguments are often wrong. Consider quantum physics and the Copenhagen Interpretation for example. And one way of arguing against CI is from a philosophical perspective (it’s instrumentalist and a bad explanation).
I looked through the whole paper and don’t think you’re wrong.
I don’t agree with the hints paper in various respects. But it disagrees with the conjunction fallacy and argues that conjunction isn’t the real issue and the biases explanation isn’t right either. So certainly there is disagreement on these issues.
Do you mean in the context of arguments in textbooks? This seems like a very weak claim, given how frequently some areas change. Indeed, psychology is an area where what an intro level textbook would both claim to be true and would even discuss as relevant topics has changed drastically in the last 60 years. For example, in a modern psychology textbook the primary discussion of Freud will be to note that most of his claims fell into two broad categories:untestable or demonstrably false. Similarly, even experimentally derived claims about some things (such as how children learn) has changed a lot in the last few years as more clever experimental design has done a better job separating issues of planning and physical coordination from babies’ models of reality. Psychology seems to be a bad area to make this sort of argument.
Yes.
It is weak, in that it makes no bold claims, and merely states what most would take for granted—that most of the things in textbooks are essentially correct.
Nice post.
Some did. At the same time that others didn’t.
The ones admitting it said all epistemologies have those flaws, and it’s impossible to do anything about it. When told that one already exists they just dismissed that as impossible instead of being interested in researching whether it succeeds. Or sometimes they took an attitude similar to EY: it’s a flaw and maybe we’ll fix it some day but we don’t know how to yet and the attempts in progress don’t look promising. (Why doesn’t the Popperian attempt in particular look promising? Why hasn’t it already succeeded? No comment given.)
And they dismissed it without even knowing of any scholarly work by anyone on their side which makes their point for them. As far as they know, no one from their side ever refuted Popper in depth, having carefully read his books. And they are OK with that.
@lip service—anyone who cares to can find criticisms of Popper on my blog on a variety of subjects. This is just accusing sources of ideas of bias as a way to dismiss them, without even doing basic research about whether these claims are true (let alone explaining why source should be used to determine quality of substance).
I had in mind myths like these:
Has anybody here said, yes, these are myths and should be retracted?
I think that’s the only one with a serious problem.
I do not trust that they are accurate. Consequently I discount them when I encounter them. I am currently reading The Beginning of Infinity (which is hard to obtain in the US as it is not to be published until summer, though inexplicably I was able to buy it for the Kindle, though inexplicably my extensive highlights from the book are not showing up on my highlights page at Amazon), and trust Deutsch much more on the topic of Popper. I trust Popper still more on the topic of Popper, and I read the essay collection Objective Knowledge a few weeks ago.
I do not trust myself on the topic of Popper, which is why I will not declare these to be myths, as such a statement would presuppose that I am trustworthy.
Occasionally you make valid points and this is one of them. I agree that most of what you’ve quoted above is accurate. In general, Eliezer is somewhat sloppy when it comes to historical issues. Thus, I’ve pointed out here before problems with the use of phlogiston as an example of an unfalsifiable theory, as well as other essentially historical issues.
So we should now ask should Eliezer read any Popper? Well, I’d say he should read LScD and I’ve recommended Popper before to people here before (along with Kuhn and Lakatos). But there’s something to note: I estimate that the chance that any regular LW reader is going to read any of Popper has gone down drastically in the last 1.5 weeks. I will let you figure out why I think that and leave it to you to figure out if that’s a good thing or not.
LScD is not the correct book to read if you want to understand Popper’s philosophy. C&R and OK are better choices.
What do you mean “along with” Kuhn and Lakatos? They are dissimilar to Popper.
Popper’s positions aren’t important as historical issues but because there is an epistemology that matters today which he explained. It’s not historical sloppiness when Eliezer dismisses a rival theory using myths; it’s bad scholarship in the present about the ideas themselves (even if he didn’t know the right ideas, why did he attack a straw man instead of learning better ideas, improving the ideas himself, or refraining from speaking?)
BTW I emailed Eliezer years ago to let him know he had myths about Popper on his website and he chose not to fix it.
As in they are people worth reading.
You’ve asserted this before. So far no one here including myself has seen any reason from what you’ve said to think that. LScD has some interesting points but is overall wrong. I fail to see why at this point reading later books based on the same notions would be terribly helpful. Given what you’ve said here, my estimate that there’s useful material there has gone downwards.
LScD is Popper’s first major work. It is not representative. It is way more formalistic than Popper’s later work. He changed on purpose and said so.
He changed his mind about some stuff from LScD; he improved on it later. LScD is written before he understood the justificationism issue nearly as well as he did later.
LScD engages with the world views of his opponents a lot. It’s not oriented towards presented Popper’s whole way of thinking (especially his later way of thinking, after he refined it).
The later books are not “based on the same notion”. They often take a different approach: less logic, technical debate, more philosophical argument and explanation.
Since you haven’t read them, you really ought to listen to experts about which Popper books are best instead of just assuming, bizarrely, that the one you read which the Popper experts don’t favor is his best material. We’re telling you it’s not his best material; don’t judge him by it. It’s ridiculous to dismiss our worldview based on the books we’re telling you aren’t representative, while refusing to read the books we say explain what we’re actually about.
I’m not dismissing your worldview based on books that aren’t representative. Indeed, earlier I told you that what you were saying especially in regards to morality seemed less reasonable than what Popper said in LScD.
So you are saying that he does less of a job making his notions precise and using careful logic? Using more words and less formalism is not making more philosophical argument, it is going back to the worst parts of philosophy. I don’t know what you think you think my views are, but whatever your model is of me you might want to update it or replace it if you think the above was something that would make me more inclined to read a text. Popper is clearly quite smart and clever, and there’s no question that there’s a lot of bad or misleading formalism in philosophy, but the general trend is pretty clear that philosophers who are willing to use formalism are more likely to have clear ideas.
He changed his mind to the same kind of view I have, FYI.
He changed his mind about what types of precision matter (in what fields). He is precise in different ways. Better explanations which get issues more precisely right; less formalness, less attempts to use math to address philosophical issues. It’s not that he pays less attention to what he writes later, it’s just that he uses the attention for somewhat different purposes.
I’m just explaining truths; I’m not designing my statements to have an effect on you.
I’m not sure about this trend; no particular opinion either way. Regardless, Popper isn’t a trend, he’s a category of his own.