I’m confused. Are you claiming that anything labeled as research is intrinsically useful? I assume you are not but then I would like to know what your actual claim is (or clarify that this is indeed your claim).
It also seems that for your argument to hold you would have to argue further that the variance in utility is small enough that small/moderate variations in interestingness overweigh any possible variation in utility. Or else argue that interestingness varies much more than utility.
As to your first point, my answer is no. What I mean by “good research” is just research that meets general normative scientific criteria for knowledge, I guess we assume that such criteria tends towards truth. I guess in the back of my mind I’m supposing that true statements are more useful than false ones.
As to your second point, I think it is based on the misunderstanding in your first point. Or else, I’ve misunderstood your second point. :) But I think my first proposition needs some work. For instance, you could imagine a continuum between good research and bad research, and a continuum between useful research and non-useful research. In this case, it wasn’t my intent to really specify how much usefulness average quality research has, but only that bad research has very little utility. The difference in utility between good and average research I really don’t know.
Also, this is my second post on the site, so hopefully I’m meeting the standards for posting here. If not, I’ll just lurk more. I also don’t know how much certainty do you guys expect when someone makes a proposition here.
As I also noted below, I think you’re fine in terms of meeting posting standards. And I regularly make propositions while only having e.g. 70-80% certainty, sometimes as low as 40-50%. I find it’s a good way to find possible weak points in my argument.
So just to make sure I understand your argument now, is it essentially this?
“The current standards of the scientific community, while possibly imperfect, are good enough that most things that are accepted as legitimate research will be useful. However, if a researcher is uninterested in a topic, even if the topic is highly legitimate, they are unlikely to do a very good job, the end result being that their output will be mostly useless, no matter how well-conceived the original program was. Therefore, researchers should not force themselves to work on problems that are uninteresting.”
Let me know if the above is an accurate representation of your views. I believe that I myself agree with the above paragraph, but that this argument, while correct, does not alleviate the social responsibility of researchers to try to optimize the usefulness of their research programs (for reasons that I can explain if you do not think this is true).
Also, I just realized that I attributed the conclusion “researchers do not have a social responsibility to optimize the usefulness of their research programs” to your original argument, even though you gave no indication that this was intended. So I should apologize for that.
I think the main disagreement I have with your translation is that I don’t think that “normatively good research” is the same as “research that the scientific community approves of”. I believe that the standards of the scientific community can and should be criticized on rational grounds. I anticipate you might ask, given the above, on what is meant by “normatively good research” then, I guess I just mean that which corresponds with intellectual and epistemic virtue. My use of “normative” isn’t my own innovation though, it is the same sense in which logic is a normative science. Logic doesn’t describe how people actually think, but how people /should/ think; but this normativity shouldn’t be understood exclusively in moral terms. Normativity refers to how well does the subject matter, in this case thinking, relate to it’s end. Normatively good research, then, refers to research that best satisfies the purpose or goal of research.
I guess, to be fully clear, I should clarify on what the purpose or goal of research is. You could say that the goal is usefulness, in which case my proposition would be a tautology (“Research that is good at being useful is useful and research that is bad at being useful is not useful.”), but I don’t think that’s the answer. Maybe I’m being an idealist, but I think the primary purpose of research is to satisfy curiosity, without disregarding any other ulterior aims and purposes that actual researchers might have. I think curiosity is one of the few actual drives that people have that points to truth for it’s own sake, it represents a person’s “will to know”*.
Is what satisfies curiosity also useful? I think if my argument is wrong, this is where it is weak and potentially vulnerable. But I don’t think it is obviously wrong. Your concern seems to be that researchers have a responsibility to prefer research that is useful over research that isn’t useful, even if it doesn’t satisfy the researchers interest as much. But I doubt that it is that easy to determine whether research will be useful /a priori/. C.S. Peirce uses the example of conic sections being useful for Kepler’s astronomy, which in turn was useful for Newtonian physics. We’re talking about research that had been worked on for generations, and its hard to imagine any of these men “optimizing the usefulness of their research programs”. Yet it is hard to imagine work that has had a greater positive affect on our standard of living than these men.
I don’t mean to say that curiosity is the drive to learn about anything, we know that different people are interested in different things. But I think that whatever a person is interested in, curiosity wouldn’t be satisfied at learning false things. I don’t mean to imply that curiosity is satisfied at learning anything if it happens to be true.
So you believe that the pursuit of knowledge is inherently virtuous, and you endorse research on those grounds? I.e. research is good to the extent that it reveals truth, and bad to the extent that it reveals falsehoods?
Can you clarify if you also believe that usefulness should be a non-negligible factor in evaluating the virtuousness of a given piece of research (irrespective of other factors which might make it impossible to care about usefulness directly)?
Well, first, note that there is a difference between intellectual and moral virtue. When you say “inherently virtuous”, I have the awful feeling that you’re talking about “moral virtue”. I would say that “intellectual virtue” and “rationality” are near-synonyms, at least in the way that “rational” is used on this site. They both seem to me to be a sort of meta-cognition, where you are thinking about thinking, and you’re trying to determine what sort of thinking will best take you closer to a given end.
But I don’t think that usefulness is an aspect of the normative end of research. When research is useful, it just happens to be that way; in the same way that conic sections just happens to have ended up being a useful science, but if it was studied or not studied on the basis of expected utility, it probably would have been passed over. Generally, I agree with C.S. Peirce about the need to separate theory and practice. Practice can make use of theory, but trying to engage in both at the same introduces prejudices into the theory, and makes the practice more difficult than necessary.
Is this correct then? You believe that developing theory based on practical considerations will lead to bad theory, which in the long term will be bad even from a practical standpoint (because in 200 years we won’t have developed the theory we would have needed to in order to efficiently tackle the problems we will be facing in 200 years).
I’m still trying understand the standards of this site, while it’s not a bad thing, it will take me some time to get used to. Your question “Is this correct then?” I think is asking me how much certainty does my proposition deserve. While I believe it is true, mainly because I trust C.S. Peirce’s judgment, I think it fails as a proposition. To me, a proposition is a social thing, I’m not just reporting my own belief, but in a proposition I am suggesting that others reading the proposition /should/ also believe it, and that’s why propositions need to be justified. Given that, I should retract my proposition. On other sites the standard was to try out ideas to try to find out which ones are better, so this is different.
Oh I was actually just trying to understand your argument. By “Is this correct” I meant “Do I correctly understand your position”. In general what it means to be justified is fairly unclear, I think you have provided a fair amount of justification for your position, assuming I understand it correctly.
This is probably not typical, but whenever I look at an argument and think “that clearly makes no sense” (which was my reaction to your original post, for reasons already explained), my assumption is that I don’t understand your position correctly, and I then spend as much time as necessary to be certain that I understand your position before continuing the discussion.
Since I am fairly confident from your response that I now understand your position, I will note that I disagree with it. Based on this and other threads, though, your position is shared by plenty of other people on this site. So in the interests of time I’m not going to get into a lengthy discussion of why I disagree right now, instead I’ll write up a short discussion post later that will reach a larger audience. I will note that your assertion is exactly what paulfchristiano is advocating testing: it seems that there is a large divide between people who think theory should be developed with practice in mind, and people who think theory should be developed in the way advocated by C.S. Peirce. Since this is such an important question, we should try to test this proposition; the fact that there has been little effort to test it so far means that (1) we should suspect ourselves of motivated stopping and (2) there is a large marginal benefit to performing the analysis.
Oh :) In that case, I think you’ve summed up my position well. I guess in my mind I have the idea of a researcher trying to “obey two masters rather than one”, that is utility and truth. It seems to me that being weighed down by utility concerns would cause someone to ignore certain perfectly rational possibilities because they aren’t productive.
Testing the proposition, I think, would be through a historical survey, don’t you think? I’ll see about summarizing C.S. Peirce’s thoughts on this matter for the site.
I agree that I was attacking a strawman. That is why I asked you to clarify your argument.
To answer your question about whether you are meeting the posting standards, I believe that the answer is yes; in particular, your arguments are written clearly, so that it is easy to understand what you are saying, even if I think it is wrong. Think of downvotes as a learning opportunity (these other people think I’m clearly wrong, I should try to understand why). I’m not sure if this is a particularly good metric, though, since I have been heavily downvoted in the past on issues where I am still completely convinced that I am correct.
In this instance I will try to explain what SimonF and I found objectionable about your original post. Essentially, you used extremely broad words (“good”, “bad”, “research”) to describe your stance, in such a way that your claim was obviously false without adding additional qualifiers. I believe that you agree with this, since you said that I was attacking a strawman.
The problem is that you did not provide the necessary qualifiers to clarify what you meant. It was probably obvious to you what you meant (you were quick to clarify when asked), but it was not obvious to me. From your perspective it probably feels like I was just trying to be difficult, but I promise, I actually did not know what your intended argument was, and was honestly trying to determine it.
This problem leads to two separate issues—first, it slows down the speed of discourse, and can lead to confusion if instead of asking for clarification people add their own (incorrect) qualifiers to your argument. Second, vague statements tend to convey insufficiently many bits of information to back up most claims, so they are a bad way of trying to support a conclusion.
I apologize if that was long-winded, but hopefully someone will find it helpful.
I appreciate your post, and I think you’ve been very hospitable, and I appreciate that as well. While I do have the habit of writing concisely, and believe in writing that way, I also have to admit that my original post was shorter because I was uncertain on how I would be received. By the way, I didn’t think that in your post you were being dishonest, in fact rather the opposite. You realized that there was probably some miscommunication and wanted to resolve it, and that’s exactly how dialogue should proceed. I felt that my post was interpreted more simply than I had intended because SimonF thought that my argument was obviously wrong. While it may be unsound, I didn’t think it was trivially unsound. I guess “strawman” is often an accusation of dishonesty, I just didn’t know what better term to use for “a more simple version of my argument is being counterargued than the argument I wanted to present”.
But I also want to thank you, again, for being hospitable and welcoming to your community. I’m still uncertain how this will go, I mainly joined because I want to learn more about induction, which is something that I shouldn’t have ignored before. I also read through many of the posts in the sequences, and this site comes closest to the “ideal” I’ve had before about my own life, and what I understand to be intellectual virtue.
I’m confused. Are you claiming that anything labeled as research is intrinsically useful? I assume you are not but then I would like to know what your actual claim is (or clarify that this is indeed your claim).
It also seems that for your argument to hold you would have to argue further that the variance in utility is small enough that small/moderate variations in interestingness overweigh any possible variation in utility. Or else argue that interestingness varies much more than utility.
As to your first point, my answer is no. What I mean by “good research” is just research that meets general normative scientific criteria for knowledge, I guess we assume that such criteria tends towards truth. I guess in the back of my mind I’m supposing that true statements are more useful than false ones.
As to your second point, I think it is based on the misunderstanding in your first point. Or else, I’ve misunderstood your second point. :) But I think my first proposition needs some work. For instance, you could imagine a continuum between good research and bad research, and a continuum between useful research and non-useful research. In this case, it wasn’t my intent to really specify how much usefulness average quality research has, but only that bad research has very little utility. The difference in utility between good and average research I really don’t know.
Also, this is my second post on the site, so hopefully I’m meeting the standards for posting here. If not, I’ll just lurk more. I also don’t know how much certainty do you guys expect when someone makes a proposition here.
As I also noted below, I think you’re fine in terms of meeting posting standards. And I regularly make propositions while only having e.g. 70-80% certainty, sometimes as low as 40-50%. I find it’s a good way to find possible weak points in my argument.
So just to make sure I understand your argument now, is it essentially this?
“The current standards of the scientific community, while possibly imperfect, are good enough that most things that are accepted as legitimate research will be useful. However, if a researcher is uninterested in a topic, even if the topic is highly legitimate, they are unlikely to do a very good job, the end result being that their output will be mostly useless, no matter how well-conceived the original program was. Therefore, researchers should not force themselves to work on problems that are uninteresting.”
Let me know if the above is an accurate representation of your views. I believe that I myself agree with the above paragraph, but that this argument, while correct, does not alleviate the social responsibility of researchers to try to optimize the usefulness of their research programs (for reasons that I can explain if you do not think this is true).
Also, I just realized that I attributed the conclusion “researchers do not have a social responsibility to optimize the usefulness of their research programs” to your original argument, even though you gave no indication that this was intended. So I should apologize for that.
I think the main disagreement I have with your translation is that I don’t think that “normatively good research” is the same as “research that the scientific community approves of”. I believe that the standards of the scientific community can and should be criticized on rational grounds. I anticipate you might ask, given the above, on what is meant by “normatively good research” then, I guess I just mean that which corresponds with intellectual and epistemic virtue. My use of “normative” isn’t my own innovation though, it is the same sense in which logic is a normative science. Logic doesn’t describe how people actually think, but how people /should/ think; but this normativity shouldn’t be understood exclusively in moral terms. Normativity refers to how well does the subject matter, in this case thinking, relate to it’s end. Normatively good research, then, refers to research that best satisfies the purpose or goal of research.
I guess, to be fully clear, I should clarify on what the purpose or goal of research is. You could say that the goal is usefulness, in which case my proposition would be a tautology (“Research that is good at being useful is useful and research that is bad at being useful is not useful.”), but I don’t think that’s the answer. Maybe I’m being an idealist, but I think the primary purpose of research is to satisfy curiosity, without disregarding any other ulterior aims and purposes that actual researchers might have. I think curiosity is one of the few actual drives that people have that points to truth for it’s own sake, it represents a person’s “will to know”*.
Is what satisfies curiosity also useful? I think if my argument is wrong, this is where it is weak and potentially vulnerable. But I don’t think it is obviously wrong. Your concern seems to be that researchers have a responsibility to prefer research that is useful over research that isn’t useful, even if it doesn’t satisfy the researchers interest as much. But I doubt that it is that easy to determine whether research will be useful /a priori/. C.S. Peirce uses the example of conic sections being useful for Kepler’s astronomy, which in turn was useful for Newtonian physics. We’re talking about research that had been worked on for generations, and its hard to imagine any of these men “optimizing the usefulness of their research programs”. Yet it is hard to imagine work that has had a greater positive affect on our standard of living than these men.
I don’t mean to say that curiosity is the drive to learn about anything, we know that different people are interested in different things. But I think that whatever a person is interested in, curiosity wouldn’t be satisfied at learning false things. I don’t mean to imply that curiosity is satisfied at learning anything if it happens to be true.
So you believe that the pursuit of knowledge is inherently virtuous, and you endorse research on those grounds? I.e. research is good to the extent that it reveals truth, and bad to the extent that it reveals falsehoods?
Can you clarify if you also believe that usefulness should be a non-negligible factor in evaluating the virtuousness of a given piece of research (irrespective of other factors which might make it impossible to care about usefulness directly)?
Well, first, note that there is a difference between intellectual and moral virtue. When you say “inherently virtuous”, I have the awful feeling that you’re talking about “moral virtue”. I would say that “intellectual virtue” and “rationality” are near-synonyms, at least in the way that “rational” is used on this site. They both seem to me to be a sort of meta-cognition, where you are thinking about thinking, and you’re trying to determine what sort of thinking will best take you closer to a given end.
But I don’t think that usefulness is an aspect of the normative end of research. When research is useful, it just happens to be that way; in the same way that conic sections just happens to have ended up being a useful science, but if it was studied or not studied on the basis of expected utility, it probably would have been passed over. Generally, I agree with C.S. Peirce about the need to separate theory and practice. Practice can make use of theory, but trying to engage in both at the same introduces prejudices into the theory, and makes the practice more difficult than necessary.
Is this correct then? You believe that developing theory based on practical considerations will lead to bad theory, which in the long term will be bad even from a practical standpoint (because in 200 years we won’t have developed the theory we would have needed to in order to efficiently tackle the problems we will be facing in 200 years).
I’m still trying understand the standards of this site, while it’s not a bad thing, it will take me some time to get used to. Your question “Is this correct then?” I think is asking me how much certainty does my proposition deserve. While I believe it is true, mainly because I trust C.S. Peirce’s judgment, I think it fails as a proposition. To me, a proposition is a social thing, I’m not just reporting my own belief, but in a proposition I am suggesting that others reading the proposition /should/ also believe it, and that’s why propositions need to be justified. Given that, I should retract my proposition. On other sites the standard was to try out ideas to try to find out which ones are better, so this is different.
Oh I was actually just trying to understand your argument. By “Is this correct” I meant “Do I correctly understand your position”. In general what it means to be justified is fairly unclear, I think you have provided a fair amount of justification for your position, assuming I understand it correctly.
This is probably not typical, but whenever I look at an argument and think “that clearly makes no sense” (which was my reaction to your original post, for reasons already explained), my assumption is that I don’t understand your position correctly, and I then spend as much time as necessary to be certain that I understand your position before continuing the discussion.
Since I am fairly confident from your response that I now understand your position, I will note that I disagree with it. Based on this and other threads, though, your position is shared by plenty of other people on this site. So in the interests of time I’m not going to get into a lengthy discussion of why I disagree right now, instead I’ll write up a short discussion post later that will reach a larger audience. I will note that your assertion is exactly what paulfchristiano is advocating testing: it seems that there is a large divide between people who think theory should be developed with practice in mind, and people who think theory should be developed in the way advocated by C.S. Peirce. Since this is such an important question, we should try to test this proposition; the fact that there has been little effort to test it so far means that (1) we should suspect ourselves of motivated stopping and (2) there is a large marginal benefit to performing the analysis.
Oh :) In that case, I think you’ve summed up my position well. I guess in my mind I have the idea of a researcher trying to “obey two masters rather than one”, that is utility and truth. It seems to me that being weighed down by utility concerns would cause someone to ignore certain perfectly rational possibilities because they aren’t productive.
Testing the proposition, I think, would be through a historical survey, don’t you think? I’ll see about summarizing C.S. Peirce’s thoughts on this matter for the site.
I think that would be really interesting!
I downvoted your post because I believe the flaw in your argument, as pointed out by jsteinhardt, is pretty obvious.
I think you guys are attacking a strawman. I said “good research” and somehow jsteinhardt translated that as “anything labeled as research”.
I agree that I was attacking a strawman. That is why I asked you to clarify your argument.
To answer your question about whether you are meeting the posting standards, I believe that the answer is yes; in particular, your arguments are written clearly, so that it is easy to understand what you are saying, even if I think it is wrong. Think of downvotes as a learning opportunity (these other people think I’m clearly wrong, I should try to understand why). I’m not sure if this is a particularly good metric, though, since I have been heavily downvoted in the past on issues where I am still completely convinced that I am correct.
In this instance I will try to explain what SimonF and I found objectionable about your original post. Essentially, you used extremely broad words (“good”, “bad”, “research”) to describe your stance, in such a way that your claim was obviously false without adding additional qualifiers. I believe that you agree with this, since you said that I was attacking a strawman.
The problem is that you did not provide the necessary qualifiers to clarify what you meant. It was probably obvious to you what you meant (you were quick to clarify when asked), but it was not obvious to me. From your perspective it probably feels like I was just trying to be difficult, but I promise, I actually did not know what your intended argument was, and was honestly trying to determine it.
This problem leads to two separate issues—first, it slows down the speed of discourse, and can lead to confusion if instead of asking for clarification people add their own (incorrect) qualifiers to your argument. Second, vague statements tend to convey insufficiently many bits of information to back up most claims, so they are a bad way of trying to support a conclusion.
I apologize if that was long-winded, but hopefully someone will find it helpful.
I appreciate your post, and I think you’ve been very hospitable, and I appreciate that as well. While I do have the habit of writing concisely, and believe in writing that way, I also have to admit that my original post was shorter because I was uncertain on how I would be received. By the way, I didn’t think that in your post you were being dishonest, in fact rather the opposite. You realized that there was probably some miscommunication and wanted to resolve it, and that’s exactly how dialogue should proceed. I felt that my post was interpreted more simply than I had intended because SimonF thought that my argument was obviously wrong. While it may be unsound, I didn’t think it was trivially unsound. I guess “strawman” is often an accusation of dishonesty, I just didn’t know what better term to use for “a more simple version of my argument is being counterargued than the argument I wanted to present”.
But I also want to thank you, again, for being hospitable and welcoming to your community. I’m still uncertain how this will go, I mainly joined because I want to learn more about induction, which is something that I shouldn’t have ignored before. I also read through many of the posts in the sequences, and this site comes closest to the “ideal” I’ve had before about my own life, and what I understand to be intellectual virtue.