Since Quinean philosophy is just LW rationality but earlier, then that should settle it.
I find it likely that if someone were to trace the origins of LW rationality one would end up with Quine or someone similar.
E.g. perhaps you read an essay by a Quinean philosopher when you were younger.
I doubt it. In fact I’m pretty certain that Quine had nothing to do with ‘the origins of LW rationality’. I came to many (though by no means all) of the same conclusions as Eliezer independently, some of them in primary school, and never heard of Quine until my early 20s. What I had read—and what it’s apparent Eliezer had read—was an enormous pile of hard science fiction, Feynman’s memoirs, every pop-science book and issue of New Scientist I could get my hands on and, later, Feynman’s Lectures In Physics.
If you start out with a logical frame of mind, and fill that mind up with that kind of stuff, then the answers to certain questions come out as just “that’s obvious!” or “that’s a stupid question!”
Enough of them did to me that I’m pretty certain that Eliezer also came to those conclusions (and the others he’s come to and written about) independently.
Timing argues otherwise. We don’t see Quine-style naturalists before Quine; we see plenty after Quine.
Eliezer doesn’t recognize and acknowledge the influence? He probably wouldn’t! People to a very large extent don’t recognize their influences. To give just a trivial example, I have often said something to someone, only to find them weeks later repeating back to me the very same thing, as if they had thought of it. To give another example, pick some random words from your vocabulary—words like “chimpanzee”, “enough”, “unlikely”. Which individual person taught you each of these words (probably by example), or which set of people? Do you remember? I don’t. I really have no idea where I first picked up any bit of my language, with occasional exceptions.
For the most part we don’t remember where exactly it was that we picked up this or that idea.
Of course, if Eliezer says he never read Quine, I don’t doubt that he never read Quine. But that doesn’t mean that he wasn’t influenced by Quine. Quine influenced a lot of people, who influenced a lot of other people, who influenced still more people, some of whom could very easily have influenced Eliezer without Eliezer having the slightest notion that the influence originated with Quine.
It’s hard to trace influence. What’s not so hard is to observe timing. Quine comes first—by decades.
Eliezer knows Bostrom pretty well and Bostrom is influenced by Quine, but I simply doubt the claim about no Quine style naturalists before Quine. Hard to cite non-citations though, so I can go on not believing you, but can’t really say much to support it.
Well, my own knowledge is spotty, and I have found that philosophy changes gradually, so that immediately before Quine I would expect you to find philosophers who in many ways anticipate a significant fraction of what Quine says. That said, I think that Quine genuinely originated much that was important. For example I think that his essay Two Dogmas of Empiricism contained a genuinely novel argument, and wasn’t merely a repeat of something someone had written before.
But let’s suppose, for the sake of argument, that Quine was not original at all, but was a student of Spline, and Spline was the actual originator of everything associated with Quine. I think that the essential point that Eliezer probably is the beneficiary of influence and is standing on the shoulders of giants is preserved, and the surrounding points are also preserved, only they are not attached specifically to Quine. I don’t think Quine specifically is that important to what lukeprog was saying. He was talking about a certain philosophical tradition which does not go back forever.
(EDIT: Quine was not Rapaport’s advisor; Hector-Neri Castaneda was.) William Rapaport, together with Stu Shapiro, applied Quine’s ideas on semantics and logic to knowledge representation and reasoning for artificial intelligence. Stu Shapiro edited the Encyclopedia of Artificial Intelligence, which may be the best survey ever made of symbolic artificial general intelligence. Bill and Stu referenced Quine in many of their papers, which have been widely read in artificial intelligence since the early 1980s.
There are many concepts from Stu and Bill’s representational principles that I find useful for dissolving philosophical problems. These include the concepts of intensional vs. extensional representation, deictic representations, belief spaces, and the unique variable binding rule. But I don’t know if any of these ideas originate with Quine, because I haven’t studied Quine. Bill and Stu also often cited Meinong and Carnap; I think many of Bill’s representational ideas came from Meinong.
A quick google of Quine shows that a paper that I’m currently making revisions on is essentially a disproof of Quine’s “indeterminacy of translation”.
Eliezer doesn’t recognize and acknowledge the influence? He probably wouldn’t! People to a very large extent don’t recognize their influences.
Applying the above to Quine would seem to at least weakly contradict:
Timing argues otherwise. We don’t see Quine-style naturalists before Quine; we see plenty after Quine.
You seem to be singling out Quine as unique rather then just a link in a chain, unlike Eliezer and people who do not recognize their influences. This seems unlikely to me. Is this what you ment to communicate?
I don’t assume Quine to be any different from anyone else in recognizing his influences.
It is because I have no particular confidence in anyone recognizing their own influences that I turn to timing to help me answer the question of independent creation.
1) If a person is the first person to give public expression to an idea, then the chance is relatively high that he is the originator of the idea. It’s not completely certain, but it’s relatively high.
2) In contrast, if a person is not the first person to give public expression to an idea but is, say, the 437th person to do so, the first having done so fifty years before, then chances are relatively high that he picked up the idea from somewhere and didn’t remember picking it up. The fact that nobody expressed the idea before fifty years earlier suggests that the idea is pretty hard to come up with independently, because had it been easy, people would have been coming up with it all through history.
3) Finally, if a person is not the first person to give public expression to an idea but people have been giving public expression to the idea for as long as we have records, then the chance is relatively high once again that he independently rediscovered the idea, since it seems to be the sort of idea that is relatively easy to rediscover independently.
The fact that nobody expressed the idea before fifty years earlier suggests that the idea is pretty hard to come up with independently, because had it been easy, people would have been coming up with it all through history.
This can be true, but it is also possible that an idea may be hard to independently develop because the intellectual foundations have not yet been laid.
Ideas build on existing understandings, and once the groundwork has been done there may be a sudden eruption of independent-but-similar new ideas built on those foundations. They were only hard to come up with until that time.
This can be true, but it is also possible that an idea may be hard to independently develop because the intellectual foundations have not yet been laid.
Well, yes, but that’s essentially my point. What you’ve done is pointed out that the foundation might lie slightly before Quine. Indeed it might. But I don’t think this changes the essential idea. See here for discussion of this point.
1) If a person is the first person to give public expression to an idea, then the chance is relatively high that he is the originator of the idea. It’s not completely certain, but it’s relatively high.
Our view point diverge here. I do not agree the the first person to give public expression and be recorded for history, alone gives a high probability that he/she is the originator of the idea. You also said you factor in the originality of the idea. I only know Quine through what little I have read here and wikipedia and did not judge it original enough to be confident that the ideas he popularized could be thought of as his creation. It seems unlikely, I would however need more data to argue strongly oneway or another.
I do not agree the the first person to give public expression and be recorded for history, alone gives a high probability
I didn’t say “high probability”, I said “relatively high”. By which I mean it is high relative to some baseline in which we don’t know anything, or relative to the second case. In other words, what I am saying is that if a person is the first to give public expression, this is evidence that he originated it.
I only know Quine through what little I have read here and wikipedia and did not judge it original enough
Many others thought it highly original. Also, I’m not confident that you’re in a position to make that judgment. You would need to be pretty familiar with the chronology of ideas to make that call, and if you were, you would probably be familiar with Quine.
Many others thought it highly original. Also, I’m not confident that you’re in a position to make that judgment. You would need to be pretty familiar with the chronology of ideas to make that call, and if you were, you would probably be familiar with Quine.
I do not think asserting this is not helpful to the conversation. I did not clam confidence, I have admitted to wanting more data. This is an opportunity to teach what you know and/or share resources. If you are not interested then I will put it on my list of things to do later.
Well, show me the power of LW then.
Since Quinean philosophy is just LW rationality but earlier, then that should settle it.
I find it likely that if someone were to trace the origins of LW rationality one would end up with Quine or someone similar. E.g. perhaps you read an essay by a Quinean philosopher when you were younger.
I doubt it. In fact I’m pretty certain that Quine had nothing to do with ‘the origins of LW rationality’. I came to many (though by no means all) of the same conclusions as Eliezer independently, some of them in primary school, and never heard of Quine until my early 20s. What I had read—and what it’s apparent Eliezer had read—was an enormous pile of hard science fiction, Feynman’s memoirs, every pop-science book and issue of New Scientist I could get my hands on and, later, Feynman’s Lectures In Physics. If you start out with a logical frame of mind, and fill that mind up with that kind of stuff, then the answers to certain questions come out as just “that’s obvious!” or “that’s a stupid question!” Enough of them did to me that I’m pretty certain that Eliezer also came to those conclusions (and the others he’s come to and written about) independently.
Timing argues otherwise. We don’t see Quine-style naturalists before Quine; we see plenty after Quine.
Eliezer doesn’t recognize and acknowledge the influence? He probably wouldn’t! People to a very large extent don’t recognize their influences. To give just a trivial example, I have often said something to someone, only to find them weeks later repeating back to me the very same thing, as if they had thought of it. To give another example, pick some random words from your vocabulary—words like “chimpanzee”, “enough”, “unlikely”. Which individual person taught you each of these words (probably by example), or which set of people? Do you remember? I don’t. I really have no idea where I first picked up any bit of my language, with occasional exceptions.
For the most part we don’t remember where exactly it was that we picked up this or that idea.
Of course, if Eliezer says he never read Quine, I don’t doubt that he never read Quine. But that doesn’t mean that he wasn’t influenced by Quine. Quine influenced a lot of people, who influenced a lot of other people, who influenced still more people, some of whom could very easily have influenced Eliezer without Eliezer having the slightest notion that the influence originated with Quine.
It’s hard to trace influence. What’s not so hard is to observe timing. Quine comes first—by decades.
Eliezer knows Bostrom pretty well and Bostrom is influenced by Quine, but I simply doubt the claim about no Quine style naturalists before Quine. Hard to cite non-citations though, so I can go on not believing you, but can’t really say much to support it.
Well, my own knowledge is spotty, and I have found that philosophy changes gradually, so that immediately before Quine I would expect you to find philosophers who in many ways anticipate a significant fraction of what Quine says. That said, I think that Quine genuinely originated much that was important. For example I think that his essay Two Dogmas of Empiricism contained a genuinely novel argument, and wasn’t merely a repeat of something someone had written before.
But let’s suppose, for the sake of argument, that Quine was not original at all, but was a student of Spline, and Spline was the actual originator of everything associated with Quine. I think that the essential point that Eliezer probably is the beneficiary of influence and is standing on the shoulders of giants is preserved, and the surrounding points are also preserved, only they are not attached specifically to Quine. I don’t think Quine specifically is that important to what lukeprog was saying. He was talking about a certain philosophical tradition which does not go back forever.
(EDIT: Quine was not Rapaport’s advisor; Hector-Neri Castaneda was.) William Rapaport, together with Stu Shapiro, applied Quine’s ideas on semantics and logic to knowledge representation and reasoning for artificial intelligence. Stu Shapiro edited the Encyclopedia of Artificial Intelligence, which may be the best survey ever made of symbolic artificial general intelligence. Bill and Stu referenced Quine in many of their papers, which have been widely read in artificial intelligence since the early 1980s.
There are many concepts from Stu and Bill’s representational principles that I find useful for dissolving philosophical problems. These include the concepts of intensional vs. extensional representation, deictic representations, belief spaces, and the unique variable binding rule. But I don’t know if any of these ideas originate with Quine, because I haven’t studied Quine. Bill and Stu also often cited Meinong and Carnap; I think many of Bill’s representational ideas came from Meinong.
A quick google of Quine shows that a paper that I’m currently making revisions on is essentially a disproof of Quine’s “indeterminacy of translation”.
Applying the above to Quine would seem to at least weakly contradict:
You seem to be singling out Quine as unique rather then just a link in a chain, unlike Eliezer and people who do not recognize their influences. This seems unlikely to me. Is this what you ment to communicate?
I don’t assume Quine to be any different from anyone else in recognizing his influences.
It is because I have no particular confidence in anyone recognizing their own influences that I turn to timing to help me answer the question of independent creation.
1) If a person is the first person to give public expression to an idea, then the chance is relatively high that he is the originator of the idea. It’s not completely certain, but it’s relatively high.
2) In contrast, if a person is not the first person to give public expression to an idea but is, say, the 437th person to do so, the first having done so fifty years before, then chances are relatively high that he picked up the idea from somewhere and didn’t remember picking it up. The fact that nobody expressed the idea before fifty years earlier suggests that the idea is pretty hard to come up with independently, because had it been easy, people would have been coming up with it all through history.
3) Finally, if a person is not the first person to give public expression to an idea but people have been giving public expression to the idea for as long as we have records, then the chance is relatively high once again that he independently rediscovered the idea, since it seems to be the sort of idea that is relatively easy to rediscover independently.
This can be true, but it is also possible that an idea may be hard to independently develop because the intellectual foundations have not yet been laid.
Ideas build on existing understandings, and once the groundwork has been done there may be a sudden eruption of independent-but-similar new ideas built on those foundations. They were only hard to come up with until that time.
Well, yes, but that’s essentially my point. What you’ve done is pointed out that the foundation might lie slightly before Quine. Indeed it might. But I don’t think this changes the essential idea. See here for discussion of this point.
Our view point diverge here. I do not agree the the first person to give public expression and be recorded for history, alone gives a high probability that he/she is the originator of the idea. You also said you factor in the originality of the idea. I only know Quine through what little I have read here and wikipedia and did not judge it original enough to be confident that the ideas he popularized could be thought of as his creation. It seems unlikely, I would however need more data to argue strongly oneway or another.
I didn’t say “high probability”, I said “relatively high”. By which I mean it is high relative to some baseline in which we don’t know anything, or relative to the second case. In other words, what I am saying is that if a person is the first to give public expression, this is evidence that he originated it.
Many others thought it highly original. Also, I’m not confident that you’re in a position to make that judgment. You would need to be pretty familiar with the chronology of ideas to make that call, and if you were, you would probably be familiar with Quine.
I do not think asserting this is not helpful to the conversation. I did not clam confidence, I have admitted to wanting more data. This is an opportunity to teach what you know and/or share resources. If you are not interested then I will put it on my list of things to do later.