Whether something is useful feedback depends on goals. Feedback is either useful for achieving a given goal or isn’t. You didn’t list any goals and thus it’s meaningless to speak with of those are useful feedback.
We might engage in mind reading and make up plausible goals that the person who’s the target of the accusations might have and discuss whether or not the feedback is useful for the goals that we imagine, but mind reading is generally problematic.
It seemed to me that avoiding fallacies of compression was always a useful thing (independent of your goal, so long as you have the time for computation), even if negligibly. Yet these questions seem to be a bit of a counterexample in mind, namely that I have to be careful when what looks like decoupling might be decontextualizing.
Importantly, I can’t seem to figure out a sharp line between the two. The examples were a useful meditation for me, so I shared them. Maybe I should rename the title to reflect this?
(I’m quite confused by my failure of conveying the point of the meditation, might try redoing the whole post.)
I’m quite confused by my failure of conveying the point of the meditation
I don’t think that you failed to communicate the point. It’s just that the approach of dealing with the issue at hand is seen as bad. And that’s actually useful feedback.
Thinking “they only disagree because they didn’t understand me for some reason that’s confusing to me” is not useful.
Goals are part of the meaning and thus any attempt to analyse the meaning independent of the goals is confused. For epistemic rationality the goal is usually about the ability to make accurate predictions and for instrumental rationality the goals are about achieving certain outcomes.
In Where to Draw the Boundaries, Zack points out (emphasis mine):
The one replies:
But reality doesn’t come with its joints pre-labeled. Questions about how to draw category boundaries are best understood as questions about values or priorities rather than about the actual content of the actual world. I can call dolphins “fish” and go on to make just as accurate predictions about dolphins as you can. Everything we identify as a joint is only a joint because we care about it.
No. Everything we identify as a joint is a joint not “because we care about it”, but because it helps us think about the things we care about.
There are more relevant things in there, which I don’t know if you have disagreements with. So maybe it’s more useful to crux with Zack’s main source. In Where to Draw the Boundary, Eliezer gives an example:
And you say to me: “It feels intuitive to me to draw this boundary, but I don’t know why—can you find me an intension that matches this extension? Can you give me a simple description of this boundary?”
I take it this game does not work for you without a goal more explicit than the one I have in the postscript to the question?
(Notice that inferring some aspects of the goal is part of the game; in the specific example Eliezer gave, they’re trying to define Art−which is as nebulous an example as it could be. Self-deception is surely less nebulous than Art.)
I was looking for this kind of engagement, which asserts/challenges either intension or extension:
You come up with a list of things that feel similar, and take a guess at why this is so. But when you finally discover what they really have in common, it may turn out that your guess was wrong. It may even turn out that your list was wrong.
You draw boundaries towards questions. I can ask many questions about wine:
“Do I enjoy drinking wine?”, “Do I get good value for money when I seek enjoyment by paying money for wine?”, “Is the wine inherently enjoyful?” and a bunch of others. Answering those questions is about drawing boundaries the same way as answering “Is a dolphin a fish?” is about drawing boundaries.
Your list doesn’t have any questions like that and thus there aren’t any boundaries to be drawn.
As far as the question of “What is a dolphin?” goes at Wikidata at the moment is our answer “A dolphin organisms known by a particular common name” because the word dolphin does not refer to a single species of animals or a taxon in the taxonomic tree. Speaking of dolphins when you reject categorizations that are not taxonomic accurate makes little sense in the first place.
As the links I’ve posted above indicate, no, lists don’t necessarily require questions to begin noticing joints and carving around them.
Questions are helpful however, to convey the guess I might already have and to point at the intension that others might build on/refute. And so...
Your list doesn’t have any questions like that
...I have had some candidate questions in the post since the beginning, and later even added some indication of the goal at the end.
EDIT: You also haven’t acknowledged/objected to my response to your “any attempt to analyse the meaning independent of the goals is confused”, so I’m not sure if that’s still an undercurrent here.
I have plenty of comments at Zack post you link and I don’t agree with it. As Thomas Khun argued, the fact that chemists and physicists disagree about whether helium is a molecule is no problem. Both communities have reasons to carve out the joints differently. Different paradigms have valid reasons to draw lines differently.
Whether something is useful feedback depends on goals. Feedback is either useful for achieving a given goal or isn’t. You didn’t list any goals and thus it’s meaningless to speak with of those are useful feedback.
We might engage in mind reading and make up plausible goals that the person who’s the target of the accusations might have and discuss whether or not the feedback is useful for the goals that we imagine, but mind reading is generally problematic.
It seemed to me that avoiding fallacies of compression was always a useful thing (independent of your goal, so long as you have the time for computation), even if negligibly. Yet these questions seem to be a bit of a counterexample in mind, namely that I have to be careful when what looks like decoupling might be decontextualizing.
Importantly, I can’t seem to figure out a sharp line between the two. The examples were a useful meditation for me, so I shared them. Maybe I should rename the title to reflect this?
(I’m quite confused by my failure of conveying the point of the meditation, might try redoing the whole post.)
I don’t think that you failed to communicate the point. It’s just that the approach of dealing with the issue at hand is seen as bad. And that’s actually useful feedback.
Thinking “they only disagree because they didn’t understand me for some reason that’s confusing to me” is not useful.
Goals are part of the meaning and thus any attempt to analyse the meaning independent of the goals is confused. For epistemic rationality the goal is usually about the ability to make accurate predictions and for instrumental rationality the goals are about achieving certain outcomes.
In Where to Draw the Boundaries, Zack points out (emphasis mine):
There are more relevant things in there, which I don’t know if you have disagreements with. So maybe it’s more useful to crux with Zack’s main source. In Where to Draw the Boundary, Eliezer gives an example:
I take it this game does not work for you without a goal more explicit than the one I have in the postscript to the question?
(Notice that inferring some aspects of the goal is part of the game; in the specific example Eliezer gave, they’re trying to define Art−which is as nebulous an example as it could be. Self-deception is surely less nebulous than Art.)
I was looking for this kind of engagement, which asserts/challenges either intension or extension:
You draw boundaries towards questions. I can ask many questions about wine:
“Do I enjoy drinking wine?”, “Do I get good value for money when I seek enjoyment by paying money for wine?”, “Is the wine inherently enjoyful?” and a bunch of others. Answering those questions is about drawing boundaries the same way as answering “Is a dolphin a fish?” is about drawing boundaries.
Your list doesn’t have any questions like that and thus there aren’t any boundaries to be drawn.
As far as the question of “What is a dolphin?” goes at Wikidata at the moment is our answer “A dolphin organisms known by a particular common name” because the word dolphin does not refer to a single species of animals or a taxon in the taxonomic tree. Speaking of dolphins when you reject categorizations that are not taxonomic accurate makes little sense in the first place.
As the links I’ve posted above indicate, no, lists don’t necessarily require questions to begin noticing joints and carving around them.
Questions are helpful however, to convey the guess I might already have and to point at the intension that others might build on/refute. And so...
...I have had some candidate questions in the post since the beginning, and later even added some indication of the goal at the end.
EDIT: You also haven’t acknowledged/objected to my response to your “any attempt to analyse the meaning independent of the goals is confused”, so I’m not sure if that’s still an undercurrent here.
I have plenty of comments at Zack post you link and I don’t agree with it. As Thomas Khun argued, the fact that chemists and physicists disagree about whether helium is a molecule is no problem. Both communities have reasons to carve out the joints differently. Different paradigms have valid reasons to draw lines differently.