I’m really interested in figuring out your objections to the post, but for now they seem quite incoherent to me. As if some words were wrongly changed by autocomplete, and, in case with this reply, as if your message was sent before you finished writing it.
Could you try once again and present me a simple and and explicit real world example where my math fails, writing your post not from a phone?
That was really not what I’ve been trying to communicate here.
My point was that people can have some notion of “obscene wealth” and you would not even know about it before this mark is reached. Therefore saying that we definetely have a social contract 1. is unjustified.
I’d also like to know what do you consider weak or poorly reasoned in my point about counterfactual mobbing and French revolution. Or at the least what you disagree with.
pretty often a naive compute limited estimate of P(G & E) will be zero with high probability unless you importance sample using T
I’m having troubles parsing what you said here.
The classic case is trying to work out the probability that a photon will hit a speck of dust in a raytraced scene, where introducing the theodicy that a photon will zing straight from the lightbulb filament to your speck produces the correct probability through an expression just like P(G&E) = P(G&E|T)P(T) + P(G&E| ¬T)P(¬T)
Of course it produces the correct probability. Why would anything I said imply that it doesn’t? I’m explicitly appealing to Law of Total Probability, after all.
But this is the entire crux of the debate! The whole question is whether reality (i.e. a reality that appears to contain evil) looks like what the theory (i.e. the world is created by an omnipotent and omnibenevolent God) would predict.
When the theory really predicts the outcome it’s pretty clear, no one needs to write bazillion papers to persuade anyone that it’s indeed the case.
On the other hand, such behavior happens, when you try to argue that your theory “totally has predicted the evidence” but only after the evidence was already revealed can you say what exactly it “had predicted”.
I grant that some people may be confused about these two cases and maybe I’ll even have to dedicate a separate post to it in the future, but at least to Mathew’s credit, he has publicly acknowledged that he would expect a world created by omnipotent and omnibenevolent God to be a paradise which our world is not. So whether unconditional P(G&E) ~ 0 is not, in fact, a crux of disagreement.
Downvoted for obviously begging the question about what the standard here is.
I don’t think this is a fair description of what I’m doing. Which of my conclusions am I assuming?
I’m not rigorously specifying what exactly is meant by “obsenely rich” and “poverty” here, because the whole point is that people can have different generalizations of the principle and different definitions. It’s indeed the case that same of these definitions will lead to civilizational collapse. However some will not. Can we agree this much?
I’d also like to mention that while actual mob justice is bad and anti-civilization, counterfactual mob justice has a lot of civilization-building advantages. And then there are instances of what can be described as mob justice which establishes the civilization in the first place, i.e. French Revolution.
This is how people in poor countries view people in rich countries as well. And how people in grievance cultures view the outgroup they hold a grudge against when that outgroup is doing better than them.
No disagreement here. But this doesn’t make the object level claims I’m making less true. Grievances can be justified.
No, that misses the core argument. “Letting people keep their stuff if it was earned honorably” is a vital component of the engine. You can’t remove it and keep the engine working.
Consider two codes:
“Letting people keep their stuff if it was earned honorably”
“Letting people keep their stuff if it was earned honorably, unless they are obsenely rich while a lot of people are still in poverty”
Whether it’s possible to remodel the code from 1. to 2. without “engine stopping running” is an empirical question about the slipperiness of this particular slope works. Your proclamation that it can’t be done isn’t actually an argument.
In fact, maybe even this framing is already giving too much ground. Are we even sure that the the initial code was closer to 1 than 2 in the first place? You never know for sure with such implicit societal contracts. It seems that at least a sizeble portion of people generalized it the second way. I don’t think we should be this quick to proclaim their perspective invalid.
You hit actual counter argument here
The term “honorably” is really vague and up to interpretation even more so than whether we have codes 1. or 2.. There is a plausible interpretation of it where UHC CEO did not earn his wealth honorably and so his assassination was not against the code 1. In fact, it may have even improved the insentives for billionaires to be more honarable so the assassin should be celebrated for their public service.
Likewise there is not an entierly outlandish interpretation where absolute majority or maybe even all of billionaires did not earn their wealth honorably.
I agree that is the case for some billionaires, and where that is the case they should be punished and their wealth confiscated. But that must be demonstrated, it cannot simply be assumed to be true because they are billionaires.
I agree that that would be the best course of action.
But good luck doing that in a world where a minority of people have spare billions of dollars to steer the world to their end. In practice decisions of CEOs of large corporations routinely lead to harming a great lot of people and they get very minor reprecussions for it if any.
I agree that just assuming that because someone is a billionare it means that they haven’t earned their money honorably isn’t right in principle. I don’t exactly endorse it. But I’m very understanding why people may think that in our world and I suspect that predictive power of this heuristic is impressive.
Coming after those billionaires isn’t just bad for those billionaires. It is revoking the Code of Honorable Wealth. It is returning to Rule of the Violent, and slave economies, and grinding global poverty. Protecting the Code is incredibly important NOT because it serves some billionaires, but because it serves every single person in our society that lives above the level of a 16th century peasant.
In a nutshell, this is slippery slope argument. “First they came for the billionaires...” And I don’t think this argument works in this case.
Slopes are slippery only when people have trouble arriving to a stable coordination equilibrium without the general restriction, for instance:
Murder is illegal. Legalization of murder of people with a particular name is a horrible idea. What would prevent us from legalizing murder of people with any other name?
On the other hand, capital punishment—government sanctioned murder of some criminals—is legal in some places. Even though, it’s not a particularly good idea in its own right, it doesn’t lead to the legalization of other kinds of murder. How comes? Because we have a coordination equilibrium around the notion that only worst criminals deserve this kind of thing and only after due process.
Likewise with “taking billioneres stuff”. People who propose it—usually in terms of rasing taxes on ultra wealthy in particular—have a pretty clear cut line. People are already coordinated around the notion that billionares are not “honorably wealth” and are net negative for society. The risk that it will somehow lead to everyone ending up below the level of 16th century peasant is miniscule.
Yes, but important caveats are in order:
Individual people having billions of dollars for steering the world, while others struggling with basic needs is inherently undemocratic situation.
If you actually manage to get to a position where you have billions of dollars to spare, most of your networth would be going into optimizing Moloch’s values and not your own.
Person #2 effectively doesn’t exist. That’s what it feels like to be person #3;
That’s a non sequitur. The fact that many #3 feel like #2 doesn’t imply that #2 effectively do not exist.
for 95% of people, you’re wrong.
I don’t think this is true and you didn’t provide any evidence in favor of this statement. But lets for the sake of the argument assume that it’s true. So what? How does it changes anything? Even if #2 is extremely rare it’s still the best of both worlds and something that we all should aspire too, isn’t it?
I’m skeptical of #4, too
If you apply your cynicism in a less motivated manner, the same reasoning that makes you think that absolute majority of people who think they are #2 are in fact #3, would make you think the same for #1 and #4. Being an actual truthseeker is hard, it requires constant vigilance, constant fight against enthropy. Naturally most people who think themselves to be truthseekers are not them, regardless how nice they are.
that’s not what that kind of social-move-maker typically feels like internally either.
The fact that there are a lot of not nice people who are not event trying to be truth-seekers doesn’t really matter to the point I’m making here. Or are you talking about something else?
I don’t think question of identity is relevant to physicalism at all.
Suppose it’s impossible to invert qualia without changing something physical in the brain. It’s still currious which one of two people I’d be in “creating a perfect copy” experiment.
This is fine. We just need to see how well the encodings which treat AB as a one symbol and as two symbols tend to systematically work in figuring out which things are likely to be true and compare the results. This is what I’m talking about here:
Consider how we came to the modern notion of computational complexity in the first place. Occam’s Razor used to be a theistic argument. There were times when saying “God did it!” was universally considered extremely simple. And while nowadays there are still some people confused by it, the sanity waterline has risen tremendously. How did that happen, I wonder?
Providing a link to Doomsday Argument and the False Dilemma of Anthropic Reasoning where I solve this anthropic issue. We can collapse all the meta-levels of anthropic reasoning into a simple principle: make sure that the map that you use actually corresponds to the territory.
My actual point (for anyone still wondering whether I have one) is that the correct way for a Bayesian to look at a counterfactual is , which is generally very near 1 — certainly it is for the Hoyle resonance.
You should be careful here as it’s very easy to overestimate how much you actually know. Anthropic problems like Sleeping Beauty and Abscent Minded Driver are confusing specifically because of that.
There is also nothing illegal about noticing that P(X) is very low even though you already know that X is realized. If your model claims that some event X is low probable, but you’ve just observed it being realized, it’s very probable that your model is wrong.
Do you know like the streets you see tend to be more crowded, airplanes have more seats taken, more people in restaurants on average from your observations, compared with how they actually are on average?
You are mixing together situations where a person can be correctly approximated as a random sample from some population with situation where it’s not the case.
What we need to do is look at every situation trying to come up with an appropriate probabilistic model that describes it to the best of our knowledge. A map that fits the territory.
What mainstream anthropic reasoning is doing is assuming that this model has to always be the same in every situation and then trying to bite ridiculous bullets when it predictably leads to bizarre conclusions.
The point of the exercise is to add skepticism to normality. Skepticism is the starting point. Justified uncertainty is the goal. The journey between the two is the exercise.
Personally, I think that pointing out the self defeating nature of skepticism in the way it’s described here is indeed a good argument against it
“This statement is a false”—is a paradox.
“This statement is unprovable”—is not.
We can say that both are self-defeating if we want to, but that doesn’t really change anything.
We can say with confidence that they are curved and that our experience of them depends on our velocity and position.
Let’s just say that Kant didn’t see that coming. He essentially made a very confident prediction about the nature of space an time that was later shown wrong.
This seems unfair to philosophers because the very nature of their subject matter precludes, or at least makes far more difficult, the precise articulation of what they’re talking about in a way which might allow for mathematical levels of rigour.
I think this is exactly fair. It’s true that philosophy has some excusable complications preventing it from achieving the same rigor as math. But then one shouldn’t claim this rigor for philosophy and be very careful when comparing philosophy to math.
This presupposes that mathematics is not the real world. If we lived in a Tegmark-like platonic mathematical universe, and knew this for certain, then mathematics could indeed prove things about the real, physical world.
I don’t need to presuppose that some elaborate theory like platonic mathematical universe is wrong, when I have a simpler account for it’s evidence.
Even if we don’t, I would still consider mathematics to be real, just not physical, and therefore to be possible to use to prove things about the real world. I object to the use of the word ‘merely’ here, even if it wouldn’t be possible to prove we lived in a mathematical universe if we did.
And what exactly do you mean by real here?
I think it’s fair for me to point out that the fact that mathematics requires the assumption of axioms does not show that it can’t provide justification for knowledge, because the axioms themselves can be included in statements about what follows from the axioms.
It means that it’s conditional knowledge, exactly what I’m talking about.
Invoking the anthropic principle makes me uncomfortable.
I commend you for feeling uncomfortable about it.
if everything I observe is a demonic illusion, I admit defeat, and so I gain more utility by focusing on the worlds where I expect my actions can, in principle, lead to more utility.
Kind of, but consider how much defeat do you actually need to admit?
https://substack.com/@apeinthecoat102771/note/c-117316511
A similar principle applies to trusting my tools of logical analysis.
I’ll be talking more about Münchhausen trilemma in future posts.
I’m pretty well aware that I don’t actually know anything for certain, and Bayes proponents are always saying there is no 0 or 1.
This is the normality that skepticism is adding up to. Probabilities, not certain knowledge.
At the same time, for most things, my best decision-making seems to have come from taking my perceptions at face value.
You can be somewhat critical about your perceptions and even hold in your mind the possibility of evil demon.
Which version of scepticism? Even the article you link to concedes there is,at least one form of scepticism that’s refutable through self defeat.
If extreme scepticism is self defeating, and certainty is unobtainable, then what you are left with is moderate scepticism—AKA fallibilism. What you need to try is the right an by if the right kind of scepticism.
I think you’ve just answered your own question more or less.
If the world is weird, I wish to believe that the world is weird.
The goal is to add up to truth.
If normality means supporting all your intuitions, then you are going to have to disbelieve much science and maths.
If it means something else …what?
We are in agreement here. And if you read to the end of the post you’ll see the answer to your question:
After all, science is the normality to which we would like philosophy to be adding to
Something can work in some contexts, but not in in others.
Empiricism doesn’t work for things you can’t see, eg:-
Modality, Counterfactuals, Possible versus Actual.
Normativity, Ought versus is.
Essence versus Existence, hidden explanatory mechanisms.
A priori truth could have a naturalistic basis. Many organisms can instinctively recognise food, predators, rivals and mates. But even the broadest evolutionary knowledge must that operate within the limits of empiricism .. not the “invisibles” I mentioned. And of course it is a rather different kind of apriori knowledge than analytical kind, based on language and tautologies.
I’m sorry I’m not going to spend time untangling this confusion in the comments. I hope that if you keep reading my posts you’ll eventually have enough insights to figure this out for yourself.
Space and time don’t need to be justifiable, because they are not propositions.
Their existence and properties are proposition.
I think you meant Euclidean.
That’s too, though I was mostly hinting to relativity.
Curious how our understanding of things that some people may assume are beyond observations are then happen to be changed by scientific discovery, isn’t it?
Almost all contemporary epistemologists will say that they are fallibilists
That’s nice. Though the key words here are “contemporary” and “epistemologists”.
There are still minor nuances with fallibilism like the fact that people still manage to be confused by the possibility of Cartesian Demon, but I’ll get to them in time.
I really don’t know why you keep coming up with these alternative formulations of the same problem, an answer to which I’ve already given. Can’t you just apply the logic I’ve very explicitly described in the posts and derive the answer for your modified problem yourself? But surething, here is how one supposed to reason:
There are 4 equiprobable outcomes of the experiment for the Sleeping Beauty:
HH_HT; HT_HH; TH_TT; TT_TH
Meanwhile for the person who randomly observes one of the days of the experiment there are these 4 equiprobable outcomes:
HH; HT; TH; TT
When the person learns that the Beauty is awaken, outcome HH is eliminated and now they are 1⁄3 confident that the first coin is Heads.
See the Observer Problem.
For this problem the conditional probability of HT is indeed 1⁄3
This, however, gives no new information to the Sleeping Beauty herself as she is participating in a different probability experiment—the one with either one or two awakenings, where she observes them in order. She has different sample space and no outcome is eliminated by her awakening.
For this problem HT isn’t an event and, therefore, doesn’t have any probability and the answers to Q3C and Q3D are “No”.