I wonder whether claims about the inviolability of physical laws (in general, rather than any specific law) actually mean anything… at a fundamental level the distinction between a law with an exception and just having a different law is pretty difficult to pin down. Either the “exception” is due to differences in circumstances that were previously ignored, or it’s just random. In either case, you can probably always make a new “law” that accommodates the difference.
conchis
I have a suspicion, based on a limited degree of personal experience, that the common philosophical practice of coming up with thought experiments, may tend to promote this sort of fallacious reasoning. Such “experiments” often artificially force people into exclusive “would you do X or Y?” dilemmas, and anyone who says “well, actually… why wouldn’t you do Z?” is promptly told that they’re missing the point. All of this is fair enough within the bounds of the thought experiment, but if people start seeing real life in the same simplified terms, then that’s something of a problem.
- 24 Oct 2010 3:59 UTC; 8 points) 's comment on The Problem With Trolley Problems by (
P.S. Jeremy: “atheistic children with an internalized sense of morality, an obvious contradiction”? Spare us, please. Why ruin an otherwise perfectly reasonable comment with such a patently ridiculous cheap shot?
Jeremy: I clearly misunderstood what you meant by “an internalised sense of morality”. Though I still suspect you’re wrong about the contradiction, that could be because I still don’t really understand the way in which you’re using the phrase. In any event, it’s clear that my “cheap shot” call was way off, and I apologise.
Michael V: Depends whether TGGP is making an epistemic claim about his/her personal knowledge of morality, or whether he/she is claiming that that moral statements are not true in general. In the latter case, I think it would be standard to say he/she doesn’t believe in morality.
Anyone else want to spearhead a movement to come up with a gender neutral pronoun?
If we didn’t have silly hopes of an eternal life built up from a young age I doubt this would even be an issue. The “crushing certainty” wouldn’t be crushing unless we’d been deluded into thinking we could avoid it to begin with. Certainly for me, “death is part of life; accept it and get on with living” has never seemed particularly problematic.
“—An unresolved doubt is a null-op.
An uninvestigated doubt might as well not exist.”
Perhaps we’re just using words differently, but I’m not sure I agree with either of these. I would have thought that recognising valid doubts would be useful in making decisions, even when the information necessary to resolve such doubts with certainty may not be available; and in some cases, the gains in terms of improved decision-making may not be worth the cost of investigating and resolving the doubt.
I think I’m using “doubt” as almost coextensive with “uncertainty”, and I’m not entirely sure what else it would mean, but do you mean something else?
Eliezer, I think I’m starting to see what you’re getting at a little more with your second definition (“an ideal Bayesian seeing a probabilistic opportunity to destroy a belief (downgrade its probability) by following a path of investigation”). But I’m still not entirely sure whether I would agree with the two points in your post that I originally took issue with.
If I come up with a reason to doubt the probability I previously assigned to some outcome, then, because (as an ideal Bayesian) I shouldn’t expect to change the probability assigned to something as a result of new evidence, I should presumably revise my probability estimate down immediately—before seeing any evidence at all. But once that’s done, whether or not the doubt warrants further investigation, or still needs in some sense to be resolved still seems an open issue. To be honest, I’m not even entirely sure what “resolution” would mean in this context any more. (Unless, perhaps, you simply mean the initial downgrading of probability?)
pdf23ds: Of course, but I interpreted Eliezer as having in mind an asymmetrical (and, I might add, intuitive) definition of doubt, that placed a higher probability on downgrading. I might have misunderstood him though.
pdf23ds, I’m not sure we’re really disagreeing about anything here. I would naturally define a doubt in exactly the way you seem to suggest. But if you use it that way, then the two points of Eliezer’s I took issue with in my first comment don’t seem to follow. I took Eliezer’s response as attempting to find an alternative definition on which they did follow, and then pointed out that the alternative definition he seemed to be offering didn’t make sense. Maybe I misunderstood something along the way here, but I’m certainly not arguing for that definition myself.
“They wanted to maximise their chances of pleasing the prof., not maximise their chances of understanding the world.”
I don’t know that I buy this. If the students make a guess that’s wrong, one would expect that to kickstart a process of the professor helping them to understand why it’s wrong. (Student: “Um… because of heat conduction?” Teacher: “OK, what does heat conduction suggest should happen in this situation?”...) This seems more likely to result in learning than just sitting there and saying “I don’t know”. If anything, I think it’s often a bigger problem from a learning perspective, when people are too afraid of being wrong to put out tentative ideas.
“I don’t know” is a rational response to this situation if you are sure enough of your understanding of all the potential principles involved that you know they can’t explain the phenomenon (and you don’t happen to guess that the professor is messing with you). But it’s fairly clear the students aren’t in that situation, so starting to generate hypotheses about what’s going on seems perfectly sensible. Of course, they should be actual hypotheses, and Eliezer’s perfectly right that “because of heat conduction”, if offered as an actual explanation, isn’t an hypothesis as much as a cop out. But if it’s a starting point, rather than an endpoint, then that seems perfectly reasonable.
In short, the problem isn’t that they’re guessing. It’s if their guesses aren’t actually saying anything, but they think that they are. (And I think Eliezer’s admonition to just say “I don’t know” conflates these two problems.)
Bob, Unless guessing is part of finding out. (This clearly isn’t the case in an exam, but often is in a classroom situation.)
Eliezer, Agreed. (That was my original point.)
Excellent post Eliezer.
In line with previous comments, I’d always understood the idea of emergence to have real content: “systems whose high-level behaviors arise or ‘emerge’ from the interaction of many low-level elements” as opposed to being centrally determined or consciously designed (basically “bottom-up” rather than “top-down”). It’s not a specific explanation in and of itself, but it does characterise a class of explanations, and, more importantly, excludes certain other types of explanation.
I would think that something like “life/intelligence is an emergent phenomenon” means “you don’t need intelligent design to explain life/intelligence”.
“After all these posts on how the strength of an idea is what it excludes, forbids, prohibits, people are still citing positive examples as proof of the power of emergence? Tell me what it isn’t!”
I thought I did. (Even if Jadagul expressed what I was grasping towards much better than I did.)
Eliezer, I wonder whether the reason you think “emergence” isn’t a useful concept is just that it seems so obvious to you that every phenomenon must fit the proposed definition that it doesn’t exclude anything that’s meaningful for you. (This seemed to be implied in your original post.) Even so, it can still be a useful concept as long as some people think that there could be non-emergent phenomena.
And yes, the proposed definitions of emergence are vague, but, as has already been pointed out, that doesn’t imply the concept is worthless.
“But Gandhi was a celebrity, and he was protected by his celebrity.”
Yeah, I’m particularly impressed at how celebrity protected Gandhi from assassination. Oh, wait...
Eliezer,
I’m afraid that I too was seduced by Doug’s analogy, and for some reason am a little too slow to follow your response. Any chance you could try again to explain why the analogy doesn’t work?
Alternatively, if you want something super scary, try 1), 2), and 3) without 4).
How can we debias our assessments of others’ biases. Or get others to debias their assessments of other others’ biases?