If you want to discuss or debate an issue to resolution/conclusion with me, explicitly ask for that. I’m open, by request, to putting major effort into resolving disagreements.
curi
Hi, Deutsch was my mentor. I run the discussion forums where we’ve been continuously open to debate and questions since before LW existed. I’m also familiar with Solomonoff induction, Bayes, RAZ and HPMOR. Despite several attempts, I’ve been broadly unable to get (useful, clear) answers from the LW crowd about our questions and criticisms related to induction. But I remain interested in trying to resolve these disagreements and to sort out epistemological issues.
Are you interested in extended discussion about this, with a goal of reaching some conclusions about CR/LW differences, or do you know anyone who is? And if you’re interested, have you read FoR and BoI?
I’ll begin with one comment now:
I am getting the sense that critrats frequently engage in a terrible Strong Opinionatedness where they let themselves wholely believe probably wrong theories
~All open, public groups have lots of low quality self-proclaimed members. You may be right about some critrats you’ve talked with or read.
But that is not a CR position. CR says we only ever believe theories tentatively. We always know they may be wrong and that we may need to reconsider. We can’t 100% count on ideas. Wholely believing things is not a part of CR.
If by “wholely” you mean with a 100% probability, that is also not a CR position, since CR doesn’t assign probabilities of truth to beliefs. If you insist on a probability, a CRist might say “0% or infinitesimal” (Popper made some comments similar to that) for all his beliefs, never 100%, while reiterating that probability applies to physical events so the question is misconceived.
Sometimes we act, judge, decide or (tentatively) conclude. When we do this, we have to choose something and not some other things. E.g. it may have been a close call between getting sushi or pizza, but then I chose only pizza and no sushi, not 51% pizza and 49% sushi. (Sometimes meta/mixed/compromise views are appropriate, which combine elements of rival views. E.g. I could go to a food court and get 2 slices of pizza and 2 maki rolls. But then I’m acting 100% on that plan and not following either original plan. So I’m still picking a single plan to wholely act on.)
I wrote a reply at https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/5ffPhqaLdrSajFe37/analyzing-blackmail-being-illegal-hanson-and-mowshowitz
I read only the initial overview at the top, did my own analysis, then read the rest to see if it’d change my mind.
Here are summaries of IMO the two most notable ideas from my analysis:
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Compare blackmail to this scenario: My neighbor is having a party this weekend. I threaten to play loud music (at whatever the max loudness is that’s normally within my rights) to disrupt it unless he pays me $100. Compare to: I often play loud music and my neighbor comes and offers me $100 to be quiet all weekend. In one, I’m threatening to do something for the express purpose of harming someone, not to pursue my own values. In the other, I just enjoy music as part of my life. I think blackmail compares to the first scenario, but not the second.
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We (should) prohibit initiation of force as a means to an end. The real underlying thing is enabling people to pursue their values in their life and resolve conflicts. If blackmail doesn’t initiate force, that doesn’t automatically make it OK, b/c non-initiation of force isn’t the primary.
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Solomonoff induction is uncomputable? So: use a computable approximation.
What is the argument that the approximation you use is good? What I mean is, when you approximate you are making changes. Some possible changes you could make would create massive errors. Others—the type you are aiming for—only create small errors that don’t spread all over. What is your method of creating an approximation of the second type?
Hi, an old discussion
http://lesswrong.com/lw/56m/the_conjunction_fallacy_does_not_exist/
gives the error, “The page you requested does not exist”
I have the right link. It’s actually still linked from:
http://lesswrong.com/user/curi/submitted/
I wanted to check something from that discussion. As you can see from my submitted page, there were 113 comments. Why doesn’t it exist? What’s going on? Can someone help?
I didn’t find any contact info except a bug tracker that didn’t seem to have much activity since 2012, and my first guess is not a software bug. I may well have missed the right place to be asking about this, tell me if so.
Which?
Popper was content with the fact that experimental evidence can say that something is probably false
That is not Popper’s position. That is not even close. In various passages he explicitly denies it like “not certain or probable”. To Popper, the claims that the evidence tells us something is certainly true, or probably true, are cousins which share an underlying mistake. You’re assuming Popper would agree with you about probability without reading any of his passages on probability in which he, well, doesn’t.
Arguing what books say with people who haven’t read them gets old fast. So how about you just imagine a hypothetical person who had the views I attribute to Popper and discuss that?
Would you mind elaborating on this? What specific problems are you referring to here?
For example, the answers to all questions that have a “why” in them. E.g. why is the Earth roughly spherical? Statements with “because” (sometimes implied) is a pretty accurate way to find explanations, e.g. “because gravity is a symmetrical force in all directions”. Another example is all of moral philosophy. Another example is epistemology itself, which is a philosophy not an empirical field.
Yes, this is the old “underdetermination of theory by data” problem
Yes
Which Solomonoff Induction solves—see the coinflipping example here.
This does not solve the problem to my satisfaction. It orders theories which make identical predictions (about all our data, but not about the unknown) and then lets you differentiate by that order. But isn’t that ordering arbitrary? It’s just not true that short and simple theories are always best; sometimes the truth is complicated.
-7.65% of your income into Social Security good luck getting that back
This is incorrect. The actual sociality security rate is DOUBLE that. Half is paid by the employer & half by employee to make it look smaller. That half you don’t see does count b/c it lowers salaries offered.
Also you included medicare taxes in the figure. social security alone is less.
Also it’s a % of your income up to something like 110k, income above the limit has 0 payroll taxes.
they’re willing to accept ideas even before they’ve been explored in depth
People also reject ideas before they’ve been explored in depth. I’ve tried to discuss similar issues with LW before but the basic response was roughly “we like chaos where no one pays attention to whether an argument has ever been answered by anyone; we all just do our own thing with no attempt at comprehensiveness or organizing who does what; having organized leadership of any sort, or anyone who is responsible for anything, would be irrational” (plus some suggestions that I’m low social status and that therefore I personally deserve to be ignored. there were also suggestions – phrased rather differently but amounting to this – that LW will listen more if published ideas are rewritten, not to improve on any flaws, but so that the new versions can be published at LW before anywhere else, because the LW community’s attention allocation is highly biased towards that).
Li and Vitanyi write:
Can a thing be simple under one definition of simplicity and not simple under another? The contemporary philosopher Karl R. Popper (1902– 1994) has said that Occam’s razor is without sense, since there is no objective criterion for simplicity. Popper states that every such proposed criterion will necessarily be biased and subjective.
There’s no citation. There’s one Popper book in the references section, LScD, but it doesn’t contain the string “occam” (case insensitive search).
I also searched a whole folder of many Popper books and found nothing mentioning Occam (except it’s mentioned by other people, not Popper, in the Schlipp volumes).
If Popper actually said something about Occam’s razor, I’d like to read it. Any idea what’s going on? This seems like a scholarship problem from Li and Vitanyi. They also dismiss Popper’s solution to the problem of induction as unsatisfactory, with no explanation, argument, cite, etc.
Well, no—it’s a set of explanations. A very large set, consisting of every explanation other than ‘the sun is powered by nuclear fusion’, but smaller than T | ~T, and therefore somewhat useful, however slightly.
Infinity minus one isn’t smaller than infinity. That’s not useful in that way.
It may be useful in some way. But just ruling a single thing out, when dealing with infinity, isn’t a road to progress.
indeed idea that quantum theory and relativity are both true is nonsense
He’s saying we use them both, and that has value, even though we know there must be some mistake somewhere. Saying “or” misrepresents the current situation. Both of them seem to be partly right. The situation (our current understanding which has value) looks nothing like we’ll end up keeping one and rejecting the other.
I find philosophy dense and difficult to understand … if you could recommend a book or webpage
In that case I’d suggest starting with:
(try it and see if the style/approach appeals to you, if not no worries) or
http://www.amazon.com/Popper-Modern-masters-Bryan-Magee/dp/0670019674
(This summary book on Popper is only 115 pages. The easiest to read book option.)
Open-mindedness and curiosity are one thing. Raw native intelligence is something different. I might be above average on the first two, but I expect I have less of the second that the average LWer. For example, I would love to understand the math of quantum mechanics, but it’s hard for me and really learning it, if I decided to, would likely be a multi-year endevour. Same with computer programming...I would love to actually be able to do it, but it doesn’t come super easily.
I think you’re mistaking subject specific skills for raw native intelligence. Being good at math and programming isn’t what intelligence is about. They are specific skills.
BTW I believe most educational material is quite bad and makes stuff far harder and more confusing than necessary. And for quantum physics in particular the situation is pretty terrible (if you want to learn it in depth; there’s OK popular science books for a lower level of detail). The situation with programming is better: there’s way more self taught programmers and more non-academic efforts to try to create material to help people learn programming, which I think are often more successful than the stuff schools put out.
I would equate intelligence with basically how good one is at learning in general, without giving priority to some fields. I think open mindedness and curiosity are crucial traits for that. A lot of people aren’t much good at learning in general, but have a specific field or two where they do OK. They can be impressive because in the area where they are rational they gain a lot of expertise and detailed knowledge. But I don’t regard them as more intelligent than more broad people.
You find math hard to learn. But most mathematicians find various things hard to learn too, such as (commonly) social skills. Most people are more impressed by math knowledge than social knowledge because it’s more common. Most people learn social skills, it’s nothing special. Yet that doesn’t really imply math is harder. More people try hard to learn social skills. And more people are alienated from learning math, at a young age, by their teachers (especially females).
Whatever topics one is bad at learning, I don’t think it’s normally caused by intelligence itself. I think raw native intelligence is itself a misconception and that the hardware capabilities of people’s brains don’t vary a lot and the variance doesn’t have much practical consequence. Rather, I think what people call “intelligence” is actually a matter of their philosophical theories and rationality, especially either general purpose ideas (which allow one to be good at many things) or ideas in specific fields people are impressed by (e.g. math).
What I think causes people to have trouble with math, or social skills, or other things, besides the inherent difficulty of the subjects, is irrationalities, caused largely by external pressure and cruelty. Those people who have trouble learning social skills were teased as children, or had trouble finding friends, or something. They did not try to learn to interact with others in an environment where everyone was nice to them, and they could fail a bunch of times with no harm coming to them, and keep trying new things until they got it. With math, people are forced to do things they don’t want to like unpleasant math homework and math tests. They don’t get to learn at their own pace for their own intrinsic motivations. This commonly alienates people from the subject. Causes like these are cultural.
To save on storage, learn powerful explanations. Sometimes ideas can be integrated into better ideas that elegantly cover a lot of ground. Finding connections between fields is an important part of learning.
Learning easy to remember rules of thumb—and improving them with criticism when they cause problems—is also valuable for some applications.
I’m somewhat skeptical of this claim—I can design a mind that has the functions 0(n) (zero function), S(n) (successor function), and P(x0, x1,...xn) (projection function) but not primitive recursion, I can compute most but not all functions. So I’m skeptical of this “all or little” description of mind space and computer space.
How is that a mind? Maybe we are defining it differently. A mind is something that can create knowledge. And a lot, not just a few special cases. Like people who can think about all kinds of topics such as engineering or art. When you give a few simple functions and don’t even have recursion, I don’t think it meets my conception of a mind, and I’m not sure what good it is.
If your categorization is correct and human beings are indeed universal knowledge creators, that doesn’t preclude the possibility of us having cognitive biases (which it had better not do!).
In what sense can a bias be very important (in the long term), if we are universal? We can change it. We can learn better. So the implementation details aren’t such a big deal to the result, you get the same kind of thing regardless.
Temporary mistakes in starting points should be expected. Thinking needs to be mistake tolerant.
I think it’s a big topic. Began answering your question here:
http://lesswrong.com/r/discussion/lw/551/popperian_decision_making/
Some theories predict that some things won’t happen (0 probability). I consider this kind of theory important.
You say I have my answer, but you have not answered. I don’t think you’ve understood the problem. To try to repeat myself less, check out the discussion here, currently at the bottom:
http://lesswrong.com/lw/54u/bayesian_epistemology_vs_popper/3urr?context=3
What is “more consistent”?
Consistent = does not contradict. But you can’t not-contradict more. It’s a boolean issue.
Huh? It may be that I haven’t read Logic of Scientific Discovery in a long time, but as far as I remember/can tell, Popper doesn’t care about moral whys like “why is murder bad” at all.
He doesn’t discuss them in LScD (as far as I remember). He does elsewhere, e.g. in The World of Parmenides. Whether he published moral arguments or not, his epistemology applies to them and works with them—it is general purpose.
Epistemology is about how we get knowledge. Any epistemology which can’t deal with entire categories of knowledge has a big problem. It would mean a second epistemology would be needed for that other category of knowledge. And that would raise questions like: if this second one works where the first failed, why not use it for everything?
Popper’s method does not rely on only empirical criticism but also allows for all types of philosophical criticism. So it’s not restricted to only empirical issues.
You say Popper didn’t impress you. Why not? Did you have any criticism of his ideas? Any substantive argument against them?
Do you have any criticism of the linked ideas? You just said it doesn’t seem that good to you, but you didn’t give any kind of substantive argument.
I don’t have a problem with the main substance of that argument, which I agree with. Your implication that we would reject this idea is mistaken.
A theory can be fallibly overthrown, but not definitely overthrown, in Popper’s view. Quotes out of context are easy to misread when you are not familiar with the ideas, and when you make assumptions (e.g. that overthrowing must be definitive) that the author does not make.