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.
Elliot Temple
Karma: −933
Whether “It’s a dog.” is a true statement depends on the context and the question asked. The same applies to every sentence – you can take any sentence and come up with a question and context that makes it the right answer and another question and context that makes it the wrong answer. My conception of truth is the standard one, perhaps explained better than some explanations, and doesn’t require rethinking what contradiction is. You haven’t even attempted to give a counter-example where you think my conclusion and the standard conclusion diverge on whether something is true, false or contradictory.
CR works universally,
Works at what ? And how do you tell?
Why are you quoting it like this and asking me? Did you misread this as an assertion by me?
induction works in limited cases
So it exists and works? Remember, I never said it could do everything.
Are you paying attention? Read the paragraph again.
So you overall position is that you think some unspecified form of induction may work for some limited parts of intelligence and knowledge creation, and unspecified other things work for other parts, and you don’t really know anything definitive and don’t claim to have answers? If that’s right, I don’t think saying basically “you didn’t 100% rule out all variations of induction in a way I understand” is the most productive way to engage with CF when you don’t want to make strong positive claims yourself. It’d be more productive to try to understand what CF claims or to point out a serious mistake in CF’s positive claims or to make a strong claim yourself that doesn’t fit the CF viewpoint, not to argue “it isn’t all 100% proven” when to the best of your knowledge no currently available position meets that standard.
I’m certainly not claiming its how the whole of science works.
Then what are you claiming? CR works universally, and induction works in limited cases where CR would also have worked? CR doesn’t work and a combination of induction and deduction is universal? Something else? I want to understand epistemology, intelligence and knowledge creation generally; I expected that you did too. What is your complete answer and what role does induction play in it?
How can anything be a standards part of induction, when induction doesn’t exist at all?
I meant a standard part of claims/theories/ideas/models of/about induction.
All you have to do is look up “inductive algorithm”.
I tried that and found different claims.
Anyway, I have shown that it exists, works and can be simple.
Don’t jump to the conclusion that you’ve won the debate when we’re in the middle. You haven’t yet defined induction (or given any source that does), so you haven’t established that the algorithm you brought up qualifies as induction. This is especially problematic when some of your claims about induction contradict standard claims about induction. You also haven’t established what the algorithm you gave allegedly works for and that it does work for that. You’ve acknowledged there are limits on what it works for (first section of this post) but haven’t yet detailed them.
When you say you “accept/believe/think that” followed by a statement, like for example, “I think that it was raining yesterday.”, do you always imply a specific purpose for which you think the statement is “true”, i. e. the statement succeeds at this purpose? What is this purpose?
I’m guessing the purpose is a factually accurate description of the weather which will be correctly understood by the person you’re talking to. The description should meet some standard, generic truth criteria like: corresponds to reality, no logical errors, the statement should be based on evidence not a blind guess (even if it’s true, if you didn’t know that, you shouldn’t have said it and hoped to get lucky), etc. It should also meet some generic communication criteria like being in a language that the other person knows.
Many statements have generic or obvious (in our culture) purposes that aren’t very interesting, but sometimes a purpose is more important to consider explicitly. They could be spies talking in code, so it’s not about the weather. Or sometimes people talk about the weather primarily for social reasons in which case factual correctness might not be important to them. Similar to people who say “I didn’t get any sleep last night” but they actually mean they didn’t get a lot of sleep.
Is “2+2=5” true for the purpose of NOT obeying the laws of arithmetic?
Yes. If the question is “What is a math equation which does not obey the laws of arithmetic?” then “2+2=5″ is a true answer for that question.
Is a fiction-idea true for the purpose of providing entertainment if it succeeds at this purpose?
Yes. If the question is e.g. “What is an entertaining story?” then a fictional story can be a true answer to that.
PS I think this website is temporarily blocking your comments or something. It says you posted this a week ago and edited two days ago but I only received a notification today. I did check for notifications yesterday and had none. This happened for at least one of your other comments previously where me seeing it was significantly delayed. I don’t know if you’re waiting in a queue for moderators to approve your posts or what. If you want to talk much more it might work better to sort out the issue with the mods or join my forum.
It can be useful to communicate about credences with other people who believe in them. But ideally everyone should move on to better approaches and choose between competing ideas for qualitative reasons not quantitative credence differences.
I take it you aren’t claiming this algorithm is how science or philosophy is done, so you aren’t really answering my question. And you’ve now introduced the complication of claiming there are multiple implementations, which raises issues like needing a flowchart or meta-algorithm to decide which one to use when, which is not a standard part of induction.
And you could have looked it up yourself
Can you provide a source which argues for induction and gives this, which I could have found?
My current guesses about what you mean by “decisive argument” and “indecisive argument”: Every “indecisive argument” is not formally logically valid. Every “decisive argument” is formally logically valid. If something of this is incorrect, then please, let me know.
That’s not how I see it. Basically no arguments anyone uses for complex issues are formally logically valid. One way to view it is differentiating cases where you think a formal deductive argument would be theoretically possible and ones where you wouldn’t. I’m trying to distinguish between e.g. these arguments, neither of which is formally valid:
I should not go to Taco Bell because I don’t want Mexican food. (Decisive in many contexts. In our best but fallible understanding, we can see a contradiction here, even though we haven’t rigorously proved it.)
I should go to Taco Bell because tacos are yummy. (Indecisive because Taco Bell might be out of budget or too far away despite being yummy.)
Ideas which are either false or true can be evaluated on a scale of plausibility. Do you think this may be useful at times?
“Plausibility” here refers to hundreds of different things. Are any useful for anything? Yes. Should we choose between competing ideas based on evaluating plausibility as a quantity? No.
But the idea being true doesn’t necessarily mean the idea will succeed at its purpose. If the idea is a fiction and its purpose is “entertain” and/or “teach”, then the idea being false doesn’t preclude it from succeeding at its purpose.
I claim: ideas can’t be evaluated independent of any purpose or context. The purpose and context must be supplied explicitly, as background assumptions, or built into the idea. Truth is success at a purpose, not a different type of evaluation that can reach a different answer.
It’s like how you can’t evaluate an answer, and whether it’s true, without knowing what the question is.
“2+2=4” is true for the purpose of obeying the laws of arithmetic but false as the answer to “What color is the sky?”
My intuition is that if one rejects the conclusion of the argument, then necessarily they do not accept the argument. Which means one can’t accept the argument and reject the argument’s conclusion. Did you mean by “accept the argument” something like “accept the premises and intermediate conclusions if any”?
I think this is just a terminology issue. For the conclusion “go to Stanford” we may make arguments like “Stanford has high prestige”. We can accept that argument and also reject the conclusion without contradicting ourselves. You’re welcome to think of the high prestige as a premise, but to answer your literal question: I didn’t mean to use that terminology myself.
How does CF deal with the following? One has determined intuitively that a certain restaurant is the best for them to go. Which is like this restaurant scores most on their subjective degree of goodness kind of scale. Then they apply CF. They either tailor their “clarify purpose/goal” step to make it produce such a goal which ensures the decisive negative argument phase excludes all restaurants besides the “best” one. This makes CF application in this case entirely irrelevant. Or they “clarify their purpose/goal” somehow but the decisive negative argument phase excludes the “best” restaurant. So if they comply with whichever the CF output happens to be, they will be upset for missing out on the “best” restaurant.
Where does that intuition come from in the first place? This raises all the usual epistemology issues, about what sorts of processes can and can’t create knowledge, correct errors or reach rational conclusions, to which I have answered CF and rejected alternatives.
What people do later, after already having an initial conclusion, is often superficial, regardless of the explicit methods used (CF, MCDM, induction, etc.) People often use one method to backwards rationalize from a conclusion that they reached with another method, though it’s also possible to do useful review and catch errors.
Would you please provide a short closing statement with your conclusions about our discussion and/or your reasons for ending the discussion?
My claim is it can’t be done other than via conjectures and refutations
Your claim was that it could not possibly work at all.
When I said that, I was using standard definitions that excluded C&R.
You haven’t provided a well-defined non-moving target for my criticism, as both CR and CF provide to you.
Yes I have: better than chance prediction.
“better than chance prediction” with the predictions done by what method? What is the math algorithm or flowchart? You’re still not providing specifics.
I deny that humans can do induction. I also deny that simple organisms can do it.
Deny what it like, there’s evidence they do it
This is jumping ahead. Humans do something. Whether or not its induction depends on what induction is, which is a current conversation topic.
Chatgpt: Induction, in a broad sense, means
I’m not going to debate Chatgpt, and this is unhelpful when I’ve already read many versions of induction and don’t need an introductory summary. Is there no literature you can cite that you think writes down correct details of induction? The issue isn’t my familiarity with induction, it’s you picking a specific claim. Even if you’re unsure and think one of many inductivist positions may be right, you could still pick a single one for us to discuss in more detail. I can’t pick that for you but it needs to be picked for me to give more specific criticism.
What are your intentions with this discussion? I’d be open to trying to actually work through these issues and reach a conclusion. I’d be open to mutually agreeing to put in some effort. Right now, every time I reply, I don’t know if you’re ever going to reply again. I don’t think we’re going to resolve these issues quickly but I think the topics are important and I’m interested in trying seriously.
But you can’t expect any given context to supply you with a set of decisive criteria that narrow your options to one.
Most goals have many solutions which we should be ~indifferent between – they all work and it’s not worth our time to optimize more.
In the cases where optimization is worthwhile and there are multiple solutions, we can narrow it down further by considering more ambitous goals.
As a simple approximation, looking only at viable solutions you want to optimize between, you may maximize one factor. Maximizing a single factor doesn’t require combining factors, dimension conversion, rank ordering or weighting, and keeps the method non-compensatory (a problem with one factor can’t be outweighed by some other factors being good). The problems with non-linear value functions are often quite manageable when dealing with only one non-binary factor. If you model decision making as multiplying many binary factors, you can also multiply in one non-binary factor without the problems that come from multiple non-binary factors. This gives you a simple answer which I don’t consider ideal but it’s mostly OK and doesn’t require reading essays to get a more complicated answer.
It uses an arbitrary threshold of decisiveness.
Budgets, or more generally goals, aren’t arbitrary and have breakpoints/thresholds inherent in them, which we should look for. The most generic threshold is “enough (or a low enough amount for negative factors) for goal success”.
If so, how can they do that? How would they or their intuition determine what numbers roughly feel right?
They can do that. Asking how they do it doesn’t mean it’s impossible.
My claim is it can’t be done other than via conjectures and refutations, CF, the stuff I’m advocating. I’m claiming that other methods don’t work. If people do it but you don’t know how, that is compatible with my claim, since they may be using the things I’m saying do work. This isn’t counter-evidence against me.
There are many different versions of induction.
Which is why it is difficult to show none of them could possibly work.
They have common themes, so it can be done using abstract arguments as long as people agree in broad strokes on what sorts of things are and aren’t induction. If you start loosening up the definition of “induction” to include C&R, that’s way too broad, and it’s no longer the same thing that Popper or I said doesn’t work, and it no longer fits the historical tradition/meaning of induction (unless we’re missing something, which you’d have to show).
If you pick a specific version of induction (preferably one with at least one book explaining it in detail like Popper’s books explain Critical Rationalism) then we can discuss how it differs from C&R, what it claims, and whether it lives up to those claims.
I have picked probabilistic prediction, which can be shown to work directly, without needing a theoretical justification.
My primary concern with literature isn’t the justification but just the specification of how it works. You haven’t provided a well-defined non-moving target for my criticism, as both CR and CF provide to you. Usually, even when highly abstract discussion is pretty effective (as is needed to cover induction generically), it’s still best to go over at least one more specific example, so if you could specify one version of induction in detail (preferably via cite) we could use it as an example.
You know the “aaaaa” pattern is simpler than the others. Its no great mystery.
I have an answer in that easy case that I believe I got via C&R. If you don’t give the math, then you aren’t showing that some non-C&R method can evaluate simplicity. And just because I have an answer in a few easy cases doesn’t mean that you or I have a good answer in harder cases.
People here like Kolmogorov complexity. That isn’t some unanswerable question.
Kolmogorov complexity is uncomputable and machine-dependent, right? So it’s not a usable approach. That people like it anyway is evidence about how hard the question is and how poor the known answers are.
You don’t need much intelligence to do simple induction, since simple organisms can do it.
I deny that humans can do induction. I also deny that simple organisms can do it. I doubt this is a good sub-topic to go into right now.
Then decisiveness.isn’t an objective criterion …it’s a question of setting up a threshhold, saying that 80% or 90% or 99% likelihood counts as decisiveness. Decisiveness is disguised weighting, if it isn’t infallibility.
Per my article, decisiveness, like other idea evaluation, depends on the goal and context. “It costs $100” is decisive criticism for a $20 budget goal but not a $200 budget goal.
But this doesn’t use likelihoods or weights. It uses qualitative differences or breakpoints for quantities (which are the points where there difference in quantity makes a qualitative difference). The generic breakpoint is “good enough for success at my goal or not?”
Decisive + indecisive criteria is better than decisive alone, because it enables.more fine grained decision making.
You can do fine-grained decision making, without limitation, using decisive reasoning alone. And convenience comparisons or marginal benefits are irrelevant given my claim (which is currently an open issue under discussion) that indecisive reasoning doesn’t work at all.
If you are only trying to satisfy your only values, then the weighting is just how much you value things in relation to each other. Presumably, your objection is that the lack of objective criteria ..but if you are making a personal decision, why would that matter.
Epistemology should be general purpose and cover impersonal issues like scientific controversies, and allow for productive debate rather than being subjective or arbitrary.
By no objective criteria do you mean people can and should just subjectively/intuitively make up the numbers with no math? If so, how can they do that? How would they or their intuition determine what numbers roughly feel right? By using intelligence via some other full general-purpose epistemology which has been used as a premise/prerequisite of this approach? My understanding is that for this kind of weighted factor math stuff to be a first epistemology – a first solution to how people think intelligently, as I believe its claimed to be – then the math has to work objectively and you can’t just rely on people somehow intelligently coming up with numbers that are in the right ballpark. If you rely on intelligence then it’s only a secondary method which leaves all the primary questions in epistemology open.
Also if the numbers are being made up non-objectively so they feel about right, why not just make up a conclusion that feels about right directly? What good is the intermediate step of making up the numbers?
“But that’s Conjecture and Refutation!” Maybe it is! If you want to say induction cannot possibly work , and maintain that C&R does work, you need to show that induction isn’t a form of C&R. (And also that it’s failing at something that is actually claimed for it by inductionists).
There are many different versions of induction. If you pick a specific version of induction (preferably one with at least one book explaining it in detail like Popper’s books explain Critical Rationalism) then we can discuss how it differs from C&R, what it claims, and whether it lives up to those claims.
There are infinitely many patterns which fit the past. Of those patterns, infinitely many will break in the near future, infinitely many will break in the distant future, and infinitely many will hold forever. Many of these different patterns fit the data perfectly and contradict each other.
Yes. But I can still choose the simplest that fits the data I currently have , Ie. I can do induction in a good-enough way.
Which patterns are simplest? What’s the rule to judge that? Does applying the rule require intelligence as a prerequisite?
Elliot Temple’s Shortform
Lol I was talking to Claude about If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies and I hit “safety filters”:
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Thanks for engaging again.
Decisive: I think this is the best issue to resolve first and I’m hopeful we’ll be able to succeed here.
The ordinary meaning of “decisive” is “settling an issue; producing a definite result”. I don’t see where it says infallibly, permanently, without the possibly of later revision, or anything like that. We can reach a definite result (a conclusion) based on our currently available evidence and ideas.
People often talk about strong and weak arguments. All weak or moderate arguments, and many strong arguments, are indecisive. When shopping for a house, you might note nice kitchen countertops (indecisive, weak argument), a pool (indecisive, strong argument), painted a pretty color (indecisive, weak argument), large yard (indecisive, moderate argument), and many more things. Or you might figure out your goal specifically enough to enable a decisive argument like “I want a commute under 15 minutes and 4+ bedrooms; this house has 3 bedrooms so I won’t buy it”. Both styles of argument are fallible. But they do have a clear, significant difference. I think “decisive” is a good fit for this difference: 3 bedrooms being too few settles the issue and produces a definite result, whereas the large yard didn’t. Logically, on the assumptions or premises that the house has 3 bedrooms and the goal is 4+, we can reach a conclusion. But if we know it has a large yard and our goal is a good house, we cannot reach a conclusion: that’s compatible with picking or not picking this house.
Nothing about this is infallible. I could have misunderstood logic, or counting, or my goal, or what a house is, or all sorts of other things. While any of my conclusions are open to potential revision, it’s also realistic that they aren’t revised anytime soon, so despite fallibilism there is a significant difference between issues where I reached a conclusion and issues where I didn’t.
Also, are you familiar with Elimination by Aspects (EBA) or Satisficing? They have similarities/overlap with CF which could help clarify this part.
If you’re familiar with MCDM/MCDA literature, that could help too. There’s a concept of compensatory and non-compensatory approaches. Compensatory approaches mean that a weak score on some factors can be compensated for by a strong score on other factors. Compensatory approaches use factors indecisively, while non-compensatory approaches use factors decisively. In EBA, if a theory fails at one of the criteria then it’s eliminated with no way to un-eliminate it within the current decision making process (you have to go outside the process and invoke fallibility, new information, etc., to revise the conclusion).
Hempel’s Paradox: Relevant. Part of the issue.
Asymmetry: When you see a white raven, that doesn’t provide certainty. You could have misidentified the bird species. But on the premise that you saw a white raven, then logic enables you to conclude that “all ravens are black” is false. Asymmetrically, on the premise that you really did see a black raven, or a million of them, you cannot conclude that “all ravens are black” is true. With some arguments, if you assume your premises and background knowledge are true, then logic dictates a conclusion, while with other arguments even if your premises and background knowledge are correct that still wouldn’t be enough to reach the conclusion. Some arguments are decisive (settle issues, produce definite results) when assuming their premises and your background knowledge, while others still aren’t. This difference is compatible with fallibility (your premises and background knowledge could be doubted, revised, etc.).
Simplest pattern:
The simplest pattern is “what will.happen before will happen again”. Simple organisms can implement that...ve”
There are infinitely many patterns which fit the past. Of those patterns, infinitely many will break in the near future, infinitely many will break in the distant future, and infinitely many will hold forever. Many of these different patterns fit the data perfectly and contradict each other. Do you disagree? If you agree, then this simple pattern idea doesn’t guide which patterns to induce/use, right? So I don’t see how this claim helps. Examples: https://xkcd.com/1122/
Rule induction: Do any of these claim to offer a general purpose thinking method (including capable of doing philosophy debates, like we are now) which solves the which pattern(s) problem?
Cannot work for induction: patterns are likely to continue in the future approaches cannot possibly work in the context of infinitely many patterns that don’t continue and no viable solution for choosing between patterns.
Cannot work for weighted factors: Dimension conversion to generic goodness only works approximately and only in special cases. Other dimension conversions are also special cases, though some aren’t approximate (like E=mc^2). Relying on dimension conversion cannot possibly work for a general purpose thinking system because it’s not generally available. Also, the concept of factor weights relies on the importance of the factor being approximately the same for different values of the factor, which is often false (both due to failure breakpoints and due to diminishing marginal utility).
Certainty: I’ve been trying to discuss fallibilist versions of CF, weighted factors and induction. Critiquing infallibilists wasn’t my focus. One of my last discussions with David Deutsch was actually about this, back in ~2013. From memory, he basically claimed that all justificationists (advocates of any kind of positive/supporting arguments) are infallibilists, which I denied. I brought up LessWrong people in general as an example, since they tend to be non-Popperian fallibilists. He claimed that they’re only fallibilists by contradicting themselves, which doesn’t really count or help. I was unable to find out from him what the alleged contradiction is between 1) fallibilism 2) positive/supporting/justifying arguments.
Duhem-Quine:
I wasn’t accusing Pooper of naive Popperism.
ok great. I don’t know who you were accusing, but generally speaking there are plenty of Popperians who I’m unimpressed by, so we might agree, idk.
I don’t think you would reply like this if I wrote a post about how Bayesian arguments are better than frequentist arguments.
Thanks for engaging.
So, to know that a criticism is decisive, you have to know that no one could possibly come up with a counter criticism.
I think you didn’t take into account the definition that I used: “A decisive argument (or group of arguments) contradicts the negation of its conclusion, so both can’t be true.” Excluding the possibility of counter criticism is unnecessary for this definition to be met. The point is that if A and B could both be true – if they’re compatible – then it’s problematic to view B as a criticism of A.
Neither form of perfection is available.
The goal is basically logical relevance, not perfection.
You are right that induction is dumb, but it still sometimes works..especially if taken probabilistically.
For induction to work, it’d have to define steps a person can follow to induce a theory. It’d have to specify what constitutes inducing a theory. The main issue with induction isn’t the quality of the results, but actually defining a specific method that produces any results. Over the years, I’ve never been able to get an answer to this along with a worked example and answers to basic questions like which of the infinitely many patterns fitting the data should be induced and which shouldn’t and why those.
Weighting is needed to see which is false.
When two things contradict and you’re deciding what side to take, weighting them and choosing the higher weighted side is one approach. But it’s certainly not the only approach. Since you’re just choosing between two things, quantitative evaluation seems less relevant or appealing than in many other scenarios.
I could go into more detail here and it’s an interesting topic but I think I’ve written enough for an initial reply so I’ll leave it at saying I don’t see what aspect of contradiction-resolution makes quantitative approaches mandatory. My best guess is you think they’re always mandatory for everything, which might be better approached from another angle, not via this sub-problem.
Weighting isn’t adding apples and oranges , it’s adding value_of(n apples) and value_of(m oranges). Everything gets converted to the same type first.
My link discusses dimension conversion (like from apples to value) being problematic. That’s covered.
All our arguments are fallible
Then none are decisive!
Do you think fallibilism prohibits reaching conclusions? Decisive basically means conclusive, aka adequate to tentatively, fallibly reach a conclusion, as against arguments that don’t provide that much (where accepting the truth of the argument, as a premise, would still be inadequate to reach a conclusion).
Well .. it’s not as simple as naive CR makes out. A single observation can be erroneous (eg Martian canals, cold fusion).
Popper knew that and wrote about it.
Indecisive arguments dont have to be logically flawed...they can be reframed as valid probabilistic arguments.
Do you have an example? If it’s actually valid, I might tell you it’s decisive. As above, decisive is an easier standard than you interpreted it as. I’m not sure what sort of probabilistic argument you have in mind though.
Are you trying to say we should use worse forms of argument on purpose because of epistemic learned helplessness? I don’t see how that would help and you haven’t given any analysis about that. Epistemic learned helplessness is a separate issue from what I was talking about: when using arguments, which types are impersonally best, just looking at the subject matter and arguments themselves? I wasn’t talking about human behavior or psychology.
Isn’t your point about all arguments, not just decisive arguments? What does it have to do with my discussion of which types of arguments are logically and epistemically better than other types of arguments?
Consider the statement, A, “I know that is a dog because it’s cute.” In the context of evaluating whether A is contained in a particular list of statements, or not, A is not an argument – it’s just a literal string devoid of meaning. I check the list and conclude, B, “A is on the list”. The negation of that is “A is not on the list”. Both B and ~B can’t be true regardless of what statements are on the list.
If you want to evaluate “A is on the list” by whether the statement is itself on the list, not by whether A is on the list, then you’re defining a goal that ignores logic, so logical concepts like negation are undefined and inapplicable.
This is off topic from what my essay is about.