James_Bach

Karma: 121

James_Bach 18 Dec 2007 8:57 UTC
21 points
on: Guardians of Ayn Rand
Great essay!

But, how can a set of ideas be a closed system? It’s ridiculous. If someone were to tell me that Objectivism is closed, I would say, Ha! I just reopened it. Ha! Try and stop me from calling myself an Objectivist if I feel like it! Oh, they can trademark it, I supposed, but if they do, I could rename my system as Reasonablism and explain it as an improved form of what-Ayn-Rand-was-talking-about.

A community of people can close itself off, but ideas are helpless to resist whatever buccaneering minds may prey upon them. This harkens to Buckminster Fuller’s cry that “true wealth only increases”, because true wealth is knowledge and knowledge is infinitely replicable and shareable.

James_Bach 6 Jan 2008 4:10 UTC
14 points
on: But There’s Still A Chance, Right?
I don’t understand why you invoke probability theory in a situation where it has no rhetorical value. Your conversation was a rhetorical situation, not a math problem, so you have to evaluate it and calibrate your speech acts accordingly—or else you get nowhere, which is exactly what happened.

Your argument to your friend was exactly like someone justifying something about their own religion by citing their bible. It works great for people in your own community who already accept your premises. To anyone outside your community, you might as well be singing a tuneless hymn.

Besides that, the refuge available to anyone even within your community is to challenge the way that you have modeled the probability problem. If we change the model, the probabilities are dramatically changed. This is the lesson we get from Lord Kelvin’s miscalculation of the age of the Sun, for instance. Arnold Sommerfeld once remarked that the hydrogen atom appeared to be more complex than a grand piano. In a way it is, but not so much once quantum mechanics was better understood. The story of the Periodic Table of Elements is also a story of trying different models.

Mathematics is powerful and pure. Your only little problem is demonstrating—in terms your audience will value—that your mathematics actually represents the part of the world you claim it represents. That’s why you can’t impose closure on everyone else using a rational argument; and why you may need a few other rhetorical tools.

Your confidence in your arguments seems to come from a coherence theory of truth: when facts align in beautiful and consistent ways, that coherence creates a powerful incentive to accept the whole pattern. Annoyingly, there turn out to be many ways to find or create coherence by blurring a detail here, or making an assumption there, or disqualifying evidence. For instance, you consistently disqualify evidence from spiritual intuition, don’t you? Me, too. How can we be sure we should be doing that?

Why not learn to live with that? Why not give up the quest for universal closure, and settle for local closure? That’s Pyrhhonian skepticism.

James_Bach 9 Jan 2008 7:49 UTC
12 points
on: Infinite Certainty
Thanks, Eliezer. Helpful post.

I have personally witnessed a room of people nod their heads in agreement with a definition of a particular term in software testing. Then when we discussed examples of that term in action, we discovered that many of us having agreed with the words in the definition, had a very different interpretation of those words. To my great discouragement, I learned that agreeing on a sign is not the same as agreeing on the interpretant or the object. (sign, object, and interpretant are the three parts of Peirce’s semiotic triangle)

In the case of 2+2=4, I think I know what that means, but when Euclid, Euler, or Laplace thought of 2+2=4, were they thinking the same thing I am? Maybe they were, but I’m not confident of that. And when someday a artificial intelligence ponders 2+2=4, will it be thinking what I’m thinking?

I feel 100% positive that 2+2=4 is true, and 100% positive that I don’t entirely know what I mean by “2+2=4”. I am also not entirely sure what other people mean by it. Maybe they mean “any two objects, combined with two objects, always results in four objects”, which is obviously not true.

In thinking about certainty, it helps me to consider the history of the number zero. That something so obvious could be unknown (or unrecognized as important) for so long is sobering. The Greeks would also have sworn that the square root of negative one has no meaning and certainly no use in mathematics. 100% certain! The Pythagoreans would have sworn it just before stoning you to death for math heresy.

James_Bach 3 Jan 2008 21:29 UTC
10 points
on: Stop Voting For Nincompoops
Forget voting. Here’s how to make a big difference in society: at least once a month, do something amazingly kind for a perfect stranger. My preference is leaving $100 tips for waitresses or hotel maids, because I’m basically lazy.

Also, raise your kids with kindness.

Practice showing courage in challenging situations.

Don’t instigate a lawsuit unless it’s reaaaaaally important.

What’s great about America is not democracy, but the sense we have that we can travel almost anywhere here and other people will smile with us, do business with us, and not hate us. There are still many places and people within America for which and whom this is not true (or not true enough). But let’s keep working toward that idea with our daily actions. No amount of voting will solve that problem.

James_Bach 28 Dec 2007 7:01 UTC
8 points
0
on: Lonely Dissent
Eliezer, never mind black, the true iconoclasts don’t go to school. I quit in 10th grade and became an emancipated minor. In the three years prior, I refused to do homework, citing the 13th Amendment. My motivation echoes yours: I could not abide fakers, and public school abounds with them. Fake lessons. Fake arguments. Fake sentiments. Public school is a thinly disguised day care center.

Fortunately, education is not the same as schooling, and there are plenty of ways to become better educated in private life. Then I discovered as an adult that being unconventionally educated could be a competitive advantage.

James_Bach 9 Sep 2007 1:21 UTC
8 points
on: The Crackpot Offer
Something seems out of kilter about this, Eliezer.

When I was 13, I thought I had a proof in principle that there must be a minimum possible distance—because to move is to move a finite distance, but no sum of infitesimal distances can compose a finite distance. I shared my idea with a professional physicist, who dismissed my idea using an appeal to authority. I don’t care how fabulous the authority was, nor how ignorant I may have been, it was a terrible thing to for him to do that. It killed my enthusiasm for questioning physics, or math, at the time.

Reasoning, even mathematical reasoning, is not about just about right and wrong. It’s also about how we model the world and apply our models to it. See Imre Lakatos’s wonderful Proofs and Refutations for a look at how proofs are not just proofs, they are assertions about what’s worth talking about and what we mean by our words.

And reasoning is also about honing our skills. We must develop the guts to recognize when we are wrong, but also the guts not worry so much about being wrong that we give up before we learn very much.

I once discovered a way to trisect an angle with a compass and straight edge. This has been proven to be impossible, apparently, but I did it. Later I discovered that I used an operation that wasn’t “allowed” (an approximation maneuver), even though I performed the maneuver with only a compass and straight edge. To me, the proof that it can’t be done is obviously incorrect, by any practical standard. Show me an angle and I can trisect it to an arbitrarily high degree of accuracy with my mechanical procedure. I challenge the “rules” set out by whomever thinks he’s the know-all on what can be done with a compass and straight edge.

I hope other 13 year-olds don’t read your essay and decide that the rational attitude is never to try to reinvent or challenge the Ancient Ones.

James_Bach 10 Jan 2008 23:53 UTC
7 points
on: Beautiful Math
I love math. It’s the only reason I sometimes wish I’d stayed in school. When I get rich, I want to hire a mathematician to live in my basement and tutor me. I bet they can be had for cheap.

Pure math is potentially a perfect idea. Applied math; not so much. When you see that line of 2′s, how do you know it continues forever? You don’t. You’re making an induction; a beautiful guess. It’s only because you peeked at the real answer—an answer you yourself created—that you can confidently say that you “predicted” the sequence with your method.

I’m much more interested in sequences produced in a simple deterministic way that are extremely difficult to crack. The move from “it makes no sense” to “it’s obvious” is a critical dynamic in human thought. I’d like to see you write about that.

As Polya would say, solving these problems is a heuristic process. The reason you think you find order when you dig down far enough is that you systematically ignore any situation where you don’t find order. Your categories have order built into them. You are drawn to order. There are probably a host of biases influencing that: availability, ontology, instrumentalism, and hindsight among them.

There’s lots of order to be found. There is also infinite amounts of disorder, unprovable order, and alternate plausible order. Occam’s razor helps sort it out—that’s also a heuristic.

James_Bach 8 Jan 2008 5:08 UTC
6 points
on: Absolute Authority
I wonder what your life must be like. The way you write, it sounds as if you spend a lot of your time trying to convince crazy people (by which I mean most of humanity, of course) to be less crazy and more rational, like us. Why not just ignore them?

Then I looked at your Wikipedia entry and noticed how young you are. Ah! When I was your age, I was also trying to convert everybody. My endless arguments about software development methods, circa 1994, are still in Google’s Usenet archive. So, who am I to talk?

(Note: Mostly I write comments that complain about something you say, but please understand that there’s a selection bias here. Even though I often find myself thinking “What an interesting way to think about that. Great idea, Eliezer!” I would rather write comments that have some kind of content, and those tend to be the critical ones.)

James_Bach 15 Dec 2007 23:17 UTC
5 points
on: Guardians of the Truth
When you speak of “guardians of truth” I hear “guardians of social order.” I don’t think the Inquisition thought of truth in epistemic terms, the way we do. They thought of “truth” as the order of the world that was under constant assault by dark forces.

Truth guardianship in science might be understood as defending Kuhnian “normal science” from assault by people outside of the dominant paradigm; or perhaps the process of indoctrinating new scientists in the accepted norms of that paradigm.

James_Bach 17 Nov 2007 6:48 UTC
5 points
on: No Evolutions for Corporations or Nanodevices
Quantitative thinking is just so much mystical numerology unless it is grounded in qualitative thinking. Unless you don’t need your mathematics to mean anything with respect to the world, you must relate it to the world by using a system of assertions called a model. Of course, you know this, I’d just like you to bring this fact out from behind the curtain where you normally keep it.

Example: when I hear a scientist talk about how winning the lottery (or some other rare event) is less likely than getting hit by lightning, I have to wonder what the odds are of being hit by lightning if you take shelter during a storm, as most people do, or if you live in Nome, Alaska? I bet agoraphobic people are far less likely to die in car accidents, too. In other words, broad numerical reasoning, when applied to specific cases without recalculating for those cases, is essentially the same thing as the sloppy qualitative reasoning that you’re worried about. It’s just as absurd.

Maybe what you’re trying to say is that sloppy and ungrounded qualitative reasoning is to be avoided, in favor of quantitative reasoning grounded in the appropriate qualitative reasoning that give the numbers meaning. That would be a qualitative judgment on your part, of course, but it seems like a defensible one in this case.

I think you are trying to advocate, not quantitative reasoning, but rather good reasoning. There’s no call to hang the albatross of bad reasoning around the neck of qualitative research as a field. That bird belongs to all of us.

James_Bach 30 Oct 2007 7:30 UTC
5 points
on: Torture vs. Dust Specks
Yes the answer is obvious. The answer is that this question obviously does not yet have meaning. It’s like an ink blot. Any meaning a person might think it has is completely inside his own mind. Is the inkblot a bunny? Is the inkblot a Grateful Dead concert? The right answer is not merely unknown, because there is no possible right answer.

A serious person—one who take moral dilemmas seriously, anyway—must learn more before proceeding.

The question is an inkblot because too many crucial variables have been left unspecified. For instance, in order for this to be an interesting moral dilemma I need to know that it is a situation that is physically possible, or else analogous to something that is possible. Otherwise, I can’t know what other laws of physics or logic apply or don’t apply, and therefore can’t make an assessment. I need to know what my position is in this universe. I need to know why this power has been invested in me. I need to know the nature of the torture and who the person is who will be tortured. I need to consider such factors as what the torture may mean to other people who are aware of it (such as the people doing the torture). I need to know something about the costs and benefits involved. Will the person being tortured know they are being tortured? Or can it be arranged that they are born into the torture and consider it a normal part of their life. Will the person being tortured have volunteered to have been tortured? Will the dust motes have peppered the eyes of all those people anyway? Will the torture have happened anyway? Will choosing torture save other people from being tortured?

It would seem that torture is bad. On the other hand, just being alive is a form of torture. Each of us has a Sword of Damocles hanging over us. It’s called mortality. Some people consider it torture when I keep telling them they haven’t finished asking their question...

James_Bach 25 Sep 2007 14:01 UTC
5 points
on: Einstein’s Arrogance
Um, guys, there are an infinite number of possible hypotheses. Any evidence that corroborates one theory also corroborates (or fails to refute) an infinite number of alternative specifiable accounts of the world.

What evidence does is allow us to say “Whatever the truth is, it must coexist in the same universe with the true nature of this evidence I have accepted. Theory X and its infinite number of variants seems to be ruled out by this evidence (although I may have misinterpreted the theory or the nature of the evidence), whereas Theory Y and its infinite number of variants seems not yet to be ruled out.”

Yeah, I realize this is a complicated way to phrase it. The reason I like to phrase it this way is to point out that Einstein did not have merely 29 “bits” of evidence, he had VAST evidence, based on an entire lifetime of neuron-level programming, that automatically focused his mind on a productive way of thinking about the universe. He was imagining and eliminating vast swaths of potential theories of the universe, as are we all, from his earliest days in the womb. This is hardly surprising, considering that humans are the result of an evolutionary process that systematically killed the creatures who couldn’t map the universe sufficiently well.

We can never know if we are getting to the right hypothesis. What we can say is that we have arrived at a hypothesis that is isomorphic with the truth, as we understand that hypothesis, over the span of evidence we think we have and think we understand. Always the next bit of evidence we discover may turn what we think we knew upside down. All knowledge is defeasible.

James_Bach 3 Sep 2007 21:59 UTC
5 points
on: “Science” as Curiosity-Stopper
At some point it maybe helpful to define curiosity. My sense of the meaning of curiosity is that it’s an urge to learn something that you suspect maybe important to know at some point, even if it may not matter now. A paper I read recently (http://www.idsia.ch/~juergen/curioussingapore/curioussingapore.html) defined curiosity more formally, as a special kind of search strategy that focuses on places that your experience shows have a higher than average probability of teaching you something useful. This doesn’t seem too far from my definition.

It seems to me that stopped curiosity is not necessarily a big problem.

In my terms, what you seem to be talking about is an inquiry stopper, which is a bigger deal. If you think that it’s actually important to know how a lightbulb works—if you need to know about light bulbs—it’s a process of inquiry, not merely curiosity.

Stopping curiosity is an interesting issue in itself, but the dynamics are likely to be a bit different from stopping inquiry, although there is significant overlap.

We all live in a world of bounded rationality. We use satisficing strategies, controlled by a variety of stopping heuristics, to learn enough about the world to get by (and curiosity is part of that strategy, by giving us some kind of good enough cover in the event that the models we might otherwise have turn out to be too simple or too wrong). That we stop before learning everything possible is hardly remarkable. But I enjoy how you are getting us to think about certain specific stopping heuristics that might be insidiously impairing us.

Last night I looked over some philosophical writing I did twenty years ago, and I’m impressed by how much I took for granted, and how little I questioned. It’s full of unabashedly sweeping statements based on what I now realize were very naive assumptions. I found myself reading it and yelling at my younger self “Why did you stop there? Keep opening the black boxes! Continue the questioning!”

James_Bach 23 Dec 2007 5:15 UTC
4 points
on: Effortless Technique
Thank you for this post. I’m in the process of writing about my system of self-education, which has two interesting elements I haven’t heard anywhere else: A) it requires no self-discipline whatsoever, B) it is centered on the feelings of learning, rather than artifacts and techniques of learning (those latter two things are interesting, but they orbit the first).

One of the things I try to explain is how to embrace certain mental behaviors that seem bad, such as procrastination. I procrastinate extensively. I am procrastinating right now (I’m “supposed to be” writing a chapter on the history of buccaneering and how that relates to intellectual buccaneering).

Procrastination helps me learn with less effort. It’s too long to explain fully here, but one way I use it is called “springboard procrastination” which is the phenomenon of trying to work on one thing, and feeling your mind aggressively push you into another thing. I once thought that was a shameful thing, to let my mind push against my will, but I eventually discovered that by rolling with that impulse, I could get lots of things done. I read more, I write more, I exercise, I am quite productive while avoiding the work I’m “supposed to do”.

I also use a technique I call “procrastinate and push” which means I keep coming back and knocking on the door of my mind, trying to work on the problem of the day, and when my mind tells me to go play a video game instead, I just do that. But I come back a little later, and a little later. I go through these cycles without any sort of bad feeling (unlike when I was younger and disgusted with my inability to bring my mind to heel). Eventually, usually shortly before a deadline, my mind relents. Often progress is very rapid after that.

These experiences have caused me to explore lots of way in which I can make good progress without the feeling of making an effort. One of my mentors in this, Jerry Weinberg, recently wrote a book about a relaxed way of writing called the Fieldstone Approach, which he first put into words while coaching me on this stuff.

Anyone interested in reviewing my book prior to its publication should contact me directly. I will soon need a few bright people to critique it.

James_Bach 12 Sep 2007 3:50 UTC
4 points
on: Applause Lights
Curiously Eliezer, I feel like applauding. Good post.

James_Bach 14 Dec 2007 6:01 UTC
3 points
on: Argument Screens Off Authority
You said: “So it seems there’s an asymmetry between argument and authority. If we know authority we are still interested in hearing the arguments; but if we know the arguments fully, we have very little left to learn from authority.”

I like your conclusion, but I can’t find anything in your argument to support it! By rearranging some words in your text I could construct an equally plausible (to a hypothetical neutral observer) argument that authority screens off evidence. You seem to believe that evidence screens off authority simply because you think evidence is what makes authority believe something. But isn’t that assuming the very thing you want to demonstrate?

Your scenarios in the first paragraphs are neither arguments nor demonstrations. They are statements of what you believe. Fair enough. But then I was expecting that you’d provide some reason for me to reject the hypothesis—a hypothesis that carried a lot of weight during the era of Scholasticism—that there is no such thing as evidence without authority (in other words, it is authority that consecrates evidence as evidence).

I used to wonder how anyone could take the obviously wrong physics of Aristotle seriously, until I learned enough about history that it dawned on me that for the Scholastic thinkers of the middle ages, how physics really worked was far less important than maintaining social order. If maintaining social order is the problem that trumps all others in your life and in your society, then evidence must necessarily carry little weight compared to authority. You will give up a lot of science, of course, but you will give it up gladly.

Obviously, we aren’t in that situation. But I worry when I see, for instance, rational arguments for the existence of God that assume the very thing they purport to prove. And your argument (hopefully I’ve misunderstood it) seems a lot like those.

James_Bach 25 Nov 2007 18:48 UTC
3 points
on: Lost Purposes
As a high school dropout and aspiring philosopher of self-education, I salute you.

My son is homeschooled, and the homeschooling consists of… nothing. He studies spontaneously to solve problems that are authentic to him, just as I do. Mostly these involve video games and online fantasy role-playing games. It’s like A.S. Neill’s Summerhill school except he’s all alone. There are disadvantages to this sort of education, but inauthenticity is not among them.

I am writing a book along these lines. It’s about how we can creates ourselves as individual thinkers. It’s called How I Learn Stuff: Secrets of a Buccaneer Scholar (old draft is temporarily online at http://www.satisfice.com/hils.pdf. The book itself should be finished in a few months).

James_Bach 22 Nov 2007 7:22 UTC
3 points
on: Not for the Sake of Happiness (Alone)
I’m nervous about the word happiness because I suspect it’s a label for a basket of slippery ideas and sub-idea feelings. Still, something I don’t understand about your argument is that when you demonstrate that for you happiness is not a terminal value you seem to arbitrarily stop the chain of reasoning. Terminating your inquiry is not the same as having a terminal value.

If you say you value something and I know that not everyone values that thing, I naturally wonder why you value it. You say it’s a terminal value, but when I ask myself why you value it if someone else doesn’t, I say to myself “it must make him happy to value that”. In that sense, happiness may be a word we use as a terminal value by definition, not by evidence—a convention like saying QED at the end of a proof. In the old days the terminal value was often “God wills it so”, but with the invention of humanism in the middle ages, pursuit of happiness was born.

In the case where someone seems to be working against what they say makes them happy, that just means there are different kinds or facets or levels of happiness. Happiness is complex, but if there are no reasons beyond the final reason for taking an action, then as a conceptual convention the final reason must be happiness.

Now I will argue a little against that. What I’ve said up to now is based on the assumption that humans are teleonomic creatures with free will. But I think we are actually NOT such creatures. We do not exist to fulfill a purpose. So the concept of happiness, defined as it is, is a story that is pasted onto us, by us, so that we can pretend to have an ethereal conscious existence. I propose that the truth is ultimately that we do what we do because of the molecules and energy state that we possess, within the framework of our environment and the laws of physics.

I could say that eating makes me happy and that’s why I do it, or I could say that the deeper truth is that my brain is constructed to feel happy about eating. I eat because of that mechanism, not because of the “happiness”, which doesn’t actually exist. We make up the story of happiness not because it makes us happy to do so, but because we are compelled to do so by our physical nature.

In the words of Jessica Rabbit, I’m just drawn that way.

I normally wouldn’t take the scientific happiness pill because I seem to be constructed to enjoy feeling that my state of mind is substantially a product of my ongoing thoughts, not chemicals. To inject chemicals to change my thoughts is literally a form of suicide, to me. It takes the unique thought pattern that is ME, kills it, and replaces it with a thought pattern identical in some ways to anyone else who takes the pill. People alive are unique; death is the ultimate conformity and conformity a kind of death.

But the happiness illusion is complex enough that I may under some circumstances say yes to that pill and have that little suicide.

James_Bach 14 Sep 2007 21:29 UTC
3 points
on: Doublethink (Choosing to be Biased)
I’m pleased to say that, through a great deal of study and practice, I have learned how to unlearn things that I know. This is called skepticism. A key to it is the ability to imagine plausible alternatives to whatever is believed. Descartes is famous for developing this idea, although he was constrained by his society from completely embracing it. Pyrrho and Sextus Empiricus developed this idea, but their community was persecuted and destroyed by the Christians, too.

Skepticism is not opposed to rationality, but neither does it accept that a rationally derived solution to a problem is necessarily the best solution (unless you define rationality as whatever leads to the best solution, in which case you have to abandon the notion of a rational methodology).

My wife is an ongoing experiment and example for me, because she seems to live her life almost entirely without rationality and critical thinking as I recognize it. She lives instead by pattern matching and by the process of comparing real and anticipated feelings. You feel superior to her. Well, she feels superior to you. Is there a non-biased process that can decide who is right? Sure there is: mutation and natural selection. My wife is the product of billions of years of evolution, as are you. So, it seems to be a tie...

I like being “smart” and “analytical”. It’s my kind of game. I find symbolic logic fascinating. I write software using my logical mind. I enjoyed reading your wonderful tutorial on Bayesian reasoning, though I already knew the material, having read the Cartoon Guide to Statistics and the works of Tversky and Kahneman, years ago. But not since 1920 or so has it been possible to make a fully rational case for living a fully rational life. To do that you have to base your reasoning on premises, and that leads to the infinite regress problem. You have to map your premises to reality, but you don’t have direct access to reality.

I’m not attacking rationality. I love it. But why be biased in favor of it? Why not just do what works for you and leave it at that?

James_Bach 26 Aug 2007 19:25 UTC
3 points
on: Mysterious Answers to Mysterious Questions
I like your list of signs of a curiosity stopper. I don’t necessarily think that “elan vital” meets those requirements (as Roy points out), but perhaps it did for many people or at some times.

I like the list because my brain feels a little more limber and a little more powerful, having pondered it. The list is a curiosity ENHANCER, and an anticipation SHARPENER.

-- James