A Candid Optimist
pangloss
Karma: 189
I am not sure I agree with your second concern. Sometimes premature formalization can take us further off track than leaving things with intuitively accessible handles for thinking about them.
Formalizing things, at its best, helps reveal the hidden assumptions we didn’t know we were making, but at its worst, it hard-codes some simplifying assumptions into the way we start talking and thinking about the topic at hand. For instance, as soon as we start to formalize sentences of the form “If P, then Q” as material implication, we adopt an analysis of conditionals that straightjackets them into the role of an extensional (truth-functional) semantics. It is not uncommon for someone who just took introductory logic train themselves into forcing natural language into this mold, rather than evaluating the adequacy of the formalism for explaining natural language.
He that uses his words loosely and unsteadily will either not be minded or not understood. - John Locke
“Even in the games of children there are things to interest the greatest mathematician.” G.W. Leibniz
“Morals excite passions, and produce or prevent actions. Reason of itself is utterly impotent in this particular. The rules of morality, therefore, are not conclusions of our reason.”—David Hume
Note about the selection of this quote: While I am not inclined towards the position that reason is (and ought to be) slave to the passions, I considered this a good quote on the topic of rationality because it concisely presents one of the most fundamental challenges for rationalism as such.
This post reminds me of Aristotle’s heuristics for approaching the mean when one tends towards the extremes:
“That moral virtue is a mean, then, and in what sense it is so, and that it is a mean between two vices, the one involving excess, the other deficiency, and that it is such because its character is to aim at what is intermediate in passions and in actions, has been sufficiently stated. Hence also it is no easy task to be good. For in everything it is no easy task to find the middle, e.g. to find the middle of a circle is not for every one but for him who knows; so, too, any one can get angry- that is easy- or give or spend money; but to do this to the right person, to the right extent, at the right time, with the right motive, and in the right way, that is not for every one, nor is it easy; wherefore goodness is both rare and laudable and noble.
Hence he who aims at the intermediate must first depart from what is the more contrary to it, as Calypso advises-
Hold the ship out beyond that surf and spray.
For of the extremes one is more erroneous, one less so; therefore, since to hit the mean is hard in the extreme, we must as a second best, as people say, take the least of the evils; and this will be done best in the way we describe. But we must consider the things towards which we ourselves also are easily carried away; for some of us tend to one thing, some to another; and this will be recognizable from the pleasure and the pain we feel. We must drag ourselves away to the contrary extreme; for we shall get into the intermediate state by drawing well away from error, as people do in straightening sticks that are bent.” (NE, II.9)
i believe that linguists would typically claim that it is formed by legitimate rules of English syntax, but point out that there might be processing constraints on humans that eliminate some syntactically well formed sentences from the category of grammatical sentences of English.
Eliezer, does your respect for Aumann’s theorem incline you to reconsider, given how many commenters think you should thoroughly prepare for this debate?
That is an interesting contrast with Spinoza’s view that all ideas enter the mind as beliefs, and that mere apprehension is achieved by diminishing something about the idea believed.
“Never believe a thing simply because you want it to be true.”—Diax
This reminds me of a Peter Geach quote: “The moral philosophers known as Objectivists would admit all that I have said as regards the ordinary uses of the terms good and bad; but they allege that there is an essentially different, predicative use of the terms in such utterances as pleasure is good and preferring inclination to duty is bad, and that this use alone is of philosophical importance. The ordinary uses of good and bad are for Objectivists just a complex tangle of ambiguities. I read an article once by an Objectivist exposing these ambiguities and the baneful effects they have on philosophers not forewarned of them. One philosopher who was so misled was Aristotle; Aristotle, indeed, did not talk English, but by a remarkable coincidence ἀγαθός had ambiguities quite parallel to those of good. Such coincidences are, of course, possible; puns are sometimes translatable. But it is also possible that the uses of ἀγαθός and good run parallel because they express one and the same concept; that this is a philosophically important concept, in which Aristotle did well to be interested; and that the apparent dissolution of this concept into a mass of ambiguities results from trying to assimilate it to the concepts expressed by ordinary predicative adjectives.”
I don’t think making a move towards logical positivism or adopting a verificationist criterion of meaning would count as a victory.
You say: You’re right; yet no one ever sees it this way. Before Darwin, no one said, “This idea that an intelligent creator existed first doesn’t simplify things.”
I may have to look up where before Darwin it gets argued, but I am pretty sure people challenged that before Darwin.
Oh, that’s a good point. I was assuming Aristotle was commending people who could hear it without coming to believe it, but it could easily be that he is commending people who diminish their belief rapidly, and acquire a state of mere apprehension.
I didn’t think that one had to. That is what your challenge to the theist sounded like. I think that religious language is coherent but false, just like phlogiston or caloric language.
Denying that the theist is even making an assertion, or that their language is coherent is a characteristic feature of positivism/verificationism, which is why I said that.
Not sure I disagree with your position, but I voted down because simply stating that your opponent is wrong doesn’t seem adequate.
Edited to link to accessible image.
Am I wrong, or are you conflating disregarding past costs in evaluating costs and benefits with failing to remember past costs when making predictions about future costs and benefits?
It seems pretty clear that the sunk cost consideration is that past costs don’t count in terms of how much it now would cost you to pursue using vendor A vs. pursuing vendor B, while induction requires you to think, “every time we go with Vendor A, he messes up, so if we go with Vendor A, he will likely mess up again”.
What’s the conflict?
I think I may have been too brief/unclear, so I am going to try again:
The fallacy of sunk costs is, in some sense, to count the fact that you have already expended costs on a plan as a benefit of that plan. So, no matter how much it has already cost you to pursue project A, avoiding the fallacy means treating the decision about whether to continue pursuing A, or to pursue B (assuming both projects have equivalent benefits) as equivalent to the question of whether there are more costs remaining for A, or more costs remaining for B.
The closest to relevant thing induction tells us is how to convert our evidence into predictions about the remaining costs of the projects. This doesn’t conflict, because induction tells us only that, if projects like A tend to get a lot harder from the point you are at, that your current project is likely to get a lot harder from the point you are at.
There just isn’t a conflict there.
You can also induce from what incentives you seem to respond to how to increase the probability that you will do B. For instance, if telling your friends that you plan to do a project has a high correlation with your doing that project, then you can increase your probability that you will do B by telling your friends that you plan to do B.
The word is “rationality”, and we should be trying to spread it, because rationality (in ourselves and in others) is useful (to ourselves and others).
The proper way to spread it is to show others how rationality can benefit them, and assist them in their development as rationalists.
Don’t think about people as divided into two groups: those who are rationalists and those who are not. Rather, think of them as practicing rationalists or potentially practicing rationalists.
There is not a single strategy for spreading the word; the number of techniques needed to help people to become practicing rationalists is almost as large as the number of people there are.
Just as it would make no sense to bury a duckling in the soil and pour water on it, or to throw bits of bread at a turnip seed, it may make no sense to attempt to intellectually nourish your grandparents by giving them a link to this blog, or to try to awaken the rationalist within your significant other by challenging them to a game of chess.
So, rationality enjoins us to spread the word, but, as with all things, it enjoins us to spread the word rationally. In essence, all preaching should be personalized.