A Candid Optimist
pangloss
Verbal Overshadowing and The Art of Rationality
The main danger for LW is that it could remain rationalist-porn for daydreamers.
I think this is a bit more accurate.
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?
“Even in the games of children there are things to interest the greatest mathematician.” G.W. Leibniz
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.
I sense a bout of Deism coming on from our creator/sustainer.
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.”
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)
For anyone interested in wearing Frodo’s ring around your neck: http://www.myprecious.us/
It depends. Sometimes it will be sight or our other senses, sometimes it will be memory, sometimes it will be testimony.
Thinks about it this way, we take in information all the time, and draw conclusions from it. “Sight” isn’t playing a key role in face recognition except providing the data, you have a mental program for matching visual face data to previous visual face data, and that program gets screwed up if you start thinking through a description of the face after you see it.
Similarly, you see a room full of objects and events. You’ve got one or more “draw conclusions” programs that run on the data you see, and that program can get screwed up by putting things into words that you don’t normally.
The data on insight puzzles shows that if you do manage to draw the right conclusions, and you try to put into words how you did it, you may get screwed up in the following way: you are confident in explanation A for how you drew the conclusion, when, in actuality, the truth is radically different explanation B.
My claim isn’t about rationality recognition per se, it is simply this: psychology has shown that verbalizing can screw us up when dealing with a process that isn’t normally done verbally. And a lot (if not most) of our inferential processes are not done in this explicitly verbalized manner (verbalized doesn’t necessarily mean spoken aloud, but just ‘thinking through in words’).
My claim is that there are known ways to get good at verbalizing non-verbal processes, and they involve training on paradigmatic cases. It is only after such training that one can start thinking about edge cases and the borderlands without worrying that the process of discussing the cases is corrupting their thinking about the cases.
Before we can advance rationality by discussion, we must first learn to discuss rationality.
Eliezer, does your respect for Aumann’s theorem incline you to reconsider, given how many commenters think you should thoroughly prepare for this debate?
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.
Why not determine publicly to fix it?
Edited to link to accessible image.
Does it matter that you’ve misstated the problem of induction?
I guess this raises a different question: I’ve been attempting to use my up and down votes as a straight expression of how I regard the post or comment. While I can’t guarantee that I am never drawn to inadvertently engage in corrective voting (where I attempt to bring a post or comment’s karma in line with where I think it should be in an absolute sense or relative to another post), it seems as though this is your conscious approach.
What are the advantages/disadvantages or the two approaches?
From what I’ve read, one needs to train oneself on paradigm cases. So, for example, with wine tasting, you develop your verbal acuity by learning how to describe fairly ordinary wines.
I don’t know how to port this strategy over to verbal acuity for rationality.
I think the question about which cases to focus on when forming theories is different from the question of which cases to use to train oneself to verbalize one’s thoughts without interfering with one’s thinking. The latter requires us to train on paradigms, the former may be something we can pursue in either direction.
This is crucial: The thought isn’t to presuppose which direction our theorizing should go, but rather to make sure that when we theorize, we aren’t tripping ourselves up.
The Implications of Saunt Lora’s Assertion for Rationalists.
For those who are unfamiliar, Saunt Lora’s Assertion comes from the novel Anathem, and expresses the view that there are no genuinely new ideas; every idea has already been thought of.
A lot of purportedly new ideas can be seen as, at best, a slightly new spin on an old idea. The parallels between, Leibniz’s views on the nature of possibility and Arnauld’s objection, and David Lewis’s views on the nature of possibility and Kripke’s objection are but one striking example. If there is anything to the claim that we are, to some extent, stuck recycling old ideas, rather than genuinely/interestingly widening the range of views, it seems as though this should have some import for rationalists.
I voted this down, and the immediate parent up, because recognizing one’s errors and acknowledging them is worthy of Karma, even if the error was pointed out to you by another.