No; most philosophers today do, I think, believe that the alleged humanity of 9-fingered instances *homo sapiens* is a serious philosophical problem. It comes up in many “intro to philosophy” or “philosophy of science” texts or courses. Post-modernist arguments rely heavily on the belief that any sort of categorization which has any exceptions is completely invalid.
PhilGoetz
Karma: 13,021
I’m glad to see Eliezer addressed this point. This post doesn’t get across how absolutely critical it is to understand that {categories always have exceptions, and that’s okay}. Understanding this demolishes nearly all Western philosophy since Socrates (who, along with Parmenides, Heraclitus, Pythagoras, and a few others, corrupted Greek “philosophy” from the natural science of Thales and Anaximander, who studied the world to understand it, into a kind of theology, in which one dictates to the world what it must be like).
Many philosophers have recognized that Aristotle’s conception of categories fails; but most still assumed that that’s how categories must work in order to be “real”, and so proving that categories don’t work that way proved that categorizations “aren’t real”. They them became monists, like the Hindus / Buddhists / Parmenides / post-modernists. The way to avoid this is to understand nominalism, which dissolves the philosophical understanding of that quoted word “real”, and which I hope Eliezer has also explained somewhere.
I theorize that you’re experiencing at least two different common, related, yet almost opposed mental re-organizations.
One, which I approve of, accounts for many of the effects you describe under “Bemused exasperation here...”. It sounds similar to what I’ve gotten from writing fiction.
Writing fiction is, mostly, thinking, with focus, persistence, and patience, about other people, often looking into yourself to try to find some point of connection that will enable you to understand them. This isn’t quantifiable, at least not to me; but I would still call it analytic. I don’t think there’s anything mysterious about it, nor anything especially difficult other than (A) caring about other individuals—not other people, in the abstract, but about particular, non-abstract individuals—and (B) acquiring the motivation and energy to think long and hard about them. Writing fiction is the hardest thing I’ve ever done. I don’t find it as mentally draining per minute as chess, though perhaps that’s because I’m not very interested in chess. But one does it for weeks on end, not just hours.
(What I’ve just described applies only to the naturalist school of fiction, which says that fiction studies about particular, realistic individuals in particular situations in order to query our own worldview. The opposed, idealistic school of fiction says that fiction presents archetypes as instructional examples in order to promulgate your own worldview.)
The other thing, your “flibble”, sounds to me like the common effect, seen in nearly all religions and philosophies, of a drastic simplification of epistemology, when one blinds oneself to certain kinds of thoughts and collapses one’s ontology into a simpler world model, in order to produce a closed, self-consistent, over-simplified view of the world. Platonists, Christians, Hegelians, Marxists, Nazis, post-modernists, and SJWs each have a drastically-simplified view of what is in the world and how it operates, which always includes “facts” and techniques which discount all evidence to the contrary.
For example, the Buddhist / Hindu / Socratic / post-modernist technique of deconstruction relies on an over-simplified concept of what concepts and categories are—that they must have a clearly delineated boundary, or else must not exist at all. This goes along with an over-simplified logocentric conception of Truth, which claims that any claim stated in human language must be either True (necessarily, provably, 100% of the time) or False (necessarily, etc.), disregarding both context and the slipperiness of words. From there, they either choose dualism (this system really works and we must find out what is True: Plato, Christians, Hegel, Marx) or monism (our ontology is obviously broken and there is no true or false, no right or wrong, no you or me: Buddhism, Hinduism, Parmenides, Nazis, Foucault, Derrida, and other post-modernists). Nearly all of Western and Eastern philosophy is built on this misunderstanding of reality.
For another example, phenomenologists (including Heidegger), Nazis, and SJWs use the concept of “lived experience” to deny that quantified empirical observations have any epistemological value. This is how they undermine the authority of science, and elevate violence and censorship over reasoned debate as a way of resolving disagreements.
A third example is the claim, made by Parmenides, Plato, Buddhists, Hindus, Christians, and too many others to name, that the senses are misleading. This argument begins with the observation that every now and then, maybe one time in a million—say, when seeing a mirage in the desert, or a stick underwater (the most-frequent examples)--the senses mislead you. Then it concludes the senses are always wrong, and assumes that reason is always 100% reliable despite the obvious fact that no 2 philosophers have ever agreed with each other using abstract reason as a guide. It’s a monumentally stupid claim, but once one has accepted it, one can’t get rid of it, because all of the evidence that one should do so is now ruled out.
Derrida’s statement “there is no outside text” is another argument that observational evidence should be ignored, and that rather than objective quantified evidence, epistemology should be based on dialectic. In practice this means that a claim is considered proven once enough people talk about it. This is the epistemology of German idealism and post-modernism. This is why post-modernists continually talk about claims having been “proven” when a literature search can’t turn up a single argument supporting their claims; they are simply accepted as “the text” because they’ve been repeated enough. (Barthes’ “Death of the Author” is the clearest example: its origin is universally acknowledged to be Barthes’ paper of that title; yet that paper makes no arguments in favor of its thesis, but rather asserts that everyone already knows it.) Needless to say, once someone has accepted this belief, their belief system is invulnerable to any good argument, which would necessarily involve facts and observations.
The “looking up” is usually a looking away from the world and ignoring those complicating factors which make simple solutions unworkable. Your “flibble” is probably not the addition of some new understanding, but the cutting away and denial of some of the complexities of life to create a self-consistent view of the world.
Genuine enlightenment, the kind provided by the Enlightenment, or by understanding calculus, or nominalism, isn’t non-understandable. It doesn’t require any sudden leap, because it can be explained piece by piece.
There are some insights which must be experienced, such as that of learning to whistle, or ride a bicycle, or feeling your voice resonate in your sinuses for the first time when trying to learn to sing. These are all slightly mysterious; even after learning, you can’t communicate them verbally. But none of them have the grand, sweeping scale of changes in epistemology, which is the sort of thing you’re talking about, and which, I think, must necessarily always be explainable, on the grounds that the epistemology we’ve already got isn’t completely useless.
Your perception of needing to make a quantum leap in epistemology sounds like Kierkegaard’s “leap of faith”, and is symptomatic not of a gain of knowledge, but a rejection of knowledge. This rejection seems like foolishness beforehand (because it is), but like wisdom after making it (because now everything “makes sense”).
Escaping from such a trap, after having fallen into it, is even harder than making the leap of faith that constructed the trap. I was raised in an evangelical family, who went to an evangelical church, had evangelical friends, read evangelical books, and went on evangelical vacations. I’ve known thousands of evangelicals throughout my life, and not one of them other than I rejected their faith.
Genuine enlightenment doesn’t feel like suddenly understanding everything. It feels like suddenly realizing how much you don’t understand.
This sound suspiciously like Plato telling people to stop looking at the shadows on the wall of the cave, turn around, and see the transcendental Forms.
To me, saying that someone is a better philosopher than Kant seems less crazy than saying that saying that someone is a better philosopher than Kant seems crazy.
An easy reason not to play quantum roulette is that, if your theory justifying it is right, you don’t gain any expected utility; you just redistribute it, in a manner most people consider unjust, among different future yous. If your theory is wrong, the outcome is much worse. So it’s at the very best a break even / lose proposition.
The Von Neumann-Morgenstern theory is bullshit. It assumes its conclusion. See the comments by Wei Dai and gjm here.
See the 2nd-to-last paragraph of my revised comment above, and see if any of it jogs your memory.
Republic is the reference. I’m not going to take the hours it would take to give book-and-paragraph citations, because either you haven’t read the the entire Republic, or else you’ve read it, but you want to argue that each of the many terrible things he wrote don’t actually represent Plato’s opinion or desire.
(You know it’s a big book, right? 89,000 words in the Greek. If you read it in a collection or anthology, it wasn’t the whole Republic.)
The task of arguing over what in /Republic/ Plato approves or disapproves of is arduous and, I think, unnecessary.
First, everybody agrees that the topic of Republic is “social justice”, and Plato makes his position on that clear, in Republic and in his other works: Justice is when everybody accepts the job and the class they’re born into, without any grumbling or backtalk, and Plato is king and tells everybody what to do. His conclusion, that justice is when everybody minds their own business (meaning they don’t get involved in politics, which should be the business of philosophers), is clearly meant as a direct refutation of Pericles’ summary of Athenian values in his famous funeral oration: “We do not say that a man who shows no interest in politics is a man who minds his own business; we say that he has no business here at all.”
When the topic of the book is social justice, and you get to the end and it says “Justice is when everyone does what I say and stays in their place”, you should throw that book in the trash.
(This is a bit unfair to Plato, because the Greek word he used meant something more like “righteousness”. “justice” is a lousy translation. But this doesn’t matter to me, because I don’t care what Plato meant as much as I care about how people use it; and the Western tradition is to say that Plato was talking about justice. And it’s still a totalitarian conclusion, whether you call it “justice” or “righteousness”.)
This view of justice (or righteousness) is consistent with his life and his writings. He seems to support slavery as natural and proper, though he never talks about it directly; see Vlastos 1941, Slavery in Plato’s Thought. He literally /invented/ racism, in order to theorize that a stable, race-based state, in which the inferior races were completely conditioned and situated so as to be incapable of either having or acting on independent desires or thoughts, would have neither the unrest due to social mobility that democratic Athens had, nor the periodic slave revolts that Sparta had. He and his clan preferred Sparta to Athens; his uncle, a fellow student of Socrates, was the tyrant of Athens in 404 BC, appointed by Sparta; and murdered 1500 Athenian citizens, mostly for supporting democracy. Socrates was probably executed in 399 BC not for being a “gadfly”, but because the Athenians believed that they’d lost the war with Sparta thanks to the collusion of Socrates’ students with Sparta.
Plato had personal, up-close experience of the construction of a bloody totalitarian state, and far from ever expressing a word of disapproval of it, he mocked at least one of its victims in Republic, and continued to advocate totalitarian policies in his writings, such as /The Laws/. He was a wealthy aristocrat who wanted to destroy democracy and bring back the good old days when you couldn’t be taken to court just for killing a slave, as evidenced by the scorn he heaps on working people and merchants in many of his dialogues, and also his jabs at Athens and democracy; and by the Euthyphro, a dialogue with a man who’s a fool for taking his father to court for killing a slave.
One common defense of Plato is that his preferred State was the first state he described, the “true state”, in which everyone gets just what they need to survive; he actually detested the second, “fevered state”, in which people have luxuries (which, he says, can only ever be had by theft and war—property is theft!)
I find this implausible, or at best hypocritical, for several reasons.
It’s in line with the persona of Socrates, but not at all in line with Plato’s actual life of luxury as a powerful and wealthy man.
Plato spends a few paragraphs describing the “true state”, and the rest of Republic describing the “fevered state” or defending or elaborating on its controversial aspects.
He supports the totalitarian polices, such as banning all music, poetry, and art other than government propaganda, with arguments which are sometimes solid if you accept Plato’s philosophy.
Many of the controversial aspects of the “fevered state” are copied from Sparta, which Plato admired, and which his friends and family fought against; and direct opposites of Athens, which he hated.
The simplest reading of Republic, I think, is that the second state he described is one he liked to dream about, but knew wasn’t plausible.
But my second reason for thinking this debate over Plato’s intent is unimportant is that people don’t usually read Republic for its brief description of the “true state”. Either they just read the first 2 or 3 books and a few other extracts carefully chosen by professors to avoid all the nasty stuff and give the impression that Plato was legitimately trying to figure out what justice means like he claimed; or they read it to get off on the radical policies of the fevered state (which is the political equivalent of BDSM porn).
Some of the policies of that state include: breeding citizens like cattle into races that must be kept distinct, with philosophers telling everyone whom to have sex with, sometimes requiring brothers and sisters to have sex with each other (5.461e); allowing soldiers on campaign to rape any citizen they want to (5.468c); dictating jobs by race; abolishing all art, poetry, and music except government propaganda; banning independent philosophy; the death sentence for repeatedly questioning authority; forbidding doctors from wasting their time on people who are no longer useful to the State because they’re old or permanently injured; forced abortions of all children conceived without the State’s permission (including for all women over age 40 and all men over age 55); forbidding romantic love, marriage, or raising your own children; outlawing private property (5.464); allowing any citizen to violently assault any other citizen, in order to encourage citizens to stay physically fit (5.464e); and founding of the city by killing everyone over the age, IIRC, of 10. (He writes “exiling”, but you would have to kill them to get them all to give up their children; see e.g. Cambodia).
The closest anybody ever came to implementing the ideas in /Republic/ (which was not a republic, and which Plato actually titled /Polis/, “The State”) was Sparta (which it was obviously based on). The second-closest was Nazi Germany (also patterned partly on Sparta). /Brave New World/ is also similar, though much freer.
The most-important thing is to explicitly repudiate these wrong and evil parts of the traditional meaning of “progress”:
Plato’s notion of “perfection”, which included his belief that there is exactly one “perfect” society, and that our goal should be to do ABSOLUTELY ANYTHING NO MATTER HOW HORRIBLE to construct it, and then do ABSOLUTELY ANYTHING NO MATTER HOW HORRIBLE to make sure it STAYS THAT WAY FOREVER.
Hegel’s elaboration on Plato’s concept, claiming that not only is there just one perfect end-state, but that there is one and only one path of progress, and that at any one moment, there is only one possible step forward to take.
Hegel’s corollary to the above, that taking that one next step is literally the only thing in the world that matters, and therefore individual human lives don’t matter, and individual liberties such as freedom of speech are just obstructions to progress.
Hegel’s belief that movement along this path is predestined, and nothing can stop it.
Hegel’s belief that there is a God (“Weltgeist”) watching over Progress and making sure that it happens, so the only thing progressives really need to do to take that One Next Step is to destroy whatever society they’re in; and if they are indeed God’s current chosen people, God will make sure that something farther along the One True Path rises from the ashes.
The rationalist belief, implicit in Plato and Hegel but most prominent in Marx, that through dialectic we can achieve absolute certainty in our understanding of what the perfect society is, and how to get there; and at that point debate should be stopped and all opposition should be silenced.
Sorry; your example is interesting and potentially useful, but I don’t follow your reasoning. This manner of fertilization would be evidence that kin selection should be strong in Chimaphila, but I don’t see how this manner of fertilization is itself evidence that kin selection has taken place. Also, I have no good intuitions about what differences kin selection predicts in the variables you mentioned, except that maybe dispersion would be greater in Chimaphila because of teh greater danger of inbreeding. Also, kin selection isn’t controversial, so I don’t know where you want to go with this comment.
Hi, see above for my email address. Email me a request at that address. I don’t have your email. I just sent you a message.
ADDED in 2021: Some people tried to contact me thru LessWrong and Facebook. I check messages there like once a year. Nobody sent me an email at the email address I gave above. I’ve edited it to make it more clear what my email address is.
[Original first point deleted, on account of describing something that resembled Bayesian updating closely enough to make my point invalid.]
I don’t think this approach applies to most actual bad arguments.
The things we argue about the most are ones over which the population is polarized, and polarization is usually caused by conflicts between different worldviews. Worldviews are constructed to be nearly self-consistent. So you’re not going to be able to reconcile people of different worldviews by comparing proofs. Wrong beliefs come in sets, where each contradiction caused by one wrong belief is justified by other wrong beliefs.
So for instance, a LessWrongian would tell a Christian that positing a God doesn’t explain how life was made, because she’s just replaced a complex first life form with an even more-complex God, and what made God? The Christian will reliably respond that God is eternal, outside of space and time, and was never made.
This response sounds stupid to us, but it’s part of a philosophical system built by Plato, which he designed to be self-consistent. The key parts here are the inversion of “complexity” and the denial of mechanism.
The inversion of complexity is the belief that simple things are greater and more powerful than complex things. The central notion is “purity”, and pure, simple things are always superior to complicated things. God is defined as ultimate purity and simplicity. God is simple because you can fully describe Him just by saying he’s perfect, and there’s only one way of being perfect. He’s eternal, because if he had a starting-point or an ending-point in time, then other points in time would be equally good, and “perfection” would be ambiguous. “God is perfectly simple” is actually part of Catholic dogma, and derived from Plato. So a Christian doesn’t think she’s replaced complex life with a more-complex God; she’s replaced it with a more-simple and therefore more-powerful God.
The denial of mechanism is the denial that anything gets its properties mechanistically. An animal isn’t alive because it eats food and metabolizes it and reproduces; it eats food and metabolizes it and reproduces because it’s alive. Functions are magically inherited from categories (“Forms”), rather than categories arising from a cooperative combination of functions. (This is why spiritualists who believe in a good God dislike machinery. It’s an abomination to them, as it has new capabilities not inherited from any eternal Form, and their intuition is that it must be animated by some spirit other than God. They think of magic as natural, and causes other than magic as unnatural; we think just the opposite.)
Because God is perfect, He is omnipotent, and hence has every possible capability, just as he is perfect in every way. Everything less than God is less powerful, lacking some capabilities, and more-complex, because you must enumerate all those missing capabilities and perfections to describe it. (This is the metaphysics behind Tolstoy’s saying, “Every happy family is happy in the same way. Every unhappy family is unhappy in different ways.”) The Great Chain of Being is a complete linear ordering of every eternal Form, proceeding from God at the top (perfect, simple, omnipotent), down to complete lack and emptiness at the other end (which is Augustinian Evil). Each step along that chain is a loss of some perfection.
Hence, to the Christian there’s no “problem” of complexity in saying that God created life, because God is less-complex than life, and therefore also more-powerful, since complexity implies many losses of perfection and capabilities. There is no need to posit that God is complex to explain His powers, because capabilities arise from essence, not from mechanics, and God’s perfectly-simple essence is to have all capabilities. This is because Plato designed his ontology to eliminate the problem of how complex life arose.
If you argue with Marxists, post-modernists, or the Woke, you’ll similarly find that, for every solid argument you have that proves a belief of theirs is wrong, they have some assumptions which to them justify dismissing your argument. You’ll never find yourself able to compare proofs with an ideological opposite and agree on the validity of each step.
“Cynicism is a self-fulfilling prophecy; believing that an institution is bad makes the people within it stop trying, and the good people stop going there.”
I think this is a key observation. Western academia has grown continually more cynical since the advent of Marxism, which assumes an almost absolute cynicism as a point of dogma: all actions are political actions motivated by class, except those of bourgeois Marxists who for mysterious reasons advocate the interests of the proletariat.
This cynicism became even worse with Foucault, who taught people to see everything as nothing but power relations. Western academics today are such knee-jerk cynics that they can’t conceive of loyalty to any organization other than Marxism or the Social Justice movement as being anything but exploitation of the one being loyal.
Pride is the opposite of cynicism, and is one of the key feelings that makes people take brave, altruistic actions. Yet today we’ve made pride a luxury of the oppressed. Only groups perceived as oppressed are allowed to have pride in group memberships. If you said you were proud of being American, or of being manly, you’d get deplatformed, and possibly fired.
The defamation of pride in mainstream groups is thus destroying our society’s ability to create or maintain mainstream institutions. In my own cynicism, I think someone deliberately intended this. This defamation began with Marxism, and is now supported by the social justice movement, both of which are Hegelian revolutionary movements which believe that the first step toward making civilization better is to destroy it, or at least destabilize it enough to stage a coup or revolution. This is the “clean sweep” spoken of so often by revolutionaries since the French Revolution.
Since their primary goal is to destroy civilization, it makes perfect sense that they begin by convincing people that taking pride in any mainstream identity or group membership is evil, as this will be sufficient to destroy all cooperative social institutions, and hence civilization.
“At its core, this is the main argument why the Solomonoff prior is malign: a lot of the programs will contain agents with preferences, these agents will seek to influence the Solomonoff prior, and they will be able to do so effectively.”
First, this is irrelevant to most applications of the Solomonoff prior. If I’m using it to check the randomness of my random number generator, I’m going to be looking at 64-bit strings, and probably very few intelligent-life-producing universe-simulators output just 64 bits, and it’s hard to imagine how an alien in a simulated universe would want to bias my RNG anyway.
The S. prior is a general-purpose prior which we can apply to any problem. The output string has no meaning except in a particular application and representation, so it seems senseless to try to influence the prior for a string when you don’t know how that string will be interpreted.
Can you give an instance of an application of the S. prior in which, if everything you wrote were correct, it would matter?
Second, it isn’t clear that this is a bug rather than a feature. Say I’m developing a program to compress photos. I’d like to be able to ask “what are the odds of seeing this image, ever, in any universe?” That would probably compress images of plants and animals better than other priors, because in lots of universes life will arise and evolve, and features like radial symmetry, bilateral symmetry, leafs, legs, etc., will arise in many universes. This biasing of priors by evolution doesn’t seem to me different than biasing of priors by intelligent agents; evolution is smarter than any agent we know. And I’d like to get biasing from intelligent agents, too; then my photo-compressor might compress images of wheels and rectilinear buildings better.
Also in the category of “it’s a feature, not a bug” is that, if you want your values to be right, and there’s a way of learning the values of agents in many possible universes, you ought to try to figure out what their values are, and update towards them. This argument implies that you can get that for free by using Solomonoff priors.
(If you don’t think your values can be “right”, but instead you just believe that your values morally oblige you to want other people to have those values, you’re not following your values, you’re following your theory about your values, and probably read too much LessWrong for your own good.)
Third, what do you mean by “the output” of a program that simulates a universe? How are we even supposed to notice the infinitesimal fraction of that universe’s output which the aliens are influencing to subvert us? Take your example of Life—is the output a raster scan of the 2D bit array left when the universe goes static? In that case, agents have little control over the terminal state of their universe (and also, in the case of Life, the string will be either almost entirely zeroes, or almost entirely 1s, and those both already have huge Solomonoff priors). Or is it the concatenation of all of the states it goes through, from start to finish? In that case, by the time intelligent agents evolve, their universe will have already produced more bits than our universe can ever read.
Are you imagining that bits are never output unless the accidentally-simulated aliens choose to output a bit? I can’t imagine any way that could happen, at least not if the universe is specified with a short instruction string.
This brings us to the 4th problem: It makes little sense to me to worry about averaging in outputs from even mere planetary simulations if your computer is just the size of a planet, because it won’t even have enough memory to read in a single output string from most such simulations.
5th, you can weigh each program’s output proportional to 2^-T, where T is the number of steps it takes the TM to terminate. You’ve got to do something like that anyway, because you can’t run TMs to completion one after another; you’ve got to do something like take a large random sample of TMs and iteratively run each one step. Problem solved.
Maybe I’m misunderstanding something basic, but I feel like we’re talking about many angels can dance on the head of a pin.
Perhaps the biggest problem is that you’re talking about an entire universe of intelligent agents conspiring to change the “output string” of the TM that they’re running in. This requires them to realize that they’re running in a simulation, and that the output string they’re trying to influence won’t even be looked at until they’re all dead and gone. That doesn’t seem to give them much motivation to devote their entire civilization to twiddling bits in their universe’s final output in order to shift our priors infinitesimally. And if it did, the more likely outcome would be an intergalactic war over what string to output.
(I understand your point about them trying to “write themselves into existence, allowing them to effectively “break into” our universe”, but as you’ve already required their TM specification to be very simple, this means the most they can do is cause some type of life that might evolve in their universe to break into our universe. This would be like humans on Earth devoting the next billion years to tricking God into re-creating slime molds after we’re dead. Whereas the things about themselves that intelligent life actually care about with and self-identify with are those things that distinguish them from their neighbors. Their values will be directed mainly towards opposing the values of other members of their species. None of those distinguishing traits can be implicit in the TM, and even if they could, they’d cancel each other out.)
Now, if they were able to encode a message to us in their output string, that might be more satisfying to them. Like, maybe, “FUCK YOU, GOD!”
I think we learned that trolls will destroy the world.
It’s only offensive if you still think of mental illness as shameful.
Me: We could be more successful at increasing general human intelligence if we looked at low intelligence as something that people didn’t have to be ashamed of, and that could be remedied, much as how we now try to look at depression and other mental illness as illness—a condition which can often be treated and which people don’t need to be ashamed of.
You: YOU MONSTER! You want to call stupidity “mental illness”, and mental illness is a bad and shameful thing!
That’s technically true, but it doesn’t help a lot. You’re assuming one starts with fixation to non-SC in a species. But how does one get to that point of fixation, starting from fixation of SC, which is more advantageous to the individual? That’s the problem.
Finding a way for people to make money by posting good ideas is a great idea.
Saying that it should be based on the goodness of the people and how much they care is a terrible idea. Privileging goodness and caring over reason is the most well-trodden path to unreason. This is LessWrong. I go to fimfiction for rainbows and unicorns.