False Positivism • Hacker News Board

Re: False Positivism

#11

Post by greenail » Tue, Oct 19, 2021, 7:07 PM UTC

tunesmith wrote: post #10

greenail wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The bigger problem is this postmodern view creates a bit of a circular problem. Someone needs to decide what the moral values are. Oppressor's are evil (both consciously and unconsciously) and do not have an accurate view of the world. The lived experience of the oppressed situates them to better make this judgement. Once they can make that judgement they gain power. Power corrupts. The oppressed becomes the oppresso…

How on earth is that postmodern? Unless you define Hume himself as postmodern. It's a classic is/ought problem. Just because two sets of people have different values doesn't mean one value isn't clearly better than the other. You and I can disagree on something like whether human life has value, but the one who holds it to have value is likely to have a lot more support. Did postmodernism get redefined to mean anyone…

"Foucault’s ideas gave rise in the 1970s and ’80s to philosophical postmodernism, a movement characterized by broad epistemological skepticism and ethical subjectivism, a general suspicion of reason, and an acute sensitivity to the role of ideology in asserting and maintaining political and economic power. Postmodernists attacked the attempt by Enlightenment philosophers and others to discover allegedly objective moral values that could serve as a standard for assessing different political systems or for measuring political progress from one historical period to another. According to Jean-François Lyotard (1924–98), for example, this project represents a secular faith that must be abandoned. In La Condition postmoderne (1979; The Postmodern Condition) and other writings, Lyotard declared his suspicion of what he called “grand narratives”—putatively rational, overarching accounts, such as Marxism and liberalism, of how the world is or ought to be. He asserted that political conflicts in contemporary societies reflect the clash of incommensurable values and perspectives and are therefore not rationally decidable."

https://www.britannica.com/topic/political-philosophy/Foucau...

Re: False Positivism

#12

Post by tunesmith » Tue, Oct 19, 2021, 8:03 PM UTC

greenail wrote: post #11

tunesmith wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How on earth is that postmodern? Unless you define Hume himself as postmodern. It's a classic is/ought problem. Just because two sets of people have different values doesn't mean one value isn't clearly better than the other. You and I can disagree on something like whether human life has value, but the one who holds it to have value is likely to have a lot more support. Did postmodernism get redefined to mean anyone…

"Foucault’s ideas gave rise in the 1970s and ’80s to philosophical postmodernism, a movement characterized by broad epistemological skepticism and ethical subjectivism, a general suspicion of reason, and an acute sensitivity to the role of ideology in asserting and maintaining political and economic power. Postmodernists attacked the attempt by Enlightenment philosophers and others to discover allegedly objective mor…

Someone should just stick a fork in the term "postmodern" and finally declare it dead. The above meaning I largely agree with, as would Hume. Of course people can have different values, and of course people with different values, faced with the same facts, might come up with different normative conclusions of what should be done about it.

But that's a far cry from how postmodernism is often decried, as something that professes no objective truth at all, or as a bunch of lazy moral relativism, where the value itself changes depending on circumstance.

So you can easily have two people fighting about postmodernism that might even largely agree with each other; that they dislike moral relativism. But one would attack post-modernism, and the other would defend it, neither really quite clear what they are actually talking about. Which seems to be another definition of postmodernism itself.

Anyway. :) Back to your original question. Given the absence of actual moral facts (which I take as axiomatic), I think the answer is limited to some public decision process that decides which moral values are in force, along with an effective way to re-decide frequently in a way that avoids the problems of becoming insular and self-reinforcing.

Re: False Positivism

#13

Post by mdp2021 » Tue, Oct 19, 2021, 8:54 PM UTC

tunesmith wrote: post #8

Simplify the question of models/algorithms by pretending these models are simply cold hard scientific facts. The problems still remain - people will interpret them differently. Different people will combine those universal facts with their own differing moral values, to come up with different conclusions on how those facts should be used. The solution is not to restrict the existence of models/algorithms/facts, but t…

(Disregarding a few complexities about the quality and stability of the models)

The problem of linking different "facts" and actions is ancient and has a plain solution: the politician applies the weighs of different interests according to the relative power behind those interests (including tactical or strategical considerations about the consequences). I am not sure that to call those interests «moral values» is actually healthy.

One issue we cannot disregard is that not only facts can be tentative: the main issue we have is with tentative solutions - it is more with guessing which solution will be effective (its estimated consequences get weighed according to the interests in order to rank the proposal) than to decide which interpretation of the world is more adequate.

Edit: anyway, Bratton seems to be fully aware and explicit in considering that "fact are less of an issue than solutions" and that "said solutions are to be calibrated subjectively, politically - since an "objective", all-encompassing algorithm is out of reach".

Re: False Positivism

#14

Post by mdp2021 » Tue, Oct 19, 2021, 9:36 PM UTC

greenail wrote: post #7

Solzhenitsyn had a few things to say about relinquishing individual responsibility in favor of group think. Abandoning the individual for a bleak world of oppression power dynamics and the postmodern notion that there is no objective truth sounds pretty terrible. This reads like Diversity Inclusion and Equity AI nightmare. "To the degree that individuals refuse to be modeled, they are to blame for the models’ failure…

Polack does not seem to be one that makes the theories of the commented (Bratton) clearer by drawing a preliminary untangled map. Before commenting on Bratton's ideas themselves we should (unfortunately) clarify them by reading them directly, as Polack's review does not really work as a summary.