Earlier quoted context omitted.
Serious question: what would you recommend, instead of empiricism?
Positivism. Logical positivism.
> Positivism. Logical positivism.
Isn't this name taken by a somewhat different philosophy?
Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality finished today
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Re: Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality finished today
#52Earlier quoted context omitted.
Positivism. Logical positivism.
> Positivism. Logical positivism. Isn't this name taken by a somewhat different philosophy?
I don't think so. Parent asserts,
> this movement appears to be a kind of hyper-empiricism informed by cognitive psychology, AI research, and Bayesian statistics.
Opening intro from wiki for Logical Positivism asserts,
> Logical positivism and logical empiricism, which together formed neopositivism, was a movement in Western philosophy that embraced verificationism, an approach that sought to legitimize philosophical discourse on a basis shared with the best examples of empirical sciences.
Stephen Bond had a neat essay, perhaps a bit dubious on the AI/declarative side, about this exact topic. He writes a bit acerbically, but read at least past "For a long time I accepted this explanation at face value...".
Re: Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality finished today
#53Earlier quoted context omitted.
Serious question: what would you recommend, instead of empiricism?
One thing the parent didn't bring up was there was a philosophical movement called "rationalism" that preceded the contemporary movement that refers itself by the same name. These so-called "Continental Rationalists" included philosophers like Descartes and Leibniz. The British Empiricist movement, featuring Locke, Berkeley and Hume, arose in response to the Continental Rationalists. One of the key points of contenti…
> Thomas Kuhn's "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions" calls into question the very idea of there being a "scientific truth" that is independent of historical assumptions.
OK, let's do this.
We have a scientific theory.
From it, we derive some engineering discipline, which uses the theory to, essentially, make predictions about what will happen if we do this to that, with the property that, if the predictions hold true, we'll have something useful.
The people following the engineering discipline create things.
Those things work.
Does that not, then, validate the scientific theory?
And if that scientific theory is validated, does that not knock Kuhn on his ass?
Because the forces which the artifact the engineers created is subject to don't give a rat's ass what our current culture says. They were the same billions of years ago and will be the same billions of years hence, the existence of our species or intelligent life at all notwithstanding.
OK, some fields of science don't make sense without humans to study. Right. But others will still be just as true if we're wiped out and replaced by sapient Corvidae, or not replaced at all.
Re: Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality finished today
#54Earlier quoted context omitted.
One thing the parent didn't bring up was there was a philosophical movement called "rationalism" that preceded the contemporary movement that refers itself by the same name. These so-called "Continental Rationalists" included philosophers like Descartes and Leibniz. The British Empiricist movement, featuring Locke, Berkeley and Hume, arose in response to the Continental Rationalists. One of the key points of contenti…
> Thomas Kuhn's "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions" calls into question the very idea of there being a "scientific truth" that is independent of historical assumptions. OK, let's do this. We have a scientific theory. From it, we derive some engineering discipline, which uses the theory to, essentially, make predictions about what will happen if we do this to that , with the property that, if the predictions hol…
I think it's weird that Kuhn never realized that things work. Could have saved himself a lot of work.
Re: Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality finished today
#55Earlier quoted context omitted.
I read well through chapter 70. I did imply that scientific investigation shows up a little , after all! I agree that the line people gave me wasn't correct, but I've heard that line enough that I felt it was appropriate to dispel that particular notion. Perhaps also germane is that I am not personally a believer in Less Wrong-style rationality, and so the intellectual content of the work was not relevant to me excep…
May I ask what about "Less Wrong-style rationality" you disagree with?
This is the kind of thing which could very easily turn into a flame war, and is much further off-topic. I'm not interested in that kind of argument right now, so all I will say in this thread is this:
My personal experience with Less Wrong-style rationalism, to simplify the situation aggressively, is that it has a core of good, useful tools (Bayesian reasoning, strict positivism, utilitarianism) that I have no problem with. However, when pushed too far, those tools tend to break down—but the rationalist answer to that breakdown is all too often to embrace the model and discount the reality. This general refusal to regard their core tools with suspicion results in beliefs which are paradoxically irrational: when faced with e.g., utilitarianism condoning torture to prevent mild discomfort, the rationalist response is not, "Perhaps human experience does not map straightforwardly to integers—we should re-examine our tools," but rather, "As our mathematical tools are of course correct, we must believe in this conclusion." This belief in math-over-matter is a major part (though not the only factor) in my skepticism towards the kind of rationalism promoted by Less Wrong.
Re: Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality finished today
#56I'm wondering if this will be published as a physical book. I prefer reading more than a few pages on normal paper.
Fan fiction at best is a grey area and at worst is blatant copyright infringement.
The community seems more than happy to leave it in that place rather than put it to the test by publishing something like that or attempting to make money from that.
As soon as someone tries to make money from it, even if just to recoup self-publishing costs there will be a lawsuit and it'll be decided concretely, probably not in the community's favor.
Re: Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality finished today
#57Thank you, Eliezer. It's been a great run and the last few weeks have been indeed special
Re: Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality finished today
#58Earlier quoted context omitted.
One thing the parent didn't bring up was there was a philosophical movement called "rationalism" that preceded the contemporary movement that refers itself by the same name. These so-called "Continental Rationalists" included philosophers like Descartes and Leibniz. The British Empiricist movement, featuring Locke, Berkeley and Hume, arose in response to the Continental Rationalists. One of the key points of contenti…
> Thomas Kuhn's "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions" calls into question the very idea of there being a "scientific truth" that is independent of historical assumptions. OK, let's do this. We have a scientific theory. From it, we derive some engineering discipline, which uses the theory to, essentially, make predictions about what will happen if we do this to that , with the property that, if the predictions hol…
Kuhn never denies that there are facts about the universe that we can observe. And I agree with you about this general class of example: no number of scientific discoveries or paradigm shifts will ever make the photoelectric effect cease occurring.
Kuhn's argument is that science occasionally undergoes what he calls "paradigm shifts" -- a low-level shift in assumptions about a certain realm of scientific thought that fundamentally changes the way we approach a particular field. One example Kuhn gives is the Copernican Revolution. Copernicus, as we all know, proposed the heliocentric solar model. Before Copernicus, most people used Ptolemy's epicycles to model the movement of planetary bodies. Initially, it worked, but the cracks started to show as observations accumulated. A major shift in our assumptions about the organization and modeling of planetary bodies had to occur before scientific progress could move forward.
In this sense, scientific knowledge progresses in giant shifts, rather than linearly or incrementally. Consider the theory of atomism how it was disrupted by the Rutherford Gold Foil experiment, or the Double-Slit experiment and what that did for physics. A dominant paradigm must always make way for a new paradigm in order for scientific progress to occur.
The upshot of all of this, according to Kuhn, is that the criteria for scientific truth are always caught up in certain historical assumptions and that we have to take these assumptions into account when assessing the veracity of a given theory. He doesn't say that there aren't facts about the universe, but rather, that the scientific approach to understanding the universe is caught up in a paradigmatic frame which makes it impossible to derive a simple, objective algorithm/process for scientific discovery.
Does that make sense?
Re: Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality finished today
#59Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Thomas Kuhn's "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions" calls into question the very idea of there being a "scientific truth" that is independent of historical assumptions. OK, let's do this. We have a scientific theory. From it, we derive some engineering discipline, which uses the theory to, essentially, make predictions about what will happen if we do this to that , with the property that, if the predictions hol…
I think it's weird that Kuhn never realized that things work. Could have saved himself a lot of work.
This is a fairly uncharitable interpretation of Kuhn's thought. Please read my above explanation of Kuhn's thought or, better yet, skip the middleman and read "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions" and get it from the man himself :)
Re: Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality finished today
#60Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Positivism. Logical positivism. Isn't this name taken by a somewhat different philosophy?
I don't think so. Parent asserts, > this movement appears to be a kind of hyper-empiricism informed by cognitive psychology, AI research, and Bayesian statistics. Opening intro from wiki for Logical Positivism asserts, > Logical positivism and logical empiricism, which together formed neopositivism, was a movement in Western philosophy that embraced verificationism, an approach that sought to legitimize philosophical…
The wikipedia definition isn't the clearest definition of logical positivism. If I had to define logical positivism in one sentence (which, in philosophy, is almost universally a bad idea), I would say something like this:
Logical positivism is a philosophical movement which maintains that statements are only meaningful if they can be formally derived or empirically verified.
In that respect, I think that logical positivism and the kind of empiricist approach identified by the OP have a significant amount in common. Similarly, I think the approaches share many of the same problems.