Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality finished today

fanfiction.net

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

61–70 of 173 posts

Re: Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality finished today

#61

Post by skybrian »

cbd1984 wrote: post #53
rpedroso wrote: post #49

Earlier 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…

There are a lot of ways to be mistaken that you're sweeping under the rug. For example, the geocentric model worked reasonably well for predicting the movements of planets.

The scientific revolutions that Kuhn was talking about often don't make the old model entirely invalid, but rather an approximation that works reasonable well in a limited domain. So the old model is not entirely true, but it's sorta true. If you're the sort of person who wants to say that theories are either true or false, it's an edge case that's not easily handled.

Re: Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality finished today

#62

Post by zyxley »

I'm seriously surprised at how many people here are fans of Yudkowsky, given his lack of any real productive output beyond thought experiments and fanfiction, the distinctly weird stuff he judges as right by taking his philosophy to the extremes (e.g. "it's better for one person to be tortured for fifty years than for an extremely large number of people to each get a speck of dust in their eye"), and the way he treats certain fringe positions as absolutely true despite the lack of any solid evidence to support them (for example, many-worlds theory).

Re: Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality finished today

#63

Post by Dylan16807 »

rpedroso wrote: post #59
fmblwntr wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 :)

(the comment you're replying to doesn't make any sense as anything other than sarcasm)

Re: Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality finished today

#64

Post by rpedroso »

Dylan16807 wrote: post #63
rpedroso wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 :)

(the comment you're replying to doesn't make any sense as anything other than sarcasm)

Yeah, I realized that in retrospect. Thanks for not being harsh about it!

Re: Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality finished today

#65

Post by Mr24601 »

Fascinating and excellent story. I was originally "eye rolling" at the diatribe against death, but I changed my mind when I realized how few people really have different and thought provoking opinions on what we think about the status quo. The rationality of the argument got past my original response, in time.

Re: Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality finished today

#66

Post by kbenson »

RodericDay wrote: post #52
cbd1984 wrote: post #51

Earlier 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…

Thanks for the link to the essay. The images are interesting, I didn't get that anything was going on until the third one. It's pretty good reading once you pick up on his humor. This passage is a gem:

> The reluctant scion of a domineering steel tycoon, one of the wealthiest men in Europe, Wittgenstein spent his childhood hob-nobbing with the highest of imperial Viennese high society — and society doesn't get much higher than that. Groomed from an early age to take over his father's industrial empire, Wittgenstein instead fucked off to England at the earliest opportunity, to devote his life to the study of the most uncommercial and practically useless subject he could find. Russell proved an ideal mentor, and Predicate Logic an ideal subject.

Re: Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality finished today

#67

Post by JoshTriplett »

rpedroso wrote: post #58
cbd1984 wrote: post #53

Earlier 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…

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…

That doesn't invalidate the scientific method, nor does it preclude having a best-known model that matches all the currently available experimental data. New data that invalidates a model will necessitate a new model, or a new model may come along with better predictive power.

And to use current rationalist terminology: any given scientific model has an associated probability estimate for being true, which is very close to but not equal to 1; any work built on top of that model will depend on the truth of the model; and invalidating a model in favor of a new one requires re-evaluating any work based on that model. The "giant shifts" you're referring to occur when a model lower down the stack, with a pile of things built on it, gets invalidated or replaced by a better model.

On a day-to-day basis, you don't typically re-evaluate the validity of Newtonian or relativistic physics. Most of us regularly use Newtonian models despite knowing that they don't exactly match how the universe works. And we know that relativistic models don't exactly match how the universe works either (notably on a very small scale), though we don't have better models yet that work on both small and large scales.

Re: Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality finished today

#69

Post by runT1ME »

cbd1984 wrote: post #53
rpedroso wrote: post #49

Earlier 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…

>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.

We actually use logic along with induction to get a lot of theories. The fact that it works is proved by the scientific method, not the other way around.

Post reply on HN