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Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality finished today

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Re: Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality finished today

#111

Post by snowwrestler »

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…

The hang-up in these discussions is the concept of "truth."

Newton's physics are useful in engineering; in fact they have been good enough for almost every engineering project mankind has ever undertaken, including complex stuff like landing a robot on a comet. But are they true?

Well, we know they are not complete. There is evidence that Newton can't explain; that's how we ended up with our modern theories of quantum mechanics and general relativity. But are those true?

Because we know we cannot reconcile them with one another. And then there is dark matter and dark energy, which are as yet unexplained, and might comprise about 95% of the known mass/energy of the universe.

More prosaically, think of the last time you saw a bird fly. What's the "truth" there? Your observation, or the theories of quantum mechanics and gravity, which we believe govern the matter and energy of the bird?

In programming we have a concept of "leaky abstractions"--build a layer of abstraction on top an underlying technology, and chances are at some point, someone will have to descend to the underlying technology to fix a bug or find an optimization.

What if our entire history of scientific observation is just a collection of leaky abstractions? We have no way of telling in advance when we've reached the bottom. So the theory we think might be "true" today, might turn out to be a leaky abstraction tomorrow.

Edit to add: Cultural and historical assumptions raise their heads when we find the holes in the abstractions and are trying to explain them. In the absence of reliable theories, or in the face of seemingly incompatible observations, we just try to sort of apply what we already know.

Kuhn's idea is not that scientific knowledge might be wrong. It's that human beings might be wrong when they think they know what the truth, or reality.

Einstein said of quantum mechanics, "God does not play dice," and he spent years trying to prove that the universe is as deterministic as he believed it to be. That's what the voice of historical assumptions sounds like.

Re: Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality finished today

#112

Post by MichaelGG »

zyxley wrote: post #110
MichaelGG wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>.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"), The number in question was 3^^^3 using Knuth's Up Arrow Notation. As he explains, that's a lot of people: (3^(3^(3^(... 7625597484987 times ...)))). If we decide that one person being tortured for 50 years is worth a quick blink by all those other people, then a stil…

> I think the issue is that people tend to round down "speck of dust" to 0, then multiply, then find of course any amount of torture isn't worth 0. Why not round it down to 0? There's some level of discomfort in everyday life to start with that's effectively negligible for any normal person, simply because it's a prerequisite for interacting with the world (getting a raindrop in your eye, dealing with a minor wedgie,…

If you round down before multiplying, then you get an invalid answer. First multiply it out. So in my example, torturing 7,625,597,484,987 people for 50 years, versus that many specks of dust for everyone else. (7 trillion is essentially 1, compared to 3^^^3, right?) 7 trillion specks of dust is enough to turn all those other lives into torture, as 7 trillion specks of dust is a few thousand a second, for a very long life.

That's why you can't round down first. Eliezer's entire intent there is to illustrate that by default, we suck at scale, we're scope insensitive.

Another way: If everyone in the US gave just a penny directly to a poor person, once in a lifetime, that person would be wealthy for life and be OK, right? A penny rounds down to zero, thus we can determine that the right action is to always give money directly to poor individuals, as this will cure poverty at a cost of nothing.

You're right that if the only choice, ever, in the entire multiverse was this one 50 years or 3^^^3 specks of dust, then sure, you don't need to follow the rules/math. But we're never going to be faced with just a single decision. Instead, we should be consistent and follow the numbers to determine utility.

Re: Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality finished today

#113

Post by zyxley »

MichaelGG wrote: post #112
zyxley wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I think the issue is that people tend to round down "speck of dust" to 0, then multiply, then find of course any amount of torture isn't worth 0. Why not round it down to 0? There's some level of discomfort in everyday life to start with that's effectively negligible for any normal person, simply because it's a prerequisite for interacting with the world (getting a raindrop in your eye, dealing with a minor wedgie,…

If you round down before multiplying, then you get an invalid answer. First multiply it out. So in my example, torturing 7,625,597,484,987 people for 50 years, versus that many specks of dust for everyone else. (7 trillion is essentially 1, compared to 3^^^3, right?) 7 trillion specks of dust is enough to turn all those other lives into torture, as 7 trillion specks of dust is a few thousand a second, for a very long…

> If you round down before multiplying, then you get an invalid answer.

Your argument here is based on the premise that the subjectively-inflicted-pain of "a whole lot of specks of dust in a person's eye" can be treated as a multiple of "one speck of dust in a person's eye", which to me is the point of absurdity that makes the whole thought exercise fall apart.

Re: Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality finished today

#114

Post by cbd1984 »

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…

> 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.

If your historical assumptions are true in a useful way, your science will progress to the point where you have more-useful engineering; if they're wrong in an important way, your science will stall out, or give you the wrong answers. If they're neither, and they don't affect the ultimate utility of your predictions one way or the other, it all becomes a bit academic: Is it even useful to say your theories are wrong if they keep making good predictions and allow scientific progress to be made? Note well that atomism (pre-quantum) and geocentrism eventually stopped making good predictions, stopped being a gateway to more complete theories, or both. (For example, geocentrism is probably impossible to integrate with universal gravitation.)

"Truth" is something mathematics has access to, not physics. Truth-With-A-Capital-T is Absolute, Perfect, Incorruptible, and utterly inconsistent with reality as it is outside of the symbol-games we play in our minds, because Platonism is downright insane.

Therefore, "scientific truth" is contingent, sure, but it's contingent on more than mere fashions. It's contingent on experimentation and experiments don't care if your histories are contingent one way, the other, or the other way entirely. Nobody's histories were contingent enough to imagine the Earth repelled small rocks.

So Kuhn agrees that there is a universe and that there are, at least potentially, facts about that universe humans are capable of discovering. That puts him a few up on some philosophers. However, I don't agree that our criteria for scientific truth is fully entwined with our historical accidents as long as we rely on science to predict what the non-human world is going to do.

Re: Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality finished today

#115

Post by raincom »

rpedroso wrote: post #49
jessaustin wrote: post #42

Earlier 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…

Aren't we past Kuhn these days? For instance, Imre Lakatos take it further than Kuhn in his "Research Programs". And Larry Laudan takes it further than these two: research traditions and problem-soloving. Well, we have all -isms (positivism, empiricism, constructive empricism) pragmatism, realism), which are to explain the progress of knowledge (natural sciences, that is).

Re: Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality finished today

#116

Post by Houshalter »

zyxley wrote: post #113
MichaelGG wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you round down before multiplying, then you get an invalid answer. First multiply it out. So in my example, torturing 7,625,597,484,987 people for 50 years, versus that many specks of dust for everyone else. (7 trillion is essentially 1, compared to 3^^^3, right?) 7 trillion specks of dust is enough to turn all those other lives into torture, as 7 trillion specks of dust is a few thousand a second, for a very long…

> If you round down before multiplying, then you get an invalid answer. Your argument here is based on the premise that the subjectively-inflicted-pain of "a whole lot of specks of dust in a person's eye" can be treated as a multiple of "one speck of dust in a person's eye", which to me is the point of absurdity that makes the whole thought exercise fall apart.

That's just basic utilitarianism. What exactly are you objecting to? That 2 dust specks in 2 people's eyes isn't exactly twice as bad as 1 dust speck?

Re: Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality finished today

#117

Post by zyxley »

Houshalter wrote: post #116
zyxley wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If you round down before multiplying, then you get an invalid answer. Your argument here is based on the premise that the subjectively-inflicted-pain of "a whole lot of specks of dust in a person's eye" can be treated as a multiple of "one speck of dust in a person's eye", which to me is the point of absurdity that makes the whole thought exercise fall apart.

That's just basic utilitarianism. What exactly are you objecting to? That 2 dust specks in 2 people's eyes isn't exactly twice as bad as 1 dust speck?

> What exactly are you objecting to?

That some arbitrarily minimal amount of subjective pain can be presumed to be actually distinguishable from the general background unpleasantness of being human in the first place.

Edit: Rephrased to remove gibberish resulting from temporary brain/keyboard disconnect.

Re: Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality finished today

#118

Post by saraid216 »

judk wrote: post #98
andolanra wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 proble…

And yet no one has really made an convincing argument of why the conclusions of utilitarianism contradict the axioms of utilitarianism. And no one seems to offer the rather simple solution that utility is non-linear (so dust in ones eye is really a quite small fraction as bad as a century of torture), and people who mock Eliezer's utilitarianism hypocritically do so on sweatshops built&recycled computers, clothes, an…

The really funny part of HPMOR is that, while it was intended to demonstrate rationalism, what I got out of it was that rationalism doesn't actually work.

I'm unwilling to post spoilers, which makes this unfairly undiscussable, but the meaning of the original prophecy did not--could not--come down to rationalism and could not for reasons that were repeated a few times through the fic. I can't tell if this was intentional on Yudkowsky's part, and I don't really care, since it really changes nothing about everything else.

For the record, though, when I disparage utilitarianism, I promise it isn't just "Eliezer's".

Re: Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality finished today

#119

Post by saraid216 »

raincom wrote: post #115
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…

Aren't we past Kuhn these days? For instance, Imre Lakatos take it further than Kuhn in his "Research Programs". And Larry Laudan takes it further than these two: research traditions and problem-soloving. Well, we have all -isms (positivism, empiricism, constructive empricism) pragmatism, realism), which are to explain the progress of knowledge (natural sciences, that is).

You have to remember that, in this era where there are more books in existence than is possible for a single person to read within a lifetime, most people haven't heard of everything.

I've certainly never heard of the two names you dropped.

Re: Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality finished today

#120

Post by jtheory »

Mr24601 wrote: post #65

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.

Similar here -- there are plenty of huge pitfalls there, if we don't die; but that's not the same thing as saying the pitfalls are insurmountable, and I value things that get me thinking without just hitting "oh, that's dumb" after a bit of reflection.
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