From: Dan Fabulich (dfabulich@warpmail.net)
Date: Wed Jun 18 2003 - 17:39:29 MDT
Eliezer S. Yudkowsky wrote:
> Dan Fabulich wrote:
> >>
> >> Nature doesn't work that way in constructing explanations; how could it
> >> be a good method for discovering them?
> >
> > My first response: "I would least expect to get this kind of argument
> > HERE, of all places! Isn't it rather the point that we can do a bit
> > better than nature?"
>
> When I am *designing* something, then yes, I will try and make the design
> modular because that is a good heuristic for humans to use. When I am
> trying to *discover* something I will not try to make the *explanation*
> modular unless I think the *reality* is modular - the purpose of the map
> is to correspond to the territory, after all. If you can build a theory
> that's modular, just because you want it to be modular, doesn't that mean
> you're inventing something rather than discovering something? Is this not
> the very essence of "mere philosophization", building maps unconstrained
> by territory?
I think you're getting yourself confused with the language of
"unconstrained by territory". I also note that you simply snipped my
Bayesian argument, which I took to be the meat of my point.
Given a theory T and our background theory B, we regard our theory T to
*more* likely if P(T|~B) is higher, *regardless* of P(B), all else being
equal. Do you contest this for some reason?
Let's suppose I agree with you that any theory T for which P(T|B) and
P(T|~B) are both high is less "constrained by the territory" than an
alternate theory T', under which P(T'|B) = P(T|B), but P(T'|~B) is very
low. T' is constrained by the territory. T is less constrained by the
territory. Are you trying to tell me, against Bayes, that we should hold
T' to be more likely than T, because T is "mere philosophy" whereas T' is
"constrained by the facts"?
Now, don't get me wrong: being unconstrained by the territory CAN be a bad
thing. But it's a bad thing only if you are philosophizing *instead* of
using all the data that's available.
(This can happen in at least two seemingly different ways: you may either
make a claim that is too weak, because you refrain from making a deeper
correct judgment when only allowing yourself access to some subset of the
data, or you may make a claim that is false [or not supported as strongly
as you might think], because it would be contradicted by further evidence
that you refuse to consider. A Bayesian would assimilate both types of
errors as mistakes about the likelihood of certain propositions, either
too low or too high.)
But that's not at all the case in my T & T' example, by construction, and
it doesn't apply to our "Why believe the truth" argument either.
Nobody's saying that we shouldn't consider the probability of a
Singularity [P(T|B)] in our calculations. But we ARE saying that a theory
that applies well to Singularitarians and non-Singularitarians alike is a
better theory, more likely to be true, than a theory that applies equally
well to Singularitarians but not at all to non-Singularitarians, ceteris
paribus.
Indeed, this very argument, is all-the-stronger because it has nothing to
do with being an academic; it has everything to do with the consequences
of accepting Bayes.
-Dan
-unless you love someone-
-nothing else makes any sense-
e.e. cummings
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