common_law

Rationality Quotes Thread January 2016

But it's also obvious that Thomas is no legal genius. (Unlike, say, Scalia, who I actually abhor more, probably for that reason). Why no black legal geniuses, theoretical physicists, abstract mathematicians, or analytic philosophers? This is more telling than fishing about in the superior range, which, even on the assumptions, is only as rare as falling in the general population's very-superior range.

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Replying toRationality Quotes Thread December 2015

Rationality Quotes Thread December 2015

Looking for mental information in individual neuronal firing patterns is looking at the wrong level of scale and at the wrong kind of physical manifestation. As in other statistical dynamical regularities, there are a vast number of microstates (i.e., network activity patterns) that can constitute the same ghloal attractor, and a vast numbmer of trajectories of microstate-to-microstate changes that will tend to converge to a common attractor. But it is the final quasi-regular network-level dynamic, like a melody played by a million-instrument orchestra, that is the medium of mental information. - Terrence W. Deacon, Incomplete Nature: How Mind Emerged from Matter, pp. 516 - 517.

Replying toWords per person year and intellectual rigor

Words per person year and intellectual rigor

Elaborate or detailed are characteristics neither necessary nor sufficient for rigor. The first describe characteristics of the theory; the second of the argument for the theory. To say a theory is rigorous is neither more or less than to say it is well argued (with particular emphasis on the argument's tightness).

Whether Freud and Marx argued well may be hard to agree on when we examine their arguments. [Agreement or disagreement on conclusions have a way of grossly interfering with evaluation of argument, with the added complication that evaluation must be relative to a historical state of play.] And we ignore what could be called holes in Einstein and Darwin because the theories... (read more)

Replying toWords per person year and intellectual rigor

Words per person year and intellectual rigor

You've drawn a significant distinction, but I don't think degree of rigor defines it. I'm not sufficiently familiar with many of these thinkers to assess their rigorousness, but I am familiar with several, the ones who would often be deemed most important: Einstein, Darwin on the side you describe as rigorous; Freud and Marx on the side you describe as less rigorous. I can't agree that Freud and Marx are less rigorous. Marx makes a argument for his theory of capitalism in three tightly reasoned volumes of capital, none of the arguments formulaic. Freud develops the basics of his psychology in "The Interpretation of Dreams," a rigorous study of numerous dreams, his... (read more)

Replying toIs Scott Alexander bad at math?

Is Scott Alexander bad at math?

Aesthetic ability as such hasn't been extracted as a cognitive ability factor. My guess would be that it's mainly explained by g and the temperamental factor of openness to experience. (I don't know what the empirical data is on this subject, but I think some immersion in the factor-analytic data would prove rewarding.)

[Added.] On aesthetic sense: the late R.B. Cattell (psychologist) devised an IQ test based on which jokes were preferred.

[Added.2] I'm wondering if you're not misinterpreting your personal experience. You say your IQ is only LW-average. You also say you have a nonverbal learning disability; but that would render any score you obtained on an IQ test a substantial underestimate. I'm inclined to think what you're calling aesthetic ability (in your case, at least) is just intelligence beyond what the uninterpreted scores say.

Replying toInnate Mathematical Ability

Innate Mathematical Ability

What's your basis for concluding that verbal-reasoning ability is an important component of mathematical ability—particularly important in more theoretical areas of math?

The research that I recall showed little influence of verbal reasoning on high-level math ability, verbal ability certainly being correlated with math ability but the correlation almost entirely accounted for by g (or R). There's some evidence that spatio-visual ability, rather unimportant for mathematical literacy (as measured by SAT-M, GRE-Q), becomes significant at higher levels of achievement. But from what I've seen, the factor that emerged most distinctive for excellent mathematicians (distinguishing them from other fields also demanding high g) isn't g itself, but rather cognitive speed. Talented mathematicians are mentally quick.

Replying toThe Hostile Arguer

The Hostile Arguer

You should question your unstated but fundamental premise: one should avoid arguments with "hostile arguers."

A person who argues to convince rather than to understand harms himself, but from his interlocutor's standpoint, dealing with his arguments can be just as challenging and enlightening as arguing with someone more "intellectually honest."

Whether an argument is worthwhile depends primarily on the competence of the arguments presented, which isn't strongly related to the sincerity of the arguer.

Replying toThe Truth and Instrumental Rationality

The Truth and Instrumental Rationality

Actually, I think you're wrong in thinking that LW doctrine doesn't dictate heightened scrutiny of the deployment of self-deception. At the same time, I think you're wrong to think false beliefs can seldom be quarantined, compartmentalization being a widely employed defense mechanism. (Cf., any liberal theist.)

Everyone feels a tug toward the pure truth, away from pure instrumental rationalism. You're mistake (and LW's), I think, is to incorporate truth into instrumental rationality (without really having a cogent rationale, given the reality of compartmentalization). The real defect in instrumental rationalism is that no person of integrity can take it to heart. "Values" are of two kinds: biological givens and acquired tendencies that restrict the... (read more)

Replying toPower and difficulty

Power and difficulty

I don't see how your argument gains from attributing the hard-work bias to stories. (For one thing, you still have to explain why stories express this bias—unless you think it's culturally adventitious.)

The bias seems to me to be a particular case of the fair-world bias and perhaps also the "more is better" heuristic. It seems like you are positing a new bias unnecessarily. (That doesn't detract from the value of describing this particular variant.)

Replying toApplications of logical uncertainty

Applications of logical uncertainty

Philosophically, I want to know how you calculate the rational degree of belief in every proposition.

If you automatically assign the axioms an actually unobtainable certainty, you don't get the rational degree of belief in every proposition, as the set of "propositions" includes those not conditioned on the axioms.

Pascal's Mugging Solved

The concept of belief and the nature of abstraction

12y

Since Pascal’s Mugging is well known on LW, I won’t describe it at length. Suffice to say that a mugger tries to blackmail you by threatening enormous harm by a completely mysterious mechanism. If the harm is great enough, a sufficiently large threat eventually dominates doubts about the mechanism.

I have a reasonably simple solution to Pascal’s Mugging. In four steps, here it is:

The greater the harm, the more likely the mugger is trying to pick a greater threat than any competitor picks (we’ll call that maximizing).
As the amount of harm threatened gets larger, the probability that the mugger is maximizing approaches unity.
As the probability that the mugger is engaged in maximizing approaches

... (read 382 more words →)

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Buridan's ass and the psychological origins of objective probability

12y

[Cross-posted.]

Belief, puzzling to philosophy, is part of psychology’s conceptual framework. The present essay provides a straightforward yet novel theory of the explanatory and predictive value of describing agents as having beliefs. The theory attributes full-fledged beliefs exclusively to agents with linguistic capacities, but it does so as an empirical matter rather than a priori. By treating abstraction as an inherently social practice, the dependence of full-fledged belief on language resolves a philosophical problem regarding its possibility in a world where only concrete particulars exist.

The propositional character of belief

It can appear mysterious that the content of epistemic attitudes (belief and opinion) is conveyed by clauses introduced by that: “I believe that the dog... (read 978 more words →)

Infinitesimals: Another argument against actual infinite sets

13y

[Crossposted]

The medieval philosopher Buridan reportedly constructed a thought experiment to support his view that human behavior was determined rather than “free”—hence rational agents couldn’t choose between two equally good alternatives. In the Buridan’s Ass Paradox, an ass finds itself between two equal equidistant bales of hay, noticed simultaneously; the bales’ distance and size are the only variables influencing the ass’s behavior. Under these idealized conditions, the ass must starve, its predicament indistinguishable from a physical object suspended between opposite forces, such as a planet that neither falls into the sun nor escapes into outer space. (Since the ass served Buridan as metaphor for the human agent, in what follows, I speak of... (read 1657 more words →)

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