James_Bach

For me, the purpose of doubt is to motivate inquiry. When any particular doubt no longer serves inquiry, I retire it.

If the purpose of doubt were to eliminate doubt, it would be far more efficient simply never to doubt.

Therefore, I doubt your philosophy of doubt. Let the inquiry continue.

When you wrote "But neither does it seem like the same shade of uncertainty" I suppose you mean that it doesn't seem that way, to you. Nor does it to me. But before, as a thinking person, I suggest that the difference is meaningful, I need a context or a reason. You haven't provided one, and that's why your argument has the flavor of religion, to my palette.

I'd love to see your answer to the actual skeptical argument, rather than the straw man you offer, here. Here you are doing the equivalent of announcing "I'm thinking of a number!..... 5!... (read more)

I love math. It's the only reason I sometimes wish I'd stayed in school. When I get rich, I want to hire a mathematician to live in my basement and tutor me. I bet they can be had for cheap.

Pure math is potentially a perfect idea. Applied math; not so much. When you see that line of 2's, how do you know it continues forever? You don't. You're making an induction; a beautiful guess. It's only because you peeked at the real answer-- an answer you yourself created-- that you can confidently say that you "predicted" the sequence with your method.

I'm ... (read more)

Thanks, Eliezer. Helpful post.

I have personally witnessed a room of people nod their heads in agreement with a definition of a particular term in software testing. Then when we discussed examples of that term in action, we discovered that many of us having agreed with the words in the definition, had a very different interpretation of those words. To my great discouragement, I learned that agreeing on a sign is not the same as agreeing on the interpretant or the object. (sign, object, and interpretant are the three parts of Peirce's semiotic triangle)

In th... (read more)

I wonder what your life must be like. The way you write, it sounds as if you spend a lot of your time trying to convince crazy people (by which I mean most of humanity, of course) to be less crazy and more rational, like us. Why not just ignore them?

Then I looked at your Wikipedia entry and noticed how young you are. Ah! When I was your age, I was also trying to convert everybody. My endless arguments about software development methods, circa 1994, are still in Google's Usenet archive. So, who am I to talk?

(Note: Mostly I write comments that complain about... (read more)

I don't understand why you invoke probability theory in a situation where it has no rhetorical value. Your conversation was a rhetorical situation, not a math problem, so you have to evaluate it and calibrate your speech acts accordingly-- or else you get nowhere, which is exactly what happened.

Your argument to your friend was exactly like someone justifying something about their own religion by citing their bible. It works great for people in your own community who already accept your premises. To anyone outside your community, you might as well be singin... (read more)

I think the advocates of Naturalistic Inquiry (see Lincoln and Guba) would say that you aren't talking about all of science, but of just the "positivistic paradigm" of science, whereas there is another paradigm called "naturalistic" or "constructivist" that does science differently.

I don't buy the whole Naturalistic program, but they raise some useful points. One of them is that the experiments you suggest require you to impose upon the object of your study an ontology along with the value system associated with it. When study... (read more)

Forget voting. Here's how to make a big difference in society: at least once a month, do something amazingly kind for a perfect stranger. My preference is leaving $100 tips for waitresses or hotel maids, because I'm basically lazy.

Also, raise your kids with kindness.

Practice showing courage in challenging situations.

Don't instigate a lawsuit unless it's reaaaaaally important.

What's great about America is not democracy, but the sense we have that we can travel almost anywhere here and other people will smile with us, do business with us, and not hate us. Th... (read more)

Since I don't accept being part of a majority that dominates a minority, I only consent to vote in a situation where my vote is for the minority, and therefore cannot possibly influence the outcome. This is mathematically identical to staying home, except staying home is more pleasant. So, I'd rather stay home.

For those who believe in majority rule, I still don't understand why you vote, since your vote cannot make any difference. There is no such thing as a deciding vote in a large election, since the error present in the system even for a fair election i... (read more)

You're such a lion against religion, I admire that. So, I'm surprised you would say that living with doubt is not a virtue. You know about incommensurability right? You know about perspectivism? There is no "view from nowhere" that can make perfect objectivity possible.

Therefore: doubt. To live with doubt makes room for learning. Lose doubt and you also lose inquiry. Some doubts are annihilated by inquiry, but as Richard Feynman said, "science is the belief in the ignorance of experts". He said we need a well developed theory of ignoran... (read more)

Eliezer, never mind black, the true iconoclasts don't go to school. I quit in 10th grade and became an emancipated minor. In the three years prior, I refused to do homework, citing the 13th Amendment. My motivation echoes yours: I could not abide fakers, and public school abounds with them. Fake lessons. Fake arguments. Fake sentiments. Public school is a thinly disguised day care center.

Fortunately, education is not the same as schooling, and there are plenty of ways to become better educated in private life. Then I discovered as an adult that being unconventionally educated could be a competitive advantage.

I don't see this exercise as being so much about rationality as it is about our relationship with dissonance. People in my community (context-driven software testers) are expected to treat confusion or controversy as itself evidence of a potentially serious problem. For the responsible tester, such evidence must be investigated and probably raised as an issue to the client.

In short, in the situation given in the exercise, I would not answer the question, but rather raise some questions.

I drive telephone surveyors nuts in this way. They just don't know what... (read more)

Thank you for this post. I'm in the process of writing about my system of self-education, which has two interesting elements I haven't heard anywhere else: A) it requires no self-discipline whatsoever, B) it is centered on the feelings of learning, rather than artifacts and techniques of learning (those latter two things are interesting, but they orbit the first).

One of the things I try to explain is how to embrace certain mental behaviors that seem bad, such as procrastination. I procrastinate extensively. I am procrastinating right now (I'm "suppose... (read more)

Great essay!

But, how can a set of ideas be a closed system? It's ridiculous. If someone were to tell me that Objectivism is closed, I would say, Ha! I just reopened it. Ha! Try and stop me from calling myself an Objectivist if I feel like it! Oh, they can trademark it, I supposed, but if they do, I could rename my system as Reasonablism and explain it as an improved form of what-Ayn-Rand-was-talking-about.

A community of people can close itself off, but ideas are helpless to resist whatever buccaneering minds may prey upon them. This harkens to Buckminster Fuller's cry that "true wealth only increases", because true wealth is knowledge and knowledge is infinitely replicable and shareable.

When you speak of "guardians of truth" I hear "guardians of social order." I don't think the Inquisition thought of truth in epistemic terms, the way we do. They thought of "truth" as the order of the world that was under constant assault by dark forces.

Truth guardianship in science might be understood as defending Kuhnian "normal science" from assault by people outside of the dominant paradigm; or perhaps the process of indoctrinating new scientists in the accepted norms of that paradigm.

You said: "So it seems there's an asymmetry between argument and authority. If we know authority we are still interested in hearing the arguments; but if we know the arguments fully, we have very little left to learn from authority."

I like your conclusion, but I can't find anything in your argument to support it! By rearranging some words in your text I could construct an equally plausible (to a hypothetical neutral observer) argument that authority screens off evidence. You seem to believe that evidence screens off authority simply because you ... (read more)

As a high school dropout and aspiring philosopher of self-education, I salute you.

My son is homeschooled, and the homeschooling consists of... nothing. He studies spontaneously to solve problems that are authentic to him, just as I do. Mostly these involve video games and online fantasy role-playing games. It's like A.S. Neill's Summerhill school except he's all alone. There are disadvantages to this sort of education, but inauthenticity is not among them.

I am writing a book along these lines. It's about how we can creates ourselves as individual thinkers.... (read more)