I suspect that you are leaping to the idea of "infinite regress" much too quickly, and also failing to look past it or try to simply "patch" the regress in a practical way when you say

No. I mention the practical patch right after : epistemies.

The remarkable magical thing about humans is not that we can construct epistemies, the remarkable thing is that humans can walk, make eye contact and learn things from it, feed ourselves, and pick up sticks to wave around in a semi-coordinated fashion.

Formal academic science is hilariously

Indeed, we were talking about rationalists (not only LW, but SlateStarCodex too for instance).

I think there are meaningful instinctive differences too, but that's not the point, is it ? If it was, then we can assume that people holds beliefs too. Sometime they change their beliefs too because of reasons (or lack thereof).

I agree with your model, but without the nerd-exception.

The lack of nerd focus on epistemology and meta-ethics implies that nerds don't have beliefs either.

They do have pressures to appear rational. Either external (peer pressure) or internal (intelligence/rationality being part of the core identity because of reasons).

The same model you mention has been useful for me in understanding why nerdy people don't actually care about the epistemic soundness of their argument, and only about sounding rational. It made me understand why many were angered when I pointed the lack of sound definition of the words used or the use of countless fallacies : it's perceived as an attack against their rationality.

I suppose I do insofar as the very act of experiencing experience is experience and thus by at all noticing your experience you know a way of knowing. And although you may infer things about epistemology from ontology, you cannot derive them because ontology must be constructed from knowledge gained through experience (at least if we demand a phenomenological account of knowledge), and thus all ontology is tainted by the epistemological methods of experience used to gain such knowledge.

Naive observation precedes any epistemic method to gain knowledge. H... (read more)

But you do because fields are just an after-the-fact construction to make understanding reality more manageable. There's just one reality (for a phenomenologically useful sense of "reality" as the thing which you experience), fields just pick a part of it to focus on, and as such there is much overlap between how we know things in fields.

I disagree thoroughly with that paragraph.

Science is not about "understanding reality". Or at least, not the "reality" as "the thing which you experience". The impact of science i... (read more)

Certainly a person's epistemology affects their understanding of many things

I think having an epistemy to deal with everything is a mistake. It stems from the post that the strength of an epistemy lies from its specialization.

I guess it's somewhat unclear to me just what work "epistemy" is doing

I don't understand "what work is [X] doing" means in this context.

that seems like a teleological approach to epistemology

It's more that different fields of inquiry lead to different epistemies. If you want to study different fields, yo... (read more)

Thank you for your thorough answer. :)

I am not asking for a general discussion place, but for an idea repository with dedicated discussion places.

From the post :

The current forum doesn’t cut it : it isn’t meant to that end. It’s easier to build a forum dedicated to that than try to artificially support a balance between “New Ideas” posts and “Information Sharing” posts so that none of these get overshadowed. The same problem applies to existing reddit boards and facebook groups.

Also, regular discussion places (reddit, fb), aren't really meant as thread repository : pinning more and more threads is a nuisance to the discussion part.

I initially needed an editor I was used to to link a post to someone on the EA Discord Server.

I thought I might as well do it on LW to gather input from LWians.

Most scientists haven't read Popper and those people in history of science that analyze what scientists actually do, don't find that scientists follow Popper's maxims.

As far as I know, this is still subject of debates. cf https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falsifiability

I agree that for psychologists and many people in biology there isn't enough explicit attention paid to epistemology. On the other hand it's still import to be aware that you will never get 100% explicit.

I don't see what is your criterium to agree with my point on a given field. Also, my ... (read more)

I think I don't understand your point :

• There are already many functioning places for EA online interactions, and these work quite well.

• Do you mean that, in the case the user base grows unexpectedly, high costs of entry should be put in order to deal with that problem ?

Historians of science like Thomas Kuhn generally assume that most scientists don't have a good explicit model of what they are doing when they are doing science. The explicit model for the scientific process isn't required.

History is indeed descriptive, while my article is prescriptive :

• Description. The explicit model isn't required, science worked without it, up to a point. And even that has to be nuanced, pre-experimental science and pre-popper science are very different from current sciences. The foundational crisis wasn't purely philosophical.

• Pr

From the post

The current forum doesn’t cut it : it isn’t meant to that end. It’s easier to build a forum dedicated to that than try to artificially support a balance between “New Ideas” posts and “Information Sharing” posts so that none of these get overshadowed. The same problem applies to existing reddit boards and facebook groups.

Also, regular discussion places (reddit, fb), aren't really meant as thread repository : pinning more and more threads is a nuisance to the discussion part.

I don't think about building a product from scratch, more about coordinating a Discord server, a Reddit board a Google doc for instance.

The website linked by @lifelonglearner is particularly good, even though it will be deleted by July.

Haven't seen it.

It makes the technical aspect easier, as a big part of the technical part already exists. What's left is :

• The interactive place
• A native commenting option
• A more precise method than a suggested template

But it is really good. Where did you hear about it ? Giving that website more reach would be nice.

Also ...

I’m writing to let you know we’ll be shutting down Hackpad on July 19. I’m so grateful for all the

EDIT : There is more on their website

I think you wrote some interesting stuff.

Thanks

As for your question on a meta-epistemy, I think what you said about general approaches mostly holds in this case. Maybe there's a specific way to classify sub-epistemies, but it's probably better to have some general rules of thumb that weed out the definitely wrong candidates, and let other ideas get debated on.

I agree. I don't expect a full-fledged meta-epistemy. Again, "That epistemy can be as simple as some sanity checks".

I don't know that defining sub-epistemies is so important. You gi

I agree has a broken link.

I don't know LW editing. (First post.) How do internal links work ? Edit : Simple HTML internal links, I had to add "#".

By meta-epistemy do you mean something that can explain how the current rationalist epistemology came about or do you want something that can explain how one should make it better in the future?

By meta-epistemy, I meant an epistemy that we should follow to define and evaluate new sub-epistemies.

Can you clarify what sub-epistemies are in this framework?

Basically, instead of coming with a new t... (read more)