This post contains large spoilers for the book Firefight by Brandon Sanderson. He is my favorite fantasy author. In this post, I explain two errors I noticed in the book.

1) Is Regalia a High Epic?

“Abigail isn’t a High Epic,” Tia said.

“What?” Exel said. “Of course she is. I’ve never met an Epic as powerful as Regalia. She raised the water level of the entire city to flood it. She moved millions of tons of water, and holds it all here!”

“I didn’t say she wasn’t powerful,” Tia said. “Only that she isn’t a High Epic—which is defined as an Epic whose powers prevent them from being killed in conventional ways.”

That made sense to me, but it's contradicted when David kills Regalia:

“No!” My arms trembled. I shouted, then brought the blade down.

And killed my second High Epic for the day.

The page with the ISBN number also calls Regalia a High Epic:

Summary: “David and the Reckoners continue their fight against the Epics, humans with superhuman powers, except they may have met their match in Regalia, a High Epic who resides in Babylon Restored, the city formerly known as the borough of Manhattan”— Provided by publisher.

2) Geometry

The left diagram shows how they were trying to find Regalia’s base. That part makes sense. Every time she appears, you know she’s in a radius of that point, so you draw a circle. The overlap of all circles is where her base could be. (You can also have circles for places she didn’t appear, which then rule out that circle.)

To narrow it down further, you need any circle which overlaps part of the remaining possible city area, not none or all. As you can see in the right hand diagrams, this new circle could be near an existing circle, or off in a new area. Both work. But the book says:

From what I eventually worked out, my points had helped a lot, but we needed more data from the southeastern side of the city before we could really determine Regalia’s center base.

That doesn’t make sense. The key thing is the distance of data points so they overlap part of the remaining area where the base could be. This can be done from any direction.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8859974

They're not wrong in that people often rationalize their 'instinctual' choices, but to imply that nobody is cognizant of any of their thoughts or biases and that we're all slaves to our lizard brains is a bit of a stretch.

This is a massive false dichtomy.

On the one hand is people are biased in ways they aren't aware of, and aren't in control of their lives. And therefore are slaves to genes.

On the other hand is, since people aren't animal slaves, people aren't super biased, super unaware of their biases, and so on.

I think the truth is pretty straightfoward here: people are hugely biased, unaware of it, and bad at controlling their lives. But it doesn't mean they are slaves. They could do something about it. But evading and dismissing the issue, or accepting that's how people are, won't fix it.

Control over your life is possible but not automatic. It shouldn't be treated as either both possible and automatic, or neither. That's the false dichtomy again.

What will fix this problem is philosophy. Read Ayn Rand and Karl Popper, among others. Or come discuss this matter at the Fallible Ideas Discussion Group. Learn better ideas and integrate them into your life so you actually live by them.

The problem of bias (and more generally mistakes) is real, but also solvable. You don't have to choose from a false dichotomy of denying the problem exists (or downplaying it heavily) or else accepting the problem as a negative feature of human life. You can recognize the problem exists and then take steps to deal with it. A lot is actually known about how to handle this, but most people don't bother learning it.

http://www.europokerpro.com/games/fixed-limit-holdem-rooms/

5: When you start steaming give up for the day and save your bankroll.

this is super bad advice if you’re trying to make money (rather than looking at it as paying money for fun). which i think is most of the audience (some of the other tips look clearly oriented to people trying to make money, e.g. 2 and 4).

if you’re trying to make money at poker, you cannot be a player who steams. if you’re a steamer, you should expect to be a losing player.

the article tip implies it’s OK to be a steamer and try to make money at poker. this is a dirty and nasty lie, encouraging losing players to lose more money (in the disguise of tips to help them win money).

The edges are really small in all the fixed limit games. For an example you can rarely expect to earn more than 5Big bets/100 hands on average even in the good games

and this is lying about what people can reasonably expect to win. 5 big bets per 100 hands is not “really small”. it sounds pretty great.

http://www.thepokerbank.com/strategy/other/winrate/

• 1 – 4 bb/100 = Great. A solid winrate if you can sustain it.
• 5 – 9 bb/100 = Amazing. This is a very high winrate at any level. Consider moving up.
• 10+ bb/100 = Immense. Very, very few have a winrate like this. You probably have a small sample size though.

i don’t know fixed limit holdem that well, but a big bet in it (they were talking 5 big bets/100 hands) is (always?) double the big blind. so they might have just called 10big blinds/100 as a “really small” edge!?!?

let’s check more info by searching fixed limit info in particular:

http://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/17/small-stakes-limit/current-expected-ceiling-earning-flh-hu-shorthanded-1486606/

I think 3.5 big bets per 100 hands (after rake, but before rakeback and bonuses?) is not even close to attainable online right now. I'm not sure what is, but more HU and shorthanded targeting weaker players would obviously boost your winrate. But the best I seem to hear of is around 1.5 BB/100 if avg players at table was like 4 or something. I'm not even 100% on those figures bc it's all pretty much anecdotal.

and

People that won 3 BB/100 were massive bumhunters and/or constantly buttoning people which is basically cheating. They were not playing regularly and winning 3 BB/100.

http://www.pokerstrategy.com/forum/thread.php?threadid=37634

In Fixed Limit Holdem we know that good player will have average income 1-2 BB (Big Bets) per 100 hands.

so the article was super fucking lying about 5 big bets per 100 hands being “really small”. completely and utterly lying to people about what sort of income poker might offer. to lure in suckers, i guess.

btw who are the suckers who are fooled? they must be dumb. i don't play poker. maybe it'd help if they were better philosophers. i catch lies like this because i have good thinking methods.

Comments on excerpts from Understanding Objectivism by Leonard Peikoff.

Q: Ayn Rand once said that the attribute that most distinguished her was not intelligence but honesty. Could she have been referring to a concept that subsumes the virtue of honesty, and the lack of any innocent dishonesty such as rationalism?

A: “Innocent dishonesty” strikes me as a self-contradiction. If a person is dishonest, then he’s guilty; if he’s innocent, he tried his best, then he was honest. So you probably mean the correct method—she was not only honest, but had the correct method of thinking. And was that simply the result of honesty on her part? I have to respectfully disagree with Miss Rand’s self-assessment. I never agreed with that, and I argued with her for decades on that point. I regarded myself as thoroughly honest, and I never came anywhere near coming up with her philosophy on my own. I think that to explain the origination of an actual new philosophy, honesty is a valuable and necessary condition, but does not go the whole way. You cannot get away from the fact that you have to be a genius on top of being honest.

Peikoff regards himself as 100% honest and using that as a premise to reach conclusions about reality (including ones contrary to Ayn Rand). This is an arrogant and ridiculous method. You should not assume your own greatness as the starting point of your arguments, and see what the world is like only on that assumption.

The specifics here are terrible too. Who is 100% "thoroughly honest"? No one. No one is literally perfect on honesty. Which is great – it means there is room for improvement, there are opportunities to be better (for those who look for them).

Rather than emphasizing self-improvement maximally, Peikoff starts attributing success to vague, inborn(?), magical "genius".

Let me take a different situation. In college, should you let the professor in the class know you disagree every time you do? Is your silence a sanction of evil? If it is, I certainly sanctioned a tremendous amount of evil in my fourteen years as a college student, so I have to come out as the world’s greatest monster, next to Kant. This was my policy: Sometimes I spoke up, and sometimes I didn’t, according to a whole constellation of factors. I realized that I couldn’t speak up every time, because I disagreed with everything. And since it was philosophy, every disagreement was vital, so I would have had to have equal time with the professor and the rest of the class, which would be ludicrous. So I simply had to accept from the outset, “An awful lot is going to go by that is irrational, horrendous, depraved, and I will be completely silent about it. I have no choice about that.”

This has the same kind of issue as the previous quote. Here Peikoff's reasoning starts with the premise that he's pretty good, and doesn't consider that he may be making a big mistake. Rather than argue the substance of the issue, he just kinda treats any criticism of himself as an absurdity to reject.

Peikoff's argument here is careless too. If he sanctioned a lot of evil, it wouldn't make him the second worst person, after Kant. Lots of people have done that, and Kant (and others) did a lot of other stuff wrong too.

As I read this, Peikoff basically confesses to huge sins and flaws, makes a half-hearted defense, and then says it can't be that bad because then life would be too hard and too demanding, and surely morality can't demand anyone be more than Peikoff is.

There's so much wrong here. Peikoff did not have to go to college. He did sanction college by going and then keeping mostly quiet and going along with it. You know Roark got expelled from school? And Roark says he should have quit earlier. Peikoff acts completely unlike Roark, and makes himself fit in enough to pass, but can't conceptualize that he may have done something wrong. Isn't that weird? He isn't taking Roark or Rand seriously. Rand is pretty clear about the moral sanction issue, and Peikoff's attitude is that a particular version of refusing to sanction evil (getting equal speaking time to his professors) is "ludicrous" and anyway he can't be so bad, so let's just start compromising principles.

Now and then I would speak up; much of the time I kept silent. And I do not regard that as a sanction of evil, and I could certainly not have survived fourteen years of university if every moment had to be total war against every utterance.

Why go to fourteen years of evil university? There are alternatives. He did sanction it. He describes himself sanctioning it and his only defenses consist of thinking there were no better alternatives (while hardly considering any) and thinking he can't be too bad.

For instance, once in a very early phase I tried to be a thorough intellectualist—that is, I was going to function exclusively cerebrally, without the aid of emotions (I was young at the time). And I remember very clearly that I went to a movie with the idea of having absolutely no emotions—that is, they would have nothing to do with my assessment of the movie and were just going to be pushed aside. I was going to try to judge purely intellectually as the movie went by. And I had a checklist in advance, certain criteria: I was going to judge the plot, the theme, the characters, the acting, the direction, the scenery, and so on. And my idea was to formulate to myself in words for each point where I thought something was relevant, how it stood on all the points on my checklist. And to my amazement, I was absolutely unable to follow the movie; I did not know what was going on. I needed to sit through it I can’t remember how many times, and I discovered that what you have to do is simply react, let it happen, feel, immerse yourself in it. And what happens is that your emotions give you an automatic sum. You just simply attend to it with no checklist, no intellectualizing, no thought, just watch the movie, like a person.

Peikoff used a bad intellectual method of movie watching, it didn't work, and then he just gives up completely instead of trying other intellectual methods. That's dumb. It's perfectly possible to watch movies a lot better than passively, and to think during them, while still following the plot. His checklist approach sounds pretty bad, but it's not that or nothing. That's a false dichotomy.

Q: What were Ayn Rand’s reasons for not wanting to be a mother?

A: Primarily I would say because she was committed from a very early age to a full-time career as a novelist and writer. She did not want to divert any of her attention to anything else. She wanted to pursue that full-time, and it was simply not worth it to her to divert any time from that goal, by her particular hierarchy of interests and values. Beyond that, she had no interest in teaching. She was very different, for instance, from me in that regard. She was not interested in taking someone and bringing them along step by step, which is essential to being a parent. She wanted a formed mind that she could talk to on the level as an equal. She had more of the scientific motivation, rather than the pedagogical motivation. So it was as simple as that.

I thought this was notable. For one thing, Rand did a lot of teaching, including with Peikoff personally. As Peikoff describes it (in various places), Rand helped him along a great deal, incrementally, over years and years. I think Rand couldn't find enough equals or peers; I think it's interesting Peikoff reports she wanted that.

"So it was as simple as that" is a bad comment to end with. It doesn't add anything. And it's wrong – the issues aren't simple. Maybe Peikoff hasn't noticed there's lots of interesting stuff here?

Sometimes you have to expect to be momentarily overcome with the sheer force of the evil in a given situation. I want to speak for myself, from this point on, from my own experience, because I’m not prepared to make a universal law out of this, so I offer it to you for what it’s worth. There are times and situations where, despite my knowledge of philosophy, I feel overwhelmed by the evil in the world—I feel isolated, alienated, lonely, bitter, malevolent—and this is, to me, inescapable at times in certain contexts. I’ll give you an example. A few weeks ago, I went to a debate at a large university, on the subject of the nuclear freeze. One of the debaters, my friend, was eloquent, but it was a hopeless situation. The audience of college students was closed, irrational, hostile, dishonest by every criterion outlined tonight. They wouldn’t listen for a moment, they were rude—they were real modern hooligans—and when they did speak up, it was utterly without redeeming features—a whole array of out-of-context questions, sarcasm, disintegrated concretes—it was a real modern spectacle in the worst sense of the term. After a couple of hours of this, I was angry, I was resentful, I was hostile. And I felt (and I underscore the word “felt”), “This is the way the world is. What is the point of fighting it? They don’t want to know. I’m going to retire and stop lecturing and let the whole thing blow up, and to hell with it.” I was depressed. And of course, once I was in that mood, I was more negative about everything, so when I saw the headlines in the Times the next day, I felt worse. Even the long lines at the bank were further evidence that the world is rotten.

The point here is that I don’t think that I made a mistake. I think you have to react to concretes.

How is this not a mistake!? Again I read it as Peikoff describing another big mistake he made. But then he doesn't see himself as having done anything wrong. Why? He tells us about why this isn't good, it's clear enough why it'd be better not to handle it this way, and yet somehow this non-ideal isn't a mistake for some unstated reason.

From Understanding Objectivism, the book version, and this is from a student talking:

Now consider three examples, a couple of them historical. One, Adolf Hitler announces that he’s going to take over as much of the world as possible. And in each instance, when his armies march into another country, he is ready with a pretext: that he is only acting in defense of the German people. The second example would be, in 1967, the State of Israel, anticipating, by means of military intelligence, that they were about to be attacked on all sides, attacked first and blew up the opposing air forces, and claimed that they did that in self-defense.

Never mind what he's talking about, it doesn't matter to my point. Just note the Israel example. Then when Leonard Peikoff is commenting, I'll show you this out of order. Second he says:

This was certainly not a rationalistic presentation. He started with some examples—leaving aside the Israel one, which was inappropriate for the reasons we just mentioned—but Hitler is certainly a good example on the topic of force;

OK, now what are the reasons Peikoff says not to use the Israel example?

So the rule here is, do not pick controversial concretes. Pick a nice range of concretes. But when you’re trying to understand, the examples should be simple and straightforward. Then, when you grasp it, you can take up trickier cases. So it is a bad idea to combine concretizing with devil’s advocacy. I learned this teaching elementary logic, and I thought I’d get two birds for the price of one, and in illustrating a certain fallacy, which is a simple fallacy to understand, I threw in an argument for political isolationism, and the example aroused the class, and it became so controversial that they began to challenge the logical point involved, because they disagreed with the political point. And I lost the entire logical issue on the example. I learned from that that examples cannot be controversial; they have to be illuminating.

First, an aside, Peikoff is wrong here. He should have learned the lesson that his class had this big misconception, this big hole in their rationality. When they "began to challenge the logical point involved, because they disagreed with the political point", that was a huge thinking and methodology mistake the students were making. Which Peikoff correctly recognized. But then instead of teaching them how to think better, he thought in the future he should avoid this issue coming up. Instead of teaching the students to be good at this, his plan is to avoid this thing where their flaws come out. :(

Now about Israel, there's a really big problem here. The issue is, the Israel example shouldn't be controversial. By acting as if it's controversial, he is deferring to anti-semites. He's treating their disagreement as a legitimate controversy, and sanctioning it. Instead of Roark's "don't think of them" type approach, he's treating evil as this important thing and saying to change your actions according to the demands of evil. You have to choose different examples because some anti-semites will get offended by the Israel example, you have to think of them and give their anti-semitic concerns due consideration.

He's letting anti-semites drag the conversation into a distorted reality where Israel's right to exist is a controversy. That's granting them way too much. There are some issues where you can say it's controversial and respect the other side, but there are other issues where you must not grant them the sanction of being legitimate opponents whose dissent constitutes an intellectual controversy. Anti-semitism hasn't made the issue of Israel's self-defense intellectually or rationally controversial.

Peikoff went out of his way to try to stop a student from acting according to reality – a reality in which Israel's self-defense is a clear cut example similar to the World War II example. Peikoff demanded the student show greater respect to anti-semites, and help them fake reality by pretending there is an intellectual controversy where there isn't one. This is a betrayal of Israel.

PS In fairness, I want to add that I mostly like the book so far, I think it's pretty good, you could learn some things from it.

I discussed epistemology and cryonics with Aubrey de Grey via email. Click here to find the rest of the discussion. Yellow quotes are from Aubrey de Grey, with permission. Bluegreen is me, red is other.

Did you receive my email?

Hi - yes, I got it, but I couldn’t think of anything useful to say.

If you want to stop talking, or adjust the terms of the conversation (e.g. change the one message at a time back and forth style), please say so directly because silence is ambiguous.

But see my comments below. I don't think we're at an impasse. I think what you said here was particularly productive.

We have reached an impasse in which you insist on objecting to my failure to address various of your points, but I object to your failure to address my main point, namely that there is no objective measure of the rebuttability of a position. I am grateful for your persistence, since it has certainly helped me to gain a better understanding of the rationality IN MY OWN TERMS, i.e. the internal consistency, of my position, and in retrospect it is only because of my prior lack of that understanding that I didn’t zero in sooner on that main point as the key issue. But still it is the main point. I don’t see why I should take the time to read things to convince me of something that I’m already conceding for sake of argument, i.e. that Aubreyism is epistemologically inferior to Elliotism. And I also don’t see why I should take the time to work harder to convince you of the value of cryonics when you haven’t given me any reason to believe that your objections (i.e. your claim that Alcor’s arguments are rebuttable in a sense that my arguments for SENS are not, and moreover that that sense is the correct one) are objective.

Also, for a lot of the things I haven’t replied to it’s because I’m bemused by your wording. To take the latest case: when I’ve asked you for examples where science could have gone a lot faster by using CR rather than whatever else was used, and you have cited cases that I think are far more parsimoniously explained by sociological considerations, you’ve now come back with the suggestion that "Lots of the sociological considerations are explained by the philosophical issues I'm talking about”. To me that’s not just a questionable or wrong statement, it’s a nonsensical one. My point has nothing whatever to do with the explanations for the sociological considerations - it is merely that if you accept that other issues than the CR/non-CR question (such as the weight that rationalists give to the views of irrationalists, because they want to sleep with them or whatever) slow things down, you can’t argue that the CR/non-CR question slowed them down.

When I say something you think is nonsense, if you ignore that and try to continue the rest of the conversation, we're going to run into problems. I meant what I said, and it's important to my position, so please treat it seriously. By ignoring those statements, it ends up being mysterious to me why you disagree, because you aren't telling me your biggest objections! They won't go away by themselves because they are what I think, not random accidents.

In this case, there was a misunderstanding. You took "explained" to mean, "make [a situation] clear to someone by describing it in more detail". But I meant, "be the cause of". (Both of those are excerpts from a dictionary.) I consider bad epistemology the cause of the sociological problems, and CR the solution. I wasn't talking about giving abstract explanations with no purpose in reality. I'm saying philosophy is they key issue behind this sociological stuff.

I regard this sort of passing over large disagreements as a methodological error, which must affect your discussions with many people on all topics. And it's just the sort of topic CR offers better ideas about. And I think the outcome here – a misunderstanding that wouldn't have been cleared up if I didn't follow up – is pretty typical. And misunderstandings do happen all the time, whether they are getting noticed and cleared up or not.


I think the sex issue is a great example. Let's focus on that as a representative example of many sociological issues. You think CR has nothing to do with this, but I'll explain how CR has everything to do with it. It's a matter of ideas, and CR is a method of dealing with ideas (an epistemology), and such a method (an epistemology) is necessary to life, and having a better one makes all the difference.

Chart:

Epistemology -> life ideas -> behavior/choices

What does each of those mean?

1) Epistemology is the name of one's **method of dealing with ideas**. That includes evaluating ideas, deciding which ideas to accept, finding and fixing problems with ideas, integrating ideas into one's life so they are actually used (or not), and so on. This is not what you're used to from most explicit epistemologies, but it's the proper meaning, and it's what CR offers.

2) Life ideas determine one's behavior in regard to sex, and everything else. This is stuff like one's values, one's emotional makeup, one's personality, one's goals, one's preferences, and so on. In this case, we're dealing with the person's ideas about sex, courtship and integrity.

3) Behavior/choices is what you think it means. I don't have to explain this part. In this case it deals with the concrete actions taken to pursue the irrational woman.


You see the sex example as separate from epistemology. I see them as linked, one step removed. Epistemology is one's method of dealing with (life) ideas. Then some of those (life) ideas determine sexual behavior/choices.

Concretizing, let's examine some typical details. The guy thinks that sex is a very high value, especially if the woman is very pretty and has high social status. He values the sex independent of having a moral and intellectual connection with her. He's also too passive, puts her on a pedestal, and thinks he'll do better by avoiding conflict. He also thinks he can compromise reason in his social life and keep that separate from his scientific life. (Life) ideas like these cause his sexual behavior/choices. If he had different life ideas, he'd change his behavior/choices.

Where did all these bad (life) ideas come from? Mainly from his culture including parents, teachers, friends, TV, books and websites.

Now here's where CR comes in. Why did he accept these bad ideas, instead of finding or creating some better ideas? That's because of his epistemology – his method of dealing with ideas. His epistemology let him down. It's the underlying cause of the cause of the mistaken sexual behavior/choices. A better epistemology (CR) would have given him the methods to acquire and live by better life ideas, resulting in better behavior/choices.

Concretizing with typical examples: his epistemology may have told him that checking those life ideas for errors was unnecessary because everyone knows they're how life works. Or it told him an ineffective method of checking the ideas for errors. Or it told him the errors he sees don't matter outside of trying to be clever in certain intellectual discussions. Or it told him the errors he sees can be outweighed without addressing them. Or it told him that life is full of compromise, win/lose outcomes are how reason works, and so losing in some ways isn't an error and nothing should be done about it.


If he'd used CR instead, he would have had a method that is effective at finding and dealing with errors, so he'd end up with much better life ideas. Most other epistemologies serve to intellectually disarm their victims and make it harder to resist bad life ideas (as in each of the examples in the previous paragraph). Which leads to the sociological problems that hinder science.


Everyone has an epistemology – a method of dealing with ideas. People deal with ideas on a daily basis. But most people don't know what their epistemology is, and don't use an epistemology that can be found in a book (even if they say they do).

The epistemologies in books, and taught at universities, are mostly floating abstractions, disconnected from reality. People learn them as words to say in certain conversations, but never manage to use them in daily life. CR is not like that, it offers something better.

Most people end up using a muddled epistemology, fairly accidentally, without much control over it. It's full of flaws because one's culture (especially one's parents) has bad ideas about epistemology – about the methods of dealing with ideas. And one is fallible and introduces a bunch of his own errors.

The only defense against error is error-correction – which requires good error-correcting methods of dealing with ideas (epistemology) – which is what CR is about. It's crucial to learn about what one's epistemology is, and improve it. Or else one will – lacking the methods to do better – accept bad ideas on all topics and have huge problems throughout life.

And note those problems in life include problems one isn't aware of. Thinking your life is going well doesn't mean much. The guy with the bad approach to sex typically won't regard that as a huge problem in his life, he'll see it a different way. Or if he regards it as problematic, he may be completely on the wrong track about the solution, e.g. thinking he needs to make more compromises with his integrity so he can have more success with women.


PS This is somewhat simplified. Epistemology has some direct impact, not just indirect. And I don't regard the sociological problems as the only main issue with science, I think bad ideas about how to do science (e.g. induction) matter too. But I think it's a good starting place for understanding my perspective. Philosophy dominates EVERYTHING.

Continue reading the next part of the discussion.

I discussed epistemology and cryonics with Aubrey de Grey via email. Click here to find the rest of the discussion. Yellow quotes are from Aubrey de Grey, with permission. Bluegreen is me, red is other.

Elliot, you seem to be missing a very fundamental point here, namely: you seem to be working from the assumption that it’s my job to refute your position to your satisfaction. That is no more my job than it is yours to refute mine to my satisfaction.

If you care about reason, that requires dealing with criticism, to resolution. Reason requires criticisms must not be ignored, they have to be addressed (not by you personally. there must be answers you endorse, whoever writes them). This is crucial to reason so that you don't continue with bad ideas indefinitely even though better ones are known. It allows error correction instead of entrenching errors.

It is your right and privilege to live a different lifestyle than this. But then you wouldn't be a rational intellectual.

If you think that Alcor’s or CI's refutations of concerns about cryonics (the ones you’ve definitely already found, because they are in their FAQs) are less compelling than mine about SENS, you’re entitled to your opinion, but my sincere opinion is that they are every bit as compelling. I put it to you that the evaluation of how compelling an argument is is an EXTREMELY subjective thing, both to you and to me, arising essentially from how immediately a refuttion of it comes to mind. So, it is hopeless to try to agree whether this or that argument is more compelling than the other argument: each of us must make his own judgement on that, and then act on that judgement in the indicated way - by seeking more information, or by accepting a particular conclusion a likely enough to be right that further investigation is not a priority.

I don't know why you're speaking to me at all when you hold the irrationalist position that reaching agreement in truth-seeking discussion is hopeless. (I also don't know why you are sufficiently satisfied with irrationalism that you are unwilling to read the books refuting it and offering a better way.)

Again I repeat my bottom line: you have not given me the slightest reason to believe that people’s failure to adhere to CR (or to Elliotism) is appreciably slowing the progress of science and technology.

I gave you examples and explanations, which you largely didn't reply to. Then you state I gave you no reason. That's unreasonable on your part.

Maybe I can explain what kind of reason I would accept as valid evidence for that. Arguably, when quantum theory and relativity supplanted classical physics, they did so by taking seriously the incompatibility between wave-theoretic and particle-theoretic descriptions of light, and such like, which had been basically swept under the carpet for ages. My impression is that that isn’t actually an item of evidence for your position, because (a) it was a long time ago, when many fewer people were any good at science; (b) it hadn’t really been all that swept under the carpet - it was just that no one had come up with a resolution; and (c) even to the extent that it had been, the key point is that there was clear data that needed to BE so swept, whereas in the case of Copenhagen versus Everett (which I’m not sure is the same as Schrödinger versus Heisenberg, but I don’t think that matters for present purposes) there is no such data, since both theories make the same predictions. If I’m wrong, and the lack of a widespread adoption of a CR-like method of reasoning back then seems likely to have substantially delayed the arrival of modern physics, persuade me.

I have tried to persuade you (in a way in which I could find out I'm mistaken, too), but you are taking steps to prevent persuasion. I cannot persuade you unilaterally. What you have done includes:

- Not replying to many points and questions.

- Not giving appropriate feedback on initial statements so we can iterate to the point of you understanding what I'm saying. Miscommunication and misunderstanding are to be expected and there has to be iteration of an error-correcting process for effective communication of ideas. (Communication being necessary to me persuading you.)

- Not being willing to read things, study issues, put enough effort into learning the topics.

A specific detail: I can't reasonably be expected to persuade you about the history of science first, as you propose. What needs to happen first is you understand what is a CR-like method of reasoning, so you can accurately evaluate which scientists did that and which didn't. But you don't want to read the texts explaining what is a CR-like method of reasoning, or ask the questions to understand it. You aren't finding out from existing material or from a heavy back-and-forth process adequate to cover a large topic.

Or take another example from the past. If you’re right that science is so slowed by this, how can it be so hard to identify an example (one that isn’t far more parsimoniously explained by sociological considerations such as I outlined in my last email)?

Lots of the sociological considerations are explained by the philosophical issues I'm talking about. Because you don't know what CR is, you can't tell what is a consequence of CR or non-CR.

We have, for example, an educational theory. Where does short-term thinking, bias, egos, etc come from? Significantly, from bad educational practices. Education is fairly directly an epistemology issue and CR offers some better ideas about what educational techniques work or not.

Regarding statistics, yes scientists believe they should be done right, and sometimes there are time and money issues. But lots of people don't know what doing them right means. There are philosophical misconceptions about how to use statistics correctly which would be problems even with more time and money. (An example is the inductivist misconception that correlations hint at causation, which isn't a funding issue.)

The underlying problem is you don't understand where I'm coming from and what the world would look like if I'm right. That can't be settled by looking at examples. I gave you initial statements of Elliotism. The rational way to proceed is to iterate on that (you give feedback, ask questions, I reply, etc, understanding is iteratively created) in order to understand what I'm saying.

And remember, what I really mean here is not “science” in the DD sense, i.e. the improved “understanding” (whatever that is) of nature, but technology, i.e. the practical application of science. Computers today rely absolutely on the fact that we no longer adhere to classical physics, but they rely not at all on the fact that most people work with Copenhagen rather than Everett. The passage you quote from BoI totally doesn’t help, because it stops at “understanding”, “knowledge”, “explanations” etc, which in my book are simply smoke and mirrors until and unless they translate into practical consequences for technology. Not even implemented technology - technological proposals, like SENS, would be fine.

You have an anti-philsophical outlook and don't understand the perspective of DD, me, Popper, etc. If you want to understand and address such matters, there are ways you can, which we could focus on. I've tried to indicate how that can happen, e.g. with iterative discussion of how CR works. If you'd rather simply leave critics unanswered, just tell me you don't want to talk.

I read FoR, but I don’t think I ever read BoI. Perhaps part of why is that I found FoR to be fatally flawed on about page 4, as I think I mentioned earlier. DD is a great thinker, whom I hugely admire, but that doesn’t mean I think all his thinking is correct or relevant to my own priorities. And you haven’t given me any new motivation to read BoI.

I don't think you mentioned that. And I just searched the discussion and I'm not finding it.

If you would say your criticism of FoR, that'd be great. When people share criticisms in public, then progress can be made. I know DD wrote the book partly in hopes of receiving such criticism so human knowledge could advance. But you and many others with similar methods withhold criticism and dodge lots of discussion and then human knowledge creation is slowed.

Sharing your FoR criticism could help advance our discussion, too. It's topical and I've been trying to get direct criticisms from you. If you tell me what is unacceptable to you, then I could address it or concede. And if I address ALL issues you have with my view, that's how persuasion would happen. Since you already accepted your view has flaws, if you had NO objections you'd accept mine.

If you're right about FoR being flawed, you have an important insight that others could learn from. If you're mistaken, by sharing your criticism you would expose it to criticism and you could learn about your error from others. If you'd prefer to retreat from rational discussion instead, that is your choice.

Continue reading the next part of the discussion.

I discussed epistemology and cryonics with Aubrey de Grey via email. Click here to find the rest of the discussion. Yellow quotes are from Aubrey de Grey, with permission. Bluegreen is me, red is other.

I don't agree with your look-at-scientific-contributions method, but in any case you don't have the input data to use it. Yet somehow you think you've gotten a conclusion from it.

I guess I was too abbreviated: what I meant was that if disproportionate scientific progress were made by those with a minority view about how to reason, it wouldn’t be the minority view for long (at least not within science), and that hasn’t happened.

This claim, dealing with a field you don't want to study, brings up dozens of difficult issues which I think you don't want to discuss to resolution. I don't know what to do with this. Do you?

I'll mention a few example issues:

- If everyone thinks like this, who will try stuff in the first place? Who will be the early adopters? Is your plan to rely on people who *disagree with you* about this matter to be the ones to find, test, and then persuade you of innovations?

- The cause of success is something people disagree about, e.g. someone might attribute DD's success to him being an outlier genius, rather than to his philosophy.

- Small sample size. And many people don't know which scientists were Popperians. Take a hypothetical scientist who admires 100 scientists who were especially effective. 70 of them might be Popperians without him knowing.

- Judging which scientists actually are Popperians is difficult and requires philosophical skill to do accurately.

- You're proposing people would do something because it makes sense to do. But sometimes people are irrational and act in ways that don't make sense.

- It's a bit like asking if capitalism is so much better, why doesn't it dominate the whole world yet? There are many things that can block the uptake of good ideas other than the idea being mistaken.

Because there are many reasons things might not work out as you propose, you shouldn't rely on that way of looking at it. Instead, the only reasonable thing to do is look at the actual merits and content of CR arguments, not the unargued reactions of others. Look at the substantive ideas and arguments, not the opinions of others.

Either you personally should consider CR ideas, or (preferably since it's not your field) others should and you could read some summary work and be persuaded by that and reference it if challenged. So CR arguments get answered (or accepted), and there is a way for you to find out about new ideas (via the work you endorse, which provides targets for criticism, being refined or refuted). But you don't want to take responsibility for this, and nor do *lots* other people, and so the the march of progress is dramatically delayed.

Your arguments in your books about topics like mitochondria are much more detailed and rigorous than what you said to me about cryonics.

Um sure, but that’s becaue I referred you to alcor.org and cryonics.org. I deny that the arguments given there are much (indeed any) less detailed and rigorous than those I give about mitochondria etc.

You didn't want to refer me to specific material, and I was unable to find material in the same league as your stuff. I wrote to you explaining problems with some material I found (I didn't find equivalent problems in your books). If I misjudged it, or they offer better material, you could tell me.

You do things like consider all the challenges SENS has to deal with to work, and address each. Where is the equivalent cryonics material?

There is a great deal of detailed scientific knowledge about mitochondria (which you carefully studied and learned). Where is the equivalent cryonics material?

Scientific progress is much slower than it could be, today. This can be seen by surveying scientific fields. I've already given you some examples like the social sciences and medical retractions. You didn't give alternative interpretations or criticisms. Now you deny it after leaving those points unanswered, without exposing your reasoning to criticism.

Apologies again for over-brevity. Of course there are many reasons why scientific progress is much slower than it could be, but my contention is that inferiority of scientific method is not a significant one of them. Rather, the reasons are lack of funding from public sources beholden to the public (who certainly don’t reason well), self-serving short-termist competition between scientists fomented by that lack of funding, egos, that sort of thing. Theer is also a big contribution from poor interpretation (for example, poor use of statistics), but again that is not because scientists don’t believe statistics should be done right, it’s because they find it more important to publish than to be correct.

Here you bring up complex and controversial philosophical issues, including freedom and capitalism. What do you think I should do? Try to explain a bunch of philosophy when you have one foot out the door, while previous attempts to explain other philosophy are unresolved? Ask why you're confident in your judgments of these issues even though your philosophy is under-specified and under-studied, and you've chosen not to read a lot of the material on these topics? Guess that you might not recognize your paragraph as bringing up a bunch of complex and controversial philosophical issues, and guess what your reasoning might be, and try to preemptively answer it? Tell you that your perspective here contains mistakes relevant to SENS funding, so our philosophical differences do matter? Any suggestions?

I would know how to handle these things if we were both using my preferred methods. But you use your own methods in the discussion, and I don't know how to work with those. I don't know how issues like these are to be resolved with your discussion methods.


You deal with philosophy issues routinely, but you don't want to study it, and nor do you want to outsource that and endorse the conclusions in some specific writing. So you end up doing a mix of reinventing half of the wheel badly, plus outsourcing-by-accident to people whose names you don't even know so there's no accountability. You're accepting a bunch of ideas (e.g. induction) that you picked up somewhere and you don't know clearly who to hold accountable, which books are involved, where to look up details of their reasoning if I question it, etc. You're outsourcing philosophy thinking third-hand: some people have ideas and others decide they were successful and still others are impressed and spread the ideas through the culture to you.

Concerning quantum physics, I am not a specialist, but my understanding is that the Copenhagen and Everett interpretations make exactly the same predictions about observable data, and thus cannot be experimentally distinguished. My question then is, who cares which is correct? The passage you quote from topics/24387 seems to me to acknowledge this: it says that the only real problem with the Copenhagen model is that it’s nonsensical. What exactly is wrong with “shut up and calculate” if it works?

Did you read The Beginning of Infinity? Do you or anyone else have answers to it? Do you want me to rewrite it with less editing? Quote it? Will you be pleased with a reference to it, telling you where to get answers?

I also don't think it makes sense to drop the random sampling topic (for example) and take up this new one – won't we run into the same discussion problems again on this new topic? I expect to; do you disagree?

BoI:

Although Schrödinger’s and Heisenberg’s theories seemed to describe very dissimilar worlds, neither of which was easy to relate to existing conceptions of reality, it was soon discovered that, if a certain simple rule of thumb was added to each theory, they would always make identical predictions. Moreover, these *predictions* turned out to be very successful.

With hindsight, we can state the rule of thumb like this: whenever a measurement is made, all the histories but one cease to exist. The surviving one is chosen at random, with the probability of each possible outcome being equal to the total measure of all the histories in which that outcome occurs.

At that point, disaster struck. Instead of trying to improve and integrate those two powerful but slightly flawed explanatory theories, and to explain why the rule of thumb worked, most of the theoretical-physics community retreated rapidly and with remarkable docility into instrumentalism. If the predictions work, they reasoned, why worry about the explanation? So they tried to regard quantum theory as being *nothing but* a set of rules of thumb for predicting the observed outcomes of experiments, saying nothing (else) about reality. This move is still popular today, and is known to its critics (and even to some of its proponents) as the ‘shut-up-and-calculate interpretation of quantum theory’.

This meant ignoring such awkward facts as (1) the rule of thumb was grossly inconsistent with both theories; hence it could be used only in situations where quantum effects were too small to be noticed. Those happened to include the moment of measurement (because of entanglement with the measuring instrument, and consequent decoherence, as we now know). And (2) it was not even *self*-consistent when applied to the hypothetical case of an observer performing a quantum measurement on another observer. And (3) both versions of quantum theory were clearly describing *some* sort of physical process that *brought* about the outcomes of experiments. Physicists, both through professionalism and through natural curiosity, could hardly help wondering about that process. But many of them tried not to. Most of them went on to train their students not to. This counteracted the scientific tradition of criticism in regard to quantum theory.

Let me define ‘bad philosophy’ as philosophy that is not merely false, but actively prevents the growth of other knowledge. In this case, instrumentalism was acting to prevent the explanations in Schrödinger’s and Heisenberg’s theories from being improved or elaborated or unified.

To understand what this means more, it's important to read the whole book and engage with it's ideas, e.g. by asking questions about points of confusion or disagreement, and criticizing parts you think may be mistaken, and discussing those things to resolution. Or if you don't do that, I think you should say more "I don't know"s instead of e.g. making the philosophical claims that shut up and calculate works, Aubreyism works, etc.

I think you want to neither answer the points in BoI and elsewhere (including by endorsing someone else's answer for use as your own), nor defer to them, nor be neutral. Isn't that irrational?

Continue reading the next part of the discussion.