From alt.philosophy.objectivism:

The empiricist approach to discerning reality is making sense of evidence that has been gleaned from the senses. Some philosophers – such as Kant – challenged this approach. They stated such things as that senses are imprecise, and that (in Kant) they only see the appearance of things – the “phenomenal” - but fail to see the things in themselves – the “noumenal.”

I want to make sense of the whole thing.

Now the senses are actually not imprecise. Incomplete yes, but imprecise no. We do not see the radio waves or the infrared radiation; we see the visible light. However the information that I get from seeing the visible light is not an erroneous one. If I see you, I am fairly certain that I am actually seeing you – both the phenomenal you and the noumenal you. I can from this make an educated guess that you are not Adolf Hitler.

Sorting out these issues requires being more careful. The word "imprecise" has a meaning when it comes to observations and measurements, which you ignore. A measurement of 1.337 inches is more precise than a measurement of 1.3 inches. Our senses are imprecise in the straightforward sense that they offer limited, not unlimited, precision. You can't look at something and see the exact, precise color or length of it.

You are trying to communicate about subtle differences between terms like "imprecise" and "incomplete", but you don't define them and you aren't using them correctly according to their standard English meanings.

After that you start equivocating with "not erroneous", "fairly certain" and "educated guess". These are standard equivocations used by almost everyone including Objectivists. But they're still a big problem.

When you say "not erroneous" do you mean it cannot be mistaken? That is, it's infallible? The standard equivocation is to be unclear on this meaning -- to say things like "X is not mistaken" like it's a fact. But then to admit, if pressed, that X could be mistaken.

This equivocation is much worse in this context because of a second ambiguity. It's possible to say that sensory data cannot be mistaken, it merely is, and the concept of error doesn't apply. If the sense data is misleading because of a defect in your eye, that's a different thing than a mistake. One can reasonably say mistakes are only made by intelligences, and that one's interpretation of sense data can be mistaken but the concept of being mistaken or not doesn't even apply to the data itself. (If one was taking that position, then one shouldn't say uses phrases like "not erroneous" to refer to error-doesn't-apply-here. But people do it anyway.)

"fairly certain" can mean things like

• you don't want to be held accountable if your claim is wrong, so you hedged.
• you don't know how certain you are, so you used a phrase that could mean pretty much any amount between 100% and 0%.
• you want wiggle room to treat what you say as meaning "certain" sometimes and meaning "uncertain" at other times.

and if that weren't bad enough, the word "certain" alone is used as an equivocation. does it mean fallible knowledge? an "educated guess" as you put it? or does it mean you found the truth and it's proven beyond being doubted? people equivocate between those two meanings. and they pretend to mean something in the middle, which they can't actually define.

now let's consider "educated guess". does this mean simply "i have a guess and i think it's good?" or does it mean something more than that? is "educated" a claim to some kind of meaningful, objective status for the guess separate from your own positive opinion? it's unclear and the phrasing allows you to shift positions mid discussion.

and it fails to specify how educated the guess is. all guesses are educated more than zero and less than infinitely. so what's the idea here? it means it's educated an amount people in our culture think is good. which is really vague and unargued/unexplained.

there are lots of ways a guess can be educated. the important things are:

1) if any of the ways the guess is educated are relevant to the discussion, they can be stated. (none were stated here.)

2) is the claim to educated status meant to grant authority to one's position?

3) there is a myth that ideas have a continuum of epistemological status. Peikoff labels points on this continuum as "arbitrary", "possible", "probable", "certain". these are terrible terms which are chosen for maximizing equivocation. "probable" mixes things up with math. "certain" suggests infallibility. and the word "possible" has a meaning (that the laws of physics and logic don't contradict something) which is true of many claims in all the categories. the phrase "educated guess" may be a claim for higher status on this continuum. this continuum is one of the fundamental mistakes in epistemology and has led to endless equivocating. what difference does status on this continuum actually make? fundamentally everything comes down to critical refutation of ideas – or not. and the continuum sometimes refers to using critical arguments (for which no continuum is needed -- one always can and should act on ideas with no criticism of them), but sometimes the continuum hides the lack of any arguments.

so the fundamental equivocation is: do you have an argument that something is false? yes or no? but people don't want to face that. people want to ignore criticism and claim it's outweighed by some positive factor. they also want to ignore that they have no criticism of something, but reject it anyway by saying something else has more merit which outweighs it. (but if it's actually missing some important merit, why not just criticize that inadequacy?)

and meanwhile people are very interested in arguments that something is true. but that approach can't work because there's no way to prove something true, we always have improvable, fallible knowledge not some sort of final perfection. so what does trying to argue your idea is true mean, exactly, if you aren't arguing it's perfect? you're arguing it's the best we've got right now, it's good enough to act on, stuff like that. but how do you do that? to say it's the best idea we've got so far, you refute the rival ideas. and to say it's good enough to act on, you consider if there's any criticism of acting on it.

patio11 wrote a great sequence of tweets:

Robert Spillane (RS) is a philosopher who worked with Thomas Szasz for decades. He comments on Critical Rationalism (CR) in his books. I think he liked some parts of CR, but he disagrees with CR about induction and some other major issues. Attempting to clear up some disagreements, I sent him a summary of CR I wrote (not published yet).

Previously I criticized a David Stove book he recommended, responded to him about RSI (we agree), replied positively to his article on personality tests, explained a Popper passage RS didn't understand, and wrote some comments about Popper to him.

RS replied to my CR article with 25 points. Here are my replies:

I am reluctant to comment on your article since it is written in a 'popular' style - as you say it is a summary article. Nonetheless, since you ask.......

I think writing in a popular (clear and readable) style is good. I put effort into it.

Speaking of style, I also think heavy use of quoting is important to serious discussions. It helps with responding more precisely to what people said, rather than to the gist of it. And it helps with engaging with people rather than talking past them.

(I've omitted the first point because it was a miscommunication issue where RS didn't receive my Stove reply.)

2. Your summary article is replete with tautologies which, while true, are trivial. The first paragraph is, therefore, trivial. And from trivial tautologies one can only deduce tautologies.

I’m not trying to approach philosophy by deduction (or induction or abduction), which I consider a mistaken approach.

Here's the paragraph RS refers to:

Humans are fallible. That means we’re capable of being mistaken. This possibility of making a mistake applies to everything. There’s no way to get a guarantee that one of your ideas is true (has no mistakes). There’s no guaranteed way to limit where a mistake could be (saying this part of my idea could be mistaken but not that part) or the size a mistake could be.

This makes claims which I believe most people disagree with or don’t understand, so I disagree that it’s trivial. I think it’s an important position statement to differentiate CR’s views from other views. I wish it was widely considered trivial!

I say, "There’s no way to get a guarantee that one of your ideas is true”. I don’t see how that's a tautology. Maybe RS interprets it as being a priori deducible from word definitions? Something like that? That kind of perspective is not how I (or Popper) approach philosophy.

I wrote it as a statement about how reality actually is, not how reality logically must be. I consider it contingent on the laws of physics, not necessary or tautological. I didn’t discover it by deduction, but by critical argument (and even some scientific observations were relevant). And I disagree with and deny the whole approach of a priori knowledge and the analytic/synthetic dichotomy.

3. Why are informal arguments OK? What is an example of an informal argument? It can't be an invalid one since that would not be OK philosophically, unless one is an irrationalist.

An example of an informal argument:

Socialism is a system of price controls. These cause shortages (when price ceilings are too low), waste (when price floors are too high), and inefficient production (when the controlled prices don’t match what market prices would be). Price floors cruelly keep goods out of the hands of people who want to purchase the goods to improve their lives, while denying an income to sellers. Price ceilings prevent the people who most urgently need goods from outbidding others for those goods. This creates a system of first-come-first-serve (rather than allocating goods where they will provide the most benefit), a shadow market system of friendships and favors (to obtain the privilege of buying goods), and a black market. Socialism sacrifices the total amount wealth produced (which is maximized by market prices), and what do we get in return for a reduction in total wealth? People are harmed!

Szasz’s books are full of informal arguments of a broadly similar nature to this one. He doesn’t write deductions, formal logic, and syllogisms.

Informal arguments are invalid in the sense that they don’t conform to one of the templates for a valid deduction. I don't think that makes them false.

I don’t think it’s irrationalism to think there’s value and knowledge in that price controls argument against socialism, even though it’s not a set of syllogisms and doesn't reduce to a set of syllogisms.

The concept of formal logic means arguments which are correct based on their form, regardless of some of the specifics inserted. E.g. All X are Y. Z is X. Therefore Z is Y.

The socialism argument doesn’t work that way. It depends on the specific terms chosen. If you replace them with other terms, it wouldn’t make sense anymore. E.g. if you swapped each use of "floor" and "ceiling" then the argument would be wrong. Or if you replaced "socialism" with "capitalism" then it'd be wrong because capitalism doesn't include price controls.

The socialism argument is also informal in the sense that it’s fairly imprecise. It omits many details. This could be improved by further elaborations and discussion. It could also be improved with footnotes, e.g. to George Reisman’s book, Capitalism: A Treatise on Economics, which is where I got some of the arguments I used.

Offering finite precision, and not covering every detail, is also something I consider reasonable, not irrationalist. And I’d note Szasz did it in each of his books.

Informal arguments are OK because there’s nothing wrong with them (no criticism refuting their use in general – though some are mistaken). And because informal arguments are useful and effective for human progress (e.g. science is full of them) and for solving problems and creating knowledge.

4. I wasn't aware that there was A key to philosophy of knowledge (metaphor?). And how is 'fixing' mistakes effective if we are condemned to fallibility?

It's not a metaphor, it’s a dictionary definition. E.g. OED for key (noun): "A means of understanding something unknown, mysterious, or obscure; a solution or explanation.”

What does RS mean “condemned” to fallibility? If one puts effort into detecting and correcting errors, then one can deal with errors effectively and have a nice life and modern science. There’s nothing miserable about the ongoing need for critical consideration of ideas.

In information theory, there are methods of communicating with arbitrarily high (though not 100%) reliability over channels with a permanent situation of random errors. The mathematical theory allows dealing with error rates up to but not including 50%! In practice, error correction techniques do not reach the mathematical limits, but are still highly effective for enabling e.g. the modern world with hard disks and internet communications. (Source: Feynman Lectures On Computation, ch. 4.3, p. 107)

The situation is similar in epistemology. Error correction methods like critical discussion don't offer any 100% guarantees, nor any quantifiable guarantees, but are still effective.

5. Critical rationalists leave themselves open to the charge of frivolity if they maintain that the 'sources of ideas aren't very important'. How is scientific progress possible without some 'knowledge' of ideas from the past?

Learning about and building on old ideas is fine.

The basic point here is to judge an idea by what it says, rather than by who said it or how he came up with it.

You may learn about people from the past because you find it interesting or inspiring, or in order to use contextual information to better understand their ideas. For example, I read biographies of William Godwin, his family, and Edmund Burke, in order to better understand Godwin’s philosophy ideas (and because it’s interesting and useful information).

6. Why must we be tolerant with, say, totalitarians? Do you really believe that Hitler could be defeated through argumentation?

I think Hitler could easily have been stopped without violence if various people had better ideas early enough in the process (e.g. starting at the beginning of WWI). And similarly the key to our current struggles with violent Islam is philosophical education –- proudly standing up for the right values. The mistaken ideas of our leaders (and most citizens) is what lets evil flourish.

7. One of the most tendentious propositions in philosophy is 'There is a real world.' Popper's 'realism' is Platonic.

So what if it's "tendentious"? What's the point of saying that? Is that intended to argue some point?

Popper isn't a Platonist and his position is that there is a real, objective reality and we can know about it. I was merely stating his position. Sample quote (Objective Knowledge, ch. 2.3, p. 36):

And Reid, with whom I share adherence to realism and to common sense, thought that we had some very direct, immediate, and secure perception of external, objective reality.

Popper's view is that there is an external, objective reality, and we can know about it. However, all our observations are theory-laden – we have to think and interpret in order to figure out what exists.

8. How can an idea be a mistake if its source is irrelevant?

Its content can be mistaken. E.g. "2+3=6" is false regardless of who writes it.

RS may be thinking of a statement like, "It is noon now." Whether that's true depends on the context of the statement, such as what time it is and what language it's written in. Using context to understand the meaning/content of a statement, and then judging by the meaning/content, is totally different than judging an idea by its source (such as judging an idea to be true or probably true because an authority said it, or because the idea was created by attempting to follow the scientific method).

9. One of the many stupid things Popper said was 'All Life is Problem Solving'. Is having sexual intercourse problem-solving? Is listening to Mozart problem-solving?

Yes.

RS calls it stupid because he don't understand it. He doesn't know what Popper means by the phrase "problem solving". Instead of finding out Popper's meaning, RS interpreted that phrase in his own terminology, found it didn't work, and stopped there. That's a serious methodological error.

Having sex helps people solve problems related to social status and social role, as well as problems related to the pursuit of happiness.

Listening to Mozart helps people solve the problem of enjoying their life.

The terminology issue is why I included multiple paragraphs explaining what CR means in my article. For example, I wrote, "[A problem] can be answering a question, pursuing a goal, or fixing something broken. Any kind of learning, doing, accomplishing or improving. Problems are opportunities for something to be better."

Despite this, RS still interpreted according to his own standard terminology. Understanding other perspectives, frameworks and terminology requires effort but is worthwhile.

The comment RS is replying to comes later and reads:

Solving problems always leads to a new situation where there’s new problems you can work on to make things even better. Life is an infinite journey. There’s no end point with nothing left to do or learn. As Popper titled a book, All Life is Problem Solving.

I brought up All Life is Problem Solving because part of its meaning is that we don't run out of problems.

10. 'All problems can be solved if you know how' is a tautology and has no contingent consequences.

It's not a tautology because there's an alternative view (which is actually far more popular than the CR view). The alternative is that there exist insoluble problems (they couldn't be solved no matter what knowledge you had). If you think that alternative view is wrong on a priori logical grounds, I disagree, I think it depends on the laws of physics.

11. 'Knowledge is power' entails 'power is knowledge' which is clearly false as an empirical generalisation.

"Knowledge is power" is a well known phrase associated with the Enlightenment. It has a non-literal meaning which RS isn't engaging with. See e.g. Wikipedia: Scientia potentia est.

I would be very surprised if RS is unfamiliar with this phrase. I don't know why he chose to split hairs about it instead of responding to what I meant.

12. 'If you have a correct solution, then your actions will work' is a tautology.

It's useful to point out because some people wouldn't think of it. If I omitted that sentence, some readers would be confused.

13. 'Observations play no formal role in creating ideas' is clearly false. Semmelweis based his idea about childbirth fever on observations and inductive inferences therefrom.

RS states the CR view is "clearly false". That's the fallacy of begging the question. Whether it's false is one of the things being debated.

Rather than assume CR is wrong, RS should learn or ask what CR's interpretation of that example is (and more broadly CR's take on scientific discovery). Popper explained this in his books, at length, including going through a variety of examples from the history of science, so there shouldn't be any mystery here about CR's position.

I don't think discussing this example is a good idea because it's full of historical details which distract from explaining issues like why induction is a myth and what can be done instead. If RS understood CR's position on those issues, then he could easily answer the Semmelweis example himself. It poses no particular challenge for CR.

Anyone who can't explain the Semmelweis example in CR terms is not adequately familiar with CR to reject CR. You have to know what CR would say about a scientific discovery like that before you decide CR is "clearly false".

14. 'Knowledge cannot exist outside human minds'. Of course it can if there are no human minds. I agree with Thomas Szasz who, in 'The Meaning of Mind' argued that while we are minded (mind the step) we do not have minds. 'Mind' should only be used as a verb, never as a noun. Popper's mind-body dualism is bad enough, but his pluralism is embarrassing.

I wrote "Knowledge can exist outside human minds." and this changes "can" to "cannot". RS, please use copy/paste for quotes to avoid misquotes.

I'm not a dualist.

It's fine to read my statement as "Knowledge can exist outside human brains" or outside people entirely. The point is knowledge can exist separate from an intelligent or knowing entity.

15. 'A dog's eyes contain knowledge'. I don't understand this since to know x is to know that x is true. Since truth is propositional, dogs don't have to deal with issues of truth. Lucky dogs!

CR disagrees with RS about what knowledge is, and claims e.g. that there is knowledge in books and in genes. Knowledge in genes has nothing to do with a dog knowing anything.

RS, what is your answer to Paley's problem? And what do you think genetic evolution creates?

16. Your use of 'knowledge' is somewhat eccentric if you claim that trees know that x.

I don't claim trees know anything, I claim that the genes in trees have knowledge of how to construct tree cells.

CR acknowledges its view of knowledge is non-standard, but nevertheless considers it correct and important.

17. 'Knowledge is created by evolution' is a tautology if we accept a liberal interpretation of 'created'. If we do not and we assume strict causation, it is false.

That knowledge can be created by evolution is contingent on the laws of physics, not tautological. RS does not state what the "liberal interpretation" he refers to is, nor what "strict causation" refers to, so I don't know how to answer further besides to request that he provide arguments on the matter (preferably arguments that would persuade me that RS understands evolution).

18. Ideas cannot literally replicate themselves.

This is an unargued assertion. Literally, they can. I think RS is simply concluding something is wrong because he doesn't understand it, which is a methodological error.

David Deutsch has explained this matter in The Fabric of Reality, ch. 8:

a replicator is any entity that causes certain environments to copy it.

...

I shall also use the term niche for the set of all possible environments which a given replicator would cause to make copies of it....

Not everything that can be copied is a replicator. A replicator causes its environment to copy it: that is, it contributes causally to its own copying. (My terminology differs slightly from that used by Dawkins. Anything that is copied, for whatever reason, he calls a replicator. What I call a replicator he would call an active replicator.) What it means in general to contribute causally to something is an issue to which I shall return, but what I mean here is that the presence and specific physical form of the replicator makes a difference to whether copying takes place or not. In other words, the replicator is copied if it is present, but if it were replaced by  almost any other object, even a rather similar one, that object would not be copied.

...

Genes embody knowledge about their niches.

...

It is the survival of knowledge, and not necessarily of the gene or any other physical object, that is the common factor between replicating and non-replicating genes. So, strictly speaking, it is a piece of knowledge rather than a physical object that is or is not adapted to a certain niche. If it is adapted, then it has the property that once it is embodied in that niche, it will tend to remain so.

...

But now we have come almost full circle. We can see that the ancient idea that living matter has special physical properties was almost true: it is not living matter but knowledge-bearing matter that is physically special. Within one universe it looks irregular; across universes it has a regular structure, like a crystal in the multiverse.

Add to this that ideas exist physically in brain matter, (in the same way data can be stored on computer disks), and they do cause their own replication.

Understanding evolution in a precise, modern way was Deutsch's largest contribution to CR.

I don't expect RS to understand this material from these brief quotes. It's complicated. I'm trying to give an indication that there's substance here that could be learned. If he wants to understand it, he'll have to read Deutsch's books (there's even more material about memes in The Beginning of Infinity) or ask a lot of questions. I do hope he'll stop saying this is false while he doesn't understand it.

19. You claim that CR 'works'. According to what criteria - logical? empirical? pragmatic? If it is pragmatism - or what Stove calls the American philosophy of self-indulgence' - then all philosophies, religions and superstitions 'work' (for their believers).

CR works logically, empirically, and practically. That is, there's no logical, empirical or practical refutation of its effectiveness. (I'm staying away from the word "pragmatic" on purpose. No thanks!)

What CR works to do, primarily, is create knowledge. The way I judge that CR works is by looking at the problems it claims to solve, how it claims to solves them, and critically considering whether its methods would work (meaning succeed at solving those problems).

CR offers a conception of what knowledge is and what methods create it (guesses and criticism – evolution). CR offers substantial detail on the matter. I know of no non-refuted criticism of the ability of CR's methods to create knowledge as CR defines knowledge.

There's a further issue of whether CR has the right goals. We can all agree we want "knowledge" in some sense, but is CR's conception of knowledge actually the thing we want? Not for everyone, e.g. infallibilists. But CR explains why conjectural knowledge is the right conception of knowledge to pursue, which I don't know any non-refuted criticism of. Further, there are no viable rival conceptions of knowledge that anyone knows how to pursue. Basically, all other conceptions of knowledge are either vague or wrong (e.g. infallibilist). This claim depends on a bunch of arguments – RS if you state your conception of knowledge then I'll comment on it.

20. You are right to say that '90% certain' is an oxymoron. But so is 'conjectural knowledge'.

Here RS interprets "knowledge" and perhaps also "conjectural" in his own terminology, rather than learning what CR means.

The most important part of CR's conception of knowledge is that fallible ideas can be knowledge. Conjectures are fallible.

"Conjectural knowledge" is also an anti-authoritarian concept. Popper is saying that mere guesses (even myths) can be knowledge (if they solve a problem and are subjected to critical scrutiny). An idea doesn't have to be created by an authority-granting method (e.g. deduction, induction, abduction, "the scientific method", etc) or come from an authority-granting source (e.g. a famous scientist) in order to be knowledge.

21. 'Actually, the possibility for further progress is a good thing' is a value judgement. But how can progress be a feature of CR? Was not Thomas Kuhn right to claim that Popper's position leads to rampant relativism (as Kuhn's does).

No, Popper isn't a relativist about anything. Popper wrote a ton about progress and took the position that progress is possible, objective and desirable. (E.g. "Equating rationality with the critical attitude, we look for theories which, however fallible, progress beyond their predecessors" from C&R.) And Popper thought we have objective knowledge, including about value judgements and morality. Some of Popper's comments on the matter in The World of Parmenides:

Every rational discussion, that is, every discussion devoted to the search for truth, is based on principles, which in actual fact are ethical principles.

...

All this shows that ethical principles form the basis of science. The most important of all such ethical principles is the principle that objective truth is the fundamental regulative idea of all rational discussion. Further ethical principles embody our commitment to the search for truth and the idea of approximation to truth; and the importance of intellectual integrity and of fallibility, which lead us to a self-critical attitude and to toleration. It is also very important that we can learn in the field of ethics.

...

Should this new ethics [that Popper proposes] turn out to be a better guide for human conduct than the traditional ethics of the intellectual professions ... then I may be allowed to claim that new things can be learnt even in the field of ethics.

...

in the field of ethics too, one can put forward suggestions which may be discussed and improved by critical discussion

In CR's view, the ability to learn in a field requires that there's objective knowledge in that field. Under relativism, you can't learn since there's no mistakes to correct and no objective truth to seek. So Popper thinks there is objective ethical knowledge.

22. Your claim that 'induction works by inducing' applies also to 'deduction works by deducing'.

The statement "deduction works by deducing" would be a bad argument for deduction or explanation of how deduction works.

Inductivists routinely state that induction works by generalizing or extrapolating from observation and think they've explained how to do induction (rather than recognizing the relation of their statement to "induction works by inducing").

23. Inductivists do have an answer for you. Stove has argued, correctly in my view, that there are good reasons to believe inductively-derived propositions. I paraphrase from my book 'An Eye for an I' (pp.183-4) for your readers who have no knowledge of my book.

'Hume's scepticism about induction - that it is illogical and hence irrational and unreasonable - is the basis for his scepticism about science. His two main propositions are: inference from experience is not deductive; it is therefore a purely irrational process. The first proposition is irrefutable. 'Some observed ravens are black, therefore all ravens are black' is an invalid argument: this is the 'fallibility of induction.' But the second proposition is untenable since it assumes that all rational inference is deductive. Since 'rational' means 'agreeable to reason', it is obvious that our use of reason often ignores deduction and emphasises the facts of experience and inferences therefrom.

Stove defends induction from Hume's scepticism by arguing that scepticism about induction is the result of the 'fallibility of induction' and the assumption that deduction is the only form of rational argument. The result is inductive scepticism, which is that no proposition about the observed is a reason to believe a contingent proposition about the unobserved. The fallibility of induction, on its own, does not produce inductive scepticism because from the fact that inductive arguments are invalid it does not follow that something we observe gives us no reason to believe something we have not yet observed. If all our experience of flames is that they burn, this does give us a reason for assuming that we will get burned if we put our hand into some as yet unobserved flame. This is not a logically deducible reason but it is still a good reason. But once the fallibility of induction is joined with the deductivist assumption that the only acceptable reasons are deductive ones, inductive scepticism does indeed follow.

Hume's scepticism about science is the result of his general inductive scepticism combined with his commitment to empiricism, which holds that any reason to believe a contingent proposition about the unobserved is a proposition about the observed. So the general proposition about empiricism needs to be joined with inductive scepticism to produce Hume's conclusion because some people believe that we can know the unobserved by non-empirical means, such as faith or revelation. As an empiricist Hume rules these means out as proper grounds for belief. So to assert the deductivist viewpoint is to assert a necessary truth, that is, something that is trivially true not because of any way the world is organised but because of nothing more than the meanings of the terms used in it. When sceptics claim that a flame found tomorrow might not be hot like those of the past, they have no genuine reason for this doubt, only a trivial necessary truth.'

What, then, is the bearing of 'all observed ravens have been black' on the theory 'all ravens are black'? Stove's answer is based on an idea of American philosopher Donald Cary Williams, which is to reduce inductive inference to the inference from proportions in a population. It is a mathematical fact that the great majority of large samples of a population are close to the population in composition. In the case of the ravens, the observations are probably a fair sample of the unobserved ravens. This applies equally in the case where the sample is of past observations and the population includes future ones. Thus, probable inferences are always relative to the available evidence.

The claim "there are good reasons to believe inductively-derived propositions" doesn't address Popper's arguments that inductively-derived propositions don't exist.

Any finite set of facts or observations is compatible with infinitely many different ideas. So which idea(s) does one induce?

Note that this argument is not about the "fallibility of induction". So Stove is mistaken when he says that's the source of skepticism of induction. (No doubt it's a source of some skepticism of induction, but not of CR's.) The claim that deduction is the only form of rational argument is also not CR's position. So Stove isn't answering CR. Yet RS said this was an inductivist answer to me.

This is typical. I had an objection to the first sentence following "Inductivists do have an answer for you." It made an assumption I consider false. It then proceeded to build on that assumption rather than answer me.

Where RS writes, "it is still a good reason", no statement of why it's a good reason or in what sense it's "good" or why being good in that sense matters is given. Avoiding some technical details, CR says approximately that it's a good reason because we don't have a criticism of it, rather than for an inductive reason. Why does no criticism matter? What's good about that? Better an idea you don't see anything wrong with than one you do see something wrong with.

Nothing in the paragraphs answers CR. They just demonstrate unfamiliarity with CR's standard arguments. Consider:

When sceptics claim that a flame found tomorrow might not be hot like those of the past, they have no genuine reason for this doubt, only a trivial necessary truth.

Many things in the future are different than the past. So one has to understand explanations of in what ways the future will resemble the past, and in what ways it won't. Induction offers no help with this project. Induction doesn't tell us in which ways the future will resemble the past and in which ways it won't (or in which ways the unobserved resembles the observed and in which ways it doesn't). But explanations (which can be improved with critical discussion) do tell us this.

For example, modern science has an explanation of what the sun is made of (mostly hydrogen and helium), its mass (4.385e30 lbs), why it burns (nuclear fusion), etc. These explanations let us understand in what respects the sun will be similar and different tomorrow, when it will burn out, what physical processes would change the date it burns out, what will happen when it burns out, and so on. Explanations simply aren't inferences from observations using some kind of inductive principle about the future probably resembling the past while ignoring the "in which respects?" question. And the sort of skeptic being argued with in the quote has nothing to do with CR.

I won't get into probability math here (we could do that in the future if desired), but I will mention that Popper already addressed that stuff. And the object of this exercise was to answer CR, but that would take something like going over Popper's arguments about probability (with quotes) and saying why they are mistaken or how to get around them.

24. You state that Popper invented critical rationalism around 1950. I would have thought it was around the mid-1930s.

Inventing CR was an ongoing process so this is approximate. But here are some of the book publication dates:

Objective Knowledge, 1972. Conjectures and Refutations, 1963. Realism and the Aim of Science, 1983 (circulated privately in 1956). The Logic of Scientific Discovery, 1934 (1959 in English). Since I don't consider LScD to be anything like the whole of CR, I chose a later date.

[25.] Your last paragraph is especially unfortunate because you accuse those philosophers who are not critical rationalists (which is most of them) of not understanding 'it enough to argue with it.' With respect Elliot, this is arrogant and ill-informed. Many philosophers understand it only too well and have written learned books on it. Some are broadly sympathetic but critical (David Miller, Anthony O'Hear) while others (Stove, James Franklin) are critical and dismissive. To acknowledge that CR 'isn't very popular, but it can win any debate' is nonsensical and carries the whiff of the 'true believer', which would seem to be self-contradictory for a critical rationalist.

It may be arrogant, but I don't think it's ill-informed. I've researched the matter and don't believe the names you list are counter-examples.

What's nonsensical about an idea which can win in debate, but which most people don't believe? Many scientific ideas have had that status at some time in their history. Ideas commonly start off misunderstood and unpopular, even if there's an advocate who provides arguments which most people later acknowledge were correct.

I think I'm right about CR. I'm fallible, but I know of no flaws or outstanding criticisms of any of my take on CR, so I (tentatively) accept it. I have debated the matter with all critics willing to discuss for a long time. I have sought out criticism from people, books, papers, etc. I've made an energetic effort to find out my mistakes. I haven't found that CR is mistaken. Instead, I've found the critics consistently misunderstand CR, do not provide relevant arguments which address my views, do not address key questions CR raises, and also have nothing to say about Deutsch's books.

I run a public philosophy discussion forum. I have visited every online philosophy discussion forum I could find which might offer relevant discussion and criticism. The results were pathetic. I also routinely contact people who have written relevant material or who just seem smart and potentially willing to discuss. For example, I contacted David Miller and invited him to discuss, but he declined.

Calling this arrogant (Because I think I know something important? Because I think many other people are mistaken?), doesn't refute my interpretation of these life experiences. RS, if you have a proposal for what I should do differently (or a different perspective I should use), I'll be happy to consider it. And if you know of any serious critics of CR who will discuss the matter, please tell me who they are.

None of RS's 25 points were difficult for me to answer. If RS knew of any refutation of CR by any author which I couldn't answer, I would have expected him to be able to pose a difficult challenge for me within 25 comments. But, as usual with everyone, so far nothing RS has said gives even a hint of raising an anti-CR argument which I don't have a pre-existing answer for.

The Fabric of Reality by David Deutsch:

The disappointment experienced by Russell's chicken has also been experienced by trillions of other chickens.

Is trillions accurate? How many chickens have we farmed? How do you even estimate this? My initial intuition is that it's too many.

People have estimated about 100 billion human beings have ever lived. So 3 trillion chickens would be 30 per person. Rich modern people eat more than 30 chickens in a lifetime, but most people have been much poorer. A lot of people have been farmers, but I don't know how many of them raised many chickens.

GISTE wrote:

how does this concept of knowledge being contextual connect to parenting?

• if a parent sees a problem with something his child is doing, it’s crucial for the parent to consider the child’s reasons for doing it. without incorporating the child’s reasons in the knowledge creation process, the parent is ignoring the context of the knowledge the child is acting on. doing so would reliably have the effect of the child either dismissing the parent's idea, or obeying it. instead, parent should ask child why he’s doing what he’s doing (to the extent the child wants such discussion), in order to help the child, and himself, evolve their initial ideas towards mutual understanding and agreement.

GISTE is playing the intellectual social game. that's why he uses words like "crucial", "incorporating", "reliably" and "evolve". and it's why he wrote a long paragraph with overly complex structure. (btw he made it a bullet point list but it's the only thing on the list. i didn't just omit the other bullet points from the quote.)

i call it a social game because people learn to play this game from other people, and it involves interacting with other people.

people learn social games by observing what others do and then try to approximate it themselves. this is how they learn other social games like smalltalk, being in an audience, or parenting.

the "game" terminology is used by Thomas Szasz and Jordan Peterson. i don't know who originated it.

they are games because there's a set of rules people are following. and if you play well, you get rewards (e.g. people like you, think you're smart, and want to play with you again).

the rules for social games are mostly unwritten. (some people are trying to change that, e.g. the Girls Chase book writes down a bunch of social dynamics and dating rules).

how do you learn a game with unwritten rules? you watch what other people do and copy it. (and maybe you make some mistakes and get punished and learn to be conservative.) that's how people learn social interaction.

this is why people don't do intellectual discussion in a precise, rigorous way. because they're just copying approximately what they say other people do, rather than understanding how to think, how discussion can facilitate learning, etc.

part of the intellectual discussion game is writing big words and fancy sentences. so people do that. even if you tell them not to. they are bad at learning from and following written rules. it's not how most people deal with life at all. (some people are good at following written rules in a specific area, e.g. programmers. but they're still usually normal people outside of their speciality.)

science works (or doesn't work...) mostly by people trying to copy the science game from other scientists, not by them learning the scientific method from a book and then following it.

the science game as practiced by most scientists living today is primarily a social game. it involves popularity, social status in the field, people with more authority and more control over money and hiring, people who get published in more or less prestigious journals, people with or without tenure, etc

and books don't tell you how to play the science social game and succeed in your interactions with other people. how do you get a reputation as a genius, get invited to the best parties, get paid well, get to decide who else is paid well (give out rewards to friends and allies), etc? you look at other people who are succeeding at these games and try to understand how it works.

you actually should read some books, btw, to do well at those games. but not books about science. stuff more like How To Win Friends and Influence People. most people don't read much, though i think reading books like that is more common with the most successful people.

people even use words as a social game. words have written rules (the dictionary). but people don't primarily learn how to use words from the dictionary. they hear and read other people using words, then they try to use those words in similar ways. they just guess the meanings from real world usage. it's very informal and error-prone.

people commonly correct others on mistaken word use when they are playing the social game badly. some word uses make you look like a child, fool, or ignoramus. people punish those with social rebukes.

but people rarely correct others just because their word usage is wrong according to the dictionary. (most people don't even know what the dictionary says, anyway, so they can't correct those mistakes.) so people end up misunderstanding many words and using them wrong.

this leads to problems when they try to discuss with someone like me who knows what words actually mean and uses the dictionary regularly. we're playing different games. i think my way is correct and has major advantages for truth seeking, so i don't want to switch games. and the other people don't know how to switch games. so it's hard to discuss.

people's use of words is very imprecise because it's based on loose guesses from what other people say. they don't know precisely what words mean. they just know enough to communicate with normal people without being rebuked.

people's arguments are imprecise because they use words imprecisely. and because their approach to arguing is to learn it as a social game. the whole social game approach involves lots of approximation and doing things that are sorta in the right ballpark and hoping no one says anything bad about it.

GISTE's approach to philosophy discussion works like that. (and it's the same for most other people). he knows what kinds of things people say in the intellectual discussion social game, and he strongly resists talking in a different way (e.g. more simple, clear, and childlike).

the quote above isn't even very bad, btw. people write way worse stuff all the time.

some of the professionals even study Kant in order to learn to make their writing harder to understand. then it filters down. non-philosopher intellectuals copy intellectual game playing behavior from academic philosophers. then some lesser intellectuals copy them and write material for more sophisticated lay people who pass it on to typical lay people who pass it on to idiots.

this is why it's so hard to find serious truth-seeking discussion. who does that? everyone just learns the intellectual social game instead!

Let's talk about what I'm doing, why, and how well it's going.

I want to know things. I want to figure things out.

My philosophy goals are first of all about myself. That's important because I don't want anyone else's decisions or failures to be able to make me fail. I only want other people to have secondary relevance, not primary importance. I want to control my own success and failure.

So I prefer goals like learning things or writing good explanations, rather than being popular or getting useful feedback. I enjoy learning and being creative, and would be unhappy without it. I have high standards for skill and quality, and would be unhappy otherwise. Those are things I can do alone (including using existing books, videos, etc.)

In the past, after over 5,000 hours of super successful collaboration with David Deutsch, I had higher expectations regarding other people. But David stopped discussing philosophy and has proven irreplaceable. (Thomas Szasz was wonderful too, but died at age 92.)

Broadly, the more and better philosophy I read and write, the happier I am. I have other interests but philosophy is the most important and most interesting. Note that I think of philosophy broadly including economics, liberalism, philosophy of science, educational philosophy, parenting philosophy, relationships philosophy, etc. In these areas, and many more, the best thing to do is apply general philosophy concepts. So the good ideas end up being more about philosophy in general than about the particular field. Meanwhile most of the "experts" in these fields are largely useless because they don't know how to think (don't know the key philosophy concepts which apply to their field about how to learn, how to create and evaluate arguments, and more).

Philosophy is about how to think and how to live, and I like to both learn and apply this. I do generally favor more abstract fields (e.g. political philosophy over today's politics over trying to help win an individual congressional election), as a personal preference and because they're more important. (More general purpose issues are like teaching a man to fish instead of giving him a fish. E.g. helping people think better about politics instead of just telling them the answer to one political issue.)

Changing The World

The world is full of suffering, stupidity, ignorance, and unnecessary failure. People are blind to lots of it, and also well aware of lots. Things could be dramatically better using only current ideas (no new breakthroughs). I know some of the best ideas for changing the world, like Taking Children Seriously. Largely destroying the minds of 99.999% of all children is arguably our biggest problem. If people's ability to think wasn't crippled in their early years, then tons of people would be smarter, wiser and more skillful than me (or than anyone else you care to name). That'd be way better.

While I'd like to change the world, I choose projects which are personally fulfilling so I won't regret it even if the world doesn't change. I write things which I'll be happy to have written even if no one replies or learns from it. I avoid outreach projects focused on getting more people's attention, but which I won't be happy with if they fail to bring in a bunch more audience.

Most people trying to change the world skip the step where they put a massive amount of effort into figuring out which are the right changes. I've done that step. I will debate anyone on the matter, but it's hard to find anyone willing to discuss it much.

Audience

My audience is too small. There's around 150 newsletter subscribers and 150 Fallible Ideas discussion group members. The good news is there are some very active people who have been around for years. And the whole audience is much more engaged than is typical. I get 2.4x the open rate and 3.9x the click rate compared average newsletters.

The small audience is bad because it's not enough to effectively test new ideas with. I could write a great new piece which would resonate with people, but get no feedback, so I don't realize that writing more similar material would be effective.

150 people could be enough in theory. Let's say I write something really great and 20% of my audience loves it. They could then share it with their own friends, who would share it with their own friends, and so on.

Let's say other people know 50 people on average (tons of people have way more than 50 Facebook friends). So I get 30 people to share it and that makes 1500 people. Let's halve it for overlap (two people share to the same person) and to be conservative. The 750 people in the secondary audience will like and share it at a lower rate than the original group, let's say 5%. That's still 37 people sharing it next, up from 30, so it would grow. With this pattern, each additional phase of sharing would increase the number of people sharing it, and it'd quickly become huge. That's exponential growth (literally).

And other stuff can go right. If someone shares on Reddit, it could get upvotes. And it only has to impress one popular person with thousands of social media followers to dramatically increase the numbers.

Difficulty Spreading Ideas

I think the reason my material doesn't spread like this is it doesn't do a great job of offering people what they already want. Instead, I offer new ideas which disagree with some of their current beliefs. I explain why these ideas would improve their lives, but understanding that requires a bunch of thinking.

I believe there aren't enough intellectuals in the world who want to spend much time learning. This makes it hard to spread philosophy ideas to a large audience. I have other forms of evidence about this too, e.g. my extensive and unsuccessful efforts to find any intellectual discussion forum that isn't terrible. (My other criterion for forums is allowing philosophy discussion. There are good forums on limited topics such as Ruby programming).

While a larger audience would be useful to better test out new ideas on, I don't know a good way to get it, and I'm not the right person to go on social media and make a bunch of friends. I hope other people will do that, but I'm not counting on it.

I've tried some advertising but, as expected, it hasn't been very effective. The smart people who like my ideas are also the kind of people who use AdBlock and ignore ads.

I have around 8,000 page views per month for my websites, around half for Fallible Ideas and half for my blog. It doesn't generate many blog comments or incoming emails, except from people who already participate in my email discussion group.

Discussion

I've been gradually transitioning to do more learning alone and less in discussion. This is a personal decision, for my circumstances, which I don't recommend to others. (It's important to be able to spend time alone and do things independently. I already do that exceptionally well. This is just an adjustment of details.)

I was extremely successful learning from discussions, and you could be too. I don't mean exclusively discussions, but they can be a major component of learning. (Note: written discussions are the best if you're serious.)

Discussion is extremely effective until you're around 50% better than the people you're discussing with. The reason you can get significantly past them is because you have different strengths and weaknesses than them. If you're 10% better than someone on average, he's going to be better than you at lots of stuff. So you can still learn a ton from him.

By around 200% better than someone, it gets difficult to learn much from them. Their general quality standards and methods of thinking are too low for you, and you have huge leads in most or all subjects you care about. You could often win an argument with them even if you were wrong. You have to fix anything they say to have more details, follow the methods of reason better, etc, before it can fit into your thinking. You may be better off reading a book than talking to them.

I've been transitioning to less discussion despite being extremely successful at learning from discussions. Why? Because I used discussion efficiently to get around a 50% lead on my primary discussion partner, David Deutsch. Then he stopped discussing and that left me with more like a 500% lead over everyone else.

But if you're not at the very top, discussion is amazing. And if you are at the very top, you ought to discuss with me...

People worry about the blind leading the blind. That's an issue. But if no one in a whole discussion group (including you) knows what e.g. Popper or Rand meant on some point, it's not like you'd do better alone. The blind leading himself alone isn't a solution.

Money

It's extremely hard to make money from philosophy ideas, so I haven't tried much. I've sold around $500 on Gumroad recently. I've made over $15,000 from philosophy, mostly from consulting (~$6,700) and donations (~$8,000), which isn't much. If I didn't do any philosophy and spent that time on programming, I would have made a few million additional dollars. (The market rate for great, experienced programmers is over $300,000/yr total compensation.)

I don't need to make money from philosophy. It's much easier to make money programming. I work part time from home, it's fun, and it pays great. I want to spend some time on programming anyway. I prefer to do a variety of activities, not just philosophy. Making money from philosophy would still be good, though.

I've started selling more material primarily because people, being self-destructively stupid, pay less attention to free material. Even if they read it, they assume free material has less value, rather making a judgement about how good it is. You have to charge people money to help enable them to care and pay attention.

People have mistaken my generosity for low status and low value. Charging money is a communication mechanism which reduces some misunderstandings. I also like and approve of commercialism. I think it's good to charge for and to pay for value.

There are some issues. People expect polish if they pay money. But I usually try to learn as efficiently as I can, and that means only doing polishing in a minority of cases. Usually I can learn more by e.g. writing a second essay on the same topic, rather than polishing the first one.

People have many bad ideas about monetary value. E.g. they often assume longer is more valuable. Actually, making material shorter is superior – it takes more work for me but saves them time and helps them focus on the most important parts by excluding the lesser parts. (Organizing a lot of material into footnotes and other optional extras is another good approach, so the main material is short but the longer version is still accessible. Only a tiny fraction of people care about reading extra details, but they are the best people, so they matter the most.)

People also think if a book costs $10, then a few essays can only be worth around $1. They aren't considering the value of the ideas for their life. Nor are they thinking about how the book is only so cheap because it's mass produced for a large audience. That book could be 4,000 hours (2 years) of effort from an author who's time is worth $200/hr (the time of the best authors is valuable, and they're the ones you want to read). Add in all the work the publisher does to edit, format and market the book, and plenty of books have over $1,000,000 put into them. Getting it for $10 is an amazing bargain. It's unfair to compare other products to that and expect the same deal.

Similarly, tons of people complain when sophisticated software costs $5, and think iOS apps should be $1 at most. This is ridiculous and is dramatically lowering the quality of software available even for someone like me who is happy to pay.

If I spend 10 hours making something, that's loosely $2000 (it's kinda priceless since no one else can create comparable philosophy work). If I sell it for $20 to my small audience, that's dirt cheap. 10 customers would pay $200 which is 10% of the production costs. I could easily make far more money programming. And I'm far better at philosophy than programming.

(Why would my time be worth e.g. $200/hr? Because I have lots of valuable knowledge which could improve people's lives, which I have skill at communicating in a simple way. And I can do this fast. I can share ideas in a few minutes which could improve people's lives by thousands of dollars if they took them seriously. How did I develop this knowledge and skill? I'm very smart and I spent ~20,000 hours, not counting school or childhood, learning the ideas, learning to write well and quickly, learning to communicate in a simple way, etc. But note that the value of products is really what they do for the customer, not how hard to make they were, so hourly rates are just a loose approximation.)

I have a small audience because I create things which challenge most people's ideas. Most people don't like that. But for people who want to do better than mainstream convention, in the particular kinds of ways I talk about (better thinking rather than e.g. healthier eating), it's very valuable. For the right kind of person who wants it, my work is worth paying a lot for and there isn't much competition.

Most people aren't very interested in investing in themselves. I'll buy whatever books, videos, software, etc, will help me be better. I expect it to pay off in the long run, plus I like it. Most people only spend much money investing in themselves in socially-approved ways (like university courses or maybe a bestselling book).

Part of the issue is that people limit the value they get from philosophy. When reading philosophy, they put over 80% of their effort into preventing themselves from learning, into creating confusions, and into other sabotage. This is due to static memes and various other issues I've written about. This makes them very hard to help. And, yes, you do it, even though you don't realize it. I'm not talking about other people. I'm talking about you. And if you doubt it but are unwilling to discuss-debate the matter, that's a pretty good indication I'm right.

Even for people who like my writing, most of them would rather leave than take it seriously. If I pushed them harder to discuss and learn, and pointed out their personal mistakes, they would hate me and quit. They'd shoot the messenger rather than appreciate finding out about fixable problems in their lives. Even if we stick to intellectual issues, and they merely find out their views about reason, education, politics, etc, are mistaken, they'd still rather leave than discuss those issues to conclusions. Most people don't even want to discuss at all.

Writing a Book?

Books are a high-prestige format for sharing ideas. Especially if you get a major publisher (and get paid 7% royalties). But I'm not after prestige.

I want to use the best formats available for learning and discussion, not the best formats for impressing people. I'd rather have a small, engaged audience which understands stuff than a large audience of cheering-but-ignorant fans.

I prefer to deal with the kind of people who judge quality for themselves in rational ways. I'm not targeting people who follow what's popular. And I'm not targeting people who judge an essay by big words and complex sentences, rather than by how good the ideas are. (People who judge fancy writing negatively are fine!) Simple writing is superior for communicating ideas.

Books are too long and discourage discussion. They're also single-format. There's value in using a mix of short writing, long writing, audio, video, slides, and interactive software.

What's good about books is they can explain a large amount of content in a self-contained way. This is especially helpful for people who don't want to ask questions or take the initiative to put together ideas from multiple places. The ability for someone to learn a lot, alone, from a single, complete package is a good thing. (It'd be better if people were more willing to interact because the misunderstanding rate when reading philosophy books alone is extremely high – call it 98% – and talking to people who already understand the ideas is great for clearing up some misunderstandings.)

Books are difficult to write, and aren't ideal for the author's own learning. Doing 5-20 editing passes isn't the best way to learn. Trying to make the whole book fit together as an effective piece of communication is difficult and is different than understanding the ideas.

The difficulty of writing a book is dramatically reduced if each chapter is a standalone essay, so the book is similar to a series of blog posts. Popper and Rand did most of their non-fiction that way. But that also removes some of the upside of books.

I wrote a series of 22 blog posts in 2007 totaling around 57,000 words, which is the length of a short book (almost 200 pages). That only took me 37 days because I'm a very fast writer (due to learned skill and practice) and didn't edit much. I've worked to develop a skill of writing good first drafts so I don't need to edit as much. (For example, this essay is barely edited.)

The Fallible Ideas website has 74,000 words worth of essays, so it's equivalent to a book.

I'm not a natural writer, by the way. In my childhood I was good at chess, math and computers. Before I learned programming, I thought I might become a scientist. I didn't start learning to write until after reading The Fabric of Reality, which is a philosophy book disguised as a science book.

I was slow at reading and writing when I got into philosophy, and my writing was much worse than today. My early writing did have some redeeming qualities. I attempted to say what I meant instead of impressing people. Writing in a simple, direct, clear and honest way can get you pretty far.

I've now written over 800,000 words of blog posts (5.75 books the length of The Fabric of Reality), over 30,000 philosophy related emails, and lots of other stuff. That's way more effort than most people put into learning. Maybe I'm a "gifted genius prodigy" or whatever (I think that's an excuse people use to legitimize their own mediocrity), but I sure tried harder too. (And I had fun doing it. Learning and creating are the most fun things one can do in life.)

Problem: Tiredness

A main problem I have is getting tired. I don't have plenty of great and easy things to do while tired.

This is 4,000 words. Should I write five essays like this per day? Because if I only write one per day, I'll have a lot of time left over. I generally find writing 4,000 words pretty tiring.

Similarly, I can read 200+ pages in a day, but it's tiring and I'll have a lot of time left over. Even if I read 500 pages and I'm completely exhausted, that takes way less than 16 hours.

Switching between text-based activities (writing, reading) and audio-and-visual-based activities (talking, videos, audio books, text to speech) helps because they use somewhat different energy.

Tiredness is a harder problem because I condense things to increase the information density. I don't just watch a lecture you YouTube, I watch it at triple speed. I only read audio books and use text to speech at high speed. I only watch TV and movies at high speed. If I don't do it fast, it's too boring for me to do it all. This makes it more tiring per minute.

This tiredness issue is standard; it's not my personal problem. No one tries really hard all day, every day, or they burn out. The general understanding of wise people is that knowledge workers are limited to around 2-4 hours per day of serious intellectual work. I've seen this claim from many smart people and I haven't found any reasonable arguments to the contrary. For example, Jordan Peterson gave advice about how to study 10+ hours per day. He said you can't do it, don't try, and:

It is very rare for people to be able to concentrate hard for more than three hours a day.

I routinely do more than 3 hours, but much less than 16 hours, so I have to find other things to do. I've tried pushing through tiredness, which is possible in the short term, but I just end up so tired that it lasts through a full night's sleep. It's more efficient if you usually limit your mental exhaustion enough that you can wake up refreshed. I also try to nap when I think I can fall asleep, and I sleep in as much as I want with no alarm. Unlike most people, I'm definitely not sleep deprived.

Finding non-tiring activities I like is fundamentally hard because, even when I do easy stuff, I try to learn something, or I find a way it's interesting and write something about it. If there's nothing to learn or write about, then I don't like it, and I want to use programming to automate it or at least multitask by listening to an audio book.

How's Stuff Going?

I'm doing well at learning things and creating new ideas. I've been writing a lot lately and making some stuff using my voice too.

I have plenty of books in my queue to read, along with some documentaries, Leonard Peikoff lectures, Jordan Peterson lectures, and more. This is helping to make up for the shortage of people to discuss with.

I want to make better material for people to learn philosophy. Lots of my older material has good ideas but is disorganized. If I rewrite stuff, I can organize it better and can easily improve the quality of writing. I want to make it easier for people with limited time and interest to find the best ideas.

Some of my most important ideas are Paths Forward and Boolean Epistemology. These are major, original contributions to philosophy. I'm going to make new and improved explanations of them with better introductions.

Boolean Epistemology corrects Popper and Deutsch on fundamental epistemology. It's about judging ideas as refuted or non-refuted rather than with any kind of amount, weight, degree or score (including corroboration or a critical preference). I attempted to discuss it with Popperians back in 2010, but they were uninterested. Nor is there some other philosophy community which cares. Academic philosophers are terrible much like government funded science.

I'm happy with what I've learned and created recently. I'm currently in a highly productive period which I hope to continue indefinitely.

I've had periods in the past where I had serious difficulty finding good enough quality ideas and people to engage with. And I've had issues deciding what sort of audience to target writing for. One needs a context in which to write in order to guide decisions about what to include or exclude, style, etc. It doesn't have to be a real audience though, one can write alone by simply imagining what sort of reader he's hypothetically targeting, or by writing for oneself.

I am trying to focus more clearly on making things I think are good, which I like, regardless of reception. Previously I wrote a lot of things oriented towards getting valuable feedback from people, especially David Deutsch. I've had to gradually change that after searching extensively for good people to discuss with and finding the world is a lot worse off than I'd like it to be.

Robert Spillane wrote:

Szasz's argument can be supported empirically by the many Australian work organisations whose managers secure psychological profiles on their subordinates despite overwhelming evidence that psychological (especially personality) tests have consistently and strikingly failed to predict work performance (Spillane, 1994).

I was particularly interested in this evidence. Psychologist Jordan Peterson (whose videos I generally like) has claimed the research shows that personality tests do correlate with various life outcomes. For example, he said agreeableness correlates to doing well at university (teachers like people who agree with them and grading is biased). I'd like to know if he's wrong about the correlation research (which I know is very different than understanding what's actually going on).

Peterson specifically says the big five personality traits (openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness and neuroticism), plus IQ, are the important ones. He says psychologists don't check if their constructs are accounted for by the big five plus IQ because then they'd find out they haven't invented anything, they've just found a proxy for something that's already been discovered.

Peterson says they discovered these traits by asking people a wide variety of questions and finding the answers to some groups of questions are correlated. That is, if you give some conscientious answers you're likely to give other conscientious answers too. The point is that different questions are related, and the questions about personality ending up statistically falling into five groups.

Note that psychologists cannot be trusted to make true statistical claims. For example, the big five wikipedia page says:

Genetically informative research, including twin studies, suggest that heritability and environmental factors both influence all five factors to the same degree.[71] Among four recent twin studies, the mean percentage for heritability was calculated for each personality and it was concluded that heritability influenced the five factors broadly. The self-report measures were as follows: openness to experience was estimated to have a 57% genetic influence, extraversion 54%, conscientiousness 49%, neuroticism 48%, and agreeableness 42%.[72]

I know this is bullshit because I've researched heritability and twin studies before. (Yet More on the Heritability and Malleability of IQ is very good.) They define "heritability" to refer to a mathematical correlation which doesn't imply anything is passed down genetically from your parents. They do this to be misunderstood, on purpose, by people who think they're talking about the standard English meaning of "heritability". And their twin studies don't address gene-culture interactions, and they know that and dishonestly ignore it. They also look at the variation in traits, rather than the cause of the traits themselves (e.g. they would study why you're a little bit happier than some other people, then announce they found a gene controlling happiness.)

For example of a gene-culture interaction, a gene for being taller could correlate to basketball success. That doesn't actually mean that basketball success is genetically passed down. Becoming a good basketball player depends on cultural factors like whether basketball is popular in your society or even exists. Nevertheless they will correlate some gene to basketball success and announce they've discovered basketball skill is 60% hereditary. And they will imply this is determined by your genes and outside your control, and that it couldn't be changed by writing a popular blog post with new ideas. But that's completely false and the "heritability" they study says nothing about what interventions would be successful in changing the results. (In other words, when they say a trait is 60% genetically determined, that actually allows for the possibility that an essay would change 100% of the trait. The more educated psychologists know that and making misleading statements anyway because they believe these kinds of caveats don't really matter and the bulk of their conclusions are about right.)

So I read Spillane's paper: Personality or performance?: The case against personality testing in management¹:

The failure of psychologists to produce laws of behaviour or discoveries of importance has stimulated the study of behaviour called reductionism.

Reductionism is refuted in The Fabric Of Reality, ch. 1.

To explain introverted behaviour by reference to an 'introvert trait' in a person betrays an insensitivity to logic since the 'explanation' is viciously circular.

Introvert is a loose description or label. It's a shortcut which condenses and summarizes many facts. E.g. I observed Joe reading a book instead of socializing three times, and I remember one word instead of three events.

I don't think "introverted" is very useful (it's too vague). But shortcut labels in general are OK, e.g. "Popperian", "Aristotelian", or "Kantian". These are more specific than "introverted" and I find them useful despite some ambiguity.

An explanation says why, how, or because. But calling someone introverted doesn't say why they're introverted. An explanation would say, "Joe is introverted because ..." It would then give a reason, e.g. because Joe found that many people are mean to him because he likes books. After you understand the reason for behavior, you can make better predictions. E.g. you won't be surprised if Joe is more outgoing at a book club meeting.

insurmountable problems for those who explain, say, the behaviour of individuals who withdrew their labour by reference to the traits 'aggression' or 'apathy'

"He didn't do much yesterday because he's apathetic" isn't an explanation. It's just a restatement with a synonym. Apathetic means not doing much. But why doesn't he do much?

This reminds me of: people often say they do stuff because they enjoy or like it. They find it fun or entertaining. And they act like that is an explanation and settles the matter. But why do they like it? What's fun about it? Often they are bad at introspection, uninterested in self-understanding, and don't know.

Maslow’s hypotheses have been vigorously tested and the results, far from supporting his theory, have invalidated it This would not have surprised Maslow himself who was bothered by the way his conjectures were so readily accepted as true and paraded as the latest example of erudite knowledge in management [emphasis added]

Sad story.

The results of personality tests, to which I now turn, are communications, not traits or needs, and they are particularly responsive to the demands of the social situation in which individuals are expected to perform. After decades of personality testing we can now say with confidence that the search for consistent personality and motivational traits has been strikingly unsuccessful (Mischel 1968). While self-descriptions on trait measures are reasonably consistent over short periods of time these measures change across social settings (Anastasi 1982). In other words, people answer questions about hypothetical situations in a reasonably consistent fashion, but when it comes to behaving in the world—the way the situation is perceived—the rewards and penalties obtained and the power one is able to exert influence the consistency of behaviour. It is not surprising, therefore, that efforts to predict performance from personality and motivational inferences have been consistently and spectacularly unsuccessful (Blinkhorn 1990; Fletcher, Blinkhorn & Johnson 1991; Guion & Gottier 1965).

The relevant part! It'd be a lot of work to check those cites though. Let's see what details Spillane provides.

For more that 30 years researchers have stated unequivocally that they cannot advocate the use of personality tests as a basis for making employment decisions about people (Guion & Gottier 1965; Guion 1991). Where significant predictable findings are reported they are barely above chance occurrence and explain only a small proportion (less than 10%) of the variance in behaviour which ‘is incredibly small for any source which is considered to be the basis of behavioural variations’ (Hunt 1965, p 10). [emphasis added]

This use of the word "explain" is standard in these fields and really bad. They use "explain" to talk about correlations, contrary to standard English. In regular English, explanations tell you why, how or because. The implication when they say "explain" is it's telling you why – that is, it's telling you about causes. But correlations aren't causes, so this use of language is dishonest.

The rest looks good.

In the face of low validity coefficients

This reminds me of Jordan Peterson who said psychologists used to underestimate their findings because the correlation coefficients they found were low. But then someone figured out to compare coefficients to other psychology research and call the top 25% of coefficients high no matter how low the actual numbers are! He thought this was a good idea. It reminds me of how poverty is now commonly defined to refer to relative poverty (being poorer than other people, no matter how wealthy you are).

On comparing three respected and widely used personality tests, two researchers found ‘little evidence that even the best personality test predict job performance, and a good deal of evidence of poorly understood statistical methods being pressed into service to buttress shaky claims (Blinkhorn & Johnson 1990, p 672).

Doh.

Poor validity is matched by poor internal consistency and test-retest reliability. In Cattell’s (1970) 16 personality factors, for example, only two out of 15 Alpha coefficients of internal reliability reach a statistically acceptable level, so testers cannot know what exactly the test has measured. This finding is not surprising given the vagueness of trait definitions and the fact that factor analysis ‘is a useful mathematical procedure for simplifying data but it does not automatically reveal basic traits. For example, the personality factors identified from ratings may partly reflect the rater’s conceptual categories’ (Mischel 1971).

Of course personality trait categorizations reflect the conceptual categories of the people who invented them. They chose what they thought was a question about personality to ask about in the first place.

It's like IQ tests, which all have a heavy cultural bias. So they don't accurately measure intelligence. But that doesn't necessarily make them worthless. Despite the bias, the results may still correlate to some types of success within the culture the tests are biased towards. In other words, an equally smart person who isn't as familiar with our culture will get a lower IQ score. But he may also, on average, go on to have less success (at getting high university grades or getting a high income) since he doesn't fit in as well.

IQ tests also deal with outliers badly. Some people are too smart for the test and see ambiguities in the questions and have trouble guessing what the questioners meant. Here's an example from testing the child of a friend of mine. They were asked what a cow and a pig have in common. And they tried answers like "mammal" or "four legs" or "both are found on farms". Nope, wrong! The right answer was they were both "animals". The child was too smart for the test and was marked wrong. The child was only told the right answer after the test was over, so they got a bunch of similar questions wrong too... Similarly, I recall reading the Richard Feynman scored like 125 on an IQ test, which is ridiculously low for him. He's the kind of person you'd expect to easily break 175 if the tests were meaningful that far from 100, which they aren't.

The technical deficiencies of most personality tests have been known for many years. Yet they are conveniently ignored by those with vested interests in their continued use. For example, the Edwards Personal Preference Scale is technically deficient in form and score interpretation and rests on poorly designed validation studies (Anastasi 1982). The limitations of the Myers-Briggs Temperament Indicator are well known: ‘The original Jungian concepts are distorted, even contradicted; there is no bi-modal distribution of preference scores; studies using the MBTI have not always confirmed either the theory or the measure' (Fumham 1992, p 60).

Cool. I may look those papers up. I'd really like one for the big five, though!

Testers rely on the validity of self-reports and assume that subjects have sufficient self-insight to report their feelings and behaviour accurately. However, evidence has shown that respondents frequency lack appropriate levels of self-awareness or are protected from exposing themselves by an army of defence mechanisms (Stone 1991).

Of course. So personality tests don't measure your real personality anymore than IQ tests measure your real intelligence. But, it could still be the case that people who claim to be agreeable on personality tests do better at university, on average (though without knowing why you can't understand what changes to our society would ruin the effect). One of the reasons I was interested by Peterson's comments on personality tests is he said basically the correlations exist and therefore there's something going on there even if we don't know what it is, and he's admitted that some of the big five personality traits aren't really understood, they are just names tacked on to the correlation which is the real discovery.

Correlations are worthless without any explanation. But they do have some explanatory context to put these correlations in. We already knew that some of people's communications reveal information about their preferences and skills. And it's not just what people openly say that matters, sometimes subtle clues are revealing. In that context, it could theoretically be possible to correlate some communications to some outcomes. It's like reading between the lines but then statistically checking if you're right very often or not.

Then there is the problem of faking which is so widespread that it is amazing that test scores obtained under conditions of duress or vested interest are taken seriously. The use of so called objective self-report tests requires the assumption that the subject’s score is free from artifacts that superficially raise or lower scores.
Yet many researchers list studies which show that personality tests are especially subject to faking (Anastasi 1982; Goldstein & Hersen 1990; Hogan 1991). So serious is this problem that one of the world’s best known personality psychologists, H J Eysenck (1976), will not endorse the use of his personality test where there is a vested interest in obtaining a particular result. Australian researchers have expressed similar reservations about the use of Cattell’s 16 personality factors in selection situations (Stone 1991; Spillane 1985). Yet the testing continues in the absence of countervailing evidence.

Right. I only had in mind only voluntary, confidential tests for personal use. If the test can affect getting a job offer, a raise, or college admissions, then of course people will lie. (People are really bad at introspection and personality tests could be a starting point for them to think about themselves. Yes a biased starting point, but still potentially useful for people who have no idea how to do better. I took some online personality tests in the past and found them interesting to think about. That's in the context of my belief that personality is changeable anyway. I never interpreted the tests as doing anything like authoritatively pronouncing what my life will be like, nor did I expect them to be unbiased or highly accurate.)

The claim that lie scales built into the tests weed out fakers is an insult to the intelligence of those who are subjected to them. Whyte (1956) explained 38 years ago how to fake these tests by summarising the strategies employed by bright people to make fools of the testers.

That sounds interesting. At least the test faking strategies. I bet if I look it up, the "lie scales" will boringly naive.

Then there is the question of cross-cultural applicability, fairness and discrimination. Most personality tests are derived from an Anglo-American environment and are therefore culturally biased. Such tests have been found to be sexually and racially discriminating (Anastasi 1982; Fumham 1992).

Of course they are. That doesn't make them worthless though. If your company is sexist and racist, then the white male who gets a higher test score may actually do better at your company... (Or have they updated the tests yet to promote "diversity" by biasing them in favor of brown females?)

Also, as far as hiring goes, I believe companies should use work sample tests. Typical interviews are extremely biased to find people who are socially-culturally similar to the interviewer, rather than people who would do a good job. It's also biased to outgoing people who are relaxed, rather than nervous, during interviews. Current hiring practices are so bad that many people are hired for programming positions who can't write working code. The trivial FizzBuzz work sample test actually improves hiring because the other hiring criteria being used, like interviews, are worthless.

Test scores can be interpreted in many ways. The most logical interpretation is that they reflect strategies adopted by the subject for the testing game. To argue that these strategies will necessarily equate to strategies adopted in the world of business is dishonest or naive.

Right. If you take a test because of personal curiosity, then you can try to answer honestly and see if the results say anything you find interesting. If personality tests were used for college admissions, then they'd be a test just like the SAT where you can read books telling you how to give answers that will get you admitted. It'd be funny if people wanted to retake a personality test to try again to get a better score, as they do now with the SAT.

Personality tests assess generalised attitudes and gloss over the rich subtleties of human behaviour.

Of course! Isn't that what they're supposed to do? They are trying to summarize a person – which is very complex – with e.g. scores on 5 continuums. Summary information like that necessarily loses a lots of detail. Does anyone deny it!?

Nowadays it is commonplace to hear apologists for personality testing admit that the tests don’t predict performance, but should be used nonetheless to ensure an appropriate fit of individual with organisational culture.

Seeking cultural fit at a company is one of the main excuses for not basing hiring primarily on work sample tests.

If companies cared more about work performance, they would come up with objective measures allowing no managerial discretion and then hand out bonus pay accordingly. (Some do this, many don't.)

... foist their crude ideas about human nature on to people who frequently don’t have the opportunity to assess their claims or to refuse to participate in the testing game.

A friend of mine got bored while taking an IQ tests and skipped the rest of the questions.

I got bored while taking a physics test at school, so I left most of it blank. The teacher didn't want to try to explain to anyone why a smart student who knew the material got a bad grade. Why rock the boat? So he just ignored the test result and asked me to take it again later. Grade falsification like this is common, and the amount of grade falsification depends on the teacher's opinion of you. A friend of mine went through school making friends with his teachers and then turning in many of his assignments weeks late and getting A's anyway.

No doubt one of the reasons for the continuing belief in personality traits and the instruments used to 'measure' them is the result of an outmoded inductivist view of science which emphasises confirming instances.

Yes. And induction is closely related to correlation. Induction involves picking out some pattern (correlation) from a data set and then extrapolating without thinking about explanations of the causal mechanisms. We know the sun will rise tomorrow because we know what it's made out of and what forces (gravity and the Earth's spin) are involved, not because of the correlation between 24 hours passing and the sun rising again.

But induction doesn't work because, among other reasons, there are always infinitely many patterns (and also explanations) which fit any finite data set. So too are there infinitely many patterns to be found in personality test data, and infinitely many explanations compatible with the test results. It's only by critical thinking about explanations that we can understand what's going on. Data can't guide us (contrary to the common claim that correlations hint at causations), we have to guide ourselves using data as a tool.

Final Comments

Even without any tests, people often use their personality as an excuse. They say they can't do some task well (e.g. go to a party and do business networking) because they are "introverted". Or, rather than simply say they don't like networking (and perhaps even giving some reasons), they say it makes them nervous or anxious because of its incompatibility with their personality type.

Many people would prefer to be victims of their personality, to have an excuse for their failures, rather than strive to better themselves.

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Footnotes

1: Spillane, R. (1994) 'Personality or Performance? The Case Against Personality Testing in Management.' In A.R. Nankervis & R.L. Compton (eds) Strategic Human Resource Management, Melbourne: Nelson, Ch 14.

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Update

Spillane comments on the Big Five in his book Psychomanagement: An Australian Affair:

In connection with any quantity which varies, such as job performance, the variation does not arise solely because of differences among personalities. So the correlation coefficient is used as an indicator of the proportion of the variation in job performance, which is related to personality scores. The correlation thus provides an answer to the question: how much does the variation in personality contribute to the variation in job performance? This question may be answered in terms of variance. The square of the correlation coefficient indicates the proportion of variation in job performance, which is accounted for by differences in personality scores. If the correlation between job performance and personality scores is +.9 then the proportion of variance accounted for is 81% (and 19% is unaccounted for) and personality would be a very strong predictor of job performance. For 50% of the variance of job performance to be accounted for by personality, a correlation coefficient of just over +.7 is required. Since important employment decisions are based on the assumption that personality scores predict job performance, one would expect and hope that the correlation coefficients are greater than +.7 otherwise decision makers will make a large number of rejecting and accepting errors.

What have the meta-analyses found? Four meta-analytic studies of the relationship between job performance and personality scores yielded the following average correlation coefficients: conscientiousness .21; neuroticism .15; extraversion .13; agreeableness .13; openness to experience .12. These results are worrying enough since the much-quoted result of .21 for conscientiousness means that the proportion of variance unaccounted for is 95.6%. Responsible decisions about hiring, promotion or training cannot be made on the basis of these figures.

However, the actual situation is far worse since it makes an important difference to the results when personality scores are correlated with ‘hard’ or ‘soft’ performance criteria. Soft criteria include subjective ratings whereas hard criteria include productivity data, salary, turnover/tenure, change of status. Since personality scores are better predictors of subjective performance ratings than objective performance measures, it is reasonable to conclude that raters rely on personality when evaluating job performance, thereby raising the question whether the relationship between personality and performance is the result of the bias of the rater rather than actual performance. In the much-quoted study by Barrick and Mount, the correlation coefficient dropped from .26 for soft criteria to .14 for hard criteria. The average correlation between the Big Five and job performance (hard criteria) was .07.²

The footnote is:

M.R. Barrick & M.K. Mount, ‘The Big Five Personality Dimensions and Job Performance: A Meta-Analysis’, Personnel Psychology, 1991, 44, pp. 1-26.

That article is freely available online. I read some and Spillane seems to be factually correct. It looks like Jordan Peterson is badly wrong.