NelsonRushton
Doctorate in mathematics, specializing in probability theory, from the University of Georgia. Masters in AI from the University of Georgia. 15 years as a computer science professor at Texas Tech. Now I work as a logician for an AI startup. Married with one son. He's an awesome little dude.
I identify as an Evangelical Christian, but many Evangelicals would say that I am a deist mystic, and that I am going to Hell. Spiritually, the difference between me and Jordan Peterson is that I believe in miracles. The difference between me and Thomas Paine (an actual deist mystic) is that I believe the Bible is a message to us from the Holy Spirit, and the difference between me and Billy Graham is that I think there is noise in the signal.
User ID: 2940
Good question. The theft of fire from the gods is the most common, indeed the default archetypal original sin in world religions [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theft_of_fire]. I don't believe there is any natural moral law forbidding people from making or using fire, or that we ought to give it back. The cultures that held (or hold) the stories sacred, including the classical Greeks, also didn't think they needed to relinquish fire or give it back. At the same time, I do believe there is a lot of wisdom in those stories. If that perplexes you, it might be because you are approaching religious mythology with the wrong hemisphere of your brain.
NelsonRushton
1mo ago
What rule makes this necessary?
This is kind of the opposite of my statement.
These are the statements I am comparing:
- @AhhhTheFrench: So you really must "call out" every moment of evil you see in the world or you're guilty too?
- The serpent: Did God actually say, You shall not eat of any tree in the garden’?
They are both phrased as questions; notably both use some version of "actually"/"really", and both suggest a narrative that, in order to do right, you have to go to onerous extremes -- which makes a great excuse to do as you please. Generally, I think it is a common pattern when someone is confronted with a duty, that they respond by saying, "What am I supposed to do, Give away all of my stuff? go around jumping in every time someone is getting bullied? Starve myself so kids in Uganda can eat? Never have any fun? Fall on my sword over every little thing? etc. etc. etc.
If you're not playing some kind of game that amounts to wanting people to stop snorting when someone brings up god in an intellectual context?
I'm glad you mentioned that. I am actually not interested in the reactions of people who scoff (or "snort") when someone brings up God in an intellectual context. The readers that interests me for this argument are people like political scientist Charles Murray and historian Tom Holland, who do not scoff, and who are even sympathetic to the idea, but who are not believers because they cannot find reasons to believe.
just parsing the differences between degrees of philosophical certainty that no one out in the world ever thinks about when making decisions?
My argument isn't about parsing degrees of certainty
Then I'll leave you to your hobby and continue to be puzzled as to the appeal. Back in the world where people make decisions, the fact that science does in fact produce functional results obliterates every other consideration anyway.
Look, I'll be honest:...
I'm glad you are being honest. In that same spirit, I think it is Philistine to separate the effort to reveal the true laws of nature from "the world where people make decisions". Science, conceived as the effort to reveal the laws of nature, involves making many of decisions; I believe it is what many scientists perceive themselves as doing, and I believe it is a worthwhile pursuit for its own sake -- independently from its applications to such things as bread and circuses.
Besides, the best, most accurate superforecasters and people like quants absolutely pull it out and do explicit work. In their case, the effort really is worth it. You can't beat them without doing the same.
I know quants do this, but I think it is a special case. Show me a hundred randomly selected people who are making predictions they suffer consequences for getting wrong, and are succeeding, I will show you maybe 10 (and I think that's generous) that are writing down priors and using Bayes rule. Medical research, for example, uses parametric stats overwhelmingly more than Bayes (remember all those p-values you were tripping over?), as do the physical sciences.
If the effective altruism (EA) crowd are in the habit of regularly writing down priors (not just "there exist cases"), then I must be mistaken in the spirit of my descriptive claim that nobody writes them down. On the other hand, I would not count EA as people who pay consequences of being wrong, or that is doing a demonstrably good job of anything. If they aren't doing controlled experiments (which would absolutely be possible in the domain of altruism), they are just navel gazing -- and making it look like something else by throwing numbers around. I have a low opinion of EA in the first place; in fact, in the few cases where I looked at the details of the quantitative reasoning on sites like LessWrong, it was so amateurish that I wasn't sure whether to laugh or cry. So an appeal to the authority if LessWrong doesn't cut much ice with me.
I should give an example of this. Here is an EA article on the benefits of mosquito nets from Givewell.org. It is one of their leading projects. (https://www.givewell.org/international/technical/programs/insecticide-treated-nets#How_cost-effective_is_it). At a glance, to an untrained eye, it looks like an impressive, rigorous study. To a trained eye the first thing that jumps out is that it is highly misleading. The talk about "averting deaths" would make an untrained reader think that they are counting the number of "lives saved". But this is not how experts think about "saving lives" and there is a good reason for it. Let's suppose that we take a certain child, that at 9 AM our project saves him from a fatal incident; at 10 Am another, at 11 AM another, but at noon he dies from exactly the peril our program is designed to prevent. Yay, we just averted 3 deaths! That is the stat that Givewell is showing you. Did we save three lives? no, we saved three hours of life.
This is the way anyone with a smidgeon of actuarial expertise thinks about "saving lives" -- in terms of saving days of life, not "averting deaths", and the Givewell and Lesswrong people either know that or ought to know it. If they don't know it, they are incompetent; and if they know it, then talking about "averting deaths" in their public facing literature is deliberately deceptive because it strongly suggests "saving lives", meaning whole lives, in the mind of the average reader. To be fair to givewell, their method of analyzing deaths averted apply to saving someone from malaria for a full year (not just an hour), but (1) that would not be apparent to a typical donor who is not versed in actuarial science, and (2) the fact remains that you could "avert the death" of the same person nine times while they still died of malaria (the peril the program is supposed to prevent) at the age of 10. The analysis and language around it is either incompetent or deceptive -- contrary to either one word or the other in the name of the endeavor, effective altruism.
That's not a cherry picked example; it was the first thing I saw in my first five minutes of investigating "effective altruism". It soured me and I didn't look much further, but maybe I'm mistaken. Maybe you can point me to some EA projects that are truly well reasoned, that are also on the top of the heap for the EA community.
NelsonRushton
1mo ago
(4) For OP: you suggest downthread that we should be inclined to trust models like Newtonian or Einsteinian physics. Why should we trust them (if we cannot infer universal physical laws with nonzero confidence) and how much should we trust them?
We should trust them for two reasons. First, we do not need nonzero confidence in full generality to trust them for practical purposes. Being 99% sure the technology works 99% of the time is good enough -- or something like that, depending on the application. Second, I didn't say we cannot infer universal physical laws with nonzero confidence, just that we can't do it without believing in one more miracle, viz. that we are blessed with just enough intelligence, and a simple enough universe, that abductive reasoning is reliable (on top of the miracle that certain equations are physically instantiated in the form of a physical systems and consciousness, that this system continues persistently to be governed by those laws, that the parameters of those laws fall into the narrow range required for stars to form, etc.).
and how much should we trust them?
That depends on how many miracles you believe.
NelsonRushton
1mo ago
Okay well in that case it's also hypocritical to criticize Cthulhu and Star Wars lore for not being literally true. Hooray, solipsism. This entire line of argument advances absolutely nothing.
If someone just jumped into this thread without reading the history, they might gather that I (or someone else) had criticized Cthulhu on the grounds of not being literally true. So for anyone who is jumping in in the middle, nothing of the sort happened.
Moreover, I would never detract from the merit of Shakespeare or Homer on the grounds that there is no evidence for the literal truth of their writings. Nor would I detract from the merit of a physics text on the grounds that there is no objective evidence that its contents are literally true. I do not think I am asking for special status for anything. I am arguing against a special status for the physical sciences, that I believe is widely attributed to them.
It essentially amounts to a theist's special request for their beliefs to be treated as intellectually serious even though they can't point to any justification... request denied until one of these arguments successfully and meaningfully distinguishes Christianity, theism, whatever, from an infinite number of bullshit things I could make up on the spot.
I agree that you should deny that request if somebody made it -- but I don't think I did (unless "whatever" casts a very wide net).
My thesis is that (1) if you hold nonzero confidence in the literal truth of a universal physical law, then you should be able to give reasons for your belief, and (2) the only rule of evidence I know of that would justify such a conclusion (abductive inference) -- and the one that is actually used in the physical sciences to establish credibility of physical theories -- rests on premises that are infinitesimally unlikely to hold in the absence of a miracle.
I agree with most of the substance of this, but have a couple of quibbles.
#1
so Occam's razor would suggest that our laws of physics roughly apply in the observable
I think this is an oversimplification. It could be interpreted to mean something true, but it could just as easily be interpreted to mean something false, and the burden of clarity is on the author. As you probably know, relatively is not even approximately true in the small, and quantum mechanics is not even approximately true in the large. So it is more precise to say that our known laws are approximately true when applied within the scope of their well tested and intended use -- which is also true of classical mechanics, Hooke's law of springs, the ideal gas laws, etc. But the scope of well tested and intended use is a loop we have to be in to make it work. The laws themselves are not as intrinsically accurate as your statement would suggest to an average reader.
#2
I also agree that in commonsense terms, "the moon is made of rock" means the moon is made primarily out of rock, and not the moon is made entirely of rock -- and that on that commonsense interpretation we are entitled to justified confidence in it on the bases of much fewer miracles that in a bona fide universal generalization.
But when you say this:
All models are wrong, some models are useful.
I do not believe we need to be resigned to it. That must mean that I believe in one more miracle than you.
Success rates matter.
The success rate of science in enabling improvements to our material lives is pretty good. The success rate of science in yielding justifiable nonzero confidence in universal natural laws may be zero. Can you defend the proposition that it is not? It would be a compelling refutation of my argument if someone were to give a single universal natural law of the physical world -- take your pick -- and give an objective argument why we should have greater than zero confidence in its literal truth. Now that I think about it, that is the straightforward path to refuting my argument, and it is notable that one has attempted to take it.
A word of advice if you proceed: don't waste your time trying to use Bayesian reasoning; you will not get a nonzero posterior unless you have a nonzero prior, and that would be begging the question. And don't bother trying to use parametric statistics, because no finite number of observations will get you there.
NelsonRushton
1mo ago
To me, what justifies the claim that failing to find a counter example makes the hypothesis more likely is statistics.
If you point me to a statistical method that can give objective evidence for nonzero confidence in a universal generalization (such as Newton's Law of Gravity), you will have taught me the most interesting thing I have learned in a month.
So if you say aliens exist and I say they don't, we are both guessing (but not randomly: we are motivated, but not justified, by our other background beliefs). But either aliens exist or they don't. So despite both of us just guessing, one of us is right and has hit upon the truth, the absolute truth. So while Newton's L.O.G. is just a guess from an epistemological standpoint, I am also tentatively accepting it as true.
The fact that you have guessed right, or that you may have guessed right, does not entail that you are rationally licensed to embrace the proposition (I think you agree with this). For example, if a tarot card reader told me that I was going to get a job offer today, and I believed her and acted on it by taking out a car loan, and if the Gypsy turned out to be right by sheer luck, my action would still be irrational.
To clarify my position in this light, I never said that the physical laws we have in our corpus are all false, or anything of that sort. I said that we are not entitled to any rational confidence in them -- just as I am not entitled to any rational confidence in a tarot card reading (unless I am mistaken about that practice), even though they may be sometimes right as well -- except to the extent we also believe in miracles.
Why can't I let the other shoe drop and say that "theism is literally false" is also a story about the world that we are better off believing and acting on?
A far as I'm concerned, you are welcome to make that argument; be my guest. I just said that, under certain premises, you couldn't rationally make the other one.
NelsonRushton
2mo ago
if both theories A and B have passed all their tests, the evidence says nothing about them. We are free to tentatively accept them as true. We don't have to, though - my guess might be that quantum computing theory is not true, or it might be that I think that quantum computing has been only weakly tested and I'm not willing to bet on it working for my missile defense system.
I think I am beginning to understand your position better. So, here is my question. Do you think that the preference for acting on a better-tested theory over acting on a worse-tested theory is an arbitrary, subjective preference? like, some people like chocolate; some people like vanilla; different strokes? I assert that it is only rational to be more willing to act on a better tested theory.
We are free to tentatively accept them as true. We don't have to, though.
When did anybody ever have to accept a theory? By have to do you mean rationally ought to? If rationally ought to is what you mean, then, as I said, I disagree.
So while Newton's L.O.G. is just a guess from an epistemological standpoint, I am also tentatively accepting it as true. I claim it really is true, and I act upon that belief, although my belief in that is just a guess. Does that satisfy what you felt was missing from my position?
The difference I was trying to elucidate with the missile defense system example was a difference in the degree of confidence you would have between two theories A and B, both of which have been tested, neither of which has been disconfirmed, but one of which has been tested more thoroughly (or, for whatever reason, you have more confidence in). The crucial issue is a difference in degrees of confidence (or what Popper called degree of corroboration) between two hypotheses, neither of which has been falsified.
The hypothesis that has passed its tests I can tentatively accept as true, and I prefer the course of action based on that hypothesis. If both hypotheses have passed all their tests, I would try to conceive of a test that distinguishes between them
This is not the situation I was describing. In the hypothetical, the two laws are in different domains (gravity vs. quantum computing), possibly for different purposes (say, missile defence vs. airplane autopilot) and one is better established (or better corroborated) than the other.
This is a good question.
If inductive reasoning is valid why can't we go from "all observed masses follow Newton's law" to "therefore all masses follow Newton's law."?
I think this puts the burden of proof in a strange place. The question is always why should we be able to make the inference, and according to what articulable rule of inference. But I will pick up the burden of proof and try to explain why we can't make that inference from all observed P are Q* to all P are Q, using the Raven Paradox.
Imagine that I see a few crows and note that they are all black, and I form the hypothesis that all crows are black. I begin to seriously pursue the matter by looking for crows, counting them, and noting their color. How many crows would I need to see, all of which are black, before I can conclude that all crows are black, or, more conservatively, that probably (more than 50% likely) all crows are black? Pick a number you think is reasonable. I'll say a hundred thousand; that sounds conservative.
Now the following is a theorem of first order logic: (for all x, P(x) => Q(x)) <=> (for all x, -Q(x) => -P(x)). Or to instantiate the symbols, all crows are black is equivalent to everything that is not black is not a crow. One way to see that that is a theorem is to see that whichever form you consider, a counterexample would consist of a crow that is not black.
But now the alternative formulation gives me an idea. It's not that easy to find crows, but it's really easy to find things that aren't black. Now there are about 150 million blades of grass in an acre of land, so I can go into my 1/8 acre back yard and find about 19 million non-black things (namely, blades of grass) that are not crows. That's waaaaay over what seemed like a reasonable threshold to establish that probably, everything that is not black is not a crow, which is logically equivalent to all crows are black. Hypothesis confirmed!
But seriously, can I prove that probably most crows are black -- let alone that definitely all crows are black -- by looking at blades of grass in my back yard? of course not. So that shows that this reasoning is not valid, even if some forms of inductive reasoning are:
If inductive reasoning is valid why can't we go from "all observed masses follow Newton's law" to "therefore all masses follow Newton's law."?
I won't spoil the fun by resolving the paradox for you. Unless want me to.
NelsonRushton
2mo ago
Science is stories about the world that we are better off acting on. This phrasing seems better to me. In this way, can't I argue against theism (whatever you mean by that) by saying "acting on theism doesn't make us better off"?
Yes, feel free. But not (under the premises I described) on the grounds that there is no objective evidence that God actually exists (since that is also true of universal gravitation).
What is a p-value? It's not a urine dipstick test I can tell you. Still can't read most papers without tripping over one. Don't ask me if they're using it in frequentist or Bayesian terms, but there's a conditional probability for you.
It is not generally true that "you can't read most papers without tripping over one [p-value]". There is a thread of truth to this in medicine and the social sciences, but not in the physical sciences. More importantly, I think the duality you are looking for is parametric vs. Bayesian, not frequentist vs. Bayesian. The tool of p-values is part of parametric statistics, which is the main alternative to Bayesian statistics. If you see a paper with a p-value, it means they are not using Bayesian updating -- so the thing you keep tripping over is evidence against your thesis.
Finally, p-values, while they may not be urine dipsticks, are also not conditional probabilities. A conditional probability is the probability of A given B, where A and B are events in a probability space. A p-value, on the other hand, is the probability of an event A in a probability space conditioned on the value of a fixed-but-unknown parameter of that probability space. That is why parametric statistics does not use Bayes rule.
NelsonRushton
2mo ago
It's not going away unless we eventually make some groundbreaking metaphysical discovery, and it's always going to be an inherent Achilles' heel of Positivism in particular and Empiricism in general.
I'm not dabbing on Empiricism. I am an empiricist. I'm dabbing on cold blooded materialism in conjunction with claims of the possibility of knowing universal natural laws.
I don't understand how this is different from skepticism in general. Like if I believe that apple pies can't spontaneously appear or disappear, by your reasoning do I have any non miraculous reason to believe that?
It is different from more aggressive forms of skepticism in that I take for granted that the universe is governed by unchanging laws and that inductive reasoning is valid in theory. The principle of abductive inference says, in effect, if I cannot produce a counterexample, there probably are no counterexamples. This requires a certain level of facially hubristic confidence in the power of your mind, relative to the complexity of the system under study -- even if that form of reasoning would work on that same system for a sufficiently intelligent agent.
I must admit, though, that the law of conservation of apple pies strikes me as pretty non-miraculous. I will think that over and get back to you.
After researching your sources, I found enough evidence to withdraw the example from the post -- though implicitly I was referring to the Roman occupation in the Second Temple Period rather than the Kitos War.
It would be nice if you cited your sources more precisely, by author name, date, and document name, preferably with a link. I notice you did not name the document by Cassius Dio, or quote it, which is peculiar because it is pretty juicy in support of your point:
Meanwhile the Jews in the region of Cyrene had put one Andreas at their head and were destroying both the Romans and the Greeks. They would cook their flesh, make belts for themselves of their entrails, anoint themselves with their blood, and wear their skins for clothing. Others they would give to wild beasts and force still others to fight as gladiators [Cassius Dio (c .30BC): Dio's Roman History, Chapter 70 passage 32]
I think the current consensus (right or wrong) is that that quote makes Dio less credible, and in any case that is also my opinion. I don't find the other sources credible in their details either -- but I agree they are enough to show by a preponderance of the evidence that the Jewish rebellion in the Kitos War was tactically targeting Greek and Roman civilians.
NelsonRushton
1d ago
Let's start with number three, because that is the one that surprises me. (1) The city government of NYC is woke AF, (2) so is the administration of Columbia U, and (3) one element of the woke agenda is a strong leaning toward both Palestine and BLM to the point of permitting illegal protests for both. Do you affirm or deny (1), (2), and (3)?
NelsonRushton
18d ago
NelsonRushton
20d ago
In some ways, the tweet is not wrong.
I think the tweet is dead wrong. It makes a claim of fact, that is a universal generalization, that is not true, and that is not usefully close to being true.
If you want society to follow a rule, hold to that rule and propagate that rule.
The issue is that there is no general law of cause and effect that would cause society to follow the rule because I do. On the contrary, it might sometimes be the case that society will follow the rule more if I (1) break the rule, (2) keep it secret that I broke the rule, and (3) use my ill-gotten gains from breaking the rule to promulgate the rule. If you claim that could never happen, then the burden of proof is on you and best of luck. Or do you claim that secretly breaking a rule for the purpose of strengthening the rule is moral if the rule is a good one?
Do you believe, for example, that stealing a horse is immoral because it causes other people to steal other things if and when they find out about it? I don't see how it would at all. Let us suppose the following:
- Person A steals a horse and executes a very good plan to keep it secret, so that the horse will be presumed to have run off, and that he took possession of a formerly wild horse. The thief benefits more from owning the horse than its former owner would have. Moreover, person A rides the horse to work daily, where he writes widely read and highly influential essays about the importance of the rule of law, and the wrongness of theft.
- Person B, an influential intellectual, writes an essay about why it is morally OK to steal, because there is no such thing as private property in the first place. He writes cogently and in good faith. The essay gets ten million views and can be blamed with high confidence to at least three actual thefts (suggesting that there are presumably hundreds or thousands of others inspired by it).
- Person C serves on a jury in a case of grand theft, and stubbornly hangs the jury because he has read the essay written by B. In the jury room, Person C argues cogently and in good faith. The accused person is not retried and goes free.
Is the immorality of A's theft mitigated by its secrecy, and the fact that it is instrumental in him promulgating anti-theft mores?
I believe that B and C have done more damage to the moral prohibition against stealing than A has. If so, should the actions of B and C be illegal, and punishable by prison terms longer than what A would serve if he had gotten caught stealing the horse?
Management and control by what agency and to what end?
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