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
This is a reply jointly to several comments so I will put it as a new semi-top level post. Several of the responses, including such as (what I consider) the most thoughtful ones of @sqeecoo and @Gillitrut, point in the direction that the mission of science is not to discover natural laws that are literally true, but to produce useful fictions -- stories about the world that we are better off believing and acting on. That position, if you really believe it, is immune from my argument. But if you take that position, and at the same time embrace the study of science, then you cannot, at the same time, argue against theism on the grounds that it is literally false.
First things first: the tweet is just wrong on its face, unless you would have me believe that the people who protested against racially integrated schools in 1960s America were really in the right all along (hot take if so).
Good point. Not to mention the pro slavery mobs who used to riot and destroy the buildings and printing presses of anti-slavery newspapers. There were over 100 documented cases of this in the pre-Civil-War era in the United States [source].
By the way, the pro-slavery rioters were Democrats, and Democrat politicians and police often looked the other way as it happened. That pattern continued on straight from Andrew Jackson in the 1830's to Bull Connor in Birmingham, Alabama in the 1960's. Fast forward to today: some things have changed, and some have stayed the same. Black is the new white; BLM is the new KKK, and Democrats are the new... Democrats!
Is this like a hypocrisy claim? That since science isn't literally true it would be hypocritical to criticize theism for not being literally true?
Yes, that's what I'm saying.
If there is some causally inert god or gods out there, who do not interact with our reality in an empirically testable way, I am not that concerned with their existence.
God's pronouns are He/Him. (For the sarcasm-impaired, that's a joke)
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.
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
*Other than why the fuck are Canadian doctors so keen to help their fellow citizens maim or destroy their bodies??!!
Whatever it is, I think it is the same thing that motivated Dr. Frankenstein.
NelsonRushton
1mo ago
How about the finding that nothing with mass can exceed the speed of light? This is something backed by math and logic, as well as experimentation. If it were otherwise physics would break, is my layman’s understanding anyway... Is that sufficiently “universal”?
It sure is. Thanks for taking me up on the offer.
I am looking for objective evidence of the theory, Nullius in verba [Latin: No one's words (will be trusted)]. If you claim something is a theorem, show me the proof. If you claim something is experimentally verified, describe the experimental design and its results. What we have here is an appeal to authority claiming that the theory is "backed by math and logic" or that "physics would break" if it were untrue, omnes in verbo [all on the word (of authority)].
I would not be so demanding that I ask anyone to perform experiments, or even look up experimental data in literature, for the purpose of making a "Motte" post. A plausible (but concrete) story of what such evidence would look like -- in evidence of any theory of your choice -- would be enough to rebut my argument.
NelsonRushton
1mo ago
Is this just because gravitation is claimed to be "universal" e.g. for all we know, gravity could suddenly change to work differently tomorrow, or work differently as soon as we leave the solar system?
Yes, it is because of the claim of universality, but this is a different issue than skepticism about induction and causality a la Hume, or the laws of nature turning on a dime. It could be that even yesterday, there were unobserved exceptions to any physical law we think we know. In fact, the point of my argument is that we have no (non-miraculous) reason to doubt that there were.
Is it? Maybe since I live in this world, I am corrupted by it and I can't imagine it any differently. But: I cannot imagine a world where the scientific method doesn't work.
What I claimed is that we have no non-miraculous reason to believe that the scientific methods works, for purposes of inferring universal generalizations, even in this world.
The easy solution is to simply reject the idea of "our community".
This may be an ideal solution, but I do not believe it is an easy solution. A community collectively and instinctively puts people in categories, assigns default characteristics to people in these categories, views the categories as part of the identity of its members, and views the categories as competing factions. If you think you can easily (or totally) escape buying into that factionalism, I think you are under an illusion. The trick is not to eliminate identity groups as functional units of society, but to make the competition between them honest, healthy, and based on furthering interests that are shared among the identity groups.
I feel the OP's pain. But the closer you are to God, the less it will matter to you whether you are a member of a group that happens to suffer from an epidemic of foolishness (whether it is biological or cultural). Moreover, if your people are acting like fools, you dissociate yourself from the foolishness precisely to the extent that you call it out. For example, as a white Christian Republican, my people have a history of irrational and immoral hatred for gays. As a Southerner from Alabama, my people have a history of hypocritically identifying as Christian while also having racist contempt for blacks. If I call those sins out, I am not stained by them. I can actually feel my conscience being freed when I acknowledge them. But, to the extent that I remain silent about those corporate sins of my own people, and at the same time identify as members of those groups, I am truly guilty by association (whether I am individually an offender or not).
The same thing goes for other groups. If you are a Muslim and that is part of your identity, that does not make you part of the problems of Islamic fascism, genocidal antisemitism, and terrorism -- but, if you aren't talking about those problems in the Muslim world and calling them out, then you are part of the problems -- even if you don't advocate for Sharia law, or hate jews, or fly airplanes into buildings. Similarly, if you are black, and you aren't talking about the problems of black supremacy, anti-intellectualism, deadbeat dads, serially pregnant welfare moms, gang violence, or whatever you honestly see as the problems in your community, then you are part of those problems. On the other hand, if you are vocally calling them out and trying to address those issues, then you are not part of the problem -- and also, you are fundamentally part of a bigger identity group called "Honest, caring people".
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.
To recollect (since the conversation is pretty deeply threaded now), this was the original challenge:
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.
and the response:
How about the finding that nothing with mass can exceed the speed of light? This is something backed by math and logic, as well as experimentation. If it were otherwise physics would break, is my layman’s understanding anyway... Is that sufficiently “universal”?
It may help to step back and consider the role of appeals to authority in general, in terms of when they are conventionally accepted and when they are not. When experts communicate with other experts in post-enlightenment scholarly discourse, appeals to authority are verboten. The sacred rule of scientific dialectic is Nullius in verba [nothing on the word (of authority)]. I did not get that out a fortune cookie; it is the motto of the Royal Society of London (British equivalent of our Academy of Science), established in 1660, and now the oldest scientific academy in the world. As Turing Award Laureate Judea Pearl put it, the scientific revolution began when Galileo said, "I don't care about Aristotle and his fancy books; I want to see these two rocks dropped from the tower of Pisa, and I want to see them with my own two eyes." The hair stands up on the back of my neck every time I re-read Pearl's words, because, whether it began with Galileo or not, science in the strict sense emerged when appeals to authority were banished from scholarly discourse -- so that ideas came to be considered on their intrinsic merits rather than the merits of their inventor or advocate. It did not happen that long ago, it has not yet happened everywhere, and we are very fortunate to have that ethos as part of our heritage.
On the other hand, in a classroom or a court of law, it is conventional (and reasonable per common sense) for lay people to accept expert testimony on the merits of the speaker, if, or to the extent that they assess the speaker to be an expert on the topic in question. In these cases, the burden of rationality for the listener shifts -- from weighing the evidence that the speaker's claims stand on their merits, to rationally weighing the evidence of his merits as a trustworthy source on the topic. For example, if a professor of ornithology from Stanford tells me he is confident that we are looking at a red-bellied wood thrush (or whatever), and that is not disputed by another expert of comparable or greater standing, I would tend to believe him. If he got his bachelor's from the University of Alabama, on the other hand, I would be less inclined. (I'm just kidding; I would grudgingly believe the Alabama grad -- but War Eagle!)
To the topic at hand, I am not assuming the role of a layman in this discussion. I consider myself an expert in logic and probabilistic reasoning, but you can be the judge of whether you agree. I have a doctorate in that subject from the University of Georgia and 11 published scholarly papers in the field (as well as 22 in other fields of mathematics and computer science). During my career as a professor at Texas Tech University, I was lead investigator in over one million dollars in research contracts sponsored by NASA and DARPA. I served as chief scientist of Texas Multicore Technologies from 2011 to 2017. My most cited paper on probabilistic reasoning [Baral, Gelfond, and Rushton (2009): "Probabilistic Reasoning with Answer Sets] (https://arxiv.org/pdf/0812.0659.pdf) has 293 citations per Google Scholar, about one third of which occurred within the past two years -- which puts it in approximately the top 1% of academic papers by number of citations, as well as indicating interest in my research that is growing over time.
I am not asking you to assume the role of a layman either, and I do not expect to be taken one bit more seriously than my arguments merit on their substance. But, given an unsupported assertion that "If it were otherwise physics would break, is my layman’s understanding", I am not willing to assent to it, let alone consider it objectively established, without seeing direct evidence (Nullius in verba) -- either from you or from the alleged expert source -- in order to examine, not content of the physics theory, but the probabilistic and/or logical rules of inference that are used to support that theory. As (Pearl imagined) Galileo said, I want to see that it is true with my own eyes.
If you don't believe we can go from experimental evidence to justified belief in theory, then we have bigger problems.
I do not believe we can, without a prodigious leap of faith in the power of the human mind relative to the complexity of Nature, unjustified by any articulable, objective reason. If you disagree, then I ask you which rules of inductive inference you would use to draw those conclusions from that evidence. So, do we have "bigger problems"?
NelsonRushton
30d ago
The definitive portrayal of Dr. Frankenstein, of course, is Mary Shelly's novel. Before I respond to this, I am curious whether you (@IGI-111) have read the book, and, in case you have, whether, upon reflection, you think it is accurate to describe Dr. Frankenstein's driving motive as "lust for knowledge".
You say: z can never be 1 for any finite number of observations, no matter how small the desired confidence c is, unless c = 0 Well where is your proof for this?
That is my thesis (recall the context was statistical reasoning). My argument is that I do not know of an inference rule that would permit this without begging the question and I have looked diligently (abductive inference). You could disconfirm my thesis by pointing out such a rule. If you try to disconfirm it and fail (like I have), that would count as additional evidence for the thesis in my view -- because you are such a smart fellow.
Do you honestly believe that we can't say, by study of the motion of say, the planets of our solar system, be justified in believing a theory about the motion of the planets (and only the planets)?
My view is not that we cannot be justified, but that we cannot be objectively justified -- justified for an objective, articulable reason that does not rest on an article of faith as I described. The theory you are probably referring to is Kepler's law of orbital mechanics. What I believe about that is that we are objectively justified (statistically) in believing Kepler's equations are usually, approximately true. That is, they are at least a useful fiction. However, I do not see any objective reason (short of a miracle) to have nonzero confidence that Kepler's' equations are always exactly true, or even always approximately (to within specified tolerances).
Imagine, for example, that I am skeptical of whether Kepler's equations hold universally (as anyone, even Kepler, should be a priori); you claim to have a justified nonzero degree of belief that they do, and I ask you for evidence. What form of argument would you use to establish this?
Suppose you try to use Bayesian statistics. It will be mathematically impossible for you to produce a nonzero posterior probability if you do not have a nonzero prior, and a nonzero prior would beg the question, so that's out.
Suppose you try to use the standard go-to method of confidence intervals (as @self_made_human mentioned, p-values), to give a statistically significant confidence interval on the probability that Kepler's laws hold for a given occurrence. Now "the rule of 3" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rule_of_three_(statistics)) says that as your number of observations approaches infinity, the lower bound on estimate of the success rate of Kepler's laws will approach 100%, but it will never be 1 with for finite number of observations. For example you can get a statistical result that Kepler's laws hold 99.9% of the time, but not 100% of the time -- that is, never any statistically significant evidence that they constitute a universal natural law of the physical world. So that's out. Moreover, it will not work to lower your confidence level to 90%, or 85%, or any other percentage other than zero. So that's out.
All other ideas I can come up with for an objective, quantifiable solution also fail. How about you? Note that I am not asking you to go out and gather the actual observations, or even to understand Kepler's equations; I am just asking for the statistical method that you would use to draw the onclusion from those observations.
Finally to address this:
Our observations inspire us to a mathematical proof that every three-sided polygon has an internal angle of 180 degrees. Would we be justified in believing that every three-sided polygon in the box, has an internal angle of 180 degrees
What we could prove, mathematically, is that in a space that satisfies the axioms of Euclidean geometry, the sum of the internal angles of every triangle is 180 degrees. However, that is not a theorem about the physical world, and it is not known whether or not the space we live in satisfies the axioms of Euclidean geometry. So we would have justified confidence in the theorem, insofar as some propositions logically entail others, but it is not a universal generalization about the physical world.
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.
While it is true that Dr. Frankenstein wanted to know something, I think to state that as his motive, and leave it at that, leaves out what is most essential. I submit that Victor Frankenstein has more in common with Faust, or Elric of Melniboné than he does with, say, Paul Erdos, or Thomas Edison (doesn't it feel so?). Like Faust and Elric, but unlike Erdos or Edison, Dr. Frankenstein commits copious moral transgressions in the service of his compulsive quest (e.g., desecrating dead bodies, theft, vivisection). In his effort to cross certain boundaries as a far term objective, he crosses boundaries that he knows, or ought now, should not be crossed in the here and now. He could have violated those boundaries in a quest for knowledge, or, like Elric or Gilgamesh, in a quest for something else. So, I think Frankenstein's quest for knowledge is relatively incidental while his quest by forbidden means, for what he ought to know is within the exclusive dominion of the gods is essential. Like Prometheus.
If this analogy [I presume you mean the analogy between the trans-mania and Frankenstein] has any legs, it has to be about the desire to see if man can be turned into woman and vice versa, about transhumanism and the escape from the binding of natural laws without regard for prevailing morality... Not the petty bureaucratic impulse of classification and normalization that moves Canada as a nation and its managerial ilk today, which itself is justified by conforming to a morality, not disregard for it.
From this I suspect one difference between you and me is that I believe Dr. Frankenstein -- along with Faust, and Elric, and the trans-mutilators -- are recklessly crosswise of morality plain and simple, not merely "prevailing" morality. They all lie to themselves to justify the intoxicating ecstasy of crossing boundaries, and seeming, for the time being, to get away with it. Like Prometheus.
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.
Not to derail, and it's possible that you're still right, since I don't know what exactly constitutes hatred for you, but I do think the scriptures are pretty clear that homosexual sex is bad.
Important enough question for a derail, IMO. What constitutes hatred, for me, is taking carnal delight in the pain and loss (or prospective pain and loss) of another person. This is as opposed to indignation, by which I mean making a judgment that someone's conduct is immoral and, if it rises to a certain level, calls for punishment. In that light, my case is twofold. First (as I think @Felagund anticipated),
For I was an hungred, and ye gave me no meat: I was thirsty, and ye gave me no drink: I was a stranger, and ye took me not in: naked, and ye clothed me not: sick, and in prison, and ye visited me not. Then shall they also answer him, saying, Lord, when saw we thee an hungred, or athirst, or a stranger, or naked, or sick, or in prison, and did not minister unto thee? Then shall he answer them, saying, Verily I say unto you, Inasmuch as ye did it not to one of the least of these, ye did it not to me. [Matthew 25: 42-45 KJV]
Jesus doesn't say "I was in prison for something I did not do and ye visited me not", or "I was in prison for a minor offense, and you visited me not". The people who count as the least of our brothers include people who have actually committed a major offense. So I think it is consistent, and indeed only right, to judge an action as a sin without hating the person who committed it. If my brother drove home drunk from a night on the town, or even murdered someone, I could acknowledge that as wrong, or gravely wrong in the latter case, without hating him.
Second, the Bible does condemn homosexual sodomy. Just as strongly, it condemns witchcraft, idol worship, working on Saturday, cursing your parents, eating meat of an animal that been strangled, consuming animal blood (e.g., blood sausage), premarital sex, and many other things which call for the death penalty under Mosaic law. Some of these prohibitions, including idol worship, consuming animal blood, and eating the meat of a strangled animal, carry over explicitly into New Testament law [cf. Acts 15]. Bible believing Christians, as a rule, do not take all of those seriously as sins, let alone call for death by stoning for all of them -- so they have to square with that one way or another.
But of all ways to square with it, to arbitrarily pick one of those alleged sins and lift it up as an abomination on Biblical grounds, while discounting or ignoring the rest, and then to use that capricious choice to justify hating another person, is not only hypocritical but blasphemous -- insofar as it also recklessly puts your bigoted words in God's mouth. Yet, as a group characteristic, that is what Evangelicals [my people] have historically done, and to some degree continue to do, in large numbers by comparison with the general population. I'm not saying we all do it or ever did; I am saying that (1) we did/do it significantly more than our outgroups in the Western world (e.g., white collar Democrats), (2) those of us who do not vocally acknowledge that are part of the problem.
And if you start with 100% credence or 0% levels of disbelief, nothing anyone can do to you short of invasive neurosurgery (or maybe a shit ton of LSD) can change it.... What are the practical ramifications? Well, here, what Nelson is trying to argue is a waste of time. If you demand 100% confidence that the laws of physics are "universal" and timeless, you're SOL unless you assume the conclusion in advance. But we can approach arbitrarily close
This is mistaken. There are two quantifiers in an assertions about laws of nature: one might be called generality, which refers to the uniformity with which the law is believed to hold, and the other might be called confidence, which refers to the degree of belief that the law holds with the given generality. For example, if I say I firmly believe that at least 1% of crows are black, this statement would have high confidence and low generality -- whereas if I said, It is plausible that at least 99% of crows are black, that statement would have lower confidence and higher generality. Nothing in any of my posts mentioned 100% confidence; my thesis is about nonzero confidence in 100% generality.
Skip Popper. Get on the Bayes Boat, baby, it's all you need.
Funny thing: everybody loves Bayes rule; but they never state their priors. To that extent they never consciously use it. Nor is there any evidence that it models the unconscious process of real life rational cognition. The evidence to support that would need to be quantitative; not just "Hey I believed something, then I saw something, and I altered my degree of belief. Must have been using Bayes!"
NelsonRushton
1mo 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.
Is there something that singles out the laws of physics as uniquely unjustifiable
This applies to all universal generalizations over any set with large numbers of members we cannot directly test. The first critical part of my top level post is this:
What you will find [in a statistics book] are principles that allow you to conclude from a certain number N of observations, that with confidence c, the proportion of positive cases is z, where c < 1 and z < 1. But there is no finite number of observations that would justify, with any nonzero confidence, that any law held universally, without exception (that is, z can never be 1 for any finite number of observations, no matter how small the desired confidence c is, unless c = 0).
So, statistical arguments cannot establish universal generalizations; nothing unique to physics about that. The second critical part is what I said in my first reply to your first comment:
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 when deployed by a sufficiently intelligent agent.
There is an old joke that is relevant to the application of the abductive inference principle [credit to Kan Kannan, my doctoral advisor]: I tried whiskey and coke, rum and coke, gin and coke, tequila and coke, and vodka and coke, and got drunk every time. Must be the coke! Maybe nobody would be that dim in real life, but the principle is real. When we are doing experiments to gather evidence for a universal principle (coke and anything gets you drunk), we might be dim witted to actually look where the counterexamples are.
Here is a real-world example. I once assigned a homework problem to write a function in Python that would compute the greatest common divisor of any two integers a and b, and test it on 5 inputs to see if it worked. One student evidently copied the pseudocode found on Wikipeda (which is fine; real life is open book and open google), and submitted this program:
def gcd(a, b):
while b != 0:
t = b
b = a % b
a = t
return a
and these 5 test cases:
gcd(5,10) = 5
gcd(8,7) = 1
gcd(9,21) = 3
gcd(8,8) = 58
gcd(1000,2000) = 100
He tested big numbers and little ones, first argument smaller than the second, second argument smaller than the first, both arguments the same, one a multiple of the other, and them being relatively prime (having no common factors other than 1), and got correct answers in every case. So, in some ways it is a highly varied test suite -- but he probably could have written ten thousand test cases and still never found that the function is incorrect, because he systematically failed to think about negative numbers in the test suite, just like he did in his code (it gives the wrong answer for gcd(-10,-5). In one way of looking at things, negative number are atypical (in that we don't bump into them as often in ordinary life), and many people wouldn't think to test them; but from an objective way of looking at things, he systematically ignored half of the number line, despite straining to come up with a highly varied test suite. Must be the coke!
The point of the joke, and the example, is to illustrate how, when analyzing complex system with nuanced twists and turns, we might not have enough ingenuity to look where the counterexamples to our hypothesis really are. But what counts as a "complex system with nuanced twists and turns" depends on the complexity of the system under investigation, relative to the mental acuity of the investigator. So, what right do we have to expect that our little brains are up to the task of finding the "bugs" in our hypotheses about the laws of nature, when they are just barely (sometimes) capable of finding the bugs in a six-line program that is wrong for fully half of its possible inputs? If the source code of the universe is that simple, relative to the power of the little meat computers between our ears, it would be a miracle.
Rule utilitarianism sets rules that protect individual liberty as a bulwark against oppression and as a safety valve.
It only does this in the context of valid arguments that protecting individual liberty is in fact such a bulwark/safety-valve, and I don't believe such arguments exist. It is very tempting to think they exist, because I agree with their conclusions, but I do not believe this is not how people actually defend those principles in practice. For example, ...
In my mind, the US constitution is a good representation of rule utilitarianism.
My response to this has a lot in common with my response to @coffee_enjoyer above [https://www.themotte.org/post/966/why-rule-utilitarianism-fails-as-a/205363?context=8#context]. I love the US constitution, but I do not think it has much to do with rule utilitarianism. Most provisions of the American Constitution and Bill of Rights are borrowed almost wholesale from the English Constitution, English Petition of Right, and English Bill of Rights that came just before them in the same tradition. Where there was a discussion of which changes to make,
- when the argument was, we should do this rather than that because the calculated consequences of this are better than the calculated consequences of that, I submit that is political science or social engineering, not utilitarian ethics.
- when the argument was, we should do this rather than that because that wrongfully infringes on our rights as Englishmen, I submit that argument was based in sacred tradition, not utilitarian ethics, and
- when the argument was, we should do this rather than that because that wrongfully infringes on our self-evident natural human rights, the argument was based in deontology.
NelsonRushton
1mo ago
the net upvotes tell the story of which way TheMotte leans ideologically.
It is a little sad, for The Motte, that it can be assumed people upvote arguments whose conclusions they agree with (as opposed to meritorious arguments on all sides).
Can we make a "universal law" about the angles of all three sided polygons in the infinite box?
I can't think of a statistical rule that would justify it. Can you?
Those who think rationality can lead to justified beliefs think that justification and evidence can make it so that we objectively rationally ought to believe a justified theory
There is a nuance to my position that this glosses over. In my view, scientific epistemology is not just matter of ought vs ought not; it is a matter of rationally obligatory degrees of preference for better tested theories, on a continuum. However, when one theory is better tested than another on this continuum, and on some occasion we have to choose between the two, then we rationally ought to trust the better tested theory on that occasion.
This is subjective in the sense that our preference for a theory is our decision, but it's not like a preference for an ice cream flavor
If I understand your position correctly, it is an awful lot like the preference among ice cream flavors. Let's say you have to choose from chocolate, vanilla, and strawberry -- but you know the strawberry is poisoned. So strawberry is a not a viable choice, but the choice between vanilla and strawberry remains wholly subjective. Similarly, (in your view as I understand it) when choosing among alternative theories to act on, the choice among those theories that have not been disconfirmed is a subjective preference as much as chocolate vs. vanilla.
For example, suppose a person has a choice between action A and action B, and that their goal in making that choice is to maximize the likelihood that they will continue living. Action A maximizes their chance of surviving if a certain viable (tested, not disconfirmed) theory is true, and B maximizes their chance of surviving if a certain other viable theory, in another domain, is true. They know one of those theories is substantially better confirmed than the other by every relevant criterion (say, the law of gravity vs. the most recent discovery in quantum computing). I say there is only one rational action in that scenario (trust the better tested theory). Do you say the same or different?
Thanks for the reply.
I agree that my argument does not merit against your stated belief [Newton's L.O.G is (merely) our best guess for how gravity works]. But I submit that you have good reason to believe something stronger than your stated belief, that in your heart you do believe something stronger than that (as you indicate: " Psychologically, very sure."), that you probably act as if you believe something stronger than that, and that you plan to deliberately continue acting that way. So, either you are acting irrationally (which I doubt), or something is missing from your formal statement (which I submit is probably the case).
For example, imagine you are told that a certain missile defense system uses a model of rocket flight that is based on Newton's law of gravity. Do you think it would be rational to posit that the system is unsafe, and to take costly action to avoid relying on it, specifically on the grounds that Newton's law of gravity is a "just a guess" in which we are not entitled to a smidgeon of confidence? Now, by comparison, imagine that a system protecting your safety were based on the latest theory of a less well studied domain (say, quantum computing); in that case you might be justifiably concerned about that, and, if so, be more likely to take costly actions to avoid relying on that system -- even though the theory it rests on, like Newton's law of gravity, might be our current best guess about the relevant domain.
Here is the point: (1) we have best guesses in many different domains of inquiry; (2) we have more confidence in our best guesses in some domains than we do in others, and (3) it is prima facie instrumentally rational to act on those differences. So, if our stated beliefs are to be consistent with our actions, which we fully intend to continue taking while regarding ourselves as rational, then we should be able to say something stronger than that the law of gravity is merely our best guess in the relevant domain. If we find ourselves unable to justify saying anything stronger, then we have important epistemological work to do.
As I recall, Popper held that repeated, failed attempts to disprove a hypothesis count as evidence for its truth (though never certain evidence). Am I mistaken?
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