LessWrong 2.0 Reader

But the set of hypotheses "X does not exist" doesn't contain both sides of the isomorphism, so the obvious argument doesn't carry through.

I figured anyone who thinks proving non-existence is extra hard also probably lacks a sufficiently thought-out concept of "existence" to convincingly make that claim :)

But ok, to engage more with the parent: My atheism takes the form "For all God-concepts I've heard of, my attempt to make them specific has either yielded something wrong like Helios, or meaningless like belief-in-belief or perhaps a bad word choice like 'God is probability'".

If the set of all God-concepts I've heard were empty, I wouldn't have the need to say I'm an atheist. That's why the burden of proof is actually on the God-concept-proposers.

I wouldn't really term this set exercises, as more of a continuous course of mental acuity development. Try to use the recommended exercise book as an observational material. People's opinions differ, but clues are meant to be studied. You can check it out through this link

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Pr2PcAqKRu9qKBCHd/principles-of-perception

Yet in general, if people are asked about the relative number of restaurants in various fast-food chains, their estimates generally bear a close relation to the truth.

The link is broken. Is it this article https://psycnet.apa.org/record/1992-18641-001 ?

This doesn't quite engage with the parent.

for any hypothesis H, it’s on average equally “problematic” to believe its probability is 1% as it is to believe its probability is 99%.

This is obviously true because there's an isomorphism between hypotheses and their negations, and "for any hypothesis" includes both. (There might also be other, less obvious reasons why it's true.)

But the set of hypotheses "X does not exist" doesn't contain both sides of the isomorphism, so the obvious argument doesn't carry through.

And I don't think the conclusion is true, either, though I wouldn't want to say much more without being specific about what set of entities we're considering. (All logically possible ones? Physically possible? Entities that people claim to have communicated with? Of course it's not your job to do this, the parent was underspecified.)

Upon further thought, maybe just splitting up #1 and #2 is oversimplifying. There's probably a position #1.5, which is more like "Words like "goals" and "beliefs" only make sense to the extent that they're applied to Bayesians with utility functions - every other approach to understanding agenthood is irredeemably flawed." This gets pretty close to normative realism because you're only left with one possible theory, but it's still not making any realist normative claims (even if you think that goals and beliefs are morally relevant, as long as you're also a moral anti-realist). Maybe a relevant analogy: you might believe that using any axioms except the ZFC axioms will make maths totally incoherent, while not actually holding any opinion on whether the ZFC axioms are "true".

In this case, I feel like there aren't actually that many people who identify as normative anti-realists (i.e., deny that any kind of normative facts exist).

What do you mean by a normative fact here? Could you give some examples?

As someone who has organised meetups outside of the main hubs my experience matches pretty much everything said here. The current format is not ideal for accomplishing anything, so much so that I've stepped down from organising mine because they were providing so little value. It's a sad state of affairs, but from what I can tell the majority are content with them being low-effort social groups.

In terms of coordinating between regional hubs I would suggest opting for LessWrong instead of Facebook. Many people simply won't see the content due to either algorithms or newsfeed blockers plus Facebook no longer maintains the monopoly over everyone's social calendar that it had just 2 years ago.

It seems to me, rather, that people often talk about updating your credences in accordance with Bayes’ rule and maximizing the expected fulfillment of your current desires as the correct things to do.

It's important to disentangle two claims:

1. In general, if you have the goal of understanding the world, or any other goal that relies on doing so, being Bayesian will allow you to achieve it to a greater extent than any other approach (in the limit of infinite compute).

2. Regardless of your goals, you should be Bayesian anyway.

Believing #2 commits you to normative realism as I understand the term, but believing #1 doesn't - #1 is simply an empirical claim about what types of cognition tend to do best towards a broad class of goals. I think that many rationalists would defend #1, and few would defend #2 - if you disagree, I'd be interested in seeing examples of the latter. (One test is by asking "Aside from moral considerations, if someone's only goal is to have false beliefs right now, should they believe true things anyway?") Either way, I agree with Wei that distinguishing between moral normativity and epistemic normativity is crucial for fruitful discussions on this topic.

Another way of framing this distinction: assume there's one true theory of physics, call it T. Then someone might make the claim "Modelling the universe using T is the correct way to do so (in the limit of having infinite compute available)." This is analogous to claim #1, and believing this claim does not commit you to normative realism, because it does not imply that anyone should want to model the universe correctly.

It might also be useful to clarify that in ricraz's recent post criticizing "realism about rationality," several of the attitudes listed aren't directly related to "realism" in the sense of this post.

I would characterise "realism about rationality" as approximately equivalent to claim #1 above (plus a few other similar claims). In particular, it is a belief about whether there is a set of simple ideas which elegantly describe the sort of "agents" who do well at their "goals" - not a belief about the normative force of those ideas. Of course, under most reasonable interpretations of #2, the truth of #2 implies #1, but not vice versa.

You've set up a dichotomy between limited (e.g., reciprocal) tolerance and absolute tolerance by presuming that the limitations would be arbitrary and unjustified, but the limitations are justified by self-preservation (in case of Popper, tempered by preferring rational discourse if possible), so what you've said is an illustration of the fallacious argument this question is about.

I don't think I've ever seen the paradox of tolerance used that way. Even in the original formulation from Popper, it's specifically an argument for restricting the principle of tolerance, based on the consequences of society being too tolerant.

The problem with the paradox of tolerance, (as I've seen it used) is people use it as an argument to justify putting limits on the principle which are in fact arbitrary and unjustified; they just say "we can't tolerate the intolerant" as a cached excuse for doing violence to political enemies while still professing a belief in tolerance.

As such, your defence sounds to me like it's ceding the ground. I don't believe in tolerance-conditional-on-reciprocity, I believe in tolerance.