Rationalists should beware rationalism

This seems a bit of a rant to me. You seem to have a pretty narrow concept of "test" in mind; claims can be "tested" via almost any connection they make with other claims that connect etc. to things we see. This is what intellectual exploration looks like. Wait a half-century if you want to see the winning claim defenses all neatly laid out in hypothesis-test format.

IAWYC, but the reason I was interested in evolutionary explanations was twofold: first, that a lot of standard (nonevolutionary) psychologists had attacked the problem and come up with what I considered unsatisfying explanations; and second, that this seemed like exactly the sort of area evolutionary psychology had been successful at explaining in the past (ie, a universal human tendency relating to strategies in conflicts and potentially having a large impact on future success).

I don't know what to think about the proposed solutions, including Roko's. On the one hand, they all sound pretty good, including the non-evolutionary ones. On the other hand, they all sound pretty good. Although it's always possible that there was more than one pressure driving people to support the underdog, five or six separate ones working simultaneously is a bit of a stretch. That means I probably have a low standard for "sounds pretty good". Which might be your point.

Still, I don't know what you want us to do. Are you just saying keep a low probability for all untested hypotheses? That sounds like a pretty good idea.

Testing new predictions is great and all, and it may be a Dark Side thing to do to recklessly state beliefs that haven't had new predictions tested, but it's not necessary to come up with new predictions.

If you are good at estimating the algorithmic complexity of a theory, and it's significantly less than the data it explains, it's most likely right. The only reason new predictions are favored over old ones is that you can't cheat with a complex theory that over fits the data.

see Einsteins arrogance

We can never try to confirm a theory, only test it.

While I think I understand the point Eliezer makes in the link, it's still possible to try to confirm a theory. One may "fail" and disconfirm it, but still - you did something that would confirm it if it was true. So you tried to confirm it.

(Where confirm means "raise your confidence that it's true" rather than "prove absolutely certain".)

"It is therefore that I say: certainly do come up with all kinds of hypotheses, but if they haven't been tested, be careful not to believe in them too much."

This is good advice. I'm one of those who throws around EP-style explanations pretty casually. But I think there's an unrecognized use of this kind of casually rationalistic thinking: it exercises our minds to come up with a materialistic reason for all sorts of social observations. Even if we can't test our EP conjecture for why people support the underdog, just formulating and considering it inoculates us against thoughts like "It's just moral to like the underdog" or "Things're more interesting that way", or "That's just the way things are" (or even more obnoxious explanations like religious ones).

It may just be semantics and a look into the biological process of decision making. I think there've been studies to show that our body tends to react to the question of which card deck is better 2-3 times before our rational self declares so. It may just be the process of a body forming a "hypothesis" and then subjecting it to a scientific type test before creating and declaring a rational theory.

Successfully tested hypotheses are more likely than untested hypotheses, but testable hypotheses are not more likely than untestable hypotheses. A lot of people commit this mistake; your post does not, but it does sort of suggest it.

Please use a less grandstandy title!

What is everyone's response to - "people aren't rational, they're rationalizers"? I'm very new to the blog, but figured this would be the perfect place to get some thoughts on this idea.

I consider myself a rationalist and have an epistemic view of rationalism, but these three claims about what I am "required" to believe are bogus:

"(1) a privileging of reason and intuition over sensation and experience"; sensation and experience are primary, you may doubt them if they conflict too strongly with your reason and other sensation and experience, and look for more evidence either way, but without sensation and experience you have nothing to reason about.

"(2) regarding all or most ideas as innate rather than adventitious"; I have serious doubts that "innate ideas" even exist, except, possibly, for some evolutionarily programmed "ideas" (depending on how you define ideas).

"(3) an emphasis on certain rather than merely probable knowledge as the goal of enquiry"; how can a person emphasize certain knowledge over "merely probable" knowledge when all knowledge is to some extent probabalistic?

For coming up with better ideas, the next best thing to actually testing them, and many cannot be practically tested, is coming up with lots of different ideas so they can be easily compared.

This reminded me of another rationalist novel, Hal Clement's "Half Life". A future where most of the dwindling population is working frantically to find a cure for the proliferating diseases that are driving humanity towards extinction. There are several rules about how to present ideas to avoid premature evalution, one of them is - if you present a hypothesis you must also either include a way of testing it or include a second independent explanation.

This seems to contradict the claim that the human mind is well adapted to its EEA. Is evolutionary psychology wrong? Maybe the creationists are correct after all writes Roko, implying that it is crucial for us to come up with an explanation

In protestation of my innocence, in this case we have an apparent falsification of standard evolutionary theory. We must be able to explain away an apparrent falsification or we should abandon evolution and go apologize to the discovery institute.

Not being falsified by the data is different from being able to predict every single data point.

Later on I was careless and didn't quite make it clear enough that my article's main point was avoiding the falsification, and explaining where the data point actually was was of secondary concern.