Popperian Decision making

I don't agree with either meaning of epistemology. The traditional meaning of epistemology, which I accept, is the study of knowledge, and in particular questions like What is knowledge? and How do we sort out good ideas from bad ideas? and How is knowledge created?

Both of your definitions of the field have bayesian ways of thinking already built in to them. They are biased.

If you don't want to be an epistemology, that would be OK with me. But for example Yudkowsky claimed that Bayesianism was dethroning Popperism. To do that it has to be an epistemology and deal with the same questions Popper addresses.

Popperian epistemology does not offer any rulebook. It says rulebooks are an authoritarian and foundationalist mistake, which comes out of the attempt to find a source of justification. (Well, the psychological claims are not important and not epistemology. But Popper did occasionally say things like that, and I think it's true)

I will take a look at your links, thanks. I respect that author a lot for this post on why heritability studies are wrong:

http://cscs.umich.edu/~crshalizi/weblog/520.html

(1). The problem is, it's pretty hard to determine whether a given answer to (1) is right, wrong or meaningless, when it's composed of mere words (cognitive black boxes) and doesn't automatically translate to an answer for (2). So most LWers think that (2) is really the right question to ask, and any non-confused answer to (2) ought to dissolve any leftover confusion about (1).

Note that Popperians think there is no algorithm that automatically arrives at rational beliefs. There's no privileged road to truth. AIs will not be more rational than people. OK they usually won't have a few uniquely human flaws (like, umm, caring if they are fat). But there is no particular reason to expect this stuff will be replaced with correct ideas. Whatever AIs think of instead will have its own mistakes. It's the same kind of issue as if some children were left on a deserted island to form their own culture. They'll avoid various mistakes from our culture, but they will also make new ones. The rationality of AIs, just like the rationality of the next generation, depends primarily on the rationality of the educational techniques used (education is closely connected to epistemology in my view, because it's about learning, i.e. creating knowledge. Popperian epistemology has close connections to educational theory which led to the philosophy "Taking Children Seriously" by David Deutsch).

Regarding the technical side of your post, if a Bayesian computer program assigns probability 0.87 to proposition X, then obviously it ought to assign probability 1 to the fact that it assigns probability 0.87 to proposition X.

I am pretty sure that is wrong. For one thing it would be overconfident. For another 0 and 1 are not probabilities.

But it's hard to think of a situation where the program will need to make use of the latter probability.

It's a measure of how much confidence there is in the estimate, so it could be used when updating in response to evidence. High confidence there would mean that it takes a lot of new evidence to shift the 0.87 estimate.

My first objection is that it attempts to "solve" the problem of induction by doing away with an axiom.

Proposed axioms can be mistakes. Do we need that axiom? Popper says the argument that we need it is mistaken. That could be an important and valid insight if true, right?

Popperian reasoning could be similarly "refuted" simply by refusing to accept any or all of its axioms.

You are applying foundationalist and justificationist criticism to a philosophy which has, as one of its big ideas, that those ways of thinking are mistaken. That is not a good answer to Popper's system.

The axiom of induction that Critical Rationalism rejects is one that we have every reason to suspect is true

No, it's worse than that. Try specifying the axiom. How are ideas justified?

If the answer you give is "they are justified by other ideas, which themselves must be justified" then that isn't merely not proven but wrong. That doesn't work.

If the answer you give is, "they are justified by other ideas which are themselves justified, or the following set of foundational ideas ..." then the problem is not merely that you can't prove your foundations are correct, but that this method of thinking is anti-critical and not sufficiently fallibilist.

Fallibilism teaches that people make mistakes. A lot. It is thus a bad idea to try to find the perfect truth and set it up to rule your thinking, as the unquestionable foundations. You will set up mistaken ideas in the role of foundations, and that will be bad. What we should do instead is to try set up institutions which are good at (for example):

1) making errors easy to find and question -- highlighting rather than hiding them 2) making ideas easy to change when we find errors

Popper's solution to the problem of justification isn't merely dropping an axiom but involves advocating an approach along these lines (with far more detail than I can type in). It's substantive. And rejecting it on the grounds that "you can't prove it" or "i refuse to accept it" is silly. You should give a proper argument, or reconsider rejecting it.

Second, with respect to the principle of criticism, it gives too much leeway to a mere clever arguer.

It is non-obvious how it doesn't. There is a legitimate issue here. But the problem can be and is dealt with. I do not have this problem in practice, and I know of no argument that I really have it in theory. You give Wittgenstein as an example, and suggest things go back and forth kind of indefinitely. Some replies:

1) stuff gets resolved or figured out. broad consensuses get reached. there isn't a rule to force people not to be idiots, but being an idiot isn't a fulfilling life and people tire of it when they understand a better way. this isn't easy but it happens.

2) adding a rule to require people to listen to your conception of reason would not solve the problem. they might refuse your premises.

3) I don't agree with your pessimism. most people don't try hard enough to organize their thinking and reach conclusions. but it can be done, in practice. you can look at issues in depth, and actually sort through all the arguments and counter arguments. it takes patience, persistence and effort to do high quality learning, but progress is possible.

following this principle does not have a good track record

As I see it, it is responsible for the enlightenment, in broad terms. i'm not trying to claim all the credit but the things done in the enlightenment were basically compatible with what i'm advocating. Also for the golden age of athens (plato and aristotle are not representative of the height of athens, they lived just after. it's the pre-socratics i have in mind, such as xenophanes.)

one aspect of the enlightenment was rebelling against authority (in particular religious authority, and in particular religious authority as applied to science. also in particular, political authority). this is broadly in line with my philosophy. and i think not so much in line with an attempt to set up foundational axioms for everyone to obey to prevent them from thinking wrong.

That said, Popper's insights beyond description of how people already learn have little track record. What they do have is pretty positive. Popper and his philosophy of science in particular has been respected by many scientists great and small, like Einstein, Deutsch, Feynman, Wheeler, Medawar, Eccles, Monod.

Anyway, back to those clever people. They can be dealt with. Wittgenstein is easy to argue with, he's so bad. Do you have an example of some argument you don't know how to resolve and want me to resolve?

Your criticism is generic. It would work on all ideas equally well. It thus fails to differentiate between ideas or highlight a flaw in the sense of something which could possibly be improved on.

So, now that I've criticized your criticism (and the entire category of criticisms like it), we can reject it and move on.

There is no "correct" or "incorrect" subjective probability, just predictably doing worse than possible to different degrees.

There is a correct P(T0|X) where X is your entire state of information. Probabilities aren't strictly speaking subjective, they're subjectively objective.

Are you saying that there is no regress problem? Yudkowsky disagrees. And so do other commenters here, one of whom called it a "necessary flaw".

You can't actually ACT as if nothing is ever conclusively true.

But I do act that way. I am a fallibilist. Are you denying fallibilism? Some people here endorsed it. Is there a Bayesian consensus on it?

Why do you think I don't act like that?

I would like to see a short description as to WHY this is a better way to view the world and update your beliefs about it.

Because it works and makes sense. If you want applications to real life fields you can find applications to parenting, relationships and capitalism here:

http://fallibleideas.com/

Popperian epistemology still relies on deductive logic.

Uses, especially in science. Doesn't rely on in any fundamental way for the main philosophical ideas.

Why is deductive logic trustworthy? (Serious question, I think it illuminates the nature of foundations)

It is not "trustworthy". But I don't have a criticism of it. I don't reject ideas for no reason. Lacks of positive justification isn't a reason (since nothing has justification, lack of it cannot differentiate between theories, so it isn't a criticism to lack it).

What is "trustworthy" in an everyday sense, but not a strict philosophical sense, is knowledge. The higher quality an idea (i.e. the more it's been improved up to now), the more trustworthy since the improvements consist of getting rid of mistakes, so there's less mistakes to bite you. But how many mistakes are left, and how big are they? Unknown. So, it's not trustworthy in any kind of definitive way.

You might argue that we conjecture that deductive logic, as we know it, is true/valid/correct and nothing that we've come up with seems to refute it - yet that doesn't mean we've "proved" that deductive logic is correct.

Yes. We do conjecture it. And it's not proved. So what?

A Bayesian might argue that the basic assumptions that go into Bayesian epistemology (The assumptions for Cox's theorem + some assumptions that yield prior distributions) have the same status as the rules of logic.

A difference between Popperian views and justificationist ones is Popperian views don't say anything should be justified and then fail to do it. But if you do say things should be justified, and then fail to do it, that is bad.

When Bayesians or inductivists set out to justify theories (and we mean that word broadly, e.g. "support" is a type of justification. So is "having high probability" when it is applied to ideas rather than to events.), they are proposing something rather different from logic. A difference is: justificationism has been criticized while logic hasn't. The criticism is: if you say that theories should be justified, and you say that they gain their justification from other ideas which are themselves justified, then you get a regress. And if you don't say that, you face the question: how are ideas to be justified? And you better have an answer. But no known answers work.

So justification has a different kind of status than logic. And also, if you accept justificationism then you face the problem of justifying logic. But if you don't, then you don't. So that's why you have to, but we don't.

So you might wonder what a non-justiificationist Bayesian epistemology would look like. If you're interested, maybe you could tell me. I certainly do think that Bayes' theorem itself is correct, but I'm not convinced it has any important applications to epistemology. I think that trying to have it play the role of justifying ideas is a mistake.

This is my understanding of Bayesian epistemology - something like (sophisticated) Popperian falsificationism / critical rationalism provides support for the assumptions of Bayesian epistemology. Then once you have the assumptions, well the rest falls out.

Popperians aren't overly attached to any particular idea. Our favorites are things like fallibilism, not deduction. But we don't have the structure of having some foundational ideas and then "the rest falls out". We regard that kind of structure as fragile and bad. Popper said knowledge is like a "woven web". There's no up and down, no foundations and derivative parts, no preferred directions, and no simple structure like A -> B -> C. Everything is interconnected in messy fashion (much more so than real spider webs, which actually have relatively simple geometric patterns). And you are permitted to start in the middle, or anywhere, even in mid air. Whenever you want. It doesn't matter. You can conjecture anything with no support, not just foundational ideas.

One of the problems with trying to use Popperian ideas for your foundations, then forgetting about them, is that they say you shouldn't. If you let them in as your foundations, they will immediately tell you what to do next, and it isn't Bayesian epistemology! They will tell you to be Popperians, and also to stop being foundationalists, they will not endorse your attempt to have "the rest fall out". If Popper was right enough to serve as a foundation, why is he wrong about all the rest?

Another aspect of your approach is reductionism. You treat low level theories are more important. We consider that a mistake. There's nothing wrong with emergent properties. There is nothing wrong with arguing from a higher level idea to a lower level one. Higher level ideas are just as valid as any others.

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A Bayesian might argue that the basic assumptions that go into Bayesian epistemology (The assumptions for Cox's theorem + some assumptions that yield prior distributions) have the same status as the rules of logic - we conjecture that they're true and they stand up to criticism, ye we don't think we've proven these assumptions.

I don't think I have heard that argued. The problem of the reference machine in Occam's razor leads to a million slightly-different variations. That seems much more dubious than deduction does.

If something can explain everything (by not being adapted to addressing any particular problem) we can criticize it for doing just that. So we dispense with it.