Don't Revere The Bearer Of Good Info

I was actually quite amazed to find how far Gary Drescher had gotten, when someone referred me to him as a similar writer - I actually went so far as to finish my free will stuff before reading his book (am actually still reading) because after reading the introduction, I decided that it was important for the two of us to write independently and then combine independent components. Still ended up with quite a lot of overlap!

But I think it probably is unfair to judge Drescher as being at all representative of what ordinary philosophers can do. Drescher is an AI guy. And the comments on the back of his book seem to indicate that he was writing in a mode that philosophical readers found startling and new.

Drescher is not alternative mainstream philosophy. Drescher is alternative Yudkowsky.

I've referred to Drescher and SEP a few times. The main reason I don't refer more to conventional philosophy is that it doesn't seem very good as a field at distinguishing good ideas from bad ones. If you can't filter your good ideas and present them in a non-needlessly-complicated fashion, is there much point in pointing a reader to it?

But I've taken into account that Greene was able to rescue Roko where I could not, and I've promoted him on my list of things to read.

I don't think I agree with your conclusion. It seems to assume that ideas are somehow representation-independent -- and in practical programming as well as practical psychology, that idea is a non-starter.

Or to put it another way, someone who can state a point more eloquently than its originator knows something that its originator does not. Sure, the communicator shouldn't get all the credit... but more than a little is due.

How much non-Eliezer stuff is there on the practical "how to" of rationality, e.g. on techniques for improving one's accuracy in the manner that Something to protect, Leave a line of retreat, The bottom line, and taking care not to rehearse the evidence might improve one's accuracy?

EDIT: Sorry to add to the comment after Carl's response. I had the above list in there already, but omitted an "http://", which caused the second half of my sentence to somehow not show up.

The article on theistic modal realism is ingenious. (One-sentence summary: God's options when creating should be thought of as ensembles of worlds, and most likely he'd create every world that's worth creating, so the mere fact that ours is far from optimal isn't strong evidence that it didn't arise by divine creation.)

I don't find the TMR hypothesis terribly plausible in itself -- my own intuitions about what a supremely good and powerful being would do don't match Kraay's -- but of course a proponent of TMR could always just reject my intuitions as I'd reject theirs.

However, I think the TMR hypothesis should be strongly rejected on empirical grounds.

1. It is notable -- and this is one element of a typical instance of the Argument From Evil -- that our world appears to be governed by a bunch of very strict laws, which it obeys with great precision in ways that make substantial divine intervention almost impossible. It seems that there are many many many more possible worlds in which this property fails than in which it holds, simply because the more scope there is for intervention the more ways there are for things to happen. Therefore, unless the sort of lawlikeness we observe is so extraordinarily valuable that tiny changes in it make a world far less likely to be worth creating, we should expect that "most" worlds in the TMR ensemble would be much less lawlike than ours: e.g., we might expect prayers to be commonly answered in clearly detectable ways. So how come we're in such an atypical world?

2. Generalizing: I think we should expect that for most measures of goodness X, worlds with higher values of X should be dramatically more numerous in the TMR ensemble unless increasing X reduces the number/measure of possible worlds much more drastically than for most other choices of X. (Because when you increase X, you get the chance to reduce Y or Z or ... a bit. More choices.) Therefore, we should expect that for measures of goodness X where "better" doesn't imply "much more constrained" most worlds (hence, in particular, ours, with high probability) should have values of X that are close to optimal, or at least far from marginally acceptable. This doesn't seem to be true.

It seems to me that counter-arguments to these are likely to be basically the same as counter-arguments to the original argument from evil.

The other thing about TMR is that it undermines any version of theism that expects God to behave as if he cares about us. If TMR is right then, any time God has the option of doing something to make your life better, then he forks the universe vastly many ways and tries out every possible option (including lots of ways of doing nothing, and even ways of deliberately making things worse for you) apart from ones that make the whole universe not worth while. As mentioned above, it seems to me that this should make us expect that visible divine intervention should be pretty common, but in any case it's not terribly inspiring. A bit like having a "friend" who, any time she interacts with you, rolls dice and chooses a random way of behaving subject only to the constraint that it doesn't cause the extinction of all human life. Similarly, you've got no reason to trust any alleged divine revelation unless its wrongness would be so awful as to make the world not worth creating. (These arguments are again closely parallel to ones that come up with the ordinary argument from evil, in response to responses that basically take the form of radical skepticism.)

Excellent post. Having just read The Adapted Mind (and earlier the moral animal), I can see where Eliezer got a lot of his stuff on evolutionary psychology from.

However, all authors must walk a thin rope between appeasing the Carl Shulman's of the world who have read everything and introducing some background for naive readers beyond telling them to simply catch up on their own. I think he in general does a good job of erring on the side of more complexity, which is what I appreciate, so I of course forgive him. :)

A niche that a good author might consider filling is actually including the numbers of the experiments they reference, ie, the experimental scores and their standard errors, etc. It might turn off the innumerate but I think that pure numbers and effect sizes are grossly under reported by science writers.

EDIT: I agree with your conclusion, but...

(Checks Don Loeb reference.)

While, unsurprisingly, we end up adding to the same normality, I would not say that these folks have the same metaethics I do. Certainly Greene's paper title "The Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Truth About Morality" was enough to tell me that he probably didn't have exactly the same metaethics and interpretation I did. I would not feel at all comfortable describing myself as a "moral irrealist" on the basis of what I've seen so far.

Drescher one-boxes on Newcomb's Problem, but doesn't seem to have invented quite the same decision theory I have.

I don't think Nick ever claimed to have invented the Simulation Argument - he would probably be quite willing to credit Moravec.

On many other things, I have tried to use standard terminology where I actually agree with standard theories, and provide a reference or two. Where I am knowingly being just a messenger, I do usually try to convey that. But you may be reading too much into certain similarities that also have important points of difference or further development.

EDIT2: I occasionally notice the problem you point to, and write a blog post telling people to read more textbooks. Probably this is not enough. I'll try to reach a higher standard in any canonicalized versions.

Is the idea here to counsel us against some sort of halo effect? Eliezer Yudkowsky has told me a lot of interesting things about heuristics and biases, and about how intelligence works, but I shouldn't let this affect my judgement too much if he recommends a movie?

Or is it more than that - just that I should be careful when reading anything by Eliezer, and take into account the fact that I'm probably slightly too inclined to trust it, because I've liked what came before? Because then of course, we have the issue that I should be more likely to trust an author who is usually right - and this just says that I should be careful not to trust them too much more.

I like EY's writings, but don't hold them up as gospel. For instance, I think this guy's summary of Bayes Theorem (http://betterexplained.com/articles/an-intuitive-and-short-explanation-of-bayes-theorem) is much more readable and succinct than EY's much longer (http://yudkowsky.net/rational/bayes) essay.

The reason i love Elizier is how many people he must have attracted this art of rationality, and that without him and this site i wouldn't even know where to begin or where to look, and how he is one of surprisingly few people able to convey the information in such tasty little bits. He may not be the smartest in his field, and may 'just' be passing on things he learned from others, but his work is super valuable, for he does what the others don't. Also, Methods of Rationality happens to be on my top 3 list of Greatest Pieces of Writing IMO, so that adds a bit. I just have to separate and clear the lines between the two kinds of reverence, which can be surprisingly difficult if you don't pay attention to it which this post reminded me of, so thanks

I recently read Greene's essay and I thought it was a nice buttressing of ideas that I was originally exposed to in 2001 while reading "Beyond anthropomorphism". The challenge with Eliezer's earlier writing is that it is too injected with future shock to be comfortable for most non-transhumanists to read. The challenge with Eliezer's more recent writing is that it is too long for a blog format and much more suited for a book, which forces people to focus on the one thing.

The title of Greene's thesis is tongue-in-cheek. Based on my understanding of Eliezer's conception of morality, I would definitely call him irrealist.

The work of Jon Haidt is very enlightening.

This evening I had the pleasure of reading his Edge article on the benefits of religion, where he takes on some prominent new atheists - Myers, Sam Harris, etc. I quote:

When hurricane Katrina struck, religious groups across the country organized quickly to send volunteers and supplies. Like fraternities, religions may generate many positive externalities, including charity, social capital (based on shared trust), and even team spirit (patriotism). If all religious people lost their faith overnight and abandoned their congregations, I think the net results would probably be bad, at least in America where (in contrast to European nations) our enormous size, short history, great diversity, and high mobility make it harder for us to overcome individualism and feel that we are all part of one community. In conclusion, I believe that Enlightenment 2.0 requires Morality 2.0: more cognizant of the limitations of reason, more open to multilevel approaches in which groups are sometimes units of analysis, and more humble in its assertion that the individualist and contractualist morality of the scientific community is right, and is right for everyone.

It's really helpful to have good info borne to me, though, in a readable and engaging fashion. For some reason I never wound up reading the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, but I did read Eliezer's philosophical zombie movie script.

Fulltext: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/85192141/1977-ross.pdf

That pointer to Gary Drescher is much appreciated. Eliezer's explanations about determinism and QM make me feel "aha, now it's obvious, how could it be any other way", but I hate single-sourcing knowledge.

Just a brief mention since we're supposed to avoid AI for a while, but it is too relevant to this post to totally ignore: I just finished J Storrs Hall's "Beyond AI", the overlap and differences with Eliezer's FAI are very interesting, and it is a very readable book.

EDIT: You all might notice I did write "overlap and differences"; I noticed the differences, but I do think they are interesting; not least because they seem similar to some of Robin's criticisms of Eliezer's FAI.

I think you have some great points here.

The "textbooks" link is broken.

The Don Loeb and theistic modal realism links are broken. Also, the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy link seems to "point" to a passage from another LW post rather than a URL.

I have never really regarded EY as anything other than the guy who wrote a bunch of good ideas in one place. The ideas are good on their own merits and after being made aware that Quine(?) invented that "Philosophy = Psychology" thing I have had some healthy 'he's right but probably not original.' And really, who cares? He is right, but don't shoot the messenger, ad hominem is still ad hominem even if it is positive. Empty agreements are as bad as empty dismissals.

Isn't this intuitively obvious? Or am I just very, very rational?

Dead link: http://philosophy.wisc.edu/info/2006%20Metaethics%20Workshop/loeb.doc

Terry Pratchett is another good person who seems to want to go out on his own terms.

There's a large overlap between the ideas on LW and OB, and a book by J. Storrs Hall called "Beyond AI". That book is a popularization. But so is OB/LW, most of the time - at least the posts, if not the comments.