Logical Positivism, Mk. II Tuesday, July 29, 2008

I've been a reader of Overcoming Bias for about as long as it has been around. Lately I find Eliezer Yudkowsky's posts there more and more disappointing. So far as I can tell, Eliezer has managed to reinvent a bad wheel called logical positivism.

One post which reads as though it were written in Vienna in the 1920s is this one where Eliezer writes
"We can build up whole networks of beliefs that are connected only to each other - call these "floating" beliefs. It is a uniquely human flaw among animal species, a perversion of Homo sapiens's ability to build more general and flexible belief networks.

The rationalist virtue of empiricism consists of constantly asking which experiences our beliefs predict - or better yet, prohibit."
The intent of the full post seems to be that there is something wrong with beliefs that don't predict or prohibit some sensory experience.

Well, only a year has gone by and Eliezer is now offering up such morsels as
"And, oh yes - why is it right to save a child's life?

Well... you could ask "Is this event that just happened, right?" and find that the child had survived, in which case you would have discovered the nonobvious empirical fact about the world, that it had come out right.

Or you could start out already knowing a complicated state of the world, but still have to apply the rightness-function to it in a nontrivial way - one involving a complicated moral argument, or extrapolating consequences into the future - in which case you would learn the nonobvious logical / computational fact that rightness, applied to this situation, yielded thumbs-up."
There's plenty to criticize in this (rightness as an empirical property? as a function?? as both?!?!?) but I'll leave that to Eliezer's commenters. What boggles my mind here is why Eliezer, after (for all that I can tell) independently reinventing logical positivism, is so sloppy about applying it.

[ posted by James @ 6:38 PM | | Digg this! | del.icio.us | Permanent link | links to this post ]

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