Yeah 99% of the work is figuring out how a human, with a messy human brain, can approximate the normative model. What heuristics work well, in what contexts? When is following explicit rules useful vs. just training your intuition through experience? etc. Lots of diff. ideas here
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Replying to @juliagalef @PereGrimmer and
Baron’s distinction between “normative” and “prescriptive” is one I haven’t seen before. That seems useful and maybe key. OTOH, if we’re looking for a disagreement crux, it might be whether a normative theory that can’t be achieved, even in principle, is a good thing.
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Replying to @Meaningness @juliagalef and
But the normative theories have technical uses! Tons of them! All of the coherence theorems! Papers calculating an algorithm's distance from an unreachable optimum! Why wouldn't you just have prescriptions based on the goal of getting closer to unreachable normativity?
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Replying to @ESYudkowsky @juliagalef and
Ah! This is very interesting… here you seem to have a “harder” take on rationality than some other people from the LW-derived community I’ve been discussing this with. 1/2
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Replying to @Meaningness @ESYudkowsky and
Hard to answer accurately or comprehensibly in 280, but: I think those benefits are rarely (not never, but rarely) useful in practice, and they trade off against other desirable features that are more often useful.
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Replying to @Meaningness @juliagalef and
Your position seems to me like saying that if we can't see the shortest path through a maze, then it must have no shortest path or at least the concept of a shortest path must not be useful. Seems useful to me. I don't get your weird ban? What else can be said?
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Replying to @ESYudkowsky @juliagalef and
I’m saying that in many/most cases there is no one correct metric, and therefore no shortest path. It’s an ontological objection, not an epistemological one. (Relatedly: I see rationalism as pervasively misunderstanding ontological questions as being epistemological ones.)
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Replying to @Meaningness @juliagalef and
So relativize the "shortest path" to a metric, like all preference orderings on options are relativized to a utility function. These ideas are technically straightforward, and if somebody manages to shoot themselves in the psychological foot, I would not blame the theory.
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Replying to @ESYudkowsky @Meaningness and
What distinguishes your position from the guy in math class claiming that there exists no absolute definition or way of counting apples, so 2 apples + 2 apples can't be said to yield 4 apples? Sure it's an ontological objection, but the answer is a sigh and to go on using math.
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Replying to @ESYudkowsky @juliagalef and
That is a case in which one choice is almost certainly better than others (and it’s obvious which). I am not advocating unbounded relativism! In many cases, it *isn’t* obvious what ontology will work well; and meta-rationality is about how to deal with that.
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Example. I have some electronic circuit. Is a Kirkhoff’s Law approximation good enough? Or is it small enough that I have to go all the way to Maxwell’s equations? Or even, do I need a relativistic correction?
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Replying to @Meaningness @juliagalef and
Well, if you pick an approximation that gives you wrong answers, I suggest you update against your hypothesis that the circuit was large enough and the math such as to make that a good approximation.
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Replying to @ESYudkowsky @juliagalef and
Yes: this is an instance of meta-rational reasoning! Note that it’s not based on general-purpose a priori considerations, but the domain-specific observation that circuit size is a major contributor to what ontology is appropriate.
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