Regardless of the actual content, at least the OP dared to criticize
something Big Yud argued in the Holy Sequences. That’s not something you
see often on LessWrong.
Honestly this isn’t bad, and logical positivism/empiricism has
enjoyed something of a minor renaissance over the last decade or so (or
at least that’s how I see it: I entered university in the first half of
the decade and first heard about it then)
The worst two things I could say about this are
The argumentation is typically vague and doesn’t cut the issues
at the joints
There is a lot of verbiage wasted on refuting
Yudkowsky’s claims (why the fuck would anybody bother to do
that)
For what it’s worth I don’t think this is actually a form of “logical
positivism”, so much as an anti-realist take on empiricism which could
as easily be related to Quine as to Carnap
Edit:
Also…fuck me, I don’t think I’ve read No Logical Positivist
I before, but the arguments here quoted are so fucking bad it’s
embarrassing. Everything seems to rest on (1) a pseudo-Bayesian account
of epistemology which (somehow?!) implies a metaphysical commitment to
realism about the objects of scientific study, and (2) a sort of “just
world” metaphysics whereby given a sufficient Bayesian probability you
could not go wrong in your judgements.
Which is fucking mental.
That bit about the spaceship…what the fuck? Nobody thinks that
because you can’t see the spaceship it’s meaningless to talk about it,
the spaceship insofar as it exists has its existence confirmed by a
network of empirically verifiable sentences, which includes
social epistemology. Yud thinks he’s got this amazing dunk on
the positivist but he’s dunking on himself: by making all empirical
confirmation subject to confirmation by a single agent he’s set himself
the task of empirically confirming the existence of a causally
unconnected object by himself.
> Everything seems to rest on (1) a pseudo-Bayesian account of epistemology which (somehow?!) implies a metaphysical commitment to realism about the objects of scientific study, and (2) a sort of “just world” metaphysics whereby given a sufficient Bayesian probability you could not go wrong in your judgements.
i.e. business as usual?
> You stand on top of a tall building, next to a grandfather clock with an hour, minute, and ticking second hand. In your hand is a bowling ball, and you drop it off the roof. On which tick of the clock will you hear the crash of the bowling ball hitting the ground?
>To answer precisely, you must use beliefs like Earth’s gravity is 9.8 meters per second per second, and This building is around 120 meters tall. These beliefs are not wordless anticipations of a sensory experience; they are verbal-ish, propositional.
Ok, that is an *impressively* bad misunderstanding of instrumentalism. Then again, this is what youd expect from big yud
Important to note the differences between empiricism and logical positivism. Empiricism builds off of and searches for empirical truths through the scientific method, logical positivism finds truths through *reason* when empiricism comes up empty. Plenty of things cannot be proven or disproven empirically, and logical positivism bulldozes right through that fact
Not sure about this as a definition of log pos, I would say log pos is a specific way of *viewing* knowledge as a matter of scientific method (often pluralistic, not just one scientific method) founded by logic and observation (using empirical method with all of the other things - such as formal logic - we have to hand)
So log pos is less about using “reason* to find “truths” - especially given that a lot of log pos people were anti-realists or deflationists about “truth” - than it is about building a coherent system of sentences that are connected between observation and logical inference
I see the distinction but I think these are both true. It's the system of formal logic and inference that leads to non-empirical "truths" within a psuedo-empirical framework being held by most logical positivists. Like, logical positivists are always empiricists to some degree but empiricists are not always logical positivists. An overestimation of what can be inferred is the thing I've seen most often, leads to a lot of evolutionary psychology and shit. I haven't seen any log pos people who are anti-realists or deflationists about truth, but I believe you that they exist and they'd definitely be a strong counterexample.
Also I'm not trying to roast formal logic or the value of inference, just that I don't think most logical positivists are really using them with the care they require to develop strong axioms.
So on the deflationist/anti-realist front you have in particular Otto Neurath (of whom I a big fan), who within the Vienna Circle was controversial (and yet influential) for advocating something like a deflationist theory of truth.
On Neurath’s account, observation statements and their logical connectives are enough: we don’t need verificationalist foundations as such when we talk about observation statements. All we need is that the observation statement exists and that it can be integrated into a holistic logical scheme. Carnap himself was interested by this idea, although he departed from Neurath’s more radically holistic way of parsing it out.
The log pos tradition has been infamously distorted in the anglophone world to mean something other than it was intended to be: we can talk about Pinker, but it also has to be acknowledged that a young A.J. Ayer was the central criminal in arguing that a “verification principle” was foundational to the system the log pos people tried to design, when in fact it wasn’t anything like that. As /u/wokeupabug once (gently) remonstrated me for not knowing: the logical positivists were deeply invested in areas outside the immediate field of empirically verifiable sentences and their correlations with logic, it’s just that they took “meaning” to be something different from “worth”.
Where are you meeting all these logical positivists? It's basically a dead movement, and has been for half a century or so.
If you just mean some iteration of internet fauna that people in places like these like to dub 'logical positivists', fine enough, but I think we need to be clear about the rather crucial differences between these people and the actual content of logical positivist philosophy. In the same way, we need to be clear about the rather crucial differences between random people online that get called empiricists and the actual content of empiricist philosophy.
The spaceship bit makes no sense to me, I'm assuming that I'm missing some sort of important philosophical debate or something else. As to me the ship cannot cross the boundary as it is part of our universe, and will just end up being the boundary.
Regardless of the actual content, at least the OP dared to criticize something Big Yud argued in the Holy Sequences. That’s not something you see often on LessWrong.
Honestly this isn’t bad, and logical positivism/empiricism has enjoyed something of a minor renaissance over the last decade or so (or at least that’s how I see it: I entered university in the first half of the decade and first heard about it then)
The worst two things I could say about this are
The argumentation is typically vague and doesn’t cut the issues at the joints
There is a lot of verbiage wasted on refuting Yudkowsky’s claims (why the fuck would anybody bother to do that)
For what it’s worth I don’t think this is actually a form of “logical positivism”, so much as an anti-realist take on empiricism which could as easily be related to Quine as to Carnap
Edit:
Also…fuck me, I don’t think I’ve read No Logical Positivist I before, but the arguments here quoted are so fucking bad it’s embarrassing. Everything seems to rest on (1) a pseudo-Bayesian account of epistemology which (somehow?!) implies a metaphysical commitment to realism about the objects of scientific study, and (2) a sort of “just world” metaphysics whereby given a sufficient Bayesian probability you could not go wrong in your judgements.
Which is fucking mental.
That bit about the spaceship…what the fuck? Nobody thinks that because you can’t see the spaceship it’s meaningless to talk about it, the spaceship insofar as it exists has its existence confirmed by a network of empirically verifiable sentences, which includes social epistemology. Yud thinks he’s got this amazing dunk on the positivist but he’s dunking on himself: by making all empirical confirmation subject to confirmation by a single agent he’s set himself the task of empirically confirming the existence of a causally unconnected object by himself.
What a fucking idiot.