I remember this post was quite helpful in exposing the strain of
anti-empiricism that runs through the rationalist project. It’s actually
a key part of his AI-go-FOOM argument: the AI will not need to run
experiments in order to solve physics and become superpowerful.
It's funny because all the technology that's called AI right now is based on the principle that if you have an enormous pile of data you don't need to understand a goddamn thing.
And it still fails if you put a piece of paper on your forehead saying ['im a cat'](http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2021/03/lying-to-the-ghost-in-the-mach.html)
I thought using weird sigils and magic circles to trap roombas and stop teslas was going to be as good as it got, but then someone wrote IPOD on an apple.
Older networks weren't simultaneously trained to classify objects and read text in images so it likely wouldn't have worked. This is from a newer combined network called [CLIP](https://openai.com/blog/clip/) that learns to associate correct text snippets/captions to images, and leans somewhat heavily on any in-image text as a result.
Incidentally this is basically the origin of libertarian economics as well. A bunch of a priori assumptions and """logically""" deduced theories of rational economic behavior. Was extremely useful in pushing back the Keynesian consensus of institutional economics.
Yeah fair that's more or less who I was getting at, I should have just said either Austrians or the Chicago school specifically. Libertarian economics writ large is probably too broad although I suspect not by much.
This was always my biggest issue with the rationalists. They seem to think that when humans have failed reasoning from first principles, its just that we didn't have enough brains rather than demonstrating that reasoning from first principles is a flawed way to understand the universe. It's not just them of course, Wired did some dumb cover article a decade ago on how if you can just collect enough data you won't really need to run experiments anymore you'll just find correlations and somehow? understand everything. In hindsight it's probably a fun accidental takedown of machine learning as it is often wielded by people today.
Why do you think the trilemma goes against first principles? What seems like the most reasonable response to me (modest foundationalism) seems like it actually *supports* first principles.
The issue is that our first principles aren't reasonable in the first place or they would not be first principles. Any reasons cited in support of them would be before them and then you're stuck in the Trilemma all over again. If you think your first principles are reasonable then they're probably circular in ways you have failed to notice.
My choice of words was bad, I didn't mean 'reasonable' in the sense that it's supported by something, but that it 'feels right'. Something like (two-valued) modus ponens just seems like it's foundational to thinking itself that I choose to believe in it, even if there's nothing to support it.
Especially because the alternatives just seem so much more unpalatable to me. What is your take? Do you deny the existence of any knowledge at all?
I can see why you'd hold up modus ponens or why others hold up "rules of thought" as foundational to thinking. Especially with the alternatives seeming to be basically solipsism.
Such rules of thought are foundational to one mode of thinking. A very useful mode of thinking that I will adamantly defend against anyone who says otherwise. But it's not the only mode of thinking and it's a mode of thinking that, while it enables our encountering some truths, it also obscures others. They're like a lens or instrument that lets you see cosmic radiation because it's specifically tuned to look for it. But if you look at some other phenomenon that doesn't put out that kind of radiation with it you'll miss it. And if you look at the same phenomenon that does show up with that form of radiation with another instrument then you'll see something different about the same phenomenon.
Modus ponens is part of a certain grammar of thought, not thinking itself. It enables people to communicate about certain things in a certain very usefully specific sort of way. It allows us to think about the implications of certain other things, to look for conditions of when this and when not this, it helps us learn all sorts of useful and good things. Again, super valid.
One example of a form of thinking that doesn't rely on modus ponens would be poetry. Another would be a Buddhist Koan. For another, here's a short story,
"I kicked the soccer ball as if a hundred judging eyes were watching".
Did you gain some knowledge by reading that? Did you learn something about how I kicked the soccer ball? Is it something you could write down in ways modus ponens would apply to? If you tried, would it really have captured it? Or wouldn't there be a danger in over-specifying; representing with false clarity something fundamentally ambiguous?
My current best guess at figuring out my take on epistemology is that it is firstly a hermeneutic/moral undertaking. We do it in the company of other people who show us new ways to experience the world. They let us see the world in ways other than the ways we're used to seeing it. In ways that reveal to us that even our "first" ways of seeing it were shown to us by other others. This way of relating to the world with others is, I think, the most fundamental way of relating upon which all others depend.
It's like walking through the woods with a herbologist friend, then the same woods with a geologist friend, then a logician friend, then a poet friend, then a religious friend, then a black friend, then a hispanic friend, then an anarcho-socialist pantheist friend, then your best friend, then your child. You get ALL SORTS of knowledge doing this. Like good grief so, so much knowledge.
So that's my alternative. It doesn't devalue my logician/modus ponens friend at all. That guy rocks! And if he wants to use modus ponens during our discussion then I want to learn how to use it too so I can walk with him and see what he sees. But it'd be a shame to only walk those woods with him when there are so many other people to walk it with. And it'd be a shame not to walk it with him again after walking it with them because I'll be different and so will he and we'll probably have a different experience this time all together and learn all sorts of new things.
I definitely agree that multiple modes/systems of thinking and how they inform each other are very important, but I guess my contention would be that it seems to me that if knowledge exists, there must be universal principles such as modus ponens - even if there might be very, very few - underlying any system of thinking, whether it's a more formal, rigid system or a much more intuitive, ephemeral one, because these principles determine *what knowledge even is*.
My argument for this is that (most?) people would say that knowledge needs to be at the very least a *justified* belief. If any justified belief exists, we need rules to describe that determine whether something is justified. The existence of rules (implication) however necessitates the existence of some form of modus ponens (implication elimination) - rules only gain their meaning once we can apply them to make a judgement. Of course, this doesn't mean that the systems themselves need to include modus ponens on the system level as a rule or knowledge - there are after all even logical systems that don't include modus ponens -, but I'd argue that this is still a meta-theoretical property that holds.
I'd like to make the case that we need rules a bit more concrete using your example of a short story. Now, trying to give formal rules for language is a foolish endeavor - language is highly subjective, constantly shifting and so intricate that I posit it to be impossible. However, I think it's clear that we still have rules for language and how we should interpret it. The idea may be vague and intuitive, but I think it's clear that we can judge some interpretations as more justified and some as less justified. We both assuredly think that the belief 'it's a story about swimming' is obviously way less justified than 'it's a story about soccer'. Now, due to the fuzziness and subjectivity of language we may not get much further than noting that some interpretations are obviously wrong, but to me it still makes it quite clear that there are *wrong* judgments, which necessitates the (theoretical) existence of some form of rules.
At the very least, I can't imagine how knowledge could work without rules/modus ponens. It just seems like everything completely breaks apart without rules. If you think modus ponens isn't foundational, how does relating work without it? To me it seems like it accurately describes how we intuitively form beliefs, but I don't see how you get to *knowledge*. That is, are all possible beliefs equally valid?
My current position is that language is both characterized by fundamental ambiguity AND non-arbitrariness. It's a lot like pointing with or seeing someone point with their finger. You know they're not pointing in the opposite direction, but are they pointing at that thing or the thing behind it? The corner of it or the side? What about it are they pointing out and why?
The same is true of rules or rule-following both for language in general and for the activity of truth-seeking. Wittgenstein's comments on [rule-following](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hrfIk4eOuN8&ab_channel=Carneades.org) demonstrate, for me, that although we can describe a linguistic activity in terms of rules, the activity we are engaging in as we apply language is not actually rule following. We learned english as children and knew how to speak it before anyone taught us rules of grammar.
And Gadamer, in Truth and Method, demonstrates that rules or laws cannot supply interpretation because they already ARE an interpretation. The method you choose to approach truth will already pre-suppose the way you will interpret what you encounter and delineate what you will take as truth.[https://www.angelfire.com/md2/timewarp/gadamer.html](https://www.angelfire.com/md2/timewarp/gadamer.html)Our interpretation is already present in our pre-judgements.
Do these rule out the existence of "Truth"? Only by some definition of truth that was impossible(and ill-conceived) in the first place, so nothing is lost. What we do have access to that we call truth is precious enough for me without needing to wish it was something else that, frankly, I'm glad we don't have. How boring would life be if there were some stone tablets somewhere that we were trying to replicate and conform our language to as we discover "truth"? The concept of truth arises not out of a context of the world being one way and not another in ways we can represent in language, but people interacting with people in true or false ways(sometimes in ways that are about the world). So I will live out my dedication to truth by first being faithful to those people, faithful to the way the world appears to them, and faithful to the way the world appears to me.
When the language we use seems fuzzy I'll engage in further dialogue with those people and we will, together, create new meanings that will have their own fuzzy edges but will clarify the world in new and meaningful ways.
I'd agree that language is both ambiguous and non-arbitrary, but how could something be non-arbitrary and yet not be determined by some sort of rule? I guess my issue is, in the absence of rules, what does it even mean for something to be non-arbitrary?
In regards to your pointing example, you might not be able to unambiguously deduce what they mean, but there's evidently a lot of interpretations that are not justified e.g. assuming no additional context, believing that this indicates them liking Beethoven's symphony no. 5.
In regards to the rules of a language, I'm talking more about 'internal rules' of our understanding of a language. This isn't something formal like grammatical rules, but rather something more subconscious that allows use to make judgements. A kid may not know the grammatical rules of a language, but their use of language is based on how they currently understand it, so their usage is *justified*.
I think I'm lacking the required philosophical background for that Gadamer bit because it went right above my head, I guess I need to read a bit more about it.
But it's not just 'Truth' that you'd be losing, it's also some objective version of 'knowledge', right? Instead, the only thing that you can say is something about your own personal preferences. If someone is just spouting bullshit or interacting with other people in a 'false way', you can't say that he's doing something that's objectively wrong in a sense - only that you don't like what he's doing. I don't know, that just strikes me as deeply wrong.
>I'd agree that language is both ambiguous and non-arbitrary, but how could something be non-arbitrary and yet not be determined by some sort of rule? I guess my issue is, in the absence of rules, what does it even mean for something to be non-arbitrary?
This is one of those things that's so every day we hardly notice it. Pointing is a good example. I point at something, and you know it's in that general direction, and that it's not something in a completely different direction, but you don't know exactly where I'm pointing or what about what I'm pointing at that I'm pointing out. Or think about the various ways we use words and are always creating new uses for them. I run, water runs, computers run, software runs, colors run, there aren't rules about how to use that word, we create new uses and then other people pick up on them. Just like no one ever sat down and intentionally created the "rules" of grammar we use in english, or any other language. I start playing "house" with my niece and we're end up with rules not because we're making or following them, but because patterns emerge, rupture, and transform always evolving but not according to rules.
My "both fundamentally ambiguous and non-arbitrary" distinction is something I picked up from this book.
https://www.dropbox.com/s/yh3ap6oeyt0lb5l/Possibility\_of\_Language\_A\_discussion\_of\_the\_nature...\_----\_%28Pg\_27--300%29.pdf?dl=0
(I wrote a big ol response to the rest and then it got deleted before I could post it somehow. I'm er... not feeling like re-typing it all up. I'll see if I feel like it later but for now I'll leave it at this.)
I don't disagree that nobody is explicitly creating formal rules, but I'd very much still consider informal rules, 'rules'. I think this largely might just be a semantic difference in that what you call 'pattern', I call 'rule'. Alternatively one might call them 'abstraction'. I guess the real contention would be the following:
I think 'Applying patterns to specific objects (circumstances) creates justified belief' - what I call modus ponens - is a universal 'pattern'. It's the fundamental form of knowledge creation (internalistic knowledge that is, i.e. irrespective of external 'Truth'). Without it, patterns seem meaningless as you can't do anything with them.
If you subscribe to some computational theory of mind (or at least think that computation and thinking are related), I think this is further supported by the fact that in the computational interpretation of logic (via Curry-Howard-Isomorphism), modus ponens/implication elimination is equivalent to a single step of evaluation/computation. The other part, lambda abstraction, is equivalent to the creation of new patterns (implication introduction), but I think it's possible to imagine a basic system of thinking in which one can apply patterns but not think up any new ones, so I don't think it's universal, though I think some form of it is inherent to human thought.
It seems impossible to conceive of any system that does not adhere to it and is still classified as thinking, which is why I would call it a foundational, universal belief. Which part do you disagree with?
The Incompleteness Theorem is amazing because it wasn’t even intended for real-world science. Those logic fuzzy spaces exist even in the realm of abstract pure theory, and *must* exist.
I don't understand. Do you think math is 'smashed'? If so, I'd say that being 'smashed' isn't all that bad.
Furthermore the computability of physics is an open question and not really related to incompleteness. If there's a Theory of Everything, who cares that there's statements that we can't answer?
My lay understanding of incompleteness is there are things which are true but cannot be logically argued from the axioms (aka first principles). This is true for all logical systems.
So now math becomes more of a science. And ideas of building really powerful proof finders that’ll discover the sum of all true things in a system is wrong.
In other words Eli’s entire idea of rejecting science and substituting agi to think up knowledge is fundamentally flawed.
What do you mean by 'math becomes more of a science'? The biggest difference is that math is deductive whereas science is abductive, right? What difference does it make that there are statements outside your theory (i.e. that can't be proven or disproven)?
>In other words Eli’s entire idea of rejecting science and substituting agi to think up knowledge is fundamentally flawed.
I don't see the connection. If reality is fully computable via some theory of everything (which isn't disproven by the incompleteness theorem - there is a 'theory of everything' (set of axioms) for Conway's game of life even though the logical theory itself is incomplete), what would science get you?
Now, of course 'rejecting science' is still nonsense because computationally this is totally unfeasible and to get a theory of everything you need science in the first place, but I don't understand the reasoning via incompleteness.
If you collect the data in the right way for machine learning, it is still based on experimentation. The key here is garbage in, garbage out. At the end of the day, your 5000 IQ robot is only going to be as good as the data that is fed to it. Hook it up to facebook, it's gonna end up a raving lunatic.
Why do you think reasoning from first principles is a flawed way? Methodological reductionism seems vastly more successful than anti-reductionist approaches.
I'm a biologist, not a philosopher. When I say reasoning from first principles is flawed, I mean the type of reasoning that I interpret rationalists seem to think is feasible-- for instance a superhuman AI that is able to make significant scientific advances merely by applying a great amount of thought to problems with little need for empirical experiments.
Looking it up, I don't disagree with the general usefulness of methodological reductionism. My impression is that many rationalists would endorse an overly strong version of this, however. I don't think say predicting most of biology from physics is a feasible or useful way to approach problems in biology. That's not so say that like reaction kinetics of molecules isn't physics, just that I think emergent properties and other things make everything very complicated very quickly and that modeling at too low a scale will prevent, rather than enhance, understanding.
Yeah, they're definitely taking it way too far, but I think their issue is more quantitative rather than qualitative. I think they saw that computational chemists use first principles approaches, but are in denial that this still involves a lot of approximations that are fundamentally unavoidable.
A (reasonable) reductionist approach doesn't mean necessarily going all the way down, just using well understood lower level parts to explain and study more complex systems including their emergent properties, though of course how well this works depends on your 'first principles'. This isn't necessarily exclusive with more holistic approaches either - more holistic insights from something like systems biology could guide reductionist efforts. An anti-reductionist on the other hand would state that it's outright impossible to explain emergent properties.
I harp on this because there's a bunch of AI crazies who do exactly that and go in the opposite direction, rejecting a first principles approach - I think this is what actually what that Wired article you mentioned may have been referring to. It's essentially the idea that the emergent properties of complex systems are irreducible so doing specific experiments to understand how the emergent properties arise is pointless and the only thing that matters is throwing statistical methods at huge swaths of data.
Topher Brennan (nee Hallquist) took this blog down a few years ago,
but it’s back up again. This post is the quick slam-dunk argument
against the Sequences.
> Scott Alexander responded to it. Brennan replied to that.
Holy hell, Brennan's reply to Alexander is an ominous look into the past:
>Consider the neoreactionary phenomenon. If you haven’t encountered them online, consider yourself lucky. This Techcrunch article is probably about the best reasonably concise explanation you’re going to get given that they’re a disorganized internet movement. TLDR; neoreactionaries typically think we were all better off in the days of monarchs and white supremacy, and no, that’s not hyperbole.
>So the neoreactionaries managed to gain a toehold in the LessWrong community. That’s how I first encountered them. And my immediate reaction was that they set of all my crackpot detection systems. Like, one of the most prominent neoreactionary writers goes by Mencius Moldbug online, and the first time I tried reading him, I ran into glaring factual inaccuracies. When I pointed this out, I was told, “yeah, that’s just how Moldbug is.”
>Then there’s the stuff about how leading scientists secretly know the neoreactionaries are right about the the inferiority of black people, but can’t say so because academic freedom is a sham. This comes with very little in the way of evidence attached. It’s arguments straight out of the creationist playbook, only more racist. (Again, none of this is hyperbole.)
This is the kind of thing that HBD enthusiasts are able to hide behind... their views are so bafflingly horrid in the 21st century that we spend all this time arguing "That really cant be what Scott believes... right? RIGHT?"
So let me say... really that CANT be what Scott believes... right?? RIGHT??!?!?
Here's a thought, what does his women and non-white clients think of him?
I didn't feel like reading Scott again but the reply digs into him much like the initial piece does to Eliezer. A bit that particularly tickled my fancy was highlighting Scott stating that Gary Taubes "misrepresented a lot of stuff and wasn’t very good at what might be called scientific ethics," in a context where that was presented as a sidenote and a minor issue. Like yeah, in hindsight, I can imagine why that might have not looked like such a big deal to Scott.
> I didn't feel like reading Scott again
It is over 10k words. (I was curious because it started out with Scott saying Tophers blog post was long).
And scrolling through it, it has Scotts typical rethorical trick. USING SHORT CAPITALIZED STRAWMEN. It is really annoying when you start noticing that trick.
> The last I heard about Eliezer’s dietary philosophy was his OKCupid profile [This included an archive.org link to yuds profile which is weird. But lets remember this if Scott ever complains about SC digging up things via archive.org], where under “Food” he wrote: “Flitting from diet to diet, searching empirically for something that works.”
> SUCH OVERCONFIDENCE. SO CERTAINTY. VERY ANTI-SCIENCE.
Also 10 years, And somehow the local rationalist community has gone over to effective altruism and veganism / animal rights. I guess that's a good thing, on balance? They still waste their energy on rather stupid projects, just now with some ethically defensible background. (Forcing a referendum on some animal research facility which they lost harder than you'd expect is my favorite). On the flipside it took me 5 years to realize Bayesianism is not bullshit, my academic career would have been different had i never encountered them.
I distinctly remember 7 or 8 years ago I was on OKCupid and had like 98% match with this cute girl. I looked at her profile and realized her being a leading local rationalist. Noped out of there real quick. Quite glad.
Or if you like, you can just read the Sequences and solve it
yourself? It’s not that hard. Hell, read
[Blindsight](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blindsight_(Watts_novel))[I
added the link], that should get you about there.
Jesus, that wokeupabug's whole exchange with a cultist was some wild ride.
> Unless you've just been trolling here, you might consider asking yourself how you got to the point where all of your cognitive reflexes have become organized into creating barriers between your existing beliefs and any new information.
That wokeupabug had to ask 3 times for evidence before it was clear what he was asking was a trip. I gave up after that, esp when I saw it went on for a lot of words. The cultist still posts in themotte/ssc btw
My main takeaway from this is that all participants need to spend at
least 6 months or so reading Foucault.
Not because Foucault was a transcendent genius (though he may have
been) or he was always right (though he certainly was more often than
these folks), but because they seem to be blithely unaware of or
entirely resistant to grappling with the historical forces
involved in the production of knowledge. And as none of us can stand
aside from the weight of history – including the Big Yud – Foucault may
offer some insight on why yes, it’s entirely possible that some problems
really do take 500 years to solve regardless of how “clear” or
“rational” the answer may seem in hindsight.
Oh hooray, thank you for this so much.
We teach calculus to high school students regularly. Does that mean any given high school student with an A+ in calculus is an intellectual equal to Newton and Leibniz?
No, of course not.
Great post. We neeed more stuff like this: detailed and well-written
critiques of the whole rationalist project. People need to understand
that, in the LW/SSC/IDW/etc context, “rationality” does not refer to
human’s intellectual ability, but rather means a very specific and
fringe ideology.
Both left wing and right wing post-rats agree that this is the point
of the Sequences (breaking faith in “the Cathedral”). The only dispute
is over whether that’s a good thing or a bad thing.
Big Yud acts oblivious to it, but IMO he knows and just thinks he can
get away with playing both sides, or maybe even secretly regrets it.
Wait, by 'left-wing post-rats,' do you mean post-rationalists who are "Blue Tribe," but in a "meta" way, so it isn't too normie? Or do you mean someone who used to be a rationalist who may or may not be interested in abolishing modern civilization as it exists today--that is, capitalism, imperialism, cisheteropatriarchy, white supremacy and a miscellaneous lot of other oppressive systems? If it's the latter, please let me know where I might connect with these people. I'd be interested in understanding their outlook on the world.
>Or do you mean someone who used to be a rationalist who may or may not be interested in abolishing modern civilization as it exists today--that is, capitalism, imperialism, cisheteropatriarchy, white supremacy and a miscellaneous lot of other oppressive systems?
I think that's what sneerclub is for
Yeah, reading Yud’s take on quantum physics was where I immediately
realized “oh, this dude is anti-science as shit, to hell with this”, and
started turning on the Rationalists hard.
Yud’s takes on QM are bad (just like anybody trying to make it
transcend from hard math I guess), and he always had a certain
holier-than-thou attitude… But being allergic to anything that isn’t a
quick throw of the bayes’s dices doesn’t really seem reactionary per
se.
Then, I guess I may be wrong (maybe the 30 years thingy wasn’t just a
figure of speech, and maybe I have been too lucky just reading the
sensible pieces of “young yud”), but the author of this article sounds
sketchy too.
The LW take on p-zombies is this,
not an ironical thing from the HPMOR blog. And he is in fact dismissing
the thing. I’m failing to see how you could miss he’s a reductive
materialist and computationalist.
And you can definitively see progress even in philosophy.
Brennan was a rationalist for years and is still part of the local subculture, he knows Yud's stuff in as much depth as anyone, and more than most here.
Sorry, I didn't know the man.
But even more so then I can't understand the article.
Or I mean, I still see how LW could be against science in certain specific ways (some more or less sizeable part of the community), but not really rationality, and all the examples here seem quite overstretched.
When he talks about logical positivism in particular, he almost seems grasping at straws. Like, yes, shortly after the provided 1945 Russell quote, logic positivism was as much dead in the water as you can philosophically be. But that's what lead the way for for modern day scientific realism? And it's actually the best example of the opposite point he's trying to make.
I remember this post was quite helpful in exposing the strain of anti-empiricism that runs through the rationalist project. It’s actually a key part of his AI-go-FOOM argument: the AI will not need to run experiments in order to solve physics and become superpowerful.
[deleted]
Topher Brennan (nee Hallquist) took this blog down a few years ago, but it’s back up again. This post is the quick slam-dunk argument against the Sequences.
Scott Alexander responded to it. Brennan replied to that.
[deleted]
this is a good dunk!
Discussed on ssc five years ago.
And as protosneered by our Most recent common ancestor:
E: and all praise the prophet u/Myrdradek
My main takeaway from this is that all participants need to spend at least 6 months or so reading Foucault.
Not because Foucault was a transcendent genius (though he may have been) or he was always right (though he certainly was more often than these folks), but because they seem to be blithely unaware of or entirely resistant to grappling with the historical forces involved in the production of knowledge. And as none of us can stand aside from the weight of history – including the Big Yud – Foucault may offer some insight on why yes, it’s entirely possible that some problems really do take 500 years to solve regardless of how “clear” or “rational” the answer may seem in hindsight.
Great post. We neeed more stuff like this: detailed and well-written critiques of the whole rationalist project. People need to understand that, in the LW/SSC/IDW/etc context, “rationality” does not refer to human’s intellectual ability, but rather means a very specific and fringe ideology.
Rationalists be like
Both left wing and right wing post-rats agree that this is the point of the Sequences (breaking faith in “the Cathedral”). The only dispute is over whether that’s a good thing or a bad thing.
Big Yud acts oblivious to it, but IMO he knows and just thinks he can get away with playing both sides, or maybe even secretly regrets it.
Damn I used to read this guy back in the day.
It would be better if Yud had decided to … raise children communally with a training program to become Mentats or something
Are there any engineers among the rats or is it just compsci people who unironically fetishize AI, computing logic etc.?
Yeah, reading Yud’s take on quantum physics was where I immediately realized “oh, this dude is anti-science as shit, to hell with this”, and started turning on the Rationalists hard.
Yud’s takes on QM are bad (just like anybody trying to make it transcend from hard math I guess), and he always had a certain holier-than-thou attitude… But being allergic to anything that isn’t a quick throw of the bayes’s dices doesn’t really seem reactionary per se.
Then, I guess I may be wrong (maybe the 30 years thingy wasn’t just a figure of speech, and maybe I have been too lucky just reading the sensible pieces of “young yud”), but the author of this article sounds sketchy too.
The LW take on p-zombies is this, not an ironical thing from the HPMOR blog. And he is in fact dismissing the thing. I’m failing to see how you could miss he’s a reductive materialist and computationalist.
And you can definitively see progress even in philosophy.