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Anti-epistemology

Being able to find outs for a theory that doesn't fit evidence is anti-knowledge, and the more practice you get at it the crazier you become.

Anti-epistemology refers to bad explicit beliefs about rules of reasoning, usually developed in the course of protecting an existing false belief—false beliefs are opposed not only by true beliefs (that must then be obscured in turn), but also by good rules of systematic reasoning (which must then be denied).

From Yudkowsky's 2008 post www.greaterwrong.com/posts/XTWkjCJScy2GFAgDt/dark-side-epistemology :

A single lie you tell yourself may seem plausible enough, when you don’t know any of the rules governing thoughts, or even that there are rules; and the choice seems as arbitrary as choosing a flavor of ice cream, as isolated as a pebble on the shore . . .

. . . but then someone calls you on your belief, using the rules of reasoning that they’ve learned. They say, “Where’s your evidence?”

And you say, “What? Why do I need evidence?”

So they say, “In general, beliefs require evidence.”

This argument, clearly, is a soldier fighting on the other side, which you must defeat. So you say: “I disagree! Not all beliefs require evidence. In particular, beliefs about dragons don’t require evidence. When it comes to dragons, you’re allowed to believe anything you like. So I don’t need evidence to believe there’s a dragon in my garage.”

And the one says, “Eh? You can’t just exclude dragons like that. There’s a reason for the rule that beliefs require evidence. To draw a correct map of the city, you have to walk through the streets and make lines on paper that correspond to what you see. That’s not an arbitrary legal requirement—if you sit in your living room and draw lines on the paper at random, the map’s going to be wrong. With extremely high probability. That’s as true of a map of a dragon as it is of anything.”

So now this, the explanation of why beliefs require evidence, is also an opposing soldier. So you say: “Wrong with extremely high probability? Then there’s still a chance, right? I don’t have to believe if it’s not absolutely certain.”

Or maybe you even begin to suspect, yourself, that “beliefs require evidence.” But this threatens a lie you hold precious; so you reject the dawn inside you, push the Sun back under the horizon.

Or you’ve previously heard the proverb “beliefs require evidence,” and it sounded wise enough, and you endorsed it in public. But it never quite occurred to you, until someone else brought it to your attention, that this proverb could apply to your belief that there’s a dragon in your garage. So you think fast and say, “The dragon is in a separate magisterium.”

Having false beliefs isn’t a good thing, but it doesn’t have to be permanently crippling—if, when you discover your mistake, you get over it. The dangerous thing is to have a false belief that you believe should be protected as a belief—a belief-in-belief, whether or not accompanied by actual belief.

A single Lie That Must Be Protected can block someone’s progress into advanced rationality. No, it’s not harmless fun.

Just as the world itself is more tangled by far than it appears on the surface, so too there are stricter rules of reasoning, constraining belief more strongly, than the untrained would suspect. The world is woven tightly, governed by general laws, and so are rational beliefs.

Think of what it would take to deny evolution or heliocentrism—all the connected truths and governing laws you wouldn’t be allowed to know. Then you can imagine how a single act of self-deception can block off the whole meta level of truth-seeking, once your mind begins to be threatened by seeing the connections.

Topoi

  • Rules of reasoning
  • Protecting a false belief
  • A false belief opposed by true beliefs, which must be obscured
  • Those true beliefs are supported by good rules of systematic reasoning, which must then be denied

Logical rudeness

kinda related?

As mentioned previously, some Christians tell atheists that atheists know there's a God really and are just being atheists to annoy, because they know it teases. Some atheists tell religious people that theists won't accept atheistic arguments because they're afraid of death, or too immersed in the church community to bear the social cost of leaving. In a conversation about race or gender, it won't be long before someone claims another person's view is held because of their privilege. And so on.

Suber calls this rude rather than fallacious because it is possible for people who hold true beliefs to be "rude" in this way (and in fact, rejecting arguments because they come from rude people is itself rude). Rather, rudeness violates the norms for debate, […]

… offenses against the cooperative flow of debate, which might be "logically rude" even if spoken politely; for example, saying "X because Y", and then, after one side went to a great deal of trouble to test and falsify Y, saying, "Well, Y doesn't really matter, really X because Z". Similarly, ignoring all the diligent work that evolutionary biologists did to dig up previous fossils, and insisting you can only be satisfied by an actual videotape, is "logically rude" because you're ignoring evidence that someone went to a great deal of trouble to provide to you.

other resources

Dark Side memes

  • "Everyone's entitled to their opinion"
  • "I can define a word any way I like"
  • That all "truths" stand on equal ground
    • the word you want to use is beliefs, not truths: trueness is just the correspondence between a belief and reality. if you have two incompatible truths, at least one does not correspond to this reality. but you can talk this way about beliefs, values etc.
  • That there is no single truth
  • That the truth is impossible to get at anyway

Privileging the Hypothesis

www.greaterwrong.com/posts/X2AD2LgtKgkRNPj2a/privileging-the-hypothesis

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Created (3 years ago)

Meditation

Different notions

  • Body-tuning
  • Track-back meditation
    • "Gently tug on memories and wait"
  • Stare into regrets
  • Editing memories to contain affection
  • Zazen: just being
  • Koans: filling your awareness with a koan
  • Mantra: repeating a phrase
    • Ideally, a mantra is composed of only a few words or syllables, so you can repeat it easily, without getting lost in a long phrase. Choose something uplifting that inspires you and engages your heart. Avoid words that stir up thoughts or disturb your mind.
    • As thoughts arise, simply return to the mantra.
  • Body scanning
  • Mindfulness of breath
  • Mental noting www.insightmeditationcenter.org/books-articles/articles/mental-noting/
  • Choiceless awareness
  • Mindfulness in daily activity
  • Metta: loving kindness

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Created (3 years ago)

Alternative Science Respectability Checklist

Meta-science

Someone comes along and says “I’ve discovered that there’s no need for dark matter.” A brief glance at the abstract reveals that the model violates our understanding of perturbation theory. Well, perhaps there is something subtle going on here, and our conventional understanding of perturbation theory doesn’t apply in this case. So here’s what any working theoretical cosmologist would do (even if they aren’t consciously aware that they’re doing it): they would glance at the introduction to the paper, looking for a paragraph that says “Look, we know this isn’t what you would expect from elementary perturbation theory, but here’s why that doesn’t apply in this case.” Upon not finding that paragraph, they would toss the paper away.

– www.discovermagazine.com/the-sciences/the-alternative-science-respectability-checklist

From that article, the checklist is:

  1. Acquire basic competency in whatever field of science your discovery belongs to.
  2. Understand, and make a good-faith effort to confront, the fundamental objections to your claims within established science.
  3. Present your discovery in a way that is complete, transparent, and unambiguous.

This looks very similar to the Ideological Turing Test (ITT).

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Created (3 years ago)

Strange memecluster

These are memeclusters (collections of ideas) of which I am suspicious, as of [2022-01-26 Wed]. Do they pass the Alternative Science Respectability Checklist?

Homeopathy🔗

A strong distrust of the medical establishment is why pointing out simple facts like "homeopathy has never been shown to work" may be insufficient to get a homepathy user to use medicine instead. There's motivated cognition going on – if you don't think medicine works, what are you gonna do when it turns out your alternative doesn't work either?! Just conclude there exists no substance that will help any health problem, and let God sort you out?

Basically if you care about a homeopathy user and want them to use medicine, it isn't a productive approach to say homeopathy doesn't work, because even if you convince them it doesn't work, they will still decline to use medicine because they feel they can't trust it.

This distrust is built on experience that hospitals seek to make money to the extent of only ever caring to treat superficial symptoms, and are actively interested in keeping people sick. Well—hopefully it's built on experience. It could be built on a huge pile of anecdotes that the user bought into because it fit into e.g. an anti-corporate world-view. This is one reason it's so important to understand that anecdotes are not experience or evidence, even if they feel similar!

This same reasoning also seems to fuel the Anti-vax group and probably others, and ultimately the poor souls in the overlap of all these groups seem to be trying to reinvent medicine from scratch with new-old interpretation frameworks like "Detox", which ret-cons all development in medicine since Hippocrates, pretending it didn't happen so you can re-do the research, how fun! That's easy to do when you don't know the history, which is why people should study history!

Question: why would the same logic behind distrusting the medical establishment not apply to their homeopathic doctor? Homeopathy is big business, just like health care, so are they any different wrt. profit motive? One difference is that health care is partly government-regulated, but that doesn't necessarily say anything since so many governments are corrupt.

Anti-vax🔗

The movement started with Andrew Wakefield's fraudulent paper. If only it mattered to them that it turned out to be fraudulent…

That the movement appears so unaffected by new facts makes me disinclined to listen to its perspective. Probably there's been a feedback loop: the reasonable anti-vaxxers already quit, so the ones still in have other reasons to stay than just truth.

Interpretivism🔗

Basically the stance that findings in social sciences can't be evaluated on the same standards as those in natural sciences. While in a trivial sense, this is TRUE, and it's good to point out that it's hard to get solid knowledge in social sciences, and therefore we shouldn't just sit on our hands and do nothing while waiting for the perfect knowledge, I'm worried this stance gets used to excuse the poor quality of any finding, and excuse not applying a scientific framework even when it could be. I suspect it gets abused as a form of Anti-epistemology, to guard Neo-Nazi and other belief systems (literally any belief system), and any bullshit will get accepted in prestigious journals if prestigious people pay lip service to the interpretivists "yeah the truth is unknowable so I can't say this is not science" because they don't want to harm their careers. Also concerned it's throwing the baby out with the bathwater: "science sometimes doesn't work, so let's ignore everything that historically successful scientists would have thought about our current method".

This is also named antipositivism, because it was born in the 60s at least partly as a counterreaction to logical positivism. May be good to point out that positivism itself has been dead since the 70s – the philosopher Quine effectively killed it with his 1951 paper. So it's anti-nothing in particular, because no one today holds that position, and the name is dishonest because you leverage someone's disreputability to elevate yourself. Instead of antipositivist, you could just as well call yourself anti-stupid. Free points for you!

Components used to prop up interpretivism:

Critical theory🔗

This field seems to try to get at the general principles underlying "critical readings" of anything, using any framework, like reading texts from a psychoanalytic perspective, a feminist perspective, a Marxist perspective and so on.

[2022-01-18 Tue]: I tried to read a textbook on this topic and it was hard to understand what the point of it all was. That implies a high Bullshit quotient. Had the same experience attempting to read Foucault.

OK, one of the aims is to reveal and challenge power structures. "With origins in sociology and literary criticism, it argues that social problems are influenced and created more by societal structures and cultural assumptions than by individual and psychological factors." (what does this mean?)

"ideology is the principal obstacle to human liberation"

Horkheimer described a theory as critical insofar as it seeks "to liberate human beings from the circumstances that enslave them."

Martin Jay has said that the first generation of critical theory is best understood not as promoting a specific philosophical agenda or ideology, but as "a gadfly of other systems."

Critical theory has been criticized for not offering any clear road map to political action (praxis), often explicitly repudiating any solutions… A primary criticism of the theory is that it is anti-scientific, both for its lack of the use of the scientific method, and for its assertion that science is a tool used for oppression of marginalized groups of people.[28]

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Created (3 years ago)
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