Dennis Hackethal’s Comments

Have you noticed that, when I offer refutations or counterexamples, you then keep tweaking the scenarios until I'm more or less forced to agree with you?

For example:

In this scenario, [...].

and

Ok, then consider [...].

and

However, if you imagine a period [...].

and

Ok, but before we could [...].

and

Assume you don’t have any background knowledge like this [...].

It's easy to find examples of you doing this, ie making adjustments to your original point so that my refutations or counterexamples don't apply anymore. You were successful in doing this with the example of the beads because you tweaked it sufficiently.

Do you think that approach is conducive to you changing your mind if you're wrong, or to "seeing this discussion to its conclusion", as you wrote?

The distinction is between a theory that has survived all falsification attempts (tentatively true), and one which has not (known to be false). So right now the problem is deciding what to do when all you have are theories that are known to be false.

I agree. I guess serious fallibilists consider even their best guesses to be false, or eventually found to be false, always. But they might be going too far: sometimes we do speak the truth, if only accidentally. (But, of course, we can never know whether we have spoken the truth, as Xenophanes said, and we should remain critical.)

I don’t think this works. A conjecture that GPS will work tomorrow is arbitrary and easy to vary. I could just as easily conjecture that it will not work. From a Popperian perspective, If we still had a good, tentatively true theory explaining GPS then we could rule out one of these options, but in this hypothetical we no longer have this.

Let me try another approach: what we know of Popperian epistemology (which is quite difficult to vary) says that theories that have survived lots of criticism contain mistakes and truth. Your question was: "Why would you continue to use GPS if not because of its past success?" That's one of the reasons why – that I know that even if it contains mistakes, it also contains truth.

I agree that people might just continue using GPS out of habit.

I don't think it's habit. What I've described is a hard requirement/dependance. In this light, regarding your followup question:

However if [habit] were the only remaining reason for using [GPS], then wouldn’t people quickly transition away from relying on it (especially for life critical application)? I think we can both agree that this wouldn’t happen, but why?

The reason they can't is not habit but dependance and because coming up with new solutions is usually difficult. It takes skill, time, and also luck. They may quickly begin to work on alternatives, but it might take a while before they find a viable one. In the meantime, it seems to me they have no choice but to keep using GPS. Breaking with traditions is hard.

What sort of evidence tells us that animals are not conscious? It cannot be evidence of their lack of creativity (since creativity == consciousness is what is under question).

Following Deutsch, I think it's more like: creativity leads to consciousness. As in: creativity bestows consciousness/consciousness is a side effect of creativity. I don't think they're the same.

For specific evidence, see (I may have linked to some of these before):

• ‘Buggy Dogs’ and the comments underneath starting at #107
• ‘Evidence Is Ambiguous’ and comment #121 underneath

On the topic of animal sentience more generally, I recommend my ‘Animal-Sentience FAQ’.

Ok, but before we could adjust our theories there would be a period of time where all we have are theories that we know to be wrong.

As fallibilists, isn't that already the case, ~all the time?

I would continue to use and rely on GPS during this period and I imagine you would too.

Yes.

Why would you continue to use GPS if not because of its past success?

I think it'd be more like: a conjecture that GPS and GR can still solve some of the problems I need solved. To put in your terms: there's no 'reason to believe' that GPS or GR are wrong in their entirety – they're wrong, but they contain truth. The true parts may still be useful.

Another reason to keep using GPS in such a scenario is tradition/dependency: lots of people rely on it and removing it would cause chaos, so you have no choice but to keep using it. (In short: dependency management, avoiding revolutions.) It's a lot like in software development where introducing breaking changes should be done with care and ripping out entire pieces of software without replacement should generally be avoided. If my macOS is found to have a bug I generally (though there are some exceptions) will not (or simply cannot) stop using macOS. If possible, I'll avoid the bug until it is fixed (ie a successor theory is found) or, if the bug is bad and pressing enough, I'll try to switch, if only temporarily, to another OS that isn't known to have this problem. In such cases, my thinking isn't 'my OS has worked in the past so it will work in the future' – if, say, I'm not confident in Apple's abilities, I may conclude that the OS won't be fixed in the future – and my reason for continued use is my dependency on the OS and my theories around the nature of the bug (not wrecking the OS entirely, the OS still being safe to use overall, etc).

[I]f you imagine a period between knowing that Newton’s gravity is incorrect and before GR was discovered, then you can ask a similar question to the one I asked above. Why continue using Newtonian physics during this period?

You can extend my previous answer to this question. In short: Newtonian physics still contained truth, and people needed to keep building bridges.

By the way, I think historically there was such a period, but I'd have to look into it further.

In the same way I would bet that the last jar contains red beads, I would bet that other animals have consciousness. This is a reason why I have the belief/expectation that animals are conscious, which conflicts with your restriction to consciousness requiring creativity.

But for the beads we assumed no other (background) knowledge, whereas with animals we have lots of evidence even if the can't see the figurative beads (ie look inside animals' heads). If there were no such evidence nor any theoretical background so that the situation with judging animal minds really were analogous to the example with the beads, I might agree with you about animals being conscious.

It irritates me a little when Popperians react strongly to seeing the word “justification”. Popper rightfully rejects justification as far as it means to prove something as infallibly true, but the word also has a more everyday meaning. When I say “justify your claim”, I don’t mean “Prove absolutely and without error that your claim is true”, I just mean “Provide reasons why I should think your claim is any good”. Here “reasons” can be those that a Popperian restricts themselves to using.

That's fair.

But remember in this hypothetical we have found that both GR and quantum physics are wrong. Therefore, we no longer have good explanations for why GPS is working right?

We'd adjust our explanations to why it only works in certain cases, or why GR (despite being wrong) still explains GPS but not certain other things. We've done this with Newtonian physics: we understand why it only works as an approximation and when it's still acceptable to use. From BoI ch. 5:

Newton’s predictions are indeed excellent in the context of bridge-building, and only slightly inadequate when running the Global Positioning System, but they are hopelessly wrong when explaining a pulsar or a quasar – or the universe as a whole. To get all those right, one needs Einstein’s radically different explanations.

Sometimes we don't know yet know why an explanation doesn't work in some area, only that it doesn't, until we find its successor – which, per Popper, will explain where and why its predecessor failed. But that's for the negative cases. In a case where a theory does work, like Newtonian physics for bridge-building, yea, continue using it, I don't see the problem. On the contrary, Newtonian physics may even have an advantage over relativity in legitimate applications, where, say, ease of use outweighs the fact that (I'm making this up) the 15th decimal place in the result is wrong, and you only need three decimal places anyway. Likewise, I'm not aware of anyone having found that GR does not work for GPS.

Back to your comment:

It sounds like you would bet that the last jar also contains red (even if only because of your psychology)?

Yes. As I have written: "[k]nowing nothing else I probably would bet on the next jar containing only red beads [...]".

These quotes give a general statement of Popper’s views, but it’s his comments on corroboration that Salmon was reacting to (the stem of this discussion).

We have also talked a bunch about justification, which Salmon invokes, too. Like when he writes "[w]hat I want to see is how corroboration could justify such a preference." I had taken the position that justification is always impossible and never desirable – but Popper is more nuanced than that and makes room for some form of justification (while being careful about how he phrases it). (I think I've 'inherited' this mistake from Deutsch. FWIW, when Deutsch borrows ideas from Popper (and maybe others), there's sometimes a reduction in quality, as I've written about here and here. I think fans of Deutsch should read those articles.) Since Popper accommodates justification a little bit, maybe I was wrong to reject it wholesale, and so maybe there's some compatibility between Salmon and Popper.

This discussion may be difficult if you take months to respond. Can you commit to responding within, say, a week?

By the way, the first quote in your last comment is a misquote of me. The first line (starting with "Because your") should be a nested quote since you originally wrote that, not me.

Adding some more info on whether Plato went by 'Aristocles', as Deutsch calls him in BoI ch. 10. The Wikipedia article I referenced in this footnote says that Plato didn't go by 'Aristocles'. I translate freely from the article (original German at the end of this comment):

Also, a claim which has been passed on, according to which Plato originally used his grandfather's name, Aristocles, is a fabrication [...].

The corresponding source/footnote reads (slightly modified for the purpose of translation into English) "James A. Notopoulos: The Name of Plato. In: Classical Philology. vol. 34, 1939, p. 135–145, here: 141–143; Alice Swift Riginos: Platonica. Leiden 1976, p. 35, 38."

Auch eine Überlieferung, wonach Platon ursprünglich den Namen seines Großvaters Aristokles trug, ist eine [...] Erfindung.

lol, I wrote "all the other room get". It should be 'rooms' (plural).

[I]f progress is to be made, some of the opportunities and some of the discoveries will be inconceivable in advance.

– BoI ch. 9

Not only some but all of the discoveries will be inconceivable in advance, or else they wouldn't be discoveries.

I’ve seen Justin Malone’s video. It’s been a while but I remember him making some good points.

I wrote:

Before, it seemed overwhelmingly probably [...].

It should say 'probable'.

In BoI ch. 8, Deutsch presents a thought experiment in which the guests of David Hilbert's Infinity Hotel each receive a copy of either of Deutsch's books, FoR or BoI. Every millionth room gets FoR, all the other room get BoI. Guests are confident they will receive BoI since the odds of that seem to be 999,999 in 1 million.

Then, hotel management makes an announcement moving all recipients of one book to odd-numbered rooms, and all recipients of the other book to even-numbered rooms. Guests receive a card telling them which room number to move to, without telling them which book they got.

Your card arrives and you move to your new room. Are you now any less sure about which of the two books you have received? Presumably not. By your previous reasoning, there is now only a one in two chance that your book is The Beginning of Infinity, because it is now in ‘half the rooms’.

In other words, Deutsch argues the guests wouldn't be any less sure which of the two books they have received. But why not? Before, they were pretty sure they'd be receiving BoI – the odds seemed to be 999,999 in 1 million, after all – really close to 1. Now, the odds seem to be 1 in 2, so only 0.5. Before, it seemed overwhelmingly probably that they'd receive BoI, now it's equally probable they might receive FoR.

To be sure, Deutsch uses this thought experiment to show that, due to the different probabilities the guests arrive at, they must be mistaken about their way of assessing them. But, within that faulty logic, it seems to me the guests should be less confident which book they have received. I think it should say 'Presumably.' instead of "Presumably not.".

I have found four different endings to the same line in a quote by Xenophanes. In BoI, he is quoted as having said:

And even if by chance he were to utter
The perfect truth, he would himself not know it –

Note that the second line ends in a dash. Deutsch cites "Popper’s translation in The World of Parmenides (1998)." Popper does not use a dash – he uses a semicolon (p. 25 and 64) and a period (p. 84 and 137), respectively:

The perfect truth, he would himself not know it;

and

The perfect truth, he would himself not know it.

So Popper isn't consistent. (He is also inconsistent about ending the preceding line "Nor will he know it; neither of the gods" with either a comma or no punctuation.)

Deutsch's quote is a misquote either way since Popper never uses a dash.

In C&R, Popper likewise gives two differing versions of that second line, namely on pages 34 and 205, respectively:

The perfect truth, he would himself not know it;

and

The perfect truth, he would himself not know it:

One ends in a semicolon, the other in a colon.

David Hume is introduced twice in the same chapter (5), only a few pages apart (strictly eyeballing it from the distance in the ebook):

[A]s the philosopher David Hume pointed out, we cannot perceive causation, only a succession of events.

And then, a bit later:

[...] ‘you can’t derive an ought from an is’ (a paraphrase of a remark by the Enlightenment philosopher David Hume).”

This second time, more information is revealed about Hume by associating him with the enlightenment. It would have been better to call Hume an "Enlightenment philosopher" the first time and then just refer to him as 'Hume' the second time.

Hume is not credited in the discussion of the problem of induction in chapter 1.

Kieren, I just stumbled upon a couple of passages in Popper's Objective Knowledge (1983, Oxford Clarendon Press in Oxford).

On p. 67, he speaks of "the logical justification of the preference for one theory over another" (emphasis removed) and calls it "the only kind of ‘justification’ which I believe possible [...]".

He also says on p. 7 (emphasis removed):

[T]he assumption of the truth of test statements sometimes allows us to justify the claim that an explanatory universal theory is false.

Do these quotes help your case?

Speaking of Popper's Open Society, somebody should look into how much overlap there is between his distinction between open and closed societies and Deutsch's distinction between dynamic and static societies. At the very least, Deutsch probably got the idea that one can and should distinguish between different types of society from Popper.

Because your [sic] expecting GPS to work because it worked in the past.

No. I'm expecting it to work because others have good explanations for why it works. Conversely, if those explanations stated that GPS only works for the hemisphere facing the sun at any given moment, I would expect it to work only intermittently. If our explanations said it will stop working in the year 2030 and why (maybe something changes about the universe that destroys it), I would expect it to stop working despite it having worked in the past.

In all those cases, our explanations tell us why GPS worked in the past and why and when it is or isn't going to work in the future. In no case does the explanation say it's going to work in the future because it has worked in the past.

I think you could have just answered “no” [to the question "If we actually did open 30 random jars and all the beads were red, would you not bet on red beads in the next jar?"] since we don’t have to be so careful about restating that we are fallible every time we answer a question.

So shouldn't I have answered 'yes'? Since "I may well" make the mistake of predicting the future from the past. (Note that it remains a mistake methodologically even if I happen to be right about the color of the bead.)

Circling back, this would mean that given 1000 random jars, you would not bet that the final jar contains a red bead, even though the previous 999 jars only contained red beads?

For you it would be just as rational to bet on a blue bead?

Depending on the explanation, yes. Knowing nothing else I probably would bet on the next jar containing only red beads (I think that's what you mean when you say "the final jar contains a red bead", emphasis added). But this strikes me as another case of distinguishing between the logical and the psychological. And, as always, it depends on what Popper calls background knowledge: what if I know the owner of the jars wants to fool me? What if I know there's at least one blue bead in one of the jars and we haven't found it yet? What if I'm at a casino and know a thing or two about how the odds are stacked against customers? What if I don't? Etc.

Is this not a case of using a theory based on its pass success (past testing)?

I don't think so. Why would it be?

Sorry, I’m still not sure how your referenced comments are answering my question. Could you please elaborate on your answer?

Not sure what you're looking for. You asked me if I break symmetry that way and I said "I may well". As in: I'm fallible. I may use wrong ways to break symmetry sometimes, even if I make an effort not do.

Comprimises are made to meet deadlines and a “seems to fix it, but not sure why” can be acceptable. The basis on whether to accept such a solution is often the result of repeated testing. If the bug doesn’t happen more than 1 in 1000, then that might be fit for purpose.

I agree that people do that (hopefully only as a last resort). Of course, then they might find that they can reproduce the bug 1 in 1000 times only in dev, and that in prod it happens every time, or every other time, or whatever.

BoI has a misquote of Popper's The Myth of the Framework at the beginning of ch. 9. I want to use it to showcase how one can find the differences between the quote and the original text. The following character-based git diff highlights the changes that were introduced in BoI (at least in the ebook):

The possibilities that lie in the future are infinite. When I say ‘It is our duty to remain optimists,’, this includes not only the openness of the future but also that which all of us contribute to it by everything we do: we are all responsible for what the future holds in store.↵ Thus it is our duty, not to prophesy evil but, rather, to fight for a better world.

In other words, Deutsch moved a comma and replaced a line break with a space. (Maybe Elliot already pointed these mistakes out, I didn't check.)

You can find the original passage here, p. xiii. Presumably that's the same edition Deutsch used (it's from the same year, 1994).

When the programmatic equality check I suggested in the post above returns false, a character-based git diff helps you identify where the differences lie. Here's what I did to run such a check:

1. Created a file called original.txt containing the original text
2. Created a file called quote.txt containing the quote

3. In my terminal, ran:

   $ git diff --word-diff --word-diff-regex=. --no-index original.txt quote.txt
   

This command prints a color-coded diff similar to the one above. The option --word-diff-regex=. changes the command to create character-based diffs instead of word-based ones. Careful, however: removed line breaks won't show, for some reason. I've modified the diff above to indicate the removal.

Though word-based diffs may help, they shouldn't be relied upon exclusively because they're not granular enough and ignore some changes involving whitespace. Line-based diffs don't work well for prose because lines are usually long (each paragraph is really one long line) and so they likewise lack in granularity.

The error has been corrected.

Whether the deeper error – that the CDC can effectively temporarily revoke your citizenship – has been corrected remains to be seen.

No man can solve every problem in his life by himself. He depends, at least in part, on the knowledge of others, so he will want to cooperate. This is what holds society together—not government!

While reading the opening pages of Thomas Paine's Common Sense, which I have just started, I was delighted to discover that he had independently set forth this argument hundreds of years ago:

[T]he strength of one man is so unequal to his wants [...] that he is soon obliged to seek assistance and relief of another, who in his turn requires the same.

Although a bit later he seems to set forth rather pessimistic arguments about man's inherent vices and that government is necessary after all:

Here then is the origin and rise of government; namely, a mode rendered necessary by the inability of moral virtue to govern the world; here too is the design and end of government, viz. freedom and security.

As Logan Chipkin likes to point out, government is just made up of men, too – so if men have inherent vices, that affects government as well. In which case it's particularly dangerous to make government a privileged institution of any kind, especially for services as important as freedom and security. There is no reason at all private corporations couldn't be hired to defend the freedom and security of their customers.

Here's an article containing the grammatical mistake I mentioned:

[T]he full current of the scripts are breaking bad [...].

The subject of the sentence is "current", which is singular, so the verb should be "is" instead of "are". But "scripts" is closer to the verb than "current" so I guess the interviewee mistook "scripts" for the subject.

The same restructuring I mentioned before could correct the mistake while continuing to use the closest noun to determine the verb's number: 'The scripts' full current is breaking bad'.

Grammarly, an online writing tool, has also changed the colors of its logo to resemble the Ukrainian flag:

And they have added a banner at the top of their homepage saying:

Grammarly stands with our friends, colleagues, and family in Ukraine, and with all people of Ukraine.

They also link to a statement about the war. Judging by that, Grammarly's case seems to be more genuine and less about seeking approval since "Grammarly was founded in Ukraine; [their] co-founders are from Ukraine, and [they] have many team members who call Ukraine home". However:

We have also made the decision to block users located in Russia and Belarus from using Grammarly products or services.

It's not clear to me what good that does. It seems to only punish the citizens of Russia and Belarus, who are not to blame.

Grammarly's favicon (the little icon in browser tabs) is also in the Ukrainian colors, but for some reason the archiving site did not capture that.

As usual, some might argue that the cat just isn't very smart – meaning it doesn't have sophisticated knowledge.

That happens to be correct, but it doesn't explain why the cat is so utterly uncritical. Which, if it is true that being conscious = being critical, in turn means that any argument supporting the standard view, which alleges that consciousness arrives at some sufficient level of smarts, must fall flat on its face.

A cat going in circles several times chasing its own tail:

https://twitter.com/_Islamicat/status/1516069606041001985

To make matters worse, it already has its tail in its mouth, meaning it should feel its teeth on its tail and realize that a) it's bitten itself and b) it doesn't make sense to keep going.

Cats are clearly not critical. And, as I wrote previously:

‘[M]indlessly’ may be the same as ‘uncritically’…

Everyone suddenly pronouncing the Ukrainian capital 'Keev' instead of 'Kiev' is another thing that should make us suspicious.

[Dennis:] But we wouldn’t throw GPS out the window if we learned GR is false (and GPS would keep working the same regardless).

[Kieren:] But why? What reason do you have for thinking that GPS would continue to work?

What reason do I have for not thinking that? If GPS has worked at all, it's because some truth is encoded in its functionality. We don't know what that truth is, but to think that GPS would suddenly stop working if our state of mind changed is some weird version of solipsism or telekinesis or something.

[Kieren:] I agree that people often break symmetry this way, but do you? Given that you think it is invalid?

[Dennis:] As I’ve said, I may well.

[Kieren:] I’m confused which comment you are referring to here. Are you referring to breaking symmetry with the hard-to-vary principle? Because that would be a different principle.

I had linked to the wrong comment (parent comment instead of the comment itself; both ids appear on the same line so I may change the UI around that). I meant to link to #242. There's also #252. Bottom of each.

https://twitter.com/MinistryofTru16/status/1508152541292511235

I recently stumbled upon this Ayn Rand quote about beauty (I haven't read the associated work, so I may be misinterpreting something or taking things out of context):

[I]f you tell an ugly woman that she is beautiful, you [corrupt] the concept of beauty. [T]o love [a woman] for her vices is [...] unearned and undeserved. To love her for her vices is to defile all virtue for her sake [...].

From Atlas Shrugged, as quoted here, except the brackets are mine. Notably, without those brackets, the quote reads like something Rand would disagree with and might have an antagonist say in the mentioned work. But there's some truth in the unaltered quote, and the brackets are meant to help that truth come to light – again, with the grain of salt that I haven't read the book.

The altered quote above is reminiscent of Rand's stance on compromise. In 'Doesn’t Life Require Compromise?' from her book The Virtue of Selfishness, p. 93, which I have read, she writes:

There can be no compromise between a property owner and a burglar; offering the burglar a single teaspoon of one’s silverware would not be a compromise, but a total surrender—the recognition of his right to one’s property.

As quoted here. Recognizing the ugly as beautiful is a total surrender in the same sense.

Unfortunately, the Ayn Rand Lexicon's entry on beauty currently doesn't load.

Do I have this right. You would continue using GR because you want the things it explains to keep working?

I was referring not to the things it explains but the things that depend on it. If we were to reject GR in its entirety, we'd also have to reject things that use GR. Like GPS (from what I understand). But we wouldn't throw GPS out the window if we learned GR is false (and GPS would keep working the same regardless).

I agree that people often break symmetry this way, but do you? Given that you think it is invalid?

As I've said, I may well.

A couple more thoughts on induction that I've had since my previous comment:

1. Supporters of two conflicting theories may observe several pieces of evidence corroborating both theories. As a result, they might become more confident in their respective theory as each piece of evidence comes in. As always, they'd be wrong to mistake their feelings about the theory for a truth criterion (or probability criterion). They'd have to be, since the theories conflict.

2. The other day, I was building an image upload for a website. Part of the feature was to display the images back to the user before he hit enter to confirm the upload. I noticed a bug: the images were sometimes displayed in a different order than the one in which the user picked them. That made it more difficult for the user to confirm his selection, so I set out to fix the bug. The nature of the bug was that I displayed the images in the order in which they were loaded, but larger images take longer to load, of course, so they'd be displayed later. I also noticed that the browser's file API gives me the images in the order in which they were selected by default.

   I fixed the bug by rendering each image's container immediately, in order, and then rendering each image within its respective container whenever it was done loading. Because the containers rendered in order, so did the images.

   Here's the thing: when I tested whether my fix worked, I did not try to make repeating observations. I hoped for non-repeating observations so I could still reproduce the bug and thereby falsify my fix! And when I did not reproduce the bug only a few times in a row, I stopped testing because I already knew from the explanation of how and why the fix worked that I should never see the bug again. I did not keep testing the fix in hopes of getting more confident in it. (That really would have been rather pathetic on my part – like I'm hoping to feel good about my code or something.)

Warren lies about wanting to regulate Bitcoin to fight Russia, when in reality, she wants to regulate it to increase government’s power over cryptocurrency and trade. As the linked article states:

The bill from the Massachusetts Democrat would grant the Treasury Department the authority to prohibit cryptocurrency exchanges under US jurisdiction from processing transactions involving addresses affiliated with Russians and would give the president the authority to apply secondary sanctions to foreign exchanges that do business with sanctioned people, companies or government entities, according to Warren’s office. The goal of the secondary sanctions is to force those foreign exchanges to choose between doing business with the US or sanctioned Russians, like its president, Vladimir Putin, and many of its oligarchs.

Even though the article is written to support Warren’s efforts, describing the phenomenon of people going about their businesses without government intervention as “shadowy”, its author, Jim Puzzanghera, does not seem to realize he’s betraying Warren’s purported intent by divulging her real one when he continues:

[The legislation] would require U.S. taxpayers engaged in transactions of more than $10,000 worth of cryptocurrency offshore to report those holdings to the Treasury Department’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network.
[…]
Warren has been an outspoken critic of cryptocurrency, which she believes lacks consumer protections, destabilizes the financial system and adds to global warming because of the huge amount of computing power required to digitally mine bitcoin, Ethereum and other forms of the virtual currency.

The government using a foe as an excuse to increase the regulation of its subjects is a very common issue. As Thomas Jefferson said, “[t]he means of defence against foreign danger have been always the instruments of tyranny at home.”

As always, an unintended (?) consequence of any regulation of Bitcoin is that it makes it harder to use for law-abiding citizens and gives criminals, who by definition won’t abide by the regulation, a leg up over them.

Warren lies about her stance on freedom, making it sound like she supports freedom fighters. In reality, as you can see in the previous comments, she supports policies which rob people at gunpoint. If she really believed in freedom, she would work on reducing the government's size until it is gradually reduced to zero, or she'd at least work to outlaw taxation.

Warren lies about the cause of restaurants' struggles to stay alive, blaming "Republican obstruction", when in reality, it was government-perpetrated lockdowns that got restaurants in this mess.

A relief fund would, again, force people to pay for the 'revitalization' of the restaurant industry the government has been busy destroying. Are you seeing a pattern here? The government fucks up some industry through regulations, then comes in posing as the hero who extorts money from other victims to heal the first victims. Warren loves violence and extortion. Somebody once said the government is like someone who creates a fire on purpose and then rushes in to extinguish it to cast itself as heroic – only it's worse because it forces others, at gunpoint, to extinguish the fire it created.

She also uses the opportunity to cast herself as brave for facing said “Republican obstruction”:

[...] I’ll keep fighting to ensure they get help as soon as possible—even in the face of Republican obstruction.

Warren lies about there being "systemic racial and class inequities". Additionally, this is SJW language, which she uses to score points.

She lies about anyone opposing the violent funding of "COVID aid" not wanting to "be prepared for the next variant" when they could just oppose it for any number of reasons, including not wanting to fight disease with violence.

I suspect she lies about people who write in to her "about issues that touch their lives". Such as some obscure "Patricia F."

I suspect she lies about the cause of increasing gas prices. She attributes them to "Big Oil’s price gouging" while they seem to be caused by supply disruptions, high demand, and low production. In the same tweet, she lies about fossil fuels increasing America's dependence on Russia, when in reality, she has contributed to that dependence, as I pointed out in the main post above.

She lies by implying that seeking to make profits is immoral. (She has several other tweets accusing companies of "profiteering".) She then uses the moral pressure that creates to extort more money from corporations using what she calls a "windfall profits tax".

She lies about her motivations when she uses children, in this case a black girl, to show how tolerant and wonderful and accepting she is.

She spreads a lie that "[s]tudent debt cancellation is a racial & economic justice [sic] issue". She does this, again, to score points with SJWs. And I suspect the 'cancelation' of student debt can mean only one thing: to force people who did not take out student loans to pay for them. Calling it a 'cancelation' – as if you could just legislate away debt – when it's really a forced transfer of wealth is also dishonest.

Warren lies by implying that "roads, bridges, and childcare" must be provided by the government, i.e., financed at gunpoint, or else "[o]ur economy doesn't work". She also links to a CNN article that heavily focuses on women so she can score points with feminists.

I agree that you could proceed here without corroboration because the use of Newtonian physics is justified because you know that it is an approximation to your current best theories. However, this scenario is too different from the hypothetical I posed. Could you please respond to it?

OK your hypothetical was:

If we did find that both general relativity and quantum physics were false (in some aspect), what argument would you provide for your continued use of these theories? […]

E.g. general relativity is needed to keep GPS running and you'd want to keep that running while finding the successor theory to GR.

If we actually did open 30 random jars and all the beads were red, would you not bet on red beads in the next jar?

I may well.

Would your betting have anything to do with the fact that the last 30 jars that you randomly selected contained red beads? Does it make it easier if it was 10 thousand jars?

Psychologically, yes to both. People break symmetry this way all the time. That doesn't change the fact that, epistemologically, induction doesn't work, and that this way of breaking symmetry is invalid. It was either Popper or Hume who broke the problem of induction into the logical problem of induction on the one hand and the psychological one on the other.

I wasn't. Here's the link for those interested: https://clojuredocs.org/clojure.core/frequencies

The source code looks fairly close to what I do above. One difference is that they use another solution to the problem of inferring zero when a key does not yet exist:

(defn frequencies
  "Returns a map from distinct items in coll to the number of times
  they appear."
  {:added "1.2"
   :static true}
  [coll]
  (persistent!
   (reduce (fn [counts x]
             (assoc! counts x (inc (get counts x 0))))
           (transient {}) coll)))

Namely, passing 0 to get.

They also use transient and persistent!, which my solution lacks. It appears that without them, my solution will break when the map gets large enough.

Adding to my previous comment. You wrote:

If the animals knew something about human history, farming practices, etc then things would be different.

Yes – and if they don't already, they might conjecture something about that (assuming they can think like humans). If their conjecture is, as I've said, that their farmer only has their wellbeing in mind, then they are wrong every time, even if their prediction is correct some of the time. And if they wish to explain rather than just predict, that's a problem. Especially if it results in death.

Humans' situation isn't all that different as sustained failure to explain the world around us also results in death.

The reason I find it relevant is because self-referentiality could be an example of an alternate cause of consciousness, which would refute your claim that creativity is the only remaining explanation.

No because, as I've explained, creativity seems to itself rely on self-referentiality by way of self-replicating ideas. In which case it's not an alternate cause but part of the same cause.

Why don’t you think it is relevant?

Strikes me as largely if not entirely separate from the issue of corroboration.

To answer your question: the theory may be really good (“hard to vary”, to use Deutsch’s terminology). It may be harder to vary than all the other theories we have guessed so far. So it’s not just that a theory has survived testing.

This answer doesn’t satisfy me because I’ve come to see the hard-to-vary principle as essentially an account of corroboration/induction. I have an outline of my argument for this here.
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1XL3yp1KfOLmnMSpUUA2GmiMLi7bxDg7Wj5E8j0MUZu0/edit?usp=sharing

I start to read the first line, which says:

David Deutsch’s hard-to-vary (HTV) criteria [1] is offered [...]

The verb is "is" so the subject must be singular. But the subject is "criteria", which is plural. It's one criterion. Foreign-language sounding words ending in -on are usually Greek and often end in -a when they're plural. E.g. phenomenon -> phenomena, lexicon -> lexica (or lexicons, but even there the point is you'd never say 'one lexicons'). I'm no expert on Greek, so see for yourself. Lots of people fuck it up and say "many phenomenon" or "one phenomena". Or when speaking they pronounce the last syllable so quietly you can't tell, to hide their ignorance. People get this wrong all the time but it's such an easy thing to get right.

Then, in the footnote marked [1], the title to Deutsch's book says "Beginning of Infinity". That's not the correct title. It's The Beginning of Infinity.

So I'm only nine words in and have already found two blunders, which makes me question how much value the document can offer. I don't wish to read on at this time.

Right, but those would be cases where you know significantly more than just the past success of the theory right?

Don't we always? We always have theories about our theories, background knowledge, expectations...

If we did find that both general relativity and quantum physics were false (in some aspect), what argument would you provide for your continued use of these theories? [...]

Instead of quantum physics, consider Newtonian physics, which also conflicts with general relativity and, as I understand it, is often used in engineering and experimental physics instead of general relativity, despite symmetry having been broken in favor of general relativity. Its continued use is not due to its having worked in the past (i.e., having survived many tests – on the contrary, I understand it has also failed many), but because the errors it introduces compared to general relativity in these contexts are negligible. We can know this from theory alone, without running any experiments. There may be other considerations such as Newton's equations being easier than Einstein's (I don't know if that's true, but it's easy to imagine other cases involving other theories where it is).

Do you not invoke corroboration then?

As you can see in my previous paragraph: no. I instead invoked two other properties: negligible error introduction and ease of use.

If we actually did open 30 random jars and all the beads were red, would you not bet on red beads in the next jar?

I may well.

Apparently being 'merfolk' is a thing.

Regarding self-referentiality, I wrote previously:

I think discussing [self-referentiality] further would take us down a mostly unrelated tangent [...].

You continued anyway. Then, later on, in another comment, I wrote:

[A]gain, discussing [self-referentiality] further would take us down a mostly unrelated tangent.

That was the second time I recommended not discussing this matter further.

Now you're continuing again:

Other than for self-replication, do you think self-referential modeling within the brain is a possible cause of consciousness?

Why do you ignore my warnings that discussing this issue would lead us down a mostly unrelated tangent?

Separately, you wrote:

How do you account for the fields of social sciences and medicine where we often make use of a theory because of its survival of past testing, not because we think it is true [...]?

You wrote this as a quote but it's not a quote. Presumably this happened because you quoted one of my lines and then didn't put a blank line between the quote and your text. As you write your comments, check the markdown preview on the right before submitting them.

To answer your question: the theory may be really good ("hard to vary", to use Deutsch's terminology). It may be harder to vary than all the other theories we have guessed so far. So it's not just that a theory has survived testing. I could imagine cases where you have two rival theories, one of which survived testing and one of which failed a test, and you still prefer the latter. Or your preferred theory may be the only one that has survived testing.

I understand that we know in physics that at least one of general relativity and quantum physics must be false, maybe both, because they contradict each other. That doesn't stop us from using general relativity for, say, navigation, and it doesn't stop us from using quantum theory to explain the outcomes of double-slit experiments. And note that so far I have written this and the previous paragraph without invoking corroboration. Granted, physics isn't a social science or medicine, but why should it be different there?

Separately, you wrote:

If we actually did open 30 random jars and all the beads were red, would you not bet on red beads in the next jar?

I ask you in turn: in the old example of the farm animals being fattened up every day and growing more and more confident that the farmer only has their well-being in mind, should they bet the day before the slaughter that the next day he will feed them again?

Amaro wrote:

Talking about plagiarism, I ran into this article by Temple accusing Dennis of plagiarising Temple in Dennis’s book A Window on Intelligence. The fact that I had found that article (I won’t link to it here, I don’t want to give the guy any traffic) by looking up his name on Google precisely because I ran into a bunch of citations mentioning his name in the book didn’t really lend Temple much credence when it came to his accusations. I had never heard of the guy until stumbling upon the citations that Dennis had bothered to include in his book. Mentioning this here might not amount to much more than gossip, but I did think that was very curious and I was wondering what was up with that. Is Temple just an unusually bitter person? His article was pretty hard to read, filled with righteous indignation and vitriol as it was.

In fairness, Temple's article is about the first edition of the book, which cited him less overall and less obviously. After he published that article, I pulled the book from the market, did a line-by-line analysis to see where he and others were affected, and switched to a rigorous Chicago-style reference system. The second edition is the result of doing that.

(Note to others: I have reached out to Amaro privately to alert him of this comment.)

Following a suggestion from Roman Glebov,

Whoever owns the roads can make those rules and enforce compliance in exchange for letting others use them. This goes back to property rights: he who owns the roads gets to make the rules.

has been changed to

Whoever owns the roads should be free to make those rules and enforce compliance in exchange for letting others use them. This goes back to property rights: he who owns the roads should get to make the rules.

Changes are bold here but not in the text. These changes are necessary since even private-road owners are not entirely free to make the rules for usage of their roads.

Salmon wants Popper to show that he has knocked on the door of corroboration, and that corroboration growled back.

Did you mean to say 'and that corroboration did not growl back'?

Regarding the quote from C&R: you previously said Popper claimed that the social sciences are "useful instruments for predicting social behaviours [or] wellbeing". Your C&R quote doesn't contain anything to this effect.

Well, that seems to be the closest he came to addressing this particular criticism.

Popper wants to "adopt critical methods which have themselves withstood severe criticism". He would have addressed criticisms of corroboration. (I imagine there are examples of his doing so but I do not wish to look up the literature at this moment.)

If you think there is a better defence of corroboration I would love to hear it.

I don't care to defend corroboration because I don't need it.

So would you agree that it is at least plausible that some form of self referential modelling occurring within the brain could be the cause of consciousness?

It's more than plausible: I wrote that "self-replication [...] depends on self-referentiality" (emphasis added). But again, discussing this bit further would take us down a mostly unrelated tangent.

Btw you need a hyphen between "self" and "referential" in "self referential modelling". In some cases hyphenation rules are confusing.

[...] the contents of the last earn is kept private [...]

"urn" and "are"

As an aside, I've noticed lots of people making the mistake of using mismatching numbers for the verb and subject of a sentence if there's another noun of a different number between them and therefore closer to the verb. It's interesting grammatically. Maybe some people's algorithm for determining the verb's number is to use that of what they believe to be the closest preceding noun. In this case, that's "earn", which is singular, whereas the subject is "contents" (plural), so the verb should be plural as well. People shouldn't use that algorithm because it doesn't work in cases like the one above. They should instead look to the subject's number, no matter how far away from the verb it is. If they have trouble remembering, that's easy to correct in writing: just read the sentence again and look for the subject and its number. Or they can write shorter sentences, or they can structure their sentences such that their algorithm does work, for example: 'the last earn's contents are kept private'. When speaking it's a bit harder; people could use shorter sentences so there's less of a possibility of another noun separating the subject and verb, and with shorter sentences it's easier to remember what the subject is while speaking.

I love languages and am interested in grammar, and writing well is an important skill, especially in discussions where misunderstandings are commonplace. (Though my notes on English writing and grammar should always be taken with a grain of salt since I'm not a native speaker.)

Sorry, I didn’t make it very clear, but the contents of the last earn is kept private as an analogy for consciousness.

My version is better because people shouldn't be able to look into other people's urns at all for that same privacy reason.

In any case, even drawing beads from a single urn, draw as many as you like, the drawn beads' colors are no indication whatsoever for the next bead's. That's the problem.

[We should] play it safe in regards to animal suffering.

You seem to be advocating the precautionary principle, which, for the reasons Deutsch explains in BoI, is a bad idea.

More disturbing development across Europe in the past few days:

• "German constitutional court rules curfews, lockdowns, and school closures were lawful amid pandemic." "The top court had received nine constitutional complaints against #COVID19 restrictions imposed in Germany earlier this year. All complaints were rejected." More info from state-financed news outlet Taggesschau here
• "Greece enacts compulsory vaccination against #COVID19 for those aged 60 and older."
• “EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen: It's time to "think about mandatory vaccination" against #COVID19 across the entire European Union.”
• Video of public-health officials and police shutting down hairdresser in Germany
• "Germany to announce nationwide Covid lockdown for the unvaccinated"

I just learned that Popper did a similar kind of 'translation' as Feynman's, of Adorno and Habermas:

I can only say that when I read either Adorno or Habermas, I feel as if lunatics were speaking.
I have translated some of their German sentences into simple German. It turns out to be either trivial or tautological or sheer pretentious nonsense. I completely fail to see why Habermas is reputed to have "talent". I do not think that he was born less intelligent than other people; but he certainly did not have the good sense to resist the influence of a pretentious, lying, and intelligence destroying University education.

And again.

I'll only report new lies from now on, unless there's something notable about repeat lies.

'Anti-vacine=mandate demonstrations' is another example of nested groupings that occur in the middle.

The Netherlands arrested several people "as a precaution", according to Der Spiegel (Twitter lets you translate the tweet which quotes the Spiegel article – it's technically a misquote but the meaning is intact).

Here she is again lying about "giant corporations" not paying taxes.

In this video from May 2020 Deutsch says:

I'm always a bit perturbed when people have strong feelings about things like [...] 'is it moral to kill [and] eat animals', 'are animals conscious' [...] when they do not know what consciousness is. None of us do.

This quote is interesting because the way it is phrased it addresses both those who think animals shouldn't be eaten and those who think it's fine. I, too, find animal-rights activists perturbing (many of them are insufferable, really).

However, given the New Yorker quote above and his view on animals, I think the quote is really only directed at those who think animals are sentient. Especially because shortly before that he reiterates his view that all the relevant features of sentient beings arise on the same level of universality and cannot be reached independently. Also, those who think animals are not conscious tend to not feel very strongly about that because there isn’t some case to be made that ‘grave injustices’ are being committed against animals.

In any case, I explain how we can know that animals aren't conscious without knowing what consciousness is here.

Regarding "say you cut a puppy’s paw off, it cries out in pain, clearly it’s conscious, right? Clearly it is", I just stumbled upon this comment on Elliot Temple's blog quoting a "TCS [Taking Children Seriously] leader":

But what if the dog is howling and yelping? Can't we be sure it is expressing displeasure -- telling us that it does not want to do this, for example? No. Plenty of people howl and yelp doing things they want to do. Look at masochists. Look at various sportsmen. Look at me when I am trying to edit an article: I moan and groan and howl in a most alarming way (I'm told) -- but still I am doing something I really want to do.

I don't think there is such a thing as what a dog wants (in the sense of having individual intentions arising out of its own free will), but if there were, I don't think there would be any justification for assuming that it wants, for instance, to have a minimum of pain, any more than human beings always do. Human beings choose painful options over non-painful options all the time, and I am not just talking about masochists. It depends on whether the painful option seems better.