Reflections on Rat Fest ’25
Discussion started by Dennis Hackethal
Justin says it’s better to spell it ‘aesthetics’ than ‘esthetics’.
My macOS Dictionary app says “aesthetics … (also esthetics)”.
Isn’t ‘esthetics’ just the American spelling and ‘aesthetics’ is British?
From https://nocoaaa.com/blog/aesthetics-vs-esthetics:
Many individuals are confused about the distinction between Aesthetics and Esthetics. The only difference between these two terms is that they are spelled differently. People in European and Commonwealth countries use the term aesthetics. Americans, on the other hand, commonly use the term esthetic.
Justin says the term ‘esthetician’ from the esthetician industry “ruined that”.
Justin says no philosopher would drop the ‘a’, including Tom Hyde, whom Justin calls a serious British philosopher.
Ayn Rand’s book The Romantic Manifesto has 114 matches for the string ‘esthetic’ and no matches for the string ‘aesthetic’. Rand was a serious philosopher who did extensive work on art and (a)esthetics.
There’s also her talk ‘The Esthetic Vacuum of Our Age’, though it may have been the Ayn Rand Institute that chose that spelling.
Well, Tom wouldn’t drop the ‘a’ anyway because he’s British.
Contrary to Deutsch, they do not believe that problems are fully soluble; contrary to Popper, they do not believe that we can ever find the truth in any matter.
Isn’t Deutsch a cynic, too? Look for quotes…
@dennis-hackethal, could you expand your argument in Lucas' blog post that self-similarity must entail correspondence?
Science writer John Horgan wrote his own article about his experience at Rat Fest:
https://johnhorgan.org/cross-check/my-weekend-at-rat-fest
Chipkin urges me to come to Rat (short for rationalism) Fest…
It’s technically true that the “Rat” part of Rat Fest is short for ‘rationalism’, but I’ve always considered it to be short for Crit Rat, ie Critical Rationalism. This matters because it’s not a rationalist conference, neither in the Less Wrong sense nor in the rationalism vs empiricism sense.
This distinction matters because later on, Horgan writes:
Why do self-proclaimed rationalists often seem so wacky?
And he means the attendees of Rat Fest. But they’re not rationalists!
Over three days Rat Festers give more than 30 talks, most just 15 minutes long, on [several topics including] objectivism (Ayn Rand’s schtick)…
My macOS Dictionary app says for schtick: “a gimmick, comic routine, style of performance, etc. associated with a particular person…”
Calling Objectivism, a serious philosophy developed over decades that has influenced millions to live a life guided by reason, a “schtick”, as if Rand had never had any serious intentions with it, is dismissive and insulting.
But if Horgan has any legitimate criticisms of Objectivism, I want to know. (I have some, too!)
Lulie Tanett, wearing a “Beginning of Infinity” t-shirt, suggests you can use reason to pinpoint and overcome hidden, irrational fears. So… critical rationalism can help you be your own psychotherapist?
Did she refer to reason? My impression lately is that she repurposes Deutsch’s distinction between explicit thought on the one hand and inexplicit/unconscious (“hidden”) thought on the other to repackage and rebrand Kant’s marriage of reason and unreason.
Dennis Hackenthal weighs the relative merits of “patches” versus “purges,” meaning incremental political reforms versus revolutions. Hackenthal asks Rat Festers which they prefer. More hands go up for incremental reform. Popper was an incrementalist, and, well, revolutions can get messy.
I don’t recall asking. The central thesis of my talk was that Popper’s advocacy of gradual improvement doesn’t work in certain fundamental matters, ie matters which allow no room for compromise because even the slightest deviation from the ideal means utter surrender of the underlying principle. https://blog.dennishackethal.com/posts/reason-by-purge-or-by-patch
Oh and it’s Hackethal btw :) No ‘n’.
If you give your students an exam on disobediance…
Typo: disobedience
… My students are using AI to do their thinking for them.
Generally speaking, people who have properly functioning minds enjoy thinking about things they are interested in and use tools to outsource toil and other things they are not interested in.
They would not want to use those tools to spend less time doing things they do enjoy. If Horgan’s students are using AI, that means they are not interested in whatever he teaches them. (That isn’t necessarily an indictment of Horgan – people often go to school not because it interests them but because they think they should.)
In this sense – and similar to what Horgan says Brett Hall pointed out to him – AI is more like a calculator allowing mathematicians to focus on what really matters: using their creativity to find new proofs, theorems, etc (I’m not a mathematician, but I imagine that’s what they do).
Horgan writes several passages about Rat Fest being “cult-y”:
[W]hy do I call Rat Fest “cult-y”?
Because what binds this band of rebels together is veneration for Popper and Deutsch. Five folks give talks on physics, and all seem to assume as axiomatic that the many-worlds interpretation is true. Why? Because Deutsch says it’s true.
I partly agree but also disagree.
My impression is that there is a mixture of Deutsch fans. Some – and I think that includes the physicists – came to their own reflected conclusion that Many Worlds is the theory to adopt. Others couldn’t possibly do that because they don’t have the requisite physics knowledge; they probably defer to the experts.
I have had discussions with some fans of Deutsch where I was interested in getting to the truth of some matter whereas they were more interested in quoting Deutsch, as if that settled the debate.
Sometimes, I remind fans of Deutsch that they need to decide between merely socializing around his ideas and actually applying them, which includes being critical of him. After all, listening to music, talking about music, going to concerts, etc are all different from actually making music!
Full disclosure: I used to be one of Deutsch’s biggest fans but have since become one of his bigger critics, as evidenced by some articles such as this one and this one. I have also published criticisms of some of Popper’s ideas, though I think on the whole my view of Popper is more favorable than my view of Deutsch.
A key tenet of critical rationalism is that knowledge is tentative, improvable, because all of us are fallible, we can never be sure we’re right. But Rat Festers cite Popper and Deutsch as if they are infallible.
My impression is that, when they cite Popper and Deutsch, they consider their citations unproblematic, ie background knowledge shared with other attendees – to an outsider, that can look like an appeal to authority.
Deutsch’s book The Beginning of Infinity suffers from this problem, too. Deutsch rejects appeals to authority but repeatedly appeals to Popper’s authority.
Same issue as in #2052: I don’t think Deutsch ever appeals to Popper’s authority. Deutsch ‘just’ thinks Popper is right, and so he quotes/refers to him. Also, recall that Deutsch criticizes Popper’s criterion of demarcation in chapter 1 as being insufficient:
Testability is now generally accepted as the defining characteristic of the scientific method. Popper called it the ‘criterion of demarcation’ between science and non-science.
Nevertheless, testability cannot have been the decisive factor in the scientific revolution either.
The claim that Deutsch “repeatedly appeals to Popper’s authority” in BoI should be accompanied by evidence. Like, Horgan should quote some passage from BoI that he thinks is an appeal to Popper’s authority.
Popper himself, when I interviewed him in 1992, was a comically dogmatic denouncer of dogmatism. He kept insisting he was right and his critics wrong.
When I told Popper a former student accused him of not tolerating criticism, he responded: “It is completely untrue! I was happy when I got criticism! Of course, not when I would answer the criticism… and the person would still go on with it.” Then Popper would eject the student from the class.
Ejecting the student seems over the top. But there’s a difference between openness to criticism and relativism. If you address a criticism but the critic just continues as if you hadn’t, I can see how that’s frustrating. If there’s no new reasoning or evidence to the contrary, I think it’s fine to “insist[]” that you are right and your critics wrong. It’s possible to determine that objectively. That’s not dogma – it’s integrity.
Overall, I don’t share Horgan’s impression that Rat Fest is “cult-y”. Yes, fans of Deutsch aren’t critical enough of him, but that alone doesn’t rise to the level of a cult.
For instance, many people at Rat Fest know that I am critical of Deutsch, and if it was an actual cult, they wouldn’t have welcomed me with open arms.
Also, having once been tricked into joining a cult, and then worked for years to escape its fangs, I know a cult when I see one. Rat Fest is not one. Actual cults want to control your life even after you leave, thereby violating your freedom of association – that doesn’t happen at Rat Fest.
Not at all, Deutsch replies. We are fallible, he reminds me, that means we make mistakes. Civilizations have taken wrong turns in the past and collapsed, that can happen again. But Deutsch thinks things will work out. American scientists can come to Europe to continue their research, and maybe not all the research should continue.
I think this passage misses a key epistemological insight Deutsch shared in response to Horgan’s worries about Trump: a society that’s free to make mistakes sometimes makes bigger mistakes than one that isn’t. What matters is that the society retains the ability to correct those mistakes (which ours does retain).
Can you be skeptical without falling into self-contradiction, like Popper and Kuhn?
Popper was not a skeptic. Skepticism, as an epistemology, says there can be no genuine knowledge. Popper opposed skepticisism.
Aaron Stupple, author of a parenting guide called The Sovereign Child, talks about how to raise your kids without making them do things they don’t want to do. I tell Stupple I wish I’d read his book when my son and daughter were young, and I mean it, Stupple strikes me as wise. But it bothers me that Stupple was inspired by Deutsch, who has no kids.
https://blog.dennishackethal.com/posts/but-you-re-not-a-parent
… Rat Festers cite Popper and Deutsch as if they are infallible.
Shouldn’t it be ‘as if they were infallible’?