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When you have program [sic] you can test a concept (incl. whether it is sufficiently defined to allow a program in the first place). But the other way around does not work: "If one does not have a program, then the concept is underspecified".
That isn’t what I said anyway. No disrespect but frankly I don’t think you know what you’re talking about.
I didn’t read the rest of your comment because you keep talking instead of coding. I’ll delete any further comments of yours that don’t contain code that at least tries to meet the bounty terms.
Isn't every theory infinitely underspecified ?
No. For example, the theory of addition is sufficiently specified: we have enough info to implement an algorithm of addition on a computer, then run it, test it, correct errors with it, and so on.
We’re getting off topic. I’m currently running a bounty requesting a working implementation of HTV.
If you think you can beat the bounty, do it. I’m not interested in anything else for now.
Also, I would think that criteria for sufficiency must always be subjective ones (e.g. a working computerprogram [sic] cannot be itself a proof of meeting an some objective sufficiency criterium)?
No, there are objective criteria.
The mistake is insufficiency. If someone gives you a recipe for baking a cake but doesn’t specify ingredients or bake time, that’s a problem.
"HTV is underspecified by Deutsch"
That isn’t a quote. Don’t put things in quotation marks unless they are literal quotations or obviously scare quotes.
It’s a criticism. Deutsch says to use HTV but never explains in sufficient detail how to do that.
Elaboration:
The conflict in addiction is between short-term and long-term solutions.
The preference for short-term in addiction is caused by uncertainty/an inability to make predictions based on explanations.
This uncertainty can be real (e.g. increased heroin addiction during the Vietnam War) or learned from insecurity during one's early years.
I think Lucas is right to reject that fragmentation but I don’t think it happens in the first place.
CR universally describes the growth of knowledge as error correction. When such error correction leads to correspondence with the facts (about the physical world), we call that science. When it doesn’t, we call it something else, like art or engineering or skill-building.
It’s all still error correction. There is no fragmentation due to correspondence.
I think Lucas is right to reject that fragmentation but I don’t think it happens in the first place.
CR universally describes the growth of knowledge as error correction. When such error correction leads to correspondence with the facts (about the physical world), we call that science. When it doesn’t, we call it something else, like art or engineering or skill-building.
It’s all still error correction. There is no fragmentation due to correspondence.
Criticising HTV would anyway be the more important first step. Maybe examples of good theories with some ETV aspects (compared to rejected theories) in them could reveal some more.
That could work, yeah. What other criticisms of HTV can you think of?
To make a new version of #3516, revise the idea. See that pencil button?
Criticising HTV would anyway be the more important first step.
The linked blog post has several criticisms of HTV.
Deutsch’s “hard to vary” is a guideline for criticizing explanations, not a step by step decision algorithm.
But he says to use hard to vary as part of a decision-making algorithm. As quoted in my blog post:
“we should choose between [explanations] according to how good they are…: how hard to vary.”
Hey Fitz, welcome to Veritula.
I realize that DD doesn’t think of it in strict, procedural terms, but I just don’t think that’s good enough, for several reasons. One is that it’s too vague, as I explain here. We don’t know how to actually do anything he says to do, beyond broad suggestions.
For something to be a core virtue, it needs to be a virtue that should always be applied in any situation where it can be applied. Forgiveness is not something that should be applied in all relevant situations, so I don’t believe it is a core virtue.
At best it would be an applied virtue, as an expression of Justice.
I actually think people are too forgiving in some ways.
I’ll think about adding it to the applied virtues list.
Bounties are epistemologically relevant.
Let’s say you post a high bounty for some idea and your terms are reasonable. If there are no pending criticisms when the bounty ends, maybe that’s because it’s a good idea.
Scientists, philosophers, anyone who’s serious about ideas, should run bounties.
In practice, yeah, but the end goal is decentralised ownership and control. According to the Britannica dictionary:
"Like most writers of the 19th century, Marx tended to use the terms communism and socialism interchangeably. In his Critique of the Gotha Programme (1875), however, Marx identified two phases of communism that would follow the predicted overthrow of capitalism: the first would be a transitional system in which the working class would control the government and economy yet still find it necessary to pay people according to how long, hard, or well they worked, and the second would be fully realized communism—a society without class divisions or government, in which the production and distribution of goods would be based upon the principle “From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs.” Marx’s followers, especially the Russian revolutionary Vladimir Ilich Lenin, took up this distinction.""
Some minds with lots of coercive memes are more like dictatorships.
Doesn’t a dictatorship mean there’s only a single actor at the top? If there’s lots of coercive memes, that sounds like multiple actors.
Ah, I see what you mean.
Cool, would you say then that it is only in empirical fields we can deduce facts/truth?
No, we can deduce truth from theories in any field.
I’d only call something a ‘fact’ in an empirical field. Like, I wouldn’t call a philosophical truth a ‘fact’.
It is a fact that I had sweet potatoes for lunch today. It’s true that children shouldn’t be forced to go to school.
But that might be more of a quibble about words than an important epistemological distinction.
Hayek was a terrible writer. Convoluted, hard to understand.
For example, as quoted by Twitter account F. A. Hayek Quotes:
The more a man indulges in the propensity to blame others or circumstances for his failures, the more disgruntled and ineffective he tends to become.
He could have just said ‘blaming others makes you unhappy and weak’. But he chose complicated language, presumably to impress people.
Makes me think he didn’t have much of substance to say.
He was also sloppy at quoting: https://blog.dennishackethal.com/posts/investigating-hayek-s-misquotes
Original article: https://www.econlib.org/library/Essays/hykKnw.html
My simplified ‘translation’: https://blog.dennishackethal.com/posts/hayek-s-the-use-of-knowledge-in-society-simp
Mirror: https://open.substack.com/pub/hackethal/p/hayeks-the-use-of-knowledge-in-society
In our book club today, @erik-orrje raised the issue of split personalities.
I’m wildly speculating here, but I wonder if split personalities could be the result of the price mechanism inside a mind being broken.
If the price mechanism is needed for different parts of the mind to communicate with each other, and this mechanism breaks down somehow, then the parts become isolated.
Hayek writes:
[P]rices can act to coördinate [sic] the separate actions of different people in the same way as subjective values help the individual to coördinate the parts of his plan.
Hayek argues that any one man always knows very little about the economy as a whole. But the price system will tell him the little he does need to know.
I wonder how far the similarities between the economy and a single mind go. If the price system is a way for parts of a decentralized system to communicate, and the mind is a decentralized system, does the mind have something like a price system for its different parts to communicate?
A mind is vast, full of ideas. Any part of it always knows very little about the rest. In this sense, ideas in a mind are like men in an economy. So how do these ideas coordinate efficiently? Do emotions act like a price system inside the mind? Ayn Rand writes:
Emotions are the automatic results of man's value judgments integrated by his subconscious; emotions are estimates of that which furthers man's values or threatens them, that which is for him or against him—lightning calculators giving him the sum of his profit or loss.
The fun criterion is surely relevant in this context, too. Hayek writes that a rational economic order is about “conveying to the individuals such additional knowledge as they need in order to enable them to fit their plans with those of others.” That sounds like common-preference finding, which essentially works the same across minds as it does within a single mind.
Are prices inside the mind involved in finding common preferences?