Agreeing With Stalin in Ways That Exhibit Generally Rationalist Principles — LessWrong
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> It was not the sight of Mitchum that made him sit still in horror. It was the realization that there was no one he could call to expose this thing…

content warning: Zack Davis. so of course this is merely the intro to Zack’s unquenchable outrage at Yudkowsky using the pronouns that someone wants to be called by

  • CollEnglish
    3•9 months ago

    Zack thought the Times had all the justification they needed (for a Gettier case) since he thought they 1) didn’t have a good justification but 2) also didn’t need a good justification. He was wrong about his second assumption (they did need a good justification), but also wrong about the first assumption (they did have a good justification), so they cancelled each other out, and his conclusion ‘they have all the justification they need’ is correct through epistemic luck.

    The strongest possible argument supports the right conclusion. Yud thought he could just dream up the strongest arguments and didn’t need to consult the literature to reach the right conclusion. Dreaming up arguments is not going to give you the strongest arguments, while consulting the literature will. However, one of the weaker arguments he dreamt up just so happened to also support the right conclusion, so he got the right answer through epistemic luck.

    • @YouKnowWhoTheFuckIAM@awful.systemsEnglish
      5•9 months ago

      Ooooh I get it for Yudkowsky now, I thought you were targeting something else in his comment, on Davis I remain a bit confused, because previously you seemed to be saying that his epistemic luck was in having come up with the term - but this cannot be an example of epistemic luck because there is nothing (relevantly) epistemic in coming up with a term

      • CollEnglish
        3•9 months ago

        No no, not the term (my comment is about how he got his own term wrong), just his reasoning. If you make a lot of reasoning errors, but two faulty premises cancel each other out, and you write, say, 17000 words or sequences of hundreds of blog posts, then you’re going to stumble into the right conclusion from time to time. (It might be fun to model this mathematically, can you err your way into being unerring?, but unfortunately in reality-land the amount of premises an argument needs varies wildly)