Some others are focused on making decisions. From this angle, EV maximization and Bayesian epistemology were never supposed to be frameworks for creating knowledge—they’re frameworks for turning knowledge into decisions, and your arguments don’t seem to be enough for refuting them as such.
Yes agreed, but these two things become intertwined when a philosophy makes people decide to stop creating knowledge. In this case, it’s longtermism preventing the creation of moral and scientific knowledge by grinding the process of error correction to a halt, where “error correction” in this context means continuously reevaluating philanthropic organizations based on their near and medium term consequences, in order to compare results obtained against results expected.
Both approaches pass on the buck, that’s why I defined ‘creativity’ here to mean: ‘whatever unknown software the brain is running to get out of the infinite regress problem.’ And one doesn’t necessarily need to answer your question, because there’s no requirement that the criticism take EV form (although it can).
these two things become intertwined when a philosophy makes people decide to stop creating knowledge
Yeah, fair. (Although less relevant to less naive applications of this philosophy, which as Ben puts it draw some rather than all of our attention away from knowledge creation.)
Both approaches pass on the buck
I’m not sure I see where you’re coming from here. EV does pass the buck on plenty of things (on how to generate options, utilities, probabilities), but as I put it, I thought it directly answered the question (rather than passing the buck) about what kinds of bets to make/how to act under uncertainty:
we should be willing to bet on X happening in proportion to our best guess about the strength of the evidence for the claim that X will happen.
Also, regarding this:
And one doesn’t necessarily need to answer your question, because there’s no requirement that the criticism take EV form
I don’t see how that gets you out of facing the question. If criticism uses premises about how we should act under uncertainty (which it must do, to have bearing on our choices), then a discussion will remain badly unfinished until it’s scrutinized those premises. We could scrutinize them on a case-by-case basis, but that’s wasting time if some kinds of premises can be refuted in general.
Hey Mauricio! Two brief comments -
Yes agreed, but these two things become intertwined when a philosophy makes people decide to stop creating knowledge. In this case, it’s longtermism preventing the creation of moral and scientific knowledge by grinding the process of error correction to a halt, where “error correction” in this context means continuously reevaluating philanthropic organizations based on their near and medium term consequences, in order to compare results obtained against results expected.
Both approaches pass on the buck, that’s why I defined ‘creativity’ here to mean: ‘whatever unknown software the brain is running to get out of the infinite regress problem.’ And one doesn’t necessarily need to answer your question, because there’s no requirement that the criticism take EV form (although it can).
Hey Vaden, thanks!
Yeah, fair. (Although less relevant to less naive applications of this philosophy, which as Ben puts it draw some rather than all of our attention away from knowledge creation.)
I’m not sure I see where you’re coming from here. EV does pass the buck on plenty of things (on how to generate options, utilities, probabilities), but as I put it, I thought it directly answered the question (rather than passing the buck) about what kinds of bets to make/how to act under uncertainty:
Also, regarding this:
I don’t see how that gets you out of facing the question. If criticism uses premises about how we should act under uncertainty (which it must do, to have bearing on our choices), then a discussion will remain badly unfinished until it’s scrutinized those premises. We could scrutinize them on a case-by-case basis, but that’s wasting time if some kinds of premises can be refuted in general.
Check out chapter 13 in Beginning of Infinity when you can—everything I was saying in that post is much better explained there :)