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
piling on.
While the writer is wrong, the post itself is actually quite interesting and made me think more about epistemic luck. I think Zack does correctly point out cases where I would say rationalists got epistemically lucky, although his views on the matter seem entirely different. I think this quote is a good microcosm of this post:
The Times’s insinuation that Scott Alexander is a racist like Charles Murray seems like a “Gettier attack”: the charge is essentially correct, even though the evidence used to prosecute the charge before a jury of distracted New York Times readers is completely bogus.
A “Gettier attack” is a very interesting concept I will keep in my back pocket, but he clearly doesn’t know what a Gettier problem is. With a Gettier case a belief is both true and justified, but still not knowledge because the usually solid justification fails unexpectedly. The classic example is looking at your watch and seeing it’s 7:00, believing it’s 7:00, and it actually is 7:00, but it isn’t knowledge because the usually solid justification of “my watch tells the time” failed unexpectedly when your watch broke when it reached 7:00 the last time and has been stuck on 7:00 ever since. You got epistemically lucky.
So while this isn’t a “Gettier attack” Zack did get at least a partial dose of epistemic luck. He believes it isn’t justified and therefore a Gettier attack, but in fact, you need justification for a Gettier attack, and it is justified, so he got some epistemic luck writing about epistemic luck. This is what a good chunk of this post feels like.
This “Gettier” attack seems to me to have no more interesting content than a “stopped clock”. To use an extremely similar, extremely common phrase, the New York Times would have been “right for the wrong reasons” to call Scott Alexander a racist. And this would be conceptually identical to pointing out that, I dunno, crazed conspiracy theorists suggested before he was caught that Jeffrey Epstein was part of an extensive paedophile network.
But we see this happen all the time, in fact it’s such a key building block of our daily experience that we have at least two cliches devoted to capturing it.
Perhaps it would be interesting if we were to pick out authentic Gettier cases which are also accusations of some kind, but it seems likely that in any case (i.e. all cases) where an accusation is levelled with complex evidence, the character of justification fails to be the very kind which would generate a Gettier case. Gettier cases cease to function like Gettier cases when there is a swathe of evidence to be assessed, because already our sense of justification is partial and difficult to target with the precision characteristic of unexpected failure - such cases turn out to be just “stopped clocks”. The sense of counter-intuitivity here seems mostly to be generated by the convoluted grammar of your summarising assessment, but this is just an example of bare recursivity, since you’re applying the language of the post to the post itself.
The sense of counter-intuitivity here seems mostly to be generated by the convoluted grammar of your summarising assessment, but this is just an example of bare recursivity, since you’re applying the language of the post to the post itself.
I don’t think it’s counter-intuitive and the post itself never mentioned ‘epistemic luck’.
Perhaps it would be interesting if we were to pick out authentic Gettier cases which are also accusations of some kind
This seems easy enough to contstruct, just base an accusation on a Gettier case. So in the case of the stopped clock, say we had an appointment at 6:00 and due to my broken watch I think it’s 7:00, as it so happens it actually is 7:00. When I accuse you of being an hour late it is a “Gettier attack”, it’s a true accusation, but it isn’t based on knowledge because it is based on a Gettier case.
I suppose I must be confused, your saying that the piece was interesting was just because it made you think about the phrase “Gettier attack”?
It made me think of epistemic luck in the rat-sphere in general, him inventing then immediately fumbling ‘gettier attack’ is just such a perfect example, but there are other examples in there such as Yud saying:
Personally, I’m used to operating without the cognitive support of a civilization in controversial domains, and have some confidence in my own ability to independently invent everything important that would be on the other side of the filter and check it myself before speaking. So you know, from having read this, that I checked all the speakable and unspeakable arguments I had thought of, and concluded that this speakable argument would be good on net to publish[…]
Which @200fifty points out:
Zack is actually correct that this is a pretty wild thing to say… “Rest assured that I considered all possible counterarguments against my position which I was able to generate with my mega super brain. No, I haven’t actually looked at the arguments against my position, but I’m confident in my ability to think of everything that people who disagree with me would say.” It so happens that Yudkowsky is on the ‘right side’ politically in this particular case, but man, this is real sloppy for someone who claims to be on the side of capital-T truth.
I suppose I get it, although I’m still a bit unsure how these examples count as “epistemic luck”
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.
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
69 minute read.
That is not nice.
Reminds me of the poetic reaction to the epic poem (1400+ lines) about May by Herman Gorter. In reaction to this Hendrik de Vries wrote: (Loosely translated, with the ABBBA rhyme scheme destroyed, im sorry)
"Gorter, Gorter!
I wanted to read your Maycanto
But soon I was afraid
That I, before I died, would not be able to finish it.
Shorter! Shorter! Shorter!"
OG in Dutch: "Gorter, Gorter!
'k Heb uw Meizang willen lezen
Maar begon al gauw te vrezen
Dat het, voor mijn dood, niet uit zou wezen.
Korter! Korter! Korter!"
Not that relevant, but I always thought it was a fun story, and it is a nice piece of poetic shade thrown.
Edit: formatting eurgh.
I love this unhinged Yudkowsky quote buried in here:
This is a filter affecting your evidence; it has not to my own knowledge filtered out a giant valid counterargument that invalidates this whole post. I would have kept silent in that case, for to speak then would have been dishonest.
Personally, I’m used to operating without the cognitive support of a civilization in controversial domains, and have some confidence in my own ability to independently invent everything important that would be on the other side of the filter and check it myself before speaking. So you know, from having read this, that I checked all the speakable and unspeakable arguments I had thought of, and concluded that this speakable argument would be good on net to publish[…]
Zack is actually correct that this is a pretty wild thing to say… “Rest assured that I considered all possible counterarguments against my position which I was able to generate with my mega super brain. No, I haven’t actually looked at the arguments against my position, but I’m confident in my ability to think of everything that people who disagree with me would say.”
It so happens that Yudkowsky is on the ‘right side’ politically in this particular case, but man, this is real sloppy for someone who claims to be on the side of capital-T truth.
The problem is… well, Zack correctly recognizes Yudkowsky is maybe not as world-changingly smart as he presents himself, and may be engaging in motivated reasoning rather than disinterested truth-seeking, but then his solution (a) doesn’t involve questioning his belief in the rest of the robot apocalypse mythos, and (b) does involve running crying directly into the arms of Moldbug and a bunch of TERFs, which like, dude. Maybe consider critically interrogating those people’s arguments too??
At this point I think there’s a pathological lack of insight going on with Zack.
Epistemic status: I have made it through this swamp. I did not read the footnotes. I glossed over the comments. Also as far as I can tell I am a cishet male, which is probably relevant to mention in reviewing this.
So here is where I am at. This post fractal sucks. Davis clearly doesn’t identify with the gender essentialist notion of male, but they also want to hold onto the idea of a biological sex binary. It sucks. I don’t think this is a unique situation- there are plenty of stories about trans kids in conservative/religious households. This particular conservative religion is the robot cult. The oppressive parents are the ghost of 2007!Yud and Scoot.
ghost of 2007!Yud
This part gets me the most. The current day Yud isn’t transphobic (enough? idk) so Zack has to piece together his older writings on semantics and epistemology to get a more transphobic gender essentialist version of past Yud.
“It was bad that the New York Times called Scott a racist, because he’s a racist but in a way that makes it correct to be racist.”
oh holy shit I was only a handful of paragraphs in but he literally says that!!!
So The New York Times implicitly accuses us of being racists, like Charles Murray, and instead of pointing out that being a racist like Charles Murray is the obviously correct position that sensible people will tend to reach in the course of being sensible, we disingenuously deny everything.
one point for (pseudo)intellectual honesty i guess!
I nominate this accidental called shot for Sneer Of The Week
