Comments on “Judging whether a system applies”

I didn’t know that lesswrong imploded. Where can I read the gossip?
On a related subject to judging when a system applies, since I was young I have tried to identify what kinds of arguments and rhetorical tactics are used when someone is correct and what kind are used illegitimately or for incorrect conclusions so that when I found people arguing about something that I don’t know much about I could orient myself towards the better truth.

I also was more attracted to subjects where I could argue when the teacher was wrong, like math.
One of my sharpest tools for dividing good arguments from pointless was what purpose I needed the distinction for.
So I only had to model the minimum nebulosity necessary.

Great post, David; you made a good introduction to how selecting systems is itself an art. However, I’ve always thought of Kegan’s Stage 5 as being not about knowing when a system applies and when it does not (itself a stark, systematic distinction) and more about integrating the results of multiple systems, each of which kind-of applies. Sometimes the results don’t mean figuring out which system got it “right” but instead combining their different reasons into a coherent whole.

I’m looking forward to seeing how you lay out a “path beyond modernism”. Talking about the limitations of systems seems like it may work.

Kegan is quite vague, though not any more so than most of the ed literature I’ve read. I think of his stage 5 not as “combining” the judgements of different systems so much as making each system provide not just a black-and-white judgement with an argument supporting it, but a richer description of how and why and when that argument applies. So while two systems may yield conflicting judgements, they provide models of the world that can be reconciled, and then a new judgement can be made in this new, richer model of the world.

That said, I would not say I have a fluent grasp of Stage 5, whatever it is, and anyway by profession have focused more on the transition from 2→3 and 3→4.

It’s not so much incorrect to say that George Washington was the first President of the United States as it is trivial. This is because what constitutes the office of President is nebulous and ever-changing. As it exists now, it is so substantially different from the way it was in Washington’s time that it is simply wrong to consider the two positions “the same” even though they share the same name.

Some non-exhaustive examples:

• The groups of people eligible to select the President now are different now than they were then — across practically every substantial demographic category: geography, race, gender, and age.
• The procedure for electing a President in the modern two-party state is unrecognizably different from that of Washington's time.
• The legal powers of the modern President are much broader than those available to Washington, both de jure (because Congress has ceded much of its rule-making authority to the Executive) and de facto (because of extra-constitutional authority the President has arrogated to itself, e.g., the power of the Executive Order).
• The military powers the modern President commands are vastly different from those of Washington's time, both de jure (we now have four branches of the military, all of which are standing forces) and de facto (Presidents can now wage war without a declaration of war), as well as pragmatically (Presidents with nuclear weapons now literally have the power to destroy human civilization).
• The modern President has police powers (via the FBI, BATF, Secret Service, federal marshals, …), which Washington didn't have.
• … (I'm sure I could list many more examples like this, without leaving the domain of differences in roles, responsibilities, powers, procedures, and prerogatives of the office; which are the defining characteristics of what it means to exist *as a political office*).
• Finally, and ironically, were George Washington to appear now, he would be *ineligible* to be President, and were Barack Obama (or Hillary Clinton!) to be transported back to 1789, they would be *ineligible* for the office as well. (In Obama's case, possibly only de facto.)

So, yes, George Washington was the first “President” — because every person elected “President” comes to a substantially different office, and each is the “first”.

If when you say “Washington was the first President” you mean it in the same sense that you would mean when you say “Obama is the current President”, then that’s just not true, because in that sense, Washington was never President.

It’s true there’s not really any such thing as a ‘president.’ However, it is a good shorthand. GW being the first president is true enough to do work, though really there’s only atoms and the void.

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Reasoning systems are functions. Functions have domains. E.g. f(x)=1/x doesn’t have zero in the domain. The domains of reasoning systems are defined by where their axioms hold. It doesn’t actually require 5th level reasoning to work out where a domain is. Though admittedly it occasionally takes 5th level to remember that you have to work out where the domains are.

Definitions are also exactly mathematical. They are coordinate systems. The actual triangle or whatever doesn’t change, but we have to use coordinates to describe it, which we can change. GW has a set of indisputable properties, such as being unanimously elected and making president-y decisions, but we have to use definitions to describe them, and we can change whether our definitions call him ‘president’ or not.

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Because the probability is incomputable doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist. (Or has error bars in the +/- 30% range.) It’s a good idea to at least have a ballpark, and compare it to some standard. In physics the standard is 99.999 etc. Expecting this from sociology or politics is just dumb, but 70% is often good enough. Helps keep the categories from muddying each other, and from bad/incompetent actors from intentionally muddying them.

Thinking about how nothing could be 100% certain allowed me to find the thing that does have 100% certainty.

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Gender exists no more than presidents do. Again, it’s a relatively-arbitrary definition, a handle we use because we can’t grasp reality directly. It’s a good definition, so it’s useful most of the time, but like systems, it has a domain, based on its original axioms. Transsexuals are outside this domain.

Though, like addition can be generalized to multiplication, the definition of gender could be generalized. How it generalizes depends on how exactly you want to construct the original definition.

I personally define gender such that transsexuals are very definitely neither male nor female. (This is of course a problem for trans, since they change precisely because they want to partake of the properties of the other side.)

The president objectively matches the definition we happen to assign to ‘president.’ Of course when you dissect the president, you’re not going to find how you or I hold the definition of president. It’s in us, not him.

I have to think about whether ‘president’ is local or not.

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Pretty sure understanding of correspondence broke down, rather than the theory.

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There’s not any logical problem with defining ‘George Washington’ as a time-sensitive function. It’s merely inconvenient. Though if you’re going to do that, should really say you can’t elect a man president even once, because neither men nor presidents actually exist. Problem is you can’t grasp reality directly, so that project isn’t going to get very far…

There’s not really any problem of transtemporal identity. It confuses the definition for the reality. Theseus never had a ship, so he can’t lose it. (Nor was there a Theseus, for that matter. Or a ‘had.’) But he had something defined as a ship. Whether it’s replaced depends on whether you want to define ‘ship’ as a particular set of boards or as the ability to cross water. Theseus loses all his original boards but he can still cross water. There’s your general, systemic answer.

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Depends on what you mean by ‘exist.’ There are artifacts that currently exist that can only have existed (modulo error) if GW had a corporeal body and matched the definition ‘president’ in the late 1700s.

If you want you can say GW doesn’t exist and is thus metaphysical, but you then have to account for these artifacts, and the model thus evolved will add up to the same thing as what we’ve got, but be more complicated.

I would say we do indeed measure GW, via his spoor. We must measure (almost) everything through spoor like this, so doing so over a greater span seems hardly problematic.

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Of course the thing itself changes without the definition necessarily changing. That’s, like, the essence of locality and identity. The question is not whether they change, but whether they change too much, and it’s clear that humans find the changes in ‘America’ to be immaterial to the continuity of the presidency.

The transtemporal existence of countries is not an issue because the country never really existed in the first place, so it continues to not exist. Studying the transtemporal definition is easy. Those two considerations exhaust the topic.

Countries are kind of interesting in that the definition is part of their causal chains.

Everyone needs to study math. If you want to make a fixed statement about an interesting function f(t), it just has to also have that variable - g(t). Even as the object described by f(t) moves, g(t) will remain true. It will endure, and be definite.

“Washington was the first American President” is a durable claim

It’s a definition. The entities ‘America’ and ‘President’ are defined, for the purposes of this interlocution, such that ‘Washington’ was the first one. It tells you what the sayer thinks ‘America’ and ‘Presidents’ are.

E.g. perhaps America ceases for a while, then America II appears. Was GW the first president, or GW_AII? Depends on how you feel like defining ‘America’ today. If you want to define it such that it will always be true, you can. But you don’t have to. The only thing you’re obliged to do is make the definitions consistent with your other definitions.

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Whether technical glitches matter depends on whether you define ‘president’ legally or pragmatically. The technicalities probably make it illegal. But he was allowed to do presidenty things anyway? So....

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Someone cares about the de facto first president generally because they want presidential high status to apply to a non-de-jure president. If so, they should argue that directly, rather than trying to re-define ‘president’ to do it, and dragging along a bunch of extra considerations.

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The British Crown doesn’t exist. Also nothing is ‘legitimate’ or ‘illegitimate.’

As a matter of fact, control probably goes in the opposite direction as claimed, these days. Whoever runs America also runs significant parts of England. Even if I accept the definition of ‘genuine state’ or whatever, so what?

“Pop Bayesianism” is a religious movement whose central dogma is that you should always reason probabilistically. This is silly, of course. As with other religions, none of its adherents meaningfully believe their Holy Truth, but pretending they do makes them feel better in the face of uncertainty and helplessness.

I’m getting a little frustrated. I thought that you’d have given up with these kinds of strawmen after all the previous discussions in the comments of the original post and elsewhere. Why do you keep making characterizations like “central dogma is … that you should always reason probabilistically”, when you should know very well by now that they’re patently untrue? Or at least, describing a version of “pop Bayesianism” that nobody so far has admitted to endorsing?

I don’t honestly remember whether we happened to discuss that particular claim, either. But I would regardless have presumed all those discussions to already have taught you the heuristic, ‘if you claim that the Bayesians believe something totally crazy, then you’re probably being too uncharitable’. :P

I’ll grant that Jaynes might have made such a claim - I’m not as familiar with him. But Eliezer explicitly disclaimed such an interpretation here: http://lesswrong.com/lw/sg/when_not_to_use_probabilities/

Thank you!

What do you feel it contradicts? I think it’s perfectly consistent with both the earlier quotes you gave (from Jaynes and Eliezer), for instance. You can consistently hold that any inferential process that produces useful information has “Bayes structure” at the core, while also holding that your mind contains specialized mechanisms for doing inference that will do the job better than trying to verbally reason about probabilities.

(I forgot to answer your question of whether I’ve read “Probability theory does not extend logic”. I started reading it at some point, then got distracted by something, then never remembered to go back. But it does seem interesting, so I appreciate the reminder. Maybe I’ll get around finishing it eventually. :))

Thanks! Clearly I ought to read that if I want to keep arguing these things. Though to be honest, I don’t really care that much (anymore?) about whether the Jaynes/Eliezer claim of Bayesianism is true or not. I just showed up to correct what seemed like a misrepresentation, and don’t have a major stake in criticisms of the correct representation. :)

As you’ve pointed out, this stuff forms only a part of rationality, and these days my attention has shifted a lot more towards aspects of rationality for which the Bayesianist debate is irrelevant. I’m now more interested in stuff like accepting painful emotions and being able to see the information that they’re trying to convey, building up reliable habits that take you towards your goals, creating social environments that encourage regular reflection on what you’re doing while also getting you to actually do stuff on top of just reflecting, etc.

Explaining what I’ve discovered about distinguishing good arguments from bad, will be difficult because it’s a system of resemblances and “that’s funny..”s rather than clear rules. And also because my project failed to find any (non obvious) universally valid or invalid patterns. Whether someone is right or not depends on the content of what they say and not just the form. So I will attempt to reconstruct it in a more intelligible form.

The basic process I use to figure out whether and argument technique is good or not is: when I see an argument used to support a conclusion that I know is wrong, it loses credibility. When an argument convinces me of something that I didn’t know before, then that argument gains credibility. (Now that I think about it is sounds like Hebbian learning)

Judging the validity of arguments that I don’t completely understand is an extension of information scent. Valuable information is true novel and important. I will focus less on novelty and importance because they are less damaging to get wrong and are strongly selected for by other people.
Someone could be wrong because they are uninformed, pigheaded, or lying. (all these are cured if they acknowledge opposing arguments)

Tings I have seen in informative arguments are; citation of facts, (because they could be refuted by refuted the facts), acknowledgement of opposing arguments, agreeing that the other person is right but that there is a bigger picture, wordplay, and that I already trust the person.
Things I have seen in suspicious arguments are; ignoring other peoples points, sensational titles that don’t get lived up to. Traditional examples (like the cargo cult example), claims that everyone else is a fool, visible misunderstandings of facts, disproportionate responses (emotionally or otherwise), incoherent responses, responses that don’t make sense given the context.

11: Somewhat pedantic: the real truth is that “George Washington IS the first President of the United States” That title has not since fallen to someone else, but exists for all eternity and thus to be expressed accurately needs to be in the present tense.

12: Others had already held roles equivalent to President, within the area now known as the United States, before George Washington. The fact that people renamed the area and the role doesn’t change the essence of him not having been the first to play this role.

13: Since history repeats itself, the notion of anything being the first instance of something is absurd. The structure “President of the United States” is merely one instantiation of a much larger pattern that transcends time.

14: There are many people named “George Washington”, making that sentence true only for some more specific designation of the person in question. [∃ “George Washington” such that “George Washington was the first President of the United States”] does not imply [“George Washington was the first President of the United States” ∀ “George Washington”]

15: Given the multiple branches of history that could have occurred, and the fact that they did occur in other everett branches, it’s not accurate to say George Washington was the first President, but merely a first President. Which is a meaningful statement! It’s not true of anyone who in all branches died before the United States was founded, or was born well after, or was born into a universe that never contained a United States.

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Mine were created before I really engaged with the rest of the post, including the idea that the systems be applicable to something else. That said, I think that my #12 is somewhat systematic and related to your #9 and #10, and that my #14 and #15 also come from useful systems of thought, if mis-understood ones.

Regarding the Bayesianism instance, you seem to be focusing on it as a kind of objective probability, whereas the notion of subjective probability, ie credence, remains very valuable. With access to any trusted sources, you can easily become basically as certain that Benjamin Harrison was President #23 as you are certain that Washington was President #1. But without access to sources (or ability to trust them) you might prefer to bet on a coin flip, because you have no idea.

But this is perhaps not relevant to your post.

There is some evidence for it. the good judgement project, and the forecasting literature in general, supports notion that ad hoc quantification of credence beats tacit models (expert intuition) quite handily. Turning expert judgement into simple linear models, even when not done very rigorously, also beats informal reasoning. This is not to say that these reasoning methods are the be all end all, they are domain limited of course. But I think they contradict your claim.

“We cannot say that George Washington was the first President because we cannot tell if our senses provide objective information about an actually-existing reality. I could be a brain in a vat or a hallucinating mental patient, in which case, much of my knowledge would actually be false.” Although I may actually be a brain in a vat somewhere, it’s irrelevant to the question, since I can distinguish true part of my experiential reality (“George Washington was the first President.”) from false ones (“My mother is the Crab Nebula.”)

“We cannot say whether George Washington was the first President because there is no such thing as objective reality, only subjective experience. And this is obviously true because look at quantum mechanics: observation makes reality!” Besides misunderstanding the “observer” of quantum mechanics, this is self-refuting because it is, itself, an objective fact.

Nicely written. Thanks. I’ve read about ten of your posts here today, and feel like I’m starting to understand what you’re saying. I’ve always doubted the depth of LWers’ claims that Bayesianism is all there is. OTOH, I don’t treat Bayesianism as just a matter of believing that you should apply Bayes’ rule in order to determine what’s true. At least as promoted on LW, it also means things like “you must update after sharing information with someone you disagree with.”

Anyway, (reference my domain, pancrit.org) I’ve always felt that Bartley’s Pan Critical Rationalism was a deeper answer to the problem of epistemology. PCR starts by recasting the nature of epistemology from “the problem of knowledge” to “How do I decide what to believe”. Bartley’s big invention was to fix Popper’s Critical Rationalism. Popper basically said “this you must believe: the secret to epistemology is attacking every question from many angles.” Bartley’s correction was to say that even Critical Rationalism has to be criticized and defended.

Your approach to the ten denials of George Washington is very much in the spirit of Bartley. It’s not enough to calculate or deny or investigate. You’re not done until you’ve used judgement to figure out what you should believe.

Thanks.

I should have given the reference. The work I refer to is “The Retreat to Commitment”. I have extra copies to give away. :-)

I think the prudent approach would be to ask you what you know about the box and how you know it (e.g. did you disassemble it, for example?). Get a feel if you are lying or trying to pull a prank, etc. Proceed accordingly. (The runes and eldritch figures are red herring, or course, so that’s somewhat of a prior that you are trying to pull a prank).

The LW mindset goes straight to "how do we apply probability theory to a physical mechanism" which, in this case, is impossible. That was the point I was trying to make.

Probably one of the issues here is framing: in real life most people would handle it correctly without much thinking. But when the problem is presented in the written form in a semi-formal setting some other mental mechanism kicks in. Like when you are solving problems from a textbook your approach is not to come up with creative solutions, but more or less find ways to apply what you’ve just learnt.

Just to note that the “This must mean something” link to apollospeaks has disappeared… Ah, linkrot…