Comments on “The structure of The Eggplant”

Hi David, I’m afraid this is a bit off-topic but I couldn’t find another way to reach you without a Twitter account.

I wanted to read Meaningness on my e-reader, and thus whipped up a quick script to download it and turn it into an EPUB file (with copyright information intact). Is it alright with you if I post this script to GitHub? If you’re not comfortable with that I can keep it to myself for purely personal use.

Somewhere recently I ran across a statement that both traditional philosophical and AI (or other computer-inspired) concepts of ontology rarely get beyond nouns.

If you want words to do something as opposed to represent something, you have to think differently.

But, to continue my campaign to understand how exactly LW-EY-2008 was definitely not meta-rationality, I found another example to discuss:

• Faster Than Science - Less Wrong

Maybe all the ‘Bayes’ stuff inclines you to write-off or approximate whatever it is EY is writing about to ‘pick a formal model and use Bayes’s rule to update on new formal evidence’.

Anyways, I had immediately thought of EY exhorting ‘rationalists’ to be ‘better at thinking than science’ when I read this part of this page:

Too much R&D is mechanical by-the-book crank-turning, within a fixed framework, without reflection on whether it makes any sense in context. STEM can be “bad” not because it’s wrong, but because it’s trivial or irrelevant. Only a meta-rational view can help with that.

And the example he uses seems pretty good for use in explaining or describing meta-rationality too – the ‘many worlds’ interpretation of quantum mechanics.