Comments on “The structure of The Eggplant”

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Meaningness e-book

Alex 2017-10-29

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.

epub

David Chapman 2017-10-30

Yes, that’s fine!

Ontology: Where are the verbs?

Hal Morris 2017-10-31

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

do-be-do-be-do

Hal Morris 2017-11-01

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

I'm pretty excited about this new-ish sub-project

Kenny Evitt 2017-11-30

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

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.

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