Posts

Showing posts from 2021

Deutsch and Yudkowsky on scientific explanation

Science aims to come up with good theories about the world - but what makes a theory good? The standard view is that the key traits are predictive accuracy and simplicity. Deutsch focuses instead on the concepts of explanation and understanding : a good theory is an explanation which enhances our understanding of the world. This is already a substantive claim, because various schools of instrumentalism have been fairly influential in the philosophy of science. I do think that this perspective has a lot of potential, and later in this essay explore some ways to extend it. First, though, I discuss a few of Deutsch's arguments which I don't think succeed, in particular when compared to the bayesian rationalist position defended by Yudkowsky. To start, Deutsch says that good explanations are “hard to vary”, because every part of the explanation is playing a role. But this seems very similar to the standard criterion of simplicity. Deutsch rejects simplicity as a criterion because

Meditations on faith

A few months before his death, Leonard Cohen, the great lyricist of modern spirituality, sang to God: Magnified, sanctified Be the holy name Vilified, crucified In the human frame A million candles burning For the help that never came You want it darker You're lining up the prisoners And the guards are taking aim I struggled with some demons They were middle class and tame I didn't know I had permission To murder and to maim You want it darker Hineni, hineni I'm ready, My Lord The first lines are a reference to the Mourner’s Kaddish, a Jewish prayer for the deceased. The million candles - each one in remembrance of a life lost - reminds us of tragedies upon preventable tragedies. So too with the prisoners, the guards, the murders: if these are part of some deity’s plan, it’s a deity which wants the world darker. Finally, hineni is what Abraham said when God called upon him to sacrifice Isaac. It means Here I am ; but with deep connotations: I am willing , or perhaps  I am y

Scope-sensitive ethics: capturing the core intuition motivating utilitarianism

Classical utilitarianism has many advantages as an ethical theory. But there are also many problems with it, some of which I discuss here . A few of the most important: The idea of reducing all human values to a single metric is counterintuitive. Most people care about a range of things , including both their conscious experiences and outcomes in the world. I haven’t yet seen a utilitarian conception of welfare which describes what I’d like my own life to be like. Concepts derived from our limited human experiences will lead to strange results when they’re taken to extremes (as utilitarianism does). Even for things which seem robustly good, trying to  maximise them will likely give rise to divergence at the tails  between our intuitions and our theories, as in the repugnant conclusion . Utilitarianism doesn’t pay any attention to personal identity (except by taking a person-affecting view, which leads to worse problems). At an extreme, it endorses the world destruction argument : tha