Haha, I never would have suggested that anybody should study his work deeply. I'm not even sure I'd want to read any of those 'atheist' books seriously. Actually the 'atheist' movement feels a little like some sort of new age religion.

My impression of his PhD was basically that he did it for fun. If he was trying to verify some philosophical opinion and peddle it in book form, well that's pretty ****ing lame if you ask me. But if we're all just being subject to some rich guy's half-assed sophomore philosophy essay... yuck. I agree, there are better things we could all be reading and discussing.

Regarding the Islam thing: I'm not sure he's said anything about Muslims apart from holding them accountable for some of the ****ty things done (by somebody, somewhere?) in the name of Islam, and then rationalized by religious doctrine. Although you said something about how he tried to argue on philosophical grounds that it's moral to kill somebody simply on the grounds that they are Muslim. If this is true, then... WTF!

As for the MRI stuff, well, I'm not sure too many other PhD's are a lot better. Don't they all use MRI in a questionable way? I'm a little skeptical of a discipline that sticks the word 'cognitive' in front of it and pretends to be revolutionary just because of fancy experimental equipment.

Re: the Klein/Harris thing, I think Harris's most supportable point is about the incentives in scientific research making some taboo topics just not worth touching. He has a bunch of emails from well-known scientists, he says, who agree with him. Which is probably true.

He overreaches, though, in trying to generalize it as a "political correctness gone too far" thing that has ruined Charles Murray's career. Which lets Klein point out that Murray is an extremely well-paid and successful conservative think tank guy whose career is doing just fine. Harris never really engages with that point.

Now you're just making stuff up. Never a good look.



You're conflating a few things here. The thing you claim is a problem is not actually a problem. As you said, the issue is whether one can derive an ought from an is. Harris (like some philosophers) thinks you can. He derives a general rule from an intuition. That's just what it means to derive an ought from an is.

Implicit in his remarks is the idea that the intuition of pain is something immediate -- a mere, intuition -- which contains a moral judgment. Pain is self-evidently bad; it hurts, and the pain that one feels when one experiences pain is the very perception that it is bad. Again, as I said in a previous post, the experience of pain is not inferred. It is immediate, or, in other words, it is self-evident, just as my perception of something as blue or green is immediate, or self-evident. But unlike my perception of something as blue or green, it is not a merely descriptive intuition. It's also a prescriptive intuition, which means its an evaluation, or a judgment of value (or as some might say, a moral perception, or a moral fact, that can be true or false).

So that's the intuition. From that intuition, Harris deduces a general rule: painful things should be avoided. The deduction that occurs is to infer from the perception of pain a general rule. In other words, this move is precisely to deduce an ought from an is (which, as it happens, is an is that contains an implicit judgment of value. It's an ought that is also an is, or an is that is also an ought, as it were... that's just what it means for there to be an intuition that is simultaneously prescriptive and descriptive).



Yeah, see, you have this exactly backwards. Things are not painful because we have made an a priori judgment that they're painful. If that were the case, I could make the judgment that putting my hand in a stove is pleasurable, and then do it, and have it be pleasurable. Obviously, I can't do that. As Harris has it, moments when I experience something painful are self-evidently bad; painfulness is immediate, so, when I am in pain, I can't wish it away. It's from the experience, or the perception, of pain, that I derive a general rule that painful things should be avoided, not vice versa.



Yeah, that's wrong. See above.



Read up on the distinction between cognitivism and non-cognitivism. There's a good case to be made that Plato and Aristotle are both cognitivists (Harris is kind of a cognitivist here). Myles Burnyeat has a good article on the Republic where he makes the case that Plato is a cognitivist and Jessica Moss has done similar work on Aristotle. You can also read John McDowell or Sergio Tenenbaum.

In the future, you might want to refrain from calling something incoherent and lacking in cogency just because you disagree with it, although I don't suspect you will.

how does BDSM fit into all of this though?

I've been going to local BDSM meetups. Pretty interesting scene.

Don't get me wrong, I don't think Harris' argument holds up very well, and this is a particular place his view isn't very well argued. There are all sorts of issues here. For instance, not all people find the same things pleasurable and painful. Is it right for me to find what I find pleasurable pleasurable? Is it right for me to find what I find painful painful? Generally, this is where virtue comes in, at least if you're coming at it from an Aristotelian perspective. The virtuous person will have the right desires, and will find the right things pleasurable and painful. That's a qualitative way of looking at pleasure and pain, where the content of the desire can be morally qualititatively different. Harris, whose view is more utilitarian than Aristotelian, likely would take a more quantitative approach, where all pleasure and all pain are qualitatively homogenous, and the goal is to have more of the former and less of the latter. (And I emphasize, not just a goal, but the goal: a maximally pleasurable and a minimally painful life is what happiness is, for this point of view.)

I don't think it's a coincidence that his example of a painful incident is an unambiguously painful one with no apparent moral content.

He didn't actually do that, though, that's the whole point. His example is the most boilerplate, straightforward example of someone misunderstanding the is-ought distinction. He might think he has done that, but he hasn't.



From what I understand, your argument is something like this:

P: Pain feels bad
P: We are naturally inclined to avoid things which feel bad
C: Therefore pain is bad

That conclusion does not follow from those premises. The premises that follows is "we are naturally inclined to avoid pain". What you're naturally inclined towards is a statement of natural truth, it never "jumps" from that realm to the realm of true ought statements.

It's a naturalistic fallacy / nonrefutation of the is-ought problem. The thing you don't understand is this isn't an argument against the is-ought problem. This sort of faulty argument is what the is-ought gap says you can't do. As far as I've found, Sam Harris does not actually address the statement of the is-ought gap in any way that isn't a misunderstanding or an ad hominem attack.

Also, Sam Harris tends to pick the most heavy-handed, stupid examples because if you attempt to try his argument on anything even remotely nuanced it becomes a cluster**** of confusing nonsense. Try thinking in his terms with any sort of real moral question and you'll see the difficulty.



Read above, it doesn't deduce an ought from an is.



Maybe judgment was a poor choice of word, because it led you to get out something not intended. By a priori judgment I'm trying to get across the point that we don't have a choice in whether we find getting burned pleasurable. If you burn your hand, you will not like it. But there's still a difference between the natural statement "Eversor doesn't want his hand to be burned" and "Eversor shouldn't burn his hand". I don't think you should, but that's not because of how the burn will effect your hand, or the physical response, or the pain you feel intrinsically. It's because the pain you feel matters to me as an ethical concern, I feel I ought to care about the people around me, so I want them not to feel pain, and that's the key premise in whether I think you should burn your hand, not the pain or the physical aspect.

Let me summarize clearly: the is-ought gap hasn't been addressed at all, the argument against it is a set of premises which embed hidden normative claims, but are disguised as being about the objective world.



It's not about "disagreement". It's that he doesn't seem to understand the ideas. Every academic review of Harris' book was not nice, either. We've come to the crossroads again where for some reason..

His claim is not that morals exist in an objective world independent of a conscious mind that experiences them. I agree that it would be really confusing if that is what he meant, and if he was trying to root morality in experiences of pleasure and pain, because pleasure and pain only exist as mental states, in the mind, and not out in the external world. After all, it's not as if when I stub my toe on my desk, the pain I feel is a perception of a quality intrinsic to the desk. Pain isn't one of the desk's properties, in the same way that its hardness is. But Harris isn't rooting morality in objective facts outside of our consciousness. He's rooting it in our consciousness, in our perceptions of pleasure and pain. (Making the distinction between the objective world and the mental world is what the first two tweets in his thread do: https://twitter.com/SamHarrisOrg/status/951276346529009665)



I'm going to focus on this, because I think it will be clarifying. This quote can help illuminate the difference between cognitivism and non-cognitivism, and I'm going to respond to it in order to address the syllogism you put forward in your last post. In this quote, you're effectively taking a non-cognitivist position when you argue that there is a difference between those two statements. (When you say there is a difference between those two statements, I take you to mean that you can't infer from the fact that I don't want to do something that it is bad for me, and therefore that I shouldn't do it.) According to the non-cognitivist, the desire not to want to burn my hand does not contain a judgment of value. It's merely a preference, which means that it doesn't imply an imperative or an injunction to act in some specific way. Hence, according to this view, the fact that I desire to do something or to avoid something does not contain any moral content (or, at least, what is pleasurable does not equal what is good and to be pursued, and what is painful does not equal what is bad and to be avoided). The fact that I desire something is merely a descriptive fact, no different from other non-prescriptive facts about me, such as my height or my hair color.

The cognitivist, on the other hand, disagrees. The cognitivist says that my desire does contain an imperative. Again, pleasure and pain are states that exist in the mind, and, specifically, the mind of an embodied organism. Therefore, this view says, they serve some function in the mental context within which they arise. Another way to put this is that pleasure and pain are states of consciousness that have a teleological content. That is, they message to an organism what it should do and what it should not do, for different purposes, certainly, but most basically, for the sake of self-preservation. So, for a cognitivist, unlike a non-cognitivist, the fact that an experience is painful signals to the mind that it is bad, and, subsequently, that it should be avoided. In other words, the desire, and the pleasure or the pain, contains an imperative, suited toward some end (again, in its simplest form, it is likely self-preservation, but the end could be something else, like virtue). To make this really concrete, the reason why my body feels pain when I put my hand on the stove is because the pain is supposed to stop me from doing it, because doing it would be bad for me. Among other things, my instincts are supposed to prevent me from committing an act of violence against myself; that is, something that would violate my inherent tendency towards self-preservation. So in contrast with the non-cognitivist view that says desire is a mere descriptive fact, the cognitivist says that desire is a fact, but it's also a fact that is norm-imposing.

As I've said before, Harris' view more closely resembles the cognitivist view than the non-cognitivist view. And look, I agree: Harris isn't challenging the is-ought distinction by showing that is in fact possible to derive a moral conclusion from a non-moral premise, which, as you point out, is what the is-ought distinction says you can't do. But he also doesn't claim that that's what he's trying to do. Rather, he's challenging the is-ought distinction by showing that there are statements of fact that are also moral statements (i.e., he's arguing that some statements of fact can also have moral content).

This is an unusual understanding of cognitivism. Cognitivism typically is the stance that we can describe moral statements as true or false, that it makes sense to describe them that way. My stance is highly cognitivist, for instance, the following logical argument:

P: We ought to avoid unnecessary pain
P: Burning your hand is painful and unnecessary
C: Therefore you ought to avoid burning your hand

Is a perfectly valid argument. Note that one of the premises makes use of an ought premise, something necessary to have an ought conclusion, and I think the premises are true (I'd contextualize the first premise, but for the sake of brevity what I wrote is sufficiently true).



Maybe I should delineate a few types of statements for reference here. There are a few types of statements being said here:

We feel pain. (not value-laden)
Feeling pain is undesirable. (value-laden)
It is the case that you find pain undesirable. (not value-laden)
You ought to find pain undesirable. (value-laden)

Many of the statements I've made that are being interpreted as non-cognitivist seem to be statements of the third form. A statement about whether people believe something is undesirable is not value-laden.

I don't see any value in determining whether you find murder acceptable, that seems to be just a fact about you. I don't think that's non-cognitivist.



Well, I don't think that's actually cognitivism, but no, desire does not contain imperative. That's a naturalistic fallacy.



What you've said here seems to be very close to the thesis "what's moral is what's instinctual". I very much reject the idea that morality is given to us instinctually or by simply following what's pleasurable. It seems to miss the point of morality altogether.



I'm still not sure that this is a proper use of cognitivist, but there's a distinction between the fact about whether you desire and the desire itself. If I actually feel the desire something, that is itself a valuation. But the statement of whether I have the desire is not.



Can you point to any statement he's made that's a statement of fact about the natural world that's also a moral statement? I don't think he's successfully done so.

Responding to a bit more above, I fail to see how what's been written deals with the statement of the naturalistic fallacy/is-ought distinction. What you've done is say "the fact that we have desires implies we ought to pursue those desires". That's a logically unsound argument.

So correct me if I’m wrong, but what I’m hearing is that Sam Harris is a popular author who expresses philosophical stances in his works without bothering to name either them or the dead philosophers who originally popularized them. And I’m supposed to believe that doing so would make his works better, instead of unbearably tedious like the last page of this thread has been. Yes?

Back when I was in university, I took one metaphysics course and secretly decided the only part of philosophy that matters is logic. That opinion has been reinforced today.

Nah, none of that. It's more that he says a bunch of dumb ****, and whines when nobody respects his work, and doesn't understand or is unwilling to deal fairly with the criticisms he's received about it.



Good for you.

lol

I agree that Sam Harris' books might not be that profound, but I always thought his 'work' was selling books? (That people seem to like, for whatever reason people like books.)

Sure, his dissertation is probably useless.

Sorry, that was unnecessarily rude.

When dealing with moral concerns, there's a good reason we have debate. Sometimes a moral claim feels intuitively wrong, but a good argument persuades you of it, and you relax or change your opinion. So when someone makes a claim, and also believes they have good evidence, you want to hear them out.

Sam Harris' end beliefs are the issue. In fact, I think many people read philosophy wrong, in that they focus too much on the reasoning and not on the end beliefs people are trying to get to. And I disagree with his end beliefs. Ideally, he would have some good arguments to persuade me. He's made many statements that sound really close to some pretty awful things. He was a big supporter of the Iraq war, and his justifications seem really close to an assertion of the supremacy of European culture. And other smaller things I disagree with, like his idea of atheism being superior to religion.

When you examine the arguments that underlie these beliefs of his, they're not persuasive, partly because they make so many basic errors like this, combine that with his routine inability to grapple with the criticism and we can conclude that we are justified in our initial intuitions about his beliefs. Eversor and I got bogged down in detail, but I think this philosophical practice is important. You go through this kind of process yourself, but you don't dress it up in academic philosophy. Which is fine.

I guess what I'm saying is, I don't compartmentalize philosophy as being only the work of academics. I don't really read much academic work. But if you are going to read something philosophical, by God I don't think it should be Sam Harris.

This is how I feel about it, as well.



I don't know why he did it, but given his lifelong campaign against religion, and the conclusions of his study, and the suspicious nature of his methodology, I find myself doubting his results a bit.




This is his defense of the Iraq/Afghanistan war, verbatim:



This is Sam Harris' view: to him, the Iraq war has little to do with economics, or world politics, or history. The Iraq war is because Islam is so dangerous, we have to preemptively kill them in self-defense.

This is a very bold claim, and one that's going to have its arguments scrutinized deeply. And it's not at all the case that people can't make outrageous claims and have good reasoning for them, like half of everything Nietzsche wrote is outrageous and convincing. But in the case of Sam Harris, I don't find the same.



Yeah.. it's kind of my bias that "cognitive" or "neuro" things are misguided and pointless. Regarding the dead fish thing:

https://www.wired.com/2009/09/fmrisalmon/

The fMRI techniques used here are the same ones Sam Harris used. The thing that's scary to me about it is, Sam Harris has influence, if he thinks religious people are inferior, and Muslim culture is worse, and has voiced these opinions while supporting a war, this has real, morally consequential effects in the world.

OK, it sounds like he is doing quite a bit more than just selling books.

Oh yeah, if he just wrote books, and responded to criticism well, and like, didn't advocate for sorta-genocide, I'd be cool with him.

I also don't personally find much value in Hitchens, but I don't think people should not read Hitchens. That's just a personal taste thing.

Hitchens was hilarious.

I also couldn't tell you if a single word he said was true, but I always found it amusing as hell to listen to.

Don't worry about it. My post was far more rude.

What exactly is the point of philosophy if it's okay to reject an uncomfortable conclusion soundly argued?

I mean, don't get me wrong about this. What you've said is exactly my problem. You can only reject the conclusions you dislike because the arguments are merely valid, not sound, or at least soundness is almost always unknowable. There's amusement to be had in the reasoning, if you care, but it's ultimately an immaterial thing. It's not obvious to me why any person who has spent a lot of time thinking about arguments from falsehood is any more qualified or worth reading than anybody else, especially for laypeople.

Objecting to his assumptions is reason enough to ignore his work. The latter point is as much a moral judgment as the former, though. The main benefit of reading academic or classical philosophy is so that you can learn all of the names, jargon, and classical argument structures, exactly so you can have the kind of discussion that you and Eversor just had. The kinds of people interested in Sam Harris probably don't care.

I'm not arguing that you should read Sam Harris. More that you shouldn't bother at all. There are lots of other subjects that exercise the same kind of reasoning, almost all of which are more accessible and relevant for people so disinterested in philosophy that they would pay attention to the man in the first place.



I mean, your argument about the is-ought gap still assumes volition, agency, and that reality isn't a coordination game. If any of those assumptions are false, Harris is right. I would consider arguing from so many tenuous assumptions to be a basic error.

Yeah, Hitchens could turn a phrase. I actually read his autobiography, for some reason, even though I haven't read anything else of his, and it was actually pretty enjoyable.

Also:



One of my favorites from him.

I think I meant the opposite of that, we read arguments presuming they're sound and we'll be forced to accept an uncomfortable conclusion. What I meant by that was, it's easy to get bogged down in worrying about the validity of an argument, or get lost in certain claims, but when reading a philosopher it's important to remember what their practical ethical concerns are.

For instance, many people read Hume and get really tied into his skeptical-sounding arguments and forget what his primary thesis was. Hume wanted to get rid of any sort of reasoning from first principles, and instead base science solely on experimental reasoning. All of his arguments were directed towards that end.

What end is Sam Harris arguing for? I'm not clear on this, but it seems like some sort of cultural purge of religion.



I think Harris' is-ought argument isn't actually valid, at least the version he presented on Twitter.

I see the problem you're getting at, though. We can say quite a bit about the structure of arguments, but true premises are the real issue. There's sort of a circularity to it all: we argue for some things to be true using other premises, and then argue for the original premises using other premises, some of which probably refer back to the original ones. We find ultimately there's no absolute premise we can start from. Okay, but that seems to not be an indictment of philosophy, but of human capabilities. It's not as if, discounting philosophy, any of these troubles would disappear. In fact, the kind of criticism at play here is an inherently philosophical one, it's a claim about the limits of our reasoning faculties. Understanding these limits can be insightful, and understanding of meta-level problems can contextualize base-level problems in a field of study.

For instance, Reverend Jones and I were talking about finitism recently. I've never really paid attention to finitism before, and finitism is itself a sort of philosophical stance, one which has premises we can't determine absolutely. I later found, though, that thinking about why the axiom of infinity is necessary, to provide later some recognition when doing proofs. It came up in a proof where the distinction between "actual infinity" and "potential infinity" mattered, and where I would have previously had more of a stumbling block coming out with a proof, the learning I did about the meta-mathematical implications of finitism helped me see why I was allowed to use an "actual infinity" in one part of the argument, but for the second I had to construct an infinite set using "potential infinities". I probably would have stumbled around the proof for longer had I not taken the time to consider that more philosophical question.

So what I mean is, often philosophy isn't going to help you with content itself, but sharpen your ability to see through complicated/stickier issues with more clarity.

Where I think the view you espoused earlier is limited is, I don't think that logic is the only place where this is relevant. For one, we could ask, "what kind of logic"? First order logic? Second order logic? Modal logic? Do we accept the law of the excluded middle? These questions, I suppose, would be similar to the "premises", and will change whether even valid proofs are considered valid, e.g. proof by contradiction fails if we don't accept the LEM, and modal logic axioms can lead to some weird ****. But, again, we still move forward along anyway, despite not having absolute premises. However, in any field where you do use logic, it's probably helpful to understand which assumptions you're making and why you're making them. It can help you work with your own study, and in doing that you're doing a kind of philosophy.

Also, it's unfortunate you picked metaphysics for your class. Metaphysics is, up to a limited extent in my view, bull****. A course on epistemology or philosophy of science would be far more interesting. You've mentioned a few times problems with how scientific research is conducted. That's great! There's plenty of interesting work done on this in the philosophy of science. One I was reading about recently was the analytic philosophy idea of theory-ladenness (just a reference, I'm not expecting you to read all of that). As the name suggests, it's a study into the question: "just how consistent is perception?" Experiments have concluded that, not only do people interpret perceptions differently, these interpretations can be accounted for by things such as where you work, that people from one laboratory will have biases in how they comprehend very primitive phenomena. In other words, bias in science doesn't just extend to the results, it goes as far as how people actually perceive the experiment itself. That's interesting to me. That's not just interesting, it's tangible, and can help people identify potential issues with experimental methods.

You could argue, yeah, but the actual findings were collected by scientists, and the philosophical discussion is too jargon-heavy to be worth reading. Both are fine criticisms, but I still think there's some true merit in the philosophical discussion. For the first criticism, I think philosophers are much better at being able to take a single experiment like that and contextualizing it into a larger understanding of science that scientists don't do. Science produces interpretations, philosophy produces interpretations of interpretations. You can create a thousand experiments which discuss all manners in which perception is inconsistent, but once you start trying to figure out what that means for science, you're doing philosophy of science. And I think the discussion of theory-ladenness to be a robust and widely-reaching one with many insights into the process of science.

For the jargon-heavy one, that depends often on what you choose to read. "What is this thing called Science?" is a great book on the philosophy of science that's very comprehensible and easy to read. The SEP is going to be less comprehensible, because it's meant to summarize for academics.



That's true, I wouldn't think Sam Harris' typical fans would care. I think the problem I have with both Sam Harris and Jordan Peterson is a similar one. It's not necessarily they they're writing poorly, it's that both Sam Harris and Jordan Peterson have come out swinging against intellectual traditions, both have made very disparaging comments about academia, and claim their interpretations supercede academic interpretations, while being dismissive towards criticism and refusing to engage satisfactorily with the counterarguments being presented to them. The feelings against them seem to come more out of these types of hostile interactions than anything.

I believe philosophy is capable of producing much more interesting and consequential discussions than the one Eversor and I are having. Epistemology and the philosophy of science are two areas I find very interesting and fruitful. Metaphysics seems pointless to me, always has. In fact two of my most favorite philosophers spent a good amount of their time writing scathing attacks on metaphysics.



Yeah, it's probably a waste of time to even launch the assault. Really, my first comment was the most apt one, that Sam Harris isn't really worth talking about.



I'm not sure what you're saying exactly my argument depends on. I feel what I was saying was really almost a matter of logic.

Also, random side note, one of the guys in the math department is married to a woman who works in one of the engineering departments. She's more knowledgeable about mathematics than her labmates, and so part of her work involves fitting data. She wanted to hear opinions from mathematicians on how to do this more efficiently, if there was maybe an algorithm or something that could get good probably estimates that's also mathematically sound.

I was reminded of the amount of discussion we've had on here about overfitting and the problems. As I was thinking of what to say about overfitting, two other people brought it up and she was well aware. So at least here, it seems many people are aware of the dangers of overfitting data. Which was reassuring.

Another, better way to put this is that intuitions form the basis of our thinking about morality. That's one fairly common view in the history of philosophy.



That's plainly not what I said but it's getting tedious correcting your misinterpretations of my views so let's end it there.

Overfitting has profound philosophical implications because it's clearly a useful concept in practice.

Also, I think if you are a user of statistics and you don't know about it, then I don't know what to say. Maybe what you're saying has to do with engineers' habit of blindly plugging **** into the computer and hoping it works.

Edit: fixed bolded text (don't know why I wrote "foundations"), didn't make any goddamn sense before. Sorry

Re Jon: I don't think philosophy is useful for anything, but according to Aristotle, that's what makes doing philosophy valuable: it's an end in itself, that derives its value from itself, and not for being useful. (Admittedly, that's a little more difficult to believe now that I'm out of college, but somehow it got me through grad school.)

And regarding Sam Harris: it doesn't matter why people find him appealing, and it doesn't offend me that people find him appealing, as Reid sometimes seems to. Frankly, I like having someone bring philosophy to bear on topical issues, even if his ideas aren't always the most rigorously thought out. And it doesn't bother me that he does so imperfectly. And why should it?

It is, but not in an interesting way. He assumes a priori that the problem doesn't exist, in an obfuscatory way, and then concludes that, therefore, the problem doesn't exist. Tautologies are valid. Asinine, but valid.

My criticism isn't about philosophy subject to the limitations of human reasoning, or even necessarily that the premises are argued in a circular way (although annoying), it's that the selection of premises under philosophy frequently seems vacuous. What does it even mean to discuss normativity, for example, when any choice of premises in philosophy is necessarily normative? Other efforts at human reasoning may suffer from the same limitations, and may use the same tools, but the goal is the exact opposite. Science, in particular, is the process of converting conclusion back into true premises. It's impossible, but at least an attempt is being made.

My understanding of philosophy is literally sophomoric, so I'm not at all trying to represent these as significant or even original criticisms. Understand this more as a retort to an earlier point you made, about how people dislike good philosophical arguments because they're challenging and not entertaining, and people prefer to be entertained. In my experience the problem isn't that people find good philosophical arguments too challenging, it's that they don't find them good.

Oh, I knew that going in. I took metaphysics as a joke. But again, my problem isn't about the material, it's about the argument. Metaphysics simply makes the patterns more obvious because it's so abstract and irrelevant that nobody should feel strongly about it.

For example, Black's symmetric universe argument against the identity of indiscernibles begs the question. Imagine a symmetric universe which contains nothing but two spheres, which have all of their properties in common. For example:

• 1m diameter
• gray
• 1000 kg
• 2m away from another sphere
• etc.

Well, except don't imagine it, because then you'd introduce an observer in your mind's eye which breaks the symmetry of this universe. Instead, just understand the universe. The identity of indiscernibles claims that an object, which has all of its properties in common with another object, is in fact that object. But the universe you've constructed in your mind has two distinct spheres in it, which happen to have all properties in common.

What have you actually constructed in your mind, though? You can't visualize this universe without introducing an observer, so you're left with, what? A linguistic description of the universe, i.e. a list of properties. Far from disproving the identity of indiscernibles, all the argument shows is that humans are capable of understanding and reciting the same list twice.

Black assumed, for no reason better than human intuition and human linguistics, that a universe with two objects exactly the same was even possible, and tried to use that assumption to disprove the identity of indiscernibles. But know what the most infuriating thing is? Leibniz anticipated quantum ****in' physics, an on-the-sleeve list of properties for which, in our universe, indiscernibility implies identity. So not only can you not mentally construct the universe Black described, but it cannot exist per our n=1 sample of extant universes. And when you assume a falsehood, you can prove anything.

Much of the philosophy I've seen has struck me as a kind of mysticism about human linguistic and psychological shortcomings, and even if it occasionally helps people get the gears moving, I personally don't have a lot of patience for most of it.

Well, not so much your argument (which, I think, is that Kant had a good point which Harris is ignoring), but the idea that Harris is necessarily wrong.

If the universe is a coordination game, meaning that everybody can achieve the best individual and collective outcome via the same comportment, then at least some oughts can be derived from whatever physical facts result in that coordination game. That leaves only the question of what a "good" outcome means. In Harris' view, "good" is what is clinically beneficial for the physical and biological system that houses the conscious human mind. The core of Harris' argument is that, if all people truly understand what is clinically beneficial, as a matter of physical and biological fact, then that understanding forms a nucleus of prescriptive statements which derive directly from descriptive ones. However, I don't think Harris' specific definition is pertinent; this condition arises so long as there is any coordination game maximizing some outcome which, given complete biological or physical understanding, all people would find desirable. Thus, we can use the idea of "universe is a coordination game" to convert statements of fact about our nature into unpredicated moral judgments.

Tying this back to politics, a universal coordination game is the basis of western law, democracy, socialism, communism, libertarianism, and the ultimate justification for why we believe people ought to be treated equally and given equal opportunities. Humans certainly seem to want Harris' assumptions to be true. I can't honestly say that I believe they are, but I also don't have any objective reason to assume they are false.

If people have no volition or agency, then all prescriptive statements are irrelevant. The facts of the world led to a brain forming a purposeless thought.



People know about overfitting, but they won't do anything about it. You need to collect a large amount of excess data with the intention of throwing it away. Create a model for a small and randomly selected portion of the data, then validate its predictive power against the rest of the data. It's expensive and reduces increases your p-value.

So instead what you do is take literally all of the data you've collected and let SPSS do "magic" and a publishable paper falls out the other end. If it doesn't work, don't worry. Try again 19 more times. (blindly plugging **** into the computer and hoping it works)

If my understanding of how neural nets is right, then it would seem that people doing things in tensorflow actually are being forced to understand overfitting pretty well, because it is only supposed to work if you have lots of data and throw things out.

Well, except that from what I've seen, people only worry about overfitting even in this case when they obviously have to (for example, if your classifier doesn't work very well).

I very much enjoy the much discussed and ubiquitous paint-dots-on-it object recognition “exploit”, which is basically textbook overfitting on the part of the trainers of practically every RNN in commercial use today.

Hmm. Then I supposed the problem begins with the assumption that enough data was collected in the first place.

Anyway, I believe the step is called 'dropout' (and I am not pretending that amateurs training NN's have anything but an operational understanding of it). Amusingly, some guy on Stack Exchange quotes Geoff Hinton as saying that humans "implement dropout" in order to stop overfitting.

On the other hand, I think humans overfit all the time! Yet we still manage to be useful. So maybe it's not so bad to build artificial classifiers that do so too, so long as they aren't presumed to represent knowledge (which is actionable), or else we get those examples of "racist machine learning" and the like that have come up here before.

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/12/opinion/paul-ryan-fascism.html



Oh Paul, don't make me swoon.

Bill Scher (guy on the left) gives a pretty good refutation of the view that Ryan would've been able to reform the GOP and make conservatism more popular if only he hadn't robbed of his chance: https://mobile.twitter.com/bloggingheads/status/984575193443119104

Damn, listening to that guy on the right defend Paul Ryans attempts to increase the retirement age a "thankless crusade" is like jabbing needles in my ears.

The problem with making conservatism more popular is, well, it's not really possible. Nothing the Republicans actually want to do is popular. You can't make increasing the retirement age popular because it's not. You can't make drastically increasing the debt to enrich billionaires popular because it's not.

Paul Krugman repeatedly writes the best opinion pieces out there. He's saying the words people need to be saying about people like Paul Ryan: he's a conman, "centrists" are committing malfeasance.



Yes, there's a phrase for that. Class war. Paul Ryan was an agent of class war.



Yes. And people need to say this: everybody making policy right now who's concerned about reducing budgets is a fraud. Every single one. Okay, maybe or or two have some legit tendencies. But they're the exception that prove the rule.



Yes. Conservative ideas do not have merit.



Yes. Again. 100% absolutely yes. This false centrist bull**** needs to eliminated. There are times when being radical is the sensible choice. We are in one of those times.



Again, yes. I don't like the Democrats, don't like Hillary Clinton, for many reasons. But we can't pretend Clinton and Trump are even remotely similar.



Yes! It's all bull****! It always has been and always will be, it's simply bull****!



Yes! YES! It's class war! It's naked, **** you for being poor class war! That's all the Republicans are! There is nothing meritorious there!

I was going to say more but I've kind of realized all I can say is that I 100% agree with everything Krugman said in this article. I'm glad he said it.

It's kind of interesting, though. I feel many people are sort of "waking up" to the reality of the Republican Party. We still do have that ever-present, whiny field of centrists working very hard to legitimize the illegitimate, but consensus is moving away from backing the Republican cancer, and I welcome every bit of it.

Now if only we can improve the Democrats as well..

Damn:

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/08/opinion/unicorns-of-the-intellectual-right.html?rref=collection%2Fcolumn%2Fpaul-krugman&action=click&contentCollection=opinion®ion=stream&module=stream_unit&version=latest&contentPlacement=2&pgtype=collection

And this, damn:

https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2018/3/15/17113176/new-york-times-opinion-page-conservatism

Damn. Are you reading this, Eversor? It's not just us wackadoodles here in our little echo chamber. Recognition of the resonating emptiness of conservative ideology and the problem of conservative apologia in the mainstream media is not fringe, it's mainstream.

Eliminated??! Yikes. To the gulag, centrists! You're traitors to the revolution!

Haha... I had typed out a response before I read the Vox article, and then I realized it was another one of thieves whiny pieces on Bari Weiss' twitter activity and conservative NYT staff writers. I'll admit that those conservatives probably don't have a massive following in the American public. But I think that people who point that out as a complaint don't really understand how our media is designed to work. It's not designed to reflect the opinions that people in the US think. It's designed to be an extension of conversations that our political elites have. Maybe it shouldn't be that way, but there's a very good reason why establishment views are reflected on the pages of the Times: because the paper is a platform to influence policy makers before it is a platform to influence the public. It's very elitist, but that should be expected from a legacy newspaper. If you don't like it, go read the intercept.

You really think that complaints about Bari Weiss' twitter activity moving off of twitter and into opinion click-baity pieces in Vox means that the idea that conservatism is hollow has moved out of echo chambers? Heh

You only have one tool in your shed, Eversor, and nobody thinks it's clever/funny/insightful.

So... no response? No recognition that saying that centrists should be eliminated is problematic, for numerous reasons?

He said their bull**** needs to be eliminated, not that they need to be eliminated. Centrism is a meaningless concept.