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Aubrey de Grey Discussion, 20

I discussed epistemology and cryonics with Aubrey de Grey via email. Click here to find the rest of the discussion. Yellow quotes are from Aubrey de Grey, with permission. Bluegreen is me, red is other.
OK look, one more time. I’m all about practicalities. I’m starting from the position that I make decisions in whats really close to the optimal way,
This claim of being close to limits of progress is completely contrary to _The Beginning of Infinity_, which you (or any writing by anyone, which you endorse) haven't offered criticism of.
when taking into account the need to limit the time to make them. The challenges you give to my position seem to me to be no more than dancing around the practicalities - arguing that other methods are better without addressing the trade-off between quality and speed, or without addressing the magnitude of the difference (how often would you come to a better view than me because of a better reasoning mething? Once every million years?).
The typical person mistakenly accepts win/lose non-solutions on a daily basis.

The magnitude of the difference is: it's such a big issue it's qualitative, not quantitative. It's a more important difference than merely 100x better. It's John Galt vs. Jim Taggart. It's reason vs. irrationality.

The idea of a quality/speed tradeoff or compromise is a misconception. And an excuse for arbitrary irrationality. It's the kind of thing that blights people's lives on a daily basis, as well as hindering scientific progress.

There do exist quality/speed tradeoffs in some sense of the term. But NOT in the sense of ever requiring acting on arbitrary ideas, win/loses, non-solutions, or known-to-be-refuted ideas. Which is what you say you do, on a regular basis. Every time you do that it's a big mistake that Elliotism would have handled differently by finding a non-refuted non-arbitrary idea in a timely manner and using that.
When I look back at history and I see people making mistakes, I see those mistakes arising from lack of information, or from prejudice, etc - I can’t think of a single case where the mistake arose from using induction or justificationism rather than CR.
The mistakes don't arise from lack of information. Even deep space has lots of information, like _The Beginning of Infinity_ discusses.

How did Louis Pasteur refute the spontaneous generation theory? He did experiments in which he looked at the conditions under which food and wine would spoil. They wouldn't spoil unless germs got in. Why didn't anybody do those experiments before? People knew food spoiled before Louis Pasteur came along. Microscopes had been around since the 17th century. So why did it take until the mid 19th century? People weren't looking for an explanation or for a solution to the relevant problems. They had methodology problems. Huge scientific opportunities are routinely passed over, for decades (or much longer) because people are bad at philosophy, bad a thinking, bad at science.

Most inductivists have had unproductive careers, never figuring out anything very important. I'm guessing you treat it as natural that most people aren't geniuses, and miss lots of stuff. You sort of expect the status quo. But what you're used to is caused by deeply irrational thinking methods. Rational methods open up unbounded human potential.

Prejudice, etc, are epistemology-methodology issues too.
I'd very much have expected you to raise such an example by now.
I gave several such examples in my previous email, e.g. the explanationless correlation studies in the social sciences. That's a bunch of justificationists wasting their careers using justificationist methods that will never work.

You apparently didn't understand what was being said (typically both our faults, communication is hard) and didn't ask for more explanation (your fault, big methodology error that really messes up communication, discussion and learning).
It’s true that I’m pretty unsure whether I’m elaborating a good justification for my own methods, because after all I am making it up as I go along - but conversely I still claim that there’s a good chance that my methods to indeed withstand scrutiny (again, measured in terms of practicalities), simply because I’m unaware of any substantive changes having occurred in my methods for a good few decades.
Not having learned anything major in philosophy in the last few decades is a terrible argument that your ideas are good enough and you can stop worrying about learning.

And if you aren't having many problems in practice, it could be because you're actually doing an unrefined version of Elliotism. It's not an argument that any of the philosophy you're advocating is any good.

Your stated methods don't withstand scrutiny. Early on I criticized them. You conceded they have big flaws. Then you claimed they are practical anyway, basically because you assume better isn't possible. More recently I also pointed out (for example) that the random sampling stuff doesn't work at all, a topic you dropped without ever saying a way to do it.

There is a better way to think, you aren't at the limits of progress. So I explained it, and you said it wouldn't work in a timely fashion. Why? What's the criticism of my position? You didn't understand it well enough to answer, and also didn't ask questions and give feedback to find out more about it. And we've been kind of stuck there, plus going on some tangents to discuss some other misconceptions.

You haven't understood Elliotism's way of getting timely non-refuted non-arbitrary ideas to act on because of the very thinking methodology errors you believe are harmless. That includes e.g. being unwilling to read things explaining how to do it, which really messes up your ability to learn anything complex. Then, somehow, you blame me or my ideas when you straight up refused to make the effort required to learn something like Elliotism. If you're busy, fine, but that isn't a flaw of Elliotism or a failure on my part. It'd be you choosing not to find time to learn about something important enough to make a reasonable judgment about it.
At the bottom line: why do you think we still, after all this discussion, disagree about cryonics?
Primarily because we're both more interested in epistemology and discussed that more. And a major feature of the cryonics part of the discussion was your epistemology view (and mine to the contrary) that it'd take too long to work out the cryonics issues in the amount of detail I think is needed to correctly judge that sort of complex issue. (An amount of detail which I think you exceed in your biology thinking.)

Secondarily because you didn't answer a lot of what I said about cryonics and resisted giving arguments (which I kept asking for) either directly criticizing my position or explaining and arguing yours. This is a result of your methodology which doesn't pay enough attention to individual precise ideas and criticisms, and instead jumps from a vague understanding to an arbitrary conclusion.

(I suspect you approach biology in a different, significantly better way. But if you understood the correct thinking methodology, and what you actually did in biology, that'd enable you to compare and make valuable refinements. So philosophy still matters.)

Continue reading the next part of the discussion.

Elliot Temple on December 9, 2014

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