burrows

Would I rather spend money on scholarships for poor children or buy the recipe for a functional net-positive fusion reactor from aliens? How much recipe does each of my dollars get?

I’d give away all of my current net worth and take out a loan for $1 million from loan sharks and give that away too for a functional fusion reactor recipe, pending some questions about whether they will be able to sell the recipe again, do we actually have the materials to build the device and I’d want my nuclear engineer friend and lawyer to review the terms.

For every dollar you put in this box, I’ll put ten cents into a scholarship fund for poor children in your country then burn the dollar. How many dollars do you put into the box?

What if it were 300 cents instead?

> Maybe unwarranted, but that also makes me less willing to accept his ideas. Who knows what evidence, lead, etc. was met with the same laziness?

I think you can only say that you’ve chosen not to engage with this these arguments, not that you’ve rejected them as that would require engaging with them.

I think if there seems to be a contradiction between the tweet and the essay it’s only a sort of psuedo-contradiction.

The point of the essay (as I understand it) is that writing about something (as for example in a business plan) helps the writer understand the topic. The tweet says that pg is not interested in descriptions written by someone else. That writing a business plan can be edifying for the startup founder and at the same time of no interest to an investor, is consistent with both the essay and tweet.

> Perhaps it was just easier to ignore when we weren't sitting directly next to our children.

I like this take a lot. Similar to the difference between hearing about homelessness second hand and walking through an encampment in Seattle or DC.

What has stuck out to you the most while observing your kid’s remote classes?

I’m furiously speculating that in person pre-college public American education was mostly bad and this badness just carried over to remote education, but for whatever reason the badness is more apparent when conducted remotely.

Is “the security of the Internet” just a proxy for, “the number of vulns in the wild”?

> [P0] has greatly improve the overall security of the industry.

What is the argument for this?

Your inability to imagine convincing motives for the US government to lie about this is evidence that they are not lying about it?

What definitions of evidence and information are you using?

I liked this as well.

> MR PRICE: Matt, there’s a second point. This is derived from intelligence, intelligence in which we have confidence —

> QUESTION: Well —

> MR PRICE: — in which we have confidence, otherwise —

> QUESTION: The same confidence you had in WMD in Iraq? I mean, what —

> MR PRICE: Otherwise – otherwise – otherwise we would not be making it public in the way we are. But here’s the other point: Intelligence and evidence, these are two separate things. It is no —

What does he mean, “Intelligence and evidence are two separate things”? Is he saying that claims and evidence are different things?

> Yes. A computer can be in an infinite loop, lose power, and then stop functioning.

Ok. Are these claims accurate?

1. All physical systems must eventually halt.

2. In many cases physical systems correspond to formal computational systems.

> Infinite Loop: A system is in an infinite loop when that system keeps returning to the same state making it unable to progress

A system is called deterministic if all future states can be calculated from complete knowledge of any particular state.

So then because the system is deterministic, we know that if it returns to a previous state it must keep returning to this state forever?

> Forever: A time period that ranges from t=now to t=infinity.

Right, it’s a period of time, but the word “infinity” is not clarifying for me. Maybe, a period of time with no end?

Does the program halt when the power cuts out?

I think our disagreement is specious because it’s trying to import terms like “infinite loop”, “halt”, “program” from a formal theory into the material world.

I think I can only ask, how do you define infinite loop and forever?

No it can’t because there isn’t infinite energy.

X failed as a project if and only if X failed as a product or X consumed (hugely) more resources than initially planned?

But what other reasons that people might care about X failing as a project when it succeeds as a product?

> That textbook definition of “valid” only applies to purely deductive arguments. Outside of mathematics, most arguments humans make have a significant non-deductive component (inductive and/or abductive). So, unless we assume that moral reasoning is closer to mathematical reasoning than to the kinds of reasoning we normally use in the sciences and humanities-a very dubious assumption-the formal concept of “validity” you are invoking has rather limited relevance to morality.

I don’t have any sense for the various properties of inductive arguments. So to the extent that moral arguments are inductive, I have nothing to say. Thanks for pointing out that I’m assuming moral arguments must be deductive. Any recommendations for an introductory text on inductive arguments?

> That’s why I read your statement as intending “valid” informally rather than formally, since in its informal sense the term is not restricted to purely deductive arguments; and informally it is very much a normative concept (formally, I think it has multiple formal senses, some of which contain more normativity than others)

Understood.

> I think your overall point is, you are expressing scepticism about claims to know the truth of some particular moral proposition, grounded in a more general scepticism of the possibility of any moral knowledge at all.

Yes, that is my point.

> I think that kind of general moral scepticism is (usually) a form of normative scepticism. The big problem I see with normative scepticism, is that attempts to argue for it logically and rationally turn out to be self-refuting, because logic and rationality are themselves normative concepts.

This is the first time that I’ve heard of normative epistemology, which I gather is what you are talking about. One thing I will say though, thinking about this seems smoother than thinking about normative morality because (I think) I don’t have as many childhood memories of people telling me what I ought to think compared to those of people telling me what I ought to do.

> But you haven't explained how this (obviously true) statement is relevant to the original discussion, about the morality of providing life-saving medical treatment to perpetrators of serious crimes.

My original point was in response to the claim that “the key principle in medicine is to treat anyone who is sick, regardless of who they are”. I took this to be an ought and wanted to point out that its truth isn’t established anymore than the ought indicated by Ed’s family, and that in fact there would be serious difficulties with establishing either one for the reason given by your last post:

> a valid deductive argument with a normative conclusion must either have a normative premise, or else rely on a logic whose inference rules permit normative statements to be inferred from non-normative ones.

But also I think that this poster makes a good point that the doctors are actually making a positive claim.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30081152

> To call an argument "valid" is to make a normative claim; it is to claim that a rational agent ought to accept it.

I think I had in mind a textbook definition I had read.

An argument is called valid if it is impossible for the premises to be true and the conclusion false. And then we say that an argument is sound if it is both valid and has true premises.

Which seems like a useful pair of definitions, and in that context I was confused about the terms.

I actually haven’t ever thought about or heard of this idea of ‘when is a rational actor committed to accepting claims’. But yeah, seems interesting to me.

Thank you for prompting me to reevaluate my position.

Initially I claimed, “There are no valid arguments for normative claims.”, I would like to amend my claim.

Def: An inferential system is a tuple of axioms and inferential rules.

Def: An argument is a non-empty ordered sequence of statements. The last statement is called its conclusion.

Claim: If an inferential system produces an argument for a normative claim, the system is either inconsistent or permits inference from positive statements to normative statements or the argument proceeds from normative axioms.

Proof. Suppose S is a consistent inferential system and that A is an argument in S from S’s axioms to a normative conclusion. If S has only positive axioms then A makes inference from positive to normative statements. QED

Corollary: There are no arguments for normative claims that don’t proceed from normative axioms in consistent systems that don’t permit inference from normative to positive statements.

> I already said: First time surgery that might not work is an experiment as much as a treatment.

I don’t think changing the name of what happened from “treatment” to “experiment” tells me anything new. If another person with a roughly identical health status but without the violent history is also willing to accept the pig heart, then the decision must be made to use the scarce resources to treat Ed or the “non-violent” person.

> we'd find ourselves regarding this operation as his sacrifice for the greater good.

I agree that people may be talking about the transplant and Ed differently had he died on the table.

> The majority of ethicists agree that normative statements can express true statements.

What do you think is a good candidate for such a statement? My impression is that arguments must proceed from axioms, positive axioms aren’t helpful because the statement is normative and normative axioms just reproduce the issue.

> medical ethics is a prescriptive and lexical ethics, one that you must follow if you are to practice medicine.

What is the meaning of “lexical ethics”? Google didn’t return anything helpful.

I believe the essence of the claim you are making is that, “There is a powerful enforcement body that will only permit doctors to practice medicine if they do no harm and render treatment in accordance with their means.” I think this a positive claim about human behavior, a proposition potentially belonging to the set of sociological or historical facts.

I suspect the family is talking about the way things ought to be, “Heart transplants should go to good people”. And you are pointing out that the doctors are responding with a positive claim, “That’s not what we do here.”?

I’m not familiar with the details of this case, but I can imagine that the time and expertise of physicians capable of doing the surgery is scarce. What do you say to the claim that, “The time and resources including the surgeons and the pig heart should be put to use helping a more deserving person.”

> The key principle in medicine is to treat anyone who is sick, regardless of who they are.

The victims family is saying “Our principle is that people who stab Ed should not get a heart, therefore David should not get a heart.” The doctor is saying “Our principle is that we don’t use the patient’s past violence or convictions to determine whether they should get a heart or not, so the stabbing doesn’t disqualify David.”

Neither party can offer a valid argument as to why their principle is true, because both of their principles are normative.

I think it’s all missing forums, places (both public and private) where people from different “home servers” can communicate.

Does “sad” refer to an emotion? If so, don’t all emotions require a human? Then who feels sad because of or about this purported fact?

Or are you saying, “I don’t like it when people care about how they’ll be seen so much that they can’t do whatever they like.”?

What about someone saying, “I like red pants better than green pants.”?

> You get these weird interactions all the time on the Internet: If I ask someone a question about their reasoning, someone else may very well respond with what they think.

Is the question about the other party’s reasoning as in thought process or reasoning as in the argument they’ve written down? I think of arguments as public processes/entities, in that it doesn’t matter who/where critique comes from. But human beings have particular social psychology so there may be ‘effects’ from drive by critique.

> In a lot of Internet conversation it's like you are correcting people who you disagree with and then expounding what you think is true.

Often when I read something I don’t agree with, my mind immediately creates a caricature of the author and I get the impulse to crush/fix them.

> Whether you are agreeing or disagreeing, but there's not a lot of actual conversation, just... reactions.

Could you elaborate on the distinction you’re making between genuine conversations and records of reaction?

Specifically, did you imply that tone and recognition of the other party are factors?

> Maybe all new features in new Major version?

I don’t think I understand the (many) purpose(s) of OS versioning. Vendors use them to make specific maintenance commitments? “We will continue to make bug fixes for version XYZ until 2025.”

And if end users care about a particular program, “Okay, version XZY of my favorite OS supports programs A and B.”?

> But drivers should be buildable by the HW vendor right?

The vendor may not create a driver for this OS. “Only 10k people use this OS, therefore it’s likely not profitable for us to make a driver for it.”

> I could get behind “converge to a fixed scope, and polish relentlessly” as the primary ethos.

> Wouldn’t it be great for FreeBSD to be the first OS to have a release that was actually, truly finished?

By OS do you mean just the kernel or also the userspace?

Then I think the challenge is to determine what gets included under the purview of relentless polishing.

Assuming you mean just the kernel, then probably bug fixes are included. But what about drivers for new hardware? And when researchers at Stanford develop a new file system algorithm with foo bar baz properties? Or a new scheme for sandboxing user programs?

> I had two points in these posts. One is that none of this pertains to whether or not space is continuous.

To me, “space is continuous” seems like a proposition that must be demonstrated a posteriori and I wouldn’t expect properties of formal systems to serve as evidence for the claim. So I agree.

> The other is that the statement “arithmetic is consistent” is provable in some contexts.

Agreed.

> If the universe “contains” a model of PA then is that model consistent or not? How does one know? (I doubt it’s meaningful to say that the universe contains PA though.)

Okay, yes, how can we interact with or measure PA as implemented by the universe? How do we (or can we) meaningfully talk about the universe implementing PA?

Yes those questions seem interesting to me, but I don’t have anything intelligible to say about them.