6 ms·

The Lucretius Problem: How History Blinds Us

73 points by fagnerbrack 3y ago

mistermann 3y ago
[flagged]
- Uehreka 3y ago
  No and no. Note: I am not rate-limited, but will not reply in any manner whatsoever. No replies from my end will reference anything at all, because they won’t exist. Feel free to misunderstand whatever you please about this comment.
  - mistermann 3y ago
    > No and no. Do you present these as beliefs/predictions, or facts? If facts, please present your proofs. Alternatively, you can also engage in highly predictable rhetorical behavior, not unlike that of a LLM when prompted with certain ideas. I've presented these two ideas to thousands of human minds, I am interested in whether there is any(!) novelty in yours in this scenario. > Note: I am not rate-limited, but will not reply in any manner whatsoever. No replies from my end will reference anything at all, because they won’t exist. Feel free to misunderstand whatever you please about this comment. Off to a not surprising start.
    - PeterWhittaker 3y ago
      > > No and no > present facts That’s not how this works, anywhere: the burden of proof, of presenting facts, is on those who say “yes”. In the former case, we have only appeal to authority (some book says) and to personal belief, neither of which are facts. In the latter case, we have a proven medical fraud committed by a person with financial interest in rival treatments, said person having lost their medical license as a result of said fraud. Your serve.
      - karpierz 3y ago
        > That’s not how this works, anywhere: the burden of proof, of presenting facts, is on those who say “yes”. What? Why? If this were true, you could: 1. Take the claim you want to assert 2. Claim the negation of the claim is false (the "no"). 3. If anyone asks for facts, just say the burden of proof is on them to show the negation is true.
        CodeMage 3y ago
        You misunderstood what the comment you replied to was saying, and you also seem to either misunderstand or simply not know about the burden of proof. For my part, I find the original "no and no" reply perfectly adequate for the smug "I'm only asking questions" assertion-in-disguise that prompted it. Life is too short to debate trolls.
        vacuity 3y ago
        I agree that parent seems to be trolling, but I don't agree on your assessment about the burden-of-proof point. Where is the misunderstanding? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36661671 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36661671 (Other reply I made just now on the burden-of-proof thing)
        mistermann 3y ago
        > I agree that parent seems to be trolling You seem like an actually reasonable person (and thanks for the support)....do you think it's possible that there might be more to what it is I'm doing than "trolling"? A way to think about it: do you think it's possible that framing/perceiving those who are interested in accuracy as being "trolls" (as opposed to realizing that they are correct, and may actually have an important point) might cause long term harm to a culture? Another way to think about it: mocking Trump supporters and religious fundamentalists is both easy and fun, and therefore popular - but how much value is there in it? Now, contrast this to finding questions that ~everyone will fail on, including highly educated and genuinely smart people. How much value might there be in this (keeping in mind the numerous seemingly intractable problems we have going on on this shitshow of a planet)? I'm asking you rather than the other guy because I think you can likely actually consider the question. An interesting followup question maybe: what do you think about people (particularly smart people) who are not able to consider certain things, but seem to be trapped in a cycle of only being able heuristically process certain ideas. I am very suspicious that this is not a 100% naturally emergent aspect of our culture - I speculate that people have been made this way. And if they've been made this way (or even if not), perhaps they can be improved.
    - michaelmrose 3y ago
      What is introduced without evidence may be dismissed without evidence. The singular proof of a link between vaccines and autism is a study we now know was a fraud. More generally since no vaccination was undertaken worldwide in a day the correlation would be evident and spoiler alert it is not. Please don't respond with a YouTube video "proving" your case.
      - mistermann 3y ago
        > What is introduced without evidence may be dismissed without evidence. We do indeed seem to have substantial freedom of choice in the environment we all find ourselves in - place your bets, and Mother Nature will reward you according to the quality of your thinking, measured on an absolute scale. > Please don't respond with a YouTube video "proving" your case. Hopefully this is more to your liking: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/There_are_unknown_unknowns https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/There_are_unknown_unknowns
  - wfme 3y ago
    This comment is a direct violation of the comment guidelines [0]. Flag and move on. [0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
    - mistermann 3y ago
      Hiding from the fundamental problems our system is composed of may be polite and pleasant, but it may also ultimately be very harmful. And that goes for the downvoters of the original question as well: you may not be interested in epistemology, but epistemology might be interested in you. Best of luck on all the problems in your system, let's hope they all somehow magically resolve themselves to a good outcome!
      - wfme 3y ago
        My comment was directed at Uehreka's comment, not yours. I think yours is at least the start of a discussion, whereas Uehreka's was an attempt to dismiss it entirely.
  - netfortius 3y ago
    Can we let the "flagged" stamp go, and make the parent comment visible to the community? This specific thread sparked some interesting follow ups, and not making it available feels like an Elon reaction.
    - hef19898 3y ago
      You can set show dead in your profile, useful feat to see what kinds of dead comments there are.
    - mistermann 3y ago
      As far as I'm concerned I'm fine with it remaining flagged/dead - if it minimizes the chances that any wisdom contained within can be used the next time you guys find yourself in the middle of yet another crisis you've mismanaged yourself into it may be best from a karma perspective.
- vacuity 3y ago
  TL;DR: One's reality is exactly that. "God", if He exists, is inherently beyond one's reality (for me and presumably everyone else on this planet). Otherwise "God" would be another being or a phenomenon or something that we could maybe percieve and even comprehend at some point, but that's not possible. Even the Standard Model is more real than "God" is. Whether or not "God" exists, we can't know as we are. I'll bite for the first question, since you so kindly mentioned epistemology. Whether or not there is a God, I can't know. I would say "we" can't know, but I shouldn't presume that "we" are all at most around the same level of reality that I am. The concept of "God" inherently implies that a "non-God" (such as me) can't find out the truth about whether there is a "God", and if so, the surrounding truths and lies. If we (back to normal "we") never had spaceships, telescopes, or anything else of the sort (indulge me), how would we ever find out the truth about the structure Milky Way galaxy? It would just be beyond us, but only technologically. This kind of epistemological investigation is in some ways utterly antithetical to mathematics. In maths, one can set axioms and prove a great many things (not necessarily all things, though). It's almost like creating things out of thin air. However, we can't even know "God" unless we can become "God", or else achieve a similar level of reality. We can set axioms to describe things within our own level of reality, but if there are axioms of some higher level of reality, we can't reach them like we are. If there is a higher level of reality with "God", then "God" also may be contained within a higher level of reality. We simply can't know. There is nothing "beyond" to know. The entire study of how we come to know things, epistemology, is thus bounded by this principle. It's not even an axiom, which is something taken to be true and then used to reason about things. There is no denying it, because what you perceive as reality is proof that you exist in your reality. You maybe don't even need a concept of "I" at this level, because your reality can't be anything but your reality. Your sense of reality may be constantly changing, but there is some reality you are within at a given point in time. All your beliefs, your memories, your experiences, what you think are your memories and experiences: anything and everything that you "know" is your reality. Your reality is that which can't be dispelled as an illusion. An illusion is a concept that you reject as reality. Babies hardly seem to know anything, but they generally have shifts in mindset, such as suddenly understanding object permanence. Suddenly the baby's reality is expanded. Something that wasn't even considered as a thought suddenly becomes routine. Of course, things aren't always so drastic. As more cognizant (than babies, certainly) beings conversing on Hacker News, one may have suspicions, conjectures, doubts, and whatnot as to one's sense of reality. All that is part of one's reality, really. There can be no reality one "knows" aside from the reality one already "knows". Perhaps one's reality at time 0 becomes illusion at time 1, superseded by a reality that may be very similar or noticeably different. To tie in a bit of psychological mischief, perhaps one's reality is altered in dreams; still, if there is any thought of anything, it exists within the context of one's reality. Haha. That was a lot. I'm 100% not trolling. All that was my sincere thoughts. As usual, I figured some of it up on the fly. I've never followed any philosophers or anything, and hardly even know of philosophical works. I think I'm sane. Oh well. You did ask for it.
winstonewert 3y ago
This doesn't track for me. Lots of people forecast, rightly or wrongly, events much worse then we've ever experienced: catastrophic climate change, apocalyptic nuclear war, immentiment economic collapse, etc. So no, I don't think we are somehow limited in our imagination to events that we've already observed to happen.
- cubefox 3y ago
  Many people respond to arguments for AI extinction risk with "that's science fiction", "that's fear-mongering", "you should instead focus on bias & misinformation in the here and now", etc. These "counterarguments" seem to be often motivated by the inability to imagine such a big catastrophy as it exceeds the previous ones.
  - ggm 3y ago
    I think you are both in a semantic linguistic argument. If person a and b are in dispute about topic c, then definitionally they can both hold concept c in their head as a named concept. When somebody says "that's inconceivable" they mean something figuratively not literally.
jrd259 3y ago
There's also such a thing as over-building. Robustness, per se, is good, but it comes at a price, including the opportunity cost. My city, Toronto, has never known a serious earthquake, though there is a fault zone in nearby Ottawa. Should we build all our skyscrapers to match the building code of, say, Seattle?
- klysm 3y ago
  How much more do we know about the risk other than the existence of the fault?
- metaphor 3y ago
  This strikes me as a false dilemma. What's troubling at face value is that the setup nudges us towards the all too common deceit of "past observations beget future outcomes" without saying anything meaningful about forward-looking risk likelihood and consequence. The architect may think it best to assume the risk; the engineer, control it; the city planner, avoid it; the business executive, transfer it. Perhaps the risk itself lacks specificity. Perhaps mitigation incorporates a bit from all major stakeholders. Surely there are other options to consider that have yet to be dealt.
nologic01 3y ago
Taleb habitually oversimplifies things, creating strawmen to score easy points. He does generate discussion but probably not in the quarters he is targeting. The deeper philosophical argumemts about the nature of knowledge have been debated endlessly [1]. The naive empiricism he criticises is never too far as a stance (see e.g the discussion about how much an LLM understands the knowledge embedded in the language corpus). There are pragmatic reasons people use historical data in a direct rather than indirect "internalized" way to assess range of outcomes of a system. One reason is the lack of understanding of such complex systems. I.e., the absence of usable and validated mathematical / logical constructs that would allow accurate answers to what-if type questions. Another reason of sticking to historical data is simply the fact they are harder to game. Ofcourse a practice might get established for more or less valid reasons but degenerate over time into a stylized bureaucratic convention. The pathologies associated with incomplete understanding (in particular( of the human condition are many and they are quite dangerous if not existential. "Angry men" railing at the "system" to sell books might not be the optimal path to get on top of them. [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Empiricism https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Empiricism
singularity2001 3y ago
and example of worse things yet to come would be a Chernobyl in a major European or American city. "can never happen again" of course
ezekiel68 3y ago
The other commenters have covered this pretty well. I came here to say that, for well over 90% of the time, the naive stess-testing heuristic not only works well, it is overkill for the true stresses which will occur in at least the medium term.
mst 3y ago
> nature, unlike Fragilista Greenspan, prepares for what has not happened before, assuming worse harm is possible What utter tosh. The random walk across trait combinations that underlies evolution means that when worse harm occurs there's often a decent chance that at least -some- members of any given species will manage to survive, true, but plenty of species just go extinct in a situation like that. Plus 'prepares' implies an active application of agency that simply isn't part of the underlying process. "Be aware that the next disaster could be worse and try to think clearly about to what extent it's going to be good ROI overall to have defences that will survive it" is good advice and no matter how obvious it might -feel- is probably something well worth explicitly pointing out to people every so often, but 'nature prepares' is still rubbish and Taleb would've had a more solid critique of Greenspan's choices had he stuck to arguments with a basis in reality. (this sort of thing continues to restrict how much Taleb I can consume at once before needing to take a week or two for the annoyance to fade - I often feel like there's room in the world for a "Taleb: The Good Parts" where somebody else trudges through the stupid bits to extract the useful insights)
xkcd1963 3y ago
I'm quite sure it's not a mental defect but if anything a fallacy.
Sophistifunk 3y ago
The best data you have is the best data you have, no matter how incomplete it may be.

73 points by fagnerbrack 3y ago

mistermann 3y ago

[flagged]

Uehreka 3y ago
No and no. Note: I am not rate-limited, but will not reply in any manner whatsoever. No replies from my end will reference anything at all, because they won’t exist. Feel free to misunderstand whatever you please about this comment.
- mistermann 3y ago
  > No and no. Do you present these as beliefs/predictions, or facts? If facts, please present your proofs. Alternatively, you can also engage in highly predictable rhetorical behavior, not unlike that of a LLM when prompted with certain ideas. I've presented these two ideas to thousands of human minds, I am interested in whether there is any(!) novelty in yours in this scenario. > Note: I am not rate-limited, but will not reply in any manner whatsoever. No replies from my end will reference anything at all, because they won’t exist. Feel free to misunderstand whatever you please about this comment. Off to a not surprising start.
  - PeterWhittaker 3y ago
    > > No and no > present facts That’s not how this works, anywhere: the burden of proof, of presenting facts, is on those who say “yes”. In the former case, we have only appeal to authority (some book says) and to personal belief, neither of which are facts. In the latter case, we have a proven medical fraud committed by a person with financial interest in rival treatments, said person having lost their medical license as a result of said fraud. Your serve.
    - karpierz 3y ago
      > That’s not how this works, anywhere: the burden of proof, of presenting facts, is on those who say “yes”. What? Why? If this were true, you could: 1. Take the claim you want to assert 2. Claim the negation of the claim is false (the "no"). 3. If anyone asks for facts, just say the burden of proof is on them to show the negation is true.
      - CodeMage 3y ago
        You misunderstood what the comment you replied to was saying, and you also seem to either misunderstand or simply not know about the burden of proof. For my part, I find the original "no and no" reply perfectly adequate for the smug "I'm only asking questions" assertion-in-disguise that prompted it. Life is too short to debate trolls.
        vacuity 3y ago
        I agree that parent seems to be trolling, but I don't agree on your assessment about the burden-of-proof point. Where is the misunderstanding? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36661671 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36661671 (Other reply I made just now on the burden-of-proof thing)
        mistermann 3y ago
        > I agree that parent seems to be trolling You seem like an actually reasonable person (and thanks for the support)....do you think it's possible that there might be more to what it is I'm doing than "trolling"? A way to think about it: do you think it's possible that framing/perceiving those who are interested in accuracy as being "trolls" (as opposed to realizing that they are correct, and may actually have an important point) might cause long term harm to a culture? Another way to think about it: mocking Trump supporters and religious fundamentalists is both easy and fun, and therefore popular - but how much value is there in it? Now, contrast this to finding questions that ~everyone will fail on, including highly educated and genuinely smart people. How much value might there be in this (keeping in mind the numerous seemingly intractable problems we have going on on this shitshow of a planet)? I'm asking you rather than the other guy because I think you can likely actually consider the question. An interesting followup question maybe: what do you think about people (particularly smart people) who are not able to consider certain things, but seem to be trapped in a cycle of only being able heuristically process certain ideas. I am very suspicious that this is not a 100% naturally emergent aspect of our culture - I speculate that people have been made this way. And if they've been made this way (or even if not), perhaps they can be improved.
  - michaelmrose 3y ago
    What is introduced without evidence may be dismissed without evidence. The singular proof of a link between vaccines and autism is a study we now know was a fraud. More generally since no vaccination was undertaken worldwide in a day the correlation would be evident and spoiler alert it is not. Please don't respond with a YouTube video "proving" your case.
    - mistermann 3y ago
      > What is introduced without evidence may be dismissed without evidence. We do indeed seem to have substantial freedom of choice in the environment we all find ourselves in - place your bets, and Mother Nature will reward you according to the quality of your thinking, measured on an absolute scale. > Please don't respond with a YouTube video "proving" your case. Hopefully this is more to your liking: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/There_are_unknown_unknowns https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/There_are_unknown_unknowns
- wfme 3y ago
  This comment is a direct violation of the comment guidelines [0]. Flag and move on. [0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
  - mistermann 3y ago
    Hiding from the fundamental problems our system is composed of may be polite and pleasant, but it may also ultimately be very harmful. And that goes for the downvoters of the original question as well: you may not be interested in epistemology, but epistemology might be interested in you. Best of luck on all the problems in your system, let's hope they all somehow magically resolve themselves to a good outcome!
    - wfme 3y ago
      My comment was directed at Uehreka's comment, not yours. I think yours is at least the start of a discussion, whereas Uehreka's was an attempt to dismiss it entirely.
- netfortius 3y ago
  Can we let the "flagged" stamp go, and make the parent comment visible to the community? This specific thread sparked some interesting follow ups, and not making it available feels like an Elon reaction.
  - hef19898 3y ago
    You can set show dead in your profile, useful feat to see what kinds of dead comments there are.
  - mistermann 3y ago
    As far as I'm concerned I'm fine with it remaining flagged/dead - if it minimizes the chances that any wisdom contained within can be used the next time you guys find yourself in the middle of yet another crisis you've mismanaged yourself into it may be best from a karma perspective.
vacuity 3y ago
TL;DR: One's reality is exactly that. "God", if He exists, is inherently beyond one's reality (for me and presumably everyone else on this planet). Otherwise "God" would be another being or a phenomenon or something that we could maybe percieve and even comprehend at some point, but that's not possible. Even the Standard Model is more real than "God" is. Whether or not "God" exists, we can't know as we are. I'll bite for the first question, since you so kindly mentioned epistemology. Whether or not there is a God, I can't know. I would say "we" can't know, but I shouldn't presume that "we" are all at most around the same level of reality that I am. The concept of "God" inherently implies that a "non-God" (such as me) can't find out the truth about whether there is a "God", and if so, the surrounding truths and lies. If we (back to normal "we") never had spaceships, telescopes, or anything else of the sort (indulge me), how would we ever find out the truth about the structure Milky Way galaxy? It would just be beyond us, but only technologically. This kind of epistemological investigation is in some ways utterly antithetical to mathematics. In maths, one can set axioms and prove a great many things (not necessarily all things, though). It's almost like creating things out of thin air. However, we can't even know "God" unless we can become "God", or else achieve a similar level of reality. We can set axioms to describe things within our own level of reality, but if there are axioms of some higher level of reality, we can't reach them like we are. If there is a higher level of reality with "God", then "God" also may be contained within a higher level of reality. We simply can't know. There is nothing "beyond" to know. The entire study of how we come to know things, epistemology, is thus bounded by this principle. It's not even an axiom, which is something taken to be true and then used to reason about things. There is no denying it, because what you perceive as reality is proof that you exist in your reality. You maybe don't even need a concept of "I" at this level, because your reality can't be anything but your reality. Your sense of reality may be constantly changing, but there is some reality you are within at a given point in time. All your beliefs, your memories, your experiences, what you think are your memories and experiences: anything and everything that you "know" is your reality. Your reality is that which can't be dispelled as an illusion. An illusion is a concept that you reject as reality. Babies hardly seem to know anything, but they generally have shifts in mindset, such as suddenly understanding object permanence. Suddenly the baby's reality is expanded. Something that wasn't even considered as a thought suddenly becomes routine. Of course, things aren't always so drastic. As more cognizant (than babies, certainly) beings conversing on Hacker News, one may have suspicions, conjectures, doubts, and whatnot as to one's sense of reality. All that is part of one's reality, really. There can be no reality one "knows" aside from the reality one already "knows". Perhaps one's reality at time 0 becomes illusion at time 1, superseded by a reality that may be very similar or noticeably different. To tie in a bit of psychological mischief, perhaps one's reality is altered in dreams; still, if there is any thought of anything, it exists within the context of one's reality. Haha. That was a lot. I'm 100% not trolling. All that was my sincere thoughts. As usual, I figured some of it up on the fly. I've never followed any philosophers or anything, and hardly even know of philosophical works. I think I'm sane. Oh well. You did ask for it.

winstonewert 3y ago

This doesn't track for me. Lots of people forecast, rightly or wrongly, events much worse then we've ever experienced: catastrophic climate change, apocalyptic nuclear war, immentiment economic collapse, etc. So no, I don't think we are somehow limited in our imagination to events that we've already observed to happen.

cubefox 3y ago
Many people respond to arguments for AI extinction risk with "that's science fiction", "that's fear-mongering", "you should instead focus on bias & misinformation in the here and now", etc. These "counterarguments" seem to be often motivated by the inability to imagine such a big catastrophy as it exceeds the previous ones.
- ggm 3y ago
  I think you are both in a semantic linguistic argument. If person a and b are in dispute about topic c, then definitionally they can both hold concept c in their head as a named concept. When somebody says "that's inconceivable" they mean something figuratively not literally.

jrd259 3y ago

There's also such a thing as over-building. Robustness, per se, is good, but it comes at a price, including the opportunity cost. My city, Toronto, has never known a serious earthquake, though there is a fault zone in nearby Ottawa. Should we build all our skyscrapers to match the building code of, say, Seattle?

klysm 3y ago
How much more do we know about the risk other than the existence of the fault?
metaphor 3y ago
This strikes me as a false dilemma. What's troubling at face value is that the setup nudges us towards the all too common deceit of "past observations beget future outcomes" without saying anything meaningful about forward-looking risk likelihood and consequence. The architect may think it best to assume the risk; the engineer, control it; the city planner, avoid it; the business executive, transfer it. Perhaps the risk itself lacks specificity. Perhaps mitigation incorporates a bit from all major stakeholders. Surely there are other options to consider that have yet to be dealt.

nologic01 3y ago

Taleb habitually oversimplifies things, creating strawmen to score easy points. He does generate discussion but probably not in the quarters he is targeting. The deeper philosophical argumemts about the nature of knowledge have been debated endlessly [1]. The naive empiricism he criticises is never too far as a stance (see e.g the discussion about how much an LLM understands the knowledge embedded in the language corpus). There are pragmatic reasons people use historical data in a direct rather than indirect "internalized" way to assess range of outcomes of a system. One reason is the lack of understanding of such complex systems. I.e., the absence of usable and validated mathematical / logical constructs that would allow accurate answers to what-if type questions. Another reason of sticking to historical data is simply the fact they are harder to game. Ofcourse a practice might get established for more or less valid reasons but degenerate over time into a stylized bureaucratic convention. The pathologies associated with incomplete understanding (in particular( of the human condition are many and they are quite dangerous if not existential. "Angry men" railing at the "system" to sell books might not be the optimal path to get on top of them. [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Empiricism https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Empiricism

singularity2001 3y ago

and example of worse things yet to come would be a Chernobyl in a major European or American city. "can never happen again" of course

ezekiel68 3y ago

The other commenters have covered this pretty well. I came here to say that, for well over 90% of the time, the naive stess-testing heuristic not only works well, it is overkill for the true stresses which will occur in at least the medium term.

mst 3y ago

> nature, unlike Fragilista Greenspan, prepares for what has not happened before, assuming worse harm is possible What utter tosh. The random walk across trait combinations that underlies evolution means that when worse harm occurs there's often a decent chance that at least -some- members of any given species will manage to survive, true, but plenty of species just go extinct in a situation like that. Plus 'prepares' implies an active application of agency that simply isn't part of the underlying process. "Be aware that the next disaster could be worse and try to think clearly about to what extent it's going to be good ROI overall to have defences that will survive it" is good advice and no matter how obvious it might -feel- is probably something well worth explicitly pointing out to people every so often, but 'nature prepares' is still rubbish and Taleb would've had a more solid critique of Greenspan's choices had he stuck to arguments with a basis in reality. (this sort of thing continues to restrict how much Taleb I can consume at once before needing to take a week or two for the annoyance to fade - I often feel like there's room in the world for a "Taleb: The Good Parts" where somebody else trudges through the stupid bits to extract the useful insights)

xkcd1963 3y ago

I'm quite sure it's not a mental defect but if anything a fallacy.

Sophistifunk 3y ago

The best data you have is the best data you have, no matter how incomplete it may be.