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"If your elders are wrong, you have as much cause to contradict them as they would to contradict you if you were wrong. [...] Once, long after I became an adult
by Barrin92 2y ago
"If your elders are wrong, you have as much cause to contradict them as they would to contradict you if you were wrong. [...] Once, long after I became an adult with children of my own, my parents asked me if it would have been better for them to have brought me up in their parents’ religion: Judaism. I replied that I preferred having been brought up in what they believed in: 18th century rationalism, the belief system of Adam Smith and David Hume."
This is very emblematic of the sort of thinking you also get from other modernist Enlightenment advocates like Steven Pinker or 20th century positivists but it's simply an extremely cartoonish position. For no good reason it assumes that everything worth doing is legible to individuals, even children in this case, and if you can't present an explicit "rational" argument for it, there's no good reason for it to be around.
Of course the fundamental problem is that there's no reason to believe that everything of value in the world is legible, in particular to individuals, and throwing long traditions away just because you can't defend them at any given point doesn't mean that in them isn't encoded some institutional knowledge that nobody can directly articulate. If an entire community acted like this household of eccentric libertarian economists it'd look like an insane asylum.
In many ways a good analogy for what's wrong with this worldview is the whole old vs new AI debate where you had the Chomsky rationalist, let's explicitly construct all knowledge camp vs the learning approaches. The philosophical insight for why the latter won out is because most valuable knowledge in the world can't be articulated, it's just embedded in practices.
- brigandish 2y agoIf you're part of a long tradition and yet still can't provide rational arguments for its continued existence then it only exists because of feelings, which will inevitably, fade. Learning incrementally is not the same as following an unjustifiable tradition, nor is it in opposition to wanting to provide arguments based on what we know now. A tradition is in opposition to learning incrementally, because when it is wrong there will be unjustifiable resistance to correction.
- calf 2y agoThen "learning approaches" camp (which BTW is also an academic camps and somehow able to do science) cannot prove that knowledge embedded in practices is actually being learned at all by their machines, if one rejects legibility. It's not even non-legible: it's self contradictory, i.e., unintelligible (which means a different thing than merely legible).
- saulpw 2y ago> If an entire community acted like this household of eccentric libertarian economists it'd look like an insane asylum. I mean Milton Friedman (the author's father) was quite influential in the late 20th century, and arguably his ideas are responsible for much of the insanity of modern capitalism.
- thyrsus 2y agoI doubt most cannot be articulated, but I think it quite likely there is valuable knowledge that is expensive to articulate, sometimes to the point of complete impracticality, and in that sense "can't". Instances of actual inability to articulate, due to Godel incompleteness or similar, seem rare. Technology applied to knowledge can change the expense.