October 10th, 2022
- > scientific astronomy not being meaningfully different in an objective correctness sense from tribal mythology
- struck by a good critique of this postmodern take
- first of all, we have to separate objectivity from meaning/value — it's fine to have a non-objective story about something! good, even!
- then, we could use David Deutsch's hard-to-vary explanation criterion
- but we could equivalently point at the key difference by saying that we would expect different people with different contexts to be able to both derive/rediscover astronomy, which isn't true for tribal myths
- which seems to imply something of an ordering
- I've been over this before, but it's newly salient having been thinking about cultural evolution and the meta-protocol, which has this convergent intersubjective quality, while enabling increased diversity & originality!!
- something about coming into deeper relationship with reality, here
- and ofc the tribal mythologies are tried and tested and good at answering all the questions they're good at answering, which may include situated ones like "when do the salmon come up the river?" that convergent astronomy doesn't
- this is the sense in which meta-protocol is a science of trust
- but unlike most sciences which try to start with the completely objective (at least physical sciences, idk wtf soft sciences are doing) and move towards increasing precision & predictive power
- it's starting with the subjective and then moving towards increasing intersubjective!
- I looked up the phrase "science of trust" and I found results but they're all inadequate as an actual science of trust
- an article about oxytocin & game theory with high-level (tho decent!) management advice
- a paper called "trust in science and the science of trust" which parameterizes epistemic trust (in experts) as a function of "expertise, integrity, benevolence" (roughly power, wisdom, love, or 2. Power, 1. Presence, 3. Warmth from The Charisma Myth)
- evolution is way more important than most people realize & memetic evolution and I guess most specifically evolution includes WAY more than biological evolution
- came across this article that fails to grok evolution includes WAY more than biological evolution
- > The evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins (1986) used the analogy of a “blind watchmaker” to describe natural selection: “blind” because it is a mechanical process lacking any sort of foresight, and “watchmaker” because nonetheless, it manages to produce structures (living organisms!) that look as though they were deliberately designed.
- this is a terrible analogy, in that the blind watchmaker is nonetheless purposeful, and in that the watch is in fact deliberately designed!
- like if you saw a watch you'd be CORRECT to assume it was designed
- but moreover, design is evolutionary!! —it's just a purposeful evolutionary process
- In Dawkins' defense, he was responding to another guy:
- > A term coined in 1986 by the British ethologist Richard Dawkins (born 1941) to denote natural selection, alluding to the Argument from Design, an argument for the existence of God put forward in 1802 by the theologian William Paley (1743–1805). Paley argued that if he found a watch while crossing a heath he would conclude that it must have had a maker, because it is too intricate and precise to have arisen by accident, and that for the same reason the intricacy and precision of the works of nature forced him to conclude that they too must have had a maker, namely God; but Dawkins argued that natural selection operates like a blind watchmaker in fashioning the complicated structures of nature.
- but also, Dawkins was the guy who invented the "meme" meme. did he not see its implication here? the correct response to Paley isn't "natural selection is a blind watchmaker", it's "design is like nature—evolutionary—except it ALSO has intent"
- though in some sense most of the intelligence is in the evolutionariness, not in the intent
- (would have to unpack it a bit more, but yeah)
- "blind watchmaker" is sort of a homunculus fallacy, actually
- > It was explained further above that, in terms of reproductive fitness, the evolutionary trend is always upwards.
- sure, IF you assume a constant environment, which is a bad assumption almost to the point of being meaningless
- by environment I don't just mean climate, I mean the entire situation, including competition from predators, prey, and conspecifics (members of the same species)
- ah actually, the meaninglessness creeps in when you assume there could ever be a measurement of "fitness"
- Vervaeke points this out in 2012 paper Relevance Realization and the Emerging Framework in Cognitive Science
- okay the author sorta gets this, but there's still a funny frame issue here
- > The only thing that is constantly improving is the adaptedness of individuals to their given environment. Because the environment changes, this “progress” always remains relative – progress relative to the adaptedness to an environment.
- anyway, gonna stop arguing with this guy, as idk who he is and he's a straight-up reductionist so we've got a pretty substantial worldview gap
- oh ew it's by FRI, the people trying to stop atoms from suffering
- oh and multiple authors, so the evolution one wasn't written by the one who wrote up how reductionism is clearly true and good. still.