Gabriel Bodeen @gabe@qoto.org

Like a river draws all who ride it toward a common sea...

I crave a new philosophical method, one with a built-in tendency toward convergence, analogously to how science and math each slowly converge toward consensus by their own methods.

Perhaps this simple method?:

Place before you a blank sheet of paper. With your interlocutor, discuss each other's views. On the paper, write only those statements to which you both heartily agree. Aim to fill the page with valuable truths. Share the best of them.

After a good & deep political discussion, a man privately asked me what my politics was. I admitted I wasn't really sure, and it gave me a queer mixed feeling. I was proud to have not been pegged into any specific label, and sad that so few share my intuitions, and most of all confused at not even knowing anymore how to respond to such a basic question.

I've had a few days now to reflect, and this is where I am in 2023:

1) Like classical liberals, I believe the twin duties of government are to protect the rights of individuals and to promote the public's material wellbeing.

2) Like progressives, I believe the most important rights of individuals are political & social equality, such that they can live the manner of life they choose.

3) Like socialists, I believe rights of political & social equality should extend into the workplace, and indeed into all human relationships and institutions.

4) Like capitalists, I believe material inequality is permissible and useful to promote both the public's material wellbeing and individual virtue.

5) Like communists, I believe the goods necessary for a dignified life (by the standards of the local culture) should be guaranteed to be within the capacity of all to attain, even the most unfortunate and least deserving, such that they can solve their own problems.

6) Like classical conservatives, I believe that reforms should be gradual, orderly, and reversible, and also that the government must promote virtue and discourage vice.

7) Like patriotic nationalists, I believe the virtues to be rewarded by the government are secular, individualistic, and aimed at national greatness: lawfulness, responsibility, honesty, courage, prudence, peacefulness, tolerance, and the like.

8) Like cosmopolitan internationalists, I believe the people of all countries deserve the same rights and an equal measure of dignity, and that coexistence in the same communities is possible and good.

Label it as you choose. (In the US context, 1, 2, 4, & 8 are associated with the Democratic party; 3 & 5 are to its left; and 6 & 7 aren't anywhere on the map. So my party preference is clear.)

I've been reading the 2016 sci-fi book "Too Like the Lightning", by Ada Palmer -- and loving it so much! Honestly I was hooked by the *title page*, because it just jumped right into the world building with gusto. (The pic is a bit blurry, sorry. But take a look anyway!)

Next paper for the Austin LessWrong philosophy working group: "The Virtue of Subtlety and the Vice of a Heavy Hand" by Alex King: http://philosopher-king.com/king_subtlety.pdf

The whole branch of aesthetics is new to me, except for arguments defining art or beauty. I wanted something that felt different, something that focused our attention on the qualities of particular artworks and makes us think about them. This paper does so in a way I find accessible but exciting 🙂.

Ugh, somebody let porn into the federated timeline on QOTO. 😠 There's no way to get rid of it without blocking the user or domain each time it pops up, and that's not very practical. I guess this is where an ML-curated timeline like Twitter's can shine, simply not showing undesired content of this kind.

5. The pragmatist strongly emphasized that science is supposed to be better than scientists. Particular scientists might be partisans of their theories, but in a field of diverse partisans, the ones with better theories will tend to be more fruitful. Enough new researchers will prefer to go into more fruitful areas that, over time, even a field of all partisans should converge on better theories. (Insert adage about science progressing one funeral at a time.)

I wondered if convergence is sufficient by itself to overcome incommensurability. Paradigms in philosophy, religion, & politics are harder to overcome than in science; what if two people who disagree simply followed this process?:

• They pick a topic and get a big piece of paper to write on.
• They take turns proposing interesting statements they think the other person might agree with.
• If they both agree, they write the statement down.
• They see what kind of consensus they can put together as they fill up the page.

4. Scientists and especially engineers are typically realists about what they're working with. They might technically have incommensurable definitions of "mass", for example, but they get past it essentially by saying, "Let me show you what I mean", and getting out some materials and equipment and pointing at something they do.

It's not essential that the pointing behavior always succeeds in having a real referent. Phlogiston and the ether are examples where the pointing might fail. But enough of the behaviors succeed: e.g. at temperature increases in the case of phlogiston, and light propagation in the case of ether. The successes or apparent successes in "pointing out" things give a realist way of bypassing incommensurability.

3. Kuhn's work itself suggests options for a common language between people using different paradigms. He seemed to presume logic and deductive validity are common across all the paradigms, for example. And he gave 5 characteristics (accuracy, consistency, scope, simplicity, fruitfulness) for deciding between paradigms, and these 5 are a neutral basis for deciding rather than part of a paradigm.

2. All language is fuzzy, and (in the strongly held view of one pragmatist participant), even "truth is not an exact precise thing", and "all theories have some slop in them". So incommensurability is nothing unusual or specific to scientific paradigms, it's present in all our talk, and we're mostly quite good at grokking what each other mean.

Thomas Kuhn & problems of incommensurability between scientific paradigms
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/thomas-kuhn/#IncoWorlChan

The Austin LessWrong philosophy working group discussed this yesterday. The main ideas discussed:

1. A sense that Kuhn focuses strongly on physics, and that paradigm shifts in many other fields are fuzzy or absent. e.g. in neuroscience or computer science, have there been any?

I was stuck on a long flight with nothing much to do, & curiosity about logic tables for a 4-valued logic (true, false, both, neither) are what bubbled up to mind 🤷‍♂️. The tables that seemed right to me result turned out to be a logic that's called "First Degree Entailment". It has a nice overview here: https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.1007/s11225-017-9748-6.pdf

It's kinda fun to rediscover the very basics of a thing, and then get to learn all about it because other people have done the hard work 😁