The initial comment was that Shermer represents some kind of brain rot that's common in people who accept liberalism, one tied to also accepting scientism. How would that not imply that his views are a good source for what is involved in liberalism and its acceptance? But even without that, I'm not sure where you're coming from. I didn't say that Shermer doesn't give a doxography of liberalism and that's the problem; I said his views aren't representative of liberalism and aren't a good point from which to generalize about liberalism. Being representative of liberalism only requires giving an account of liberalism that is, like the person I replied to said, nuanced but also reflective of what liberalism actually involves. I don't see why you'd think I meant giving a doxography.

> When talking about humans, it's probably bad practice to generalize from what you think and what you want to everybody else.

That's why I initially said 'truth' (or getting moral matters right); I don't know why you replied as if I hadn't said that. I only added what I would say IF you just meant appeal to readers because even though you seemed to mean truth what you were describing looked a lot more like appeal or acceptability. What readers think "relates to their own lives" and is "useful" is a great sign of the appeal of that writing to the readers but doesn't tend to have much to do with truth/correctness. For example, if I'm dissatisfied with sex with my husband and care more about that satisfaction than his happiness, I'm probably not going to find someone's writings about why I shouldn't cheat on my husband terribly useful, no matter how rightly or wisely that case is made.

Not at all. As an engineer, I understand we're building models, based on our incomplete understanding. As we learn more, we refine our models, but they are always only models, and as such, necessarily simpler than the real world, because they are based on principles abstracted from the real world, and not the real world itself.

There's no 'pretending' involved. We know they are models, we know they are only approximations, and we also know the approximations are good enough to get the results we want. And with that, we built the society you see around us.

Why do you sneer at the process that has resulted in immense wealth and better lives for billions of people?

Actually, it is: the bigger the data set, the more patterns you can find, but the less meaning these patterns have. It is a well known issue with Big Data.

yes, I agree it's a delusion. The more data we have, the easier it is to find the patterns. The new data tools are so powerful, it's easy to winnow through fields of chaff to find a few grains of wheat. And don't be fooled by what's commercially available.

Ten years ago, I went to a conference where one of the speakers was describing how they had successfully used the Qlik BI tool to be able to extract opinions from natural speech.

For those not in the field, natural speech is extremely hard to catalog. For example, an old type of system might have read "Trump was not the best president", and because "best" and "president" and "Trump" were in the same sentence, the system would have concluded this is a favourable opinion, when clearly it is not. That's just a simple example; it gets much worse.

But this guy was able to show us that his company's product had overcome those limitations. When the Q&A came around, he was asked who was using it, and he gave us the standard "I'd tell you, but then I'd have to kill you" line. Except I don't think he was joking.

As I said, that was ten years ago. Data science advances by leaps and bounds each year. I'm pretty sanguine about our ability to keep up with the datums.

The author has an embarrassingly bad understanding of statistics and machine learning and makes a very unclear argument. In fact, the opposite is true. The more data we have - the easier it is to find meaningful patterns. Variance - which is the thing that causes most spurious patterns, decreases with the root on the number of samples. The more data points you have, the more likely it is that if you have a true relationship between variables, you will pass whichever hypothesis test (such as the p-score). More data therefore allows us to set higher standards for hypothesis testing.

However, most of the arguments in the article don't even support this main hypothesis. Instead the author talks about unrelated things, such as some low-quality studies that found some weird correlations and about the replication crisis, which is a complex problem caused by many reasons, none of which is an abundance of data.

I'd say it's more an is-ought-fallacy, rather than a naturalistic fallacy.

I agree with a few things in this article although I don't think in the way the author intends. I've said before that IMO there is no major difference between science and philosophy. The difference is that what we call philosophy are topics where science is very immature such as the study of human ethics. Similarly, I think that there is no one "scientific method" but rather science is a combination of various methods such as peer review, data analysis, theory development, mathematical analysis, experimentation, falsifiable hypotheses, etc. For some disciplines (e.g., physics and chemistry) we can use all of these tools for others (e.g., psychology and even history) we can only use some. We use as many as we can for any problem. Some will object that for example it is impossible to do experiments regarding history but in fact I've seen various experiments done to attempt to answer questions such as "Where was the battle of Cannae actually fought?" or "what was Greek fire?".

I also think there is no question that science can apply to the study of ethics. Moral Origins by Christopher Boehm, Moral Minds by Marc Hauser, and a paper I wrote based on some of Hauser's ideas and research in evolutionary psychology: https://www.michaeldebellis.com/post/umg_ontology

I also think that there is a lot of overlap between good science and being (what I consider) a good person such as rationality, accessing arguments rather than the status of those who make them and so on. But (as I argue in my paper) there is one fundamental difference between what we consider morality and what we consider science. That is that morality is about value judgements. There are many scientific theories that can make one feel uneasy. Saying "if X is true then Y is true and Y is something I consider fundamentally immoral regardless of any arguments" is not a valid scientific argument. This is what Hume called the Is-Ought problem. We can't go from the domain of analyzing the universe (is statements) to what is moral and right (ought statements). Thus, any coherent moral system must start with at least one axiom that says I value X because I value X. E.g., a Utilitarian values maximizing well being. If you ask them why, although they may attempt at an explanation, what it really comes down to will always be that there is some core value (ought statement) that they take as a given. That's the fundamental difference between morality and science. Science strives for objectivity, morality can still strive for rationality and coherence but ultimately morality must be founded on some core axiom(s).

Humans are naturally amoral. There is no such thing as objective morality, which is why everyone struggles to be moral.

Morality is a contrived set of standards that is meant to suppress human nature in order to get humans to be civilized; civilizations cannot function when their citizens are amoral. Hence, morality is pragmatism rather than a natural set of standards.

The damage that so-called immoral behavior causes to humans is ultimately caused by civilization itself.

For example, if there were no civilization, then there'd be no visual media and therefore no pornography; hence, one wouldn't have to struggle with porn addiction and suffer the mental health effects of it.

Another example is gluttony. In a natural environment rather than a civilized one, food is not abundant and is not readily available; hence, there is no opportunity to be gluttonous.

Morality is nothing more than a means of countering the negative effects that civilizations induce in humans.

Civilizations create an overabundance of opportunities, which is unnatural and which no species is naturally equipped to handle. Nature does not do this; nature's limitations induce balance in the species that live within it.

This logic applies to medicine as well. People who would not survive in a natural environment are able to survive in civilizations due to medicine, whether that be surgical procedures or prescription medication. The irony of this is that such people are subsequently able to reproduce, thereby creating subsequent generations of people who are dependent on medicine. Hence, civilizations then have to come up with means of supporting the increasingly burdensome need of medicine, such as publicly funded medical insurance or at least affordable medical insurance - which is a major political issue.

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I find this odd. Shermer is not being presented in such a way. He is giving his philosophical views about philosophical topics. No one is saying one should ask Shermer to give a doxographic account of liberalism. Rather Shermer is giving a philosophical account of his own views. This may be problematic(in the specific and the general) but the issue is elsewhere. He is not giving a doxographic course of philosophy.

I don't just mean appeal, I also mean correctness. The correctness of a philosophy is not about the history of philosophy or a doxographic account. That is not the discussion, such issues are only of interest for exams or such academic pursuits. The question "should I cheat on my husband?" and "what did Nietzsche mean by eternal return"? are two different kinds of questions. One is philosophical in its content and the other in its form. An academic philosopher will give you a very competent response to one and a very unwise response to the other.

The author's argument seems to be:

1. There are many people writing machine learning papers without understanding core statistical principles.
2. The best explanation for this is that there is so much data, that there are no valid methods for distinguishing valid correlations from accidental ones.
3. Therefore, big data will produce nothing of much value from now on, since we have too much data already.

There are many procedures in place to give some protection from data over-fitting. Random pruning is one of them.

GPT-3 (and its siblings) and DALL-E 2 (and its) would not be possible without the scrape of a significant fraction of all the textual data available (DALL-E obviously combines this with images). They overcome overfitting using hundreds of billions of parameters and moving up. The power requirements of training these systems alone is mind-boggling.

Much medical data that is fed into learning systems is absurdly under fitted. Imagine a (rather dystopian) world where all health indicators of all people taking specific drugs was fed into learning systems. A doctor might one day know whether a specific drug will be effective for you specifically.

There is much yet to learn. To make a falsifiable prediction, corporations will be greedily seeking to increase their data input for decades to come. Power needs will continue to grow. This will be driven by the success (in their own value terms) of their procedures and not blind adherence to false assumptions as the author might seem to suggest.

Right? We prefer to pray to the angry sky god. All this info is difficult.

> I don't necessarily think that the answer people give to a question is correlated with the factual answer to that question, but I do think there may be value in looking for those questions for which consistent answer profiles are given across human populations. In other words: killing is thought of as a taboo basically everywhere you go, which implies that there may be some scientific underpinning to that taboo. Eating pork or beef is thought of as very taboo to some, but very normal to others, implying that the taboo is less scientific than particular.

Majority opinion doesn't really seem to be relevant if you just look at history. What's the majority of people going to say about whether the sun orbits earth or indeed earth is flat, if you ask at various points in history? There is no easily visible correlation between the truth of an opinion and whether or not it's the majority opinion, nor the size of the majority holding it.

That is up to individuals desired feelings.

Do you want knowledge of comforting false beliefs? Do you want feelings derived from the wire head or not?

I don't disagree that all MY feelings are generated by my brain making electro chemical impulses. I highly doubt that ALL feelings are electronic chemical impulses in my brain.

I also believe that science can in fact determine those feelings most of the time but not all of the time. Does something being difficult to measure mean it is meaningless? I hope that portion of Logical Positivism can be abandoned here. Science generally relies on truth, induction working, and the hope our senses are aligned so that we can make sense of the world. Those are all three very fundamental intangibles.

How can a feeling be authentic or not? That is up to the feeling being. Taking an animal and vivisecting so that I may wire up its feelings may be happiness for that animal. It may have no opinion on the authenticity of its feelings. Yet humans clearly care about authenticity.

I couldn't tell you exactly what authenticity is in a global sense. I could give you a recipe. A feeling is authentic if the feeling being is correct in how it was generated and feels that the way it was being generated is authentic. This is very difficult to get at, but not impossible. It is indeed subjective.

I was watching a TikTok video by XerofoX that goes into a theory where one will live each life from different perspective before reach God status.

He says it is based on the Egg Theory which is based on Andy Weir’s book The Egg Theory.

Is he right, or is there an actual philosophy behind the idea?

Truth is a totally different question from representing a particular philosophical position in an accurate or nuanced way. It is indeed the case for academic philosophers that no one should take them as authorities on what is true about moral questions. Philosophical topics aren't the kinds of topic where it makes sense to treat anyone, academic or popular, as an authority on what is true or false. I'm just talking about treating someone as a good source for what a particular philosophical position even is or in this case for a careful, nuanced account of liberalism and its connections to other views (like scientism).

And if you didn't mean truth (or getting, say, moral, practical, and political questions right) but are just talking about appeal or acceptability to readers, then, absolutely, pop philosophers are much better than academic philosophers for that. Pop philosophers are usually better than academics at writing something that leads people who read it to feel like they have a better understanding about what is right and about how they should live. The same goes for pop science writers: someone who knows how to throw around the word 'quantum' in an engaging way that speaks to what readers want to hear are generally better at writing something that appeals to readers than an academic is (though, as with pop philosophy, some of these popular science writers are also experts who know what they're talking about).

No that's not the point. You're talking about practicalities, i.e. predicting the full consequences of an action. (Which only matters for consequentialist ethics anyway).

The fundamental problem is that you cannot simply equate suffering with bad and pleasure with good, it needs to be justified, and it is this justification that science can never provide.

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Sure. That would also be the case for academic philosophers. If I want to know, for example, whether X is moral or immoral, an academic philosopher could lead me astray more than a pop philosopher or give me an unworkable solution. This is in relation to practical wisdom vs technical sophistication. People like pop philosophers because they are trying to gain practical wisdom that relates to their own lives and this is useful and probably more useful than the technical sophistication of someone within a given school or tradition that will probably clash with the technical sophistication of another academic in an opposite school/tradition.

"The world is complex, but if we pretend it's simple we can make patterns.."

Sure, we can use the word 'philosopher' that way if we like but then pointing out that Shermer is a philosopher doesn't say much about whether he's a good source for understanding liberalism or even whether he has nuanced views on the topic.

In any case, we should question a person's understanding of liberalism if most of their picture of it comes from writers, like Shermer, who had little to no expert guidance in learning about political philosophy (or had that only incidentally - I have no idea if Shermer took an undergrad course in political philosophy here or there while he was getting his psychology and history of science degrees).

Knowing that a scientist has a habit of publishing misleading, misguided, inaccurate or otherwise deliberately false information is justification for ignoring what that scientist says and believes.

It's not justification for ignoring the results of their work.

>If someone lies, all of their work is suspect . . .

and within scientific fields and disciplines, the standard is that all work is suspect until it's been tested and recreated under similar conditions.

Are we absolutely certain of this?

We've been able to observe empathetic and altruistic behavior in animals, even (arguably) in bacteria. Is that not a sign that our moral framework has a biological component? And if it does, doesn't that mean that we (potentially) isolate morality within the confines of biology (and thus, the physical world)?