Schopenhauer - On thinking for oneself
ebooks.adelaide.edu.au
ebooks.adelaide.edu.au
Paul Graham's advice to "run uphill" is a generalization of this: the better activities require more effort.
On Reading and Books - http://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/s/schopenhauer/arthur/essays/c...
in which he talks about "[those that] have read themselves stupid."
It's interesting that we can trace a parallel with technology: reading too much but building too little.
When a philosopher sits down and writes about their perspective on a topic, it's a safe assumption that they thought about their conclusions before publishing them.
After the elderly Schopenhauer sat for a sculpture portrait by Elisabet Ney, he told Richard Wagner's friend Malwida von Meysenbug, "I have not yet spoken my last word about women. I believe that if a woman succeeds in withdrawing from the mass, or rather raising herself above the mass, she grows ceaselessly and more than a man."
He might be a misogynist, but at least he recognised exceptions.
It's also interesting (in the context of his time) to note that he was a strong supporter of abolitionism and animal rights.
"""That is why all those who think for themselves come, at bottom, to much the same conclusion"""
!
(Edit: It does change after a while. Press on past the chain of: People who think are superior to people who read. People who think are superior to people who read. People who think (e.g. me) are superior to people who read. People who think (e.g. me) are superior to most people. I am superior to most people. I am superior to most people).
But you are right, this fact is more often invoked to justify smug in-group monocultures.
Does that mean all Bayesian's are trying to be the same as each other? That Bayesianism considers human individuality silly?
Because if all Bayesians must agree given sufficient information, then the only things left to disagree on (potentially) are ideas which have no fixed grounding in reality, such as whether Wilkie Wilkinson's writings show colonial alienation - and maybe they would eventually agree if given enough information on each other's mental states and histories.
So, is it pushing towards the idea that there is only one possible rational superintelligent view?
Bayes says nothing about goals, however. Rational Bayesians can have completely divergent goals, so becoming increasingly rational does not impinge on "human individuality."
If your goal was not picked rationally based on facts, you can't claim to be a completely rational thinker.
So the only room for human individuality is the knowledge gap between us and omniscient beings where we can pick goals arbitrarily, then pursue them as rationally as our limited mental abilities allow.
?
Two perfectly rational agents with the same fundamental goals would, of course, inevitably select the same sub-goals and actions to reach those goals.
But at some point if you keep asking a rational agent "but why do you want to do that?" the only answer will be "because it is my nature."
(By self-referential I mean one who understands oneself absolutely; one who possess a perfectly accurate map of oneself. There probably is a better word.)
More than once you've probably made a decision, at least in part, by psychoanalyzing yourself (and maybe psychoanalyzing the way that you're psychoanalyzing yourself) - so imagine being able to psychoanalyze yourself in real time, with (near-)perfect accuracy. (There might be information-theoretic problems with trying to simulate your whole brain inside of itself at speed.)
If one is the kind of person who has given serious thought to one's motivations in life (which must include coming to the realization that they are, in a certain fundamental sense, arbitrary) then I don't know that they would necessarily change all that much under these conditions.
That's a rather controversial statement. You have to bear in mind that the very idea that there's a clean split between issues of fact and issues of "values" or "goals" is a very controversial one. Hillary Putnam's book on this issue is a great read ("The Collapse of the Fact/Value Dichotomy").
Of course, there are also issues with the notion of "observation" used in Bayesian statistics. Since any observation which isn't actually just a direct report of a sense experience (e.g. "I see red in the top left corner of my visual field") involves the application of some theory, it's not clear what should count as an observation for a rational agent or group of rational agents. For example, did John observe that a car drove past? Or did he observe that something which looks like a car drove past? Can John observe that Bill was being petulant, or is that a value judgment? Did John observe that the current is 0.5A? Or did he observe that the ammeter reported that the current is 0.5A? Etc. etc.
The Bayesian framework is an idealization, resting on an ideal notion of "observation". I personally think that it's crazy to take this framework to be a model for rationality itself. We are not able to make observations in the Bayesian sense.
For example, smart indian girls make me happy. Perhaps dumb blondes make you happy. Is it irrational for us to choose different goals based on these facts?
What rational argument and evidence do you think could change my emotional reaction to one type of girl (or food, preference concerning temperature) over another?
Writing may help you organize your thoughts, but it's not necessary.
On the other hand you have to think about things only tangentially related to the actual problem you are writing about like style, grammer and finding the right words.
So there are advantages and disadvantages to actually writing stuff down.
The vast majority of bugs I find after writing the code are trivial. Certainly, I learn something from writing it, but I find that if I just start writing without thinking about it first, especially for larger projects, I don't end up where I want to and have to scrap large pieces of it.
Writing helps you get the details straight, but thinking is essential for designing the big picture.
I mean, with that logic, you might as well write in assembly.
Newton couldn't have invented classical mechanics without the ancient Greeks. In order to think, you need something to think about; you need input. Some of that input will be from watching apples fall off of trees. Some of it will be from information gathered from other people, presented in books.
What rubbish.
"The really scientific thinker does the same thing as these illiterate persons, but on a larger scale. Although he has need of much knowledge, and so must read a great deal [...]"