For example, "I put the family first" can be a principle.
But then you must put your family first, both when it's convenient for you and when it isn't.
Otherwise it's not a principle.
2/11
ON PRINCIPLES
The recent censorship events have shown that many don't understand what's a principle.
If you only practice it when convenient, it's not a principle.
1/11
For example, "I put the family first" can be a principle.
But then you must put your family first, both when it's convenient for you and when it isn't.
Otherwise it's not a principle.
2/11
They keep us focused on the long term when the short term would misguide us
For example, I do not like Trump. And yet, yesterday I defended his free speech. Because I believe that defending free speech is ultimately good for everyone.
3/11
They protect us from the problems we didn't experience and from what could go wrong.
They are there for when we think they could be transgressed. They are there for when we think it makes sense to skip them.
4/11
Rights are preserved by granting them to our enemies.
The moment we cease to grant them when inconvenient for us, we cease to have them too.
The moment we destroy their sanctity, we open the door to someone else taking them from us.
5/11
However, in practice, lines can be moved. Say, someone could define an opinion creating emotional discomfort as violence.
6/11
Anyone who worked in a company knows that Core Values become meaningless as soon as lines are drawn, explicitly or implicitly.
Eg, we request respect for people, unless you're a star performer.
It won't work
7/11
This is because violating principles has second-order effects, and in the long term, they catch up with you.
8/11
Five out of six times, you'll be better off.
And some idiot-yet-intellectual might even justify that the average outcome is positive. And he might be right.
But if you keep doing it, the bullet eventually hits you.
9/11
10/11
WHY IS ERGODICITY IMPORTANT? AN EXAMPLE
— Luca Dellanna (@DellAnnaLuca) December 17, 2020
My cousin was born in a mountain village in the French Alps. Like many there, he learned to ski before reading.
I am a good skier, but I remember the humiliation when I was 14 and he was 6, seeing him surpass me, swift as a bullet.
More from For later read
Nice to discover Judea Pearl ask a fundamental question. What's an 'inductive bias'?
I crucial step on the road towards AGI is a richer vocabulary for reasoning about inductive biases.
explores the apparent impedance mismatch between inductive biases and causal reasoning. But isn't the logical thinking required for good causal reasoning also not an inductive bias?
An inductive bias is what C.S. Peirce would call a habit. It is a habit of reasoning. Logical thinking is like a Platonic solid of the many kinds of heuristics that are discovered.
The kind of black and white logic that is found in digital computers is critical to the emergence of today's information economy. This of course is not the same logic that drives the general intelligence that lives in the same economy.
Help! What precisely is "inductive bias"? Some ML researchers are in the opinion that the machine learning category of \u2018inductive biases\u2019 can allow us to build a causal understanding of the world. My Ladder of Causation says: "This is mathematically impossible". Who is right? 1/
— Judea Pearl (@yudapearl) February 14, 2021
I crucial step on the road towards AGI is a richer vocabulary for reasoning about inductive biases.
explores the apparent impedance mismatch between inductive biases and causal reasoning. But isn't the logical thinking required for good causal reasoning also not an inductive bias?
An inductive bias is what C.S. Peirce would call a habit. It is a habit of reasoning. Logical thinking is like a Platonic solid of the many kinds of heuristics that are discovered.
The kind of black and white logic that is found in digital computers is critical to the emergence of today's information economy. This of course is not the same logic that drives the general intelligence that lives in the same economy.
