![\"\"](\"https:\/\/2.bp.blogspot.com\/-IDA560vrjQE\/T7-KCwyr9UI\/AAAAAAAAA9k\/ztjaglvZ18s\/s1600\/Meta.jpg\" "\\"meta\\"")
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Eli of Rust Belt Philosophy has expanded his critique<\/a> of the LARPing exercise<\/a>, and I found it really helpful. The game is meant to help you defend against not taking an idea very seriously or not working out its consequences or predictions, and now I understand why Eli doesn\u2019t think that properly falls into the category of good epistemology. I\u2019ve excerpted below, but you should nip over and read the whole thing.<\/p>\n On its face, this sort of thing [ugh fields<\/a>] looks as though it\u2019s relevant to epistemology or reasoning: it identifies a flaw in human cognition, supports the proposed flaw with (allusions to) fairly solid cognitive psychology, and then proceeds to offer solutions. In reality, however, the problem is not one of reasoning as such and the solutions aren\u2019t at all epistemological in nature. To wit: although \u201cugh fields\u201d can prevent us from reasoning well, they aren\u2019t reasoning failures in and of themselves. Listing them alongside cognitive biases is therefore a little misleading: the fundamental attribution error (e.g.) is a bad mode of reasoning, but \u201cugh fields\u201d only contribute to bad modes of reasoning. As such, the concept of an ugh field is something suited to some kind of meta-epistemological theory. Or, to say that in plain English, it\u2019s something that\u2019s relevant to producing a good reasoning environment, reviewing a reasoning process, or some such thing, not something that\u2019s relevant to reasoning itself. As ever, we can even see this kind of distinction in basketball: maintaining a healthy diet is not a basketball value in and of itself, but it does have a sort of meta-value for basketball players. When you\u2019re playing against someone, you don\u2019t get any bonus points for eating well and they don\u2019t lose any points for eating badly \u2013 but it definitely is prudent to eat well if you plan on playing basketball, especially if you plan on doing so for a living.<\/p>\n Appropriately to this sort of problem, the proposed solutions to \u201cugh fields\u201d are not good reasoning methods but are, instead, solutions that are intended to lead to good reasoning later. Those solutions include self-monitoring of symptoms, positive visualization, the use of affirmations \u2013 which, as you\u2019ll hopefully recognize, are therapeutic solutions and not rational or philosophical ones. (I mean this literally: those are all very common techniques in the field of psychotherapy.) They may get you to the point where you can begin to reason or train yourself in reasoning, just as eating well may get you to the point where you can practice well or get the most out of your practices. But you can\u2019t settle for disposing of your \u201cugh fields\u201d any more than Tim Duncan can settle for eating only whole-wheat bread. Just like you can\u2019t develop a jump shot with a fork and a knife, you can\u2019t develop or critique a theory with positive visualization and affirmations\u2026<\/p>\n When we approach something from a statistical angle, we usually have to admit \u2013 at least tacitly \u2013 that we\u2019re doing so only because we don\u2019t have enough information to approach it any other way<\/a>. Gambling is a perfect example of this: if youknew<\/em>\u00a0which cards your opponent held you wouldn\u2019t have to play the odds, but you\u00a0don\u2019t<\/em>\u00a0know that and are therefore forced to use statistics to help you out. Applying this to the subject at hand, all we can say about \u201cugh fields\u201d is that theysometimes<\/em>\u00a0act as precursors to bad reasoning. This is a start, but it\u2019s not much of one \u2013 we don\u2019t know\u00a0how often<\/em>\u00a0they do this (it could even happen only in a minority of cases),\u00a0in which circumstances<\/em>\u00a0they do this,\u00a0why<\/em>\u00a0they sometimes\u00a0fail\u00a0<\/em>to do this, and so on. As such, we\u2019re in a rather awkward position when it comes to \u201cugh fields\u201d: when we notice that one is operating we\u2019d like to be able to say with certainty that there\u2019s bad reasoning going on, but we can\u2019t. Apparently good reasoning that happens within an \u201cugh field\u201d is actually bad sometimes, yes, but there are other times when it really is good. Despite this, lots and lots of LessWrong-ites apparently feel like they don\u2019t even have to check the reasoning itself but can, instead, determine whether an argument is good or bad simply by examining the meta-reasoning. Instead of making substantive (i.e., reason-based, epistemological) objections, these people tend to ask questions like:\u00a0was this argument charitable<\/a>,\u00a0does it seem like the author was angry while writing it<\/a>,\u00a0is the author behaving pro-socially or anti-socially<\/a>, and so on. Those questions aren\u2019t irrelevant \u2013 they\u2019re only\u00a0meta<\/em>-epistemological, but they are still meta-epistemological<\/em>\u00a0\u2013 but they are, in the final accounting, beside the point. Especially because we don\u2019t have specific probability distributions to use in our statistical meta-epistemological analyses, it\u2019s naive to fixate on the meta-argument to the total exclusion of the argument itself. Statistics is the right approach to use here, but statistics just doesn\u2019t work this way.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n I agree with Eli that if people focus on what he terms meta-epistemology to the point where it eclipses epistemology, it\u2019s a problem. \u00a0I think of these techniques and warning signs as being like glasses. \u00a0You want to make sure you\u2019ve got them on, to correct for some of your built in flaws, but then you\u2019ve got to\u00a0look<\/em>.<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Eli of Rust Belt Philosophy has expanded his critique of the LARPing exercise, and I found it really helpful. The game is meant to help you defend against not taking an idea very seriously or not working out its consequences or predictions, and now I understand why Eli doesn\u2019t think that properly falls into the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":127,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[68],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5259","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-epistemologyphilosophy"],"yoast_head":"\n