SforSingularity comments on Dreams with Damaged Priors - Less Wrong

36 Post author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 08 August 2009 10:31PM

You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.

Comments (61)

You are viewing a single comment's thread. Show more comments above.

Comment author: SforSingularity 13 August 2009 08:14:50PM 7 points [-]

most people don't spend a lot of time wondering, after they fully wake up, whether the pink elephant might really be hidden inside their pillow.

Yes, most people have a "that's clearly ridiculous" filter that emulates the work that a complexity prior should do. It seems to work much like the way modern antivirus works - there's a blacklist of "ridiculous" ideas that you reject out of hand, and popular culture acts like the "update virus database" function. Simple hypotheses like evolution often end up on this blacklist, and horrifically complex ones like the Abrahamic God often end up off it.

Comment author: Vladimir_Nesov 13 August 2009 08:20:41PM *  0 points [-]