SforSingularity comments on Scott Aaronson's "On Self-Delusion and Bounded Rationality" - Less Wrong

16 Post author: cousin_it 18 August 2009 07:17PM

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Comment author: SforSingularity 19 August 2009 10:35:05PM -2 points [-]

The greatest epistemic rationalist on Earth could have a happy relationship with a Young Earth Creationist;

false in general, false as a statistical statement too.

Comment author: eirenicon 20 August 2009 12:32:01AM 2 points [-]

The greatest epistemic rationalist on Earth is still made out of meat.

Comment author: Furcas 19 August 2009 11:19:06PM 2 points [-]

I was making a point about human thought processes, not human desires. I agree that it's unlikely that the greatest epistemic rationalist would want to have a relationship with a YEC, but if s/he did want to, s/he could.

Comment author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 19 August 2009 11:38:31PM 6 points [-]

If I were otherwise unattached, I would totally have a relationship with a YEC, if she was from a world which had actually been created 6000 years ago. Otherwise no.

Comment author: Alicorn 20 August 2009 12:02:35AM 8 points [-]

What if she was just from a world where lots of evidence pointed to it having been created 6,000 years ago, but it was really created last Thursday?

Comment author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 20 August 2009 12:17:16AM 14 points [-]

Is she hot?

...okay, that was a bit out of character, but I think that at that point in the thread I basically had no choice but to say that.

Comment author: Alicorn 19 August 2009 10:38:39PM *  1 point [-]

Unless you have actually tracked down and interviewed the greatest epistemic rationalist on earth, how do you know? Maybe (s)he is very tolerant of such things. (When does intolerance win on a personal scale?)

Comment author: SforSingularity 19 August 2009 11:11:54PM *  1 point [-]

how do you know?

This sounds like scientism.

Because I have experience with good rationalists, and the kind of people they have relationships with, and I am a bayesian so I can assign degrees of belief to propositions that I haven't tested directly. In this case, it seems reasonable that similar people have similar relationship-behaviors, and so my existing knowledge is relevant.

Rather like "how do you know that the fastest dog in the world can't outrun a formula one car?" - I know this with high certainty because I believe that similar animals behave in similar ways.

Comment author: whowhowho 27 February 2013 03:25:34PM 0 points [-]

If it is false they could not. What would prevent them?