Scott Aaronson's "On Self-Delusion and Bounded Rationality"

cousin_it

Poignant short story about truth-seeking that I just found. Quote:

"No," interjected an internal voice. "You need to prove that your dad will appear by a direct argument from the length of your nails, one that does not invoke your subsisting in a dream state as an intermediate step."

"Nonsense," retorted another voice. "That we find ourselves in a dream state was never assumed; rather, it follows so straightforwardly from the long-nail counterfactual that the derivation could be done, I think, even in an extremely weak system of inference."

The full thing reads like a flash tour of OB/LW, except it was written in 2001.

Poignant short story about truth-seeking that I just found. Quote:

"No," interjected an internal voice. "You need to prove that your dad will appear by a direct argument from the length of your nails, one that does not invoke your subsisting in a dream state as an intermediate step."

"Nonsense," retorted another voice. "That we find ourselves in a dream state was never assumed; rather, it follows so straightforwardly from the long-nail counterfactual that the derivation could be done, I think, even in an extremely weak system of inference."

The full thing reads like a flash tour of OB/LW, except it was written in 2001.

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.

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Scott Aaronson's "On Self-Delusion and Bounded Rationality"

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Scott Aaronson's "On Self-Delusion and Bounded Rationality"

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