The casual reader might be saying to himself, "There goes Hollerith with another long comment about what he is calling formal epistemology. Why doesn't he have the manners to refrain from injecting a long thread on an unrelated topic into Mitchell's article on monads, consciousness, etc?"

Well, two replies to that. First, I say formal epistemology is not unrelated. Mitchell has been writing for many years around these parts on how consciousness presents a problem for standard physics. He has even solicited donations to support him in researching the matter further, saying that it is dangerous to have a singularity without having done that research. So, one of the ways formal epistemology enters naturally into this comment section is that I humbly sumbit that anyone engaged in such a project that Mitchell is engaged in should have as part of his technical background an education in formal epistemology. It leads to crisper thinking, and given how many resources Mitchell is devoting to the project, his dedicating some of those resources to learning formal epistemology is probably a good use of his time (and, oh, by the way, I'm not going to pay anymore attention to his writings on consciousness, ontology, etc, till he does).

Second, now that it has become plain that my mention of formal epistemology might lead to a long thread of conversation, I will indeed move the conversation to this place. It might move back to Less Wrong in the form of a top-level article by me with a title something like Why most people here should probably learn technical epistemology, a.k.a., the math of rationality. This prospective article would cover no ground that Eliezer has not already covered, but when it is important to publicize some point, then it often wins to have more than one voice making that point.