Eliezer_Yudkowsky comments on Less Wrong Q&A with Eliezer Yudkowsky: Ask Your Questions - Less Wrong

16 Post author: MichaelGR 11 November 2009 03:00AM

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Comment author: [deleted] 11 November 2009 04:51:53AM 3 points [-]

Earlier today, I pondered whether this infinite set atheism thing is something Eliezer merely claims to believe as some sort of test of basic rationality. It's a belief that, as far as I can tell, makes no prediction.

But here's what I predict that I would say if I had Eliezer's opinions and my mathematical knowledge: I'm a fan of thinking of ZFC as being its countably infinite model, in which the class of all sets is enumerable, and every set has a finite representation. Of course, things like the axiom of infinity and Cantor's diagonal argument still apply; it's just that "uncountably infinite set" simply means "set whose bijection with the natural numbers is not contained in the model".

(Yes, ZFC has a countable model, assuming it's consistent. I would call this weird, but I hate admitting that any aspect of math is counterintuitive.)

Comment author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 12 November 2009 03:14:33PM 6 points [-]

Earlier today, I pondered whether this infinite set atheism thing is something Eliezer merely claims to believe as some sort of test of basic rationality.

I've said this before in many places, but I simply don't do that sort of thing. If I want to say something flawed just to see how my readers react to it, I put it into the mouth of a character in a fictional story; I don't say it in my own voice.

Comment author: [deleted] 13 November 2009 02:27:09AM *  0 points [-]

I swear I meant to say that, knowing you, you probably wouldn't do such a thing.