timtyler comments on You cannot be mistaken about (not) wanting to wirehead - Less Wrong

34 Post author: Kaj_Sotala 26 January 2010 12:06PM

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Comment author: timtyler 22 January 2013 02:12:47AM 0 points [-]
Comment author: RobbBB 22 January 2013 03:11:01AM *  0 points [-]

Certainty (confidence, etc.) is in the mind. Fallibility isn't; you can be prone (or immune) to error even if no one thinks you are.

The point is that 'What if I couldn't be wrong about it?' does not express 'What if I could be certain that I couldn't be wrong about it?'; the latter requires that 1 be a probability, but the former does not, since I might be unable to be wrong about X and yet only assign, say, a .8 probability to X's being true (because I don't assign probability 1 to my own infallibility).

Comment author: timtyler 22 January 2013 11:49:46PM *  1 point [-]

Certainty (confidence, etc.) is in the mind. Fallibility isn't; you can be prone (or immune) to error even if no one thinks you are.

Though no one could ever possibly know. Seriously: fallibility is in the mind. It's a measure of how likely something is to fail; likelihoods are probabilities - and probabilities are (best thought of as being) in the mind.