xamdam comments on "Life Experience" as a Conversation-Halter - Less Wrong

11 Post author: Seth_Goldin 18 March 2010 07:39PM

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Comment author: xamdam 19 March 2010 03:07:21AM 2 points [-]

Continuing the devil's advocate line, I do not think it's reasonable to expect someone to give you their log of relevant experience. Experience does something like train a neural network (literally in this case) and the training data is often thrown away.

I think the crucial question is finding the distinguishing property of the two kinds of life experience.

Comment author: ata 19 March 2010 03:17:22AM *  3 points [-]

That may be true, but that doesn't make it valid reasoning. You should only use it with an explicit acknowledgement that your intention is to end the conversation (perhaps in a manner similar to that proposed by Dagon), without pretending that it is somehow an argument in its own right.

And even then, it should be used very sparingly. I'd be suspicious of any belief I hold if I can't remember why I hold it (if "the training data [was] thrown away").