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RobinZ comments on The scourge of perverse-mindedness - Less Wrong
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...why are you defending it, then? I don't even see that thinking along those lines is helpful.
For everyone else, it was a chance to identify flaws in a proposition. No such thing as too much practice there. For me, it was a chance to experience firsthand the thought processes involved in defending a flawed proposition, necessary practice for recognizing other such flawed beliefs I might be holding; I had no religious upbringing to escape, so that common reference point is missing.
Furthermore, I knew from the outset that such a survey wouldn't be practical, but I've been suspicious of CEV for a while now. It seems like it would be too hard to formalize, and at the same time, even if successful, too far removed from what people spend most of their time caring about. I couldn't be satisfied that there wasn't a better way to do it until I'd tried to find such a way myself.
It's polite to give some signal that you're playing devil's advocate if you know you're making weak arguments.
This is not a sufficient condition for establishing the optimality of CEV. Indeed, I'm not sure there isn't a better way (nor even that CEV is workable), just that I have at present no candidates for one.
I apologize. I thought I had discharged the devil's-advocacy-signaling obligation by ending my original post on the subject with a request to be proved wrong.
I agree that personal satisfaction with CEV isn't a sufficient condition for it being safe. For that matter, having proposed and briefly defended this one alternative isn't really sufficient for my personal satisfaction in either CEV's adequacy or the lack of a better option. But we have to start somewhere, and if someone did come up with a better alternative to CEV, I'd want to make sure that it got fair consideration.