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SilasBarta comments on Understanding your understanding - Less Wrong
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What if "Bayesian rationality" were deleted?
How did "Bayesian rationality" get discovered, except by the usual practices of scientists? (I won't say "the scientific method", partly because it's really fuzzy and so the "the" at the beginning of the phrase is deceptively concrete, and partly because I don't think that the process is as tidy as descriptions of the scientific method make it out to be.)
If we're looking for an error-correcting system, we need to look for a vast number of weak epistemological principles, on the level of "if event X is followed almost immediately by event Y, guess that X is generally followed almost immediately by Y", along with perceptual details of "how long?" and "what should count as an event?".
They would probably be fiercely embodied, but that's not actually a problem - we're fiercely emphysicsed, after all.
Beyond a certain point, the "regenerate if deleted?" metric becomes useless. For example, if your entire source code is "0", well, everything's been deleted, but there's no way it's growing back. There has to be somewhere to start. (Related: Where recursive justification hits bottom)
Still, you can characterize epistemic states by how much they could recover, from how deep a deletion, which was one point of the Truly Part of You article. I can imagine simpler epistemic states, lacking knowledge of the scientific method, that could recover Bayesian rationality: you would need to recognize that primitive-future has dynamics very close to primitive-past (where primitive-X denotes the inborn, intuitive understanding of X), which gives you induction, and, combined with basic numeracy, could point you in the right direction.
That was my main problem with the definition of stage 3 and was why I posted my original comment. It seemed to me that you could apply stage 3 to parts of your knowledge but not for everything.
When I read 'This stage should be the goal of all rationalists.' (in the original post) I was confused because it seemed to me that stage 3 was unreachable. I mean, if I started with only my human psychology, my senses and the world around me (i.e. the level of a caveman) I don't think I would invent math, physics,... Stage 3 seemed reachable if I assumed infinite time & persistence and scientific reasoning.