bogus comments on Compartmentalization as a passive phenomenon - Less Wrong

44 Post author: Kaj_Sotala 26 March 2010 01:51PM

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Comment author: BenAlbahari 27 March 2010 12:55:49AM 1 point [-]

Could I express what you said as:

A person is in the predicament of:

1) having a large number of beliefs
2) the mathematically impossible challenge of validating those beliefs for consistency

Therefore:

3) It is impossible to not compartmentalize

This leads to a few questions:

  • Is it still valuable to reduce, albeit not eliminate, compartmentalization?
  • Is there a fast method to rank how impactful a belief is to my belief system, in order to predict whether an expensive consistency check is worthwhile?
  • Is it possible to arrive at a (mathematically tractable) small core set of maximum-impact beliefs that are consistent? (the goal of extreme rationality?)
  • Does probablistic reasoning change how we answer these questions?
Comment author: bogus 27 March 2010 01:32:37AM *  3 points [-]

Does probablistic reasoning change how we answer these questions?

Edwin Jaynes discusses "lattice" theories of probability where propositions are not universally comparable in appendix A of Probability Theory: The Logic of Science. Following Jaynes's account, probability theory would correspond to a uniformly dense lattice, whereas a lattice with very sparse structure and a few dense regions would correspond to compartmentalized beliefs.

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