Open Thread: April 2010, Part 2

Unnamed

The previous open thread has already exceeded 300 comments – new Open Thread posts should be made here.

This thread is for the discussion of Less Wrong topics that have not appeared in recent posts. If a discussion gets unwieldy, celebrate by turning it into a top-level post.

The previous open thread has already exceeded 300 comments – new Open Thread posts should be made here.

This thread is for the discussion of Less Wrong topics that have not appeared in recent posts. If a discussion gets unwieldy, celebrate by turning it into a top-level post.

Same questions, new formulation.

It seems that here at Less Wrong, we discourage map/territory discrepancies and mind projection fallacies, etc.

However, "winning" is in the map not the territory.

In one extreme aesthetic, we could become agents that have no subjective beliefs about the territory. But then there would be no "winning"; we'd have to give up on that.

So instead we'd like to have our set of beliefs minimally include enough non-objectively-true stuff to make "winning" coherent. Given this, how can we draw a line about which beliefs are good to have? For example, we certainly don't want to have beliefs that are objectively false. But what about the entire set of beliefs that are objectively neither true nor false? Are they all equivalent? Is there any way to define an aesthetic for choosing from this set of beliefs?

I think physical materialism tries 'minimalism' as an aesthetic and fails, because there is a continuous trade-off between fewer and fewer beliefs and a less well-defined sense of "win"; there seems no natural place to make a break.

Instead you could choose beliefs that maximize the sense of winning, and that is what theists do.

Our sense of "winning" isn't entirely up for grabs: we prefer sensory stimulation to its absence, we prefer novel stimulations to boring old ones, we prefer to avoid protracted pain, we generally prefer living in human company rather than on desert islands, and so on.

In one manner of thinking, our sense of "winning" - considered as a set of statistically reliable facts about human beings - is definitely part of the territory. It's a set of facts about human brains.

"Winning" more reliably entails accumulating knowledge about wh... (read more)

3Jack16y

Same answer, new formulation. [...] Nah. Winning isn't determined by the map, it's like a highlighted endpoint (like drawing on a map with a marker). You win when you get there. Note that a little red x or circle on a map isn't really part of the map. There is nothing there that we expect to correspond to the territory (imagine arriving at your destination and everything turns the color of the marker you used!). The theistic move is like not finding any destination on the map that you're happy with so so you draw in a really cool mountain and make it your endpoint. Winning isn't in the map because winning conditions are defined by desires, not beliefs.