MichaelVassar comments on How to always have interesting conversations - Less Wrong

45 Post author: Kaj_Sotala 14 June 2010 12:35AM

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Comment author: MichaelVassar 16 June 2010 09:48:02AM 5 points [-]

I don't think, at a first approximation, that written communication much less careful than Eliezer's sequences can successfully communicate the content of surprising ideas to very many people at all.

I see lots of intelligent people who are not apparently stuck with false beliefs. Normatively, I don't even see myself as having 'beliefs' but rather integrated probabilistic models. One doesn't occasionally have to change those because you were wrong. Rather, the laws of inference requires that you change them in response to every piece of information you encounter whether the new info is surprising or unsurprising. This crude normative model doesn't reflect an option for a human mind, given how a human mind works, but neither, I suspect, does the sort of implicit model it is being contrasted with, at least if that model is cashed out in detail at its current level of development.