= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
Eliezer_Yudkowsky comments on Open Thread: July 2010, Part 2 - Less Wrong
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
= 783df68a0f980790206b9ea87794c5b6)
Loading…= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
Powered by Reddit
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d)
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (770)
Hm. Have you looked at the multiverse lately? It's pretty apparent that something has gone horribly weird somewhere along the way. Your confidence should be limited by that dissonance.
It's the same with MWI, and cryonics, and moral cognitivism, and any other belief where your structural uncertainty hasn't been explicitly conditioned on your anthropic surprise. I'm not sure to what extent your implied confidence in these matters is pedagogical rather than indicative of your true beliefs. I expect mostly pedagogical? That's probably fine and good, but I doubt such subtle epistemic manipulation for the public good is much better than the Dark Arts.
(Added: In this particular case, something less metaphysical is probably amiss, like a math error.)
Whowha?
Er, sorry, I'm guessing my comment came across as word salad?
Added: Rephrased and expanded and polemicized my original comment in a reply to my original comment.
Yeah I didn't get it either.
Hm. It's unfortunate that I need to pass all of my ideas through a Nick Tarleton or a Steve Rayhawk before they're fit for general consumption. I'll try to rewrite that whole comment when I'm less tired.
Illusion of transparency: they can probably generate sense in response to anything, but it's not necessarily faithful translation of what you say.
Consider that one of my two posts, Abnormal Cryonics, was simply a narrower version of what I wrote above (structural uncertainty is highly underestimated) and that Nick Tarleton wrote about a third of that post. He understood what I meant and was able to convey it better than I could. Also, Nick Tarleton is quick to call bullshit if something I'm saying doesn't seem to be meaningful, which is a wonderful trait.
Well, that was me calling bullshit.
Thanks! But it seems you're being needlessly abrasive about it. Perhaps it's a cultural thing? Anyway, did you read the expanded version of my comment? I tried to be clearer in my explanation there, but it's hard to convey philosophical intuitions.
I find myself unable to clearly articulate what's wrong with your idea, but in my own words, it reads as follows:
"One should believe certain things to be probable because those are the kinds of things that people believe through magical thinking."
Was your point that Eliezer's Everett Branch is weird enough already that it shouldn't be that surprising if universally improbable things have occurred?
Erm, uh, kinda, in a more general sense. See my reply to my own comment where I try to be more expository.
I'm afraid it is word salad.