wedrifid comments on Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality discussion thread, part 2 - Less Wrong

13 Post author: dclayh 01 August 2010 10:58PM

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Comment author: wedrifid 07 August 2010 08:22:24AM 4 points [-]

I shouldn't need to explain this to you. You have authored essays on the concept of 'subjectively objective' and my statement was quite clear and even noted that it was purely a technical tangent. In fact, the upvote on its parent was mine.

"What the reader says" is not the same thing as "what happened to the reader". 'What happened to the reader' can be fully determined by the timeless state of reader themselves but is not necessarily the same thing as what the reader says. Just as someone who says "my prior for A is 0.34" when their prior is actually "0.87" is wrong, despite the fact that priors are subjective. Subjective does not mean what people say about themselves must be true.

but if the reader says you're messing with their suspension of disbelief, the reader is always right.

Still false.

If that's what happened to the reader and broke their suspension of disbelief, that's what happened. It doesn't matter if the reader made a mistake. Your text caused that mistake.

True.