RichardKennaway comments on Five-minute rationality techniques - Less Wrong

55 Post author: sketerpot 10 August 2010 02:24AM

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Comment author: [deleted] 10 August 2010 12:24:31PM 9 points [-]

The most important thing I learned from this site:

If you suspect something is factually true, don't be afraid to believe it. It can't hurt you.

That's simple. Not easy to implement, but easy to express.

Comment author: satt 12 August 2010 07:08:47AM 2 points [-]

This is technically true, in the sense that belief won't hurt me in and of itself. But beliefs inform our actions, and once the two are connected, beliefs acquire causal power to hurt me.

Comment author: Oligopsony 12 August 2010 07:17:29AM 4 points [-]

Also, we have a bias against overturning beliefs.

I think the folk epistemology implied in the distinction between words like "suspect," "think," "feel," "believe," and "know" is, on the whole, fairly useful. You can flatten them all into the word "believe" but you lose something. The dogma here is also to assign probabilities to your beliefs - the zoo of belief-verbs is just a cognitively cheap way of doing so.