Ah, yes, you're correct. That was poorly written.
On your latter point, do you really mean that in the thought experiment of someone wanting to shoot your friend and coming to you to ask for directions, you hope you couldn't make yourself honestly believe falsehoods that you could then convey to the assassin thereby misdirecting him without seeming dishonest?
On your latter point, do you really mean that in the thought experiment of someone wanting to shoot your friend and coming to you to ask for directions, you hope you couldn't make yourself honestly belief falsehoods that you could then convey to the assassin thereby misdirecting him without seeming dishonest?
Indeed. As long as we're asking for superpowers, I'd prefer to have the ability to defeat the assassin, or to credibly lie to him without believing my lie.
Given that this situation is not going to happen to me, I'd rather keep the ability to distinguish truth from falsehood without epistemically poisoning myself.
What must a sane person1 think regarding religion? The naive first approximation is "religion is crap". But let's consider the following:
Humans are imperfectly rational creatures. Our faults include not being psychologically able to maximally operate according to our values. We can e.g. suffer from burn-out if we try to push ourselves too hard.
It is thus important for us to consider, what psychological habits and choices contribute to our being able to work as diligently for our values as we want to (while being mentally healthy). It is a theoretical possibility, a hypothesis that could be experimentally studied, that the optimal2 psychological choices include embracing some form of Faith, i.e. beliefs not resting on logical proof or material evidence.
In other words, it could be that our values mean that Occam's Razor should be rejected (in some cases), since embracing Occam's Razor might mean that we miss out on opportunities to manipulate ourselves psychologically into being more what we want to be.
To a person aware of The Simulation Argument, the above suggests interesting corollaries:
1: Actually, what I've written here assumes we are talking about humans. Persons-in-general may be psychologically different, and theoretically capable of perfect rationality.
2: At least for some individuals, not necessarily all.